Unity To Roll Back Some Key Aspects of Runtime Fee Policy (ign.com) 25
Unity has announced some key changes to its widely panned Runtime Fee policy, which spawned both derision and confusion from developers and the gaming community at large when it was unveiled earlier this month. From a report: It's easing up on some big aspects of the previously announced charges, removing the fee from the Unity Personal tier entirely, although it still remains in a revised form on the Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise tiers. In short, as originally announced, starting on Jan. 1, 2024, Unity would start charging developers a small fee every time someone downloads a game built on Unity's game engine after a certain threshold for minimum revenue and install count.
The different tiers of Unity plans - Unity Personal/Unity Plus, Unity Pro, and Unity Enterprise - had different thresholds and, per the original announcement, smaller developers using Unity Personal/Unity Plus would have to pay Unity $0.20 per install once their game passes $200,000 in revenue over the last 12 months and 200,000 life-to-date installs. Unity announced today, however, that there will be no Runtime Fee on games built on Unity Personal, which will remain free. They will also be increasing financial theshold of Unity Personal from $100,000 to $200,000 and will remove the requirement to use the Made with Unity splash screen.
The different tiers of Unity plans - Unity Personal/Unity Plus, Unity Pro, and Unity Enterprise - had different thresholds and, per the original announcement, smaller developers using Unity Personal/Unity Plus would have to pay Unity $0.20 per install once their game passes $200,000 in revenue over the last 12 months and 200,000 life-to-date installs. Unity announced today, however, that there will be no Runtime Fee on games built on Unity Personal, which will remain free. They will also be increasing financial theshold of Unity Personal from $100,000 to $200,000 and will remove the requirement to use the Made with Unity splash screen.
Use Godot. (Score:4, Informative)
It's free.
So stupid (Score:3)
Charging for an installation makes no sense because it has no correlation to the sales. A user might install it only once or 20 times even if they bought it once. It depends if their computer fails, or if they delete the game to free storage and want to reinstall it later. It makes no sense whatsoever and is purely motivated by greed.
If there was actually a metric they needed to address with funding, they would charge 20 cents per unit of that metric. But they don't have an expense they need to cover, just greed, so they picked something random like per install.
will MS and sony pay up as part of game pass? (Score:2)
will MS and sony pay up as part of game pass? and what happens if they don't pay the bill?
also what about other issues like
contract law issues with an change like this?
GDPR issues?
how they count installs issues?
will this force some must be online to play and unity servers must be up to play?
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will MS and sony pay up as part of game pass? and what happens if they don't pay the bill?
This is the part where we break out the popcorn and watch what happens.
contract law issues with an change like this? GDPR issues? how they count installs issues? will this force some must be online to play and unity servers must be up to play?
All of these fell under "Trust us, bro" way of doing things. Why should developers be worried? :P
Will the outrage matter? (Score:3)
They're absolutely destroying the good will of the community. But... each company making use of it will have to do the calculus for themselves.
How much to make the switch? Could be quite a lot - especially since the retroactive nature of these terms make already released products problematic. Companies may have to reopen previously "finished" games, or pay the cost. Some devs are already threatening to release scripted transition tools that will ease the cost... but it's still a cost.
But... Unity may be sabotaging their future in pursuit of immediate profit. The calculation has changed when considering what tools to use when launching a new effort. They may make themselves irrelevant in the near term. I guess it all comes down to whether the customer feels that the the perceived value minus their internal anger is greater than the cost of going elsewhere.
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The retroactive portion was the most troubling bit, because it was a violation of their own TOS. With these new adjustments, the new fees only apply starting with the next LTS release of the engine, so it's no longer retroactive. That makes the math far easier, since it's only for new projects.
~D
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A while back they added a clause to the TOS saying they could add fees at a later date.
Before they started making the questionable TOS changes, they got rid of the GitHub repository that stored the license. It's no longer easy to figure out exactly when they made the change. But they were planning this for a while and prepping for it.
Re: (Score:3)
Step 1: Build a mountain of good will
Step 2: Reduce mountain to rubble
Step 3: Squeeze the blood out of all the stones you've just created
Step 4: ???
Step 5: Profit!
The problem with this method is that, as you've noted, you're no longer dealing with a mountainous community of good willed enthusiasts, but instead are dealing stone by stone, and stones tend to go where they want.
I should think it would have been obvious that it was best to keep the mountain and exercise greater care. I hope the stockholders sue
Re: (Score:2)
"I hope the stockholders sue these people for incompetence."
