 Hey everyone, welcome back to Nintendo Prime, we have a bunch of stories for you today on Prime News including maybe one of the bigger and sadder stories we've had to talk about in terms of its impact on the whole of game development, especially our indie developers. We gotta dive into some massive changes with the Unity engine and why it's such a big deal. We got some pre-order bonuses coming in here for Mario Wonder, we have obviously the announcement of a Nintendo Direct, I'm sure you've heard about this already, and more. So without further ado, let's jump into thing, well first I gotta remind you that hey, I would appreciate if you were subscribed to the channel and maybe go ahead and ring-a-ling that ding-a-ling. Yeah, yeah, jingle that tingle, uh, you know, shake the snit. Oh, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho. Alright folks, let's actually just hit that like button and get into today's news. First of the day, we have a Nintendo Direct announcement, I'm sure you've already heard, but if you haven't, it's happening tomorrow at 9am Central Time, roughly 40 minutes of Nintendo Switch, goodness, lasting, well, through this winter. At least that's what they're claiming. Of course, they're focusing on this winter, which for those who don't know, winter doesn't begin until like December 15th or 21st or something, meaning a majority of winter is in 2024. Kind of crazy, so uh, yeah, we're gonna probably hear a bunch of 2024 stuff, which is pretty awesome, so I'm really excited for this Direct. I already did a predictions video, we did a predictions podcast last week, so yeah, we got you covered with your predictions, so I'm not gonna waste any more time here. I'm just gonna say please, Nintendo, Metroid Prime 4, please. Now our next story is a fun one because it deals with new pre-order bonuses, however, at Walmart in the United States for Mario Wonder, Super Mario Bros. Wonder to be exact. Now, what is this pre-order bonus? Well, they're giving away a 10 card pack, so it's like, you know, a pack of cards like your Pokemon cards, your baseball card packs, etc. This is a Mario Wonder card pack that you can get while supplies last, and you will get 10 cards in your pack, and it'll be based on a collection of cards. So there's 15 base cards, four foils, and then two foil elephant Mario cards that are gonna be numbered 1 to 1000, which sort of suggests there's only 2,000 of them. I don't really know, like 2,000? Does that sound like a lot for all the Walmart? Look, I don't really understand how this works, but you know what, you go ahead and pre-order now if the pre-orders aren't already sold out for this. I'm really sorry if they are, and maybe like that 2,000 is just limited to those two cards so you can get the other foils. Look, I don't know, the pre-orders can go get in, and you know, we'll put a link down in the description for that. Now our next story here is maybe the biggest story of our show today, and it deals with changes happening to the Unity engine that, well, a majority of indie developers use, and these changes are absolutely horrendous. They put up a blog post about it, and we're just gonna sort of give you the layman's way to look at this. So Unity is changing how it charges developers, and the change begins in January of 2024, and it could literally kill some indie studios if they don't switch to a different engine. They are charging money for game installs past the first 200,000 installs for Unity Personal and Unity Plus, the cheapest versions of Unity for developers, or really sort of the free versions. They also have to make $200,000 off the game. Now this is within a 12 month calendar, so 200,000 installs plus $200,000 in revenue. Now, this is just revenue made, this is a profit, so it does include taxes, this is just strictly revenue. Let's say an indie developer spent three years making a game with a friend. They invested all their time and money to make said games, so they didn't have any other job. Two people likely valuing that time at way more than $200,000 in revenue. They released their game and see some modest success. Let's say they moved about 250,000 units, and they were selling it at about $5 a pop. Now 30% of that $5 already goes directly to the platform, so Steam, Nintendo, PlayStation and Xbox. So the standard fees, which are standard fees on platforms, so now that $5 is down to $3.50 per copy. They made a good amount of money still, right? $875,000 to be exact. Now some of that has to be paid back by the time they already spent making the game. So let's say they cut off half that money to pay themselves back for the time spent making the game. Now these are profit of $430,000 or so to put towards the next game. Great! Or is it? Because they still have to pay $0.20 per install. That's $50,000 ripped out of their pocket. Now they're down to $380,000 to put towards that next game. Oh, poor them. Oh wait, do we mention they still have to pay taxes on that $875,000? Of course they do, like any other revenue. Also, all of that revenue isn't at once. It's over a 12-month span. By the time it's said and done, they end up running on razor-thin margins and barely enough money to make their