Unity Rushes To Clarify Price Increase Plan, as Game Developers Fume (axios.com) 71
Unity, the tech company behind one of the most popular engines for creating video games, is scrambling to clarify how a price increase for its services will work, after its announcement Tuesday morning broadly infuriated the game development community. From a report: The fees, which Unity said are essential for funding development of its tech, left many game makers wondering if having a hit game through Unity would cost them more money than they could make. Developers spoke throughout the day of delaying their games to switch to rival Epic Games' Unreal Engine or other services on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. But by the evening, Unity exec Marc Whitten was updating Axios on the policies, potentially defusing some concerns raised by game creators.
The new "Runtime Fee" announced Tuesday morning is tied to a player's installations of a game, an action that previously didn't cost developers anything. With Unity's new plan, developers who use Unity's free tier of development services would owe Unity $0.20 per installation once their game hit thresholds of 200,000 downloads and earn $200,000 in revenue. Developers paying over $2,000 a year for a Unity Pro plan would have to hit higher thresholds and would be charged with lower fees. The newfee system will begin at the start of 2024. [...] After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unity's Whitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation. (A spokesperson told Axios that Unity had "regrouped" to discuss the issue.) He hoped this would allay fears of "install-bombing," where an angry user could keep deleting and re-installing a game to rack up fees to punish a developer.
The new "Runtime Fee" announced Tuesday morning is tied to a player's installations of a game, an action that previously didn't cost developers anything. With Unity's new plan, developers who use Unity's free tier of development services would owe Unity $0.20 per installation once their game hit thresholds of 200,000 downloads and earn $200,000 in revenue. Developers paying over $2,000 a year for a Unity Pro plan would have to hit higher thresholds and would be charged with lower fees. The newfee system will begin at the start of 2024. [...] After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unity's Whitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation. (A spokesperson told Axios that Unity had "regrouped" to discuss the issue.) He hoped this would allay fears of "install-bombing," where an angry user could keep deleting and re-installing a game to rack up fees to punish a developer.
Whoops. Sounds like a ... (Score:5, Insightful)
... major marketing blunder by Unity. Those who have been on the edge will now definitely switch to Godot, basically the FOSS alternative/successor to Unity.
In eaely 2011 the last Flash/AS internet gaming project I was on got canceled, and Flashs days were numbered. My entire team was all hype about this newfangled Unity thing and I too was intrigued. But I said to everyone: "Flash was the honorable exception and Adobe eventually f*cked me over (because of course they did). There is no way in he'll I'm ever again going to hinge my career on a proprietary technology. I won't be getting involved with Unity."
Haven't regretted that decision ever since. QED.
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On the other hand, a lot of companies are shipping Unity games and making money. How many of the games am I suceptible to play on android or PC that are made with Godot? What does Godot lacks to be a worthy competitor to Unity?
I heard one of the bad aspects of Unity is their tendency to deprecate a lot of functions and your game rapidly can't be built on newer versions, is it meaningful?
How about Unreal? Is it simply to complex for the majority of games made with Unity?
Honest questions here, I welcome every
Re:Whoops. Sounds like a ... (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't switch versions of Unity like you describe. Once you start a game, you stick with that version and only do security updates. Yes, they deprecate a lot of things.
Unreal isn't nearly as easy to use, that's always been the biggest difference. You can do most things in Unity via the visual editor, it requires minimal knowledge and is very easy to learn. Unreal technically has a visual scripting option, but last I checked (it's been a few years) this wasn't very workable and didn't allow you to do nearly as much. Also, Unreal takes a cut of your revenue. That used to sound like a bad thing, but it's great compared to Unity's new pricing.
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Though they are adding C# support (not fully implemented yet), so that will be good for Unity devs.
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It did initially use LUA before they switched to GDScript, so perhaps early exposure to the engine?
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C# in Godot has been fully implemented and fully supported for years now.
Re: Whoops. Sounds like a ... (Score:2)
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So since if you publish on EGS it'll be 11%, while if you publish on Steam, GOG or whatever else, it will be their fee +5%, there's no option that'll let you avoid paying at least that 5% cut unless you manage to stay below that $1M revenue.
