1800/person/seat is a pretty minimal cost, at least in the US. Even if you're paying your people 40k per year, it's a 5%-ish increase in costs, at most. Probably much less once you factor everything else in.
I'd be interested to know how many non-hobbyist devs are seriously affected by this.
As a ps3 owner who was considering that it might be fun to make a simple game or utility it's a total non-starter.
Of course I can make a game for free on my desktop, laptop or phone and have many options available. But I was literally just last night thinking about making something for use with a controller on the sofa and bookmarked Unity for further consideration. I'd rather use Godot but I don't think that works with consoles at all.
It sounds like this still works for older versions of Unity? I am not imagining anything elaborate/commercial. The ps3 is not the best computer (or even console) I own, but it's one I like and use daily, even if just for a few minutes to play an old game or watch streaming video.
Edit: after looking around Unity's website it seems they're just not catering to hobbyists at all any more which I guess makes sense from their business perspective. Oh well.
Unity is completely irrelevant here, your first question should be "Will Sony give me the software and the hardware to make a PS3 game/software?" and answer in 2021 will most likely be hard no because PS3 is so old at this point (remember that retail console is not a devkit nor a testkit). Which only leaves homebrew toolchains to explore, and they are not supported by any of big engines today.
Yes, the price is very affordable for even small independent studios knowing that engine licensing costs are one of your biggest non-labor expenses, but the price is also set high enough that an individual will easily have it out of budget.
Only hardware is marginally more expensive, and only sometimes.
Dude if UE makes me a millie I would happily hand them 5% for it, considering that would be all I owe them, ever. Especially for all the free assets they provide.
Agreed. It's a very good model for building their customer relationship. I would be happy to give them 50k. It is revenues however, not profit. This might not look as favorable if you're running a moderately sized studio with payroll costs.
Seems like these types of devs go to PC first anyway, since the cost of getting started there is so much less than consoles. I doubt anyone in the industry will be too broken up about it.
You only need one seat I think also. Just for when you're building to console (At least that's the way it used to be when you could only build to certain platforms on pro) Eg. If I was doing a build I'd just use the seat and if my colleague had it i'd ask him to relinquish it.)
The license doesn't allow doing that, you can't really mix free and pro on the same project (also if you work with multiple people probably the company has > 100k revenue). Of course Unity doesn't really have any good way to enforce this...
I'd be interested to know how many non-hobbyist devs are seriously affected by this.