Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

sounds like you are doing some impressive work, very nice. You are absolutely right about open source advantage, but even saying those words make unity team very angry, they close all topics relating to it and say "this has already been discussed." Well we aren't finished discussing and it's what everyone wants. Personally, I am excited to start using UE5, I know it will be a learning curve, but I feel much safer with Epic's future than unity's future, the death of unity has been predicted years ago when the CEO change happened lol. I am actually surprised it took this many years. I worked with three of the original creators of the engine way back in 2004 and even helped on some physics engine stuffs, when it was completely free, there was no full pro version until 2006 if I remember correctly, which separated water optimizations and ray tracing techs from the basic version. That was the last time unity was good, and even then, that was a step in the wrong direction. Just look at how many versions there are and updates break projects though they are "stable." The one thing this editor has going for it is the ease of use and jumping right in for beginners, but that's now being threatened. I feel so bad for those companies that have everything invested in this engine, but we have been saying for years to find an alternative as this was predicted many times over.

 

Why would someone pay when unity announced it is either spyware or they can't tell if you paid?

 

That's also what they say about unity.

 

really sad that there isn't macos support for the editor

 

And that's a two year old showcase.

It's there. You wouldn't be able to make macOS and iOS builds for it if it wasn't.

https://flaxengine.com/download/

 

It is quite painful to lose vested years of knowledge and learning... I haven't touched Unity in months because of hardware failure, and I am kinda glad I sat on the sidelines... the moment I saw that email, I knew something was going down. And going down it did. I've heard of Godot and Unigine, but it will take me MONTHS to get up to speed. Unreal 5 is already nice, especially with its tools that makes doing character animation much easier.

 

They've had one week. Give it 3 more days to allow angry legal letters to arrive by certified mail.

 

yeah i said it back on page 20 or so long term developers have been hear before

 

Maybe the target of this Unity Change are all Developers which are now in fear?
The "install" fee combined with a revenue fee we magical guess is only a fearmonger.

A court can question Unity why not use Money transfer data as a direct link to financial success in the light that Unity dont have the download infrastructur for the game. The install fee is in my opinion not court safe. Its like we have electricity meters but we think our hidden estimation method is better.

Unity has about 70% App market, and the fees hit f2p games with chirurgical precision.
I think Unity will go 2 Steps back and offer a "solution" like permanent Analytics and maybe Unity Ad program for a "correct" price in exchange for the install fees.

Maybe the real target is to feed their aquisitions like Ironsource with data/money. And control more of the whole Pipeline than only the development part.

 

Dang, they hide that right in plain sight

 

Ironically Torque is now FOSS and is pretty good now. They just had a major release this year.

 

Exactly this is why I wish more of you technical artist type guys would join us on more esoteric engines than UE. UE has already great tools to make characters, Flax, Stride, etc aren't. Especially for us non-artists.

 

I really hope Unity goes the same way. Imagine a barrage of volunteers just fixing what is there.

 

These are more just odd's in a game generating more then $100k not a unity problem the tool is irrelevant,its normal for indie's especially solo dev's/hobby project for there game not to be financially successful.There are exceptions were they make millions as a solo dev/hobby project but that is rare.

 

This whole Unity thing just reached mainstream people, and the whole situation is now out of control...

If Unity does not revert course QUICKLY, it's dead.

As for me, I'll finish my current game in Unity, release it, then go back to my roots: XNA/MonoGame. I'll undust my old Engine built on top of it, modernize it, and use it for all my future games.

 

Unity doesn't have api calls outside of services like unity ads who are already paid for this.

Even if they have api calls, they're not allowed to do that since it's illegal for developers to sell a product who does that without the user agreeing in the first place.

Unity just wants to leach on developers' success instead of making their own.

 

Well well well... how the turntables...

https://odysee.com/@DarkTitanEnterprises:d/unity-death-threats-were-a-plot-for:6

 

Yup. I got to experience this directly...twice...while working at two iterations of GarageGames on the Torque team(s). Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them.

 

If Unity had any intention to revert, they would've already done so. It's not getting reverted. They're brainstorming on how to calm down the storm.

 

There are many, many features we probably take for granted. Does Flax have a remote so you don't need to build for the device to test touch-screen input? Does it have a database system? Does it support fMod audio? Is the documentation going to cover your development? Does it integrate with your IDE thoroughly? I went on the forum a couple of days ago. There are comments like this:

All the fancy rendering features in the world aren't particularly useful if you are constantly banging your head against a wall learning the system.

Not that I'm saying that's the case with Flax et al - I haven't tried them yet. But the sheer number of man-hours behind Unity means we can't expect other engines to be comparable. That's thermodynamics, basically! Unless they have a new AI generating documentation and examples or something, they have to be behind in various areas, probably QOL ones as these are the least interesting for the engine creators to work on!

 

I'm mostly an artist and that is what drew me to Unity back in 2009. I know how to make great looking shaders and models, but it will take some time to migrate everything.

 

The radio silence thus far is astounding, to say the least. Instead of trying to put out the fire they started, they are just sitting back and letting it get out of control.

 

They would have had to just announce the change with a simple clause in bold: Fees will never exceed 5% of your gross revenue.

And everything would have been pretty much fine, sure people would still be mad for more fees, but this uncapped install thing feels the biggest scam ever happened in tech, this makes bitconnect look like a legit company in comparison.

