Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

I'm surprised Ghost Town Games haven't said anything yet, sure, it's been a while since Overcooked (and OC2) has been released, but as we learned 3 days ago, that's irrelevant because apparently companies can change contract details years afterwards like god damn time travellers.

 

I think this will go down in history as the best thing to ever happen to... Godot.
I don't think there ever was anything the Godot devs could have done to gain more popularity than what Unity just did for them. And practically overnight no less!

 

I'm sure you've seen Godot then, it's basically that.
I've been digging into it more and what's there is nice! If a lot of us were to join in, I'm sure we could really help make it an excellent Unity replacement. It would be awesome if some of the popular Unity package creators began porting for Godot.

 

RE the legalities / TOS clause they removed saying we can use old TOS if we don't like the new

Source: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023...d-to-just-change-its-fee-structure-like-that/

(I recommend reading whole article)

Where Unity might run into some legal exposure, Hoeg said, is in the apparent conflict between the overall ToS (which Unity says you are subject to as long as you use its services) and the Software ToS (which until recently said you can keep using an older version if you don't update your game). "That's an ambiguity that... we try to avoid first and foremost when we're writing contracts in legal land," Hoeg said.

In general, this ambiguity would usually be resolved with the more general ToS overriding the "additional" Editor Software Terms, which are considered ancillary in legal parlance. At the same time, Hoeg said a developer could argue that they had reasonably relied on the ancillary language in the Software terms, including the clause that would conceivably let them keep those terms even in the case of future changes.

"Someone could have looked at that and said, 'Yes, I'm going to invest my time and efforts,' and by changing that without making it known and then changing the fee structure here in September of 2023, it's possible you might bring a claim," Hoeg said.

A developer who wanted to pursue that kind of claim in court could argue using the concept of promissory estoppel, or the "notion that you can't just change the deal if somebody else relied upon it," as Hoeg put it. "You made a promise to a party that you were going to give them the Unity tools that they weren't going to have to pay money [for], and they spent four years of their life in investment, in education, learning the Unity toolset and getting ready to build a game, and then you change the pricing right at the end," Hoeg said by way of hypothetical argument.

While Hoeg said he might be personally amenable to this type of argument, it could be a tough, technical claim to make in an actual court. It's the kind of argument where you basically "throw yourself on the concept of justice and hope that things turn out all right for you," as Hoeg put it.

That might be the kind of legal argument some Unity developers are preparing to make, though. Indie developer Xalavier Nelson, Jr. told Axios that "some of the most significant developers in the space using the engine" are considering a class-action lawsuit over the changes, following a Tuesday social media post suggesting the same.

"I can't see how that is legal," Cult of the Lamb developer Massive Monster told PC Gamer. "They absolutely have lawsuits coming their way."

 

Unfortunately Godot's C# implementation is such that using it as the primary language is as bad for performance as anything else you can do. A game engine that was built first and foremost to satisfy the designer's desire to write Python at the expense of performance is one based on a questionable premise. I sincerely hope that the project can wriggle itself out of the position this design decision placed it in.

 

Excellent point that even if you manage to contact their freaking help desk and get them to waive installs during the period where the giveaways are happening, beyond the promotional period those future installs are going to absolutely be counted. If they had the ability to track which ones were originally free then they wouldn't have to count other devices as repeat installs in the first place. They can't tell the difference. Every free giveaway is a potential future cost no matter what they say.

 

I don't disagree at all. Their PR and communication has been a complete and utter disaster. Completely unprofessional and downright incompetent. And it makes me sad to see Unity in a state like that. But that doesn't mean the reaction from developers needs to be as equally unprofessional and irrational.

 

Yea Godot feels like home but no one is there. Very clean.. a little too clean haha

 

Downloaded it yesterday for the first time. Has an interface very similar to Unity on the surface. Doesn't seem to have much of an asset store, but maybe there's a 3rd party store that everyone uses that I'm just not aware of yet.

 

What I think is that the idea that you can sell 100% of your copies at 29$ is absurd.

What about doing a realistic scenario? Like 80% of your sales are humble bundles, steam 80%+ discounts and maybe a deal with apple arcade or game pass for 100k gross total and a free weekend.

