When it comes to the end of the year, we often get an email from HR reassuring us that our wages will be analysed, and changes will be made so we are paid a fair wage.
Define “fair”.
When there is inflation, if your wage doesn’t rise to match, that is essentially a pay cut because the money you get just isn’t worth the same as it used to be. HR often say that it has never been a policy to give inflation rises, but how is that fair?
They will often say that raises will be given based on performance, but with some exclusions (if you have had a recent promotion or wage rise). Then they say they look at what other companies pay, but that’s purely based on trust.
How many companies do they look at?
How do they find equivalent jobs to base the comparison against?
We carry out external benchmarking to ensure our salaries are competitive and fair in today’s market.
We use external salary data to develop market rate midpoints for roles. This is the rate of pay for someone who is fully competent in the role and therefore individual salaries may be below or above the midpoint. Our salary frameworks are reviewed on an annual basis to ensure they remain fair, competitive, and are suitably benchmarked both internally and externally.
If you are promoted or move into a new role that is an approved vacancy, the new salary will be determined by the new line manager and HR , subject to approval by the Senior Leader of the relevant business area. If a proposed increase is more than 5%, it will need to be approved by the relevant executive member and the Head of HR)
HR
See, it is a wishy washy definition and claim. If they are paying fairly, why are there so many people required to sign off a rise of more than 5%? If you were underpaid before and deserve a large rise, then why is this process there?
There’s been times where people get promoted or change roles, and the difference in wages is very large. But they have the skills and the attitude to do it, yet are told the rise is too large, so it needs to spread over a few years. Yet, if they employed someone externally, they would give them the starting salary, maybe even allow them to negotiate a higher one. But the loyal employee that they know is good? – don’t want to give them the money.
Just remember: companies would rather pay $25k to a recruiter to replace you than give you a $25k raise
Just remember: companies would rather pay $25k to a recruiter to replace you than give you a $25k raise
Overtime
I’ve criticised overtime in many of my blogs. I think it encourages slacking because you can create the need for overtime by not doing your work during contracted hours. Since overtime is usually given based on your hourly rate, overtime is even more beneficial if you are already paid more, but yet you could be doing the exact same work that everyone else is doing.
When you reach a certain rank, our contracts then say that you can no longer receive payment due to “their contracts allow more flexibility to work additional hours to fulfil their duties”. I don’t even know what that means. We all have reasonably flexible work hours.
Total Rewards
Another way we get fobbed off is with the phrasing “total reward”. They claim that our benefits are first-rate even though I think our holiday allowance is pretty standard in the industry, and there’s the usual basic discounts like “gym membership”, “cycle to work scheme”, “voucher discounts”, and “free eye test”.
Our reward framework is based on a “total reward” approach. Total reward includes not only monetary rewards such as pay, bonus, incentives and “core” benefits (holidays, etc.), but also recognition (financial and non-financial), development and progression opportunities and work/home life balance. Our total reward philosophy is designed to ensure that our people feel valued, recognised and motivated to give their best at work every day.
HR
This is just HR buzzword spam.
Some of the rewards they hype up, but then it turns out to be rubbish. There was one where they said we could get “discounts on technology” so we could get cheap laptops/PCs/tablets/phones etc. However, when you read into the terms, it was an average saving of 5% from the recommended retail price. Yet you could go into a shop like Curry’s PC World, and find the same items on sale (>5%). Then going through the process was actually more effort because there’s loads of forms to fill in. More effort, and it costs more; brilliant.
Another classic one is Costco membership. I’ve never shopped at Costco, but you need a membership card to shop there. For some reason, they restrict who can sign up, but some Costco representatives would come visit the office, and if you signed up and showed them your work badge to prove you worked here, then you could get a membership card.
Someone asked HR what the benefit is of signing up when the Costco staff come visit the office. The employee could go and sign up directly in the Costco store. The reply was that they often ”bring free cakes” to the office, and you’d have the advantage of “not needing to take your ID badge to the Costco store”. Wow, amazing benefit. Like I said, they hype up a benefit then it turns out to be not much of a benefit at all.
Unity have announced a new fee which they call the “Unity Runtime Fee” which is going to take effect in January. It affects all Unity developers, even people that have already released their game many years ago; which has caused mass outrage among the game development community.
I think the existing model states that once you reach a threshold of revenue, you have to pay a licence fee which works out around £1500 for the year. With the new model, once you reach a similar threshold, Unity is now going to charge a fee of 20 cents every time somebody instals your game on a new device for the first time.
