Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Speaking of vegetables, the developer of Caves of Qud ported his game over a period of about 14 hours.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/16lphwe/caves_of_qud_dev_ports_his_game_from_unity_to/

 

That respect became price sensitive 6 hours...I mean years into the game...ehhh...development cycle.

e: Maybe this was the great plan all along. *folding a new layer of tinfoil*

 

Ye I saw that, but its only a core for now and they will finish the game in Unity and then port fully to godot, from what I saw on twitter.

 

This feels like watching the final embers of a burning house.. and it's a damn shame

 

Absolutely agree!

(Also, great to see a fellow Hungarian here on the forums)

 

Just to be sure: I do not want and I am not going to move, is no equal. But it is gross oversimplification if you think it is easy to move business from one engine to another. There are a lot of traps that need to be taken into account.

 

Nah its not doom and gloom. Unity will revert the stupid policy, leavea 4% rev share and ppl will calm down over months. Most of those who are "switching" now will go back to using Unity.

And then 1-2 years into the future Unity comes up with another brilliant idea, ppl will outrage, they will change it...and the cycle will continue .

Average person doesnt remember what happened 2 weeks into the past, if it was different, ppl wouldnt choose the same politicians over and over again .

 

It depends on the goals of the project and personal preferences.

For example, with evergine, there's no source code access, unless you pay. Source code access costs 20000 eur per year.

For 3d, I'd probably look into stride3d, or unreal. Maybe Unigine.

 

I think nobody claims its easy. If You have over 10 years of investemnts and pipeline workflow process, it is hard as hell to switch platforms.

But serious studios probably are inteligent enough to take that into account and if they decide to switch at soem point they probably will take all the traps into account (previously troughly researching what platform could fit them well)

 

Well, 8pm PDT, 11pm EST and 5am CET (tomorrow), it's safe to say there won't be an update today (Wednesday).

 

As a fellow Hungarian, 5am CET hits hard rn xd

 

I met Joachim at WWDC in 2006. I accidentally stole his place in line to talk to the Apple UI guys while he was stuffing his face with free chocolates from a little rolling table. But he's a billionaire now so I assume he's not still mad at me about it.

 

What policy change are you talking about?

 

I'm not gonna jump ship just yet, but for the coming months "Unity" is gonna be a dirty word in the game development community. I use Unity for look dev and character rendering...

 

I thought I'd check back in here. I'm on day 5 of my switch to Unreal, for those who are interested:

It's not nearly as scary as you think!
Day 1: Watched a 5 hours long intro to Unreal video that mostly went over the editor. Things are named differently and in different spots but within a day you'll be feeling comfortable with where everything is at and the new layout. (Navigating the viewport not so much but that will come in time)

Day 2 + 3: I spent the next two days tracking down all the various things I'd do in Unity and how they are done in Unreal. A lot of similarities! Mechanim? Almost identical to their Animation Blueprints. Visual Effects Graph? Almost identical to their Niagara. New Input System? Almost identical to their input. Skinned Mesh = Skeletal Mesh. Project Panel = Content Browser. A lot of things are just new terms. The biggest pain point is def the node based workflow (blueprints + shaders aka "materials") and the C++.

Day 4 + 5: A LOT of learning about how they organize their version of gameobjects/prefabs, learning about blueprints, how the engine operates and starting to pick up bits of C++ (pro tip chatGPT - copy/paste code block and ask it to "explain line by line").

Overall I'm really excited and determined to learn Unreal. From what I can tell Unreal has TONS of built in functionality and loads of documentation and helpful devs. But it really wants you to understand the proper way to build a game, the proper way to structure your code, the proper way to approach things. I'm hoping I'll be a much better developer all around once I get my feet back under me. That's my experience so far, good luck to all of you, whichever route you choose. If you make games in 3D I think its a no brainer.

Oh P.S. a really nice change is all those features you see in the Unreal hype videos? They are all 100% real working, accessible, replicable things you can see and use immediately. Nanite and Lumen are two of the craziest feats of engineering I've ever seen. And check out their BUILT IN modeling and animation tools. IK rig functionality, animation retargeting, all built in. It's all just very impressive (and slightly overwhelming).

 

Fee policy

 

Every competing game engine should release counterprogramming to Unite on 11/15 and 11/16, if they even still hold the event.

