This is 100% targeted at bleeding indie game developers dry in hopes of taking some of that sweet viral cash from devs like the one who made Vampire Survivors. They see that indie devs are charging $3-5 for their games, and so they aren’t hitting the $200k threshold unless they go viral, so Unity is charging by install, not just by total revenue. I hope that the ESA or other interested groups take legal action against this retroactive greed.
After seeing the way WotC handled DnD and MtG, and the way Musk has been dragging Twitter through the shit, I really believe that shareholders are trying to take what they can while they can and peace out. No one is looking at the long term anymore. Everyone just wants theirs, fuck everything else.
As someone who’s using Godot and giting gud at it, I hope you enjoy it. For programming, you can go with either its GDScript (python) or C#, so Unity veterans shouldn’t have much trouble.
More enshitification. This is the kind of stuff I’ve grown to expect from tech companies. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are bleeding money due to interest rates and they need any way possible to stay afloat.
They haven’t been profitable for, like, past half a decade or so. Each year brings bigger and bigger losses.
Seeing how the CEO sold 50k shares over the last year, and another 2k not long ago, I can see it being the last hail mary to extract as much money as possible and sell the company to Microsoft/Apple/Facebook/Whoever is willing to buy
depends on your platform and your level of experience. Both unreal and godot have steep learning curves depending on where you come from. GDevelop is very accessible but also caps out quite fast. Great for making prototypes and getting simple games out there but depending on your level of ambition you will probably outgrow it sooner or later.
Godot, definitely. Or GDevelop, if you want an experience akin to Construct3 and an end product that’s entirely javascript+html, but with a FOSS alternative
I think they have the web play question in their FAQ somewhere and it does include as a download. There’s no real way to know how their telemetry is calculating this though.
A: Games on all platforms are eligible for the fee but will only incur costs if both the install and revenue thresholds are crossed. Installs - which involves initialization of the runtime on a client device - are counted on all platforms the same way (WebGL and streaming included
I’m pretty sure that even if the license agreement does have such language that it won’t uphold in court. And there are enough big companies using Unity for this to go to court if they try to come to collect.
I mean seriously, if that would be legally possible, nothing would prevent them from uping the charge to $10, $20 or even $100 per installation, applied retroactively.
I sure feel glad to never have gotten into developing with it. When I saw that a blank project generated a ~231MB executable back in 4.1 or so, I simply ditched it.
Licenses that allow retroactive changes are terrible for the end user, fuck up the company’s image and might give a significant boost to competition. Hasbro trying to pull that shit with DnD earlier this year comes to mind.
Our terms of service provide that Unity may add or change fees at any time. We are providing more than three months advance notice of the Unity Runtime Fee before it goes into effect. Consent is not required for additional fees to take effect, and the only version of our terms is the most current version; you simply cannot choose to comply with a prior version. Further, our terms are governed by California law, notwithstanding the country of the customer.
Yup lol.
What’s funny and sad is that about 3 years ago on r/godot, I had an argument with a Unity fanboy over this exact thing. He was demanding someone give him a reason that Godot should exist, when, in his humble opinion, Unity did everything and did it better.
My take was that you don’t actually own your Unity-made game. You might own the assets and trademark, but as long as you’re licensing the engine, you are subject to the whims of Unity.
Can you name some? Honest question, I don’t know either Unity or Unreal in depth, I’m just aware that Godot still struggles with performance in the 3D department
This is a bit old now, but has a good break down of stuff that’s missing for large games. Godot 4 works well for smaller 3D games just fine, it just doesn’t do stuff like level streaming. Also it’s missing a landscape tool. (Though there is a third party one, not sure if it was ported to Godot 4 yet or not)
thank God for their inconvenient way of installing and using of the engine itself, if I didn’t have a hard time back then I wouldn’t have switched to Godot 🙏🙏🙏
So this will apply to games that have already been distributed on stores as well? How the fuck is such a change in the terms even legal?
I guess this will mostly impact F2P mobile devs since they will lose most money from installs. The good news is that Godot is more than capable for those types of games.
Quake world engine. Huh, wasn’t aware of that one! Speaking of which, you can do all sorts of silly stuff with Doom sourceports, so that’s also a valid alternative.
I have a friend who has been moderately successful in the game creation space and he is saying he wants to just give up at this point because of this change.
I can’t even blame him. I would too. This is essentially a situation where the only option is going to be a rewrite from the ground up in a new language and new engine.
If I was an indie game dev I’d be questioning my future right now too.
It’s probably still going to take some projects with it. If you’ve sunk hundreds or even thousands of manhours into a project you can’t just… do it again, or at least not always. Especially not if you’ve invested money as well as time, which is probably the case for most indie projects that aren’t literal one-person shows.
