Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Last time I checked (many years ago) Ogre was a graphics engine, not a game engine. Meaning you have to pair it with an input system, audio playback engine, physics engine, etc…

 

By that description seems pretty much useless, as a developer may start with simple 2D games but later want to make a high end 3D one or take freelancer jobs that can be anything.

So investing in learning such a limiting environment is crazy in my mind.

Blender is 100% different, noone can use it for commercial version, that is why Godot developers cleverly put it as MIT, so can at any point sell a version of it, possibly freely advanced by the users involved.

Otherwise why would they not place it as GNU like Blender, so can forever for sure be free and noone make a paid version of it ?

 

So Reddit and Twitter are the "entire ecosystem"?

I'm starting to think the issue with most of you isn't actually Unity...

 

Thanks for this

 

Remember to use static typing doing so, if applicable

 

It can be enough time depending on the scale of some projects. Apparently Caves of Qud was ported in like a day.

 

An uncapped, open ended payment system based on counting your installations that you canNOT estimate your expenses properly is NOT and NEVER a generous scheme. Your game can be viral and you can be punished for many people's downloading your game in this system. And still you are talking.

And I don't want my game sequels or demos to be combined as a single project to inflate the payment to Unity:

 

After 8 days of reading this thread and finally catching up to the last post, I’d like to add my 2 cents.

But I can’t because Unity took it.

 

You still owe Unity 18 cents

 

Try Evergine. They're targeting non-game 3d-content ppl like you.
Their license is tied to version so they won't scam you like unity

 

Reddit, Twitter, the forums right here, an absolutely absurd amount of professional Unity devs, but hey, who's counting?

Not you, clearly.

 

And let's not forget 424 game studios (this number keeps growing) with more than a combined 20 billion game installs who have turned off all Ironsource and Unity Ads monetization until and unless this is all walked back.

At this point, I'm fairly certain that Lefty is either JR himself or a member of the Unity board. Sad.

 

Thanks, it's on my radar. Like most engines that support webgl, I can't rely on a large community and it scares me a little, but there are no alternatives

 

I'm wondering that nobody mentioned Leadwerks yet as an alternative: https://leadwerks.com/

Even though I have to admit I don't know if it's as good as the website mentions.

 

Thought so at first about a few here, but at least one I looked up has a decade of their life on unity asset store. Let that sink in. It's OK to not engage, but maybe think about how royally unity F***ed at least some of them already.

 

I'm just glad all the other tools that I use for development are not like Unity (and Unreal to some extent).

Unity - $0.20 per install.
Microsoft Visual Studio - $0.20 per install.
Microsoft Windows - $0.05 per install.
Blender - $0.15 per install.
Gimp/Photoshop - $0.05 per install.
A* Pathfinding Project and other scripting assets - $0.10 per install.
Purchased 3D models and audio - $0.20 per install.
Atlassian SourceTree - $0.05 per install.
Git - $0.05 per install.
Apple/Google/Steam - 30%.
Me - "Welcome to McDonald's, can I take your order?"

 

Hey you bring up a valid concern,

First, read:
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/3d/occlusion_culling.html
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/3d/visibility_ranges.html#doc-visibility-ranges

here is a benchmark you can design your self

1. Take a concept you have laid out in a file, or on text somewhere (pictures are a big must here, but are not necessary if you have prompts to work along side this)
2. Add the maximum amount of any type of occludable scenery objects, animations, special effects, code using objects that you believe could ever exist at once in a level.
3. make one script/object script that will spawn these objects randomly and count them, and enter them either into some form of data table, make sure you can control, remove, and garbage collect or pool these objects, and make sure while the project is running, you can render text on screen that shows current deltatime/FPS/load during benchmark
4. add a camera with Fly Camera controls, that can pass through this scene.

5. make more scenes which would stress out the player, with design schemes from step 1, add things like caves, or offices, open fields, this gives you an idea of what your game would use.

6. make a version with entities utilizing pathing, also include ones which do tasks which are timed, such as going back and forth, patrols, etc.

7. ???

8. There is no profit, only pain.

 

Stock is down

33.32-0.64 (-1.88%)
At close: 04:00PM EDT

33.21 -0.11 (-0.33%)
After hours: -

 

This needs a lot more attention. Unity is losing a lot of money, last year was a loss of 920 million. A price increase should be something that can get them back into being viable financially but what they proposed hits a bunch of small studios for amounts they can't afford, but the large studios that they really need to have funding them pay relatively little.

