Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

And ignored. Nothing personal but if you dont have the intellect to understand why this is wrong on so many levels (all levels?) I think its best we dont see each other anymore

 

Unity, the first developing tool where you pray not to get too much success.

 

Again.

 

A talking moose wants my credit card number? That's only fair.

 

The CEO sold 2000 shares a week before dropping the news. WTF.
https://www.pocketgamer.biz/news/82...week-before-dropping-their-pricing-bombshell/

 

No, he sold them three months and a week before and it wasn't even him, it was his wife.

 

We should not miss a simple point: we pay for Microsoft Word and write stories, reports, etc... Then we put our stories on sale. This is the true nature of relationship in these middleware things. What Unity does is not accepting this nature and trying to cheat on this. And they do this very obviously, the words and language they use clearly say this ("we don't want revenue based, we want this..."). It is so clear, it is so there. This attitude suits mafia, not a legal business. So, we all should have an ethical stance against this. That simple! It is not even about money or all of those other technical issues.

 

Nothing compared to what Silverlake Investment dropped just friday evening.

 

But at least Unreal doesn’t change past terms of service, which can really get you in the end. And it’s pretty nice to download Godot and not have to worry about enterprise licenses or pro licenses. You just download the full app.

 

Untill they get accuired one day by xyz corpo and apply fees. It happened such things before many times. So you SAFE bet is only an illusion.

Also, Unreal has big bucks supporting it behind the scene. So they can do pretty much whatever.

 

They will have known about their plans months in advance as well.

 

Pretty impressive for a forum to take this long for Godwin's Law.

 

That's exactly why those countries among many others count as "Emerging market" and have drastically lower fees (0.01-0.02$) by Unity!
In central Europe for comparison Among Us costs 4.50€ right now.
The devs would not have had to sell their houses with the new fees either >_>

Unity did not think of this fee system willy nilly...

 

Picture is from 4chan(most probably) and people should know that it is not anonymous at all.

 

"Our computer system told us, that you owe us $20,000.00 dollars."

/thread

 

John R. is literally Hitler

 

If that was true we wouldn't in 5th day of the whole debacle and Unity wouldn't be dead silent on any matter and they wouldn't have amended the whole F***ery multiple times already.

They absolutely thought of this willy-nilly.

 

No, GODOT is distributed as standard alone software. The source is included, you can compile GODOT yourself with your own license.

 

You are wrong:
https://godotengine.org/governance/

 

Unity has published the conditions. Even made this thread with further info as a QnA. Hard to clarify much more than that.
They surely watch the reactions right now and will evaluate over days or weeks whether consequences are to be taken. It also seems like they are in some talks with studios.
It is never smart to react to S***storms like these within days because short-term reactions don't matter in big business.
Just like it's not smart to abandon an Engine within days either, lol. Looking at alternatives of course never hurt in general.
Also this thread here is at least 90% overrun by trolls and people with <50 posts over years.

Btw. I see you writing day and night here. No other hobbies?

 

Every time someone tries to defend Unity's install counting scheme and deceptive TOS changes, I'm reminded of this scene from Animal House. That's Unity holding the paddle.

 

In which they have been contradicting themselves. They went from “reinstalls always count as installs” to “the spirit was always to only count the first install”. They are making it up as they go.​

 

I'm thinking a lot about Unitys current financial situation, and I'm starting to see why they felt they had to go for a retroactive TOS change. Not that I agree with it, and I believe it should rightfully be a reason for businesses to abandon the company, but I do see their perspective.

Thanks to them being a public company now, we have their disclosure statements pointing out their revenues, losses, and cash on hand. As of February, Unity was looking at 1.6 billion in cash on hand and an annual shortfall of 920 million. They can stay in operation for another 21 months at that rate.

The problem though, is that we need to look at the lead time in games where a change to licensing such as revenue share would be applicable. 2023 LTS is being supported until 2025. Developers may continue to use it past that too, especially if a later release includes a revenue share. So the earliest we would see a company realistically start a project eligible for a revenue share would be 2025, which would mean a release date of around 2028.

Unity would therefore need to figure out how to reduce their deficit by enough to extend their runway from 21 months to at least 54 months. And short of mass layoffs which would greatly impact their ability to deliver on enough features to convince people to switch to an updated version of an engine, I'm not sure how they could do that.

The leadership at Unity has completely F'ed them.

 

I would like to know..

A : Income threshold over the last 12 months.

For me the last 12 months means that at the beginning of each month ( the 1st of the month ) they recalculate the last 12 months.

Example:
Release game = January 1, 2024
On February 1, 2024, Unity will check the last 12 months, even if it's only been a month.
We are in January 1, 2025

• 
  
  
  • January 1, 2025, Unity check for last 12 months . -> January 1 to December 31, 2024
  • February 1, 2025, Unity check for last 12 months. -> February 1 ,2024, to January 31, 2025
  • March 1, 2025, Unity check for last 12 months. -> March 1 ,2024, to February 28 (29..) 2025
  • Etc...

A1 / That's it?
​

B : Questions:

1. Does Unity receive our revenue each month or do we have to provide it?
2. Will we have access to the live install quantity for each of our games?
3. They can't do it by sale instead of per installed ? (complicated?)

