> Starting in November, Unity Personal users will get a new sign-in and online user experience. Users will need to be signed into the Hub with their Unity ID and connect to the internet to use Unity. If the internet connection is lost, users can continue using Unity for up to 3 days while offline. More details to come, when this change takes effect.
Notably, Adobe Creative Cloud requires you to check in every 30 days to validate licenses. I feel like it takes some work to come up with a DRM scheme for a development tool that is more onerous than Adobe's restrictions, but what do I know?
I certainly have never left a demo laptop unplugged for a week and then set up a demo quickly without Internet access and needed to make a quick change in my engine. That never happens to indie developers, so locking down the editor until they reestablish an Internet connection totally won't be a problem for them. /s
Godot just announced a new developer funding platform today for donations, which apparently takes a smaller cut per-donation than Patreon does.
It's optional (Godot is free), but if any developers who are considering switching from Unity want to see Godot development accelerated, consider kicking the project a few dollars a month: https://godotengine.org/article/godot-developer-fund/
Don't drop all the eggs you already have. But if you can look into a new basket after launch, then Unity sure is giving you a good reason to shop around.
I think GoDot will become very popular as an alternative and started a company around it. Ramatak released the first pre-release of their mobile studio for GoDot two weeks ago https://twitter.com/RamatakInc/status/1696914278861656397
> They eliminated Unity Plus subscriptions as of today, Plus members are being switched to Pro automatically. Be careful not to have auto-renew on your account if you can't afford the price. And this is with just 2 people on my team with project access.
According to the article, it won't be automatic, and won't be a higher price at least for the first year.
> Finally, Unity Plus is being retired for new subscribers effective today, September 12, 2023, to simplify the number of plans we offer. Existing subscribers do not need to take immediate action and will receive an email mid-October with an offer to upgrade to Unity Pro, for one year, at the current Unity Plus price.
The messaging from Unity around this has been completely confusing. They use different terms and don’t define them in various places throughout the announcement and FAQ.
It is a disaster trying to consume this announcement and make future plans based upon it
> I certainly have never left a demo laptop unplugged for a week
Right. I had a demo laptop turned off for most of a year, and when I turned it back on, it took half an hour while Windows updated. All laptops are now on Linux.
I’ve never seen a Linux (or even Android) distro that forces the user to update. Pester? Yes. But never “The system is rebooting in 60s to apply updates. [Reboot Now] [Wait 0s]”
Can some distros be configured that way? Almost definitely. But OP is clearly a decision maker t their company and would not choose that.
> Notably, Adobe Creative Cloud requires you to check in every 30 days to validate licenses. I feel like it takes some work to come up with a DRM scheme for a development tool that is more onerous than Adobe's restrictions, but what do I know?
JetBrains license server is 48 or 72 hours and won’t even let you open the app in any way if you have no connection.
I am honestly not sure. Maybe to get people to upgrade to the subscription plans instead of sticking with the free versions by making the free version less reliable? Maybe to make sure telemetry in the free version of the editor works better?
I am also curious to hear from Unity what their reasoning is for putting excessive DRM on a "free" engine.
It's a shame Unity seems so intent on making itself unattractive to developers. I prefer writing c# to c++, and I think Unity's onboarding experience is much better than Unreal. But when it comes to a non-solo-development effort, when you need to start thinking about businesses and numbers and all the things that aren't making the game, Epic has made Unreal attractive, and partnerships with the Epic Games Store can boost that value even further.
Unity's recent moves to me speak to a fear that they've more-or-less hit their market saturation point, and now they're looking to extract more from the developers who live in their slice of the pie. I fear this will make that slice shrink, which will create more fear, and then the problem spirals.
> Unity's recent moves to me speak to a fear that they've more-or-less hit their market saturation point, and now they're looking to extract more from the developers who live in their slice of the pie. I fear this will make that slice shrink, which will create more fear, and then the problem spirals.
This isn't really a solid argument since stockholder investment isn't even "money"; it's collateral in the form of market valuation against which Unity borrows. The actual "money" (dollars in a bank account) comes from lenders who look at a bunch of factors and make determinations about how much $$$ to give. That money isn't free, but it's got very little to do with "the shareholders" in general.
> it's got very little to do with "the shareholders" in general.
no it's got everything to do with shareholders, because ultimately, the money the shareholders invested into the company will need to be recouped by the shareholders, by any method they can.
And in a cut throat business of game engines, unity is trying to squeeze out every bit of juice it can. It still has some advantages over godot atm (such as big install base, and a pre-existing network/momentum which is hard to dissipate), and my guess is that unity is trying to get revenue up before godot takes their lunch in a few more years.
I don't think that's true, and I don't think the juice would be worth the squeeze. Unreal's flavour of C++ is heavily managed, relying on preprocessing of header files to create garbage collecting pointers and a whole heap of other things you don't think you're signing up for when you think about a C++ codebase. There is no simple place to begin if you're trying to make it C# friendly.
But most of my issues have been with engine philosophy, where Unreal has bent over backwards to expose things to their visual scripting language. It feels like every single feature has a mandate to work in a blueprint tech demo, and as a result few of them are pleasant to code against and almost none of them work together coherently. These are not issues that depend on the language used.
C# being the deciding factor an incredibly common refrain in game development "what engine do you/should I use?"
Whether or not it's justified is another manner. I haven't personally dealt with the modern Unreal Engine but natively supporting C# would, at the very least, make people a lot more likely to switch over.
I was surprised that Unreal Engine didn't just translate Blueprint directly into C++ code. They already have a text-based version of Blueprint. You can see it when you copy a blueprint graph and paste it into a text file (or at least you could when UE4 launched).
Honestly, Unreal C++ isn’t that bad or hardcore. It’s fairly high level, and Unreal APIs are pretty well designed. You spend way more time dealing with Unreal specific stuff and your game objects than dealing with C++ issues.
Disagree. Unity is pretty strong on mobile and multi-plattform. Enough to survive on this alone (imo). I also think Blueprints is already a strong competitor for the share of users who find C++ too complicated (non-programers and people who have only dabbled in scripting). I think for "traditional programers" the difference between C++ and C# isn't big enough to make a difference and frankly people with a gamedev background probably prefer C++.
That being said as a non mobile guy who occasionally dabbles in engine stuff I'll be migrating to Unreal for good now. I haven't been a paying customer for a while now but I used to pay for Unity back in the super early days of AR.
Mobile is the kind of use case where the pricing changes will be massively impactful though. If you're selling a non-mobile game for $10+ then you can just eat the per-install fee, but if you're shipping a free to play app or a $1 app? The per install fee could make your business model nonviable.
I mean, knowing c++ and c#, I am always terrified about the former. There is an enormous set of things that shouldn't be touched and a whole set of gotchas in managing headers, writing macros, templates.
Granted none of the two are used at my day to day job.
I don't mind C++, but can you delete the script file without closing the editor yet? It was such a turn off for me at the time that I abandoned all intentions of ever learning to use Unreal Engine.
There was C# support for Unreal (contributed by the Mono maintainers) at one point but Epic actively blocked it. They want everyone on C++ and nothing else
the megagrant appears to have happened in 2020, the blocking of unreal C# happened years and years prior and put an end to development (community and otherwise) at the time (pre-2017, I don't know the exact date)
S&box is still in progress and using C# but it is now using the Source 2 engine instead. You can actually get invoted to it on Steam and play/build games for it now too.
It previously used UE4 and C# integration was all working with that but, as soon as they found out that they could get access to Source 2, they took the opportunity. Makes sense because the team is significantly more experienced with the Source engine since most of them have previously worked on or with Garry's Mod.
There was also Mono UE [0] - which was being developed by some of the Xamarin folks.
I’ve not played around with any game development for a long while - does C# end up popular here just because people are familiar with Unity? I definitely get that C++ is not the most productive language - though improving perhaps.
Simply loading the .NET Core CLR is not difficult [1] - but unless things have changed since I last tried binding C++ interfaces to C# is time consuming, especially if you want to be able to implement an interface in managed code.
Part of C#'s popularity with indies is due to the legacy of XNA. Thousands, probably tens or even hundreds of thousands of indies got started with XNA and released games using it, so it's natural to stay on C# whether you move to FNA, MonoGame, Unity or Godot
I think a lot of people find the learning curve of c++ fairly extreme, especially when considering the amount of knowledge to do idiomatic programming in c++ required to “do things elegantly.” C# and related languages tend to have idioms baked in closer to the syntax and grammar. My view of c++ after 30 years of it is it’s great if you’ve got 10 years experience programming it within a team of seasoned c++ programmers who shows you the ropes. Even then I think rust is the language I wished for all these years (albeit not for game dev yet). Finally, for the reasons rust isn’t great for game dev, c# and ilk generally have excellent reflective and dynamic natures making them sort of the sweatpants and old T-shirt language for game programming.
That said, it locks you into using stuff like mono and stuff for cross platform which makes me a sad.
Keep in mind that in addition to the "learning curve" arguments, there is also the functional developer ergonomics of things like live reload (where you can maintain memory state) that are simply not possible to do with C++ without heavy limitations or customized tooling.
Being able to fix a bug without resetting memory state is a huge ergonomic advantage in game development where generating the right memory state can be incredibly complex and depend on a ton of very specific and hard-to-reproduce factors. Not to mention recompiling and restarting a game can be incredibly slow.
Yes, but it has many known limitations and isn't nearly as reliable as a runtime that has a full GC and virtualization optionality, which you really need in order to fully track what state can be evicted and what needs to stay.
Better is relative. And it's just a different type of tool. To be honest I know many more better engineers who primarily work with dotnet over CPP. The learning curve for CPP is higher because the ability to shoot yourself in the foot with CPP is higher. It's neither better or worse. Just a different tool in a toolbox.
Game devs want fast iterations above everything else, with performance being a close second. c++'s "toolchain" makes those iterations prohibitively impossible, even with decades of workarounds with hot reloading and extravagant methods to keep compilation times down.
If you're a AAA dev you give up a lot of that iteration because performance overtakes you, but there's little reason some indie 2d platformer will want to deal with even 30 second iteration times (which would be blazing quick for a AAA setup). C# is a mature, familiar environment for devs with similar syntax to C++ that can get decent performance as long as you maintain some discipline (for starters, no LINQ)
The new versions of C# can compile ahead-of-time, and have expanding support for value types and pointer-like semantics, so you're not stuck with the Java-y OOP For Everything paradigm if it doesn't fit your requirements.
The standard libraries are still an allocation party, of course, but that can be supplemented in an engine context.
Citation needed? Raw speed is likely similar; the cost overhead comes from GC cycles and the general approach to managing memory primarily in the heap vs stack, although C# can stackalloc if you're really diligent. Note that this is the same problem that blazing fast alternatives like Go have at competing with C/C++. These languages are mostly equivalent to C/C++ in speed, but lose the benchmark shootouts because of GC.
Calling Go blazing fast would be a stretch at best...the path to performance in C# is same as in Rust or C++: struct generics (aka templates), as short hot paths as possible, static partitioning of the work, sometimes hands on memory management and minimization of locking.
This is a pretty wild generalization to make. It's not hard to contrive scenarios where C++ with its notoriously slow stdlib (despised by game developers) is going to be slower than C# with its JIT doing runtime optimizations like guarded devirtualization.
C++ written by people who really good at writing fast C++ is faster than C#. Naive and readable C++ written by average programmers wanting to solve a problem in the obvious way on the whole isn't faster than C#
How is Unreal's mobile gaming situation? I haven't worked in mobile game development for a few years, but at least through the 2010s, Unity was an undisputed king of free-to-play mobile games for studios who weren't rich enough to develop their own engines.
Unreal has limited traction on mobile, which is now >50% of the gaming market. It's likely one of the reasons Unity thinks they can get away with this. The last number I saw had Unity above 50% share with Unreal under 15%.
It's difficult to champion high end features for your engine but keep it suitable for low end smart phones. Epic made a good attempt to win mobile devs back in the Infinity Blade days, but given their recent focus (not to mention lawsuits against Apple and Google), it seems they intentionally decided to deprioritize mobile and focus on PC and console.
I have an open world game I have to make run in 1.3GB of RAM for my min spec. I just can’t see a world where I could do it in Unreal. And unity knows that and is trying to get away with murder.
The problem is that Unity has a lot of customers that make freemium/ad supported/low cost (mobile) games. $0.20 per install is absurd when most players are gone after less than an hour of playtime.
Of course if you sell games at $60 a piece it is not a whole lot, and the regular seat pricing of Unity is most likely a far greater expense.
This does look pretty bad for hyper-casual and casual Unity devs. The total earning per install could easily drop into the negative and even with the $200k revenue buffer, it'd be easy to end up with almost nothing. I imagine these folks will just shut their game down around the $200k mark if they see their LTV hovering at or below $0.20.
Wouldn't upgrading to Pro be a better option? Yearly subscription for a seat seems to be worth about 10k $0.2.
Also you're cost per install is almost certainly going to be significantly below $0.2 because every install outside of:
"United States, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, South Korea, and the United Kingdom" (I wonder how did they create this list, e.g. Spain and Italy seem to have a comparable or even higher cost-per-click than Sweden , Austria, Finland etc.)
You're right, upgrading to pro would be better at $2k/seat/yr which gets you a much larger million dollar buffer. Also, I'm noticing that the revenue thresholds seem to be per-game not per org - so actually, the new pricing isn't that bad!
Yeah, it almost seems to me that the $0.20 is there to force to encourage plus subscribers to Pro.
