Official Important updates to the Unity Runtime Fee policy

It also helps the execs who came up with the scheme to save face, but I share your concerns (briefly mentioned previously) that it could turn into a trojan horse.

Yup, if the previous point was possibly a trojan horse, this almost certainly is (or will become one, given time).

And half the time there's a preview version that you can use even without the sub

Also going to bring this up once more so it doesn't get burried, but given the sheer destruction of trust the forced arbitration clause should be removed from the TOS.

Like you, I'm extricating myself from Unity moving forward as reasonably fast as I can. I might give Unity another shot when it is under new management.

 

I don't want to derail this thread too much, but key features within their engine have been stagnant and lacking for a very long time, and it's not a good sign of things to come if they cannot address them. Light baking, the terrain solution, and a slew of tiny little annoyances the engine over have plagued Unity for a very long time. These sentiments have been posted THOUSANDS of times.

They had a massive revenue stream, they doubled their head count. What came of that? How is Unity better today than 4 years ago? DOTS and ECS? Ok great, Unity can lead by example by adding some amazing new features to their engine based on these new additions.

They need to demonstrate that they are capable of turning funds into value. This is the key issue here.

 

Do I have to upgrade to the new LTS to remove the splash screen? If not how can I remove it on the version I already have installed? I don't want to upgrade even one iteration. How do I remove it today?

Seems like a way to get Personal version users to move to the new version anyway and then eventually if they do well they are subject to the runtime fee. Whereas if they stay on old version they never would be subject to runtime fee but can't remove the splash screen.

Correct me if I'm wrong?

 

That's just a childish opinion, grow up. Even before the latest outrage people paid for PLUS just to remove the splash screen. Has nothing to do with things like to be "ashamed because of using Unity" or B$ like that. That's fanboy/hategirl talk at it's best.

 

ok, sorry.

 

I do not understand the hate currently. Yes its not perfect but its far from destructive anymore. I think there are some nooks and issues to iron out but the option to choose rev share or installs is much more flexible and transparent. Coupled with the fact that previous Unity versions are unaffected is a good sign.
I think its now in Unitys court to build back trust. I hope they really have learnt from this event. I have never seen that much damage done to a brand

 

I mean the Unity logo has been a mark of shame for a while now, proven by how many people paid money to get rid of it.

 

The announcement from 10 days ago was just a diversion to make this one look acceptable.

People need to compare it to where we were before.

Chopping off one of your finger doesn't become acceptable because I was going to give you cancer last week. This is still a loss with nothing to gain for you.

 

The post was funny, and it wasn't any more immature than any of the other drivel the rest of us are posting, no need to apologize.

 

But that was no problem for you until now it seems?

 

Imagine instead of all this, Unity just come out with these terms initially, and some straight shooting announcement that basically said "hey we need to do this or eventually we will fold, we've done our best to ensure it doesn't hurt the majority", something like:

Like any business Unity needs to make a profit to continue to thrive, just as you as a game developer need to make a profit. Although we have for a long time avoided mechanisms which charge you for your success, such as revenue share models, we have come to a point where its clear that this is the only model that will allow us to thrive.

We have set parameters on this revenue share model that will allow hobbiest and small indie developers to continue to operate entirely for free, we've also increased the PRO threshold to 200k, and you can now even remove the Unity splash screen in the Personal version.

Revenue share models only start once you reach 1 million users AND 1 million in yearly revenue. It will not impact the vast majority of Unity developers in any way.

For those who experience financial success, hitting the install and revneue thresholds, you can choose to pay a percentage of revenue (2.5%) or pay a small fee per runtime install. You can choose which ever mechansism is most cost effective for you and revenues and installs will be self reported. The total share of revenue can never exceed 2.5% (plus the unchanged cost of the Pro license) and may be less if you use the per install model.

You can use this calculator to work out if what, if anything, you might need to pay: <LINK>.

For those who don't wish to engage with us under these new terms you may continue to use existing LTS versions of Unity, which will stay under the existing terms with no revenue share model, we will continue to patch and support existing versions as per our normal release cycle (i.e. 2022 LTS will be supported for at least 2 more years).

