Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

This way of monetizing is extremely stupid and greedy. Bye bye free games, created for fun and shared around the world. Welcome extra fees for us devs for our pirated games. Insanely stupid move. I've been thinking of moving to Unreal over a year now, and now it's time to do it.

 

Artificial Mastercomputer will calculate installs by stock market fluctuation

 

we will try win you back in Nov by some carrot on a stick with tools ?

 

Imagine the players. The past year unity managed to be in the news for merging with malware company and then for tracking user installs. Will they want to install unity games? As someone said here, at this point Unity is a dead engine walking.

 

enjoy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UE_Logo_Black_Centered.svg

 

Interesting. I admit to not personally having done this or knowing exactly one way or another, but there has definitely been talk about 2 packets being sent when a Unity app starts to https://config.uca.cloud.unity3d.com and https://cdp.cloud.unity3d.

Earlier in this thread there were examples of build preprocessor methods you could use to prevent it (through modifying values stored in UnityConnectSettings.asset during the build process).

 

I think if I want to release a game now, I need a lawyer. It is not comprehensible how they arrive at their figures. It is not foreseeable what other costs they might incur in the future.

I paused working on my current game, waiting a week or two, if there is any reaction. To be honest, however, I do not expect any. So probably see you in the Godot or Stride3d forum soon....

 

What game engine do you recommend for hypercasual game developers?

 

They chose a thankless and arduous task.

 

It

Was more to do with the wording about having to contact them in advance before I distribute to end users. Also the wording at the beginning seems confused and seems to imply ANY commercial work using their tools is prohibited, despite the fact that they also say they require me to disclose any income generated.

 

This one, I saved it for reference

 

Oh, I forgot the monthly subscription fee for the Pro license of $170. PER SEAT of course.

 

That's what I said. In that example scenario every install above 4m would be when you would pay, and that also assumes you made your 200k in 12 months. If it took you 2 years to make that 200k in revenue, you could have 10 billion downloads and wouldn't pay them anything. To be clear I'm not supporting it, I think it's a terrible policy that needs to go if nothing else for the uncertainty it creates and it's certainly questionable how legal it is to track everything, but I do also think it's been over blown when people say they're gonna owe Unity hundreds of thousands or millions on their game that made only a few thousand in revenue

 

as always, CEO's and execs get coddled, while the workers on the ground need to handle the repercussions of arbitrarily demolishing years of trust because the higher-ups don't treat their clients like legitimate business

 

Sorry to interrupt your discussion, but let me ask for some advice:
If I am new to Unity, should I continue to study it or, depending on this situation, is it better to switch to another game engine?
It's just such a confusion that I don't know what to do.

 

Sadly, no. If you're new then you have nothing invested, and there is literally no good reason to invest now when walking away costs you little to nothing.

The real broken hearts here are the developers with 5+ years of experience who are even agreeing that walking away is necessary for them, and that's no decision to take lightly.

 

I am once again asking:

Proton reinstalls could be detected as new installs just by the way Proton works. Have any measures been taken about this and if so how?

 

I'd take the implicit and explicit advice of the 8701 posts in this thread before yours and get out now and try something else that seems suited to the type of games you'd like to make and how you'd like to work. Also an engine that seems like it'll still be viable in 5, 10 or 15 years from now would be best.

 

An ex employee suggested on their twitter that this is was something kinda sprung on a lot of them. They are probably legitimately afraid for their jobs at this point.

 

Did another quick check and yes, indeed. I can't confirm those URLs, but there is data being sent into the same subnet in Kansas City. Got to correct my post it seems.

That again raises my question: What are they sending? The EU's GDPR is very strict, and violations can become very expensive. I'm not into the legal yada enough to tell for sure, but if there is personal information being transmitted, whoever is shipping a Unity game and has Unity transmit stuff without explicit consent from the player violates the GDPR. I don't know what is being sent, but surely being able to track legit and unique installs would certainly require some sort of personal data?

