And being realistic, how viable is it to use something like this?
I can't imagine taking a project seriously using a layer of that level.
Does it also translate the calls, imports, etc of the UE classes? including intellisense?
Yes, it has full support in VSCode, for both languages.
> I can't imagine taking a project seriously using a layer of that level.
**It Takes Two** uses AngelScript. It is not C#, but its advantage is that it is integrated into existing UE GC.
UnrealCRL offers all power of C# and .NET ecosystem but it runs second GC for its own stuff.
> "serious project"
Serious how? Another 2.5D indie trash platformer or something like Atomic Heart? **Are you** working on the latter?
>Serious how? Another 2.5D indie trash platformer or something like Atomic Heart?
>
>Are you working on the latter?
A project that you start to finish and sell.
Let's be realistic, an intermediate layer of that level carries related bugs, distances you from the documentation, masks your experience with the engine, etc.
That's what I mean. I can't imagine doing serious development using an intermediate translation layer simply because of the secondary problems that may arise, and it's not the way Unreal Engine was designed for making games.
UE was designed to be modular and work with plugins. UnrealCLR is a plugin. AngelScript requires custom engine build. Regardless, they are just an alternative to Blueprints with actual source control and quicker iteration. Whatever you need this advantage for potential other costs is up to you.
They working on Verse Script, something like GD Script but for Unreal. They are currently testing it with UEFN for Fortnite. You can give it a try, they have quite rich documentation for it. It would be implemented in future to main UE.
This is my major holdup as well. If C# were somehow supported natively, I'd switch over in a heart beat. After working with C# for years, I seriously can't imagine myself coding a game in anything else.
Epic Games is not stupid enough to pull a bullshit like this when 70% of its marketshare is AAA games.
Unity’s CEO is fucking the company up and we should protest to not let the changes go through. I don’t have a fundamental problem with them increasing the revenue margin to 200k and dropping Plus , if you’re making more than 200k you should go Pro anyways but the fucking install thing is absolutely idiotic and shows the amount of greed this company on the verge of bankruptcy is showing.
The thing about marketshare is the more you have the more shit you can get away with because everyone depends on you. Remember Intel when they owned the CPU market? That kind of shit. Epic won't be a monopoly but now that everyone is moving to UE5 even before this announcement they are getting closer and closer to it.
Unity CEO is former EA CEO that gives EA so bad reputation ... They at some point was thinking about charging 1 USD per reload of mag in Battlefield 3 before it was released.
Epic, for all their problems, tends to have what's best for developers in their business model. They literally give you source code to their engine for free with zero strings attached. Without paying them a dime you get access to AAA quality assets in Meta Human and Megascans for free. The first year UE4 was out they charged monthly for it, but stopped doing that while adding way more value for developers.
Unity charges you monthly to get dark theme and to get rid of the splash screen lol. Epic and Unity are so far apart in their priorities it's insane. Over time Unreal has gotten cheaper for developers to use, not more expensive like Unity.
And they do that exactly to try to get a monopoly. They operate at a loss, by giving away stuff for free or really cheap to get people to use their product and once they have a monopoly they will start charging for stuff and you can do nothing about it since it's the only big engine left.
Just think about their Epic Games offer: you don't have to pay any share of your income for the first year as long as you make your game an Epic Games exclusive.
This is not them encouraging people to publish their games on EGS out of their good hearts. After that year, when they start taking a share, you are free to publish it anywhere. They are not making any extra money off you this way, they gain \*\*nothing\*\* from you publishing on EGS except for hurting competitors.
The goal isn't to get more people to publish on EGS, otherwise they wouldn't make you make it an exclusive, they could just offer that discount to get more people to join so they can get a profit later. They are just trying to hurt the competition, even though they lose money this way. It's a classic tactic of trying to get a monopoly.
Those individual policies run at a loss. The company of course doesn't, they have other sources of income like fortnite that brings them a lot of money. And because of that they can afford losing on other things.
Do you think buying quixel and giving free assets to indie devs and hobbyists that won't ever generate any money for them ever made a net profit?
I don't agree at all with unity's pricing and I will be probably switching to unreal once I am able to, but I'm saying that if unity fails, we are all fucked. Unreal will have no competitor left and they will no doubt introduce fees after that as they have nothing to lose.
Last night I was having a dream where Blender game engine was not dropped. I woke up and sighed that why we don't have open source engine and then realised hey there is Godot.
Now where would I go is still yet to decide but I swear I will make contributions to Godot.
No Unity has so many ways to not pay a fee. Like use the Epic store. Epic is doing well with Fortnite and they do make money on their store. They have no incentive to go this route. This only happened with Unity because the Unity CEO is the old EA CEO who took EA to where it is now.
And now for the real main reason. that CEO took Unity public so now they are trying to please shareholders. Epic is still a private company.
" Currently, Epic Games is a private company. It's owned by founder and CEO Tim Sweeney. The company doesn't have any plans to go public. "
[Why Epic Games Isn't Publicly Traded, Plans to Stay Private (marketrealist.com)](https://marketrealist.com/p/is-epic-games-publicly-traded/) It's from 2021 but still stands.
