Official Important updates to the Unity Runtime Fee policy

Or even just move it to a github repository and have the community fix it for them. If I recall I'm still hosting a copy of the Standard Assets 2018 pack that I had to fix bugs in because they were abandoned with no replacements. It was less than five minutes of work with most of that spent on the import/export processes.

 

To be fair, you have to report some sense of data, like your revenue if you make more than the agreed upon plan you chose. They could force you, but it's usually not worth it. What they're saying is that IF you're using a Game Service, which is not required to publish a game, then they can use that to get a sense of your data. But AFAIK, Game Services are not required and it's only if your using ANY of the game services that they can track some data. But if you're using Game services, you already agreed to that, that's what you're paying game services for. You might disagree here, but it's still a fact.

 

If this PR disaster couldn't cause a change in leadership, then nothing ever will, and by leadership I'm not only talking about the CEO, but every other manager below him. It'd be naive to think that replacing Riccitiello would change anything for the better, he's mostly just a scapegoat for zoomer gamedevs who are still mad that he wanted to introduce microtransactions into their favorite Battlefield game back in the day.

Anyway, with the changes to the pricing model Unity has become the cheapest Tech Feudalism game engine and is at least 50% cheaper than Unreal. So that's definitely a substantially positive change from the initial announcement. Thank you.

Probably should just call it "Easing Royalty" though instead of "Runtime Fee" as @moatdd suggested.

 

Unfortunately it's the people above him too and they are far more difficult to remove.

 

This was good, an interview with Marc Whitten, with (finally) some answers. Marc apologized to the community, and admitted that before making the orig announcement, that they didnt listen to feedback, as much as they should have. To me thats a big point (thank you Marc).

This would have been my only question or statement to him:

Unity does not use their own engine, and develop games to represent it. Book of the Dead?, nice work, you were on the right track, but performance was bad. Gigaya?, again on the right track, but it went down in flames. Feel our pain. Example: how can you try and sell me a supposed high quality bike, if you yourself dont ride the damn thing, lol. Would have loved to hear that answer...

 

I just don't understand why you talk about actual metrics of a game when I talk about how people perceive Unity. Of course, no one is going to see the Unity splash screen and hastily close the game in disgust. I'm talking about when it's time to decide which game engine a dev will learn to use. That's not something you can track in any game's metrics. That's gonna be a collection of all the biases they got over the years and the decision is most likely going to be emotional rather than purely informed.

 

And yet Unity is a massively popular engine that keeps seeing new users. You are making up problems.

 

To have a engine that kind of works, but lacks in every segment.
But mobile they are at least not extremly bad. Though their Canvas UI system is bad performance wise, since it was designed for desktop.
Unity is best at mediocre desktop titles. Mediocre in terms of overall performance.

Idk unity should focus to have a performant all around mobile solution - first and foremost. Second on Indie games that dont need to have hyper realistic AAA games. They cant compete with Unreal in that segment anymore.

But it seems they want to become a marketing first company. And everyone knows what happens when marketing and finance people fully take over such tech companies. So for now we can be happy a rational deal was found. But that it even came that far is something most will keep in their mind going forward.

And as it seems no one has to go and no one was at fault, which means it pretty much came from the top&top.

So im predicting that unity will have a long way to go and yeah if something similar happens again, everyone will leave this engine for good, because it was really F***ed up

 

They appear to be straying from the original vision as democratizing game development. Instead of investing on the development of a high-budget AAA game, which could potentially yield substantial profits and enable them to reinvest in their engine's features and improvements, they are diverting their attention towards mobile gaming market. This particular shift of focus seems disconnected from their core engine-centric mission, and, what's even more concerning, it could gradually transform Unity into an ads company.

 

In previous thread someone brought up that making engines out of components became easier and then linked this:
https://github.com/ConfettiFX/The-Forge

Maybe Unity is no longer a blank slate but something like that is.

