Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Only if you do not optimize and create very simple stuff.
I recall Flash running on the desktop. Who will play these games with lagging input? And you'll have to wrestle with browser overhead instead of making better graphics.
Don't mean to say that web games don't have a place, but for all other platforms it is like walking with a ball.

 

Thanks god all my games with former microtransactions are now completely free - and my next one will be full-price-only.

 

What really pisses me is the radio silence. I guess the Unity guys are not allowed to answer here anymore and the management just hopes for the dust to settle. And yes, there won't be an immediate effect I think, their shareholders will be happy for the next 3-4 years because lots of projects will be released using Unity as shifting to a new engine takes time. But the long term effect will be devastating which is a pity as I really like the simplicity of Unity over Unreal.

 

It's not mine, I just saw it on reddit,
https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/co..._to_start_a_petition_to_remove_john/?sort=new

maybe guys can upvote it here too, so it gets more traffic - atleast until reddit is not charging per click hahaha

 

Technically yes, I also have a localhost server running here (no internet required for testing WebGL builds in a browser). But can't really ask all your players to set that up - however, as mentioned earlier by someone else, there are tools to package web games as desktop or mobile apps. How well those work where performance is concerned, I can't say because I haven't tried any in years. Also, it's unclear whether games packaged that way would be approved for release on app stores.. at one time they were, I guess it's possible they still are today. But I also expect Unity will close that loophole and restrict the exemption to websites, more sooner than later if it's being excessively abused. Of course you could probably get around "phone home" or install-tracking logic more easily, but could also end up in hot water legally if you're intentionally working around their license terms and underreporting anything applicable.. I guess it depends on what country you live in whether anything could actually be done to you though and how significant it might be.

 

As I see it, the only way out of this in the long term is Chapter 11. Fire whole c-suite, restructure the company and ideally take it private. Devs have lost trust. Nobody is going to bet their livelihood on company in this state, where employees complain they don't have resources to do basic stuff (like support for 64bit mono) while c-suite is sucking hundreds of millions USD from the company.

 

In love and humility to your fellow human beings, especially the super-rich, it is said:

Love your nearest super-rich person, for in them the splendor of prosperity is revealed. Pave the way for him to even higher wealth, for in his abundance he finds the path of prosperity. Follow in his footsteps, so that the burden of his wealth may never weigh you down, but become inspiration and wisdom to you.

Have respect and always strive to support the super-rich on their path, for their successes reflect the possibility of advancement for all. Do not hold a grudge against the super-rich, for they do not hold a grudge against you either. Rather, carry them on your hands, that you may shower and nurture sweat upon you, for in their beneficence life is brightened for many.

In this attitude of love and devotion to our fellow human beings, the super-rich, we find harmony and peace in our world. May love for our neighbors, of whatever wealth, always be our guide. Amen.

 

Many thanks to Unity for wasted time. If I had known their payment policy would change, I would have taken a closer look at Godot. The funny thing is that Unity recently got rid of its status as a second-rate engine. This is what happens to a company that hires a CEO from EA. This game engine will no longer be on my computer. Rest in peace.

 

While I am personally not touched by this plan, my concerns and reflections are:

1) Symptom of corporate malaise and future failure
2) Board of directors that mismanages the company with bad decisions.
3) How can I trust a company that asks me for money retroactively for work I did when the plans were different?

The engine has been suffering for some time and has several obvious unresolved problems and bugs (More or less since Unity 5), and we have moved forward patiently.

But this is a really bad low blow and a harbinger of business failure.

Can you point me to some good alternative engines that use C#?

I would have switched to Unreal but I have been programming in C# for over 8 years and studying everything from scratch would be a problem.

 

Frustrating, but I think it might be best if they stay quiet and plan out a solution (an actual one) rather than rush to make more "clarifications" that just contradict prior statements or polish this turd little by little until people give up.

Really though, so long as John "once we got their hooks in them these morons are less price sensitive" Riccitiello is still at the helm, I expect nothing good at all.

 

Not quite true. If you generated enough revenue in the last 12 months, you'll be taxed per install even if you close down. It's only once the revenue in last 12 months falls below the threshold that you are free from the tax. It's not explained if that's a rolling 12 months or annual.

 

This is just insane. You betrayed your entire consumer base and community with this greedy, and frankly very idiotic move, Unity. If you double down on this, I will definitely never touch your engine again and will move on to one of your competitors instead. I assume many-many others will do the same. Why did you even for a moment think that this is remotely sensible? Many years of community building and trust down the crapper because your management has no idea what they're doing. Great job.

 

If WebGL builds are really not counted, just release every game as a hudless browser.

 

If you are focused more on a 2D environment, look towards godot, it has support for sharps. You can do 3D there, but if you like to use third-party assets, you may have problems with this engine, as there is no asset store.

