Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Damn, this fire just keeps growing. As I'm still reading up on this, I have a genuine concern for those who have designed assets for the engine and what if they decide to pull their assets out of the store in response to the recent announcement. If I were an asset creator, the decision making would give me pause

 

saw one here,
https://forum.unity.com/threads/deprecated-my-assets-in-the-assets-store.1492178/


buyers are in difficult spot also,
https://twitter.com/demigiant/status/1703341484294930556

 

I mean... You could still have chosen to sell on Steam

Plus, you might not know your game will get profitable until it gets popular. Think about the success of Flappy Bird. I doubt that developer had a fancy license.

 

According to a recent Unity tweet, 10% of their customers will be affected.

ChatGPT reminds us they had 5 million in 2021, while some google results put registrations in the billions. Let’s say the AI is right, that translates the tweet as saying “only” 500,000 developers are affected. Most developers have more than one game, and I’m sure there are enough of those that qualify to make this proposal sound like a wet dream to the decision makers here.

All arguments against Unreal have no weight at all.

They have two models: buy the source code (negotiated contracts), or pay royalties (after $1 million sales)

Unity is the bi-polar love child of a street hawker in comparison. But whatever, enjoy the bed you sleep in, lice and all.

 

He didn't need one. He used Cocos-x which is MIT licensed. He didn't have to pay anything. The Flappy Bird author made the smart choice in the end to use that instead of Unity as if these changes go through he would have to pay them many millions of dollars. Instead he continues to pay nothing.

 

Okay, let me make my proposal.

Maybe it's time to formulate our questions to management and then demand answers to them? They screwed up, but it's worth establishing a dialogue.

 

Not sure what those numbers are, is the 14 million new users or just redownloads for example ?

 

Well, that's what the Insiders have been doing...at least, once Unity's employees got it into the heads of management that they should probably hear some concerns raised by people whose livings are made on the engine.

 

Totally get where you're coming from. As someone deep into Unity's animation, I'm right there with you. Unity does have its perks when you're importing and handling animations. Recently, I've been diving into Unreal more seriously than before. While I've been tempted by the possibilities it offers, I'm also hesitant about leaving behind tools like Animancer Pro. It's like the perfect blend of my favourite fields: animations and C# coding.

But let's be real, Unity isn't the gold standard for everything animation-related. For me, the best way is animating outside of Unity and then importing the polished piece. The in-built animation tools in Unity? Not the greatest. I've dealt with thousands of animation clips, and dealing with those frames can sometimes drive me nuts. Sure, the Humanoid rig has its moments, but manually tweaking bone values? Total pain. Even though I’ve gotten so used to it, I can adjust values on autopilot (I literally memorized the whole list of bones). I've tried store assets too but didn't strike gold there either. Unity in-house IK rig solution feels like it's lagging behind what other software offer. You'd think with their resources, they'd invest in mirroring the features of top-tier animation tools instead of snapping up licenses left and right. Or why not acquire the ultimate IK system (forgot the name) from the store, make it freely available, and then refine and expand it? Of course not, just the current fiasco...

Sorry for going off on a tangent there. Just some animator feels!

ps. surprinsigly, seems like alembic data is usable these days inside Unity, but Unreal has many issues dealing with it. Another worry.

 

I never said that. Why would they need to close it ?

They will just start a new Godot version with payment, that will get all support and updates.

The current MIT version of that time will just stop working on newer hardware and APIs and will need to pay if want to release there.

Same why mobile games cant be published with Unity 4 for example.

 

tbh i'm here because people share links with detailed news, also, i'll be here when unity staff says something about it, just for curiosity because i'm not staying

 

It will be possible to understand their intentions crystal clear if they do not answer this time.

 

That's the thing, no. Most (probably all) contributors will support the open free version. They won't work for a for-profit company for free, they aren't Unity Asset Store publishers...