 

So true. I think it's called Dogfooding and Unreal seems to be the best example of that.
They also made Megacity and, sure, there's a sample, but they should finish it. I heard they stopped working on it because they couldn't make ECS work in a real game scenario. But then, I just saw they updated their git last week, so I might be wrong

I just want Unity to make a game like Fortnite (Fortunite?) and test every new features on it.

 

Personally I feel satisfied with the course correction here, and I can understand the logic of the Plus changes.

To make Unity more money long term, there has to be some friction point to either encourage upgrades to the 2023 LTS version and terms, or to make legacy versions more profitable by increasing the cost of remaining on those. Yes it sucks that the in-between option of Plus is going away, and I was on Plus for several years myself at one time, but I can understand how keeping that option is perhaps no longer financially viable for Unity, hence the new friction point.

The 30 day login requirement for Personal is clearly part of this new strategy, for making sure that staying on pre-2023 versions while dropping down from Plus to Personal doesn’t become a workaround hack to craftily stay offline and keep the splash screen turned off. The periodic check will be to make sure your sub level hasn’t changed in an attempt for those on older versions to avoid the friction point of moving to Pro. Again, I don’t necessarily like it but I understand the thinking behind it.

 

That's good question:

This video is outdated on the price situation but raise some question:

Unity has more employee than EA, which has engine development AND game development at the same time, AND they have way to track their scummy monetization, and they are profitable. Unreal has less AND is profitable.

Is Unity Overstuffed?

 

You just joined and are playing to the outrage crowd and trolling. Your input is basically worthless..but keep trying and keep getting smacked.

 

"Ride Your Bike!"

Users should probably slogan this when dealing with any Unity staff, leadership and their claims.

Along with:

"Look Mum, no hands!"

 

Wow. I didn't pay much attention to them naming the rendering engine they were using because I thought that it was just a name they came up for their own technology to make it sound impressive. I had no idea it was an actual framework you can download and use. I'm also thoroughly amused that it's powering the macOS No Man's Sky.

E: I just realized that I referred to "them" without specifying that it's "Bethesda".

 

I am a bit confused about the first engagement and revenue caps. From my reading of the new pricing announcement and the FAQ, the first engagement metric is per game, but the revenue cap is less defined, but likely per legal entity.

This doesn't make any sense to me. It seems likely to punish entities for publishing multiple f2p mobile games.

An example might be a small studio releasing some completely unmonetized mini games to build brand. These would hopefully have large install rates. Then the studio releases a monetized game, and ends up having to pay their entity revenue cap multiple times!

Amy clarity would be appreciated.

 

I was kind of hoping this whole debacle would uproot the core of the problem at Unity - poor vision, poor leadership, poor strategy, bad goals.

But it looks like they just made a small course correction due to the unexpected negative reaction. The direction is still basically the same.

The whole runtime fee idea should be dead and buried, not transferred to an 'option' so it can hang there waiting for its day to arrive to take another shot, or inching its way forward under cover.

Regarding ToS changes, what I would like to see is a personal statement made by Unity's leadership that for as long as they are steering the ship, users will never have licenses retroactively modified. Because at the end of the day, it is people who make good or bad decisions and are responsible for them, who are responsible for building or destroying trust. Generic PR statements mean nothing because no one can be called a liar when they change. And I think as an act of leadership, of showing commitment to gaining trust, that should be the least and easiest thing to do.

As far as the rest of the new terms, I think they are fine - personally I'd be more happy to see no mention of 'runtime fee' at all and just the 2.5% royalties option since it's clear that it's holding position there for some future development. I never quite understood the hostility to royalties - to me the principle of 'help me and when I eat you eat too' seems like the most basic and honest way to do business and sets up the right incentives for everyone involved, and I'd certainly rather pay the lions share of royalties to an engine that needs continuous development rather than a storefront that only needs a window clean every once in a while.

For the future of Unity I am still concerned that the direction and strategy is going to continue the same way - wild investments that burn through hundreds of millions for little benefit, haphazard 'shiny-object' driven engine development, continued fragmentation and complication of what was once an extremely well-designed, tight and polished piece of software, and overall far more concern for the share price than for the actual product. Because right now Unity comes across more as a monetized marketing campaign than it does a product company with a clear understanding of what it provides to its users.