The threshold is $200,000, which on the face of things, 20 cents per install doesn’t sound unreasonable when they have given you a great tool to help you create your game. They need to earn money as a business and deserve some kind of cut for their service/product. According to this tweet, it looks like they are burning through money so some drastic action is probably required
There’s a fair few aspects of why this is new model is complicated, but I still feel some of the anger is misplaced.
I think the whole scenario is similar to what I have written about recently where the CEO demanded we release our software weekly instead of monthly and we told him several reasons why it is technically, and legally impossible. Then later he then demands all our changes have a well-documented rollback plan, and again, we told him loads of reasons why it wasn’t possible. He still insisted and looked like a fool when it backfired and caused a few problems he thought he was solving.
The main Problem
The core problem stems from the idea that it is based on installations and not based on Unit Sales or Revenue. For comparison, the main competitor, Epic Games’ Unreal Engine charges you five percent of your total revenues after you’ve earned at least a million dollars on your game. Now, that can work out to be a lot of money and especially in the long run if your game is successful, but the difference is that they’re taking a cut of your money that you’ve already earned. When Unity charges you for an installation you’re being charged whether or not you’ve earned any money, or at different period of time to where you earned the money. That could turn into a cash flow problem.
Once you’re over the threshold, if somebody bought your game a long time ago and they’ve now installed your game on their brand new computer, it’s going to cost you 20 cents. I suppose if it is an old game, you probably won’t be selling $200k over the last 12 months, so it’s probably not actually going to apply.
If you decide to port your game to a new platform which is often fairly easy in the Unity engine, then all those new installations are also going to be hit with fees. I suppose if you are re-selling the game then it’s not a major problem, but sometimes developers make a free-to-play mobile version. Then you make money later with microtransactions. Often these games have 90% of players not paying a penny, but then you make your money on the 10% who often spend big. In this case, you could end up losing money on the average player of your game.
People also raised the point of bundles like the Humble Bundle where people buy a bunch of games for a small price but some of the money goes to charity. You end up selling high volumes but gain very low revenue. If you hit the threshold, and you are more likely to with a sale like this, then you could be hit with a lot of fees. I think the interesting thing with this point which people don’t seem to be mentioning; is that people often buy these games then never actually play them. So you actually have a sale, but no install, so don’t pay the fee.
Fairly similar to a bundle is a service like Xbox Game Pass, where people could play your game with an overall payment to the provider, in this case Microsoft. I think Microsoft often pays a flat fee to the publishers to gain their games but I suppose contracts can vary. But the theory is, you could get a flat fee, then either get low instals so you’ve gained, or get a surprisingly large amount of instals if it is popular and it eats into your profits.
Piracy
People who pirate games don’t pay but do install your game. This means that every time your game is pirated you’re going to be slapped with a 20 cent fee. There can be other malicious ways you could be charged, if someone abuses Virtual Machines. There’s programs that will spin up large numbers of them, so you could “Install Bomb” quickly with virtual machines, hitting the developer with a 20 cent fee. It’s like when people “Review Bomb” where you leave loads of negative reviews on a game you don’t like in a coordinated way, but in this case you need fewer people, and they directly sap the revenues of the developer instead of just hurting their online presence.
Target Price
Unity has always positioned itself as being pro Indie. They want to help new aspiring Indies learn to program, break into the gaming market, and get their career started. New developers are also much more likely to sell their games for cheap. There’s a lot of games like this on Steam which are sold for £10 or loads for £5 or less, and that’s before you apply discounts. Steam is renowned for its high discounts in sales, and so these games are being sold for just a couple of pounds. They’re going to be disproportionately hit by having to pay Unity 20 cents every time the game is installed.
In the extreme case, imagine you’ve made a Steam game or a mobile game that sells for one dollar and then you pay a sales tax of 10-20%, then Steam takes 30%, then you know you’re left with around 50 cents. If you use a Publisher, then they will take their cut too. Then Unity takes 20 cents of it for an install and then maybe another 20 cents for another install, then you could be left with basically nothing. You could then lose money if it isn’t sold for full price.
Meanwhile, if you sell a premium game for £40+ then 20 cents is nothing. So it actually hits the indies harder. Unity have ways of getting the price per install down, but they look more aimed at larger companies who will want to pay the upfront fees to use the premium Unity features.
