Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Unity are prohibiting me from posting.

They are actively removing posts of mine that state the disgraceful behaviour of theirs to try and charge for every game ever made with unity if it was installed.

 

Thanks for reply. But the problems that those engine's is basically unusable in terms of mobile platform except unity of course... I know about cryEngine as well but many of people's claim that this engine is literally not updated anymore and really low production... and of course very little community as well.
About Unreal it's a dead point since you can't low MB... It's always stuck on a hundred MB even on an empty project.
About FNA/XNA I don't know if they can handle and support mobile platform (android & iOS)

 

Are we seriously going to just have this whole board suddenly devolve into this?

We could be discussing possible solutions to the issues that have arisen from the hare-brained schemes those in charge have cooked up, and ways in which developers can deal with them or go on the offensive and blow the doors open and force things to change or something.

Just...anything that's more productive than this self-cannibalising nonsense that I'm knowingly partaking in!

Anyway! Unity. Nice engine. Shame about the owners.

 

Unreliable close minded developer, similar to Juan from Godot. Both embraces open source but they are reluctant to change to their babies.

 

MonoGame is based on XNA and can be compiled for mobile

 

How much time it takes for you just to build an empty scene and how much in size (MB)?

 

Here is the solution.

Rollback. Apologise. Move forward.

Do we really want Unity gone? I don't. I just don't want to have to worry about anything like this happening again.

Am I asking too much?

 

Unreal greatly decreased the size of their executables on mobile not too long ago. It's pretty close to the size that Unity makes now. And they've put a lot of work into make it perform well and from what I've read its compatibility is better too. If you haven't checked it out recently, you should read about it. I was surprised at how far they have come.

 

The problem is that the CEO has his mind set on having a "fundamentally different business model"

 

You are right, but what Im seeing right now a wave of angry Unity devs with existing projects mid way through flooding out Unity. It might be their worse decision (or the best, we don't know yet).
Maybe wait for Unity's official answer and then think a future move thoughtfully?
What's 100% sure from now on, is that we have lost all trust in Unity, and my future new projects will be Unreal if things remains the way they are now.

 

But does it have a 3D environment? Or it just for 2D?

 

Actually the problem is, unity still have the same CEO from past week...

 

Unity has been undercutting competition by relying on debt for years with the plan to monopolize. This is poison for any industry. I'll refrain from making emotional judgements based on that.

 

It is both 2D and 3D...the 3D side is a bit more raw than Unity perhaps (but same amount of control is possible) and it is C# based.

 

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

 

That kind of model, as has been seen, does not work with a Game Engine. It worked at EA but EA were selling games, dlc etc. Unity is not the same type of company.

 

I think as long as that is coupled with the removal of the CEO and anyone else at the top that made this happen, that would be a good step.

People losing their positions and the company being under new leadership would at least signal to their customers that those people aren't the company and their decisions didn't align with it's best interests.

The problem is that Unity is a public company and has done the typical thing of inflating itself at great loss to build market share so they could one day flick a switch and reap the reward. But they flicked the wrong switch because they are stupid.

The inflated company and the goal of a public company to enrich shareholders is still there. So they've just completely bungled it and I don't know how they recover in a way that can satisfy their different masters: Shareholders (primary), Employees and Customers.

 

I just tried it now with unreal empty build finished in 12 minutes with 67Mb in size
Unity took 1 minute and 37 seconds with 14Mb in size.
So yes I can agree that Unreal improved like it was insane when I tested it years ago from 500Mb to somewhere 67MB but in my opinion it still a lot in terms of mobile...

 

I think the reason they are taking so long in coming up with a plan is that they know they need to do something more drastic. Walking back won't be enough. I think they are shopping for a buyer...

 

Thank you! Good to know. I'm surely gonna try this one. The main things that important for me is having google services integrated maybe with some plugins but I have no idea if they have one

 

Yep, I agree.

What possessed them to do this? I can't believe that someone up there CEO wise thought that this was actually going to be accepted. It beggers belief.

 

There are other options, but you'll be making sacrifices no matter what. Some others include:

Godot
PlayCanvas on Cordova
Cocos
Stride

even Heaps.io with some effort

 

Thank you. My wording was poor. I wanted to ask if the earnings call tomorrow can be watched live or later when it will be listed on unity's page eventually.

 

It's about encouraging people in the mobile space to switch to their ad platform. Catastrophic fees or get locked into their platform that removes competition on ad rates (that Unity already wasn't competitive with). Unitys financial disclosures basically divide revenue into create and grow. Grow covers their ad platform, and this is set up to increase that, as it's already their largest individual revenue source.

Problem is, that violates laws to enforce competition in the EU, and likely a few other places. It's easy to see what they're going for, 100 million from install fees but if they could use this tactic to up their ad service by 100% they get 600 million. Better, but still not enough, and also illegal.

 

Anybody who makes a living using unity and multiple countries' consumer's protection laws are also against this.

For some of us, unity's new business model is illegal meaning that we are not allowed to distribute the executable.

 

Just as a heads up, you won't hear anything about the pricing changes here of note. Everything is basically just earnings talk.

 

That would be too good to be true.

 

I'll have to take another look at it. I set up Unreal 5.3 the other day for testing, just haven't gotten around to it yet.

 

Mine wasn't an empty scene, so it was close to 40MB. I suspect that if you do some settings optimizations you could get an empty scene down to 20MB or so. An empty Unity scene is around 10MB (looked it up just now). So the initial empty scene is still larger, but they should grow at about the same rate. I think the main issue with mobile games on UE is that the dev tools aren't very polished for 2D. But there are 2D games that have been built with UE.

