Official Important updates to the Unity Runtime Fee policy

Coming Next, Photoshop users will be charged for distributing "Adobe Pixels".

 

Anyone can initiate a lawsuit for any reason.

 

And? Seriously, go read the ruling. That it started with Epic violating the contract is WHY Epic lost.

If that's too hard, I've linked to a lawyer going over it and explaining it.

 

So you are saying Epic sued Apple because Epic violated the licence? Free to say that, I don't have a problem with it.

 

Yes, it's all outlined in their internal memos from discovery and was a key point in the trial. It's well documented and indisputable.

 

This thread is kinda slow so I'll just chime in and ask any official Unity representatives who might read this thread about the estimates when we would get the new update Terms of Service. Surely we won't have to wait till the 2023 LTS would be released in the end of the next year?

 

i wouldn't hold my breath. things can change in so many ways before the LTS. and if there will be one anytime soon, expect it to change before the release...

 

Just came on to see if Unity smartened up yet. You should be focused on making improvements to the engine and core toolset, not spending your war chest keeping up with the Joneses. Want to improve your engine in major ways? HIRE PEOPLE INTO YOUR COMPANY THAT ACTUALLY MAKE GAMES!! Even a high quality demo that EVERYONE can play. And show some damn confidence and interest in your products!!

 

^^This^^ and get rid of the dolar reload guy.

Did they ever finish the replacement for the networking side or the new input system, or all the rest of the bits that have been in development and forgot about for years? I aint looked for ages. Stop buying crap 99% of your users couldn't care less about and get back to making awesome features that don't require a subscription and extra fees on top and the company will start to shine again.

Sad fact though is once you go public the users/creators no longer matter only the dividends going into the shareholders pockets. Art is Dead in the hearts of these folk.

 

They just aren't doing this. I mean, they have hired people who have made games before. Don't get me wrong, that's hard not to do if you are selling a game engine. But they aren't doing it to make games in their own engine, so to speak. (And the tutorials hardly count as real games. Just tech demos.)

Gagaya was obviously an exception on some level. It was basically going to be a full game as a demo. But I get the impression that they won't be flirting with that kind of project again. Whether they have the money or not. But a full game as a product like Fortnite is out of the question.

They just refuse to do this. I've personally asked people "on high", and they said it is because Unity will NOT compete with its customers. No challenge to the folly of that will ever be heard. You can say that it will help us understand our customers and their needs so much better, but they are not interested. Not as long as the same people make the decisions.

 

My goodness, that reasoning only makes sense if all games were monolithic. It's like saying: "Oh no, someone made 28 Days Later so there's no point in making Dawn Of The Dead." Hell, I'll watch both zombie movies back to back.

I get that the reasoning works if we're talking Valorant vs. Apex Legends, but Gigaya was not planned as a "game-as-a-service".

Come to think of it, if they made Gigaya, I imagine that it would spur a lot of modders to come in and learn Unity to improve upon it.

This part makes a few things click into place. Unity is more of a technology marketer at this point. They produce tech demos which increase speculative value. They don't actually make games, and this hits pretty close to home for me considering that I've unwittingly become an interop programmer over the last few years. Nearly all my efforts go into making this engine suitable for making a AAA-title.

For instance, I have to make it so that my game can create assembled firearms, serialize them with JSON so they can be sent via Networking for DOTS (I wanted the rewind feature for netplay, and you can't use it in tandem with Networking For GameObjects) plus make a user interface for firearm assembly, plus making it so that these firearms can be saved and loaded, and that the individual parts reference ScriptableObjects that hold their base attributes, and these are marked as Addressable Assets so they can be swapped out by modders, and they have to be async-loaded and aren't hard-referenced, and I still have to get to the part where I make the gameplay specific details so that the firearm actually launch projectiles that possess the necessary modifier data from some of the parts of the gun (so when you attach a longer barrel the bullet flies faster and further and possibly more accurately), plus the firearm has to have states that keep track of whether they're set to semi/burst/full-auto so when you hit a keybind (from the new input system) it changes the appropriate value which is then stored on the actual part of the gun (the selector switch) that keeps track of this so when you stow the weapon and pull it out later, it doesn't change unexpectedly, and the reason I store it on the part rather than as a monolithic variable is because you can attach sub-weapons like underbarrel launchers and shotguns that ALSO have their own separate switches, AND THEN these weapons also have to retain heat values so that when you fire them with your heat vision turned on, various parts need to start glowing and this involves changing shaders that have "Lightmode" tags on them for shader replacement with a RenderObjects pass, and if you put the weapon away and swap back to it, it STILL has to process cooling of the gun so that it doesn't completely cool if you pull it back out quickly enough, so this means you can't just make the gun cease to exist when you stow it.