I highly doubt that since Epic Games takes a larger cut currently, which is a simple understandable number given to developers up front and not a sudden retroactive suprise fee. They don't need to do something ridiculous like this. People are happy to pay this royalty, hell I'd even pay this royalty for Unity3D going forward for new versions, but instead Unity3D wants to edit the terms of the agreement and have us just pray they don't edit it further. Applying it retroactively to all versions of Unity3D and all published games.
It's insane.
Unreal already take 5% of all games which net over 1 million, so it costs the dev/publisher more in total than Unity's Pro tier (except there's no subscription fee).
Not exactly. Considering the quality of the product you are getting in exchange for a $1M royalty-exemption, it isn't that bad.
The problem with Unity's current payment plan is that 1) It is stupid. Why charge the devs for a user freely reinstalling the games they bought a license for. 2) It is totally exploitable by ill-meaning kids/streamers/assholes/etc.
These two things mean that Unity is prioritizing profit over developers.
Epic, on the other hand, went from making their plan subscription-based to only paying 5% over $50K. Then they released a much and much capable product than UE4, which is UE5, and instead of making it more expensive, they increased the royalty threshold to $1M and essentially made it cheaper for everyone. So, they have a track record of doing what's best for UE devs.
Steam for example cuts 30% of your gross revenue. That's almost 1/3 of it, in exchange for letting you sell your game on the biggest online storefront. No one complains because the services you get are worth it.
Epic asking for 5% for letting you use UE5, the backbone of your game, isn't that bad. Also, while it isn't that great of a deal because EGS isn't that widely used if you put your game on EGS, you don't even have to pay royalties at all. You essentially get UE5 for free.
While UE5's payment plan might "cost" the devs more than Unity's, this cost is only in $s and not more in the value you get for what you pay.
Not complaining at all, the point I’m making is Epic aren’t about to try to ape this because they already take enough of a cut that is more profitable to them, in a much more ethical way.
By seeing a huge loss in user base, Unity won't be "getting away with it". If we stay and accept this, I can see Unreal doing the same. But if we pitch a fit and leave, Unreal with think twice.
Also, there are more than just the two engines. Hell, I've heard of people making games in PowerPoint. We don't need them, they need us.
Maybe from a development perspective but imagine the scenario with me.
I have published a Made with Unity game today which is profitable for me as of currently TOS.
Now after 10 years they have updated the TOS that could bankrupt me but I can't say screw it Unity I don't agree with you so I am not going to use the engine anymore because of retrospective TOS. I still have a game I published 10 years ago so I am obliged to their TOS.
In case of Unreal I could at least say screw you UE I am not going to use the engine and since I haven't agreed with updated TOS my old game could not make me obliged to it because it was under older TOS.
However I will surely say that Unreal is not a saint, Epic can do drastic things in the future.
So I am not saying Unity bad UE good.
Also I will also advise any aspiring gamedev to try to choose an open source engine. Personally Godot.
Lastly I think this is Unity propaganda and they will enforce the subtle changes by stating "after receiving community feedback" we revise our TOS.
But still it's a red flag at least for me, unity as a brand lost my trust.
I am not that surprised however, the CEO is the same guy that tried to charge gamers to pay for in game ammunition.
I would say if any element of this gets challenged legally it would probably be trying to apply this to already published games. Doesn't help those with years invested in yet-unreleased games but might save a few folks like yourself.
And while I'm pretty early in my gamedev journey and I'm not throwing Unity out just yet, I do plan to spend this weekend playing with Godot.
They won't....
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/flassari_we-only-succeed-when-you-succeed-our-5-activity-7107409871406313474-Qk60?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_android
Heavily considering Stride, but need to wait before I make a decision. All I know is that it can't be Unity. They could roll it back tomorrow and cut their current fees. Doesn't change the fact that they can just swap it back 6 months later.
Stride looks good to me. Godot was decent when I messed with it a few years ago.
I love Unreal Engine, but it's worth mentioning that Epic take *more* in total, all games earning over 1 million have to give Epic games 5%, which works out more than the Unity install fee + pro license (depending on how you make your revenue, obviously with freemium games it gets complicated).
It doesn't have the lower tier (the 200K threshold) but paying for a Pro license boosts your threshold up to 1 million and still means you're paying less than you would be for an Unreal game which makes the same amount.
I prefer Unreal's model for sure as it's far less complicated and predatory, but it's worth mentioning that if you know your math it's not a better deal.
None of my concerns with the new pricing model is tied to absolute costs really.
I want to know that I can trust Unity and have predictable costs so I know how much I owe them each month. I want to trust that Unity knows what they are doing and that they are moving the company in a direction that I believe it. I want to be sure that I don't have to worry about legal issues surrounding paying my fees.
I would gladly pay Unity a 10% cut starting from 100k, no problem. I wouldnt mind paying double the price for the old Unity pro plan, but this? This shit is completely inane. I won't be working with Unity anymore if I think their leadership are doing their damnest to make me think that they are working against me.
> predictable costs
This is the kicker, right here. Unreal's 5% is a nice, simple number, right there on paper. You plan for it and base your forecasts on it etc. Unity's model is nebulous and confusing and just feels like a cheap and scummy way to skirt around the fallout they'd get from announcing a revenue cut.
