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.
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.
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 behavior, etc. They maintain a large compatibility for a huge and growing list of varying hardware devices, phones, consoles, 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 their C# to native 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 remotely basic and usable, 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.
Ah, the ol [trust thermocline] (https://web.archive.org/web/20230403081519/https://twitter.com/garius/status/1588115310124539904)
Give it two weeks, no one will care anymore
If they open source their engine then at least you wouldn’t need to trust them.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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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.
“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”
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.
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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.
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.
Lol, imagine grabbing your customer’s head, blasting a massive fart in their face, and then trying to say, “Just kidding! Just kidding!” when they get pissed off and leave.
Unity can get fugged.
Fuck that.
These are a lot more reasonable terms, but remember that the people who designed the outrageous policy is still very much in charge at that company. They’ll keep pushing to see what they can get away with, they just fucked up by pushing too much at once instead of building up to it.
Or push too much so when they “backtrack” they still get some of what they wanted.