Patch Quest
Lychee Game Labs’ Patch Quest released on 2 March 2023 and so far has reached 182,594 total key activations on Steam (people who bought the game on Steam along with everyone who got the game elsewhere like in a bundle or a giveaway or for review purposes). So if the game keeps selling, or people install on more devices, then he will be taken over the threshold then would start being charged. He did remark that “for the sake of argument, every single person who already owns the game decided to install it on a second PC, I’d be hit with a charge of $36,400. Now it’s obviously not likely that this would happen” but it does make you think how Unity are gonna deal with these outliers.
Unity Response
Within the day of the announcement, there’s a lot of angry people, and Unity has tried to clarify the points raised. However, it’s not clear if it’s actually possible to do what they claim. They reckon they have some sophisticated fraud detection technology which can prevent the “install bombing”. Then they say that they will have a process for them to submit their concerns to our fraud compliance team. So from what I understand here it sounds like the onus will be on the developer to try and somehow keep track of how many of their instals are fraudulent and then if you have concerns, you contact the fraud compliance team, and then they will hopefully give you your money back. I think the majority of people don’t have a lot of faith in such a system when Unity have to put in some work to decide if they want less money from you.
Unity have clarified that if you’re part of a bundle like Xbox game pass or you’re in a charity bundle then you’re not going to be charged for the install, although it’s not exactly clear how they’re going to know which instals come from charity bundles or game passes. They seemed to imply that for Game Pass, they would send the bill to Microsoft but I can’t imagine Microsoft will be too happy to have sprung upon them. It would probably have to be negotiated in future Game Pass deals and it might just be the case that Microsoft just doesn’t add any Unity-based games to their service.
Unity tried to justify this whole new fee structure by pointing to the thresholds and saying “if you don’t already earn loads of money on your game then you’re not gonna pay extra”. This is where I think a lot of developers are wrongfully attacking Unity, when they would never pay them anyway. I suppose in the Patch Quest example, I’m not aware of it being a major hit, and he has pretty much reached the payment threshold. But given that it’s been many months after release, you would imagine sales will now be low and he will only be liable for minor fees which he should be happy to pay.
Conclusion
There probably is a clause somewhere deep in Unity’s terms and conditions that says something like “we retain the right to change our terms and conditions”. Companies love to have that kind of future-proofing in their legal small print, but how many actually go through with major changes? It can be logistically difficult to implement drastic changes, and evidently a PR nightmare. However, despite that, many companies are against Unity for switching the Terms and Conditions with only a few months notice. When games can take years to make, you need that predictability to adequately budget, and if Unity can charge you more on a whim, then it’s unpredictable. People also wonder if they really can change the terms built on an older Unity software version as you essentially have an agreement at the time of release; but that needs to be left to the lawyers.
Switch Engines?
I think a key statement that many are using to justify their decision to abandon Unity at this time is “Is this the last time they’re gonna change their terms?
Jumping ship to another one might be possible when you’re just starting up on a new project but the deeper into development you get, the harder this becomes. Your game gradually ends up dependent on the engine it’s built in. Switching to Unreal Engine will require programming in C++ plus instead of C# which is a massive learning curve. Godot seems to be gaining popularity but people seem to say it specialises in 2D games at the moment. I think C# doesn’t have full support so their own GDScript is more popular.
Unity Pricing Thoughts...
For context, we are a small studio (7 people) with a Steam game with 3M~ players.
I'm seeing many non-developers tell developers that this pricing change is not a big deal, here is why the entire community is lighting a fire:
• Massively disproportionately punishes indies
• Only three months notice
• Double dipping (Licence fee/ads cut)
• Dangerous precedence for charging "runtime"; you no longer fully own that exported build. If Unity continues to struggle, pricing could become more aggressive
Here are a few examples:
• Unity's own example on their site has a hypothetical scenario:
-- $2M USD Gross in 12 Months
-- 300k Users/month (200k Standard/100k "Emerging Market"), $23.5K USD/month
-- This means $282K/Year in fees, 14% of gross revenue, 3x Epic's 5%.
• F2P Games that are NOT excessively monetised are penalised:
10M Players:$1M USD
1M Players:$10M USD
The first case, with a vastly less predatory set of MTX is now punished significantly worse than one purposefully building money-extraction machines.
Our team has been hard at work for 2 years on a massive update to our game, with a F2P mobile ver coming next year. We built this from the ground up to be ethically monetised/for whaling to be impossible, so we are particularly unhappy with the news.
This affects developers everywhere, of all sizes. I am grossly disappointed by any industry figures brushing this off as "developers complaining." that do not understand the severe damage this can cause smaller studios.
