Kabam will you inflate Game prices for spending because this?
CursedLand
Member Posts: 124 ★
https://unity.com/runtime-fee
Unity (the engine that MCoC use to build their own game), have announced they will make creators (Kabam in this case) pay for unity for each game installation.
this means Kabam will probably inflate the prices because this will make them go broke mode?
@Kabam Miike @Kabam Jax please this is important and critical for the community too.
Unity (the engine that MCoC use to build their own game), have announced they will make creators (Kabam in this case) pay for unity for each game installation.
this means Kabam will probably inflate the prices because this will make them go broke mode?
@Kabam Miike @Kabam Jax please this is important and critical for the community too.
1
Comments
Retroactively complaining when there's been no indication that this will happen is hilarious.
If unity is now going to charge by the download, then kabam has a new cost.
Yeah I get it. Everything is up in the air. Shouldn’t really worry now. No one knows all the variables or factors.
But I can’t say it’s not an interesting idea or even a bad question.
100,000 people download in December. Unity say charges $25 thousand. Maybe kabam absorbs it. Maybe not.
If they don’t absorb it though, one sure fire way to mitigate that new cost is to increase purchases. It’s not like it’s some left field or oddball idea
I do not know how often the game gets downloaded every month, I also don't know what plan Kabam has, but as a successful studio I assume they are going with Enterprise. As for downloads, I doubt they get more than 100K new ones every month so we'll use that one!
That puts it at $0.125 per download, that amounts to $12500 per month in the most expensive scenario. That's a big wad of cash
Netmarble(Kabam's parent company) reported $465.98 million in revenue(keep in mind, that does not include operating costs) in the second quarter of 2023, with MCOC making up 12% of that from what I gather. That's about $50m for that quarter, divided by 3, which is in turn about $16.7m per month(again, without operating costs)
I think it's safe to say that $12.5K will only be a small dent in that, but only time will tell what will happen
This is ofcourse assuming I calculated everything correctly, I'm no financial expert
Here is my source: https://mobidictum.com/game-industry/netmarble-financial-earnings-q2-h1-2023/
https://app.sensortower.com/overview/896112560?country=US
I think they’ll be okay. According to this website (which is an absolutely legit analytics source), Kabam is gonna be paying about $18,000 extra a month or so, and that’ll be getting subtracted from their $8 million in confirmed revenue so far this month
Prices are not going up over something like this
It's really one of the best ways to amortize this cost onto the players. If that's what they choose to do.
Excuse me while I go set my hair on fire.
I suspect the MCOC devs would rather chew off their own arms than implement ads, but they don't own the game.
But keep in mind I'm one person, and I've loaded MCOC on six phones and four iPads over that time. I would count for ten installs in eight years. You break your phone and get it replaced, you will count for another install (because that's a different device). You play on iOS and Android, that's another install.
From what I've been told by people affected, the most pernicious element at the moment of the Unity licensing change is that Unity has stated that they themselves appear to be the final arbiter over counting licenses, and they are not sharing their process for counting. Consider that unless Unity has illegal or undisclosed telemetry, Unity can't directly count downloads or installs. So they are inferring how many installs a developer has, based on guesswork. And then charging them for that guess, monthly.
Unity's language here is also inconsistent. They sometimes refer to installs and sometimes downloads. They might be inferring installs (defined to be one copy on one device) from downloads. In which case you have to wonder if counting downloads counts downloads of updates that also change the engine type, say, as a separate install. Who knows, because Unity isn't sharing.
And not because they forgot either. They consider their process for counting to be proprietary, to avoid people gaming or defrauding the process. Which means they are just going to guess installs, send devs a bill, and not explain the number. Which seems to have some developers considering legal action. Either Unity is guessing wildly and charging based on their guess which seems borderline unfair practice (and possibly unenforceable) or they are using proprietary information taken from their customers without permission to perform this calculation, which is arguably illegal.
And for those that think Kabam is the dirtiest company around, apparently Unity publicly stated back in 2019 that to provide stability to developers they would allow them to use the version of the TOS of the engine associated with the version of the engine they were using, until they changed engines. However, Unity's legal team has apparently stated, in regards to these changes, that the TOS itself allowed for changes to fees at any time, so in effect their position is that although they promised developers they would not change the terms of service retroactively, the terms of service allow for retroactive changes so they are still following the original terms of service.
That's rules-lawyering on a whole 'nother level.
And complaining about getting disagrees, is a surefire way of getting more disagrees