1.5 years of learning unity gone down the shitter. here I come, godot
even if they backtrack, trust is ruined at this point. this only makes sense if you’re trying to destroy the company intentionally and short your stock on the way out. what the fuck
1.5 years of learning unity gone down the shitter.
And this is the real damage to their business here. They clearly lost sight of their business model: Create an army of developers who know their product very well, so that it’s on a short list of products studios are all but forced to consider.
A wave of developers who know soemthing other than Unity or Unreal has the potential to turn the games development ecosystem totally on its head. They didn’t shoot themselves on the foot, they possibly shot themselves in the femoral artery.
6 years of professional experience for me, only engine I’ve used.
Yes, but no. My company is working in a proprietary engine, so there is almost no one we can hire with that engine experience, but we still want people who became familiar and strong with other engines because they can do it again with ours.
Don’t be too discouraged by this, but start learning your next engine.
It’s actually neither of those, the biggest impact is free-to-play games. Hearthstone, Legends of Runeterra, virtually every Unity mobile game in the market… Having to pay per install has huge potential for abuse and can cost a fortune for games with millions of downloads.
JFC, I just learned that they are retroactively applying this new rule. This means that games that are out already or have been on sale for multiple years will have to pay the runtime fee too. Insane. They can bankrupt a studio before they even release their next game.
I still can’t believe that retroactive fees like that are legal.
They aren’t and likely won’t hold up in court.
Gotta pay the lawyers to go to court though.
Welcome to capitalism! Ain’t it grand!
Because they’re not charging for previous installs, not new ones, and they operate technically on a free “subscription” model it’s going to be hard to challenge legally
I don’t think they can enforce that, right? I assume that would be a change of the contract, which they can’t just do willy nilly.
Yeah, I think that’s straight up illegal and I would simply refuse to pay.
If they can retroactively change terms, why can’t I, as a bonafide counterparty in that agreement? Maybe something like a 100% discount on runtime fees for days that end with ‘y’.
Otherwise I could simply “retroactively apply” a 100% discount on my lease or new car purchase.
The correct answer and what all studios/devs should do: tell them to retroactively pound sand and ditch Unity for all future projects.
Pricing should protect indie and small businesses. When it destroys those, we need government to step in because we’re on track to create oligarchs in every industry that are too big to fail.
This needs to turn into a class action suit that results in John Tortellini having his oxygen rights revoked. I can’t imagine shareholders will be happy finding out that John Riceroni has been selling off Unity’s stock, and I’m pretty sure what Unity’s trying to do here is straight-up illegal in the US. Fuck John Rigatoni. God, I was so happy thinking he’d died and gone to hell after EA, but nope, still alive and well.
With all your puns, I still don’t what John Cappelletti’s real name is.
I think it’s, never working in this industry again.
Hahaaa nah, ToS:
The Parties agree that any arbitration will be conducted in their individual capacities only and not as a class action or other representative action, and the Parties expressly waive their right to file a class action or seek relief on a class basis.
Forced arbitration is one of the most villainous legal practices still somehow allowed in the US.
There is no way they can legally enforce retroactively charging. How the fuck is that even possible or legal?
Unity is not a product, it’s an ongoing subscription. You can distribute Unity as part of your game as long as you have a subscription.They changed the terms of the subscription for next year. If you don’t have a subscription then you cannot redistribute Unity. So your choice is to either accept the new terms, or pull your game from the stores.
Why the ever loving fuck would any company willingly use a library or framework in their product that uses a subscription model instead of a licensing model? That’s absolutely mind blowing. Having critical tools with subscriptions is bad enough, but at least those aren’t shipped to customers.
If it’s really true that Unity uses a perpetual subscription rather than a license I’m utterly flabbergasted that it ever got as popular as it was.
