Official Important updates to the Unity Runtime Fee policy

Please don't fight, this thread is for talk about the new Unity TOS and fees and if you will be migrate to other engine after this changes.

 

To be honest, don't bother, you should see clear intention of the user by now. Definatelly has nothing to do with game dev.

 

gotta be scotch talking...

 

Looking forward when this community is comprised solely of "people" that created accounts on September 2023 and all the discussions are about which boot to lick first.

 

find anything interesting on this side of the tangent?

 

Just the run of the mill dysfunctions that has plagued pretty much everything in all of human history: power hungry jack offs high on fat paychecks stole the keys to the kingdom so they could play politics and insulate the gravy train at the expense of the greater good.

 

John? Is it you? Stakeholders called, they need the latest numbers.

 

You lied or just failed. But amusing nonetheless.

 

One of these days the rest of you will discover the ignore feature on this forum and your lives will improve dramatically.

 

Hot damn!

 

Once the dust settles, Unity needs to refocus their efforts on making the engine better and get real dedicated to making it work well for those serious about game development. I was even researching on how to make animated films with Unity, and just need time to figure it out.

With all of this bickering, the engine is STILL missing a dedicated lighting tool like Beast (I'm going wayyyyyy back), the Shader Graph looks inelegantly strange to me (which is why I use Amplify Shader. The UI is cleaner), and the VFX graph as far as I know doesn't play nice with other custom shaders.

If you REALLY want to redeem yourself, work towards having a unified rendering pipeline to make it easy on everyone making their games.

And TALK TO US. I remember I would be able to talk to Aras_P or other Unity devs when they would frequent the forums when I needed advice on a technical problem (I'm not a programmer, I'm an artist). I still remember Stumpy Shaders. Those are the glory days we need back and have actual tech enthusiasts running the show. Stop with the PR stuff and get those who LOVE GAMING

Sorry if I'm rambling here, but I just came across some of my recent Unity character models rendered with hdrp 12 and how GREAT it looks after the hard work I put in. You're able to make something amazing when you have a dedicated team with high morale. I work in the customer service field and I know first hand what happens when corporate big wigs interfere with the retail process. Anyway, sorry for rambling

 

I just used it for the first time. Wow

 

What people like to call free speech is often not actually that. Free speech is the right to express yourself without government interference or regulation neither of which applies to these forums since they're owned by a private organization not a government one. You can't actually say anything you want without repurcussion.

 

It is of serious concern that bedroom devs can typically outperform Unity on tools.
Can't really rely on 3rd party tools to not have dev stall.... unfortunately the same could be said about Unity tools, to practically the same extent, even the big important ones...

Visual Scripting, anyone?
They can't compete with asset store alternatives, never mind blueprints.

Even when Unity buys a tool to get their foot in the door and not do most of the work, they can't keep up with 3rd party alternatives, and development stalls... It really is starting to look like VS was more of a gimmick to attract new devs and compete with Unreal on paper, but not in reality. They bought a tool that targeted noobs at the expense of potential for more complex functionality, and now it can't compete with alternatives that can output and parse C#, support interfaces, inheritance, generics... Dev has just stalled, and if it hadn't stalled I'm sure it would be laughably slow, and there is no plan to support needed features to compete with alternatives anyway, it's just "we need to make it not slow, and a lot less janky and buggy", and they'll take forever to do that if they don't sunset it instead for being "too difficult".

A company as big as Unity should have and could have been able to build visual scripting from scratch by now.


People are talking about Unreal laying off a significant % of their workforce.
It's obvious that Unity should do that as well. Too many people not creating anything, just getting in the way with their half baked marketing-driven ideas that waste time and resources and backfire the second they are released because they aren't finished.
Starting to feel like they have 100 engineers while having 7000 employees.

 

So like I clicked his Username, clicked ignore, and what you said actually became true.

 

Obviously.
Number may be a bit higher, but in around 2021, there was alone 50 dev on DOTS.
Consider different areas of engine itself, you could probably account up to 1000 staff with some margine error, working on engine. Even if you take optimistic count 2000 or even up to 3000,
rest is ... well, not related to core Unity engine. That not even halve, of Unity Tech.
So no surprise, it is given so little attention.

Basically, Unity Tech could become Unity Tech without Engine, if the would want to sell it (worse case).

 

The thing is, improving core tech does not benefit the stock value short to midterm. And they've created so much technical debt, it can't be solved short term anyway. In a world were they have to balance value for shareholders and users, they seem to be doing everything for the former and almost none for the latter, which is a sign the company is on the road to failure.

