Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

In theory you could end up paying less than Unreal since it's per quarter rather than lifetime of the product.

 

Wouldn't that be better than paying 4% full year above 1.000.000? Most sales will happen in one quarter anyway.

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/16mqavu/to_welcome_users_and_contributors_from_unity_the/

 

I am fully expecting UGS free threshold limits to be reduced soon, this they can do without a huge outcry.
Imagine if they got away with their proposed runtime free without complaint
you would prob see an expansion of runtime fee like a rendering sprite fee etc..lol

 

Unity certainly, Unreal, it depends on how your revenue comes in. If your launch is release-date-heavy like most AA games, then yepp. You start earlier to pay up than at Unreal, but once you passed the 1M revenue, on a quarterly level this is better, at Unreal you pay up above $10k, here you pay up above $250k. If your revenue comes in more flatly, not too head-heavy, then this can easily be better than Unreal's deal. Purely on the numbers game.

 

Strict in which way?

Also, they talk about 'earnings'. It's a HUGE difference earnings vs gross revenue of a store like Steam.

Like comparing 4% to 15%.

Also, having to pay after 250k for quarter means that you have Unreal-like detraction EACH YEAR.

 

So a week is over now, the announcement really gave me the push i was always to lazy for and learn other engines. First I tried godot, doing some 2D stuff. I'm very impressed I must say. Then I bought an udemy course for unreal engine and I'm starting to understand the workflow of unreal. What can I say, I really really like it since I'm slowly get to know it better. So thank you Unity for that push, I fell in love with two other engines!

 

It is also mostly one man project, much more than Godot, for example. This fact and the licensing are pretty big cons. Otherwise it's impressive engine with awesome C# support (we could just dream about anything like that while using Unity)

 

It's gross revenue.

https://flaxengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Flax EULA.pdf

 

There's never been a better time to migrate to another engine.
Thanks John Riccitiello!

 

True. The 'earnings' word on the front page is misleading.

 

That's cool an all but I don't think it can compete with the Unreal community, store and ecosystem.
Also all the Epic freebies like MegaScans and MetaHuman!
Because, let's face it, we're going to need all the help we can get when migrating.

For me, I think it's going to be either FOSS or, if I have to go proprietary, Unreal: at least I'll have the best graphics in the planet out of the box.

 

With Flax's support for C#, it feels like a no-brainer to consider porting Unity code directly to their scripting system. To me, Unreal has always been targeted more towards larger teams that can handle the massive amount of boilerplate code needed to make some of the simplest changes. Unreal has always been more of a AAA engine than an indie engine. It's a beast. It can do a lot, but for smaller teams, you'll spend more time doing fewer iterations than spending less time doing a lot of iterations.

 

I read that Joachim is on a sabbatical ...

 

It's a blatant clone of Unity but using modern technology and without all the bloat. You may check out my impressions and discussions with others here:
https://twitter.com/VehiclePhysics/status/1703758238838100406

 

I thought the same, clean small and fast booting.. unfortunately right now there is zero 2d support , im actually chatting with someone on their discord about a sprite atlas shader, to atleast draw some basic sprites in a scene.. the build-in ui sprites are super unperformant. spawned 10k was at 2 fps lol, spawned 10k cubes only dropped from 160 to 150 fps.. as you mentioned the c# code is very similar api and i was already able to port over several scripts will little effort. i don't like the material interface in the editor though very restrictive, cant even edit a texture on a material..

 

Edy knows a thing or two.

 

I looked, and your soft shadows one is already in my saved list. Was just waiting on the URP version. Haha Is that still going to happen, or are you waiting to see?

 

Not really. It is similar to Unreal. I believe I brought it up before.

In Unreal you have 1mil lifetime exception, then you pay royalty from anything above $10k per quarter. 5% royalties.

In Flax, you don't have lifetime exception, but you pay royalty from anything above $250k per quarter. 4% royalty.

Flax license is altered Unreal license, by the way.

Speaking of communities, my experience with unreal community has been deeply negative, and I'd say it is best avoided. Lots of people feeling strongly about the most random things there.

 

I'm glad people are dumping cash on Godot in droves, maybe they end up with a viable engine soon. The more the merrier.

 

Flax feels a bit more like if Unity and Unreal got drunk one night and created something (terrible / wonderful)?

- C# or C++
- Supposedly seamless coding e.g. auto compile and all that?
- Nested prefabs which honestly the lack of nested hellscape is something you learn to love about UE over Unity so not sure that is a good thing
- Double precision
- Networking

And 1% cheaper than UE

It is a very interesting little engine that I do look forward to playing with but we are running with Unreal for this project, maybe Flax for the next.

 

Note that Flax uses different terminology:

• Material (Flax) = Shader (Unity)
• Material Instance (Flax) = Material (Unity)

So once you have your Material (= shader), you create a Material Instance (= material) and you can edit the available slots there.

 

Flax seems super risky since it's a solodev project that's not open source. If the dev falls ill, burns out or Riccitiello sends an assassin, it's done.

 

From my point of view, my code is so reliant on the inner workings of Unity, the component system and its physics API, that even if I could put my code verbatim on another engine it's not going to work anyway.

My philosophy with my current project is to just redo it from scratch with the tools of the specific engine I end up using instead of porting it. (and now I'm 50% for Godot and 50% for Unreal...)
I'll port the idea, not the code.

I'm not overly concerned by the language though. Even if it's visual scripting, I don't care as long as it goes fast.
I have coded in so many languages already that I don't even care anymore.
My favorite language was Pascal with inline ASM, but I guess it's not going to come back, right?

