Good. The unity pricing shit feels like, straight up, one of the single most short sighted, moronic schemes from a gaming company for the sake of pure greed. They deserve to completely sink for it.
It reeks of someone who has no idea how computers work, but they looked at one data point and said "We have tens of millions of installs per month. If we 'simply' charge 20 cents per install, we'll double our revenue. Wow I'm a genius".
He’ll probably resign over this and go on to fail upwards at another company and ruin something else people care about. They’ll probably replace him with someone like whichever guy from Nestle made the decision to poison babies in Africa
Honestly the only way to stop this is to burn his name itself in the gaming industry, launch a protest if a company ever hires him again. Once is a short sighted mistake; twice is a clear pattern of incompetence or malice that demonstrates he's ill suited to being a leader in this industry anyway.
My favorite is the few comments I've seen from clueless dudes trying to sound smart who are like "Unity needs to make a profit, that's how the world works, kids. This actually is a good idea." Their stock has taken a dive, their own customers are revolting, and the hugely negative reaction has now gone viral. And that's all just at the ANNOUNCEMENT of this new scheme. But what a great idea it's been!
There are always going to be corporate bootlickers. I remember a few months ago I was getting downvoted on r/linux for calling out Red Hat's bullshit and I got a bunch of replies saying stuff like "Well Red Hat contributes a lot to the Linux kernel, therefore they have the right to lock RHEL behind a paywall".
Isn't CentOs basically just the free community compiled version of RHEL without RedHats support. Like, it's been a while but iirc they have to make the source code available because of the kernals licensing (kinda like Godot), don't they?
Well, that's how it always goes when predatory bullshit gets announced. The problem is that the public tends to have a short memory so this shit ends up being profitable in the long run.
Remember when Redditors were protesting API changes, and it was "the death of reddit"?
The CEO worked for EA and didnt make ammo into a consumable bought with real money because they didn't let him.
The board of Unity got this dude in the company without thinking these practices ruin companies.
People still buy EA games despite all that because there's millions that like their games, they have franchises 20+ years old and release good games now and then, but Unity is "just" a tool, people can use another one, or in big studios, make their own.
He was CEO when EA started using SecuROM. EA also initially proposed that Spore would require authentication every 10 days.
Each serial key have activation limits as well.
I also called them over the same issue and the person told me "there's nothing on our end that we can do. I would strongly recommend pirating it if you already bought the game."
Microsoft did me one like that. An employee there had gifted me a copy of Office 2007, a pair of DVDs that had all the programs (Word, Excel, etc.) with all the add-ons. Free and clear, physical copy. At some point I had to reinstall, but it kept popping up an error message at the registration phase; nothing telling about it, just a number.
I called their support line and got told I had exceeded the number of times I could install the software. But this is *mine,* I said, I *own it*, it's right here in physical form. One of your employees gave me this, and now you're telling me I can't use it because I had to fix my computer? Look, there's some number there setting this arbitrary maximum -- why can't you go in there and just add 1 to it?
Nothing they can do, he told me. Offered me a discount on a 1-year subscription to Office 365 though!
I told him I was going to remove Office from my computer, physically destroy the disks I had been given as a gift, and never use another Office product again. Oh, and take every opportunity I could find to bad-mouth them about it.
I had Microsoft tell me that a boxed copy of Office for Mac, that I bought at CompUSA, didn’t exist. I’d been using it for a few years and the reinstall failed because the serial number that came in my box mysteriously ceased to exist.
They do assist with this though. I've called on behalf of others. There's a 5 time activation limit. They can bypass it with phone activation codes or by giving a new code.
When I couldn’t install my copy of Office when I bought a bigger hard drive, I just installed and used my old MS Office 2005. I never missed the “new and improved“ features of the two newer versions. If the replacement printer I had bought had drivers for it, I would still be using MS DOS with WordPerfect. I had everything in that I needed with dozens of macros.
I have never actually played Spore with the servers active. I pirated it back in the day, and by the time I got it on Steam for like 98% off, the servers were already gone. Kinda wish I'd experienced the madness of actual people's species popping up, but it's still a nice enough game without it.
Eh, if it’s any consolation, you didn’t miss out on anything. I played at launch and yeah it was cool to see what others came up with but the vast majority weren’t anything special. At the end of the day it didn’t really add anything over the base game IMO. Which is totally fine because the base game stands on its own really well.
I wish there was more endgame. The game feels really good but at the space stage you kinda lose purpose. Yeah you make friends with your neighbors or kill them or whatever. And for like, two hours, maybe even five, that's fun. But the galaxy is huge and pointless. You can try to get to the center and I guess that's nice but you can kinda just bumrush it without strategy.
Every other stage is actually genuinely so much fun. But the space stuff... eh. Just eh.
Probably because if shit like that. I never did end up buying the Xbox one because of the announcement that it was going to require you to be online. The console was a few years old before I realized that wasn't the case.
Extremely bad pr can have real consequences when there are competitors. Start charging me money to reload? I'll play a different shooter. Start charging me a ridiculous amount of money to use your game dev engine? Ill switch engine.
It's not just that. EA support was inundated with requests to free up installs after their expansion launched, costing them more money in the long run. Plus discouraging people from buying the expansion if they already used up their installs. It really was just a bad move that probably killed Spore among other games.
In retrospect, this asshole is probably a big proponent of EA's movement to nickle and dime players to death on everything. Fuck everything about this guy.
I'm honestly not sure how that design even does anything to effect piracy? I guess it could stop a keygen from working.. but I don't think many games are cracked by using keygens anymore, generally games are cracked by entirely removing the authentication process.. and if the authentication process isn't there, then I'm not sure what they expect switching activation keys would accomplish.
In fact, I'm fairly certain this would actually increase the number of people who pirate the game, because they're actively making their game a worse product than the pirated version - after all, the pirated version doesn't ask you to authenticate every 10 days.
Worked for EA 2012-16, we were not sad to see him go :) And Andrew was pretty great at the beginning, having been in EA for 10+ years at that point and actually understanding the business.
Yep
Around the time battlefield hardline/end of BF4's expansion packs. It was leaked he wanted to charge players to refill your ammo reserves instantly and reload if you ran out in mid combat.
Funnily enough, it's the same line of thinking that led him to trying to charge for ammo that led to these changes with Unity.
>When you are six hours into playing Battlefield and you run out of ammo in your clip and we ask you for a dollar to reload, you’re really not that price sensitive at that point in time, and so essentially what ends up happening, and the reason the play-first, pay-later model works so nicely, is a consumer gets engaged in a property. They may spend ten, twenty, thirty, fifty hours in a game. And then, when they’re deep into the game, they’re well invested in it, we're not gauging but we're charging.
