Official Important updates to the Unity Runtime Fee policy

This seems a lot better. I think if this had been the initial update to terms there would have been a much less hostile reception. Thanks to all the people at unity who must have pushed very hard to make this happen, and also to the collective action from devs around the world that didn't take it lying down. Now let's make some awesome games together

 

They anticipate devs staying on 2022 LTS for a few years in order to avoid the new TOS.

 

This is much better. Thank you.

People will be very wary going forward - let’s see if Unity can focus on the engine a bit more and “services” a bit less.

if the quality of the engine doesn’t compete with all the ones devs have been evaluating over the last week then ToS updates won’t help.

 

Yeah, I think they should keep the Plus subscription until they actually release the 2023 LTS (which could be somewhere between spring and summer 2024). I don't have any other objections otherwise

 

Since we are able to keep our Plus subscriptions until March 2025, I want to learn what a Plus subscriber gets in terms of storage for DevOps, Asset Manager.
FAQ only mentions Personal.
Does that mean Plus = Personal when it comes to these services?
Or is Plus = Pro with those services?

 

This is a big question here. I'm developing in 2020.3. My plus subscription is no longer going to be available, and I do not require any of the pork included in Pro. Does that mean I'll be forced to show the splash screen or can I also remove it optionally?

 

To be honest I was going with 2023 anyway regardless of splash because of other reasons.

 

So I see in the FAQ, Game Pass and WebGL applications count again towards the runtime fee and you would have to pay. You still need to hit the revenue and the install count which seems like it may be more likely for a gamepass game.

 

Thank you for listeing to the community! What advantages does the "education" license have from now on, after the splash screen becomes optional?

 

This seems fine, most newer projects will be starting on 2022 which should be directly portable to 2023, or 2023 directly i suppose.

 

It's a proven fact in human psychology that trust is more easily broken than earned, and negative experiences are experienced and remembered to have about twice the impact as a similarly significant positive experience. Community trust will not be regained today, or tomorrow, or even any time this year for many who feel emotionally betrayed. Emotions don't conform to logic and reason. Trust can only be regained slowly over time by consistently demonstrating behaviors that benefit the developer community. Developers have been asking for many specific changes consistently in these forums for many years that have still not been addressed and don't seem to even be roadmapped. In contrasts, many attempts at monetizing the engine and cloud services are being focused on, and as far as I can tell most developers weren't asking for that focus and don't need those features. When the community feels like monetizing the engine isn't simply intended to line the pockets of the already absurdely wealthy, but is actually being reinvested in the company and the tools in ways that the users of the product, we the developers, actually have been begging for loudly for many years, then trust will *slowly* be given a chance. Laying off the team that was meant to dogfood the engine by making an actual game with it was a big mistake and a huge red flag. If nobody at Unity even uses their own software from top to bottom to produce the intended product the focus is off target. We only want the engine to work for us. I'm not going to go into specifics here, but perhaps it would help to have more direct back and forth communication with prominent community members to poll for the actual changes that your users really want to see, and to fix all of the most commonly expressed pain points. Actually involving the community in a back and forth dialogue and actually listening and actually making the changes that real people genuinely have asked for would be a *start*.

 

Two questions:
1-Will you be still be able to subscribe Unity 2022 LTS Pro in 2024?If yes for how long will it be possible?
2-What is the new storage thing? Is it an optional thing or what? I don't understand what goes in there. Is it the Unity cloud build? if yes, better make it clear.

 

thats a good start, id like to thank you for that

now for one more push to restore the trust of most of the folks here (hopefully)

the terms of service should state all of the above plus if you wanted to update the ToS, it should only apply to the upcoming LTS version and it should be stated clearly

again i want to thank you for reviewing the pricing policy

 

Answered here: https://forum.unity.com/threads/imp...untime-fee-policy.1494761/page-6#post-9356834

 

Ya I mean removing the requirement to show it in Personal 2023. That's a win.

 

I think I can roll with that... though I wish I could use my own splash screen in it's place, especially if I'm making film with Unity. Also I hope you guys take time to listen to us and improving unity as a viable engine.

 

Is it true ?

you earn $1,000,001 you suddenly have to pay $25,000? Important question.

 

Well I've been reviewing everything that's being said here. I've been working with Unity since 2016 and have lots of assets. I will risk going with Unity. But I have lots of doubts you can be sure of that. This has been outrageous and many people have suffered a lot including me. I only hope this will be the last time we must suffer two weeks like we have lived now.

