Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Does anyone know which alternative game engine has the beat support for building UIs? I have a mobile app with game elements that I was using UI Toolkit for. Anyone with experience building UIs in other engines and can share would be greatly appreciated.

 

It doesn’t matter.

 

According to Unity's interpretation, they would be inside their rights to impose a 90% royalty fee on your existing products after a three month warning period. (Or maybe they would just edit that warning period out of the TOS too!)

The point isn't that the changed terms impact you now. The point is that the sword of Damocles is dangling over your head, because Unity believes they can alter whatever agreement you think you have with them at will.

Unity's interpretation of the license isn't "pay us for pro and installs over some threshold" it's "pay us whatever we think you should pay us whenever we decide that's what you should pay, for all past present and future projects."

Do you get it now?

 

Remember everyone

We have to pay $2000 to remove their logo now.

 

ok but please wait a little bit before boycotting unity games , because some of us can't leave unity yet im to deep in the the developement of my game so i can't even port it to another engine

 

There's a joke that "Neznayka on the Moon" is a good explanation of unrestricted capitalism. There's some truth in that.

In general this sort of frame of mind is easy to "understand", especially if you ever played an RPG with an evil-aligned character - just place money above all else. Someone is happily walking outside? For free? They should be paying! Buy the road. Install a toll booth. Make it enforced silence zone, fine people for laughter and place mimes along the way. Then keep pushing your luck inventing more and more ridiculous schemes until someone rebels. Present the idea to shareholders, and get a raise for doing that too.

Something like that.

Obviously most of the people do not want to take insanity and greed to elven, and just live normally.

 

i wish other companies communicated like this. gotta respect the way they say how they will squeeze you now and later - and in the past it seems. revealed their hand and told us how they have no idea how to implement certain things. i love it. keep going!

 

Good idea, thank you! I'll just press the "Export Unity project to Godot" button.

 

is genuine

https://www.polygon.com/23873727/unity-credible-death-threat-offices-closed-pricing-change

confirmed, unity employee made the death threats or at least is what the CEO claims that employee did.

 

Boycotting Unity games only hurts poor developers, not Unity. But too many gamers buying and installing Unity games now hurts mid/big sized developers.

So... The best way to hurt Unity company / avoid "spyware" but support developers is to buy game but DON'T install and go get a copy "elsewhere" and make sure firewall is up and don't tell anyone.

 

You're assuming that people are boycotting Unity games out of a desire to hurt Unity rather than a desire to not install weird spyware on my device.

I do feel bad for the people at the end of their dev cycle who are stuck between a rock and a hard place but no one could have foreseen Unity completely losing their mind.

 

Or imposes an additional, completely different scheme.

 

Not only that, but many of us are also thinking about the people who play our games. Our fans are phenomenal and we've promised them we'll never put analytics or bloat into our games. We're very pro-consumer. Now we have to tell them there's some sort of secret mechanism in their executable that is phoning home to Unity and tracking their installs and we can't describe to them what it's doing, nor can we disable it.

Well, I've given these crooks over $1,500, I was not consulted, and so this is not a decision I'm going to let Unity make for me if I can help it. And mark my words, there WILL be a way around this if they insist on proceeding. And I don't just want tweaks to this proposed system, I want this proposed system GONE. Enough is enough.

 

I'd like to hear the employee's story

 

Yesterday you said tomorrow. Yes you can. Just do it.

 

I could imagine a soon to be furloughed employee saying the usual rhetoric on social media, "I would love nothing more than to kick X down a flight of stairs" or "they should just take a long walk off a short dock", and some how that becomes a very "credible death threat" for the CEO in question. Its all so vague and coincidentally convenient, that its hard to take it seriously and at face value.

 

I agree with your take. I just wanted to point out that if install fees are only charged upon purchase, then why not just call it a royalty and charge based on the purchase itself?

I think the only logical reason for this metric is that the company expects to earn more revenue this way, and the future cost for individual developers is unknown until Unity calculates those installs each month using [proprietary data, censored]. Scummy indeed.

 

Quote from the article:

"Update: San Francisco police told Polygon that officers responded to Unity’s San Francisco office “regarding a threats incident.” A “reporting party” told police that “an employee made a threat towards his employer using social media.” The employee that made the threat works in an office outside of California, according to the police statement."

 

man I'm all alone I'm working on an open world and after 5 years I'm close to release I can't do that now unfortunately but i already installed flax and unreal engine

 

In an ideal world, we can move on from things as easy as making the choice. While it might be easy for you, for others it's not.

 

There is a huge number of indie games that has 200,000 installations for $1,000 revenue.
Imagine what the revenue will be when they reach the required amount.
Riccitiello apologized for calling developers who don't think about revenue idiots, but showed that he still does.
He killed EA, now he's killing Unity. I hope the S.E.C. takes a look at his shenanigans.

