Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Also about Flax, realtime GI isn't that great as it looks: it's actually a kind of realtime lightmapping: it's not that great covering correctly the whole object, has seams issues, is quite rough and eats a lot of VRAM.
It doesn't have cloth simulation either and doesn't look that great overall.
I mean, it's ok, but not enough to support those terms of service, sorry.
It also looks like the pet project of a guy working somewhere else.

 

I'm speculating here, but I suspect the delay isn't because of the fact they don't already have myriad spreadsheets ready to go to model any changes they make to this model, but because they'll need to announce some blood on the tracks at the same time given what a S***show the whole thing has been.

 

https://github.com/DJLink/list-of-game-engines-and-frameworks/

 

It's over. By the end of this month Godot will have all the funding it needs.
On top of the paid developers it will get a a lot of serious game developers to help for free and with high motivation to make the engine better.

https://twitter.com/robotgentleman/status/1704495631010816030

 

i like monogame and i've used it quite a bit. but i can't say anything about active development. at least it hasn't been for months, years? maybe this will activate them... hope so.

 

Agreed. I don't think they expected the backlash to the degree that is happening. Also the share selling that execs did might be making some investors nervous. Like there is something the execs know that they don't. Even though this underhanded move effects Unity customers (devs), as an investor I would be concerned about trustworthiness of the exec team. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it would not be surprised that some investors don't agree with what Unity did.

 

Yep I'd pay 4% over 1,000,000 pa. At least you know where you stand. No paying per install though. Happy to support the development of the engine and not trash my company in the process or be extorted.

Yep the longer they take (by the hour) the madder I get about this. I need to know so I can work out what I am going to do. I just want to proceed and if that is switching engines I want to get started like NOW.

 

DISCORD...
Why is everyone using Discord this days instead of forums??
It's like trying to talk technically in a 1990's party line or a live stream comment section!
Nothing got ever done on a crowded discord server!
Then trying to find some technical info inside a discord server is hell!

 

Or at least until they decide to move to a commercial version.

There is no such thing as for all time, as soon as Godot get more popular and see loosing millions from a potential paid version, can go either way.

Then developers will be left with the task to make the engine work in the whatever specs of the hardware is targeted manually, which may or not be possible.

 

Wait till they find out Discord also hasn't ever been profitable and is bound to decay just like Unity, Twitter, Reddit et al when they ramp up their new business model schemes.

 

You can fork it at that point.

 

Once someone like MicroShaft make a move to buy it it will pop I reckon. Might be a time to buy some shares. Hmmm

 

I read on Discord that the author plans to clarify the licensing agreement when he releases 1.7. I'm getting the feeling he was just using existing licenses as a template for his own (I can understand that legal agreements can be difficult to write for the average person.) However, I agree, that if that license is not clarified and improved Flax may not be worth moving to.

 

Yeeessss, indeed.

It is called Godoic,

where the transitory studios of the Lords of Game dev converge.

In venturing to the github repo,

the coders discovered the truth of the currently proposed unity license:

"Your paychecks fade and you can't afford enough seats to continue working."

 

I can't see the Unity Board or Management being in any hurry.
They have set "their" Terms or worse to come.
I imagine they are quite happy to wait until all here has disappeared from sight if not memory and await January next year and watch the Big Money install fees roll in and fill up their bank accounts....

That's probably all wrong but they are seemingly in no hurry which could be for a multitude of reasons of which we have little influence perhaps. Time will tell I guess.

 

My hunch is that a majority of the executive team and a majority of the board were behind this decision. I don't think it was one person or a minority faction.

As evidence I present the following recent quotes from Helgason and Riccitello where they indicate a deliberate attempt on Unity's part to implement a new business model:

'We F***ed up on many levels. No other way to put it: a new business model for Unity was announced in a way that was hard to understand, but it also missed a bunch of important “corner” cases, and in central ways ended up as the opposite of what it was supposed to be. Now to try again, and try harder. I am provisionally optimistic about the progress. So sorry about this mess'

- David Helgason, Co-Founder and Board member.

https://www.facebook.com/davidhelgason

“I don’t think there’s any version of this that would have gone down a whole lot differently than what happened,” Riccitiello said. “It is a massively transformational change to our business model.”

- John Riccitello, CEO

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

Now, keep in mind, these changes to Unity's business model are news to everyone. They are news to the public, to developers, and to Wall Street. Last Tuesday was the first time anyone outside of Unity has heard of this new business model.

