They’re still scumbags though
Nothing they do at this point will bring any of the goodwill back. They already messed up and no amount of walking it back is going to change the perception that they might just do it again at any moment
1,000%
I’m a year into developing my first game though and this means I don’t have to abandon all the progress I’ve made. After I publish this game, all bets are off as to where I go…or should I say where I godot.
Have you explored what level of effort it would take for you to convert it to use another engine? There are a TON of tools people are making to assist with porting projects from Unity to any number of other engines. Sure, the tools won’t do 100% of the work, but by what I’ve been hearing, they take a HUGE amount of the tedium out of the process.
Yeah I have. There’s a couple of promising programs that everyone should know about:
https://github.com/V-Sekai/unidot_importer
https://github.com/barcoderdev/unitypackage_godot
But for me, I’m too new to programming to pick up another language very quickly to do all the manual stuff right now. Anyone more skilled than me should definitely check those links out.
This isn’t really useful for data heavy games such as the one I’m working on.
It doesn’t help that Unity-specifc stuff seeps everywhere (stuff like floating point Maths, Vector classes, Time and so on) mainly because Unity themselves push people to go that way rather than use the .Net equivalents (which aren’t quite equivalent).
Aye. I’m not waiting for godot.
And pointedly, there was no mention of acknowledgement whatsoever of their sneaky license modifications from months ago that a bunch of people discovered after the fact.
Unity’s execs and board do not fucking care. Their opinions have not been changed. They will certainly try something just as scummy at some point in the future. It’s only a matter of time.
They don’t need good will, unfortunately. They just need devs to not abandon it for Unreal or some other engine, and the cost/benefits calculation on that is going to be made by short sighted people on a project-by-project basis.
Which is exactly why anyone in a position to do so should still drop Unity like a hot potato, sunk cost or not. We can’t condone this kind of behavior.
Ah, the ol [trust thermocline] (https://web.archive.org/web/20230403081519/https://twitter.com/garius/status/1588115310124539904)
I agree they need to go to rev share, but I don’t think restoring trust is really what they are trying to do here. They planned for a good chunk of devs not returning to the engine. Since 80% of users don’t pay them anything, and a large percentage of what’s left like three hundred bucks (the engine costs several hundred million dollars to maintain) there’s not much to lose there., this is likely more about keeping large tier studios and mid tier ones working on mobile games in the ecosystem. They are abandoning their old “seats” model regardless.
the engine costs several hundred million dollars to maintain
I just don’t understand this. Godot is fairly comparable in scope and while it is behind Unity somewhat it also has a tiny fraction of the budget. Sometimes just throwing more money at a product does not make it any better any faster.
You’re not counting the several millions of dollars required for executive salaries yearly. Those executives are important because how else are you going to drain the life out of the developers who are actually maintaining the thing with useless meetings, bureaucracy, “cultural transitions”, and other forms of daily torment?
Unity employs a small army (about 3K) of senior software engineers, that can definitely command upwards of 200K per year, which puts the estimate at 600 million, plus a number of specialists (mathematicians, physicists) for things like cloth and hair simulation, large water body dynamics etc. They maintain compatibility for a huge and growing list of varying hardware devices, computer operating systems, VR headsets, phones, consoles, i think unity games can even run on apple tv, this means they have to get things like floating point operation results reliable on all machines, older x86 processors, RISC chips, etc going back several decades, and even get experts directly from places like Microsoft for features like DOTS C# to native/burst compiler. Most devs don’t appreciate just how much commercial game engines handle in the background and make your build process so much easier. It’s definitely would take a slew of specialists years to get something basic and usable enough, just to display a couple moving shaded triangles, let alone something robust.
Godot on the other hand while a highly capable engine, is a much lighter weight as by design (Juan L says so himself on the Godot blog). Features like plug and play multiplayer servers, machine learning for NPC behavior, encryption for credit card IAP, either aren’t included or havent been implemented as heavily or are only included in the asset store, as a product of a volunteer contributer, as most FOSS software is known to have. Just going through the unity package manager will show off the disgustingly bloated pile of software that is the unity engine. Probably several tens of thousands of packages available that most people will never use.
I won’t trust Unity with any of my future projects until I see the heads of their entire upper level management team on pikes.
Even that wouldn’t bring me back. There are simply other options. Godot’s good so long as you aren’t planning of a console release. If your are then Epic are no angels but they haven’t pulled this crap with Unreal.
If they open source their engine then at least you wouldn’t need to trust them.
Give it two weeks, no one will care anymore
So future versions of the engine will still have these awful price changes? Why would anyone start using them then? Seems like if you have a choice, it’s time to learn a different engine anyway
If they had just made it a 2.5% revenue share for the high-revenue games in the first place, I doubt even many game news outlets would’ve covered it, let alone “real” news. Now, after the massive dustup and pissing off all their customers, falling back to that may be a bit more difficult.
Well even going back on their announcement completely would not mend this. They showed they don’t care about their clients and will screw them over at the first occasion. You can’t build a business when the fondation is built on a time bomb.
