Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

K thanks John. Get off your phone and focus on why you're all in that meeting

 

Maybe fewer carriage returns next time?

 

I don't understand the fear with Unreal. It's a complex tool with many features, but starting from scratch and going step by step you can control Unreal in some weeks, at least to have a minimum undestanding. And the C++ is full of classes and stuff related to the tool, not C++. So you're not using C++ but the Unreal implementation of C++. Something like C# with Unity.

In the end I'm loving Unreal. Yes it's something tough but nothing to fear.

 

The best advice is DONT FIGHT THE FRAMEWORK . Just put away ur ways from Unity etc., and just go with the flow how UE does things . If u try to force Unity ways into Unreal u will have ugly time .

 

Sir, this is a Wendy's.

 

90% of the games made with Unity are 2D or simple mobile games? If you are in a serious project with a medium or large team you normally don't use Unity. You don't use the asset store either and you pay for the support and training if needed.

So when you are talking about ambitious projects... What do you mean exactly?

 

Yeah, no, it's actually very accessible thanks to having a very competent visual scripting system.

 

Or any kind of code-related assumptions. Or logic. All these are against Unreal's horrid spaghetti-terror which haunts, ties up and suffocates you in your nightmares about illogical texts on cardboard boxes tied together with half-rotten, cooked spaghetti pasta.

Khm, nothing. I'm okay.

 

My plan is to try a new engine and only build a game that fits with the available features and strengths of that engine.
Instead of what I've been doing in Unity which is coming up with a game design and all the features, then trying to figure out to make that happen in the game engine (Unity). Even with everything available to Unity that approach has cost me 100's of hours trying to fit my square peg game design into the Unity round hole.

I'm actually quite looking forward to only working within the natural limitations of whatever engine, and taking advantage of its strengths.

 

Oh I think there are quite some ambitious projects done in Unity. But I think you meant the same?

 

Learning your first engine the first time is a lot harder than learning another one. The interface looks different and the controls are in a different place, but fundamentally they all do the same thing.

Any good artist can quickly get up to speed in any modelling software.

Any good programmer can quickly get up to speed in a new language or IDE.

Any good pilot can quickly get up to speed in a new aircraft.

Because fundamentally, all modelling software does the same thing, all languages do the same thing, all aircraft do the same thing. The only things that change are on the surface and are quickly adapted to.

And to be relevant and useful in this day and age, where every studio uses different tools to do their tasks, it's a good idea to get your P's on at least all of the leading ones in your field so that you aren't wasting unnecessary time catching up should you need to change.

 

That is literally impossible and probably due to faulty testing and getting render bottlenecks.

 

That's what we said the last time...

 

jason weimann will be live streaming in ~28 minutes (about this topic)
** looks like it got delayed for another 70 minutes, seems like they know when the deal is out..?

 

UE

Nope. take "any" pilot and put it into Airbus cockpit and say "fly". It is not as driving is about "steering and pressing pedals". Regular driver put into 188 wheels truck + carrier will have dramatic times at parking, turning, maneuvering in general.
So to some degree yes, but there are barriers which might cause a lot of troubles to "get into speed".
It is mainly a matter of getting used to specific workflows which in some cases might be "impossible" to cross.
Like me and Blender. I tried it ... 17 times to say the list for few hours each time. I'm doomed I think and I will be auto desk indie slave forever.

 

I'll preface this by saying I'm speculating like everyone else is at this point.
However, I'm basing my predictions on official Unity-approved correspondence, that being from the Bloomberg article and Will Goldstone's tweet.

Both of those sources have emphasized rev share, scrapping the entire install idea altogether (at least for now, until they can figure out a way to track installs that won't make everyone angry, and that can take years among talks with many business partners).

I don't think they're cutting anything out of Unity Personal. In fact, I think they're going to remove the splash screen restriction from Unity Personal if you install the next version of Unity. My guess is next year 2024, which would be the 2023 tech branch and eventual LTS.

What they'll include or incentivize for the Pro tier though, I have no idea. There'd be no incentive for anyone to go Pro right now, other than maybe rev share limit increases, or something like that.

People may think Will Goldstone's tweet getting removed is a bad sign, but I think they're actually following this thread and other social media outlets and removed it once they figured everyone got the message.