 

In what universe is Tim Sweeney not one of "the big guys"? He owns one of the biggest companies in video games right now, which wields tremendous power and influence in the space.

Sure, they've (thus far) proven themselves to be more trustworthy than Unity, though at this point that's hardly saying anything. One can still choose not to do business with them because you think their business model of wealth extraction for success is unethical, and that the company as a whole is a terrible member of the game developer community because of Fortnite's nigh-predatory monetization practices, and whose look-good campaigns against Apple have been driven entirely by a desire for further wealth and control, not out of any kindhearted attempt to stick it to the man.

 

unironically there is an import unity package plugin for godot... and godot supports c# out of the box. maybe if you use a lot of unity specific features it will take a bit longer but porting the broad strokes of a basic unity scene made of gameobjects, with c# scripts on them seems quite doable. There are of course situations with assets and render pipeline specific work that will not be easy to replicate. I have some projects elements that are like that but i've taken it as a cautionary tale about depending on a corporate closed source feature when i could have made something more engine agnostic by sticking with pure c# and not using many assets from a store that is tied to the engine.

 

So wait, the changes are so bad that they are receiving death threats from their own employees??

 

Yea, complete bullsh**. I was gladly paying them their $40 or whatever the heck it was to remove it. I'm not bothering paying that much. Guess they don't want my money.

 

In fairness, we should have.
This is not the first time Unity has created a dumpster fire over some half-baked sudden change ... its the most extreme sure but we have seen several lesser events before. The last time or time before cant recall it was a similar facepalm-inducing WTF moment caused by Unity just flinging a business impacting change out without thought or cocenr that we started looking at Godot, UE and others as a point of migration.

So when it happened again and to this level we felt stupid for not moving then and have moved now.
Unity as a technology is our preferred and honestly a solid tool
The devs that work on it the few we know good people who seem passionate about their work
The corp and the business decisions it makes ... well I mean the CEO is from EA's peek of evil so it should have been expected ...

I get Unity needing to make a profit ... it hasn't been a profitable venture
I get Unity needing to move to a rev share model or something to pull in more rev from its successful clients
I have even suggested a royalty model before ... though I imagined it would be dropping the sub fee

But this is a predatory move, it is being applied with poor communication, retroactively with 90 days notice ... its just in every day it could possibly be an assault on the community that built Unity and very clearly paints Unity as a liability in terms of being a business partner. They have shown a level of incompetence and a willingness to cause harm that just isn't vaguely acceptable.

 

yeah, speculating but people can become desperate.

it appears at the moment that unity management made a big error that would bring massive layoffs in the near future.

Is the old corporate capitalism story, management getting $200 millions in bonuses and salaries and when is time to pay for errors they layoff hard working people.

They got billions in investments purchased useless tech for a fortune as I've said at the time of acquisition and correctly predicted the outcome of that purchase.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-announces-intent-to-acquire-weta-digital.1195474/#post-7702093

they didn't want me as CEO now look where we are.

Still available! I know how to fix this! Call me!

 

He is a self-made man running a small company compared to Microsoft or Apple. A hands on programmer and smart guy.

 

I'm sure that this Apple + Unity partnership regarding that overpriced vision thingy is gonna go bye-bye now with even death threats and so many angry people, it will smear over and apple dont want that..

 

Trust me, I bet Unity employees are just as upset as we are. These crappy decisions always come from the higher-ups.

 

Not a huge surprise, honestly. If you're a Unity employee who currently has job security and is generally trying to do right, and now your superiors are intentionally divebombing the craft into the water, you might feel like your entire livelihood is being threatened. There are probably a lot of Unity employees who knew this would cause a riot and are furious about this because it could kill the company.

 

Not All Heroes Wear Capes

 

Just joking to make you feel better. I'm alone myself for personal projects. And I always loved Unity as a rapid prototyping tool.
But what choice did they leave me? Only to drift to the next thing, like after death of Flash.
That said, I believe you should finish the game using a current version of the engine and not pay anything extra except a subscription, as no one agreed to this nonsense beforehand.

 

Can someone explain the SEC Edgar reports for multiple Unity people not previously mentioned selling at once almost 10 Million in stock a couple days ago? Also want to explain why Unity board of directors voted to change the by laws.

https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1810806/000181080623000161/unity-20230907.htm

Don't think it is just the CEO, President, and CTO.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1810806/000195824423001739/xsl144X01/primary_doc.xml

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1810806/000192109423000635/xsl144X01/primary_doc.xml

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1810806/000192109423000636/xsl144X01/primary_doc.xml

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1810806/000196858223000471/xsl144X01/primary_doc.xml

 

If you trust Riccitiello to report something like that truthfully.