 

It is a very valid question.

On paper 2.5% is lower than 5% for UE, but another question is what You get for those 2.5% vs what You get for the 5%.

The question about sustainability is also very much valid, Unity has over 7k employees, and asking if this new pricing system can help make Unity green in profit is quite important, because if Unity continues to loose money that means they will try to change monetization again not far in the future, or it means engine to cease or be bought out by somebody.

Those are very valid questions, we all now Unity needs money thats why they introduced the original plan initially to squeeze a lot of money from You. So why are they so generous now hmm ? .

Ist not a troll but a valid concern, just put aside the rose tinted glasses and be honest about it.

 

Thanks Marc Whitten. In the uproar I also heard the suggestion for removing "Made with Unity". That's excellent you made it happen.
One other suggestion: the asset store is a huge strength of Unity compared to other engines, and it holds great potential for your revenue. Therefore, fix the package manager. I personally will spend more money at the asset store if you make it less friction to import assets. Example: I want to send my new purchased asset to my open project without dealing with package manager. Currently, I need to wait for 3-10 seconds for package manager to refresh every time I open it. Why not cache and just send partial updates, or keep a websocket open, or something in the background when cpu is not busy.


I think have a store built into the editor is an attractive idea. Nurture your asset store and its creators, make the editor great so it attracts more users, then funnel users to the asset store. Take away all the friction around asset acquisition and usage. Both you and the asset creators will make more money, which will attract more creators, and more users.

 

What happens when Unity decides our self reporting isn't accurate?

There's been a long history of less than stellar behaviour from Unity when their in-house mechanisms determine users are above their thresholds for licenses.

Given that Unity supposes rights over the Runtime, what draconian practices are being planned for differences of opinion between us users and Unity over engagements and revenues?

 

Hi,

While I appreciate that we no longer need to rely on Unity to determine installations, I was wondering if Unity has any plans to release that proprietary software they mentioned that is capable of identifying pirated and malicious installs. It would be a shame to just shelf such a system, if it exists at all.

 

I am implementing multiplayer on a large space shooter with multiple devs. There hasn't been a peep about this amongst us. I wouldn't have known about it because I boycotted the forums for a while because zombiegorilla kept crushing AI threads under his narrow version of what AI was/is and crapped all over those who primarily do not make games but applications for a living with Unity. I clicked the forum accidentally the morning the first announcement was made, saw the locked post and rubbernecked over to the announcement. Folks who work on games and pay no mind to forums or game industry news would not know, care nor been beaten around the head by the outrage culture insisting they lose their trust because of some money issue the outragers will never run into..

Now we have a wave of new joiners such as yourself who are only here to play low level psychological gambits to amuse their little hearts with. The stars and tides move about their courses and you can flail at the outcome or ride the surf.

 

I have posts archived here about the quality of their HR and bloat of non-engineering folks. The issue to me is do not make a new account and come one here with more outrage BS and try to p*ss in everybody's cornflakes. Most of these worry worms people will never have to worry about cutting a cheque to UT and I have no sympathy for them or their vaporware concerns. Frankly in all corners of society I refuse to budge logically or emotionally because of someone else's trumped up outrages and feelinz. I am good to go with the new terms. If they integrate the Weta stuff into Pro I would buy it even if I didn't "need" it just because I like powerful toys and was initially bred digitally as a 3D character and sfx artist. Weta was the gold standard to me.

 

"If it happened once, it will happen again."

The fact that at any day they can change the service policy and impose new conditions without your consent leaves no chance of doing business.

It is very difficult to imagine those people who really thought that they could simply change the rules of the game. I'm scared to imagine what will happen to the company if such naive children work there.

Now I know that doing business with the Unity company is dangerous. I'm finishing the last project on this engine and moving to another. I think every reasonable developer will do the same to the best of his ability.