We understood this will be a shock to some, but ultimately we beleive this is the best path to ensuring the continued success of the engine which we all love.


​

I think more than anything its the retroactive changes to terms, including the unnannounced edits, github removal, etc, that makes it hard for the community to put their faith back in Unity. I think this new model is pretty solid, but it doesn't undo what was done

 

I forgot the /s

 

Excuse me? It wasn't an option before. Now it is. Right? What are you even replying with this nonsense for?

 

14 years, good while it lasted. Bye.

 

Maybe it's a way to be more enticing the more expensive the game's initial price is. As we know, Unity is more frequently used for games with low initial price, specially F2P games. It may also help to compensate for games with a higher initial price tending to require more Pro licenses.

 

Unity,

Thank you for finally properly starting to address the fiasco that you created. It was long overdue.

Your commitment to re-committing to allow us to remain on stable terms of service for the same LTS version is a very positive start, and meets my key demand. Really, it's the minimum you should be required by law and honor to do here. You had promised us a long time ago that we could stay on the TOS version that went with the LTS version we downloaded, and it is good to see you re-committing to that promise.

It is also positive to see Unity backing off from using an ill-defined number of installs as a fee metric. Basing on number of initial engagements as is clearly defined is MUCH more reasonable.

However, I am still going to have to decline your new offer and remain on 2021 LTS and its associated terms for the following reasons:

Your pricing terms for 2023 LTS do not seem to be fixed for the life of the terms. This represents an unacceptable risk. It may be 2.5% now, but a year from now (when a brand new project would still be in production) you could decide to change it to 3% or more. I am almost certain that you are writing this ability into your 2023 LTS TOS terms as I write this.

Which brings me to trust. Unity has lost trust, big time, and unfortunately, the past cannot be changed.

Of course, your main breach of trust was through your TOS shenanigans from October 2022 to April 2023, all leading to September 12. Deliberately trying to usurp new rights to monetize MY works of art through your bad-faith TOS shell game was one of the most personally offensive things that you could do to me. You can trust me 100% when I say that if you try it again, my response will be even fiercer.

Another breach of trust occurred when you decided to stonewall your entire forum community for well over a week. NO ONE came to make sure we felt that we were heard and understood. We, as your community and your customers, were quite literally just abandoned and left to shout at a stone wall. Yet you publicly touted that you were talking with your community. This is not an acceptable way to behave toward us.

As a result of your actions, your trust balance with me is very strongly in the red after being so offensive, to the point where Unity may never recover my trust. How can I trust your commitment to not monkey with the terms of service when you already broke your 2019 commitment to the same? The answer is, absent some kind of fantastic "poison pill" attached to the removal of those terms, I cannot.

Further, your product has not particularly impressed me of late. It really shows that you don't actually make games with your product, or else you would have long addressed many of our pain points. But even the impact of that degree of lack of stewardship pales in comparison to the consequences of your recent actions.

The damage Unity has done to the entire industry over the last two weeks will take a long time to repair. The full cost is likely uncapturable through any metric. Cancelled publishing deals, retooling and rework, a general loss of stability, and more are all very real consequences of this. This is no way for a major player in the industry to act toward business partners. One or more persons within the executive team and on the board should take responsibility for these consequences, and sever themselves from the job of stewarding one of the major toolsets in our industry (sans golden parachute - you have to save every million you can to survive as a company, right?)

Unity has done the minimum here to stop me from being belligerently angry. However, it is far from having put things right to a degree where I would feel comfortable accepting and working forward with any kind of new deal.

Further to declining this new deal, I will no longer be recommending Unity as a toolset for others who are starting out.

It is very sad that things had to come to this, but this is a situation solely of Unity's making.

Unless the situation substantially changes from here, this will likely be my last post about this situation. As I said, now that my prior art is safe I am not nearly as enraged. I don't have to accept new business with a company that I don't want to deal with, and that's pretty much the end of it. For the rest of you that would stay on, I would say be forewarned and make sure your costs are predictable throughout the ENTIRE life of your product/project, not just for the next twelve months.