The odds of such a true threat from a Unity employee sounds like it's, let's just say, orders of magnitude less likely than a true threat from a hobbyist. And even if it is the case, the entire thing is still disingenuous. Riccitiello knew that everyone would interpret his announcement as a hobbyist or non-Unity employee making the threat. It was reported the way it was in an attempt to shore up support, because reporting the full and honest truth could only erode support.

 

Something is definitely fishy here, insider trading..

 

Carful

Those same words have been said about many that are now labelled turds like the rest

Epic has its issues as well and its CEO is just as much of a jerk as the next guy.

Its not about who is pious or a "good guy" its about business
Unity has proven its untrustworthy as a business partner, its current model is actively hostile to many indies
While Epic has its issues it has proven to be reliable and has guardrails in writing to mitigate similar disasters

So between the two we chose to go UE ... as much as I personally think Epics CEO is a prick and I hate the PC Exclusives, etc. .. but this is a matter of business nothing more

Unity as a tech is solid IMO and my preferred tool
Unity devs are friendly and seemingly passionate
Unity the corp is a S*** show and dangerous entity to partner with

 

i mean this comes only in effect if they go through with it and you have to go to court with them.
they had this clause exactly for preventing them from doing what they are doing now. im not a lawyer but they restricted themselves with having a TOS like that online. The editors TOS was accepted by you the time you have installed (or downloaded) the editor version and you could reject any future changes made by Unity and stay with "Previous TOS" as long as you stay inside their conditions.

And from what it reads its seems to say do not upgrade your unity version to a major unity version after the date they removed this clause. If you do so you accepted the new TOS and lose your right to stay on the "Previous TOS".

That stuff is about lawyers and californian law. So i can be wrong, but a TOS should be legally binding.

 

Come on. I don't want to argue. I was just expressing that I don't like the fact I still need to use unity after this mess.

Actually, I'll try to answer you. If you agree that changing to a new engine is not easy, then how can I accomplish it while still moving forward with my project? It took me a few years (part time) to get where I'm at. I didn't have any Unity experience before that, so to get it working in a new engine, how long do you think that would take? I'm not asking that in a snarky way, like honestly in your opinion how long would you think?

 

Yeah, I found SEC Edgar reports for trade sells of multiple members of the board, the CEO, and more.

Those links documents kind of show the that something is up. And those are legal documents with the SEC so, good luck Unity. You F***ed up and kind of made it easy to look for the sales of stocks.

 

Fun fact that few people know: executive officers are only allowed to sell stock at a predetermined time. I've seen people mention multiple times that the CEO sold 2,000 shares just before this announcement, but those sales are set up months in advance.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rule-10b5-1.asp

 

Cool but I never said anything about sticking it to the man and if you want to get into unethical wealth extraction, Unity's hands are hardly clean. I'm simply saying that as far as a business proposition is concerned, Epic's doing a hell of a lot better than Unity has over the past decade.

 

Just release and keep your revenue under $1 million if that means adjusting your pricing higher ands not having sales so be it.

 

12 years on unity. Not in a million years would I switch even tho the engine is incredibly behind Unreal Engine.. Installed Unreal, played around, I'm making the switch today. I'm very happy with unity's decision, hope they keep their word.

 

I know very well, but player will change device overtime
You mean you never switch devices?
and something as simple as changing a component could be considered a new device.

and you also completely ignored all the other points and only focus on a small detail.
I also said in my example that it while using PRO version.

And yes I'm not yet a pro user,
I want to properly judge if switchin to pro would lock me in the ToS without anyways to legaly fight back this arbritally change to a game already release.
because that still an additional 1700 anually fee to came out of nowhere when my current budget is very very tight

 

https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/large-world-coordinates-in-unreal-engine-5/

 

Many apps and game engines send some kind of analytical data out, just like Unity, but it has to be GDPR and CCPA compliant in all cases. So Unity cannot truly spy on users to fully verify a new install. Which is good for players but bad for developers, as our extra fees will be guesswork we cannot refuse to pay

If you really care about privacy that much, then I'd recommend using a firewall (besides Windows builtin one) to block all apps/games from sending out data. simplewall is a fantastic choice if you don't have one already.

 

Interesting. So, JR and the board probably filed a 10b5-1 plan at some point in the past, knowing they would enact this ridiculous "install" fee afterward. I'd be surprised if the FEC isn't already investigating.

 

This has been done a few times already actually. Even ChatGPT thinks this is a bad idea.

 

what i

what if tomorrow they change the tos in order that I can only open the editor if I have the pro or x or y licence?
what if in a year they increase the value to 0.50 or more?
what if they do another retarded stuff that I can't even predict now? (like they just did)
This is beyond your understanding, please avoid being stupidy on the internet.