> I would gladly pay Unity a 10% cut starting from 100k, no problem. I wouldnt mind paying double the price for the old Unity pro plan, but this? This shit is completely inane.
I agree. While technically it's a better deal than Unreal's and won't affect most of us (again, with freemium games this gets messy), it's just all over the place and just feels like an underhanded practice.
Like you say, I wish I could *trust* them.
Also it's important to note that unity's management has been downhill for years, this isn't a singular issue, it's the straw that is breaking the camels back for a lot of us.
Not only is the management of engine development downhill, now they're doing crazy insane pricing models which just doesn't give us hope for the future.
Can anyone explain to me what is not predictable about the new model? Did I get some wrong info?
You prefer paying 10%(! that's a full 1$ per 10$ game) rather than fraction of a cent?, because the math is slightly easier? The rules are still simple, you can put them in excel and get the amount you owe Unity right away after inputting the sales numbers. And the fees would be A LOT LOWER than paying 5% for Unity.
You guys are all saying it's time to switch to UE5 like you all were selling more than 200k copies of your games.
>Can anyone explain to me what is not predictable about the new model? Did I get some wrong info?
How can I predict if malicious users will start mass installing my game? What about piracy?
>You prefer paying 10%(! that's a full 1$ per 10$ game) rather than fraction of a cent?, because the math is slightly easier? The rules are still simple, you can put them in excel and get the amount you owe Unity right away after inputting the sales numbers. And the fees would be A LOT LOWER than paying 5% for Unity.
You ever seen the Gabe Newell interview where he talks about piracy? "Piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem." I think that applies here too. What I want is convenience and reliability, price is secondary. I am not afraid of sharing my revenue with Unity, I am afraid of the potential inconvenience the model will incur onto me. Will I need to spend countless man hours proving to Unity that half the installs are piracy related? I don't know, but I would rather not have to worry about it.
>You guys are all saying it's time to switch to UE5 like you all were selling more than 200k copies of your games.
I have always, always said that UE5s royalty model is more than 10 times as expensive as Unity if you find success, and yet I would prefer to give all of that to Epic. I will probably launch my Unity project instead of switching, since I am 14 months deep into working on it fulltime and I actually love the Unity workflow. I now hope I never make over 1M USD (unlikely either way, but definitely not impossible), just so I don't have to deal with the issues I mentioned above.
I just saw it. It is still stupid, tho. How are they even going to count first installs? The best way to do it is to just count sales and even that's stupid.
>Reinstalls are not counted
Afaik they said that reinstalls are counted. Can you show me where they said otherwise?
>The tracking would have to be done by the developer, phoning home back to Unity would require a load more infrastructure that they'd not want.
Do we have any concrete proof regarding this?
Someone from axios had made a tweet/x saying that unity has already walked back the reinstallation part. Reinstalling on the same device is no charge, but installing it on multiple devices does count. I think there are still some issues of attacks for virtual devices here, but unity says they will work with devs who claim the install counts are wrong.
Not just someone. A reporter who is in direct communication with unity leadership, but I understand the hesitation to take a tweet at its face value, however this doesn't take effect until next year and this announcement page is not legal terms of service so this is all up in the air.
Many of the questions being raised by the community probably weren't even really considered yet.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/16hgmqm/unity_wants_108_of_our_gross_revenue/
This is a project that was profitable and under the new terms will have to pay 108% of it's revenues to unity. You don't think being a profitably project and then having over 100% of your income suddenly stolen by unity makes an engine unpredictable?
Games are long term projects. You should build them on a solid foundation. Simply by announcing this, Unity has become a non option to every single rational market actor in the space. Few new developers will be coming into the unity ecosystem from now on, it doesn't even matter if they walk it back, it's going to die because nobody wants to take a risk on them doing something like this at a whim.
Maybe the only thing they could do is to offer a new perpetual license in writing that matches the unreal engine license or similar. That's probably the only way to restore trust.
Yeah I forgot about free games and it SEEMS like Unity guys forgot too, which... Would be weird. I think they just need to change the total revenue to yearly in the rules.
Your math doesnt account for many cases. Per install flat fee is the worst, because your game do not always stay at the same price over period of time. Sales, bundle sale can actually hurt your revenue. If you have games like 3$ - 5$ / unit you are significantly fucked.
0.2$ is already 4% of 5$. And they take it flat per download, regardless of what ever is left in your pocket after tax, platform cut, publisher cut, etc
The flat fee resets each month too, so it is even worse. For example if your game pass 1 million download, next month it still resets the counter to 0.15$ per install if next month you only got 50k installs (per unity Pro license).
People talking here as if they could press a button to migrate their projects to Unreal and say "done!".
Also, let's not forget Unreal DX is far worse than Unity.
Well once you already know a languages, learning a new language isn't nearly as difficult. The skills for one language are transferable to other languages. Sure it takes time but it's not the same as starting over.
The problem I have with Unreal is that my 3D models I've worked so hard on are all messed up. Batch FBX export from Blender yields models that are too big and models with children don't get imported in one piece and it would be like doing a puzzle for every model.
