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Unity developers, what are your plans after the last annoucement?

A topic by Maidelen created Sep 12, 2023 Views: 2,679 Replies: 82

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Maidelen1 year ago (1 edit) (+1)

Because I'm interested to know what Unity developers are gonna do. Working with unity is gonna be kinda hard after the new policy.

My totally personal thing: I like Unity games because if the developer provides it, can give a really good configuration on things like resolution, textures quality, shadows, etc that I don't see so often, so my really old pc cand run various "modern" Unity games. Godot games, in the other hand just can't open because my graphics drivers are very old, haha. And everyone is switching to Godot afther the Unity thing... Someday I'm gonna get a not-old pc.

End of personal thing, that's just me. What about you?

~~10 seconds~~ edit: What I just tell is my problem, I'm don't blame anyone who wants to drop Unity after this for better alternatives.

gamertose1 year ago(+2)

I'm dropping Unity entirely and moving to Unreal since I know that just as well as Unity. Sure I haven't had 200k downloads in a game yet, but with the way they are structuring it to include reinstalls and per hardware is insane! Imagine a troll not liking your game and sets up a script to just delete and reinstall the title over and over! You'll go bankrupt just because of some troll or hell even a company who wants to buy your game from you! Since my games on this site are all WebGL based, they just need to constantly refresh the page and that counts as an "install" under Unity's new terms

Insculpo1 year ago

I have been looking into other game engines for a bit of time even before the announcement, Godot and Unreal I have been making more attempts at. Maybe I try Twine again.

Ofihombre1 year ago(+1)

Basically Randy & Manilla development is taking me between not releasing it commercially or merely canceling it.

I had planned to be able to finish it until 2025, but due to Unity's new plans, if I decide to change the engine (either Unreal, Godot or Flax), it would end up being delayed until 2030, because it would be so expensive to recreate it from scratch for the entire time by all programming and graphic redesign.

If the other engines opted for similar policies, a new video game crisis could come due to them (especially indies), and the developers would end up giving up on the industry. Charging for installs is a treacherous attack on the video game industry, and one in which so many games would be affected.

Can you imagine that YouTube will also charge taxes for views, once a video exceeds the 200.000 barrier?

Maidelen1 year ago

You should use engines with a price 'wall' or open source engines. Especially with the last, if the police of the main code changes, someone can took the source code of that engine and make a new version without a hypothetically bad politic.

Ofihombre1 year ago

But the problem is that my game started in 2019 (4 years!).

Maidelen1 year ago

I was searching a bit and looks like you can port the code of a Unity game to Godot engine. I think that fits you, right?

Ofihombre1 year ago

Yeah, something like that:

I had heard that there was a godot addon that can bring Unity scenes, although it wouldn't apply the same for scripts.

Evolutionary Games1 year ago(+4)

I assume you mean this announcement: https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates

I think it's fair. Unity is still giving a lot for free. Remember, it's not only the installs, it's the installs and money you earn combined. So free games will be exempt, because they will have the installs but not the money component.

If you compare it to GameMaker, GameSalad, Clickteam Fusion, Construct - you pay an upfront fee and then again for new releases. So over a few years you might not make money from your games, but you're paying for the software. With Unity, you only start paying once you start earning.

Unreal charges a percentage of takings and it isn't capped (last time I checked). So they will coin it, if your game becomes popular.

I had played around with Godot a few years ago but it wasn't suited to the way I work - it kept crashing and losing my data. I'm sure it's improved since then, but I'm not going to risk it. Besides, the community must pay for it so the developers can continue its development. So although payment is voluntary, it isn't exactly free.

Ink1 year ago (1 edit) (+5)

Why are INSTALLS being charged fair?

1) Unity, as far as I know, doesnt contribute to server costs of devolopers or storefronts. So downloading game is not costing them. Nor is installing it. "phoning home" is cost they are making themselves, so that doesnt count either.

2) they are trying to put the fees on gamepass game installs to Microsoft instead of devs with their latest "clarification". Good luck with that. Guess who is gonna "suffer" from that? Either we get another price hike or devs get less money from gamepass deals. And for what? shareholders gettin more money?

3) Game prices are just gonna trickle upwards. Remember that 0.20c is still 1% out of 20 dollar game. Which is per machine they install it to. So potentially 2% with steamdeck and 3% if steam library share counts for example, 4% if person has laptop too etc.

With 5 dollar game, that itch is full of, thats 4% one install, 8% two, 12% three installs. If it breaks the 200k downloads/revenue ofc.

4) Also saw tweet earlier that went basically that "imagine your game being freemium, you get to the 200k revenue. BUT your game has been downloaded something like 3 million times. We now owe Unity 20c per 2.8M installs, $560K".

Would that happen? Would Unity forgive the bill despite agreeing to the terms? I doubt it. Either start to be more agressive with freemium games or have it free forever and dont make dime (which is totally fine)

Evolutionary Games1 year ago

The reason I'm pro Unity is because I get a lot of resources for free - not only from Unity, but also from an awesome community. Because of the size of the community, you can generally get help. I struggle with software that have small communities to get (a) the developers to take my bug reports seriously (b) help, when I don't know how to do something.

