This Unity shitstorm is an interesting thing. Like, I have never seen a company set itself on fire like this before, at least one I am partially invested in. What’s funny is a lot of people also don’t understand why Unity set itself on fire, it actually has a good reason. Y’know, despite it doing the dumbest fucking thing imaginable. A lot of people also don’t understand where they stand in terms of Unity’s interests. Nor do they understand why Unity doesn’t give a shit about them, it does have a reason to not care about you. I know this sounds like I am siding with Unity, but I’m not. What Unity did was fucking retarded and I do not think they will fully recover from this, if they ever will. What surprises me the most is how many studios/teams insist on relying on others for tech instead of making their own so shit like this can’t happen again. (Ed note: This was delayed due to a few injuries)
How Unity fucked up
Starting next year Unity decided, in all of their wisdom, to charge game devs/publishers per download for any game using their engine. This is an awful idea. I understand Unity needs to make money, and we’re going to go over this later, but this is an awful way to make money. With Unity’s new payment system you have no idea how much you’ll owe. They walked back on charging developers for reinstalls on the same device but this means if someone owns 3 computers, like I do, and they install your game on all three devices then you need to pay for all 3 of those installs. If someone has a phone and a tablet, that’s two installs. If someone has a family plan on a console and they’re sharing games between multiple consoles that’s an install per console. This also means if you were a dev who decided to give away mobile and PC versions with one purchase you have the possibility of being charged for 2+ installs. Someone buys a new phone and installs your game? That’s a new device so there’s a charge a few years later after you’ve stopped supporting the game. It’s the worst way for a game engine to try and generate money. Let’s see how drastically different this is from other payment models, including Unity’s current one, and why devs are flipping out.
Unity’s current model, which we’re going to go over the issues with this model later, is a monthly fee. You pay a monthly fee per license you need. This means if you have a team of 100 people who need to use Unity that’s 100 licenses you need, but they do offer bulk rates. With Unreal Engine you pay 30% of each sale to Epic. This is a model I don’t like but at least you know how much you’re going to give Epic at the end of the month. Some engines, like Godot, are free/ pay what you want. This means you just download everything and you never have to pay a dime, but you should since your livelihood depends on this engine. With most other game engines you pay for a license and that’s it, this is also how both Unreal Engine and Unity used to work. The downside to this method is it’s really expensive. You’ll drop thousands of dollars on a license, sometimes tens to hundreds of thousands. However, you own it for commercial use. This means you can use that engine until the end of time without needing to license it again, you just can’t redistribute it. You know, the way software used to work. Like how I still own my copy of Visual Studio 2011, or was it 2012, but no one owns a copy of Visual Studio 2023 because it’s software you rent. If your projects later rely on specific pipelines that only work on Visual Studio 2023 you’re pretty much fucked, where as I can load up my copy of Visual Studio 2011/2012 to this day. Which I’ve needed to do when working on older projects. Sorry, sidetracked. Point is this is how game engines used to work, and what I think is the best model if you can afford it.
Why Unity is doing this
“Well, Unity’s current model sounds fine and it is the industry norm. Why change what ain’t broke?” Unity’s current model is broken. That’s the issue a lot of people don’t seem to understand. Unity requires you to subscribe to Unity Plus, or higher, if you work for a company that makes over a certain amount a year or if your project has made 200k USD in sales. How does Unity enforce this? By self reporting. This is Unity’s issue and if you want proof of this being an issue look at Battlebit Remastered. To the best of my knowledge the devs still haven’t bought Unity Plus, or a higher tier. How do I know? The “Made in Unity” logo still appears when booting the game. When you buy Plus, or higher, you get to remove this boot up screen. You should remove this boot up screen because the engine doesn’t start any pre-caching or anything whenever that screen is loading. This means you’re wasting the player’s time by having it. Despite selling close to 2 million copies the devs of Battle Bit Remastered haven’t bothered to pay for Unity. They’re not alone either. I’ve met people who have said their studios are using the free version and if they have a license then only the computer dedicated towards making the release build has it, and they will stop paying for it until they need it near release. “Well, there’s the asset store!” The asset store is rife with piracy and assets being given away in bundles. This also limits the amount of money Unity earns, as well as the people who make the assets. If I decide to give away CD keys for my asset in a bundle I will make some money but Unity will make 0 while paying for the bandwidth to host my product. When looking at sites like Humble Bundle we can see there’s a lot of downloads for any bundle that offers Unity assets. That’s money Unity isn’t making from the store but is paying for us to download.