 

I think there’s not a lot of people who will choose principles over monetary interests.
But thoose who do will, go make their own open source tech.
Thoose are the people who make projects like Blender what it is. Or Godot and so many other cool stuff possible.

 

I am wondering why such a great game engine would be ruined by those F***ing profit only member, I think the 3 founders who not longer can take control of Unity will be heart broken

 

I'm riding easy, residing in California at the moment.

People usually do that on the other way around, using Unreal for lookdev, even if they end up in Unity or other engine.

 

Some will, but IMO majority will crawl back to Unity.

 

Great write up. The transition is a challenge, but it's not like Unreal is generally any more difficult than Unity once you know what's what.

This point though about the "proper way" is one of the key pain points I always have with Unreal. I wouldn't say it's the "proper way", I'd say it's the "Unreal way". There's nothing wrong with that though, I think there's a lot of benefit in having a particular way of doing things for a game engine because that slight narrowing of possibility or expectation allows for more solutions that work in the expected cases and potentially more optimisation.

It can be difficult though as a programmer coming from Unity when there is a far less rigid framework for how to do things. It definitely has its pros and cons. If you don't fight it, it's better, but that can limit your creative freedom a bit.

 

At this point the main reason I have Unity installed at all is to compare functionality between engines and because sometimes I make VRChat avatars for my friends. I've narrowed down my transition engines to O3DE and Unreal, but I'm really leaning towards Unreal since it just has a greater amount of community support. I also have my own engine I'm working on that's very slapdash at the moment that I'll be tailoring more and more to my specific dev style and needs for my own projects rather than freelance stuff.

Unity feeling like a dead end for personal projects isn't a new thing for me, and really the license changes are just the straw that broke the camel's back when it comes to dealing with UT's bullshit at all. I can't trust them not to keep making more licensing changes, but more than that, I haven't been able to trust them to be good stewards of their own product for years.

 

Even if Unity retains enough market share based on irrevocable commitments to Unity tech, at best Unity will die a slow death from here. It certainly will not be preferred or recommended.

I'm a long-time active member of my local gamedev community - we have lots of students come through our meeting space as they come up through university. Some of us (not me) even teach gamedev at those universities. Very few of us will be recommending Unity to them from this point forward. I'm sure many other gamedev mentoring communities will be doing the same. We can't in good faith recommend working with tools from a bad faith company.

The loss of trust will affect them in both the short term and the long term, even if there is a mid-term rebound.

 

Unite is supposed to be one week after the next earnings report (November 8th) which is when I suspect the stock will tank. Will be interesting.

 

At last, a new low since June

We need to go deeper

 

Hello guys, can you briefly write about the news and changes of recent days?

 

Coping, posting memes, discussing opinions, some rumors and leaks… etc.
No offical word yet

 

I hope this doesn't reach 300 pages, without me being there, if it ever does, although the momentum has slowed down a lot.

 

I guess everyone is busy validating other engines. I'm already played with a bunch
- Stride
- Flax
- Unreal
- now I'm checking Unigine (both performing small tasks and checking tutorials) - I have to say, it has interesting video tutorials, more than Stride or Flax, but less than Unreal
Also showcasing an iconic ZIL-130 model (a Soviet truck), which is always cool.

BTW, I feel the entire forum slowed down considerably. Fewer questions and discourse are going on in other topics too.

 

Even if Unity turns this around, it will take tremendous amount of time and efforts to restore its trust. I don't know man... This is just too sad. I am not against Unity needing more money for whatever reason (which I think many of us feel like they spent way too much money on other non engine core stuff) applying any negative policy retroactively is just single biggest mistake.

 

The writings has been on the wall for a while now, discourse here has been stagnant for many months. All the things Unity can do is old news, and all its current issues have been discussed. If you google enough you can find an answer to problems you're running into.

Looking into Unity is like reading a Eulogy, "Oh here's an article from 8 years ago about the issue i'm having". It's just sad. This isn't how gamedev is supposed to be. We're supposed to be looking forward to cool new particle effects, neat new animation tools, deformable terrain, new bells and whistles that excite us to make neat new games.

Instead we get the opposite, we get restrictions, we get near fears to compound the already hectic nature of indie development.

What's to talk about? How depressing this all is? We're not even allowed to, they've shut down all conversation about this subject. Barring this, there is nothing worth talking about as this studio has become incapable of improving their own tools.