You could theoretically go lower than tha
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> leaving you with more money in your pockets.
Look at Mr. Money Pockets over here and his multiple pockets with money.
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Godot is still mainly 2D...
Godot's 3D is rather good in the 3.5+ releases. I was pleasantly surprised at how well its 3D has matured.
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Also, Unreal takes a cut of your revenue. That used to sound like a bad thing, but it's great compared to Unity's new pricing.
How is that different from Unity's new pricing? Which appears to be a cut from your revenue after a $200,000 is sales.
With Unity's new plan, developers who use Unity's free tier of development services would owe Unity $0.20 per installation once their game hit thresholds of 200,000 downloads and earn $200,000 in revenue.
Or, directly from Unity's post on the matter (https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates)
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.
The biggest issue I can is that for the free tier (Unity Personal), the fee is fixed at $0.20 per sale/install regardless of numbers after $200,000/yr in sales, while the minimum paid version (Unity Pro, ~$2,000/yr) starts cheaper and decreases in per unit price as volume increases (a
Re:Whoops. Sounds like a ... (Score:5, Informative)
The fees ... left many game makers wondering if having a hit game through Unity would cost them more money than they could make.
And that's not considering the free games which make no money.
It's also not considering the privacy implications, though that issue has been present for quite a while. When you make a game and you sell or give your game to someone else to play, there's no reason for one of the middleware companies (one of probably several middleware companies) that you used to have any knowledge of that interaction between yourself and your customer. If you use photoshop to make an image, and you post that image on the internet, should Adobe know about all the people who look at it? Should Adobe be able to charge you for everyone who does?
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If they're not giving you money then how are you reaching the revenue trigger?
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Re:Whoops. Sounds like a ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Newcomers usually struggle with pointers and references a bit, but most of them can wrap their heads around them after a bit of practice.
A big perceived downside of Unreal is that its official documentation is often lacking or essentially non existent, so people often have to trial and error, or look up stuff themselves elsewhere. The situation has improved over time with lots of tutorials on YT and Discord servers (like Unreal Slackers). But still, if you're looking for answers to your questions from Epic, unless you're part of some big developer that cooperates closer with Epic, you'll not likely get satisfactory answers from there. And of course even though source available for no additional cost, which is a good thing if you already have an understanding of C++, it is still a proprietary engine owned by Epic Games.
Godot on the other hand is Open Source and free.
Working with Unreal Engine myself, I do find these these developments concerning as I do not trust Epic to do the thing that's the best for developers if there's no more viable competition left on the general purpose engine market. If they are in a position like Adobe or AutoDesk, they might also adopt more anti-user stances where license agreements are changing for the worse. Sure you can stick with whatever licensing terms you agreed to that apply for your own fork of some older engine version, but that also effectively bars you from the Unreal Marketplace and whatever new and interesting features Epic will be implemented for new versions of the engine unless you yourself have the knowhow and time and money to reverse engineer and implement them on your own into your own fork.
Unreal is a trap! (Score:2)
Unreal sounds awesome at first since you don't owe them a dime until you break a million in revenue...
But according to the license you have to file quarterly income reports to Epic Games forever! And they have the right to come to your place of business and audit you whenever they want!
Its a total pain. Unity has been superior from a licensing perspective because you just pay your two grand a year, and done. No income filing, no auditing, nothing. I wonder if these new license changes introduce the same
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The rules there are a bit different. On the market place, Epic sees everytransactions anyway and takes their cut whether I want it or not. And I'm not sure how they would check what I sell "under the counter" as a contractor. But as I said, if Epic was ever to make terms more unfavourable, I have no choice to play along or lose access to the market place which is usually where most money from freelancing does come from.
If push comes to shove, I'll
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You can use C# on Godot if you want. GDScript is Python-like (PEP8). You can also just use whatever you want with GDextension.
Unity has a lot of coderot, and no threading support. So it's very "mobile friendly" but games built with it barely use more than two cores regardless of platform they are on.