Of course the easiest way to offset these financial losses is to cut the CEO’s and other higher up’s paychecks, but we all know this will never happen. After all, Unity’s stock has been tanking for a while. It has lost 46.86% in value, as of 9/16/23. Some of you are going to say that’s because of this change, but no. It’s actually up 2.19% in 1Y and up 34.92% in YTD. Yes, the stock has grown 2% since this time last year and has increased almost 35% since the start of this year. Yes, it has gone up since making this announcement. Its 1M growth has been 4.67%. Sure it has lost 5.56% in 5 days, but overall it’s up. I’m sure the planned town hall, which was canceled due to a death threat from a Unity employee, will either help the stock grow again or sink it more. The important point to this is Unity has been down lower than it currently is, a lot lower. Which shows the management of Unity is fucking terrible. They do not deserve their massive paychecks, or bonuses. I would bet a lot of them don’t even deserve their jobs and only wound up there because of failing upwards, or social connections. Of course stock isn’t everything but with venture capitalist (VC) money drying up, they need to please shareholders more and more.
If you’re wondering how Unity thinks it can get away with driving away all their business, then you don’t understand the business Unity is in. Unity is in the analytics and software development market. Hospitals use Unity for medical software. Militaries are using Unity for simulation software. Some driving schools are using Unity for their own road simulators. Hollywood studios are using Unity in movies. Hell, my friend worked on a project for the World Cup one year and he had to use Unity for the project. Unity is used by FIFA and the NFL. Unity isn’t in the game development market, and once you recognize this a lot of things make sense. This is why they have let the game development side rot and instead they focused on “adding features no one asked for.” No, people were asking for them. Unity’s real customers were. Unity gets a nice name recognition from games but its real customers, those who pay for premium licenses, aren’t in the game industry. Lots of game devs only subscribe to Unity Plus, and some of them cancel it until they’re ready to build a project. Lots of devs don’t pay for Unity, even if they should. How many of you have a massive archive of Unity assets that you got from bundles? You didn’t pay $70 for that asset from the store. You paid $20 for that asset with 30 other assets. Unity never received a dime from your asset bundle.
Some may argue that the reason Unity lost so much money is because they stopped focusing on game developers, but that’s pretty hard to say. Unreal has decided it’s worth the money to step in on Unity’s turf in the non gaming market. So, it can’t be that otherwise Epic wouldn’t focus on expanding into those markets. I think the real reason is because their analytics system isn’t used. In the modern day user information is what makes money. Unity merged with Iron Source so they could become an analytics company. Reminder, IronSource was a company that had a history of using their ad network to install malware wrapped with regular software(Source # 2). To the investors of IronSource, now the investors of Unity, personal information is gold. They can harvest our data and abuse it. This is true for every analytics company, and now anticheat companies plus social media companies. With Unity’s analytics tanking they need to do what they can to get people to use it. Thus the whole “If you use our analytics tool you don’t pay the fine.” Unity is trying to make some money, especially money off that sweet user data. It’s also possible their real customers, hospitals, entertainment companies, and governments, don’t meet the install requirements to even be charged the installation fees. Yeah, this fee is looking like it’s supposed to exclusively target games and mobile apps made with Unity.
Why it’s fucking retarded.
Now if you think I am trying to excuse Unity’s awful decision then you jump to conclusions too fast and are pretty closed minded. I can understand why Unity is doing this while disagreeing with it. Like why airplanes don’t let you on with a bottle of water anymore. It sucks, but I understand, and I disagree with it. If I was Unity I would first look into why no one is using Unity Analytics. What is wrong with the software and what other more popular analytic tools do that’s better, and then implement those mechanics. Unity is instead trying to strong arm people into using their shitty, and vastly inferior, analytics program. This is always a bad idea and will never work. Any time you’re forced to use something you just grow to resent it. Like how my friend’s college made her use China Construction Bank (CCB). Any payments to the school had to be done via CCB and she despised CCB because of it. A job here forced me to use a bank to get paid, they refused to pay me if I used my own bank, and I loathed both that job and the bank. All this is going to do is make developers hate Unity more. People like freedom of choice.
