Video Game Engines

This week we talk about Unity, Unreal, and Godot. We also discuss fee structures, user revolts, and indie game-makers. Recommended Book: How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner Show Notes * https://www.statista.com/outlook/dmo/digital-media/video-games/worldwide * https://www.billboard.com/pro/ifpi-global-report-2023-music-business-revenue-market-share/ * https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/07/video-game-industry-not-recession-proof-sales-set-to-fall-in-2022.html * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_industry * https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/22/are-video-games-recession-proof-sort-experts-say/ * https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/unity-s-pricing-changes-are-trying-to-solve-too-many-problems-at-once * https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/unity-apologizes-to-devs-reveals-updated-runtime-fee-policy * https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/22/23882768/unity-new-pricing-model-update * https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/15/23875396/unity-mobile-developers-ad-monetization-tos-changes * https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/12/23870547/unit-price-change-game-development * https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/08/22/are-video-games-recession-proof-sort-experts-say/ * https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/022216/how-microtransactions-are-evolving-economics-gaming.asp * https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/srhonorsprog/902/ * https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/053115/how-video-game-industry-changing.asp * https://finmodelslab.com/blogs/operating-costs/video-game-company-operating-costs * https://www.makeuseof.com/ways-the-rising-costs-of-games-affect-the-industry/ * https://codeswholesale.com/blog/5-ways-to-make-money-in-the-gaming-industry/ * https://gamemaker.io/en/blog/cost-of-making-a-game * https://www.gamedesigning.org/learn/video-game-cost/ * https://www.reuters.com/technology/video-gaming-revenue-grow-26-2023-console-sales-strength-report-2023-08-08/ * https://www.statista.com/outlook/dmo/digital-media/video-games/worldwide Transcript Depending on how inclusive you are with your measurements and the specific numbers you're tallying, the global video game market is expected to pull in somewhere between $187.7 and $334 billion in revenue in 2023. That's somewhere between 2.6% and 13.4% above 2022 numbers—and again, those figures are pretty far apart because different entities keeping tabs on this industry measure different things, some only looking at direct sales of video games and in-game items, while others look at connected sub-industries, like e-gaming events and service jobs that do customer support for game companies. Whichever end of that spectrum you look at, though, the global video game industry is a behemoth that's growing every year, and its income surpassed that of the music and film industries, combined, years ago, the global film industry expected to bring in around $92.5 billion in 2023, while the global music industry pulls a paltry $26.2 billion. The video game market is continuing to grow at a fairly stellar pace, compared to other entertainment categories, as well. And while it was shown not to be entirely recession proof, as had been claimed since the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, when it remained one of the few industries still growing steadily, that growth balking a bit in 2022, when the industry contracted by 1.2%, it grew substantially at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and has largely maintained that growth since, which has allowed entities operating in this space to claim more and more entertainment-related marketshare, which in turn has shifted the center of gravity in the media world toward video games and away from other leisure options, including things like travel, vacations, and other things you wouldn't typically think of as being competitors of the video game market. Since video games really took off, hitting the mainstream in the 1980s, and becoming a big deal in the 1990s with the emergence of user-friendly consoles and 3D graphics, the economics of video games have changed substantially. Once, video game companies sold games that would play on a user's computer, then consoles—which are basically gaming-focused mini-computers that plug into a customer's TV, or can be carried around in their pockets—those quickly became the new default for many gamers, creating a more optimized gaming experience, though also introducing a new cost for game-makers, as they typically need to pay something to the console-maker to use their tech and have their products work on these platforms. Retail stores became increasingly important to the gaming industry's budgetary concerns around this time, as they would need to take a cut of the sale price of everything they sold, but also have the flexibility to offer deals to their customers, to incentivize purchases and lure them away from other game stores. And further toward the base of the development stack, as games became more sophisticated and refined, game-makers had to spend more money on high-end hardware, but also higher-end software tools that would allow them to develop the games, polish them so they could compete with other offerings, and in some cases use what's often called "middleware" to serve as a scaffolding for their game projects—software tools that are sometimes referred to as game engines. All of which has made the process of producing video games a lot more complex and expensive, and as the industry has become more popular, roping-in more and more customers, more and more entities have popped up, intent on making their own games; and that's fed a spiral toward higher-costs and more complex game-making processes, leading to a lot of enrichment in some cases, and quite a few new business models optimized for different platforms and styles of game, but also quite a few bankruptcies and hostile takeovers, even seemingly successful video game companies sometimes falling short or investing too much in a game that flops, leaving them with