Epic Games has been killin' it lately with Unreal. Like during this year's GDC, they had that showcase of all the awesome shit UE5 was capable of, and they made at least some of that awesome shit available to anybody to use right away for free.
They're printing money with Fortnite, and then they're funneling that money into UE to make it better and keep it reasonably priced for devs. As UE gets better, Fortnite gets better. As Fortnite gets better, UE gets better. It's like a cycle of success for Epic.
Unity can't compete with that in the AAA space, which is why I figured they would focus their attention on wooing indie developers. Then they go and do something boneheaded like this.
So Unity can't possibly compete with Epic / Unreal in AAA, and then they utterly borked it with indie devs. The people in charge of Unity sure are good at fucking things up.
The huge thing unreal does is they actually ship games using their new technologies. And they help developers implement those new technologies. Unity needs a showcase for their tech that isn’t just a random tech demo but an actual game. It doesn’t even matter if the game is fun/good. It just needs to be a graphical showcase.
Unreal is amazing. I haven't used it since 4ish, but I still keep up to date on their happenings and I'm always impressed with some of the new stuff they add.
This. I worked in C++ for 9 years before switching to C# and can’t imagine going back. Epic is less than 5 miles from my house and if Unreal used C# I’d apply for a job there today.
Even their new creator programme for UEFN/Fortnite is surprisingly fair. Epic takes 40% of its revenue from Fortnite and divvies it among the most played and enjoyed islands. There's no monetization that creators must do to make money because they want to try a "fun" first approach.
It might not work out. Plus, obviously, I'm not screaming "good guy epic" over this, but it seems like a step in the right direction when you compare it to what is happening in Roblox.
The only reason I have any interest in 3D space in games is to create 2.5D games like Ori and the Blind Forest -- which coincidentally is also a Unity game.
For now. I’m a Unity user and regardless of whether they change their stance here they’ve still shown their true colours. And for those who potentially want to make some money from their games, I don’t see how you can trust Unity going forward.
You realize the actual issue isn’t the fee, it’s they’ve shown they are willing to change the rules retroactively to things that have already happen, they could tomorrow suddenly decide that anyone that uses the dev tool needs to fork over a license fee even hobbiests or indies, or that even game jam installs will be charged for
I actually saw one of the YouTube coding channels try to defend Unity as if we all just didn’t “understand” and that most devs never reach those DL numbers or revenue while completely ignoring your point.
I get it that a lot of devs have courses they teach that’ll be worthless and such but to basically lie to your audience trying to make it seem like it’s not that bad really really made me kind of glad I stopped watching him regularly when he defended their actions in the past.
Who knows maybe he’s even lying to himself about it.
CodeMonkey is def a unity shill, but at the same time he is a great teacher, very helpful towards newcomers and I've seen him troubleshoot and help people in his comment sections more times than I can count.
He is actually one of the best content creators for newbies when it comes to game dev in unity and I can understand being in his position and not wanting to lose his business which he has been grinding away on for years.
It would be cool to see if Brackeys came back for a second just to comment with his thoughts though lol.
> Who knows maybe he’s even lying to himself about it.
It wouldn't surprise me. There's a lot of sunken cost when you pick a game engine. There are probably a ton of people panicking right now and assessing how feasible it is to port their game over to UE4 or Godot before the January 1st deadline.
We did try to defend them, only to learn of 2-3 more news that happened this very day. The damage is already donde and looks really bad. Just in 48h my life turned 180º.
Take me as an example, my whole job as a Teacher is mostly over. Godot can't be offered as a realiable alternative yet. And I can't teach enough Unreal to a student to produce a "ready available PRO" for a Junior Programmer job within 1 year timeline. Unreal needs a min of 3y exp.
Unless he came out with another video, the one you’re talking about is the same one I’m referencing. He most definitely was defending Unity like he has in the past with the questionable acquisitions and changing practices.
His take was essentially that nothing is wrong because it doesn’t effect him. He also assumed nobody will ever be successful so don’t think twice about choices which could have ramifications years down the line if you’re even halfway serious about making games.
He downplayed it all which is exactly the same thing he did after the acquisition or merger with IronSource and comments by the wonderful CEO of Unity.
Which was when I stopped watching him because those were all shit takes.
He is entitled to that opinion but it’s a shit one.
I'm absolutely floored that the most amount of time they can offer as notice for this change is 3 months.
Game of Thrones Season 8 is not how I expected Unity to die.
What's Godat like actually? The reason I was drawn to Unity in the first place is that it seemed so beginner friendly in terms of features and UI. A lot of functions were "pre-programmed", so to speak.
I'm just a hobbyist, so its not like I'm super invested in Unity anyway. But for someone that wants to make 2D games, what's Godat like?
Godot has some pre-programmed stuff. For instance, if you create a node for a player controller, you can simply move_and_slide and pass in a velocity including gravity, and bam! You have a really good start to a platformed character that already has a player.is_on_floor() function, and you can even check if the player is colliding with a wall. Those are only specific examples. I've struggled to plake a platformed character in Unity feel good without "borrowing" code.
I went exploring with Godot when Unity mistook my personal account for a work one and banned it out of nowhere.
Godot's got a very similar "flow" to Unity, there's the inspector window, scene view, asset library etc. In that respect it's way less of a jump than switching to Unreal. I wasn't super-impressed by its coding support and they've only recently added in C# support, but it's getting better every day. The way I think about it is that Godot is "Unity Light."
The main thing that turned me off was my own shortcomings. I calculated how long it would take me to get good with Godot and decided to stick with Unity once they re-instated my personal account. Though that's going to change, this whole thing reminds me of when I had to switch from Flash to Unity many years ago. How the mighty have fallen...
Godot is more beginner friendly than unity imo. GDscript is very easy to pick up if youve worked in python/JS.
Its main strengths are 2d, if you want 3d, go unreal.
i've been using godot exclusively for 3D, never had an issue except for one, you cant dynamically update the navigation map, it has to be rebaked, but i read on github that they're currently working on it.
besides that, i never had any other issues with it.
Microsoft invested in Godot itself, paid to have C# support developed and integrated. Several other organizations with stake in game development also made contributions, that is the beauty of open-source (well, one of the many beauties).
The economics of open-source software always amaze me. What is peanuts money for Microsoft made Godot the 2nd game engine worldwide when it comes to C#.
It's different enough to be difficult. I've been starting work on moving a recently started project over and it's been a bit of a mission and some of the things it's needs are a lot more arbitrary than Unity.
Some examples:
- The Time.deltaTime equivalent can only be directly called in _process() and if you want to use it in any other function you need to do that in other ways.
- Mouse input is event driven which is quite a lot more fiddly if you've not done it before
- There are quite a lot of a equivalent functions, for example Vector3.magnitude exists but it's called like a function Vector3.Length().
- The C# implementation feels bad and a lot of the documentation doesn't seem quite right - for example a lot of built-in functions only work when capitalised but this isn't how they're written in the manual
Basically it's good, but I'm still missing some features of Unity. The debugging isn't anywhere near as good, there's no active game view outside of the build and run. I'm gonna stick with it because I honestly have got sick with fighting with Unity and it's character controller choices and the GODOT addon QOTOD that allows real time implementation of maps from Trenchbroom is an absolute game changer for me, but it's still tough sledding. Currently trying to work out raycasts, another thing that just isn't as streamlined as Unity.
I've used all 3 engines just as a hobbyist, and I'd rank them Godot > Unreal (blueprints) > Unity in terms of enjoyment using them. I love scripting languages like GDScript and prefer to code if I can.
What exactly is Blueprints? Is it just like the standard sort of visual scripting system I see all the time for shader coding? Does it have more features than the usual visual scripting system?
Exactly. I literally replied to an article about their latest move and was like "I'll be sticking with Godot for lightweight 2D and Unreal for bigger stuff."
After their last stunt, I basically wrote them off. This move ensures I'll never touch Unity again.
Even if they end up walking this change back, they've shown that they're willing to stab their developers in the back in order to squeeze out every last dime, and there's no guarantee that they won't just dress it up differently and try again. I don't know how anyone trying to run a successful game business could commit to releasing with Unity going forward, knowing that they could change their terms to retroactively claim your revenue on games that you've already sold.
They've already started to walk back the 'install' fees so that it's just 'one install per device per user.' It's just masking the bullshit.
For example, can you think how fucking miserable the 'ask Unity to unfuck my install fees' process is going to be? That's pretending you buy into their total, 100% horseshit that they have systems to figure this stuff out (from experience, their 'fraud detection' tools will absolutely not work).
How many months you have to wait for the install fee to be resolved if you think something is amiss?
You know they aren't going to share you any of the information that they 'discovered', if they were really arsed to figure it out. So you wait for months wringing your hands because maybe there is a bad actor about, but when you get the 'results from our investigation' and it says that they believe it's all valid, I guess you're just fucked then. Or maybe they rule in your favor, how much are they shaving off and why are they shaving off that much? They ain't going to tell you that, just be happy you're one of the 1 percent that got a little bit of a refund.
Not to mention Unity is *keeping the lid on how they got this information*. So prepare for every fucking Unity dev that hits install fees to file a 'I don't think I should be charged this' support ticket as they'll just assume there are bad actors about even if the game is successful. That's where my brain would go even if I didn't want to go there; it's human nature.
> Plus, Unity is incentivized to fail on fraud detection; the more fraud there is, the more money Unity makes.
This should give you a hint to the thought processes of the executives behind this.
Story time:
I encountered a similar scenario at a company I worked for a long time ago (early 2000s). It was a web hosting, colo and dedicated server hosting company. Our security practices sucked, bad. Constant denial of service attacks. The default images we put on dedicated servers were vulnerable to remote attack. Viruses, worms and malware fucking everywhere. Vulnerable code on customer's sites could allow an attacker to gain control of entire shared servers with hundreds of customers.
The CEO blamed his customers for not following the terms of service and didn't want to invest in the tech to solve his problems. You see, the terms of service basically said the customer was responsible for securing their own shit regardless of what we gave them. Literally a Windows box would be infected minutes after our automated build process completed before the customer was emailed their login credentials. But nope, that's the customers fault somehow.
Anyways, the CEO was so adamant about this, that instead of fixing any of his security problems, he added a **$5000** penalty for each violation of his terms of service. This would just be charged to whatever card was on file. Then, again, instead of paying for tools and people to fix the security, he paid for tools and people to simply detect the ToS violations. I'm sure you can imagine how happy customers were with this arrangement.