While game developers aren’t Unity’s customers they are the ones that keep the brand alive. I know this sounds weird, but follow me. The US government, NFL, FIFA, medical software companies, and such aren’t going to use Unity if it isn’t a known/trusted piece of software. Game developers have made, and continue to make, Unity a trusted piece of software. People know about Unity because of video games, not because the NFL uses it in some cutscene most people ignore. A cutscene that doesn’t even have the Unity logo. We keep Unity in people’s minds. It is us, the game developers, who makes Unity look like a good investment to your average investor/stock trader. No one knows about Unity being used to make medical software. I am sure everyone reading this post will find that to be new information. This goes to show why Unity needs game developers and why making a change to target game developers is fucking retarded. Without us people will forget Unity exists. Your stock will fall from the lack of marketing because we pay Unity to market Unity. Is it as much money as others pay? No, but they don’t advertise/market Unity. Once developers have switched from Unity other companies will too. It won’t be right away but in due time. Maybe 5 years from now militaries will stop using Unity because finding Unity devs will be a pain in the ass. Which means Unity will lose a massive contract, possibly to Unreal Engine. The same could be true for every other industry that uses Unity. Once Unity devs become harder to find they will have less places to recruit from. Especially since people who know how to heavily optimize Unity will have switched their talents to Godot or Unreal Engine.
What I think Unity is really trying to do
I don’t think Unity ever intended for this to go through, and I know that sounds weird. There’s a bargaining technique where you ask for way more than what you really want. This way you can barter down to what you want and get a better price. Futurama showed it best when Leelah asked for the first born children in a negotiation. She immediately turned to Fry and said, “This is so we can have something to give up later in the negotiations.” While this may have been a silly joke it is a good strategy for negotiations. You don’t do something as drastic as asking for their first born because you have a chance to piss them off and sour all future negotiations, but you do ask for more than what you want. This is what I think Unity is doing, but they fucked up and asked for everyones first, second, third, and fourth born children.
I think Unity is trying to sour pot us (opposite of a honey pot) into taking a bad deal by offering us a monstrously bad deal. When they come back to say, “We’ve heard your complaints. We will now do X instead of this,” it will sound like a much better deal than if they just came out and said they’ll do X. Capcom once dealt with a massive negative blowback by bringing an Ace Attorney game exclusively to the 3DS eShop. They even said it was to skip the phase about begging for the game to release in the US with everyone going, “Please! We don’t care if it’s digital only!” Their previous release went like this and everyone praised them for bringing the game as a digital download. They decided to skip that phase entirely and were lampooned for it. The optics matter a lot, people need to think they made an impact. Unity is letting people think they made an impact whenever this decision is reversed in a month or two, like I am assuming it was always planned to be.
It’s also possible that Unity has no clue what they fuck they plan to negotiate down to. It’s possible the plan is to wait for viable alternatives to be suggested so they can say they listened to us and chose an awful choice one of us suggested. Originally I intended on suggesting a better alternative, but then I realized I would be doing what Unity wanted me to do. Even suggesting a way of cracking down on devs stealing Unity, hint you’re half way there Unity you just fucked up on the implementation, is most likely what Unity wants. They want to look like the good guys by listening to us and taking our suggestions. This is why I think it is important to offer no suggestions other than, “Remove your board of directors and executive leadership.” If anyone offers anymore advice past fire the CEO and everyone else involved with this dumpster fire then you are giving the devil the knife that will soon go into your back. Do not give them advice and do not accept whatever shitty way they’re going to attempt to stab us in the back with. As much as Unity thinks they don’t need us, they do. As much as Unity thinks we need them, we don’t. I may not like Godot, and Julian is dealing with a lot of stress from Unity devs barking demands at him over a donation based project (I am curious how the donations have come since people are barking demands at him. Please ease up on Julian and the people who support Godot), but it will do the job.
What this exposes about modern devs
Before you get too inspired let me crush it. I’m sure Behind Blue Eyes by The Who said something about making sure people aren’t too inspired/happy. This whole drama has exposed a lot about modern devs, especially indie devs. A lot of them are upset at wasting “thousands” of dollars on Unity assets. They’re barking at Julian from Godot to make crucial changes to his engine for them. If you do this then you’re a piece of shit and you deserve what Unity is doing to you. I may not like Godot but I respect the shit out of Julian and what he is doing! Fuck y’all for stressing him out and attacking him because Godot isn’t exactly like Unity. Modern devs are fucking babies. Sorry, I got a bit heated up there. I just don’t like people attacking others who are trying to make a change. Modern devs want to buy assets. They don’t want to make their own tools. They don’t want to create anything outside of a product to sell. Few people are trying to create their own plugins. Judging by the comments I’ve seen, most people refuse to work without using pre-bought assets/tools.
