To say it's been a bad week for Unity is the understatement of 2023. First they announced a terrible new Pricing scheme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlP...
To say it’s been a bad week for Unity is the understatement of 2023. First they announced a terrible new Pricing scheme, then their customers revolted, as the week goes on though, it gets worse and worse for Unity, from threats from an employee shutting down their offices, to more studios threatening to leave, to scummy secret changes to their terms of service and back door deals with clients to get around the Unity Runtime Fee in an attempt to bury a competitor.
Am I the only one that wishes these video posts had some text explaination for those of us at work and unable to watch videos in the middle of the office?
Some of us here didn’t grow up in the YouTube generation, where what could be a one minute read has to be turned into a ten minute ad-riddled video with over the top voice acting, “artistic” shots, and useless transitions.
Anyone know off the top of their head what the price difference is between Unity and Unreal now? And are there Unity engine alternatives that people can seek?
Godot is great at 2D and would be a great replacement for those games but lacks a lot of 3D stuff Unity users would miss. If someone is doing a 2D game tho… Godot is a fantastic option to go with.
It’s a full engine! It specializes in 2D games but their 3D support is growing rapidly, just not up to what Unity and Unreal offer right now. Here’s a showreal they did for games released using Godot last year: https://youtu.be/UAS_pUTFA7o?si=QuPq6hByt-lve-vg
Godot is a full engine, I would position it in the market somewhere between Unity and GameMaker Studio. It is capable of making 2D and 3D games, though there’s some things Godot lacks, for example the asset streaming capabilities that allow for large seamless open worlds without loading screens, they’re working on that.
Godot runs on WIndows, Mac, Linux various BSDs, and they’re working on an Android port. Godot games can be exported to Windows, MacOS, Linux (and thus SteamDeck), BSD, Android, iOS and the web. Godot games can be ported to consoles, but Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo are really fucky about licensing. The way you would go about publishing your Godot game to Playstation, Xbox or Switch is to work with a porting company who specializes in such things.
Fun fact: The Godot IDE is itself a Godot “game.” The Godot editor runs in the Godot engine and is built from UI tools available to end users; this makes it pretty easy to create tools and extensions to customize the editor to your team or project’s needs. It’s also a practical demonstration of how robust Godot’s UI creation tools are; I’ve been toying with the idea of building a woodworking CAD program in Godot.
there is no “price difference” they use a completely different pricing model, unity is SaaS, and moving to pay per install. Unreal is free, if you make more than a million dollars then you have to pay 5% royalties to epic.
Not necessarily. Unity says they’re charging per initial install once you break $1M (they walked-back on the “every” install bit), but Unreal takes a cut of your royalties once you break $1M, so it’s still hard to really compare them properly. If you’re making a free to play game, your install number could be dramatically higher than what a non free-to-play game would need to break $1M, for example.
Unity is planning to charge a flat fee of $0.20 per install over the entire life of a game. A Triple-A developer can release a game for $70 and it earns ten million dollars. Assuming every customer installs the game maybe three separate times on average over their lifespan, Unity’s gonna take maybe about $85,000 in total in runtime fees. If the game had been developed in Unreal, Epic would have taken $450,000.
But let’s say an indie dev makes a great game in Unity, sells it for $5, and it goes viral (like Vampire Survivors). They make ten million dollars, Unity takes 20 cents per install, and assuming the same install rate, the bill comes to $1.2 million, over 14x what the AAA developer is paying. Epic would have still charged $450,000.
With the AAA example, Epic’s 5% may seem steep for games that cost a lot per unit, but at least when a game stops making money, they stop charging money.
For Unity’s runtime fee, though, as people buy new PCs/consoles/phones and install their library of games to them over and over, the developer keeps getting billed with no profit coming in. Effectively, the more games they have out there in the wild, the greater a financial burden a developer has. They’ll be living in fear of some Reddit post sending 10,000 people in /r/gaming down a sudden nostalgia trip and wake up to a $2000 bill the next day with seemingly no explanation.
And this is to say nothing of the problematic nature of how Unity would even accurately assess the install count of a game, or differentiate paid copies from promotional or pirated copies (which I doubt they will). Or if a developer wants to bankrupt a rival developer, how they could just rent a click farm in Malaysia to install a game over and over again and rack up a bill too high to afford.