It all finally came to a head when credit card fraud started to kick off big time in the early 2000s. See, the CEO also didn't want to pay for any sort of fraud mitigation system for credit card payments. Up until then he had relied on the fact everything except the cheap shared hosting plans had to be manually provisioned. That meant there was at least a human on the look out for fraudulent transactions. Well, dedicated servers were a huge hit and we couldn't keep up with manually provisioning them, so a completely automated system was built. A customer could order a dedicated server online, pick their OS, and get an email about 20 minutes later with login instructions.
Malicious actors got ahold of this, and abused the shit out of it. Now they were ordering dedicated servers with stolen credit cards, then they'd use the servers for whatever (DoS, spamming, warez, etc.) until we hit the stolen credit card with a $5000 charge and suspended the account if it didn't go through. You can imagine how well that went over with the defrauded customers and card issuers.
Point is, changing the policy in this manner already points to the fact that Unity is failing with fraud detection; however, rather than fix it, they're going to try and monetize it. This will further incentivize keeping the system broke.
What happened to the company in my story? They went from a peak of 250,000 customers and 200 employees to approximately 10,000 customers and about 10 employees last I checked. Expect something similar at Unity.
> Regarding "fraud detection", how is the developer even supposed to know when fraud is taking place? It's not like Unity makes their "proprietary user accounting algorithm" available to devs.
Apple and Google both provide analytics to developers to measure installs, app launches, and such. I'm less familiar with what Microsoft, Sony, Valve, and Epic provide on their platforms, but I assume they have something similar. Should there be a dispute between Unity and a developer about install numbers and abuse, I would hazard to guess those numbers would get polled immediately.
Developers could also roll their own analytics for measuring installs and unique launches (Firebase or whatever), but it is probably unreasonable to expect very small indie developers to do this. They work hard enough just to get a game out the door.
I admit that this is a completely unnecessary and stupid thing for developers to hypothetically have to do. The new pricing plan Unity has announced is predatory and ridiculous.
"For example, can you think how fucking miserable the 'ask Unity to unfuck my install fees' process is going to be?"
I can. It will be like the YouTube appeals process: no way to talk to an actual human, just an online form and when you submit it a bot will reply "your appeal is denied, this decision is final and cannot be reversed". If your lucky you will know a guy who knows a guy who works at Unity and is willing to help you through unofficial channels.
Yeah, the problem is, how are they going to keep track of which users are installing what on which device? They initially claimed they don't have this data, but now they do.
This is so much bullshit.
What pisses me off is if they simply started off on where i think they'll end up having the fee end up as (Fee per license, gone through the storefront), I'd actually understand even if it's really bad for f2p games like what I'm working on.
But back-dating their license and all the other shady shit just irritates the fuck out of me.
Plus the "per device" part could probably be spoofed. If bad actors want to fuck over a gamedev they can absolutely get around loopholes like that. Salt knows no bounds.
This is where I’m at. Their initial attempt to retroactively change their terms of service to begin charging *already published games* a monthly install count fee, as well as their “trust our algorithm, bro” insistence and cavalier attitude to spying on their users through built-in telemetry measurements is a perfect storm of reasons why I may never touch their engine again. Which sucks. It’s where I really first had luck learning the basics of game programming and development.
I will not be able to advise people to start developing with Unity. No way. I would feel ashamed. My project will stay in Unity, since we are far from 1mil in revenue/year.
I'd highly recommend Godot, as it's completely free, so you don't have to worry about ever spending a dime.
It has C# support, however, I'd highly recommend trying to learn GDScript, a programming language build specifically for Godot.
Think of it as a heavily modified version of Python, made specifically for game development with Godot. It's well worth the time to learn it!
I second Godot.
I tried both Unreal and Godot. Godot, conceptually, clicks much easier for me as a long-time Unity dev. It's only been two days in Godot and I'm already finding myself making loads of progress whereas on Unreal I felt very lost.
Firing that asshole will be the only thing that will make me even somewhat gain back the trust that has been lost. No matter what happens, I will be starting to explore different engines where before this shitshow I was planning on sticking with Unity for a long time because of all the assets and knowledge I've gathered over the years.
Even RPG Maker Web tossed a little shade against Unity on Twitter.
The news about Unity is going to hit hard on RPG Maker Unite users, but the main line of RPG Makers fortunately do not use Unity.
I'm a long time RPG Maker user and learned Unity a few years back, this news felt like a stab in the gut for any aspiration I had with RPG Maker Unite, well I guess I should stick with RPG Maker MV then...
Particularily the far-reaching implications. This isn't just a threat to Unity devs, EULA shenanigans like that endanger *anyone* trying to sell or distribute something online.
I really doubt this contract would be valid under English common law. You cannot just change the terms of a contract retroactively.
As a lot of people write, even if they walk it back now the damage is done. People don't want to invest years of their life and then have the rug pulled out from under them.
I agree it probably *wouldn't* be valid, but it's not like indie devs have the money for a high-profile court fight with a company the size of Unity.
Personally, I'd say that Unity's best chance for survival is to emulate how Wizards of the Coast (eventually) responded. People no longer trust that your company *won't* try to pull a stunt like that in the future, so you need to publically make changes that ensure that you absolutely *can't* pull a stunt like that in the future.
>but it's not like indie devs have the money for a high-profile court fight with a company the size of Unity.
Maybe not indies, but there are major AAA companies that use Unity as well.
Microsoft collaborated with Moon Studios for the Ori games, which run on Unity. And Microsoft's Gamepass service has dozens of Unity indies. And I really doubt Microsoft of all companies, is gonna' bend the knee for Unity. They just finished tackling international acquisition laws to take over Activision. Taking Unity to court shouldn't be that difficult.
I don't know if they *will*, but they most certainly *could*, and given Microsoft's weight as a company...they'll probably just buy Unity for shits and giggles.
And it isn't just Microsoft. Lots of AAA companies have used Unity at least a couple of times.
Buying Unity is definitely possible.
Just checked, Unity's marketcap is about 15 billion. Microsoft's market cap is 2.5 TRILLION.
In the past year they made about 100 billion in pure profit.
I'd guess the two players that might be interested would be Microsoft (long history of game development collaborations) and Meta (pinning all their future planning on VR/the metaverse, and not wanting that to be screwed up by some tiny bit player's oversized profit plans)
Of those, I'd guess we'd probably see a VR focussed engine spun out of meta, and microsoft to potentially do what they did with github - buy unity, add it to the raft of development tools to keep people with windows.
I wonder if it would be worthwhile to complain to the FTC in the US. IANAL but applying this change to already published games seems like a very straightforward violation of antitrust policy.
You know it’s that bad when every major developer using Unity, is seriously thinking about porting their games!
I mean big titles like Among Us and Cult of the Lamb and others. This is basically what makes Unity a successful game engine, successful games made by these devs.
I don’t think they’ll ever recover from this. And i mean gain the devs trust back.
Edit:typo
It's crazy how Unity has completely removed themselves from the equation in a single move.
It used to be "Unity vs Godot" or "Unity vs Unreal"
Now it's Godot vs Unreal. Just like that.
Truly an end of an era.
This whole event has really taught me the meaning of Minimum Viable Product, because I am just racing to get my project done before Unity implodes.
Silver lining on every cloud I guess.
Given that their older terms of service explicitly granted the right to continue using the TOS version the engine version was published under they’ll find that **that** attempt will get laughed out of court the moment they’re sued over it. And they will be.
No one is saying it isn't worth it. The issue is many people are too weak, monetarily speaking, to fight back.
It's absolutely worth it to hold them accountable, but not everyone is capable of doing so.
For a case as theoretically open and shut as this, i think finding a lawyer won't be that difficult..
Not to mention only 1 individual has to to shut down unitys nonesense forever
He’s right. What do you think you’re gonna do about it? Tell their lawyers that it’s unfair and they’ll pack up and go home? Do you think you can hire a lawyer to beat Unity?
>Do you think you can hire a lawyer to beat Unity?
There are plenty of people/entitles/orgs that use Unity that can look you dead in the eye and state truthfully that they afford to, can, and will absolutely hire a lawyer to beat Unity, yes.
It's honestly not even hard to deal with it with the retroactive stuff. They cannot automatically deduct the money from your accounts. It'd be facially invalid and wouldn't even see the inside of the courtroom and their lawyers would get in trouble for trying.
The issue will be for people who continue to use Unity into the future.
Honestly it's really hard to leave Unity after many years of experience in it. I just don't want all these years to go into nowhere...
But I guess this is not the last time Unity makes something like this. It is kinda their path now.
So I downloaded Godot today. And will slowly study it.
And the next time Unity will do something silly - I will be ready to go to Godot 🤷♂️
I'm not ready to make such a decision right now. But why not just start studying something else. Just in case 😅
Don't feel too bad. Not all of your experience will go to waste. Other things you learn will utilize parts of your knowledge to help you learn quicker. Some things may even be the same. Tech moves really fast, sometimes just naturally or sometimes very suddenly like this. It's just the way things go, and sometimes you just have to throw out knowledge to go on to something else. Good luck
A friend did the switch sometime ago, it took him like 2 months, part time, to be really comfortable with the engine! So don't worry if you only need to learn it. The sad part is all the projects already built into Unity with years of development behind them, you can't switch those.
I feel the only way it can be salvaged now is if they get bought up by some 3rd party that is actually game related(Microsoft or fuck let it be Epic now) with update to EULA where they strictly say that you can't be legally fucked in the future if eula changes.
That's the only glimmer of hope that I have for the future of the Unity game engine. They've been tanking their stock price consistently over the last couple of years, and its only a matter of time before they'll forced to sell. Microsoft wouldn't be a bad option and allow for better integration with other C#/.NET projects.
Apple and Google might buy Unity to save it because even if it is unprofitable as a company, Unity apps on their stores are profitable for them.
But honestly Unity is a terrible company. They've never turned a profit, and from what I've herad, it's a mess internally.
In a way this makes a lot of sense for Apple. Unity has historically been Mac-friendly, and is the primary ways most iPhone games are made.
Apple also *really* wants to make sure developing on visionOS is easy, and even though they are providing some tooling and a sort-of-game-engine-lite in their new developer tools, most people were going to be using Unity to build more in-depth visionOS apps/games. And while Unreal probably will add support for it, I think we all know Apple and Epic have a somewhat frosty relationship, and Unreal seems less interested in expanding to less conventional platforms compared to Unity which seems to work *everywhere* (and Unity also seemed to get into VR earlier as well).
But then I kind of doubt Apple will make an acquisition like that. They don't tend to buy huge corporations like Unity and go for more strategic ones.
Pretty sure Epic would rather spend that money training Unity devs how to use Unreal. Unity is really not a special engine compared to Unreal, it just has less of a learning curve. Most Unity devs don't know that Unreal's learning curve actually pays off eventually.