Unity has decent engineers, but not managers. Bye

 

See ya. No much else to say after reading the umpteenth "I am forever done here!" decorated with words best proffered when large alligators are in the backyard. How many google or microsoft products do you use that continually update their terms. FFS the Bill Gates mafia routinely shuts down my computer via grfx faults and other BS to install updates with new terms, often when I am working and lose data. Far more dangerous and outrage worth than anything Unity has done besides hard crash my machine. Google always updates its term and conditions. I am sure you have posts over on related forums expressing your utter disgust at these companies dangerous policy alterations without your explicit approval being granted. You have switched to Linux and never use google no doubt.

 

If you will not remove those responsible then, for the sake of those who are staying and giving you another chance, remove the forced arbitration clause and remove the new editor DRM. You can not be trusted with either one.

 

Well, I called it.

This was clearly what was going to happen. I had called it from the first post, they were going to roll this back and introduce royalty. Good job to everyone who convinced them royalty is their key to success, and not just a short-term concession - you've contributed to the whole problem with this company, the idea that this will work, as a result, they will not be creatively trying to solve the issue, only increasing their fees on a year-on-year basis. In one year from now most(not all) of the studios that said they'd never use it again, will, simply because the man hours to move engine is going to be much more expensive.

When I'm selling a product B2B, the main two focal points are:

• Does it make them money?
  
• Does it save them money?

I'm in the business of saving money. Unity - saves money. You can argue about morals all you want or the future, but reality is - the large majority of us are not their target audience(because simply - you don't pay the bills. Not even MiHoYo can)

But, I want to make a point that concerns me greatly about this new fee plan.

There's no way they're going to profit from this. Just like a monthly subscription wasn't sustainable, it was just a loss leader to drive artificial growth.

The biggest studios with 9+ in their back pockets with no idea what to spend it on that were using Unity before now just had fire lit under their ass to build their own in-house engines. Throw a team at it, and see what comes out. Sell your "proprietary engine" to investors and throw in some buzzwords.

Unity is stagnant engine wise - it's bloated, it has too many features and has a desperate obsession with maintaining backwards compatibility at all costs, slowing down any real innovation. Combine that with the multitudes of platform outputs, having to support low build sizes etc...it's ridiculously insane the problem they have on their hands. They can't just fix one bug - it might be as simple as flipping a switch - but who knows the unintended consequences.

I find Unity incredibly risky going forward, as I am deeply concerned about the long term profitability in this. Especially as more and more of the biggest studios pull out. Indies are not profitable, especially at the scale Unity is. Honestly, I can't even see this profitable if they were able to miraculously strongarm MiHoYo and more to throw them a 5% cut, and this is 2.5%... It's no wonder they were going after the ad business and services.

Sadly, Unity was killed by speculation. A lust for unnecessary, and unrealistic growth. There are only so many devs in the ocean, and you can't be a unicorn with unlimited growth forever.

How on earth are they going to make it out of this? The direction has to be changed drastically and some very hard decisions have to be made, and that isn't "0% royalty, go back to old plan, fire CEO!".

This requires someone who is willing to rethink Unity's business model, flip it on it's head and try to see a new outlook.

Unreal was incredibly fortunate to have the success they did with Fortnite, combined with a huge influx of cash from overseas investors they were able to throw $$ at everything, turn their launcher into a marketplace for other games etc.

But you can't bet your company on having a major success like Fortnite..can you? I can't say, but what I can say is..

The path Unity is taking is going to get much worse. Anyone care to bet on it?

 

It's fascinating to see how a cheap marketing trick (Door-In-The-Face Technique) works so well. Come on... do you really think that most game developers now know more about marketing than a multi-billion dollar corporation?

 

This. It would make our lives much easier during development

 

This is still the one remaining big question for me.
For now, I think they wanted devs to pay because they can't be that deep in the red forever.
Today was a start in the short term, but I think they seriously need to reconsider their direction and business decisions if they want to stay afloat for the next 10 years.
They have a good thing, they have a market, they just need to focus on that, make their tech rock-solid, and make it profitable instead of buying up random companies and making their engine users pay for it.
Unfortunately, that will be a board-level decision, we'll just have to see in the coming years.