As one of the glassdoor reviews quoted earlier in the thread, the culture that made Unity great is long dead. It's now some corporate husk feeding on what remains of a once great engine. Peak late stage capitalism.

Had they integrated Bolt 2 like initially planned, it would be usable. Not great, but adequate. But 3 months after acquisition they decided to solve package manager fragmentation and unify everything, cancelled Bolt 2 and shipped the outdated Bolt 1, because it was far simpler and more malleable for their new plans.

It's been 3+ years and none of those plans have materialized per typical Unity practices. No ETA either. Things like a new codegen runtime replacing the current reflection based one. Or mixing several graph types - UVS, ShaderGraph, VFXGraph, etc. Or even basic UX things like graph search. Their biggest feature update has been sticky notes in 3 years of development. But I guess most of it is happening behind closed doors like usual. Schrödinger's Visual Scripting. It might end up being great or a complete dumpster fire. My bet is on the latter.

 

For small corporations I agree that trust is vital, but where larger corporations such as Unity are concerned it is way more favorable (for the users) that competition exists, and a community that's willing and able to support the competition, for the same reason Linux keeps Windows in check can also apply to Unity, engines like Godot absolutely need to be funded and developed further, and every serious developer now should be able to see why that is so important.

 

Unity is becoming like the mexican army: one thousand generals and two soldiers.

 

200 top-tier developers earning 500K per year costs the same as 1 executive earning 100M. Even with just that, think of the acceleration of progress.. just saying, could let 1 go. Maybe next time Unity is about to lay off 100s/1000s of people, they could lay off a handful near the top instead.

 

They could if they gave a S*** about the engine. All the old guard is gone. Joachim will stay on his supposed sabbatical indefinitely or announce departure soon, I bet. At this point, it's all about making as much money as possible while investing into technology as little as possible. All the leaders of Unity are sales and marketing people, and MBAs. They can't understand everyday issues of users, their concern is only with stuffing their pockets.

 

Nah, they know and understand. JR is actually well versed in game development. They don't give a F***, but they know and understand. The problem isn't with lack of information or attention, it's with the goals and intentions.

 

JR knows the big picture, and can throw technical terms around but I doubt he understands the problem space from the side of developers. As he himself said in an interview, he's here to do good business. He's not an engineer and doesn't get into the weeds of things. He doesn't use Unity.

As long as some middle management asshole says the engine is in an acceptable state, JRs mind wanders upon acquiring nonsense overpriced bullshit like Weta, which has to be one of the most wasteful acquisitions in IT history and other useless things like short films masquerading as demos that are built with non-reusable custom tech.

Now that free money is gone and all outside investment is going into AI, JR must make Unity profitable or perish. inb4 mass layoffs and selling of acquired companies for sums far smaller than they were bought for.

 

Oh my god, what happened to these comments?
If you think someone's comments are annoying, you can click on their avatar and ignore them. They won't appear on your page in the future, which will avoid raising your blood pressure.
After all, more people hope to see constructive discussions.

 

Not that I think this will happen, much less with anti-compete clauses, but wouldn't it be interesting if Joachim does depart and announce a new engine?

At one point, there was talk of releasing the core code to Open Source like ID did with IDTech. I wonder if that was part of why Joachim went on a sabbatical. For context ID released the previous version of their engine open source to combat the business guys. At first, the business guys said, "Won't that give a leg up to our competitors," but many years later, Kevin Cloud told John Carmack, "In retrospect, that was really the right thing to do."

 

A lot of his wealth is tied to Unity shares value, so he's not motivated to rock the boat.
He also has F*** you money, so he can do whatever whenever without the need to work a single day for the rest of his life. I doubt he'll do anything game engine related going forward be it Unity or somewhere else.

 

If? Hasn’t he already left? He’s not CTO anymore that’s for sure.

 

I think most people would find it difficult to work hard on a game engine if they could just quit and live like a billionaire.

 

If I could quit and live like a billionaire I'd do nothing but make games and engines.

 

Sounds like Unity needs a Tim Sweeney.

 

Opposite. Assuming their financial problems are solved for the next millennium, people would focus on things they love doing.

Although with money at hand, it would be probably more efficient to hire more people for the project.

 

So, i've been away for some days, any update on the "we won't mess with prior versions' TOS anymore" clause? Has it been written in stone (aka in a new TOS that we have to sign) or is it still al talk and nothing concrete?

 

I would build buildings, missiles, drones and games. But why is this thread still going on? What do you expect from it?

 

What's funny is people responding to invisible members! I can't see half the conversation, just ranty replies. If everyone users the ignore (please do!) all that goes away and the thread can operate normally.

 

From the sounds of it everyone's busy in pointless meetings about the next big pivot.