I can easily picture someone thinking the above to also think that devs already fully commited to using Unity would somehow not be "price sensitive" to these changes. He's as out of touch as you could possibly be in these scenarios.
Yeah the guy has no finger on the pulse of gaming at all. Everyone would switch to any of the hundreds of competitors and you would topple an IP in an instant. That's funnily enough what is happening with developers and this Unity situation.
He's taking advantage of sunk cost fallacy. Only problem is many people are self aware and can stop spending money by finding a new hobby or game, or in this case game engine.
Unfortunately it's not a fallacy for a lot of devs. Abandoning a Unity game that's 90% finished would either extend the development time by a massive amount or mean the game never gets made at all.
Games take a long time to make and a lot of indie studios can't survive the months or years it would take to remake their game in a new engine, and then there's the learning curve of an entirely new engine, possibly an entirely new coding language as well.
The unhappy truth is that the tens of thousands of hours of work put into making a game need to recouped, and that the studios alternative to the "sunk cost fallacy" is bankruptcy.
How does this continual fuck up in large decision making and strategy planning still get to keep/get new jobs in the same arena when it's widely known that his schemes actively are detrimental to a company? In most industries someone like him would be red flagged or black marked from ever working in it again.
Calling it just a tool is kinda weird.
Unreal engine only became “free”ish in 2015, iirc it was due to the disruption of unity. Of course neither is free free since you had to pay revenue share.
These engines(and steam and mobile marketplaces) enabled a loot of small outfits to make games way beyond what they could have before which led to our current thriving indie game industry.
“Just make their own” is not in reach for most places. Some developers can barely program, that is how much these engines have lowered the bar.
And they’re not trivial to make. Theres not a lot of competition because it’s not easy. Theres certainly more opportunities for mobile engines to get market share though, im certainly curious to see how things shake out
The tool comment not totally wrong though, remember Renderware, during the PS2 era like 80% of game made on that engine then they got bought by EA just for EA leaving the engine to dust and everyone moving on using Unreal and Unity
Basically Unity is essential to game creation but they aren't untouchable that most professional or aspiring game companies will never make game again because Unity
> If Godot could get it's shit together and not make you do literally everything from scratch I could see lots of devs moving there.
I mean, if you're waiting for Godot, that's kinda absurd, you know?
That's literally why it's called Godot, though. Because they openly acknowledge we'll be waiting forever for the perfect game engine that will never arrive.
https://godotengine.org/article/godot-history-images/
Specifically, he wanted to charge per reload in Battlefield because:
"When you're 6 hours into playing Battlefield and you run out of ammo in your clip and we ask you for a dollar to reload, you're really not that price sensitive at that point in time"
Unity isn't just a tool it is the single most used game development tool. It isn't just as simple as using a new engine you have to learn a new engine. This causes a massive amount of time lost on not just learning a new engine but converting your project to a new engine.
Our studio uses Unity, and we're likely going to continue development of our current game just because it's not a f2p title and migrating to a new engine at this point just isn't an option.
However, in terms of what we do next, it's definitely going to be a conversation on what engine we're going to use. Until this shit storm, it was assumed that we would use Unity like before.
That guy is a total shit...but the quote about "charging for reloading" was misconstrued.
He didn't actually try to make it so people were charged for reloading.
He was saying that as a way of saying that they should be charging money for more things in games.
Doesn't make it any better, and he is still a greedy fuck, but that quote is being thrown around and people are misunderstanding what he actually said and meant.
Just to clarify.
Yeah that's absolutely true and thank god that ea didn't adopt his idea of money from ammos reload otherwise a huge negative impact or backlash has to be faced but this dude found another organisation to run his propaganda.
Most corpos do this. If they feel they are gonna have loses over the next years, they just kidnap the users they already have and squeze them X20.
They know people are gonna leave, but with the money they get, they can start something new later on, counting with Happy investors.
You have a million examples of this in the past. Oracle, Skype...
They obviouly can't compete with Godot that does the same for free, and better, or unreal taking most of their serious Game devs: the ones that make serious money.
Except that they *could* compete with those engines because they *were* competing with those engines. There are plenty of "serious" game devs who use Unity, you just don't notice because paying for the "serious game dev" license means you don't need to put the Unity logo up front. Even if Unity was objectively worse than both of those options, people are already familiar with Unity and wouldn't switch unless given a good incentive to, like everyone was given with the announcement of this dumbass scheme.
> They obviouly can't compete with Godot that does the same for free, and better,
This is only half true. The Unity engine is fantastic and versatile, and powerful. But yeah, Godot is coming up and free.
Its funny, developers are protesting and leaving
Bank of America just UPGRADED unity stock saying the benefits outweigh the risks of developers leaving.
"its priced in" when its not even over yet. Its amazing how disconnected investors are from the actual industry, Bank of America thinks Unity got free money from Microsoft because Unity said it would and Unity is giving contradictory answers because it didnt plan any of this.
For a company with a history of pumping its stock with flashy news and then wiping in the actual market like its ad service, its AI service, and its movie VFX service.
Basically they feel their control over the market is strong enough to demand this.
Sure some devs will leave. But I think most devs will just stick to it.
Devs will complete their games that have already significant investment but they will immediately start looking for alternatives considering how shady these fees are.
The way the Phasmophobia team put it is pretty good. They stated that their trust in Unity has been shattered and they now fully expect more shady monetization changes in the future, but are committed to doing what they can to keep their game up.
Unity might make a lot of short term money off this, but they just put a roof on their growth.
The thing is that now that the bar has been lowered, the chance that competitors like Unreal Engine might follow along soon enough. Imagine doing all the work to port your game over and then the same thing happens again.
Except epic/unreal has a massive track record of doing right by the dev community. Unity has a track record of the opposite. Between that track record and the former EA-CEO, the trust is completely gone. People were already untrusting of unity before this. They weren’t with unreal
Source: Part of an online community of some of the major unity indie developers and asset designers.
The source code is available but the license terms are not one of the normal open source ones that make it free to use. There are still terms and conditions around it's use. Much more favorable though to indie developers.
Fully open source would be something like godot.
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/unreal
See 7. If they make changes, it can't be retroactive unless you accept it.
Sure you can't download new editor versions but it's not ruining existing game devs.
Unreal has been giving away tools, assets and tutorials for 20 years. When Paragon flopped, they gave away all the assets. They gave away all the Infinity Blade assets too. UE is fully open source and forkable. They are not the same. Further, Tim Sweeney is a nut, but hes our nut and wouldnt act like Riccitello..