 

Yes, that's the point. This plan is meant to push mobile developers into using more Unity services, like their ad program, which then gives the devs credits that can reduce or even eliminate the runtime fee. The FAQ also states the Industry license is exempt from the fee as well. So the main goals of this thing are to push more Unity utilities as well as more license subscriptions

 

I'm happy I stopped using Moq around 4-5 years ago. That was a tremendous breach of trust. I currently use FakeItEasy.

 

I have a hard time believing you've read or listened to any of the complaints, because that's exactly the case. Malicious actors could, in fact, ruin you, and Unity's direct financial incentive is to let them.

See the FAQ on page 1:
Q: Do installs of the same game by the same user across multiple devices count as different installs?
A: Yes - we treat different devices as different installs.
(Updated, Sep 14)

Even in the best case, non-malicious scenario, users who have already bought your game will cause your fees to rise when they upgrade computers, buy a steamdeck, switch from desktop to laptop, etc. Every time, forever.

 

At that amount of income it just doesn't make any sense to stay on Personal. It's been said you can upgrade to Pro midproject and the new terms will apply. So anyone informed will get Pro or even Industry at that point to reduce the fees.

 

For us it's the definitely the last project on unity. We're doing mobile f2p and these changes are just insane.

There is almost zero chance unity switches to revenue share (which is also not viable for f2p). I just don't believe it. I'd love to see how they would approach tencent who makes tens of billions a year from unity games and like "oh guys here's the invoice for 1b".

Actually I would love to know how they are going to do business in china even with the current licensing I guess they dancing around them and treat china as "emerging market" (which is absolute joke) because there is no chance it's going to be acceptable there.

The whole situation is like how to bite a biggest ones so they won't run away and make others to switch to levelplay. No thanks.

For my 15 years career I've remember only this one at the same amount of incompetence: https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/29/developers-adobe-flash-charge/

Adobe were also like hey, there is a growing market in social network games. Companies use our tools and make millions, what should we do We all know where's this tech now.

We're currently evaluating alternatives, but the whole situation made me think that it's actually good to rely on foss. I used to not even look at this direction. It's just even Unreal scares my now. I actually believe they are next. It's just the major flaw when company making tools is actually making money from other stream. If fortnite start declining or all this roblox like initiatives won't work out epic also eventually have to make some moves.

 

Cool. Until they reach their goal and stop giving you credits

 

This is depressing.

 

Riccitiello must be cuckoo again like at EA

 

Riccitiello must be cuckoo again like at EA

 

Comment from Kent Bye:

https://x.com/kentbye/status/1702517865365242087?s=20

"The top five executives at Unity received $206,711,987 in total compensation from 2020-2022. Now they're speedrunning a complete brand implosion."

 

You want humble bumble analytics - be my guest.
First three weeks you sale for premium price - realistically this is a most common scenario. You bundle in long tail or if it's a total flop after 3-4 weeks max.

 

I won't comment this.

https://twitter.com/FreyaHolmer/status/1702763041123684601

 

So... are they really just going to hope everyone forgets about this by Monday?

Kinda confused why no more dialogue has happened with Unity itself not just some random source that says they talked with them.

 

Oh boy, this is going to happen isn't it, its the natural next step after all this and Unity are in the perfect place to do it with their Ads service and the IronSource merger!

 

It really should be criminal to extract that much monetary value out of a public F***ing company while adding such little value. And the company isn't even profitable. Should be a requirement the company has to be profitable for them to take anything other than a fair salary. No stock sales. Incentivize them to run the business well and make money then they can sell. Otherwise their stock goes to $0.

Executive compensation is a whole separate issue but it's just disgusting and is responsible for so much of the downward spiral the western world has been experiencing the past 30 years. Zero incentive for these ghouls to run the business well. Get in and cash out is all they do.

I'm tired, boss.

 

It doesn't matter.

We're finishing our project and then we're moving to another engine (not sure which one yet). We're also cancelling our Pro licenses (I'll have to look up a few details first).

Unless the whole C-Suite and board leaves the company and then it is taken private, there is nothing they can announce that will change our minds. The course they have taken for many years doesn't align with our interests at all, maybe they will walk back this specific move a lot, but it's simply a matter of time before they screw us over again, it's inevitable.