 

Yep

 

Most people who want to remove the splash screen would remove that from any game engine they are using. It's just annoying that anything shows up before my app is starting. That's the whole point.
When you are ashamed for a that long time for using unity - why are you still hanging around here? You should be move on and do what makes you proud.

 

You try to stick to an old version of personal to ship around the fees. So you can expect to not get new implemented features in the engine - and the spalsh screen removal is one of them. Not too difficult to understand.

 

I am doing what makes me proud, it’s just that the tools I was using became S***ty and greedy while I was busy with my game.

 

If anyone at Unity is listening, here is the #1 thing you could do IMO to restore faith in your company.

Announce some fantastic new feature: deformable terrain, a quality feature-complete light baking solution, it could be anything really. Something impressive.

Assemble a team of badasses who have ownership of this system, and assign them a representative for speaking to the community, how can we best utilize our resources at hand to make forward progress? How do we ensure the pipelines have the best chance of delivering value to this engine? Get in the trenches with us, put your money on the line making something and have accountability for it. What's the goal? What are the challenges you face? How do we solve them so future features are more easily achieved? How do we built not just each feature, but the entire pipeline to ensure the fields of Unity are fertile?

Talk to us about the trials and tribulations of making these tools, explain why these features are hard to create, why it is difficult to make things that simultaneously add value to the engine, without breaking all existing content. Make this easily downloadable from the package manager, and directly link to a general and technical forum from the package manager where we could engage on how to make the most of this system, from how it sits in the editor, to what bells and whistles it has, to the sort of code paradigms that could make all of this possible. Help us help you.

Create a new partnership system. There are ROCKSTARS out there who can help you to create these systems, let them present themselves to you, give them some money and freedom to create amazing systems and if they deliver you a product that can be upkept, and built on, throw a S***ton of $$$ at them. Everyone wins. Amplify shader is 100x the shader editor your built in tools are. You have failed to properly monetize and incorporate the best tools for your engine. I see no effort made on your part to bring on the best talent to make the best engine.

Engage the community and your own employees with this content. DEMOCRATIZE GAMEDEV. Let's learn together how best to make your engine as badass as possible. If things need to be proprietary, fine, whatever. Let's have a dialogue about how we can get awesome new features in future releases, and figure out how to port old content forward later. Let's end the stagnation, let's put our money where our mouth is.

We want to see this forum alive with people discussing how best to maximize this engine, forums with endless resources from start to finish how to create incredible custom property windows, how best to integrate with animators and sound systems. We want people excited to make you guys a S***ton of money, we want employees building this engine that are excited for the cool toys they're bringing online for everyone to play with.

This is a gamble, but at least there is a chance for success. That's gamedev. There's a fire under your guys's asses right now. that's a good thing. People are demanding you work hard and provide something of value, welcome to the f*cking show, that's what we deal with every darned day. So suck it up, you want a piece of the pie? Earn it.

Here's the kicker, if you fail, if you learned from it, and we got to see the journey along the way, then it is what it is. The thing is, if you're going to be a great engine, you need to start trying. You need to start fostering a culture of industry, or wanting to suck it up and create cool S*** and with that comes a want to share that awesome stuff. The silence is not encouraging.

Want to do shady, money grubbing things on top of all this? It's the nature of the beast, just keep it reasonable, and when you have a quality product and you respect your customer, people will happily give you their money. But pls provide something of value to justify it.

You need to justify your existence as a corporate entity by making something, Unity. That's what makes this whole capitalism thing work.

Last post from me for today, didn't want to post endless grievances without proposing solutions. Thanks everyone who took the time to read these blathers, especially those of you at Unity who look these posts over despite our "exuberance".

I know these posts can come off as petulant and ungrateful, but I mean this with all sincerity, we DO NOT want to be angry with you. We WANT to have faith in these tools, we WANT to have faith in you as a company, we WANT to be content collaborators working with you to make boatloads of $$$, making awesome games together.