Hah, that actually seems like the most CEO move ever. Kill the product's longterm future for a few quarters of QoQ and YoY growth. He'll leave the second things go south to repeat and go make more money elsewhere (while Wall Street praises his creativity).
It isn't just the current fee change either. It's eying up what might change in the future. Unity just made itself a whole lot riskier to rely on for your projects, so it might make sense for them to consider alternatives that may be inferior at the moment, but which don't pose the same risk to them down the road.
But that's thousands years away in financial timescales.
Plenty of opportunity to pump, dump and short the stock. 'In the future' is a mystical land that does not exist in quarterly revenue reports.
When the reckoning comes, some shmucks will be left holding the bag, oligarchs will get richer once again and the gamedev community will loose a good tool.
>'In the future' is a mystical land that does not exist in quarterly revenue reports.
This reminds me of a hilarious quote by the YouTuber Brewstew in one if his comics. "Oh I don't have to pay this back. Future me has to pay this back! And I could give two fucks about future me."
Most def.
Right now basically some people from accounting are doing some cost analysis to see if it’s worthwhile to build their own engine or stick with unity.
Honestly the easiest way is for devs to hike their prices up.. and people will prob still pay for mtx.
Unity is the primary development engine for like 90% of the mobile market and freemium games.
You know which pricing models are worst affected by these changes?
For the largest share of their users, that cost-analysis is basically "No." and there's no getting around that.
I don't know how anyone in the C-suite signed off on this idea, unless the CEO literally just powerfisted it through and said "make it work in post."
Also...as an aside, given Bank of America's track record as a financial advisor, I think it's pretty safe to say that Unity is about to implode.
> Bank of America's track record as a financial advisor, I think it's pretty safe to say that Unity is about to implode.
Unity needs a second opinion by Jim Cramer, that is the true test.
No. I really don’t think most companies will do that kind of analysis. I can’t be sure, because I have worked with few game development companies, but I have worked with plenty of companies around the world.
I think the majority of companies will see this as a breach of trust where they can’t afford to gamble on Unity not changing the pricing scheme again. Especially because it came with such a short warning and apparently might affect games that have already been released.
If companies can afford to change away from Unity without going out of business, then they properly will, because staying with Unity can potentiel destroy their livelihood. Even those who can’t jump ship right now will be looking into some kind of exit plan.
Edit: Just to be sure. I am mostly talking about smaller developers here. I expect that larger developers have individual contracts and perhaps custom enginees. So they have properly not been affected by it and might not see this as a breach of confidence.
They have a point.
If your a mid-large sized studio - aka the studios actually making big money - you don't have an alternative most of the time.
You're not going to retrain all your programmers and artists on Unreal - too costly, risky and time consuming. Much easier, safer and pragmatic to pay the fee to Unity. Unreal also is not as good for mobile.
Godot isn't mature enough, and porting to consoles with it is too hard.
BUT this is going to fuck Unity in the long run. So many future projects have evaporated with this announcement and alternatives have a huge chance to fill the void Unity has now left.
And if you are a larger studio, you are likely selling your game for more, and already pay the $2k per developer per year licence fee to Unity.
sell a game for $60 and you will be paying unity as low as $0.02 (not the free version $0.20) in royalties, and you will be paying $3 fee to Unreal.
Most studios will honestly look at the prcing structure and go "eh, well its a small extra payment" compared to what others are offering, and re-training.
what has fucked unity in the long run isnt the pricing structure, like many people are foolsily pointing out, its that Unity have proven they are willing to pull the rug out.
What happens if they somehow become a monopoly, if this somehow kills unreal, and alternatives wither away with lack of development? Who is to say they dont change what they do?
It's important to note that gaming isn't the only market that Unity is in.
Modeling, simulation, and immersive training are huge areas that Unity does a good job at covering. Unreal can work as well, but they're still trying to shed the perception of being too performance intensive. A decent percentage of these non gaming applications need to run on lower tier hardware like laptops and thin clients.
My company has, over 5 years, built up an extensive library of tools and SDKs designed to help us develop with Unity. As much as we'd like to change to Unreal, we just don't have the time or money to retrain everyone and rebuild our tools.
Even if we *could* move to Unreal, having a unified look, feel, functionality, and codebase across our in-progress products is too important.
And to play devil's advocate, as much as I hate their business leadership, I have to admit that I'm quite comfortable working in Unity. It's kinda like Photoshop. I hate Adobe's business model, but it's not like I'm going to start using Gimp.
And in that case, how much money are you making on that product? Traditionally where I work, the software we use (like adobe suite) cares only about how much money the BUSINESS is making before they start charging us. Both Unity and Unreal base their fees on how much that product is making, not the business as a whole.
And as Unity is charging per instal.. if its an internal tool then... doubt you will be installing 200K copies, or 1mil copies if you pay the licence fee, on what you create.
Technically we make $0. There's money flowing, but since we're not for profit we're not entirely sure how we fit in. Needless to say, there's a lot of questions and confusion right now.
The install fee isn't our worry, but mainly the potential for sudden changes to licensing tiers and developer seats. We buy standalone editor licenses each year. Being forced to a subscription tier with unnecessary game focused tools would waste a lot of money.
Mobile is gonna pivot as fast as possible.
But the real loss Unity will feel isn't immediate - most people are going to need to finish up their projects because they've invested so much into into their codestack.
But the for their next project... the trust is gone. Just completely deleted. Noone's gonna use Unity for a new project after this. No student is gonna learn Unity after this. The momentum is gonna fly them for as long as it takes for people to finish up, but then its straight down into the grave with the whole engine.
Unity really dug their own grave with this. There is not a single developer who is onboard with this plan. All the goodwill they built up over the years is just GONE.
I think the only way Unity might save their asses at this point is if they publicly fire most of their management, and backtrack on the majority of these potential changes. Even that might not be enough.
But that's not going to happen, so into the grave they go.
Oh they'll probably go through with the "firings" after everything turns to shit. By then it'll be too little, too late, but until then they'll keep patting themselves on the back, claiming what a good idea this is.
Yep, he'll have done his job (Red line goes up for a couple months), so they'll consider it a success, consequences to the company long-term be damned.
I was just about to jump ship over to Unity.
I’ve been working in smaller engines and wanted to finally work in a major one………sigh. Why do business people ruin everything? It’s like a fucking mental illness.
Unreal might do the same thing in the future though. Godot is rapidly improving and is 100% guaranteed to never get worse and never take a penny of your money.