Companies love subscription pricing and customers keep it up. Lots of software went this route and proved people still want the product. It shouldn’t be a surprise
Sure, for services or stuff used internally, but not for things that they’re selling to their own customers. Unless a company is also using a subscription model for their software it makes absolutely no sense to use a subscription library in your product, you’re putting yourself on the hook for recurring expenses on something you’re only receiving income on once. Any way you slice it that’s an absolutely braindead decision, and anyone that makes it should be terminated immediately for gross negligence.
Have you used Unity? If you haven’t. You’d understand why if you did. Its incredibly easy to use with a vast public storefront people can sell things on. Extremely extensible. Before this bullshit anyway
There were no recurring expenses per-install under the old terms. The only expense was your own, per-developer expense. Als long as you had developer seats you could ship infinite units at no cost. Unity has often said that they were never going to change that. But that was just a pinky promise and wasn’t actually in their terms.
I wasn’t aware either, but the devs who use this in their product should have known this could happen. Now the question is: did they just not consider the possibility, or is it a known risk because all the engines require a license? In that case, Unity might just very well be the first one to do this, and others will follow suit in the coming years.
It’s normal for a engine to have licensing requirements, but those are laid out up front and will typically be defined based on income. So like a pretty common thing would be something approximately like free for the first $10K earned, then 10% for up to $100K, and then 30% for everything past $100K. Importantly though, that’s NOT a subscription, it’s the terms of the license you agree to in order to use the software, you aren’t paying a fee based on time, but rather based on money earned. You can choose to back out of the license at any time, you just need to stop selling the software, and as long as you keep paying the engine developer their cut you can keep on selling copies. Further the terms of the license are what they are when you download the library/framework, and they can’t be retroactively changed. If tomorrow they decide to start charging you based on total downloads, you can choose to keep distributing the previous version under the previous license terms based on profits.
Unity on the other hand, has done two things. First they require an ongoing subscription, so if you stop paying for your subscription, technically you’re no long allowed to sell your game. Secondly, and much more controversially, they’re defining the license based on installs rather than based on earnings, which is tying your debt to actions of your customers rather than your own, which is a very precarious position to be in.
This whole thing reminds me of the D&D shenanigans a few months back where Hasbro tried to retroactively re-define the terms of their “open source” license, and the TTRPG community collectively told Hasbro where they could stick their new license. There are a LOT of parallels here.
We got used to letting one company control everything
wait so if unity goes bankrupt everyone is fucked?
Pretty much, yes
I’m waiting for a Legal Eagle breakdown or something. I’ve been thinking the exact same thing. Sneakily removing stuff from their TOS in GitHub a while back is dodgy.
I read somewhere that they removed their TOS entirely from GitHub but I would love a breakdown of this too. I’m not familiar with how the Unity agreement works.
So there’s a little nuance here. They aren’t going to charge you for the downloads that already happened, it’s on all downloads moving forward, even if the game has already been released. I still think it’s ridiculous, but it is not the same as suddenly hitting you with a bill for all the downloads the game already had. That would not hold up in any court. But the latter case…we’ll see. Depends on the specifics of the initial agreement I suppose. Totally possible they are within their rights even if it’s scummy.
Correct me if I’m wrong, that’s my understanding. I don’t think if you had a million downloads last year, for instance, you’ll be charged for those.
No, you won’t be charged retroactively for previous downloads. But the change does retroactively affect games previously released on Unity.
So last year you made decisions on your game’s price and revenue model that are no longer true. if you made your small game free to play with microtransactions and its had more than 200,000 installs you’re probably shitting yourself. Unity will be charging $0.20 per install even if it’s to the same device multiple times. A million installs of your game is you having to write a check to Unity for $160,000 for installations alone.
So your microtransactions game now must average a spend of at least $0.20 per install, plus per seat licensing of Unity, plus your overhead for it to even begin to make a profit.
And Unity has said that multiple installations on the same device will all be charged. So it’s inevitable that script kiddies with bad attitudes are going to install a game thousands of times. Unity has said you can appeal this type of behavior, but that puts the onus of detecting and reporting this stuff on the devs, further increasing their workload and risk.