Yeah, if they didn’t do this and literally just said “from this future version royalties from high earners will need to be paid, as we need an income source. The old version will be a LTS release.” and it would have been literally fine.
But retroactively screwing people like this? Obviously they will lose trust, and I do not understand how they didn’t understand that.
Because the people who made the decision aren’t people familiar with the product or the community it caters to. They only see numbers and how mug the numbers could be…
They could have done some fucking research. The message they sent was they didn’t care about fallout. So they deserve all the blowback of ever.
They believed they could get away with it.
Yeah, I suppose the reputational harm from the announcement in the first place is going to set them back quite a bit, regardless. I suppose that’s why things like this are supposed to be reviewed before they get announced.
Sub 1 million is not going back, they are just reducing the scope. Unity is dead
Exactly. Somebody needs to explain to them what “backtrack” means…
Is it even reducing the scope? I swore they had some language about only taking a cut after the first $1 million before. Something like "if you sell $1,000,001 then our cut would only be 5¢”
I think the limit was 100k before, but not sure.
Context, I work for Unity, but this is my own understanding of things and doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of my employer nor should it be considered “official” positions of the company. We have folks where communication is their job. Mine is helping build a better engine. There’s been a lot of misinformation since the changes were announced and hopefully I can help straighten some of this out, but again if there are other questions, there are others who are better qualified to address that.
The limit for using Personal was 100k. That has been raised to 200k. For the original terms, and these new terms, it is the same; no per-seat price until you reach the threshold. Once you reach the threshold, then you have to upgrade to Professional or Enterprise, and then there is a per-seat charge for the editor. When you hit the revenue or instance thresholds, then there is an additional charge… But you will be doing very well at that point and the amount is insignificant for most developers at that scale. Compared with Unreal, it is still significantly less, even with the announced terms last week. Unity continues to try and make it possible to create highly portable games for multiple platforms, and devices, and to do so with terms that encourage anyone to become a creator and build your dream game. The last thing Unity wants to do is stifle innovation and creativity.
If you watch the Q&A, the reason for the change, so that it was “retroactive” was to apply these term changes to companies pulling in high revenue, think millions of dollars, and who were releasing what amounted to DLCs and Season types of updates but without doing anything except maybe changing assets. Some of these games are even repackaged and re-released as “new” games. In other cases they may sometimes radically change the game so that it might be more accurately described as a new game, but they continue to release using an unsupported version of the engine. If a developer did this every time they approached the threshold, they could technically have millions of users, all while skirting around the TOS. Do this on Personal, delist at 90k, and release a “new” game to perpetually circumvent the licensing fees. The change wasn’t intended to harm the good developers or studios who are trying to make high quality games, it was intended to go after the businesses releasing “Banana Slots 2022.1 (updated).” If that’s the content you release, I’m sorry, but I think your games are kind of scummy. Please stop. The app stores don’t need more of this sort of cash grab content.
If you are making great content and the terms would severally impact you, then Unity was intending to work with you to reach agreeable terms.
Under the new terms, the same applies. If you or your studio are greatly impacted by the new trerms, Unity doesn’t want to sink your business, they are trying to find a way to keep investing in the development of tools and services which will allow you to reach the greatest number of users and want to work with you to make that happen, as that works best for the creator and for Unity.
For those making games for charity which were told they were going to be impacted, that was bad communication and you inadvertently spoke to the wrong person who didn’t fully understand your request. Content made for charity was always intended to be treated with favorable terms. The specifics of those terms I’m not deeply familiar with, so I don’t know how that applies to per-seat licensing or the details of such a contract, but I know that Unity works hard to support humanitarian efforts and I’m sure if you were making content for charities, nothing has changed.
The bottom line is this. If you feel like the terms are going to make you insolvent, work with Unity to resolve that. Unity is a partner, not an overbearing entity. Unity wants you to be successful.
Not gonna lie, you sound like a PR department. And if you work for unity you better be looking for a new job. It’s only downhill from here.
Yeah, I expect that it might. Nope, I’m an engineer working on the engine side of things. I joined Unity because I believe in the work we’re doing, like my colleagues. The last couple of weeks have been a distraction, but my team is still pushing ahead and building the engine of tomorrow. Believe me, I’m personally just as frustrated with how things were communicated. I have a lot of faith in my team and the positive impact of the work we are doing. All I can say is that we’re continuing to build functionality and features which will enable developers to accomplish more and drive success. Decisions about how this technology is licensed isn’t something I have direct control over, but I hope that through our efforts we can help restore the trust which has been eroded. I’m still bullish on the future road map.
Sounds good, but I don’t think this is a problem that can be solved on that side of the Business.
Don’t trust it. Even if it was a dry run, the only way to prevent this happening in the future is to abandon the platform completely. Fuck these people.
There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.
A few things:
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Unity is still bleeding money. They have a product that could be the basis for a reasonably profitable company, but spending billions on a microtransaction company means it is not sufficient for their current leadership. It doesn’t seem wise to build your bussniess on the product of a company whose bussniess plan you fundamentally disagree with.
