Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Nothing? What are the Pro license sub fees I’ve been paying for years though? Nothing?

 

I mean per game numbers or revenue.

Plus still had the Personal option

 

This runtime fee turning into a runtime flee...
Do you think there's a chance for Unity to cancel this movement?

 

Unity TOS don't give you infinite updates either. You are moving the goal post, again.

 

I wonder, why wouldn't Unity give a choice to the developers? After all, they already have several different subscription plans, so just making a choice between % of income vs. pay for installs wouldn't be a problem.

 

I never said they do, just that MIT does not mean anything in the long run

 

Or can just cap the current proposed scheme, that would also make more sense and make it universally same to much better than Unreal

 

I think it would be only fair that unity also charges asset store sellers 20c every time someone, imports their assets, mind you not buy their assets, but just import them.

 

I think you are a bad faith actor, troll or worse and blocked you.

 

the difference is that MIT lets you fork the full source code of engine. E.g. if the maintainer of the Godot or Blender repos changed the license and took it private, the community has all the source code and can take things forward without possibility for legal restrictions on use of that version.

 

I will only mention Unreal, as other free engines are not near to Unity or Unreal in production level and features.

Lets say that after using it, i got a feeling that will spend all my time looking at the SDF baking, with my laptop almost at burning point and with a terrible editor that is exactly what i hate in GUIs.

The editor experience itself drive me far away from Unreal. I am a C++ programmer for my post doc studies with drone programming and write most code in c++ in Linux, so for sure the language is the least of the issues and generally c++ has been much more managable to use in last years.

 

Which means nothing really, even if Unity 5 was released now for free and MIT, you could probably not use it in latest hardware specs, so would need to rewrite parts of the engine.

 

In fact, the Unity TOS gives you "zero" updates and automatically ports you over to whatever changes they make (or at least that's how they'd have you take it).

Offering the option to stay on the existing agreement/platform is a huge improvement over 'we can screw you over at any time of our choosing', particularly if LTS releases are frozen to a particular agreement as well.

 

Yeah, I would say troll also, considering the comment about UE5 charging, but forgot to mention it was only after a million worth of sales, depending on how much we charge for our apps it would be more likely we will never get charged at all using UE5 compared to Unity now.

 

In Godot bug fixes get ported back into older versions without other changes, great for legacy code bases. You could stay with the bugs if you want, though.

 

Because adding either of these to already existing license terms has the same issue. It requires a retroactive change to the TOS, which means revenue calculations, risk management, and so on for games becomes problematic. Terms agreed to at the start of a project need to either be followed through on, or offered up for optional renegotiation mid project. Changing them unilaterally without consulting the other party is questionable even when your TOS says you can do that.

The only way to change terms is to do it for new versions of Unity. But, between the lead time for game development and the time it would take to convince devs to switch to a more expensive version of the engine, it would be a rather long time before Unity ever saw additional revenue from a change.

They're in a position of either burning all trust with their developers and giving businesses a huge reason to not work with them in the future, or waiting years to see any benefit from their price changes. These are both bad options, and it's the fault of their companies leadership that they're in this position in the first place.

 

MIT licence means that if your project is a few months from release, the engine devs can't screw your project over with random licence changes. And the open source nature of Godot means that you can always review any critical security fixes and port them over yourself if you need to (although in practice, someone from the community will be maintaining LTS/point in time releases as a secondary body of work).

Ultimately the real guarantee is that the governance body is not driven by a for profit motive, because even if they did decide to implement any sort of billing framework, the profit would stay with the project as there are no 'shareholders' to send it to.

The high level details are here: https://godotengine.org/governance/ and I'm sure you can find the legal docs published somewhere.

