Unity has a new CEO: Matthew Bromberg

By RTE do you mean the runtime fee? Or do you mean something else?

Because when you need to get Pro over 200k and the runtime fee kicks in over 1million, not sure how it could apply without getting pro.

 

I'm basing that off the original announcement which had an RTF if you didn't get pro which is what confused people.

The current page does not have this info but I do not believe it is gone.

 

https://unity.com/pricing-updates

Before that, there was a convoluted structure of prices with different, confusing amount of payment by random stuff.

 

I said it was removed from the page because it was confusing people lmao.

But I don't think the RTF is gone for people who don't get pro.

 

? It is in the quote I posted. I'm not sure why would you think it is not gone for people on Personal or Plus licenses. The straight up say that. Maybe after a while they will screw over the Personal and the few remaining Plus licensees (like me) and reintroduce some runtime fee, specifically for us, but I don't think it will happen on the short run. The 1M income limit is just too high, it is easier to lower that to the 200k to sync up with Pro subscription.

 

Don’t bother he is low effort posting / trolling. Or just spreading FUD I don’t know anymore.

 

It never applied to anyone making under 200K per year. As I said from the beginning this is about consequences for people who didn't get pro when they were supposed to.

What you posted has nothing to do with that, maybe people just entirely forgot what the original post said. But don't be surprised when you read the details of the terms when Unity 6 comes out proper.

It's good they simplified the messaging, so people know what the focus on. But jeez lmao.

Not my fault everyone forgot what the original post said.

 

Don’t make stuff up without a source. You or your lawyer need to read the final licensing agreement.

 

Their original post was extemely confusing, here's an archive.

You might read this page, and think it's changed but it literally has not. Even on the old page, when you made 200K you get unity pro to avoid the RTF, which worked until you made millions. They just wrote it in an extremely confusing way.

This is an archive of their extremely confusing page.
Unity plan pricing and packaging updates | Unity Blog (archive.ph)

This post was so F***ing confusing people still don't understand it lmao.

EDIT: WARNING: Do not click the link above if you don't want to risk being extremely confused and likely misinformed cause it's that F***ing horrendous.

 

That has changed. Originally, they wanted to allow the option of using Personal + paying a royalty. This option would allow organizations with a large number of developers the option of using Personal rather than Pro. The math only worked in some edge cases. It had nothing to do with punishing people for using Personnel over the revenue limit, that is something you invented and is not even logical.

 

And I disagree, there's no reason to think that policy changed. They just removed that information from the main page to make it less confusing.

We'll see when Unity 6 launches officially.

 

On the fricking page you linked but didn't read:

The new I quoted above:

So I don't really know what you're talking about.

 

Like I said people still don't understand that page, I rest my case.

 

Fair enough, but we'll see when Unity 6 releases officially.

My point stands on what the RTF was intended to do, and that problem probably hasn't gone away even though they simplified things (by removing plus). If they have removed it, we'll see the same issue again and they'll have to find a solution or bring RTF back as intended.

 

This needed to be said this clearly. Well said. Thank you.

Mirrors my experiences with it, and is something I'd wish anyone considering alternatives to Unity to know. But the Godot community is very vocal in shouting down, without evidence, any criticisms or analysis such as the above.

Unity, for all its (MANY) troubles, is still the best general option for an effort across most platforms. Sadly.

 

The RTF was always intended to be a price hike across the board, to push people to Unity's ads, and to be confusing so they have a new way to raise prices in a way that is difficult for people to calculate properly, and it is still doing all that.

 

The runtime fee isn't confusing at all. That's why every time it comes up we don't have several pages of people confused by it.

They could have avoided all of this with a sliding scale royalty system. The fact they're sticking with this runtime fee idea and charging for pro licenses instead is pretty wild.

 

It avoids a direct comparison with Unreal. That's probably the reason and it's a valid one.

 

Not invented here syndrome is not a valid reason for business model choices...

 

It's not even a little valid, especially considering the effect it's had.

 

Release the source code for editor/unity specific packages(AI, etc) so justify the Pro membership fee + royalties. Unreal has source available.

 

Can't expect a public company to do the right thing.

 

True.

But enough users demand it and they'll be left with little choice.

 

What packages do you mean exactly? Those normally are open source. Look into the "packages" asset folder and except for DLLs for interoperation with things like vscode you'll mainly find .cs files. Think that's typical for everything that's handled via the package manager.
It's the "non packaged" things that are not open source.

Unity is not responsible for people loving to misinterpret things :/

 

Unity is known for being awful at explanations.

 

It is literally their job to properly communicate changes to how their consumer-end billing works, something they did so poorly that they had to release multiple statements. Not only was the communication poor, but they had to revise the entire structure in the first place. Also, this doesn't address how "it'd look like what Epic does" is not a valid strategy in the least.

 

I don't think Unity cared what pricing Unreal had. After all, since when does anyone confuse the Play store, the App store, and Steam just because they all had for the last decade not only the exact same pricing model but also the exact same royalty percentage?

I think the reason why Unity did not want royalties is because royalties only matter when your customers make a lot of money. Unreal was initially targeted at big companies which would make significant revenue regardless, so that made sense for them. Unity had a lot of customers who didn't make that much money, so they tried charging subscriptions instead.