Which probably was a poor choice marketing wise since most people will just see a single number and not pay much attention at anything else.
Also it's only $0.2 fore a specific list of countries (US, CAN, AU, NZ, JP, SK and some richer EU countries). Everywhere else it's $0.02
I don't personally like this whole business model that much, but financially it seems to be pretty reasonable (I guess as long as you can somewhat predict your expected install count in advance which might not be that easy in some cases).
It does seem reasonable as an incentive for successful studios to switch to pro. However the issue is not purely with the price only.
The issue is the fact that the wording is unclear. Also a price per install seems like a bad target overall. How is it reported? Now they are saying that there are exceptions like gamepass installs. It is going to be a mess.
Also the change is retroactive. Imagine a vendor announcing that starting January 2024 you will have to give them a piece of your cake. Even if the piece is small, you are still going to contact your layers, and you will loose trust with this particular vendor.
> The issue is the fact that the wording is unclear. Also a price per install seems like a bad target overall. How is it reported? Now they are saying that there are exceptions like gamepass installs. It is going to be a mess.
Oh yeah, I 100% agree with this. On the very basic level I just hate the concept of a third party tracking and counting every user I have without my (or the actual user's consent). Not every game/app made with Unity is distributed on the App Store/Steam/etc. and there are plenty of other reasons why I wouldn't want to share that data with anyone (or even collect it).
Looking at their per install pricing if you have large number of users but very low revenue per user it would certainly make sense to upgrade to Pro where you would only pay ~$2k for each seat as long as you make less than 1 million per year. Which doesen't seem that unreasonable.
It's not necessarily about the pricing. It's how the pricing is determined. 5% of revenue is concrete. You can make a business plan and plan for the future based on that. With Unity's new pricing structure, it's impossible.
IMHO this is yet another failure of leadership at Unity.
This will absolutely kill any incentive for the remaining indie devs to use Unity with such a low floor and flat cost. Whereas your game going temporarily viral would have been huge , now it’ll be a huge burden. Meanwhile Unreal is 5% after 1M.
A progressive fee would have at least made some sense.
As it is, Unity lags severely behind Unreal for both features and sentiment. The big markets for Unity were indie and enterprise. They’d ceded everything in the middle to Unreal.
Epic provide megagrant funding to Godot, in what I imagine is a play to eat Unity from the bottom up. Unity will just accelerate that.
And enterprise is fickle. They’ll switch to something else as soon as any project lead feels like it.
Imho this is one more step down the road to the death of Unity. They have brilliant engineers led by very incompetent leadership.
That is the problem, and what is completely baffling, games that are sold at 70$ means they pay a ridiculously low fee (%) compared to cheap or free to play mobile games where that fee means it can render the game unprofitable and need to be shutdown, yet with a reasonable % of the revenue they would be able to be profitable and everyone makes money.
Big company selling big games will see this as a rounding error in their revenue. Indies / small company will probably need to shutdown some games because this won't be profitable...
Maybe you're not familiar with the economics of f2p mobile games, but basically, the game is free, you get maybe 100k installs and make back 25k$ (IAP, etc.) so revenue of 0.25$ per user. But then you have to pay for users acquisition (marketing to get installs) so the actual revenue is more like 0.19$ per user (still profitable!) BUT then I have to pay 0.20$ for any installs regardless of it made any money, so I'm effectively at a loss -0.01$ per user when I could've been profitable.
I made up the number up but you get the idea. With a % of revenue share (or at the very least do not count installs that generated 0$ revenue) it could be a profitable game, now it risks of being shutdown.
I'm going to use the Personal / Plus pricing instead of Pro, on a f2p mobile game, but let's say you made 200k$ on the first 200k install, but only 20k$ on the next 200k installs (for whatever reason, different market, whale spending 10's of thousands $ skewing the data, etc.), you owe Unity 40k$ and are now in the negative for those new installs when you could've still turned a profit, albeit less.
Of course Unity deserve to be paid and receive revenue, I'm absolutely not against that and if you are on the Pro subscription, it is only a concerned once you reach 1M$ which at this point means the project should be profitable and manage to pay that tax (otherwise maybe that project isn't commercially viable).
But it just feel very harsh for the mega popular indie hit that have very low revenue per user you know... A % of revenue would be better or at the very least only count install that generated revenue or whatever...
> but let's say you made 200k$ on the first 200k install, but only 20k$ on the next 200k installs (for whatever reason, different market, whale spending 10's of thousands $ skewing the data, etc.), you owe Unity 40k$ and
And that point you should just switch to Pro and ust pay ~2k per seat each year without install fees.
Of course I guess you need to think about that in advance, but unless there is a massive spike in popularity and your daily installs spike by 10000% or something in a day (which is not that unthinkable) you should be fine.
yes, you are correct in that scenario. It would be nightmare. But the scenario seems like it would be rare. And it is $200k revenue in the previous 12 months, not lifetime. So the trailing 12 month revenue would start to drop, probably under the 200k threshold.
But there are definitely gotcha scenarios, and tracking installs is highly dubious.
I assumed than US/CAN/etc. user would be worth much more than that?
> marketing to get installs
Not sure how accurate, since this was on the first page I googled:
"Average mobile app CPI – $0.93 (APAC), $1.03 (EMEA), $0.34 (Latin America), $5.28 (North America)" but would imply that those numbers are no realistic.
All Latin America and most Asian (outside Japan and SK) and significant proportion of EMEA users would only cost $0.02 per install. And the users you have to pay $0.20 for are likely to be generating significantly more ad/IAP revenue for you than the rest.
But yeah, if you can't get to $1-2 even for NA/etc. users are you're actually selling your game for $1-2 the 20 cent fee seems pretty extreme.
Not sure I understand? I just made those number up to give you an example, be it realistic or not hardly matters. You get X per user and it cost you Y per user and Unity take Z per user. Now `X - Y` is profitable but `X - Y - Z` is not, that's it. If it was instead a % at least it would still be profitable if only less, it doesn't put the revenue per user in jeopardy of being in the negative.
Plenty of games are profitable at scale with only a few pennies per user.
> I just made those number up to give you an example, be it realistic or not hardly matters
That's pretty much the only thing that matters. there is a huge difference whether they make $0.5, $1 or $2 etc (and especially how much more do they make per user in a "rich" country since Unity seems to think that they are worth up to 10x more than everyone else.
> Plenty of games are profitable at scale with only a few pennies per user.
Beyond a certain point (over 1 mill users) it will only cost $0.01 per install. So this will affect 1-5 dev/worker studios with very low revenue per user. They could still probably just pay ~2k for Unity Pro per seat and stay under the 1 million revenue threshold.
To me it almost seems that the '$0.20 per install' is only there to encourage developers to upgrade to pro if they have more than a few hundred k. users.
> If it was instead a %
True, I'm not arguing that wouldn't be more fair. It would be quite expensive to enforce and close to impossible in certain cases. So I understand why Unity chose to do this instead.
> That's pretty much the only thing that matters. there is a huge difference whether they make $0.5, $1 or $2 etc
My point is those numbers can vary GREATLY from games to games, and not only the revenue per user but the cost of user acquisition as well. There isn't one truth, the numbers I gave up could very well fit a real project.
Of course you would be pretty stupid to not subscribe to Pro once you notice your game going to 200k. And let's be real, at 1M$ threshold, if the Unity tax is what kill your game, maybe there wasn't a market fit. But it just feel such a bad and unfair way to generate revenue on free to play games.
> So I understand why Unity chose to do this instead.
Other engines does it just fine, tracking installs (without any false positive) seems a much bigger hassle especially legal wise
I'm not sure that's comparable or even true. No other proprietary engine has as even remotely comparable market share in the freemium/Ad/IAP-funded/shovelware mobile game market.
Also Epic isn't trying to pay for 8000 employees (especially not just with their engine revenue) or service billion in debt accrued from (possibly unnecessary) acquisitions. It feels to me that Unity pushed themselves into a corner by increasing and don't really have any choices but to try and maximize their revenue any way they can.
e.g. Epic seems to have about 4000 employees and compared to Fortnite Unreal seems to almost be just a side gig for them.
Also let's be fair a 5% royalty would be much more likely to scare off their best paying customers. And looking at their current leadership and overall philosophy I find it easy to understand why they might not care that much what will happen to some indy/small developers who can't afford/don't want to pay for Pro or have more than 1 million users but can't generate more than ~$0.2 - 0.5 in profit per install.
I get that, but I feel like there must've been a much better way to do so than with this proposal that seems to have burn the last remaining goodwill that developers had left in Unity and making sure most future projects won't get done on Unity.
A lot of people have been thinking about switching for years, Unity is becoming slower and slower with time, more buggier, etc. I feel like this is the tipping point where the number of developpers is going to go down, so was it worth it? Maybe, maybe it was the correct decision, time will tell.
I'll still continue to use it for on-going projects I have and pay the tax no problem, but I won't pick it for any project in the future personnaly because of how out of touch and ridiculous I personaly feel this business decision is (and other decisions they've made).
I get why would people be opposed to these changes on a more "philosophical" level (and I think I am) but I'm not sure that much changes financially for most developers who make less than 1 million in revenue per game (and they overall seem to be somewhat fair(ish) in relation to what Unity provides and compared to 30% storefront fees or what ad companies skim):
- If your company was making over $200k you already couldn't be on Personal/Plus and would have had to upgrade to Pro, so the $0.2 fee seems irrelevant.
- The current limit is based on company's entire revenue, it seems they changed it to per game? If so you're actually now better off if you have many games which make about $100k or so.
- The only issues I see is that if there is huge unexpected surge in downloads/sales which might leave with a large bill (which you could've mostly avoided by upgrading to Pro in advance). Which is not the most unlikely scenario.
You sold you game for a fixed fee to Apple/MS/etc. (Gamepass, Arcade..). I doubt many games there cost less than 200k (thought I don't really know)? So you're probably on Pro. But if your overall revenue for the game is over $1 million you'd still be on the the hook to pay for additional downloads (above 1 mil) with zero increase in revenue..
the average is skewed by games like Genshin Impact with gross exploitative monetization, not to mention literal casino games. So smaller developers with more reasonable monetization are not getting anywhere close to those averages and will be punished hard by these fees, especially because it's per-install not per-user.
If a user installs your F2P mobile game on 2-3 devices (not uncommon), you now owe 40-60 cents, not 20. Hope your average revenue is good enough that you can afford that after Apple/Google take their 30%.
Average cost per install should be significantly lower than 20 for most games (it's just 2 cents for most country's in the world after all). However yeah it seems pretty excessive.
I wouldn't be surprised if that 20 cent cost is just there to encourage developers who'd have to pay to update to pro (e.g. a seat for a year seems to be equal to about 10k installs, but with pro you get extra 800k free installs and increase your revenue limit by another 800k so you'll likely won't even have to pay extra for users at all)
Most Unity games are mobile apps. Some suits probably saw the numbers on installs and saw dollar signs, but never thought about if it was a viable pricing model for most of their actual customers.
> pricing model for most of their actual customers
I guess they don't really value customers who can only generate $0.01-1.0 or less per install. Not saying it's right but it's not like this group of developers is really paying them that much anyway (and noncommercial games/apps don't seem to be affected at al).
You'd be surprise how HUGE that market is and also Unity's foothold as the engine of choices for those games. So this makes this decision even more baffling because instead of sharing the revenue these developers will just change to a different engine (it's not like that market will disappear, so if using Unity is unprofitable or too big of a dent in the revenue, they won't stop making those games, just use a different engine)
I'm sure one reason Unity did this is that are pretty certain that many of those developers won't be willing to share their revenue. In countries like China where even relatively large studios would just pay for 1-5 licenses for 100 employees forcing them to give you a share of their revenue seems hardly possible.
They will have the same problem trying to get them to pay per installs as well, whatever punishment can happens for not paying their cost to install tax they can do the same tactic for those not paying their revenue share.
But that's the crux of it. For Epic, you have to make several times the amount. 200k of success is a lot more achievable than 1M of success for an indie.
The issue is that, Unity are in a very odd place of the market. They completely ceded high end gaming to Unreal. They have reasonable alternatives like Godot on the other end. So their main markets are:
1. Enterprise - which is fickle
2. Indie devs aspiring for success - who are going for cheap
3. Mobile (which might include 2)
4. A very few AAA games
I think this move will alienate a lot of their indie clients in the hopes of getting more money from their higher end clients.
For those indie clients, hitting 200K of revenue is a much closer dream than 1M of revenue, and they'll see that Unreal gives them more "high end graphics".
So I understand Unity's position, I just think they're alienating one of their biggest bases. Even if they don't make money directly off of them, those are the people who often advocate for use of Unity in other areas like Enterprise.
> For those indie clients, hitting 200K of revenue is a much closer dream than 1M of revenue
If you were using Unity you already had to update to Pro when you company hit 200k revenue (they actually changed this to per game now, I think?).
So fundamentally nothing really changed to that regard.
They added an option to not upgrade to Pro and pay the $0.2 per install instead. I can't imagine why would anyone do that though.
You'd basically have to have about 300-400k installs and revenue but require 10-20 seats so that paying per install would make more sense than upgrading you subscription.
I can only imagine this might be the case in some third world sweatshop where you pay you developers less than 10k per year..
A great move by Unity. Sometimes I find myself missing features from Unity after moving to Godot; a general purpose, strongly typed programming language and live editor changes whilst the game is running are my biggest examples, but thanks to these changes I'll never look back longingly at Unity again. Good work team!
