Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Never underestimate the power of stupid.

 

I think that was clear when they cancelled Plus and pushed existing sub renewals to Pro with a one year discount and called it a simplification of their monetization, which in reality is a significant price hike for a lot of indies needing to get rid of the splashscreen.

 

"Well no" I'm waiting for this engine to be game ready since 2018, I know how much they promisse things, I was there in the beginning

 

Yeah, I've come to regret that phrasing, but in my defence talking about whether risk is bounded or unlimited is a thing that people discuss *a lot* within games studios, it isn't particularly loaded language within the context I usually discuss these things. If you asked me about unity and these pricing changes, I'd say the unlimited financial risk (because the fee isn't tied to income) is a turnoff.

For what it's worth, I've worked on Destiny 2's platform layer, the Frostbite engine's platform layer, briefly Diablo 4's as well. During the course of that work I was "loaned" to teams with different engines as well to help them with theirs.

I have 3 university degrees, two in computing (one specialised in operating systems), the other in mathematics.

Platform layers and optimisation are what I know, public relations is not, and I was honestly just trying to share my knowledge and help people. Clearly that didn't work out, and I now understand the context of many people just.. saying blatantly non-technical things or purely wrong things confidently in these spaces (I encountered a lot of this in replies, actually).

But at the time I wrote it, I was an unusually experienced indie trying to share that experience with people who can't afford consulting from someone like me. I now regret doing that, and won't do it again, but I hope people understand that my intent was good.

 

yes. and ignoring the fact, that almost all big studios were once small studios with limited resources, only tells me they are ONLY after short term gains. the current board wants the money back right now. what happens in the future, will be a challenge for the next board. not this one. we've seen what this one can do.

 

Doing so will only cultivate some powerful potential opponents. If you walk into darkness on the same road.
As far as I know, Russian and Chinese companies are developing their own game engines. Because of your strange operations, they have a sense of distrust and crisis. This is bad. I believe that unity will no longer be competitive in the near future, because they can use their own engines to develop games like Escape from Tarkov or Genshin Impact.
At that time, the 5% commission on the Unreal Engine and the subscription fee for Unity will have no effect. This is terrifying.

 

People are emotional, especially at a time like this. I would try not to take it personally. Easy for me to say since I didn't get any of that negativity. In any case, I understand your angle. Just wanted to say I understand where you were coming from and thanks for the effort, even thought it fell on deaf ears.

 

It definitely did not. Many of us read it now and took it into consideration. Was it worth to pull through that level of negativity? Well, no one else can answer that, but them, and according to them the answer is no, since they said they won't do it again, despite that their work is important and appreciated by those who understand it.

 

Heard of FNA? It's a recreation of XNA, and the Terraria dev just gave them (and Godot) a big donation to help these engines grow.

 

To be perfectly clear I still plan to help other devs privately, I just don't think I'll dip my toes into public content about things that are currently the game industry topic du jour.

I'm glad it was useful to people as well

 

They won't pay $88 million, they are fully capable of researching their own engines. Other large companies are also planning for the future, and companies with huge profits are still sensitive to a 5% commission.

 

Didn't mean to suggest my statement is encompassing of all community members. Sometimes it just takes a few negative loud voices to create a negative impression. Like you I also don't know how much negativity was sent his way, but I respect his decisions. It's just too bad he was turned off, that all.

 

Because Unity works for them. It enabled them to make $2.2 billion. $88 million could fund their own engine, but when they use Unity, they are backed by a multi-billion dollar engine. In short, they cannot create something with the same features and abilities as Unity. It'd take many years and lots of investment.

They already give 30% to Apple and google. Why/. Because they need Apple and Google to create the platform and audience they can sell to. They pay ad companies instead of creating their own. It why all companies deal with and pay other companies to share the work needed to achieve success.

4% is not a lot; definitely not compared to the cut everyone is asking.

And lastly, I'm sure Unity will offer deals to their biggest users to reduce costs to stop them leaving the ecosystem. That'll be why Enterprise no longer has a list seat license but a "call us to discuss" requirement.

Edit: It's the same reason lots of AAA studios have given up their in house engines to use Unreal Engine

 

When I said before that open source communities have a tendency to act like cults, this is exactly the kind of thing I was referring to.
They use to see their projects as their baby: not as a tool to do things, but as an end in itself. So they aren't usually very concerned about the actual usability of the thing and will fight you to death if you criticize it.
Of course, not everyone is like that and not every community is a cult, but the very popular ones usually are.

