Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Unity is based in California where, apparently, every company can change TOS at will and no current agreements are safe. That's what lawyer told us.

 

...which is technically illegal, hence not saying it upfront.

 

Careful, butthurt Unity moderators are deleting anti-unity memes and banning accounts and leaving seething comments in the ban note. Probably just mad because we didnt pay the $0.20 per meme view fee.

 

I was looking none of the analytics are in my game, i used to have them once when crash dumps were in it, but that stopped working a long time back, so i dont seem to have anything like this in my games these days cos i never hooked it up to unity .. im not saying they dont, i just dont seem to have anything matching any of that.

 

...basically this whole episode is to introduce an illegal "solution" to generate revenue on their failed business model, that unexpetdly just destroys their customer base. whilst earning a $20 million salary detached from any consequences. also whilst decimating your employee base (which will eventually go to zero once the business is destroyed).

begs the question why not just clone an actual working model like URE...?

 

yes, it might even success in short term (as in unity profits would increase), but slow decay will follow.
(unless radical changes would happen)
https://twitter.com/slipster216/status/1702358226652533071

 

A gentle reminder that vertical integration practices that gives business partners a discount when they also use the engine maker's other services are still bad when the engine maker is NOT called Unity Technologies.

 

Hire me as new CEO, I will also charge players per buttons pressed in the game.

 

And is the value for devs or Unity?

 

https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-new...om-one-of-its-employees-claims-report-3498506

 

In every case don't make harsh decisions over something publicated a few days ago. In a few weeks we should know more and reasonable evaluations of risks and consequences will come up.
Knowledge gained with Unity will be helpful either way in game dev...

Do we actually know that it works?
Epic makes money with using the engine themselves and they generaly profit from a large userbase which they can afford since they are primarely a game Studio, not an Engine studio.

 

Unity know this?:

Each day without a REAL communication and no back to previous prices and conditions, Unity loses a 10% from renewals and new licenses. This licenses is no back to unity...

In one week the Unity income is near to 0.

 

perfect answer

 

Honestly, currently I'm just heartbroken.
This might sound dramatic, but to me, it's another (very personal) example of the world going to S***, because (the vast majority of) rich people couldn't care less about anything other than themselfes..
Assigning other greedy maniacs with too much power to make awful decisions they're grossly unqualified for.
Destroying or harming beloved franchises with dumb decisions (GoT, Cyberpunk, Witcher, every anime adaption ever except OP, firing a complete Blizzard team after a succesful project) ... I could go on.

This will hurt indies the most, and the beauty of indie games to me is that in every little detail you can feel the developers passion and love for their craft, they feel so personal and precious and bring people together in a way most AAA games never could.
Simply to bring joy to their customers and make games they themselfes would enjoy and not to only drain their wallets.
A characteristic that is defined as "F***ing idiotic" by Unity's CEO btw, surprising absolutely no one.
Seriously gutwrenching.

But I guess this is something a heartless profit-obsessed shareholder will never understand, so for the unlikely chance one will read this, maybe it's time to talk in their language...

So...

DEAR SHAREHOLDERS!

NEW POLICY WILL RUIN UNITY COMMUNITY.
UNITY COMMUNITY MAKE KA-CHING.
WITHOUT COMMUNITY, MONEY GO BUH-BYE TO COMPETITORS.
INSTALL FEE HURT RICHY RICH MONEYBAGS STOCKS.
INSTALL FEE BAD FOR PILE OF GOLD.

 

unity CEO already had this idea, he wanted to charge player for reloading their weapons in fps games.

you need to top that if you want any chances to become the next unity CEO

 

I don't think anyone is mad about the vertical integration. Everyone is mad about the retrospective TOS changes that they made after promising the community they'd never make another retrospective TOS change.

ed: lol typo.

 

Lol. People who have actual success in business do not make such harsh decisions within days.

 

I'm concerned that this new pricing model will not for many developers, especially myself.

I'm making games that will release for FREE... with a revenue strategy of IAP and in-game ads.

My hope is that the game(s) do become a viral success and get installed by hundreds of thousands or even millions of users.

However I'm expecting the vast majority of users will play the game for free, and never make any in app purchases (IAP), nor generate any significant ad revenue.

On average, I would be beyond thrilled if the average revenue was 5 cents per downloaded app.