This goes into a larger issue I have with modern programmers. Everyone follows the idea of, “If someone already made the tool why should you make your own?” Maybe you need it to work in a specific way and their code doesn’t do that? Maybe you need to edit it and the person who wrote it was crazy as shit. Nothing is commented out properly and it’s written in a very confusing manner. Maybe the person didn’t know about specific exploits and you’ve now exposed your entire project to said exploits. This is how shit like Log4J almost killing the internet happened. This is why printers fucking suck, because one dude wrote a driver for printers and every printer company has been piggy backing off of code that is older than I am. Devs no longer want to create things but instead “save time” by ignoring all the technical debt they are bringing onto a project by using other’s work. I have an entire post coming up about this and how it’s destroying software.
Devs are also saying that they’ll come back to Unity if the decisions are reversed. This is signaling to Unity they can get away with fucking you over. If you stick with them after this decision is reversed you’re willingly allowing someone into your home after they just attempted to break into your home and rob you. They might not try to rob you again, but who knows? They already tried once. You’re showing how reliant you are on them and that they can get away with being an abusive husband, as long as they don’t leave any marks. Everyone trying to find the next game engine so they can buy a bunch of assets also shows a weakness with modern devs. People are demanding Godot to add an asset store, that’s how much people rely on using other people’s code/assets. Any engine you switch to has a chance to also implement this pricing system. If Unreal Engine, Lumberyard, CryEngine, or any other engine sees this doesn’t tank Unity’s revenue like people thought you can bet they will try it too. Next thing you know you’re going to be moving again. I’ve seen people say, “Which engine won’t pull a Unity.” You know which one won’t? Any engine you make. It’s possible in the future Julian might have to sell Godot due to financial reasons. The company who takes over could pull a Unity. There is no guarantee any software you are using that is made by others will not pull a Unity. Tomorrow Windows could decide to charge users to login. I don’t think they will, but there is a non-0% chance of that happening. It’s always a possibility unless it is software you or your team made.
What can devs do to retaliate
That isn’t to say you don’t have a way of fighting this to make sure it doesn’t happen with other engines. Look, I may think people are weird for overly relying on other people’s assets/codes but I ain’t going to tell you to take this lying down. I will still offer my advice/support. The one thing every company understands is money. This means if you have a currently active Unity subscription then you need to cancel it. “But if I do that then I don’t get my Unity Plus discount since they’re getting rid of Unity Plus too!” That’s what Unity wants you to do. They want you to bank on the fact this is going to blow over and you’ll forget to cancel or accept your discounted Unity Pro as a deal with the devil. No, fuck them. Cancel your Unity Plus. They need to lose that money now. If you still have months left then cancel the recurring payments. They keep track of that internally, every company does. This will send shivers down their corporate spine.
The next thing you need to do is disable IronSource in any of your Unity projects and disable Unity Ads. I know this will hurt you. I know you’re going to get hurt in Unity’s confusion, but it’s a must. The information from IronSource and Unity Ads is what they use to pull in new investors. If you cut that vital information from Unity then you will hurt their stock. You will hurt how the company looks to investors and you will hurt their immediate cash flow. People who buy ads on their ad network will stop doing so when they see the ads aren’t being shown. We need to hit them in these two spots to have a chance of actually punishing Unity. It’s possible if enough people do this it could cause Unity to lose enough money that their CEO could be ousted, but I think that’s unlikely. Again, it’s a non-0% chance albeit low.
Finally the other thing you can do is delist old games, or temporarily take them down for sale. If you have a game that is wishlisted by a lot of people then temporarily take it down. Make sure you include an update on those store fronts explaining why. If you have an online multiplayer game take your game offline for a day or two so people can rally against Unity. Make a dev update explaining what’s going on because not everyone knows about this. I stopped using Twitter and I only learned about this because I needed to log in to Twitter to check if a script was working correctly. I stumbled across this and found out after the initial reactions happened. Not everyone is on social media and not everyone reads gaming news sites. You need to make sure your players are aware and get them mad at Unity too. Ruin the reputation of Unity if you want to make sure no other engine will attempt this again, or if you want a better chance to get the CEO out.