I know and thank goodness for that… but there will be projects that simply won’t be able to afford to move to entirely different engines. It’s a lot of work that might have to be redone.
I’m in the middle of a project right now that’s going to be released on an out-of-date engine because the newest versions broke backward compatibility and I’m too far along to port everything. If I had to change engines entirely at this point I’d have to cancel the entire project.
… not really, and for what a few years? Indie devs don’t have a lot of money, and there is a huge discrepancy between unity and other engines. They work in fundamentally different ways.
There are some pretty big games built in unity, the money on the table is coming from them, (assuming reasonable licensing terms) not the small indie games.
I may be entirely off the mark, as I don’t work in that part of the industry. But I’ve messed around with unity and it’s not particularly unique compared to any other engine it competes with in my experience, particularly when it comes to actual runtime. Assets will need conversion and sure, the API shim will probably give a performance hit, but there’s no reason I can see that unity is fundamentally different.
I’m sure someone will try, but it seems nearly impossible to do this in a way that’s actually useful. Most game engines are going to have fundamental differences that won’t easily map to the unity way of doing things
I’m not a game engineer, so someone else who’s actually in that segment of the industry can probably give more answers, but Godot and Bevy seem to be making some waves.
And if they’re not enough for what a dev needs, given these license changes, I don’t really understand why someone wouldn’t pick unreal or something much more comprehensive over unity now.
Correct me if I’m off the mark, but unity always seemed like what you’d go for if you wanted something like unreal, but (completely understandably) didn’t want to pay the fees associated with it
Godot has a dedicated workflow for 2D games, so I’d rather make one of those color sorting puzzle games that’s all people play on mobile these days in Godot than Unity or Unreal.
There’s unreal, Godot, and a couple others I can’t think of off the top of my head. They’re not as widely used because they lack the feature set of unreal and unity, but they’re out there.
That’s pretty much what I thought. Unity is so big because it offers a ton of features with a pretty permissive license. There’s not something comparable except unreal, which has an even worse licensing situation
Unity got popular because it was simpler than unreal, and way more feature complete than Godot.
Was… these days unreal is easier to work with, and Godot is much more capable. So it’s mostly inertia at this point. And now everyone is going to take a real hard look at the alternatives.
Rule 4: get fucked by better and cheaper products (Unreal/Godot)
Rule 5: make an obituary presentation on what went wrong (hint: it’s always management)
Unreal engine will probably do the same shit than Unity, Unreal engine might be opensource (not FOSS), I think there’s the same clauses about production royalties.
I think Godot will not win simply because Unreal is so much better for 3D games what most comercial games use. I think Godot will become the indie favourite for 2D. Where it goes from there I’m not sure. Is the revenue sharing not enough to carry the game engine? Unreal/Epic is a special case. But is Unity mismanaged so hard? It still has huge market share.
Every copy has to be hand made by routing bits around the copper highway ar ludicrous speeds, and rearrange them manually to form what is called “a game”.
So if Microsoft published a Unity developed game on Windows, Microsoft could easily charge a $0.20 free to the unity team for installing the Unity Runtime on their OS.
Not being completely serious there. Honestly thought, did the CEO not realize if they start doing this, what’s to stop another company from doing that to them. Things like mp3, where developers need to pay a license for, could then be charged in a similar fashion for each install.
Oh yeah… I can’t see this being weaponed by the bad side of the consumers.
Game comes out, it does something stupid or just “woke” and pisses people off. They attack the dev by installing more copies. Company goes bankrupt. Dickhead gamers win.
So basically they’re explicitly condoning it. That’s not just bad, but even worse that they’re doubling down that a delete+reinstall will charge the dev twice.
This will end a lot of indie projects and they’ve basically destroyed their good standing in indie dev circles.
Hard to chuck unity in the bin when you don’t use unity.
We’re lucky there are enough other engines on the market at the moment, but eventually someone will need to spearhead a FOSS engine with blackjack and hookers.
So once a game stops selling it had better hope its player base dries up and stops reinstalling it? The way that is phrased makes it sound like you could net lose money over the long term if sales decline and people keep reinstalling it
That clarification makes it even worse, this is obviously an attempt to push free to play or indie games out the window while making major bank.
The fraud detection will not help at all to prevent abuse especially in cases like steam family sharing where other “users” won’t have to pay to install the game!
There’s literally no reason to charge per game install here, the only possible reason is greed
Also, what counts as an install? Ive seen many unity based games that don’t have an installer and just run standalone? Would a standalone game count as already installed? Is it a first run thing in that case? Honestly this, and the additional clarification raises more questions than it answers?
