Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

You seem nice.

 

This is wrong. Unity took on venture capital early on and eventually those investors need a return ion their investment.

 

They should have done that from the get go (if this is true).

 

We're now the proud owners of Enterprise licenses for Unreal Engine. Our project is unique in that it's a non-game app that actually started in Unreal, and only ported to Unity because of their battles with Apple. So we don't pay a royalty, but pay for seats instead.

But this whole episode triggered repressed feelings of dissatisfaction with Unity. The render pipelines are so fragmented, we can't come up with a plan for how to get through this project. Every standard feature in Unreal is a plug-in by some ambitious and good-hearted Asset Store developer picking up where Unity didn't bother to finish something, but the result is a boat-load of incompatible solutions. If you want volume lighting and SSAO and tessellation global illumination and whatnot, the only solution is to make your own shaders that incorporate everything good from other people's shaders. Except that Unity took away HLSL, so you're stuck letting Jason Booth save your life again with Better Shaders.

This episode really broke open the wound that Unity is not working for us. It's a requirement-matrix that can't be solved. I now realize that I had started procrastinating, because I had been hitting a dead end in getting all these things to play together. In Unreal they already play together.

I'm under no illusions what the experience is in Unreal. We came from Unreal. I know everything about digging around in the engine source to understand APIs. But I know my way around, and now I have a lot of code I no longer have to port to Unity.

Either way, it's a done deal. We have one live Unity app that I might just downgrade to Personal and tolerate the logo, so I can cancel our seats sooner.

 

That will contradict the past twitter saying that a lot of employee know about it and already trying hard to fight it, already warn higher up, already bargain with other option. Yet they don't care

One can only be true

 

I see. Well then, that's disappointing.

 

[Link to Jason's article with token this time]

So they are doubling down on both the "trust me bro"-billing and the "we reserve the right to include spyware in your game" bullshit.
No thanks, Unity, we told you, it is unacceptable.

 

So just what ppl were shouting in forum, that is just like last time they F***ed up badly. And in a few yaers again they will pull out some shananiganz. Nope out is the only way, as hard as it is.

 

This is the best way to get a message through. Management wants to make the shareholders happy. They brought in this insanity thinking more money would be happier shareholder. The fallout will be less money, reflected in the share value dropping.
This isn't anything like the worst reaction Unity has seen. Share price dropped 30% from $42.58 15th Feb to $29.59 24th Feb, for example.
We just need enough to hammer home a strong financial message along the vocal outrage.

 

Say what you like about the Unity3D Reddit community, but they certainly do have a sense of humor

 

Hopefully the majority of your community will get that joke.

 

its probably the rest of the board that is at fault. the CEO put himself in that position by just giving negativ and dickish statements. its like ok here we go.

who ever at unity thought it is a great idea to 1. use installs as a metric und 2. rolling out and communicating those changes in the way they did. is at fault. if it came from the CEO then he should just step back.

they basically announced we are going to make the unity runtime maleware and make you all pay for it. this may lead to a few cases were we bankrupt a few of you. but dont worry, you can always send us a mail we may take 50% of your revenue so try to increase your income per install. we also can not really prove how many installs there were and we will count reinstalls double. ok not reinstalls just installs on new devices. how we count them? we have a magic proprietary tehcnolyigy that counts them.

thats basically what unity did here. the level of idiocracy is unreached and the pictures with burning down your house are pretty accurate. even if parts are exaggerated its really a epic fail lol

 

Based on what source? This has been perpetuated here on the forums for years, perhaps by current leadership, but it's bullshit according to employee #4: https://forum.unity.com/threads/uni...ckaging-updates.1482750/page-192#post-9326633

That was later confirmed by another Unity OG: https://forum.unity.com/threads/uni...ckaging-updates.1482750/page-197#post-9327554

 

Even worse than that, really. Unity bought Ironsource for $4.4 billion (side note: which seems crazy overvalued and suspect to me). This huge price tag basically requires that they extensively use Ironsource no matter what happens, to try to recoup some of that 4.4B.

 

I don't understand. There is no built-in option to use HLSL?

 

Bloomberg rumors are always verified by management otherwise they don't publish them. They are floating it out as rumor first to get "feedback".

 

And the changes affect only those who make more than $1million... what about the lower tiers?

 

You should already know, this is not a time to put a stop on this trainwreck. All I have seen is you just try to save your own self by arguing we should protest in more gentler so it not affect you

You got benefits from Unity? That's Great. In my country a unity programmer normally don't even get bonus and now Unity are destroy our Job and also my whole life

What you doing now is just this

 

You didn't read the full article:

 

I'm really hoping competition regulators get involved.

 

There's something wrong with a company that only responds to massive outrage. And even then it's a half-measure. I guess it just comes with being in the techno-feudalism business.

 

I guess they still want you to buy that license. Or use their ADs.

 

It's behind a paywall, no? Almost everybody hasn't read the full article.

 

What if models predictions wrong? Never said they are accurate

 

We've been told that they will treat it as the same game.

 

I think it's very clear on this point that the majority of both the board and the executive team support these policy changes.

I am shocked, to be honest. I would never to do this to my business partners or my customers in a million years. It's unbelievably messed up, and I don't know why the decision-makers at Unity fail to understand how thoroughly unethical their behavior is. Every one of their responses seems to indicate a complete and total lack of awareness on their part that their actions are wrong.

No, the developers are not confused. We know exactly what you're doing, unity executives and board members, you're stabbing them in the back.

Years from now, no one is going to remember the wealth these people have acquired. What they're going to remember is their broken promises.

 

What does that change? So instead of Unity, the devs would have to fingerprint the users to track unique installs? Or because english is my not native i dont understand this part?