 

Starting with the management.

The management.
7000 employees who actually had a plan and decent leadership might be amazing!

 

There's been no further communication. While we stand around waiting for a development, conversation has diverged somewhat.

 

They lost the corporate battle and frankly I have no idea they were thinking they had any chance.

first they had this business plan: subscriptions, make engine, dev make game and unity offers adds service for those games.

then they said, we don't need the engine, we offer the adds service.

but this implies cutting a piece of pie from google, facebook, apple. so unity needs to wrestle with these giants. it ended exactly as one expected it ended.

they even merged with a failed advertising company. the company that they merged with lost the war with the giants above. Yet unity board believed this is a good plan.

They lost the add war and they lost the game engine war.

Trying to survive by leaching on locked developers and using the stick and carrot to attract them to the advertising business. How this will end up?

Question: Anyone knows what happened with the group of devs that paused the unity adds in their games? Did they turned on the adds or they are still off?

 

These 7000 employees are a huge burden, how many people are used in engine development? They need more funds to support these people.

 

Epic's 5500 employees were clearly a burden too, and that's with an actual source of cash. I don't know how Unity is going to maintain anything greater than a couple thousand without coming up with an equivalently large source.

 

Epic's revenue includes Fortnite and their store on top of UE fees. But the store might also be a huge cost as they continue to give games away to try and grow it.

 

UE makes them almost nothing. Here's some statistics that are admittedly old but in 2019 UE was making them just $97 million while their games were making $3.8 billion. Total revenue has increased since then but that's 39x more money from games than UE.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1234185/epic-games-annual-revenue-segment/

Tencent's investment was $330 million which isn't much compared to what they make now but back then that was a few years of development time thanks to how little the engine actually made them.

https://www.pcgamer.com/every-game-company-that-tencent-has-invested-in/

On the bright side the engine should be self-sustaining (I'm assuming <1000 engineers for it) so it's not like they have a reason to change licensing unless something drastic happens to their cash cow.

 

I obviously can't speak for the guy, but Joachim doesn't strike me as a person who is "in it for the money". The past years must have been stressful as hell, I can understand someone needed a breather to retain their sanity. The passion and commitment of the OGs have made the engine what it is today; couldn't image it happening under the current leadership.

 

interesting insights. thx for sharing!

 

With all this Unity greed going on, is it fair if the developers start becoming greedy too? Overcharging for games, and aggressively changing terms retroactively?

I wanted to keep my games free or very low cost, but Unity is now forcing me to reconsider. I don't want to but Unity greed is contagious (or more likely I am just afraid of being financially ruined by Unity greed and fees).

I am considering instead of free to play games, I am going to charge no less than $49.99 for every game I have ever made; I blame Unity entirely for this decision, I want customers to get upset.

Also I will use the proceeds of the sale to help me move to Unreal Engine so I never have to use the new Unity editors.

 

You are making free to play games only because no one else would play them, if they had a price tag, as your business plan. Also due to high competitive market and difficulty to break through.

Or you making for free, because is your passion and have no intention to make cash.

If you thinking to "overcharge" it has nothing to do with your business plan, but some behind weird motive. Seems like waste of your own time and effort, for bringing nothing in a valu back to players. Definatelly there is no loss for gamers, as there is plenty fish of games to choose from.

Better be smart about it, instead some hot minded decisions.

 

Lashing out at customers is a great way to lose those customers. They will get upset - at you. Because unity's decisions are not their problem.

 

I'm curious why Unity getting a max of 2.5% (plus 2k for Pro license) is so greedy that you will triple or quadruple game prices, but Epic asking 5% isn't, or Google Play, Apple, and Steam taking 30% from every game sale isn't greedy enough to triple your game price.

Also, how does paying 2.5% of your revenue for a tool that provides the entire basis for the game you built financially ruin you? How is it absolutely unacceptable that a tool like that get any revenue cut? It'd be nice if it took no cut. That's a huge plus, and some engines do that. Unity obviously used to. But it's not unreasonable either.

 

Massive investments. Simple answer. I don't know who gave them so much money. I need to do a deep dive into that. But at one point during IPO, they had 4 billion dollars invested. Which of course they went on a silly buying spree and wasted about 3 billion of that in an instant... But it's a lot more being invested than what went to Epic. Which is a little surprising. But then, Unity makes about the same games as Epic overall, and Unity is the heavyweight in the mobile sphere, which rakes in the biggest cash. So that's probably why people would invest more in Unity than Epic.

 

I think most of us agree that 2.5% is pretty fair. It's not the amount it's the lost of trust and the way they tried to rip us of with retroactive license changes. And that lost trust is hard to earn back.