If you're making a lot of money from your game i.e. $200,000 you'd likely upgrade to Unity Pro or Enterprise. At that point the cost per install in your scenario becomes 1c or 2c.

In the meantime, those of us earning a few cents per game can create games in robust software for free.

I agree their argument is weak, but I'm ignoring that, and looking at the bigger picture. They need to make money to stay in business. And they increased the minimum earnings before you need to start paying from $100,000 to $200,000 per year. They have to make up that shortfall somehow.

From my perspective, if my game was making that kind of money, I wouldn't begrudge Unity the money because they take the risk. They say: "okay, you use the software for free and we'll carry the costs of your game development - which is considerable when you start looking at the analytics, UDP, etc. they give me for free. If you're successful, we want to share in that success, so pay us a fee then, but we'll cap our fee or reduce our rate as you grow and use more of our services."

Maidelen1 year ago(+4)

Let's see if I can tell some things correctly: You have visual and audio resources outside of Unity as well. GDevelop has its own asset download center, with RPG Maker you have all the plugins/scripts and with Godot you have templates for a lot of things. Maybe they don't have the same community as Unity, but between veteran forums and active discord servers there's someone who has written tutorials or fixes, or people that you can talk about the engine.

... Wa,waht, what? 200.000$? In my opinion, at that point you aren't a novice if you get that by game sells. 200.000$ by sells of a indie game means to me that you are doing very well, more than the majority of the people who uses itch.io, or even Itch.io itself. (This is not an insult to Itch.io or its users. I would be insulting myself).

I don't know how to put in precise words, but, do wathever you want, I'm not someone to tell you what to do in game engines but I don't recomend you call yourself a "Pro Unity" or defend the a-lot-of-money company who doesn't know you and if it could, it would make your experience more difficult with the service if it means making more money.

Regarding Godot, you don't lose anything by giving it a try, or Gdevelop, both engines are free and open source. Note that my main engine is a paid one and is closed source, but I admire Godot and Gdevelop, both the people behind those engines and their developers. And if I stopped using a software because it suffered a crash that caused it to lose data, I wouldn't be using a computer.

redonihunter1 year ago (1 edit) (+7)

I believe many people are not enraged for Unity trying to make money, but that they try to change their method to charge per install.

It currently to my understanding is this: if you are under 100k revenue in past 12 months, you can use Unity personal for free. If you are above, you have to use one of the subscriptions that start at roughly 2k a year. So very roughly, they are now charging like 2% ish of yearly revenue. Or less, if your game is popular.

As someone pointed out, if you have a low cost game, maybe free with ad revenue, you might clock in with millions of downloads. A hit like angry birds has 100 + million downloads. So even with the highest tier of only 1-2 cent per install we look at over a million $ in cost what previously was a couple thousand.

Oh, and from what I could dig up on their faq, the subscription fee for Unity pro + is still to be paid...

So, assuming a subscription of 10k a year and being "eglible" for that runtime fee. Having a tremendous amount of success and managing to have 1000000 downloads of your game is doubling your cost. It costs at least 1 cent, that is 10k. Oh, and if you manage to garner 2 million downloads, now your costs are not 10k for your subscription, but 10k subscription and 20k runtime fee. But 2 million are likely to get 10 million, making the yearly subscription only 10% of your costs, and having 90% of the cost being that runtime installation fee.

Small but successful devs might want to switch to an engine with more calulateable financial risks. As it is now, if you are not very careful, you might end up in a paradox situation, where success can spell out financial ruin for your gaming company.

There will be consequences. And there already are, judging from various news articles about this.

Maidelen1 year ago(+1)

Yeah, I don't saying that the person/team/company behind a service software can't make money with it, the thing is the methods that they are gonna do to get profit.

These are cool calculations, although I'm not someone who does that kind of accounting (yet).

redonihunter1 year ago(+3)

It is just rough estimates based on the table Unity has on their site.

The cheapest is like 1 cent per install. But it starts at 20 cent. Granted, there is a threshold, but what aspiring dev would not want to have success in the future. So even amateurs will be wary what engine to learn for future success - even if that success might not come.

The pricing model they plan to have is especially detrimental to the pay-what-you-want model popular on itch.

So if you had a very popular pwyw game and had the gigantic success of making the threshold, what would that boil down to? You used Unity personal of course, because you are one of those indie devs that have no money. And that one stays at 20 cent. So you have 1 000 000 downloads a year of your Unity personal game. 20 000 of the players tossed you a 10er for the game. Bringing you above the threshold. Your payment due to Unity? 200k. And if you have a single download more, now you lost money by having a popular game. Maths is fun.

redonihunter1 year ago(+1)

They should change it to a percentage of sales. That would benefit them quite the same, while also not exposing some devs to financial risks.

If the only games you offer for download are making money per download, there is not much argument. They get their cent for the game, the player pays whatever the game did cost, and so on. (Plus additional costs for keeping track, that are unneccsary if they would just have kept it at sales income.)