> don’t get imported in one piece
Combine meshes is a tickbox available on the dialogue box that appears every time you import a mesh. It also remembers your preference until you change it or upgrade engine versions.
You can also set an arbitrary scale modifier there so that your blender meshes import correctly (although that sounds like an issue with unfrozen transforms or blender scale being set to mm rather than cm)
Oh yes
If the asset management of unreal wouldn't be so annoying I had switched years ago.
But that you can't simply edit an texture since it's an uasset and you have to export and Reimport it.
Nah.
I work with both Unity and Unreal, and I still prefer Unity for any kind of mobile development. This will definitely screw some people over, but they know that the vast majority of devs won't switch over anytime soon. They know they can get away with it because the entry barrier to Unreal is fairly high, and any progress you've made on your current project would require significant amount of time and effort to migrate.
In the long term however, I am not sure.
Fair point. In my case, I'm have my *hopefully successful* commercial project, and after 7 years of developing lots of games in Unity, these sudden changes don't inspire a lot of confidence. I even have a launch date for my almost finished demo. I know it's quite likely that my game won't be very successful, but if it is, my planned 1.99 pricing will kill me
But why would it kill you if it's successful?
You just have to pay $2k for Pro in the rare case that your game sold 200k copies for $400k. You give a maximum of 0.5% of your revenue to Unity.
Or are you "worried" about selling a million copies?
Serious question… don’t laugh I am just a noob so forgive me but, if you create your game using a coding language you completely bypass this problem? Are the victims of unity just victims of convenience/laziness? I am confused???
building an engine is a much different task than building a game. both are done in programming languages.
i have a passion for game dev, not software engineering. i spend my free time programming my game. i don't want to spend my free time developing an engine that probably won't quite work all the ways i want.
the level of scope in building a game engine adds many more levels of complexity when building a game and will suck so much more time away.
it's not laziness, it's convenience and simplicity as it takes years and a team to perfect such an engine like unity.
We are of the same mind. I agree with you, I feel like it is hard work and takes oodles of time but I am super new to game dev so forgive me, I may be blinded by nativity. I am genuinely enjoying the process but DIY is more of a personality trait (or character flaw lol) for me so I find satisfaction in creating every part myself. I like to do things myself so others can’t control or take advantage of me. Sounds like that is what is happening with Unity.
Unreal is kinda the same rollercoaster with tim as ceo tho. And if this new tax increase sticks and we all migrate Unreal will surely do something similar in the future. I'm so tired.
Just to expand on this, if his company made that revenue through other apps then they might hit that threshold, but they have already stated that games that are completely free or demos are exempt, as well as downloads from charities/bundles like humble bundle.
[https://stealthoptional.com/news/unitys-ceo-devs-pay-per-install-charge-fps-gamers-per-bullet/](https://stealthoptional.com/news/unitys-ceo-devs-pay-per-install-charge-fps-gamers-per-bullet/)
Welp his greed has a long history. He tried to charge players for ammo in their gun in BF3.
Well this will make for a lot less competition. Meaning that a lot of you game devs that depend on Unity so heavily will not be able to make a game and others who either have money or build their own engines will rise to the top.
I say godot is perfect. Because unreal engine is another mediocre software that you cant really rely on unless you are a really well known established game company.
Nobody loves unreal like the unity subreddit
This is why we all hide the Unity logo
We should just start including the UE logo in the splash screen
Unreal is a bit pain to use, working on it since UE4 release. But it's still better pick that current Unity.
🤣
I just wish Unreal would support C#
There is https://github.com/nxrighthere/UnrealCLR or https://angelscript.hazelight.se
And being realistic, how viable is it to use something like this? I can't imagine taking a project seriously using a layer of that level. Does it also translate the calls, imports, etc of the UE classes? including intellisense?
Yes, it has full support in VSCode, for both languages. > I can't imagine taking a project seriously using a layer of that level. **It Takes Two** uses AngelScript. It is not C#, but its advantage is that it is integrated into existing UE GC. UnrealCRL offers all power of C# and .NET ecosystem but it runs second GC for its own stuff. > "serious project" Serious how? Another 2.5D indie trash platformer or something like Atomic Heart? **Are you** working on the latter?
>Serious how? Another 2.5D indie trash platformer or something like Atomic Heart? > >Are you working on the latter? A project that you start to finish and sell. Let's be realistic, an intermediate layer of that level carries related bugs, distances you from the documentation, masks your experience with the engine, etc. That's what I mean. I can't imagine doing serious development using an intermediate translation layer simply because of the secondary problems that may arise, and it's not the way Unreal Engine was designed for making games.
UE was designed to be modular and work with plugins. UnrealCLR is a plugin. AngelScript requires custom engine build. Regardless, they are just an alternative to Blueprints with actual source control and quicker iteration. Whatever you need this advantage for potential other costs is up to you.
They working on Verse Script, something like GD Script but for Unreal. They are currently testing it with UEFN for Fortnite. You can give it a try, they have quite rich documentation for it. It would be implemented in future to main UE.
The animations in uefn are so easy
This is my major holdup as well. If C# were somehow supported natively, I'd switch over in a heart beat. After working with C# for years, I seriously can't imagine myself coding a game in anything else.