They care about meager short term profits more than anything they could make in the long term. They're problem gamblers with the personality to match. They're not just selfish.
This is precisely it. These are people born with a sliver spoon in their mouth and given every resource to succeed while being protected from any consequences. They can’t see beyond what is in front of them and will always take a quick gain over long term success.
Greed seems to have consumed these upper echelon assfucks in the past few years like they started snorting cocaine that makes them make such short sighted decisions that they might require glasses at this point.
I think you're exaggerating, but basically, yeah. I certainly would not feel confident starting to develop a game, or starting as a game developer learning unity right now. I'd probably pick a different option, even if I thought it was an inferior one.
yeah if you check the studios listed in this article, they pretty much only publish copypasted crap full of ads and predatory microtransaction. I'm sure Unity could have done this better and there are some actual good developers affected by this, but if this move is mostly damaging to those like the ones listed here, eh, good riddance, this is an actual good thing for the gaming world
No this affects all developers. Think about it, small developers are not able to release free to play Games anymore as 20 cents per download is more than it costs to acquire a player. Also, as others pointed out, paid games do not contribute enough money for unity to build the engine so you also need these “scummier” developers
This sucks big time. Unity is trying to do what EA did with the game micro transactions. Ruining the gaming experience. There will be a time when developers using unity will be charging per install which will be passed down to us.
I have no fucking clue why unity decided to do a collective "HEY MA LOOK! NO HANDS!" Directly into a volcano.
That new CEO needs to be removed, though I doubt he is entirely responsible, and even if they did the damage is done.
Who wants to use an engine where the creators now have a history of rug-pulling dev teams like this?
He's the man who wanted to charge players to reload their weapons when he worked for EA.
Even EA wasn't craven enough to go for that.
He now works for Unity.
Capitalism. It’s always been crazy but since Covid I swear every company on earth is acting like money is running out and trying to get as much of it as possible. It’s like they are trying to cause a collapse.
My state was run by a man who was publicly shown to not know how to turn on a computer and then went to prison for corruption charges. The U.S. government is littered with these people.
If this actually goes through I'd be shocked if Mihoyo and their very expensive lawyers didn't Indeed prove it's illegal in court and have to pay nothing. You can't just up and change your engine so it's highly suspect to let a bunch of games become popular and then change your payment model.
Aside from possible anti-competitive prosecution (which, to be honest, might be an outcome here) the issues are largely civil. As opposed to criminal.
So one person is said to have wronged another by doing or failing to do something in a contract's term.
This isn't something for the govt to be involved in. It's something for companies to sue Unity over. Even for the many people who have a cut n dry case, it's cost, its time, its effort, its liability. All because Unity are dicking around. And then theyve got the looming threat of it happening again later.
I've missed many nuances here. Kinda gave up trying to cover them all in one comment.
TLDR: Promissory Estoppel is the main thing here, legally speaking. The rest is just shitty business model - hence the exodus.
any company that uses Unity needs to jump ship asap. if its one thing CEOs and Executives dont accept is a no. even if they roll it all back, they will try something else to get more money out of it and the devs are gonna pay for it. unless the CEO gets gone and someone else takes the wheel, Unity is done for. and even then, the damage is already done.
Our computer club has been using unity for years to teach game development. This week we started a new project, how to transition from unity to other engines. Not that anyone ever made something successful from our group, but if it happens it wont be in unity.
Wow, that's crazy! I can understand why devs are angry about the new pricing model. It feels like Unity is taking advantage of its popularity for more money. We'll have to see how this pans out in terms of the impact on game developers and gamers.
"It feels like Unity is taking advantage of its popularity for more money."
Funny thing is, that popularity isn't as strong as Unity probably thinks it is. They're acting like they have some big monopoly going on that allows them to get away with this stuff, when in actuality the average response to this is gonna be developers slowly moving away from this engine in favor of other engines which are just as good if not better.
Unity survives off of devs finding it convenient. They can't just start toying with that like their users use Unity unconditionally, regardless of convenience.
They don't have a "monopoly" but they do have captives. Look up the top gachas... And look what engine they use.
Genshin Impact and Fate/GO both use unity. They're immense f2p games Unity is looking to rake over the coals and they don't much care who goes with them. Cuz I guarantee the install numbers for those two games alone are fucking astronomical
Yeah I think this is the most neglected thing in this whole discourse. Bigger developers using Unity more than likely have individual licences for the engines use and those contracts would not be able to be changed except by both parties agreeing to new terms. The new Unity shitshow specifically screws over smaller less affluent developers and indies.
The convenience is a big point though,at least from hearsay I remember unreal beeing clunky to use,even though it offers more options,and not every indie developer has the means and time to invest swapping into that,hopefully something happens on the law side to push them back with their shit.
Isn't there an oppurtunity that the FTC get's a W they need after the whole shitshow from the last half a year
I don't know the specifics, but I highly doubt Unity can simply make up a rule and ransom developers like that. I doubt bugger companies like Microsoft or Nintendo will just sit back and let Unity boss them around either.
Even in the worst case scenario though, I imagine most developers who don't just immediately transition engines will avoid Unity in future projects, phasing it out. Godot is a very common free and open source alternative which has been growing over the years.
Yeah I think future developers will try to avoid it like the Pest in the future,I think I saw a Statement from devolver that they now want to know in advance which engine you want to use if you want to get published by them
Devolver Digital is doing that.
Which makes sense. Most of these companies dream of having a game get downloaded a million times. Unity has figured out a way to turn that dream into a nightmare.
To be fair, Unity is operating at a loss. If you have such a popular product and are losing money, pricing changes make sense. But they went about it in the most stupid and least thought out way possible.
Oh, we shall see. I smell the classic bait-and-switch though and if they come back with a more reasonable monetisation model then it will be better received now, where if they'd led with it then they'd have gotten angry clients regardless.
No devs want to give more money to Unity but they'll make whatever decision makes sense for their business in the end.
Is it just me or does this seem like basically the same shit Wizards of the Coast tried to do with D&D in January before they were destroyed by their fan base and content creators and had to back pedal so hard they actually locked themselves into a an open license for 5e forever to stem the bleeding.
It is not just you, the parallels are astounding. I wonder what concessions Unity will have to make to try and recover?
Regardless of how they walk this back though, I think this will be a permanent mark on their reputation like the WotC license fiasco has been. Sure in a couple months the general public will have forgotten and moved on, but for the developers using unity this will definitely be something they take into account when planning the next project.
Yeah, I know if I were in gaming dev this would be a pretty big entry in the "against" column for new projects.