 

You people need to chill out, Unity OWE you NOTHING. If they want to charge a MILLION bucks per install its their thing, take it or leave it. Retroactive or guessing the install that is not ok but else its their right. WE 3D guys are the worst of the worst, ALWAYS Demanding but very unwilling to pay or share a buck with the engine makers. Let me Remind you all that THANKS unity and Epic we are able to use SUPER modern engines, They are the Microsoft of 3D, Remember Microsoft and Apple? If it were for apple computers would still cost 30k^.... So you all are just ungrateful people. Godot? Hahaha, That weird piece of software were its a pain even to import assets? Yeah GO THERE!!

 

That's an endorsement right there.

 

1. Normally, a user downloaded and installed a game to decide whether to purchase or not, and user not yet purchase the game yet, will Unity charge the runtime fee in this case ?

2. What about Unity assets published by developer A had been purchased and deployed by developer B on B's games, will the runtime fee charge upon developer A in this case ?

If Unity charge runtime fee based on installation regardless of whether that game is purchased or not, then this is a huge problem to its developers.

Please advise.

 

I cant imagine how can we really be comparing Godot to Unity

https://6sense.com/tech/game-development/unity-vs-godot#:~:text=Comparing the market share of,share in the same space.

Unity has a 29.41% market share in the Game Development category, while Godot has a 0.74% market share in the same space.

If Godot was at Unity popularity, i dont think they could keep support development for free.

Being MIT today means nothing, at any point can be charging more than Unity for all we know.

 

Wait at least a week. Unity changed their mind within 24 hours and its weekend.

 

Even if they reverse this decision 100%, will you still trust Unity? Is there a guarantee that they won't ruin your business with a more ridiculous decision in the future?

 

Go away, troll. If the EU Commission investigates this, they will destroy Unity. It's not like a private company can do whatever it wants. We don't live in a jungle.

 

"Today, people don't aspire to create value - They aspire to capture it"

 

No, when Unity was at it's prime(damn it was on the verge of competing with unreal) i evaluated legality and stumbled upon Johnny boy who just arrived.

 

probably read the MIT license and educate yourself on what open source is before spamming this constantly

 

So we can't voice our opinions?
Also as you can see from the thread people have no problem with unity increasing pricing, the issue here is being charged from an action a third party is doing that you have no control over, cannot stop, can be done unlimited amount of times, for the rest of your life.

They can charge me 10% of my revenue from the first sale, no thresholds, I'm totally fine with that.

- I make 50k, they charge me 5k? Totally fine with that.
- I make 50k they charge me 1cent because they claim some dude is installing the game somewhere in the world? No thanks

 

Why the developer should pay the Unity when the player just downloads the game without any purchase? I am confused...

 

You completely ignored everything I said to post a bunch of stuff that doesn't matter.

 

Hi,

I have been using Unity for about 10 years and have some questions about the latest license changes. Forgive me if some of these are naive as far as legal questions go as I'm not a lawyer:

1) You're asking us to rely on your closed-source method for counting installs. If a game is only released as a paid download on a well-respected platform like iOS or Steam and the download numbers in your estimation differ from the actual download numbers retrieved from Steam or Apple, whose download numbers will be taken as the truth? Yours or Apple's or Valve's?

2) Further to question one, where is this guarantee or elucidation in the latest TOS?

3) What sort of guarantee is in the latest TOS that you won't retroactively change the license terms so that a company owes so much money that they now have to sell the family home 5 years after releasing their game for some reason known only to Unity's C-Suite??

4) Is there a precedent in legal history that you are basing your license changes on in which the terms of a contract were changed retroactively and said changes were determined to be justified by a court/judge?

5) Further to question one, how are you tracking installs? ML-base estimation methods or direct phone-home methods or some other method?

6) Further to question five, if it's phone-home methods, how are we going to change our official stance from "no, I don't collect data" to "lol jokes, I have actually been collecting data this whole time and feel free to sue me" when we tell Apple that we don't collect data on children that may download our games?

7) Further to question five, if it's ML-based methods then what are the inputs and models used? XGBoost? LightGBM? Blackbox proprietary?

8) Further to question seven, are you encrypting the data that you learn from? Is that how you are avoiding privacy concerns?