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Yes, the fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. We look at a game’s lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.
I read that as it’s billing moving forward but they’ve been very opaque thus far so I’m willing to entertain there’s a contradiction elsewhere lol
As I understand it, they’re billing moving forward but counting past installs for the purpose of figuring out if you have to pay.
yeah i deleted my post because they keep changing their minds.
its retroactive (for now) in the sense that they started counting from before, just only billing for new ones.
Per their lawyers it’s in the TOS. Everyone just hits “I agree” when they get that EULA but there’s always a “we reserve the right to fuck you over” buried in the fine print.
I don’t think I’ve ever read one where the clause “we can change any if this at any point in the future and you automatically accept it” wasn’t there. All the fucking time it’s there. Everyone is always agreeing to this shit all the time. That’s why many services can just change their prices and whatever how they want and only send an email “next month the price is X”.
Everything is rotten.
Depends what is in the contract. If the contract says devs on are the hook for any future fees they deem necessary, then the devs are on the hook. Unless they want to pay a lawyer big bucks to take on the company behind Unity with their billions of dollars of revenue and the lawyers that buys. How many indie devs do you think can afford to do that?
Not just indie devs bro
Pokemon is made in unity
They aren’t retroactively charging. They’re charging a new fee going forward.
They are retroactively applying the new pricing model to games that have been out for years. That’s what I meant. So they’re not back-billing for previous downloads, but already-released games don’t get grandfathered in.
I’m always open to corrections though.
Games that have been out for years arent going to hit the minimum 12 month downloads/revenue figures unless they are still very popular, no?
I dont agree with this downloads based fee to be clear.
Yeah, I’m not 100% sure. There are instances too though where someone gets a new PC and installs their old games. I think it would still count in those cases, which is just silly to me. It all feels like a massive cash grab, or they’re trying to fudge the stock value.
I’ve been wondering about this too.
Oh fuck no. Silksong is never coming out.
Is there a way to convert it to use Godot or Unreal? I understand nothing about programming a game but… oh damn
Not really. Assets are more or less portable with some effort, but not the logic. There are tools to help you port your code but it more or less requires a complete re-write.
though to be fair, a big part of writing the logic is figuring out the logic, designing the system and interactions etc. so while it is a big task, its much smaller than starting over from scratch
Fair enough, but it’s still a massive time and resource sink. You also can’t really implement new features during the re-write lest project creep gets out of control, and even after the rewrite the product will be less stable than the original for quite a while until it’s had sufficient time to mature.
It might be worth the investment to ditch proprietary software from a predatory company and jump to open source though, which can’t really pull shit like this in its future.
Not necessarily since different toolsets have different logic operators and transformers and the logic isn’t always 1-1. I’ve moved enough code from even the same language but different implementations, nothing to say of entirely different system and languages.
Speedruns show how much of a bodge jobs a lot of games are and how much they could be broken.
Something else to think about is that it will potentially make it so there are more patches required, and those patches may take more time to cycle to production. Companies that had deadlines and a work schedule planned are now thrown into disarray.
Not instantly. This could take months or even years of additional work.
Someone has pulled off porting an Unreal map over to Unity before, but a lot of the maps lighting and other effects were completely lost. Look up Stanley parable rocket league. It’s definitely possible to port Unity maps to other engines and vice versa, but it would take a lot of work and a lot of rebuilding everything from scratch
So Davey Wreden, writer and creator of the stanley parable, has a brother who is a youtuber, DougDoug. When ultra deluxe dropped Davey joined his brother playing through the game again. Anyway, at one point in the video he mentioned that in order to port over the rocket league map they needed to hire an outside consultant to port it.
No, they’d have to start from scratch. They’re entirely different engines and everything is very specific to the engine, down to the tooling and languages used.
It depends.
