Official Important updates to the Unity Runtime Fee policy

The difference is that you get a new sign in and a new online customer experience.

I guess what I'll do is just stick with the older versions not affected by the new TOS and see how everything pans out next year. But I'm still a bit confused if this affects any previous LTS that gets updated in 23

 

Except they wouldn't be making more money (regarding the old runtime fee) as multiple unity developers stated they would abandon unity (hence unity quickly backtracking with the new pricing model). No developers = no games= no money to make from games.

 

I think you've misunderstood the meme

 

If you distance yourself from the engine so much that is too easy to switch engine it mean you didn't have a need for an engine in the first place, you could simply use a graphic library and a sound library.
The game you posted seem exactly like that, I don't see much there that require an engine. It may be complex code wise, but it doesn't seem to have any use of 3d animation, physics, complex audio rendering, 2d puppeting, inverse kinematik or anything a modern engine can provide.
An old SDL library would have sufficed, so of course it's going to be fast.

That is if you code everything from scratch, but that is not what Unity is famous for.
Unity is famous for saving time to code by using assets from the asset store, which mostly rely on the editor to setup things.

Plus in many cases you cannot avoid using the editor because Unity doesn't expose the methods to do so, or if it does, it is completely bugged as it has been the case for mecanim for example, until the recent years.

 

I mean. Yeah. As I've been saying, Unity becomes better the less you use of it. And for audio you should be using something like FMOD Studio anyway.

For other features, if you make really intense use of them you will probably get burned in one way or another and most of the Unity features are not good enough to be worth that risk.

 

Not sure about any main TOS but looking at the asset store Standard license, it seems to me that it is clearly stated that the license Terms Of Use EULA for Unity assets owned/purchased is subject to being changed at any time at their sole desecration, which could be retroactively if they so decided, preventing their use outside of the Unity Engine/Runtime or potentially having to Pay a Fee/Royalty to do so.

Who Knows. Personally I am not convinced that wont be the case at some time in the future so I cant see me using them outside of the Unity Environment at the moment as things stand. That would mean I may have to bear substantial not foreseen costs if I moved to another engine for new upcoming Game developments, which I am looking at as an option currently.

Regards

 

Creating GUI tools is arguably the most annoying and time consuming part of making custom stuff, so there's value is using an engine if only as a convenient wrapper for your own project.

I've personally seen two Unity games and one Unreal game from clients where the actual game logic was entirely done in their own separate C++ plugins, carried over from their previous games, with Unity/Unreal acting basically to provide input, rendering, asset management, and an editor UI to put stuff together.

The recent classic Doom and Doom 2 console ports also used Unity as a wrapper, while the actual Doom engine was running as a native plugin. There's also Sonic Colors, a Wii game that got an HD release for current gen consoles, which was ported over using Godot.

 

License threshold requirements have been around for years prior and it was based on "company" revenue, not game revenue.

 

...

What part of "the previous proposal" (aka the original one we got now, before they changed it) is not clear?

Do you want to explain to me then, how with Unity Personal as described in the previous proposal we would be paying $0.20 per install for over $200k per game if we were forced to upgrade to Pro as per the license threshold requirement?

 

Except, if investors think it will make more money, they will think it's a good idea. People keep acting as if gamers, developers, and investors all think the same way. They are different animals. Gamers and developers absolutely hate endless microtransactions and things like MUT mode in Madden, which EA uses to absolutely ruin game after game. Investors LOVE THAT because it makes them so much money.

I think Unity will objectively make more money with up to a 2.5% revenue boost. I think the reason for the dips has mostly been the bear market, and a general consensus in the market that the stock market will be in a lot of pain by the end of December. Everything's pretty bearish.

 

The majority of people saying they will abandon Unity have not paid Unity, and would not have to pay them under the new fees. Sure they lose some license revenue, but they will make it back with a 2.5% cut of games like Genshin Impact and Pokemon Go. They will make it back and then some.

 

[Citation needed]

 

On the same token, citations needed to prove the opposite - which is sort of what the statement I am replying to suggests. But really, the people saying they are leaving are small Indie devs. People who are making small games, and are not likely to make tons of money for Unity.

Did you see any large studios like the ones that made Pokemon Go, Marvel Snap, Genshin Impact threatening to leave? I didn't. Granted, InnerSloth and MegaCrit did respond. But unless they actually leave Unity, nothing has happened to Unity. The only people saying they are done with Unity no matter what are not big players. Developers who were not likely to be paying Unity anything beyond a license fee to remove the splash screen.