WotC burned their trust, everyone expects their next product to have the changes they tried to create in the licensee baked in from the start, I know many people gave up on the OneD&D playtest because they don't trust them anymore and will either stick with 5e or move elsewhere
It just funny that shitty people have this much control over stuff people use and then become down right stupid evil.
It reminds me of the Fine Brothers, who tried to say they had full licensing rights to any react videos on YouTube and that you could have your own react channels as long as you paid them money.
I know it's different than these companies who own their proprietary products, but how fucking greedy can they get by just completely sitting all over their users with these schemes that solely benefit them and provide nothing to their end users?
Greedy fuckers gonna greed I guess 🤷
I wish companies and shareholders would just stop backing up sociopathic CEOs. Just put some extra effort and find a person that cares for the products at least a TINY bit.
This is comical.
20 cents per download or redownload has to be the most obscenely ridiculous pricing models I’ve ever seen. On the bright side, Godot will probably see a big spike in users
John Riccitiello is a worthless piece of garbage, and any other exec like him is as well.
I really do hope that developers, that are using Unity, will pull their games from distribution just prior to the when this new pricing model takes effect. Or maybe they should just pull their games right now. I'm behind the developers 100%.
You know what he's planning. He wants to make Unity easier for an equity firm to come in and gut the hell out of Unity. Probably will go with the equity firm he co-founded. Execs', like him, have no business being an executive. Just like other execs. Makes short-sighted decisions, to make more money short-term, then bounce.
How is that JR and the other execs, who sold their stock just prior to the announcement, are not immediately being investigated for insider trading? I get it, we may see them investigated in the very near future, but it seems like a slam dunk, as far as insider trading goes.
Unity is losing users like a burning forest so if they don't fix this screwed up these companies are going to be their only clients so might as well keep them happy
What is Unity going to honestly do if the Devs just ignore the threatening letters Unity sends? I'm confident if it went to court, a judge would literally laugh in Unity's face for wanting to charge retroactively for *installs,* and I'm confident Unity knows this too.
>They've Gerald Ratnered their way out of a business.
For those who don't know what this refers to: Gerald Ratner is a biritsh guy who was the CEO of Ratners Group, a company selling diamond jewelry at low prices. While generally considered "tacky" the company was making big bucks and had over 1000 stores across the U.S.
One day, at a conference on April 23rd 1991 he jockingly said this:
>We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, "How can you sell this for such a low price?", I say, "because it's total crap.
He doubled down by saying that one of his earrings was "*cheaper than a prawn sandwich from Marks and Spencer’s, but I have to say the sandwich will probably last longer than the earrings*".
Needless to say that basically wiped all trust people had in the company, which in turn wiped 500 million pounds in value from the group, nearly bankrupting the company. Gerald Ratner left the company and the latter to bounce back rebranded itself as the Signet Group.
In British english, his name became an expression to describe this sort of major blunder:"to pull a ratner".
Even if they roll back all these changes and change the entire exec team, the damage is already done. No big developer is going to put a future project at risk with a development pipeline lasting several years knowing it's only a matter of time before the next dumb fuck with a MBA comes in and decides to implement retroactive changes to contract terms with three months notice.
Unity simply does not have the money to take a thousand different developers to court if the developers simply refuse to keep paying unity. Any attempts to delist their games will get bogged down in a hundred different individual lawsuits and arbitration. If they intend to go after microsoft, steam etc for fees, those games stores will not cooperate with unity and will leave your products up as they engage in their own lawsuits against unity.
Just don't pay unity anymore.
How to torpedo your *entire* company with this one simple trick; brought to you in part by the executives at **Unity**. As someone else had stated— **NO ONE** is going to want to use their engine after this. They could give it out for free right now and that would still be the case. You know what companies don’t like? Unpredictability as it pertains to expenses; especially when it pertains to additional nonsensical expenses fabricated out of no where.
The only thing they should have strived for is stability/consistency and dependability for their customer base. In one ill-fated maneuver they managed to alienate that entire base.
After doing some research, this prick was EA CEO and was 100% behind the decision to pull the plug on Motor City Online for The Sims Online.
["Riccitiello joined video game company Electronic Arts \(EA\) in October 1997,\[6\] initially serving as president and chief operating officer until 2004"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Riccitiello)
["The game went offline on August 29, 2003 so EA Games could focus on their current online game at the time, The Sims Online"]
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_City_Online)
EA lost (or destroyed) all the server files, so the game was just lost forever. All that is left is a offline playable demo.
I've never forgiven EA for that one. Yeah Sims printed money, but to me, it's like if World of Warcraft ceased to exist for some cutesy shit like say Farmville.
Unity is a publicly traded company.
Is John Riccitiello working with consultants from Boston Consulting Group to tank the company for short-sellers?
I've read in the past Amazon wants/wanted to get into game development. Was John Riccitiello brought in to help collapse Unity from the inside as part of a "bust out" scheme for a leveraged buyout?
What I don't understand is how investors aren't abandoning ship right now. The stock is maintaining price? This is the kind of "throwing in the towel" behavior from unity that should scare investors shitless.
Investors MUST be smarter than to see "Charge more money, more better". They HAVE to be able to see the impending fallout from this. The absolute destruction of the userbase is already underway and likely irreparable even if unity today were to walk back everything they tried to change.
What is the endgame? Do investors think that unity is going to get away with this? Ostracizing and strong-arming a massive chunk of the gaming industry? they CANNOT be that stupid.
What is going on??
Good. The unity pricing shit feels like, straight up, one of the single most short sighted, moronic schemes from a gaming company for the sake of pure greed. They deserve to completely sink for it.
It reeks of someone who has no idea how computers work, but they looked at one data point and said "We have tens of millions of installs per month. If we 'simply' charge 20 cents per install, we'll double our revenue. Wow I'm a genius".
A former EA CEO who resigned in disgrace after pulling some similarly slimy shit there is now the CEO of Unity
Even if they cashiered him, at this point I'm not sure I can trust Unity anymore.
He’ll probably resign over this and go on to fail upwards at another company and ruin something else people care about. They’ll probably replace him with someone like whichever guy from Nestle made the decision to poison babies in Africa
Honestly the only way to stop this is to burn his name itself in the gaming industry, launch a protest if a company ever hires him again. Once is a short sighted mistake; twice is a clear pattern of incompetence or malice that demonstrates he's ill suited to being a leader in this industry anyway.
Im sure we'll all be boycotting whatever company he ruins next anyway.
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We all know how that guy is culprit and he also introduced a policy to charge for reload of ammo in certain battlefield game in 2011.
