1229
This is of course not including the yearly Unity subscription, where Unity Pro costs $2,040 per seat (although they may have Enterprise pricing)
Absolutely ridiculous. Many Unity devs are saying they're switching engines on social media.
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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That point about social networks is true, but it's more of a symptom of the internet at large.
Running things on the web isn't free and most of the major innovation has stemmed from trying to hide that fact from people.
It started in the late 80s with donations to the guy that ran your favorite BBS. But that was not sustainable, so banner ads started showing up, but they didn't pay out enough. Then the pop-up and was born, but it turns out that people really hate those. So then they did away with them entirely, instead harvesting data about the users to sell to advertisers.
Now, there are basically 2 paths forward. Host your own microservices that connects to a larger network, widely spreading out hosting and storage costs across the userbase. Or, pay a subscription to access a service with the understanding that they won't advertise or sell your data.
Donations are somewhat sustainable because the per-user cost of having stuff on the internet is super low. So even at $1 USD per month any remotely successful service becomes wildly profitable. People just thought that banner ads would be yet-even-more profitable since they can be applied to everyone who looks at the site, not just regular users.
In going to be dirt poor if I have to subscribe to every site I visit online.
But not every user donates