Official Important updates to the Unity Runtime Fee policy

Cancelled the last remaining pro seat my company had yesterday. We were on the edge for another year of Pro. We had 6 or 7 seats 2 years ago.

I'm currently looking into removing all remaining service usage (PlasticSCM) which will be a whole another fight because it's really easy to use for my graphic artists.

We were using Unity for VR experiences before we switched to Unreal for that. Never had to pay a dime ever since.

I've been a long time Unity Dev. Heck, I even bought a Mac back then to be able to use it.

I was willing to grant Unity the benefit of doubt because I really loved their approach to game development. But the recent years of their behaviour and the ever increasing of unfinished features, decreasing performance and unfulfilled promises alongside this complete BS in regards to the TOS and pricing changes nailed the coffin.

I had this last Pro version in case I would advise the use of Unity to a customer. Since I can't do it anymore without having to explain the recent events (customers usually do their research when you use some tech they have to pay for), I ditched it...

I'll still be around since my company sells a couple of assets in the store.

 

The thing that gets me with this new policy is that using the old pre-April tos, you could choose to stay on the terms and you could keep using the current-year version of unity, including any LTS versions.

Let's say I have agreed to these terms before April. The current-year version in 2023 would be Unity 2023.

Why does Unity imply that If I'm using 2023 LTS I'm automagically bound by some different rules?

Also, the new terms don't have that clause still present, so It's been removed for this sole reason.

 

Sneaking DRM into the editor (successfully, because everyone is focused elsewhere) is not something a contrite company that is trying to make good faith, meaningful change would do.

It's something scumbags do. Offering a hand to shake while holding a knife in the other.

The only reason they're adding that DRM is to have more control over you. They want you to be as locked in and at their mercy as possible. That's their nature. It's the same reason why they won't, say, try to restore trust by removing the forced arbitration clause. That's something you would expect from people who are actually sorry, rather than pretending to be.

And it's right in line with a company that would make a critical promise, brazenly break that promise (with around a year of premeditation), and then when things don't go their way retreat back to that promise without taking any real responsibility, hoping you just forgive and forget anyway. And then, the real cherry on top, blame and gaslight you when you point out the premeditation.

Unity leadership cannot be trusted. They are untrustworthy by nature. This whole disaster started because Unity leadership made dumb, fiscally irresponsible decisions and then had to come up with a dumb idea to fix them. Now they're in an infinitely worse position than before. They're going to lose huge money and the new fees will not even come close to offsetting that.

If history is any lesson, Unity will not fix their absurd spending. They will not beg to take back the employees who left in protest who were almost certainly their most productive cornerstone employees. If they do layoffs, they will do them ineptly. They will not fix the corporate culture that is cancerous to real engineering, because leadership is the root of that cancer.

They will look to those of you who remain as the answer to their financial woes. The most immediate and obvious move will be to increase the cost of Unity pro, significantly, because they have you by the balls with that one. You're paying a SaaS subscription for the privilege of paying a royalty. And speaking of, they will slowly shift the royalty fee to become more and more predatory with each iteration (hopefully at least tied to each new LTS release and not applied retroactively).

They will do this because they have to, but even if they didn't have to, they still would (perhaps less quickly). They have to because they cannot run a business competently in normal times much less in this disaster of their own making. But they will not do so hesitantly or with sorrow or as a last resort or anything of the kind. They won't feel a thing for you when they start to squeeze.

OTOH, maybe Microsoft will buy Unity and this seemingly inevitable future can be preempted. Or perhaps there are forces working internally to replace the current leadership that need a bit longer to line up all their ducks. Aside from those possibilities, you better believe the future is going to look a lot like what I've wrote here.

 

In the end, I liked the way the story developed with the introduction of fees for the profits made.

Unity will now be able to start making a profit, whereas before it was only making an operating loss.

The community of developers has understood in a clear and concise way the dangers of working with a proprietary technology whose terms and conditions of use can be changed at any time.

In my opinion, it is time for game development studios and publishers to organize a joint investment fund for open source engine development. It's much better to pay for the implementation of new features and support than to pay top executives who do nothing but make a profit.

 

This implies that influence of Tencent was positive.