But charging for installs is disconnecting the money the game makes from the costs. Sure, they have that threshold, but imagine a company that barely breaks even, but with 200k revenue per year. Maybe free to play with premium version. The premium gets the money. But Unity will charge for the installs of the ftp, not for the amount of money the company made.

Eris Lord Freedom1 year ago(+1)

Whether or not it's "fair" for Unity to charge per install...

they're being very cagey about how they're going to get that number.

Example: I download a Unity game from itch.io. It's in a zip file. I unzip & click on the .exe. Is that an "install?" I put it on a flash drive and run it on a different laptop. Is that a second "install?" How can they tell? If I'm offline when I do this, how do they even know it exists?

Are Steam, Itch.io, GOG, and Epic going to give them access to the number of installations of Untitled Goose Game next year?
Right now, Unity's info on their counting method is "Just trust us, bro."

...I can't wait for the lawsuit when someone they bill demands they prove how many installations happened for that game.

And that's before we get into, "how are they going to prevent hostile bot installations" - someone who decides they hate a dev, so they rig a bot to a VPN and a cluster of virtual machines to make it look like there's 5,000 new installations. Or 50,000.

Charity bundles are exempt... what counts as a charity bundle? Does that mean any bundle, or are they picking which ones count? (Do they have ANY IDEA AT ALL how many game bundles are active at any given time? Or do they think there are, like, six game distributors on the internet and only two of them run charity bundles?) What about not-charity bundles, like the Humble Trove - those are "pay $15/month for a subscription; get a cluster of high-value games, plus keep access to a swarm of over 50 small indie games as long as you're subscribed."

How are they going to figure out whether a game has made more than the threshold? AFAIK, financial records of gaming distribution sites are not open to the public. (Has Untitled Goose Game made more than $200,000 in the last year? How would Unity know?)

They're dodging a lot of very basic questions about how they'll get the numbers they plan to use to invoice people.

Even if they had that - this is the end of Unity as the default "not sure what engine to use? Here, this is free and fairly easy to learn." Because shifting from "free forever" to "maybe we'll charge you some day, some amount that we'll decide, based on numbers that maybe we made up but we're not going to tell you any details," means it no longer works for people getting started in the industry.

(Right now, they're saying they'll charge up to 20 cents per installation. What prevents them from deciding to change that to $1 per installation next year?)

Evolutionary Games1 year ago

Unity's analytics can tell them how many installs there are. It will only trigger an install if someone actually opens the game. So downloads, without opening it, does not count. I have a game published through Unity's UDP that have many downloads (shown by the store) - bots I assume - but Unity shows there's only 1 person who actually opened my game (I assume the tester). I had queried it with them, and they explained how their analytics works.

In contrast, Unity has no way of knowing how much the game actually earns. They will have to extrapolate that from x installs with this funding method is likely to yield x return.

Note the analytics and UDP, and their own marketing division, gives them a lot of data, and they might have implemented their pricing plan based on the data they have. This data most likely excludes small developers, but the price point of $200,000 also means most of us will never need to pay for the software.

I can foresee a scenario where someone earns on average 10c per install, and now faces a bill of 20c per install. But as far as I can determine that's only after earning $200,000, and not retrospective. Their pricing shows it is a cost per new install. So the developer at that point would need to change their pricing model or talk to Unity about it.

What concerns me is everyone is looking to currently "free" software as an alternative. That software is not free, someone is paying for it in the background. It will come down to your risk tolerance - I see using "free" software as too risky - if something happens to the sole developer, can the software continue? I don't foresee most of my games ever reaching $200,000 in earnings and I'm excited about some of the new tools Unity is developing. So I have no reason to abandon Unity. But this is a personal decision every developer must make for themselves.

redonihunter1 year ago(+2)

Interesting. On their faqthey claim differently. Or they try to make it seem that they claim differently.

Is collecting the install data GDPR and CCPA compliant?

The method we are using to calculate installs is currently derived from aggregated data from various sources collected in compliance with all privacy laws and used to build a confidence around our estimate. If anything changes, we will provide you with notice and compliance mechanisms to assure all parties remain in compliance with applicable laws. Please note we will always work with our customers to ensure accurate billing.

What various sources were used to estimate that your tester used the game?

Will games made with Unity phone-home to track installs?

We will refine how we collect install data over time with a goal of accurately understanding the number of times the Unity runtime is distributed. Any install data will be collected in accordance with our Privacy Policy and applicable privacy laws.

So actually, they do not have the slightest clue how to collect the data, and hope they will come up with something that does not get them sued over breaking privacy laws. And this one will be tough. Will players have to agree to tos and eula of Unity now, for playing games made in Unity? Retroactivly? Because all this applies to already made games as well.

Eris Lord Freedom1 year ago(+1)

Godot is open source. That means it's not being maintained by a sole developer - anyone can make a copy of the code; anyone can make edits. The current developer decides what goes in the main version, but anyone can develop their own fork of it - and if the developer abandons the project, or decides to inflict adware in it, someone will grab the last stable version and make a new project where other people can develop that. (Tenacity is a fork of Audacity after its hostile takeover.)