 

I'm not playing fool. I'm saying that it wasn't allowed to use Plus for clients that made more than $200,000. Plus was for more than $100,000 but less than $200,000. Now that Personal's limit has been changed from $100,000 to $200,000, you have the same limit with Personal as you had before with Plus.

I'm not playing deaf. I live in Mexico, so you don't have to assume I don't understand the cost. I do think that if the company you are working for makes more than 200,000 usd, wherever they are, it shouldn't be too hard for them to pay for a Pro license. A lot of the time they would only have to pay for a month. I understand that still some companies wouldn't want to pay those prices, and it can make getting some jobs harder. When I worked as a contractor, software price in relation to the kinds of clients I was getting was a big consideration because of this.

I really think I understand you, or at least I'm trying, but I don't feel like you're even trying to understand me. And maybe it's hard because we've all been some sort of angry for the past week, but please don't be rude to me. I'm not being rude to you.

 

Were you really asking everyone you contracted to, to validate their revenue was under 200k? Were you really turning down work if they said the had revenue over 200k?

If you are doing fiverr jobs for individuals then things got better (threshold is now 200k), you don't need Plus.
If you are working for entities making over 200k things are the same.

I expect the number of people who were only, and strictly, doing jobs for entities earning under 200k is pretty darn small and any detriment to them would be far outweighed by the new benefits to those using Personal.

There are plenty of reasons to be mad at Unity, but this isn't one of them.

 

First of all, I liked it's not a fixed-rate royalty.

Self-reports seem to solve the problem of pay-to-play games, piracy, uninstalling, reinstalling, etc…

But what about free-to-play mobile games? Is there any solution in the new announcement? I am talking about automated bot installations, people are mentioned this in the previous thread.


(I don't say I will achieve these figures, by the way.)

Example from your calculator:


If

Estimated monthly revenue: $500,000 Estimated monthly initial engagements: 100,000

Estimated monthly Runtime Fee: $10,800 Runtime Fee as a percentage of revenue: 2.16%


Else


Estimated monthly revenue: $500,000 Estimated monthly initial engagements: 120,000

Estimated monthly Runtime Fee: $12,500 Runtime Fee as a percentage of revenue: 2.50%


What if those extra 20,000 come from bots or some groups targeting games?

How will I know how many people have genuinely downloaded my game?

Am I missing something from this new announcement?

I know it's not a huge difference, and I don't mind paying it, but for huge corporations like yours, especially tech companies, a solution is this "don't worry, worst-case scenario, you will only pay 2.5%" ?

A 2.5% cap solves the bankruptcy problem, but still, why can't I benefit from a lower fee for some bot software?

If it is possible, I think Unity should offer a service to determine if a particular download generates any money from ads or in-app purchases before counting it as whatever you call it. It shouldn't be forced on developers to implement it in their games, it shouldn't collect personal data from users. The verification process should be as transparent as possible, technically. And it shouldn't be JUST for ironsource.

Otherwise, again, "don't worry, worst-case scenario, you will just pay 2.5%" seems like a street vendor-level business mind set to me . it's funny and sad for a billion dollar company .

 

Then what are we paying for?

 

It appears that this is the key perspective I am taking away from this whole thing as well.

 

No. I think @daveinpublic summed it up the best. Prior to this snafu the company felt like passionate developers but even though the individuals in the company may be passionate I can no longer see the company in that light.

Maybe that makes me naive and maybe leaving is just "cutting off my nose to spite my face" but back when I started using this product I genuinely believed in this company. With how the product is scrappy and the company always felt like they were playing catch-up it felt like I was supporting the underdog even if they weren't one.

Here's the thing: I'm a contract developer first and foremost. I've never built my own games to directly sell. When I went to get a contract I had people asking me to use Unreal Engine and because of that I always had to justify my choice of using Unity.

What did I receive in return from the company? One of the worst attempts to monetize that I have ever seen, and an insanely long period of silence while we sat here worrying about our futures.