Funnily enough the changes have also made me look back into Unreal, I hear they have a proper Linux editor now and that their flavour of C++ is a bit nicer than I expected. I doubt I'll switch from Godot anytime soon, but worth a look.
EDIT: I see the point being made a lot that this won't affect many smaller devs as they'll never make enough money to meet the threshold, however it seems to me that if your choice of engine makes you hope your project isn't successful, then it might be time to choose a different engine. Unreal engine devs hope their game will make enough to qualify for the revenue share, not because the revenue share is a good thing for them, but because it means if they're making that kind of money it won't be a problem.
Boy, this is demoralizing. Unity needs to make money, but they just gave folks a great reason on the lower end a reason to switch to the completely free Godot which:
- Will soon reach performance parity
- Now supports C#
- Is less bloated
- Is FOSS
Unity did have some great and useful libraries for doing things like animation rigging and editor customization. RIP
Unity is a tragedy. They have managed to fumble the technical aspects so much it drove people away, to the point they become more valuable as part of an ad business than an engine one. Their efforts outside the games industry don't appear to have as much traction as they deserve either.
The question has already been "Why aren't you using Unreal?" and that's just going to get harder.
Given the current VC taste for eliminating all things which count against gross margins now might be a good time to be an engine developer again.
Godot is a little behind Unity in terms of technical features. It's way behind Unreal.
I do a fair amount of Godot development - for casual mobile games, limited PC games, or games where you're planning on a publisher to fund your port, I think Godot is a good choice.
Do you have an example of a 3d godot game that you have played? Searching returns no games I've heard of, even including 2d.[0] Cf. unity and unreal. I've never played any godot games as I don't like 2d games. With the exception of 2d rpgs for which rpgmaker seems to be better.
>Unreal is just another vendor with a hand in your revenues.
My last comment there is a hint that might happen, as this shifts the calculus enough that for big casual players hiring devs to work on godot makes more sense. However, those players will also get preferential treatment anyway.
But everyone will be waiting for Godot to have the first widespread hit before jumping in like that.
Godot is not really optimized for thousands of entities but they're getting there. Also, the tooling for consoles isn't there. I use Godot almost exclusively and its impressive what they've built.
C++. Sure, we can talk about Verse or even Skookum, but C# is much easier. Still, if any big game engine would have something like JS it would be even better for indie or small studios.
Unreal C++ is so heavily modded that it often doesn't really feel like C++. Like I feel kind of odd the rare times I use std:: anything. And Unreal C++ tends to be garbage controlled, support reflection, and so on. The only real big downsides are you have C++ compile times and generally poor intellisense - though IDEs that specialize in Unreal, like Rider, have seen exponential improvements on that front. And for teams that are genuinely averse to C++, going 100% Blueprint is also a completely viable option.
For people scared off by C++ and who want faster recompile times, check out the Nim bindings [0]. Check out his Twitter/X account [1] for plenty of cool things it brings to the table.
The name of the game is iteration speed. (I always think of Paul Grahams story about beating out the competition using Lisp.)
I've been working with UE since 2014, originally started in UE4 C++ and avoided blueprints and kept everything in C++. Was great 'for performance' and code diffs but now 10 years later I'm 99% blueprint and only go down to C++ if the performance requires it for the 1% of hot paths. My iteration time in UE using blueprints makes me shutter to think of all the time I spent waiting for C++ to compile.
I just started using Unreal 5 to prototype a VR game (lots of quirks but this engine is amazing). I’ve been writing C++ for 5ish years now and am pretty comfortable with it. I’ve also been slowly converting all the blueprints in the VR template provided by Unreal to C++ for a few reasons and was curious if these effect you.
I tried using blueprints for awhile, but it just feels so cumbersome and time consuming. I can bang out 10 lines of code basically as fast as I can think, but converting those same 10 lines of code to blueprints often involves much more time. You have to click around a bunch, rearrange the routing wires, make it look readable, abstract a lot of stuff into functions that usually don’t need it just because it helps condense the blueprints. Then the blueprints end up sprawling a large area and are very difficult to keep in my head at once (whereas it would normally take less than a page of C++ code to write it out and you can easily hold that in your head).
Basically, I was wondering if these downsides to blueprints effect you much or if you’ve developed suitable workarounds? I want to like blueprints, but the time it takes to click around and make it readable is painful, in my opinion, more painful than compile times for the C++.
Yea its unfair to taught Blueprints as the answer when they have a serious learning curve.
It took me a while to build up enough experience where I could become more expressive with Blueprints than C++. The Lyra example has some good Blueprint hygiene worth reviewing where they organize all variables underneath a function call.. but until you have serious experience with Blueprints they are going to feel like a cumbersome mess.
My advice is to do what you feel most expressive with, doing the thing you enjoy more will lead to more hours of experience. Start with C++ and build up a good understanding/mental model of the engine and then eventually give Blueprints a try in a few more years and you will see them in a new light.
I’ll have to check out the Lyra example! But yea, C++ definitely feels more comfortable for me at the moment. I’ll try blueprints again in a few years :)
Blueprints are fun to work with, but the amount of time it takes to drag and drop nodes around to make the equivalent of a for loop feels incredibly unproductive. The result does look visually pleasing though!
I really hate BP and wish we get something better. The thing is, technically you are supposed to do gameplay in BP and push the core ones to C++, but BP is so messy after a short while.
How big is your team? How do you code review? How do you unit test? How are you maintaining 3 year old blueprints?
This will work just fine for small indie games and teams where the code is thrown out after a year, but there's no scaling this. I've worked with enough 10 year old Max/MSP patches to know that you will have an unmaintainable mess of wires that is as good as garbage after a while.
Larger teams typically use Blueprints to prototype but then rewrite in C++. This is a perfectly fine use case, but ultimately you still need it "written down" for the maintainability.
tl;dr Blueprints are a tool in the process to writing C++, they aren't a replacement.
Because it was not JS, it was UnityScript which is what happens when someone read "JavaScript: The Good Parts", and thought the title was "... The Bad Parts" and threw all those away and kept only the actual bad parts.
It was just about fine if you were doing very small projects but quickly got very hairy, and their compiler was full of bugs.
And to contrast, Godot's GDScript has been great for me so far. I've been hacking at a personal project for a couple of days now and I feel right at home in the language, which feels right at home in the engine.
Probably not very good on a team, yeah. I actually have a bit of a toy game engine for the browser/ThreeJS targeted at making games similar to the Windows 95 screensaver. Learned some good things like GLSL and shaders but working in JS was definitely a bit of a slowdown when I'd hit classes of bugs that wouldn't be possible in C#, even with annotations helping me. But other times it was convenient being able to pass stuff around without writing up classes or structs for them as you alluded to.
It's a fun experiment in seeing what JS can do, it's cool having it run natively on the web, and annotations get you a lot of the way there, but in a context like Unity I'd never pick it over C#. Typescript might be alright but at that point why bother? C# has anonymous types, tuples, and such today too.
It really isn't the lack of mobile support, as Fortnite shows, it is the fact Unity devs are cheaper and iteration speed from code changes is faster, which in hypercasual type stuff proves to be essential.
I tend to think the dev iteration speed is the core Unreal weakness.
The problem Unity have created is if something can be made with Unity it will get crowded out with clones in five minutes.
I did an evaluation earlier this year between the two. We needed the 3d engine but also needed native phone features. Meaning some screens of the app would be Unreal/Unity and some would be native iOS.
We couldn't even get Unreal to build as an embeddable library for a mobile app nor could we get it to build into anything that would run in a web browser despite more than a week of effort.
We had Unity working for both use cases in under a day.
The idea that developer iteration speed is actually an indicator of project-completion-at-scale speed is really only true at a trivial scale; you know, when you only have developers. Maybe a handful of them. ..and like, one does-everything artist.
When you have multiple different teams including non developers working on actually building a significant game, crafting levels, assets, etc. the iteration speed of your handful of devs is really really a drop in the ocean.
There are a lot of very powerful tools in unreal for teams, and they have consistently invested in tooling (eg. File per actor) and real life production needs (eg. LED stage support) with their customers.
Unity has invested in different areas, with a lot of effort, and bluntly, nothing to show for it.
You seem to suggest this means it doesn't really matter? I run a startup with 4 employees (only 2 of us are developers). I care about stuff in this "trivial scale" and a lot of other developers are like me.
> The problem Unity have created is if something can be made with Unity it will get crowded out with clones in five minutes.
This really has nothing to do with Unity. Flappy Bird could have been built on any platform and you would still have a million clones of it. Because it takes a day to make it. It's just as easy to clone that game in Unreal Engine, fwiw.
Unity didn't create the concept of the quickly built game, nor is Unity responsible for society incentivizing this type of game dev. If anything, the new runtime fees will disincentivize this type of game, so maybe that's a good thing?
Compared to unity, yes (especially for 2D stuff which is more the norm on those platforms).
Unity is already imho pretty bloated but at least useable and a sensible choice for both, Unreal is just too massive and more suited for console 3D type of games.
I'm a game dev and Unreal is not a Unity replcement imo.. Making a game in Unity feels like making a game in XNA, you just start writing code and can write your entire game from scratch and can ignore most of Unity's features.
Unreal on the other hand feels like you are modding an existing game and you must use their many existing systems and patterns.
I'm moving to Godot, it feels like the new Unity / XNA.
In the past fews years, it feels like Unity had exactly one programmer for each important package like SRP/UI Toolkit and all the other employees were sales and PR.
They also recently changed the pricing structure of their cloud build - they charge per minute used now. For whatever reason it takes their service 60 minutes to build our iOS game, which costs us around $4. It was kinda tolerable when we weren't getting charged per minute, but now it's just stupid to pay more money because their builds are slow as hell.
We're kinda busy right now so we're paying the fee, but buying a mac mini for builds is definitely on our TODO list now, and once there's some slack in our schedule that will be done.
We've also wasted weeks of time debugging bugs in their cloud system in the past, some of which were mysteriously fixed and they had no clue why. So I'm not even sure we've saved much time over just having our own in house build server.
If you haven't looked into it yet, GitHub Actions is relatively easy to setup for Unity builds and, for us, it cut build times more than in half (60+ min to ~20min). GHA isn't cheaper per minute, but it is much faster and you can output things like Code Coverage.
I haven't written a lot in compiled languages, so maybe this is a dumb question, but are you actually saying that it takes an hour to compile your unity project? I thought that only happened with huge c++ codebases. How do you get any creative work done without quick iteration?
Distribution builds, especially to consoles, need full shader compilation of all variants in the build. This can take hours. For some pc games they also can prebuild some shaders for common hardware to speed up loading times.
If you want to test locally, you can just hit the "play" button in the Unity editor and it all happens pretty fast. We use this for building something you can install on an iOS/android device, or for putting up on the web for webgl.
I don't understand, is this as absolutely insane as it seems? Am I reading this wrong? They're charging the game developer 20 cents every time a user installs the game? I must be missing something here.
Yes, but the developer has to have made $200k over the last 12 months and had 200k installs. So if you hit both minimums and have made $1/install, they'd like 20% of that. Unless you're in an emerging market, in which case it's 2%.
Is that insane? I'm not a game developer, but it seems like it's in the ballpark of what the app stores are charging, and with a structure that's actually enforceable at reasonable cost from Unity's perspective.
> it seems like it's in the ballpark of what the app stores are charging
Are there any app stores that charge developers per install? It's only per-purchase/transaction, right? The principle behind that is you don't get charged except as part of a transaction where you're making money. If a user downloads your app for free or pirates it or doesn't make any transactions, you don't pay anything.
What Unity is saying that if I buy a new phone and re-download my apps, that should cost the developers money. That seems like a very different situation to me.
I get the concern, but app stores can do that because the money flows through them. Unity says they're shifting away from revenue shares, presumably because they can't track purchase revenue and are tired of having a bunch of small fights with people who have every incentive to hide revenue from them.
> presumably because they can't track purchase revenue
So tracking installs and distinguishing between pirated and legit copies, and fingerprinting consumer hardware, and dealing with malicious or troll installs is going to be something they're somehow better at?
I can't prove Unity's motivations, but I can quote directly from their article:
> Qualifying customers may be eligible for credits toward the Unity Runtime Fee based on the adoption of Unity services beyond the Editor, such as Unity Gaming Services or Unity LevelPlay mediation for mobile ad-supported games. This program enables deeper partnership with Unity to succeed across the entire game lifecycle. Please reach out to your account manager to learn more.
and I think it's reasonable to at least entertain that it's not enforcement trouble that's causing them to create this policy. Not for the least reason being that they still have a revenue requirement sitting in front of this policy, and they still need to engage in the exact same accounting and fights to figure out which companies have made $200,000 so they can start charging them per-install.
I have no inside knowledge and am not a game developer. So I'm just guessing here. But yes, I believe tracking installs, which have published app store numbers and are instrumentable by them, is much easier than tracking revenue.
Note that nobody here really cares about total precision. Especially not their major customers who have negotiating power and who end up paying $0.01 per install. They're going to miss x% of the installs and have y% of spurious extras, and whether or not this approach advantages one side or the other is going to depend on a lot of factors down in the noise. If there's a large enough error it's going to end up as one more factor in the conversation with the account rep I'm sure they'll be having anyway.
> they still need to engage in the exact same accounting and fights
No, I think these are very different fights. A rev share means that every month everybody has to have the fight about what the actual revenue numbers are. I expect the way this work is that Unity will be tracking every game and looking at their app store metrics. If in their opinion they think you're making enough money to be worth squeezing, they're going to have an account rep call you. And if you don't engage, eventually they bring in the lawyers. So it's a one-time pain versus a monthly pain. Then the fight's just about install numbers, which are published and which I'd guess they have the ability to check on via instrumentation.