You can, of course, keep using Unity... and hope that next year they don't decide "actually it's 50 cents per install, even for free projects." Once a company has decided to squeeze money out of formerly non-paying participants in their project, they don't stop.

redonihunter1 year ago(+3)

Working with unity is gonna be kinda hard after the new policy

You need to get over two thresholds. Downloads alone are not sufficient. If you have over $ 200k in sales for your game, you have other things to consider as well, like paying taxes, having a business etc.

I am more concerned how they measure the "installs". And they specifically speak about installs. Not downloads. Most, no, every game I saw on itch is not an installed game. It is unzip and run. There is no installation routine. So no installation process. And not even considering web games at this point.

How exactly does Unity know, if and how often a game was installed?! Are unity apps phoning home? When? If it is not at installation, as there is none, it would have to be at each start. Wich would mean, they would have to have a database of users to distinguish returning users and new users, as they plan to charge for installs. That breaches privacy. I have a contract with the developer, not with the engine maker. I did not allow Unity to collect my data. They might even violating data protection laws in several countries with this.

Digital Hedonist Games1 year ago (1 edit) (+4)

Currently looking into Godot. I'm not sure yet if I like the Nodes workflow, although it's probably not that different from Unity's Prefab system. I want to see what tools are available in their editor and how much I need to tooldev myself.

If I really can't get into Godot I will go for UE. Although I have a heavy dislike for Epic, at least they aren't publicly traded (yet) so they are more hesitant to try shit like Unity just did and it's industry standard for a reason.

What is certain for me though is that I will leave Unity behind. I've been using that engine since 3.5 and I will probably never be affected by the new licensing but the past two years they have shown that they are an unreliable business partner. I just REALLY dislike shareholder vultures ruining every software/game.

Paige-K-afk1 year ago(+1)

I don't know what I'll do. I know Unreal Engine, but the workflows are so different, and UE5 makes my laptop run hot, which is awful to work with in the warmer seasons.

All the unity games I'll make and distribute myself are free, so I shouldn't have to worry about paying for people installing my game, but I'm actually shaking right now and feel sick. Not in the internet user terms of it, in real terms. I'm feeling actually physically unwell. I had to get a good friend of mine who doesn't have a Unity account to send in a support/complaint ticket to unity support on my behalf cos I don't know how malicious they'll be to some nobody like myself disagreeing with them.

I really hope the backlash of large studios pulling their games from sale makes unity company rethink what they're doing and stop this stupidity.

I was planning on using Unity for a game jam, but it looks like I'll be using RPG maker MZ instead.

vikter1 year ago

Unless unity undo the changes, im screwed because I dont know a different engine other than unity, perhaps I will publish games under other names to probably get away with it, im puzzled right now

Ofihombre1 year ago

You could go try Godot or Flax.

vikter1 year ago

Im not used to godot, but what is flax?

Emerald Reserve1 year ago(+1)

At one point you didn't know Unity either. You can learn a new interface.

vikter1 year ago(+3)

8 days later and im currently learning godot, its going really good so far!

Emerald Reserve1 year ago

I'm on the same path, good luck brother.

vikter1 year ago

good luck to you too

DioShiba1 year ago (1 edit) (+3)

I'm just an artist and an animator who works with game devs so I'm not sure how much my opinion applies here, but I do think it is bullshit that the execs at unity are pulling this kind of stunt on people who barely make enough as it is trying to get by selling a game. It's not really any different from how Adobe pulls a subscription fee for just one program or you buy all of them in order to use them, not necessarily in the same sense where Unity is charging users based on how many times their game has been installed isn't just scummy, it's pure greed and that's where the comparison can be made.

I was going to consider picking up C++ as a skill along with HTML and JavaScript for the purposes of learning user interface but honestly, if this is the path Unity goes down then I'm better off looking into Unreal or Game Maker (Even though game maker uses a completely different coding system.) I'm more interested in 2D games than I am 3D personally but that's just my own personal preference. Or I might not bother and just go through with the latter two.

Mongli Games1 year ago(+2)

I'll be removing my Unity games from the store until I redo them in other engines (Godot for simple ones, Unreal for a big one I've been working on for seven years), but who knows how long it'll take. I won't touch Unity again, that's for sure, even if they undo the changes. I can't trust them anymore.

thislittlelog1 year ago

Not much of a dev myself but had tried to dabble in it through a few game engines. After the debacle with Unity though? I don't think I'll ever touch it again, that is until John Riccitiello and anyone else involved with pushing this scummy move are fired. In the meantime I decided to try messing around with Godot more and might even learn how to work with UE5 for stuff that's more "professional" because who knows? It might be a job prospect later on. And of course, I wouldn't mind tinkering with other game engines as well

redonihunter1 year ago(+3)

The plans of some devs are to ditch Unity and even delete their games from stores.

And not talking about tiny devs that would not hit the threshold anyways. Possibly a marketing ploy, but they will very likely switch engines for future projects.