The announcement is coming today. Most likely at the end of the day like others have suggested, so that shareholders/investors don't get a chance to read the news until Monday morning. This becomes a win for the game developers over the weekend, and saves Unity some face for that short time until the investors are mildly caught off guard on Monday. Insvestors will be slightly disappointed in the business plan change, because it's not as aggressive, but they'll be okay with it (just like all developers would've been okay with rev share to begin with anyway).

 

Didn't say there isn't a learning curve, but it's nowhere near the same as the first time.

I just converted say 5-10 scripts worth of code from Unity into blueprints. While it took a little while to understand how to use the tool, conceptually I knew what needed to be done, how the variables and functions needed to look, how the code should be split into different components, the way the transfer of input and information from one component to another should look.

So it was really just about understanding terms like actors, scene components, actor components, etc and mapping that onto my preexisting knowledge of game dev in Unity.

It's always unpleasant when you look at a new interface and everything looks weird, but once you get through a week or so of using it constantly, progress happens extremely fast.

 

https://twitter.com/gekido/status/1705244879083929754

 

Do not be discouraged. Check out https://www.gamedev.tv/ and their Unreal courses. Just go through the courses first building on your skill. Forget about your game for a couple of weeks. Then try again.

 

Whatever is ultimately announced, be very suspicious of any promises that Unity will use their proprietary data model to keep track of things. This is the same data model that caused them to send me a nasty e-mail saying they were prepared to switch off my plan if I didn't respond *immediately*, because they believed I should have been on the Enterprise plan. Why did they think that you ask? Because one of my projects was named "GettysburgClient". It was the client component of a Gettysburg game, but the word "client" convinced them that I was working for an industrial customer and was enough of a reason to threaten to shut my account down.

What if I had been on vacation for the next 2 weeks? Would I have returned to find my Unity plan cancelled?

 

Here's the video showing the code (GDScript) that he later modified for that video (C#). He's not really doing anything with the code. Many of the performance troubles with Godot are in specific areas like raycasting.

https://sampruden.github.io/posts/godot-is-not-the-new-unity/

 

All the things you listed are non-issue for people that are skilled with the engine and already know how to program.

You pick up new tool, you write anything that's missing, and community and asset store are not really needed.

If you cannot do that, well, improve your skills. It always been like this, honestly. Tools come and go, general principles remain.

 

Yeah, make something new, unique. My game does not even have a genre. lol I do not care because I having such a blast with my own design and I am building an audience before it is even done. So much fun.

Remember, have fun. Don't feel like you have to use the same template as everyone else.

My game will probably be niche but will be so fun to see people play it and thanks to discord, I will have my own community. They will enjoy naming the head hippie, and gather conspiracy theories from NPCs, and most of all they will love to laugh.

 

True, but that was almost 6-8 years ago ( Unity 5 came out 2015 and 5.6 in early 2017), things have changed, most notably the IPO. So at the time there really wasn't any good reason for Unity to switch to royalties, the perpetual license, then subscriptions were matching the expenses of the company.

Today due to IMHO wasteful purchases and mergers by Unity we are in a different situation where if we want Unity to survive they will have move to a different revenue scheme. Obviously I would hope after this slapping from the community, the board will move to make the company more streamlined and stop buying out pointless companies just for the sake of making shares go up, but who knows.

I think regardless of the updates today from Unity, developers are going to be taking a much more critical view of the companies actions going forward and if they do switch to royalties but then also continue to squander the good will and spend vast amounts of money they don't have, that developers will re-evaluate it as a long term engine as we will no doubt be back with the same problems we have currently.

 

I wonder what he'll say about the changes. He made a video about the original announcement and the take was that it wasn't that bad.

 

https://twitter.com/mikegeig/status/1705226917236945405

 

What I meant is that you have to evaluate your options depending on the game you are going to develop. If you are developing Celeste... you can do that with Godot. If you are going to develop Hollow Knight, you can choose Godot too. If you are going to develop something more complex like Escape from Tarkov, you could do that with Flax (even when I would not do it) or Unigine (which would be my option). But if you are into something like GTA, you don't choose either Unity, Godot, or Flax. You go to Unreal or develop your own engine.