The current thresholds have 1 million installs paying $46,500 while the next 20 million installs only cost between $100,000 and $200,000 in total. 20 times the installs for only 3 to 5 times the price. Besides being unpopular (and not even enforceable, because installs as a metric are silly), it's not even something that would get the company the type of revenue it needs. Any of the top 1% of Unity games out there make more than the bottom 90% of Unity games combined, yet they all are paying the same amount, and that amount doesn't come anywhere close to fixing the deficits Unity is running.

 

There's a cross platform language called "Purebasic" that uses Ogre for its graphics but that language has been out for ages and only has occasional updates, so I don't know how current its Ogre implementation is.

 

It's not. It's honestly garbage. I could go into it myself because I've given it numerous chances, but these reviews cover the same issues I had.

These are just the ones that match up with my experience. To add to this, the engine itself hasn't seen an actual update in over four years, with Leadwerks 5 basically feeling like vaporware at this point.

 

Yeah it is obvious this isn't about trying to get "mega money" via runtime fees.

We know that wouldn't work.

They know that we know that wouldn't work.

It isn't really about that.

This seems to be some form of move that has people like this behind it:

 

I will also put emphasis on people acting emotionally, specially if you are mid way through with your project. Think twice before you leave Unity. Are you really affected by this move right now? Moving to a new tech, might be more harmful at this moment for you. Weight your cons/pros, evaluate other engines, check with your staff (if any) but take the time to plan your move for the future.

 

Because you're clueless about the history of Blender whose GPL license has massively slowed down its adaption by the professional industry.

Copyleft Requirement
The GPL uses a concept known as "copyleft," which requires that any derivative work based on GPL-licensed software must also be released under the GPL. This means if you integrate GPL code into your software, the entire software becomes subject to the GPL.

Source Code Availability
When you distribute GPL-licensed software (or software containing GPL code), you are also required to make the source code available to the recipients. This is contrary to the typical proprietary software model, where source code is closely guarded.

Incompatibility with Closed-Source Licenses
Proprietary or closed-source licenses usually restrict the use, modification, and distribution of the software. These restrictions directly conflict with the freedoms guaranteed by the GPL, making the two inherently incompatible.

Commercial Restrictions
While GPL doesn't prevent the commercialization of the software, the requirement to release source code and allow free redistribution can make traditional commercial software models unfeasible.

Software Integration and Libraries
Even if you don't modify the GPL-licensed software but merely link to it or incorporate it into a larger software suite, the GPL usually requires that the entire combined work be licensed under the GPL. This can be problematic for proprietary software developers who want to keep their codebase closed-source.

Legal Risk
Ignoring or failing to comply with GPL requirements can expose companies to legal risk, including potential lawsuits from original software authors or other parties with vested interests.

Because of these reasons, developers or companies interested in developing proprietary software often avoid integrating GPL-licensed code into their projects to maintain the closed nature of their software. Instead, they might opt for software licensed under more permissive licenses, such as the MIT License or Apache License, which don't have the same "copyleft" requirements.

 

So is there literally no others engine for 3D environments? I mean the engine that I saw kinda lack of many features and functions. Using and learning Godot is like populating with 2D games on all the platform which is sucks since I never liked to play in 2D. Others engine seems to be more difficult and at the same time lack of many features which is crucial... It could take at least 6 years or more to implement those functions or if it even gonna be possible... I'm so sad bring my depression back

 

I wonder if Unity would listen if the people they care about spoke up?

I mean, not the f***ing idiot developers of course. The advertisers.

Who spends on those adverts with Ironsource and what influence can they bear on it? Advertisers seem to have a lot of influence on company decisions these days. Just a thought.

 

Buddy. Unreal. It's right there.

 

TOS changes are the core issue. Especially, deleting living terms as if you are above the actual law while they are alive, in effect, and are still legally binding. Then implanting your own overruling terms, which retroactively demolish terms that contained no expiration date. Those legal terms were bound to those specified versions of TOS per those versions users downloaded and used.

Tacking on some wily coyote style money making scheme onto updated terms is a different issue.

