Don’t let your kids grow up to be Unity developers.
I’m so scared for the Silksong developers right now.
My faith is unshakable.
I am an ardent worshipper of the holy SHAW and shall continue praying even more devoutly for the second coming of our lord and savior Hornet.
Oh god I didn’t even think about Silksong D:
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Well good luck to Unity in fighting massive games like FGO or Genshin.
Wait, is Genshin made with Unity?
Yup
Nintendo lawyers:omau wa mou shindieru
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I wonder if they realize the extent to which this disincentivizes upgrades to any newer form of Unity - and the newer license - even outside the rest of the recent drama.
It would take amazing changes to even consider giving this up - and at that point, it’s a hop and a skip to a platform shift.
Google app store requires a change, old version doesn’t have the capability to make the change. App gets pulled or you upgrade and make the change… boom that’s all it takes. And appreciate from other comments it happens semi-regularly.
Can someone help me understand? Maybe my understanding of contracts is too simple but in this example:
I’ve developed and published a unity game. The game is complete and will receive no future updates from me, but will remain on sale for the foreseeable future.
My understanding of the current situation is that unity is somehow claiming these new terms will apply to my game. But I don’t see how that’s feasible. Shouldn’t my relationship with unity be at an end as the product was completed? Would I have to de-list my completed game to avoid charges? How is that legal?
The game is complete and will receive no future updates from me, but will remain on sale for the foreseeable future.
That’s the sticking point. A game could be complete, and receiving no material updates, but still need to be “updated”. Sometimes the app stores require a re-compile and you will be bound by the new terms.
In the worst cases, a highly played but low earning game (like Flappy Bird) requires a recompile to update the minimum API level it supports in the Google play store. There are no gameplay changes what-so-ever. If you don’t re-compile and update it, Google will de-list the game. But you also can’t submit the update unless you accept the new terms.
So is this something that all companies deal with? For example:
If Google builds an app with an embedded library that costs a license fee, and the company that offered that license decides to raise is price by 10x for future versions and they only give 3 months warning. Now my app has to go without security updates or suddenly be subject to extreme charges. But I don’t have enough time to completely rewrite my app either.
I find it hard to believe companies would leave this sort of thing up to chance. If AWS suddenly decided to 100x it’s price structure would that actually fly legally? If so, why don’t they?
Unity has had over a decade to establish itself as the main game engine. They have passed the growth phase and are now in the exploitation phase.
AWS and Azure are currently in the growth phase. They charge more for worse performance than self hosting and traditional third party hosting, but it’s close enough execs on the hype train are switching as fast as possible so as not to be left behind by their peers. Once they have destroyed traditional hosting options, they will absolutely move into the exploitation phase and pull this same move, and the ramifications will be much greater than just gaming.
Well… I look forward to using Unity’s replacement…
All this talk about development has made me want to dip my toes into it. Is there anywhere you can download free to use art and models? Is there somewhere I should start reading before just jumping in. (Trying to RTFMS before building I guess)
Honestly, just jump in and start making something, either following a tutorial and/or referencing the docs as you go. As for free assets, maybe try the creative commons website? Just make sure to adhere to the terms of any license that you use.
Is there an easy thing to start with? I was thinking of doing something solitaire or tetris related to start with, just because I assume there is tons of guides and stuff to copy for something that old and ubiquitous. While I can still heavily edit the appearance and other aspects of the game.
Internet archive is awesome
I want to know who hired that fucking CEO and put him up to purposefully tank Unity.
This can’t be anything less than a blatant attempt to destroy a company so who would have a vested interest in destroying Unity? It can’t just be for money.
Its the same ethos of those CEOs that are demanding everyone must return to the office. No ifs, or buts.
They damage moral which takes years to build up, they further announce layoffs which destroys whatever moral was left.
These idiots never seem to be held accountable.
Honestly, these management types need to be case studied.
We have to start holding them accountable ourselves, because the system sure ain’t gonna do it.
Yeah, it’s looking like 1776 time.
It’s not only the CEO, it’s all the board. Don’t think he can do this kind of shit alone.
It is Big Godot pulling the strings to entice people to jump ship to their free and open source game engine. The plan is dastardly, but effective. Can’t use other game engines if there are no other engines left standing.
You know, if Godot was actually a for-profit endeavor, I probably would believe you.