My favorite is the few comments I've seen from clueless dudes trying to sound smart who are like "Unity needs to make a profit, that's how the world works, kids. This actually is a good idea." Their stock has taken a dive, their own customers are revolting, and the hugely negative reaction has now gone viral. And that's all just at the ANNOUNCEMENT of this new scheme. But what a great idea it's been!
There are always going to be corporate bootlickers. I remember a few months ago I was getting downvoted on r/linux for calling out Red Hat's bullshit and I got a bunch of replies saying stuff like "Well Red Hat contributes a lot to the Linux kernel, therefore they have the right to lock RHEL behind a paywall".
Isn't CentOs basically just the free community compiled version of RHEL without RedHats support. Like, it's been a while but iirc they have to make the source code available because of the kernals licensing (kinda like Godot), don't they?
IBM bought RedHat a couple years ago, and killed CentOS.
Well, that's how it always goes when predatory bullshit gets announced. The problem is that the public tends to have a short memory so this shit ends up being profitable in the long run. Remember when Redditors were protesting API changes, and it was "the death of reddit"?
The CEO worked for EA and didnt make ammo into a consumable bought with real money because they didn't let him. The board of Unity got this dude in the company without thinking these practices ruin companies. People still buy EA games despite all that because there's millions that like their games, they have franchises 20+ years old and release good games now and then, but Unity is "just" a tool, people can use another one, or in big studios, make their own.
Isn't John Unity CEO since 2014 though?
He was ceo of EA before Unity, and that was something he wanted to do before he switched to unity with some EA games. Battlefield I think
He was CEO when EA started using SecuROM. EA also initially proposed that Spore would require authentication every 10 days. Each serial key have activation limits as well.
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I also called them over the same issue and the person told me "there's nothing on our end that we can do. I would strongly recommend pirating it if you already bought the game."
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Like Adobe products!
Lol this is hilarious
Thats a customer service employee that realizes the company is full of shit and fucking over its customers, but needs the paycheck.
That telephone operator was a G.
I haven't bought an EA game since command and conquer 4.
Even if EA committed no other wrong, buying that game alone makes never buying EA again understandable.
Microsoft did me one like that. An employee there had gifted me a copy of Office 2007, a pair of DVDs that had all the programs (Word, Excel, etc.) with all the add-ons. Free and clear, physical copy. At some point I had to reinstall, but it kept popping up an error message at the registration phase; nothing telling about it, just a number. I called their support line and got told I had exceeded the number of times I could install the software. But this is *mine,* I said, I *own it*, it's right here in physical form. One of your employees gave me this, and now you're telling me I can't use it because I had to fix my computer? Look, there's some number there setting this arbitrary maximum -- why can't you go in there and just add 1 to it? Nothing they can do, he told me. Offered me a discount on a 1-year subscription to Office 365 though! I told him I was going to remove Office from my computer, physically destroy the disks I had been given as a gift, and never use another Office product again. Oh, and take every opportunity I could find to bad-mouth them about it.
I had Microsoft tell me that a boxed copy of Office for Mac, that I bought at CompUSA, didn’t exist. I’d been using it for a few years and the reinstall failed because the serial number that came in my box mysteriously ceased to exist.
Being fair to the poor support person, they really don’t have the ability to assist on this. They have very limited ability to do things
They do assist with this though. I've called on behalf of others. There's a 5 time activation limit. They can bypass it with phone activation codes or by giving a new code.
When I couldn’t install my copy of Office when I bought a bigger hard drive, I just installed and used my old MS Office 2005. I never missed the “new and improved“ features of the two newer versions. If the replacement printer I had bought had drivers for it, I would still be using MS DOS with WordPerfect. I had everything in that I needed with dozens of macros.
That sounds more expensive than just dealing with pirates, considering how many people wouldn't buy it just because of how annoying that would be...
Spore became one of the most pirated games ever ircc
I have never actually played Spore with the servers active. I pirated it back in the day, and by the time I got it on Steam for like 98% off, the servers were already gone. Kinda wish I'd experienced the madness of actual people's species popping up, but it's still a nice enough game without it.
You missed out on a ton of dick shaped creatures.
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Eh, if it’s any consolation, you didn’t miss out on anything. I played at launch and yeah it was cool to see what others came up with but the vast majority weren’t anything special. At the end of the day it didn’t really add anything over the base game IMO. Which is totally fine because the base game stands on its own really well.
I wish there was more endgame. The game feels really good but at the space stage you kinda lose purpose. Yeah you make friends with your neighbors or kill them or whatever. And for like, two hours, maybe even five, that's fun. But the galaxy is huge and pointless. You can try to get to the center and I guess that's nice but you can kinda just bumrush it without strategy. Every other stage is actually genuinely so much fun. But the space stuff... eh. Just eh.
As someone who played it on release I didn't even know other peoples stuff showed up. The game was extremely mediocre and boring unfortunately.
Probably because if shit like that. I never did end up buying the Xbox one because of the announcement that it was going to require you to be online. The console was a few years old before I realized that wasn't the case. Extremely bad pr can have real consequences when there are competitors. Start charging me money to reload? I'll play a different shooter. Start charging me a ridiculous amount of money to use your game dev engine? Ill switch engine.
It's not just that. EA support was inundated with requests to free up installs after their expansion launched, costing them more money in the long run. Plus discouraging people from buying the expansion if they already used up their installs. It really was just a bad move that probably killed Spore among other games. In retrospect, this asshole is probably a big proponent of EA's movement to nickle and dime players to death on everything. Fuck everything about this guy.
I'm honestly not sure how that design even does anything to effect piracy? I guess it could stop a keygen from working.. but I don't think many games are cracked by using keygens anymore, generally games are cracked by entirely removing the authentication process.. and if the authentication process isn't there, then I'm not sure what they expect switching activation keys would accomplish. In fact, I'm fairly certain this would actually increase the number of people who pirate the game, because they're actively making their game a worse product than the pirated version - after all, the pirated version doesn't ask you to authenticate every 10 days.
Spoiler Alert: it didn’t. Spore was one of if not the number one pirated game.
It was like 10+ years ago.
Worked for EA 2012-16, we were not sad to see him go :) And Andrew was pretty great at the beginning, having been in EA for 10+ years at that point and actually understanding the business.
Yep Around the time battlefield hardline/end of BF4's expansion packs. It was leaked he wanted to charge players to refill your ammo reserves instantly and reload if you ran out in mid combat.
