Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Yes, that is exactly what they did with Unity 5. But instead of adding royalty fees, they gave money away. Why? Because all these game developers HATED royalties and they threatened to go to another engine if royalties were part of it.

Do not blame us Unity Personal users. If our game does well...who knows...we will be happy to pay a royalty. This is what have gotten from Unity Personal.

We have several games on our list, first one is an almost finished platformer, beautiful and made by two of kids, programmer and artist.

My son honed his skills at programming using Unity personal. We bought a few assets for them to use.

My youngest was encouraged to learn to compose music for our game and he is now preparing an album for sale.

For me, I am a storyteller, a landcape maker, a manager, and I have met people like 3d forge, Adam from Gaia, Jason Booth, and so many more. I support them, and spend more money on assets just because I want them to do well. I probably spend more money on assets than I would for 1 plus sub in a year. We go to conventions in NYC for my team, my kids and others.

Unity has gotten me out of my funk. I designed my game, pitched it, I organize a meetup, I happen to have the ability to talk to people and make friends easily, so have gathered a nice audience already for our game.

I am an out of the box, throw away the ordinary game template, type of designer. With help from Atavism, and Uma, and Microsplat, and Speedtree, now part of Unity, and so much more. Using UMA we have hundreds of clothing and armor for our game.

Rocks and water, and textures, and so much more.

I will keep on supporting asset developers because you are the ones who make it so that we can make beautiful stuff.

 

You can negotiate a custom license to reduce or eliminate royalties. You'll have to pay a fixed fee upfront but that may be preferable if you know a game will be successful.

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/license#contact-us-form

 

While this sounds nice and it'd be easy for them to bring back, I don't think this will be part of announcement. I think Will Goldstone would have included some movie reference to "Plus" to clue us in. That'd be a pretty huge deal.

 

Whaaaaaaaat ?




... ( <== this means I'm joking and knew about it, I'll try to make it blink next time )

 

I'd say Will Goldstone's cryptic movie tweets was the closest to a teaser that we got.

 

Hi everyone, I would be happy to get some feedback onto this.

I know I said, to myself more than others, that "I am out". I don't trust the management and I know what kind of time we live in, concerning capitalism, where the reigns are very loose.

Now I am learning Unreal at the moment, trying to, pretty difficult and annoying(just the fact to give up and redirect all the established thinking and working patterns) and so I just want to know, from othes:

It has been one week without any real statement other than what was leaked. The "we heared you" thing, is more of a placeholder. Maybe important but this is where the issue of trust comes back in.


Is it stupid for me to be annoyed by this fact? Is it stupid to come back here to talk about this?
Shouldn't I, shouldn't we, just give up already?
I feel like I might just be underselling myself,
but the annoyance in learning, reorientating myself to something compeltely different has, sadly, quickly overwealmed my sense of determination of letting go of such a inherently volitile prodcut as Unity.

Should I continue, even a little, what I have build up to now, in Unity or should I really push it away?

What are you guys doing. Going to do. Really? For reals.

Would love the feedback.

 

So not only is Godot GD Script faster than Unity Monobehaviours, Godot C# is as fast as Unity ECS. This is nuts. How is unity getting demolished by an open source engine.

 

I tried Unreal. It crashed on me twice in 4 hours. I couldn't get a displacement to work decently after several tries whereas I could do the same in Godot in 20 minutes without a crash. I need 3D but not AAA-quality, so I've evaluated different software and chose one that I can work with. Not Unreal. I would suggest you to try other engines and see if they are up to the job for you.

Personnally, I'd like to get investors, and I doubt any investor would put money on a game designed in Unity if their terms and conditions can change anytime and make investors lose money.

So, for reals, I'm planning to spend a few weeks or months recoding everything I've done in Godot unless Unity completely changes their board and TOS.

 

Can you be my mum? Coz you sound amazing, bless you and your family!

 

This is an exceptionally good analysis of the situation. Thank you for posting this video.

 

For real, my projects are big, I have a lot of things to do for my users and what they would care less is waiting almost a year to have exactly the same game, but a different engine. A different engine, in my case, wouldn't be better or more stable or easier to work with - so I'm here waiting to know if what Unity will ask to my business is viable. I compulsively hit F5 because I need a closure. On monday will I start on a blank document with a plan of porting games to another engine in 2024 or will I start unity hub and do real work. These days were a depressing limbo.

 

´The only possible solution for Unity to become a decent company again would some

I'm waiting...

I have a project I´ve been working on for the past year and a half, it was a mobile game, based on ads, RTS game, whatever...