From UE documentation:

 

Allegro is still around?! Hell yeah! DJGPP ftw++;

 

That's the problem. I don't either, but if they get away with this and survive as a company then expect this business model to spread.

 

What unity has to say themselves is not interesting, the questions and their answers are.
e: Or does unity want money for asking questions as well?

 

I'm currently looking at Godot's 3D features (and trying it out with an actual real 3D project for learning) and while it has its limits (especially for mobiles), I wouldn't count it as not working with mobile 3D. In fact, it clearly reminds me of how you had to manage a project in Unity 3 back around 2012, but with most of the additional modern features that reminds me of stuff that got added to Unity since then. It's also a highly modular-based game engine (again, like early Unity before it went crazy on acquisitions instead of slower-paced active developments) so any features missing might actually exist somewhere as an add-on created by someone somewhere. (This is, again, kinda like Unity prior to the 2010 when it launched its asset store.)

The main issue with it is that it's documented like other open source projects (like Blender) and its development cycle is making an hell to know what's what. Like features working in 3.5 not working in 4.1 because they got replaced and a whole new set of better functions... so you got to know what version a documentation/tutorial is pointing at.

That's the actual most insane cool thing about Unity from a production standpoint: been how it manages deprecation such as you get to know what's changed for what directly in the engine. So if you follow an old tutorial with deprecated functions, you get a warning and the step to fixes the deprecation. Godot basically throws you an error and tell you that the code is wrong as soon as it's deprecated. This makes Godot kinda bad when you try to learn it from 1-2 years old sources not knowing how things changed and where to look for its changes.

Still, I can at least tell you that, yes Godot can do Mobile 3D just fine, if you're keen on real old-fashioned optimization from the get-go. If you're the kind of devs who build a clunky prototype and, then, fixes and optimize, you'll most likely have a bad time with it (for 3D mobile games) because will be a lot of work just to setup the profiler's accurately toward your type of build/devices and the testing isn't as straight-forward as Unity where you can just plug your mobile device and press "Build and test" and instantly get actual device-based performances readings. (You can have certain performances readings, but not on the same levels as Unity with its mobile simulator package.)

 

FNA/XNA for 3D??
I thought they were just programming frameworks?

 

Yes, clearly ~60 hours wasn't enough so far to say "we roll back all, sorry, we go back to the drawing board and come up something more feasible at a later date, also we only change EULA for future version from now on and we personally will notify every single user about it".
I say 60 because Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and average 10 hours per day. If the management should instigate CRUNCH on themselves is a crisis like this, so 10 hours work day isn't impossible.

They simply don't care. Really.

 

I went through the whole thing. Unless you want to hear the same sort of thing that's been pretty open discussion for years now about how Unity is being run, the only new things you're going to hear is stuff like "we know the people not paying for engine licenses are going to want AI tools so that's going to be big money for us." This is standard business bullshit.

 

This is kinda strange to me why am I still get 67MB I literally have nothing in my project... no images , no code , no plugin activated... I'm gonna try to dig into more about this case...
One question is it matter API android maybe this make more size?

 

IDK, there is Fortnite for android and people are playing it so it must work unless you're targeting hypercasual audiences, in which case you could go 2D instead.

 

IMO they either waiting for the community to get less mad, so it's easier to implement their watered-down but not really bs they want to,
Or starting to realize the weight of the whole situation and everything is on fire.

 

there

EDIT: It seems I have just been banned for posting a meme. Oh well, good luck everyone.

 

I mean, we will get less mad as we get used to our new game engines of choice.

 

To each their own. I really like investor calls, because nowhere else you get a free premium course in corpo speak and can match to what is actually being done.

 

I could be wrong, but it has been feeling like the community has just been getting more mad. I think they are finally realizing that things are simply not fine as it all burns around them.

 

I'm only making 3D games and I don't like typology of the 2D functions like flip character to left and right and kinda strange movement inputs...
The problem is not running the mobile games on Unreal but how to lower the size as much as possible. Let's say you wanna keep your game somewhere around 300MB so basically with an empty scene you already start with hundred of Mb and you still need to start making your game this is kinda a mess..
Not everyone want to play a 10Gb game on their phone

 

This is no longer necessary thanks to .NET slowly supporting the major platforms.

 

That's a fair point. It raises an interesting topic about how solid Godot's license foundation is(in comparison to blender). Godot's license seems to be preferable over Blender's (there have been discussions regarding godot turning copyleft). Also there has since been reddit threads and youtube videos about whether Godot can acheive a rugpull like unity did.

In a worst case scenario, sure, the lead godot dev goes on rampage, abandons and even attempts to destroy the progress on his 10-year pet project. Is it likely? hell no. Is it technically possible? yes, and the community will have to pick up the pieces. But in this unlikely worst case scenario, the question comes back to: who can you trust? Your options are a 30-year game dev with a 10-year passion project (plus the direct backing of the community's involvement) vs the former CEO of EA. Who is more likely to fork you over? I'll take my chances.

And tbh, I don't think I'd mind a paid version of it (as long as its not scummy).

 

Yea, they are definitely code-first, so you might consider them frameworks. The term "engine" has been fairly bastardized throughout the years. But they are among the few that has a proven track record even in 3D games in recent years. You don't get the WYSIWYG editor and will probably be building a lot of tooling yourself. Definitely capable, but seems to be more popular for 2.5D style games like Bastion, perhaps due to the complexity of working with 3D models and surface shaders.

 

A buyer that knows how to rebuild the company, manage it well and make it stable and clear, can be a solution. I wonder who can be?

 

Pretty sure they are doing their best impression of an ostrich right now.

 

Well, guess I'll be going to Unreal Engine.... And here I thought Unity was better until now. Unity won't be able to regain this lost trust.