insufficient resources to keep the lights on or produce their next product. What I'd like to talk about today is a recent scandal in the video game industry related to one of those middleware, game engine-making companies, and how they're scrambling to make things right after seemingly losing much of their goodwill and credibility essentially overnight. — In early September, 2023, a game engine company called Unity announced that it would be changing its pricing structure, effective Jan 1, 2024, and that set off a wave of outrage and anger from its users, most of which are individual game-makers and game-making companies. To understand why this response was so widespread and vehement, it's helpful to understand a bit about how game engines work and their role in the modern video game industry. Fundamentally, a game engine is a piece of software that serves as a framework for making video games. So while it's not a simple "click a button, get a game" sort of setup, it does dramatically reduce the amount of time and effort required to produce a finished game product, giving users—game-developers of all shapes and sizes—level-editors, physics engines, rendering engines that help them more easily produce and edit 2D and 3D graphics, collision detection tools, which basically track and control how things bump up against each other in the game and what happens when they do, alongside more basic media tools like those that allow for the creation and editing of audio, animations, video content, text, and the like. Modern game engines also help developers keep the size of their games moderated without losing too much quality, they help with memory management on the developers' computers, they can provide artificial intelligence tools and software that helps them build-out multiplayer functionality—it's a really big and powerful toolkit, so the engine that game-makers choose to use is important, and it shapes every other decision they make, and in some ways the final product, too, because of how easy or difficult things are to do within their specific scaffolding. Unity makes a very popular game engine that was originally released in 2005 as a Mac-specific product, but it has since become multiplatform, allowing developers to make games for all sorts of computers, consoles, mobile devices, and virtual reality interfaces. It's perhaps most popular in the mobile gaming space, as it's relatively easy to learn compared to other engines, and is fairly lightweight; and because the mobile gaming space has been growing so rapidly, that's meant Unity has become increasing popular and widespread as a tool, which in turn has had the spillover effect of making it more popular on other platforms, as well—because folks making a mobile game might go on to make a Playstation game next, and may decide to stick with the engine they know, or a gaming company might decide to perch all their games upon the same game engine because that's just a lot easier, both in terms of keeping things simple for developers, and in terms of the costs associated with using a bunch of different engine. The pricing models used by these game engines vary quite a bit from company to company, but typically they make money by selling licenses to use their products; there's generally a free tier for folks learning to use their tools and who make games below a certain threshold of popularity and profit, but at a certain point they'll need to buy the right to use the engine, which generally also comes with a few bonus perks, like better analytics and error reporting options. This system has worked for everyone for a long time now, and though some developers have balked at the idea of paying Unity and similar companies for their engines, opting for free and open source options like Godot, instead, the larger gaming industry has generally oriented itself around just a few primary, paid options, including the Unreal Engine owned by Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, among many other offerings, and Unity, which since its release has been used to make more than 750,000 games, alongside non-game offerings, like augmented reality experiences in Microsoft's HoloLens headset, about 90% of Samsung Gear VR content, machine learning programs like Google's TensorFlow, and even film content, like the backgrounds for the 2019 real-life version of The Lion King and engineering blueprints, like those for cars and buildings. All of which partially explains why so many people were up in arms about the changes Unity announced, seemingly out of nowhere, to their fee structure in early September. The old Unity model, again, included a free version of Unity for folks operating below a certain threshold—that threshold has been $200,000 for a while now—and after that folks would pay a monthly fee to use the engine, and that fee would typically cost about $400 per year per game, though it varied quite a bit as folks paid per seat—that is, per developer using the engine—and based on the size of the studio and game they're working on. Unity's newly announced pricing model, in contrast, would keep a free tier, but would remove some of the cheaper payment options, nudging people up to higher yearly rates, while, importantly, also tacking-on a small fee, somewhere between a cent and twenty cents, for each installation of a game that uses the Unity engine, after a threshold has been crossed. The announcement also said that Unity would use a secret, internal method of determining download numbers, and folks would be on the hook, in some cases, for something closer to $2,000 a year per game, rather than $400-ish, though that number would also vary wildly based on a game's popularity and reach. This sparked all kinds of concerns, as it was an additional fee on top of existing fees, costing game-makers more over time, and without providing any new value in exchange, and because it was retroactive, so everyone who had ever used Unity for any game would be on the hook for this new payment structure—meaning, all those 750,000 games or so would potentially be new sources of revenue for Unity, but would be burdened with new expenses for the folks who made them. All sorts of immediate concerns bubbled to the surface of the gaming