I disagree, these requirements refresh regularly and are applied per-game (note, I'm not saying that Unity is charging per-month, I'm pointing out that if you make $200,000 one year and $180,000 the next year, you dip back under the threshold and don't have to pay.)
This is still going to be a continual fight. Sure, I buy that you save some effort for studios that are clearly over the threshold, but it sounds like you're primarily talking about smaller companies anyway, and (correct me if I'm wrong) I don't see how it would be harder for a company to say "last year our 5 games each only made $190,000, it was a slow year for us".
> They're going to miss x% of the installs and have y% of spurious extras, and whether or not this approach advantages one side or the other is going to depend on a lot of factors down in the noise. If there's a large enough error it's going to end up as one more factor in the conversation with the account rep I'm sure they'll be having anyway.
> Then the fight's just about install numbers, which are published and which I'd guess they have the ability to check on via instrumentation.
I don't think these statements agree with each other. In any situation where it's simple to check install numbers (ie, Steam) -- Steam will also be tracking revenue. Where sales numbers are hard to track would be across multiple storefronts where... I mean, installs are also going to be hard to track. Unless they're planning to require an Internet connection for installing GoG games and Itch games because those installs aren't otherwise tracked. But I feel like that's going to be an issue for users if they do. Tracking revenue on a platform like GoG should be significantly easier than tracking installs, GoG has very little infrastructure I'm aware of to track installs of DRM free games.
I'm not an accountant, I don't want to make a serious claim, I could be wrong about the complexity, but it sounds like there is still going to be fighting over what installs failed, what was and wasn't pirated, etc... is that fight easier to have than "how much revenue did you take in?" :shrug:
Also bear in mind that this is not "you cross the threshold and then pay us for all installs", it's "you cross the threshold and pay us for installs after that point." So it's not just enough to ask if a company is making $200,000. When did they hit $200,000 in the current calendar year? How many installs happened specifically after that point? You still have to have that conversation with the company's accountants and you still have to try and confirm dates. And you have to do that yearly, and if you're already going to companies yearly and working with their accountants per-game to figure out when exactly installs start costing money... I don't know, again I'm not an accountant. I see that as a similarly complicated problem. Maybe I'm wrong.
----
My take is that Unity isn't saying that this makes their accounting easier, they're saying that it's going to encourage more "deep collaboration" with developers who purchase additional services, and that it supports the "continued investment" of the runtime. I'm inclined to believe the motivations that they're saying publicly. I'm sure that if they're pressed they won't reject a framing of accounting/ease of use, but it strikes me that it's not the motivation they're leading with. But I can't read their mind.
The FAQ suggests that once you cross the install threshold, you keep paying. The thresholds are "lifetime"
>The Unity Runtime Fee will apply to this game, as it surpasses the $1M revenue and 1M lifetime install thresholds for Unity Pro. Let’s look at the game’s installs from the last month:
Prior month installs (Standard fee countries) - 200K
Prior month installs (Emerging market fee countries) - 100K
The fee for install activity is $23.5K USD, calculated as follows:
(100K x $0.15 (first tier for standard fee countries)) + (100K x $0.075 (second tier for standard fee countries)) + (100K x $0.01 (fee for emerging market countries)) = $23.5K USD
Wait, that can't be right, it would be ludicrous. Once a game passes the threshold it pays per-install permanently? That's so wildly horrible of a pricing model that I just have to assume that's not what they intend, even a completely out-of-touch exec should be able to see the problems with that.
Have a game that's profitable enough to pass the threshold and then interest drops off? You're suddenly incentivized to completely take it off of the market and remove the game from people's libraries since you'll keep racking up fees from installs even if no one ever buys another copy.
I'm not denying that the quote does seem to imply what you're saying, but I have to believe that's a misprint or bad writing on their part, the implications of the threshold being lifetime sales are so bad. The policy is bad, but there's no way Unity is that comically out of touch, is there?
> Wait, that can't be right, it would be ludicrous. Once a game passes the threshold it pays per-install permanently?
Yes and no. You need to meet _both_ thresholds, cumulative (lifetime) installs _and_ yearly(!) revenue. I (!)'d the yearly part there, because you still need to be pulling in a yearly $1M of revenue (I'm assuming Unity Pro here cause the math is simpler) after your 1M of installs.
So while there are some edge cases here that are legitimately ludicrous, it's not the case that you're on the hook for the game in perpetuity, because if your game falls off a cliff and you make $500k in revenue next year, you owe nothing in runtime fees. In other words, you're not incentivized to take it off the market after 1M installs unless the runtime fees made it so you started losing money on the game after your $1M of revenue-- there are some examples where this is possible but none of them are very realistic.
It's also not clear if its $1M in the previous 12 months, or in the past calendar year, or if they have any rights to audit us, or which financial entity is on the hook. Is in the entity that pays for Unity, or the Publisher, or the Distributor?
What about the contractors we pay to do a few months of work at the end and use their own licenses. What about the folks that do our PS5 and Xbox ports for us?
Unity attempted to clarify their position around Game Pass telling devs not to worry because Microsoft will pay, but that makes me more worried because MS will just pull those games. I think there are 25 million Game Pass subscribers, and that's a lot of 20c installs.
We were hoping for another stint in Game Pass as a follow up to Void Bastards.
their terms also not about game profits. Let's say in case if $300k spent on Ads to get 200k+ installs and as result you made only $200k back as in-apps payments Revenue from game (so your profit is loss of $100k+fees+taxes) then Unity will demand you to pay them $40k+ just to cover installs amount and you almost won't have control to stop new charges because even if you will shutdown a game then some installs continue to happen from various pirate sources or some small app stores.
It looks completely insane terms for lot of mobile games where monetization is huge challenge and difference between profitable game and company bankruptcy measured in cents per user.
> Unity says they're shifting away from revenue shares, presumably because they can't track purchase revenue and are tired of having a bunch of small fights with people who have every incentive to hide revenue from them.
So now they are charging developers for something users have an incentive to try to do without paying the developer.
I would not categorize an ad platform as an app store. Plenty of streaming services and content licensing models charge per-stream/impression as well, but I feel that's a pretty separate category.
I'd be open to more clarification if there's something I'm missing, but I still don't think this is comparable to app store fees.
Do stuff like DDoS attack services or botnets charge per-install instead of directly for usage or compute time? Honestly kinda predatory pricing if that's the case. Seems a little problematic.
> it seems like it's in the ballpark of what the app stores are charging
But now that's on top of the app store fee. So, using your example and the "standard (aka 30%)" app store fee, after that 200k cliff, the game makes $0.50 for every $1 sale. That is going to drive people away from using Unity on mobile games imo. Who cares about a $0.20 fee for a $70 (rip $60) game, but for a $1 game where 30% of your rev is already gone... it changes the dynamics.
Maybe that's what they want though? Maybe they are trying to use this to angle as Unity is a "serious" engine now?
Yeah, the case that interest me is mobile games with a high install/revenue ratio. If I install a popular game, try it out for 3 minutes, and decide it's not for me, then am I costing some indie developer $0.20 even though there's no revenue?
My guess is that the answer there is in this bit: "Qualifying customers may be eligible for credits toward the Unity Runtime Fee based on the adoption of Unity services beyond the Editor, such as Unity Gaming Services or Unity LevelPlay mediation for mobile ad-supported games. This program enables deeper partnership with Unity to succeed across the entire game lifecycle. Please reach out to your account manager to learn more."
My guess is that as long as Unity is getting a slice of your ads, you don't have to worry about per-install fees. So this may be more about driving free-to-play mobile devs to use their ad services.
Depending on how the legalese is worded, we might also see the comeback of demo versions and paid versions. So the free version has lots of installs but zero revenue, and the $0.20 bite only comes out of things you're charging for.
You're telling me. I've been working on a Unity project for several years and now I'm on the verge of scrapping the whole thing and starting over in Godot because of these fucking MBA parasites. I should've known better than to trust a publicly traded company with anything ever.
Godot is reasonably better than Unity, especially with Godot 4 and onward. A bit of a learning curve, but that's the same with any engine. You can certainly prototype and ship more quickly with Godot than Unreal.
Then, a while later, a new plugin came out that's made by the community, which seems to address some of my concerns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwJEXOglBrQ (video by Gamefromscratch)
To me, it feels like Godot has a pretty nice future ahead of it. I'll probably stick with Unity for the time being, since I don't actually expect any of my small game projects to ever get big, so the change in pricing doesn't really affect me at the time. But in the future? Maybe I'll go back to Godot, even their C# support is getting much nicer now!
College students don't have to, since they don't meet this criteria to be charged the monthly fee: "Those that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs."
That said, wow. Charging a monthly fee on game installs is absolutely wild. The personal fee (for first world countries) is $0.20 / month. If you charged $10 for the game, you'd be losing money after only 50 months (around 4 years).
They managed to create a price that inviabilizes both ads-for-playing (and the more devious variants, like pay-for-win and lottery) and upfront paid games. That's just amazing, and will probably become a case study somewhere after the company fails.
You’re reading it wrong the monthly bit refers to the reporting/billing period and volume discounts. So each month you pay for the installs past the thresholds that month.
You need to meet minimums in terms of revenue and installs so for college students it’d be a success problem. It’s still going to put a load of people off because who needs the added worry and reporting involved!
Maybe because it's paid monthly no matter what, as opposed to yearly plans?
> You will be invoiced monthly based on the month’s install data. Invoicing will be the same method as for your Unity plan subscriptions, though it will be monthly regardless of your Unity plan payment cycle.
I'm assuming that $0.20 is paid every time it's downloaded based on their wording, so that could introduce a new way to harm competitors. Buy their game and uninstall / reinstall on loop?
Surely that’s not right… it’s gotta be first install is 20 cents. 20 cents per install is egregious but a recurring license is financially unsustainable.
I can't believe that they're encouraging MORE Unity games to be riddled with ads. Isn't that the (admittedly unfair but true for the mobile market) stereotype?
Mobile users put up with even directly "pay to win" mechanics and blatant gacha bullshit. They seem unwilling or unable, for whatever reason, to even conceive of a different paradigm. "Mobile gaming", read mobile unregulated casinos where you can never withdraw, are the biggest and most profitable gaming sector.
Don't worry, companies like EA are looking at that market, licking their chops, and continue to try and push such concepts as gacha into what used to be perfectly fine video games, and plenty of consumers eat up any excuse just so they don't have to go a year without the exact same videogame as last year but worse.
So they basically tripled (4.5X actually) the cost of customizing the splash screen, to an amount that for non US based customers is a lot. I'm quite shocked, I was looking at godot with mild interest but now I'm actively hoping it picks up, this kind of changes are just insane and I'm guess things will get worse over time.
And what about the install fees? Let's say my studio fails but people keep installing because of piracy or any arbitrary reason, am I going to get charged for the remaining of my life? It's just a shocking move
> If a player deletes a game and re-installs it, that's 2 installs, 2 charges
This is genuinely insane — I’m not familiar with any other software in the world that charges a customer for deleting and reinstalling it to the same user/same machine.
In an age where the typical user has to install and reinstall games because storage is limited and games are getting heavier and heavier... that's going to be a problem.
Last year Unity merged with IronSource, a mobile app ad network.
The writing was on the wall then. These “pricing upgrades” today are designed to drive more adoption of Unity’s ad network. Popular free games will have to start showing ads via Unity to pay for the new runtime distribution fee.
Most of the talent from IronSource has left or checked out, and they started to slip in competitiveness and lose clients as a result. This pricing model seems designed to slow those losses, but if it increases developer adoption of Godot or another rival platform (other than Unreal), it seems like Unity is playing with fire here.
Well, this is in line with their wonderful incentive for devs to pay to REMOVE the mandatory Unity logo.
This has made +10 years of high-quality, unforgettable, GOTY games made in Unity to not have the logo, while all the humble, low-quality, full of free-asset-store assets, practice projects of newbies, show the Unity logo first and foremost.
Literally attaching your brand recognition to the projects exactly opposite of the ones you want your brand to be recognized with.
The pricing is a bit weird. Their criteria is based on gross revenue of >=$200k. But instead of charging a percentage of that, they charge per install at a rate of $0.20/install.
So if you made $200k off of 1M installs, you’ll now pay $200k and your total profit will be zero.
I guess the assumption is that each install will earn you >>$0.20, but that’s a very generous assumption. What about a F2P game that has millions of installs but only a fraction support the game with microtransactions?
There’s definitely going to be some cases where studios will owe more money to Unity than their game makes.
They've been pushing hard recently to get people to use their ads platform, my bet is they're hoping to push "under-monetized" games to run a ton of ads in order to make any money. This kind of a pricing model forces games to think about ads and monetization from the beginning instead of building a large happy user base.
I think you need to read the table again. If you have that volume you shouldn’t be on the most expensive per install plan. And if you’re on a higher plan you wouldn’t qualify for the per install pricing at all.
Before this change, there would be no reason to spend $2100/seat on Unity Pro. The Personal/Plus plans would be more than sufficient for indie devs.
You’re right, some studios are going to be forced to switch to the Pro plan to save on per install pricing. That just seems like a really frustrating forced upgrade.
In fact, the Plus plan is being removed completely. It's only mentioned off-handedly in the last paragraph of the article, but it's another giant change for indie devs (who have no choice but to migrate from Plus to Pro).
They are offering a free upgrade from Plus to Pro for one year, but that does nothing once that time elapses - you have to pay the Pro fees or drop down to Personal, which is not viable for most games.