Unity's trust within the games industry has been steadily eroding for years now, this latest change is a testimony to how horrendously mismanaged the board is. Personally dumped all of my Unity stock after this announcement was made.
I'd bet heavily on the people making these decisions have never even opened the editor, let alone released a game.
From <https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1702189840383832408.html>
Elon Musk fired 6,500 employees at Twitter. A little birdie told me it’s down to:
– 2 designers
– 6 iOS developers
– 20 web developers
– Around 1,400 sales and operations people
How is it possible that we are still using this website? Two words: Parkinson’s Law.
Have you ever wondered why seemingly simple tech companies have tens of thousands of employees? Sometimes, it’s because they have huge sales forces or tech support/operations people. But often it’s also due to Parkinson’s Law.
Parkinson’s law is like lighter fluid for bureaucracy. It’s a business tapeworm that slowly eats away at companies, making them less and less efficient and innovative over time. Parkinson’s Law is the idea that the work will generally expand to the amount of time, budget, and number of people allocated to it, and no matter how many people you allocate to it, those people will feel busy. They’ll feel busy because, due to the excess time/slack in the system, they’ll start focusing on less and less important tasks.
Here’s how it manifests on an individual level: Let’s say you have a report due in a week. The report might only take you around five hours to finish if you really focus and work efficiently. However, because you know you have a week to complete it, you might find yourself spending a lot more time on it than you need to. You’ll be more prone to distractions, take longer breaks, or perhaps decide to add more details, tables, graphs, and so forth. Essentially, the task becomes more complex and time-consuming purely because you have more time in which to do it.
And here’s how it manifests across organizations: Imagine a big tech company. A social media company with various departments. Each department has tasks that it must complete to contribute to the overall productivity of the company. Now, suppose each department is given a budget and a set amount of time to complete its tasks for the year. According to Parkinson’s Law, each department will use its entire budget and the entire allotted time, even if the tasks could have been completed more efficiently. This is because as resources and time increase, departments tend to become more complex and less efficient. For example, a department might add more steps to its procedures, requiring more approvals and creating more paperwork, which slows down the process. Or it might use the full budget on additional personnel or equipment that doesn’t necessarily improve productivity. The department might also use the full budget to justify the same or larger budget for the next year, since budgets in many organizations are often determined based on the previous year’s spending. This is a phenomenon known as “budget padding” or “spend it or lose it” mentality.
Inefficiencies can also develop in staff allocation. If a department expands, it might add managerial positions that aren’t strictly necessary. More employees are hired to manage, creating layers of bureaucracy that may not contribute to productivity and can even slow decision-making. I have seen this occur over and over again in my career. The larger the team, the larger the budget, the longer the timeline, the less gets accomplished. I’m very curious to see how many more tech companies come to this realization.
In the last few years, my employer hasn’t bothered matching inflation. When challenged, the HR Director has said they traditionally don’t do this and are not obligated to do so.
It’s basically a wage-cut if they don’t though, and each of these years they seem to be posting record profits. Always seems really sketchy when you get told there’s no budget but they seem to forget they are a Public Limited Company and need to announce their finances, including director’s bonuses and all that.
This time they acknowledged that inflation is very high this year, and are hyping up how caring they are because they are actually giving an increase… although in most cases it still is going to be under inflation. It was pretty predictable that it was going to rise further than the 5% they were benchmarking against. The current figure published by the ONS was 6.2%.
They claim to be giving “an excess of 7% rise“. Everyone is getting a 2% rise, with a further 3% at the discretion of line managers but they can’t give it if your salary has changed in the last 6 months. Last year, when they finally acknowledged I was underpaid, they staggered the increase in 2 instalments so I only got my full rise in January so that means I don’t qualify for this 3%. They are also giving 2% profit share which is a one-off payment and not a salary increase at all. Pension will increase by 0.5%.
So according to their maths, 2 + 3 + 2 + 0.5 is 7.5%. But 2 of that is the one-off payment so at most you can get 5.5%, but 0.5% is your pension, which is nice, but it doesn’t end up in your bank; so we only get 5% direct in our bank.
Personally, I just get the 2% plus 0.5% pension. That is supposed to cover the 6.25% inflation, and is it even going to stay that way? Could rise further.
I love that in the FAQ they provided with the announcement, they went with:
Will I receive a salary increase if I leave?
Surely no one would even think that. How can you get a salary increase from a company you are no longer employed by.
Stranger Coding Tings 