And I think the chaotic nature of this abrupt and drastic change to Unity's business model is likely the result of an unforeseen slowdown in Unity's revenue that has forced their hand. As evidence I present the last two quarterly earnings reports webcasts featuring CEO John Riccitello where he painted a picture that was all sunshine and roses:

https://s26.q4cdn.com/977690160/files/doc_financials/2023/q1/20230510-Unity-Earnings-Webcast.mp4

https://s26.q4cdn.com/977690160/fil...oftware-Q2-2023-Financial-Results-Webcast.mp4

But it's clear that Unity has been hemorrhaging cash:

"In Q2 alone, Unity posted a net loss of $193 million on $533 million in revenue. The problem is not necessarily revenue but expenses. For one, Unity doled out a whopping $158 million worth of stock-based compensation in the quarter, roughly equivalent to 30% of revenue. Sales and marketing expenses doubled year over year, partly due to the ironSource acquisition."

https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/09/14/unity-takes-a-big-risk-to-boost-growth-and-profit/

And last quarter's report indicated a big earnings miss:

"Unity Software U reported second-quarter 2023 loss of 51 cents per share in contrast to the Zacks Consensus Estimate of a profit of 6 cents. The company had incurred a loss of 69 cents per share in the year-ago quarter."

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/unity-software-u-q2-earnings-125300936.html

Based on this information, and the conclusions reached above, I predict Unity will proceed with some version of the plan they announced last Tuesday.

 

Godot's ex-leadership already formed commercial entities for enterprise support and console porting, which are things that the Godot Foundation being a charity can't do. This is the same model Blender has. I guess Blender's license makes it rather impossible for it to become commercial, while Godot's doesn't but on a surface level they're the same models. There's the crowd funded charity working on tech side, and a commercial entity using that tech for profit, dog fooding, marketing and other good endeavors.

Godot becoming commercial is far more unlikely than Unreal going public.

 

It absolutely has. If you look at the volume of stocks traded, that price reflects a MASSIVE attempt to buy and sell during a crash. Insane levels of volume being thrown into it at the moment and it's STILL going down.

 

Well, said.

 

To be fair I think the entire post you quoted gave your essay a much more emotional spin than necessary. The last sentence basically is that Godot is a wrecked toy and nothing more than frustrating. even though not written by you specifically it's what sticks since it's the last thing the reader holds in mind. That's more or less guilty by association.

Getting hints and warnings about the tool you plan to dedicate your time, energy and project(s) on per se is always a good thing if based. It's also understandable to have an emotional reaction if you're told that this very tool is supposed to be rubbish. Still no excuse to behave toxic, of course. for example, I have started investing time (also some money in courses which I don't regret) into Godot for over a year now on/off and I was dead set to start a project in it because I really like the design paradigms it has. I also personally never found Juan's posts to be as pushy as others apparently did. But getting a whammy like - "this might not get you further than a prototype" is still rather harsh to hear.

On the other hand I also heard that about Unity many years ago (and look where we are now) and in a similar fashion about Blender (and look where we are now). Godot is also just now starting to take off and I think being an allrounder with a friendly UI and very permissive license is still one of the best available alternaitives around. It's just now that the typical doubt-response creeps in and it's an ugly feeling.

It's basically comment maths: 500 positive reports + 1 negative report = 1 negative report.

 

Yes, but if need an upgrade for some new hardware specs, potentially you have to do yourself.

It may be possible or be game over, depending on the case.

 

Well, they are as active as they can be considering they work on donations and do not have proper funding like Unity (and Godot now) has. The key point is that they have a framework which fully uses the language most Unity devs are comfortable with; the rest is up to us to shape.
If MonoGame only has even 10% of the ex-unity developers being part of the community, it will thrive!
We are not just game developers but entrepreneurs and, there are many many possibilities for the taking with MonoGame. The main reason MonoGame is not thriving IMO maybe is because nearly everything is based on a donation-basis. If they can commercialise their operation a slight bit without being greedy (looking at you JR), they will have the funding and incentive to rise and shine.

 

true. which reminds me of THEIR current position. i better read the TOS. i hope there won't be 0.20c per new channel...

 

Perhaps the delay is over some deal like that. Not necessarily MS. Maybe there are some discussions going on. If say MS wanted to purchase Unity they might be talking to them now to make sure the license update doesn't drive away even more people. As part of a possible purchase. It's far fetched but you never know.

 

Yes. I can't really understand the teams that are directly jumping into porting without doing a full evaluation of the engine first. (Though, I guess some projects are just right at that spot that it could be trivial.) Identify the top technical features of your game and implement quick tests of those features in the new engine. Profile the engine with your most expensive assets loaded and processes running and see how it performs and whether you can live with it.

It sucks when you start porting something, everything is going along great, run into a roadblock 6 months in, and can't find a workaround. It kills the project. And it kills whatever morale and motivation you still have from before you had to port to begin with.

 

Maybe, but is far from a 100% certainty, the fact that has a sale permissive license and they did not go with GNU means a lot to me.

Maybe needed their options open or plan ahead a paid version, after get more popular.

 

Holy sh*t. Much respect. But. Holy Sh*t.

 

Bruh

Stop

I've been using XNA for years, and FNA, and monogame,

we still have allegro even, allegro

SFML, SDL2, OpenGL, LWJGL, etc..

most of us are pissed not because Unity is the only way to produced content, it is because a lot of us retaught ourselves to create games exclusively using this WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) game dev process.

I'm not sure it was worth it, I didn't want to believe this was going to happen

then a red flag happened to me:

That, Gigaya project, which seems extremely useful as a demo project for anyone who has played any platformer, was cancelled.