What I’ll do and what my plan has been from the start
I’m sure everyone is foaming at the mouth and angrily shouting, “BUT YOU USE UNITY!” after I made a big deal about devs not making their own tools. Sure, I use Unity but I code everything in it. I may use temp art assets from stores but I am actually working on making my own, despite not being an artist. I am also not using Unity like others. Every other dev I’ve seen complaining about the bullshit fees is a bigger indie dev. Companies that made big indie projects that have sold tons of copies, or have tons of microtransactions. Companies that have hired teams of people. Companies that grew from 1-3 people into 20-40. Some of them have even turned into publishing houses. Why are you relying on third party software as a service (SaaS) engines? I know 3D engines are really complicated to make but you could license a proper 3D engine. One where you don’t pay monthly or have to deal with surprise bullshit. One where you license it and can make as many games as you want with it. You know, like how Id Tech used to work. I’m sure Source still works like this. Bethesda’s Creation engine was made from the skeletons of Gamebyro. They molded it into their own engine. You can license out old engines and do the same thing. I’m sure you can contact some old companies and purchase their engines, despite them not advertising it. Terminal Reality licensed their tech to High Voltage Software, you too can enjoy the same engine from Ghostbusters: The Game (Loved that game). I imagine High Voltage Software would be happy to make some money off of the Quantum 3 Engine since The Conduit didn’t do too well (I bought the first one). Try reaching out to old studios and see what they charge. A lot of them have tech rotting away, and lets be honest y’all don’t need the bells and whistles from newer engines.
Now, while that may sound I am trying to excuse myself by saying, “But I am one man,” it’s not. It’s me showing you my intentions. I am using Unity now but I am also making my own engine. Sure, I make 2D games but most devs don’t even have their own 2D engine. Look at Among Us. They said they would switch from Unity to a new third part engine opposed to just developing their own 2D engine. As someone programming a 2D engine, yeah it’s hard. Yes, it is annoying, but it’s great. When my engine is ready to roll I’ll have experience working on games because I used Unity as my stop gap. I am learning more about game development because I am working with Unity so I know what I need to implement with my engine. That has been my plan with Unity this entire time. For 3D games I plan on learning with Unity as well, then moving on to Unreal to get some experience with C++ in a 3D game and then to a non-SaaS 3D engine that works with C++. If I need to license an engine from another company, so be it. I’ll do that and use the tech. If I can magically create my own then I will. Most likely I’ll try to use Source 2, as long as they keep a traditional engine license. If not I’ll pull a Respawn and buy Source and then slowly modify it as I need to. It’s not like I’m making AAA games. Who gives a shit if my games don’t have all of these features? I’m working towards using as little SaaS as possible.
I own a copy of Visual Studios 2011/2012 on DVD. If I need to work with older code bases, that’s fine. I bought all of the art programs I need and I am trying to make my own tile mapper. I know this is making it more expensive for me now, but it saves me any possible headache. At any point any company selling us SaaS can fuck us over, and I’ve been fucked over by a lot of SaaS products I used. Unity is just another example. If you’re wondering why SaaS fucks us over it’s easy: SaaS doesn’t make money. Look at most SaaS companies. They rely heavily on VC funding to stay a float because renting your software while keeping a staff meant to maintain not just the software but the service of it isn’t profitable. SaaS companies are losing money and those that aren’t are mega corps, like Microsoft and Amazon, have a hard time covering those losses. Now that VC money is drying up due to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank they’re all struggling to exist because they don’t make money. Just like how streaming movies and music doesn’t make money. No for real, Spotify has never made money. It’s highly questioned if any other music streaming service has. Movies and TV aren’t doing much better. Even for Disney.
Extra bullshit and the end
Since it has taken me so long to write this (injuries are fun), new things have popped up. Unity has apologized and said they’ll rework the pricing systems. I still believe this to be a sour pot. Their apology reveals something very important that everyone is ignoring. When the announcement was first made people pointed out how the Unity stock has “tanked”. No, the stock didn’t tank. It lost $6 in value, which yes is a fair amount, but that can happen when someone offloads a lot of stock and it gets reported on. Like what just happened when their CEO and other executives offloaded stock. That’s a normal stock market reaction to such an action. This is a bad thing to focus on because it gives the false idea that inaction and bitching on Twitter does anything, it doesn’t. Their stock was recovering day to day. That was until they issued the apology. After issuing the apology their stock is projected to lose another $1 or $2 in value within this upcoming week. Telling shareholders/investors we’re going to not make money doesn’t make them happy. People bitching on Twitter doesn’t phase investors. Unity isn’t profitable, that’s just a fact. This is from May of 2023. People have been telling investors to avoid Unity for a while now because they’re not profitable and have no means of making a profit unless they fix core pricing issues. Something they can’t do if Unity is to remain SaaS, especially one that relies on self reporting.
