Official Important updates to the Unity Runtime Fee policy

Your humble opinion. Noted.

Your failure to grok proportionality in existing frames of references versus the creation of entirely new mechanisms of extraction are also noted.

In the metaphor you're attempting to opine about, the gas station is now wanting to charge us for the number of times we drive past someone looking at our car in between fuel stops, and increasing the cost of petrol.

 

It's actually taking your money from filling your tank all the while telling you that it can call you next month to ask for more money because they can change the terms of the contract whenever and however they want.

 

It should not be about trust but given how Unity writes its TOS all you have is trust. In B2B relationships credibility, trust and strong relationships are important.

 

There are ways to use all of Unity's key systems without creating ANY garbage. These ways aren't easy to find because Unity and its advocates spent a lot of time saying GC isn't a problem (it is), but they're there.

DOTS to ECS has been an abject and unmitigated failure, but the path to it gave us Burst, Jobs, Native Arrays and Low Level access to all manner of things that provide enormous performance improvements, along with Span<>!!!

 

"Just last month, indie roguelike hit Vampire Survivors swapped to a whole new game engine in Unity. Now, with the whole game industry crying foul over Unity's half-retracted fee changes, the game's creator has a simple answer for whether he'd ever use the engine again: "lol no thank you!""

https://www.gamesradar.com/vampire-survivors-dev-asked-if-hell-ever-use-unity-again-lol-no-thank-you

 

I'm so sorry for this poor guy and his studio. I hope Vampire Survivors will be able to migrate back. I didn't know the game till last week and I bought at once to support them.

 

Why would they?

WTF? Huh? I mean if "failure" means you, personally don't like it, sure.

 

can this lead to something good - for devs?

 

These two posts quoted below best summarize why, I guarantee you, no one who is saying "just switch to Godot, its so easy" has ever released or worked on a major project. Not one. The idea is absolutely laughable in all the but the very simplest cases. We get it, Godot is cool and an impressive piece of software, but its thoroughly unsuitable as a replacement for Unity if you are working on a serious project. I think we can put that matter to bed now.

Unreal is the only serious alternative, but again, the difference in its workflow can be extreeeemely cumbersome to work with unless you are making what it was designed for: corridor shooters. They have done some more focusing on mobile platforms, but still: there's a reason why games like Cities: Skylines are made with Unity and not made with Unreal.

I've only seen 2 moderately successful studios claim that they will be switching engines (and their games aren't exactly hugely complex). MiHoYo uses a licensed custom version of the Unity engine and I seriously doubt the engine dev job posting was for anything but working on that.

At the end of the day Unity is an engine used by businesses and it comes down to costs. Moving to a new engine is going to cost a studio of any real size far more than Unity's new fee structure, and will be far more of a risk to boot. Far more.

If Unity ever genuinely becomes unprofitable to use, then undoubtedly no one will use it. Until then, I assure you, people are going to continue to use it.

 

Just my 0.2 cents...

The Unit's first change of plans was unbearable.
The total silence of days and days was a nervous disaster, giving me almost health problems (I have to work on it, I always somatise!).

The new plans are, in my specific case, decent. you can budget for them thanks to the upper limit, and if you ever had to pay, it would probably be less than the price of a full-time developer rewriting an engine and 10 years of development. I've done some research and I don't like the current state of any open source game engine. I don't see great advantages (in my case) of switching from an engine that asks for 2.5% to one that asks for 5% considering the small number of licenses I need.

Trust has been disintegrated. I hope the competition makes Unity understand that just as we need a good product, they need developers. In the future I will definitely spend some of my time developing alternatives and more R&D.

I hope this situation has opened up new job opportunities for low-level engine developers and has, personally, made me realize how insecure and undiversified my business is.
I think we all need to work on this aspect and we need to do it soon.

I wish everyone good luck, live long and prosper.

 

That depends on the project we're talking about. Godot is a capable engine with some serious shortcomings. But they have enough funding, buzz and vibing, it can become the next Unity in a couple of years.

Also it depends on the project. There are more also capable engines, the question is what are you doing. If you're doing mobile, it seems, you're out of luck. But if you are doing desktop, you have many very capable options to replace Unity and be happier than you were before.

Yepp, I share your view that the initial migration will be limited. The real harm will come when the meeting rooms will be about the next title and where to begin with them. A lot of next titles won't be started on Unity because of this enormous F*** up. Even if the dialed back from the ludicrous speed F*** up to just enormous F*** up.

 

That's fine, no one is arguing there will be no one left, what people are arguing is that Unity are past their peak, these moves stink of desperation and if people do start leaving you can expect more desperate moves from them, so it's good to make plans now.

Plans can mean "finish current project with Unity then move to something else", you don't have to port your projects if they are too far along.

 

Sorry, written too briefly and unclearly. I meant: I don't know the studio well, but I read somewhere that, after the success of the game, they got a lot bigger. Of course they will use the engine they prefer and make their own choices, but perhaps they might have problems paying the license fee in 2024? I mean, it's not easy to budget for a change with only a few months in advance and so I hope that if they need to they can go back and not lose money..