community, ranging from worries that small, indie devs would be priced out of the market—folks without big bank accounts to draw upon, and who aren't making games that bring in tons of revenue—to concerns related to the concept of putting a price-tag on downloads: would trolls be able to aim hefty fees on developers they don't like by repeatedly installing and uninstalling their games? Would Unity's tracking software be legit? Would it differentiate new downloads from redownloads, or would someone who buys a game, paying for it once, conceivably be a drain on the developer's bank account forever into the future, because they might install it over and over again, over time, on multiple devices? This outcry was also laden with a heavy sense of betrayal because it seemed to violate Unity's terms of service, and that outcry grew even louder and more betrayal-laden when it became clear, as folks went back to check the end-user license agreement they'd signed, that Unity had quietly, in the preceding months, gone through and edited its EULA to basically allow themselves to do what they had done, even though previous versions said they would never do such a thing. The first week after this announcement, as the gaming world unified against Unity, the company's stock tumbled around 16.5% from where it was before the announced change, which is the opposite of what the company had hoped to accomplish—industry analysis suggests that the company is trying to shore-up its numbers, never having been profitable, but finding itself especially pressed for cash right now, and hoping to avoid being in the same situation in the future. What seems to have happened is they tried to do too much at once, essentially grabbing at immediate cash as much as possible, while also trying to scale-up their future prospects by giving themselves a means of benefitting from the success of the games that use their engine; this isn't an entirely novel concept, as their competitor, Unreal, charges a 5% revenue share from game-makers using their engine, but because this was new, out of nowhere, seemed to come about without the folks running Unity checking-in with anyone in the gaming industry to see if it would be alright, and if so to see what sorts of numbers would be tenable for their business models, and because it was retroactively applied using a seemingly pretty skeezy, secretive method of basically giving themselves permission, on the down-low, after swearing up and down they would never do exactly this—all of it went over quite badly, the gaming world revolted against them, near-universally, and this has led to a huge exodus from Unity to other platforms, including the free and open source Godot, which has quite suddenly received a wave of funds from some of the more successful indie game studios out there, and newfound attention from folks who are learning they can relatively simply port their games from Unity to Godot, saving them the future hassle and expense of dealing with the former. The alternative floated by some gaming studios and individual makers was to simply pull their games from shelves, and this was also threatened, especially in cases where the games are free to play, and thus tend to garner huge numbers of downloads, but don't make money on all the people who install their game—which means their work would become huge weights around their ledgers, losing them money each year, rather than earning them money. It took more than a week, but the higher-ups at Unity eventually made some noises about having heard the game-making world and feeling bad about releasing this new model without first seeking their input, and they said they would take another stab at things and get back to them. They then released a new plan, a new pricing model, that seems to have infuriated people substantially less—a revamp that still includes changes, but apparently less catastrophic ones. The new plan says they'll rely on game-maker-reported numbers to tally downloads, and they've raised the revenue cap at which folks need to upgrade to $200,000, so below that and you can keep the low-tier Unity Personal plan, which is excluded from this new pricing model, and that roughly lines up with where things were before—and any game that makes less than $1 million in 12 months will also be exempt from the additional, per-install fee. Perhaps most importantly, though, Unity is now saying games made with previous versions of their engine won't be beholden to this new pricing model, nor would they need to abide by the new terms of service, which among other things says their games need to include a big, Made by Unity splash screen at the beginning, and only those that use the new version being released in 2024 would be required to pay based on downloads, though developers can choose to pay a 2.5% revenue share rather than using the per-installation model—and there's some indication that if they report install numbers, the company will choose whichever is the lowest fee for them, automatically, and charge them that. All of which seems to have cooled things down quite a lot, though a fair bit of damage has already been done to the company's reputation in the industry; many game-makers are still saying they're intending to port their games away as soon as they're able, and that they won't use Unity in the future, because the people in charge of the company have shown their true colors, have shown that they're willing to renege on previous commitments and promises, and burn the goodwill they've earned over the years, in order to pull in more money, to fill the gaps in their balance sheets. The company is investing in a big PR push to try to win people back and polish their now-tarnished brand, but it could be a while before they manage to do so, if indeed they do manage to do so. In the meantime, industry alternatives have seen a big boost in attention and use, and there's a chance we could see more entrants in this space, popping up to take advantage of the hole left by Unity's flub, and introducing entirely new business models that may further innovate on what we've already seen, and allow entirely new game-world business models to arise and flourish.

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