And yes, changing engines is scary. But you cannot be tied to a single engine all your life. Unity could broke tomorrow. If they continue managing the company in this way it could eventually happen. Descouraging people from evaluating options is not the way to go.

On the other hand, you are giving a lot importance to the asset store, or the community, or the support, ... Which are things that you normally need when you don't have the skills or the resources. If you are in that case, probably you are not involved in any ambitious development.

And yes, Unreal is complex. I have been working with it for several years. But it is not that difficult when you get it. The thing is that it has a lot of functions Unity doesn't. The average game will not use 60% of them. When people start learning it they try to learn everything and that is not the way it should be done. That's overwelming. Just learn the things that you are going to use for your game and ignore the rest of them.

 

I'm not sure why, but my test in Godot is having trouble adding 5000 objects to the scene. I attempted to add all the objects in a single loop, unlike in the video where the bees were added overtime. It's been spinning for 5 minutes now. In Unity, it's almost instant.

I'm a little bit doubtful with this video tho.

 

For whatever it's worth the stock is up around 2%.

 

Little bit of a fanboy here? I guess noody assumes that any other engine is just get go on the same level, it will be hard work to get anywhere. But what is the alternative, stay and get screwed over every 5 years, every 2 years, every year again?
So yes it means some rather painful time developming all the stuff that is missing there, instead of just getting robbed by unity with a future that just gets worse by the hour.

 

This is an absolute atrocity. I would be completely fine with, say a 10% revenue split, but this installation tax just makes anyone adverse to micro-transactions and ads in their game just end up bleeding money unless they charge for their game.

 

Excuse me?

 

I know... 10% booo

 

A 10% rev split would be an absolute no-go for most of the devs I know.

 

I just want to chime in on this real quick. The devs and community behind Godot are actively adding things such as an AOT Compiler to GDScript and replacing the Godot Physics engine with Jolt. On the topic of Jolt. You can literally replace Godot Physics right now with Jolt Physics with a few clicks. That alone will increase your Frames per second quite a bit.

 

If they rolled out a 10% revenue split I'd uninstall the engine and the hub.

 

How long will it take to finish your game and what game are you working on? I have a gamer friend looking for more games to play.

 

First of many legal issues for the Unity Runtime Installation Fee, today Unity can fix some errors, all are waiting.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023...-to-look-at-unitys-anti-competitive-bundling/

 

I think Jolt physics only covers the 3D side? But this plug and play of AAA level systems is pretty powerful stuff.

 

If by talking to people such as Jason, Freya etc. they mean "talking with the community" then they are way off from reality than I thought. So we mean less than community & customers to them. Great

 

They're definitely making improvements if the discussions I've skimmed through are any indication, but some of this is in the core design of the engine and not simply fixed.

 

if I make games as a hobbyist, then i'm fine with not gaining a substantial amount of revenue off of a game and unity can take what little amount 10% of revenue is, but if i'm losing money because people like my game enough to install it, then that becomes an issue.

 

Jason peddles low quality courses but what's wrong with Freya? She knows Unity like the back of her hand and she's developed indie games with it in the past. Code Monkey is also and insider probably and he's alright, the definition of a grinding indie.

 

Yeah, I am aware. Just trying to offer solutions in the mean time.

You can do this with Godot's 2D physics as well. You can replace it with Box2D this is what I have done with some prototypes with Godot.

 

Congratulations, we've seen something more shortsighted than the last post I called as much. You're not the only person using Unity.

 

By all means I am not talking about them as an professionals. They are more or less tied with unity. I don't know if they are developing their own games besides CodeMonkey, but what I meant that they are not Unity's regular, grey, anonymous customers. I bet that there is a little bit of bias there.

 

also some side news about how bad things are inside unity,
no wonder all features are late or half broken,


https://twitter.com/gekido/status/1704137482537935218


https://twitter.com/AndrewKingDev/status/1703150095166849092

 

yeah, well, some of us is really trying to make living with games. you would be golden probably with 100% revenue-share, if 10% is nothing to you.

 

I was more thinking a specific plan that allows a revenue split rather than charges on a per-install basis, not a forced revenue share for everyone

I'm a novice to game development, sorry if I said something that the rest of you with a more valid opinion found insulting.