Official Important updates to the Unity Runtime Fee policy

Same way you've been responding to everyone so far: with your own hyperbole.

 

I reiterate that question. I wasn't too worried about that clause in the past as I was under the impression that it would be applied for things such as varying existing rates, or charging for newly added things. Unity have now demonstrated willingness to make up whole new charges which generate essentially unlimited liability.

I expect it's going to be legitimately harder to pitch using Unity for a project while anyone involved feels that could happen again.

I want you to be profitable. I can't afford to work with you if your edge cases might put my business / house / financial security at risk.

 

Just keep refreshing the page, so it gets enough views.

--Eric

 

Yeah the main reason I've been vocal about this point is because I want to make sure they know that there are at least some people that are going to be paying attention to this when they write the new ToS and maybe it would prevent them trying to get away with it.

Over a long enough span of time they might try and get away with retrospective ToS changes again, but I think it's fair to assume this event was big enough and damaging enough that they won't be able to do so for a number of years. If we can try ensure that the ToS as written doesn't give them any easy opportunities to screw anyone retroactively in the short term then that at least should give a little more peace of mind for a while.

The subscription amounts and Runtime Fees will go up over time. Anyone intending on using Unity on projects they expect to be profitable needs to be very careful and think not just about what the $s and %s are right now, but what might be the state of things in a few years time and what that might mean for their post-2023LTS released and unreleased projects.

Also remember that although Unity have come with an apologetic tone and new terms that might seem agreeable to most, it's still an astronomical increase over the cost of a few weeks ago for many financially successful projects. Also the people ultimately making the decisions are also the same ones that made the original decision that was so clearly egregious in an immediately obvious way to 99% of people. It was either a mistake, or they purposely overreached. Both are bad and you shouldn't be ready to accept this counter and move on without keeping a very close and sceptical eye on it going forward.

 

The personal limit was raised to 200.000. If you were a plus subscriber you can stay on personal. Look at their actual announcement.

 

couldnt have said it better. even though this is a great improvement, i dont think i can trust them with the current leadership after this. what if, like 2 years later all of this goes down yet again? to make matters worse, something like this already happened once or twice before. i believe one time (like in 2019 or so) they changed something with the ToS similar to last week, causing major backlash and them to eventually back track and put up the GitHub for the ToS (please correct me if im wrong). and the other time was when Unity acquired ironSource, which yet again cause major backlash considering that they had a history of being an adware company.

 

I've lost all trust in Unity. Right now, I trust Autodesk and Adobe more than Unity. Unity has become really rapid growth hungry, also quite unpredictable. You don't know what crazy growth idea they will come up tomorrow morning that will badly affect your business.
Unity is not just going in the wrong direction for quite some time, which doesn't benefit my business at all, but buying expensive things we don't need and asking us more money to pay for that. Nope, not for me.

 

I love checking in with Unity to see how it’s doing every once and a while and find absolutely bangers like this…

FROM A MOD!! lol

Ya Godot land is going great fellas! No complaints so far! Plugged in the Rust based Rapier physics engine quite easily and am porting over Blocky Ball! Loving it so far!

 

Interesting graph.

I wonder if there is a case of company with 20 developers that has a 200K income, that would be 10K per developer per year, which make no sense.

Also the above graph assume a specific game price, while the price affects the outcome in Unity, so can be much lower.

 

I mean it’s the upper limit of the graph, if you want more realistic examples, look in the middle?

But yeah, I guess it’s also missing all those totally super duper common and realistic examples where a single developer sells millions of copies of their $20 indie game and where Unity is super obviously a better deal.

 

You know it's been a hot minute since I last linked this.

Spoiler: GDC Source Video

 

It has to be installed. That's my biggest issue. Either actual Visual Studio, or MSBuild tools that has to be precise version. And even then it doesn't guarantee things will compile and link smoothly.

Not really. There's a hot reload and Live Coding feature which allows to just patch parts of the libs that were modified. I'd say its faster sometimes than domain reload in C#.

Then again, if people actually would've used hot reload in C# / Unity, it could've been faster. Or maybe not, depending how many things has to be serialized / deserialized.

 

I love how Unity switched back the 200k Unity Personal threshold from per game in the proposal a couple of weeks ago to good old gross revenue, and everyone just went "omg, this is so cool, thanks Unity, seems fair".

 

I don't know about the proposal a couple of weeks ago, but I'm pretty sure that before that tier eligibility for a business was always based on revenue rather than game-specific income.