My first thought was, this is the EXACT kind of game that will have a lot of "installs" but very few ARPU...

The first thing I did was gave up this market and tried to modify and release it for PCs, on Steam as a paid game, not that hard, to be sincere, it was my plan all along (stupid me for making it in portrait orientation)

But then I decided to move to another engine, installed godot and unreal...

Tried working on my stuff again...

Simply not in the mood, probably will give up gamedev all entirely...

Thanks Unity!

 

I'm selling on the asset store so I'm not the right person to tell you this but I think you should first try to clear your head for a while, things might change and the changes that will come might be or not be what some were waiting for, in the meantime you can be proactive and learn Unreal or work on what you already have. My suggestion is, if you have any projects unfinished in Unity, finish them and if possible keep going with Unity while shifting to Unreal. It sounds like you want to make a final decision to use another engine or stay with Unity. Personally, I'll take the risk of staying with Unity but I'll learn Unreal in the meantime. I don't know what else to tell you.

 

So out of curiosity, what would be cut out of Unity Personal. Those of us in the middle of making a game would lose something that is crucial for our game. How would that effect our game, which we are working on now. We may not be important, but we still would feel very betrayed if we lose personal. I am asking because I do not know. I would like to know.

Plus is fine but depends on the cost. We have made money using Unity with commissions.

But we have not earned enough money to pay for 4 licenses of Plus for our small studio.

Once we earn the money, then we would go to Plus, because we can afford it. That was the entire plan for plus. Bring it back, to take off splash.

 

Urgent Changes Needed to Regain Trust in Unity

Dear Board of Directors, Mr. President, CTO, CFO, and all C-Suite Executives,
The recent decisions and communications, especially from Mr. Riccitiello, have left a significant portion of the Unity community feeling overlooked and undervalued. Many loyal users now grapple with diminished trust.

To rejuvenate the community's confidence and retain users:

1. Consider a leadership change or restructuring, particularly concerning Mr. Riccitiello's role.
2. Prioritize transparent and genuine communication.
3. Engage the community in major economic decisions. Unity's strength has always been its community collaboration—let's not forget that.

In essence, let the name "Unity" not just be a brand but our core principle.
Thank you for your attention and understanding.

Alan Mattanó

 

Are you a programmer? lol

Thank you. I already have four kids, but you know one more is no problem.

 

Honestly I doubt that this is true.

 

I hope you are being sarcastic. A subscription model to obtain certain services is somewhat acceptable. Providing basic functionality like reading an external file through a paywall is the most absurd, anti-customer, dystopian idea I've read in a while.

Of course that is the shortest way to absolute failure in the face of totally free options in its use and experimentation as unreal and godot. Demanding paid features in 2023 when not even epic does it....

Unity's own employees have acknowledged that it was sustainable by selling licenses when unity was not even a quarter of what it is today. Those who keep looking for solutions to "invented monetary problems" have a good symptom of stockholm syndrome.

 

I have invested a huge amount of time into Unity (more than 10 years), four games released on mobile and currently working on a big PC game in my fifth! year.

Since the announcement, I have looked into several game engines including Unreal and Godot and touched a few others on the surface. I feel angry, frustrated, demotivated and overwhelmed by the current situation. I am also over 50 years old, so learning isn't that easy anymore.

I am still not sure what to do, but looking into a new engine is helping me to cope with the situation somehow. While Unreal is far from perfect it has so many features integrated, that I feel that my game could really benefit from this. That said, throwing so much time away is a tough decision and I haven't made up my mind yet. I will take more time and see what the future brings.

My trust in Unity has suffered a lot over the last few years which tells me that I should have learned other engines a lot earlier. Regarding your point of staying with Unity or not. It is really up to you, but I recommend looking into other options and making a well-informed decision about what is next. Imho Unity cannot be trusted anymore, unfortunately.

 

Haha. First one was easy, having two was a huge difference but I've heard it gets easier with 3 and more? Haven't tried.

 

In fact is even incredible that we are discussing about all this. Unity's community loyalty has been demonstrated. Everybody wants to make Unity sustainable. Almost everybody would accept a revenue-based fee over a given amount on money and paying for their plus/pro licenses. However Unity still keeps trying to kill the golden-egg goose even when they know that there are feasible alternatives to them.

One example of this is Unigine: it is objectively a better engine than Unity overall (for 3D). From 100K revenue you have to pay $1500/yr per seat (cheaper than Unity Pro). No royalties at all. You also have Flax, Unreal, ...

For 2D you have a lot of options: from Godot, GameMaker, Defold, ... All of them with a more beneficial business model for the developer than Unity.