 

Explanation for everybody to understand how the new Unity fee works:

Unity uses a wave function that is derived from your monthly revenue from game sales. When Unity reaches your customer record, the wave function collapses, and Unity calculates the probability that you had higher than expected sales. If so, he will charge you his share. It is known that Einstein and Dirac were working on this and they called it "the Unity Einstein Dirac Equation".

 

Unity have failed to effectively run their business and are attempting probably the most egregious tactic to save it I've ever seen in trying to charge existing released, and upcoming successful games an arbitrary amount of more money every month. An amount they will effectively be guessing, but expecting you to be beholden to it.

Unity charge X for their software, have Y number of users for Z revenue. They then use this revenue to pay their employees and expenses. That's how a basic business is run.

The amount they charge is based on what amount of users they can sell to and their expenses and desired profit margin. Like almost all software that gets used to produce something, they gamble on what % of users will be profitable and benefit from the price and what amount will not be and would not have paid in hindsight.

Unity, like other companies selling tools, would love it if all users were very successful because they could charge more for their software up front. That is not the reality though.

We have former and current Unity employees chiming in around the place now trying to claim that Unity deserve more money from the companies that would have paid more. They are effectively saying that those companies should exist in the alternate dimension where all users are successful and the subscription price should have been higher. That is not how this works.

Unity want the users to gamble on their success by paying for the license at the price they set, but they also want to take their own gamble away by taking more from the ones that succeed. They can change their offering to do that and see who accepts going forward. But retroactively? For existing games or games soon to be released that were developed under a different bargain? Outrageous.

Unity executives have failed to effectively run their company. They expect all the previous successful developers that used Unity to bail them out because their lawyers said they could do it.

No one should accept these changes, or the slightly reduced changes they will try offering next week. What an insane precedent for the entire software industry this fake install counting charge would be.

The Unity execs have failed and should step down. Sell the non-core business assets you have accrued, scale your business appropriately for the revenue you will now receive, even raise the subscription prices again if you think the X and Y calculations will be positive.

They are a business and they want to make as much of you as they can. Do not start to think they deserve your charity, people.

 

I will do my own calculation called the Ligma calculation. They can ligma balls if they think they will be getting $1 out of me under this method of billing.

If they want to come up with something fair and realistic and trustworthy, let me know. Otherwise ligma.

 

I haven't really seen this in the research I've been doing. Most seem to state that C# is faster than GDScript in most instances, while GDScript is best for rapid iteration and has some other strengths on a case by case basis.
It also seems like C# support has greatly improved in general for Godot 4. They've also moved away from a lot of the reflection they were doing to improve speed and integration with the engine.
I'm sure it's not where Unity C# support is, but it seems to be a priority of the Godot team to continue improving support for it.

All that said, there is still the option of writing C++ which is great.

An excerpt from a reddit discussion I had come across (possibly anecdotal, so take with a grain of salt!):

"C# is 4 times faster according to the docs (its in there somewhere) That said, c++ modules are quite similar to write compared to gdscript, thus making it quite easy. If you want to use gdnative without c++, I can reccommend gdnative-rust Its harder to learn at first, but is has similar if not better performance than c++, and it makes multithreading easier to do if you need that"

 

... and yet Unity have all the information ( or so they claim) to know exactly when this happens, so they could simply add a clause that anyone on Personal, who exceeds its threshold can/will automatically be moved up to Pro for that month.

Granted its still a bit unpredictable in terms of outgoings for the developer, but no worse than best case scenario, and infinitely better than worse case.

Needles to say it doesn't change the fact that the whole plan is flawed to begin with.

 

if you ever downloaded a new version all you TOS changed over so game over

 

you get benefit when you make us look good, what else to say there.

 

I guess you've missed the past 5-10 years of aspiration to not just be a game engine company then, or that whole 'realtime visualisation' notion is a pretty big thing n all sorts of industries these days.
Its quite bleedin' obvious they saw Unreal getting a better toehold in the film and TV industry than them and thought an acquisition like this could fix that.

 

Yes, that's how business works. Why on earth would Unity promote or encourage you to use a competitors's software over theirs?

 

And yet they just did. This change is the best advertisement Godot and Unreal have ever seen.