Unity is driving fast against a wall right now. And their backpaddeling to claim they would make xbox&co pay for installations of those game pass games will not sit well with such services as well.

Thracco1 year ago(+3)

I am in the middle of making a slasher horror and I bought many assets and tutorials on how to do some things so dropping off right now is not an option. I want to see it finished BUT I will start learning another engine so by the time I finish my game, I can transition smoothly to the other engine. Unity's fame is tarnished, even streamers and youtubers caught this. Maybe if they fire Riccitiello might save some face, but the ship has started to sink.

vikter1 year ago

Im making a slasher too, Im currently learning godot because of the announcement, its going good so far

Qory1 year ago (4 edits) (+5)

"Working with unity is gonna be kinda hard after the new policy."

My answer is "I'm not." Then again I took a haitus to work on a webcomic, so I'm going to need to relearn a lot of crap when I feel like gamedevving again. Perfect time to learn a different engine.

And I don't care if this sounds confrontation or whatever, but fuck the simps that are going "it's okay because there's a minimum threshold for revenue," since (1) we're long past the point in the gaming industry where these kinds of bad precedents are excusable (remember how lootboxes started?), and (2) That's a "you" excuse, not a legitimate defense of the practice that addresses any developer that wants to eventually make money from their gamedev. It's a selfish perspective that relies entirely on ignorance to excuse this kind of crap.

Unity could have easily done some shit like aping Unreal's scaling-pricing model, but this whole shit of "installs" is such baffling insanity that I cannot comprehend how anyone could have thought it was a good idea without a whiskey glass full of alcohol and meth. I don't care if they undo the changes.

redonihunter1 year ago(+1)

I read that the responsible guy and several other execs sold shares before announcing this, actually sold all year long and not buying any. So no trust in his own company. It could be a deliberate ruse to manipulate market. At the very least they knew exactly how the market and gamers would react to such a move. So maybe he saw a sacking coming. Apparantly he is highest paid boss in gaming and chances are that someone noticed that and he made the gambit of either delivering big money for his salary or cashing in with market manipulation.

poison.ivy.maze1 year ago (1 edit)

With that Microsoft court document PDF leak (https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/09/ftc-v-microsoft-document-leak-outs-detailed-plans-for-mid-gen-xbox-refresh/), along with the whole fiasco of publishers being headed by businessmen who don't game much (hello Konami); one can certainly see that gaming in general is becoming much more corporate.

It appears that Flax may ultimately be what Devs will be be guided to use next. However, since it too isn't open source; one can anticipate potential lock-ins.
Godot is said to have some issues despite Godot 4.0's improvements. At the very least, if Godot ever followed in the footsteps of other open source products who turned evil (like Audacity), someone can still could fork it at least.

We may have a frog-in-pot situation. Adobe users have some familiarity with this.

Sch3ffel1 year ago(+1)

i was about to start a project (my first one i should add) on unity... good thing my indecisive ass made me procrastinate a lot. never touching unity again.

Maidelen1 year ago (1 edit) (+2)

My main engine is RPG Maker because it suits me perfectly to someone who knows almost nothing about coding. That includes my favorite free alternatives RPG Paper Maker and Wolf RPG Editor. But the originals Makers are done by a company, I hope this Unity mistake shows them that this is no the way. Something that Unity has done is disable all previous versions of Unity so you can only use the latest. In RPG Maker, you can buy and use each edition whitout problems. I'm not convinced by RPG Maker MZ, but that's fine, I can still use MV (my favorite) whitout problems, it evens gets some support updates.

Thanks to the steam special sales prices, you can save money when buying a RPG Maker. But if someone wants a free alternative (maybe you can call them 'clones' but thas a bit mean) you can try these:

https://www.moddb.com/engines/wolf-rpg-editor

https://rpg-paper-maker.com/

Wolf is the one that I want to use when I din't have money to get a main RPG Maker, and some of my favorites games were made in it (1bitheart and Alicemare). Altought the software is "dead" is still worth it.

Paper Maker is still getting support and doesn't look that It will stop, when I'm more economy confortable I want to tinkering more with Paper Maker and make something interesting. Also, is a 3D engine but very optimized, runs very well in my computer! And also looks pretty.

Ofihombre1 year ago

They was deleted all previous versions? So no one could update with the version that best suits them.

Once again, Unity proves to be the most anti-developer engine on history.

vikter1 year ago

i still have Unity 5.5.5

Angry Ant Entertainment1 year ago(+4)

I have been in this business for thirty years. We developed our own game engine in 1999 and used it until 2006. I know how much work and cost developing an engine is. So Unity back then was a great development as Unreal and ID's engine were unachievable due to their high licensing prices.
Right now, unreal is the only viable engine when it comes to stability and professionalism compared to Unity. The problem is, and I know this from colleagues that switched, is that Blueprint coding is very limited. For 'simple; games it is okay, but as soon as you are trying out-of-the-box stuff or more complicated features, you will need to switch to coding in C++. Being a deep programming language, there are two major problems: 1. It is harder to learn and you have to do a lot yourself (memory management, for example) and 2. The compiling times for even a simple script lies at 30 minutes to an hour depending on your system. Meaning you wait for that time until you can test if your new code actually works. Unreal is great for large teams, with the latest hardware, and big budgets. Their VR development until recently barely reached 45FPS from what I have heard from other developers.