 

Yes. You can host WebGL games via Python in Win 10, which I can use for testing WebGL builds.

 

I’ve only been scratching the surface of it so far because I only started looking into it this week, but just from my first impressions, I think Godot is honestly in a much better place now than Unity was when I started using it back when they were still a small company selling a Mac-only editor for $250 a pop. I don’t think anyone is seriously putting it forward as a feature-equivalent competitor for either Unity or Unreal, but I’d be willing to bet that a lot of devs on this first raft of ship-jumpers aren’t really using the full raw potential of Unity right now anyway.

I’m not under any sort of illusion that Godot will become “the next Unity” overnight, but as an open source project, it at least has the benefit of not being limited by or beholden to the financials of a single corporation (it doesn’t even have to ever turn a profit, so there’s far less motivation to do stupid nonsense BS to it). The more people who start using it for their projects, the the bigger the pool of potential engine contributors becomes (and also, there’s already a number of surprisingly good-looking free(!) packages in their asset directory that fill gaps like terrain tools and meet common needs filled by popular packages in Unity’s store). Imagine how much better Unity itself would be if the Asset Store devs could actually build their stuff into the engine itself (instead of having Unity capriciously buy a few out at random and then let their products decay into uselessness as official packages).

Again, it won’t happen overnight, and if it doesn’t suit your needs right now, by all means feel free to give it a pass. That said, I think for the lower end of the market that Unity originally served, Godot is already in a pretty good place (hell, it actually has a character controller ), and it has the potential to get way better if enough dev teams pick it up and pay it forward.

I think that’s the worst idea you could have come up with short of what Unity already dropped on us this week. I think the last thing the industry needs is a third proprietary engine just waiting to turn predatory. What should happen is people who want Godot to succeed, or those who have gotten value from it, should donate to their Development Fund so they can keep working and grow their team. And Microsoft doesn’t need to buy them, they’ve already donated the funds to make sure that C# is a first-class language in the engine alongside GDScript.

 

Webgl platform have many problerms and limitations.

Furthermore, given the company's fraudulent policy, who can assure us that they won't touch that too in the future?

 

Another evidence this was half-improvised without any serious preparation and consideration:

Amazing, I live in an "emerging economy" that happens to be the 11th in the world. Apparently the intern that wrote the document in ten minutes didn't heard of countries like Italy, Spain, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Luxembourg, Iceland, Portugal, Estonia, Slovakia...

Of course this "benefits" us since the fees from those 120 million people will be lower, but it's shocking how they'd go through such a devastating ordeal only to leave out the potential fee from millions of players, just because.

 

Not saying it's a general solution, just one way to F*** them over

 

https://www.stride3d.net/
https://flaxengine.com/
https://godotengine.org/

All allow use of C#. The terms in the license of flaxengine have me a bit spooked personally though.

 

This video summarizes quite well the effects accepting all this, and the eventual slightly watered-down version Unity will offer us eventually, would have.

Remember how everything became subscription-based?
It was because one company showed that people accepted that system, and then every corporation started doing it.

Remember, when you could BUY a program and OWN it, and everything you made with it?
Remember you could buy Unity Pro, and own it, by paying $2000?
Now you pay that EVERY YEAR for the priviledge of using this product, that hasn't offered anything new worth that, and is steadily becoming worse and worse.

Imagine everyone wanting a cut of every installed piece of work YOU made,
Adobe being like "oh you used our PhotoShop to create those graphics, you own us 20 cents per copy of the game,
Microsoft seeing it, "oh this was made on Windows, pay us per every copy as well.

And if Tencent sees that people are willing to pay this, expect Unreal Engine to start using the same system.

 

Unfortunately I make 3D games... I was evaluating Stride Game Engine https://www.stride3d.net/
It looks good, but I want to evaluate others too.

 

I've said this before, but Unreal's royalty is not 5% its actually lower

$1M rev -> nothing
$2M rev -> 2.5% (first $1M is waived)
$3M rev -> 3.33% (first $1M is waived)

at around $10M rev -> 4.5%

because there is the first $1M waive, it never reaches that 5%. If one says just get Unity Pro, then under the same conditions Unreal is completely free. No Subscriptions, No Royalties nothing. Zero.

And this is per game.

and TOS stays with per engine version, can't change it retro actively.
So if you use the current version in 2033, same conditions apply.

 

My best guess, is that they go by the bundle ID/package name, and the organization that's registered to.

As an aside you should really get in the practice of not mixing company work with your personal account. My old account was from over a decade ago and I made that mistake. Because there were a couple asset store purchases on it paid for by the company, they claimed ownership of my personal account when I left, hence why I have a much more recent join date now.

Your employer will win the battle 100% of the time when there's an argument over who owns your personal stuff that was used for their business.

