Is it time to lose the Unity Splash Screen in Personal/Free Edition?

I'll try to keep this short. Basically I have given this much thought and I do understand their thought process of having the splash screen but....

I think the negatives far outweigh the positive they get from 'free' advertising/awareness.

Some negatives I can think of:
-Bad press for Unity, many games are bad and the general gaming youth consider Unity Splash Screen as an instant sigh the game will be bad.
-Personal Tier Unity is designed for private users AND companies that earned less than $100k in 12months. This means many small studios with decent products are lumbered with this horrible seal-of-bad-quality at the start of the game. It is currently very expensive to upgrade to Pro purely to remove splash screen.

Well that was just a couple of negatives, but before I started writing this I did have a few more in my head lol

But what positives are there really??:
-Potential free advert to potential wannabe game-devs ? (most game-dev, even budding ones, will use Google etc and find Unity pretty much instantly anyway)


I honestly cannot think of another positive worth mentioning.

Therefore I have to take the stance of, why the heck is it still there?

(And yes I am a budding game dev, intending to release some small games and really dislike having the splash screen at the start of every game).

There are just 2 things I dislike about Unity (when compared to say Unreal Engine)
1. The UNET (and other networking offerings) tend to push users with little knowledge to the paid hosting options which are usually not worth it for a small startup game company.
2. The goddam Splash Screen.

Also, UE is 'source available' which is nice.
That said, I much prefer Unity, I think it is superior overall for my needs. I am able to create full games in just a week or so using Unity. UE and others have a steeper learning curve and IMO not as good a 'framework' as Unity. I give Unity 10/10 review and will always use it, but the Splash and the Networking almost makes me consider ditching it to be honest.


EDIT: One last thought. What if they split the 'Personal' tier in two? They could have 'Personal' for purely non-commercial use. And then 'Indie' for companies under $100k. I would be happy to pay a small one-off fee. Or even a very small yearly fee. But I don't make income from my games and therefore cannot justify anything close to what the current cost is to remove splash screen.

 

You will never get Unity, the company, to agree with the premise that the Unity splash/logo is a "seal of bad quality." For a public company to admit something like that would be signing their death warrant. It's a sign of being ashamed of your product. Why would anyone invest in a company or purchase their products and services if the company looked like they didn't believe in their own company?

In my opinion you can file this under "never gonna happen."

 

• Unity logo is pretty cool nowadays, times change. Unity only got a bad rep for the logo originally because previously Unity Indie had a dramatically reduced feature set so the logo + bad graphics did not work. Nowadays it's 100% fine!
• Competing engines like Unreal show logo on bad games too, because it is the developer that causes a game to be good or bad, not the engine.
• This thread has been done a lot so it's locked for that reason, not for the reason of you duplicating what you said in another thread.