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This is 100% targeted at bleeding indie game developers dry in hopes of taking some of that sweet viral cash from devs like the one who made Vampire Survivors. They see that indie devs are charging $3-5 for their games, and so they aren’t hitting the $200k threshold unless they go viral, so Unity is charging by install, not just by total revenue. I hope that the ESA or other interested groups take legal action against this retroactive greed.
Has to be a smarter way than this. This is just going to make devs go back to activation limits.
After seeing the way WotC handled DnD and MtG, and the way Musk has been dragging Twitter through the shit, I really believe that shareholders are trying to take what they can while they can and peace out. No one is looking at the long term anymore. Everyone just wants theirs, fuck everything else.
It feels like no one has been looking at the long term for ages now, and this is just the natural conclusion
And that’s why we need more than one standard
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Play an AAA game in the past… 10,000 years?
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It kinda… does
Depends if you mean generally considered by the public, or specific to an organization that definds standards.
I think we both know he meant the former, even though you replied to him like he was saying the latter. AKA, “Ackshully…”
Well, guess it’s time to learn Godot.
As someone who’s using Godot and giting gud at it, I hope you enjoy it. For programming, you can go with either its GDScript (python) or C#, so Unity veterans shouldn’t have much trouble.
That’s great to hear. C# has grown on me so much lately! It’s like TypeScript but not sucky.
I think GFScript is it’s own language, but looks definitely inspired by Python
More enshitification. This is the kind of stuff I’ve grown to expect from tech companies. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are bleeding money due to interest rates and they need any way possible to stay afloat.
They haven’t been profitable for, like, past half a decade or so. Each year brings bigger and bigger losses.
Seeing how the CEO sold 50k shares over the last year, and another 2k not long ago, I can see it being the last hail mary to extract as much money as possible and sell the company to Microsoft/Apple/Facebook/Whoever is willing to buy
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That’s the definition of capitalism
line go up or die
Man I was just getting into game development and learning Unity.
I guess it’s time to pivot into Unreal or Godot or something.
Anybody have recommendations?
Unreal has similar business model, so Godot.
depends on your platform and your level of experience. Both unreal and godot have steep learning curves depending on where you come from. GDevelop is very accessible but also caps out quite fast. Great for making prototypes and getting simple games out there but depending on your level of ambition you will probably outgrow it sooner or later.
Godot, definitely. Or GDevelop, if you want an experience akin to Construct3 and an end product that’s entirely javascript+html, but with a FOSS alternative
So, if you get 200k lifetime installs but don’t get the 200k revenue a year, you don’t have to pay it?
OOOHOOOOO BOY, now, that’s going to hurt a fair amount of people!
Also, what about web play? I guess that’ll only count towards revenue, but not towards downloads?
I think they have the web play question in their FAQ somewhere and it does include as a download. There’s no real way to know how their telemetry is calculating this though.
https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/
Wow… I expect that WebGL telemetry to be less reliable than from an installed app. “No cookies found, guess this is a brand new download, chaps!”
If their licencing agreement permits retroactive changes like this, that is reason enough to gtfo
I’m pretty sure that even if the license agreement does have such language that it won’t uphold in court. And there are enough big companies using Unity for this to go to court if they try to come to collect.
I mean seriously, if that would be legally possible, nothing would prevent them from uping the charge to $10, $20 or even $100 per installation, applied retroactively.
I sure feel glad to never have gotten into developing with it. When I saw that a blank project generated a ~231MB executable back in 4.1 or so, I simply ditched it.
Licenses that allow retroactive changes are terrible for the end user, fuck up the company’s image and might give a significant boost to competition. Hasbro trying to pull that shit with DnD earlier this year comes to mind.
Yup lol.
What’s funny and sad is that about 3 years ago on r/godot, I had an argument with a Unity fanboy over this exact thing. He was demanding someone give him a reason that Godot should exist, when, in his humble opinion, Unity did everything and did it better.
My take was that you don’t actually own your Unity-made game. You might own the assets and trademark, but as long as you’re licensing the engine, you are subject to the whims of Unity.
Of course that was theoretical, until today.
You guys should check out Stride if you are looking for another C# based engine. It’s open source, but pretty rough around the edges right now.
Or, go for Godot for something more mature.
What about Open 3D Engine? Basically an updated version of Lumberyard. https://o3de.org/
I’d imagine Unity user would most likely be looking for a C# based engine instead of a C++ or Python based one, and O3DE doesn’t support C#.
Don’t know that I’d call Godot mature exactly. It’s still missing a lot of major features that both Unity and Unreal have.