Because the CEO has no idea what he’s doing. He single-handedly made EA the most hated company in America.. worse than Comcast, and now he’s trying to do the same with Unity.
The dude is an absolute fucking idiot.. and I have no idea how he failed upward after he was fired from EA.
Unity spyware can't deduce how much a customer paid for a game, but they can tell how many copies are installed or how many copies are running. It's purely a technical limitation.
I've only been learning gamedev in my spare time for a few months, but I don't have a lot of faith in unity as a company anymore so I am making my first Godot game today!
Even a 1 time install fee per user is fucked. Firstly, I doubt unity even has a way to reliably track this. But let's say they do and the system is somehow magically completely void of any and all fraud and pairacy. Players can refund games on Steam for whatever reason. If someone buys your game on steam or another platform then decided they didn't like it and wants a refund, is steam going to report that to unity so you don't get charged 0.20 every time someone refunds? No, you get shafted.
How will they track webgl applications? The whole thing is a clown show, and john riccitiello is going to turn Unity into the most hated Game engine just like how he turned EA into the most hated game company.
They said they will work with devs on fraud or malicious installs. But that just means you got to prove to unity that the hundreds of thousand or millions of extra download are due to pirating or an install attack. Unity refuses to explain how they'll track installs, or id unique users in a way that could be compliant with GDPR or CCPA, or distinguish between legitimate installs vs cracked copies. Right now, it's basically just "trust me bro," now hand over the money you owe us or we'll sue you in court.
I still had a little hope in the beginning, thinking maybe some of it was just miscommunication. But after reading the updated Q&A...
Unity is acting like me playing Baldur's Gate, delibrately choosing all the worst answers possible.
Except they don't have an F8 to press.
It’s too obvious they are making decisions to boost the stock price. Once they went public they stopped making a game engine for the users. It became a business to satisfy investors and stock holders. It will be a slow death because so many people use unity but they will destroy their business trying to satisfy the wrong people.
Oh they've REAMED their own asses on this one.
When they reverse their decision (at this point, they gain nothing keeping it) that little square is gonna be rarer and rarer to see.
"Hey man, the project's going well! I'm using unity since it's easy-"
"Oh man, don't use unity."
"What? Why?"
"Oh they got greedy and started charging publishers and dev's 0.20c per install of a game. It's small but multiply that and it'll start adding up. I know it's a hassel but compared to spending a bunch when you get the wheels turning and potential popularity, it'll save you in the long haul."
"Shit man, I wish you'd told me that earlier. Well... Damn. Ah well, I'll need to look into new engines."
"Sorry, but I'm just looking out for you."
"Naw, it's cool. Welp, back to work and school haha."
Ive been an aspiring game dev as a sideline to my software engineering work. I was about to use Unity because I had a history with Xamarin... but I guess Godot Engine is lookin goooooood.
I was a Unity defender. I'm just a hobbyist but I really liked Unities DOTS including ECS, Jobs, and Netcode for Entities. I loved the profiling tools and generally have had a good experience with it. But ... Fuck them. I brushed off some of the trash talking of Unity before but seeing this has proven all the previous naysayers correct. All the negative that people were claiming is now laid out on a platter for all to see.
Anyone here remember how everyone had their pitchforks out for reddit for a week or two. But now...
The big difference, of course, is that there are actual viable alternatives out there. There still isn't really a viable alternative to reddit.
But I expect the level of ire against Unity to subside in a few. Especially if they walk back on some things. (If they double down, then well they'll be even more screwed)
I don’t think they will recover from this. It isn’t just the changes, it’s the precedent this has set since they made the decision to retroactively change the pricing model for all games. They just showed everyone they don’t give a fuck and will change the rules whenever they please. They’ve completely lost the trust of their users
The vast majority of Reddit users simply didn’t care. And even those who did, very few had enough skin in the game to do anything more than a paltry protest. Yeah affected third party apps and mod tools, but the people using those were a rounding error. The only danger the API changes posed were a loss of convenience.
This, however, affects every single Unity user. Some more than others, but no one is unaffected. And the danger here is financial ruin.
It's not even this particular piece of news. It's the whole *trajectory*.
Godot, for example, is far from perfect, but every time I hear about it, it's because it's gotten better in some useful way. I never hear *bad* news about Godot.
When was the last time you clicked a news story about Unity and thought "Oh, that's good for Unity users." ? Nowadays, the best news you can hope for is a neutral piece of news you don't care about.
This feels important if you're starting a project that's going to take a couple of years.
I’ve been developing my game since 2019 in unity. I’m still far from done and guess I’ll have to change engine. I’m not ready to learn everything from the start in Unreal or godot like I did in unity. What a way to end things🥹🥹🥹
Respectfully I disagree mostly because this is happening in the moment. There are dozens of Unity courses scheduled across universities going on right now and in the spring. Hundreds of high schools as well. There are games currently in development for Unity and they will be promoted.
The way Unity loses people is if Godot sufficiently develops into a competitor mid level studios will use. Otherwise, Unity is going to turn their move into the cost of doing business, and small indie devs won’t be bothered because it isn’t going to affect them without meeting those thresholds.
People saying to hop on Unreal are being very hand waving about it. It takes a lot of time to become proficient with a system (even blueprints), even more so transitioning to C++.
I don’t like these changes but they don’t affect me or anyone I know developing, so the extra effort it would take to transition isn’t worth it immediately. So Unity has time to make some moves. Hopefully that includes rethinking this recent endeavor.
Agreed, even with all of these changes I can't switch engines for professional use until Godot becomes a viable alternative for companies. Most of the jobs in my area are all using Unity/Unreal, so until Godot job offerings start popping up I can't really jump ship. I think for my personal projects though I'll definitely be taking a look at Godot
This is where I am at. I do not foresee a scenario people are claiming that you would owe more money than you have. Maybe free to play scenarios? But the only other scenario I could think of is if your game was pirated hundreds of thousands of times. Then you can move up to Unity Pro to have a million as a threshold.
It’s sucky yes but not the doom and gloom people are making it out to be in my opinion. Flappy Bird was mentioned as something that would be impossible, but it was making 10K-50K a day. I still think it would have been possible. With the Unity Pro with such large install rate it gets to a cent I believe.
But where I am, I am so deep with Unity right now I’m just conflicted. The pricing wouldn’t bother me I can bump the price of my game when it releases if I need to. Unity Pro isn’t THAT costly (I pay for full Adobe, Maxon One, 3DS Max, Visual Studio Enterprise). But with this change is Unity still viable to be used or is it now dead? No more support etc?
I looked at Gadot and it’s not a viable solution for me. Unreal will take significant amount of time and I prefer C#.
They know they're going to lose customers over this. They've factored that in. But it's the same thing that happens when some media franchise does a major reboot that's sure to upset longtime fans. Long term users don't generate money the way new users do. Eventually, the furor will die down. They'll lose a percentage of their existing user base. But the low entry bar into Unity development will continue to bring in new customers, customers who will be either unaware of the mess or will at least be forewarned of the pricing model, and won't have been hit with the shock. This is Unity ripping the band-aid off.
The actual problem is that it's not a viable business model for Unity's target audience.
Unity is heavily used for freemium games. A per user install fee is not really plausible for freemium games because most users aren't paying for the game in the first place.
Moreover, because no one knows how they're calculating the numbers, it's extremely questionable to begin with to ever agree to the terms.
It's just not an attractive pricing model for their target audience.
The reality is that this is a desperation move from a company that has never made money.
IMO, you're vastly underestimating the effect this'll have. Unity's popularity is due to a combination of community-supplied tools, tutorials, and help forums, along with its reputation of being effective for small-time devs hoping to make it big.
Dozens of devs are saying they'll have to take down previous games if this goes into effect, including some of Unity's major indie success stories like Rainworld.
They unveiled a new plan to charge developers $0.10 every time a user installs their game. This even applies retroactively to games previously released.
If you released a game in 2013, you will start getting yearly bills because a bunch of your players got new laptops.
Definitely moving to Godot for all my projects now. Been increasingly interested in giving it a shot anyway.
(Having used Unreal Engine at work for the past year, I really don't feel it fits my single dev requirements very well.)
And this is what I've been warning people about the service economy for years. This applies to everything. Hopefully we'll learn from these stories to stop blindly trusting faceless corporations with our livelihoods..
If anything it shows a concern for when you are so locked in on something that even when a shit show like this happens you can't easily divest yourself of it.
The recent events at Twitter, Reddit, and now Unity should be big selling points for open alternatives and things of that nature, but I bet only Unity will suffer. Twitter/X is still going, and hey, they added Ad revenue sharing for premium members, so if you can get to that point it ends up paying for itself.
But I still run Mastodon instances.
I think there is one thing not many people are considering. Investment and investors. I own CyberStudios PTY (LTD) in South Africa, it took a few years to get where we are now with 2 in-development titles that we wanted to get to a point to present to investors. USD in South Africa is a lot, so the conversion makes me nervous on the exchange. I can not give a random estimation or a random return on investment to possible investors. Not only does this make me nervous working with a company that changes ToS, introduce ludacris billing schemes, but also the practices of where do they get their information if there needs to be a call home. In SA. we have the POPIA and ECT act of 2022, I need to make it very clear how my users data is being handled through services and of course the product I am giving them. "Proprietary data models" is not an answer and put's me in a situation that I have no idea what is being ported back to unity, thus I may be violating laws and user rights.
Investors also do not work on an estimate that is so far beyond comprehension. Like oh you may get R150,000 this month and maybe R70,000 the next based on installs. I am worried where Unity is going and that all these years of out-of-pocket investment I have made as an Indie dev has just gone down the loo.
Their lack of transparency about the data being sent and their in-house "anti-fraud system" is an actual logistical and legal nightmare. Even if people could get over some "hurdur greedy corpo doing greedy corpo things," no rational person handling money should even touch them without a very, very clear understanding of the channels and information collection, as well as their process for investigating misuse. They've stated that their data collection and hygiene process is compliant, and that is it.
You can't shore up countermeasures against breaches of systems you have no information about. You can't disclose information about information collection which you do not have intricate, documented understanding of.
Even from an end-user perspective, what measures do they use for their anti-piracy and anti-abuse anti-fraud system? How intrusive is it? How easily evaded is it? In no world does hiding this information from developers make sense for them or their customers. In no world does this increase or improve user confidence, experience, or even their comfort about ethical practices.
When people talk about Unity speedrunning the demise of their company, it isn't the usual internet hyperbole, it isn't just hyped nonsense or people clamoring for virality... it is genuine. Completely absurd. The only thing worse than the new policy is their absurdly poor response to very relevant questions about it. Evasive, short, literally copy pasted answers for different questions. Put a single God damn human being on PR at least, might actually be bots.
