Official Important updates to the Unity Runtime Fee policy

Unity's impact was MUCH bigger when you look at the numbers.

http://www.videogamelayoffs.com

 

That's not how I read the revenue statement. It says within the 12 precedent months. This strongly indicates that it's a moving window from month to month.

 

Thanks. I think the term 'rolling' should be added to the official description in the T&Cs as a necessary qualifier.

 

Superpig and the example said the same, that it is a moving window, so only 7 months are paying months and not 12.

 

That's what the 'former' option was. There might be a difference in language. Perhaps 'trailing' means 'rolling' in the US, or I'm just out of date. For me, 'trailing' and 'preceding' 12 months don't qualify how often it's measured, whereas 'rolling' does. Superpig's clarification is just that, that it's a moving 12-month window.

 

before deciding using unity long term wait for the license tos that will be created by the unity legal team. for now is speculation, unity staff that is not management may have inaccurate information, or if true at the moment it may change at any moment from now on till the tos is released.

stuff like "retroactive fees" "retroactive user engagement calculations" "optional volunteer data submission" "third part police verification of game data" "penalties if dev doesn't give correct numbers or doesn't want to pay" all this stuff is the real key information and will start to become clear once the real license and tos show up.

even then, the tos license is redacted in a way to be hard to figure out if you get the short side of the stick down the road.

Is nice that unity staff sometimes post here to trail this forum thread along but I would put little value on the actual information they are publishing. The people that matters are the investment funds representatives trough the board members which were proven to not listen to unity normal staff, make sudden changes that are poorly planned, half retract the changes to buy time, clearly not a good strong leadership for this company.

 

What'd I miss?

I was wondering the same thing.

 

https://create.unity.com/contact-un...QwYAAU&sflsa=Unity Enterprise Contact Us Form

form to contact unity if you need a custom solution.

 

Try buying source access. It's become nearly impossible to buy source access at any price. Can only imagine why.

 

Sorry? The legal agreement is redacted so we can't read what we're signing up to?

 

No, as far as I know is not out yet. the new tos license agreement for 2023 LTS and 2024 versions. Once this tos show up you will have precise answers obviously hard to read because legal documents are like that on purpose.

Off course you can read the tos you are not agreeing without reading, but reading and understanding are two different things. legal documents have their own meaning is why there are hoards of lawyers everywhere talking their own language, and you need to pay them to translate it to you.

normally if all goes well you will be fine, if something goes wrong then you soon figure out that you needed a lawyer to read the contract

edit: ok sorry so by "redacted" I wanted to say "redact" in the sense of write down not to hide. English not my first language and apparently it has double meaning or maybe not.

at this link is the meaning of the word as I've intended to use it
https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/redact

To redact is to arrange or edit text in a written document.

but it also means

"to remove words or information from a text before it is printed or made available to the public"

I can't confirm but I doubt they will say no to money. That option is for games like genshin impact not some poor single seat indie game dev. You are free to try and you may get an answer but is not your club.

 

Isn't Unity Enterprise the custom license? Or is there another license where you can complete eliminate all of the problems everyone is having with the TOS?

 

Thought as much. 'Redacted' is when text is obscured with black marker so key details are missing - not great for a legal agreement!

 

Multiple fellows have recently tried to buy source access, from different sized studios and publishers on behalf of the productions they represent. All are getting rebuffed with stalling questions.

 

Have you not noticed that the fee estimation calculator includes Unity Enterprise? And that it still goes up to that 2.5%? Is it really a custom license at that point?

https://unity.com/runtime-fee-estimator

 

I guess you can negotiate anyway, (and having the fee in enterprise as well gives Unity more negotiation power) it's just less formalised than Unreal and probably out of reach for most of us here.

 

Yes, I'd imagine that's the case too as otherwise they would drive these companies away, but then there's the flip side which is that the companies that would have benefited Unity the most with that up to 2.5% may very well not be paying it at all.

 

IMO Unity has been trying to shove away indies for a long time now, hence the focus on movies and CG and services, and refusal to fix common animation bugs, citing bullshit like "not a lot of people use it", but also putting effort in HDRP that definitely not a lot people use.

I think any positive thing that has come out for indies, features and bug fix wise, was more from employees "going rogue" and deciding to just fix and improve some stuff. This is reinforced by stuff ex-employees say, but also current employees that often express that "we have been fighting internally for this" etc. Unity is not a unified company, each department wants different stuff.