Like, this ^^^ -- this is what interop programming is. It is a lot of very fastidious and bothersome crap that I deal with, but to be honest, if it wasn't for all the technology that Unity has developed I wouldn't have even considered doing it. They make a tech demo and I stupidly see all the possibilities and I run with them to try and make a game out of it. It's just... sometimes I wish I had a more direct line to talk to the individuals responsible for creating all these different systems because it would greatly accelerate my development process, because I get stuck on little things all the time and I keep having to spend a few days here and there to break through.

 

Generally speaking, if a company has not developed to a certain scale and does not pay attention to its own game engine,
They will use unity first. Until they don't want to be bound by the engine, like this Unity event.
However, two-dimensional games do not necessarily require the use of engines. You can use algorithms to simulate everything in simple scenarios. Yes, you don't need ECS (entity component system) at all. You don't need to design any complex systems, you just need to complete your work.
The advantage of Unity is that it is easy to port to various platforms, but you still need Pro on the console. Yes, I know that there are preferred platform licenses available. Since Unity requested the use of Pro to create console programs, I have felt that the nature has changed, but I didn't expect such a significant change.

 

Famous spanish indie game developer and youtuber Alva Majo will be migrate from Unity to Godot Engine.

 

Godot is hardly a replacement for 3d at the minute. just look at the games its still very much in its infancy maybe in a few years with a lot of hardwork, https://steamdb.info/tech/Engine/Godot/

 

Depends on the fidelity and what game you're making. Road to Vostok dev considers Godot good enough right now:

 

I keep seeing this but the more I look at the games the more I'm convinced it's not the engine.

 

It's not a replacement for intermediate to advanced level 3D graphics, but most indie games don't work in that space anyway.

 

All I can say is that Unity seems really suited for outliers like me who have too much time on their hands and are dumb enough to actually put all the tech they've developed to use. That said, I'm glad that people like me are uncommon because if they were everywhere there'd be no place in the world for me.

 

Guess time will tell, I will admit though it doesn't look terrible and the guy is right, Blender is the boy! and that coming from a guy who was a 3dsmax fanboi back in the day before they went crazy with subscriptions/launchers and all the other crap they tacked on top the past decade or so.

 

Godot 4 just got released 7 months ago, which was a drastic overhaul of the renderer among other things. Yeah, maybe not "at the minute", but what good game is made within "minutes" let alone "months"?

There's plenty of comparison between Blender's path to success and Godot's possible path to this same success.
Yeah, Blender eventually got grants from several studios. And we've seen Godot get a significant cash infusion in the last few weeks. I could imagine this will continue.

But one major difference between Blender's path and Godot's path, is that the competition didn't fully royally F*** over their user base in a span of a few weeks and completely destroy any semblance of trust. Autodesk just did it mildly so, comparitively.
Spite plays a large role in success, as much as we care not to admit it. And there are thousands of developers right now who feel spited and want to dish something back the other way.

 

That would be a lie though. We are a Unity customer and they compete with us for contracts all the time. They even won one against us about 3 years back. Their Industry teams and offices literally are built to compete with their customers for work.

If they aren't making games it's because they see them as not profitable, not because they are looking out for their customers. This is a company desperate for money that will go out on any venture they deem as even remotely worth it.