Sadly, there often comes a time when a critical mass of the business leaders decide “you know what, I want to cash out and no matter how disastrous this will be long term, I think short term this will milk some revenue out of some captive audience”.
In the IT industry, that time is usually when Broadcom buys you.
You’ve hurt me right in the vSphere.
What a lot of people at these companies don’t understand is that other options existing means people will find a way to continue without you… The more that happens, the larger the community… the faster you fail.
When Broadcom announced buying VMWare, literally all the IT subreddits in unison looked for other alternatives. We’re on Proxmox now, it’s been a better product than VMWare in literally every way.
It’s also called the trust thermocline. Once a certain level of exploitation is reached, customers leaving suddenly goes very quickly and usually unrecoverable. The straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Or in the case of unity, you smash the poor camel with a baseball bat and are very surprised it tries to bite you.
I remember at the time that a presentation circulated on a previous Broadcom acquisition, as a preview of what was in store for vmware. I never saw analagous material for vmware exactly, and I can’t remember what Broadcom acquisition it was.
Their analysis was that they predicted their changes would kill off any new business, and kill off 80% of the existing customer base. However, this was fine as the other 20% was so stuck that they could charge more than 5x to make up for it, and all without spending any money on R&D and reducing customer support load.
While I know nothing of the numbers… This was my understanding of it as well. That they’d make probably just as much if not more money because of the captive groups.
However, while they might be captive now… Doesn’t mean they’ll be captive forever. VMWare is going to lose the entire market over this very rapidly, then the rest slowly after.
Indeed. However all the key people making this call will have made a few million off the husk on the way down, and will have moved on to drain the next company.
And this is why we shouldn’t have monopolies. People shouldn’t be held hostage by one or two companies. When they go full stupid like Unity is, the customers grumble, shrug, and get to work with a different system.
Or not just monopolies, but companies in general have a dictatorship authoritarian structure where the c-suite has all the decision making power and employees or customers can go fuck themselves. Corporations should be made for the people by the people.
Aligning power over systems with stackholders impacted by those systems is usually good for avoiding hostile incentives which result in hurting people, yes. Plus to some it might axiomatically be morally good.
I’m forced to use VMware for cisco classes.
Sounds a bit odd… What networking class requires VM platform usage?
AdvancedAlgorithmicLigmaBalls201
If I teach a class that needs a vm, I’m making damned sure everyone uses the same type.
Good thing you’re not a teacher then!
Edit: LMFAO the downvotes are astounding! So let’s make students install VMWare… Who’s gunna pay for that? It’s funny because I actually did work full time lecturing in an R1 institution in several classes that required virtualization. It’s really not hard to publish different images for all the major vm platforms.
Assuming this is college, requiring students to pay for software is part of the norm.
The vm has “tools” preloaded and helps students experiment with configurations that don’t end up causing the host computer to be badly configured. The host PCs are pretty restrictive and have no admin privileges. The VM is fully capable of being “free to mess with” in a sense. The idea behind it is to prevent unauthorized bad actions on the host pc. Creating a separation of students’ abilities behind a vm. You can use your own PC, but that is cumbersome and unnecessary. The “forced to” is a bit loose, but it helps students start from a state where the teacher can help guide the students to what to do.
In the software side of IT, this is usually when you start seeing layoffs and a mass replacement of talented developers with bottom-of-the-barrel offshore contractors. Beware the following fail cascade.
That’s what everyone is saying but this policy will only cost them from lawsuits, so it can’t just be about money.
It will cost them in future earnings… Companies won’t want to work on their platform if these policies are still in place… and many will never want to work with them again since they’ve shown their hand.
That is what makes me think there’s something more to this.
I think rival companies might groom CEOs that get hired by their competitors but whom, secretly, are paid by the rivals to destroy the companies from within.
Perhaps I’m wrong but that’s the only explanation I’ve been able to come up with that makes any sense to me.
The CEOs don’t need to be paid by other companies. All a competing company needs to do, is to convince some company’s board members to hire a CEO with a track record that they know will tank the company… maybe through indirect lobbying, maybe by hinting they want to hire them because it’s “such a valuable CEO”… and bam!
CEO ruins company, then bails on a golden parachute, and you only had to spend whatever it took to mislead the competing board.
(I’ve seen it done to tiny companies with as few as 20 workers, it’s surprisingly easy to convince a board to hire someone who will destroy everything)
What’s the point to do this ?