This one isn’t related to Unity but instead related to their CEO. Stop bringing up the worst company in America awards he “earned” when he was the CEO of EA. If you don’t know, those awards are an online poll. Watch the Internet Historian video on polls to see why internet polls are worthless. If you don’t want to watch a video then look at the time 4chan rigged Time’s person of the year to spell out Kim Jung Un Gas Chamber with the names of the winners. Also the time they spelled “The Game”. The years EA won those awards they beat companies responsible for defrauding customers to get their credit score hit, companies poisoning water supplies in India and Africa (though they weren’t on the list for some weird reason), companies being sued by the US government, and more. In fact, Forbes agreed that EA doesn’t deserve the award. EA wasn’t anywhere close to “the worst company in America”, and they’ve never been. So why did they win it? Because SimCity had a bad launch and the year before that Mass Effect 3 had a bad ending. Neogaf, 4chan, Reddit, and other like minded sites all voted EA the worst company because of a bad ending and a poorly launched game. Since time has moved on lots of people have forgotten what happened and are bringing it up as an own towards John over the Unity shit. No, it shows how little you know/understand what you are talking about. Since no one ever mentions it, the consumerist is not a serious organization in any way. Here’s the actual voting page for 2013. If these awards hold any weight to you then here’s an award for you: Biggest Fucking Idiot 2023. The award I just gave you holds as much weight as the one the Consumerist gave EA. With the exception of I didn’t use a poll that could be easily botted to award you “Biggest Fucking Idiot”, you just earned it naturally!
I get it EA sucks, I know. EA used to be one of my favorite publishers and since the PS3/360 they’ve sucked fucking ass. However, they’re not worse than Bank of America, Coca-Cola killing union workers in Columbia (By the way finding non-blog sources for this one is kind of hard. Coca-Cola had the entire Wikipedia page with tons of sources taken down. The only thing left on Wikipedia is the court case, which leaves off a lot of information. Luckily the website KillerCoke.org is still online. Yes, I am accusing Wikipedia of bullshit because they’ve done this in the past. The SEO on this one is fucked to the point that I think Coca-Cola did some fuckery to hide the good resources), Coca-Cola’s ground water pollution in India (But they forgot this one!), Nestle taking all the clean water from multiple countries, and more. EA doesn’t even come close to the worst company in America, but they do fucking suck.
You’re going to notice actual sources in this post. Yeah, I don’t want to get sued. I also brought up a lot of information people don’t know about, for some weird reason. Stuff like the NFL and FIFA thing I couldn’t find sources for, but I know people who worked on projects in Unity for them. Unity has fucked up. What we’re seeing with Unity isn’t going to be exclusive to Unity. Remember when I said VC funds are drying up? Expect every SaaS company to try something like this, merge with a mega corp, or collapse. Streaming services for music and movies have already jacked up their prices, and keep doing so. Cloud hosting services have also jacked up their prices. Everything that is a service is going up and up in price. Even here in China the bikes and scooters/mopeds that you can rent are going up in price, and people have freaked out about it.
Not everything needs to be a subscription, or free. We need to think about our purchases and how we’re going to use them in the long term. Have long term plans towards owning the tools you work with. Try to own things that are important to you and your work. Finally, programmers stop relying on scripting for everything. Actually understand what it is you’re doing and how it all works. I’m tired of apps just being chromium wrapped in an application running a website. I’m tired of people using the same assets making games that feel the same. The indie scene is supposed to be about creativity. You need to make that creativity and if there’s something you can’t make, inspire others to work with you on it. If you can’t get others to help you with your project then how can you expect people to buy it? This was how I gauged if a project was worth working on or not. If no one wants to work on it then no one will buy it. If not for the love of the craft then do it for yourself because SaaS is about to come crashing down, and it’ll take you down to hell with it.