How can you cancel, this? And rake in billions in tech company acquisitions?

What the F***?

 

"In Q2 alone, Unity posted a net loss of $193 million on $533 million in revenue. The problem is not necessarily revenue but expenses. For one, Unity doled out a whopping $158 million worth of stock-based compensation in the quarter, roughly equivalent to 30% of revenue. Sales and marketing expenses doubled year over year, partly due to the ironSource acquisition."

https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/09/14/unity-takes-a-big-risk-to-boost-growth-and-profit/

158 million dollars in stock-based compensation in one quarter?

 

I've seen somebody work out numbers that, even if they pulled off this Runtime Fee scheme as planned, they'd only net $100 million per year? That seems like a shortfall... also, the sheer number of employees for Unity seems excessive, but $1 billion loss excessive? Something is definitely wrong with those numbers.

Honestly, I think regardless of how they resolve this, even if they manage to reassure their customer base and retain a good chunk of their "whales" - I don't know if that's enough.

Riccitiello should have taken the AppLovin offer when it was on the table. I can only imagine how much different this situation might have been. WE might have disdain for the idea of an ad service buying up a game engine, but Unity seems to think of itself as an ad service company first anyway, only now it's worse, because IronSource's scuzzy execs (and the PayPal mafia) have their hands firmly in the cookie jar, and none of them seem to care about the core business, beyond how much money it will pay them.

 

MIT or Apache is the ones I see most around FOSS IT projects. I've never run across GNU in the wild personally. Blender's GPL license, while keeping Blender forever free, has also been a big obstacle for wider industry adaption. MIT license doesn't seem like a red flag to me.

 

Well, if the engine is used by devs up to the point of it changing the license any short comings in h/w spec support would be seen while it is still open source and should be addressed at that time. After the (hypothetical) license change to commercial I can see it being forked and a similar situation to what is going on with Unity now happening. Except you don't have to learn a new engine, just setup a new entity to support the forked version and continue development with existing community.

 

Unity 2 when?

 

unity 2 open source pls

 

They obviously burn through money, because they scaled up like there is no tomorrow.
7k+ people - yet noone seem to be able to think things through? Not what I would expect from a publicly traded company. Which is why I think this move was not about trying to save unity from bankruptcy but an intentional move to nuke the company on the stock market into oblivion, so some corporation can take over. This is the only logical explanation I see.
It seems very improbable that such a company can make such an obvious "mistake" and then keep silent for days, so I don't really buy it.

 

This is my tentative conclusion:

I think what's happening is that Unity's executive team and board members are trying to justify Unity's valuation on the basis that it is a high growth tech stock. That is the myth they are trying to create. And they are doing this by spending a lot of money to generate a lot of revenue.

And if they can keep up the charade long enough they can dump their stock on institutional and retail investors before Unity falls apart.

So squeezing developers is not about turning things around, it's about getting through the next quarterly earnings report.

Note that Silver Lake sold all of its direct holdings last Friday:

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1810806/000089924323019190/xslF345X05/doc4.xml

Silver Lake still has a ton of stock that it holds indirectly though.

And let me be clear. I don't think they planned this (and by "this" I mean Unity's implosion, they obviously planned the new business model change). I think they are just incompetent.

 

they will 100% proceed with this. does it happen in Q3 or Q4 (in ten days) may be the reason we are not hearing anything. maybe they want to avoid this issue in the Q3 report and buy some time... idk

 

I have just become a MonoGame evangelist
Unity killed XNA; it would be so ironic if MonoGame can take out Unity now!

For anyone else interested in MonoGame, we started a discussion about on the MonoGame forum here:
https://community.monogame.net/t/how-good-of-a-replacement-is-monogame-for-unity/19448/7

 

Isn't GNU infectious? The binary is not tied to GNU, therefore you can profit off a closed source sublicense product for commercial use.

 

can i share your observations on my discord server? please

 

sadly you are right

 

so much info, thanks ❤

 

How does Unity have 7000 employees? That is pretty insane.
They are also based in the most expensive city and state in the world. Not ver lean and nimble if you know what I mean...

 

You're right.

 

Unity: 7000 engineers working on the engine
Godot: 1 billion developers are helping to make the engine better

Spoiler: Source

According to a report by Newzoo, there were approximately 1.2 billion video game developers worldwide in 2020

 

The main problem I think is two fold, early investors want the leadship to pump the stock by gaining whatever market share they can get so they can dump and leadship wants to maximize headcount.
Typically CEO etc compensation correlates with the amount of employees.

In this equation nobody who makes decisions cares about making a good engine.

 

discord != forums

 

I think you might be off by a billion or so A few hundred thousand maybe...

 

Imagine if you had legitimately no ability to gauge someone's work ethic or talent because you had none yourself. Now imagine you only saw value in how much employees drove their nose up your ass and allowed you to run wild with destructive monetary policies.

 

Games on Steam:
Unity: 37947
Godot: 906
https://steamdb.info/tech/

Btw. (unfortunately) only a fraction of the 7k employees part of the Engine.