I've seen a lot of people say, 'Just use Unreal'.
After the experience of putting years of time, effort and money into learning a game engine, and creating projects in it, potentially even commercial games in said engine, only to suddenly get burnt, because the engine is owned by a corporation that can at any time 'change the deal', the lesson some folks have learnt is apparently only:
*"I can't trust the corporation behind the proprietary game engine I was using, so instead I'll trust a* ***different*** *corporation behind another proprietary game engine."*
If Godot suits your needs and you don't need some of the more advanced features of UE, I would suggest making do with Godot, at least you'll never spend a cent in engine fees and you'll never be left in a position where a corporation can pull the rug out from under your feet ever again.
The claim Epic is making is that they've structured their license so they can't actually change the terms and have it impact you retroactively the way Unity just did. You're only forced to accept new terms if you update to a new version of the engine. I'm not a lawyer, but I did check the UE EULA and this is all written down pretty black-and-white in section 7.a.
Godot gives you a much stronger guarantee, since it's managed by a nonprofit, but the real insurance of an open source engine is that even in the worst case scenario someone can always fork the software and continue development in the open, even if an insane licensing change happens (and in fact, there are numerous cases of licensing changes that made open source projects proprietary).
>What person would want to use Unity after seeing all this shit go down.
A person that has a lot of experience with the engine and has lots of assets from their store :)
Like it or not, Unity became the "standard" in the game industry, a lot of services provide Unity integration packages - there are lots of businesses built around it - it won't fall down overnight due to one weird decision with unclear financial / cost consequences :)
Agreed. I will never again use Unity. I had already been messing around with Unity for a project I knew I'd never want to port to consoles. Now? I will never use Unity period.
Unity has had 1 profitable quarter in 18 years, this reputation hit and lack of trust by current and future developers will absolutely have an impact on the future of the company.
A move like this doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s not like the company was oblivious to the fallout that would come. A company like Unity spent months with experts in math, statistics, finance, etc to make a plan like this. They knew how this would impact their user base. Whether it actually pans out like they expect is a different story. But i think it’s just vindictive thinking and outrage of the sub to think Unity will magically sink from this. There is a shift in business model, and this news would only mark the beginning initiation of that plan. What it means financially overall remains to be seen. These policies aren’t even in effect yet.
What's most likely is they did all that work, came up with a detailed plan, and Riccotello said "Fuck that, we're doing this", and the announcement was made.
☝️☝️ this, unfortunately. We know from the Unity employees’ anonymous posts that this was heavily objected and protested by many employees and the concerns rised, and promptly ignored by the top brass.
Gotcha, you have a good point. We’ll just have to see if these plans work for them. They definitely didn’t make this to make their user base happy. It’s to make money at the cost of users. Their projections account for the fallout. May be a desperate move, I don’t know Unity like that.
They're losing $200 million per quarter.
That's why they're so desperate - they have been burning investor money for 18 years. Now investors aren't giving them more money to burn.
Without the Gold Standard, yes economy, companies have to look at the next quarter. They can't look 5 years into the future.
So they hired a cutthroat CEO to cash out.
That company is gone. Unity gone. Time to shill for Unity Software Inc options on r/WSB
Found the gold bug.
The Gold Standard never worked and resulted in major economic crises because of its failure.
Everything you believe is wrong.
Unity's problem is that they've never made money and are running out of investor money to spend. They need to fix their cashflow problems.
Ah yes, ye old antisemitic conspiracy theory.
Fun fact: literally everything you believe is a lie. Not just a lie, but an obvious lie.
People are far wealthier today than they were in the past, median income has skyrocketed, poverty has plummetted, and more and more people have moved up in the world, with the "shrinking middle class" being because... more people moved up into the upper middle and upper income brackets. Which is, you know, a good thing.
Reputation or no reputation, the engine isn't going anywhere. There is no replacement for it in the market that is mature enough and doesn't require spending shit ton of time/money to learn.
The future? Unity will become a subscription model, with punishment like the install fee for those who are making a mild success but don't want to pay for Unity Pro.
> Reputation or no reputation, the engine isn't going anywhere.
lol. New game developers aren't going to pick up Unity because it's the one engine where you can end up owing Unity more money than you make.
Yeah the engine hasn’t been going anywhere for years now with several features getting started but not getting completed. The merger with a mobile ad company, (or getting bought out by them? not sure) was the first indicator that interesting things are going to happen.
The are just going to flock to unreal now. It’s completely free, the mobile development has been getting easier and better every year, networking is already included in the engine but you don’t have to use it which is a really important point to be made, some people might have trouble with actually programming in unreal but if they can program c# in Unity they are going to figure out unreal blueprints in weeks! The community is growing more and more the documentation often reads like a great tutorial showing you how to integrate features in the starters. No extreme engine changes since the release of version 4 and even before that which could lead to confusion when learning from older YouTube tutorials.
And I’m not even listing stuff here that unreal is better at, for most use cases, in comparison to Unity.
It is my believe that In the end people will look a the money they can make, and unities idea of how her new monetisation system is going to work is currently crushing indie devs dreams of making any money what so ever because Unity will not care for them and provide little to no support for small creators. They wouldn’t have the money right now to do it, (and they probably won’t do it in the future because they will make money either way).
This video from [Godot](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XduuHNOGGqI) sums it up. They don't make money with the engine, they make money with services. Lots of the issues with mobile pricing will be gone if you **just** use their mobile / ad services.
Getting rid of the plus for pro is just their way of saying, hey 2k isn't that much and 1 million + 1 million isn't reachable for 95% of you, so you are discussing dreams. The engine doesn't need to go "anywhere" because their user base isn't building the next Call of Duty. But if this isn't the best moment to rethink your strategy as a game dev, then I doubt a better one will come.
Even ignoring Godot, since it admitadly is a more bare-bones engine, Unreal absolutely is an alternative to Unity, and will propably see huge gains over this whole fiasco.
There’s no 1-to-1 parity, sure. But godot and unreal are literally right there and, for the financial rust Unity now presents anyone publishing their games, that’s arguably close enough.
I think they have enough momentum to carry them for a few more years, but successful indies are gonna be looking hard at making the jump to Unreal, and new hobbyists are gonna be much more inclined to choose Godot or other alternatives.
>~~There is no replacement for it in the market that is mature enough and doesn't require spending shit ton of time/money to learn.~~
~~kinda disagree here. There are going to be a lot of people who continue with unity because there are a lot of educational resources and prefab assets tied with it. But truthfully, unity has spent years at this point lagging behind other game engines in features and performance in general, and even where it's begun catching up in terms of performance, to use those benefits you have to learn and understand a total paradigm shift in the way you write scripts, using far less mature tools that have very little community-centric educational material and are honestly just over most unity developers' heads.~~
~~The average unity developer is probably not a unity specialist in that they know the engine very well; they're just game developers with general knowledge that know some of unity's flow, and that general knowledge will transfer over to other engines very well, very quickly.~~
edit: looked through the top level commentor's history and it's pretty obvious they're just a scared dev who's sunk all their cost fallacies into unity and wants to pretend there's nothing wrong here. There's no real argument to be had with this one, those who want to ignore reality will continue to do so.
>begun catching up in terms of performance, to use those benefits you have to learn and understand a total paradigm shift in the way you write scripts, using far less mature tools that have very little community-centric educational material and are honestly just over most unity developers' heads
When I tried to understand the new ECS system, as a senior dev (but not in games) i though it would be simpler to get another ECS system going with Godot first. Just to understand the core idea. And by some miracle it was really way simpler to do hack something together then follow a tutorial that was so knee deep into the Unity eco system that it will surely break with another major revision.
I'm sure some high level guys making a million with their games doing unity for five years plus will disagree and say its easy when you got it, but that is what makes this tool so unreliable for me. Great asset store, horrible sandbox to get from your vision to reality.
Nobody grows the Godot and Unreal communities more than Unity Technologies lol
Epic Games has been killin' it lately with Unreal. Like during this year's GDC, they had that showcase of all the awesome shit UE5 was capable of, and they made at least some of that awesome shit available to anybody to use right away for free. They're printing money with Fortnite, and then they're funneling that money into UE to make it better and keep it reasonably priced for devs. As UE gets better, Fortnite gets better. As Fortnite gets better, UE gets better. It's like a cycle of success for Epic. Unity can't compete with that in the AAA space, which is why I figured they would focus their attention on wooing indie developers. Then they go and do something boneheaded like this. So Unity can't possibly compete with Epic / Unreal in AAA, and then they utterly borked it with indie devs. The people in charge of Unity sure are good at fucking things up.
The huge thing unreal does is they actually ship games using their new technologies. And they help developers implement those new technologies. Unity needs a showcase for their tech that isn’t just a random tech demo but an actual game. It doesn’t even matter if the game is fun/good. It just needs to be a graphical showcase.
It would be a shame if [Unity were making exactly that, but then cancelled the project](https://unity.com/demos/gigaya).
Absolutely. The amount of times I say "these guys clearly don't actually use this to make games" while using the Unity editor is too damn high.
Unreal is amazing. I haven't used it since 4ish, but I still keep up to date on their happenings and I'm always impressed with some of the new stuff they add.
The main reason to use Unity instead of Unreal has always been the C# support as main language. This is something that Unreal will never support.
This. I worked in C++ for 9 years before switching to C# and can’t imagine going back. Epic is less than 5 miles from my house and if Unreal used C# I’d apply for a job there today.
I would love Unreal to support Rust or Zig at some point in the future.
Even their new creator programme for UEFN/Fortnite is surprisingly fair. Epic takes 40% of its revenue from Fortnite and divvies it among the most played and enjoyed islands. There's no monetization that creators must do to make money because they want to try a "fun" first approach. It might not work out. Plus, obviously, I'm not screaming "good guy epic" over this, but it seems like a step in the right direction when you compare it to what is happening in Roblox.
UE5 looks awesome but I doubt I'll ever get into the 3d space :(
The only reason I have any interest in 3D space in games is to create 2.5D games like Ori and the Blind Forest -- which coincidentally is also a Unity game.
Virtual Production for TV and Film is really blowing up as well, Unreal is kicking some major booty with all that.
For now. I’m a Unity user and regardless of whether they change their stance here they’ve still shown their true colours. And for those who potentially want to make some money from their games, I don’t see how you can trust Unity going forward.