Unity's biggest down side is also it's biggest upside. The asset store. This results in a lot of "asset flip" games that people just download, change the credits on, and then upload to steam. On one hand, it's v
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Godot has a lot of features and is really quite usable. The C# support is behind their proprietary gdscript. My gut feeling is godot is where Blender was 10 years ago. They've got a good chance to break out into something really great if they can manage to get into a virtuous cycle of adoption and OSS contribution.
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They've got a good chance to break out into something really great if they can manage to get into a virtuous cycle of adoption and OSS contribution.
I agree. The Godot developers have the momentum and mindshare to do for game engines what Blender did for 3D content creation. They just have to grow up a bit and understand that they can't fuck up again like they did with the transition from 3.x to 4.0.
Backward compatibility is not just a good idea, it's a requirement. They hurt their own growth by ditching backward compatibility, and they hopefully understand that they can no longer act like amateurs. They have some incredible talent, but that won't be wo
Re:Whoops. Sounds like a ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Here is something even more interesting [dotesports.com]... The CEO has been slowly unloading shares for the past year, with a chunk of them sold a week before the announcement.
It also shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that, before joining Unity, he was previously the former CEO of... EA.
So to sum it up: The guy leaves his position as CEO of EA, the company best known for it's aggressive monetization strategies, then joins Unity and starts slowly unloading shares before announcing an aggressive monetization plan.
Does this reek of insider trading?
Thing is, that sounds like his source of income... (Score:5, Insightful)
Thing is, remember that most CEOs are paid mostly in stock options. In order to realize that income, they have to sell stocks.
So you could easily have a CEO selling shares just to meet living expenses(for their inflated lifestyle, of course).
In this case, the first transaction they mention is $80k. The year's worth, if all sold at the high value of $40/share would be $2M.
Not exactly all that unreasonable for a CEO's income.
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...Now let us discuss whether it is reasonable for a $2m/year job to exist at all. I assure you, they do not have $2m/year in expertise nor do they put in $2m/year in effort.
Nobody should be paid enough in two years to fund a middle class lifestyle for the remainder of their lifetime - that's absolutely ridiculous when we have people who can't afford to own anything and struggle just to rent.
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If only you had the eloquence and testicular fortitude to convince a board of directors to hire you as a CEO and pay you an insane amount of money..
Oh wait.. its the same lack of confidence that you have with women that keeps you down making sub-200K salary and posting on Slashdot
Carry on.
Re: Thing is, that sounds like his source of incom (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Thing is, that sounds like his source of inco (Score:2)
"I don't like what everyone else thinks of you so they're wrong!"
Keep it up, coward. The more posts you make like that, the less people will take ACs seriously, and that can only be good for them.
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I assure you, they do not have $2m/year in expertise
No they don't have $2m/year in expertise. They have $2m/year in responsibility. If I were in charge of $14bn of market cap and just shy of 8000 employees, I'd consider $2m/year waaaay too low. Fortunately he actually gets paid more than that, more in line with his responsibility.
When you fuck up at work nothing happens. His fuckup can throw 7700 on the job seekers market and wipe off billions from the collective value of your 401k.
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The moneygrabbers don't care ... (Score:3)
... about technology. They couldn't be bothered. They just want cash, all else be damned.
This is the exact reason wonderful pieces of software get castrated, decommissioned, discontinued or bloated and broken by design. Which in turn is the exact reason I basically consider anything mission-critical that isn't FOSS an unprofessional solution.
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That's not interesting. CEOs sell stock all the time. 2000 shares before the announcement is not insider trading, especially considering it is part of a total of 50k shares sold in close to 50 transactions across the leadership team at Unity.
What you're looking at is a pre-announced trade of someone cashing in their income, after all, he earns about as much as I do when you ignore the $8m a year he gets in stocks, and $3m in restricted options.
Does this reek of insider trading?
No. At least not to anyone who understands how CEOs of smaller b
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After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unity's Whitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation. He hoped this would allay fears of "install-bombing," where an angry user could keep deleting and re-installing a game to rack up fees to punish a developer.