​

 

Godot is MIT.
https://github.com/godotengine/godot/blob/master/LICENSE.txt

Should have been this license though.
http://www.wtfpl.net/
http://www.wtfpl.net/about/

 

Everyone here needs to think about the positives: this is going to be great for Epic's stock price!

Isn't it funny how Unity and Tencent, which owns 50% of Epic, are owned by almost exactly the same institutional shareholders? Wouldn't firms with a large stake in the large AAA publishers (look at institutional shareholders of: EA, Activision, Rockstar, etc...) see this as a viable way to undermine the Indie studios, especially in light of declining interest in AAA and Indies' increasing market share in recent years? If so, wouldn't that be a crime, and constitute fraud against Unity's other shareholders? I sure hope nobody goes to jail for that!

What do I know, though? I'm just a guy who's trying to make a conspiracy-themed video game, asking some questions on an Internet forum.

Sequoia, Blackrock, Vanguard.

 

Yes, I think so.

You mean the numbers? They don’t receive it. You’re probably supposed to self report, and they will send you passive aggressive emails if they suspect you made money over the threshold and haven’t told them.

I think the answer is yes.

They want to be able to “calculate” the number, so it needs to be a number that doesn’t have a verifiably right answer. If they calculated sales, everyone would see they are wrong and they would be flooded with support tickets. “Installs” on the other hand, especially ones with weird exceptions and non exceptions, don’t quite have a right answer.

 

The FAQ says reinstalls will not be charged.
Next?

 

Epic is a private company.

 

Does Unity consider Russia and China "emerging markets"? If not than PC devs will be affected by this. With regional pricing on Steam, your profit margin per sales in these markets are a lot lower.

 

No. Insanely stupid investments from the management should have inhouse consequences. This is NOT something the clients should be paying for. I have NO idea how the CEO has hold his chair for this long, knowing his past. I've NEVER seen a company to take this deep dive this fast. But, some people are narcists, and they screw everyone nearby your besties. Been there, seen that. It's never their fault, always someone nearby. I've played this game few times before setting up my seconds own company.

 

The FAQ also said they had no way to verify this at all.

 

Why is everyone skipping the part about installs on other devices counting?

 

Can't they just open source part of the engine, "Unity Community Edition" *COUGH* M$ *COUGH*

Then get rid of this LTS idea?

Just charge royalties over sales >=$200k, >= $500k, >= $1m.

Keep membership license models of Plus and Pro, maybe add Plus Ultra, and Pro Plus, yes.

I think there are a ton of developers who would love to take a look at Unity source code.

Proprietary parts of the engine should be stripped out and kept modular.

I don't this idea makes sense at all to do anything sensible at all ever, for anyone, even within extraterrestrial economies outside of our solar system.

Ever.

You have to ask yourself, would the Hutts of Nar Shaddaa do this? Wouldn't they? No? I don't know.

 

50% owned by Tencent, which is publicly traded.

 

Tell me you don't know how middleware licenses work without telling me you don't know how middleware licenses work.

 

40%

They are still private.

 

It's not 50%. Tencent owns a 40% share of Epic. Tim Sweeney is the majority owner.

 

rofl....such ignorance. Its all based on trust if they can actually track that or not. If you trust them then that is very foolish.

 

Well excuse me princess. The overall point still stands if you look at almost all the AAA publishers. Who owns Activision? How about EA?

 

They're just hiring low-paid PR interns to do damage control in this thread.

I posted a wall of text and this guy was waiting to object to the first sentence 5 seconds later.

 

I’ll be honest, I didn’t read your full post.

 

That kind of thing has actually happened a couple of times to the open source community, however there's a pretty solid defense against that. That defense is in the license - specifically it's a specially crafted license that allows whoever they want to take the existing code and create the next Godot under that same open license.

 

most of those people were working on games, i didn´t log in years since it was not nescessary. its 90% non trolls. you woke up the programmers and they are pissed

 

FWIW, I appreciate the conspiracy theory take from a conspiracy theory game dev. A little levity is nice in the midst of all this clusterf**kery.

 

I personally don't have objections over some install-based fee, Unity was always very cheep in comparison to competitors and it is understandable that they need more income to support development.
Even this model that was proposed could work BUT if they will add come sort of revenue % ceiling on that fee. For example 5% or even 10%. This way the worst situation for a developer could be just paying similar to unreal's revenue share, which would still be competitive.
And transparent way to measure installs for a developer.
This two things are enough for me to alleviate complains about new model.

 

The plot thicken:

the
IRONSOURCE
Angle​

 

As far as I'm concerned as soon as a bill goes out without a reference to terms being used it's breach of contract. As soon as billed without transactional information it's billing and invoice fraud.

As soon as it has transactional information it's breaking Consumer Data Protection laws.
As soon as transactional information is received from parties(steam/microsoft/good old games etc.) Said companies without issuing a consent to consumers/notice are committing consipracy to commit fraud.

since these are online transactions that cross country and state lines it's no longer a state issue.

 

At that point they should just do what Unreal does then and make the revenue cap 5%.

See, that's the problem with all these "here's how this could work" proposals: literally every one of them is still going to end up resulting in the same thing but with a cap that will protect the biggest earners out there. None of this addresses the needless complexity or the trust violation that comes from this idea in the first place.