 

Pocket Gamer has an interesting story about the top 10 games on the USA iOS store made with Unity, who will end up paying a lot according to the original scheme.

https://www.pocketgamer.biz/news/82...es-the-big-names-wholl-pay-the-biggest-bucks/

 

Saying risk is unlimited is hyperbole. It would have been more accurate to say that an undefined level of risk existed. In the worst-case scenario, you would have needed to switch engines which is not an unlimited risk.

Joining an open-source project and immediately deciding to rewrite the engine without even understanding what you are doing is kind of stupid and arrogant. Open-source people are willing to work with you if are willing to collaborate in a reasonable way.

 

Because with Unreal they would pay even more?

 

Yikes. I think that's what most people are concerned with. On another note financial times has this article:
https://www.ft.com/content/2fb878a6-bf88-4a07-b4f8-daa5483e670f

They estimate that the pricing/license change would add to Unity bottom line about $100 million.

 

If CoD will be owned by MS (seams pretty sure ATM) I don't think MS will stay quiet if the new pricind model is implemented and sure there are others there, but unity uses C# and VS

 

Not really a question, more a kind of rant. Open a Wikipedia "list of game engines" -- there are nearly 200, and even if we focus on non-proprietary engines, there are almost 100. And yet is seems people are keen to reinvent the wheel or implement their own unique "vision" and "goals". I wonder why nobody's willing to make a plain do-it-all environment without creating new programming languages, pushing opinionated approaches, etc. Just make something boring that works and can be improved. I had hopes that maybe Godot is the closest match, but it seems it isn't the case. Really, I wonder whether there is any chance to find and focus on some "Boring Engine", maybe still in its early phase, which can become a basis for a general purpose open source tool of choice for the future.

 

In that case then no technical risk is ever unlimited, because worst case scenario I can simply design and develop my own hardware architecture and operating system and engine to do whatever I'd like...

Switching engines is not generally considered an acceptable state to be in for a commercial developer, and it also pre-supposes another engine that fits your needs exists and that your staff are equipped to use it.

As for the second half of your claim, if you find me to be stupid and arrogant and doing open source wrong, then I will just have to live with that. Have a good one and best of luck on your projects

 

Still waiting for a new announcement, Unity. Your "couple of days" is up.

 

exactly anyone here who has no users, will never understand but anyone who has users knows, no matter how stupid you allow for, there is always someone who finds a new level

 

Actually, that won't happen because this developer is the largest shareholder of the UE

 

It would not surprise me if it was at the end of the day. They might want to see what the stock does today. On a side note, you look so sad on your profile picture .

 

Unity needs the money because it scaled too fast and diversified into areas that aren’t bringing in money. It got so big that Games has becomes a division. Why not spin off gaming into a separate company of the scale it used to be. An agile company that develops the engine at the pace it used to, then the other divisions can use that tech add the bits they need.

The smaller gaming company shouldn’t need this amount of monetisation, and survive on subscriptions.

 

OpenSource in practice means that in order for your fix to get applied to upstream, you'll have to deal with people that maintain upstream. Those people may have very different idea regarding what the project is supposed to be, and the may actively hate the person submitting the patch.

So it is possible to run into a clash of personalities where people won't let you submit anything until you're "accepted" into their club. This stuff happens, because you're dealing with other humans. And dealing with humans is tiresome.

The point of opensource is that you can always fork it, making "your own casino" even if there are disagreements. And in time, your fork may surpass the original project. But there's no warranty that it will happen. So a valid tactic is to maintain your own private fork, using it for your own games, without trying to accumulate a following.

 

I think some people are not keeping up with updates to the first post, like:

BenjiM_Unity said:
We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days. Thank you for your honest and critical feedback.​

 

That data will be inverted in a year's time.

 

That was 3 days ago.

 

More studios are turning off Unity ADs.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/over-500-developers-join-unity-protest-against-runtime-fee-policy

 

wow that is great IMO

 

I once saw a negative review for a torch app saying it doesn't work - The dev commented back saying it's because their phone model doesn't have a camera flash.