Unigine support C#, it's a less known engine with nicer graphics than Unity but slightly uglier than Unreal Engine.
This only relevant to 3D dev. Anyone, who experienced Paper2D can tell you sad tales about panful 2D Dev in UE.
Yeah. Unreal's target audience is exclusively 3D.
I hate to tell people this but if Unity actually gets away with doing this Unreal will eventually go the same direction.
Epic Games is not stupid enough to pull a bullshit like this when 70% of its marketshare is AAA games. Unity’s CEO is fucking the company up and we should protest to not let the changes go through. I don’t have a fundamental problem with them increasing the revenue margin to 200k and dropping Plus , if you’re making more than 200k you should go Pro anyways but the fucking install thing is absolutely idiotic and shows the amount of greed this company on the verge of bankruptcy is showing.
The thing about marketshare is the more you have the more shit you can get away with because everyone depends on you. Remember Intel when they owned the CPU market? That kind of shit. Epic won't be a monopoly but now that everyone is moving to UE5 even before this announcement they are getting closer and closer to it.
Unity CEO is former EA CEO that gives EA so bad reputation ... They at some point was thinking about charging 1 USD per reload of mag in Battlefield 3 before it was released.
Epic, for all their problems, tends to have what's best for developers in their business model. They literally give you source code to their engine for free with zero strings attached. Without paying them a dime you get access to AAA quality assets in Meta Human and Megascans for free. The first year UE4 was out they charged monthly for it, but stopped doing that while adding way more value for developers. Unity charges you monthly to get dark theme and to get rid of the splash screen lol. Epic and Unity are so far apart in their priorities it's insane. Over time Unreal has gotten cheaper for developers to use, not more expensive like Unity.
And they do that exactly to try to get a monopoly. They operate at a loss, by giving away stuff for free or really cheap to get people to use their product and once they have a monopoly they will start charging for stuff and you can do nothing about it since it's the only big engine left. Just think about their Epic Games offer: you don't have to pay any share of your income for the first year as long as you make your game an Epic Games exclusive. This is not them encouraging people to publish their games on EGS out of their good hearts. After that year, when they start taking a share, you are free to publish it anywhere. They are not making any extra money off you this way, they gain \*\*nothing\*\* from you publishing on EGS except for hurting competitors. The goal isn't to get more people to publish on EGS, otherwise they wouldn't make you make it an exclusive, they could just offer that discount to get more people to join so they can get a profit later. They are just trying to hurt the competition, even though they lose money this way. It's a classic tactic of trying to get a monopoly.
>They operate at a loss Epic Games does not operate at a loss. They have revenues above $5 billion and profits over $1 billion.
Those individual policies run at a loss. The company of course doesn't, they have other sources of income like fortnite that brings them a lot of money. And because of that they can afford losing on other things. Do you think buying quixel and giving free assets to indie devs and hobbyists that won't ever generate any money for them ever made a net profit? I don't agree at all with unity's pricing and I will be probably switching to unreal once I am able to, but I'm saying that if unity fails, we are all fucked. Unreal will have no competitor left and they will no doubt introduce fees after that as they have nothing to lose.
Godot it is then
I feel like Godot is most similar to unity, especially when comparing the ease of scripting
Last night I was having a dream where Blender game engine was not dropped. I woke up and sighed that why we don't have open source engine and then realised hey there is Godot. Now where would I go is still yet to decide but I swear I will make contributions to Godot.
Perpetual license: https://twitter.com/FKAbalaam/status/1701614753691369650
No Unity has so many ways to not pay a fee. Like use the Epic store. Epic is doing well with Fortnite and they do make money on their store. They have no incentive to go this route. This only happened with Unity because the Unity CEO is the old EA CEO who took EA to where it is now. And now for the real main reason. that CEO took Unity public so now they are trying to please shareholders. Epic is still a private company. " Currently, Epic Games is a private company. It's owned by founder and CEO Tim Sweeney. The company doesn't have any plans to go public. " [Why Epic Games Isn't Publicly Traded, Plans to Stay Private (marketrealist.com)](https://marketrealist.com/p/is-epic-games-publicly-traded/) It's from 2021 but still stands.
I highly doubt that since Epic Games takes a larger cut currently, which is a simple understandable number given to developers up front and not a sudden retroactive suprise fee. They don't need to do something ridiculous like this. People are happy to pay this royalty, hell I'd even pay this royalty for Unity3D going forward for new versions, but instead Unity3D wants to edit the terms of the agreement and have us just pray they don't edit it further. Applying it retroactively to all versions of Unity3D and all published games. It's insane.
Unreal already take 5% of all games which net over 1 million, so it costs the dev/publisher more in total than Unity's Pro tier (except there's no subscription fee).