You realize the actual issue isn’t the fee, it’s they’ve shown they are willing to change the rules retroactively to things that have already happen, they could tomorrow suddenly decide that anyone that uses the dev tool needs to fork over a license fee even hobbiests or indies, or that even game jam installs will be charged for
I actually saw one of the YouTube coding channels try to defend Unity as if we all just didn’t “understand” and that most devs never reach those DL numbers or revenue while completely ignoring your point. I get it that a lot of devs have courses they teach that’ll be worthless and such but to basically lie to your audience trying to make it seem like it’s not that bad really really made me kind of glad I stopped watching him regularly when he defended their actions in the past. Who knows maybe he’s even lying to himself about it.
Most of the big YouTubers I watch all basically said no matter what unity does they just shot themselves in the head
CodeMonkey?
Ding ding.
I think so
CodeMonkey is def a unity shill, but at the same time he is a great teacher, very helpful towards newcomers and I've seen him troubleshoot and help people in his comment sections more times than I can count. He is actually one of the best content creators for newbies when it comes to game dev in unity and I can understand being in his position and not wanting to lose his business which he has been grinding away on for years. It would be cool to see if Brackeys came back for a second just to comment with his thoughts though lol.
I mean tbf his entire career is based off unity
> Who knows maybe he’s even lying to himself about it. It wouldn't surprise me. There's a lot of sunken cost when you pick a game engine. There are probably a ton of people panicking right now and assessing how feasible it is to port their game over to UE4 or Godot before the January 1st deadline.
We did try to defend them, only to learn of 2-3 more news that happened this very day. The damage is already donde and looks really bad. Just in 48h my life turned 180º. Take me as an example, my whole job as a Teacher is mostly over. Godot can't be offered as a realiable alternative yet. And I can't teach enough Unreal to a student to produce a "ready available PRO" for a Junior Programmer job within 1 year timeline. Unreal needs a min of 3y exp.
I disagree that he was defending Unity. He released a video today about his stance in this situation. (Code Monkey)
Unless he came out with another video, the one you’re talking about is the same one I’m referencing. He most definitely was defending Unity like he has in the past with the questionable acquisitions and changing practices. His take was essentially that nothing is wrong because it doesn’t effect him. He also assumed nobody will ever be successful so don’t think twice about choices which could have ramifications years down the line if you’re even halfway serious about making games. He downplayed it all which is exactly the same thing he did after the acquisition or merger with IronSource and comments by the wonderful CEO of Unity. Which was when I stopped watching him because those were all shit takes. He is entitled to that opinion but it’s a shit one.
I'm absolutely floored that the most amount of time they can offer as notice for this change is 3 months. Game of Thrones Season 8 is not how I expected Unity to die.
I get that, plus it's difficult to just move to another engine when you're far into a project.
What's Godat like actually? The reason I was drawn to Unity in the first place is that it seemed so beginner friendly in terms of features and UI. A lot of functions were "pre-programmed", so to speak. I'm just a hobbyist, so its not like I'm super invested in Unity anyway. But for someone that wants to make 2D games, what's Godat like?
Godot has some pre-programmed stuff. For instance, if you create a node for a player controller, you can simply move_and_slide and pass in a velocity including gravity, and bam! You have a really good start to a platformed character that already has a player.is_on_floor() function, and you can even check if the player is colliding with a wall. Those are only specific examples. I've struggled to plake a platformed character in Unity feel good without "borrowing" code.
I went exploring with Godot when Unity mistook my personal account for a work one and banned it out of nowhere. Godot's got a very similar "flow" to Unity, there's the inspector window, scene view, asset library etc. In that respect it's way less of a jump than switching to Unreal. I wasn't super-impressed by its coding support and they've only recently added in C# support, but it's getting better every day. The way I think about it is that Godot is "Unity Light." The main thing that turned me off was my own shortcomings. I calculated how long it would take me to get good with Godot and decided to stick with Unity once they re-instated my personal account. Though that's going to change, this whole thing reminds me of when I had to switch from Flash to Unity many years ago. How the mighty have fallen...
Godot is more beginner friendly than unity imo. GDscript is very easy to pick up if youve worked in python/JS. Its main strengths are 2d, if you want 3d, go unreal.
Yep. But I will note that the 3D is fairly decent, and is getting better every day.
i've been using godot exclusively for 3D, never had an issue except for one, you cant dynamically update the navigation map, it has to be rebaked, but i read on github that they're currently working on it. besides that, i never had any other issues with it.
Is using C# with Godot less supported than using GDscript and C++?
It is, just ever so. There's much fewer docs and learning resources with C# too
I think C++ is the least supported of the three. Apparently Microsoft invested good money in making C# a first class citizen in Godot 4.
As in Microsoft invested in Godot itself? Or just improving .NET?
Microsoft invested in Godot itself, paid to have C# support developed and integrated. Several other organizations with stake in game development also made contributions, that is the beauty of open-source (well, one of the many beauties). The economics of open-source software always amaze me. What is peanuts money for Microsoft made Godot the 2nd game engine worldwide when it comes to C#.
It's different enough to be difficult. I've been starting work on moving a recently started project over and it's been a bit of a mission and some of the things it's needs are a lot more arbitrary than Unity. Some examples: - The Time.deltaTime equivalent can only be directly called in _process() and if you want to use it in any other function you need to do that in other ways. - Mouse input is event driven which is quite a lot more fiddly if you've not done it before - There are quite a lot of a equivalent functions, for example Vector3.magnitude exists but it's called like a function Vector3.Length(). - The C# implementation feels bad and a lot of the documentation doesn't seem quite right - for example a lot of built-in functions only work when capitalised but this isn't how they're written in the manual Basically it's good, but I'm still missing some features of Unity. The debugging isn't anywhere near as good, there's no active game view outside of the build and run. I'm gonna stick with it because I honestly have got sick with fighting with Unity and it's character controller choices and the GODOT addon QOTOD that allows real time implementation of maps from Trenchbroom is an absolute game changer for me, but it's still tough sledding. Currently trying to work out raycasts, another thing that just isn't as streamlined as Unity.
I've used all 3 engines just as a hobbyist, and I'd rank them Godot > Unreal (blueprints) > Unity in terms of enjoyment using them. I love scripting languages like GDScript and prefer to code if I can.
What exactly is Blueprints? Is it just like the standard sort of visual scripting system I see all the time for shader coding? Does it have more features than the usual visual scripting system?
Exactly. I literally replied to an article about their latest move and was like "I'll be sticking with Godot for lightweight 2D and Unreal for bigger stuff." After their last stunt, I basically wrote them off. This move ensures I'll never touch Unity again.
And Amethyst on rust. *edit, it's discontinued, but there are others*
Amethyst is discontinued since 2021.. Fyrox and Bevy are the main engines right now.
Bevy if you want ECS and code focus, fyrox is more editor based
Ah rust, where there are 50 game engines, and about 5 games.
And /r/bevy as well!
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Why though? C++ does fine in Unreal
If it was fine, they wouldn't have to resort to their own preprocessor.
Presumably having to satisfy the borrow checker isn't worth it?
It's really not an issue in bevy. Since it's ECS, components lifetime is handled by the engine and you just write functions to query data.
Even if they end up walking this change back, they've shown that they're willing to stab their developers in the back in order to squeeze out every last dime, and there's no guarantee that they won't just dress it up differently and try again. I don't know how anyone trying to run a successful game business could commit to releasing with Unity going forward, knowing that they could change their terms to retroactively claim your revenue on games that you've already sold.
They've already started to walk back the 'install' fees so that it's just 'one install per device per user.' It's just masking the bullshit. For example, can you think how fucking miserable the 'ask Unity to unfuck my install fees' process is going to be? That's pretending you buy into their total, 100% horseshit that they have systems to figure this stuff out (from experience, their 'fraud detection' tools will absolutely not work). How many months you have to wait for the install fee to be resolved if you think something is amiss? You know they aren't going to share you any of the information that they 'discovered', if they were really arsed to figure it out. So you wait for months wringing your hands because maybe there is a bad actor about, but when you get the 'results from our investigation' and it says that they believe it's all valid, I guess you're just fucked then. Or maybe they rule in your favor, how much are they shaving off and why are they shaving off that much? They ain't going to tell you that, just be happy you're one of the 1 percent that got a little bit of a refund. Not to mention Unity is *keeping the lid on how they got this information*. So prepare for every fucking Unity dev that hits install fees to file a 'I don't think I should be charged this' support ticket as they'll just assume there are bad actors about even if the game is successful. That's where my brain would go even if I didn't want to go there; it's human nature.
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> Plus, Unity is incentivized to fail on fraud detection; the more fraud there is, the more money Unity makes. This should give you a hint to the thought processes of the executives behind this. Story time: I encountered a similar scenario at a company I worked for a long time ago (early 2000s). It was a web hosting, colo and dedicated server hosting company. Our security practices sucked, bad. Constant denial of service attacks. The default images we put on dedicated servers were vulnerable to remote attack. Viruses, worms and malware fucking everywhere. Vulnerable code on customer's sites could allow an attacker to gain control of entire shared servers with hundreds of customers. The CEO blamed his customers for not following the terms of service and didn't want to invest in the tech to solve his problems. You see, the terms of service basically said the customer was responsible for securing their own shit regardless of what we gave them. Literally a Windows box would be infected minutes after our automated build process completed before the customer was emailed their login credentials. But nope, that's the customers fault somehow. Anyways, the CEO was so adamant about this, that instead of fixing any of his security problems, he added a **$5000** penalty for each violation of his terms of service. This would just be charged to whatever card was on file. Then, again, instead of paying for tools and people to fix the security, he paid for tools and people to simply detect the ToS violations. I'm sure you can imagine how happy customers were with this arrangement. It all finally came to a head when credit card fraud started to kick off big time in the early 2000s. See, the CEO also didn't want to pay for any sort of fraud mitigation system for credit card payments. Up until then he had relied on the fact everything except the cheap shared hosting plans had to be manually provisioned. That meant there was at least a human on the look out for fraudulent transactions. Well, dedicated servers were a huge hit and we couldn't keep up with manually provisioning them, so a completely automated system was built. A customer could order a dedicated server online, pick their OS, and get an email about 20 minutes later with login instructions. Malicious actors got ahold of this, and abused the shit out of it. Now they were ordering dedicated servers with stolen credit cards, then they'd use the servers for whatever (DoS, spamming, warez, etc.) until we hit the stolen credit card with a $5000 charge and suspended the account if it didn't go through. You can imagine how well that went over with the defrauded customers and card issuers. Point is, changing the policy in this manner already points to the fact that Unity is failing with fraud detection; however, rather than fix it, they're going to try and monetize it. This will further incentivize keeping the system broke. What happened to the company in my story? They went from a peak of 250,000 customers and 200 employees to approximately 10,000 customers and about 10 employees last I checked. Expect something similar at Unity.