 

Yes. "switched back" "good old gross revenue"

 

I've tried recently. With two potential investors, both of them said the same thing: We'd be more comfortable with providing more money for more time so you can transition to Unreal.

 

Actually, I think we're talking about different things - the proposed Runtime Fee threshold vs. license eligibility thresholds.

 

The previous proposal didn't have a license eligibility threshold.

But that's semantics. With the previous proposal you could use Unity Personal for free for up to $200k per game, with the current you can use it for up to $200k gross revenue.

 

Really? Well, I missed that, but it's a detail that certainly didn't matter compared to the other stuff in there.

 

It wasn't really a detail. How would you pay $0.20 per install for over $200k per game if you were forced to switch to Pro if you went over $200k revenue?

But anyway.

 

Question for Unity: What does it mean that will be different to how this currently works?

November 2023, Unity Personal customers will get a new sign-in and online customer experience. Customers will need to be signed into the Hub with their Unity ID and connect to the internet to use Unity.​

Specifically

• What new terms and conditions are to be applied to this new sign-in?
• Will the Unity editor become unusable unless you signed in?

My concern is this is actually another MAJOR issue, that has sadly been glossed over due to the more pressing concerns of the change of plans.

For many years now parts of the Unity editor are unavailable if you are not logged in, such as package updates, accessing Assets and services. However the wording here suggests that the editor itself will be unavailable!

This opens the way for Unity on a whim or due to external pressures ( genuine or otherwise ) to cancel your account and lock you out of the editor completely! Perhaps you don't care about such external factors, maybe you think they are deserved, but what about when Unity itself might do this?

For example in a few years time, Unity, even completely within the terms we've requested, decide to make huge sweeping changes to payment systems or how they collect royalties, or any number of other possibilities, that you might disagree with, well now they can with the click of a button deny you access to the Unity editor with immediate effect.

Its rather chilling that we've gotten to this stage with access to software. I'm not even sure what safe guards Unity could put in place to avoid this.

 

and that is why there was a dude in the previous thread saying they invest $1millon in advertising&promotion and hope to get back $1million and $100k so they have enough money to pay the company staff each year.

All those steam games, the true is making the game is 20% of the work. Creating awareness and hype, find players that have money to spend is the rest of 80% of game development. Which off course I figure out now not 10 years ago.

 

Pretty sure that's what it means.

Pretty sure that is the intent and pretty sure they can already do this, remember a couple of years ago that nobody could start the editor for a day because they had a certificate misconfigured? ( https://forum.unity.com/threads/cur...erify_flag_expired.786755/page-5#post-5822986 )

 

Thanks for that, I don't think I was directly affected at the time so didn't remember it.

Reading through it appears to be related to users who had HW Stats enabled or used analytics. It was also unclear to me from a quick browse of the posts if the editor was disabled from use, or just unable to be used due to spamming of errors.

It was interesting to learn that there are privacy settings for the editor that are accessible via your account online from this Unity post. I am guessing these are the same as HW Stats in the editor. Just went and checked and it appears I've opted out , which I assume means I've 'opted-out' of my personal information being collected by Unity, though you can also request a 'privacy' report of you account to see what information Unity has collected, so I've done that - now to wait up to 30 days for the reply.

 

It has already been answered. Can work offline up to 30 days, after that you need to have internet connection to continue for another 30 days.

 

We didn't have the TOS to know which one of various possible ways would have shaken out. None of which mattered to me because the overall proposal was a non-starter.

Well, the answer would simply be that they remove it (I think it's at least partially already there). However, I suspect that they have strong incentive to keep it, because it's likely used when auditing large businesses. I completely understand that some people would see it as a risk, though.

 

It was not, I always have them disabled and couldn't use Unity at the time.

 

i can guarantee, there is plenty of studios with 20+ developers with 0K income. it's risky business and unity made it even riskier.

 

That was not what I was asking at all.

I'm interested in learning what new T&C will be imposed on this new sign-in beyond the 'always online' component, but more importantly I want to know if this new sign-in directly ties into Unity being able to disable you use of the editor completely! Currently lack of sign-in affects some services, asset and package access, but you can still work in the editor even if you have to give up some services. This new sign-in suggests that the editor is going to be locked down and prevent you even opening it if your account is blocked/cancelled.