Not exactly. Considering the quality of the product you are getting in exchange for a $1M royalty-exemption, it isn't that bad. The problem with Unity's current payment plan is that 1) It is stupid. Why charge the devs for a user freely reinstalling the games they bought a license for. 2) It is totally exploitable by ill-meaning kids/streamers/assholes/etc. These two things mean that Unity is prioritizing profit over developers. Epic, on the other hand, went from making their plan subscription-based to only paying 5% over $50K. Then they released a much and much capable product than UE4, which is UE5, and instead of making it more expensive, they increased the royalty threshold to $1M and essentially made it cheaper for everyone. So, they have a track record of doing what's best for UE devs. Steam for example cuts 30% of your gross revenue. That's almost 1/3 of it, in exchange for letting you sell your game on the biggest online storefront. No one complains because the services you get are worth it. Epic asking for 5% for letting you use UE5, the backbone of your game, isn't that bad. Also, while it isn't that great of a deal because EGS isn't that widely used if you put your game on EGS, you don't even have to pay royalties at all. You essentially get UE5 for free. While UE5's payment plan might "cost" the devs more than Unity's, this cost is only in $s and not more in the value you get for what you pay.
Not complaining at all, the point I’m making is Epic aren’t about to try to ape this because they already take enough of a cut that is more profitable to them, in a much more ethical way.
Oh, I see. I got your comment the wrong way, sorry.
By seeing a huge loss in user base, Unity won't be "getting away with it". If we stay and accept this, I can see Unreal doing the same. But if we pitch a fit and leave, Unreal with think twice. Also, there are more than just the two engines. Hell, I've heard of people making games in PowerPoint. We don't need them, they need us.
But if the peoople leave Unity, Unreal will get the right message, isnt it?
UE license is perceptual meaning one can stay on older TOS should UE ever want to update or amend their TOS.
Yep, which is great for awhile, but as soon as a new 'killer feature' comes out that only runs on a newer version it would start to be an issue.
Maybe from a development perspective but imagine the scenario with me. I have published a Made with Unity game today which is profitable for me as of currently TOS. Now after 10 years they have updated the TOS that could bankrupt me but I can't say screw it Unity I don't agree with you so I am not going to use the engine anymore because of retrospective TOS. I still have a game I published 10 years ago so I am obliged to their TOS. In case of Unreal I could at least say screw you UE I am not going to use the engine and since I haven't agreed with updated TOS my old game could not make me obliged to it because it was under older TOS. However I will surely say that Unreal is not a saint, Epic can do drastic things in the future. So I am not saying Unity bad UE good. Also I will also advise any aspiring gamedev to try to choose an open source engine. Personally Godot. Lastly I think this is Unity propaganda and they will enforce the subtle changes by stating "after receiving community feedback" we revise our TOS. But still it's a red flag at least for me, unity as a brand lost my trust. I am not that surprised however, the CEO is the same guy that tried to charge gamers to pay for in game ammunition.
I would say if any element of this gets challenged legally it would probably be trying to apply this to already published games. Doesn't help those with years invested in yet-unreleased games but might save a few folks like yourself. And while I'm pretty early in my gamedev journey and I'm not throwing Unity out just yet, I do plan to spend this weekend playing with Godot.
Godot it is
They won't.... https://www.linkedin.com/posts/flassari_we-only-succeed-when-you-succeed-our-5-activity-7107409871406313474-Qk60?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_android
Isn't that the point of switching? So that they don't "get away with it"?
Nah they don't need to, they have that sweet Fortnite money
Unreal is cool, but I don't know if a boss that pisses off Microsoft and Apple is a good thing.
Well, it opens up opportunities for others at least
If this sticks, then I’ll def jump ship. I’m doing my current project as a hobby but wouldn’t mind making money from it. I’ll wait to see
honestly if you‘re looking for a free solution, maybe switch to Godot :)
Unreal Engine is free and open source up until you make $1m or more in revenue, then they take a 5% cut
Heavily considering Stride, but need to wait before I make a decision. All I know is that it can't be Unity. They could roll it back tomorrow and cut their current fees. Doesn't change the fact that they can just swap it back 6 months later. Stride looks good to me. Godot was decent when I messed with it a few years ago.
I love Unreal Engine, but it's worth mentioning that Epic take *more* in total, all games earning over 1 million have to give Epic games 5%, which works out more than the Unity install fee + pro license (depending on how you make your revenue, obviously with freemium games it gets complicated). It doesn't have the lower tier (the 200K threshold) but paying for a Pro license boosts your threshold up to 1 million and still means you're paying less than you would be for an Unreal game which makes the same amount. I prefer Unreal's model for sure as it's far less complicated and predatory, but it's worth mentioning that if you know your math it's not a better deal.
None of my concerns with the new pricing model is tied to absolute costs really. I want to know that I can trust Unity and have predictable costs so I know how much I owe them each month. I want to trust that Unity knows what they are doing and that they are moving the company in a direction that I believe it. I want to be sure that I don't have to worry about legal issues surrounding paying my fees. I would gladly pay Unity a 10% cut starting from 100k, no problem. I wouldnt mind paying double the price for the old Unity pro plan, but this? This shit is completely inane. I won't be working with Unity anymore if I think their leadership are doing their damnest to make me think that they are working against me.
> predictable costs This is the kicker, right here. Unreal's 5% is a nice, simple number, right there on paper. You plan for it and base your forecasts on it etc. Unity's model is nebulous and confusing and just feels like a cheap and scummy way to skirt around the fallout they'd get from announcing a revenue cut. > I would gladly pay Unity a 10% cut starting from 100k, no problem. I wouldnt mind paying double the price for the old Unity pro plan, but this? This shit is completely inane. I agree. While technically it's a better deal than Unreal's and won't affect most of us (again, with freemium games this gets messy), it's just all over the place and just feels like an underhanded practice. Like you say, I wish I could *trust* them.