To destroy the competition.
How does one insulate a company from corrupted CEOs?
Technically that’s what a board of directors is for. They are the ones who can axe a CEO and hire another.
Oh, plenty of business “geniuses” make some pretty boneheaded moves, especially when they feel a need to try to produce huge growth after saturating a market, or if their business results somehow fall short of some need (either actually losing money, or some arbitrary self-imposed “goal” not being hit).
Currently there’s an epidemic of businesses making some pretty dubious long term decisions for the sake of trying to prop up numbers amidst a receding market reality. Recessions are, in part, a self-fulfilling prophecy, where whatever impetus exists, it’s exacerbated by every participant screwing things up further.
Kicked me right in the Reddit.
It can’t just be for money.
Lol (litterally)
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He’s a VC CEO, he’s there to pump the company for everything it’s worth for maximum stock returns.
I just checked the stock ticker for Unity and it fucking tanked. So that can’t be it.
I wouldn’t put it past them to short their own stock while they make announcements then go long once things settle down…
How the fuck is that even legal?
It isn’t. That would be Insider Trading.
But it doesn’t stop people from trying (and sometimes getting away with) it.
Even though this is bad and many developers won’t want to use Unity, I think there still may be enough devs that will comply and generate more profit.
If you were at the start of your journey right now and were trying my decide between Unity, Unreal or any other tool… Would you be choosing Unity?
Let’s hope not. We can’t be complicit in our own subjugation any longer.
No one said they were good at their job
It doesn’t matter for most devs, unless you don’t support the game anymore, this doesn’t help anything, at some point you will need an engine update to support new hardware, fix an engine bug or similar.
I know Unity claim they can apply their new pricing to old versions anyway, but setting that aside, how practical is it to simply stay on Unity 2022 LTSB or earlier?
I’m not a software developer, I’m a CAD modeller. My company pays Autodesk a substantial amount of money every year for licence tokens which grants us access to new releases, but using the latest is pretty much unheard of.
For AutoCAD, 2022 is the default (2024 is current) although they don’t seem to have added much of interest since v2019. For the likes of Civil 3D and Revit there are useful updates in newer versions, but the version used is locked in at the start of a project, and upgrading mid scheme is only done in exceptional circumstances.
If Autodesk came out with some kind of scheme in their 2025 tos that said “if you model a bridge in Revit, we will charge 5 cents for every car that crosses or passes under it” then we could easily stick on 2024 for a decade, more than enough time to skill up on the alternatives.
You can’t do that in unity, because each version has somehow a major bug ruining your life or your project.
They usually only fix them after they introduce another bug that breaks another part of your project, so it’s a neverending race.
You don’t wan’t to reimplement everything yourself and they are always “working on it” so you trust them
So basically unity wants money even for games made on their engine before this shitty update. All older versions of games with older versions of unity are eligible to be monetized. Forget ethical, how is that even legal?
Unity, I hope you die. Sorry to all the Devs who put their soul into developing it.
Jesus dude chill it. Somehow hating Unity is popular here, and don’t get me wrong I am also here because I hated the corporate asshole named spez, but this move Unity wants to make isn’t super unreasonable. They want to charge proportionally to the amount of usage. If they’d done this right out of the gate, nobody would have thought that is unreasonable. Unity is a great engine, they should be able to charge for it.
Imagine you buy a licence for Microsoft Office, you make a word document, share it with friends/colleagues and you are charged a penny for every single time someone downloads that document on their device.
That’s only fair if I am making three pennies for every single time someone downloads that document. Microsoft Office made it possible and so the deserve a share.
Sounds like you’re describing every newspaper, blogger, and scientist (who release scientific papers).
Unity isn’t only a tool. Unity is also an ingredient. It’s shipped with the product and is an integral part of what makes the product work. Most OEM deal out there also depend on usage.
You want to ship a product with Neo4j (or any other software developer) under the hood? Go make an OEM deal with Neo4j and I’ll bet you it is going to be some deal that will be proportional to the amount of usage your product is going to get. Which is only fair of course.