 

Godot being open source means someone just forks the last available release and continues development. I don't know if you saw it but earlier I mentioned how a .NET framework called Moq gained DRM. Well the previous version that didn't have it was forked off.

https://github.com/hassanhabib/CleanMoq

That's the advantage of open source. One bad apple can't ruin the pie.

Yeah with all of those assets and how some of them are major I fully expect his opinion to be heavily biased even if he knows better. I also wouldn't be surprised if he were getting featured or sponsored by Unity at some point in the past. He doesn't want to kill that golden goose of his.

 

Why do you think in your scenario the current version would stop working. There are hundreds of contributors and over a 1000 forks. Did they all drop dead or something?

 

It takes a bit more for older versions to stop working on newer hardware. Something first has to change in the newer hardware to make old stuff no longer compatible - and that's a thing that doesn't happen often.

Instead what happens is more of a "The old version is not being maintained, so new features are not added, and developers are pushed to look elsewhere if they want to use the new ray tracing hardware".

 

I mean yes but also my point was more of a "Someone created something small without a real expectation of success and it unexpectedly was a massive hit"

 

But generally is zero guarantee that it will continue to be updated, if the people that started it and have the expertise to update it go away with a paid offering.

As for the Blender comparisson mentioned above, Blender is GNU GPL, not MIT.

There is a good reason Godot is MIT and it is clearly so they can use the last version for their paid engine later, so it is nothing like Blender license that guarantees this can never happen.

 

Is unity trying to kill themselves? Obviously developers are going to move to other engines. This is blatant insider trading and needs to be investigated, the CEO and others sold a bunch of stock before making the announcement. Unity is not in the hands of the right people.

 

I've been tinkering with Unreal for the last 4 days. Only those who made me fall in love with them in the first look;

When you press the PLAY button in the editor, you can start the game WITHOUT waiting.

The biggest problem in my unity game project was the really big map. After a few tries and wasted money on UAS, i found terrain streaming, but it is something that is extremely difficult to implement as solo dev. And as usual, there were beings who stated that they were doing this job in uas, and one of them, Gaia, was in my library. But I saw that I had to pay extra money to use it in the 2022 version. I said ok and bought it. And although it worked as usual in theory and on small-scale scenes, it was completely useless on large-scale maps.(as with most assets).

The first thing that caught my eye in unreal was that the "world streaming" feature was embedded in the engine. And you can use with just one click.(yes just a 1 click)

Another thing is Nanite... When this feature was first announced, it only worked on static objects, but as of version 5.3, you can use everything you see on stage with nanite (foliages etc..). Nanite means being able to export your million polygon model from Zbrush and use it directly in your game.

Another thing is Lumen.. You can make completely dynamic global illumination and reflection in your game. You don't need to put a lot of fake lights, reflection probes, tons of light probes, light baking etc..

Many of us already know the landscape auto material. You can use procedural landscape materials without using paid add-ons such as microsplat.

Unreal Engine support DLSS 3 and Ray Tracing and unity still supports dlss 1.

From time to time, i was fed up with Unity errors and installed unreal and did research something for how can i learn the engine, but i could not find the courage to change the game engine. I also spent thousands of dollars in UAS..... The unreal 5 demo impressed me greatly. I will never forget the day i watched that tech demo. I owe a single thank you to unity. Thank you for giving me the courage to change the game engine after your unreasonable pricing decision.

I no longer need to use a lot of assets to make my game look beautiful (like hbao for ambient occlusion (also, due to a bug that the hbao developer has mentioned that Unity has not solved for years, rendering hbao behind the fog does not work. aaah again, the classic asset store problems we always talk about)), I can improve the performance with little touches of my game. I did not need to use polygon reducing plugins or convert my models to lods(extra workloads). I can optimize it with just a few touches and my scene seems more UNREAL than ever.

As i learned these, Unreal began to interest me even more. For this many features, i am ready to give 5% after the first 1 million.