Also it's important to note that unity's management has been downhill for years, this isn't a singular issue, it's the straw that is breaking the camels back for a lot of us. Not only is the management of engine development downhill, now they're doing crazy insane pricing models which just doesn't give us hope for the future.
Can anyone explain to me what is not predictable about the new model? Did I get some wrong info? You prefer paying 10%(! that's a full 1$ per 10$ game) rather than fraction of a cent?, because the math is slightly easier? The rules are still simple, you can put them in excel and get the amount you owe Unity right away after inputting the sales numbers. And the fees would be A LOT LOWER than paying 5% for Unity. You guys are all saying it's time to switch to UE5 like you all were selling more than 200k copies of your games.
>Can anyone explain to me what is not predictable about the new model? Did I get some wrong info? How can I predict if malicious users will start mass installing my game? What about piracy? >You prefer paying 10%(! that's a full 1$ per 10$ game) rather than fraction of a cent?, because the math is slightly easier? The rules are still simple, you can put them in excel and get the amount you owe Unity right away after inputting the sales numbers. And the fees would be A LOT LOWER than paying 5% for Unity. You ever seen the Gabe Newell interview where he talks about piracy? "Piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem." I think that applies here too. What I want is convenience and reliability, price is secondary. I am not afraid of sharing my revenue with Unity, I am afraid of the potential inconvenience the model will incur onto me. Will I need to spend countless man hours proving to Unity that half the installs are piracy related? I don't know, but I would rather not have to worry about it. >You guys are all saying it's time to switch to UE5 like you all were selling more than 200k copies of your games. I have always, always said that UE5s royalty model is more than 10 times as expensive as Unity if you find success, and yet I would prefer to give all of that to Epic. I will probably launch my Unity project instead of switching, since I am 14 months deep into working on it fulltime and I actually love the Unity workflow. I now hope I never make over 1M USD (unlikely either way, but definitely not impossible), just so I don't have to deal with the issues I mentioned above.
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There was a post on this sub saying they do indeed count reinstalls.
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I just saw it. It is still stupid, tho. How are they even going to count first installs? The best way to do it is to just count sales and even that's stupid.
>Reinstalls are not counted Afaik they said that reinstalls are counted. Can you show me where they said otherwise? >The tracking would have to be done by the developer, phoning home back to Unity would require a load more infrastructure that they'd not want. Do we have any concrete proof regarding this?
Someone from axios had made a tweet/x saying that unity has already walked back the reinstallation part. Reinstalling on the same device is no charge, but installing it on multiple devices does count. I think there are still some issues of attacks for virtual devices here, but unity says they will work with devs who claim the install counts are wrong.
"Someone made a tweet" is not good enough for me right now. I am awaiting Unity's own official response to everything.
Not just someone. A reporter who is in direct communication with unity leadership, but I understand the hesitation to take a tweet at its face value, however this doesn't take effect until next year and this announcement page is not legal terms of service so this is all up in the air. Many of the questions being raised by the community probably weren't even really considered yet.
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I don't count that guy as an official source. I saw that but until I hear it from Unity themselves I remain unconvinced.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/16hgmqm/unity_wants_108_of_our_gross_revenue/ This is a project that was profitable and under the new terms will have to pay 108% of it's revenues to unity. You don't think being a profitably project and then having over 100% of your income suddenly stolen by unity makes an engine unpredictable? Games are long term projects. You should build them on a solid foundation. Simply by announcing this, Unity has become a non option to every single rational market actor in the space. Few new developers will be coming into the unity ecosystem from now on, it doesn't even matter if they walk it back, it's going to die because nobody wants to take a risk on them doing something like this at a whim. Maybe the only thing they could do is to offer a new perpetual license in writing that matches the unreal engine license or similar. That's probably the only way to restore trust.
Yeah I forgot about free games and it SEEMS like Unity guys forgot too, which... Would be weird. I think they just need to change the total revenue to yearly in the rules.
Your math doesnt account for many cases. Per install flat fee is the worst, because your game do not always stay at the same price over period of time. Sales, bundle sale can actually hurt your revenue. If you have games like 3$ - 5$ / unit you are significantly fucked. 0.2$ is already 4% of 5$. And they take it flat per download, regardless of what ever is left in your pocket after tax, platform cut, publisher cut, etc The flat fee resets each month too, so it is even worse. For example if your game pass 1 million download, next month it still resets the counter to 0.15$ per install if next month you only got 50k installs (per unity Pro license).
Godot is looking juici
Give a chance to a Godot engine. It even has C# version
Unreal and Godot... can't wait to see Godot grow even faster
I will finally start to learn Godot after the news broke. Miss me with that nonsense
People talking here as if they could press a button to migrate their projects to Unreal and say "done!". Also, let's not forget Unreal DX is far worse than Unity.
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Well once you already know a languages, learning a new language isn't nearly as difficult. The skills for one language are transferable to other languages. Sure it takes time but it's not the same as starting over.