 

the thing why unity acts like that, is that they assume everyone is malicious in their indent. its something that sociopaths always are scared off, because they themselves do it all the time.

they didn´t think about a smart way to determine the bad "impacts of the install fee on everyone - including themselves", since this would have needed them to have empathy and an understanding of others in their buisness, but they did think about how others could abuse their "system".

similar happend in how they wanted to improve their AD earnings. they could have had a revenue fee % with certain layers. additional introduction of a limited reduction in those % fees, if people were using their AD network. that they would have rolled with a bigger delay and slowly increased over the next 12 months.
they could have market that as a necessarily of their struggling buisness while keeping those companys using unity.

positive reinforcement. this could have been a win / win scenario and would have strengthened their foothold in the ad buisness for long, while going for competitors and reducing the costs for the editor. unity could have grown stronger, while simultaniously reducing fees.

but what message did those idiots send across instead? "we will bankrupt you with a runtime installation fee, if you do not want that, use our ad system. we have a magic blackbox. if we bankrupt you, give us a call. if somebody pirates your game, which is sad, write us a mail".
its absolutly baffeling in every sense how bad this is and i honestly believe that a lot in their upper league must have heavy ASPD since you really only needed to reflect once to see this. they only believe that everyone looks for themselves.
"90% of you are not affected by this WHY ARE YOU MAD".

 

Never thought that this is still alive and kicking. Thank you so much!

 

I'm never gonna use Unreal for Android platform it's one of the worst nightmare. Such as not optimised and no update at all basically it was always dead in that part of section. And literally a whole empty project on Android build finish with 500Mb with absolutely nothing inside the apk nor with activated plugins and it take like more than 1 hour to build empty project

 

The rabbit hole gets so deep, we could think we end up in Wonderland.

Here's a common scenario in today's market that could make it really bad for any self-published dev:

Imagine if you are releasing an Early Access game (a Beta version) on Steam for $10 and someone decide to buy it, but ends up not liking what he/she is seeing within Steam's refund threshold. He/She applies for a refund, gets his/her money back. Well, that install count to your total installs profile.

Now let's say that in 1 year, your game is released and it's much more improved since that time when it was in Early Access. Well, what if this past refunded users decide to buy it again, but this time decides to install it on a new more powerful PC (or laptop) that he/she might have gotten since then (or just the same old PC with a new motherboard)? Well, that's another install being counted. Then what if he/she decides to try the game on both PC and a Steam deck back in the past and now? That becomes a total of 4 installs for a single purchase. What if he/she's part of a family and shares the game between family members by using Steam Family Share and install a game on multiple PCs and Steam Decks? You can end up with as much as 10-12 installs PER purchase really easy. That $0.20 becomes $2-$2.20 for a single purchase if you reach the threshold. If 3-4 years later, the game gets on Steam sales at 80% off and come to $3 per purchase, which $0.90 goes to Steam?

Now, imagine if you implement a regional pricing for your game where some (poorer) country might pay $8 instead of let's say $15.

I'm not even covering the one type of business that could raise the per-installs purchase cost to 20+ installs: Net Cafes.
Legally speaking, Net Cafe are supposed to purchase 1 game per PC (a.k.a. 1 license to play) and Steam is enforcing this, but let's be honest... in many parts of the world, lots of Net Cafes uses the Offline & Family Share trick to purchase only a few licenses for all their PCs.

Like a Net Cafe might have 10 PCs with a note that tell you can play any games on them, then you might see 20 PCs with a note that tells you may only play a specific series of games that can run via Steam while in Offline mode. Those Steam Offline PCs has the games installed while online (so Unity counts them), but then the shop uses a custom executer (.exe) to only launch Steam in offline mode so that they can run the game simultanously on more than the number of purchased licenses.

That's where Unity will start to get some calls about their per-install bills and when they will obviously utterly fails at having enough people on deck to manage the chaos that will ensure.

 

This seems to be taking longer than people thought, I'm not sure if that's good or bad.

Either they're taking their time to make it right or the business is so F***ed they can't think of any alternative models. Probably second option.

Earning call is tomorrow so maybe something will come of that.

 

Whoa, blast from the past! No idea Leadwerks still existed. I remember it from the times when Torque Game Engine was still a thing.