Your race car driver analogy makes no sense by the way. A developer makes a product and that product is shipped many times to a lot of people. You could think of Unity as a pizza bottom and a pizza oven. The developer puts stuff on top, bakes it in the oven and then it is shipped to people. The developer has to pay for the pizza bottom and the cost of the tool will be discounted. The developer charges a price such that after subtracting the cost of the pizza bottom there will be a nice profit. Profit and cost will be proportional to the amount of pizza’s eaten.
Your race car driver analogy makes no sense by the way. A developer makes a product and that product is shipped many times to a lot of people.
Well a car manufacturer makes a car and then sells it to a rental company and many rental car company customers use that car.
I’d say the analogy holds.
In your altered (before it was a race driver?) car rental company analogy, the developer would be the car rental company and Unity the car company? This would mean the developer would rent Unity to its users? Still not making any sense dude.
Apart from analogies. Here are some facts.
- A commercial game is a product made by a developer
- Unity is a tool that can be used by developer to make commercial games
- Unity is also a part of what makes the product work and is shipped with the product.
- Unity itself is a commercial product
Take any other kind of commercial product that is shipped along with a commercial product. Is it unfair to charge based upon the number of times that product is shipped?
But why do they want to charge based on usage? Their users are already subscribed. It’s not like they run cloud services or anything. There is literally no cost to them except for the self imposed analytics stuff.
Good question.
Let me ask you the reverse with a hypothetical: imagine that you spend a great deal of time building a library for generating realistic engine sounds, like this guy. Now you make an OEM deal with Sony and your work goes into the next version of Gran Turismo. Now let’s say everybody loves the new version, because of the great engine sound and a number of other awesome features. Would you want your work to be rewarded by how much value Sony extracted from it? You would right? (otherwise tell me why not and we’ll have that discussion, but I can hardly imagine you’ll say no to this)
Then put yourself in Unity’s position. It’s not one company you’ve got to track, but perhaps hundreds of thousands. New ones popping up, old ones dying without a trace. You want to be rewarded for your continuous effort based on how much value people are getting from your product. This is only reasonable, right? Now you’ve got to come up with a way to do that. So one way to do that would be to track the revenue of each developer and charge a percentage. This is mission impossible. Perhaps you can do that with the larger companies, who are less likely to forge data and easy to get hold of, but you’ve got thousands on thousands of developers that are making peanuts or making just enough that are one man shops. There is also no reliable way to get accurate revenue data from developers across the world. You can’t just ask the tax office of the Philippines or Norway for income statements of random developers. So instead they use a heuristic, which is very common by the way. The heuristic goes like this: revenue ∝ usage ∝ installs ∝ downloads (∝ means “is proportional to”, but in this context I think it would be better to say: “correlates highly with”) .
Now if you proof to me that downloads does not positively or significantly correlate with revenue made then I’ll agree with all the people who feel they need to hate on Unity right now, but the way I see it this isn’t an unreasonable business model.
One last thing. It is an oversimplification to say that Unity doesn’t have any cost to usage. Sure once the binaries have been built, there are no costs to those binaries being copied across the globe, but more usage means more demands on the developer, which translates to demands on Unity to make sure their engine works well on all platforms and devices and is able to keep up with the queries and demands of the developer. Imagine just having to QA the Unity engine; it’s gotta be an enormous undertaking. They’ve got to offer active support on a number of versions (n) of their platform for a number of platforms (m) and supported devices/hardware (o). That makes
n^m^ocombinations that could cause issues and then still that is an oversimplification. A game that is used a lot is going to hit a lot of these combinations and that’ll certainly translate into a lot more work for Unity to ship updates. So I would even argue that usage ∝ costs.Corpo shills nyeed learn to shutup
These chatGPT walls of text are getting out of hand.
Didn’t use ChatGPT, but you’re the first person to accuse me of that. Funny times :)
Didn’t use ChatGPT
Yes you did. But, to be fair, in case you didn’t, why don’t we say chatGPT-like then, to make you feel better.
And I’ve seen others say the same thing about those huge walls of text that are semi-nonsensical lazy ramblings to other people, so I’m not the only one expressing this opinion.
Honestly I didn’t. Have a nice life, I’ll not be responding anymore.
If they’d done this right out of the gate, they would not have nearly the market share they have today, let alone all of the free advertising in the form of guides, courses, Q&As, and general expertise.
It’s a classic honeydick.
Yeah, maybe. It is a bit of honeydick.
If they’d done this right out of the gate, nobody would have thought that is unreasonable.