And management, clearly and desperately wants Unity to be seen as some sort of bullshit high tech CGI Movie Metaverse NFT AI powerhouse, and not like the little indie engine that could, which is why they are so desperately chasing and pivoting towards bullshit trends at every opportunity and failing spectacularly.

 

Neural Fourier Transforms ; )

 

We're talking about Unity here. Clearly it's "Not Finished Technology".

 

I dont think that the Unreal Big Players pay Upfront more than Support Seats. Its interesting in 1-2 years when alot of U5 games are released how much money the engine can make.

 

Considering it's powering Fortnite it's indirectly making a fortune while simultaneously making almost nothing.

 

Considering Unity powering Genshin Impact it's indirectly making a fortune while simultaneously making almost nothing.

 

One of these benefits the engine it used and one doesn't do anything for it leading to dumb monetization choices.

 

Do you actually know? I mean, from what I've heard you guys say, you where blindsided by all this... That would imply you don't know about the contracts.

 

Would it? I wouldn't expect that knowledge of upcoming announcements via marketing about decisions made by the C-level would have a strong relationship with knowledge of deals closed by the sales team with customers.

 

Indeed this is very true, they should be focusing first on the interactive part than the CGI side and unnecessary stuff.

100% agreed to that, hopefully doing that can also reduce their running costs as well so can finally thrive than be in decline.

 

Not rell

Not really. Had to get a quote for one of our prospects and got it within 2 work days.

 

mihoyo uses Unity for several games, not just Genshin Impact, so they also have several teams that are constantly working on it (new maps/areas, new story, events, etc.) and I think they also have source access. So Unity should earn some here (although probably little if compared to the income)

 

Which version?

 

If they got sources - it means they're already on custom license. Meaning - they already pay (potentially a lot).

Can't double dip custom licensing, that's just greed.

 

They can double dip if TOS allows it. And public TOS has always allowed fee changes at Unity's discretion. We simply don't know what the big studio licensing looks like besides it being custom. It's likely that the custom license terms are for a set period of time rather than indefinite or tied to specific engine versions. Otherwise, this fee change doesn't make sense, since only some indies would pay it.

 

I mean, yeah they could make it double dip. But that's just morally wrong decision to make.
Basically business self-destruction 101.

Its easier to just negotiate a price increase instead of silently backstabbing people.

 

Rather than it being greed, I think they're in a financial trouble, which is why they tried to push out retroactive changes to save their sinking ship. I wouldn't be surprised to see more layoffs next year.

 

Nuke ironsucks and save the day? Or any of the recently made useless purchases.

There are lots of ways to manage this. Unity took the most damaging one to the customers.

 

That's one of the few profitable parts of the business. Unity's own ads service wasn't that good before the merger and it also saved their asses with iOS ads data they F***ed up irreversibly so they had to get it from elsewhere. Ironsource saved their ads business in a sense, but in the process, they've become even less of a game engine company.

This ship is led by clueless MBAs who bought their way into a tech company and predatory adtech ghouls.

 

There are other parts that aren't that "profitable" (not that merging ironsucks was a great idea instead of fixing their own platform).

Google "Unity acquires".
Check out how many of those acquisitions were actually profitable or actually used in engine at all.
Spoiler - most of them are dead tech, or near useless for game dev.

Smartest solution would to be invest in small, useful tech for everyday use instead of mythical 3D whatever AI NFT blah-blah-blah. But... its already too late.

 

The way C-suite is paid goes contrary to sane business practices. All they do is designed to boost the stock, so they can enrich themselves. Hence why all the trend chasing - RT3D, metaverse, everything in the cloud (but worse), Hollywood, now AI. They'll continue to trend chase as long as this company exists. And the engine users will continue to get increasingly taxed for their poor attempts at making Unity the everything engine.

 

We can make assumptions though. Starting with it can't be any worse than ours or they wouldn't have signed, and considering that we weren't paying royalties prior to this agreement I can't imagine they were paying them either.

Would they have signed if Unity had included clauses to change the Terms of Service? I'm doubtful they would have as what's the point of a custom license if the company isn't getting custom terms. Is it expensive? I'd fully expect a six to eight digit amount depending on what they want.