 

You know there's loads of ways to reduce build sizes, right? If you want to deploy to Android and iOS, you just need to take care to pay attention to what you're running and to use options to shrink your builds.

https://georgy.dev/posts/reducing-mobile-build-size/

 

legally it may have been a red herring from the beginning. they just communicated it like it would protect us, while doing some legal tricksters. but from the legal side it seems there are not many ways, basically just one, to go against this (by californian law).

they are morally speaking gangsters. legaly speaking the system enables this. professionally speaking .. idk still gangsters i guess

 

Purebasic? Ogre?

 

Ha cool thanks a lot will give that a go. Interesting

 

But in fact, everyone is affected. And this has nothing to do with money.

 

Seeing here how many different engines people are (claiming) to split to, I have a feeling the people who stick to Unity will profit from all this.
A lot of competition will drop away because people will struggle with engines that have no significant community and/or are not as popular for a reason.

 

I'm going to repeat this...
Installs is an unacceptable metric for the following reasons:

1. As a measurement, it is not tied reliably to revenue.
2. Technically, this is not feasible as a form of measurement unless the application communicates, over the web, that it has been installed.
   - My belief is that this idea came from an ad service (IronSource) executive. For Ad Views, they do indeed collect the idea of a "base install" for serving applications. This does not apply to ANY software NOT using ad services.
   - They claim the installs measurement comes from "data modeling" - sounds like ad view analytics.
   - They claim it won't "phone home" - technically, viewing ads does/doesn't phone home, depends on perspective.
   - They claim they'll detect pirated games using their "ad fraud detection algorithms" - WUT? Sure sounds like their plan was to stuff our games with ad services.
3. Even assuming we are willing to use IronSource, er, LevelPlay ad services in our games, I definitely call BS on the idea they can differentiate between charity and normal sales just from a game that is installed.
4. The entire idea reeks of a Nebraska cattle farm on a hot, moist day... Unity flip flopped and lied to us users in their official responses.
5. The entire idea was cooked up because they did not trust us to self-report REVENUE.
6. The rumors of the walkback have Unity agreeing to let US collect "installs" - how magnanimous... let us developers figure out how we'll collect a BS metric that cannot be collected in anything but ad supported games. This is unacceptable.

Installs are an unsustainable, technically suspect metric that Unity did not even have a solution for, leading to their confused replies to questions. They are unable to properly describe their scheme to developers, who, I might add, are much better at the technical side of games than the executives trying to shovel this massive pile of bovine feces down our throats. Stop it, Unity, it's insulting.

(yes, there are many other issues, I was just focusing on one aspect I see being conflated)

 

The longer this takes the more likely things are not going well in the land of the C-Suite and board. Every day that passes without this new amazing clarified policy that will resolve our "confusion and angst" makes it seem more likely to me that it's not getting pushed through the way they wanted and heads might be rolling.

Whether or not it changes anyone's opinions on Unity in the short or long term, I think the only real way they can begin to salvage this is if there is new leadership, contrition and an honest attempt at a new, focused direction for the company. Maybe they could put all their focus and effort on... I dunno... the game engine this time?

 

Most people are moving to Unreal and Godot which already have significant communities and/or have been increasing in popularity pretty substantially for years now.

 

Yes I already know about this since I tried years ago Unreal and I'm testing even right in hope that something is changed in years but it's seems the same... Even if you manage to have less MB in my opinion for just an empty scene build it gonna be still a lot especially speaking of mobile platform...

 

Most other 3D engines will be lacking in some features or they won't having a proven track record in 3D. Your readily available options for battle-tested 3D are pretty much:

Unity
Unreal
CryEngine
FNA/XNA

 

Unreal has gotten a lot better recently in the mobile arena. They greatly reduced the install sizes - I think it's still larger than Unity, but not by much. I tested a simple app on my Android phone and it was similar to Unity - just hit the button to compile to phone and a few minutes later when it finished my app was up and running on my phone with good frame rates. I was surprised - I expected it to be a big ordeal but it was easy.

 

My posts are being removed. Why? I took screenshots of them all.

 

https://investors.unity.com/financials/quarterly-results/default.aspx
There is a webcast replay for Q2. Is it possible to watch live or is waiting until it is at that page needed?