Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

While my "confusion" about the new pricing system, I checked out Unreal, Godot, O3GE and flaxengine. I also had a short look at Unigine and Stride. The good thing is: none of this engines/tools is really bad, I could imagine working with any of these engines. I'm not happy, loosing more than 10 years of experience in the unity-engine/tools, but that's life.

The bad thing is: The community will fall apart. Many 2D-developers will head over to Godot, many 3D-developer will move to Unreal. The 3d-developers, who want to continue with C# (like me) will move to Stride, flaxengine or any other. If you want something reliable, you may move to O3GE.

I was not using Unity because of the 3 Render Pipelines, not for ECS or the terrain system. I was using is, because you could find an answer to almost any question in the internet. You also had the oportunity to find thousand of great assets on the asset store that put you in a position to develop a game in the first place. Thousands of youtube tutorials...

I can almost hear John in the back of my head: Where is the return for me? What is your great comunity paying me?
Hey John, lets ignore the fact, that you get a good amount of any asset store purchase. The community is the reason, why your engine stands out from the rest. Did you ever calculate, how many support-members you would need without this community? How much more money you must pay for advertisement without the community? Free troubleshooting, free training courses etc.

Yes, John, I know: You are not interested in the long term success but only thinking short term profit maximization. And that is the crucial point why it cannot go on here.

 

For everyone who's sad leaving Unity

 

Unity Hub asked me to give a rating, do you think I was too generous?

 

CEO Firing Petition https://chng.it/hc4GWYvdb6

 

nice,
this one has more,
https://www.change.org/p/unity-technologies-revert-the-pricing-model-and-replace-your-ceo

 

i think they are (?)

 

That's the problem right there. They don't want to do that.

JR and people like him don't have that kind of talent. They don't know how to create wealth so they take it from someone else.

That's why I advocate for more business regulations. Successful companies should be built from wealth creation. People should be happy to pay for your service and feel like they got the best part of the deal. Unity used to be in that situation.

That's what win-win transactions are about. Nobody lost and everyone is better from it. This is how you build a wealthy society.

 

Just to be clear - this time (at least for me) no adjustment will cut it. 100% rollback and if you need to make more money find a better to calculate, fairer and less intrusive solution.
Just to state the obvious again - you have breached trust this time. This is not a technical hiccup with a partial remedy. This time in this instance it seriously is an all or nothing thing.

I, personally, will at this point only use Unity every again if I an employment requires me to.

 

While i recommend you Unigine... i do not recommend you Stride, for what i can see is pretty dated sadly

 

Instead of I would get the unity pro version and you can wait for < 1.000.000 sells. Then make Version 2 of the game.

But to be honest you pay after 1 mio. Means the first sale/install after 1 mio it costs you $0.15. This means for every new sell you just pay $0.15 which is very good.

But what is not very good? Tracking, trust issues and free2play games with microtransactions which hits 200.000 or 1mio have too risky times. Suddently you free2play could do no much money but the installs can hit millions and millions.. this is heavy.

 

Its a shame that so many people will be forced away from using the Unity Engine, I am one of them. I hate that I have to switch to Unreal now and port my entire project, but I guess we are forced to do this.
See you on the Unreal forums I guess...

 

This. I've already been testing Stride + SveltoECS. But my god SveltoECS sucks ass compared to Unity Entities. Rigid "archetypes" are a nightmare and nigh impossible to work with without coding. And I was thinking it was too much boilerplate with Entities.

Need to test out Entitas. Maybe its better.
Otherwise working with async scripts is okayish, but won't scale to the same levels.
Still better than Unity's default Update's though.

Stride is good. A bit rough around the edges, but decent.

 

The emotional roller-coaster Unity keeps putting me on is like a ride between heaven and hell, hell apparently is where it ends.

 

We should start a github colab project were we create a wrapping layer for monobehaviours and the API so we can run our domain in Unreal with as little change as possible. Makes it easier to port existing games.

 

I think either Vicunya or WizardLM could deal with coding locally, but, uhhhh. You need to filter the results. You can run quantized models on 12GB GPU, but they occasionally go completely bonkers. Chatting speed is comparable to that of ChatGPT.

By now you should be used to it. In my experience, when encountering community criticism, unity usually tries to stick with the idea anyway. Even with Lithium it took them a while. Then there was unity connect.

 

Some Flax engine resources like fsr, dlss, networking stufss etc...
https://github.com/topics/flax-engine

 

Lmao, yes, unless they were using IL2CPP, its a 10 second job to decompile mono. Still what he said is correct, OpenAI will store all your data, and what you get in return is mostly nonsense. Ive been trying to use it for coding on atleast 10 different occasions/use cases fromvery simple code to something a little more complex (like calculating angles to fire a cannonball) spoiler alert: It always fails, it just spits out random nonsensical formulas. Other times its missing huge parts of the code, and so far Ive never gotten any code from it that just straight up works, Ive even given it 10 or 20 chances to improve and give it feedback, and even so it still cant figure out the correct code.
Maybe all their training data is from script kiddies who didnt know what they were doing and then its giving wrong answers all the time based on that. Anyway in my experience its worthless.