 

Think of it this way. Unity know the difficulties you have with switching when you're midway through development or your studio has spent years doing all business using unity.

The announcement and what they set up would have meant people like you would accept it as it would cost more to go elsewhere. And they would still fleece you of much of your games/studio income.

They know that people built themselves a Unity trench that took years to dig and that they could slap you hard with stuff like this because they know that getting out of that trench is going to be extremely difficult.

It is a deplorable, disgraceful and disgusting way to stab an entire ecosystem of Unity developers in the back and then announce that it wasn't great and that we are confused by it.

There's no confusion. It wasn't great. It was the blade tip of a scumbag.

 

IDK, the things I'm working on were just fine on Unity, I simply didn't need any flashy stuff other engines are trying to push on you. I do not agree with that this was on the wall a long ago, well, except people think that the SpatialOS fiasco was similar, well, it wasn't really, other than Unity lost the PR-war against them and against Epic back then. So they had to concede and pivot. The end result was great, EULA on github.
The big mistake was its removal and all that happened now, at least in my eyes. The engine was going just fine in my eyes, if this utter failure decision doesn't happen, I would still be here and help others on Unity technical matter. And sometimes would be grumpy when someone wants Unity to be Unreal or something.

Anyway, it's not important anymore, what happened, happened.

 

I hope it's not 4% gross AND unity editor fees, that'd be insane.

 

I'm already not using unity, I moved to javascript:
- for prototyping ease,
- sharing without deployment,
- no installation hassle,
I had so many stuff to REimplement with it and engine slowed on my potatoes, such that was unusable.

It seems like I will never reach a level where I make any money with unity, and since I was on small hiatus, I have no incitive to come back after that news.

That read like the intro of JRPG, irony since in JRPG we end up killing god itself.

Actually this is honest, notice the second line:
"the individual developer that wants to compete at the very top".

But more dev come in and like was like, "nah I'm good without the top", which is why he called them "F***ing idiots". The top was about making lots of money, but we didn't, we made niche filling money, not AAA money (engine don't support it, they haven't invest this), not all the money (niche f2p game with low ARPU).

He thought there would be more people fighting for the top, so he could sells more ads escalator to them, but escalator stayed empty. He got mad, and gone into "gave me the money" install tantrum, and now, and now, everyone has seen through, he was honestly deceiving us.

It's bad barely poetry night, enjoy!

 

The only issue you'll face with blueprints is mostly getting some sprains in your wrists because while you may be able to make a whole game using it, it's often un-optimal when it comes to the actual nodes implementations compared to coding by typing. For example, while you might type 1 line of code, that line of code could easily requires 4-8 nodes in Blueprint because it's all linear. You need 1 node for maths (add/substract/divide/multiply), 1 node for any conversion, 1 node for parameters like float, ints, bool, etc. Then if you referring to a past-calculated value, you got to link things together from past to newer nodes than might be miles away from each other. (Yes, there are good and bad practice with Blueprints just like with actual code, but the thing about Blueprint is that spaghetti nodes are actually visually like spaghetti. XD)

 

Let me guess, no response today but everyone is still left hanging. So much for the we'll get back to you in a couple of days. Now I am seriously thinking this management team are incapable of managing a company like this into the future. It appears it is going to be ran into the ground. The risk seems to big to take for new projects or in my case nearly completed ones.

 

I think once the update announcement is made, it'll push it over 300.

 

I give you my word that everything in that didn't come from within his brain. Someone else thought it up i.e. a normal human.

 

In order for Unity to win back our trust, they're going to have to do something monumental. And with the current leadership, I don't see any way that is possible. They're not known for monumentally good decisions. Quite the opposite, now.

They think this is a financial issue. It is not. It is a trust issue, and they've made it clear that they are only sorry that we're mad at them. I bet half of them are still wondering why people are mad.

 

Five major planets in retrograde. Big things appearing to go backwards. Keep working and your efforts will be rewarded next week. "We canna move the planet to a new position at that speed or she's gonna blow captain."

 

I spent a year perfecting this to support Unity's web player. Not only did they ditch the web player entirely, we got the horribly massive and slow HTML5 thing as a replacement. So, not the first time I feel like Unity ignored its developers.