 

It's not just the graphical features. You know that scripting update we've been promised by Unity? Flax took a few months to jump to C# 11 and .NET 7.

 

It was the first alternative I was looking at, but the game I plan on porting is UI-heavy, and it doesn't look like Flax is set up to have a 2D UI on top of a 3D game. Am I wrong on this?

EDIT:
Eh, I guess they do have it, but I don't know what made me turn off from it. I thought it was lack of 9-slicing, but I don't think that's it either. Anyway, time to look at that a little more, but I'm still looking into Godot... Ugh. this f*cking weekend.

 

Eh, not really. You can go low level if you want. You can modify the engine itself. But by default, "Unreal C++" is memory managed and not much scarier than C# is in Unity.

 

As someone used to this kind of documentation(my favorite type): What would you expect the documentation to look like instead? Only thing more important to me is testing capabilities. I've also seen quiet some docs for more WYSIWYG type of programming and really struggle with long tutorials or examples instead of just plain, dry and compact.

 

If you yourself are making millions of dollars, why not?

Because there's no way you're getting close to having to worry about the runtime fee without generating millions in revenue.

 

Single digit million. It's not plural. You hit one million you will have one million installs at a minimum.

 

OK, by that logic, is everything you buy from the asset store also owed a percentage of your cut? Those assets are also not your code, your models, your audio. Can you change the terms of those assets retroactively so you have to pay the authors of each one $.20 for every copy of your game that you sell?

--Eric

 

https://github.com/FlaxEngine/ImGui
This gets used so often AAA use it in prototyping.

 

Oh, they'll absolutely walk back at least a few things as a play to placate us, whether that amounts to much, I have no clue. Hopefully the retroactive TOS part is reverted.

But it won't matter. Without a full revert, hardening the TOS against retroactivity (again), and replacing the leadership with a team we can trust, Unity is a dead engine and company walking. Or at least a shadow of its former self walking. Nothing less has much hope of convincing developers that it is again safe to do business with Unity.

The next smartest thing for them to do would be to not meet us half way, but screw us even harder (just not so hard or in such a fashion where it would seriously worsen Unity's chances in the courts and/or with regulators) to extract as much wealth as possible before the inevitable end.

Leadership won't do that however, because even though the current management is certainly sociopathic enough for it, they aren't smart enough to realize the extent of their problems, or humble enough to realize that the situation isn't salvageable while they remain a part of the equation.

 

Plus, the more esoteric engines are the ones that need the knowledge about what you're usually trying to do, what works well, and whats missing.

Open Source developers aren't careless - it's legally safest to not look at closed source competition because then you can show that no, you weren't copying. But they are also not experts in every area. Usually it's the UX that suffers because of this, especially for non-developer users.

Unity owns their tools for making shaders, but those of you who make shaders own the shaders themselves, and can help provide information on the missing features.

Unity owns their tools for making characters, but those of you who make characters understand what goes into making a character.

If all you do is port your assets, and provide feedback to what makes that easy or challenging, I'm sure you'd do a lot to make the smaller engines easier to use.

 

Please do the engine your porting to a favor (especially if it's a FOSS engine) and take thorough notes during the migration.

 

And money!

 

Unless you're flooding Steam and Nintendo eShop with $1 games, you could be making millions before you even hit the 200k sales threshold.

 

Money is always nice

 

But it's not a sales threshold.

It's an install threshold.

One sale can be many, MANY installs.

 

Nah, Unity will be fine. Indies using Unity will either die or jump ship sooner or later. Unity isn't an indie game engine company anymore, it's a mobile advertisement and data-mining company who, on the side, has a game engine. They will be fine.

I wish everyone would stop answering this guy, he's clearly only here for trolling and "being the devil's advocate, but knowing nothing about how things works in reality".

 

No it can't because re-installs don't count

 

I expect some sort of a statement by Monday/Tuesday...

 

Ok this is my last reply to you, to try and explain the problem

Unity announce on Monday that all Asset Store creators will have to pay an Asset Install Fee to take effect Jan 2024. You will be charged $0.2 every time a user installs your asset into a Unity Project, regardless of when they purchased the asset.

Thats ok isn't it? I mean as you say they can change TOS whenever, you just have to get use to it. You can trust Unity to tell you how many times the user has installed your asset, they have those numbers, and look its only $0.02 for each install, thats nothing to you.

Don't like it, ok sure remove the assets from the store, oh but BTW every person who has ever bought your assets can still install them and every time its installed into a project, regardless of whether its still for sale, Unity are going to charge you $0.02.

Does that explain the problem and why people are angry?

 

Someone should get statements from Valve, Apple, Google and Nintendo to speed things up.

 

Installs on different machines count

Installs on machines they can't identify as the same machine will also count (which is particularly relevant if you play with an emulation layer. [HEY. DON'T JUDGE. Some of us don't use Windows.]).

Ergo - one sale can be multiple installs.

 

Dream big man, that's the ticket.

 

Hmm, actually there might be a good idea there for a business model. Like ue5 but for assets. All assets are free but they take a percentage royalty cut. Although I agree with your original sentiment, the crux of the issue is that you already paid for something in agreement so you should be able to use it freely.

 

Omfg

 

And in round in round in round in round... we shouldn't feed the trolls, really.

 

And the people who are trying to convince us everything is just fine because they want to keep selling assets.

 

okay you're right. i thought it was an argument made in better faith.