Can you name some? Honest question, I don’t know either Unity or Unreal in depth, I’m just aware that Godot still struggles with performance in the 3D department
This is a bit old now, but has a good break down of stuff that’s missing for large games. Godot 4 works well for smaller 3D games just fine, it just doesn’t do stuff like level streaming. Also it’s missing a landscape tool. (Though there is a third party one, not sure if it was ported to Godot 4 yet or not)
https://godotengine.org/article/whats-missing-in-godot-for-aaa/
thank God for their inconvenient way of installing and using of the engine itself, if I didn’t have a hard time back then I wouldn’t have switched to Godot 🙏🙏🙏
firing up godot felt nice, no logins or other bullshit
So this will apply to games that have already been distributed on stores as well? How the fuck is such a change in the terms even legal?
I guess this will mostly impact F2P mobile devs since they will lose most money from installs. The good news is that Godot is more than capable for those types of games.
“F2P game developers are the biggest fucking idiots” - Unity CEO, c. 2022: https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/18/23269218/unity-ceo-john-riccitiello-apology-game-developers-fucking-idiots-ironsource-merger
Never forget
I not only expect lawsuits out the ass, but tech lobbyists are likely going to fight against it since basically every game uses Unity now.
Switch to Godot or FTEQW, screw Unity.
Quake world engine. Huh, wasn’t aware of that one! Speaking of which, you can do all sorts of silly stuff with Doom sourceports, so that’s also a valid alternative.
This might kill entire indie projects.
I think we need to kill everything so this is a good start. Snake blisken LA
Indies are the ones who deserve to die the least.
I have a friend who has been moderately successful in the game creation space and he is saying he wants to just give up at this point because of this change.
I can’t even blame him. I would too. This is essentially a situation where the only option is going to be a rewrite from the ground up in a new language and new engine.
If I was an indie game dev I’d be questioning my future right now too.
There’s other engines, this will kill unity
It’s probably still going to take some projects with it. If you’ve sunk hundreds or even thousands of manhours into a project you can’t just… do it again, or at least not always. Especially not if you’ve invested money as well as time, which is probably the case for most indie projects that aren’t literal one-person shows.
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I know and thank goodness for that… but there will be projects that simply won’t be able to afford to move to entirely different engines. It’s a lot of work that might have to be redone.
I’m in the middle of a project right now that’s going to be released on an out-of-date engine because the newest versions broke backward compatibility and I’m too far along to port everything. If I had to change engines entirely at this point I’d have to cancel the entire project.
There’s going to be a lot of money on the table for another engine that can build a unity migration or abstraction tool
I don’t see that being left on the table for long
… not really, and for what a few years? Indie devs don’t have a lot of money, and there is a huge discrepancy between unity and other engines. They work in fundamentally different ways.
There are some pretty big games built in unity, the money on the table is coming from them, (assuming reasonable licensing terms) not the small indie games.
I may be entirely off the mark, as I don’t work in that part of the industry. But I’ve messed around with unity and it’s not particularly unique compared to any other engine it competes with in my experience, particularly when it comes to actual runtime. Assets will need conversion and sure, the API shim will probably give a performance hit, but there’s no reason I can see that unity is fundamentally different.
I’m sure someone will try, but it seems nearly impossible to do this in a way that’s actually useful. Most game engines are going to have fundamental differences that won’t easily map to the unity way of doing things
Art assets, sound effects, storylines, that sort of thing transfers pretty easily.
Rigging, animations, scripting, physics…these pretty much don’t and would have to be rewritten from scratch.
Honest question though, what other small engines have the support and features of unity while also having the permissive licensing they used to have?
At least when I was looking into engines unreal and unity really stood out as the only useable free engines.
I’m not a game engineer, so someone else who’s actually in that segment of the industry can probably give more answers, but Godot and Bevy seem to be making some waves.
And if they’re not enough for what a dev needs, given these license changes, I don’t really understand why someone wouldn’t pick unreal or something much more comprehensive over unity now.
Correct me if I’m off the mark, but unity always seemed like what you’d go for if you wanted something like unreal, but (completely understandably) didn’t want to pay the fees associated with it
I only prefer unity for 2 reasons, 1. I have assets that I’ve purchased. 2 I like c#.
It depends on the game you’re making.
Godot has a dedicated workflow for 2D games, so I’d rather make one of those color sorting puzzle games that’s all people play on mobile these days in Godot than Unity or Unreal.
There’s unreal, Godot, and a couple others I can’t think of off the top of my head. They’re not as widely used because they lack the feature set of unreal and unity, but they’re out there.