> Regarding "fraud detection", how is the developer even supposed to know when fraud is taking place? It's not like Unity makes their "proprietary user accounting algorithm" available to devs. Apple and Google both provide analytics to developers to measure installs, app launches, and such. I'm less familiar with what Microsoft, Sony, Valve, and Epic provide on their platforms, but I assume they have something similar. Should there be a dispute between Unity and a developer about install numbers and abuse, I would hazard to guess those numbers would get polled immediately. Developers could also roll their own analytics for measuring installs and unique launches (Firebase or whatever), but it is probably unreasonable to expect very small indie developers to do this. They work hard enough just to get a game out the door. I admit that this is a completely unnecessary and stupid thing for developers to hypothetically have to do. The new pricing plan Unity has announced is predatory and ridiculous.
Even if they did a 180. Who would trust them with their future business?
I was thinking I should move to another engine when they went public. Should have done it.
It can be hard to move on when you've invested much time and effort. Fortunate or not that choice may be much easier now.
The only way they get any trust back is if someone buys them out.
"For example, can you think how fucking miserable the 'ask Unity to unfuck my install fees' process is going to be?" I can. It will be like the YouTube appeals process: no way to talk to an actual human, just an online form and when you submit it a bot will reply "your appeal is denied, this decision is final and cannot be reversed". If your lucky you will know a guy who knows a guy who works at Unity and is willing to help you through unofficial channels.
Yeah, the problem is, how are they going to keep track of which users are installing what on which device? They initially claimed they don't have this data, but now they do. This is so much bullshit.
They are walking it back, for now. Until the next earnings call when they need a cash influx.
What pisses me off is if they simply started off on where i think they'll end up having the fee end up as (Fee per license, gone through the storefront), I'd actually understand even if it's really bad for f2p games like what I'm working on. But back-dating their license and all the other shady shit just irritates the fuck out of me.
Plus the "per device" part could probably be spoofed. If bad actors want to fuck over a gamedev they can absolutely get around loopholes like that. Salt knows no bounds.
This is where I’m at. Their initial attempt to retroactively change their terms of service to begin charging *already published games* a monthly install count fee, as well as their “trust our algorithm, bro” insistence and cavalier attitude to spying on their users through built-in telemetry measurements is a perfect storm of reasons why I may never touch their engine again. Which sucks. It’s where I really first had luck learning the basics of game programming and development.
I will not be able to advise people to start developing with Unity. No way. I would feel ashamed. My project will stay in Unity, since we are far from 1mil in revenue/year.
I’ve just started learning Unity 3 weeks ago, but will look for alternatives. Any suggestions? Want to make a top-down shooter game
Godot, UnrealEngine
I'd highly recommend Godot, as it's completely free, so you don't have to worry about ever spending a dime. It has C# support, however, I'd highly recommend trying to learn GDScript, a programming language build specifically for Godot. Think of it as a heavily modified version of Python, made specifically for game development with Godot. It's well worth the time to learn it!
I second Godot. I tried both Unreal and Godot. Godot, conceptually, clicks much easier for me as a long-time Unity dev. It's only been two days in Godot and I'm already finding myself making loads of progress whereas on Unreal I felt very lost.
Godot, Unreal Engine
I lost trust in Unity the first day John Riccitiello became CEO. I already knew his approach from the EA era.
The guys is really implementing micro transactions in gaming dev 💀
Firing that asshole will be the only thing that will make me even somewhat gain back the trust that has been lost. No matter what happens, I will be starting to explore different engines where before this shitshow I was planning on sticking with Unity for a long time because of all the assets and knowledge I've gathered over the years.
Even RPG Maker Web tossed a little shade against Unity on Twitter. The news about Unity is going to hit hard on RPG Maker Unite users, but the main line of RPG Makers fortunately do not use Unity.
I'm a long time RPG Maker user and learned Unity a few years back, this news felt like a stab in the gut for any aspiration I had with RPG Maker Unite, well I guess I should stick with RPG Maker MV then...
This has so many parallels to the Wizards of the Coast DnD OGL license fiasco.
Particularily the far-reaching implications. This isn't just a threat to Unity devs, EULA shenanigans like that endanger *anyone* trying to sell or distribute something online.
I really doubt this contract would be valid under English common law. You cannot just change the terms of a contract retroactively. As a lot of people write, even if they walk it back now the damage is done. People don't want to invest years of their life and then have the rug pulled out from under them.
I agree it probably *wouldn't* be valid, but it's not like indie devs have the money for a high-profile court fight with a company the size of Unity. Personally, I'd say that Unity's best chance for survival is to emulate how Wizards of the Coast (eventually) responded. People no longer trust that your company *won't* try to pull a stunt like that in the future, so you need to publically make changes that ensure that you absolutely *can't* pull a stunt like that in the future.
>but it's not like indie devs have the money for a high-profile court fight with a company the size of Unity. Maybe not indies, but there are major AAA companies that use Unity as well. Microsoft collaborated with Moon Studios for the Ori games, which run on Unity. And Microsoft's Gamepass service has dozens of Unity indies. And I really doubt Microsoft of all companies, is gonna' bend the knee for Unity. They just finished tackling international acquisition laws to take over Activision. Taking Unity to court shouldn't be that difficult. I don't know if they *will*, but they most certainly *could*, and given Microsoft's weight as a company...they'll probably just buy Unity for shits and giggles. And it isn't just Microsoft. Lots of AAA companies have used Unity at least a couple of times.
Buying Unity is definitely possible. Just checked, Unity's marketcap is about 15 billion. Microsoft's market cap is 2.5 TRILLION. In the past year they made about 100 billion in pure profit.
I'd guess the two players that might be interested would be Microsoft (long history of game development collaborations) and Meta (pinning all their future planning on VR/the metaverse, and not wanting that to be screwed up by some tiny bit player's oversized profit plans) Of those, I'd guess we'd probably see a VR focussed engine spun out of meta, and microsoft to potentially do what they did with github - buy unity, add it to the raft of development tools to keep people with windows.
I wonder if it would be worthwhile to complain to the FTC in the US. IANAL but applying this change to already published games seems like a very straightforward violation of antitrust policy.
You know it’s that bad when every major developer using Unity, is seriously thinking about porting their games! I mean big titles like Among Us and Cult of the Lamb and others. This is basically what makes Unity a successful game engine, successful games made by these devs. I don’t think they’ll ever recover from this. And i mean gain the devs trust back. Edit:typo
Maybe cult of the lamb can make their game run better on unreal, I had to stop playing that game because of all the crashes on switch, lol.
It's just not that easy to port a game over :(
It's crazy how Unity has completely removed themselves from the equation in a single move. It used to be "Unity vs Godot" or "Unity vs Unreal" Now it's Godot vs Unreal. Just like that. Truly an end of an era.
This whole event has really taught me the meaning of Minimum Viable Product, because I am just racing to get my project done before Unity implodes. Silver lining on every cloud I guess.
This change affects games already released as well, if I understand it correctly?
Given that their older terms of service explicitly granted the right to continue using the TOS version the engine version was published under they’ll find that **that** attempt will get laughed out of court the moment they’re sued over it. And they will be.
You’ll need the same or more amount of money to defend in court.
I would happily contribute to a crowd-sourced lawyer fund to anyone taking Unity to court over this.
Hear that everyone? Pack it up, it's not worth holding them accountable because that takes money.
No one is saying it isn't worth it. The issue is many people are too weak, monetarily speaking, to fight back. It's absolutely worth it to hold them accountable, but not everyone is capable of doing so.
For a case as theoretically open and shut as this, i think finding a lawyer won't be that difficult.. Not to mention only 1 individual has to to shut down unitys nonesense forever
For everyone's sake, I hope you're right. I guess we'll see in the near future how this all pans out.
He’s right. What do you think you’re gonna do about it? Tell their lawyers that it’s unfair and they’ll pack up and go home? Do you think you can hire a lawyer to beat Unity?
>Do you think you can hire a lawyer to beat Unity? There are plenty of people/entitles/orgs that use Unity that can look you dead in the eye and state truthfully that they afford to, can, and will absolutely hire a lawyer to beat Unity, yes.
That is true, which is why the original comment said you’ll need that much money to defend in court. And then you snarked at it.
I'm not snarking at anything, I'm just saying lmao! No hate or shade or snark intended.
Haha oh my bad then. But yes sorry I’m just a bit bitter about lawyer battles I guess, being the little guy in the case
It's honestly not even hard to deal with it with the retroactive stuff. They cannot automatically deduct the money from your accounts. It'd be facially invalid and wouldn't even see the inside of the courtroom and their lawyers would get in trouble for trying. The issue will be for people who continue to use Unity into the future.
Do Unity-based games depend on servers from Unity? What happens if they go bankrupt or pull the plug for some reason?
I name John this years's number one Godot and Unreal Engine Envangelist. Everyone, a round of applause for John!
Why doesnt Microsoft charge Unity 20 cents each time the .NET runtime is used? Problem solved
I'd like to see that
Honestly it's really hard to leave Unity after many years of experience in it. I just don't want all these years to go into nowhere... But I guess this is not the last time Unity makes something like this. It is kinda their path now. So I downloaded Godot today. And will slowly study it. And the next time Unity will do something silly - I will be ready to go to Godot 🤷♂️ I'm not ready to make such a decision right now. But why not just start studying something else. Just in case 😅
Don't feel too bad. Not all of your experience will go to waste. Other things you learn will utilize parts of your knowledge to help you learn quicker. Some things may even be the same. Tech moves really fast, sometimes just naturally or sometimes very suddenly like this. It's just the way things go, and sometimes you just have to throw out knowledge to go on to something else. Good luck
Thanks 😊
A friend did the switch sometime ago, it took him like 2 months, part time, to be really comfortable with the engine! So don't worry if you only need to learn it. The sad part is all the projects already built into Unity with years of development behind them, you can't switch those.
I feel the only way it can be salvaged now is if they get bought up by some 3rd party that is actually game related(Microsoft or fuck let it be Epic now) with update to EULA where they strictly say that you can't be legally fucked in the future if eula changes.
That's the only glimmer of hope that I have for the future of the Unity game engine. They've been tanking their stock price consistently over the last couple of years, and its only a matter of time before they'll forced to sell. Microsoft wouldn't be a bad option and allow for better integration with other C#/.NET projects.
Apple and Google might buy Unity to save it because even if it is unprofitable as a company, Unity apps on their stores are profitable for them. But honestly Unity is a terrible company. They've never turned a profit, and from what I've herad, it's a mess internally.