 

Interesting, so their official answer ( error due to calls made due to analytics ) didn't address the actual problem at all?
That makes me a bit more concerned in general since several posts claim it also affected built games, meaning this also would have affected products that had no approved analytics included. The upshot of which being that could Unity use this to effectively stop builds from running in the future.

 

Maybe I am mistaken and remember wrong but I think it's already like this.
You already cannot use Unity without sign-in, you can avoid sign-in in the services but not in Unity. When I don't use Unity for a long time it ask me for a sign in again, how do they know which license do you have otherwise?

 

I insist because this is important:

@karl_jones, @DairyFan28, @superpig or any Unity member.

When will the 2023 LTS version be released? Because people estimate summer 2024 at the earliest.

Why not keep the PLUS for everyone until the release of the 2023 LTS version? We need the PLUS to not pay the PRO to remove the Splash Screen, it's quite abusive and you don't take into consideration those developers who didn't subscribe to the PLUS in the past but we intend to release a game before the 2023 LTS version is available.

 

Yeah I can see it being a bit messy, but I know from experience that the editor frequently 'loses' my sign-in, which if I remember correctly is due to allowing my machine to go to sleep. I'm still able to continue to use the editor, though if I want services/assets/package access I have to go back to the hub and try and force it to re-sign-in.

I've never tried but I suspect if I do lose 'sign in' then internally the editor will drop down to 'Personal' subscription level access, so I couldn't make a build without splash-screen.

Overall my point is that it does seem possible to continue to use the editor without a sign-in, even if you lose some access, but this new sign-in system, combined with newer versions of Unity might be a move to allow Unity to prevent any access to the editor.

 

Which version are you using? I think they changed this behaviour already, I think I remember Unity not starting at all until I logged in. Again, not sure, since I didn't think much of it. Probably was working the way you were saying up to 2020 or 2021.

 

October at the earliest.

https://blog.unity.com/engine-platform/2023-3-coming-april-2024-with-updates

 

I was until recently on an old version of the hub, the one before they had the problem with the hijacked module that caused a security issue. I'm now on 3.4.2 from April, though unsure why it hasn't automatically updated to a new one.

As for Unity I use 2018 up to 2022 for projects, but like yourself I got used to the way things operated, or in this case didn't with getting signed out, so I can say for sure if it still happens. I feel the only way to be sure would be to download the editor on its own ( not the hub ) and install to a fresh machine to see what happens, which sadly I don't have the means to test.

Edit: Still can't believe the hub is using folder names of projects and not the name of the actual project.

 

It seems, that when 2023lts comes out it won’t be able to be downloaded separately without the HUB, that’s my guess
https://unity.com/releases/editor/archive

 

Sorry I'm not seeing anything on that page suggesting that. Am I missing something?

From that page you can download the hub, or the editor and other components separately for each supported platform.

 

During installation.

 

I mean that it will not be possible to install the editor separately, this will confirm your theory about the possibility of blocking via the hub

 

Interesting, though doesn't change the fact that currently I think you could install whilst owning a license, then use Unity editor ( but not some services/assets/packages) if not sign-in. Meaning that if Unity cancelled your sub/license after installation you could still at least access your projects in the editor.

If the editor/account in the future prevents projects even being opened without a sign-in then that's really bad.

 

Another day of Unity stocks down and Unity users migrating to other engines, maybe these days are the real "indiepocalypse".

 

pfft, just because Unity is going down? You don't give indies enough credit.

 

Really you not understand that means that the tool most used by the indie game devs was ruined, migrating to other engine is hard, some have not used c#, others are no ready for production, others are expensive, etc, and the most important the time to learn use other engine.

 

Based off of the comments from people in the various communities the only ones finding it hard are the ones that weren't very good at Unity.

I've yet to actually see this supposed expensive game engine.

 

Wow, thanks for the true, now i can migrate my projects to Unreal and Godot and tomorrow publish them in Steam and in a week i will be Rich like Richcitiello

 

I've been watching multiple communities for this game engine and there have been a good number of people who have ported their game in the time it took all of us to argue about it. It's not just the experts either. Including those like you who thought it would have been more difficult. Only unlike you they didn't keep making excuses.

 

Maybe something with the complexity of flappy bird.
Just transposing the UI can be a lengthy process for many games without even touching the code.

 

I've yet to see a game being ported that was as simple as Flappy Bird.

A complex game doesn't automatically mean a complex UI, and it does depend on which of the UI systems you're using.