Are we the only ones?

.. that long back to the days when you could buy unity for about 1500 bucks and you would own it forever and it actually worked? In the last few years Unity has bloated into this behemoth of features but getting everything to actually work has gotten harder and harder, all the while the monthly subscription keeps sucking more and more money away.

These days we spend most of our time trying to get the damn thing to work. Between license issues, collaborate discrepancies and version issues there is little time left to actually develop. It totally sucks the joy and momentum out of developing.

Maybe this is a natural consequence of a tool that is trying to keep up with AAA game development but for the smaller developer, it is difficult to keep pace.

Ok, venting done.

 

It is true that the Pro subscription license is more expensive than the previous Pro perpetual licenses. In Unity's defense, they did also add the Plus license option. Smaller developers can choose between completely free and the Plus license (currently $40/month or $399/year). Smaller developers generally do not need the more expensive Pro license.

 

This nostalgia for the old days of Unity really puzzles me, as it keeps coming up on the forums over and over. The complaining about Unity was just as strong back then as today.

People must be forgetting......
* I bought an asset but it is all JS files, and I don't know JS! Help! OMG Unity so dumb!
* I got Unity cause they said it supports JS, but I've been doing JS for a decade and this ISN'T FREAKING JS! Unity so dumb!
* So you're saying I paid $1500 for Unity but I can't do Android builds without more money? Unity so dumb!
* OMG why is Unity so stupid they can't even figure out we NEED nested prefabs! Unity so dumb!
* Unreal is so much better, why can't Unity see we NEED a post processing solution! Unity so dumb!
* So you're saying If I want Unity to actually be usable on my 4k monitor I need to set my res to 1080P? Unity so dumb!
* OMG Unity is still on C# 4? Why so old?!!! Unity so dumb!

 

Paying 1500 bucks for Unity?
Back in those days I just paid $100 for Torque!
Ah, those were the days...
Back when I was completely incompetent and had no idea what I was doing.
Not like now when I'm... Uhh... Okay things haven't actually improved.

 

Let's not forget the $1,500 for Android Pro and the $1,500 for iOS Pro. Since many developers were mobile developers that meant spending $4,500 and then another $2,250 every new release ($750 x 3).

 

Unity is more difficult to approach these days. It's plagued with confusing packages, render pipelines, frequent ballistic changes and a huge roadmap of even more daunting changes.

Approachability was a huge appeal for it a few years ago but now it's significantly more difficult so the nostalgic feeling creeps in.

Losing that appeal doesn't change anything for new users that don't know what it used to be so it's largely irrelevant and experienced users don't need it.

 

Yes, these are the "good old days" I remember. Paying $125 a month is much better, and bugs aside, Unity has grown by orders of magnitude in terms of what you get for that price.

 

You could skip releases though, you didn't have to update to every single Unity version. (plus releases weren't a yearly thing) So you would pay that every, say, 3 years.

We are skipping whole Unity versions now, even though we are paying.

In short we are paying more now than we were before subscriptions, and plus with Unity in perpetual re-write mode, it feels like we're paying so that they can abandon the features we are using, while they are working on features that are perpetually in preview mode.

Subscriptions are a mistake.

 

Yeah, I mean, theoretically, it makes sense; you pay a monthly fee to get a product, but with software, it's such an ever-changing product, are you really getting your money's worth?

It's like, renting an apartment, only having the landlord tear down walls, or remodel your kitchen every month or two.

 

It's more like a landlord saying they're going to replace your walls but leaving the old ones there in the meantime.

Last year I worked on a multiplayer "game" for work that used UNet. It worked fine.

 

And now shareholders will get to decide what those walls look like!

 

Not really. In the risks section of the IPO they state that unity employees internally hold the majority so buying in wouldn't give a shareholder any power at all.

 

I'm going to say accessibility has just change its profile, nowaday, when even in BOTW modding discord you have "milk vs orange" joke (made by adult), you realize influencers have gone too far, they basically filter unity complexity in joke youtube game dev (THICC), on the other side there is a bigger professionalization of hobbyist, where hobbyist's culture have basically shift to half professional, since they seem to make no distinction between doing game for fun and eventually make money for it, which mean that the complexity of unity is part of the game, it's now a valid career path. Personally I found all of that a bit weird, i'm getting too old.

 

One big upside of subscription is that version changing/updating is now purely a technical decision, and not a financial one. Prior to the sub, if there was something critical in an new version, you may have unplanned expense. Or when deciding whether or not to upgrade, you have consider cost. At a large company, it was huge cost if we decided to upgrade, and we had to do everyone even a different project didn't decide to upgrade. At a small company, it was huge choice because of the much smaller budget.

Granted, in the scheme of things, this isn't a massive feature in the plus column. But from the perspective of someone who has had to, more than once, justify the cost of upgrade for few updated features, the sub model is way nicer in that respect.

 

This is purely a perspective thing, though. For anyone working on multiple and/or mobile platforms, the new sub system is objectively better. It's cheaper and you almost certainly needed the upgrades at some point anyway. For people working on a single platform who were happy with the features available at the start of the project it's objectively worse for any project longer than a year, because you have to keep paying after your $1,500 would have been covered.

I don't think it's a big deal either way. I just think it's worth acknowledgement that the reason people are so vehement about it being "better" or "worse" is that they're both right, depending on specific circumstances.

 

Well said.

 

Don't disagree. It just seems that if I were making the choice today, it would feel better to pay a simple $125 a month rather than $4,500 one time. If memory serves, I paid the $3,600(?) back in early 2009 (Unity and Unity iPhone) and then nothing for several years. Then I had to decide to either stay on a specific license/version permanently, or switch to a monthly license and then be on the permanent upgrade path. I don't think it was possible to do otherwise, but it was long ago.

Then they messed up my license account so I ended up having to create a new one (which is why my tag shows 2013 instead of 2009).

 

They don't make a profit anyway, the ipo document laid down their distress, they lost their competitive advantage, many people I follow have switch to unreal let's see if that trend continue, and the market is saturated, there is little growth to expect.

 

By the way, where did @hippocoder go? Iirc his last post was in the Unreal Engine 5 thread.

 

The only thing stopping me from going to Unreal is C#. Unity roadmap and features are an absolute shambles and it's clear there is no single-vision in the company or any decisive leadership.

 

Some people don't like loosing their privileges, do they?

Ah, the good times when only the rich could afford these wonderful tools, fully protected from the garbage rabble, looking at them from all the height of their glass tower...

 

If you're talking about my posts, I'm not against personal existing, I'm against subscriptions, especially when they are more expensive than perpetual licenses.

Having a free (fully featured) tier is just fine with me.

 

No, I wasn't. I was answering to the first post; I just didn't bother quoting it.

Edit: fixed.