Call it intuition, I guess. But I based this off what we all could clearly see, with who said they aren't coming back at all.

 

Nah, what you were quoting is that multiple developers have stated they will leave, which is true, many developers have stated that. There is nothing to prove.

 

"Except they wouldn't be making more money (regarding the old runtime fee) as multiple unity developers stated they would abandon unity"

That was the quote. It says they will be making less money. And I am saying that they will be making more money. Which was the point of the revenue change. And my explanation for why they will make more money is because the loss of devs will not be has painful as the gain from the new revenue model. Just my opinion though.

 

Might have something to do with Unity releasing a dogshit pricing model and then walking it back a week later after mass outrage. Not just from the small teenager developers using unity to make itch.io games as you would have people think either, but some bigger dev studios like the Terraria studio (who even donated $200K to other game studios because of this), Devolver digital (who basically said they won't be publishing any games from unity devs), and some others which I'm sure you're able to look up if you're interested. Yes, I know they're not Nintendo with pokemon go or genshin as you keep flouting, but the threat was still big enough for Unity to retract the pricing model in place of the new one, because they as a corporation knew they would be losing money .

Or for the naïve, Unity changed the pricing model because they "heard the developers" and wanted to make it right out of the good of their hearts. Nothing to do with the stock decreasing due to mass outrage, negative press, and critism at their for-profit corporation.

 

Will that gain actually make them profitable? From some quick math other people have run, it won't. I can't say one way or the other but I'd expect price hikes. Pro is already slated for a yet another price increase. I'm sure all rates will rise every few years per classic Unity behavior post IPO until they can feed this overgrown beast or die trying.

 

Just wanted to remind everyone, that Ludum Dare is this weekend, if anyone wants to give themselves an excuse to try out some engine alternatives if you haven't done so already. (EDIT: My "Goodbye Unity" Theme did not make it to the voting round.)

And, if you want to take a break from all this mainstream engine drama, how about trying a fantasy console?
I've been liking Pico-8 and Tic-80 lately.

 

Funny you should mention Genshin Impact. The day this came out, miHoYo (developer of Ginshin Impact) put up job listings for engine devs. Does that sound like they are planning on staying with Unity?

 

They have Unity source access, the devs could be for that as well. We just don't know.

 

I'm sure you're right. The timing is purely coincidence.

 

Maybe not. I could be wrong. Just throwing out my take and my reasoning for it. I think you are right that Pro will rise. If for no other reason than inflation. But probably for multiple reasons.

I have a hard time believing that larger companies react that impulsively. No rationally-led company would instantly set up a job listing based on something that happened that day. That would lead to a very chaotic and unstable company. They knew as well as everyone that the policy would be adjusted, and they would have waited. Granted I'm not saying there's no way they aren't changing engines, but putting up job listings like that, in my personal opinion, is not directly related to Unity's announcement.

 

I have a hard time thinking a company would even consider retroactively changing their license. Unity has now announced retroactive changes and rolled them back twice. Depending on Unity, at this point, leads to a very chaotic and unstable company.

 

I've got no doubt it was affected by this on some level. But what I have been stressing is that developers/gamers are a completely different animal to shareholders. What a developer loathes can be the greatest addition to a service to shareholders. Which is why I like to use the EA example so much -> No gamer or developer loves games to be 90% microtransactions and 10% gameplay. But shareholders love it.

So yeah, I am saying that if it is true, come end of quarter 1 next year, that Unity has remained profitable for the first year of public IPO, expect the stockmarket to forget this, and rocket up.

 

Yeah. Not really directly relevant to my points or yours, but I agree. Although they rolled back once right?

 

They rolled back the 2019 retroactive changes, and they seem to be rolling back this one... that's twice by my count.

 

I was unaware of the 2019 situation.

 

It's almost certain that Unity talked with MiHoYo and other big studios before publicly announcing the plan. I had seen rumors on twitter in gamedev circles about changing business model a week or so before the actual announcement. So the job listings could be their indirect answer to Unity's change of business model. But it's all speculation.