 

Why can't Unity make a concise, convenient and simple User Fee and Terms and Conditions?
I don't understand that at all.

 

I believe having confusing monetisation is very much on purpose. Heavily monetised games do it too, so that it's unclear how much anything costs and it's easy to argue "well, I it's probably not that much", or have people spout bullshit about math or something.

 

Im sure oracle and vmware users said the same when they converted from 1 license per server to cores/memory charges... when instead of spending $n000 on a license you paid that and more, and then you needed more memory spent 100k on memory and it was "ahh dont forget us, we havent done anything and you wont be changing how many tickets you log etc but, we want more too now"

 

very much, "our game is free" but if you want to do more than login and move 1 step you will want to buy energy or whatever, and its hard for the user to keep track of spending..

 

That I do not entirely disagree with. I would love to see some fire under Unity to improve and innovate soon. However, the engine as a base is still rock solid as far as engines go - so unless your next project requires bleeding edge, boundary pushing stuff that Unity just doesn't do already, its unlikely that Unity would not be a strong contender.

As for finishing your projects and starting the next one on another engine: thats not particularly easier than porting an existing project. Not if you have developers specialised in Unity, and years worth of tools and custom assets designed specifically for use with Unity. Most of the cost will be in re-tooling and re-training, rather than the actual game code itself.

So no, I don't even see studios picking another engine for their next title, or the one after that. Not unless the pricing situation with Unity deteriorates to a point where burning cash re-building your development system from the ground up in another engine becomes the cheaper option. If that point comes, that is when studios will start actually switching. I really don't see that happening any time soon. I would be very surprised if Unity swiftly priced itself out of existence, and if it did, I imagine it would be purchased by someone else pretty quickly. Its easy to forget just how incredibly valuable Unity's software is.

 

My point is that should be less worried about what Unity does and thinks and have exit plans.

I disagree with that. Maybe the bar is low, but still.

Two wrongs don't make a right? This seems even more urgent to unentangle yourself from Unity so that you can move to something else more easily, while the terms are still reasonable and you have some time, because if things get worse you will be in an even worse position. Worst case scenario you add more tools to your toolbelt?

Again, I think it would be too late at that point.

 

Is the trick, first the bad news, then silence and finally the "good" news, really Unity never remove the new "Runtime Fee", sooner or later they will be make this the only fee for the engine, is the way of Unity to try get money from free to play games.

 

to port the engine if you are more than 20% done (maybe even less) is not a good idea practically.

you are right you can build an engine by yourself
but... they care about projects that can bring them money...
if an engine that a person can build by itself in a decent period of time is enough then you most likely will not make 200k so they don't care about you.

they don't care about very small devs . epic doesn't either . godot sure, they care because they are open source

 

I don't think we need to pretend that Unity is some useless piece of software. Unity is, by far, one of the best development engines ever created in terms of speed, flexibility and compatibility with different build platforms. Its not really something thats up for debate.

I'm not at all suggesting people shouldn't expand their toolsets and make some forays into other engines. Its always a good idea, and Unity losing some marketshare could fuel some competition that is good for the marketplace as a whole.

But I do disagree with the assertion that you need to be making plans to switch as soon as possible or you're in danger. The idea that Unity is going to suddenly somehow empty

If Unity's financials get so bad that they would have to price themselves out of existence and bankrupt their entire user base... well, someone is going to have purchased Unity long before it gets to that point. Remember that these

 

Hi, is there no middle ground between those two statements? Because I feel uncomfortable with both options you have given me.

I don't do it well either, but planning ahead and acting upon certain predictions even if it's "just in case" is pretty big part of business.

If you wait for something to happen before starting to prepare for it, you will always be too late.

 

I don't want to sound like a unity defender, but i doubt that that's the only reason they cancelled. Nodoby cancels based on lack of trust. In business if you work on trust you are dead before you begin.

And let's be honest now... unity is the new NMS, anthem, ME Andromeda, 76, 2077, starfield.... something everybody loves to hate, until the new hated company will appear and the last one is actually not that bad anymore...
I've seen this so many times ...

Sure they deserve it, but if they are not "f... idiot" (time will tell) they will recover and they might actually get stronger...

 

agree with this. you can't buy an insurance if the house is burning already. looking for alternatives and *preparing* for big changes is the only sensible thing to do.

 

Indeed, this is super strange to suggest that 200K is fine for a 20 people company, including company expenses.

Is far from realistic or viable scenario and Unity pricing would be the very last of the issues with such a venture.

 

Are people missing the part that the graph has a range of 1 to 20 seats? Sure it gets a little ridiculous at 20 seats, but look lower?

 

i bet there is a new studio born every week, if not every day, where is 10 people working in it, has zero revenue. have some funding. and end up not releasing a game. this scenario may very well be more common than we think, given that an average game makes $1k revenue in it's life time. and yes, they probably need more than personal plans, especially if they target consoles.