 

By the way, doesn't Unreal only take commissions on games sold from its store?
Or am I wrong?

 

Unity's recent decision presents us with major challenges, even though we operate in the machinery sector. It will not be easy to restore customer trust and loyalty after this move. A robust and loyal gaming community is central to our business.

Unity's management seems to be making unpredictable decisions. It is becoming increasingly clear that just having a business and management background is not enough. Even if the stock market, which often also lacks technical expertise, cannot grasp these complexities, tech-savvy executives are vital to the survival of tech companies like Unity. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be the case, especially when you look at the CEO's background.

 

Engine should be proprietary while being opensourced

opensourced project should allowed to have profit. And donation with goodwill is proven to be not sustainable. Unity know this more than anyone so they know we cannot moved to godot or other alternative as easily. They don't have enough team to backing up the project from donation. And only business model will allow them to have investment

We need to have correct mindset about business. If even your game are proprietary and don't use donation model to sell your game, then so the engine should be

We need some balanced

 

Do you mean "not sold from its store"? Then yes.

 

After Unity 5 it's crap.
Every day I have to curse because I come across the same bugs that haven't been resolved for years.

 

No, they take (max 5%). For revenue sold on Epic Store, the royalty is exempt.

But, like any other store, eg. Steam takes 30%, they take 12% for platform split.

But the engine royalty is really not high, because it is per game. If you never broke $1M with a game, then Unreal is literally, and completely free.

I mean $200k revenue is very do-able, $1M is slightly different.
Also, if you are making very little per month, let's say $10k rev per month, they don't take royalties.

So, theoretically, you could go over $1M over 10 years, but then in that case, you are not paying royalties. They only charge you if you are making a big bang sort of success.

This is very fair game.

 

Thank you,
I'm seriously considering it even though unfortunately it uses C++ and would force me to study everything from scratch

 

No, it was the terms of use that they would ask you for revenue you have each year, and charge some when above threshold, or face legal challenge

They can contact store to put your game down for selling illegal product, such as steam

Normally this royalty fee are fair so no one ever have problem paying it

 

Does the CEO have some connections with the us government? If my assumption is correct, he will get out of this situations(insider trading, spyware software etc..) very easily legally. He will write the rules himself. This means we all f*** up, nothing will change.

on wikipedia;

on mercury news;

 

Thank you for the reminder. At the time, all I thought about was just removing the unity logo use any random id. Fortunately, amidst the misfortune, I think from 2024 onwards, neither the company nor I will continue using Unity.

 

We're not though... Who's gonna buy our assets if everybody stops using Unity?

 

Revenue % share is a better model.

 

On top of that, games created with Unreal Engine released on the Epic Games Store are excluded from the 5% royalty calculations.

 

That’s not how… anything works. On any level… do you not know what proprietary means?

Tell that to the Blender foundation. They’re killing it these days.

 

Also urhosharp and cocossharp. From what I read cocos is more 2d with minimal 3d.

Urho3D is still in development though the Urhosharp port is abandoned. In any case it integrates into Xamarin which I like so I'm trying that one first.

 

Can I point out your company has been churning out half finished garbage for years - it's a miracle any games get made on Unity - You've just killed your own Engine - I mean what world do you live in where you think you're better than UE5.3 - you don't have nanite or lumen or anything close to myriad of other features Epic have added recently and yet you're just gonna screw every dev?

I remember when you introduced ECS, F***ing garbage.

From everyone who's ever bothered to waste their life working in Unity I'd like to say F*** YOU.

 

Well, goodbye and thanks for all the fish, I guess.

 

well making a basic webserver is easy enough, with the number of developers here, im pretty sure someone could knock up one specifically designed to farm out webgl games locally so a tiny tiny exe that runs on 127.0.0.1 so you can run webgl games offline - except for any web calls to highscores/etc that they may make

 

Modern C++ has improved a lot, so things which were annoying before now have simplified solutions. It's still a bit of a pain actually compiling C++ in general, but Unreal fortunately encapsulates a lot of the hard work of doing a build, even ensuring you have some of the dev tools installed. Open project, figure out where to go for a build and selecting type of build, wait a couple of minutes, have ready distributable game binary/folder.

 

FIND OUT what data Unity are storing on you as a player!

EU devs and players – we are all annoyed. I get major red flags when thinking about some of the lies, in particular: Initially, they said we must pay for re-installs because they don’t receive end-player data, just aggregate data. They backtracked less than 24 hours later and said we wont be charged for re-installs.

SO YOU DO RECEIVE END PLAYER DATA? LIARS. Its really bugging me.

Here’s what players can do:

- Email; unity-player-login-privacy@unity3d.com
- Subject: Subject Access Request
- Give your name and email address in the body and state you want access to all personal data that is held about you.