They **SAY** that "install bombing" won't happen, but as far as I can tell they have not actually done anything to prevent it.
Charging developers according to how many times players install something can only end one way -- badly. If you don't think this will be abused and turned into a way to attack someone you don't like -- you are living in a fantasy world.
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There is no way in he'll I'm ever again going to hinge my career on a proprietary technology. I won't be getting involved with Unity."
Haven't regretted that decision ever since. QED.
It sounds like you are more desperate to work in a way that will prevent you having to learn or develop in any way. IT is not a good career choice. People using Unity have not hinged their career on a proprietary technology. They use a tool, learning to use another tool is not only easy enough, it would outright be expected of anyone ever touching a PC at any point in any career.
Funny your career history sounds like the career history of Mediatonic, a company that developed Flash games on the internet, and
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... major marketing blunder by Unity. Those who have been on the edge will now definitely switch to Godot, basically the FOSS alternative/successor to Unity.
So would you say, perchance, those developers have been Waiting for Godot?
Re: Whoops. Sounds like a ... (Score:2)
Gah! And I just spent all my mod points!
unity is such a waste of money (Score:1)
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Would that be linked to the fact they apparently keep regularly deprecating a lot of functions? As in, with this mass of employees, they have to find ways to employ them, so they just make new stuff and deprecate what's was already working?
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They don't just do the game engine, they also do content creation tools and app monetization bullshit. Weta and IronSource probably added a couple thousand employees.
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Tech in general in a nutshell.
Lots of bloated 5-8k employee companies doing the work of 100-200 guys.
Tech companies look more like huge Adult day cares than actual companies.
I will not work with Unity... (Score:3)
I don't have a problem with playing games based on Unity (Cities Skylines for example shows that you CAN make a Unity game that doesn't suck) and will continue to do so for now (although if unity adds DRM to it that's too intrusive or annoying, that could change and I could stop purchasing games that use it).
But I will not go anywhere near Unity as a development tool or use it for any projects I might work on.
Re:I will not work with Unity... (Score:4, Interesting)
Unity used to be the go-to for people who were new to game development and didn't have much experience in software design, how to use profiling tools, and quality assurance in general. A very common issue accross all engines that I've seen so far is that newcommers have too many redundant operations in their logic, like running logic on "tick" (that is every frame), essentially re-calculating things that do not change their value until certain events happen all the time. And then also not doing that on a separate thread where only the result is communicated back, but do it on the "main thread", where it competes with all the other, more important logic for CPU cycles, slowing the entire thing down. Not to mention not understanding how to use pooling approaches in order to not make the Garbage Collection turn the experience into a stuttery mess.
Thus a lot of the games that released running on Unity were low quality due to the developers.
Understandable to me, because everyone needs to start somewhere. Likewise with Unreal Engine becoming popular we're also seeing a ton of crappy Unreal Engine games, again because expertise needs to be learned first. The thing with redundancy and memory management pitfalls happens in Unreal Engine as well a lot.
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A very common issue accross all engines that I've seen so far is that newcommers have too many redundant operations in their logic, like running logic on "tick" (that is every frame), essentially re-calculating things that do not change their value until certain events happen all the time. And then also not doing that on a separate thread where only the result is communicated back, but do it on the "main thread", where it competes with all the other, more important logic for CPU cycles, slowing the entire thing down.
But enough about Bethesda.
(Seriously, there is a mod for FO4 that stops rendering during loading screens because that processing continues and actually slows down loading... my GPU fans actually slow down during loading screens now)
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Unity used to be the go-to for people who were new to game development and didn't have much experience in software design
i thought it only recently became a point and click 3d gamemaker type thing, didnt it used to just be an API?
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Cities Skylines for example shows that you CAN make a Unity game that doesn't suck
Bad example. Cities Skylines is a woefully poorly optimised game with very average visuals. Though that is down to how they used Unity rather than a function Unity itself but the point is the game engine doesn't determine if a game is fun or not, it determines how it runs, how much effort it takes to make and how it looks.