In your presumed case the studio would already be breaking Unity’s terms to be using Personal or Plus as companies making over $200,000 in the last 12 months need to have Pro subscriptions! Dunno how flouted that is though.
my understanding is that the $2100 removes the life time install part, and that it's only for games going forward so you'd be able to do the math up front. It definitely stinks, but unity needs to make money. It's this or forcing ads down your game's throat more or spyware
'made 200,000' that doesn't meant that you able to get any profits from that, and it lot of cases with 200k revenue small game studios only loosing money
His point stands tho. Think about mobile games, where games are significantly cheaper (0.99€-5€). That install fee will hit a lot different than for high priced desktop titles (30€+). In addition think about the turnover in mobile games.
The Unity Page does not mention free games with micro transactions, but especially there the user turnover is way higher. A lot of people will install it, play it for a few minutes (or days) and remove it again. Will the developer pay those install fees too?
This entire thing seems not really thought out.
I am also wondering what about trolls, who spoof HWID (or whatever the unique install id is based of) and spam-install it
> I am also wondering what about trolls, who spoof HWID (or whatever the unique install id is based of) and spam-install it
You don't even need to get that technical. It seems that using a privacy respecting browser that blocks cookies and fingerprinting techniques will identify a simple page refresh as an install.
I would think it would be weird for a game engine business to try to curate what type of creative talent utilizes their game engine product. It would seem to me from monetizing installs that you'd want anybody and everybody using your game engine product to generate _anything_ to get installed one or more times by a consumer.
To make your case, I think it would be more relevant if Unity decided to charge game publishers extra for publishing games that were only installed for some short amount of time on a device before going uninstalled. That is not the case here.
Anyway, I see where your mind is at, but I think the conclusion you came to is not correct. I don't see what incentive Unity would have to keep low quality games off of their product, they actively would want them to succeed to hit the thresholds for monetization. And besides, everybody already knows to judge the tool based on its potential, rather than judge it based on some mediocre games that came out and flopped, because that happens with any engine.
Except it doesn't. Selecting Unity as your game engine is a business decision and part of your business model. If you cannot make a profit in your game after the fee, it's not Unity's fault that you have a bad business model.
I once crapped out a game engine over a weekend using python. I called it turdPy.
I released it under a commercial license of $20000 per CPU thread per developer device per day to use. With an additional 80-20 revenue share model (80% going to me) once the devs sell their game.
I never got any customers, and I always wondered why. But now I understand that it was because game studios simply didn't have a good enough business model.
Perhaps missed in the discussion so far is that the Unity Personal license (the one that's free up to a certain sales volume) will now require an always-on Internet connection to use.
That's a change from the past, and the FAQ doesn't provide a reason why. My guess would be analytics over licensing, but who knows really.
They got bought by an ad company, and have mainly been investing in ads and the 17th render pipeline internally so you can see where this is going: always on internet to deliver UHDQSRP ads
Sounds like I need to start a betting pool as to when ads will come to the editor.
Ugh, this whole thing is so frustrating. I’d love to cancel our unity projects and port to godot or unreal, but that’s just not possible in the near term.
Unity is doing everything they can to push devs away.
> Perhaps missed in the discussion so far is that the Unity Personal license (the one that's free up to a certain sales volume) will now require an always-on Internet connection to use.
Is that really such a problem? It looks like it'll work offline for up to 3 days.
Will there many people doing game dev that can't go online once every 3 days in 2024?
I think you're looking at it the wrong way around. The question isn't whether you have access to the Internet; the question is whether the server on the other end is up.
Products that require an Internet connection to function are effectively time bombs that stop working at some future date, due to an incident or a change in someone else's business.
I didn't say that was a "problem", but since it's harder to write a tool like this that fails when a server is down than to write one that keeps working... the question is why?
I’ve enjoyed using Unity for the last 6 years but this is a deal breaker. It’s just wrong and makes one wonder what other policies they’re considering.
After taking some time to mourn I plan on looking into Godot. I expect to take a big productivity hit but at least I won’t be continuing to invest my time into working on a platform that is so anti-dev.
What's super crappy about this is all the plugins, I've invested mega money in c# Unity specific asset store assets and now switching platforms is extra painful, vendor lock-in and all that. Foolish me.
It's impossible to have such a tool. Not even close. If there is that would be the biggest innovation in the history of computer science (yeah, seriously).
This is brutal and devastating. They might as well have called the post "Party time is over, our MBAs need to make some money for our investors".
In my case, this would be the final straw after years of baffling tech reorgs and broken promises, but I have such a massive sunk cost investment in Unity store assets that I am effectively locked in.
All of that said, I would put serious money on this getting at least partially rolled back in the next few days. The blowback is going to be big enough that the investors might tell the MBAs to stop sacrificing their long-term profits for short-term gains.
Is the drive to make money for investors specific to MBAs? If your investors want their money back it seems reasonable to find ways to give it to them?
There are a lot of things to dislike here, but it's particularly unbelievable to me that Unity would try to retroactively apply this change to games that were in development or released before the change to the licensing model. I've never worked in the games industry, but in every field where I've worked, that would be a company-ending poor decision.
Imagine Sony suddenly trying to impose a per-playback fee on all existing and future factory-produced Blu Ray discs.
Imagine Lockheed spending 5-10 years developing a jet fighter, then a year before it's finished, TI tells them that there will be a monthly usage fee for every TI chip used in the aircraft.
Imagine a retailer spending hundreds of millions of dollars to roll out a new Fujitsu point-of-sale platform, then a year later Fujitsu says they're updating the license terms to require a flat fee for every customer transaction. Or worse, imagine that the Fujitsu platform runs on Windows, and Microsoft tells the retailer that the Windows licensing terms have been updated to require a per-transaction fee for every Windows device that has point-of-sale software installed.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm completely failing to see why any business would continue to use a product that requires a long-term commitment when the vendor has acted this way.
Is it a last-ditch cash grab to appease Unity investors? i.e. do they know that it will kill their platform, but they're hoping the tail end of Unity-based games[1] will generate enough licensing fees to recoup some of the investment money?
[1] i.e. games already released, but still for sale, as well as games still in development but too far along to switch to another engine.
As a Unity developer, first this year our account manager told us our yearly fees were about to double and now runtime fees. One of the reasons we picked Unity was because of the fact they advertised (loudly) about the lack of runtime fees.
"Once a game passes the revenue and install thresholds, the studio would pay a small flat fee for each install (see the table below)."
This was not clear to me at first based on their table which currently shows 1-1000 installs as falling into the $0.20, but it's in fact actually the installs AFTER passing the threshold I believe. So assuming it was installs, it would be install 200,001 - 201,000 that would be charged $0.20?
> We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share.
I'm sorry but maybe I'm missing something obvious.. Why are they making this seem preferable to developers? Also what does the runtime being installed have anything to do with the cost to Unity? This is mind blowing, i have to missing something.
This really is mind blowing, I used to play games like Subnautica and think how impressive it was that it was made on Unity. It was advertising of the engine/framework in itself!
This cannot be right, how can this makes sense with mobile gaming? Unity has a HUGE market share there, so they know the number. How can free games ensure a 0.20$ per install? Why not go with X% of the revenue?
Unreal isn't being used to crank out low end mobile games that are purely ad sponsored... betting that there are more shenanagians going on in unity's space that would means it hard to actually check the books versus someone with 1M in revenue
They hint that the install fee can be discounted if other Unity services (read: their ad network) are used by the game in question.
I think it's a play to force f2p games to use their ad mediator as the install fee will effectively raise the cost-per-install for anyone using competing ad networks.
Vampire squids doing vampire squid things. I'd expect them to get sued, and at least in the EU it seems likely to be difficult to defend.
I've been developing in Unity since it was a two man company. Deep down when EA ex CEO took it over I knew it was all downhill from there... I'd subscribed yearly to the Unity licence for 14 years! Certified Unity Expert. Flew to EU for conferences. I remember saying to the founders in the day they should raise money and grow the company (I was the random guy using Unity for window displays and other business applications, running the water shader for 24 hours and seeing it degrade etc.). I made a great living out of Unity, particularly in the Wind Energy industry. It speaks volumes to me about big-capitalism that it's gone this way... but to be fair - the product was so fragmented towards the end - multiple versions to choose from for a new project - LTS builds. It honestly became a nightmare to develop in for me. I lost the joy of making stuff work... Unity 2015 was probably the peak for me...
These days I'm doing WebGL and ThreeJS is not fun either with upgrades, depreciated functions.
The whole ecosystem is a mess these days. I need to shave my beard.
Similar to when GameMaker: Studio switched to a subscription model Unity is about to shed a lot of users but will probably make mire money then it ever has.
Also this seems to be targeting the mobile market more than other markets because of how large install bases are on that platform. 100M+ users for each popular mobile game * 0.01-0.02 = a lot of money for Unity.
If their sales margin is the same, but fewer users buy and install their game because it's now 20% more expensive, that reduces their overall profit which definitely matters to them.
I suspect this will significantly impact the Xbox GamePass lineup soon once it takes effect.
Also, imagine that pirated copies or even multiple installs by the same users counts into hitting that threshold. I could see a malicious competitor pushing a lot of installs to hit someone else bottom-line and sink them financially with a minimum of risk for them.
That new policy need to go back to the drawing board ASAP.
Unity has built a very impressive engine and runtime.
With that being said, I have never had the desire to use it (or any other engine). Perhaps I'm a minority here, but I dislike engines and I dislike the idea of "building my own engine."
I think you should set out to make the game. You begin by creating a window. Then you draw some pixels or render a texture. You add events and controls. You make the game logic and states. Then you have a game. It can take as little as a hundred lines of code to have a basic game up and running.
From there, you make the thing you want to create. No more, no less.
> You begin by creating a window. Then you draw some pixels or render a texture. You add events and controls.
Yes, but without an engine, how do you make this all cross-platform?
Using something like Unity, you can theoretically write your program once and it runs on damn near anything. Android, iOS, Linux, Windows, PlayStation 4/5, Switch, and more.
That sounds nice, but it looks a lot like a "what if" scenario. What if I need to support a dozen systems? What if I need to do fancy 3D graphics? What if I need to do some other thing that isn't my problem right now (and likely ever)?
It's like when a web developer starts talking about how they will handle the c10K problem, or how their todo app is deployed on a fancy kubernetes cluster across the planet running on edge networks and fault tolerant, but they have zero users and no good ideas.
Just make the game you want to make. If it's fun and people love it, build it out more. Rewrite it if you have to. Hell, Minecraft was wrote in Java, then C++. Just make a game.
I think, at the very least, it makes sense to want to support Windows, Mac, and Linux. Trying to support consoles adds a massive layer of complexity regarding their stores.
"Just make a game" is fine if your game is going to be simple and can be done in a month, but there are plenty of indie games that have had only one or two developers for a couple years before even entering Early Access. A game with that kind of complexity helps a LOT to use an engine.
And then you setup the forward rendering pipeline, and the programmable shaders, and the skeletal animation system, then the inverse kinematics for procedural animation, then the asset pipeline for publishing to different platforms, then the netcode, then the realtime physics system.
Did I forget about reflection probes? How about a terrain editor? Maybe you need to bake lighting to make your game look good.
I think this comment might wildly underestimate just how much modern game engines like Unity, Godot, and Unreal bring to the table. They may very well be the most complex pieces of software in the world today
That's fine for a hobby; specifically a hobby where you plan to spend 90% of your available time reimplimenting crappy equivalents to things you get on day one of using an engine. In other words, a hobby project where the point is the exercise and has no need to actually ship.
Just pray that you're never employed to be the #2 developer to someone who built their own game without an engine. "Why would there be documentation? Just follow my inner voice."
Any advice on how to build a tender pipeline from scratch? Im struggling learning how to implement interesting shaders as a user. I couldn’t imagine building a render pipeline engine on top of writing shader code.
I haven't seen it mentioned here yet, but for anyone wondering:
"How will Unity track installs?"
> We leverage our own proprietary data model, so you can appreciate that we won't go into a lot of detail, but we believe it gives an accurate determination of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project.[1]
Someone’s going to break the system, “install” random games 1,000-1,000,000 times, and Unity’s going to have to salvage some metrics and defend their accuracy in court and public.
People keep saying this is not a monthly charge per install. The header clearly says “standard monthly rate” with various per install charges. An I not interpreting this correctly?
Not just "what is an install?" but "how do they detect installs?" Does every Unity game have always-online DRM included now? Will pirates count, so Unity demands a share of money you didn't make? If you give out an open beta to the public, do those development versions count as installs?
Or what about games made on previous version of the engine? They certainly didn't include a phone home to Unity but still according to the pricing on January 1st any new installs of old games is going to have a cost at that point...
Web Games? So every single person that open the web page is going to cost me 0.20$?
>So every single person that open the web page is going to cost me 0.20$?
That's what they're saying, "each time a qualifying game or app is downloaded by an end user". And they have an incentive to count multiple downloads as multiple "installs".
You are likely already paying a recurring cost to Unity, as per https://unity.com/pricing: Excluding the free Student & Personal tiers, the starting list price is $2,040 per year per user (for Unity Pro), going up to $4,950 per year per user for the top tier (Unity Industry).
So, this is a new charge, which becomes active when the following conditions are met for a particular game:
• # of installs, over the life of the game, passes 200k (Personal) or 1MM (Pro/Enterprise).
• Revenue, over the last 12 months, passes $200k (Personal) or 1MM (Pro/Enterprise).
