Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Understood. Unreal Engine it is!

 

People overreacting to a situation before all the details are revealed and set in stone?
I think that's probably been happening since the first human settlement was founded lol

 

Unity would need to prove themselves to be able to be trusted first. That's the long and short of it; Unity have made it abundantly clear that they can't be trusted right now.

 

Feel free to fire your current CEO and hire me. I'll only ask for a measly million dollars a year in total compensation and I'm sure I'll do a better job.

 

One thing here with the "continue" is that you can just continue the major version of unity you had used or any LTS version.
I dont think this forces you to continuously use that new version since this continue is meant for continuing the current years version of any version. interpretending this as a condition to have to keep using one version without deleting an older one would be an odd interpretation. if you have multiple versions installed and didnt trigger any major version jumps after april 2023 i think it should be save.

but yeah it lets space open for interpretation but it also doesnt say you cant continue multiple versions. i reread it and it actually says you can continue any current-year "versions" plural. if theyd written version id worry more.

not a lawyer

 

That's the thing, they can't track revenue from external revenue sources.
Their install algorithms will only be able to estimate it.

 

The only good thing in this disaster is the funny new term used by other engines users: "Unity Refugees"

 

Never trust a big corp. At least I will try to learn multiple tools now.

 

A quote from the article:
"Seriously $200,000 revenue in 12 months is a lot of money."

And this is where I stopped reading

This guy has literally no clue what he's talking about, as with many others who don't even know the difference between net and gross revenue. It's a night and day difference.
Your gross revenue can EASILY be thousands of times more than your net revenue. And it usually is.

There have been a ton of devs here explaining how they are over the 1m threshold and can barely afford to pay themselves a small salary for 2 people. That's not an edge case - that's how these things work in reality.

$1m gross revenue is easily achievable by any game that's good enough to be playable and to have a positive cost-per-ad/revenue-per-user balance.

But being profitable is a whole different story - that's the hard part and the gross revenue in no way tells if that's the case or not.
And to be able to afford such taxes, the game needs to be profitable, not to have a large gross revenue.

 

yes, they have planned for this. and they have also planned that you don't try any of these tactics that some proposed like for example: "wait for the game to be near fee threshold then unlist it and publish it again under a new name" they specifically stated that this example will not work, don't even try.

Quote

"Each game or app’s cumulative install amount cannot be reset or reduced even if it has been sold, transferred to a new party, changed its name, been republished as a new version, added expansion content, or had its unique identifier (e.g., BundleID) altered. Additionally, a change in publisher or distributor does not reset the cumulative install amount."

"Do not fck with us, we are not joking." signed "your beloved unity engine"

 

I've been thinking more about this. Most people have figured out by now that install bombs are going to basically threaten to destroy the entire landscape, and have figured out that Unity probably can't actually determine installs. So what about using this against them? Developers can install bomb their own games, and then take Unity to court over the dispute.
What are they going to do about it? They have no metrics for installs, so they can't prove anything.

 

Yeah, you are both right. Both Unity and Epic are scumbags. So if you can help, don't choose Unreal. Although it is obviously tempting.

 

Court often means that the party with more money and time wins. Good luck.

 

That's fine, there certainly isn't enough info available to make rational decisions yet and I don't blame the pessimism and wariness. People should at least wait for Unity's calculator so they're working with some kind of official math. But all this immediately announcing on Twitter you're cancelling everything and rebuilding it all on some magical unicorn perfect engine with no royalties that doesn't exist...yeesh. Makes you wonder how these "professional" studios even made it this far to begin with.

 

sigh... was hoping there was going to be an update today. Its quite depressing. The longer they stay quiet, the greater the damgage they re doing...

 

Just wondering though, is there anything to stop Godot from pulling a Unity down the tracks when it gets bigger?

 

You seem to be misjudging the situation.
Majority of Unity users will stay - the non paying users.
Those who are making money with Unity are forced to leave.

No one is protesting. The damage was done, we have moved on. We are lingering to do damage control, so that our projects in the pipeline don't become damaged goods. The direction of the future was decided when that announcement was made, we didn't make that choice, Unity did.

Devs are artists, creators and generally tech nerds. But the devs who make a living with it, are also business minded people. That is how we survived, by understanding two different aspects of game development. I am not confused, and I don't think others are. We are just making enough noise with the hope of salvaging projects in the pipeline. Its just simple straight up damage control.

 

I'd like to know that too: Has anyone figured out what they mean buy 200 hours of build time?

 

The details are known, Unity is willing to throw everyone under the bus for pennies on a whim. They are scumbags. End of story, no further details will be revealed about this.

 

Looking at what he said when he was EA's CEO, I wish good luck to those who decide to stick with Unity

 

They had an alleged death threat so they won't talk today about anything.

 

What are you on about, the moment you click "install" in the app store it's a download and an install.

 

I think this is the best post in this thread. We have seen it happened to Adobe, Autodesk and Unity. It will only be a matter of time before Epic Games start to capitalize on their win against Unity and other big 3D game engine companies, by increasing their prices in the future. Unfortunately, Unreal Engine is still the best 3D engine for realistic graphics and massive scenes

 

wdym, it's FOSS. You can just fork it.