That’s ridiculous. There’s no technical way they can accurately detect repeat installs on the same device, or pirated copies. Which means devs will pay out the nose for no reason. The outrage exists for a reason
It’s based on downloads. Of course those are easy to track. Outrage exists because people hate change. I get that, but it still isnt unreasonable.
It’s NOT based on downloads. Where are you even getting your info from?
“We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user. We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share.” - https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates
Here’s the FIRST sentence of your link
Effective January 1, 2024, we will introduce a new Unity Runtime Fee that’s based on game installs.
Here’s the details of how the plan will work a few paragraphs down, again from your link
Once a game passes the revenue and install thresholds, the studio would pay a small flat fee for each install (see the table below).
If that wasn’t clear enough, here’s the pricing table. Notice what it refers to? Hint: It’s not downloads
Which is based on downloads.
Nobody here is arguing from direct information, just implications of vague statements. Here’s where they spell it out in more detail:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/
Q: How are you going to collect installs? A: We leverage our own proprietary data model. We believe it gives an accurate determination of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project.
Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game, will that count as multiple installs? A: We are not going to charge a fee for reinstalls. The spirit of this program is and has always been to charge for the first install and we have no desire to charge for the same person doing ongoing installs. (Updated, Sep 14)
Note the update there. They completely walked back their previous answer:
Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs? A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data.
Which has lead to a lot of confusion. It seems like their “proprietary data model” is focused on another point, which is preventing install spamming. Or maybe it’s also about reinstalls, even though they “don’t receive end-player information” so that was impossible a few days ago.
Well, I am just going by what their own official statement is:
“We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user. We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed.”
https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates
But the link that you sent indeed sounds a lot more vague. It’d be a major mistake on their part if they are not going to be transparant on how they are going to do the counting.
Taking a fixed percentage of the profits/revenue is reasonable. Taking a fixed amount of money for every install is insane.
Tracking revenue of thousands of developers over the whole world is impossible. Maybe put yourself in Unity’s position?
And tracking the installation of games across millions of machines is more reasonable?
It’s based on downloads. It is easy to track those.
“We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user. We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share.” https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates
Games qualify for the Unity Runtime Fee after two criteria have been met: 1) the game has passed a minimum revenue threshold in the last 12 months
So revenue still need to be tracked like it was before so they know when to start charging. This just adds another metric to track, not replacing anything and does not make anything easier.
Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share
This from the CEO of unity John Riccitiello who introduced loot boxes at EA and famously called developers that don’t have ongoing monetisation of games fucking idiots. Yeah, fuck that shit. This will just penalise developers that sell their game and don’t constantly try to grab as much money from their user base as they can. Exactly what he wants to see. Fuck that guy he seems to destroy everything he touches.
Once you’ve begun collecting money for your product, you’ll need to track gross revenue and pay a 5% royalty on that amount after $1 million USD in gross revenue is earned.
Also, right now Unity forces you to take a subscription to their paid version when you make more than $100k a year.
Once you hit a $1m target, they’ll be wanting to see your books yeah. That is a much smaller number and doable. Believe me, tracking revenue of other companies is a pain in the ass though. I’ve done a number of OEM deals and revenue based OEM deals are much more complicated than usage based OEM deals.
I was wondering how they would do it with tiny companies using excel spreadsheets to track… but if it’s only 1M+ companies they have to have decent books, so that makes it easy.
Taking profits means that:
- They know the developer is making profits
- There are actually profits - no one will ever be charged for money they don’t have
- It can all be traced and taxed fairly and legally
- Non-profit developers aren’t punished
Doing it based installs is none of that.
It’s insane. It’s a stupid idea from an idiot who probably arrogantly ignored everyone who told him it was a stupid idea.
If I was a shareholder of Unity I would want this moron investigated for selling shares and then tanking the company.
No doubt they are going to buy shares at the lower price before they announce a total reversal or this plan.
Or one of their friends. Or their kid’s friends.
It’s not proportional at all wtf, get your facts straigth
Proof me wrong then. Downloads/installs is not proportional to usage? Sounds like a nice null hypothesis that is easily disproven with a bit of data.
Your comment is total nonsense, there is nothing to prove.
Would you pay 20ct every time you open a pdf ? Why not then ?
Would you pay 20ct every time you open a pdf ? Why not then ?