I’m working on a game with Unity and the software design has been done in a way that keeps most the game itself as data, and uses the Unity stuff mainly as something to display multiple views on the state of the data (a 3D view of the game space, multiple UI elements diving into slices of the data an so on) - basically a Model-View-Controller Architecture, so moving from Unity to something else doesn’t require a rewrite (in fact such structure makes it possible, for example, to with some ease change the game’s visuals from 3D to 2D), though it would still be quite a lot of work.
However my game is survival-management in space (within one or more generated star-systems, so it was simplified down to a 2D plane) which doesn’t relly on Unity things like terrain, navigation meshes or even colliders to constrain the movement of objects in the game, so calculating “what happens next” (say, the movement of planets or the guidance of ships going from planet to planet) gets decided using Maths at the data level without going through the Unity layer, and Unity is mainly the means to get user input comes and the layer that gets updated with the state of the data at the end of each cycle (i.e. game objects get moved around) which it the uses for rendering.
Other games which are not reliant on Unity to do the heavy lifting for objects interactiong with other objects on a 3D space, such as 2D platformers, can probably use a similar architecture, but for example something like Valheim or Planet Crafter (were the player controls a humanoid avatar on a 3D world which is mainly terrain) is probably much harder to move out from Unity,
Not to mention I’m sure they use third party tools to help with things. Bigger games like Genshin Impact for example, are on an older version of Unity where they heavily modified the engine to suit their needs. That would take a tremendous amount of work to move, and they’d have to redesign their entire graphics pipeline. Which also Godot has gotten better, but is still far behind the others in terms of high end graphics. That’s why it’s usually seen as the go to for indies, and not so much high end games. Also they don’t plan on making anything like DOTS, but I’m not sure how relevant that actually is.
Oh my…what a waste of time, money, old games will be removed I imagine, knowledge. All to gain what? Developers are already moving away from Unity. It’s one company after another going to hell and causing damage.
Probably not but the good news is a lot of the pains of developing a game is that unlike most projects you need 10 artists for every one programmer
So, while core logic will likely change, all the other assets and planning is done. It shouldn’t be as bad as remaking it from scratch
I’m not an artist but some of that work may be done in the engine, and so is not simple imported into it. I assume much is though.
I am not an artist either, so take this with a grain of salt, but a quick Google search suggests the two should be convertible
From their FAQ, looks like Unity doesn’t have any real way of dealing with pirated or fake installs. Their FAQ says you have to work with them when that happens so they can correct your bill. It doesn’t say Unity will automatically filter those installs out.
pirated? they want developers to pay Unity for people pirating their game???
Officially no, but the wording on the FAQ says it’s the developer’s job to take it up with them to resolve it. So it’s clear they don’t have any safeguard and only after you’re affected you can talk to them lmfao.
Does the Unity Runtime Fee apply to pirated copies of games? We are happy to work with any developer who has been the victim of piracy so that they are not unfairly hurt by unwanted installs.
Same thing goes for “install-bombing”:
We are not going to charge a fee for fraudulent installs or “install bombing.” We will work directly with you on cases where fraud or botnets are suspected of malicious intent.
So not only are the fees outrageous, but now devs are responsible for making sure this whole system isn’t being abused. It’s not gonna be long until people figure out how the install count is updated, and will proceed to weaponize it lmfao.
and don’t forget that this is “we’ll work with you” - i.e. you’d better build your own analytics into your game to prove your case otherwise unity can go “well assume 10% are bad installs - now pay for 90%”
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The difference here is that it’s pissing off businesses, not users.
Yeah businesses can sue you for pulling out the rug like this.
Users cannot.
Pokemon is made on the unity engine, so one of the scariest legal teams in the world. Nintendo doesn’t like it when people take a little whipped cream off of the mcflurry, and this threatens to take the whole McFlurry.
What exact grounds would a business sue for?
Retroactive change of terms for already released unchanged products? I don’t know the legal details but it seems pretty strange that they can just say they will charge over something for products that were finished and released under different terms before all this. The devs may not even be opening those projects on Unity anymore.
