Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

I don't share this view, I think we have plenty of things improving, albeit slowly. Like URP, HDRP, shaders, spline, moving to proper .Net, etc.

But at the same time, there are things I can't ignore, obviously, like this:

So WTF? This is intern-level stuff and no one is taking care of this? This is pure management failure.

 

I'll trust Unity again if:

• The new pricing model only applies from Unity 2022 LTS onward.
• Editor subscriptions are removed.
• No malware, spyware, adware or any kind of sh**ware...
• A revenue-sharing model like Unreal's is implemented.

With JR as CEO for nearly a decade, Unity remains the best game engine on the planet. If he's an incompetent CEO, things could have been much worse, maybe we've all switched to another game engine long time ago, so his resignation doesn't matter to me. Who knows if the next CEO will be any better?

 

I don't remember any of the details any more so if there's an acronym or name for the feature that enables it you'll have to name it.

Yeah I knew there was a cult-like mentality with the community. For example experienced developers have been analyzing the engine during the exodus from Unity publishing their findings and at least one of them had to pull theirs down after the community went after them aggressively on social media.

It's that community that has largely kept me away from the engine even though it looks like a decent engine for personal projects and game jams.

 

It is still not probable because the engine is not as popular as Unity

Given a Unity elimination and the potential of multi million returns, even 100 of millions, then noone knows really what can happen.

Few said no to few extra 100s of millions for sure. The thing is that with Unity around, Godot is nowhere near Unity numbers as expected with the weaker 3D aspect, so for now is pretty safe i assume.

 

Are they improving? I've never had so many shader issues in my life. I use amplify shader, its far superior to the built in tools, and the multiple render pipelines are causing anyone doing involved shader work to be running around like a chicken with their head cut off. Every update is a sense of "oh god, what's broken this time?".

The pipeline isn't improving, the multiple half finished graphical pipelines are like a festering wound at this point that no one is properly sutchering up. It's common knowledge at this point that the render pipelines are a failure, under par, and that they have no end goal of what a finished render pipeline even looks like. All the higher end features are half baked (pun intended), and the lower end pipelines though acceptable, just aren't anything to write home about.

It's a running joke that they put out these tech demos every few years where they show what their engine is capable of, but it's total bullsh*t. Smoke and mirrors where they just straight up lie to the consumer that this is what their engine can do. It's kind of their mentality in a nutshell. They love buzz, they love conjuring up excitement. But they haven't delivered in forever. They just don't have the internal teams capable of fostering the long term passion, hard work and skill to get the job done, and there are MANY factors to this, all stemming from the culture they have created within their walls.

As a whole, the render features are underwhelming in performance, look, implementation and usability. If you post any feedback in this forum, if you're lucky enough to get a reply from unity, some burned out employee is going to post, "working as intended".

 

This is slightly off topic, but as soon as they went the multiple SRP route it basically killed the unified forward momentum. It's pretty clear why they did it and it makes a lot of sense, but I think it'll be looked back on as a key mistake. Multiple teams implementing the same things in different or similar ways which kills any ability for developers to easily swap between pipelines.

Now they're trying to undo the mistake and unify them enough and that you can swap between them, but that will no doubt mean a lot of pain for us developers as things change in both.

Back in the day when you'd start a Unity project there was 1 option. Now before you even begin a project you need to know an impossible number of things about it between built-in, SRPs, GameObjects, ECS, etc. Like picking a character class at the start of an RPG before you even know what the game is or how they play.

Add on to that the dozens of seemingly core packages and how they are managed and inconsistently updated. I've never really felt confident that any package would last through the length of my project. They often seem to be maintained by a tiny handful of people and if any of those people leave, the entire thing might be ignored. They're also seemingly changed in ways that require code updates on the developer end at a frequency far beyond anything experienced in core Unity pre-packages.

I wonder if Unity developers feel a sense of isolation and separation they wouldn't have before when they're on these small package teams.

It's been very hard to be excited about starting a project in Unity for at least the past 5 years now. There's so many choices and none of them are right and add on to that that you have to find the particular editor version that doesn't have bugs that will regularly stop your progress dead.

 

Let me just fix that for you:

To the leadership of Unity, a coder is $, a designer is $

 

It also destroys the whole reason for the SPR to begin with. HDRP is stagnating and URP is slowly catching up. I don't see them investing much into HDRP in the future. I think they have ceased that part of the market to Unreal.

 

One thing I will say I have tremendous respect for at Unity, is they take on the Herculean tasks of doing their best not to break existing projects, to the point I think they burn through their absolute best developers.