Going forward I have to learn Unreal Engine. I don't consider that a problem. I was learning Unreal Engine 3 (aka UDK) around the time that Unity was becoming popular. UE3 was very competent but obnoxious to work with and I loved the idea of an engine that worked with C# which I already knew. Meanwhile UE5 is very pleasant.

There is one silverlining to all of this. I no longer have to spend time justifying my choice of using an engine to the people who want to use my services. Instead I can just nod and be like "Yes, I can use Unreal Engine".

I'll still occasionally be around this community (there some very insightful discussions and I love the people here), and I'll still watch to see if the company makes a true comeback, but I'm not going to use Unity for the foreseeable future (aside from any currently active contracts of course).

 

I mean thinking that Unreal features are toys and comparing tit to Mario Maker is obviously silly, but for sure Unity is closer to a blank slate in terms of its prediliction for certain types of games. The tools, the resources, everything assumes you are starting from an agnostic place, so building certain types of games feel much easier and natural in Unity, than Unreal.

Making it easier to get started then leads to interia, its easier to stick with what you know.

This is really only a surface level concern though, once you dig deeper in to either engine anything is possible, and the expereince isn't vastly different.

For those actually releasing games I think what Unity brings to the table more than anything else is really solid cross platform support, particularly for mobile.

For those wanting to smash out prototypes or games without much budget, for example programmers without art skills (or artists without programming skills) the Asset Store is pretty huge too.

 

I would say this is pretty reasonable offer. If it was the one released in the beginning, most of us would have no problem. I'm totally fine with Unity taking revenue from the successful games, so it can keep becoming better game engine, otherwise it would be unsustainable. The Personal version's charge threshold is already very higher for indie game, not mention the removal of splash screen. I believe Unity has been back a lot. So, I yield, I'm going to stay. But there are still things I look forward for future:
1. please pay the engineer team with the revenue to enhance the game engine, instead purchasing unworthy companies
2. things like this never happen again
3. fire the idiots in the leadership who have show terrible judgement and decision (though seems not likely)

Time to continue work.

 

On further reflection, a full-on Warrant Canary approach would not be needed. To that end, perhaps the following would suffice:

curl https://api.github.com/repos/Unity-Technologies/TermsOfService

Automate to taste. Extracting further data from the payload is left as an exercise for the reader.

And yes, it is ridiculous to feel the need to resort to such methods to protect your future rights regarding Unity Software, but this is where we are.

 

Except DOTS is exactly what you just described and UGS isn't part of the engine.

 

I am with you, the past few years, Unity doesn't focus its attention on its self improvment but much on many commerical trade, it is far away from we game developers, which make sense that Unity has made such a big trouble.I choose Unity because there are lots of people willing to help each other, Unity has completely struck their heart, and unfortunately, everything is nearly in vain now.

 

Unity, you bring in royalties, and that's okay. Now, could you please stop being cheap and make splash screen removal available for every version? Stop asking for $2,000 from people who haven't yet earned any money and might be never will

Edit: Your 2023 LTS will be ready next year

 

Although I agree, but this equally say the same thing about those people as well, since hiding the logo is nothing more but placebo (for themselves).

Well, obviously I'm not an EULA-guru or anything, and I don't want Unity to dodge this question, but I didn't find anything that they would change their mind about subscriptions. It is only needed if you're actually using the editor.


---
Anyway, I am happy that we can wrap up our current projects in relative peace and proper and we can choose a proper engine for our next projects from a wider selection of engines.

 

Fair.
Still though, the limit should apply to the contractor's rev not its client,
if unity thinks contractors won't reach 200k then just make a different limit & licence price for individuals, like other saas companies do

 

Even so, who are the ones building games? Choosing the game engine? Releasing the game? Devs. Somewhere, there is someone that wants to make a game and has to decide which engine they're gonna use. And who will they ask to make that decision? Not HR, not the C's, but the devs. And most likely, they'll decide to use the one they know.
It's like, why have I never learn how to use GameMaker? Because every games I saw made with it were meh. I'm sure there's good game made with GM, but I don't know them.

My point is, the devs ARE the gamers. They learned a game engine because they've seen what it can do.