They’re just different pricing models, not different verticals. Unity is still cheaper, but incurs significant risk now. Whereas Epic will take their 5% after $1M, Unity has no revenue split. However now that they’re charging per install, devs need to be sure their marginal profit clears this bar. No one is sure their pricing model works before launch, so I think this risk is unreasonable.
I’m also interested in checking out Stride tomorrow. Hopefully I can find a good alternative to Mirror for multiplayer networking and the FinalIk package I had in Unity.
One gripe I have with this video is that he said the situation at the unity office - namely the supposed death threat by an employee against their employer - was “understandable”. It absolutely isn’t understandable. No matter how shitty your tech CEO is, unless they happily throw puppies into a wood chipper in the office, death threats are definitely not understandable.
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Am I the only one that wishes these video posts had some text explaination for those of us at work and unable to watch videos in the middle of the office?
I’ve found this useful: https://www.summarize.tech/
looks very useful but the description is pretty sus haha
government meeting?
Parliamentary debate or similar?
If it does what it sounds like, it really should be integrated directly into Lemmy or Lemmy clients.
Nice tool
That’s one for the bookmarks. What an incredible site.
I’ve had that thought about 6 separate times this morning sitting at a hospital. I miss RIF showing me the link before I go to it.
Done 👌
Thank you!
Excellent work srgnt
Doesn’t this? (Jerboa) image
Yeah it was added by op. (thank you op!) Very kind
Yes, they did, but I meant the link summary under the link, not the text body. Unless that is also made my OP.
Ah yeah but that summery inside the box doesn’t really give any info
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I don’t own any airpods. Is Apple discipleship so strong that we all just assume everyone has the newest tat?
Quick, check your iPhone…
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Some of us here didn’t grow up in the YouTube generation, where what could be a one minute read has to be turned into a ten minute ad-riddled video with over the top voice acting, “artistic” shots, and useless transitions.
If anyone needed conclusive proof that the word “hipster” is now functionally meaningless, here it is.
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This is conclusive. Time of death 11:41, September 15.
Have you considered that plenty of people probably find your advice stupid and condescending regardless of saying the word “airpod”?
Or that the word airpod was also unnecessary since you already said headphones?
Apple defaultism is pretty dumb on its own, but it’s hardly the biggest problem with your comment.
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Anyone know off the top of their head what the price difference is between Unity and Unreal now? And are there Unity engine alternatives that people can seek?
Pretty sure godot is pretty up there from what I hear but that’s the extent of my knowledge.
Godot is great at 2D and would be a great replacement for those games but lacks a lot of 3D stuff Unity users would miss. If someone is doing a 2D game tho… Godot is a fantastic option to go with.
Thanks for elaborating.
Is Godot a full engine? I thought it was a UGC platform (like Roblox)
I have literally no idea. It just pops up left right and center so it seemed it is a competitor.
It looks like it’s a full engine, that’s pretty neat. I might have to check it out, though I’m on unreal ATM so unity drama doesn’t affect me
Thanks for elaborating. Unreal is supposed to be very good. How is their price model?
It’s free until you make a million dollars (so basically it’s free for me, probably forever 😭), after which they take 5%
In that case, it’s a pretty good model. Thanks for elaborating.
It’s a full engine! It specializes in 2D games but their 3D support is growing rapidly, just not up to what Unity and Unreal offer right now. Here’s a showreal they did for games released using Godot last year: https://youtu.be/UAS_pUTFA7o?si=QuPq6hByt-lve-vg
Today I learned that Cruelty Squad was made in Godot.
Ah nice, I might check it out after my current projects
Godot is a full engine, I would position it in the market somewhere between Unity and GameMaker Studio. It is capable of making 2D and 3D games, though there’s some things Godot lacks, for example the asset streaming capabilities that allow for large seamless open worlds without loading screens, they’re working on that.
Godot runs on WIndows, Mac, Linux various BSDs, and they’re working on an Android port. Godot games can be exported to Windows, MacOS, Linux (and thus SteamDeck), BSD, Android, iOS and the web. Godot games can be ported to consoles, but Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo are really fucky about licensing. The way you would go about publishing your Godot game to Playstation, Xbox or Switch is to work with a porting company who specializes in such things.