 

Although we re talking jobs here. But yes I would say Unity is overstaffed. I will not name any names but there were / are people in positions (not in the technical department) that probably do not have the skill/experience compared to what the position they were in. What Unity needs to do is less bullshit position for bullshit roles and invest more in the technical side. You cant tell me most of the 7000 people you employ are engineers.

and btw this is and was the case for almost all companies. There is a reason why so many companies had to let people go recently. Over aggressive hiring is not always good. Not good for the company and employee.

 

I just want to drop my feedback in for what it's worth. I was surprised at how good the new deal is. Self report. 2.5% share cap on your fees. Upgrades for Personal. Exemption for not only published games but all current versions of Unity.

This should have been the deal from the start. It's a night and day difference. John was wrong when he said there's no version of this that wouldn't go down the same. And honestly that quote is terrifying in it's recency. He doesn't give devs with irons in the fire who know how good of a product Unity is enough credit.

What this has done for me is given me peace of mind. Whatever happens with my current project I'm at least free to publish under the status quo and reevaluate my business relationship with Unity by the time the next project spins up.

And I really want to stress that because I will be doing so. 2024 Tech Stream has to be relevant. It has to have something for 2D and 3D devs alike. As a long time user there are things I will be watching. We need editors for many components unified. We need spline integration. We need something - anything - on the 2D roadmap. It would be great to see ShadowCaster2D's rewrite finished. It would be nice to see that new custom renderpass feature for URP ship. RigidBody.Slide? I could go on.

The thing that gets Unity out of this is devs doing good work. They should invest in you accordingly with those shiny new pennies they'll be making. This whole situation has made me sick of waiting for Unity to do this stuff.

 

Sounds good and will be pretty cool, if only the game would be a bit successful as Fortnite, will be a breakthough.

 

That is no option at all - they broke trust, the least they can do is grandfather in people that have plus if not just give it for free to all versions. Now they are forcing people who use to have plus to pay 2k or risk upgrading their project and introducing numerous bugs and issues. That is not cool, at all.

It can introduce game breaking bugs and numerous other issues. That is why we stay on a LTS and don't upgrade.

 

Except this is totally an opt-in situation. For starters you have been able to disable sending HW information has since Unity 5.2 ( maybe earlier ) so that's at least 2015. Whilst UGSA and previous analytics had to be added to your project, maybe at worse removed during early years of switching to package manager.

Granted I suspect these analytics are tied into other services Unity offers, but those are opt-in too. As a developer its important to have analytics, by default you even get a level of these from Android and iOS anyway ( e.g. crash metrics ), but even then you don't have to have them, and i'm pretty sure you could find 3rd party ones to integrate if you don't want to use Unity's.

 

You can if you have decades of AAA experience and processes in place to foster that kind of success.

Unity have never made games past that very first small scale failure and some fancy marketing demos, which are more movies than games for the most part. Unity can't do Fortnite or even a regular AAA game. Amazon tried with all the money in the world and failed numerous times, because developing on that level is not a money problem even if Unity had any to burn, which they don't as evidenced by this S***show.

There's a good chance Unity triggered a killswitch unknowingly a couple weeks back. We'll see in a few years. My gut feeling is to invest elsewhere after the current project is done. For certain markets like VR, though, Unity is practically the only option due to platform support and tooling. But then VR can't fund Unity.

 

This would also make it easier to send assets you make to the store and also update it. I HATE the package manager for creating packages for the store

 

After playing with the calculator, looks like the idea is that on top of subscription, which is per seat, if your game becomes successful, unity wants you to pay $10-50k monthly, and make calculation convoluted. And unity wants you to pay that ON TOP of subscription fee.

 

You are looking at this from the wrong perspective. The problem in the past is that gamers would complain AFTER they bought the product, they would leave negative reviews. Further to that once it was known a game used Unity due to the logo, that information would permeate to social media ( e.g. say Reddit ) where threads would distribute that to a wider audience.

