Unity has a new CEO: Matthew Bromberg

The point is, i'm not talking about games that are already released, i'm talking about games, lets say, 5 or 6 years for now, you need to give those things time to shine, in fact, there are still games that are going to be released with unreal 4 that already looks the same if not the better than the best you can do with HDRP. Unreal is focused on high-end tech, performance and accessibility in terms of easy to use, you know that, everybody knows that... while in Unity i'm struggling to activate a feature on HDRP because i need to do it on 2 or 3 different pages -.-" just a little example.
Maybe Unity doesn't need to compete with unreal, maybe it would be ok if is a mixed bag between good graphics/performance and easy to use, ok fine, but at least they need to fix/upgrade the engine and its features, for example, people are not exactly excited with APV as people where excited with PSDGI or Lumen (in their respective communities)

I mean, if you follow the line: Bad news from ironsource (the malware thing which i don't thing it was what they said), then they merge with unity, then, suspicious (at least for me) "runtime fee" thing, then "we are focused on mobile and monetization", then this new CEO... that doesn't look good at least to me.

About Steam, i think, for what i saw in the GDC, Epic is proposing good things for their store, sadly, their store is not exactly loved XD

 

Well, it's not because they developed a couple of features that developers want and pretty much none of what the users want. Why would the users like it if it is a big pile of hot garbage and on the top of this pile the rotten cherry is that they are paying for exclusives instead of developing a store that people want to use...

 

If we are going by CEO's past jobs and applying them to what they do when leading Unity; im pissed Riccitiello didn't gift us all Haagen-Daazs ice cream, Pepsi and golf clubs with Unity pro subscriptions.

 

Maybe it will become normal, but I think the basic logic behind it is unintuitive.

The only way I can imagine it being intuitive is in a scenario where the sales process of a game is so obfuscated that you somehow can't properly attach a royalty or license fee to number of sales. But I don't see that being the case here.

Not only that, but to even be able to track installs almost implies a violation of privacy of both you and the customer of your game. The argument of being able to somehow predict it with modelling is just ridiculous as far as I'm concerned and even if it were true doesn't really make the whole concept any more secure. Nobody wants to play guessing games with their costs.

Attaching fees to the point of sale is extremely intuitive and easy. Records of sales are always available, and each sale represents distinct revenue for you, which logically represents the point where you determine how much goes to Unity.

All this is to say that I don't think it will easily become normal, at a minimum. And the reaction confirmed that.

 

Okay but see unlike some complaints in the thread, this is entirely reasonable.

 

Based on his alleged scandal he was just picky.

 

Same deal path tracing.

Dude there's stuff you can do in URP that looks better than HDRP in some cases. Comes down to the team and artists.

But I agree there's some UI issues. But at least for me despite not having a HDRP project i've gotten decently used to HDRP's setup.

And I will note maybe HDRP users aren't excited for APV but as a URP user it's huge for me lol.

Again this really doesn't matter for most games, only the ones making millions. You're not F***ing around at that point.

The exception is people skirting Unity's subscription policy and not getting Unity Pro. In that case you'd probably be audited to some degree and made to pay the RTF you owe. This move was almost certainty made to target people who didn't get pro, and actively avoided it (I've heard the stories).

And Unity struggled A LOT with getting people to follow the rules. Now they have proper consequences.

And again, even with the botched announcement it's clear "installs" means "Sales", runtime and installs is just a bunch of lawyer speak for that.

 

Have you also heard the stories where Unity was a bad actor and was repeatedly accusing people of not being compliant with their licensing?

 

That's not true at all. Since when would a lawyer refer to a sale as a 'runtime' or an 'install'? They aren't engineers.

And even if it were true, wouldn't it be easier to base costs on sales, since there is an actual transaction and record for it, rather than attempting to guess how many installs are made of the game?

I don't want to derail the thread, since it is specifically about the new CEO, but I don't think it's reasonable to assume that the terms simply got confused by the lawyers involved. 'Sales' and 'installs' are very specific and distinct in terms of what they are and how they are measured, and lawyers are paid to be very precise. This was an intentional way to gain more revenue based on installs, apparently because the runtime was the most expensive part of the engine to develop and maintain.

 

Unity wants to get money from free 2 play games that don’t use their ads, possibly as a means to push everyone to their own ads, that’s probably the only thing they care about, and “sales” would have let those go Scott free, hence the confused terms they ended up using.

 

Yes, I have and I understand why they were doing that. Cause A LOT of people were not compliant. But also people got really angry when pressed about it.

So unity said, okay, we won't press you, but when it's EXCEEDINGLY obvious then we'll have a way to get what we're owed. We'll even get rid of Untiy Plus so people don't think getting plus is good enough just to get rid of the logo and not follow revenue rules.

