Official Important updates to the Unity Runtime Fee policy

Unity sees developers as cold commodity, they have abandoned their role as shepherds and now busy themselves with corporate lusts: "How do we author payment structures to net endless profits? How do we strong arm our users to behave in a way that maximizes revenue? How do we milk this world to build as large an empire as possible, crushing all competition?".

This makes them so clever, as if us "dumb f*cks" don't understand the profit that could have been made, the power plays that could have been run if one were to manhandle the creatives.

No, WE GET IT, it's just evil, it destroys us all in the long run. But when you have so many mouths to feed, when you're surrounded by so many yes people, you have a great many seductive whispers in your ear, "you're doing the right thing".

Unreal understands the medium, they understand that a small handful of people can change the world, they understand recursion, they understand inheritance. A brilliant core can propagate through their users and create something wonderous. They strive every day to create a living and evolving toolset that will be relevant for decades, that invites the creation of the next transcendent experience. There is a kindship here, Unreal and their devs, they are one in the same, they both want each other to succeed and make cool things and share the prosperity

Unity now sees the developer as the other, the mutually beneficial relationship is over, we are the livestock upon which they feed, we can no longer trust them. Unity seeks monopoly, they seek unwarranted influence and shady business practices because they now fixate the markets, the platforms, the consumers the money, not the product. They find competing to be taxing and beyond their ability so they're seeking total control.

Here's hoping others understand the stakes, understand how to assemble and utilize top tier talent hedging their bets on quality, core systems and an ergonomic, but powerful environment to create games in. I hope there are business and tech savvy people out there that understand the market share Unity just left on the table, and that they swoop in and give us incredible tools again.

 

I think people know that crystal clear.

Unity pissed off lots of devs, including some big whales.
My prediction is that either some FOSS engine like Godot will become next big mobile dev platform, or others will step up their tech and just strip engine better to reduce overhead. And that will be pretty much the end of Unity.

It's not an if, but rather when question.

 

At this point I'm rooting for Unreal. They've been here forever, they never gave up their fighting spirit, and they've always been fair and measured, quietly making awesome toys without getting a big head about it.

If they integrate C# based logic into customizable blueprints it's Game Over. They win.

 

Honestly, after trying myself, I don't think you'd need C# for the blueprints.
It's not a raw C++, it's kinda similar to the subset of. Pretty intuitive and similar to Monobehaviours or if Unity would've had proper visual scripting.

At the same time C++ is closer to the hardware, so you can do whatever desired under the hood and just bring back results to the designers. It's good if not overabused. Some systems are just that - systems, not nodes.

With Rider support I felt minimal difference when coding either.
This is subjective though, as I've had basic C++ courses in the past and well used native containers plenty with Unity's Collections.

 

Wow, people are so biased that they are going blind. Can't you see what stupid mistakes they have made?

Scenario #4 where they claim Unity is significantly more expensive for mobile:

6x Devs, $1.5M revenue, 10M annual engangements

Unreal Engine
5% of $500,000 = $25,000 (correct)

Unity
$2,040 x 12 x 6 = $24,480 <---- WTF? Two mistakes in one line.
$3,125x12 = $ 37,500 <--- WTF? Use the damned calculator: https://unity.com/de/runtime-fee-estimator

I hope they were stoned when they wrote this?
Let me fix that for you - Unity is cheaper, just $24,740:

Unreal Engine
5% of $500,000 = $25,000

Unity
$2,040 x 6 = $12,240
$12,500 (Runtime Fee on $500,000 capped at 2.5%)



Scenario #3 where Unreal and Unity cost about the same:

6x Devs, $1.5M revenue, 100K unity shipped - Developed over a 2 year period

Unreal Engine
5% of $500,000 = $25,000

Unity
2,040x12x6 = $24,480 WTF? Same nonsense

Let me fix that for you:

Unreal Engine
5% of $500,000 = $25,000

Unity
2,040x2x6 = $24,480


Now imagine they take 3 years to develop! Or just one? Or they earn 3 million dollars? The examples are worthless. You can always construct one in favor of Unity or Unreal, but it doesn't change the fact that beyond a certain point, Unreal will just always be more expensive.