 

Complete migration from Unity to Unreal course:

Code (CSharp):

1. playlist link:
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1GQJ2d4wZk&list=PLZpDYt0cyiuu1ZKrZwxOWTRjTUDXMmGaX&index=2&t=0s

 

I'd like to truly and honestly thank Unity for helping me get into game dev over the past 10 years. It's been a bumpy road, with many points of frustration, but I really appreciated all of the work that has gone into making this engine so powerful and accessible.

It's a sad moment for me, but now we need to be apart in order to grow. It's been a great journey, and I wish you all the best.

 

Amazing that this thread has 12k replies, I dont think its possible for a Unity employee to read every message anymore lol

 

https://www.pcgamer.com/unity-apolo...-scheme-will-be-making-changes-to-the-policy/ - HMMMM let's what they do this time. Probably it will be better, but will they fix the wrong they did? Unfortunately, I don't think they can and I don't think they want to...
But we'll wait and see

 

Following up, here's a video from the same dev from a few hours ago.

 

From what was reported, their insider team was vehemently against these changes (they had 24 hours advance notice), some of them are quitting Unity all together simply because this was proposed, and a good chunk of the rest are leaving if it's not reverted. It also seems from those meetings it was revealed Unity had been bringing up the same concerns for months, reporting up the chain. All the same issues the community is bringing up now.

And Unity did it anyways, seemingly with their upper management simply dismissing any concerns that businesses might have over lack of definitions of things like installs (or concerns about it being a metric they have no control over), and the huge risk that retroactive TOS's involve.

 

I think it will be easy (for anyone here) to summarize the thread for them : )


p.s @BenjiM_Unity don't forget that CEO must leave.

 

Flecs is said to be the best-in-class ECS. It has a C library and generated C# bindings
https://github.com/flecs-hub/flecs-cs

 

Its not even the fee that is the largest problem ( for me at least) , but how untrustworthy the company is. The software is bugged, fractured in 3 ,large portion of it is left in the dark ( the built in pipeline), yet they keep on shifting things and want more money, lots of basic features arent part of the software and have to rely on asset store extensions which might or might not be updated . Unity 5, good days.
The only thing that keeps them afloat for sure, is the ease of use and programming.

Godot seems great, once they manage to implement a "in editor" play mode, they going to explode no doubt.
Right now its just too hard to debug and test a game if its not running in the editor.

 

Durban Egon was not CEO of IronSource. He's a Board member. He only sold off all shares held by Silver Lake Group, LLC. He still has over 34 million shares held through his other companies as of 9/15/2023.
Sec Form 4 Filing - Silver Lake Group, L.L.C. @ Unity Software Inc. - 2023-09-15
Bar-Zeev Tomer was CEO of IronSource. He still has over 6 million shares as of his last sale on 9/1/2023
Sec Form 4 Filing - Bar-Zeev Tomer @ Unity Software Inc. - 2023-09-01

 

That's the main issue: without management changes ... BIG changes, Unity can't be trusted

And it pains me. After a few small project with someone a few years back, I finally started working on a project on my own, alone. And I have a lot of assets and experience here which is hard to move to Unreal. I mean i will loose at least a few months + money for assets (sounds and graphics will be okish to move but other assets will not). But depending on what unity does now, I will decide if I move or not.

I mean DOTS is late by 1-2 years. UIToolkit is ready only for editor. They dropped the game they where making. A lot of good stuff that is delayed, but we got services almost nobody asked for...

 

I used Unreal engine for the first time this weekend and I was absolutely BLOWN away. Everything just seems to work and I was using blueprints within an hour, obviously not at expert level but they are super simple to use. I cannot see myself staying with Unity now. No fighting with different pipelines like Built-IN, URP, HDRP. In Unreal it is just works and it is beautiful straight out the box. YES, there is a learning curve but it is going to be worth it in the long run.

 

So who thinks that this only happened after companies started turning of ads?
(making instant dent to their income and in November unity should have next financial results announcement..)
https://unitedgamedevs.com/

 

Unreal has it';s issue also. Don't worry. It's the "shinny new thing" and you don't see them yet.
You want to switch... sure. Especially now, nobody can blame you. But keep in mind that you will find issue with it and you will find stuff that's easier in unity

 

True. Unreal, in terms of ease of use and flexibility is light years behind unity.

 

This is the third petition I signed in this thread.
Like a stalker pursuing an unapproachable girl.