 

Hard to answer just yet. Wait for a week before making any decisions.

 

This is usually what happens when the top executives are out of touch with the technical side of the company. You don't have to know how to write down some lines of code. You just have to be aware of the limitations of your technologies to make an informed decision. When the tech team is telling you your engine can't give you a granular telemetry of unique game install without being picked up by Norton, Malwarebytes, Trend Micro, Bitdefender etc... as spyware, you uh... you take those geeky peeps seriously.

 

that's what we're figuring out.
basically, it's looking like this;

• new game? not unity
  
• almost done game? finish and move off unity for the next one.
• unity rolls back changes? if you need the tools keep unity, but watch with an eagle eye.
• unity keeps this plan/feeling spicy? make a game in unity anyway. after all, they cannot legally enforce it in most jurisdictions. if they sue you, you have a real good case, probably.

 

Wait wait wait. Are you European? Cause if data is sent over to the US I'm pretty sure that's illegal.

 

UNITY: "Hey you know that free-to-play mobile game you've been working on for 3 years? Well just to let you know, we might take all your revenues due to charging a $0.20 fee on each of your players that only have a $0.02 to $0.20 value. But you have 3 months to re-build it on another engine instead if you want. No biggy"

 

Wait for next move of Unity. My bottom line is rollback this pricing plan and remove the CEO.

 

Even a week won't change much, fact is Unity's days are numbered the moment they even tried.

Worst case scenario is they maintain course, in which case professional developers will leave, new users will dry up, games will never trust the brand again, and Unity will be dead in one year.

Best case is they fully backtrack and apologise, in which case some new users will be tricked into thinking it's all good again, but the experienced devs will be leaving anyway because now the door has been opened anyone with a livelihood dependant on Unity knows it's not good business to never know what will be announced tomorrow.
So Unity will be dead in three years.

 

Average installs are higher than 1 so very likely you are not paying only $0.20

 

Turn and run.

 

Really sucks that to be able to build a game, first have to find a lawyer to read all the licenses to find a one that won't bite you in the arse.

 

If that's true , that's even worst.
I have invested time and money in Unity, but with some MAJOR changes (and I'm not referring only to the pricing model, but also to unity's management) I really don;t see how I can continue using unity.
It will be paintfull to change, for sure, but at least i will avoid further drama...
This guys really don;t know when to stop.
a mail with "we heared you, we will reevaluate our stand and give you an answer in a few days" whould have been much better than hur hur death threats, hur hur

 

Exactly, we are talking about best case scenarios here and it's still F-d up.

 

just saying, that can't really be enforced most anywhere. Lots of companies have contracts with sections that you can just ignore from a legal standpoint, because they tried to do something super unethical and no one would accept it as fair or ethical in court.


and good riddance.

 

We can FIND OUT what data Unity are storing on ourselves as a player - wonder what it will show?

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.

 

We don't know either. Pragmatically speaking, the engine is just as capable as it was before the announcement. Lots of people calling for the big switch won't go through with it due to numerous reasons such as no true Unity alternative existing for multi-platform releases, the project is too far along in Unity to not finish it, or it's too expensive to switch in general.

Many will switch out of principle for sure, but this is unlikely to impact Unity financially. PC/Console devs making the noise here are 10-20% of Unity's revenue. And only a subset of that will switch. I can't comment much on mobile, but I assume independent low ARPU mobile F2P games are also not that financially significant for Unity since they're outright killing them with this change. They've determined the new business model will compensate way more than what will be lost. Unity might even see this as a benefit since they don't care about indie developers and by extension cheap or low monetized games from a financial standpoint.

Personally, I'm using Godot whenever possible and will recommend it to clients if platform reach will be sufficient for their purposes.

 

I can't point to any particular posts/Tweets/etc right now, but I'm pretty certain before they went radio silent it was implied that while they do get information, it does comply with those laws. Maybe also in one of their FAQs about this.