9) Further to question seven, are you using homomorphic encryption to train ML models? Is that how you are avoiding privacy concerns?

10) Will there be any guarantees that you won't retroactively change the license terms to charge more for Assets downloaded from the Asset Store such that we cannot use them unless a new fee structure is agreed to?

11) Will there be any guarantees that, given your latest push for AI-driven capabilities, that you won't decide in the future to change your TOS so that you are allowed to train your AI/ML models on my game's unique assets?

12) Further to question 11, once you've trained your ML-models on my unique assets will you then create new assets using my style and then change the TOS so that no game may have a similar style to any assets on the Asset Store and if they do then compensation will have to be paid to Unity?

13) Further to question 11, if my game is unique in it's gameplay then will you create an Asset Store template of a game of exactly my game's unique style and then change the TOS so that anyone who creates a game using Unity and that uses that particular gameplay style or template must pay Unity a fee whose magnitude is at the sole discretion of Unity?

14) If a user decides that your terms aren't acceptable and changes to another engine will you change the TOS so that porting a game to another engine is against the TOS and if done then Unity has the right to compensation?

15) If a user decides that your terms aren't acceptable and starts a crowd-sourced project to create a user-friendly asset that ports games from Unity to say, Unreal, for free, will you then change the TOS so that no game can use such an asset?

16) Have you consulted Apple, Google and Valve about this? Are they confident in your ability to estimate install numbers? I ask as I'm sure there will be companies challenging your estimates with actual download numbers from those companies.

17) Does anyone at Unity who has been involved in this decision have any financial or political interest in Unreal? This latest round of decisions seems like a great way to increase Unreal's standing amongst game developers and to tank Unity's standing.

18) Everyone wants Unity to be profitable. Surely, during internal Unity discussions there were other alternative financial models that were raised. What were they? Why were they rejected?

That is all for now. I'm sure others will come to mind.

 

It's per installed unit on any device no matter how many licenses were bought for your game, not downloads. At least that was their last and probably not final statement.

Downloads would be easy and technically possible to track.

 

i was a unity's fanboy till 2021 - 2022 and even i am looking for another engine with at least basic functions

 

IIRC Vanguard has his hands in both pots
unity:
https://www.marketbeat.com/instant-alerts/nyse-u-sec-filing-2023-08-27/
tencent->epic games->unreal:
https://personal.vanguard.com/us/Fu...NT&APP=PE&Wl=PE&tableName=Equity&tableIndex=0

edit: unity could rebrand itself as "twentycent"

 

Hi, John! Nice of you to show up on the forums.

Nope. You've demonstrated repeatedly that you absolutely refuse to understand, so maybe give it a rest.

 

This engine is dead. Next.

 

Vanguard is just an set of investment funds, they generally don't have strong opinions like 'we must destroy your company in a bizarre attempt to make your ad company purchase look more sensible'.

 

Voodoo etc. Genshin impact.

They are messing with lot's of big money as well as us small guys

 

Their revenue model is tapping everything and then make things move, no matter the direction. If you are interested message me, because I don't want to go off topic.

 

A lot of people here pay royalties to use Unity and you call them ungrateful? Is it true that Unity doesn't owe us anything by changing the TOS and forcing us to pay a second time for old Unity versions?

 

I mentioned Unity is charging per install thing to a friend yesterday and he asked, "are these guys mafia?"

No more words needed on this.

 

The FAQ also says counting will be a hidden box where no one can see anything and you'll have to believe their numbers. Next?

 

Runtime Fee?

More like FUNTIME REEEEEEEE!!!!

 

Vanguard's model is skimming management fees off the top of their funds. Profits = dividends = more money for vanguard's funds and therefore Vanguard; however, I'm 100% confident that Vanguard are capable of recognising 'hey, alienating our customer base in a wildly misguided attempt to strongarm users onto our ad platform' is not going to work.