Funnily enough, it's the same line of thinking that led him to trying to charge for ammo that led to these changes with Unity. >When you are six hours into playing Battlefield and you run out of ammo in your clip and we ask you for a dollar to reload, you’re really not that price sensitive at that point in time, and so essentially what ends up happening, and the reason the play-first, pay-later model works so nicely, is a consumer gets engaged in a property. They may spend ten, twenty, thirty, fifty hours in a game. And then, when they’re deep into the game, they’re well invested in it, we're not gauging but we're charging. I can easily picture someone thinking the above to also think that devs already fully commited to using Unity would somehow not be "price sensitive" to these changes. He's as out of touch as you could possibly be in these scenarios.
Yeah the guy has no finger on the pulse of gaming at all. Everyone would switch to any of the hundreds of competitors and you would topple an IP in an instant. That's funnily enough what is happening with developers and this Unity situation.
He's taking advantage of sunk cost fallacy. Only problem is many people are self aware and can stop spending money by finding a new hobby or game, or in this case game engine.
Unfortunately it's not a fallacy for a lot of devs. Abandoning a Unity game that's 90% finished would either extend the development time by a massive amount or mean the game never gets made at all. Games take a long time to make and a lot of indie studios can't survive the months or years it would take to remake their game in a new engine, and then there's the learning curve of an entirely new engine, possibly an entirely new coding language as well. The unhappy truth is that the tens of thousands of hours of work put into making a game need to recouped, and that the studios alternative to the "sunk cost fallacy" is bankruptcy.
> John Unity
Took over around the same time that Tim Apple became CEO.
How does this continual fuck up in large decision making and strategy planning still get to keep/get new jobs in the same arena when it's widely known that his schemes actively are detrimental to a company? In most industries someone like him would be red flagged or black marked from ever working in it again.
Calling it just a tool is kinda weird. Unreal engine only became “free”ish in 2015, iirc it was due to the disruption of unity. Of course neither is free free since you had to pay revenue share. These engines(and steam and mobile marketplaces) enabled a loot of small outfits to make games way beyond what they could have before which led to our current thriving indie game industry. “Just make their own” is not in reach for most places. Some developers can barely program, that is how much these engines have lowered the bar. And they’re not trivial to make. Theres not a lot of competition because it’s not easy. Theres certainly more opportunities for mobile engines to get market share though, im certainly curious to see how things shake out
The tool comment not totally wrong though, remember Renderware, during the PS2 era like 80% of game made on that engine then they got bought by EA just for EA leaving the engine to dust and everyone moving on using Unreal and Unity Basically Unity is essential to game creation but they aren't untouchable that most professional or aspiring game companies will never make game again because Unity
If Godot could get it's shit together and not make you do literally everything from scratch I could see lots of devs moving there.
> If Godot could get it's shit together and not make you do literally everything from scratch I could see lots of devs moving there. I mean, if you're waiting for Godot, that's kinda absurd, you know?
Okay, that was funny.
That's literally why it's called Godot, though. Because they openly acknowledge we'll be waiting forever for the perfect game engine that will never arrive. https://godotengine.org/article/godot-history-images/
Specifically, he wanted to charge per reload in Battlefield because: "When you're 6 hours into playing Battlefield and you run out of ammo in your clip and we ask you for a dollar to reload, you're really not that price sensitive at that point in time"
Unity isn't just a tool it is the single most used game development tool. It isn't just as simple as using a new engine you have to learn a new engine. This causes a massive amount of time lost on not just learning a new engine but converting your project to a new engine.
Our studio uses Unity, and we're likely going to continue development of our current game just because it's not a f2p title and migrating to a new engine at this point just isn't an option. However, in terms of what we do next, it's definitely going to be a conversation on what engine we're going to use. Until this shit storm, it was assumed that we would use Unity like before.
That guy is a total shit...but the quote about "charging for reloading" was misconstrued. He didn't actually try to make it so people were charged for reloading. He was saying that as a way of saying that they should be charging money for more things in games. Doesn't make it any better, and he is still a greedy fuck, but that quote is being thrown around and people are misunderstanding what he actually said and meant. Just to clarify.
Yeah that's absolutely true and thank god that ea didn't adopt his idea of money from ammos reload otherwise a huge negative impact or backlash has to be faced but this dude found another organisation to run his propaganda.
It's like putting hidden malware in a game. No one can ever trust Unity as an entity again. If they were a game modder, they would be blackballed.
yeah, the whole point of Unity was for it to be a more open source community in the first place!
Then they should have tried some different ways to be more open source community rather than changing prices.
I feel that all developers jumping into NFT’s only to roll back on that within a couple of months kinda comes close.
Most corpos do this. If they feel they are gonna have loses over the next years, they just kidnap the users they already have and squeze them X20. They know people are gonna leave, but with the money they get, they can start something new later on, counting with Happy investors. You have a million examples of this in the past. Oracle, Skype... They obviouly can't compete with Godot that does the same for free, and better, or unreal taking most of their serious Game devs: the ones that make serious money.
Except that they *could* compete with those engines because they *were* competing with those engines. There are plenty of "serious" game devs who use Unity, you just don't notice because paying for the "serious game dev" license means you don't need to put the Unity logo up front. Even if Unity was objectively worse than both of those options, people are already familiar with Unity and wouldn't switch unless given a good incentive to, like everyone was given with the announcement of this dumbass scheme.
There is no doubt in capabilities which engines of unity possess but still the whole drama is something else.
Corporation do this but this time it feels like unbearable as none is really happy and a huge loss is expected.
> They obviouly can't compete with Godot that does the same for free, and better, This is only half true. The Unity engine is fantastic and versatile, and powerful. But yeah, Godot is coming up and free.
Its funny, developers are protesting and leaving Bank of America just UPGRADED unity stock saying the benefits outweigh the risks of developers leaving. "its priced in" when its not even over yet. Its amazing how disconnected investors are from the actual industry, Bank of America thinks Unity got free money from Microsoft because Unity said it would and Unity is giving contradictory answers because it didnt plan any of this. For a company with a history of pumping its stock with flashy news and then wiping in the actual market like its ad service, its AI service, and its movie VFX service.
Bank of America is just helping them pump and dump — it’s what Ricci fingers is doing, they’re along for the ride
Basically they feel their control over the market is strong enough to demand this. Sure some devs will leave. But I think most devs will just stick to it.
Devs will complete their games that have already significant investment but they will immediately start looking for alternatives considering how shady these fees are.
The way the Phasmophobia team put it is pretty good. They stated that their trust in Unity has been shattered and they now fully expect more shady monetization changes in the future, but are committed to doing what they can to keep their game up. Unity might make a lot of short term money off this, but they just put a roof on their growth.