 

I used to live in an area that simply didn't have internet service provided to it so yeah, it would easily be one or two weeks that I'd go without internet unless I wanted to drive about fifteen miles to the nearest gas station and mooch off of them. While I don't currently have that issue anymore (they finally started providing service to the area about five years ago) I haven't forgotten that and I base a lot of my decisions around it to this day. For the record, yes I live in the U.S. This is still a common issue in many of the more rural and remote parts of it.

 

And you can say that without your stupid and pointless initial response.

Now can I hear from someone who isn't a prick on this?

 

Thank you for listening! The new changes are great and far more palatable than the original copy. I appreciate the effort and thought put in when reviewing the changes. I, myself, am happy to be able to carry on after these long 10 days, but of course I can understand why other might wish to move away. I hope these new changes help bring in the revenue necessary to continue to innovate and improve the engine that we all know and love.

Wishing you all the best

P.S. Please unify the render pipelines and give us feature toggles or build options instead. Which SRP to use should be the last decision we're confronted with, not the first.

 

I think this is a good point. Right now, developers need some kind of concrete terms. We need to know that what we build today won’t have debilitating fees in the future. Our future terms can’t be changed retroactively.

How can we accurately predict how much effort we can afford to use now to justify changing future costs? We need to know that the pricing structure we sign up for when making our current game will be the pricing structure we stay on for that version.

 

And they will see that from the games, and if they're turning the game off the second they see a splash screen then they're not making educated decisions in the first place.

 

Well hopefully over time it will become a badge of honour and quality. unfortunately as its completely optional, we will never get that as it will just become a pendulum. The moment the Unity logo is seen to have some status ( like Unreal logo has in general ), low effort developers will enable it on low effort products. That will tank the perception of the logo and dev's will start removing it again

Honestly I think perhaps Unity should have just followed Unreal's example here and only provided the option to have the logo on Pro subscriptions and up.

 

They bring royalty and still chasing 2000$ for splash screen. That’s mind blowing , how this company runs , and they learn nothing from backlash, even almost buried alive.

Last week I searched altarnative game engines and I realized Unity were golden goose(ease of use,small porting sizes etc. you know it (not talking about asset store)) they ruined it for last 4 good years in every aspect.

News come from Unity = Bad
News come from Unreal= Wow, what is that?

I've started learning Unreal and will continue with it. This kind of mindset within a company can't lead to a good outcome.

 

i believe you can remove it by paying 2000$ a year for pro, while still keeping the 2021 or lower LTS

I hope Im not reading it wrong

 

Yes and while I agree, I believe it's pretty known that most mobile games that still show the unity splash screen are garbage (not necessary of course). But if out of the 20 games you've played on your phone, 15 of them were unbearable and 10 of them had the Unity splash screen, it would be naive to think no one would get biased. Not to mentioned that in my example, all of the 20 games were made using Unity, but no one could know, because 10 of them had enough money to remove the splash screen. So you're left to think that only bad games are made using Unity.

 

Good luck everyone, I wish you all the best. I'm out.

 

Whilst this is a concern, I recently updated a 2018 LTS project for both Android and iOS with no problems. I do think this was lucky and have a plan in place to upgrade this project to a more modern version. In general, the Apple/Google terms of staying up to date, which are a PITA, do not currently necessitate using the current version of Unity at all.

Edit:
I feel I should point out with the discussion of the problems of upgrading legacy projects to 2023LTS, that whilst the project mentioned above is being upgrade, it was only planned to go to 2020 or 2021 LTS and then probably waiting another 3-5 years before the next upgrades. This was done on the basis of limiting the time/cost and continued use of legacy plugins.

 

You can turn this off in settings. You can even check that UnityConnectSettings asset and you'll see m_Enabled is 0

if Unity wanted to hide a tracker they would do it deep in c++ core.

 

Most mobile games in general are garbage. Most games in general are garbage. And, again, I have worked on actual released titles and looked at the actual metrics at play here. This is not the factor you think it is.

 

I mean this tells everything about the current state of the company. Unity Create is so well-lead that they can't organize an intern-level task.