I am pretty sure Unity will row the entire thing back and most likely fire Riccitiello. EA got rid of him when he messed their brand up. But that is only a guess, of course.

Ofihombre1 year ago(+1)

Even when EA fired Riccitello, continued to be the hated company that it is, with the loot boxes, or even the crunch in games like Anthem.

Well, if Unity did the same, the situation won't change much, since they lost the trust of the developers.

It wouldn't be strange if Unity would soon be bought by EA itself.

poison.ivy.maze1 year ago(+2)

Ah.... ol' C++
Rather than shoot yourself in the foot as you can in C with malloc and reference pointers, with C++ you can shoot yourself in the foot where each copy makes additional copies which also shoot you in the foot! Fun!

CrashDumpSoftware1 year ago

I think for 99.999% of the developers on itch this changes nothing:

- you have to earn more than 200000 $ per year with your game

- WebGL games do not count. It will still be free, even if you make millions with it

Is there really anyone here who is affected by this??? Please speak up if you are affected!

Ofihombre1 year ago (2 edits) (+2)

It won't affect us that much financially, It will affects us more with the following things:

1. For November, there will be an offline blocking system, in which if you are without an Internet connection for 3 days, unity can't be used for offline.

2. It will also not be possible to experiment between previous and new versions, because they have eliminated everything before at once on the website (Before they deleted the 3 and 4 versions, now all except the new one).

CrashDumpSoftware1 year ago

For me this sound still rather theoretical. You can download all versions from the past 8 years. Who is developing with an engine that is older than 8 years? And who has no internet for more than 3 days? (And the offline block is not mentioned in the blog post - where is this information coming from?)

Ofihombre1 year ago(+2)

Well, I have already seen it again, and it seems that the versions up to 5 at least have returned.

But with second question, it's as if you don't care about the people who have used the engine, but who have suffered catastrophes that can leave them without internet for months or ever years (like earthquakes or hurricanes).

Eris Lord Freedom1 year ago(+2)

"Who has no internet for more than three days?"

...People on vacation. (People who have gone somewhere remote for vacation and have brought their laptop so they can work on their novel or their game dev without distractions.) People who live in a place where internet is unavailable or unreliable, and they go to the library once in a while to download things. People whose only internet is their phone, and sure, it has a hotspot, but they can't afford to use it regularly. Kids whose parents strictly regulate their internet access. Kids in boarding schools that strictly regulate internet access. People whose internet service was lost after a natural disaster, and it'll probably be fixed in a week or two but in the meantime, they have computers, just no online ability - and they're desperately interested in playing the games they have.

Paige-K-afk1 year ago

A lot of studios will drop the engine, so as someone trying to get into the industry, I'm affected as my experience in Unity is now mostly dead weight with only the C# knowledge and logic knowledge being worth anything.

CrashDumpSoftware1 year ago

Yes that could be a problem. But on the other hand: Why should professional Studios quit Unity? They should not be affected - when you are in the pro-plan you have to pay 0.02$ per install, which is basically nothing compared to Steam/Google Play/App Store - fees.

Paige-K-afk1 year ago(+2)

It's about the broken trust. Even if it's "nothing compared to x store fees" and the company CAN pay it, it is still a stinky move that would make anyone say "nope I don't want to work on an engine that would even think to treat me like trash".

CrashDumpSoftware1 year ago(+1)

Probably that is the reason I am not affected by this: There is no major company that I really trust. :) So no trust to lose. I only do the math and see that Unreal is way more expensive ...

redonihunter1 year ago(+3)

Why should professional Studios quit Unity?

Really? They are the ones that are affected the most!

Maybe ask Massive Monster why they plan on ditching Unity and threaten to delete their games from stores. They have a discord, I bet that one is buzzing right now.

My guess is, that is has to do with principle and not wanting to have unreliable business partners and financial risky calculations. The business is hard. And Unity is not applying the fee on financial success and sales, but on installs. That is not the same.

If you lack the imagination, think about scenarious involving pay what you want, free with adds/premium, bundles, discounts...

In other words, if no one were affected by this pricing model change, why would they try to implement it in such a way in the first place? This is costing developers more money while not giving them more benefits. This alone is reason to be angry.

In yet other words, why should a gaming company put up with a engine maker that changes pricing so, that your licensed engine now ramps up from costing you 10k $ a year to double or triple or more? The pricing for Unity pro currently is ~2k per seat a year. So having 5 developers developing in that one would cost 10k for the engine alone. Developers want money too, so your company must make enough money to employ 5 devs. Plus assets and whatnot. So you can assume that your games have to have a sales volume putting you over the thresholds. 1 million times 2 cent gives you an additional cost of 20k. And even with only 100000 that makes 15k.