No, but I would pay for a PDF reader based on the number of times I install this PDF reader if for some reason this PDF reader offers features that I can’t get from some open-source tool. Especially if that means I get support, bug fixes, support for different devices and the like, which Unity does. This is not an uncommon model at all.
I failed my question.
Would you pay 20ct every time a user open a pdf you made ?
Yes, if I would make more than 20 cents of of it, let’s say 40 cents, and the company that I am paying to is offering a major service to me that would make it otherwise near impossible for me to make such a PDF, then sure.
Let’s say you have a free game, that’s pretty popular. You offer some cosmetic stuff players can buy, and/or a few ads. The game gets really popular, and you exceed $200000 income. You also have millions of downloads of the game.
In that case you could end up owing unity money, because a download/install is not the same as a sale.
Now imagine you published this game a month ago and it’s popularity is climbing, and your income is slowly climbing too.
Do you gamble that the game will be profitable, or do you delist the game because you risk bankrupting yourself if you don’t?
Edit: also, what’s stopping them from changing it to $2 per install, or $20? You have no guarantee. Not something you’d feel comfortable building your business on, and sink years of development into.
Edit2:
- geometry dash lite - 100M+ downloads
- Roblox - 500M+ downloads
- Solitaire - 10M+ downloads
- angry Birds 2 - 100M+ downloads
If they’d be made in unity, they would each have owed unity millions just from downloads. I’m not sure they’re that profitable…
If it’s a free game then you shouldn’t be using a commercial engine. If you do use a commercial engine in a commercial setting then you need to make sure that you make a profit after you’ve payed your costs. This is not different from any other type of commercial enterprise.
If you are going to go with an ad based model for your game, like you suggest, then you should be able to make a profit if enough people use your game, which should be somewhat proportional to the amount of installs. People aren’t just going to install your product and never use it. What could happen of course is that they use it once or twice and determine it’s total crap and then don’t spend any time actually playing it, so not enough ads can be displayed. In that case you should indeed delist the game, because it isn’t viable. This should be easy to track based on the number of downloads and ads revenue. But of course if your game is crap then you can also expect people to not download it in the first place, so it isn’t a very realistic scenario. If your game is slowly becoming more popular, like you suggest, then you should be able to make enough of of it to pay your dues.
Perhaps what could happen is that you manage to stir up an incredible amount of hype around your game. A ton of people download it and then simultaneously determine it is crap without listening to game reviews and such. However, in this case I can hardly imagine that the business model was ad based revenue when you’ve got the marketing budget to stir up such a hype.
Nevertheless I wouldn’t say it is completely out of the realm of possibility to get cornered by Unity’s business model, or any third party business model as of fact, but it’s unlikely if you think it through. And that is actually part of the risk of entrepreneurship that you need manage. A friend of mine also had a clothing store and bought a bunch of clothes that in the end she couldn’t sell and needed to default on her payments. It happens. The clothing store industry is much harder than the game industry: you need to buy everything up front and then hope that you’re going to be able to sell it.
Unless you’re dealing with a liberal open-source license, you can’t just expect to go out into the world and use somebody else’s work without having to deal with these types of issues. And that is just fair, if you’d ask me.
A few points:
- If your revenue is above $100.000 the last 12 months, you need a professional license. Which you pay for. The “free for smaller games” is what allowed Unity to gain it’s current foothold in the market. This install fee will be in addition to that. And for all games, including older games or games made on older versions of unity.
- It takes years to develop a game, and Unity announced this pretty recently (September 12). If you had a plan that would be profitable with ads or microtransactions and you and your team spent years making it, you’d suddenly might not have a business model any more. And for games already released, it might not be profitable keeping it up any more. Unless you have a way to predict the future, that point is completely moot. If you started developing a new game the last … 5 days, sure. But then you’d probably pick a different engine that doesn’t have such a requirement.
Finally, someone who actually makes arguments! :)
I can fully imagine that some people who counted on the old business model are really fucking bummed out by this change, need to rethink their business strategy and feel forced with their back against the wall. That has got to be a major pain in the ass and disappointment.
I am unsure why Unity is making this change. Perhaps they are just greedy bastards, perhaps they need it to survive or perhaps something in between. Regardless, if you would be in Unity’s position and would want to do this change then I don’t see a way an easy way around it. Even if they’d decide that older versions are licensed in the old way, then that would potentially mean you’d get a whole bunch of people sticking to an old version, which of course opens up a whole new can of worms that they might have good reasons for not wanting to open up.