Ah, I forgot to mention that you can use Quixel and MetaHuman for free..

 

Imagine a tool company that produces things to build something specific for the people who does the job. Then decides to take extra money from them based on sales they made from their products that they built solely themselves.

Does the company own the products also? I dont think so. Yet you said this as an opening statement:

Which leads to a false opinion. You don't own the runtime product. You may own the services. And that's reasonable to put a price tag on it as long as you provide them as optional.

Unity 3D game engine is only a tool to make-build games easier thats all.

 

That goes for any engine, including Unity, and actually with their recent financials, especially Unity.

At least with Godot you get the source and can patch in stuff you really need if it stops getting updates.

 

Okay, I get it. You have all these assets you're selling to Unity developers and you're going to lose your market.

My recommendation to you is to begin porting everything over to Godot's upcoming marketplace.

Most Unity developers aren't going to put up with this.

 

So you will work on a game with the assumption that when Android requires a new API adjustment to build for the latest versions, some random user may make it work, if the original engine developers are not involved anymore ?

I would never even think about such an option myself, even as a remote possibility to start a game.

 

If you check this page you can see just in the last month 131 people have contribuited 300+ commits to Godot.

https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pulse/monthly

What you are saying is that if the couple of those with maintain rights on the repo decided to close source / charge for the repo, the other 100+ contributors would just stop working

this just never happens - active projects with value the contributors always continue on the open fork. in reality, the closed branch would die very quickly and whatever fork that continued would carry on as normal

as i was saying dont think you have any understanding of open source works

keep pointing out what you are saying is ridiculous and you're just ignoring what everyone is telling you

godot is not a company, its a decentralized community pushing code. if one or 2 people tried to make a private version, it wouldnt effect anything, please educate yourself a bit on how open source works

 

How can you patch an engine you did not create ? That may require specific knowledge and years of development.

 

I just want to add my two penneth here. I have waited for a while for the dust to settle on this and tempers calm. I have read the pricing model several times, I have discussed this with several people who will be affected by it, and have listened to arguments both for and against.

This pricing model is the single most delusional, money grabbing, moronic move anybody could have made. We all knew that Unity was going to turn into a money grabbing corpo as soon as they floated, but holy hell this is bad.

There are many other ways that you can get money, a multitude of ways that you can milk your customers dry, but this just doesn't make sense. You are locking out any indie dev before they even get started, coupled with the fact that Unity is NOT a AAA game engine, the indies are your bread and butter. Why? Who is the genius behind this? Is this deliberate, are there some stock holders that want to drive down the share price so they can perform a hostile takeover?

 

What if none of those contributors know how to adjust the engibe for a latest Android API for example ?

How can you guarantee that ?

 

You would wish it was like that, they don't want to charge x sale, they want to charge x install.
The situation is like this:

1) You make a hammer
2) You sell the hammer
3) Every time your customer uses the hammer you get charge 0.20c
4) Your customer is gone, you don't know where he is, or who he is, and you cannot stop him from using the hammer, ever until he is dead.

This is their new pricing model

Literally unity is a curse that not even witches can remove from you.

 

It's far easier than you're thinking it is.

 

You just have to be good.

If you want to work in a video game company, you should likely be able to do that if you don't want to be stuck in low-scripting positions...

 

We could hope it's David Helgason whispering terrible ideas into the board's ears in an attempt to make them sell everything.

 

Then why need an engine in the first place and constant updates ?

 

I am well aware that. I am only discussing in best situation. And in current declared pricing and install rates, you are still in ruin, so my example points that.

 

You should know that ~50% of installations are usually reinstalls. Knowing this, you can easily make a calculation and determine how "profitable" the new monetization system is.

 

Just in general, there is this ever-present risk you face with every business contract and every economic transaction that the other party you are dealing with will renege on their end of the deal. And the appropriate thing to do if someone or some company does this to you is to simply not do business with them again. And if circumstances merit, sue them.