 

But they would generally start with the free Unity Personal in such case, correct ?

If targeting consoles as first venture, without any funds to support that, then is just a very bad plan imo

Plus would not need to work directly on consoles from day one probably.

 

Its not just about cost from current fees. If you can't trust the company you are doing business with - you cannot do business with them. The risk, right now, is simply too high. They have shown a brazen willingness to pull unethical and possibly illegal shenanigans. That, in and of itself, is enough to never do business with them, and has potentially massive financial implications. No thank you! We've been bitten several times by Unity, and have no reason to believe they wont bite again!

 

Um... What business school did you go to?? LOL This is the worst business advice I have ever heard.

 

Time to kill the thread. "Trust me bro" argument and finger pointing.

 

with funds over 200k you can't have personal. so, a new studio with experienced developers should never target consoles first?

 

You don't need to trust me, go run a major game development project on Godot and release it on multiple platforms.

 

Again, there are plenty of game development projects which do not aim to release on multiple platforms initially. Blanket statements either direction is very wrong. Godot is capable of a lot and it is not there yet simultaneously... You can say it is in superposition...

 

These things didn't happen overnight either. This was years of poor decision making, years of changing company culture, years of taking everything for granted, years of stagnating and losing core talent, years of growing accustomed to failures. I do not see Unity in a great position to change course. They need to take radical action to remain a positive company that does great things, before they fade into yet another massive, money grubbing company that produces next to nothing and is a net drain on this world. Sick of this happening over and over and over again. This decay just goes on and on and on.

 

Really?!
Ok borrow me 100k and TRUST me i will give them back to you...

On trust people preorder games like NMS , 76, Anthem, 2077, etc and ... well... I think you know the rest

You should never trust a business. That's what contracts etc are for. Do you think Epic is better?! "Trust" is the impression that they will somehow respect what they say. And they usually don't... regardless of the company

maybe a 5-15% on the decision should be based on the company "trust" but never more. and never important stuff. at some point every company screws up

 

You either need way less than 200K to start a side project with a bunch of people who have alternative income streams or you need way more than 200K to start a company with a bunch of people who have no other income streams. People have lives - you know - families, mortgages, bills, etc. What kind of person posts 5 job opening, let alone 20, for engineers when they only have 200K?

 

It's more likely that you will get complaints that their company of 30 devs with under 200K revenue is not represented in that graph. Outrageous!

 

You probably trust Unity more than you realize. More then Nigerian scammers I would hope. Before this happened I bet you never thought that they would change the rules to the degree that they tried to. The contract you sign with Unity allows them to change the rules so you have to trust them.

 

i don't think anyone even hinted anything like that. 200k was said, because it's the threshold between personal and pro.

 

Trust has nothing to do with the fact that I will not swich engines ATM or with my answers here.
I was pissed? sure! But not disappointed, because I don't expect companies to... not be after money
In the end a company must make the shareholders happy, not the costumers...
Also according to the videos on youtube made by lawyers what they did was legal (imagine my surprise).
Epic is not much better wither, unfortunately. So let's hope Godot or something similar will be actually good so we can have an alternative...

 

I'm with my current contractor because the lead programmer saw my responses to posts and decided that I was competent and would fill additional programmer role that they needed. I didn't need a resume and I didn't need a portfolio.

I'd much rather have to deal with Godot on the consoles than Unity. With Unity I had to have different versions for the PS5 and XB S/X SDKs because of the way that Unity handled their release cycles, and because I had multiple releases of Unity and the SRPs are tied to editor versions I had multiple releases of the render pipeline to deal with.

With Godot I could have just ported and kept the same version of engine while only changing the SDK.

 

well, they didn't seem to impress either one. and that's a bad sign.

 

Now the most Unity community does not trust in Unity, the new strategy of Unity is make easy money with new fees and force many developers that use the Plus plan migrate to Pro plan, and force many developers that cant assume the cost of migrate their Unity projects to other engines stay working with Unity, is a good strategy in the short term but in the long term most Unity users will be migrate to other engines.

 

if what they tried worked i';m very sure they would have been

 

They need to make both happy or that company will not be around for long. Or at least happy enough.

 

Shareholders are smarter money makers, therefor the best decision makers, and role models, because they don't waste time being Devs. Because if you are a unity dependent Dev you are not going to be wealthy with this price range. You've also got the hurdles of asset store filtering. There are so many opportunity for corruption. It's beautiful in a way. You could get a job any of these crazy positions at unity and make crazy decisions like who can and can't sell assets and why, and then you can just charge whatever you want and treat people like utter crap in total freedom and just buy something you don't know nothing about and then just progressively destroy it over a span of years and try to sell it at an increased value.
Like a used car
You gotta admit that lifestyle sounds fun.
You can totally understand why they live it

 

Any dope can become a shareholder. You just need ID and some cash.

I've owned U stock at various points.

 

but it didn't work. they tried something risky, right? and while they are at it, i have no problem believing they will try another stunt at some point, which will also fail. and that's that.