Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Writing an abstraction layer, maintain it, and rewrite the implementation once you need the switch engine may not be much faster than simply rewriting the code once you need to port to the new engine, with the difference that in the first case you spend time even if you don't need to change engine.
Unless you rely on very basic features, then the code is simple enough and easy to port anyway...

And by the way good luck abstracting things that are only doable in the editor without code.

 

Well then.

I am very happy to be wrong.
If that's the case... the needle has swung several points towards migration instead.

 

They're only going to live if the math makes sense. If their Unity install fees bankrupt those businesses then Unity will get nothing. If Unity gives them a fair % revenue deal they might stay. It will depend on the pain point. If Raid Shadow Legends starts loosing 50% of their revenue I would imagine they would start a port immediately. Then replace their game with new Engine (whatever they pick) version and no longer have to pay Unity.

 

Refresher:

 

I have read the EULA, as have multiple other people. As long as the asset you've licensed is using the standard Asset Store EULA, there are no restrictions on taking the asset to another engine. Assets that are licensed per-seat, or which have restrictive licenses or other custom EULAs set by the developer, may not be though, so definitely check each asset before you take off with it.

(Edit: I am apparently the slowbie today, Whoops!)

 

I would be afraid of losing that income too. It's not only that developer are looking for other engines. I have talked with asset developers who are investigating migrating their assets to UE or even Flax. Flax is starting, but it's very similar to Unity, looks good and they are going to have a store ready in a few months. We tried as a replacement for Unity and while we are not choosing it for several reasons, we were pretty impressed.

 

Don't feel too bad. I did some copy/paste

 

None of those huge companies are paying 0.20c per install, they get 0.02 or what ever was the best rate. Or even 0 if they use Unity mobile services. And none of them will go out of business. Only the small guys with low ARPU are going out of business if you actually run the math. Furthermore, the sheer amount of mobile services Unity provides means there's a lot more involved than simply switching the engine. The total cost of leaving Unity for the huge studios likely exceed the fees they'd pay if they stay. Unity knows this.

 

For me the only viable options are Flax and UE. Can I ask what put you off Flax?

 

Fair enough. But if you do have a studio with low ARPU. Could they not port and switch the game as I suggested. It would depend on the size of the game of course but depending on how much time it takes them to reach $1M in revenue, they might have time to do a port before the install fees start biting?

 

Yeah, isn't that funny? Unity's word doesn't mean anything, does it?

Now every time we talk about a legal issue involving Unity there always be this caveat: "Unity may break the rules..."

 

Currently it is a one person effort. He is trying to change that and find some funding. Also reviewing the EULA because it is not that good in its current status.

The other thing is that at some stage he copied code coming from the Post-processing Stack and he had to remove it. A colleague also reviewed the code and saw parts of the code too similar to those of UE4 (but I'm not suggesting that they were copied). I have to remark that all that has changed. However, I would not like to be in a position where the engine we are using runs into legal issues. That's the reason why I prefer to wait and see how everything evolves in the future. Said that, it has very interesting features and, in general terms, works well. The editor can be improved but is very customizable and the migration from Unity is very easy. I will be using it for my own projects at home indeed.

 

I don't see how this is the developers problem. Anyone in the games industry can tell you there's a multi year delay between building something and seeing revenue from it. That delay gets longer when you're developing the tools.

If they have a runtime fee, or any other cost change, it should apply to new versions only because the terms for current versions were already set. If that means Unity has to wait while they push out engine updates for people to switch to new versions, and then wait longer until people release stuff with those versions of the engine, that's just too bad. That's how it works.

Changing the billing after the terms were set and products are out for sale, even if legal (questionable), introduces a risk that will prevent anyone from working with them in the future.

All I read when I see their nearly billion dollar annual losses is that the companys leadership has screwed up, and that raising fees in the short term doesn't fix those screw ups. It might cover for them for a bit, but it also enables them to screw up more, and it's not a good sign for the company.

 

Thank You.

 

No worries. Thanks anyway.

I suppose that's yet another avenue to consider for asset migration. We can contact the asset author and ask if they're planning to port their asset to another engine's asset store, hoping we don't have to go through all the work ourselves.

 

This is why I started this whole tragedy week with downloading all my assets last Tuesday. Every single one. With the current EULA next to them. Went to my personal NAS for long term storage.

 

Yeah, although the sad thing is that asset store creators who write code or provide binaries are screwed.

Going forward I won't be buying anything on the asset store that cannot be easily converted - like texture packs or sound libraries.

Final IK's full body IK has been absolutely crucial to my game's gameplay and unless I can find an alternative, I'm stuck on Unity.
There does not seem to be an equivalent on Unreal's marketplace that I can find (speaking of which the site design leaves a lot to be desired too)

I will not be making such mistakes in my game design stage ever again.

 

Yesterday I saw Jason Booth in Flax discord. He was trying to figure out the feasibility of migrating Microverse to Flax. He was asking about texture formats too. Probably evaluating a future migration of Microsplat.