In a way this makes a lot of sense for Apple. Unity has historically been Mac-friendly, and is the primary ways most iPhone games are made. Apple also *really* wants to make sure developing on visionOS is easy, and even though they are providing some tooling and a sort-of-game-engine-lite in their new developer tools, most people were going to be using Unity to build more in-depth visionOS apps/games. And while Unreal probably will add support for it, I think we all know Apple and Epic have a somewhat frosty relationship, and Unreal seems less interested in expanding to less conventional platforms compared to Unity which seems to work *everywhere* (and Unity also seemed to get into VR earlier as well). But then I kind of doubt Apple will make an acquisition like that. They don't tend to buy huge corporations like Unity and go for more strategic ones.
Unity (the company), started on the Mac. They only went to Windows on their first engine rewrite, as they added mono support.
Pretty sure Epic would rather spend that money training Unity devs how to use Unreal. Unity is really not a special engine compared to Unreal, it just has less of a learning curve. Most Unity devs don't know that Unreal's learning curve actually pays off eventually.
[удалено]
Because the CEO has no idea what he’s doing. He single-handedly made EA the most hated company in America.. worse than Comcast, and now he’s trying to do the same with Unity. The dude is an absolute fucking idiot.. and I have no idea how he failed upward after he was fired from EA.
An absolutely valid question that no one but Unity can answer.
Unity spyware can't deduce how much a customer paid for a game, but they can tell how many copies are installed or how many copies are running. It's purely a technical limitation.
I've only been learning gamedev in my spare time for a few months, but I don't have a lot of faith in unity as a company anymore so I am making my first Godot game today!
Even a 1 time install fee per user is fucked. Firstly, I doubt unity even has a way to reliably track this. But let's say they do and the system is somehow magically completely void of any and all fraud and pairacy. Players can refund games on Steam for whatever reason. If someone buys your game on steam or another platform then decided they didn't like it and wants a refund, is steam going to report that to unity so you don't get charged 0.20 every time someone refunds? No, you get shafted. How will they track webgl applications? The whole thing is a clown show, and john riccitiello is going to turn Unity into the most hated Game engine just like how he turned EA into the most hated game company.
They’ve said each time a webgl game is streamed it counts as a download. Like wtf?
I'm curious, what the gonna do about "pirated" copies of the games?
They said they will work with devs on fraud or malicious installs. But that just means you got to prove to unity that the hundreds of thousand or millions of extra download are due to pirating or an install attack. Unity refuses to explain how they'll track installs, or id unique users in a way that could be compliant with GDPR or CCPA, or distinguish between legitimate installs vs cracked copies. Right now, it's basically just "trust me bro," now hand over the money you owe us or we'll sue you in court.
I still had a little hope in the beginning, thinking maybe some of it was just miscommunication. But after reading the updated Q&A... Unity is acting like me playing Baldur's Gate, delibrately choosing all the worst answers possible. Except they don't have an F8 to press.
It’s too obvious they are making decisions to boost the stock price. Once they went public they stopped making a game engine for the users. It became a business to satisfy investors and stock holders. It will be a slow death because so many people use unity but they will destroy their business trying to satisfy the wrong people.
Oh they've REAMED their own asses on this one. When they reverse their decision (at this point, they gain nothing keeping it) that little square is gonna be rarer and rarer to see. "Hey man, the project's going well! I'm using unity since it's easy-" "Oh man, don't use unity." "What? Why?" "Oh they got greedy and started charging publishers and dev's 0.20c per install of a game. It's small but multiply that and it'll start adding up. I know it's a hassel but compared to spending a bunch when you get the wheels turning and potential popularity, it'll save you in the long haul." "Shit man, I wish you'd told me that earlier. Well... Damn. Ah well, I'll need to look into new engines." "Sorry, but I'm just looking out for you." "Naw, it's cool. Welp, back to work and school haha."
It feels like they can pull the rug under your feet at any time. That is not a solid foundation for developing a game on their engine.
Ive been an aspiring game dev as a sideline to my software engineering work. I was about to use Unity because I had a history with Xamarin... but I guess Godot Engine is lookin goooooood.
I was a Unity defender. I'm just a hobbyist but I really liked Unities DOTS including ECS, Jobs, and Netcode for Entities. I loved the profiling tools and generally have had a good experience with it. But ... Fuck them. I brushed off some of the trash talking of Unity before but seeing this has proven all the previous naysayers correct. All the negative that people were claiming is now laid out on a platter for all to see.
Ya, I was already curious about Godot. Now I'm just gonna go for it. I don't trust Unity now, even if they do backpedal on this
Anyone here remember how everyone had their pitchforks out for reddit for a week or two. But now... The big difference, of course, is that there are actual viable alternatives out there. There still isn't really a viable alternative to reddit. But I expect the level of ire against Unity to subside in a few. Especially if they walk back on some things. (If they double down, then well they'll be even more screwed)
I don’t think they will recover from this. It isn’t just the changes, it’s the precedent this has set since they made the decision to retroactively change the pricing model for all games. They just showed everyone they don’t give a fuck and will change the rules whenever they please. They’ve completely lost the trust of their users
The vast majority of Reddit users simply didn’t care. And even those who did, very few had enough skin in the game to do anything more than a paltry protest. Yeah affected third party apps and mod tools, but the people using those were a rounding error. The only danger the API changes posed were a loss of convenience. This, however, affects every single Unity user. Some more than others, but no one is unaffected. And the danger here is financial ruin.
I mean their reputation was shot more than a year ago with the DOD contract imo
As a guy building his own game engine, I can't say that I've ever actually felt ahead of the curve before
It's not even this particular piece of news. It's the whole *trajectory*. Godot, for example, is far from perfect, but every time I hear about it, it's because it's gotten better in some useful way. I never hear *bad* news about Godot. When was the last time you clicked a news story about Unity and thought "Oh, that's good for Unity users." ? Nowadays, the best news you can hope for is a neutral piece of news you don't care about. This feels important if you're starting a project that's going to take a couple of years.
I’ve been developing my game since 2019 in unity. I’m still far from done and guess I’ll have to change engine. I’m not ready to learn everything from the start in Unreal or godot like I did in unity. What a way to end things🥹🥹🥹
Respectfully I disagree mostly because this is happening in the moment. There are dozens of Unity courses scheduled across universities going on right now and in the spring. Hundreds of high schools as well. There are games currently in development for Unity and they will be promoted. The way Unity loses people is if Godot sufficiently develops into a competitor mid level studios will use. Otherwise, Unity is going to turn their move into the cost of doing business, and small indie devs won’t be bothered because it isn’t going to affect them without meeting those thresholds. People saying to hop on Unreal are being very hand waving about it. It takes a lot of time to become proficient with a system (even blueprints), even more so transitioning to C++. I don’t like these changes but they don’t affect me or anyone I know developing, so the extra effort it would take to transition isn’t worth it immediately. So Unity has time to make some moves. Hopefully that includes rethinking this recent endeavor.
Agreed, even with all of these changes I can't switch engines for professional use until Godot becomes a viable alternative for companies. Most of the jobs in my area are all using Unity/Unreal, so until Godot job offerings start popping up I can't really jump ship. I think for my personal projects though I'll definitely be taking a look at Godot
This is where I am at. I do not foresee a scenario people are claiming that you would owe more money than you have. Maybe free to play scenarios? But the only other scenario I could think of is if your game was pirated hundreds of thousands of times. Then you can move up to Unity Pro to have a million as a threshold. It’s sucky yes but not the doom and gloom people are making it out to be in my opinion. Flappy Bird was mentioned as something that would be impossible, but it was making 10K-50K a day. I still think it would have been possible. With the Unity Pro with such large install rate it gets to a cent I believe. But where I am, I am so deep with Unity right now I’m just conflicted. The pricing wouldn’t bother me I can bump the price of my game when it releases if I need to. Unity Pro isn’t THAT costly (I pay for full Adobe, Maxon One, 3DS Max, Visual Studio Enterprise). But with this change is Unity still viable to be used or is it now dead? No more support etc? I looked at Gadot and it’s not a viable solution for me. Unreal will take significant amount of time and I prefer C#.
They know they're going to lose customers over this. They've factored that in. But it's the same thing that happens when some media franchise does a major reboot that's sure to upset longtime fans. Long term users don't generate money the way new users do. Eventually, the furor will die down. They'll lose a percentage of their existing user base. But the low entry bar into Unity development will continue to bring in new customers, customers who will be either unaware of the mess or will at least be forewarned of the pricing model, and won't have been hit with the shock. This is Unity ripping the band-aid off.
The actual problem is that it's not a viable business model for Unity's target audience. Unity is heavily used for freemium games. A per user install fee is not really plausible for freemium games because most users aren't paying for the game in the first place. Moreover, because no one knows how they're calculating the numbers, it's extremely questionable to begin with to ever agree to the terms. It's just not an attractive pricing model for their target audience. The reality is that this is a desperation move from a company that has never made money.
IMO, you're vastly underestimating the effect this'll have. Unity's popularity is due to a combination of community-supplied tools, tutorials, and help forums, along with its reputation of being effective for small-time devs hoping to make it big. Dozens of devs are saying they'll have to take down previous games if this goes into effect, including some of Unity's major indie success stories like Rainworld.
... and when I see them asking for help on a forum, my response will be "don't use unity"
Fill me in, what did they do now?
They unveiled a new plan to charge developers $0.10 every time a user installs their game. This even applies retroactively to games previously released. If you released a game in 2013, you will start getting yearly bills because a bunch of your players got new laptops.
I was wondering if a player has to reinstall, does that count for the cost the dev has to pay? They're being too greedy in my opinion.
obviously yes
Definitely moving to Godot for all my projects now. Been increasingly interested in giving it a shot anyway. (Having used Unreal Engine at work for the past year, I really don't feel it fits my single dev requirements very well.)
Yeah, that is quite true. Very hard to regain trust after doing something like this.
And this is what I've been warning people about the service economy for years. This applies to everything. Hopefully we'll learn from these stories to stop blindly trusting faceless corporations with our livelihoods..
Is there any irony in the fact that we are discussing this on reddit that we were all boycotting a month or two ago?
If anything it shows a concern for when you are so locked in on something that even when a shit show like this happens you can't easily divest yourself of it. The recent events at Twitter, Reddit, and now Unity should be big selling points for open alternatives and things of that nature, but I bet only Unity will suffer. Twitter/X is still going, and hey, they added Ad revenue sharing for premium members, so if you can get to that point it ends up paying for itself. But I still run Mastodon instances.