They have said that they don't capture user data, so the assumption, if they're not just talking complete nonsense (which they probably are), is that on the user's machine they check if their default Unity app save data/registry values exist and only send a "this is a new install" element in their packet if so. This does not contain explicit user information and it is basically what they've suggested their process is.

What the data would need to contain though is information about the application being run (App ID, exe name, ?), and I speculated earlier (https://forum.unity.com/threads/uni...ckaging-updates.1482750/page-168#post-9321278), possibly some sort've ID that associates it with the Unity license used to build the application.

 

Depends entirely on your plans and personal situation.
You should generally not take advice from people in a thread about how much the company producing the engine sucks at the moment. My two cents (which you should not take for any real advice since you have basically no idea if I am qualified to answer your question) - if you want to get a Job in a bigger studio and work with high end graphics or realtime video production you should currently go for Unreal. Unreal Engine is taking off in terms of progressive technology and broad industry relevance.
If you want to create a game for yourself or start your own company, then the world's your oyster. Check which engine you like, what you value in it (morally, technically and UX) ... do research and go nuts.

here's a broad selection of alternatives from all shapes, forms and sizes:
https://github.com/DJLink/list-of-game-engines-and-frameworks/

 

https://azurgames.com/blog/collecti...netization-until-new-conditions-are-reviewed/

 

Honestly if you have time is best to try and check others game engines just to see what they are good at and how they fit with your way of thinking.

One mistake I've made was to learn all there is about game engines and I didn't focused on simple stuff. I should had found a simple engine that lets you quickly start building actual gameplay and interactions and game loops.

do not learn this or that engine but learn game design, game development.

 

If you want to be a hobbiest Godot maybe
If you want to be be hired somewhere maybe Unreal... But it's harder to learn (C++)

I would wait maybe (there's still a chanse) that this will be solved in a favorable way. But It's not the first time the CEO f**s us up so without some resignations I don;t know how they can regain our trust.
It's your choice but if you are at the begining of the road at this point Unity doesn't have a clear direction management wise and that's very bad!

 

We are forced to stay the course for now, having invested money and time, but you can be sure that we will switch to Unreal as soon as we can.

If they don't reverse the course in max a month, I advice you to start studying other engines because the job market for Unity will shrink a lot, if not disappear, in the next years.

 

they aren't sending anything. they're asking other platforms for various numbers, and putting it through a patented-gives-you-accurate-install-counts-no-you-cant-see-it-just-trust-me-bro-algorithm, that once again, is totally unenforceable because you cannot bill someone for an unprovable estimation of theoretical deployment of the result of their tools

 

it would be a smart decision to turn off monetization because the way this is going unity will default in providing the advertising payments down the road.

 

I just love how they went "We are introducing this fee that will probably end your company, but hey, here's the good part, your fee will be almost insignificant IF you use our monetization platforms."

 

Here's a fun thought: https://twitter.com/FalconeerDev/status/1702601621874606105

If Personal has no revenue cap, all the outsourcing and porting studios now can just cancel their Pro licenses en masse to reduce costs.

 

This, this again 100 times. There is no truly going back without getting rid of the greed. Otherwise it'll just continue to fester.

 

who is responsible for the privacy law breach? the developer/publisher that sold/provided the game or unity? can one argue that it didn't know that functionality exists?

I guess everyone expects that game developers are expert at everything but in reality this is a very complex piece of software that gets updated every week. Is humanly not possible to be aware of everything that changes, is added, is removed.

 

https://chng.it/WgTbFZkSvg

 

you seem to miss the important issue at hand.. lets say they make a few changes and mostly everyone can live with it.. what about next year or two years down the road when they Change the TOS again and its now $.40 an install or the threshold is only 50k installs.. etc... thats the issue for me. the current changes dont effect me. but now i dont know what Unity will do in the future.. why develope a game that fees may cost more than revenue, or atleast make it not worth even tryn cause ill only make $10 once unity takes it tax.. simply not acceptable to change a contract after its agreed upon.. so keep fanboying ...