 

And that is a crying shame because then it will highlight the limits in their engine and make them improve it. Having separate pipelines honestly was a stupid idea and just complicated things to the point where I didn't bother setting it up. They could have kept it at ONE rendering pipeline and disable features you don't want to use with a simple toggle. Game development is hard, but not making tool robust and easy to use makes it harder

 

I'm not sure about that; did you watch the video from the Road to Vostok developer? He says he spent 30 hours or so testing Unreal for his project, and then 40 hours testing Godot and starting to port his Unity project over:





Obviously not cutting edge but I'd classify that as intermediate and certainly good enough for indies. It remains to be seen how well that holds up as a complete game, but it's also not the case that Godot is a fixed thing. If its developers listen to feedback coming from a real project like this, that would probably help the engine a lot. And there's at least a chance of that, whereas unfortunately I've seen very little evidence of Unity listening to feedback in recent years. They used to be pretty good about it, long ago.

--Eric

 

@Eric5h5 Seems like a huge undertaking getting an openworld game up and running efficiently. Afaik godot 4 doesn't even have a solid terrain system yet (though believe someone is working on it), nor support for HLODs etc.etc. That said, neither does Unity really...

 

Even if they don't listen, the rule of open source is you own both halves. If there's something they won't fix he can fix it himself... he certainly seems competent.

 

The influx of Unity users en masse and increased studio attention has also sparked several initiatives in improving several points of interest in Godot:

1. C# support Roadmap: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/7895
2. Support for more rendering techniques for those of us who are not graphics engineers: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/7916
3. Zero allocation C# bindings: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/7842
4. Drawable textures akin to what other popular 2D engines have like GameMaker: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/7379
5. Integration of AAA level physics library Jolt used in Horizon Forbidden West: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/7308
6. Multiple shader passes in the same file: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/7870

And many more.

Unity at this point in time is entirely closed off to the general public, all development happens in closed of silos unavailable for public feedback. Instead, they work with studio partners and internal teams for years and the drop an MVP of some new system that's incompatible with a half a dozen other Unity systems. And then the new systems can't even reach feature parity with legacy systems they replace after 8 years of development.

Godot is the complete opposite of that, there are 0 interop issues in Godot, everything simply works by design and all development is open for everyone to see and give feedback to. Sure, Godot is not perfect. They've made some bad decisions in the past like developing their own physics engine from scratch, which didn't pan out all that well. But Jolt Physics didn't exist then, it does now and soon Godot will ship AAA physics by default. It's already available as a plug and play GDExtension with a few caveats.

Godot might not match Unity in the number of features, but what it does have feels very consistent and easy to work with. In another year or two, Unity will have a real contender on their hands. One that is entirely gamedev focused, lacks Unity's bloat and fragmentation, and doesn't have the stigma of clueless corpo leadership and bad decision making spanning more than half a decade now.

Godot 4 does have HLODs https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/3d/visibility_ranges.html and automatic LODs: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/3d/mesh_lod.html

 

IS scary mind we keep getting side tracked by other engines instead of pushing Unity to fix there S*** and sack the $1 reload guy.

 

If I were to offer a totally wild take based on my current experience, I would say that maybe they tried making Gigaya, realized that all of their awesome new tech was plagued with interop issues and decided that the fallout from shelving the project would've been a lesser evil than revealing that their new tech pieces don't play nice with each other, because that's been my main struggle for years.

Like, I've managed to make these things work but always at a great sacrifice to time and sanity, and I am saying this as someone who worked for 5 years as a technical director for visual effects and has been programming nonstop since the MS-DOS days.

I always used to make lots of games but my production capacity has slowed to a crawl that is directly in line with the terrible compile iteration times. I thought I'd try returning to dev-streaming but OBS takes up too much horsepower and I need every Hz I can muster.

Every time I make a puny change to some script, it triggers off a Burst compile that takes 5 minutes to crawl through, even though the script is totally unrelated to DOTS. It is absolutely excruciating to sit here every day with big plans and an alert mind while my computer is grinding away.

 

Nothing is more motivating for Unity than people switching to other engines.