They are incapable of saying, "Ok, this is going to break everything, but it's going to allow us to finally fix up and deliver a cohesive render solution." Instead the juggle all the poorly implemented features and render setting assets, and structures that existing games are built on. It's short sighted, and easy for the manager to just side with their consumer who just wants things to work, but it's terrible for their employees. And time after time people get locked into this mindset of "why should we even try?", let's just not touch anything.

It's likely already too late. Their best devs have likely already left, or mentally checked out. They are now in that defeated state where everyone is just burned out, where you show up to work, and you look out at everyone in their cubes and they're just mentally checked out. Everyone is just doing the bare minimum to not get fired, and it doesn't even really matter, because no one is looking for them to work hard, because they have failed so terribly in the past trying to make anything of talented labor. The entire company is in cruise control, which is why we get this announcement, "We need more of your money to cover for our ongoing failure".

 

Again, for me, the answer is yes. But I'm fine with SRPs, I have no asset business to instigate uproar like publishers. It's rather simple choice and once you're in there simple boundaries. But again, we are allowed to disagree on what we find helpful and what we find uncomfortable. The truth is, there are a buttload of things we are taking for granted.

URP-users say the same thing about URP. Apparently the miles long changelogs are for decorations on the Christmas-tree.

Anyway, it doesn't matter anymore.

 

Try out Stride. It has Android build support (though I haven't tested it myself). 3D is good and in theory shouldn't take hours to build as its decently lightweight.

 

It's not too late. There are people who care about this engine. It has a fantastic foundation, it was giong in a promising direction. It COULD be salvaged. It COULD be exciting here again if things change.

Not going to say things are over here, but obviously much of that is out of our hands. We only have the power to post here and try to alert shareholders and board members our grievances.

Not long ago we were told in these dead forums that complaining was pointless, that nothing would ever reach management, or the Unity employees. Now look at this thread, over a million views.

Our voices do matter, our convictions and complaints CAN enact change. It's not a guarantee, but we're having more of an affect now than we ever did in the past. Will Godot become a great engine because of the support stemming from this debacle? Will Unity become reinvigorated to enact their own positive change within? The optimal situation would be both.

This is a solvable problem. Nothing is f*cked, though it can certainly feel that way.

This thread is a testament to how much people love this engine, how much they want it to succeed, the promise it has that has in recent years been squandered.

Anway, burning too much passion here, gotta save a bit for dev. Thanks for reading and keep giving them hell everyone.

 

I've been with Unity since version 2.x and am too deep into this engine. But as of right now, my long-term trust is gone. We are continuing the current development in Unity but will wait for the upcoming AI-based migration tools that are certain to pop up like mushrooms over the next year or so ...

 

"We will share an update in a couple of days" ...words have value!

 

And it's worth 100 installs!

 

https://libgdx.com/ Java 2D/3D Engine
seems well made has anyone used it to make mobile games?

 

I am wondering how much revenue all non-gaming products generate. Parsec, Pixyz, Simulation Pro, well event OctaneRender generates and how profitable it is. It would be great if Unity could focus on its core. Also - mentioned a couple of times already - Gigaya. In my opinion, it was a sign that something good can happen. It was a sign that something fishy was going on when it got canceled.

 

actually i do agree with you
but just wan t to remind you that unreal has a subscription also for console

 

This is the issue we are getting divided, getting funneled to other different engines

now for example a lot of ppl getting funneled to godot, terraria donating to godot

but now everything with godot is getting exposed, that godot was not such a good place to go after all

this is resulting in a very bad allocation of resources for us
not only we get fractured, funding is also getting dispersed to the wrong sources

 

I used it to make my first game, it was a very good experience (2015-2019). I released my game for Android, iOS, and PC (Win, Linux, Mac) and worked like a charm. I have no idea how it fares nowadays.

 

Blender's Community has also often been called Cult Like and don't get me started on Apple Products.
What are you referring to with the "funding for webplayer and then spend it on anything but"?

 

To make this clear: The author of this site is very active in YoutTube comments and claims that godot has gathered Millions in Funding, then spending it on something else than development. This was a drama that played out shortly before all of last week happened. And it's a total fabrication and misunderstanding.

See this here: https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/152janp/the_godot_engine_is_not_a_scam/

Just read through the comments below the video and see for yourself.

 

I've actually taken a look at the engine during the last week and I'm including it into a quote for one of my customers who wants to include real-time 3D and VR into their WinForms application.

In the tests I've made, the coding part and integration was really quite forward.

 

Apparently they're not. Installs have.

 

But then... this might have been the initial triggering action that led us to today's mess!