Look, in the west/USA "Tencent, Chinese goverment, EVIL" is quite popular. I'm not quite sure that's the angle you're pursuing, of course. But to people outside of US this sounds like "people will not play your game because of unity splash screen". Meaning both arguments are quite popular among vocal minorities in niche places, but most people do not take those ideas seriously.

So far Tecent haven't tried to pull anything, and Epic Games was giving away grants to many projects including godot. Unity technologies, on other hand, triggered the event we're discussing, and is currently voicing some strange excuses, like "number of views" for terms of services.

 

Imagine buying a Rolls Royce and paying extra to have the badge removed…

So many devs being ashamed of the tools they use should spark some action somewhere.

 

https://forum.unity.com/threads/uni...ackaging-updates.1482750/page-45#post-9297488
Was this lawyer's response addressed by someone from the company? It clearly states in the previous ToS that you can keep complying with it with versions of Unity predating the new revision. Together with closing the ToS repo due to "low viewership" (albeit temporarily) this thing creeps me out.

 

LMAO, players who pre-ordered Fortnite (PVE) know EPIC's ethics inside and out. Today, Epic is a beautiful story like a Disney film : **Good com (EPIC), Bad com (UNITY) **

 

This is coming from an investor's site and is the highlighted news when you check the Unity stock value on Google Finance.

https://investorplace.com/2023/09/g...looks-like-it-as-game-developers-ditch-unity/

 

Interesrting, seem 4 November 2022 were at $25, now at $31.

Given they had gone to $200, few dollars difference does not seem critical yet

 

Is Unity a dead man walking ?

What will happen in a few years, when 90% of the base will stick to 2022 TLS to avoid the new fees, most of the other 10% will be under the new fee thresholds, and most of the big payers will have either moved to the concurrence or developed their own in-house engine ?

If Unity is short on cash now, in what state it will be by then ?

What Unity will invent again to make more cash ? How they'll manage to make their user base move away from 2022 TLS ?

Am I wrong and the big payers will massively believe that the 2.5% cap rate will be set in stone and not migrate away in mass ? After all the lies & play we just got ?

Are we heading to a 100% increase on the Pro subscription price, or even more ?

Unity, what have you done ?

 

True, 30% and they do not even give you a fast response.

 

from what I have seen the big payers have no reason at all to move to the 2023 LTS

lets say nintendo and blizzard? they will stay on 201X forever

what is the incentive to move to 2023 LTS?

it will just force them to pay more for no reason?

 

I will make it simple for you. You do not speak for everybody. I do not care if the splash screen is there or not. It diminishes nothing I do or make. What makes all you people so sure you speak for everybody wth your trust and safety and outrage issues...because sure as hell someone says they speak for me I will immediately take a contrary stance.

 

Unity appear to try to do something good, but shot themselves in the foot. A free version without the splash screen, but make that far into the future.

Just add an alternative download for 2022LTS with the new TOS and splash screen removal option.

 

good stuff! very insightful. you are probably right, unity will not change. it is really clear that, even we have not heard anything from bigger studios, they will make business decision soon. it's just delayed a bit.

why we haven't heard anything from them, is that they don't want "special treatment" from unity. they want to let unity think it's business as usual. but it's not.

they will not only assess their short term risks, but risks in the long term. and they are not stupid. they know unity is too random partner to go with. and they know that unity knows that. and unity knows that they know that unity knows that.

letting an unpredictable partner make unpredictable business decisions for you in the middle of a bigger project is not something you really want. a project that may take years to complete, it may cost millions to make. and what you really don't want either is to worry about retroactive changes maybe for years after release. check mate. game over.

 

Joined in August but yer an expert on the top dogs in the industry and privy to their contracts with Unity.. Right.. You people are getting tiresome with your spaghetti at the wall prognosticatings.

 

Nah, it's intended to entice you to accept the new terms. If they actually wanted to do something good they would have changed the revenue threshold and splash screen policy now.

 

Well, to be fair, the editor has had that for many years. Pro versions used to require phoning home since long ago, and if it failed every attempt for 30 days there was trouble. I'm not sure about the days before a free option existed, but definitely then. It had to check the licensing somehow.

Never trust a company, always keep options around. Microsoft could be a good option or it could be dumb (there was resistance to that from Helgason when they actually tried to sell to MS too), but I think the current leadership is just the wrong sort to run a game engine company. They run it like an ad agency of the scummiest sort, with some employees gracefully allowed to work on an engine to distract people.