Some more DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
The only way to track "installations" is to embed more DRM in the binaries that calls home somewhere. And the only way to try to track "reinstallation" is to fingerprint user's computer and send that back home too. Now, how do you determine if a game "earned" enough revenue? Either you don't, or you get what would be very interesting tracking between the engine, the developer/publisher and the users (games are not sold at one price everywhere, sometimes not sold at all, etc.)
The initial announcement was so out of touch I'm convinced it was what Unity wanted to do. The later clarification are still so out of touch I can't believe anyone in any PR team allowed that to come out.
Only charging for initial installation? (Score:5, Insightful)
So how do they think they're going to accomplish that?
Are they going to stick cookie crumbs on my computer when I install a Unity game? I understand the average executive is completely unable to remove any file on their computer that isn't deleted by the uninstall utility, but if I wanted to install-bomb, needing to clear out some \appdata\ or a few registry keys isn't going to stop me.
Are they going off the SID? SIDs are pretty simple to change in a VM. Maybe not trivial to change when you factor in the hassle of setting up the VM and going through the re-init each time you clear the previous SID, but remember, in 2014 gamers got so pissed off with payola reviews they managed to get themselves condemned by the United Nations. Never underestimate the sustained pettiness of gamers.
Going off of the SID would also put an end to Linux support. /etc/machine-id, but that's trivially changed. Yeah, Linux support is niche, but one of the appeals of Unity is that the dev can target whatever niche they like. And of course, no Linux support means sketchier SteamOS support (helloooooo, Proton!).
I mean, what do they do then? Force all Unity games to use user accounts, with limited unique machine installs per user account? DRM like that is why Steam took off in the first place. Casuals like the simplicity of "my games follow my Steam Account", and good luck explaining to casuals how all of a sudden 50% of their game library has to be chained to one or two computers... forever. It's one thing when Ubisoft does it, they're a big company and make that decision for themselves - but to force it on all Unity devs would be pretty catastrophic.
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Seems like a flawed plan to me (Score:4, Insightful)
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For comparison (Score:2)
IIRC, the previous arrangement was "Unity is free until you hit either $100k annual revenue."
The biggest problem (Score:1)
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How the fuck did so many professional developers agree to a fee structure which could be changed down the line? Games have sell through, so you're putting your head in a noose.
As usual, gamedevs are lazy ... too lazy to read a contract. How the hell did no one notice until Unity pulled the noose tight?
They're taking a 20% cut (Score:2)
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There are a bunch of open source game engines. Most of them are oriented toward 2d games, but there's also stuff like Godot and Urho that are more general. The Quake 3 engine is open source. The Source engine is available for no charge (but the associated tools cost money).
So there's no reason to pay that much.
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So, if I want to sink a competitor... (Score:2)
Just buy their game and install/uninstall it a few million times?
Neat, hopefully something new (Score:2)
But then again, that would require devs to actually do something beside turning everything into HTML/CSS/JS and covering the results with ads.
Pirates and Charity (Score:3)
Unity also claimed that pirates would be somehow "Detected" using their "Ad Service Fraud detection algorithms" which is complete bullshit. Simple logic and some knowledge of how applications work, and specifically game engines like Unity, there is no connection to tell the game engine phoning home that in install is a pirate copy. Worse, is the claim that "charity bundled games would be excluded" - utter nonsense. Nothing in the game would tell the engine if it was purchased on itch.io or as part of a HumbleBundle. It's the same binaries.
Even worse... they want to charge Unity-based games already published years ago under the same fee schedule. That is blatantly illegal.
John Riccitiello is up to his old tricks again, the same tricks that wrecked Electronic Arts, and the wrecking ball is already swinging on Unity.
Half their customers are gone, and the other half just haven't heard about the new price plans yet.
Pretty hefty fee (Score:1)
From the summary, it notes that game makers will only have to pay if they cross a threshold of making $200,000...
That sounds like a lot, but to make $200k a game might have say a million downloads, with some paying customers to get them to 200k. So the payment to Unity in that scenario would $0.20 * 1 million - or $200,000!!! So the engine fee would potentially eat up the entire profit for a game studio...
If they would alter to make that only paying Unity per paying customer, it would start to sound more