 

That's fair but it is worth pointing out that most of the assets on the Marketplace can be used outside of Unreal.

20%.

 

GUYS GUYS!
We should do a poll somewhere to vote for the engine we're going to migrate so that asset store devs know where to invest their energy.
Personally, I'm currently divided between Godot and Unreal, now that Godot has announced they'll be doing an asset store.
If they do, it's gonna be the next Unity for sure.

 

depending on how this turns out and how unity will abuse their new terms of service. we will maybe need to set up a community fund if they are going to sue developers because of wrong data or whatever.

i mean they will basically keep their right to take down the games if they believe you reported wrongly. maybe not since they would need to transmit data... though they wrote so in their TOS. but... isnt that illegal in the eu? maybe not because its not personal user data

the more i think about it the easier it would be to just stop developing games or switch. this engine just kills itself with fee per install.

 

In theory you shouldn't have big problems converting to Flax, Flax uses PhysX 5.1

My clients most likely make me migrate to Unreal. My personal projects PROBABLY will end up on Flax or Unigine, but most likely Flax.

 

I’m down for this

 

I agree. It's in an early stage, but I can see a lot of potential. To me, it looks as Unity at early stages if its development had started nowadays. Not for starting a big project on it yet, but good for prototyping, demos, concept tests, etc.

 

Damn, that's a very compelling reason for me now... if it's C# plus PhysX I could REALLY port my current code...
RRRAAAAA!!!!! I HATE ANALYSIS PARALYSIS!

 

I agree that it seems risky with one primary developer (I believe there are other contributors), but it really is open source?
https://github.com/FlaxEngine/FlaxEngine/

That is how I found out how clean the engine code was. It seems quite a bit easier grasp, compared to the Unreal source.

 

Same boat here. My long-term plan is rewriting the core of my technology to make it dependent of the .NET SDK exclusively. Then it could be integrated and used in any engine that supports .NET (Unity, Godot, Flax, Unigine, StrideDotNet, etc) by just writing the components in each engine that call the methods in my assemblies.

 

It's source available but not open source. Go view the license in github repo, which leads back to his website, where you have to download the EULA that, from a quick glance, looks pretty restrictive.

 

Only in the same sense as Unreal Engine.

 

This could be unity's problem: https://gdpr.eu/
Unity would have to ask for every bit of information as a single item. That's why there are tools for browsers that auto decline that stuff for websites in EU, it's annoying and intrusive. If they don't ask it's straight illegal. Once they got the data, they have to follow further rules I don't know.
These hopefully are waking sleeping dogs: https://www.egdf.eu/egdf-unitys-install-fees-are-a-sign-of-looming-game-engine-market-failure/
If someone has seen more legal action I'd like to see it.

You could always try all the things if you got the time for it...

 

Seems interesting. Might you know if it is free to use, I do not see any mention of charges on their site! Great stuff.

 

Yes.

https://flaxengine.com/licensing/

 

It is proprietary. Just like Unreal. Unreal is also proprietary. "Source available" but not "open source", because "open source" tends to mean FOSS. Not that the engine includes the same restriction where you cannot post more than 30 lines of code in public, or something like that.

That means that flax dev in theory can also go nuts and attempt to implement Runtime Fee. In theory.

 

Oh, you're quite right! I guess I was just amazed at actually being able to at least see the engine code, coming from Unity (I'm not on an enterprise license). Also, the documentation states: "You can fork it and edit whatever you need. Modified Engine or/and Editor can be used in Flax games production so it can be very handy to have more control over the engine. Also, any pull requests are welcome." -So it did not seem too restrictive too me, but I did not read the EULA (which I should, if I have learnt anything from Unity)

But yeah, not the same as a completely open source engine

 

Nah, I'll have to choose one and commit to it, otherwise I will never get things done.
Also, all starts are clumsy and awkward, so every engine will feel wrong until I get used to it.

 

This delay is by design. They want to wear you down mentally. If they didn't they would have consulted with their customers before announcing this new licensing schema. Either the management does not understand their own product (counting installs? common) or this was planned in advance. The fact that TOS was also altered in stealth mode for over a year also suggests this was planned to go down exactly as it is going.

 

Now I'm curious: why use a different engine for personal projects? Is Unreal that much cumbersome to use?

 

My original interest in Flax, some time ago, was more from a perspective of being interested in writing my own, but also wanting to ship stuff and thus loving the idea of having a head start on the common stuff. Basic functionality is all in place, there's an Editor, it already claims to support all of the platforms I'm currently interested in, etc.

From that perspective the "single developer risk" people have mentioned isn't such a showstopper.

What I would want to check out in more detail is performance. Just about anyone can write a thing that's fast enough on the beasty workstations a lot of devs have. I want to know how it goes once it's running on a 5-year-old fixed hardware platform.

 

Maybe Unity could try to have something like a binding warrant canary statement built in to their homepage and info box of the editor so everyone one knows when the next round is about to start.

 

Why not?

Different tools have different strengths and weaknesses. Whether it's a personal project or a commercial one, just use the right tool for the job. Prior experience is a good strength for a tool, but it's just one of a bunch of factors.

 

Yeah well, it's not a good idea to let devs hanging for a week because we're the kind of people that find solutions by ourselves.
A week ago I would have never thought of migrating anywhere and now look at this thread.
They don't have a clue what's coming.

 

Here is a developer who has announced that they now have to change their "free to play" game to a paid download thanks to this

https://www.gamesradar.com/just-day...ee-to-play-plans-and-start-charging-dollar20/

This is exactly John R's goal in my opinion.