Let me make a new example out of Scenario 3:

What if the team has just started, has hardly any revenue, and is funded for production only by crowd funding and other investors? If the team of 6 people makes $200,000 a year through crowdfunding and other investors, that's $33,333 a year for each person. Most people can easily live on that. Especially if the team consists of freelancers who are all directly involved.
Then it looks like this after 2 years:

Unreal Engine
5% of $500,000 = $25,000

Unity
$0

In the end, the cost of both engines can be $0, but Unreal will always be more expensive if there is really a lot of money at stake. In between, the winner depends on the circumstances.

 

I suppose I'm looking at it wrong. So long as there are enough nodes with all the logic you would ever need, I guess you'd never need to generate custom logic. I used to be a big proponent of node based systems, but now that i've been coding for a few years I don't want to just throw all that away. If I look back through the years, the first time I truly fell for gamedev, was working with Kimset many, many years ago. I friggin' loved creating this little logic structures and making a little game.

Truth be told I'm not sure which workflow is better if you were of equal competency with both at a high level, and that's crazy to me, you would think Unity or Unreal would be shouting from the rooftops, "In the end our platform allows for the most fun games", but maybe it's just too subjective. Don't know how much Unreal has improved the blueprint workflow over the years and what their plans for the future is. I'll have to look into it when I have some free time.

Apologies for the random tangent.

 

Not sure what planet you're living on where Epic aren't trying to create an empire and crush competition. They're just better at it than Unity is.

 

Well, seeing as Unity and Apple are their core competition, I'd say they're doing the world a favor.

 

Even if the company goes out of business, the software can still live on. So I wouldn't worry about that. The code doesn't disappear.

They could even just lay off 99% of the staff at some point and continue licensing the engine as-is until they are solvent again and can continue development.

Or sell the engine to another company, just the engine, not the company.

 

I asked this precisely several times in this thread and they just ignored the question.

This along with the recent PR interview at Ars Technica and on YouTube doesn't give me any sense of security.
They just talk like scammers talk when they get caught red handed.

As long as the MAIN TOS is not changed to reflect all those promises and prevail over any future changes, nothing has changed for me since last week.

And they have to change the MAIN Unity TOS, not the "additional TOS" as they call it for the editor alone, since the main TOS has prevalence over the others and supersede them.

If they don't change the MAIN TOS, it means they plan another rug pull in the future.

 

People of my financial scale amount to little in the grand scale of things, to the point that making a move to milk more money from me is an unlikely motivation for them. I'm never going to be one of those big Genshin Money devs. However, crushing devs like me stains their expensive suits in a way that is inconvenient to their efforts towards getting their engine being used by larger studios. We made enough of a fuss that it entered the public awareness for a while and put a dent in everyone's expectations and faith in Unity as a corporation.

Increasing their profits might be in their long-term goals but anything that disrupts that (such as a tarnished public image in the eyes of their investors, and venture fund providers, as well as major industry organizations) is what keeps them on the straight-and-narrow.

 

There is a third party project for C# 10 and .NET 6. It's somewhat inactive though and only works on standalone.

https://github.com/nxrighthere/UnrealCLR

 

Don't sell yourself short. Notch's Minecraft was so important that it was a key piece in microsoft building their gaming empire. Even in massive game companies, it's the contributions of a select few, often from modest beginnings that determine success or failure.

The individual with a crazy dream is still the driving force in this medium, we don't know what's going to drive change in the future, we only know it's going to be some revolutionary idea from some crazy person like being able to punch lego blocks out of trees.

 

For every Notch, there's a ton of people like me. People with grand ideas but not much more to back it up than sheer perseverance and time.