Also Unity has demonstrated that they might radically change pricing. So they could change it radically again. Lowering thresholds, increasing fees, removing exceptions, counting differently, and so on. And on a short notice. This is hard to calculate. And if you try to have a company providing your livelyhood, you want stability as much as you can. Players are fickle enough.

CrashDumpSoftware1 year ago(+1)

OK, I agree. Setting up a licence model where you cannot predict what you have to pay is dangerous. Even if it is no practical problem. (And I am not a lawyer: But changing the terms of use after I installed Unity sounds illegal to me?! Could Microsoft change the terms of use for Word, so that we have to pay 1$ for every Document we create from tomorrow on?)

Eris Lord Freedom1 year ago

My not-a-lawyer guess is that the old TOS applies to old versions of Unity - but if you update to the new version, you're stuck with the new TOS. (And Unity is not going to bother telling people that existing, non-updated games are exempt from this whole fiasco.)

I suspect Unity is actually planning to totally ignore everything not distributed through a trackable service, but they don't want to announce that to the public, because then dev companies would be actively looking for ways to dodge their install tracking.

Eris Lord Freedom1 year ago

It's 2 cents/install right now.

What stops them from making it 25 cents/install next year? ("That would be stupid?" Considering how many game companies have announced they're changing engines in the last couple of days, I don't believe "stupid" would stop them.)

If dev companies and distributors accept the "per installation" fee, Unity will eventually jack up the price to whatever they think the market will bear.

Thracco1 year ago(+2)

Mark my words it will definitely affect everyone, people will ask you "Is this made in Unity" and since this site is indie dev dominant, they might not buy your game. Or even donate to your WebGL game.

CrashDumpSoftware1 year ago

I understand that this is kind of a "shitstorm" and that things might go into this direction. But as a matter of fact: Unity was never a charity-company. Also in the past they forced you into paying, if you earned money with your projects. And they take a substantial share if you buy stuff in the asset store. And the asset store is full of crappy assets - when you buy one, and it turns out that you cannot use it, good luck with getting your money back.

So, from my point of view: It does not change much...

Thracco1 year ago

From a financial point yes you are right.
But if you want to make a game with the purpose of selling it, it will be tied with Unity's tarnished fame. You will lose sales. Especially on itch. Many people make Unity games here and selling them for 1-5$+.

redonihunter1 year ago

You think Unity will become the next AI-made? ;-)

Thracco1 year ago

Most certainly it will. I already have seen comments "Is this made in Unity"? haha.

Maidelen1 year ago

One of my favorite games in Itch.io, Touhou Fumo Racing, is made in Unity. I'm gona keep safe in my own repository the latest version of the game.

Thracco1 year ago

Will you buy Touhou Fumo Racing when it releases knowing that it will have an install tracker?
I won't.

redonihunter1 year ago(+1)

That is the aspect of all this that worries me most. I have not dug deep, but how do they plan to track all this stuff? Do projects that meet the threshold get a mandatory addon for installation tracking? Will there be an eula we have to agree to even play those games?

Because there are things that would be quite illegal under current privacy and data protection laws. And tracking is only possible via phoning home. Tracking sales is trivial. Tracking installations for drm free games is inherently impossible. Because it would constitute drm. Granted, this would hurt the developer in theory, but once there is infrastructure for all this, there are all kinds of things, those nice Unity CEOs might come up with to upsell to naive developers.

Qory1 year ago (1 edit) (+1)

"- you have to earn more than 200000 $ per year with your game"

Pardon my french, but this argument is fucking stupid. It's basically saying "I'm not going to gross $200,000 in any of my games, so this isn't a problem for anyone else." Which is stupid even when taken at face value.

"- WebGL games do not count. It will still be free, even if you make millions with it"

I'm reading and watching a bunch of sources stating that WebGL games will be counted per page runtime as a separate install. (ex. [Youtube]). If you have something from Unity saying they're not going to charge anything for WebGL, please post it.

redonihunter1 year ago

https://unity.com/pricing-updates

Does the Unity Runtime Fee apply to web and streaming games?

We are not going to count web and streaming games toward your install count.

For now ;-)

People did not sign up for that kind of pricing model, when they opted to use Unity. Now they are commited, have invested ressources, time and have half finished products, they change pricing. So they might decide to change it again and charge for web games at a later point, for all we know.

Ofihombre1 year ago

That doesn't take away the fact that it is a patch on a poorly designed business model.

CrashDumpSoftware1 year ago(+1)

I think that brings it to the point, the new business model is poorly designed. As was the old one: I did some searching and it turned out that the Unity development was funded by increasing debts in the past. Unity was never profitable. It had to crash eventually. Now it did...

TLSAxt1 year ago (1 edit) (+1)

I quit. I've been using Unity for the last 5-6 years. I taught myself C# through tutorials, and I haven't made any money at game development anyway. I don't really care for learning another engine without any kind of return. So, I just quit, and I will soon be removing my games from all platforms and deleting my unity accounts.