 

Might not need a patch, but sure, they could deploy a new build on each LTS branch.

However, that's not the point. The point is that Unity is saying (or heavily implying via omission) one thing in their blog post and another in the the FAQ, which is a whole separate page. The issue is still trust. A path to restoring trust is required to win back a lot of us (myself included), but there's still no hope in sight for that. Acting deceptively only hurts trust further.

 

Of course not, because only the community can give an opinion and do something about a commercial company.

It seems to me that the fact that such companies as voodoo and azuregames wrote a letter with negative feedback was the reason for the license change.

 

Trust is totally earned for me back after this new announcement, shows that took all criticism seriously and more than make up for it and still the scheme is far lower than Unreal, for a vastly better game making environment, at least for my development needs and tastes.

Trust would be broken if the response was mediocre or not changed at all and implemented, then for sure would be no turning back, but nothing like that happened.

 

Yeah, the stigma attached to the Unity logo has dwindled over the years with the release of such high quality games using Unity, to the point it could be considered parity. It was with their Sept 12 announcement that completely swung things back to stigma, and it was their own damn fault. With these terms now though, devs are no longer tied to that stigma, and Unity can start to re-build their brand as quality (I believe they can, but it'll take far longer than if they hadn't made this misstep to begin with).

 

It is as if people are commenting without reading what they commenting or complaining about.

 

This is not true. You can only remove the splash screen for 2023LTS

 

This plan hurts you if to start to become successful. It's fine if you fail or if you are already have succeeded.

Further as more and more people leave Unity, they will have to continually increase pricing. Larger companies have leverage so they won't get hit. Small companies have no revenue so they can't get hit. So, once again the 'becoming successful' independent companies will pay to keep Unity's revenue flowing.

This version is better than the absurd previous version, but that doesn't make it good for anybody other than a solo developer that fails (or at least never adds resources) or for larger companies that might not leave. At this point, who know what the potential exposure is for under reporting. That exposure will probably change over time as Unity continues to adjust the tos to maximize their income.

In any case, the market will decide if this is an acceptable enough of a reversal or not. There are definitely less cases where Unity is the recommended solution. Is the revenue gain enough to offset the market loss, who knows?

My guess is that Unity ends up being sold and these changes are being made to make Unity look better to potential buyers.

 

I think all fees were applicable in the above threshold items, but would also like to see if is not so.

 

Today Unity no roll back their infamous Installation Fee, simply make more confusing the terms to not looks evil, this is my last post about, fortunately for me i finish this year an small game in Unity and can migrate to other engine, many have not the same luck, PLUS users are forced to upgrade to the very more expensive PRO plan or downgrade to personal. Sorry for the millions of developers that trusted in Unity.

 

Well done. But who can say that these terms will not be changed later on?

 

Or benefit you, if Unity becomes better due to the fees and not close down and then we have zero means to make the next game, other than half baked and incredibly awkward solutions.

 

That was part of the original policy. It was still a S*** policy.

 

I think that would be true if you make more then 1,000,000 in the first month. I don't see anything that says the 1,000,000 does not count once you are over the threshold.

 

They will.

 

While some of what you say is true, there were valid concerns. Even contractor that Unity hired a year ago stated that a game like Among Us would be negatively impacted. You can't ignore edge cases like that. Also TOS was in GitHub then it was removed, now its back. Why was it removed? Trust definitely has comes into play.

 

Why would we believe this now?

"The last changes were made on April 3, 2023. We will make sure that you can stay on the terms applicable for the version of Unity you are using as long as you keep using that version. We will post these changes on our GitHub repository and https://unity.com/legal."

When the repo was simply deleted last time to hide it?

 

Hi @karl_jones , @DairyFan28 or any Unity member who wants to answer me, I have a couple of questions. The first one is about this:

I will have to accept Unity Services. Accepting that will be an option in the Project Settings or when creating the build? Or just by using Unity we are already accepting?

Second question, what is "Asset Manager free tier (10GB total storage)" and "200 Windows build minutes"?

 

I will be honest, this is a lot better than the nonsense you proposed last week. I am temporarily satisfied.

I hope all of us don't forget what unity tried to pull this time, same S*** they did 4 years ago. They will 100% try to pull more bs like this again in the future.

 

Overall, it's ok. I don't hate it. I feel safe to finish my game now. Thanks to everyone inside of Unity who fought to get these changes

 

The problem is the legacy projects are not viable to upgrade due to taking too much investment to update, plugin assets no longer being supported etc. These legacy projects are basically in maintenance mode, enough to update once in a while to adhere to any new changes on mobile stores, but not enough to invest time or money into upgrading.