FWIW there were a lot of great suggestions out there like a generic Unity runtime app that others could write apps for, which would run on iOS devices so all we had to deploy was the tiny bit of our code. They ignored that. I still don't know why. They could've done some kind of profit sharing on that and raked in the bucks.

Anyway, not the first time I've been mad at Unity. But it might be the last time.

 

https://www1.salary.com/Unity-Software-Inc-Executive-Salaries.html

At a guess I'd say Carol Carpenter Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer
is all over this along with John Riccitiello President and Chief Executive Officer
Luis Felipe Visoso Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Marc Whitten President, Create Solutions
Anirma Gupta Senior Vice President, General Counsel, and Corporate Secretary

 

BTW Don't bet too much on NeRF, you are a good programmer, go see 3d gaussian splatting asap, they released the training code on github.

And since you are a good programmer, and the 3d gaussian do things explicitly, you will be able to leverage your experience to solve the only problem gaussian has, storage space, because game dev have been compressing stupidly laid out data like guassian splatting since forever. It's a bunch of position with matrix and spherical harmonics...

Seriously, nerf is a stupidblack box slow to execute, 3d gaussian splatting at worse is a bunch of floating billboard with a gaussian rendering shader and a spherical harmonic values indexed by camera direction. You have so much more control over nerf, and its literally a varients of lightprobe volume but non ordered.

 

There wasn't any point in continuing development when the browsers wouldn't be able to run it.

 

It's a respectable mentality to have, but I can't get over what this engine could be. This isn't a company that cares about their product.

We don't need to see Unity investing billions into big new features like awe inspiring lighting (it would be nice though!). But I don't see anyone at Unity tasked with improving things even in a very basic way. Documentation, little quality of life improvements with the UI here and there. Every passing month things get a little more dormant, a little more silent, a little more blah, and one has to think, there is sever disfunction within. Squandered work, broken work ethics, a culture of defeatism among a work force that's given up on creating an excellent product.

It doesn't feel right, it doesn't feel like a healthy company. Gaming thrives on innovation, at dreaming of pushing more polys, at more realistic reflections, at more ergonomic coding paradigms and design approaches. These things are exciting, they inspire us to think of cool things, and to wake up energized to work on our products, and to look forward to a vibrant future. It's been the norm for decades that every several years we have roof shattering innovation, be it new rendering tech, better design environments, new animation tools, easier team management, etc.

Think back to when we were getting the videos on DOTS and ECS, and the vibrant atmosphere of hope and excitement for exciting new things on the horizon. That company is dead and gone. Compare that with the videos coming out every few months from their competition. You can feel the excitement they have. We used to have that too.

For the longest time, we haven't had anything exciting, and there's nothing on the horizon, and that's why this uproar is resonating with such fervor from this neglected community that is usually quite meek.

Something is rotten in the state of Unity.

 

They can only think in terms of money because it's all they know. They don't understand the tech they have stifled because they do not create tech, they don't understand the long term decline they have inflicted because they have never built anything long term, skills that require many years to cultivate, pipelines that take a lifetime to push to an even better state. Dedication, investment, hard work, and long term growth cultivating excellence are foreign concepts to snake oil salesmen.

To the leadership of Unity, a coder is a coder, a designer is a designer. They think their unique business acumen is going to steer the company, they think monetary schemes are going to give them the capital to create the next big thing.

Money doesn't mean sh*t, they're scribbled nothings on bank notes. They do not conjure hard work or passion or revolutionary ideas from thin air, or the years of grit and determination that it takes to realize those ideas.

This is like an episode of Hell's Kitchen where the restaurant owner simply has no idea how to cook, and they've staffed the kitchen with friends and family and no one has a passion for the food, for making something great and taking pride in their dishes. The owner just wants money, the employees want a paycheck, and everyone is looking around wondering who's going to right the ship.

Give some rare talent out of college internet, a roof over their heads, and room to breathe to pursue their passions and in a few years you might have the next minecraft.

Take 2 billion dollars, hand it to a company like Unity, and they'll assemble an army to burn hundreds of millions of dollars a year for absolutely nothing, then they'll turn around and put the burden on you.

 

Well, that's pretty worrisome. Get funding to make web player, spend it on anything BUT engine development. Fascist tendencies too. Perhaps there isn't much potential in Godot, at least not with the current dictators.