Nobody has any idea if Unreal will breach their contract with developers in the future in the way Unity has done. Nobody has any idea if Godot will become the Blender of game engines. But what people do know is that Unity's executive team and board will stab their developers and their employees in the back in pursuit of short-term gain in order to keep the gravy train going for themselves.

Once someone has demonstrated such extreme unethical behavior like this, the best thing to do is to cut them out of your life. What Unity has done is not normal behavior. This is not what individuals or businesses do to each other.

 

This was a nice overview video that also has comments from the CEO of App Lovin.

 

We don't need an engine. We choose to use one because it's a question of how much work we can get for how much time we invest. Unity allowed us to invest far more of our time into our game rather than splitting it across game and engine.

 

"If you can add a dozen things to an engine yourself, why do you need an engine?", how does this make sense? I want one for the rest of the things I don't want to add myself?

 

because they're already doing it today??? just gonna block you you're either trolling at this point or deliberately ignorant

 

@Matty86 I just wanted to state that Unity is out of its scope with this move. Also people generally inclined to focus on the details about install tracking or fee percentage comparisons etc.

To me the most important topic for all this is: People owns what they built for themselves. And this move here is opposite of it.

 

This is very sad. I was planning on selling character based assets and it would be very helpful to Unity character artists, but to see asset makers pulling their products hurts.

I don't blame you. I was working on a Unity project and since I haven't been able to work on anything lately, I've halted my projects indefinitely until I can figure things out. One bought assets over the years that I'm finding get use for, including Universal Fighting Engine. It's like watching a slowly sinking ship. It's terrible

 

Not for much longer. It's clear from a financial perspective Unity is not doing well. It is hemorrhaging cash, firing its employees left and right. This is what has driven them to such desperate action. And the executive team will keep exploiting their employees and the developers and the shareholders dumb enough to buy the shares the executives and board members keep selling until Unity is bled completely dry.

 

No,

Go here:

https://unity.com/runtime-fee


Read.


Then read their own statement here, again:

At this point, I genuinely am freaking out, as these industries are connected and they are just trying to push another model out. Technofuedalism.

I spoke to an attorney and they said this is all perfectly legal due to binding contracts being tied to the structure of these forms of software, similarly to adobe photoshop, or autodesk. They can, indeed, charge a runtime fee at the end-user level, even without providing adequate support.

 

If you sold an app for 1 dollar. Apple will take 30%, cross the runtime fee threshold(20c USD) that's another 20%. After taxes, you'd be lucky to garner 40%.. Got a publisher? You'd be lucky to make 30%. Earn 1 million dollars gross profits? Congrats on your 300,000. Sheesh. And that's best case scenario. 1 install per customer.

 

I wouldn't bet on Unity only anymore, but more than zero dollars is more than zero dollars, so if you can make it work on the potentially shrinking user base and remain profitable, still go for it!

 

I'm gonna play it smart and sell my assets to use for ANY engine, OUTSIDE of the Unity Asset Store. I DO KNOW how to use Unreal 5 and my character models will look just as good in it. My custom shaders (especially my skin and eyes) would have to be recreated in UE, but that should not be an issue. The fact that I was able to use HDRP and make it look really good shows my testament to show off Unity and how powerful its engine is. But there is an old saying that "they screwed the pooch".

 

If the whole goal is to get the big F2P games on their ads why not just say ad based game over $1m has to use LevelPlay. Give everyone 1 year notice and call it good.

I can't imagine they will make any money tracking installs for the tons of games that are flash in the pans at best.

 

Why use software libraries? Why buy fast food? To save time. A lot of devs could write an engine but why spend five years creating your own engine when you mostly want to create a game and not an engine.

 

Which Unity's lawyers believe allows them to do. It's for the law courts to decide if they actually can. Just because something appears in a contract, doesn't mean it's legally binding as contract law includes provision for unfair terms.