I think this was a mistake, which was reflected in the way they kept revising the subscription model trying to find something that worked, and ended up making gaffes trying to chase down license fee dodgers. This is because for Unity, I believe, subscriptions are the worst of both worlds - the minimum revenue threshold meant that you made no money off most of your customers, and those who did cross the threshold paid you a pittance even if they had a mega hit that raked in millions.

Royalties would have been the solution here imo, because it would have given Unity the option to do deals with some big fish to make a lot of money. That sort of thinking - making money from select customers and projects while offering a general product to everyone - is what enabled Epic to succeed so far.

But probably by that point the overall goal was to take Unity public anyway, and so the main concern was to have a big sheet of paper with a lot of numbers and upward trending curves on it.

 

positive first impressions from Will,

https://twitter.com/willgoldstone/status/1787510771817029752

 

I tend to ignore statements from Will. His posts always feel like public relations rather than an actual opinion.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/leading-unity-into-the-future.275510/page-3#post-1819672

 

The CEO of the Empire was a good CEO. Ok, joking

 

At least with the power of hindsight we now know for a fact that if Will became CEO he would most definitely try to make Unity a physical paper based product.

I also can't recall him ever making a statement that wasn't PR fluff.

 

Most Unity content of that sort is under the "Unity Companion License" which doesn't match OSI's open source definition.
(Unity is also famously allergic to GPL/LGPL in Asset Store content - VLC as an example)

 

Because it is impossible to satisfy conditions of GPL if you use any proprietary engine, and very difficult to satisfy them with LGPL.

If you use GPLed code in a unity project, you are obliged to disclose entire source of unity under GPL. Which you cannot do.

If you use LGPLed code in unity project, you're obliged to make sure this piece of code can be easily swapped by the user. Meaning it has to be a dynamic library, and user should be EASILY able to swap that library with his own version of the library withour rebuild. That's the point of LGPL. You'll have hard time doing that on mobile (if it is even possible), webgl, and so on.

Those licenses are legally binding agreements. They come with harsh conditions. A newbie user will be unaware and will breach the license. That's why there is a restriction. Also it is not uncommon for an author of a new opensource project to just slap a GPL on it without thinking of consequences, or while being unaware of them.

 

This one's funny too: https://forum.unity.com/threads/leading-unity-into-the-future.275510/page-4#post-1822426

Frankly the whole thread is worth a re-read and hopefully people can see parallels between what Unity people are posting now and back then, complete with user dismissal as hyperbolic ("mob mentality"), the damage control, the passive aggressiveness (nah you don't get it, why are you making assumptions) and asking for the benefit of the doubt...

How did all those work out I wonder.

 

(post - deliberately don't summon the poster despite they are still active)
LOL. This thread aged very poorly.

 

You're missing the best part of that post: this follow up statement a year ago about how he just knew it.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/john-riccitiello-is-stepping-down.1503950/page-4#post-9424769

 

This one is also funny but for different reasons.
https://forum.unity.com/threads/leading-unity-into-the-future.275510/page-3#post-1820164

 

Ok, this has turned into a very entertaining thread. Some threads are an absolute goldmine.

I'll never know why some are defending someone when they don't know, work, interact or gain anything from him/her.

 

Because things need to be set right even when they don't personally affect you. It's a bit selfish to only care about what's directly around you, isn't it?

 

No, it is not needed, especially when those, who attempt to "make it right" tell the nonsense that we shouldn't judge someone based on their CV. The entire world of work based on that you will be judged based on your CV, what have you done so far. So telling people to wait and see and don't judge based on the past actions and positions is just silly, it makes nothing right.

 

I think feeling like you know what is “right” so strongly that you can’t stop yourself from correcting everyone around you (especially when you don’t really have more information than everyone else) is some sort of hubris.

Also see the thread linked in the last few posts for many examples of “setting right”.

 

Unreal is also not open source by OSI definition. Source is available, with some restrictions.
The C# part of Unity is also available.

 

Huh, did I say that?
On the opposite, I said not to judge about the LAST job he had, but the whole CV (which includes work for EA/BioWare).

 

EA wow, that's so cool, we've never had a CEO from EA before!

Also, for the record, what he mostly did for Bioware was turn The Old Republic into Free to Play.

Admittedly, that might have been the right move for that game (I'm not sure, I didn't follow it that closely), but from that quote I personally get the sense he is the same breed of man that calls people that don't monetise their games to death "F***ing idiots", or at the very least he seems more interested in how things are monetised than the actual games.

 

BTW, so everyone can judge for themselves, here is his "whole CV".

 

A monetization guy and a banker. He has a good track record of generating value for shareholders, which is why he's here I guess.

 

Quarterly financial call tomorrow (9th). Will be curious to see what the new CEO says. Likely too early days for any actual actions but how they address and talk about the last quarter will be interesting!

 

Its not that surprising, Unity is definitely not going to be hiring some introvert C++ nerd, who has shipped games to Itch.io, as their CEO. It was always going to be someone from the money/business/operations background to make the share price go up.

Too few Gabes, Sweeneys and Iwatas.