If I'm gonna be entirely realistic, the odds aren't in my favour but having a long-term passion project to work on gets me out of bed every day.

I will say, however that we're the primordial soup from which people like Notch come from.

 

How do we (and you) know when we cross the lifetime initial engagements threshold without everyone self reporting from day 1?

 

don't be so hard on you, you may just be honest.

did you know minecraft was stolen and the original creator got nothing?

 

From what I've learned you're intended to use some combination of the two: C++ to create custom nodes and then you bind them together in Blueprint. With that in mind have you seen this?

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/magic-node

 

That's rough. It's also why I don't go on X/Twitter to brag about the things I'm working on.
It's also means that the only way I'll be able to have people know what I've done is to see this game through to completion and release. It keeps me going.

Edit:
On further investigation into Infiniminer, it seems that while both games involve mining in a voxel world, the objectives of both games are extremely different, and that the *effort* expended to bring Minecraft into the game it is today constitutes a vastly greater proportion of total value of their project than the seed of the idea from Infiniminer.

Infiniminer may have been the 1% inspiration, I think that Notch really put in that extra 99% perspiration into Minecraft.

 

what if you cancel all plans after the game has shipped?

 

This is the sort of stuff that gets the blood pumping! We used to chat about these in visual scripting threads in these forums years back.

Damn it would be cool if there were a C# visual script solution where we could just paste code into a node chunk, and the inputs and outputs would auto generate on the sides and we could share these code nodes like trading cards.

It would revolutionize gamedev top to bottom, making it accessible to everyone and allowing us developers absolute control of how much we wanted to use node based system.

Sad we don't even bother thinking of this stuff nowadays, just argue about what level of grumpiness is acceptable in relation to the recent corporate moves.

 

I would replace "nowadays" with "here on the Unity forums", it's not a sign of the times, it's that we are on the forums of an engine that is more interested in its monetisation than interesting gamedev tools.

 

If my vision of the Unity C-Suite is of a bunch of people with a strange obsession with money, then I am a person with a strange obsession with productivity. If there's one thing I missed towards the end of our days of "confusion and angst", it was just getting stuff done.

 

Tell me you never played Infiniminer or Minecraft without telling me you never played Infiniminer or Minecraft.

 

I have also spent a bit of time getting to learn a bit of the Unreal scheme. The Blueprint vs C++ is not a very big issue at all, in my mind. The prevailing advice is "you'll probably start out doing more Blueprint than C++, and when you feel like it or the profiler suggests, you'll migrate some of your Blueprints to tighter harder code." It's exactly the same idea as grayboxing vs detailed stage modeling, but you'll leave quite a bit of useful grayboxing around because nobody's going to notice it. I do wish it were scripts instead of nodes, because they're a lot easier to diff, study, discuss and meta-program, but that's not a big deal in the grand scheme. I do like how their visual scripting is much more obviously event-oriented than most Unity visual scripting systems I have looked at. Edit: At least you don't see a bunch of people saying "I asked ChatGPT to draw me a Blueprint..." yet.

The bigger hurdle for me in Unreal (besides having to find a newer machine that could handle it) is the loss of Mixamo/Mechanim. I have a ton of Humanoid assets with whatever weird bone setups they all chose to use, and the Avatar just maps them all perfectly with just a few clicks in the Inspector. The Unreal process is quite labor-intensive for each new skeleton, and fits in two camps: "Live-retarget your skinned mesh at runtime, like the cockroach-alien-man in Men In Black, at the expense of game performance" or "Sift through hundreds of animation files and let a tool bake the retargeted equivalent animations to new assets you'll have to track." As I go forward with Unreal, I will likely take the Mixamo/Mechanim Avatar ".ht" files with me, and script the import process in C# or Python somehow. Writing scratch tooling in C++ is ridiculous.

 

I have worked on a game for 3 years and sick and tired of this bullshit. This is draining me emotionally and I can't take it anymore.