No it is not - those businesses ARE the users. Unless by user you mean consumers
My real point is that one of these userbases has lawyers and are highly risk-averse.
Pedantically though, yes.
Unity games include Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, Pokémon GO, Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail and Marvel Snap.
I doubt The Pokémon Company, MiHoYo and Marvel/Disney will just let Unity shove this decision at them, especially when some of these are have tens of millions of players and many more downloads per player.
MiHoYo’s games are free-to-play on mobile platfroms, right? If they’ll going to get charged 20c per install, they’ll going to get royally fucked because most of free-to-play users aren’t buying anything. IMO that’s a huge incentive to switch ASAP, unless they have special deal with unity and not affected by this new pricing scheme.
I wouldn’t say MiHoYo would be fucked because they are making bank. But they will definitely get a massive bill on top of however much they already paid Depending on whether Unity counts updates as additional downloads, that’s even more money. It might be enough to make them fight it. This whole change in monetization is probably aimed at mobile games in general
We barely had a mass exodus from Reddit. It was quite modest lol
That being said, I popped my head in on reddit last week to find something, and it definitely seems noticeably worse at a glance. Or maybe I’ve just had enough distance from it now that I see the warts more plainly.
No we did have a mass Exodus from reddit, it’s just people stopped using the platform altogether instead of coming here.
Do you have any numbers? The only stats I saw were in the early throes of the black out. I haven’t seen anything lately showing a significant drop in DAU’s.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, I just haven’t seen anything indicating that
I imagine it will get a bump. I’d love to see more developers using Godot, more tutorials, more in the asset library. The engine itself is quite good, but it doesn’t have a huge ecosystem built around it the way Unity does.
Plus unlike unity, being closed source, devs can actually contribute to the engine for others to benefit, as well as go in a fix problems they used to have to wait for unity to fix.
FOSS makes so much more sense when the people using the software, are devs themselves.
Unity did something like this before with built in advert data or such, and some left. Now is drawing a new line, perhaps too far for many more.
My hope is that this backlash extends to all proprietary software eventually. Discord banned 3rd party apps before Reddit thought it was cool to overcharge for the privilage.
If W4 doesn’t enshitiffy it to push people to their proprietary fork (which is unfortunately required because Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft don’t allow making their APIs public).
Ive been making my game in Godot for a few months now. Its a really good engine after the 4.0 update.
I’m looking forward to try it out next time I get the energy to do game development for fun.
I’d heard Godot 4.0 made massive improvments to multiplayer systems.
I understand the controversy, especially in light of the recent Reddit bullshit. But I don’t think I understand the tech.
For the sake of it, let’s focus only on games that are paid for, installed on a system (or downloaded using Game Pass), and do not involve a multiplayer element. (Hollow Knight, Cuphead, etc)
Is there some ongoing resource use (on Unity’s end) when people download or play these games? Like, when I play Hollow Knight, my system isn’t connecting to Unity to use their servers to run the game on my home system, is it? When I download a game to my system, an I downloading the engine separately from the software, thereby using Unity’s servers?
As abhorrent as the Reddit API change was, at least they were charging for the ongoing consumption of some digital resource (Reddit data). Unless I’m misunderstanding something, this just seems more like trying to collect a residual after the fact.
No, there are no costs for Unity in this situation. The way they’ll need to track installs is with the unity runtime, which gets packaged with games made using Unity.
This is what economists call “rent-seeking”, where companies seek to extract more profit by charging subscriptions, rather than introducing desirable products. Adobe, AutoCAD, Microsoft Office, and the Reddit API are all high profile examples of rent-seeking.
Unity Revenue reporting has always been “self-reported” by users. If they think you’re lying and aren’t on the right license they send the complkance team to make sure you’re giving enough. Unity has no way of knowing installs because as you said it doesn’t connect to Unity.