 

Yes, they're introducing the bad side of the new terms a YEAR before they introduce the good side. How hard is it to do a quick build so all tiers of the product are updated? Removing the splash screen editor may require engineering and a QA period, but simply flipping the free version to work like Plus shouldn't take a lot of work.

 

Funny you should mention Nintendo, really.

Nintendo, I would assume, use their own internal tools. As a publisher, however, they allow for different engines but have requirements on which versions you can use, and with Unity, they have a rolling version requirement. This requirement puts the onus on the developer to use a more up-to-date version of the Unity engine in order to publish their games on the Switch.

You might be wondering what the big deal is. Well, about 15 hours ago, Neognosis — the team of developers behind BallisticNG (a WipEout-style sci-fi racing game) — announced it has had to cancel its planned Switch port due to the aforementioned rolling version requirement, as it adds additional work to ensure the Switch version runs in the necessary engine version, and also because their subscription is for Unity Plus, which goes away next year, and would require a bump up to Unity Pro, something that would incur a heavier fee than desired. As a result, they'll continue supporting the existing releases and look around at other engines in the meantime.

 

To Unity:

Sorry for the third time asking this silly question, but you are so confused that I need to know your intensions on this matter:

I release a game titled T with Unity. Assuming it immediately becomes eligible to pay runtime fee (or revenue share, not important at this moment), I pay for the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd months. Then at the very beginning of the 4th month, I put into store a new version made with another engine. So, in the next 3 months (4th, 5th, and 6th months) will I continue to pay Unity since the title T is making profit, although the revenue in 4th, 5th, and 6th months are not made with Unity?

Of course, the logical answer should be no. But, I am asking, what are your ToS/regulations/intensions saying about this?

Thank you for your time. Hope to receive an answer this time.

 

Their competitors are not only ue and godot, but they will also lose their market in other countries in the future,
Because more profitable companies such as China's Mihoyo and Tencent are likely to research their own engines to replace Unity in the future, they do not want any betrayal behavior,
Because there is a Chinese saying: "A good horse will not eat grass that passes by"

If you have betrayed them, they will not look back at you again. It may not sever the relationship in the short term, but it does not mean that it will not in the future.
Unity's behavior this time will only promote them to research their own game engines faster, and even take precautions against foreign engines such as UE to prevent this situation from happening again. This is bad, I mentioned it on another thread.

 

Lmao I'm sorry, this whole situation is bad and Unity management has been awful (you can read my previous post about it), but painting Epic as some sort of white knight after the stuff they pulled in the Apple case? They weaponized children to make a quick buck... no company is your friend. No company is "good".

 

I speak for you when I say that you will NOT transfer your money to my account...

 

I'm glad that most of this has been resolved. Honestly, for me, the main thing was any kind of retroactive pricing - we've paid our license fees - you don't then later get to ask for a cut. I'm sure we'll just be sticking on 2021/2022 (we're always a few versions behind anyway), but at least this new way gives us that choice... and 2.5% + self reporting, even if we eventually have to move up, it's not that bad.

Please, though - don't post nonsense like this. It's enough. "We're disappointed about why you think we removed the TOS, we actually removed it 'coz it wasn't getting many views". Absolute nonsense & doesn't gain you any sympathy (if that is the aim), and also - who cares. It's much better just to say "We shouldn't have removed it, and it's back now". It shouldn't have to be said, but: Don't try to be emotionally manipulative in your PR communications!!
https://twitter.com/unity/status/1705317639478751611
Actually fully bonkers to read that tweet. Stop it.

 

It's like they're their own parody account.

 

No the difference is that Unreal will come with a offer you cant decline.

Steam came with Half Life 2
Unreal 5 came with Lumen and Nanite
And Unity came with Splash Screen Removal?