Im seriously considering publishing the source so it doesn't go to waste completely. Anyone got any advice what the best way of doing that would be?

Btw. If I ever develop a game I will probably use o3de in the future.

 

A lot of us feel the same way, it's a good time to take a deep breath and wait a few weeks. There were many issues that needed to be talked about and they built and they built and now the dam is bursting, but it's not going to be this rocky for long. This situation will likely cool down before we know it.

 

your vision is accurate. i don't think you can get even 2 levels below c-level in public companies without having obsession with money.

 

Interesting, one of the aspects of gamedev I thought Unreal was pioneering as of late was the humanoid animations, and rigging stuff. I saw that you could paint weights right in the engine and they had all these advanced realtime facial mappings from video. Didn't realize that the runtime animations and rigging was so much more superior for Unity. It always amazes me just how uneven this gaming landscape is, with all these little edge cases and pitfalls one would never even think of when you look at all the pipelines we're cultivating to make these digital experiences. Good to know, and curious what they're cooking up to solve this issue, likely some new tools that services both gaming and high end film capture.

 

The problem is that a C-suite is actually necessary due to the sheer scale of the sums of money being handled in order to broker deals with multimillion and multibillion dollar companies.

Unfortunately, the skills and vision that comes with being able to operate in that world often comes at the sacrifice of the skills and vision necessary to understand and operate in the practical world of video game production (or, in plain English, we call it specialization). As much as I pride myself on possessing a plethora of interdisciplinary skills useful to producing video games, I can't envision myself being able to also take on the skills and mindset of a C-suite denizen, and as such, would find it unreasonable to expect that any of them would be able to see and operate in my world.

Aside from dragging them kicking and screaming to experience an internship position in our world, I don't know how this gap can ever be bridged.

 

Maybe you're looking at this the wrong way, clearly the solution is you need to party on more yachts and get a sizeable promotion!

Seriously. The world (when it was functional) used to be ran by the guys that started as the janitor. The problem is the people at the top have no understanding, no respect for hard work and utilizing their talents with elbow grease.

CEO's will value a no talent hack who agrees with them over someone who's going to tell them when they're wrong to save the company. They know only the world of schmoozing, and now everything is falling apart.

 

It's a bit fiddly, but this is a pretty good description of Playmaker. Despite its success, still a greatly underrated asset of Unity usage if you're working with folks that don't like code based programming AND as an introduction to the APIs of Unity for real coders.

 

Ok last post from me today, wanted to end my blathers with a little bit of optimism.

Unity DOES have 7k developers, they're not all bad, we've seen them posting here, they're passionate about this engine and have the same aspirations we do to make awesome stuff.

Here's hoping that some of them have been working on cool crap under the radar for a bit now, or maybe this is the kick in the behind to give them the green light to start doing so. Maybe there's cool stuff cooking, we already know that the WETA guys are doing who knows what. So at the very least we know we've got some top tier animation stuff coming down the pipe in the next few years.

We know they're beaten and battered with egg on their face from the DOTS and ECS fiasco's. They promised the moon and came up short. Maybe they're simply developing in dark mode, here's hoping.

Easy to get swept up in negativity, lots of rage bait out there, but maybe good can come out of all this craziness.

At the end of the day, Unity is an amazing engine, and there's nothing stopping us from making great games in it, AS IS. Nothing is doomed, their current terms are acceptable. No reason to lose our minds and become destructive to our own projects or a potentially bright future. I just hope Unity is listening and growing.

 

So in this example, if they were to earn $500k in Sep 2024 ie. before having upgraded to 2023LTS. Revenue counter starts at zero once they upgrade in Oct24. Let’s say over the next 6 months they earn another $500k, in terms of counting total revenue from the trailing 12 months, is the total $500k or $1M?

Unless it’s been edited, the wording around trailing 12 months is vague and confusing. I’d suggest making it clearer that lifetime installs and revenue totals are cut off and will never include rev or engagement from before the upgrade.