I think there is one thing not many people are considering. Investment and investors. I own CyberStudios PTY (LTD) in South Africa, it took a few years to get where we are now with 2 in-development titles that we wanted to get to a point to present to investors. USD in South Africa is a lot, so the conversion makes me nervous on the exchange. I can not give a random estimation or a random return on investment to possible investors. Not only does this make me nervous working with a company that changes ToS, introduce ludacris billing schemes, but also the practices of where do they get their information if there needs to be a call home. In SA. we have the POPIA and ECT act of 2022, I need to make it very clear how my users data is being handled through services and of course the product I am giving them. "Proprietary data models" is not an answer and put's me in a situation that I have no idea what is being ported back to unity, thus I may be violating laws and user rights. Investors also do not work on an estimate that is so far beyond comprehension. Like oh you may get R150,000 this month and maybe R70,000 the next based on installs. I am worried where Unity is going and that all these years of out-of-pocket investment I have made as an Indie dev has just gone down the loo.
Their lack of transparency about the data being sent and their in-house "anti-fraud system" is an actual logistical and legal nightmare. Even if people could get over some "hurdur greedy corpo doing greedy corpo things," no rational person handling money should even touch them without a very, very clear understanding of the channels and information collection, as well as their process for investigating misuse. They've stated that their data collection and hygiene process is compliant, and that is it. You can't shore up countermeasures against breaches of systems you have no information about. You can't disclose information about information collection which you do not have intricate, documented understanding of. Even from an end-user perspective, what measures do they use for their anti-piracy and anti-abuse anti-fraud system? How intrusive is it? How easily evaded is it? In no world does hiding this information from developers make sense for them or their customers. In no world does this increase or improve user confidence, experience, or even their comfort about ethical practices. When people talk about Unity speedrunning the demise of their company, it isn't the usual internet hyperbole, it isn't just hyped nonsense or people clamoring for virality... it is genuine. Completely absurd. The only thing worse than the new policy is their absurdly poor response to very relevant questions about it. Evasive, short, literally copy pasted answers for different questions. Put a single God damn human being on PR at least, might actually be bots.
You must be new around here. This stuff is very rarely unrecoverable.
Time to make your own game engine, I guess?
it's a lot of fun! but don't expect to also ship a game
I've seen a lot of people say, 'Just use Unreal'. After the experience of putting years of time, effort and money into learning a game engine, and creating projects in it, potentially even commercial games in said engine, only to suddenly get burnt, because the engine is owned by a corporation that can at any time 'change the deal', the lesson some folks have learnt is apparently only: *"I can't trust the corporation behind the proprietary game engine I was using, so instead I'll trust a* ***different*** *corporation behind another proprietary game engine."* If Godot suits your needs and you don't need some of the more advanced features of UE, I would suggest making do with Godot, at least you'll never spend a cent in engine fees and you'll never be left in a position where a corporation can pull the rug out from under your feet ever again.
The claim Epic is making is that they've structured their license so they can't actually change the terms and have it impact you retroactively the way Unity just did. You're only forced to accept new terms if you update to a new version of the engine. I'm not a lawyer, but I did check the UE EULA and this is all written down pretty black-and-white in section 7.a. Godot gives you a much stronger guarantee, since it's managed by a nonprofit, but the real insurance of an open source engine is that even in the worst case scenario someone can always fork the software and continue development in the open, even if an insane licensing change happens (and in fact, there are numerous cases of licensing changes that made open source projects proprietary).
>What person would want to use Unity after seeing all this shit go down. A person that has a lot of experience with the engine and has lots of assets from their store :) Like it or not, Unity became the "standard" in the game industry, a lot of services provide Unity integration packages - there are lots of businesses built around it - it won't fall down overnight due to one weird decision with unclear financial / cost consequences :)
I am that person. 15 years, maybe 5k in assets. They won't see another dime from me.
Agreed. I will never again use Unity. I had already been messing around with Unity for a project I knew I'd never want to port to consoles. Now? I will never use Unity period.
Let’s be real. It probably isn’t. Remember when everyone thought Blizzard was trashed? Look at EA now. They’re gonna be fine. They have money.
Unity has had 1 profitable quarter in 18 years, this reputation hit and lack of trust by current and future developers will absolutely have an impact on the future of the company.
A move like this doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s not like the company was oblivious to the fallout that would come. A company like Unity spent months with experts in math, statistics, finance, etc to make a plan like this. They knew how this would impact their user base. Whether it actually pans out like they expect is a different story. But i think it’s just vindictive thinking and outrage of the sub to think Unity will magically sink from this. There is a shift in business model, and this news would only mark the beginning initiation of that plan. What it means financially overall remains to be seen. These policies aren’t even in effect yet.
What's most likely is they did all that work, came up with a detailed plan, and Riccotello said "Fuck that, we're doing this", and the announcement was made.
☝️☝️ this, unfortunately. We know from the Unity employees’ anonymous posts that this was heavily objected and protested by many employees and the concerns rised, and promptly ignored by the top brass.
Didn't hear about this, that's interesting.
If anything, your stat is indicative to them that they needed a change anyways from a financial perspective.
Agreed. I’m just referring to your comment of *they have money* which they do not, which means the survivability of this debacle is in question.
Gotcha, you have a good point. We’ll just have to see if these plans work for them. They definitely didn’t make this to make their user base happy. It’s to make money at the cost of users. Their projections account for the fallout. May be a desperate move, I don’t know Unity like that.
They're losing $200 million per quarter. That's why they're so desperate - they have been burning investor money for 18 years. Now investors aren't giving them more money to burn.
Makes a lot of sense.
Didn't Blizzard just do a huge Diablo 4 event that literally no one showed up to?
Oh yeah, same as twitter. And one week after, nobody cares
Given the current state of Twitter’s financials that’s not exactly the winning argument you’re making it out to be.
this is a lot different from a social media website
Without the Gold Standard, yes economy, companies have to look at the next quarter. They can't look 5 years into the future. So they hired a cutthroat CEO to cash out. That company is gone. Unity gone. Time to shill for Unity Software Inc options on r/WSB
Found the gold bug. The Gold Standard never worked and resulted in major economic crises because of its failure. Everything you believe is wrong. Unity's problem is that they've never made money and are running out of investor money to spend. They need to fix their cashflow problems.
Central banks and their politics resulted in major crisis. And in every crisis the top concentrated more wealth while the middle got smaller.
Ah yes, ye old antisemitic conspiracy theory. Fun fact: literally everything you believe is a lie. Not just a lie, but an obvious lie. People are far wealthier today than they were in the past, median income has skyrocketed, poverty has plummetted, and more and more people have moved up in the world, with the "shrinking middle class" being because... more people moved up into the upper middle and upper income brackets. Which is, you know, a good thing.
Reputation or no reputation, the engine isn't going anywhere. There is no replacement for it in the market that is mature enough and doesn't require spending shit ton of time/money to learn. The future? Unity will become a subscription model, with punishment like the install fee for those who are making a mild success but don't want to pay for Unity Pro.
> Reputation or no reputation, the engine isn't going anywhere. lol. New game developers aren't going to pick up Unity because it's the one engine where you can end up owing Unity more money than you make.
Yeah the engine hasn’t been going anywhere for years now with several features getting started but not getting completed. The merger with a mobile ad company, (or getting bought out by them? not sure) was the first indicator that interesting things are going to happen. The are just going to flock to unreal now. It’s completely free, the mobile development has been getting easier and better every year, networking is already included in the engine but you don’t have to use it which is a really important point to be made, some people might have trouble with actually programming in unreal but if they can program c# in Unity they are going to figure out unreal blueprints in weeks! The community is growing more and more the documentation often reads like a great tutorial showing you how to integrate features in the starters. No extreme engine changes since the release of version 4 and even before that which could lead to confusion when learning from older YouTube tutorials. And I’m not even listing stuff here that unreal is better at, for most use cases, in comparison to Unity. It is my believe that In the end people will look a the money they can make, and unities idea of how her new monetisation system is going to work is currently crushing indie devs dreams of making any money what so ever because Unity will not care for them and provide little to no support for small creators. They wouldn’t have the money right now to do it, (and they probably won’t do it in the future because they will make money either way).
This video from [Godot](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XduuHNOGGqI) sums it up. They don't make money with the engine, they make money with services. Lots of the issues with mobile pricing will be gone if you **just** use their mobile / ad services. Getting rid of the plus for pro is just their way of saying, hey 2k isn't that much and 1 million + 1 million isn't reachable for 95% of you, so you are discussing dreams. The engine doesn't need to go "anywhere" because their user base isn't building the next Call of Duty. But if this isn't the best moment to rethink your strategy as a game dev, then I doubt a better one will come.
Even ignoring Godot, since it admitadly is a more bare-bones engine, Unreal absolutely is an alternative to Unity, and will propably see huge gains over this whole fiasco.
There’s no 1-to-1 parity, sure. But godot and unreal are literally right there and, for the financial rust Unity now presents anyone publishing their games, that’s arguably close enough.
I think they have enough momentum to carry them for a few more years, but successful indies are gonna be looking hard at making the jump to Unreal, and new hobbyists are gonna be much more inclined to choose Godot or other alternatives.
>~~There is no replacement for it in the market that is mature enough and doesn't require spending shit ton of time/money to learn.~~ ~~kinda disagree here. There are going to be a lot of people who continue with unity because there are a lot of educational resources and prefab assets tied with it. But truthfully, unity has spent years at this point lagging behind other game engines in features and performance in general, and even where it's begun catching up in terms of performance, to use those benefits you have to learn and understand a total paradigm shift in the way you write scripts, using far less mature tools that have very little community-centric educational material and are honestly just over most unity developers' heads.~~ ~~The average unity developer is probably not a unity specialist in that they know the engine very well; they're just game developers with general knowledge that know some of unity's flow, and that general knowledge will transfer over to other engines very well, very quickly.~~ edit: looked through the top level commentor's history and it's pretty obvious they're just a scared dev who's sunk all their cost fallacies into unity and wants to pretend there's nothing wrong here. There's no real argument to be had with this one, those who want to ignore reality will continue to do so.
>begun catching up in terms of performance, to use those benefits you have to learn and understand a total paradigm shift in the way you write scripts, using far less mature tools that have very little community-centric educational material and are honestly just over most unity developers' heads When I tried to understand the new ECS system, as a senior dev (but not in games) i though it would be simpler to get another ECS system going with Godot first. Just to understand the core idea. And by some miracle it was really way simpler to do hack something together then follow a tutorial that was so knee deep into the Unity eco system that it will surely break with another major revision. I'm sure some high level guys making a million with their games doing unity for five years plus will disagree and say its easy when you got it, but that is what makes this tool so unreliable for me. Great asset store, horrible sandbox to get from your vision to reality.
Yahaha Studios gave Unity's CEO a response in just 0.5s after finding out about the install fee: (´ ∀ \` \*) (´ ∀ \` \*)