The app description even said it needed a flash for it to work

 

we are about to reach 300 pages -.-"

 

If I had to switch to another engine, and until now I haven't decided whether I'll do waiting for yesterday announcement, what I need for my current game isn't a feature rich engine but a stable and fast one with a minimum set of fundamental features. Unreal will surely do, an open source one would be better. Maybe even an advanced framework, but in the long run switching engine means even learning toolsets, workflows, languanges, entering a community etc. so a temporary solution isn't a real solution.

My POV is that of a solo indie dev so I can probably say I am unaffected by "plan pricing and packaging updates" yet not by the general changes. Being a programmer I'm not worried by what nasty language an engine throws me, I'll catch that curve ball, what an engine should not make me do is engine development, also I could fix bugs in a stranger engine extended codebase as long as I haven't to develop entire new solutions (I even don't know if will be accepted). Else I might as well start an engine from scratch. Well, it seems Godot is gaining momentum, but what's the current status of the rendering pipelines? Does it fully support Vulkan or DirectX 12? What does limit its performance?

I think Godot team (as any open engine that's targeted for a broad public) should work to provide bottom fundamental features before going to top shiny ones, this way coming game developers would have an approchable starting point and build on top of that without the engine team or community approval. It's not a perfect solution because multiple devs can have to solve the same problems if they are not publicly addressed and shared, but it's better than what I'm seeing so far.

 

Silence is the answer of Unity, possibly a devaluate stocks strategy is run for a fraudulent sale of the company.

 

They're also fully capable of negotiating. That threat of $x million is just to force them to the table.

 

Meltdown

 

This is all correct, but the problem is the retroactive changes.

They created a product (the engine) and licensed it at a specific price (subscription rate), and the agreement between Unity and the developers who used it was "if you pay this fee you can use our product to make games."

Then they saw how much money some games made and they said "hey wait a minute! These guys are making tons of money. We should have charged them more for the subscriptions!"

But instead of taking their lumps and adjusting their prices going forward and calling it a lesson learned, they tried to *change the terms of existing deals* to get the money they felt they "should have" asked for in the first place.

It's gross. It's greedy and predatory. Just absolutely a disgusting way to do business.

 

Probably in ref to https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/40146
and
https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/40763

Attempted fix for 3.2.x but got reverted due to compat breakage and was kicked down to 4.0

 

this is the real reason make me feel dirty when open Unity at this time

 

Yeah and its just about how th

They did that for a heigher evaluation in their IPO. Its to cash out for all of their managment.
Now they cant sustain that anymore and their only way is to push their AD buisness. Their plan was all along to make a unfair offer so companies have to user their ADs to not go bankrupt.

They will still try to do so, they may get some near term cash, if those changes go through, but as soon as godot is ready, everyone will move there. Unity is a garbage company and you do not make buisness with such folks

 

No they wouldn't - as companies that size would simply have a custom license - same with the largest Unity customers

 

Imagine the situation:

Medium and large studios get together and establish a fund!
Called the Alliance Engine Foundation

The main goal of the foundation is to create a free,
publicly available open source engine
that could open or directly port their projects from the Unity engine.

In this way, they would not only secure their business,
but would be able to maintain the relevance of the current knowledge base
and insure their already released projects against possible legal attacks in the future.

 

I think 4% is palatable, so long as the cost of other unity services is set off against it. I think a tiered approach for significantly higher revenues makes sense, albeit I doubt if would ever have to worry about them! I also think a phased introduction over a 2 year period would be sensible and commercially acceptable (eg. 2% year 1, 4% year 2).

To the earlier points about how this can end up being a big chunk of money, there is a lot of significant risk offset by the next to nothing initial investment costs. If a project garners a lot of success, finding a commercial model that ends up in a 'nice problem to have' situation works for everybody, and allows these big successes to drive investment (he says optimistically) in the engine for the whole community.

 

guys i will definitely recommend you to test the engine, tools, performance BEFORE trying to port your projects... that way you can understand basically what to expect

 

It's not that difficult. We just buy a single Enterprise license to access the Unity source code and then ask an AI to rewrite the code while maintaining the same output

 

Not a bad idea but it would be a major undertaking. Perhaps a robust game converter that can convert from engine A to engine B would be a better investment. And when I say convert I mean like 95% of the work is done for you after conversion. I don't think we need another game engine out there. If it was me I would probably focus on Open 3D Engine, previous lumberyard. Everyone has an preference/opinion on this

 

and then make it open source... not a bad idea xD

 

Of course lol