 

A preview of what Unity is about to announce:

 

I've noticed multiple asset authors looking into bringing their work to other engines. Jason Booth for example is currently in the Flax discord learning the engine with the goal of migrating MicroVerse.

https://assetstore.unity.com/publishers/25047

E: Someone beat me to it.

 

Yeah, if he goes there and they change the EULA for the better, it will be a strong contender. I'm keeping an eye on Flax.

Eh, I'm old, I need glasses already.

 

For the longest time, Odin Inspector was shoved in my face so much, I just finally decided to purchase it. I have not even used it.

 

Odin is the other asset I'll be missing a lot (besides Cinemachine).

 

This truly is feeling like the end of times. But I guess exploration doesn't necessarily mean they'll leave the Unity ecosystem if Unity sufficiently address this.

Odin, DOTween and Naninovel (for client projects) for me.

 

I'm so in love with Photon Quantum I just can't leave. It's what DOTS should have been. Ya they have unreal in the works but many months until even alpha.

 

Here's an alternative that supports C++ and Blueprints.

https://github.com/jdcook/fresh_cooked_tweens

I've seen mention of it being in development for UE.

 

I sure did. They made me realize that I didn't actually use any of the crap from Pro, so I downgraded.

 

Yes, DOTween for me as well. And there are other assets that depend on DOTween too.

 

Most companies I have been watching burning to the ground don't mix interacting with investors and the customer. Waiting for Friday for an announcement could be seen as trying to protect the stock from their next announcement.

A few years back unity was close to being a real competition to unreal and the industry desperately needs competing commercial solutions.

Seems like the unity game devs were very able to make a stand. Unity is really not the great thing about unity, it's the content creators that bring the value resulting in such a huge market share.

Actually he has been on it for at least three years and I am a fan.

include me in the screencap

That's 2 cent per execution, thank you. I hope they do install fee, because that would fix or kill unity mid term from the outside.

Registration is closed due to "exceptional interest" whatever that means.

Thank you, did not know my boy xrayez is here as well. If you read this(I know you will): Hi and I hope you are doing well! Stay safe and take care.

Click a name and press "Ignore" to the right. This thread is really not hard to read after a few.

If I see an unreal splash I know it will work great. Don't remember any exception to that rule, but it might well exist.

You can tell at a glance if something is probably made with unity, right at storefront. If it looks mind blowing, it's unreal. If it looks a bit less mind blowing and you see choppy frame times or similar it is most probably unity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liskov_substitution_principle
SOLID principle in general. Don't know how that applies to unity/c# though.

Anyone knows when we get the investors call?

 

I have an experiment in Flax which does basically the same as Odin Inspector (on a smaller scale obviously). And it was surpringsily easy to make. I mean, I can include annotations in fields and show customized editors for each of them in the inspector. From there, is a question of expanding functions and having more field types available. I could even replace all fields of a given type with my own-customized editor without a lot of effort, just by looking at Flax source code.

Odin is probably my favourite asset in Unity. The only thing that it's not good about it is that it cannot be distributed together with other assets. The never managed to find a way to do a feasible solution to do it without distributing the whole framework.

 

Last one was June 30th.

https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-...-software-u-q2-2023-earnings-call-transcript/

 

https://www.marketbeat.com/stocks/NYSE/U/earnings/

Unity Software has not formally confirmed its next earnings publication date, but the company's estimated earnings date is Wednesday, November 8th, 2023 based off prior year's report dates.

 

I even WILLINGLY put Unity on the splash screen for my current game (along with my own) because I was proud to be working as part of this community.

WELP SO MUCH FOR THAT.

 

Do you trust any company?

 

Well I'd hope we'd at least trust our own companies.

 

I generally trust for companies to work in their self interest instead of destructing by preventable causes. But weird things keeps happening in this late stage capitalism world.

 

Well, I have trust in Companies, until they do a Unity. At least now I will always be cautious.

That's going to stick forever.

 

Currently I'm a sole proprietor. I'll fire my CEO.

 

Wow, more good news! Achievement unlocked, open source future!

 

Thank you. I was under the impression that there is an earnings call today that was listed on their website, but I can't find it now. https://investors.unity.com/overview/default.aspx

 

Ha ha ha, oh man.
ExcEpTionAL.
It must be truly remarkable.

 

Or everyone canceled and they don't want anyone to get wind of it.

 

This is a hilariously shortsighted view of things.

 

But accurate 51% of the time.

 

Whoever had this bright idea I suspect will not be working in the industry soon again?!

 

Road to 300.

 

Probably for some insane reason Unity assumes that a royalty system based on installs is easier for them to predict?

And it guarantees that they can have better control over the whole thing, since they have full control over the estimated installs and thus only have to contact developers to control their sales who have exceeded the number of installs and have not yet volunteered plausible sales data.

If they were to rely only on voluntary revenue declarations, there would be an extremely high risk that revenue contractually due to Unity could be withheld by some creators.