They are LEGALLY REQUIRED by EU law to respond within 1 month, but can extend for an additional 2 months in some cases (but they must inform you why in the first 30 days)

They must inform you: Why it’s being stored, where it came from, who it is being shared with, how long they keep it etc.

 

What a drag though... I have to study a new engine all over again.

But can't you organize a demonstration to throw out the entire board of directors?

 

On the plus side, you get to learn a new engine! Some of the things you know will give you a boost.

 

It's less daunting with tools like GPT that might get you 80% of the way there with some careful prompting.

 

We, as Unpredictable Games, declared a statement before, but I am writing this as person here.

We were about to release our title Create Your Own Universe on September, 28 this year. Before delaying that, we discussed how we can manage this new pricing plan without compromising our business if we go for a release. Here are some interesting facts:

We were planning to release our game for $25 on Steam Early Access. Now, assume that it is the right pricing, and the game deserves it, but let’s concentrate… The idea is to sell until just before you become eligible for this per install “tax”, and there, delete the game. Here are some interesting outcomes of this idea:

We have Unity Plus licenses and we hit the revenue cap with the 8000th copy. So if we make it there, we will definitely want to go for more and upgrade our plans to Unity Pro to increase the revenue cap to $1 million.

After this point there are 2 scenarios:

Scenario 1: wait until you sell the 990000th copy in order not to trigger the install cap, or leave a better buffer for multiple installs if you like, and then delete the game. You can literally prove how much revenue you made from this game and how much copies you have sold, and you are in good position, right?

No!

In this case, you make a revenue of 25 x 990000 = $24.75 mil and then what’s a few cents to pay for us, right?

Also, no!

The problem is, Unity leaves open holes in the security of their pricing plan: they do not have a working, accurate, tested and proved install detection system, and a piracy detection system (which should probably be a single system with both functionalities). With this security hole, someone, maybe our rivals, maybe some angry player group, maybe mafia, and maybe Unity themselves, by hiring some underground teams, we can easily be dragged beyond the install cap, although we stopped selling our product. And then there is a very high possibility that these actions continue until we are forced to subscribe to some additional services, or we pay a cut to mafia, or we go bankrupt, etc.

Of course, this is just imaginary, but, it is possible, right? Remember, anyone coming with such an idiotic pricing plan was imaginary by the last week, it just happened!

But, wait. This pricing plan idea, with those purposefully left security holes, is actually not that much idiotic, in fact, it is a brilliant plan just for one thing: please, keep reading…

Scenario 2: Now, that we understood the essential part of this system is not to control how many copies we sell, but how much revenue we make. We should not go beyond $1 million, in order to secure the future of our business. This is the only way. And the amount of copies we need to sell for $1 million is 40000. So, as we sell the 39999th copy and delete our game we are good, right? This is the only way that we can secure the future of our business.

As a result, we are not allowed to sell more than 39999 copies even if we are very successful. We should delete the game, start another one, and hope for a similar success.

This plan prevents us, small studios, startups, etc. to reach enough amount of income that they can afford dealing with all kinds of law suits and become an industry actor. Instead, we are forced to be passive actors that can easily manipulated in various ways in the industry.

Well, it sounds like, what this whole thing is all about. To elaborate on this: our game, for example, is a space game that you can land on the planet surface, go into/out of your ship, go into/out of buildings seamlessly, explore the entire planet seamlessly, by walking, by flying, by vechiles, etc., (and we have even Mars sized planets), and we are doing this for years, now. I know other indie developers who can do these things, even some are very impressive. On the other hand, look at space games of AAA companies, look at the comments they receive from players, from influencers, etc… in a time frame of 7 years back from now. Consider No Man’s Sky as a starting point.

It seems, this pricing system is aiming to make creative, innovative game developers fade out, leaving the scene for those AAA companies secured. Although they don’t need it!… For example, I like Starfield very much, I can’t do some stuff they do, and I can’t do some close to their quality. But I have the right to show my disagreement of how they implement the space travel not only in words, but also showing how it should be done with my game, right? Look at the audience I am allowed to reach without dangering my business: 39999. What about 1+ million that will put me in front of spotlights?

(Of course I am not saying Starfield is behind this mess.)

You see, this is the function of this pricing system. The brains behind this system are, I believe, Unity + some non-Unity behind the curtain actors.

We indie developers should stand very strong against this. We should immediately leave Unity and never turn back. This should be an example case for such future efforts in similar manner. What Unity is doing today, is just a single occurrence, and more should be expected. The indie developer answer to this should be very very strong, so that, no one else dare to do so again. Or, we are all finished.

 

THIS^^^

This is why I said earlier we should not be trying to make some kind of even informal counteroffer like rev share or anything like that. The unreasonable first proposal has tainted the entire "negotiation" before it even started. This is why we need to turn our backs and just say no.