I doubt the clueless moneybags on top have any understanding of package interop issues or the tragedy that is the render pipelines and the ever breaking URP API. But it sounds plausible. It's been a struggle for everyone.

 

I'd advise Godot not to develop an asset store tbh. Considering it's opensource, you want to be able to just integrate things into the engine, and not end up in a situation where you don't want to step on anyones toes, to the point where features everyone wants, they have to buy from random devs who can disappear whenever... If there is an assetstore, maybe you want to sell your feature, maybe you don't want to give it away anymore... Honestly, if you're using opensource, you should be more willing to give away the features you develop as a user, but if someone dangles potential money in your face, maybe not. You also want user developed features to be able to exploit other user developed features... something you can't usually do with the assetstore.

And I'd advise Unity to develop popular features regardless of whether they have to step on toes, because if a feature is very popular on the asset store, it's because Unity doesn't have that feature. Instead what they've been doing is relying on the asset store to provide popular features, and then they've been spending time and money developing less popular features. An exception to this is splines. Splines are useful, and I don't care that the assetstore has spline solutions, the engine needs a good spline solution built in, and they built it. More of that needs to happen.
Took a long time though.

 

I have a different opinion. Godot Store will help fund the engine further, which is very much needed. Having an asset store also builds an ecosystem around the engine, that's professionally/semi-professionally supported. One of the main reasons cited for not switching to Godot is the lack of Asset Store.

Godot also doesn't work like Unity, they're not a commercial entity, they won't ever acquire an asset or a dev. They hire from the already existing volunteer contributor pool and those people work on what they want to work on because they're passionate about it and have already proven being capable of handling it.

Also, Godot has a C++ plugin system, which means any plugin can run at native performance and feel engine integrated out of the box. Take Godot Jolt as an example, you simply download a plugin and you have AAA physics available just like that using all the default physics nodes Godot already has. No custom components, no domain reload time increase, etc.

Godot's Asset Store has far more potential than Unity's simply because their plugins don't have to be bolted on in the C# layer. Of course, C# addons are still possible if that's what you prefer. I feel like this could be something truly great and ensure Godot's continued existence. Asset Store revenue is chump change for Unity, but for Godot it could be enough to fund development efforts for a very long time.

 

You don't have to take my word, Juan Himself told us what's the problem in it's blog about AAA and AA dev, and some of these aren't limited to AAA unfortunately, while we don't have access to unity code (without a fee) people with access has told us and we can benchmark and look at the evolution through time.

https://godotengine.org/article/whats-missing-in-godot-for-aaa/
Godot for AA/AAA game development - What's missing?
By: Juan Linietsky

QUESTION is Juan Linietsky a unity fanboy? All of these are deal breaker for me and they were deal breaker when I was on unity too, I ranted about that for years.

Also there is issue with godot rendering backend being JIT instead of AOT which is a dead send on console, I haven't checked the latest update on that though, and some other minor gotcha for serious commercial ambition.

Godot is where unity used to be, but unity has an incentive as a commercial entity to cater to anyone, slowly but surely, even though they stagnated on that front.

To be fair there is unfair allegation leverage at Godot's leadership, especially pitting blame on Juan for not following everyone wishes, which is stupid, you have on guy and there is scarcity of resources, of course he gonna follow a certain direction that he can afford. GODOT IS FREE, get a bunch of people, fork it and rename it to Godot Pro under a new leader, as the license allows you, and stop complaining. When blender dumped it's engine, that's what happened, and they are still porting stuff from the main branch to merge with their game engine specifics, which mean they don't redo they stay focus. So the whole cultish bla bla bla is really about people not liking the direction not going their way. They just need to organize, it's very different from unity where you are stuck with what you have.

 

I'm not a native language speaker so maybe something was lost in translation. Or maybe you thought I was criticizing eric with whom I generally agree. I don't know, but what it seems you are asking me is kind of a cosmetic language change.
Still if I had to tell that story to a friend I would say: Epic has sued Apple because Fortnite was banned from the store but lost because has previously violated the terms. Or something like that.
I'm not defending Epic, yet in this mess, with Unity and Unreal and Godot and enter_engine_name_here having their own set of problems, what are we supposed to do? Other than talking freely?
If you want me to say Epic actions, or whoever would dare, of asking for a more open store and for alternative payment methods is a silly thing to do, you have to explain why it would not be potentially beneficial for mobile (Unity) developers. Manage to do that and perhaps I will be happy to tell that story with your words.