However instead of this being profitable for me, it would put me in significantly in debt to Unity.

I would be more than happy to revenue split with Unity at a reasonable percentage based on gross/net earnings, but attempting to match it to runtime installs is just insane math that will never be feasible.

Please update your FAQ to cover this scenario... e.g. "20cents per install, or X% of net annual game revenue, whichever is least"!

Otherwise if there is no cap on this, and my ratio of downloads to revenue is super high, I will have to port my game code to another engine as this will bankrupt me.

 

Oh, the people who noticed are mad. It's not about the discount, it's about them indirectly forcing you to use their platform for monetization.

 

If anyone is hoping this will be reversed you need to understand this is the 4th day and nothing has essentially changed. Proton installs count as reinstalls, just by this very fact, the more you sell on the Steam Deck the more your WILL pay per REinstall. I seriously don't understand how noone is commenting on this. It's a massive issue of robbery that no dev has a say on.

 

I think the people worried about the vertical integration should consider the fact that there's so many worse things that Unity could do if they wanted to. And they do.

Because if half the userbase quits over this, that's quite a lot of lost revenue the remaining users will need to make up.

 

Alright.

 

It would be very interesting to know if developers can do that on behalf of the players. In accordance with GDPR, they will be obligated to delete any installation data.

 

Btw, everyone should have the logo of the engine they are switching to as a profile pic just as a form of protest.

 

These CEO geniuses are beyond me.

 

but we are commenting !

Is two days now that unity staff vanished, twitter account is dead, no one replies here.!

 

That' not how Proton works. Do you know anything about Linux? Proton creates a folder (called a Wineprefix as Proton is based on Wine) that is a new Windows installation and many times is registered as a different machine. So reinstalls are a thing.

 

No it won't. Unity specifically said that they will find a solution for people like you. Just trust them. It's not like they changed their TOS overnight to retroactively screw people. Oh, wait...

 

Depending on the OS vendor's paranoia, it may regenerate a random hardware ID simply from an OS upgrade too. This hasn't been thought through at all.

 

I'd say we considered the other things as well, that's why almost all of the community is angry.

 

As a person that has been using Unity for over a decade now I say this: There is nothing for you here anymore. It's over.

 

Hush now.

 

Unity management's lack of understanding our serious concerns speaks volumes....

 

Guys, supposedly that death threat that Unity got came from one of their own employees. https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-new...om-one-of-its-employees-claims-report-3498506

Edit: Looks like that was posted already...

 

I was never bothered to check, but I do have the UnityConnectSettings.asset in my current project, so I will look for the reason and a way to disable the event reporting, since I do not use any unity services, only AWS.

 

please sign (and share on your social channels) if you are still holding out any hope Unity will reverse this idiotic policy:
https://www.change.org/p/return-united-remove-runtime-and-installation-fees-from-unity-engine

 

Stride3D is a good alternative to Godot, for those not satisfied with its extremely different pipeline. Both engines however require funding in order to solidify their form.

• Godot has abysmal import pipelines and requires too much fiddling around in order to get the most basic things to work (I could not yet find a proper way to import a rig with a skeleton). Lack of an actual deferred renderer and prefabs is a letdown right now for me.
• Stride3D has a UI that's a lot more familiar to (RIP) Unity, imports fbx and even .blend files, but lacks some features like blendshapes and multiple animations per import.

You can support Stride3D's development via one-time donations in its Open Collective page for specific features. I might not end up using either one or the other, but I will contribute to anything that gives us alternatives to the scumbag charade that's going on here.

 

I'd like to charge developers for every "Instantiate(prefab)" and only pro users are permitted to use object pool.

 

Exactly! If you change your GPU that may also count as a new install. This is beyond bonkers. @Gorki1337 sorry I just saw your post clearly. This is exactly the issue. Let me write the script for how you can "reinstall" a game on Linux thousands of times in an hour:

Code (CSharp):

1. !# /bin/bash
2.  
3. while true
4. do
5.    steamcmd app_run 123456
6.    sleep 3
7.    steamcmd app_stop 123456 force 1
8.    rm -rf ~/.steam/steam/compatdata/123456
9. done
10.  

Ii wrote this in 1 min (also had a visitor come by) and don't even know Bash. XD

This is COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS Unity!