The current 2,5% fee and a maybe 4-5 core features completed in a new LTS vesion and the people may be happy. But Splash Screen Removal? Its like Phone tarif advertising today with core feature FREE SMS

 

And responses like this from LAWYERS don't make the situation any less suspicious:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/uni...ackaging-updates.1482750/page-45#post-9297488

 

No offense but investors are f*cking dumb.
Or let’s just say not everyone did their proper market research before investing in $U.
I was following the IPO very closely, all they needed to say was the current buzzword “metaverse” and they got a hypetrain to 150-200$ per share (lol)
I was following a few investing sites & resources and a lot of them lost credibility for me after this, it made me to just stop investing alltogether (it was always more of a hobby anyway).
Most of the big names are just r/wallstreetbets with responsive web design.

 

you know you can just correct me? Atm you are just attacking me personally without providing any retort nor sharing your valluable insight. Not saying that Im right and you're wrong, you just posted a worthless comment unless you care to elaborate

 

I tend to disagree. Don't forget the DRM, without running licensing server your local copy of Unity wouldn't even start. Well at least starting with 2023 LTS.

 

I am sure if that was the case, some skilled people would have "fixed" the DRM or find a way of overcomming it. I hope this would not need to happen and Unity finds its way out of this s***, and do not f***up again in the future.

I like the engine, in the last 14 days I have tried Unreal, Unigine, Flax and Godot. Unreal and Flax are not usable on Linux, Godot is great but lacks a lot of features (even "simple" things like getting rigidbody velocity at certain point).

Unigine looks like the best choice, but stil, Unity is for me better than all other engines I have tried.

So here I am, hoping they get their s*** together and stop f*****up, so all my investment in bough assets and years of learning the engine are not wasted.

 

Thank you for the changes in your policy. The new pricing seems a lot clearer and fairer. I would have hated for you to change something in retrospect or for current versions of Unity. I think the new pricing model looks a lot more balanced and will not break current business cases as much as the old one did, so overall, good job.

However, I'm still very irritated at the first policy changes. You broke a lot of trust into the engine with this absurd changes and I still can't wrap my head around how these policies were agreed upon on management level. Don't ever do that again and think hard about who of those people that made the decision should stay in the company for the sake of the company.

 

They're not dumb, we've entered a late stage capitalism phase where people understand the value of monopoly. Over the past several years all the markets were sewn up. Steam, the Apple Store, Itunes, Amazon.

People jumped at "metaverse" not because it meant "product of great value", but because it signalled all the algorithms, all the marketplaces, the giant machine that allows you to reach the consumer will open up. All the major entities (which work in unison) were going to herd the customer to Unity, they were going to be crowned the profitable engine by the kingmakers of the markets.

Flash is dead, the physical store is dead, the days of getting a demo of doom at the local fair are long gone. The only places people go to find new games is steam and the various App stores, and there's so much vaporware that it's nearly impossible to find decent games that aren't showcased. Where do you even hear word of mouth? On the manufactured zeitgeist of reddit? Reality has been sold to the highest bidder.

Every year the chances for indie developers are diminished by a thousand tiny cuts. Could minecraft even become a hit these days? This is to say nothing of the cultural machine that likewise destroys the individual but never cuts into the giant corporate profits.

Just 10 years ago was the golden age of indie. TONS of big games were showing up all the time, making substantial profits, getting lots of press, showing up on the front page. What happened? The entire machine shut it down, insulate all media and market,to the big corporate club.

Think of the decline of Apple before Steve Jobs came back, but on a larger scale. Instead of the marketing team of Apple taking of the company and stifling product, imagine the marketing teams and executives of every company in the world all uniting together within a few key companies to shut out all competition so that quality of product no longer mattered.

It's really depressing even typing this out. But there are legions of coders, marketers, social media people all working in unison at countless corporations ensuring that only the soulless slop makes any money in so many different ways we can't even fathom it. It takes money to make money, and they have it all, and they're willing to use it in dastardly ways to give themselves the advantage.

Monopoly is like a landslide, it starts slowly, but as the resources begin to concentrate and critical mass is reached, all aspects begin to shift in that direction as people subconsciously understand the unwritten monetary contract to which they are now part. It's far easier to manufacture monopoly than it is to create quality creative works and every single year, as people receive fewer and fewer products of quality, they forget it was ever the norm, they develop a taste for this mediocre slop. Top executives become more and more comfortable making bets on simple algorithm changes and greasing the wheels to suppress competition rather than taking a bit on trying to make the next big thing. Kids these days don't even know there were superior products before, they just see the graphics and assume it's "dog water".