 

shareholders absolutely love it.



and another 3% today? GG

 

I only ever used official numbers from Unity. The actual $0.20 fee applied to revenue and installs over the 1 million threshold. I even tripled and quadrupled install numbers from download numbers to account for the most extreme examples, and the result was still less than flat 5% royalty. That is not hyperbole. Hyperbole is you saying that Unity literally will take everything you have. Come back with actual math, not nonsense.

 

We've done that and it only makes you stop for a bit, and then you ignore the previous arguments and start droning about math again.

So... no.

 

There are people that spent years programming. Before they begin to use unity. This stuff you describe is normal everyday thing. You crash course through the docs, learn how it works and then just do it.

Basically, it is not an uncommon situation, when you have to do something you never thought of, using framework you never knew of, in a language you never used for a platform you never touched and you have few days to figure it all out.

The important thing to know, however, is that you should not invent barriers for yourself. For example: "You don't know how the components work. You don't know how to efficiently use the API" --> This is not needed. In practice you don't need to know internals, and only need to find functions that get the job done. That's completely different scope, and it is achievable in a short time.

 

Man, this thread has gone downhill. I am waiting for the new TOS and updated FAQ. Everything that can be said has been said for now.

 

yeah, I keep getting back here to see if the TOS and FAQ have been published

maybe they are waiting for the 2024 alpha to be released and then the TOS will be bundled with this new version.

for now what is certain is:

a substantial increase in the subscription fee which cut out a chunk of smaller developers. they can't afford the high cost of a PRO licence. so that revenue for unity is out.

pushed medium studios and big studios to start looking at alternatives, and when they do that we know part of them will jump. this is statistically a fact. and another revenue for unity is out.

and this is why the stock is down 3% today

 

Years into my project. A substantial ammount of time has gone into making unique prefab setups, organizing the scripts onto objects, painting terrains, setting up materials, shaders, color values, tuning the stat values in scripts. I've spent months tuning values that work with the physics systems of Unity. Setting up the collision layers, setting up the tag systems, properly settings these on each and every asset. Organizing every asset, naming them properly, Giving them the right material. Generating the right sorting on shaders. MANY months creating unique particle shaders, materials and systems that cannot be ported to other engines. Every line of logic is designed to function with Unity's C# object oriented systems, Quaternions, physics forces.

I've got huge #'s of custom animations i've built in Unity that can't simply be ported to another engine. Combinations of art that makes new custom items, organizations of art for environments. Dialogue that exists in prefab instances...

This is years of work that exists ONLY in Unity. I could migrate, but it would take many months of me waking up every day, and just copying work for 8 hours straight. I've done this mind numbing labor for months on end before, it's not fun... it's not sustainable, i've already payed my dues, my passions are already hanging by a thread late into my project.

It would be an arduous, painful process that would sap all energy and likely kill the project to migrate now. Not sure if other engines have prefabs or nested prefabs which would require new elements of code and design to supplement the workflow.

We picked Unity because it was one of the best, more ergonomic options, this would be time spent porting to an engine with LESS usability, LESS graphical bells and whistles, so none of this speaks to the additional time it would take to make up for lost graphical fidelity, or an overall inferior product after many months of soul crushing porting.

If it's possible, devs should absolutely migrate to new engines to avoid predatory monetary practices. But for some of us it's simply not feasible, not even close and I say this as a technical artist, I've worked professionally in multiple engines using their most advanced features. Even if you've mastered them and there are no growing pains the migration of a full fledged project with years of custom shaders, particles, physics settings, materials, folder structures, animations, and on and on is debilitating. These are just the things off the top of my head, what about rescaling every single art asset? Setting up your level layouts again. Inputing the damage #'s, attack speeds, knockback, enemy sight ranges, the collision volumes for attacks, quest triggers, game logics, setting up dummy objects for scene organizations, etc. etc. etc. for every single little thing in your game...

 

Since we like math overhear heare, as most people has a some background in business.

The equation is simple:

UnityRevenue(GameMonetizationScheme) + Unknown - Operational(Cost) = Survivability

If we rearrange the term:

Unknown = Operational(Cost) - UnityRevenue(MonetizationScheme) + Survivability

As long as Unknown is bigger than 0, unity is at losses, unity is at losses, basic arithmetic show that best case don't seems to cover the losses, ie Unknown > 0. Which mean there is a high incentive in changing Monetization to bring Unknown to below zero. Which it does if Monetization goes up or Operational Goes down. Trivial and easy.