I just don't want to wake up one day and be in debt to Unity.

the rat gremlin1 year ago(+2)

If you're using Unity Engine (or were but already left it since the pricing), there is a list of good alternatives made by @alienmelon

https://itch.io/blog/588977/the-generous-space-of-alternative-game-engines-a-cur...

So good luck, and if you know someone who also has this problem too, share it(or simply if you can)

Maidelen1 year ago

Unrelated but I din't know that Blog section of Itch.io. Looks really god, you can even mention games that are gonna to appear in the end of the post. Really cool, let's see how I can use it.

redonihunter1 year ago

I used to use Unity as an example for indie game's dependence on a single tool. As a Flash developer it seemed like a disaster waiting to happen.

I think this sums it up.

The amount of trust Unity lost is priceless. And judging by the linked article in that post, there is also rot inside the engine environment for quite a while now. People beginning to see Unity in a critical light might no longer ignore those faults. This is a downward spiral about to happen. Maybe it will survive for some consoles and mobile. Most of those alternative engines are not very friendly to export to a gaming console. Godot for instance can only export to Steam Deck and that is half a lie, because that only works, because that "console" is a linux device.

FearCode1 year ago

This is one of the very few hassles I don't need to face since I'm making my own game engine.

Talk Like a Beluga1 year ago

I will finish my current 3 projects (fingers crossed) as soon as possible and decide afterwards.
I hope I will get them done within the next 6 months. Maybe until then, Unity is somewhat back on track with a rewind and a new CEO/management, but I doubt it.

So I think I will look into Godot. I played around with it a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it. It's nowhere near Unity in terms of capabilities, but there will be a huge influx of intelligence into the community now and limitations never hurt the creative process.

Also I always wanted to learn C++ and contribute to an open source project. And as soon as I'm comfortable with C++ I will probably look into Unreal as well, but I will need a beefier computer then. :D

I hesitate trying other options like Flax, Stride, Unigine and the likes because of the small communities.

redonihunter1 year ago(+2)

To put it into perspective, according to this here

https://itch.io/game-development/engines/most-projects

from the projects that identify the used engines, Unity is most popular by far. So while most of those devs surly will not meet the threshold, it still may affect them indirectly. And since the pricing policy is especially hostile to the pay-what-you-want model so popular on itch, it is a looming danger in the future, as Unity might decide to change policy yet again.

Also the collection of data is problematic and might alienate players, so they try to avoid Unity-made, the same way some avoid AI assetts, drm or adware.

Oh, and if you want a popular example, Among Us costs a 5er on itch, steam and so on. But it is free on mobile and has 500 million downloads on google store. I believe the maths is not very hard on this one. Calculate with 1 cent or 20 cent. It does not matter.

Hodslate1 year ago

This doesn't affect free games though surely? What about older versions of unity?

redonihunter1 year ago(+2)

Not directly, no.

It seems they silently replaced tos for some versions. So it is unclear. There are some shady things done, in addition to that fee pricing scheme.

I also read, that the intended target might acutally be mobile advertising, as they apparantly give out price reduction of 100 % on the fee to users of their own advertising service, so those devs would not have to pay the fee. Effectivly undercutting the other advertising services and trying to run them out of business.

If Unity is seen as toxic poison by players, they might not look at the Unity game, even if it is free. There are so many games. Why bother with some that support such a scammy engine developer. Also, they changed it once on such short notice, they might do it again. This is not future proof. As you said with the older versions, we are not sure currently. What if you make your free game today and in 5 years you suddenly have to pay for installs too. Also, the installation tracking is affecting users. There are already users avoiding certain games because of the implemented drm. You can see that on some AAA games reviews on Steam. "Tracking installs" is drm. It is supposed to affect the developer, but the tracked one is the user. Users do not like such things.

Augustinas Raginskis1 year ago(+2)

Yeah, the unity situation is a mess. I would like to switch to some other engine just out of principle, but the king of projects I tend to work on take a looong time to make and I'm in a middle of making a game. I'm afraid to even image how huge of a pain it would be to recreate( or hopefully transfer) everything I made in unity to another engine. I think I kinda have to finish this before trying to learn a different engine or else it's going to be months of my free time just doing that. When I work on a game for two years and there is still a fair bit left to finish it it's not exactly easy to switch.

The monetization thing won't be an issue for someone like me who makes no money on these projects anyway, but who knows what kind of nonsense they will announce next after they quite likely go back on this monetization model.

redonihunter1 year ago(+1)

Wow. I just realized that Unity games already report "telemetry" by phoning home for quite a while. I have serious doubts that this is legal. My main point is, that I have a contract with the game developer/platform where I buy the game. But not with Unity. They have no consent to collect any data from the user.

Thanks greedy Unity CEO for making people look closer at Unity, so they see what a mess this thing really is.

AFRiFICTION1 year ago

I first read Unity's announcement before hearing what the media had to say, I calculated what they were asking and how it would affect me and I thought it was not going to break my business model. It makes sense that Unity needs more money to stay up to date and bring new features, they have always struggled when compared to Unreal, so I figured if these fee's allow them to bring better features and make Unity a more competitive engine then I support this change.

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