That’s pretty much what I thought. Unity is so big because it offers a ton of features with a pretty permissive license. There’s not something comparable except unreal, which has an even worse licensing situation
Unity got popular because it was simpler than unreal, and way more feature complete than Godot.
Was… these days unreal is easier to work with, and Godot is much more capable. So it’s mostly inertia at this point. And now everyone is going to take a real hard look at the alternatives.
I dunno if Epic’s licensing is worse. At least it’s a cut of revenue and not charging per install.
Not to mention that Epic gives sweetheart deals to indies periodically. They make their money from Fortnite, not the engine.
The thing about Unreal is that you can always negotiate with Epic Games. And if they like your project, they can even invest or provide tech support.
True, but you also have to deal with Epic, which is a downside for many. It’s a great engine without a doubt, but it does come with its downsides too
This will kill new development on the engine and older games without who have a limited number of users.
The ones halfway or more through development to recently launched will have to move to subscriber model or a shit-ton of ads.
In the next 3-5 years however their profits will likely be up. So some larger company will likely buy them out.
rule 1: get user by giving free candy rule 2: let’s them build their product, workflow on your tools rule 3: harvest.
Rule 4: get fucked by better and cheaper products (Unreal/Godot)
Rule 5: make an obituary presentation on what went wrong (hint: it’s always management)
Unreal engine will probably do the same shit than Unity, Unreal engine might be opensource (not FOSS), I think there’s the same clauses about production royalties.
Even if Godot wins, there’s a cost to move.
I think Godot will not win simply because Unreal is so much better for 3D games what most comercial games use. I think Godot will become the indie favourite for 2D. Where it goes from there I’m not sure. Is the revenue sharing not enough to carry the game engine? Unreal/Epic is a special case. But is Unity mismanaged so hard? It still has huge market share.
It is management
CEO or whatever used to be head of EA
Rule 6: Unreal does the same thing, everyone switches to Godot 😂
Wow that is such a bad idea… I… I’m honestly speechless. Who thought if that? I mean…
Ok and??
Like… wow, that’s what the engine is! Fucken doinks.
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Every copy costs them money. Don’t you know how digital copies work?!
Every copy has to be hand made by routing bits around the copper highway ar ludicrous speeds, and rearrange them manually to form what is called “a game”.
Guys they’re artists. They deserve to be paid every time you play any game. You wouldn’t steal a car
starts copies of GTA on a thousand computers
So if Microsoft published a Unity developed game on Windows, Microsoft could easily charge a $0.20 free to the unity team for installing the Unity Runtime on their OS.
Not being completely serious there. Honestly thought, did the CEO not realize if they start doing this, what’s to stop another company from doing that to them. Things like mp3, where developers need to pay a license for, could then be charged in a similar fashion for each install.
Oh yeah… I can’t see this being weaponed by the bad side of the consumers.
Game comes out, it does something stupid or just “woke” and pisses people off. They attack the dev by installing more copies. Company goes bankrupt. Dickhead gamers win.
Regarding this being abused by bad actors:
- @stephentotilo
So basically they’re explicitly condoning it. That’s not just bad, but even worse that they’re doubling down that a delete+reinstall will charge the dev twice.
This will end a lot of indie projects and they’ve basically destroyed their good standing in indie dev circles.
It’s time to chuck unity in the bin. If not Godot, go for unreal… though I would check their requirements beforehand first.
Hard to chuck unity in the bin when you don’t use unity.
We’re lucky there are enough other engines on the market at the moment, but eventually someone will need to spearhead a FOSS engine with blackjack and hookers.
Godot is a FOSS engine.
Oh, fantastic. Good to know, thanks!
But does it have the blackjack and hookers? 🤔
I’d make my own branch with BJ and hookers, but both GCC and Clang failed to compile :(
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I’m sure somebody somewhere has made both of those games in Godot. Lol
So once a game stops selling it had better hope its player base dries up and stops reinstalling it? The way that is phrased makes it sound like you could net lose money over the long term if sales decline and people keep reinstalling it
That clarification makes it even worse, this is obviously an attempt to push free to play or indie games out the window while making major bank.
The fraud detection will not help at all to prevent abuse especially in cases like steam family sharing where other “users” won’t have to pay to install the game!
There’s literally no reason to charge per game install here, the only possible reason is greed
The fraud detection is especially bad because they have a financial incentive to ignore, or under-report installation fraud.
Exactly! I’d put money on a group abusing it, admitting to abusing it, and the game devs still being charged in the near future.
Also, what counts as an install? Ive seen many unity based games that don’t have an installer and just run standalone? Would a standalone game count as already installed? Is it a first run thing in that case? Honestly this, and the additional clarification raises more questions than it answers?