 

Also I came back to a post comparing unity to unreal...

That comparison is faulty, because unreal scale more easily for bigger project than unity, there isn't a lot of 3rd person open world with AAA quality running on console with unity, for a reason, a bunch of them burned due to technical issues, even when a persona spin off was ported to switch, ie not really an ambitious game technically, it chugged, meanwhile I play fortnite no problem and the scale and density only improved since the released.

Unreal cost more and is worth it (for the type of game you can do with it).

 

So Odin ports to Godot.... and now you have to pay for that functionality, and as someone developing assets for Godot you just can't include any of that functionality in your own asset because the engine relies on some other guys asset for that functionality, because they are financially incentivized to rely on that asset for functionality.... Yeah, that sucks. I hate that about Unity.. I hate having to rely on assets as a user for features that the engine should have, and I hate not being able to rely on assets that other devs have created when I am building tools that I want to release...

If C# is an option, then that is the option most people will pick. Goodbye advantage of C++ plugins

I didn't say Unity should acquire assets or devs, because very rarely should that even be considered, instead they should just see what assets are popular to find out what features they are missing, and then be unafraid to just develop a better version integrated into the engine, and not really care about an assetstore dev crying about how he is no longer swimming in money because nobody is buying a feature that should have been in the engine anyway.

Unity is a giant company, you'd hope that they can develop a feature better than almost anyone on the assetstore, and if they can't, they've got other problems they need to sort out.

 

The game was actually coming along nicely. The Gigaya team had everything working out very well. No major issues. Granted, I wasn't on the team, and didn't follow their every word. But I checked up on Gigaya after it was cancelled, and saw nothing of the sort.

 

You've just described one of the biggest patterns of Blender usage: wanna use it like a pro? Be paying for plugins, add-ons and improvements from the community, and spending a LOT of time version matching. What you save in full costs of professional software you lose in management and administration of your bits and pieces that make it nearer a whole 3D pro app.

Personally, I'd rather the 3ds Max experience, and Unreal is much closer to that than Unity and Godot.

 

I, on the other hand, saw exactly what moatdd suggests - the next 20% was going to take 80% of the time, and the next 10% was going to take another 90% of the time, etc.

Just like using Unity outside of Unity's staff, it gets much more brittle the closer you get to shipping.

 

I can't comment much on the technical side but W4 Games had Godot running on both Switch and Xbox in this year's GDC. The company is headed by Juan so while it's technically not 1st party console support, it's as close as it gets. Sorta like Blender Foundation and Blender Film Studio, there's Godot Foundation and W4 Games: https://w4games.com/2023/08/06/w4-g...console-porting-solution-for-game-developers/

Unity's assets are also not Odin based. Also, Odin guys might finally release that permissive license for commercial use. They teased engine agnostic plans recently.

Definitely not by most of the current Godot userbase. There will be a healthy mix.

 

This has been true of game development since time eternal.

 

Gigaya was aiming for a release at the end of the same year that they were cancelled. Whether they would have hit that target I don't remember @Andy-Touch stating but it has been more than a year since it was discussed.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/how-long-was-gigaya-in-development.1323219/#post-8366169

 

Ugh this is a highly believable conspiracy theory.

 

You should evaluate the situation realistically based on what has actually happened, what currently exists, and decide what works best for you.

Epic didn't ask for a more open payment system, they demanded they be granted an exception to the agreement that they and everyone else accepted. Take note of that, while Epic gets all high and mighty, they started by asking Apple for an exception for only themselves. Risking damage to all UE mobile devs was a choice they knowingly and willingly took, not for devs, but to get a bigger slice of the pie.