next project. That $50,000 that was taken away sure could make a huge difference in development time, couldn't it? But here's the thing, that's not even the worst of it. It actually gets even worse because that's someone that might be able to survive this. Because the fees massively drop if you're part of the Unity Pro or Unity Enterprise Pro costs $2,040 per year per developer and you have two dads working, you gotta pay for two development seats. Cool! Well $4,950 is what you have to pay for Enterprise and these are the ways to get the cheaper fees. Now keep in mind, Unity, which owns a majority of the indie space when it comes to game development engines, has a market cap of $14 billion. They are not a small company and they are also not hurting for money. Many other competing game engines do not charge these crazy fees, let alone per install fees. It's almost better to not find hardly any success with your game rather than be excited about finally getting 200,000 players. But it gets even worse when so many Unity games are actually free and only make money off ads. As an example, Unity games made for phones. You could have a billion installs on a phone, but let's cut that back for a moment. Let's say a million installs. But just because you made $200,000 in ad revenue off that million installs, you have to pay $0.20 for each of those installs. So let's say a phone game has 1 million installs and you hit $200,000 in revenue off ads, that's $0.20 per install, or basically $200,000 that you have to pay to them. So imagine you released a phone app and you were good enough, popular enough to get it to a million installs, but ad revenue is pretty low, you made $200,000, they just ripped that away from you. They take all of your money. Yeah, that's going to bankrupt a lot of indie developers. This is a major issue, and interesting veteran Jeff Keely chimed in on Twitter simply to say, what a joke. And you know what? I tend to agree. Unity, your policy, at least as it stands today, is going to make not only some gamers not want to play Unity games anymore, it's also going to lead to most indie developers finding a different thing, and you're going to completely wreck your market cap. In fact, you've already seen a major dip in your market cap because of this announcement, because everyone knows your investors included that, yeah, people are just going to switch to a different engine that doesn't have these crazy policies. Whatever, I guess you like to dig your own grave. Now last but not least today, we got to talk about the Pokemon DLC, because yes, the Pokemon DLC has well dropped. And hey, we got a little PR email to read for you guys. Experience a whole new land, welcome to the land of Kitakami, a tranquil place whose quaint rice fields and apple orchards set it apart from the wilds of Paldia. You'll visit this lush countryside area as part of your academy's school trip, joining students from another academy in an outdoor study program that has you travel the land in search of signboards depicting one of Kitakami's oldest folktales. Meet a variety of fantastic characters adventure together with new characters like Carmine and Kieran, a brother and sister duo who attended Blueberry Academy, but call Kitakami home. Perrin, a camera-loving traveler who is on the hunt to snap a shot of a mysterious Pokemon, and Miss Briar, the teacher in charge of your school trip who shows a keen interest in the terrestrial phenomenon. Discover new Pokemon, catch newly discovered Pokemon from the land of Kitakami, including the Macha Pokemon, the Pulchageis, the Candy Apple Pokemon, Diplin, and a trio of Pokemon said to have protected Kitakami in the past, Okadogi, Monkey Dory, and Fezza D.P.D. I totally butchered those names. You can look forward to entering a host of previously discovered Pokemon like Vulpix, Snorlax, Poochiana, oh gosh, man I do not know how to pronounce Pokemon names, I'm really bad at this. Anyways, explore your Pokemon and friends together, or explore with your Pokemon and friends together. In new ways, you have an ogre ousted and as a fun minigame in which you collect berries by popping ogre balloons. You'll receive Maki that can alter the base points of your Pokemon stats as a reward. Play solo or with friends and come up with a strategy to take on higher difficulty levels. Taking photos is also never been more fun. The new Roto Stick accessory for your Rotom camera will allow you to take photos at wider angles, and a new feature will allow you to direct Pokemon to set up the perfect shot. Players must own the base Pokemon Scarlet and Violet Game, or either or, to access the hidden treasure of Area 0 DLC. And all I can say to that is, fix your damn game, I'm not playing. Alright guys, that's gonna do it today for today's Prime News. Thank you so much for tuning in. We have a podcast that I APM Central type, Jake Randall, Andre Treestart, yours truly, Eric Moore. We're gonna have a blast talking about Nintendo Switch 2, not the Nintendo Direct, or at least not much of it, because we already did our predictions last week, but we'll at least mention it and have a brief combo. You guys are awesome, and I'll catch you in the next video.