Thus if a gamer had previously bought and been stuck with a low effort Unity title, or even just tried low effort free-to-play, known a game was made with Unity would adversely affect future purchasing/trying of games!

Of course in general such a stance is stupid and only hurts the gamers, but by the same token, prior experience inform biases and understandably affect future purchases.

 

Cool! Unity must to change their commerical strategy

 

What if a game was released on multiple platforms using different backing engines. Would we only count users and revenue from the platforms used by the version using Unity?

 

Hi, in the 17th page. I want to say a bit of what I think about this.

First, please don't be rude to the people from Unity that are answering this. They didn't take the decisions that caused all these problems. They are just trying to help. A lot of them are doing it in their own time, because they care about this community; it's not even their job. I know there is anger, I've been a bit angry too, but these Unity employees have had a very though couple of weeks. Many of them have been fighting for us internally all this time. Please be kind to them.

Second, I like these terms much better. The retroactivity of the changes was the thing that bothered me most, especially since a clause that covered this was added in 2019 (after a similar controversy), and it was removed silently in April. So I really like that the TOS will include again a clause to prevent unwanted retroactive changes. I didn't expect it. It's helped calm some other people I know. I think it could be better highlighted in the blog/FAQ; some people seem to miss it. Also, I think the sooner it's actually added to the TOS, the safer we can feel about it. Is there an ETA for this?

Some people are saying the word "trust" doesn't make sense in the context of a big company, but I know at least predictable costs are important in this business and I'm glad it's been considered in the update. I still feel a bit hurt, and a bit silly about feeling hurt to be honest, but I feel like I can still use Unity again, and I really wanted to keep using it because I really like it.

Third, I think it's better to not be rude to each other here. Please let's not be rude to each other. No one will get anything good from it. I'm not saying it's wrong to discuss stuff, and this is heavy stuff for a lot of us, but all this rudeness hinders the good flow of information. The community needs a good flow of information right now.

 

Players don't give a S*** about engines, they only care if the game is good. And like 90% of gamers don't participate in online spaces such as Reddit, which represents a vocal minority of gamers. While recent Unity drama has penetrated the mainstream YouTube to an extent, it'll be forgotten soon, just like previous infractions of Unity related to TOS and other bullshittery.

The splash screen is a distraction for devs, who have watched too much Jimquisition back in the day. Gamers don't obsessively consume game engine related media and news.

 

100%, what is Unity doing about their core problems, do they have a plan, what is it?

 

Dude. Don't give them new and amazing ideas about possible monetization sources.

 

As someone who was pretty angry about the runtime fees (not to mention the way in which the original announcement was made), the update seems reasonable.

It is pretty confusing, though, but the upside is that it seems in some circumstances the cost could be cheaper compared to a fixed revenue share.

People who are still disappointed, what don't you like about it? Or can I put my pitchfork away for now?

 

Thanks for taking time to answer questions whether just quoting material or not.

 

Depending upon reading the actual TOS and supplemental legal documents I'd disagree.

The problem with the old legal documents was they had an effective 'get out clause' in a supplementary service agreement. This really made it IMHO 50/50 if any single developer tried to take them to court ( not hat they would, its damn expensive ) . Perhaps some governing body might have more teeth, maybe the EU, but would expect that to take years and certainly no guarantee.

If the new TOS are written to enshrine what has been stated in the blog updates, then while Unity can certainly change them retroactively just like anyone else at any time for any version ( and even Unreal in this specific case ) , developers would have a much stronger legal standing with which to fight it, and most likely win, not just 50/50.

That is the difference with the new plan vs the old one. It does not guarantee that Unity wont unethical in the future, but it should re-enforce our ability to stand up to any changes.

Importantly though this might not apply when we take fee amounts into consideration. I've seen several reports that the structure and pricing is NOT part of the TOS and not fixed to a unity version. If that is true, then these changes might not have actually done anything at all.