You don’t download anything separately, the runtime is included with the game.
The runtime could be updated with a phone home feature to track the install
No because this goes against GDPR. They aren’t allowed to have anything identifying users “phoning home” without explicit consent/logging into a launcher.
If it included identifiable information then yeah it would be a breach. This is just using a mac address most likely that will also if they do it right will be hashed client side so even if a bad actor could do something with that info they won’t actually get it anything from it anyway.
Is there some ongoing resource use (on Unity’s end)
Nope. The engine is part of the game once compiled. So all hosting and bandwidth cost goes to steam/gog/whoever is selling the game.
They are just trying to get more of that sweet viral game money.
Unity hasn’t been very profitable, for most of its users it’s completely free. I don’t blame them for needing money to improve the engine, but not like this
If Silksong is delayed because of this I’m going to riot!
I encourage people here to check out Stride too, for something open sourced, C# based, and if Godot isn’t your cup of tea for some reason.
Doesn’t Godot have C# extentions available?
It does! But this is for people looking for more alternatives. Different people like different things.
Fair enough.
Also, speaking of alternatives, people should check out O3DE. It’s based on Amazon Lumberyard, which itself it based on CryEngine, but it’s FOSS and managed by the Linux Foundation.
Interestingly enough, Epic Games is a premier member, along with many other companies.
If they kill Cult of the Lamb over this. There will no longer be any reason to live.
Cult of the Lamb did come out and say they weren’t serious about delisting.
Telling people to purchase their game because they’re delisting it, then coming out later and saying, “haha jk” is kind of shitty.
Cult of the Lamb has always been shitposty with their marketing. It would be a little silly to take them seriously immediately and buy on the spot.
That does seem to be their excuse. It crosses a line when they make a call for action that benefits them monetarily and “it’s just a prank, bro” is just deflection for not great behavior, imo.
Nah dude, don’t be so eager to jump on people’s throats like this. They were being sarcastic about a difficult situation that they and many other indie developers might have to deal with, that in January 1st they might be sent a massive bill over a deal that they never agreed with.
If your conclusion here is Cult of the Lamb/Massive Monster/Devolver is being greedy rather than Unity, you are missing the point. Unity is the one actually making it so that the most sensible decision for many smaller developers barely making ends meet will be to delist before January 1st.
Sometimes people become so cynical that they go back around at losing perspective by always assuming the worst out of everything and everyone, that’s not great.
This, jumping on massive monster is definitely victim blaming. The real massive monster is unity
I think you are misunderstanding what I’m saying. I do believe they were just joking around and being sarcastic, I don’t think they were intentionally trying to fleece people for money. But when you’re running a studio and you make a call for action saying “we’re going to pull the game so buy it now!” and just expect people to somehow know you’re kidding, well, that isn’t very responsible or professional. That’s my point. I’m not sure why you’re defending them, here. It’s not the end of the World or anything, but it’s not great behavior, either.
Here we go back around to where I started with. They always been silly with their marketing. They also said they would sacrifice their players and they both have beef and flirted with Angry Birds. Nobody would take that seriously.
A quirky indie studio going “welp, better pack up and leave next year” at the Unity situation just seems par for the course. No reason to jump the gun unless they confirm that later.
I’m defending them because I think you are making too much of an issue out of it.
Can they go retroactively? Aren’t there contracts?
Can Steam buy Unity and end this nightmare?
I know Valve has a good reputation but I really don’t want another company owning both a major storefront and a major game engine. It’s not great to have Epic in that situation, but at least they provide competition to Steam.
If Unity fails hopefully that means another game engine company can grow and take their place and keep market competition strong.
Valve already owns Source 2 which I assume is better than unity
Well, to be fair the Epic Games Store is not a major storefront.
The only way I see Unity being saved is by developers buying it out, only to render it Open-Source. And for the purpose of an open-source 3D game engine, you’ve got Godot.
Looking forward to pihole lists that block every single domain from ubity.