Fun fact: The Godot IDE is itself a Godot “game.” The Godot editor runs in the Godot engine and is built from UI tools available to end users; this makes it pretty easy to create tools and extensions to customize the editor to your team or project’s needs. It’s also a practical demonstration of how robust Godot’s UI creation tools are; I’ve been toying with the idea of building a woodworking CAD program in Godot.
there is no “price difference” they use a completely different pricing model, unity is SaaS, and moving to pay per install. Unreal is free, if you make more than a million dollars then you have to pay 5% royalties to epic.
there is no equating the two
Wouldn’t the new Unity pricing model be somewhat comparable to the current Unreal pricing model?
Unity is charging per install (not per sold unit), so technically developers can owe Unity more money than they make.
Not necessarily. Unity says they’re charging per initial install once you break $1M (they walked-back on the “every” install bit), but Unreal takes a cut of your royalties once you break $1M, so it’s still hard to really compare them properly. If you’re making a free to play game, your install number could be dramatically higher than what a non free-to-play game would need to break $1M, for example.
They’re pretty different.
Unity is planning to charge a flat fee of $0.20 per install over the entire life of a game. A Triple-A developer can release a game for $70 and it earns ten million dollars. Assuming every customer installs the game maybe three separate times on average over their lifespan, Unity’s gonna take maybe about $85,000 in total in runtime fees. If the game had been developed in Unreal, Epic would have taken $450,000.
But let’s say an indie dev makes a great game in Unity, sells it for $5, and it goes viral (like Vampire Survivors). They make ten million dollars, Unity takes 20 cents per install, and assuming the same install rate, the bill comes to $1.2 million, over 14x what the AAA developer is paying. Epic would have still charged $450,000.
With the AAA example, Epic’s 5% may seem steep for games that cost a lot per unit, but at least when a game stops making money, they stop charging money.
For Unity’s runtime fee, though, as people buy new PCs/consoles/phones and install their library of games to them over and over, the developer keeps getting billed with no profit coming in. Effectively, the more games they have out there in the wild, the greater a financial burden a developer has. They’ll be living in fear of some Reddit post sending 10,000 people in /r/gaming down a sudden nostalgia trip and wake up to a $2000 bill the next day with seemingly no explanation.
And this is to say nothing of the problematic nature of how Unity would even accurately assess the install count of a game, or differentiate paid copies from promotional or pirated copies (which I doubt they will). Or if a developer wants to bankrupt a rival developer, how they could just rent a click farm in Malaysia to install a game over and over again and rack up a bill too high to afford.
They’re just different pricing models, not different verticals. Unity is still cheaper, but incurs significant risk now. Whereas Epic will take their 5% after $1M, Unity has no revenue split. However now that they’re charging per install, devs need to be sure their marginal profit clears this bar. No one is sure their pricing model works before launch, so I think this risk is unreasonable.
Reddit 2.0
Twitter 3.0?
X 4.💩
If the studios don’t switch to Godot and contribute back, they’ll be setting themselves up for another Unity a few years down the line.
If we don’t get together and destroy capitalism itself, we WILL get another Unity every few years.
The easier path is opensource. You can use it today, no need to wish the fall capitalism and do nothing until then
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I’m also interested in checking out Stride tomorrow. Hopefully I can find a good alternative to Mirror for multiplayer networking and the FinalIk package I had in Unity.
I’m curious why they chose C#. Maybe to be a Unity alternative without requiring to invest in a new language?
Godot has C# as an option.
I don’t know, but I like C#. It’s got a lot of features that I like such as extension methods and custom attributes. And I feel comfortable with it.
Holy shit, I had no idea about that whole quid-pro-quo bullshit. That’s crazy. Also, that’s definitely super illegal.
One gripe I have with this video is that he said the situation at the unity office - namely the supposed death threat by an employee against their employer - was “understandable”. It absolutely isn’t understandable. No matter how shitty your tech CEO is, unless they happily throw puppies into a wood chipper in the office, death threats are definitely not understandable.
Active evil vs passive evil.
What’s the difference between puppy-chippers and starving out families with policy changes?
Agreed
What if they only indifferently throw puppies into a wood chipper?
They still shouldn’t do it in the Office. They should do it at home, like all others puppies-in-wood-chippers people I know. Boundaries, Karen!
I’m ok with it then
Man, i’ve missed this. 😂
I assumed the threat was from a developer whose life’s work is ruined by these terms. I wonder what the employee’s motive was.
I presume a day off work.
Boss needed a bomb threat called in
I wonder now whether that means that you feel that egg industry CEOs deserve death threats…
https://youtu.be/udSiluTAOaQ?si=QF7odI0WUCXdUmWS