 

Hello, Unity Technologies representative.

I have a humble request, and some thoughts to share:

1. [Thoughts] I care not for this experimental revenue increasing business model. I am not emotional when it comes to business, only when it comes to sudden changes interfering with my plans projected in the past, to drastic sudden changes, which may not be entirely legal. But I see this has somewhat been rectified.

2. [Query] Can Unity release the remaining Gigaya project demo files to the public, even if it has been canceled?
It could go a long way in marketing Unity.

 

So, obviously Unity only backtracked because they didn't expect us to unite, didn't expect corporations to increase funding to open source alternatives, and didn't have the leverage over other software like Unreal that they thought they did.

I think Unity tried to squeeze their community too hard & too fast before their monopoly was complete. They saw the trust we had in them, they thought they had lured us with their carrot of free membership far enough that we were in their trap. Now they're trying to stop the bleeding of users to open source communities, and rekindle that monopoly... and then what do you think will happen?

We need to learn our lesson as a dev community, and keep this lesson as a guiding principle to dive into the open source community from here on out. Game developers and asset store developers, too.

I don't think there's ever been this kind of momentum in the open source game engine community, and I'll be jumping into the Godot and Monodevelop community now. After I finish my current Unity app, which is close, I will make a game in Godot soon, probably my next project! I hope to see others in their forums as well. Let's develop those alternatives for the future together.

 

Let's see how this will play out over the next couple of years ... surely they will change the TOS again hoping nobody notice. They did it already twice so nobody preventing them for doing it again. Trust was broken and not that easy repaired.

 

They seem to have taken a step in the right direction with the new changes today, but I'm still not fully convinced I can trust them with any future projects

Though I want to thank everyone who fought against the original proposal to get us where we are now

 

How exactly is this giving so many complete reassurance?

Things that are better:

1. 2.5% of revs instead of crazy, arbitrary, bull**** table.
2. Unity are keeping their hands off published games and those that are in progress (yay if true - But see below for how this might not be true).

Things that are unresolved (as far as I can see - Please tell me if I have missed):

1. Unity are still infiltrating the industry with this fishy install/runtime bull****. WHY? There is no need for it other than whatever they are secretly determined to do with it. What are they planning to do with it in the future? Am I the only person that finds this suspicious as f***? Like total Trojan Horse that everyone is waving in? If this turns out to be so they can lever more money in the future, what other software companies are going to follow suit? My point is, only the C level guys know what this truly is and I think it is fair to say that they have demonstrated that they like money a lot and don't care about upsetting anyone to get it unless it's to the extent that their company is at risk from folding.
2. While they are tying the introduction of the fees to an editor version which is great - I didn't see anything about tying the value of the percentage - I.e. the 2.5% BINDED to version(s) so that in 2, 5 or 8 years you don't find Unity demanding 40% for the game you released while content with 2.5%. Because otherwise we are not in any different of a situation to before this latest announcement really. And THEY ARE NOT KEEPING THEIR HANDS OFF ALREADY PUBLISHED GAMES. Just prolonging the date of the next ****storm when Unity decide they are jacking up the price and there is nothing you can do about it. Would really appreciate an answer to that one.
3. Karl mentions (Hi Karl! Thanks for your hard work!) that the TOS are getting locked. I definitely want to see these as iron clad as possible - So locked to editor version INCLUDING MENTION OF THE CURRENT FEE for that editor version super, extra, undeniable mention that the clause being written about can never be erased and overpowered with whatever unity want like they tried this time. Other wise why should we believe they won't do it again? This needs special/officially addressing. And when can we see these new/reverted TOS please?

That's my initial thoughts.

I wouldn't say they have resolved the issue. Just pushed it back enough to appear like they have at a quick glance and so calm the rage. Now the frogs in the pan will gradually have the water boiled rather than thrown into boiling water - Or whatever that phrase is.

Pat yourselves on the back C suit. For now. You've prob done enough to slide in your shady plans. Damn shame.

I'll be GLAD to be shown otherwise.

 

You've made that promise before, and you broke it.

 

I think this group is the new group that feels shafted with this deal. From now until 2023 LTS is released, Plus members have to upgrade to Pro, which I assume is still on the 1-year discount of the Plus sub price? Even then, those that wish to stay on pre 2023 LTS builds and want to remove the splash screen must continue a Pro license.

It sounds fair to me, but probably not to some.