Does Unity Pro Pay to Own keeps customizable splash screen?

For people who have chosen Pro subscription over Plus, one of the benefit is to Pay to Own after 24 consecutive months, as stated here https://blogs.unity3d.com/2016/06/16/evolution-of-our-products-and-pricing/.

After discussed with Unity Sales, it is not the same story as previous Unity 5 perpetual license.

With Pay to Own, we are able to keep our existing published titles, dark theme editor UI, but no longer has customizable splash screen in all versions.

Really hope Pay to Own is not the same as “Personal + dark theme editor UI”...

edit on 23 Mar 2018:
My first 12 months Pro subscription was started in April 2017. (not new customer)

update on 9 April 2019:
Finally received Pay to Own as Pro perpetual license as expected, thank you Unity.

 

Yes, you should, but not on all versions, the the unity 5 you have the perpetual license for.

 

Thanks so much for replying.

• Will I own the Unity 2017 as perpetual with customizable splash screen after the remaining 12 months subscription, on April 2019?

(I already own the previous Unity Pro 5 perpetual license before the subscribing in April 2017.)

 

That can't be true - they can't simply degrade your pro license after the pay to own threshold.
Pay to own is/was an explicit perk of the pro license when i started subscription ( same situation as Lu4e ). Of course without any updates after you decidet to stop, but of course the license of the installed version has to exactly stick the same as it's right in that moment

zombiegorilla: i don't really understand your post....

 

He mentioned “all versions” in the original post. The perpepetual applies only to the current version at the end of the 24 months. So if the last version he uses at the end of 24 months was 2017, then he can always use all the pro features on 2017. But if switches to 2018 after that, he won’t have the pro features on 2018 unless he subscribes again.

 

• Pay to Own would be able to keep your existing published titles, and all future titles would have the Made with Unity screen and no service.

• Older versions would also have the Made with Unity screen for all new builds.

• Pay to Own only retain dark editor UI.

Above three points were the answer from the Unity Sales, and they were double confirmed with the team.
My expectation to Pay to Own is exactly as same as zombiegorilla mentioned...

 

Really? Wow.

 

I am hoping early committed customers are not included with this change.

 

thanks gorilla for the detailed answer, which is exactly how i understood it
@Lu4e: there is still the chance that the Unity sales rep is wrong, but considering that i can't find the pay-to-own perk mentioned anywhere in the official docs leads to growing suspiocion on my side...

Is it possible that Unity again starts to do a full "Autodesk" here ?

 

For any future reference, i post a screenshot of the subscription FAQ page from last december 2017 (restored via thearchive.org ) , when i started my pro-subsciption. It clearly mentions the Pay-To-Own Perk.
The current FAQ (as of march 24th 2018) though has all this info removed, so i guess this Pro subscription perk is indeed gone. I would be happy to be be proven wrong, this is Unity after all, not Autodesk

This is really a bit disturbing to be honest

 

Actually this hurting Pro users loyalty a lot, making us look fool towards Plus users.

1. I believe Unity Sales was right, telling Unity has decided to replace “Full perpetual” to “Dark skin UI Only” version of Pay to Own.
2. I also believe customers who has committed the Pro subscription within the “Full perpetual” Pay to Own effective time window, still own all the Pro features, as expected from all of us.

Since 1&2 not contradict, we need Official confirmation on 2 only.
I would email this thread to the Unity Sales, they should clear the ambiguity.

 

On my old thread, Ryiah was kind enough to point out the exact legal text location now of this feature

https://forum.unity.com/posts/3436375/

the term "pay to own" does not appear in text text any longer though

 

That makes pay to own basically worthless.They might as well remove it, since it provides no benefits whatsoever to what you build. The whole point of pay to own was exactly to rent it for a long period (total amount equal to the old price for outright buying), and having a full, splash-free product at the end.

The worst part isn't even that they're doing it, but that this happened in a sneaky stealth-update with no announcements.

 

I find this super greedy of them. What is the next step? Your Unity Free versions becomes crappy featureless garbage so you are forced to get a plus or pro subscription? I am a long time user and fan, but they are walking on a thin line here, if they continue F***ing up the users, I will switch engines.

 

You do realise that's what Unity was BEFORE version 5, right?

 

You're too new to have remembered pre-5.x. We used to have half of the functionality we have now. And we were happy back then too because it was still far superior to paying the million dollar license for Unreal Engine 3.

 

Unity moved away from this model because Unreal came out with full features for no upfront cost. If they went back to that model it would be the best thing that could happen for Epic. I doubt unity will ever go back to that model unless Epic changes something drastically with unreal engine.

 

I wouldn't call even the pre-5.x free version "crappy, featureless garbage". You take a lot of things for granted.

 

It did not even support rendertextures.

 

Or the profiler. I remember everyone on free using the Stopwatch class to time everything.

 

Or soft shadows, I know. It was a FREE engine with a lot of cool stuff which I would create in years (but at least many-many months) if I started to write an engine for myself.

Again, we take a lot of things for granted.

 

Except all those things were standard in all other 3D engines. Unity was not the only engine at the time and the free version was actually pretty crap.

 

We have a very different definition of 'crap' then.

 

I remember trying out the free version many years ago, and got instantly turned off by all of the restrictions. A few years later, now that all of those features are unlocked, I am back.

If I remember correctly, there were also restrictions involving the skybox? I forget the details.

 

Possibly... RenderTextures were disabled, so any functionality that relied on RenderTextures was out. The big ticket items that impacted were shadows and post-process effects, but it certainly limited what you could do in other places as well.

 

For the heck of it, I loaded up the old license and highlighted some particular pain points I had.

Spoiler

 

You highlighted the profiler but I'm surprised you didn't highlight static batching and occlusion culling (aka Umbra). Having no access to tools that exist to improve performance would have meant that many Unity Free projects would have had to rely on the developer being smart.

Based on the way the splash screen was associated with low quality games for a long time we know how that turned out.

 

I wrote my own occlusion culling system, so that wasn't a particular pain point, but things like not having rendertextures or stencil buffer support meant that any form of real time shadows was basically impossible if you wanted more than blobs.

 

Exactly. Their whole free version + splash screen really screwed them over, and they're still trying to get out of this hole to this day imo. I showed a demo of my game a few days ago at a convention, and several people said "ew unity" when I mentioned it. I eventually stopped mentioning it at that point. :')