Probably because this specifically applies to Unity games installed on devices and not like Film and such. And they don't want the policy to apply to that when they haven't worked out that model yet.

It's for things installed on devices, not sales of products made with unity. Those are different.

 

i agree, APV seems pretty good for URP...

 

If you feel like the velocity is bad for Unity, the rational thing to do is complain on the forums learn another engine.

 

Complaining about Unity = BAD
Complaining about other users = AMAZEBALLS apparently.

Everyone is already learning other engines, I don't know what you think you are contributing here.

Also, not sure why it's such a difficult concept to understand that people have professional obligations and projects that are tied with Unity and "why don't you just leave" is just a beyond silly a suggestion. But then it's not really a suggestion, is it? It's just a smug remark.

 

I've been developing with Unity full time for 10+ years, none of the drama has affected my daily work or ability to obtain work. None of the drama has affected any of my clients or employers either. I suppose YMMV? I don't see any reason to panic or dreadfully speculate because there's nothing insane actually happening.

 

The optics are bad with another ex-EA person cut from the same cloth, but Whitehurst is still chairman of the board and still has a say. And he did divest from all the Hollywood and digital twins nonsense, focusing Unity more on games, even if they are mobile games. Still better than nothing.

Time will tell how this one pans out in a year or two. In the meantime it's business as usual as they like to say.

 

Not sure how that is an answer to anything I said or was previously said in this thread, but... good for you.

Also, the drama is obviously affecting you in some ways, because otherwise you wouldn't feel the need to tell everyone to stop talking about the drama.

 

I'm literally making my own engine but I still have clients who require Unity support.

 

The persistent CLOUD column in the Hub is a blinking hint of what's the future of Unity, because that's the most metaversey the engine could get without creating some Gigayaroblox to allow users create digital worlds. It would be interesting if the engine could have real cloud features like shared assets from the store so you don't have to download them all, just drag and drop what you need. But the super-low priority sanding of rough corners in the engine is increasingly leaking users. We will see if the new CEO can make Unity an appealing engine again without fully walling the garden.

 

Nanite is more of a feature for the developers than it is for the gamers. It essentially eliminates the work, memory, and disk space requirements of LODs, and on top of that it compresses the base mesh data making them take up less space too.

 

That's just them trying to upsell more services. Common marketing tactics. Make it visible and easy to access. And those services are what Unity has been for a very long time, that's nothing new.

Unity could do F*** all for another 5 years and the engine would be just as popular as long as it exports to every platform under the sun with the same tech stack. The write it once, export to everything is incredibly powerful and no other engine or framework can match that. For as long as that remains the case, Unity won't fall no matter how rough the edges get.

But sure, some people will go to Unreal because they care only about Steam and/or console. Some will leave for Godot because it's perfectly serviceable for retro pixel platformers or boomer shooters. And who knows, maybe Godot will catch up to Unity in platform support in the next 5-10 years.

 

Aside from out of the box console support it's already there. It's even on VisionOS.

https://github.com/kevinw/GodotVisionExample

 

That's not exactly a unique feature anymore. Unity nowdays is what looks the best for such little resources and cost.

 

This does not make any sense. The runtime fee has nothing to do with editor licensing fees. The runtime fee was advertised as being a runtime fee, not an editor fee. The idea was that the runtime was separate from the editor and should have a fee attached to it. It seems that for years prior they were already tracking installs with Unity analytics. I should add the runtime fee also has income limits.

Unity had 2.19 billion in revenue for 2023. Years of mismanagement and bad decisions created their issues. Spreading FUD is low effort posting.

 

It is unique to Unity. iOS, Android, Desktop - Windows, Mac, Linux, WebGL, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch and all the relevant VR platforms with dedicated tooling. All relevant features are supported on all those platforms assuming you are using URP. Burst/ECS is the only thing lost on web due to lack of multithreading, otherwise the game will look identical on all platforms.

Unreal comes close, it only lacks WebGL, but that is one of our main marketing channels so it's out by default. We also don't do high end 3D or work in large teams, which is where Unreal shines.

Or Godot for example - it can sorta do web export, but won't work on Mac/iOS devices. It can do 3D on web sorta, but common rendering features such as FXAA are not available because their compatibility renderer that's supported on web is an afterthought. It can export to web with pure GDScript, which is a toy language, but not C# or their C++ plugin system GDExtension. You can get into a closed beta for console export done by a 3rd party company, but that console export costs more than Unity's free preferred platform keys and once you get a publisher, they straight up ask $10k per team yearly. There is an asterisk on everything when using Godot.