Heh.
The share price was north of $160/share 2 years ago, and had steady support above $100. Then it fell apart for a variety of reasons (nothing to do with the current debacle -- I'd say it is mostly attributed to Apple policy changes that impacted unity advertising revenue from mobile apps built with unity) and it's been between between 30 and 45 for the last year or so.
Unity lost BILLIONS of 'market cap'; and is under massive pressure to find new
New Name (Score:2)
Their CEO is ex-EA from the Bad Times (Score:4, Interesting)
Once again an incompetent CEO who blundered his way into failing up has basically destroyed an entire company and will walk away with a gold parachute smelling like roses because his class takes care of their own.
Meanwhile if any of us cost the company 1/1,000,000 what he just did we'd be out on our asses without so much as unemployment and a black market on our CV.
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The buying spree is too result to have results. That was driven by the IPO. Lots of companies take advantage of the high stock price after and IPO and buy other companies with stock.
Unity was never profitable and always needed to make more money. They hope that buying spree will pay off in the long run, but with or without that spree, they were going to need more short term revenue.
A fee increase was always always inevitable, they just went about it pretty much the worst possible way.
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Once again an incompetent CEO
I mean their Board of Directors is culpable as well in this. Roelof Botha, from ye olde days of PayPal. Musk's brotanium from Sequoia Capital who is actually the guy who toss his hat in for the Twitter loan to Musk. Shlomo Dovrat perhaps Israel's most out of touch with everyday man and Viola Ventures fame. And Barry "I made AOL famous" Schuler.
Reading the Board is a list of "egos and pushovers" which I wouldn't be one bit surprised if Riccitiello made lofty promises of mucho dinero and found those who wo
To explain why Unity did that (Score:3)
3 words: Free to play.
How much money does Unity get from games that are F2P and monetize the living daylight out of people with in-game purchases? Right. Zero. Because the game is sold at 0 bucks.
Once you realize that, and once you realize that Unity is (not only for this reason) the go-to platform to build your f2p money gouger on, be it for PC or cellphone, you notice that they want a piece of that cake. And if you ask me, they're kinda entitled to it, too, after all, when you look at the average f2p atrocity, I have to say that I'd wager that Unity pulls about 99% of the weight of that garbage.
From that point of view, the move was pretty sensible. What they did not take into account, obviously, was that this means that the monetization is out of whack for games that are actually sold.
And no, I don't have a solution for them. But I can see where they are coming from.
Re: (Score:1)
There is no argument that Unity does or does not need to find a practical monetization method.
But this wasn't it.
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you notice that they want a piece of that cake
Yeah, and this was perhaps the dumbest way to go about it. Lots of different ways they could have changed the license, they picked the path of stupidity.
And if you ask me, they're kinda entitled to it, too
I got no problem with them getting a fair share. They can change the license to be a percentage off of IAP if your F2P involves that. Them doing on install volume was perhaps the dumbest way to go about that. Because install affects everyone, even those putting out games sans IAP. The "money gougers" as you so put it, yeah, they're a problem to be addr
Re: (Score:2)
So you have a solution to get accurate IAP numbers? Because you sure don't suggest that Unity should trust F2P makers to be honest when reporting their IAPs.
I wouldn't trust a F2P maker with anything. I'd thrust them, and you can certainly imagine where and with what force, but trust? Sure as all hell not.
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If their methodologies are odious enough, they become the former go-to platform.
I watched Cisco lose a shit ton of government business by trying to force licensing servers for their IOS on the DoD. Oracle, same deal. Agencies were willing to devote big dollars to recoding their apps to use SQL Server, of all things, to avoid Oracle BS. VMware is in the same boat at this point.
I submit all the above firms were better off with the USG using their shit, regardless if they were getting every single licensing
NOPE (Score:2)
I don't often use sports metaphors (Score:1)
... but it's hard not to think of the phrases "unforced error" and "own goal" here.
You lazy f*ckers can't read! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's fine and all... but for how long? It's already known that they want to charge everyone, so who's to say they won't just roll it out in smaller increments?
Where they want to take Unity has been revealed so you're better off jumping ship now to make the transition easier.
It's too late. (Score:2)
Stabbing game devs with a nine inch blade and then pulling it six inches back out doesn't make everything all better. The only way Unity is going to recover from this is to fire some executives, eliminate this runtime fee crap and then put out a major upgrade.
This is not going to fly because you have shown people your true colors and it is not a pretty sight.