When's the last time you tried a free game on a website? Saw a big story on a media site for a hot new indie game that sparked your interest? It's no accident our behaviors have changed. Big money and pressures have gone into algorithms, algorithms that feed into other algorithms. It's all fear of missing out, it's all manufactured interest, it's all suppression of competition year after year after year until we're all sucking down their garbage, even though we know it could be better, because that's just the nature of the machine, it's the nature of billios of people trying to make a living and make money, the assholes willing to exploit others and cheat and steal are going to do so, and they're going to pull ahead as generation after generation the adults in the room die off.

At the end of the day, these CEO's aren't gamers, they don't give a damn about this "low brow" entertainment. They want the fast car, the big yacht, the fancy parties, the elaborate trips around the world enjoying the company of other movers and shakers who exploit the world to be at the top. It's a culture that breeds a growing disdain across the class lines.

In the upper circles, it's actually embarrassing to give a damn about your product, to empower people who are so lowly as to work hard, to have principle that gets in the way of amassing wealth, to associate with the "plebs".

The thing I try to take solace in, is the quality bar is starting to get so damned low, that even with all their monopoly, people are just going to leave, their big projects like the metaverse are going to implode under the weight of hubris, incompetence and greed. People are just going to stop buying these sh*tty games and there will be a void. It's happened before it'll happen again. Last time the sh*t hit the fan they buried millions of copies of ET in the desert and out of the ashes Nintendo rose and saved the entire darned industry. Great story in gaming if anyone wants to look it up.

The more things change the more they stay the same. Things will always go to sh*t and someone will pull the wreckage from the abyss and bring about a new golden age on and on and on.

 

If it's your first game, or incomes from your other games are less $200,000 for last 12 moths, then you can work 10 or 100, or more years on your game without Pro plan, until you publish it and earn above $200k.

 

Which golden Age of Indie?
You mean Alpha 23, or Beta 27 from games like Zombroid or 7 Days to Die or the classic DayZ.
The machine shoot itself in the knee with neverending development cycles and a absurd narrow portfolio Zombie/Survival/construction.

 

In hindsight that was an incredibly smart decision on their part. Epic Games wouldn't have made that pricing model making it available to everyone, and more importantly they wouldn't have shifted Fortnite to be a test for games as a service and it wouldn't have become the cash cow that it is.

 

Well the outcome of the decision is the only correct measurement.

While Epic makes bllion+ in net profits, Unity struggles to stay afloat .

 

The "trailing 12 months" start after the income from your game(s) exceed $200,000 for last 12 months (then you need to buy Pro plan), and when any of your games (this one is per game, not the sum of all games) exceed 1,000,000 initial engagements lifetime and $1 000 000 for the last 12 months (then you will need to report and pay a fee for the money above the initial $1,000,000 made with this game). If your income for last 12 moths get bellow $200,000 - then no need to renew Pro plan, or if they are less $1,000,000 for the last 12 months - submit a report that your game income is bellow requirements, and no need to pay fee.

 

Didn’t want to go there because it’s too ideological for me but I see your point.
Hovewer I still belive this isn’t the world we live in (yet), this is the capitalist dream machine but sometimes reality seeps in trough a little crack and slaps you in the face real hard (like in the case of $U)

EDIT: creativity and originality is still the backbone of game development.
Even when everything else is manufactured garbage, a copy of a copy of a copy like in the mobile markets you still need something to copy.

 

The one that made longshot successes such as this possible:

(Using this as an excuse to show how passionate this industry used to be before the big decline)

Said decline:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indie_game#Fears_regarding_saturation_and_discoverability_(2015−present)

 

Bit depressed are we?
While you have some fair points there its not quite that doom and gloom
This isn't the first time we have seen the game industry consolidate and it wont be the last

It's quite typical of every industry to go through fragment and consolidation cycles. It's not a terminal linear pattern and its not limited to capitalism.

You get ebs and flows of volatility and stability, one caused by the other. In volatile swings we see fragmentation, loads of new startup hopefuls some of which will find footing and grow, most will now this most recent one was the big indie boom over the past 10-15 years or so.