SO when it comes to trust:
A - the company stay at losses until it dies, you can barely make engine because everything goes down, the engine won't respond after phoning home within 30 days. Only old version respond, but the market will move up til they are outdated.
B - The company tries to catch up Survivability, it find a gold pot in other revenue somehow.
C - There is no other revenue, the company need to get creative with Monetization again, this time there will be no coming back, else it dies go to A
D - The company slim down to survive, massive lay off to get under the threshold
E - Somehow, there is a change in the market and a huge influx of paying customer to unity, bringing the company to threshold.
F - It's E but the company also get greedy and can afford to rise Monetization to get richer and have better margin.

The question is not so much trust, but which ot these scenario is the most likely. That's all the debate comes down. Ie how long can it survive with losses, what strategy to survive and how greedy it will be if it has no longer losses.

 

To add my example (I've posted bits of this before but have had time to explore more deeply)

I have a 2D strategy game with a fairly complex UI. The game is architected to be highly portable - the core engine logic runs happily in a console with no engine dependencies whatsoever.

The 200k-ish lines of C# code which are engine independent - I got this running in Godot in under 24 hours from me opening the Godot editor for the first time ever. Not a single line of code needed to be changed.

The UI is a different story however. After playing around with Godot for a few days, I estimate this part will probably take me around 1-2 months of effort (along with all the other engine-specific tweaks like build, asset handling etc)

A large part of that month will be developing my toolchain/workflow/customised UI components to the same level in Godot as it is in Unity, so the work will be highly reusable in future.

The main positive from this whole situation is that

- it has vindicated my choice of keeping the core game logic highly modular and engine-agnostic
- it has made the overhead of migrating off Unity far easier to estimate

I've already halted all Unity asset store purchases, and am only waiting around to see their ToS changes.

If I'm not happy with what they come up with, I know that I have a realistic path off Unity. Not zero cost, but perfectly viable.

 

good scenarios. i could come up with a couple more, but that's not the point. you may be right. it's not about trust anymore (or yet), but how toxic partner are you willing to tolerate and how big risk are you willing to take. i'm not sure if they can control possible outcomes anymore. it is what it is. but i would say D.

 

exactly why these changes are so bad. Because they come out of the blue with no previous notice and no way to adapt. It looks like blackmail.

My advice is to continue with your project. Hope it makes enough money to get at least even with the investment. Then for the next project use a different engine.

This is why for unity the long run looks awful, people that can afford to switch already did it. and those that were forced to stick around because you locked them out in a cellar, those will not love you back, and they already planned to escape as soon as possible.

Yes, they milk you if you make enough money, but never forget and plan your future projects carefully

 

Still evaluating the feasibility of migrating my 3D project to Godot. Godot is RHCS. Unity is LHCS. My import scripts would have to account for that. I have no idea what that will do to my animations done in Blender. I'll have to flip the coords in my code. Not looking forward to that. I actually wish I had just started my project in Godot to save me from the coordinate conversion. It's so annoying to see the -90 X rotation every time I import a model in Unity.

 

You appear to be conflating learning a new game engine with becoming an expert in it. You don't need to be an expert in an engine to be able to use it unless you were already pushing right up against the limitations of your target device and even then you only need to worry about it if the new engine is in fact slower.

Also Godot isn't the only game engine out there. Flax hasn't really been touched on it this thread but it's a clone of Unity. It's actually described as "Unity and Unreal having a baby". It's missing features at this point like 2D but the APIs are almost verbatim the same as Unity.

Finally it's not a magic bullet and you do have to be careful with it but ChatGPT is extremely effective at helping learn a new game engine. I've mostly been using it as a form of docs when official docs are lacking but it can do enough of a translation that I can use it to get an idea of how the scripting works.

 

A lot of people have been saying you should finish your project.
I get it. But I am only interested in Games as a Service so there is never really a point where it's finished. I could end up in a situation where I stick around for years. And I don't want to do that.

 

I didn't distance myself that much from Unity, but I also didn't make every script from one of the base classes provided by Unity. In fact the biggest reason I was doing it wasn't even that I wanted to be independent of the engine but that I had no choice to properly support the platforms I was targeting.

 

I'll add my example, too.

Coming from a programming background - a lot of the concepts in Unity can lead to coupled code. It took me months to try out all the bells and whistles, fancy Unity specific stuff, etc. Everyone was suggesting to build "in the Unity way" and just forget solid principles and traditional architecture because it is not how games are made... Sure, let's go!

