
In case you don't know any 3D graphics developers, roughly the entire community has been roiling over an unexpected price increase for using the graphics engine:
With Unity's new plan, developers who use Unity's free tier of development services would owe Unity $0.20 per installation once their game hit thresholds of 200,000 downloads and earn $200,000 in revenue.
Developers paying over $2,000 a year for a Unity Pro plan would have to hit higher thresholds and would be charged with lower fees.
The new fee system will begin at the start of 2024.
That's quite a bit when it comes to popular Unity-based games/virtual worlds, most of which are free, and end up downloaded many millions or tens of millions of times, hitting developers with fees in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. (There's also a fee when the same user installs multiple copies to different devices.)
More key for New World Notes, here's some of the leading metaverse platforms that run on Unity:
Yes, this price change might impact development and release of the long-awaited Second Life mobile app!
However, after chatting with some developer colleagues, my take is the impact may ultimately end up a gut punch, rather than a crippling blow -- but the blow will be felt for years:
Ultima Underworld's Untold Influence on Early Metaverse Development -- Including Second Life
Watching Philip Rosedale and Avi Bar-Zeev talk about early days in metaverse development, reader "Nadeja" points out another early milestone that's often under-appreciated -- the launch of pioneering game Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss:
Great points! To which I can add a fun fact: Back in 2004, since I knew him through some of my early articles, I invited lead Ultima Underworld developer Doug Church to visit Linden Lab and judge an early Second Life game development contest.
Philip was excited to meet Doug, because as I wrote in the first book, Ultima Underworld strongly enforced Philip Rosedale's vision of creating a virtual world:
Continue reading "Ultima Underworld's Untold Influence on Early Metaverse Development -- Including Second Life" »
Posted on Tuesday, August 15, 2023 at 02:49 PM in Comment of the Week, Making the Metaverse | Permalink | Comments (0)
|
|