I'll defend Epic against misinformation, but I'll also fight misinformation in their favor. That's why sometimes I may seem in their favor, and sometimes against them. People choosing to depend on them need to know what to expect from them, and while past performance is not an indicator of future results, it's the only thing we have to look at.

 

In Unity, yes.

 

Actually the epic that sues and the epic that does the engine was two distinct legal entity, which is why Apple couldn't F over the other devs for Epic's action, as legal reality caught on Apple when they tried doing that.

Therefore this doesn't work. However the cause they were fighting for would also help many instances were business are forbidden to compete. For instance, there is an African who started a company to allow people of that continent to pay for Apps in way that work with the local reality, it was killed by Google and Apple, because it's non traditional and wouldn't go through apple and google's wallet, which mean african (and african business) cannot leverage the huge local AND global market to finance their own growth, especially access and creation of "leap frogging" infrastructure dearly needed. Epic winning would have help any instance over the world where this has been a huge dampening to local economy.

 

Actually, it doesn't matter. That was a TRO, which as since been lifted. Apple can boot the UE development division at any point now, that said, the optics of doing so before all appeals are exhausted is... poor.

No, they may have been writing that in the press, but internally they requested an exception only for themselves. Epic is not your friend. Neither Epic, nor the United States District Court for the Northern District of California cares the slightest about Africa, the latter having no jurisdiction there. If African nations want to make limitations on what Apple does in their countries, they should pass (and enforce) laws to do that (just like the EU did mandating USB-C charging on phones).

 

I had read something along the lines of court ordering, after the ruling, the change of rules for all developers in the US store. I don't know if these articles are badly written. For example here. Where did you take those info?

 

Why would you bring care in that? Opportunity would have been great!

That's funny in a dark way, everytime we tried something like that, we end up being bombed and leader disposed. It's not like it's a secret either and it's been well documented, and everytime it happen people go shocked pikachu, and the media blame us, then 10 years later you have a documentary in the form "oh no the west did a bad thing(tm)".

But we are straying from the topic, let say trying to get through game dev in some country is hard enough for even more layer of BS like the new TOS of unity.

 

You claim many things, yet, still twisting the reality. If you want to defend them, it is up to you. I'll be long gone. Next time they will f--- you hard. However, a few things to say:

Yes, you can stick to 2022, but, you can only renew your plus subscription once more, then you are forced to buy pro to remove the unity logo. Isn't this a true blackmail? Let Unity not behave like this and then see if I support them or not, maybe I will lovingly buy pro, then. (In fact, as I am already paying my subscription fee, maybe I am already supporting them more than you, if you are still using the personal licence). But, now? I am truly blackmailed! What kind of thing is this? Yes, you shouldn't defend their previous behavior, and neither this one.

One bulshiting of you is claiming these are standard practices. Taxing this way is not standard, actually, the dumbest thing everybody heard in their lives. This is pretty non-standard. You are twisting everything. It is not our job to find a way to rise their funds nor softening the effects of their faults. And the way they chose to increase funds is completely sick. They have to pull everything back and work harder to earn their bonuses, not you and me.

Doesn't Unity add any value to my game? Yes and no. This is another twisting tactic: even if it adds some value, this doesn't mean they can tax me. What they tax is my work, my time, my sweat, my funds to hire personel. If my content is not there, their runtime does not have any value. Does it? At this point, I can imagine you open an empty project build it, run the runtime and watch it for hours and hours... You should be doing that at your spare time as a recreational activity instead of listening to music, etc... as you are a hot defender of them. If you are not doing this, probably you are not that insane, it is my content that adds value to Unity software, not the other way. They can not tax it! They can increase the subscription fee, they can ask for a flat revenue share, but they can not tax it. This is ugly! The idea is ugly! Amount does not matter!

As I said, I will be long gone next time they want to f--- you or who ever left deeper.

 

First world governments and media are constantly trying to target these large international corporations as well. Forcing them to stop using every tax loop hole in the book so that they actually pay a significant amount of tax has been an ongoing battle for many years, and they're still using loopholes and paying little even after a bunch of laws have been passed...