 

I did read the full article and that's totally bonkers since no one can track installs. Especially not the developers. So they will put back the tracking part after the emotions calmed down a bit. Self-reporting installs is stupid and dishonest the begin with.

Sorry, I want to emphasize: choosing installs as the basis of any fees is bonkers the begin with. So this whole debacle is super-stupid and dishonest from Unity's part.

This one isn't for me at least. I do not have bloomberg account and I can read it all the way.

 

Jason shared the link with a full access token: Unity Overhauls Controversial Price Hike After Game Developers Revolt - Bloomberg

 

There's not for URP and HDRP. It's Shader Graph only. This was why Jason Booth made Better Shaders, so you could do HLSL, and it would get threaded responsibly into the main lit shaders. Unity has since made Block Shaders, which I never got to explore, because they were only a development preview.

I'm going to be doing a lot more shader graph stuff in Unreal than I want. But Unreal has Material Functions, which allow you to reuse shader "layers", including stacking layers, something I again would have to build from scratch with Block Shaders, which Better Shaders did, but it's yet another external dependency, yet another developer who has to keep supporting a module or your project is in trouble.

The grass wasn't greener. I know the limitations in Unreal. In my conclusion, the limitations in Unity are far worse, because you stuck trying to force the engine to work against its will.

 

Incorrect, I said it affects a lot of innocent people, like Unity employees who had no control over this, including me. You are disingenuous and vindictive. I am not going to respond to you any further.

 

Now THAT's impressive: Caves of Qud dev ports his game from Unity to Godot in 14 hours

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/co...urce=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

 

Lower tier doesn't exist if you have Pro. They want you to get Pro.

 

What could possibly go wrong?

 

So the ones who make between 250k-1mln$ per game are better going with Godot or UE

 

This is just odd.

So, my 1 cent. They are not going to stop until the royalty ceiling is the sky. My guess, is that they want to become the next EA... EA + IBM hybrid.

EBM

UniEAM...

Unibeman

UBIEAM.

 

Thanks for the link. Reading the article though, the CEO is completely tone deaf.

 

You should not response to ANYONE from the start. Your response is not even slightest productive and that put more fuel into the fire, we are ranting here because our future is also on the line. And you also just have no solution except let us accept our fate so it will not affect yours

In essence you put yourself to be our enemy, instead of ally, for protecting so called benefits of yourself and people like you

And where will your benefit and profit will came from again?

YES, from US paying the FEE as PLANned

That's fantastically amazing

 

Riccitiello said. “It is a massively transformational change to our business model.”
But, he acknowledged, “I think we could have done a lot of things a lot better.”

Riccitiello said he can do things A LOT BETTER, HMMMMM. Sounds like a threat!

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...rsial-price-hike-after-game-developers-revolt

 

Don't forget that TWO separate legal entities would be involved in this situation -

One that distributes the runtime and makes NO money.
One that distributes the content and is responsible for no installations.

If I release a free game with no content and modders start their own patreons and release their own maps and the modding market for my game takes off but I don't take a dime from them, then who does Unity come calling for when it comes to billing time? Will they pursue ALL the other modders for money? Will they come after me expecting me to pay for money that other people made from entirely separate endeavours with no contracts between us?

What if I were to make a barebones runtime that ONLY had the necessary routines to load external DLLs that determined all game code, and anonymously released it to the public as a sort of jailbroken runtime (and open-sourced it) and then developers could release their games in DLL form with their content? Now the entity that is responsible for the runtime is completely decentralized and the concept of who's responsible for the runtime installs is scattered to the wind.

I can't be the only one who knows these methods exist.

 

Well its still possible to charge 1$ per editor start, per asset import and so on. There are a lot of ways to do better : ): )

 

1 cent charged, every log in to editor.

 

Thank you for that detailed explanation. So HLSL for the community championed HDRP is the most desirable, if I got that correct. It sure looks a bit messy from the outside.

 

Don't get me wrong, I do not disagree with you there. Was just clarifying they've moved from the "proprietary just trust us bro" model to "we'll trust you" (until we audit and take you to court if we think you're lying) which I know was a point of contention for some people.

But I am curious what exactly they're walking back on the retroactive front. From the article it sounds like just installs won't count retroactively, but previous games will still fall under this new license even if you haven't touched them since Unity 5 or whatever, so still a potential timebomb.

 

I think this would have been "fine" if they went with it from the start, the install fee is still the most stupid idea in the history of business, but with the 4% cap, I would have treated like a weird revenue share.

But now, I personally don't believe that 4% cap is there to stay, it's just "let's put 4% cap to calm the waters" while we think of some other shady stuff to F*** everyone again.

 

It's Big Business. What has ethics got to do with it?

 

It still will be, because it's impossible to track installs, so Unity can weaponize your self-reporting. You will be signing under legal obligations that your reporting will be ACCURATE. Which is impossible.

Up until now old games would accrue installs and revenue, so they could be started charging the new installs from January 1st. Apparently they made a concession on this, so games will START to accrue installs FROM January 1st, so everyone starts with zero installs. Which is also irrelevant, because TRACKING INSTALLS is IMPOSSIBLE.

 

"Although the company first said it would use proprietary tools, Whitten said Monday management will rely on users to self-report the data."

How are they going to know that values reported by developer are correct? Are they going to audit? Also how are developers supposed to know how many devices a game is installed on.

 

They can't be trusted, but what this shows is the Unity developer community (or what's left of it) can.

They might be doing the right things for the wrong reasons (i.e. they were forced to) but you'd have to have a great imagination to envisage a world where they tried something like this ever again.

 

The new installation fee and eliminate de Plus plan is a insult for the Unity users, the last tweet of Unity is other insult, that John Riccitiello have not resigned is other insult, are many insults to the users community so that Unity can survive as a popular game engine.