What else is there? Gamemaker? It's a bit of a relic in my eyes, still no proper UI system. I guess people who have worked in it a decade have coded around its problems. Nothing about the engine appeals to me, the community also appears to be shrinking as Godot is eating a sizable portion of their userbase.

Defold? They got Playstation support in February 2024. 3-4 years after launch of the console. This is another thing Unity excels at. A new console is coming out? You bet Unity will first get support for it. Switch 2 release is nearing.

Flax, Stride and other tiny engines are not worth adapting as long as there is no sizable community. They also don't appear to have the power to build that community since they've been around for years and pop on the radar only when Unity F***s up. Godot is the only standout that seemingly has managed to build some momentum.

I guess it's not just the platform support, it's the whole ecosystem. You can take any Unity C# integration and it will generally run on all platforms, doesn't matter for what that integration exists. Want FMOD support in Godot using a GDExtension addon and then export to web? Forget about it.

 

WebGL is the only one in that list that is still unique to Unity. Godot removed support with 4.0.

 

Which is why I'm still here. But it's not just WebGL, it's also the ability to run any integration on any platform. A true first class C# support that works everywhere. Integrations for other engines are typically written in C++, while games are scripted in some dynamic language so you end up dealing with stuff like Godot's GDExtension system that has limited platform support and next to no documentation or you have to deal with recompiling engine binaries, then distributing those binaries to the rest of the team in a reliable way. In that sense Unity saves as much pain as it causes in other departments. There is no perfect engine, only tradeoffs.

 

Godot has C# on standalone and mobile. I assume the consoles too. Where Unity is currently on .NET Standard 2.1 Godot is on the much newer .NET 8. Unity has been promising a scripting runtime upgrade but everyone else has been delivering it.

 

Desktop and mobile isn't everywhere. WebGL support depends on upstream support that'll come maybe in .NET 9 at the end of this year or maybe .NET10 at the end of next year. They went for the cutting edge and in the process sacrificed platform support their previous engine iteration already had. It's a major regression, and perhaps a bit of a red flag signaling their decision making processes might not align with our needs long term.

And C# is a second class citizen in Godot since Inspector doesn't really support non-native Godot engine types. You are limited to what GDScript supports. You also have to cast your perfectly normal C# collections to Godot collections when interfacing with any engine API and back to C# collections when you get back what you need. Also if you want to expose the collection to inspector. Godot has two collections - array and dictionary, that's it.

.NET 8 is great, you get nuget, it's faster than Unity's mono. But it lacks platform support in Godot, and it lacks engine integration that could compete with Unity's powerful and extendable Inspector. I can't get the same ergonomics in Godot. I can't drop an Odin Inspector attribute on top of some class or variable and achieve the desired result in seconds in Godot like I can in Unity. And serializing abstract classes or interfaces to Godot Inspector is basically a pipedream.

Not to mention all the other problems Godot has like unstable asset IDs making version control a nightmare, scenes getting corrupted because you moved a file or renamed it, cashe not flushing properly so you get errors from things that don't exist anymore and have to do a hard git reset. Godot needs years to mature.

 

Agreed, it bloats the forum I read.

 

Then stop adding to it.

 

Good point I suppose, the community seems to be devolving over the years, maybe it’s time to leave it behind.

 

It's mostly General Discussion.

 

Do you maybe have a link of the WebGL stuff you do? I am under the impression that WebGL, in general, hasn't caught on, so I would be interested to see someone using it effectively.

(if you can't post a link for whatever reason that's totally understandable too)

 

Bromberg might be an adequate steward to Unity's business interests, but I do wish they'd picked someone who could plausibly be said to have a creative vision for the engine. Both Unreal and Godot have opinionated leadership that directs development according to their visions of what they want the game industry to look like. Unity's messaging suggests it wants to be everything to everyone, everywhere, but it means their competitors are always setting the pace and are the first to innovate effectively.

 

I talk too much S*** here to link client projects, but they are not profitable in of themselves. They are mostly demos for Patreon and/or Steam funded games. You can get thousands of Steam wishlists by getting featured on the front page of Newgrounds and similar sites.

Our best one has nearly a million views on Newgrounds.

 

Why isn't there any blog post about this?

 

There's an investors entry.

https://investors.unity.com/news/news-details/2024/Unity-Appoints-Matthew-Bromberg-as-New-CEO/

 

You avoid the fees by paying the licensing you've ALWAYS been intended to get. It's a licensing fee for when you refuse to pay the licensing fee.

The million threshold is there so they don't lose too much on massively successful games.

According to their financial reports Unity made basically no money from subscriptions. And then people wondered why they shifted focus from games.

 

Oh you'd be surprised. Here's genokids which they used to market their kickstarter.

Genokids DEMO (newgrounds.com)

Outside of server storage size limits depending on the platform you can do solid visuals on WebGL and very easily market your game. I'd link mine but it's NSFW

WebGPU is looking very promising aswell.