 

All markets are red, it has nothing to do with unity decision

 

My rough idea for the next engine

- C# only
- Use Silk.NET and Xamarin as a core and build pipeline
- Use vscode as editor. I mean the inspector / hierachy windows / project structure / console. Every UI will be inside vscode
-- Drawback is current vscode still not support floating windows. So maybe need some hack to run separate 3D windows as Scene editor and game view in the meantime
-- Another is much of engine code will be typescript
- Most layout will try to imitate unity
- Maybe use GameObject system. And will try to make it could import unity project and scene and unitypackage file, if possible
- Left hand coordinate with +Z forward

If unity official announcement is not satisfied I will try to start this project or contribute to a project that similar to these concept (piggyback on current tech as much as possible)

ps. stride3d is RH and has no webgl capability anytime soon. I might try to fork some system into this engine instead of just using stride

 

JR did not build up this company; JR had nothing to do with its success and everything do to with its failure

 

Seems there is no fall at all by the graph. Stocks can generally do anything, that is why stock market is a gamble in the first place.

Unless goes to $1 this graph shows that is actually doing amazingly good after such a massively destructive announcement, it is just back to August levels so far.

 

It was on a site (can't remember which") but one who predicted the unity stocks will double. That said the stocks did go down actually because of the fact that they want to revert the changes, not because of the anoucement and backlash in the first place.

 

Rumour is that the Unity CEO has left. Is this true?

 

They have taken down https://unity.com/pricing-updates in the last few hours.

It now only states :

 

If the CEO has left and they don't announce it soon, rumours will drive the stock price down.

 

God dammit don't they understand the problem IS the runtime fee? They seem to think we don't understand but that was never the issue to begin with!

 

we can only hope...

 

Well, HTML5 export. The Mozilla Foundation gave a donation, and it wasn't spent on getting an expert making such export functionality. The founders are very keen to reinvent wheels, their way, as the long post in that link provides evidence of. Ideas are shot down all the time, and Juan decides what goes into the engine. This hasn't always worked out well. Perhaps getting a massive number of experienced developers looking at the engine now makes them realise they should be a community project in more than name. We'll see.

 

At least they are not saying "we ae sorry for the confusion"
let's see what they come up with, but the fact that the runtime fee is still there is not really a good sign. But maybe i'm wrong, hopefully...

 

any official updates?

 

Yes, they do not GET IT, nobody wants the runtime fee.

 

"Updating the Runtime Fee"

 

They are "listening" XD
lol, so sad... i really liked Unity

 

John Rich-itiello is about to retire anyway. He's 65.

 

Source?

 

It doesn't matter if people remember. What matters is if companies remember when they're writing up business proposals, working with publishers, conducting risk assessments, and building business cases for game development. Unitys recent actions, even if they revert, are going to be present in all of that. And every single time what's going to come up is Unity adding new fees out of nowhere, retroactively changing TOS's, and having a license model that is all but guaranteed to get more expensive each year by unpredictable amounts.

 

So, I looked at Unreal for a few days and it was overall a good experience but its huge and will take quite awhile to get to grips with. Blueprints are easy, just not sure I want to go the visual route. C# is still my preference and I definitely don't want to have to work in C++ again. I did find that it can be a bit slow working in Unreal and on my machine (MAc M2) it was not very responsive. Now.... Godot, well I was pleasantly surprised, it does obviously lack some features and that might require some more effort to code yourself (Not much mind you), but it is SUPER fast to work in and C# seems to stand up well. Scenes and Nodes, well Scenes are similar to Unity prefabs and Scenes contain nodes. When you get your head around this concept, it just makes sense for game design. I'm leaning toward Godot.

 

I don't really understand why they don't make something like:
4% royalties after xxx for free and plus
3% after yyy for pro and enterprise
whatever. something like this.
sure royalties is not ideal, but it's predictable, it doesn't make you go bankrupt and it can be kept for many years without further price chages.
and they can make a "if you use y you will only have to pay 2% or whatever". I'm not a fan of this king of blackmail but unreal does it too ("no 5% royalties from sales on epic marketplace").
And maybe for launched games you can let the user choose which LA suits them the best.

I don't know it's a perfect price model, most likely it isn't, most likely I forgot some stuff, but it's better than this and it has another advantage: the logistic for royalties and revenue requires much less resources that this install stuff...

 

https://www.sarkariexam.com/who-is-john-riccitiello-is-john-riccitiello-fired/430789

 

Eh, people are retiring later and later. We recently had someone start a job as one of the most powerful people on the planet at the age of 78. But JR does have a S***load of money so I wouldn't blame him wanting to take a break.

 

I'm not a religious man, but I will go to church and pray for this