While everyone is up in arms and hating on Unity my entire point was only to say that the business model that they are proposing isn’t unreasonable. Paying per installation. People are acting like it is totally unreasonable to charge for the number of installs, as if Unity isn’t a core ingredient of all those shipped products. It seems like people lose critical thinking skills when they get emotional.
This is not to say that it doesn’t suck monkeyballs for those affected. I use a free ferry service quite often where I live. It’s great and it would suck ass if the municipality would start charging for it, but I wouldn’t pretend that it is totally unfair that they decided to ask money for it.
PS some person accused me of using ChatGPT while directing their Unity hate onto me, but I truly don’t, so I am keeping my wall of text because I think it gets my point across more effectively.
You want to run a pearson correlation line throught the number of downloads and the amount of usage. You’ll find P approaches 1. I don’t have the data, but if you do I’m willing to take the bet.
Did you bring your clown makeup with you from reddit or did you just buy a new set?
Haha, well you are the joker, so maybe I can borrow yours?
Dammmn dude why are you so lame?
Haha, well you are the joker, so maybe I can borrow yours?
It’s OK. You can take your time crafting a reply. Don’t feel you have to go with the first one you think of.
Somehow the worst take ive seen in a long time. And to add to the convo they should have just did what unreal does with the 5%
If they’d done this right out of the gate, nobody would have thought that is unreasonable.
More realistically, a lot of Devs would’ve never have chosen it, thereby not having it to become as popular as it is today. Something else would’ve taken its place, simple.
That’s what I thought also. I mean they could legally also add that for every instalation of an old game the developer would have to send nude pics to Unity CEO?
Yup. Totally normal. It is part of the user agreement. We just aren’t aware of it yet.
Any idea of why Unity did this?
I mean, they’ll generate some short term cash, sure, but they just lost their entire customer base. No developer of any size can take on the liability and risk of working with Unity again, even if Unity realizes how badly they screwed this up and reverts this.
The current Unity-CEO is the Ex-CEO of Electronic Arts, under him EA was named “Worst Company in America” two consecutive times in 2012 and 2013 by Consumerist Magazine and he’s on record saying that game devs that don’t focus on microtransactions are "the biggest fucking idiots".
Most likely to sell ads. Apparently the whole “pay us for every install” thing will be waived if the developer will be using their ad platform.
I’m pretty sure there are open source alternatives to this?
Anybody care to shine some light on which projects would be comparable, and how they stack up against unity?
There is, unreal besides being a product has its source available and Godot focus on the same niche most of unity games were. But the problem never was the lack of replacement, the problem is, a game with years of development on unity whould not easily switch to any alternative, they have assets from unity store, scripts made for unity, UIs using unity specific stuffs, even network protocols could be bounded with unity. Change this is an herculean task and most of the games are in barely maintenance mode, imagine a full rework. So these games should be pulled of the market and thrown in the garbage to avoid new installations.
Godot focus on the same niche
Not exactly, Godot is 100% free and open source, Unreal is only partially.
Edit:
I misread, the meaning is that Godot and Unity is serving the same niche, which is true. Except for those who want true Open Source, then Godot is the clear choice.
Sorry, I was trying to say that Godot gas the same niche of unity, in the sense of both are widely used for indie and small games
Sorry, I misread, I can see what you mean now. And that’s true.
I think he meant as the kind of games and Devs that use both tools. They broadly fit the same niche
Yes, you are right, after reading again I can see that.
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Coders cost money and coding takes time.
The most valuable thing is an experienced team who thoroughly understand both the specifications and the implementation as well as the reasoning behind both. Written specifications are great as onboarding and reference material but there will always be gaps between the specifications and the code. (“The map is not the territory.”) Even with solid specifications you can’t just turn over maintenance of a codebase to a new team and expect them to immediately be productive with it.
This is true for most of software out there, but most of the game industry operates with a small margin, and when you look to games individually, most of the games that are still selling (think about GoG games) are not worth any developer time
But the problem never was the lack of replacement, the problem is, a game with years of development on unity whould not easily switch to any alternative
I read that there’s a porting tool from Unity to Godot out there. Never used it, have no idea how well it works, but that is a possible option.
Godot Engine is a nice alternative.