 

Unity went down the venture capitalist path which is an approach focused on rapid growth. While on that path no company makes money. Prior to it Unity was reasonably profitable even with just perpetual licenses according to people like Aras who had been at the company since practically the beginning.

Unity shifted because they were preparing to leave the venture capitalist path which meant that overnight they were going to have to become profitable again after they had almost TWENTY times the number of employees compared to when they were last profitable.

That's the downside to the venture capitalist route. You grow rapidly but then you suddenly have to be capable of sustaining yourself and turning a profit once it stops. Most companies never succeed. In fact the failure rate is as high as 80%.

 

Well, I didn't even know newgrounds was still around, I thought it died off together with flash and was still around as museum. Thank you, I do find it quite interesting.

 

That is not how the runtime fees works and Unity has been tracking installs for years with analytics. Unless you are paying Pro fees you are not even eligible for the runtime fee, and you must pay both runtime and editors fees. I don’t know where the idea that only runtime fees will be collected is coming from.

In 2023 Unity Create had revenue of $492 million. Epic made an estimated $275 million in 2023 for the Unreal Engine. The Unity engine is already highly monetized for an engine. If they switched to a 100% royalty-based system, they would likely make less. I am sure that Unity is bring in the most revenue of any game engine in history.


https://s26.q4cdn.com/977690160/files/doc_earnings/2023/q4/generic/q423-shareholder-letter-final.pdf

https://sacra.com/c/epic-games/#:~:text=Finally, Unreal Engine, another of,and $275M in 2023.

 

It's $2220 (currently, Unity has pretty much said they are going to raise this) per year per seat the moment revenue or funding or your client's revenue exceeds 200k (currently 100k).

So, in a post Unity 6 world, a small team / company consisting of 5 people that got $300k of funding, or is working for a client that makes more than $200k, would start paying $11k per year to Unity without ever having to release anything.

And then on top of that, if you go over $1M revenue and 1M installs (currently, Unity has pretty much shown they are willing to change terms with the minimum legal notice), the fee kicks in, which is either installs based, or 2.5% whatever is less (see previous parenthesis).

There's no part where you avoid any fees.

 

The word "embrace" gives me the squicks lately. Embracer Group (formerly THQ Nordic) bought up half the world of gaming, tabletop and others, then released one of the major players they owned from their clutches while saddling them with 900 million Euros of debt. People keep saying we're in "late stage capitalism", but guys like the CEOs of these holding companies say "HOLD MY KEG!" and prove that there is another, more terrible stage to look forward to.

Godot has problems, and people seem to accept major flaws just because it's open source. UE isn't a good fit for dinky indie stuff. Unity is like a city with constant roadworks looping back to the original starting point. If I need something more advanced than Ebitengine can provide, there aren't many options I like.

 

(note you don't pay both until making a million)

Ask yourself why the RTE was both ALWAYS and HIGHER in price when you don't have Pro and exceed the revenue threshold. They might have removed it from the page cause it was confusing, but I don't believe the fee for not getting pro is gone.

That was always the case, the 200K revenue per year was ALWAYS required. Nothing changed there.

If anything skirting that is probably easier cause without a release you have no installs (based on what they originally showed, that I doubt has changed), and therefore face no consequences. You'd probably have to ask unity about that... But to me it sounds like that scenario was cheaper.

 

I didn't say anything changed there, other than Pro getting increasingly more expensive over time and probably being scheduled to get more expensive by the time 6 comes out.

? They can track editor installations more easily than game installs, and Unity has been going after people for that even when they don't have evidence, so not sure why you keep mentioning skirting, and I'm not sure what your point is.

I was doing a recap of what the post 6 monetisation is, because this thread seemed to have confused people in it. I also don't understand what you meant by "You avoid the fees by paying the licensing you've ALWAYS been intended to get. It's a licensing fee for when you refuse to pay the licensing fee."

What scenario is that?

 

Because now you can't not get Pro, with the initial announcement you could choose to not get it.

 

Well, that's what happens when they announce something and fail to explain it properly, so people get mad even if they benefit lmao.

But personally, I don't believe they changed the RTF for not getting pro. The updated page is effectively the same it was before, just without the RTF info for if you don't follow the revenue guidelines.

EDIT: i mean RTF not RTE

 

Too lazy to check his voting record as a board member at Bumble, but that company is poop and has been poop since the day it went public. From $76 a share to about $10, while the rest of wall street has partied.

As far as vision, Bumble just reversed its defining and founding feature a couple days ago.

I dont know anything about Monzo.

Ill not make any predictions. Who knows how he'll perform? It's one of those wait and see things.