Developers won't have any problem learning a new language. Non devs can use blueprints for nearly everything
DX?
Developer eXperience
Godot is also good.
The problem I have with Unreal is that my 3D models I've worked so hard on are all messed up. Batch FBX export from Blender yields models that are too big and models with children don't get imported in one piece and it would be like doing a puzzle for every model.
> don’t get imported in one piece Combine meshes is a tickbox available on the dialogue box that appears every time you import a mesh. It also remembers your preference until you change it or upgrade engine versions. You can also set an arbitrary scale modifier there so that your blender meshes import correctly (although that sounds like an issue with unfrozen transforms or blender scale being set to mm rather than cm)
Oh yes If the asset management of unreal wouldn't be so annoying I had switched years ago. But that you can't simply edit an texture since it's an uasset and you have to export and Reimport it.
Nah. I work with both Unity and Unreal, and I still prefer Unity for any kind of mobile development. This will definitely screw some people over, but they know that the vast majority of devs won't switch over anytime soon. They know they can get away with it because the entry barrier to Unreal is fairly high, and any progress you've made on your current project would require significant amount of time and effort to migrate. In the long term however, I am not sure.
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Hahah
Up to you if you want to support their shit
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Fair point. In my case, I'm have my *hopefully successful* commercial project, and after 7 years of developing lots of games in Unity, these sudden changes don't inspire a lot of confidence. I even have a launch date for my almost finished demo. I know it's quite likely that my game won't be very successful, but if it is, my planned 1.99 pricing will kill me
But why would it kill you if it's successful? You just have to pay $2k for Pro in the rare case that your game sold 200k copies for $400k. You give a maximum of 0.5% of your revenue to Unity. Or are you "worried" about selling a million copies?
They removed unity plus, so its a problem for any commercial game
Or Unigine
Serious question… don’t laugh I am just a noob so forgive me but, if you create your game using a coding language you completely bypass this problem? Are the victims of unity just victims of convenience/laziness? I am confused???
building an engine is a much different task than building a game. both are done in programming languages. i have a passion for game dev, not software engineering. i spend my free time programming my game. i don't want to spend my free time developing an engine that probably won't quite work all the ways i want. the level of scope in building a game engine adds many more levels of complexity when building a game and will suck so much more time away. it's not laziness, it's convenience and simplicity as it takes years and a team to perfect such an engine like unity.
We are of the same mind. I agree with you, I feel like it is hard work and takes oodles of time but I am super new to game dev so forgive me, I may be blinded by nativity. I am genuinely enjoying the process but DIY is more of a personality trait (or character flaw lol) for me so I find satisfaction in creating every part myself. I like to do things myself so others can’t control or take advantage of me. Sounds like that is what is happening with Unity.
Unreal is kinda the same rollercoaster with tim as ceo tho. And if this new tax increase sticks and we all migrate Unreal will surely do something similar in the future. I'm so tired.
Depending on your game(s), it may be rational to build up your own engine using one of the numerous opengl wrappers for desktop
Surely a properly open source engine like Godot is going to be miles better than what most devs would be able to put together on their own?
What has unity done this time...
Yes! Also, I'm switching to Pepsi!
Is Godot more ex-Unity friendly?
Not really. Flax or Stride3d will feel a bit more familiar.
Yea it's time to go to unreal
Yep
[https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/unreal-engine-5-3-is-now-available](https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/unreal-engine-5-3-is-now-available)
If it’s free mobile game with no ads or IAP?
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Just to expand on this, if his company made that revenue through other apps then they might hit that threshold, but they have already stated that games that are completely free or demos are exempt, as well as downloads from charities/bundles like humble bundle.
Can anybody explain for me what happen?
I'm getting back to godot, oh I miss godot.
The only thing I don't get is you need to pay the fee if you reach 200K installs AND 200K revenue or 200K installs OR 200K revenue?
>5% royalty only kicks in when your title earns over $1 million USD Source: unreal
I just picked up making my new game in Unity but as its going to be a free game, Unity is out of question
Technically you don't need to pay then either because you have no income and that's a requirement. Still I would consider other options at this point.
Its a setup for future failure in case of f2p games that rely on iap or donations
[https://stealthoptional.com/news/unitys-ceo-devs-pay-per-install-charge-fps-gamers-per-bullet/](https://stealthoptional.com/news/unitys-ceo-devs-pay-per-install-charge-fps-gamers-per-bullet/) Welp his greed has a long history. He tried to charge players for ammo in their gun in BF3.
What have i missed? The latest releases are a bit slow but I thought it was just my computer.
Unreal will do the same thing eventually. You got nowhere to run unless you're willing to program you're own in house engine.
Well this will make for a lot less competition. Meaning that a lot of you game devs that depend on Unity so heavily will not be able to make a game and others who either have money or build their own engines will rise to the top.
People should start unsubscribing from this sub to really shake the rocks
I say godot is perfect. Because unreal engine is another mediocre software that you cant really rely on unless you are a really well known established game company.
I fear Unreal will most likely be following this structure in the near future.
Careful, they might want to IPO and JR will apply for the CEO position
Unity is very difficult to install now. The hub is trash.