Then that saturates, kills off a good many scares away more, and creates stability from the volatility of it all this drives consolidation e.g. growth through acquisition, etc. This however doesn't kill volatility this reignites it. As consolodation happen you get fragments left behind, in the case of game industry its vets that go start a new company, or bank role a few new companies and over time that consolidation will give way to a new period of volatility where there are yes a few large giants but most the noise will be made again by the smaller studios this will spur on a new flood, we get saturation again and the cycle repeats

EA was once a small company, it grew, it became a big fish ... its day is largely over

Vivindi was at one point the largest by a mile, its day has also come and gone and isn't a huge player anymore

Countless "big studios" no longer exist at all, sitting in the bone yards of giants some of which have also faded away.

A couple of vets in the industry have been through this cycle a few times now I can remember at least 3 and know of 5 from a matter of history.

Point is this isn't doom and gloom, this isn't the death of indie or monopolization of the few, this is just part of the cycle. Game industry really runs this cycle fairly frequently I think you can see a full end-to-end here in just 15-20 years

I remember when Blizzard was a small indie making polished but simple games
They are now consumed by MS and I would say have a 50/50 of ending up in a bone yard they were part of a big fish there for a solid 10+ years or so. One of their founders has now spun of a couple new "indie" studios that may well be a new "blizzard" ... or might wither on the vine its all part of the process

EA's founder did similar, EA became big, he split off, and tried a couple of things after but nothing really stuck

Even Steam was a MS guy as I recall before Steam was a thing and as huge as Steam feels its day will come to

 

this is really good writing. i agree with almost everything i learned something new. it really didn't even crossed my mind, that the indie market has been slowly dying for a long time. now that you said it out loud, i buy it 100%. and the money destroyed it, yes. it grew too big to be marginal. indie became mainstream. what's the next indie?

made me really think, is this worth it. it probably is not.

 

The Unity stocks continue down, is normal, a company that betrayed their users possibly never recover their users trust. Imagine the position of many indie or profesional developers that spend years to learn Unity and years for made their games and in a moment Unity change the prices, the plans and the license to add new fees, and imagine that one of this new fees is a very unfair fee like the Runtime Fee, possibly Unity does not survive this crisis and like other says is good have a second option like UE or Godot to migrate if Unity collapse.

 

If any Unity employees are watching this thread. I just watched the video with Jason Weimann and Marc Whitten. In the video there was a TOS question we didn't get a straight answer to. The question was along the lines of what is stopping Unity from doing the same thing. And the answer should be: Legally, nothing. Marc said that TOS is in GitHub now and TOS will be changed and "we promise". OK. But legally, bottom line, period, what is legally stopping Unity from doing it again? If Unity want's to regain trust they should be straight forward and state the truth. People are already suspicious, so that kind of answer non answer just doesn't inspire confidence. Lastly, Unity already had provisions in TOS about older Unity releases, Unity already had TOS in GitHub and look were we ended up. So how is reinstating those things do anything, because is certainly didn't protect us in this case. Marc's answer makes no sense to me. Also Marc says he believes it and wouldn't say it or write it in the blog if he didn't believe it. So does that mean I should make my decision on his integrity (which I'm not diminishing)? What if he leaves Unity next year? What we need is an ironclad legal protection, under the law, where Unity lawyer can't just get back and say that we have no choice but to accept it, like it happened this time. I hope you can pass this feedback along to your lawyers.

 

The Golden Age when Silksong is being released.

 

You noticed it, too?

Yeees, indeed.

It is called Algorithmic.

Where the transitory indie devs of the Lords of Struggle go to lose all profits.

 

I touched on the rise and fall towards the end of my post, but I tend to ramble on so I get why people wouldn't read it.

But I don't think you're seeing the big picture here. There is absolutely a ubiquitous force, an invisible hand that is playing with visibility, with those who are hired and let go at large tech studios. Where we used to live in a world where failure would lead to decline, like you stated with EA, that doesn't much happen these days.

The point was that Monopoly has become so compounded by our modern tech, that declining studios don't fail any more. They grow, they get new funding through alternative means, they expand their work forces, they carry on and double down on nefarious revenue streams.

Frankly, I don't know how you can post in this thread, knowing everything that's going on, and not see that that we're living in an extended period of decline where falling quality and standards has been given a lifeline and bolstered by mass predatory corporate tactics on a mass scale. That's the entire point of this thread blowing up.