They’re still scumbags though
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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 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.
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.
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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.
When someone shows you who they are, believe them.
Fuck Unity.
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.
So its still there. Just only for more succesful games… lol
What a fucking joke
“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
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.
It still doesn’t return the broken trust or conformation that the people running Unity are insane, but this is a good move and devs don’t need to alarmingly port their current projects to other engines.
I want to start with this: I am sorry.
Translation: damn, we really didn’t get away with this.
The Runtime Fee policy will only apply beginning with the next LTS version of Unity shipping in 2024 and beyond.
We will make sure that you can stay on the terms applicable for the version of Unity editor you are using
Good. This is how it should’ve been from the start. If they bake that into the license I think people will be comfortable staying on Unity for the time being.
For games that are subject to the runtime fee, we are giving you a choice of either a 2.5% revenue share or the calculated amount based on the number of new people engaging with your game each month. Both of these numbers are self-reported from data you already have available. You will always be billed the lesser amount.
Also good. It should’ve been revshare from the start. I still don’t understand how they would trust self-reported numbers but we’ll see.
These are good changes. The damage isn’t undone but at least current Unity devs won’t be thrown under the bus. I still think they should switch to something open source in the future but they get a lot more time to decide now.
Yep, this is good as in won’t rail someone already developing or have developed something on Unity, but it has a lot of “and I would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you meddlesome kids!” energy to it.
I still don’t understand how they would trust self-reported numbers but we’ll see.
Because this was primarily about mobile. And because they can sanity check by looking at home many “installs” are reported by Apple and Google. I’m convinced that’s half the reason why they did the weird move of basing this on installs and not purchases (the other half or so being that they needed some way they can get more money from the bajillion free-to-play mobile games out there that Unity dominates)
And they can sanity check SOME numbers being reported by Steam/Sony/etc though console and PC matter less to them.
Also - how are they currently getting metrics for game revenue that they’d bill off of? Seems like a lot of self-reporting would be happening there too? And enforced with contracts, etc.
I still don’t understand how they would trust self-reported numbers but we’ll see.
This is just how this stuff works. Unity already operates with some self-reporting reliance (although afaik they don’t even require a report on the personal license), since the different tiers have a maximum revenue cap before you must upgrade. Software audits are a thing, and trying to skirt them by lying on your numbers is an easy way to get fined or sued.
Every single thing they wrote there is anchored on “trust us” and trusting them is what we used to do until they broke that trust, massivelly so.
So far they have done zero to restore the trust: their entire reaction has been to pull back on the face of the massive pushback and there is not even genuine remorse at having tried it - they purelly adjusted their demands in response to the reaction, rather than show true regret, make amends and make sure people have at least some way of trusting it won’t happen again.
It’s like the bully that’s about to punch the little kid on the face for his lunch money and a teacher appears so has to stop. He didn’t “learn his lesson” and nothing has happenned to convince him to “never do it again”, so he’s just going to try it again at an occasion when it looks more likely to succeed.
As others pointed out, the current CEO and board at Unity must go and a legally ironclad guarantee they can’t try this again needs to be put in place before any serious game developers are willing to risk using Unity again.
I want to start with this: I am sorry.