 

A more correct petition will be : fire the people who made this decision! Because as bad as the CEO is, he's NOT the only one who agreed to this!

 

I think your post is one of the most accurate summaries of the future of the Unity ecosystem for small studios, where large studios would barely be affected by this, smaller studios living on 100K, 150K then start climbing and for a few years hit the 200K then suddenly they get a few more downloads one year and Unity demands over half the years earnings, and the developers have NO WAY of predicting or prepare for such outrageous fees because the decision lies solely with Unity as the only authority in making the decision. I now feel like using Unity is dangerous, should be avoided for all future projects. All current projects are a risk. All previous projects are also a risk.

 

I beg to differ about talking with the community - its been basically radio silence since the announcement, and no, talking to a handful of your fave people isnt talking with the community, its talking with people who already had favoratism. If unity were talking with the community there wouldnt be 12k posts here ranting and raving

 

Yeah the thing is that my project will be better with Unreal so that policy change was just the incentive to move. Today I figured out how to make an equivalent of empty game objects to parent my floor and walls, it was just a matter of creating an actor blueprint, add a scene component to it and changing its mobility setting. Maybe there is something simpler in Unreal but that did not take me too long.

As for ease of use, I can't really tell since I'm more of a backend programmer than anything else. With Unity I have spent a LOT of time on the user interface (UI Toolkit), but was never totally satisfied with it because of the lack of gamepad support and proper navigation control. I think that making the same with Unreal will be difficult but from what I've seen the navigation part should be covered flawlessly.

 

THREE Change.org petitions calling to fire the CEO...
90% of devs romancing new engines and enthusiastically sharing their progress in porting...
Internet on fire...

Unity stock price and financial news:

 

Maybe a poll is usefull...with good options of course.

 

I got an idea, lemme run this by you guys and see if it's a viable loophole -- since we can't expect Unity to do the right thing we should at least put our heads together and find ways to comply without getting screwed in the process:

Let's say I start a shell company: (Moat's Game Runtimes Inc.) which acts as a separate business entity. Under this shell company, I post my game for free -- but the game has no content and relies on DLC for the actual experience. People can download and install this game from the shell company as much as they want, and the company makes NO money, therefore it does NOT trigger the requirement that you get $200,000+ AND 200,000 installs!

Then I use my main business (Moat's DLC Content Inc.) to make DLC packs for my game and sell those, WITHOUT the runtime.

This way the Runtime Distribution company can accrue infinite installations of the runtime but it earns no money, and the DLC company can earn all the money but it accrues no runtime installs.


Problem, Unity?

 

Maybe I really should investigate Unreal instead and just go full C++.
Less marshalling, more performance.

Looks good and much more versatile in any case.
Definitely an option to check out. Thank you.

 

recommended, i'm following that guy for years and he is really good

 

It's exactly an option for a lot of developers. The other thing if you want to stay with the past instead of moving into future. This engine cannot last forever.

 

I know by this point I'm pretty damned dependent on Unity and quitting it will come with its share of deleterious effects. Even the guy above me is still lingering in this thread despite making such a big show on how much he's quit Unity and how you all need to join him because he doesn't have the courage to do it by himself.

"Hi, I'm Moat and I'm a Unityaholic..."

 

Stock price was holding firm against the initial drop, but after Dr. IronSide dumped his 2 million shares at the close on Friday, it'll be very interesting to see what happens this morning.

 

Does anyone here have experience selling on the Unreal marketplace? Asking for a friend lol.

 

Yeah, that analyst saying "this unlocked Unity's growth" is clearly a shill trying to convince investors to stay and don't panic.
Honestly, anyone holding Unity stocks and not already selling is completely out of touch with reality.
There is no possible way this is going to end well for Unity as a business unless they plan to turn into a patent troll for their foreseeable future, but even with that mentality, it's clearly a dead-end since no one is going to develop with an engine that is being cancelled by every major publisher. (and I really doubt anyone is going to pay Unity for already published games on old terms of service. No matter what Unity wants.)

 

I'm convinced the stock market is all a big circus. These financial media outlets have a meltdown when a company has a mouse fart in a warehouse and yet here you have CEO being petitioned, majority of users porting to competition and internet on fire with any PR execs worst nightmares and none of them are saying anything about it. On friday one took the time to post a nice long article saying how Unity have a lucrative new monetization plan without ANY mention that 99% of their customers are not going to stay with them if they go for it. How is that not suspicious?

 

Idk if you're talking about me or not, but I'm currently learning Unreal lol
I'm here to share insights with other people in my situation about the next engine to migrate to, but right now I'm 75% for Unreal myself. (although I would REALLY like to go with Godot or Stride because they are FOSS)
And also for the drama and the memes, not gonna lie.