 

Unity boycott begins as devs switch off ads to force a Runtime Fee reversal

https://mobilegamer.biz/unity-boycott-begins-as-devs-switch-off-ads-to-force-a-runtime-fee-reversal/

 

Azure games JUST STOOD UP ----> https://azurgames.com/blog/collecti...netization-until-new-conditions-are-reviewed/

 

It's not in beta, it's been enabled by default since 5.1 and the only way to disable it is by recompiling the engine.

I wouldn't trust anything that user says about Unreal, they got a track record of making erroneous claims can be disproved with a simple web search.

 

Its always good advice to learn as much as you can about as many tools as you can

If your just getting started out and haven't the bandwidth to learn multiple tools I suggest going with UE for now. As you get your feet under you pick up Godot, UE, O3DE, etc.

An engine is a tool not a religion, you can use many and learning a second and third is no where near as hard as that first one

So you want that first one to be

1. Stable ... e.g. not violently changing rapidly ... Unity is less so now, Godot has big changes fairly rapidly as well
2. Reliable ... e.g. not going away anytime soon ... Unity will be here tomorrow such a big ship takes time to sink
3. Helpful Community ... Unity Community is helpful but in panic mode and this isn't new or the first time even within recent memory ... Unity the corp likes to the bed
4. Rich ... e.g. you can do many things in it in a fairly industry-standard way ... so Unity & Unreal are the gold standard here

We have a community that is focused on Game Dev in general not limited to a given engine ... we do focus a lot on Steam as a platform but not limited to Steam either.

Love to see you there
https://discord.gg/6X3xrRc

 

I've begun porting my game to UE5 and I think it's a solid choice for learning a game engine today or releasing a new game.

Unreal Engine docs are a lot better than they were a few years ago, there's a learning platform and a load of samples. They also share the source code with you so average mortals can peer into the internals. You don't need to learn C++ to start with because you can achieve a fair amount with blueprints.

Right now godot just isn't that mature so I don't think it's a good engine to start with if you actually want to release a game. I think it's fine for more experienced coders that want 2d mobile/desktop games. The learning curve is actually fairly easy but it's because there's a lot less features to actually learn and the lack of inbuilt tooling will be a hindrance.

That said there are a few fairly well polished games made with godot and I think it will replace unity as the defacto indie game engine, I think the actual architecture of how games are put together is more rapid with godot and gdscript is easier (and possibly faster) than C#.

With all the people taking a fresh look at godot I think more people will contribute and so accelerate development. I hope to add a few PRs myself this year.

Probably said 100 thousand times at this point but it's not worth working with any software licence where the vendor (Unity) feels they can change it later, even if they're in the wrong (legally) it's not worth the uncertainty, it's also been said that publishers and platforms may simply not accept games with uncertain licensing.

 

They've been in incompliance since GDPR went into effect, just nobody bothered to pick it up. GDPR enforcement is... spotty, to put it mildly, without a political reason.

Their claim to user data is "necessary to provide service" or some such, despite the fact that the "service" they provide that relies on the telemetry is to the developer, not the user. There is no immediate contract between Unity and anyone that buys Unity-based game.

Also, GDPR requires opt-IN, not opt-out, and that before any information is transmitted, with a disclosure of what information is being transmitted.

So technically any Unity game that does not implement the required GDPR disclosure and opt-in handling that ever was made can very well be in incompliance as far as EU law is concerned.

This was one of the main reasons I avoided going with Unity in the first place - quite a few developers on the forum couldn't get basic information about hardcoded telemetry when I was trying to figure that one out.

But IANAL, so maybe this conclusion is dead wrong. Not like laws seem to be important until someone with enough money rallies behind enforcing them nowadays, either.

 

They just didn't update the docs. It's been the default since 5.1. It's baked in the launcher version of the engine, it's not a setting you can toggle: switching back to 32-bits requires recompiling from source.

 

Charge for "Enter-Play-Mode", or pay for "Script/Shader Compilation time", OR: you have to buy tokens, each action in the runtime and the editor uses tokens. Unity will charge these automatically for you, trust them!

 

>Who is charged the Unity Runtime Fee?
>The Unity Runtime Fee will be charged to the entity that distributes the runtime.

so digital owners like PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo, Google, AppStore are liable to pay the runtime fee on behalf of the game developers?

Devs: so do we have to pay anything?