Keep in mind any company capable of spending seven to eight digit amounts on an engine could also just make their own. It's not that difficult to do so for even an individual developer and achieve what most of these games actually need. Unity only has so much leeway before the company tells them to scram.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if we saw more this year, honestly. Like late November, early December.

 

For those of us who are still looking for Unity-alternatives, I haven't heard 'Evergine' get brought up yet (unless I missed that discussion). It seems like a lesser-known choice (partially because of the recent rebranding from 'Wave Engine' to its current name).

Despite this, It still looks like a decent C# Game Engine that is similar to Unity (but with less bloat) and has a more .NET-like experience. It isn't FOSS like Stride nor as juicy as Flax, but it is totally free (no royalties, no nothing) unless you want source access or premium support (and the ToS looks reasonable unlike Flax, so that's good). It comes with a fair amount of expected features (Physics, Input, Audio, etc), but it seems potentially more akin to a 'Interactive Rendering Engine' built with an ECS architecture rather than being a true 'Game Engine'.

(And yes I am aware that an 'Interactive Rendering Engine' is basically what a game engine is, but ssshhh)

 

And considering Unity has not sued mihoyo we can conclude that the contracts are bullet proof.
Maybe mihoyo forked the engine like Amazon with Lumberjack/Cryengine.

 

Enterprise plus source code with possibility to change the code.

 

Hi, I still confused about the financial threshold caps, some places mention that the threshold is the amount of earnings I do using Unity, in another places say that this threshold is the amount of earning of the Company I am creating the apps for.

I am a really small developer, I work alone, but some times a good company come to me to ask for some development service

The question is:

For instance: Can I use Unity Personal to develop an AR App for Coca Cola?, they paid me for that service US$25k, so I am way below the 200K cap, but according to this FAQ, what counts is the Coca Cola Earnings not mine to determine that Cap:


That means that I as a small developer I wont ever be able to develop solutions for a big client ever?, I will only earn US$25k, but the company I am providing for, that in this case is Coca Cola, certainly has a trillion income per year.

 

I tried it briefly and I was left with the impression it's meant to compete with Unigine in the industrial simulation space. It's even very similarly named.

 

and this explains the desperate retroactive push.

if mihoyo has their own "unity" now that they can customize and improve directly forever and ever then I can understand unity being really angry about it.

"can I have the source code?"

"yeap, here it is"

"great, thanks" - proceedes building billions US dollars games never need to update or ask for unity supports. Did they got some unity top devs on payroll? I bet they did.

...

"finance? what about that mihoyo company? any news?" said unity CEO one day while sipping coffee and looking out from his office window.

"who? nope"

"whaaaaaat?? did they run with our engine?!?! noooooooooooooooooo"

note: scenario above is fictional and doesn't refer to any real persons or companies, any similarities are purely casual

 

You will be able to, just you need to buy a Pro license or ask the corporation to throw in one for you.

But this is not a new rule, you should have known this when you negotiated your work. The only thing changed that instead of $100k, the threshold is $200k (because they killed off the Plus license).

 

https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1711479684200841554



I'm pretty sure Tomer Bar Zeev, the CEO of IronSource will be much better CEO... I guess.

 

inb4 another C-suite ghoul takes over.

But it's funny how history likes to repeat itself. Company has good times, Riccitiello throws money around left and right for acquisitions that don't make much sense, a sudden economy downturn happens and Riccitiello resigns. Call it the Riccitiello cycle. Perhaps next time before he decides to expand in every F***ing direction, he'll think for a minute.

EDIT: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231009494331/en/Unity-Announces-Leadership-Transition

"Unity (NYSE: U) (the “Company”), the world’s leading platform for creating and growing real-time 3D (RT3D) content, today announced that John Riccitiello will retire as President, Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and a member of the Company’s Board of Directors, effective immediately. James M. Whitehurst has been appointed Interim Chief Executive Officer, President and a member of the Board. Roelof Botha, Lead Independent Director of the Unity Board, has been appointed Chairman. Mr. Riccitiello will continue to advise Unity to ensure a smooth transition.

The Board will initiate a comprehensive search process, with the assistance of a leading executive search firm, to identify a permanent CEO."

 

No. You need a Pro license for that. This has been this way for years.

Yeah… this is probably 5+ years too late to be a positive thing for Unity.