Unity should be proud of their community and instead of praising it, they try to get all their money and cheating with the TOS.

I'm proud of you guys

 

Comment from that video that confirms what everyone thought:

"Prior Unity employee here. They have a lot of management in every area.

They also start initiatives with new employees and when that fails, they move them to other areas that need people.

They hired a metric crapton of people when they went public and had a lot of people doing nothing. Quite literally most of the day is slammed with meetings talking about nothing. This is outside the engine team, didn't work with them so I can't speak to that area."

 

There is one important lesson I'm trying to draw out of this situation.
Progress is placed outside of comfort zone.
Even if you return to Unity ( for whatever reason ) after using UE for some time, it will make you a better person.
New ways of thinking, ways of dealing with data, coding "scenarios", shader construction ( Fkuicgn WPO ) ....
all of it will bring a new value. And it is yours. Keep it and put into good use
If you will stay in UE, then there is no better moment to do it than this sh*t storm.

 

last update:

https://twitter.com/willgoldstone/status/1705115457664036996

 

That paints a unbelievable and catastrophic unprofitable picture of a company.
Guess with such case most ppl will just claim unity simply deserves to fail.

 

Any idea if it's still taking 10 min plus to load a single 4k texture? lol That was an issue for me when I tried it.

 

Must be on California time.

 

I think install tracking is off the table. For now. Until they can get it right. In the short time since their horrible announcement, they've had to scrap any semblance of it, and go rev share, as hinted at by Will Goldstone's tweet.

Not saying they're not going to try this again. But I think they'll need more infrastructure to track such things, and that's beyond Unity's control. What's nice about revenue is that it's a common commodity across the global e-commerce network.

They have a lot of stuff to iron out to make this work. One of the major telltale signs is Microsoft getting caught off guard with the "distribution service will foot the bill for the install fees". Behind their "No comment", is a huge "WTF".

 

Unity's community is so much more than just making games. We care about each other, we respect each other, I have known asset devs that have reached out to others who are going through difficult times. We check up on each other. Some check up on me. We succeed because we have that person we can contact to say...hmm what is the best Unity version today.

I cannot even imagine losing people I care about from this community. Unity is foolish to forget about that.

 

... through the editor.

Personally while I have tried Unreal, Flax and Stride I opted for Godot. More because of its open source architecture and less for its performance qualities (although my preliminary tests until now are passing the barrier).

But it depends on what projects you have in mind. I know I will mostly be an indy dev with 1-2 people to help along so an engine like Godot is actually good for what I have in mind.
Having a c/c++ background also gives me confidence that a showstopper bug with the engine could not be an issue.

As most of other users here said, trust to Unity is lost even if we get a better deal. So the Genie is out of the bottle now.

 

If today is 0.2, tomorrow can be 1,
Today is 4; tomorrow's sun is for John Riccitiello to have fun.

 

IDK What constitutes as "the west coast up", I'm up for what it's worth.

 

Unity clearly saw that games like Genshin Impact are making money hand-over-fist (Over 4 billion dollars by the end of last year) and wanted a piece of the pie to help balance the books. That was clearly their target, as the vast majority of users - including most complainers (and me) - are chump change in the grand scheme of things. The problem is not that they need money to continue, but that the initial plan really only considered the big dogs, and harmed the rest of us. Reinstating Plus (or giving plus benefits to everyone), and/or introducing a rev share after a self-reported income limit would work fine, and I hope that is what is happening.

 

And if Godot can handle 3D

we talk again.

 

Probably waiting for everyone to get into the office.

 

A naive but interesting perf comparison between Unity and Godot:

Seems like C# runs worse in the editor than GDScript, but runs quicker in build by about 30%. And Godot is more performant than Unity in a similar use case without Burst/ECS. Albeit, it's not clear why, since he doesn't dive into the profiler or the code. Perhaps a mix of the CoreCLR runtime and the lack of Monobehaviour overhead assuming code is of sufficient quality.

EDIT: I missed that this was posted already. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

While I do not doubt that Godot is a great engine and also don't want to question the skills of the programmer, it doesn't tell us the whole story unless we can check the source code of his samples. I have worked with ECS, 10k objects is nothing if you do it right. I had 100k on the screen which took less than 16ms.

Also, fps is not a great measurement for performance, milliseconds per function call is.

 

I thought Godot 4.0 supported .NET 7.0 Unity is still on old Mono.

 

That's correct but I doubt that alone is contributing to roughly 50% perf difference at a high amount of objects.

 

Don't expect anything for another hour or two. It is 7:55 AM in California.