Once both of those thresholds have been met, then you get charged a flat fee per install over the threshold. So, if you meet the Revenue amount, and you've had 200k/1MM installs, your next install requires you to pay a fee to Unity.
For games that are not being distributed through a channel (Steam, GoG, console/app store, etc.), this is going to be really annoying to track and report on. This is also going to be annoying for games that are distributed through multiple channels. Unity's probably going to get into the auditing game at some point; à la Microsoft, Oracle, etc.
Many companies start as bright locomotives of the tomorrow world, only to crumble into the valley of greed in the future. Unity is not an exception, it seems. For them, it's so much easier to raise prices and f%.k their customers than to truly innovate.
Innovation requires talent, efforts and pain - and that's a scarcity, especially in the aging company which prefers an illusionary comfort to the true freedom.
Everyone on HN has been suggesting GoDot. I have also spent lots of time with Unity, but recently spent about 5-10 hours playing around with GoDot. Some thoughts:
- I strongly dislike the name and logo
- It feels very foreign at first, but easy to pick up
- It appears to me that it is production ready
- Migrating an existing unity project would be an absolute nightmare
- Publishing to consoles looks tricky, but I haven't been far down that path yet
I am going to be spending more time with it now, because I have been growing less and less happy with unity over the last 2+ years. The proverbial straw has now found it's seat upon the camel's back
Yeah, but Havok has that precedent set. Unity doesn't, and since the price was so low previously, the ones with the splashscreen were the ones not willing to spend even a bit of money. Whether it's warranted or not, it goes give that impression of demo/low-budget/low(er)-effort.
Yeah, there's like a small size studio, or studios where they plan to not have like a very strong monetization curve, where this makes sense.
This pricing change pressurizes modestly successful long tail profits. And so I think yes competitor game engines that are more progressive will be more popular for those segments.
I wonder if installs could be faked? So find a project that has revenue of the 200k and then appear to install it couple million times... Is this sort of scenario considered at all?
The developer doing so would certainly result in bans and/or lawsuits, but it's not inconceivable that if it is something that relies on the installer being able to phone home that people start building it into ad-blockers or popularising some script to set the appropriate firewall rules. And if this does go through, there's bound to be thousands of people with the talent and influence to do so and a desire to spite Unity.
So you feel this applies healthy economic pressure, and his appropriate for applying across all markets?
Like I kind of get where you're going... Increasing expectations so products must be high quality and guaranteed to be profitable. Although that's still a little wishful. And so it might not be realistic.
I personally think this will actually suffocate certain segments of the software market. It's like the insurance donut hole here in the United States where if you're between certain ages you don't qualify for Medicare and you still are paying for it and so you risk going into extremely high insurance cost zone, just because your age happens to be like 58 years old.
Was this true? I recall back when the first wave of App Store games were coming out, the general feeling among mobile players was "You buy your $40 game, and I'll buy 40 $1 games and we'll see who has more fun." So I think mobile games were always dirt cheap.
Nowadays, of course, the $40 game is $70+Battle Pass+Digital Deluxe Upgrade+Day 1 DLC and the $1 game is free but contains a hypnotoad that will mind control you into spending $400 a month gambling for jpegs.
If it only applied to games sold for profit (or with microtransactions) it would be okay, but basing it on installs leads to things like that a Unity developer should avoid including their game in a charity bundle unless they mostly want to donate to Unity. E.g. Fanatical's Stand With Ukraine Charity Bundle would have cost each developer ~$2000 if they were on a Personal/Plus plan. It's not a huge amount, but Unity does not deserve it.
I was looking at that table, which otherwise made great sense, but struggling to understand why Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise had cheaper per-install prices than Unity Personal. Part of the answer is that they charge up-front monthly fees to use it:
So I see $2040 per year per seat for Unity Pro. That doesn't quite explain why the per-install costs decline with volume for Pro/Enterprise licensees, but I suspect that's just that the Pro/Enterprise are more sophisticated and have better negotiating power.
Presumably the Pro/Enterprise subscribers are more likely to reach the thresholds as well so get charged for installs and it’s a carrot to get people to upgrade if you expect volume.
I wouldn't be surprised if the way they determine installs adds an extra layer of DRM that requires an internet connection too, killing all Unity games if the company ever goes under.
they're not pissed off, they're afraid that the spectrum of release models will be affected by Unity's plan. They're afraid of sudden massive charges. They're afraid for their revenue. They're afraid that this feature will be implemented with as much care as the threatening emails they send to developers. They're afraid of the prospect of rewriting their games in another engine because there has never been time enough for that to be a good idea
Read the FAQ, which would have taken less time then you spent expressing your faux outrage on HN.
What is the Unity Runtime Fee?
We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that
applies to certain Unity subscription plans
based on per-game installs across any Unity-supported
game platform. Creators only pay once per download.
So I guess you can't make fully online games with unity anymore - the runtime will have to connect with unity servers at least once to report new installation.
I took a wait and see approach to the IronSource merger. I hoped for the best while expecting something like this. That said, Unity blew my expectations out of the water.
I’m fully expecting enshittification of the Unity Editor next.
TIL you pay more the more your game is used. I thought these were just normal subscription pricing. I guess it's only a matter of time before this type of thing will be introduced into code editors like VSC and you need to pay based on how much your program is used. Middlemen rent seekers are a cancer.
I wonder if this is an attempt to motivate Unity developers to produce higher quality (or at least, higher retention) games? This seems to heavily favor desktop experiences that are paid upfront and mobile games with high retention, while it would more or less kills hyper-casuals with low retention.
Commenters here are overreacting due to misunderstandings:
- the per-install fee doesn't kick in until you've passed BOTH the annual game revenue and install thresholds (i.e. >$200k annual revenue on the game and >200k lifetime unique downloads)
- the fee isn't monthly, it's per unique download (poor wording in Unity's chart)
- you only pay the fee on the number of downloads over the threshold
This new pricing will actually decrease the price of using Unity for many developers. Before, if your company's total annual revenue was >$100k, you had to buy a paid Unity license no matter what. Now those company's can use Unity totally free until their game reaches $200k annual revenue and 200k lifetime downloads.
This licensing scheme is actually very similar to licensing the AVC/H.264 video codec from Via LA (for example, if you want to ship a build of Chromium with MP4 enabled). In their case, licensees self report the number of units they've distributed per year and pay a small fee on the number of units over 100k. If you ship under 100k units, there is no fee.
I think a lot of people are just fundamentally rejecting the structure of a deal like that. The numbers will matter a lot to individual org's decisions but at least to me the emotional reaction here is unrelated to the specifics of the thresholds and rates. It's just "game engine company should not be doing that."
Probably true since it doesn't appear like they're a game engine company any more. The enshittification machine is rumbling to life.
I do appreciate that if you make something that's always free, no matter who you work for you don't need to worry about which license to use, and by making it revenue for the last 12 months we don't need to worry about every dev taking down all their old Unity games to avoid fees. But it's still not a great deal. Even if they somehow can exclude pirated copies and malicious reinstalls, there's still plenty of absurd scenarios with it.
A developer decides to make their game that was a hit almost a year ago free? Now they might have to pay Unity more than the $200k they made on the game earlier!
Or if they throw it in a charity bundle, they get punished for their attempt to help people in need!
Last time I checked their storage limit was around 40GB, that's too little unless you are making 2D casual games. I'm making a 3D shooter that takes 300GB+.
My sympathy for indie Unity devs wrt this kind of thing is....limited. They made a deal with the devil, and now the devil has come to collect. Tough tits!
Were the benefits of Plus over Personal worth the price? My impression was that most people bought because they went over the threshold which has now been eliminated for Personal.
Splash screen removal, access to support, etc. Generally all the benefits that come with paying for a thing, rather than being on a tier that the company is trying to get you off of.
This is pretty late, but - does this completely kill Unity web? I mean, if every visit to a web game is an "install" there's no way games are making enough to cover that scenario. I guess caches could mitigate this somewhat.. but a viral spike in traffic would become a huge financial liability.
If we save 0.2 per install by having Unity ads, does this mean the other ad sources drive less income? This effectively means the saved amount by using Unity ads is offset by the lost income from the no longer used original ad source.
Today I've deleted my Unity-Account. They've got that EA stink after announcing those nonsensical pricing plans. Gee, I wonder why their CEO dumped Unity shares months prior.
Related cautionary advice for AI developers: be careful to design a business and revenue model that can survive the underlying licensing fees as they change (increase) over time. Cheers.
I don't quite get the outrage. I feel like most of the people commenting here haven't actually read the post.
"We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user."
"Only games that meet the following thresholds qualify for the Unity Runtime Fee:
Unity Personal and Unity Plus: Those that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs.
Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise: Those that have made $1,000,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 1,000,000 lifetime game installs."
Yes, so far there has been no clarification by unity about pirate installs or malicious competitors faking the unique installation API called to the Unity backend.
Ripe for fraud.
If unity is malicious they could actually set up farms artificially inflating installation counts and generating a little extra profit.
I am 100% going to do this with an old laptop of mine. Is it even "fraud" if I just want to test my SSD longevity by constantly installing and uninstalling a game?
If you're an indie studio making small 2d or basic 3d games, you will use Godot
If you're a big studio looking for AAA graphics capability you will use Unreal.
There is no other reason to use Unity other than legacy asset store purchases and existing project maintainence.
In 2-3 years those legacy projects will wrap up and Unity will be dead in the water as a company, mark my words.
- cross your fingers for a deal with a major (Xbox game pass, Epic exclusivity)
- cross your fingers for a deal with one of the smaller ones that will do proper guidance and marketing (devolver, deck13, new blood, Annapurna, team17, etc)
- cross your fingers for big streamers to dedicate at least a few hours to your game
- make an extremely niche, moated game that will for sure attract a specific fanbase that buys everything on that niche. And cross your fingers that a competitor doesn't launch around the same date.
- make an addictive gachapon filled casual mobile game, and burn money in ads
Only one of these doesn't have you crossing your fingers. (I'm half joking please don't take this too seriously)
Wow I wasn't expecting it to be as bad as it is. Charging per download and install and removing the cheaper tiers is ridiculous. Good news for any griefers out there who feel like making a particular game developer lose money, just download and install the game a handful of times. What a terrible decision by Unity, shame for all the developers who have spent years and years learning a powerful tool run by complete sociopaths
are they only counting unique installs or do developers pay with any install? Like if i reimagined my machine and reinstall games does that mean they have to pay the install fee again?
EDIT: The more I read the FAQ, the more I think this is a bad deal
Ooh, good question. Does Unity phone home when a game is launched? If I were in Unity's shoes and trying to enforce this cheaply, I'd either have it phone home so I could keep track of how many active users a game has, or I'd just scrape data from the app stores to see who's worth having a salesperson call up.
how do they plan to even track revenue and also installs?
Also what do they do if they say you are over the revenue or install threshold and just tell them to fuck off? Can they remotely kill your game???
"We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user. We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed."
This reads as something insane. If a player replays a game on steam, redownloads it, the developer still pays for the installation? I know people who redownload games all the time, like tens of times over the span of several years. I hope it's imprecise language and only the initial install/download is counted.
I hope these changes (whatever they actually are) won't push game developers towards developing games that milk users more, with loot boxes, in-game currency, cosmetics etc, and away from stand alone you-pay-once games, single player or multiplayer, only to be able to pay for the ongoing engine fees.
- What about maliciously installed copies? (4chan: "alright frens, time to install-bomb <gamewehate.exe>! Remember to click the IP address rotation button each time!"
And even if you assume they only charge for legitimate, authorized installations -- what about free demos? This seems to create a massive disincentive to make those available.
I think demos would be fine, if you create a separate project for the demo. It's effectively a separate game with no revenue. Development builds, on the other hand, would be the same game.
Information provided by Unity says that they can merge numbers for multiple games if they decided that they are sufficiently similar. So clever tricks of making separate game will not work. It depends on how greedy they are whether Unity will apply this rule to demos.
I posted this update in a discord server and that was the first thing a friend of mine said. Said "Great, lets reinstall [game they don't like but I won't name here] over and over again!"
You probably wouldn't need to install the entire game, possibly just install the first bits and then cancel. I'm sure our wonderful friends over at 4chan and other places full of honorable, upstanding citizens will come up with some interesting ideas.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Yeah, there are definitely games on Steam I've played and deleted many, many times over the years.
Eufloria is a good example (for me), as I've played that one on several different machines over a few years. Probably played and deleted it more then 20 or 30 times overall. And will likely keep on doing more too.
Yup, it makes free-to-play games with high installation numbers and less exploitative mechanics that result in $200k (or over $1mil with the pro subscription iiuc) yearly income either non-viable, or much less viable using this engine.
They are also seemingly making Unity games online-only for the DRM/accounting purposes.
Oh boy. Anyone remember a decade ago when Adobe tried to charge a revshare for cross-compiled 3d engine code on Flash Player and it pushed everyone out of Flash development and to Unity?
Also, this continues my pet peeve of disguising bad news with neutral headlines. If they had made anything cheaper they would have put it in the headline. "Updates" means "price increases".
Oh boy...the mobile game studio who are already making little money per install are gonna go crazy.
Unity right now is only massively used by
1) Indies
2) Mobile game studios
They just made sure that all of those will switch tech.
Unreal Engine has a much better license because it says that "it's not retroactively changable": so if you eg stay at Unreal 5.2 forever no new epic changes to the license will apply to you since the 5.2 license applies to you forever.
RIP unity.
Even if unity reverts this (which IMO they will due to backlash) all new mobile studio game devs will move to some other engine.