Godot, it’s the most mature of the bunch. It’s a little different than Unity, but it’s definitely very user friendly, really powerful and has an active community.
Godot feels nicer to work in than Unity. The object model is better designed and more intuitive. I hope this gives Godot a big boost.
Godot is probably the best choice for open source game engines. Its got funding and full time developers working on it.
Stride3D is probably the closest open source clone of Unity. It was developed by Silicon Studio as a commercial game engine but they eventually stopped and open sourced it. Its got a ton of modern features including vulkan and direct x 12 support. It has an active community too, but no full time staff making new features.
Basically don’t update existing games & stop using Unity completely & you’re good.
No, Unity is still saying they want a cut of old games if they’re ever newly installed.
Does this mean that the “Report on install” feature is already in the old release? It’s a reasonable feature to already have, I assume Unity gives you a handful of statistics “for free” as part of using the engine.
However there is a difference between “installs” the number and “installs” the billing number. A website might have 1,000 page views. So 1,000 users? Well we need unique page views. What makes a page view unique? What if someone visits your website but leaves after 2 seconds, do we count those?
In addition to being a terrible decision I don’t think the company is prepared at all for this decision.
No, they have some magical “proprietary method” for determining those, with additional hand-waving for not counting “illegitimate” installs. Translation: they pull these numbers out of their ass, fuck you.
A pre-sale cut could be considered “reasonable” since there’s a paper trail with real numbers that basically everyone can agree on. Unity is just trying to muddy the waters.
My understanding is that one of the services Unity provides Devs is analytics telemetry, and they just have to hook into that to read some telemetry of their own.
And this clause will give unity some fun lawsuits for those old versions
I’m really hoping some of the bigger Unity devs, like the people that made Rust or Among Us sue, as most of us don’t have enough money to even stand a chance in court against Unity’s lawyers…especially once they have all that nice runtime money to spend. 😒
Well yesterday, Unity decided they were gonna get Sony and Nintendo and Microsoft to pay the fees for smaller studios (lmao wat).
I don’t think Unity understands exactly how many top-tier lawyers those companies are going to bring to the table in the interest of legally curbstomping then.
Maybe that’s the point. Unity caves immediately to the big lawyers and says “Sorry guys, we tried. Looks like all you little studios will have to pay up after all. Blame Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft”
And then their customers sue the ever loving fuck out of Unity and win, because they’re not only looking at breach of contract, but also monopolistic and predatory business practices (they were basically forcing smaller studios to switch from a competitor mobile analytics platform to their in house platform). Either Unity’s exec suite didn’t consult the lawyers, like, at all… or their legal team should be disbarred. Unity is fucked unless they do a complete 180 and clean out the C-suite.
It doesn’t seem like they are thinking that far ahead. Or if that was the plan it’s really not working out.
Thinking small there, there are several Unity games published by big dick AAA corps.
Like Hearthstone, most of Kings catalog, the Doom ports were wrapped in Unity. Plus there’s a lot of Unity games on Gamepass and that’s Xbox 's bread and butter right now so Microsoft could just slap the shit out of em or just buy em out entirely (might be smart just for the King purchase itself).
My guess is that AAA developers will just negotiate individual contracts that are more favorable for the developers. They’re not going to sue when they can just work out a special deal.
god I hate how right you are here
I really don’t want you to be right, but I’m super convinced that you are.
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This is what I think. It kinda comes off as extortion.
I’ve seen the “Microsoft should just buy Unity” argument a lot lately. And while I think it’s probably a better management than current, I imagine Microsoft is hesitant having only just come out of a, what, 6 month long legal battle in US and EU courts regarding acquisition of ActiBliz? So a good idea, but one I can imagine might not happen…
I honestly don’t think MS really wants to own Unity. Like, sure, there’s a small amount of synergy because some of their games use it, but owning Unity also means committing resources to support and improve it and competing with Unreal to an extent.
If anyone would be interested in buying Unity I’d think it’d be a Chinese corp like Tencent or NetEase or else a publisher that works with a lot of indies like Devolver or maybe Embracer.
Yeah, it kind of sucks that Microsoft being an even bigger unstoppable monopoly would have actually helped in these instances… at least in the short term… hopefully something less future terrible comes along to solve the short term problems instead at least.
Microsoft gaming is not even an industry leader, much less a monopoly.