 

Any new news?

 

This is only the tip of the iceberg. If the user buys a new computer or changes his phone, it will be treated as a new install. Since many people change their devices once per 2-3 years, we can assume a single user will generate at least 4 installs on any game.

This also applies to devices replaced via warranty.

 

If every major game/studio is publicly announcing they're not using unity anymore and this only effects the top 10% of users, who do they think is going to pay this fee?

 

There's a big difference between publicly traded and privately owned, like Epic. This guy gets it.

(Fast forward to 4:19 for the relevant bit.)

 

He is not wrong. People just download games, and don't install(run) it. That's what everyone does, right? I mean around 30~40% of my players have Steam Deck, so yay! Imagine 2 downloads, but they don't run the game, no initialization! No payment to Unity! No problem!

 

@LeonhardP where you at

 

If the unity runtime is "calling home" to report installs then 2 installations of spyware is 2 too many.

 

If they're making money, they have no reason to trash all their products and restart on an unproven engine that hasn't made them any money so far. That's an absolutely juvenile and stupid way to think of business. Which is what tells me most of this outrage is from hobbyists or random children just looking for memes.

 

Probably home, everyone got sent home due to the death threat.

 

WHAT?!

 

You are entitled to you own opinion, as am I. But like I said, I am just doing damage control for my projects in the pipeline.

But FYI, many tech devs at Unity were fighting hard against this. Apparently, the higher ups sort of said they will "discuss it again/won't do it" and then they released this announcement. There are devs at Unity who are straight up quitting their jobs.

This post alone, has more than 500k view and over 7000 replies in which many are veterans (10+ years and have shipped multiple games). If you see this as a juvenile manifest of internet fun, then I agree that there is that to some degree. But if you think that the situation is misread, and the seasoned devs are not even interested, well, my friend, I honestly think you are misreading the situation.

 

If there are a lot of free Users, what is the problem to make Unity Editor for free, but if you want to build - buy subscription. This is the best way. You can learn Unity for free, but if you want publish something - just purchase a subscription.

A lot of users say like 5% of gross revenue is fine - no, it's not fine, it's still a lot for the tool. Adobe Photoshop costs 11.99$, and there are no issues with company's profit.

 

Nearly every major unity dev/studio has announced they are nolonger using unity.

 

Epic has investors too. Their biggest being Tencent, a state controlled Chinese company. Are you going to tell us John Riccitiello is more evil than Xi Jinping?

 

In the end, this is the crux of the problem. There's no point in arguing people are overreacting over something they don't know about, when the fact of the matter is Unity have been entirely opaque and vague about things. Everyone's weary, and for very good reason, because when the thing your livelihood depends on is suddenly at risk of being weaponised against you...err, oops.

Maybe people will come back to Unity. Maybe that's how things will go when the honeymoon period ends with other engines are over and issues start creeping in. Or, developers adjust to the newer tools quickly and get back up to speed within a few months on something that they have no immediate reason to distrust. Or some go the lesser trodden route of making their own engine, increasing the workload but making something truly their own.

It all remains to be seen how things will pan out. All that can be said right now is if Unity wants to claw back as much support as it possibly can, Unity will have to consider what exactly it is doing here. The course it's currently following, that simply isn't happen unless fatigue just sets in for everyone, which, given how violent the reaction has been, is doubtful as far as I'm concerned.

 

They should stay with the engine that has proven it will screw them over?

 

Ahah, I can just imagine that with all the lipstick kisses. XOXO

 

Unironically yes

 

They around

 

okay, so, uh, I never once paid for pokemon go.
neither did my friends.
you know what? keep the retroactive clause. I wanna see nintendo and unity duke it out.

 

I am not affected at all, just started a few hobby projects, but that sucks.
Other engines are worth a look, I guess.

I have myself a few games I will install at least once a year, maybe even start it up and notice I do not want to play it at this day anymore.

 

@Tautvydas-Zilys where your lawyers bro

 

So, which versions of Unity are associated with which versions of the Term Of Service? I just checked through the Unity application folders on my machine, and I couldn't find any of those documents in there.

I found a TOS and a legacy TOS on the Unity website.

Apr-12-2022: release of version 2021 LTS

Oct-13-2022 : change in TOS (removing clause about allowing old TOS to be used forever as long as the dev does not update Unity (section 8) )

June-1-2023: release of 2022 LTS


Does section 8 of the TOS disqualify old games from these new fees?

I also want to add that I was planning on using the 2020 LTS for my game, but needed to update to the 2021 LTS so I could update the ECS package.

 

MMhhmmm, like I said, you'll see when the fiscal reports start hitting. It's easy to make that commitment on Twitter, now they're all gonna have to see what happens when they take out ALL of their yearly revenue. You want to talk about "unknown factors" in your financials? How about abandoning all your products in the HOPES that you'll be able to replicate them on a completely new engine and relisting them again.

 

You are telling me if I only sell on stores there is no way for me (and by definition them) to track real downloads? Are you really telling me that?

 

I highly suspect Nintendo has a custom license / contract that is more ironclad than Unity’s TOS.