Charging a monthly fee on game installs is absolutely wild, considering that most games on Steam are one-time purchases. The personal fee (for first world countries) is $0.20 / month. If you charged $10 for the game, you'd be losing money after only 50 months (around 4 years).
I still refuse to believe that's the right interpretation. That can't be real. Are you really going to owe more to Unity every time a user uninstall/reinstalls your game? If they want to play in their main PC and their Steamdeck?
Completely abolishes the incentive of pushing free updates too. You don't want to make new great features that would push people to re-download your game.
> We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that applies to certain Unity subscription plans based on per-game installs across any Unity-supported game platform. Creators only pay once per download.
> An install is defined as the installation and initialization of a project on an end user’s device.
> We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that applies to certain Unity subscription plans based on per-game installs across any Unity-supported game platform.
> An install is defined as the installation and initialization of a project on an end user’s device.
> Each time a game is downloaded, Unity’s runtime code is also installed. The Unity Runtime Fee goes towards the continued investment in that code to support the billions of devices served every month.
So if BuyerX installs the game, I get charged, he then re-formats his hard drive, and re-install, I get charged again, if he goes to another of his machines and install, I get charged again? Crazy.
And a weirdo who hates a developer could keep auto-reinstalling (or just re-triggering the "new install" signal to unity servers) 1000 times per day, every day.
They will most likely use hardware ID to track installs. So if you reinstall the game on the same machine it won't count, if you install it on a different one it will. Unless they let you bind it to some internal ID and track it that way.
Unless you get crafty, machine identifiers aren't stable on Windows and will change with updates. So if you update windows and reinstall an app, a lot of naive software will detect that as a fresh install on a fresh machine.
That would really suck for a small Unity dev to get screwed by a Windows update that forces reinstall of their users' game libraries - which isn't that uncommon.
On PC the only upgrade that would generate a new hardware ID would be a complete mobo replacement and that's somewhat rare. Upgrading your CPU/GPU/RAM does not regenerate the hardware ID.
On the recent Intel platforms upgrading your CPU required upgrading your mobo too, and there are many people who upgrade almost every generation, i.e. 1-2 years. Burdening game developers with this is unjust. The engine fee should be tied to the game's purchase, or game related purchases(DLC, other paid content).
AMD also promised (iirc) that the AM5 will only be good for 2 generations.
I'm aware. Yet I am prepared to wager that the number of people who upgrade their own mobo(instead of buying a whole new pc/laptop) is absolutely insignificant on the scale of the market.
> They will most likely use hardware ID to track installs. So if you reinstall the game on the same machine it won't count
Pretty trivial for a malicious user to spoof, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's something that calculates a new hardware id for trivial changes as we see so often with "don't install this on more than 1 computer" DRM implementations.
What is your monetization model for your game? It might not be a huge issue if you know you'll get way more than $0.20 per user. If you were selling a game for $10, this is minor. If you're making a f2p game where there's no guaranteed income and most of your players will not spend a dime, it's a lot riskier. I'd worry about the install counts getting spoofed by angry players, but that seems like a bigger liability for Unity than developers.
It's per install not per user! If your user installs it 5 times over the course of 2 years it already eats 10% of the game gross revenue. And it just keeps going..
The amount of outrage from people with no P&L or game development experience in this thread is unreal.
Let's look at fictional scenario for Vampire Survivors, and model 5M units sold in the first 12 months at $4.99 per sale. We'll also assume a Unity Enterprise plan.
I can't be certain exactly how Unity is planning to accrue installs when determining installs over threshold, so treating it like brackets.
So in this fictional scenario, the Unity fee is 0.3% of gross or 0.47% after Steam takes its cut.
Even if we assume the average consumer downloads the game 1.2 times, that's still only $20k more. The bigger issue is how thresholds accrue, since that could push more installs into costlier lower threshold brackets.
The outrage is that this pretty much kills hobbyist game devs in Unity. Unity was great because it allowed small devs who aren't seeking to make a profit to put stuff out there relatively quickly. I used it myself all the time in college. Now imagine a game you made...for free...goes viral and you pass your threshold. Now you owe Unity a bunch of money.
Not every project needs to seek to make money. Sometimes you want to put something out there for the sake of putting something out there without worrying that you are going to need to pay up for it.
While we are at it, I want to shill my personal favorite engine...Godot. I know its fairly well known in the HN scene, but I think that this should be a push to use more free and open-source technology in game dev, rather than relying on a bunch of corporate black boxes that can turn predatory at any minute.
Freemium games with millions of installs but maybe only a couple hundred k of revenue. The model of "having a bunch of users but only a couple of them pay money" or ad-supported so the ARPU is really low is not uncommon, and certainly more of a likely sweetspot for a smaller game or studio to find themselves in.
Is it a hobby if you're making more than $200k in a 12-month period? Most hobbyists will likely be unaffected by this, and those that are will see very small fees less than what Visa charges to process a credit card transaction.
It seems disingenuous to pick one of the most popular games of this year as an example when the pricing goes down with more sales.
I would like to see that same breakdown for the much smaller games that barely pass the sales threshold. That is the main Unity audience. Vampire Survivors is a huge outlier that didn't even start using Unity until after it became a massive hit.
Steam and Epic both have a minimum price of $0.99, not sure about Apple & Google App Stores. Credit card processors have a minimum charge that makes lower prices untenable.
> Why do you say you "pretend" in your numbers
Where did you pull 10%, happy to go over your math/model.
> Where did you pull 10%, happy to go over your math/model.
The example numbers I posted would give 10%.
The pricing was easy enough that the 10% worst case could easily be pulled from it.
I wouldn't trust the numbers from someone who needed a model to go over to see that and I seriously thought you were joking about not getting where the 10% worst case was from.
I wasn't considering F2P or ad-supported games, so my mental model was seeing $0.99 as the pricing floor. If you want to arbitrarily choose an ARPU, we could get that percentage to any number we wanted to make a point.
> As of July 2023, nearly 97 percent of apps in the Google Play app store were freely available
I don't think "arbitrarily" is the right word to use here. Your mental model might have been $0.99 as the pricing floor, but that mental model does not represent the reality of mobile app stores. Paid apps are a minority on both iOS and Android, the dominant revenue model for mobile games is to offer free downloads/installs with advertising and in-app purchases.
It blows my mind that you open with "The amount of outrage from people with no P&L or game development experience in this thread is unreal" and close with "I wasn't considering F2P or ad-supported games".
Your "mental model" didn't consider 80% of the market by revenue?
My point is that 30% makes the situation worse, because it is not available to you to pay Unity's cut, so it's as if you made 30% less revenue. IE Unity pricing kicks in at $200k gross, but that's only $170k net, which is what is available you as a business to pay Unity.
> Even if we assume the average consumer downloads the game 1.2 times, that's still only $20k more.
Charging the developer when a customer re-downloads a game they already bought sounds incredibly asinine to me, no matter how small the fee actually is. No download store charges for this privilege, and they're the ones actually footing the bill for the bandwidth and infrastructure to make that possible. Unity is adding accounting complexity and fees for something they do none of the legwork to provide.
Vampire Survivor wasn't developed with a Unity Enterprise subscription, so it's irrelevant what their hypothetical cost structure would have been if they had done something completely different than what they actually did.
5 million x $0.20 = $980,000 in Unity fees under 2023 pricing vs. $2040 annual pro subscription under 2022 pricing (for exceeding $100k in sales).
In other words, this is an instantaneous 480x fee increase, without any corresponding increase in the value of the services provided.
Do you even know the history of Vampire Survivors?
The game's sales blew past the Unity threshold in hours when it first became a hit. Yes, they would have switched to Enterprise after that. And you know what? It would have still been too late to prevent them from owing several multiples of what the Unity fee used to be.
It seems like to me you're the one with little to no game development experience given your repeated comments about mobile games.
As an example where their new pricing scheme especially breaks down: You actively lose money (beyond just lost sales) for including your game in things like charity bundles because Unity will still ship you a bill for every install. This means if you had a modest success the incentive is to never give away your game even temporarily.
They also removed pricing levels that hobbyist developers used, which means they also have to pay more in subscription fees (up to $1k+ more) in addition to the fees above.
The number of downloads or installs is not equal to the number of purchases, and can be quite a lot larger, particularly for a game with a free demo, steam refund "trial" shenanigans, pirated copies, etc.
Don't forget Mobile or f2p gaming, Unity has a huge market share there and the margin are really low, adding ~0.20$ per user when most will makes you 0$ doesn't make sense at all.
Going with % of profit does.
Also it is quite unfair to cheaper games, indie 5$ games pay a much bigger share than a 40$ / 70$ game
> Unity isn't responsible for a bad business model. If you can't turn a profit after the fee structure, then don't choose Unity.
What? Unity is in fact responsible for the fee structure, they made it. It's not a force of nature, you don't get to change the business model under people's feet and then say, "huh, real irresponsible of you to choose a business model that doesn't work because we broke it; not our fault, you should have planned for us changing your revenue structure." Especially since as far as I can tell, Unity is retroactively applying this change onto existing games already on the marketplace.
God didn't make the business model bad, Unity did. And when those games launched, they launched under a different business model than what Unity is proposing. It is in fact not their fault that they didn't have the psychic ability to consider, "what if Unity randomly decides in the future to charge us every time a user installs one of our free games even if they only play it for 30 seconds?"
It's the developer's fault that they didn't magically guess what Unity's terms were going to be in the future? Be serious.
This is absolutely Unity's fault. If you buy a car to use Uber, and then half a year later Uber decides that your brand of car is no longer eligible to drive or that it needs to use a different fee structure, then it is Uber's fault that you are losing money.
If you launch an ad-supported game in 2020 under a revenue share and in 2023 Unity decides that it's bored of revenue shares and it wants you to start paying per install, it is Unity's fault that you are losing money. There just is no way to spin it otherwise. Are you seriously trying to blame developers right now for not being psychic?
I guarantee 100% that if we were having a conversation about Unity a year ago and someone said "I don't know if I should use Unity because what if they charge for installs in the future" you would have been making fun of that developer for having that concern. I promise you that a year ago you would not have predicted this change and you would have dismissed concerns about a theoretical structural change away from revenue shares as fearmongering.
> If I buy a Porsche in order to do Uber, it's not Uber's fault that I'm going to lose money.
Also once again, Unity's pricing model is not a natural consequence of the laws of physics. It's made up, Unity made it. The reason you'll lose money driving a porche for Uber is because the car will physically degrade, not because a bunch of board members at Uber got together and thought, "how can we extract more revenue from porsche owners?" Unity's revenue model is not the natural result of entropy, they decided to make it what it is.
If a company makes a product, say physical goods, and the price of manufacturing goes up but the company doesn't increase consumer prices in response, is it the manufacturers fault?
> you would have been making fun of that developer for having that concern
What a ridiculous statement, thinking you can somehow figure out how I'd reply "100%" just from reading this thread. You haven't provided anything so far in this conversation that has pushed the conversation forward, other than some ad-hominems. Great job.
Would you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? You started a doozy with this one and then continued to perpetuate it by breaking the site guidelines yourself. Seriously not cool.
> What a ridiculous statement, thinking you can somehow figure out how I'd reply "100%" just from reading this thread.
Am I wrong? :) I mean, feel free to prove me wrong, were you a year ago thinking about the possibility of Unity dropping a revenue share model completely? Was that a conversation anyone was having anywhere at all? Forget about your personal response, you might not have been thinking about Unity at all a year ago. Fine. Can you find a thread, anywhere at all, advising mobile developers not to use Unity because they might abandon revenue sharing?
I mean, apparently this is a thing they should have considered, right? So do you have an example of anyone, anywhere, considering it?
The closest I can think of is the general advice to game developers not to use proprietary tools period, but I don't think that's what you're suggesting given you're not on here now saying that nobody should use Unity because of the power imbalance.
> If a company makes a product, say physical goods, and the price of manufacturing goes up but the company doesn't increase consumer prices in response, is it the manufacturers fault?
Nothing physically has changed to force Unity to change prices, nor is Unity claiming that's the case. Also yes, in a scenario where you have an agreement with a company and the company changes the underlying prices of that agreement without warning, you would be correct in saying that it is certainly more the supplier's "fault" that a company goes out of business than the company owner. You might claim that the supplier didn't have a choice, but it would be ridiculous to claim that it's the buyer's fault that the prices changed.
And again, I have to keep saying this: there is nothing physical going on here and Unity the company itself is not claiming that they're changing their pricing model in order to cover new costs. Analogies to material costs don't really apply here.
> All pricing models are made up.
Yep. That's... that's what I said. And if you're asking "who's fault is it that the pricing model is what it is" it's probably the fault of the person who created the pricing model.
"Who's fault is it that this book has these words in it? The author's?"
> I mean, apparently this is a thing they should have considered, right?
I'm unaware of any business that doesn't consider pricing changes to strategic costs as future liabilities, especially when you don't have a contract with fixed terms. I don't see any evidence that Unity made guarantees that it's historical prices would remain consistent into the future. They're a public for-profit company, not a charity.
> Nothing physically has changed to force Unity to change prices
So not only can you predict what I would say, you have some sort of insights into Unity's cost structures and what it requires for them to keep Unity updated and competitive?
> but it would be ridiculous to claim that it's the buyer's fault that the prices changed.
It's not ridiculous to blame the seller that doesn't increase their pricing to keep a tenable margin. If my costs of goods increase but I keep my prices the same, it's my fault.