In my case what broke "the Unity way" for me was when I decided to use ScriptableObjects. This felt hacky right from the start but I rolled with it. A few months down the line, dealing with the editor was a nightmare and managing all these assets added a ton of cognitive load and felt coupled like no tomorrow.

Long story short - I rearchitected my app to be engine agnostic, with all the logic in standard classes and Unity just being a presentational facade. I felt confident that my app is easily portable to anything else running on C#.

Fast forward to the current situation - after some research I figured there a few alternatives that I can port to. I just had to rewrite the UI and a few Unity specific features. I was happy for the earlier decision to rewrite the project to be engine agnostic. I was ready to start the transition.

However, I realised that all these other engines have many other limitations, which require massive community contribution to make them on par with Unity. You see, many SDKs do not support these alternative engines - no IAP, no backend stuff like Firebase/etc, Godot 4 doesn't build C# for iOS, no stable builds for the latest version of some platforms, lack of roadmaps, no clear direction, lack of organisation, etc, etc, etc... The list with unsupported third party services became really concerning. I reached out to a few third parties asking if they plan to port their SDKs to Godot or any of the other engines - the ones that replied had no plans, and encouraged me to port their products in the spirit of OSS, others had some community ports with concerning backlog of issues on github with months of no replies. This is not what I signed up to in the first place. So despite my engine's agnostic code, some of the services I used were not engine agnostic. Same for the few small assets which I purchased from the Unity asset store, which I actively use and have absolutely no plan to port to another engine, nor I see their developers doing it anytime soon.

Then there was the lack of resources - obscure communities, empty/discontinued discord servers, outdated documentation, lack of examples, missing functionality across versions, higher % on revenue, etc, etc...

Then there was my build pipeline, which had to be rebuild for another engine.

As someone mentioned before me - my motivation is also wearing thin with the project at this point. Going the rabbit whole with a completely new engine, just for experience and/or a bit of saved $$ with a risky new project, is not something I'm looking forward to. The only thing I'm concerned with, right now, is to launch the project.

I sincerely hope that Unity will take all these cases into account and follow through with their statement that they want to provide creators with the best tools for making games. I think that instead of limiting access to these tools, they should open them to the absolute max for small devs who try to build great new products on top of them. I feel the goal should be to grow a large % of successful games that will share a reasonable profit with Unity, rather than fight for developer attention with limiting propositions. Boxing startups, when you hope for unicorns sounds like a really risky choice moving forward.

 

Oh that's a point I hadn't given much thought to. I'm currently in the process of learning UE5 which has a high chance of being supported but I could definitely see that being a sticking point for the other engines.

That said it isn't necessarily impossible to overcome without having to port the SDKs as many of them provide either an OAuth or a C++ API that you can use instead of an engine specific implementation, and many of the engines outside of Unity provide access to the C++ side and in some cases make it easy to write code for.

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/scripting/gdextension/index.html
https://firebase.google.com/docs/cpp/setup

 

If there's any upside to all this craziness it's that we're finding lots of youtubers that make great content regarding gamedev.

 

Most "popular" services support Unity and UE because they are the market leaders. UE is made for heavier 3d projects, and it's rendering capabilities are insane. My project doesn't need all that rendering jazz. On top of that rewriting and dealing with C++, at this point, will burn me out with questionable return. I would prefer to stick to Unity/C# and spend the time to build the remaining features, launch and be proud of a completed project.

I feel many indie studios and solo devs get too concerned for the financials of their project, when in fact they don't even have a live project.

On the other hand I understand studios with massive projects that don't want to share big % from their revenue. I totally see how companies like miHoYo are looking to build their own engine. This, however, is not an undertaking for a few extra devs in an average studio which pull in a few million. There is a lot in an engine and doing it in house puts insane risk. The big mic drop could be if any of the big players create some solid alternative and open it up for everyone (think Facebook's React). At that point only a big player like Microsoft will stand a chance to keep Unity in the game.

 

Nothing is impossible. As a matter of fact it's a massive opportunity to become the hero of OSS if you decide to port every missing SDK to Godot or whatever engine. I'm just not the right person for such endeavours.

 

@Ryiah Also, you know what else is annoying with all these third party services? Even if you integrate it into your project, open the integration for everyone, and roll with the idealistic OSS philosophy you still have to pay those same third party services a % from your revenue to use their service lol

... and support it.