 

Yeah, back to $400 for Plus or better yet, the self reported income limit and a rev share. With a team of 4 using Unity, it can add up but not impossible for us. However it could hurt people who cannot afford $400.

 

.NET benchmarks are always a lot faster then mono. 50% is a lot I would have guessed 30%.

 

Just to make this clear again, for everyone who is talking about other engines here:

IT'S NOT DONE JUST PLAYING AROUND A LITTLE LITTLE! This is something for hobbyists!

Unreal for example is WAY OUT OF RANGE! All management is different, animations are different, administration is different, programming language is different - everything is different.

So if you want to switch to any engine:

- Flax? no real-time weather, no car controller, no animation controllers of any kind, 0 assets, no vehicle, no character, no inventory.

HAVE FUN!
It will be a year before you have the absolute basics and can start looking for bugs in the systems. Nobody talks about the fact that you moved a tree from Unity to Flax! But from working!

The same for everyone who starts here from “GODOT”. If I take a simple, simple game, something really small, I'm still faced with the first question. Movement, Physics, GameSave, prefabs and their peculiarities. Material systems, particle systems...

So if you've just picked up 1 or 2 models and otherwise, like most people (including me), have no idea, you shouldn't go on and on about how "easy" it is to change an engine.

It is NOT that!

And if you want to play even APPROXIMATELY a fairly routine game, you need at least:

- inventory
- Heaven's system
- Save system
- Event and combat or comparable system.
- Dialogue and quest system
- Prefabs and particle systems.
- lots of art design for it.
- vegetation damage.

Knowledge of optimization.
the animation within the engine,
the animation system,
the programming language and its peculiarities (even in Godot, C# is different than in Unity! That's a fact!).

- the tricks and bugs of the engine,
- Problems that he encounters, which one collects over years and can deal with through experience,
- Knowledge about the behavior of the engine in certain situations,
- Knowledge of the interaction of factors!

Let's take a closer look:


Flax:
- No asset store,
- hardly any community,
- hardly any toturials.
- difficult entry.
- Hardly any research resources,
- no systems that are helpful,
- no big “support” anywhere.
- and 0 Knowledge.

Uniengine: Same.
Comparable projects: also.

The highly celebrated Godot: currently very small, AND in the 3D area it is anything but useful and far too insufficiently developed. It can still come, currently: no.

WHAT REMAINS ?
unreal.

What does switching to unreal mean? Even if you get a character to run around after Toturial, you know: nothing.

3 - 4 months is the minimum to even understand the basics!

Anyone who wants to create complex projects is out! To be specific: OUT!
he's never had a chance in Unreal. This requires at least 1 year of working with unreal, or longer.


There's nothing wrong with looking around! But when everyone here always talks about how changing the engine can be done in just the snap of a finger:

THEN PLEASE AT LEAST STAY REALISTIC! And evaluate things as they are on the table!

For ambitious projects, Unity's current status is a massive problem!

They are not easy to transfer!

And anyone who hops back and forth between engines in the hobby area just to have a say will not be affected by the TOS changes at all!

Please keep that in mind!
Thanks!

 

I thought he wanted some opinions...

 

I hope that most of us small studios and hobbyists know by now we will not be affected. Some just do not trust that. The TOS was the big trust issue.

I agree, I have been contacting some solo and small studio friends and trying to get them to wait and see at least a little longer. Telling them not to pull their assets out of the store as many of are still here and will still be here.

I like going to discord chats and make friends. One problem is the drama. People freak out, they are scared, they are afraid they will lose something.

Read, listen, watch the great videos coming out, talk about, but realize we will not know until they tell us.

 

Yeah, the lesson here is to stop relying completely on one engine and one source of stability.

I've spent the last week having fun in unreal, it works fine on my laptop, never crashed or anything, and I've replicated a bunch of fairly complex code in blueprints and started to actually like using them, which is not the experience I had last time I dabbled.

I don't think Unity's development environment can be matched, and even at this early stage I'm having to come to terms with some trivial things being unnecessarily complicated (such as referencing a component from another component) but at the end of this I will have two choices for what engine I want to work with.

I know it will take a long time for me to be as fast and fluid as I have been in Unity, but I don't want to hang my future entirely on a company that's being run the way Unity is. Better to take a hit now and get to a better overall position rather than wait for Unity's management to see the light.

 

Dude chill...
Nobody said it would be easy to switch engines. People are exploring their possibilities. Nothing wrong with that. Everybody knows that it will take a lot of time and effort to learn something new but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be possible to switch engines.

Also, your judgment about which systems and assets you need to switch an engine is flat wrong. There are more game genres than RPG games...