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It would be the best for the long term health of bussniess-to-bussnies services if we as a community manages to send the message that it doesn’t matter what any contract says - just trying to introduce retroactive fees is unforgivable and a death sentence to the company that tries it.
the W reference was so early 2000s.
It’s a classic
On a related note, I heard somewhere that the reason Bush “messes up” that quote is that he realized mid sentence that he didn’t want a sound bite of him saying “shame on me”.
May just be a rumor though.
You had me going until the first blunder of the old saying. Oh GWB², your antics paled in comparison to today’s Trainwreckublicans.
George W. Bush is still the torture president, the surveillance state president, the police state president, the war on terror president and the war profiteering president.
Oh and the signing statements president.
Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize in his first year just for the act of Not Being Bush.
Not to bash Obama, but how many of those things did Obama stop doing? GIMO is still open, five eyes was started under him, and Biden was the one that pulled troops from Afghanistan.
Bash away. Obama promised us hope and change and upheld most of George W. Bush’s policies, even adding village-burning drone-strikes to the war on terror and disposition matrix. After Bush we believed for a moment that maybe Obama might turn around the ultra-conservative nightmare we’d been watching unfold. Not at all. We learned about NSA’s PRISM and XKeyscore programs, Obama the president debated with Obama the candidate on television
And we had to face that the Democratic party isn’t going to save the United States, not from the transnational white power movement, or Christian nationalism, not from the climate crisis. Not from runaway unregulated capitalism.
I still vote Democrat, but that’s to vote against the Republican takeover, since they’re not even pretending about going full-on authoritarian dictatorship. It’s all a mess, and I don’t know if there is a good ending to this adventure.
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This company will be dead in three years. No one will pin their livelihood to this engine after this
Exactly. This isn’t some wack subscription fee for a game, they’re directly attacking the livelihoods of industry professionals. Many studios were already having a hard time seeing the value in unity over unreal anyway. Now it’s an easy choice.
As for the company… idk. I’d be surprised if they completely go away. I suspect either the company or the engine tech will be bought by Microsoft, or some other company, at some point.
Only way I can see them surviving is if they get rid of their CEO and their entire board of directors. That might be enough to reestablish a base of trust.
Why does the new board of directors look like the same people but with mustaches?
The CEO will probably sell the company and walk away with a ton of cash.
Public company. He can’t just sell it. Hell probably make millions off his own shares though.
I think the engine will survive, like you say. I don’t think the actual company will. But I am just speculating. I have no knowledge one way or the other
I wouldn’t be that optimistic. It’ll be a less attractive engine for indie devs and smaller companies, but it’s their enterprise customers that bring in the lion’s share of the revenue, and it takes a lot more to move them. To them, it’s purely a business decision. They didn’t even notice the drama, but come the q1 2024 fiscal report they’ll notice the supplier’s cost increased, have an investigation done if any competitors offer a better deal and what the retooling and retraining costs would be, observe keeping with Unity will be significantly cheaper, and life will go on. I sure hope Godot can take over the indie scene though, that would be amazing.
Removed by mod
All my homies hate Unity.
No for real though, I’ve met some genuinely excellent people in the Godot discord
Ongoing projects will probably not migrate engines as it’s prohibitively expensive & time consuming, but only a really clueless dev would start a new project in Unity. I guess it’s kinda the perfect scheme for a cynical short-term “investor” who’s just trying to pump company revenue then dump their stock, as the results of this may not be fully realized for a few years.
Worth noting - Unity still showed utter contempt for Devs and gamers. They’re still public enemy number 1.
If you’re working on a game now, switch to an alternative like Godot.
I would, but I’m still waiting for it.
Any game developer that chalk this up as a big win and go back to business as usual as if nothing happened last week deserve to get rugpulled again in a year or two. Just the fact that Unity as a company is in a financially questionable state alone should be a blaring alarm to ditch the platform. Scumbags that tried to fleece game developers are still there collecting paychecks with zero consequences. Every Unity developers should have a plan in place to migrate away from the platform as soon as possible.
Oh the damage has already been done. Trust is a hell of thing. Gained in inches and lost in miles. Let this be another cautionary tale for the rest of them.
Yeah. I imagine the only ones that will keep using Unity at this point are either the devs that are too lazy to learn something else. Or the devs that already developed games using Unity, and now that the deal is reasonable will probably keep those games on Unity, but will switch to a different game engine for any future projects.
When someone shows you who they are, believe them.
Fuck Unity.
“We’re sorryu it didn’t work this time, we’ll work harder to make sure that the next time we try again, we’ll do so in a more insidious way that boils the frog slower”
~Unity Backtracks~ No they didn’t, they updated the terms
So its still there. Just only for more succesful games… lol
What a fucking joke
Trust was broken. I would have hardly batted an eye if this is what was planned in the first place, but of course the greed got the best of that company at the risk of its entire customer base. Since the backtrack, Unity might have a chance at keeping its existing customers, but I’d discourage anyone new from using Unity at this point.