 

What constitutes an unity insider?

 

The issue is it was a lot easier and natural for unreal to break into TV / film. They were already aiming for more high end photorealism and then someone figured out if they cranked up all features up to 11 and have some minor tooling around it, boom, you can use it for whole new industries.

Unity has been trying to jam things for film and TV that don't quite fit with the rest of the game engine, which is why they are failing.

 

Mmmhmmm

Good luck is all I can say for that

 

PC/console devs aren't really hurt by these billing changes specifically. It's a small revenue loss, but since Unity is increasing prices anyways, anything would do that (ignoring the install bomb by malicious people potential).

However, PC/console devs are greatly hurt by the way in which these changes are implemented. Retroactively changing terms of service, and implementing new fees under terms that weren't initially agreed to is a huge issue. Businesses really don't have a reason to trust Unity going forward because even if you're in the category of developer that's not significantly affected here, they've implemented the ability to make future changes like this, and you don't know when or how big those changes will be. It's a completely open ended liability that the developer has no control over. For many companies that's going to be an unacceptable risk, because it doesn't really matter if Unity is better than the alternatives from a technical standpoint, it's now associated with risk factors that you can't control, can't approximate, and can't plan for.

 

Why stop there?

Place a $0.02 fee for every script creation.
A $0.2 fee for every editor launch.
Heck, a $0.0001 fee for every character in a script.

This way we will have the most optimized code.

 

Update from Freya Holmer: https://twitter.com/FreyaHolmer/status/1702763041123684601#m

"a few of us unity insiders just had a meeting with some of the leadership at Unity

we're under NDA, so I can't share details of what was discussed

but, I got a tiny glimmer of cautious hope restored

I'm happy they were willing to talk frankly, and take the time to listen

I will continue to push on two points:

1. retroactive TOS/monetization changes are completely unacceptable, this is why trust was broken, irreparably for many. Any big changes to monetization should only apply to future versions of unity. not retroactively

2. the monetization scheme has to be something you can run the numbers on, it has to be predictable and workable as a business, using metrics/data we actually have access to, like sales. "installs" as a metric is a chaotic mess with lots of privacy and trust concerns

I'm pretty sure that if the original announcement was: • rev share model (at or below Unreal's rate & threshold) • only applies to unity 2024.x and beyond • no more per-seat licensing costs people would be upset, but, it wouldn't even be close to this level of backlash"

 

$.02 on every second Unity Editor spends on
- script compile
- shader compile
- domain reload
- asset reimport

 

Give it a rest. I used to think this way too.

But Godot does things much better than unity in the 2D space, and unreal does things much better than unity in the 3D space. Godot may catch up with the 3D stuff too.

Only catch I see with Godot is the porting to consoles but there are publishers who can help with that or other means.

Never say never compadre.

 

It wasn't though, so this hypothetical serves no purpose.

 

This was basically my outdated view of Unity. Up until this point, I hadn't done much research about the company Unity is now (CEO, layoffs, dev drama, stock sales, etc.) rather than what it was like ~10 years ago. Unity was always in competition with unreal and I had thought Unity went without royalties in their plan because they acknowledged that their engine was pretty behind par in a lot of ways to unreal. Unity was supposed to the be the more "indie-friendly" option, and a few years ago, it was. Clearly that isn't the case with this pricing update. It seems now that Unity wants to be basically if EA were to run a game engine(hint: it would be predatory S***).

Unity trying to make money is fair (I didn't realize how or why they were even in financial trouble and why they wouldnt put the breaks on company costs for program expansions like sentis, visual scripting, etc.), just like unreal is making their money, but this pricing plan is laughable and I really want no part of it. Now that Unity has officially lost it's "indie- friendly" status, I can't see why devs wouldn't be pulled toward other engines.

 

Regardless if the dev charges $5 or $60 for a game, they are all charged the same 20c fee. This means "low fees" creators and/or startup devs who have found success ends up paying unity (perpetually) instead of earning anything. This is how Unity kills their "goose that lays the golden egg".

 

This feels like a positive development, but I'm still not holding my breath. Any competent leadership would've made the right decision once the ship started to sink.

 

And this would be a much better option, but it's too late now.