Don't get me wrong, I agree that Vanguard are pushing for profitability, but I'm sure they'd prefer a flat percentage over the potential value of forcing users onto Ironsource [with the enormous caveat that its entirely possible the CEO et al might have 'overstated the benefits and understated the risks' of the current approach when briefing the board].

I don't think this is super off topic, because it does go to the heart of 'what assumptions did the exec team make about the funding model when they sold it to the board: Maybe something like "Everyone will love it and people will flock to Ironsource for ads and we're going to all be rich and wear fur coats and that other ad company will be ruined forever".

 

Every time you have fun playing a game made with Unity engine you will have to pay 20 cents, and we will count it with our own proprietary engine LOL

 

1) They would be forced. If Unity want people to use LevelPlay, they should provide positive reasons to. That's called good competition. Devs choosing AppLovin; over Level Play do so for a reason. Perhaps it's because of the reputation Ironsource has?
2) Inventing a fee to push users onto Unity's own service where Unity owns a huge share of the mobile engine space is clearly anticompetitive behaviour by Unity.

 

Not saying it is true, but if this conspiracy is true, can you imagine the mind you have to have in order to have the thought process:

"Right what we'll do is face all our mobile developers with potential financial ruin - But we'll offer them a get out of jail pass if they are willing to help us financially ruin someone else instead. Yes. They will forgive us and trust us forever again after that, forgetting we just threatened to ruin them. I would take that deal. So I am sure they will go for it. Let's roll it out internationally"

 

Cool, yet more people who don't understand the issues in all of this. Or probably just being a troll. Either way, still stupid.

Let's forget about the fact that developers are being asked for a form of royalty (which isn't inherently a bad thing, but this whole deal takes the piss). Let's ignore that for the moment, and focus on the other issues that matter right here.

Firstly, the fees are being charged based on installs. Unity claims are conflicting and nonsensical in this regard, where they claim they can seemingly track the numerous different installs on numerous different kinds of device so as to not count an install on a device that game has already been installed on.
But how can you know? Does the game fingerprint the device and send that to Unity? To what degree does it do that? What are the criteria for a "new install"? A change of CPU? A new graphics card? Hell, could changing your device's storage trigger the 'new install'?
Whilst it can be argued to be possible on devices that have their hardware locked down (consoles, mobile devices etc.), a not insignificant amount of games get released on PC, and there, things get incredibly muddy and unreliable due to how many variables there are to keep track of. There isn't really a way to keep track of everything in a way that isn't a potential security and privacy concern.
On top of that, the charge per install becomes a lottery for developers, because on PC, games don't always install perfectly and can sometimes have an issue that breaks the game, necessitating the player uninstalling and reinstalling. How can we trust that it won't count a 'new install' instead of a 'reinstall'? Vague assurances?

And that's before we talk about the big issue here: the retroactive application of the new Terms of Service to pretty much anything that has been made in Unity in however many years. The games that these Terms of Service are now forced into compliance with were never made with them in mind; they were made with earlier versions in mind.
Shuffling everyone onto the same ToS regardless of when they made their game, is a good way to make people very weary of you, because whilst companies change their ToS on a regular basis, usually those changes are pretty small. I struggle to think of an instance where the implications of the change have been this drastic.
Fundamentally, the problem here is that Unity have lost a lot of trust with independent developers. Some might argue that they're exaggerating the problems here or whatever, but it's hard to trust a company when they make a decision like this, ignore all the warnings that many people in the company urged its higher-ups not to go through with, and remaining silent after posting assurances that this isn't really all that bad and only fanning the flames and making things worse. The silence is deafening.

But sure, it's not all that bad; people are just exaggerating, I guess.

 

How could ML be trained to model installs when there's no ground truth?

 

The irony is - the companies that Unity is trying to monetize(mobile) are actually the ones that can migrate to Godot the fastest. Unity management - you couldn't fail harder even if you tried.
Sucks for everyone but after going through this with Flash, the developers are going to be alright. Unity won't.