 

2022.LTS probably needs to go permanently supported for them to have any trust. Ideally open source so that it can forever be patched for target platform requirement changes. But we know that's not going to happen.

 

This whole debacle and its shenanigans have just pulled back from dissecting the frog to a slow boil.

But we all now know the pot is on the stove and the fires are lit.

 

I don't even care if Unity said 10%. I just want a solid and SIMPLE expectation to plan from. The last thing I want to think about is "what if they change their minds?", or my favorite, "what if they take their ambiguous language in their ToS and use my revenues from all products and services into consideration for their fees?"



For that, Unreal shines, and you simply can't argue that point.


BTW, anyone have any thoughts on Godot as an engine to build a shooter that has Halo Reach levels of textures and performance?

 

Another question.

When you say that the new terms kick in from when we upgrade a project to 2023 LTS. Do you mean you start counting thresholds from when we simply upgrade the version the project used OR specifically when we first release a game that uses the 2023 LTS runtime?

eg. If we upgrade our project to 2023 LTS in Dec 2024, but we don’t release any build that uses this runtime (or newer) until Jan 2026. When do you start counting the 12 months trailing revenue from? Dev 2024, or Jan 2026?

Because it’s important to note that developers can earn revenue from a project, before a game is ever released, so this ^ is an important distinction.

 

From experience, the tone is a lot more passive aggressive and threatening than your example, (and completely bullshit, all three times), but that’s not on you.

Thanks for the reply.

 

DOTS is at odds with the main game loop. One is data oriented, the other is object oriented. I like DOTS, and I think if they want to really make it shine, they need to rebuild the engine core with an exclusive data oriented programming paradigm.

A guy can dream...

 

Interesting. More importantly, does the payment schedules only apply to LTS releases?

 

DOTS/ECS also really needs Addressables support, or at least, some sort of way to make the two interoperate. I don't love having to straddle both Addressables and the Content Management system

 

Worst case scenario you pay 2.5% of gross revenue. Just plan around that and you don't have to think about it.

Nothing aside from there are inefficiencies in the APIs. I recommended reading through all of the articles in this reddit thread and the official article discussing what's missing for AA/AAA.

https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/16mzwi4/unity_devs_raise_technical_concerns_about_godot/
https://godotengine.org/article/whats-missing-in-godot-for-aaa/

 

I suspect Unity rushed out the original announcement simply to meet the 3 months notice requirement so it can take effect Q1 next year. This update was just to extinguish the outrage, but I don't see why they couldn't now just lay low and not reveal the actual TOS until it goes into effect to both avoid any more drama and bait hopeful users into staying with the engine until it's maybe too late for them to switch.

So stick with Unity at your own peril because I have zero trust in them now after their repeated contradictions, manipulations and "disappointments" with us for being upset about their gross negligence.

 

$100k? Or $200K now?

 

I was reading this article and something hit me about the mobile game industry and Unity.

https://venturebeat.com/games/game-...ity-ads-until-its-price-increase-is-reversed/

Unity's engine shines in the mobile game market. But, the mobile game industry pushed back big on this fees announcement.

Unity is essentially saying to the mobile industry, "We aren't profitable, we need more revenue, and so you need to pay more for what we offer you. You have been getting more of a free ride and profitable at our expense."

The mobile industry is replying, "We can't make a profit worth our time if we have to pay these fees."

Is the mobile game industry of today a profitable model? And if it isn't, what does that mean for Unity's future? Has Unity been essentially subsidizing the mobile game industry all this time unawares?

 

Apparently they were working on it for more than a year.

But you could argue that is rushing, considering Unity’s usual pace in anything they do.

 

No, what Unity is saying is “I blew all my money on hookers and drugs random acquisitions, time to ask for more money from those F***ing idiots”

 

It’s $200k only if you use 2023 LTS. It’s to entice you to accept their new terms (the runtime fee), I guess they have big plans for that.