The only people making arguments about future Unity changes were Open Source weirdos like me who were warning against proprietary software in general, and we were regularly dismissed and called impractical. Nobody was considering that Unity would drop revenue sharing as a business model. If you go back and look at advice about the mobile markets, this was not a concern on anybody's mind.
Yes, people considered that pricing itself might change, but professionals in industry were not advising about the possibility of Unity changing away from a revenue share model, nor was this ever coming up as a concern in conversations about Unity's efforts to appeal to mobile developers. It's actually fairly easy to tell what people were thinking about Unity's pricing model given how recent the change is -- you can just go back and look at the many conversations people were having about engines.
I'll tell you what you won't see: you won't see a lot of people floating the possibility of installation-based pricing.
> I don't see any evidence that Unity made guarantees that it's historical prices would remain consistent into the future.
This isn't about a pricing change, it's about a change to the entire pricing model.
Nonetheless, you raise a good point. Unity could make arbitrary changes in the future as well. Doubtless, you would agree that it's irresponsible for devs today to use Unity under the current terms given that they have no control over what Unity's future pricing will be and given that pricing changes can be retroactively applied to games that they release before those changes?
Certainly you'd advocate today for the same level of responsibility and caution that you're arguing mobile developers should have had in the past, right? We have no idea what Unity's pricing model will be in 6 months, there's no guarantees in the contract -- and like you say, we need to consider that fact when building a business. So it would be the height of irresponsibility to advocate that everything is fine and the changes are no big deal and developers should just continue to use Unity.
Would you advise Unity developers today to decrease reliance on the engine and to be extremely cautious about building a business on top of a platform that can make arbitrary changes to pricing structures and that can apply those changes to existing products? Sure Vampire Survivors is profitable now, but as you correctly point out, there's nothing in the contract stopping Unity from changing that in the future.
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> So not only can you predict what I would say, you have some sort of insights into Unity's cost structures and what it requires for them to keep Unity updated and competitive?
Scary, right? I'm almost as psychic as you expect mobile developers should have been. ;) In my case it's not magic though, there's a trick to it. I get my information from having being active in game development spaces for a while and being familiar with the conversations that professionals were having about engine choice, and also from reading Unity's own press release and reading their own supplied justifications for why they're making the change.
----
> If my costs of goods increase but I keep my prices the same, it's my fault
For anyone unfamiliar with how F2P and ad-supported games work, you can't just increase the cost of purchase for them, that's not really a thing, ad-supported games don't have a purchase cost to increase.
Because I'm not throwing out low-effort "woe poor game developer" vibes and am instead expecting more? I've actually made effort to model how this could work, rather than exclaiming "this is going to ruin indie game developers!".
Bad faith is making unsubstantiated claims and then getting mad when asked to back it up.
Yes, casual web games. Millions of units, high eight-figure to low nine-figure in gross sales. Tens of billions of online game sessions. I helped start an early online gaming site called GameRival.com that's most famous for Gold Miner and powering MySpace Games, and later led engineering for Grab.com (before the domain was sold off for taxis or whatever it is today).
I still run into Gold Miner clones at casinos even to this day.
So what's particularly funny about this is that Unity has since clarified that transmission of the runtime over the web via streaming or browser plays counts as an install, and your nine-figure sales compared to tens of billions of sessions would have been impossible to do profitably under these terms. And yet you're still on here defending them and somehow forgot that the F2P genre existed when doing your math.
If this is your background then this conversation is even more ridiculous; you should understand what it means to have more installs than profitable users because that was literally your business model. So why are you having trouble connecting the dots here about why developers would be concerned about these changes? By your math you were making pennies per-session. How are you having trouble understanding why even a 2-3 cent additional cost for each session would be a problem for that model?
We didn't build our games on a platform that required royalties. And when the tools we did use had unexpected cost increases, like Macromedia Flash Communication Server, we built our own to replace them. When the advertising model became untenable, we switched to downloadable purchases and a subscription model.
Unexpected changes to supply chain happen. Cost of goods go up, or sometimes even disappear altogether. That's business. It's an absolute punch in the throat that Unity has decided to apply these fees retroactively and with so little advance notice, but the onus is on the game developers to adapt and change their models to the new reality.
There seems to be plenty of outrage without me, so I don't understand why you seem so adamant for me to be sympathetic to businesses that are only profitable with the charity of another company. There's more than enough room for us to have different perspectives.
What's ridiculous is that you seem to think that there's only one right answer or reaction to this, and that it just happens to be yours.
> I don't understand why you seem so adamant for me to be sympathetic to businesses that are only profitable with the charity of another company.
That is... certainly a way to phrase the conversation we've had and it is certainly a way to characterize the complaints that developers have with Unity's changes, as if they're simply looking for charity handouts.
I would suggest that part of the free market and part of Capitalism and part of business is that when platforms make decisions that hurt a lot of developers, sometimes those platforms get criticized publicly for those decisions. That's part of how business works; bad publicity is one of the penalties businesses pay for bad PR decisions.
----
Of course you don't have to sympathize with developers, but it's disingenuous for anyone to claim that these changes won't impact developers or that critics of these changes are just ignorant of actual game development practices.
> It's an absolute punch in the throat that Unity has decided to apply these fees retroactively and with so little advance notice
is a pretty different phrasing from how you talked about those developers in your other comments, and it's ironic that you seem to hold such disdain for them given that your own industry experience would not have been possible under the same terms that you dismiss in other comments above as having virtually no impact on the majority of games.
Again, I'm not trolling for sympathy here, I really don't care if you care about developers. It's just not good for you to spread misinformation about the potential impact of the changes or to act like the pushback to the changes is based on inexperience or ignorance rather than legitimate grievances about their potential impact on whether or not Unity is usable for entire segments of the market.
> It's just not good for you to spread misinformation about the potential impact of the changes
Everything being said so far is purely conjecture, and my guess is as good as yours as to how it will play out. People keep talking about all these poor F2P or ad supported games that are going to be harmed, but it's all just conjecture and guesses.
Personally I think app stores are filled with too much trash and I'm not going to be sorry to see some of it go. Obviously it sucks when anyone has to deal a situation that affects their livelihood, but them's the breaks.
Consider layoffs. I've been on both sides of the fence, so I can appreciate the companies perspective of preserving cash flow while acknowledging the hardship it places on those affected, but I'm not going to lose sleep over it or join in on the chorus of outrage that wants to attack companies for what people want to perceive as malice. It's just business, as impersonal as it sounds.
> The amount of outrage from people with no P&L or game development experience in this thread is unreal. [...]
> Everything being said so far is purely conjecture, and my guess is as good as yours as to how it will play out.
For the most part no one is calling you out for being mean or not liking F2P games, you got called out for very confidently dismissing worries about the changes as uninformed fearmongering based on back-of-the-napkin math where you forgot about the existence of one of the largest gaming categories on the market, and then doubled down (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37483482, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37485433) when that error was pointed out, and then blamed developers in those categories for not predicting the changes, and then revealed that your industry experience was in those same categories and that your games made the exact same choices about both funding models and proprietary engines/licensing that you were criticizing mobile developers for making.
I'm not trying to call you out for being mean to mobile game devs, I pointed out that "they should have seen this coming" is kind of openly ridiculous to say about an out-of-nowhere TOS change that almost inverts Unity's funding model -- especially given that it turns out you were in the same industry and obviously worries about funding changes didn't stop you from using proprietary engines.
Yes, sometimes businesses fail and bad stuff happens, I don't care what your attitude is about that. But "the universe is chaotic and sometimes difficult choices about funding need to be made" is a far cry from "well why did those mobile devs make the same decisions I made, they should have been more responsible."
> I can appreciate the companies perspective of preserving cash flow while acknowledging the hardship it places on those affected [...] It's just business, as impersonal as it sounds.
So this is not why you were called out, your attitudes towards the amoral nature of Capitalism aren't really the issue, you were called out because a bunch of developers said, "this is going to impose a hardship on us" and your response was "no it's not a hardship, these people don't know what they're talking about, this criticism is coming from people who don't know anything about making games, the new terms look quite reasonable."
And so the shift from that kind of confident statement about how these changes are a nothingburger to "well none of us have any idea what's going to happen" is the part that draws attention. If your original comment had been "it's anyone's guess what the impact of this will be" you would have saved everyone a lot of time.
My guess is it doesn't (they're talking about streaming via a platform like Stadia). Twitch streamers aren't distributing the runtime (arguably Gamepass streaming isn't either, but there is a clear tangible difference I think). Of course, Unity seems to be making this up as they go along, so who knows what they'll claim. But I can't imagine them trying to treat Twitch streams as installs.
So in the same situation where you lambast mobile games for not meeting profitability, you admit you've worked on games that would've fallen into that same situation.
And despite your belief that you were not dependent on any sort of intermediary platform I believe many games on that platform including Gold Miner were made using Adobe Flash, so you were in fact using a platform that could've been nickel and dimed just as much as Unity is now. Except you had the advantage of those games being made at the advent of the internet before rent seeking companies clawed their way into the middle.
The fact that you've been spreading misinformation or being downright disingenuous about many of the points you've been making makes me believe that many of your points are false.
Remember: It's impossible to criticize a business for unilaterally altering previously existing deals (this change is retroactive) because you should have been able to see in the future and know ahead of time that this change would hurt your business and thus Unity was the wrong choice.
Easy to say to mobile games studios that have ben using Unity for the last 10 years (or where in the process of releasing a game after multiple years of development) and didn't have to pay that tax before.
Also this will apply to every games made on Unity, so if you have a hugely popular game just above the threshold but make less than 0.20$ per user you effectively need to shutdown it down.
It isn't "bad business model" either, there is definitely a market for games where the revenue per user is less than 0.20$ (or whatever number).
Going with % of revenue is the sensible decision, just like Unreal does...
He was the person that turned EA into a microtransaction and arguably live-service game pioneer. For the worse.
"If you are six hours into playing Battlefield, you run out of ammo on your clip, and we ask you for a dollar to reload, you're really not very price sensitive at that time".[1]
> If you can't turn a profit after the fee structure, then don't choose Unity.
You've got the order wrong. This is about people who already chose Unity, and then they changed the fee structure. Changing engines is beyond nontrivial for a project in flight.
redo the math for an indie with Unity Personal and a sudden hit with 250k sales
Units Sold: 250000
Gross Sales: $1 247 500
Steam Fees:
$0-10M (30%): $374 250
Unity Fees (personal or plus):
250 000 : $50 000
Net Sales: 823 250
Now it's more or less 6%, and that's before development costs and taxes.
It's a big bite for something that's impossible to code out of the project.
Imagine if Oracle charged a dollar every time someone ran your software the first time on the JRE in that machine. installation on a new machine? pay again. Old customer reinstalls the JRE? pay again. main executable or JRE update? pay again.
Except there's no fee for the first 200k installs, so the Unity fee is only $10k for the 50k after the threshold.
You could also have saved $8k by upgrading to Unity Pro for $2040, though of course you run the risk of paying for that plan and not selling 250k units.
Unfortunately the blog post is so poorly worded that I'm not sure after that. My reading, too, is that once you reach the threshold, you pay for those first 200k installs, too! The table says 'per install', not 'per additional install' or anything like it. Not sure though.
Unless my math is wrong it seems like a pretty onerous fee for the case that your monetization starts failing.
Start with 5 million installs, and then your new installs are another 5 million copies, which incurs a worst case ($0.20/install) $1 million fee from Unity. You would still have to have earned $200,000 (worst case you're personal user) in the last 12 months.
So with this, you would gross -$800,000. And this is before app store fees, taxes, payroll, and no accommodation for pirate installs in the new plan.
I don't see the benefit to the developer. Mark Whitten CFO of Unity, says the developers are excited about this. The 6 Plus pages of 99%- comments on the unity forum shows a lot of excitement, a lot of negative excitement from developers.
I don't see the value to many developers. It seems like a huge mistake.
What if you're just an indie who makes some random app game that gets popular suddenly? Maybe you made the next Flappy Bird but didn't monetize it quite well enough?
>a company that’d need to be on Pro licences anyway
They also got rid of the income threshold for Personal licenses.
I’d choose an engine without this silly install based scheme. Which is what I expect most hobbyists and small developers to do now.
The other route if the game was F2P or ad supported would be to use a similar process to the big guys and soft-launch to judge the product and monetization on a smaller scale.
This is such a uneducated and specific take, like literally leaving out a huge percentage of the real projects that use Unity, not the succesfull paid games.
If we go cherry picking the succesful games that are banking a lot of revenue, it's obvious this crap won't affect them that much.
People here need a bit of a common sense.
Especially since the extra cost will certainly be passed onto the customer anyway. That’s a small bump for a 4.99 game, but a 20% bump for a 1$ mobile game
Yup. Unity I believe is very fairly priced and even with these changes the fees are very reasonable for what you get. And at the end of the day, if you think it's too expensive, you're free to build your own cross platform game engine from scratch.
> Starting in November, Unity Personal users will get a new sign-in and online user experience. Users will need to be signed into the Hub with their Unity ID and connect to the internet to use Unity. If the internet connection is lost, users can continue using Unity for up to 3 days while offline. More details to come, when this change takes effect.
Notably, Adobe Creative Cloud requires you to check in every 30 days to validate licenses. I feel like it takes some work to come up with a DRM scheme for a development tool that is more onerous than Adobe's restrictions, but what do I know?
I certainly have never left a demo laptop unplugged for a week and then set up a demo quickly without Internet access and needed to make a quick change in my engine. That never happens to indie developers, so locking down the editor until they reestablish an Internet connection totally won't be a problem for them. /s