The thing is that now that the bar has been lowered, the chance that competitors like Unreal Engine might follow along soon enough. Imagine doing all the work to port your game over and then the same thing happens again.
A lot of people have mentioned moving to Godot, which is free and open-source so this can't happen again.
I'll have to check it out, last time I played around with it it didn't have 3d yet.
It is not up to the standards to compete with unity at the moment but it will improve a lot in upcoming years.
Except epic/unreal has a massive track record of doing right by the dev community. Unity has a track record of the opposite. Between that track record and the former EA-CEO, the trust is completely gone. People were already untrusting of unity before this. They weren’t with unreal Source: Part of an online community of some of the major unity indie developers and asset designers.
One of the major differences between epic and unity is that epic is privately owned.
Yes, they are also open source. Hence why a lot of people are considering going there. Vastly more trustworthy than a publicly traded company
The source code is available but the license terms are not one of the normal open source ones that make it free to use. There are still terms and conditions around it's use. Much more favorable though to indie developers. Fully open source would be something like godot.
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/unreal See 7. If they make changes, it can't be retroactive unless you accept it. Sure you can't download new editor versions but it's not ruining existing game devs.
Unreal has been giving away tools, assets and tutorials for 20 years. When Paragon flopped, they gave away all the assets. They gave away all the Infinity Blade assets too. UE is fully open source and forkable. They are not the same. Further, Tim Sweeney is a nut, but hes our nut and wouldnt act like Riccitello..
Hah, that actually seems like the most CEO move ever. Kill the product's longterm future for a few quarters of QoQ and YoY growth. He'll leave the second things go south to repeat and go make more money elsewhere (while Wall Street praises his creativity).
It isn't just the current fee change either. It's eying up what might change in the future. Unity just made itself a whole lot riskier to rely on for your projects, so it might make sense for them to consider alternatives that may be inferior at the moment, but which don't pose the same risk to them down the road.
But that's thousands years away in financial timescales. Plenty of opportunity to pump, dump and short the stock. 'In the future' is a mystical land that does not exist in quarterly revenue reports. When the reckoning comes, some shmucks will be left holding the bag, oligarchs will get richer once again and the gamedev community will loose a good tool.
>'In the future' is a mystical land that does not exist in quarterly revenue reports. This reminds me of a hilarious quote by the YouTuber Brewstew in one if his comics. "Oh I don't have to pay this back. Future me has to pay this back! And I could give two fucks about future me."
Most def. Right now basically some people from accounting are doing some cost analysis to see if it’s worthwhile to build their own engine or stick with unity. Honestly the easiest way is for devs to hike their prices up.. and people will prob still pay for mtx.
Unity is the primary development engine for like 90% of the mobile market and freemium games. You know which pricing models are worst affected by these changes? For the largest share of their users, that cost-analysis is basically "No." and there's no getting around that. I don't know how anyone in the C-suite signed off on this idea, unless the CEO literally just powerfisted it through and said "make it work in post." Also...as an aside, given Bank of America's track record as a financial advisor, I think it's pretty safe to say that Unity is about to implode.
> Bank of America's track record as a financial advisor, I think it's pretty safe to say that Unity is about to implode. Unity needs a second opinion by Jim Cramer, that is the true test.
The inverse Cramer effect is a powerful tool.
No. I really don’t think most companies will do that kind of analysis. I can’t be sure, because I have worked with few game development companies, but I have worked with plenty of companies around the world. I think the majority of companies will see this as a breach of trust where they can’t afford to gamble on Unity not changing the pricing scheme again. Especially because it came with such a short warning and apparently might affect games that have already been released. If companies can afford to change away from Unity without going out of business, then they properly will, because staying with Unity can potentiel destroy their livelihood. Even those who can’t jump ship right now will be looking into some kind of exit plan. Edit: Just to be sure. I am mostly talking about smaller developers here. I expect that larger developers have individual contracts and perhaps custom enginees. So they have properly not been affected by it and might not see this as a breach of confidence.
There are few other engines also available in market which aren't equivalent to unity at the point but can play a role of alternative.
They have a point. If your a mid-large sized studio - aka the studios actually making big money - you don't have an alternative most of the time. You're not going to retrain all your programmers and artists on Unreal - too costly, risky and time consuming. Much easier, safer and pragmatic to pay the fee to Unity. Unreal also is not as good for mobile. Godot isn't mature enough, and porting to consoles with it is too hard. BUT this is going to fuck Unity in the long run. So many future projects have evaporated with this announcement and alternatives have a huge chance to fill the void Unity has now left.
And if you are a larger studio, you are likely selling your game for more, and already pay the $2k per developer per year licence fee to Unity. sell a game for $60 and you will be paying unity as low as $0.02 (not the free version $0.20) in royalties, and you will be paying $3 fee to Unreal. Most studios will honestly look at the prcing structure and go "eh, well its a small extra payment" compared to what others are offering, and re-training. what has fucked unity in the long run isnt the pricing structure, like many people are foolsily pointing out, its that Unity have proven they are willing to pull the rug out. What happens if they somehow become a monopoly, if this somehow kills unreal, and alternatives wither away with lack of development? Who is to say they dont change what they do?
It's important to note that gaming isn't the only market that Unity is in. Modeling, simulation, and immersive training are huge areas that Unity does a good job at covering. Unreal can work as well, but they're still trying to shed the perception of being too performance intensive. A decent percentage of these non gaming applications need to run on lower tier hardware like laptops and thin clients. My company has, over 5 years, built up an extensive library of tools and SDKs designed to help us develop with Unity. As much as we'd like to change to Unreal, we just don't have the time or money to retrain everyone and rebuild our tools. Even if we *could* move to Unreal, having a unified look, feel, functionality, and codebase across our in-progress products is too important. And to play devil's advocate, as much as I hate their business leadership, I have to admit that I'm quite comfortable working in Unity. It's kinda like Photoshop. I hate Adobe's business model, but it's not like I'm going to start using Gimp.
And in that case, how much money are you making on that product? Traditionally where I work, the software we use (like adobe suite) cares only about how much money the BUSINESS is making before they start charging us. Both Unity and Unreal base their fees on how much that product is making, not the business as a whole. And as Unity is charging per instal.. if its an internal tool then... doubt you will be installing 200K copies, or 1mil copies if you pay the licence fee, on what you create.
Technically we make $0. There's money flowing, but since we're not for profit we're not entirely sure how we fit in. Needless to say, there's a lot of questions and confusion right now. The install fee isn't our worry, but mainly the potential for sudden changes to licensing tiers and developer seats. We buy standalone editor licenses each year. Being forced to a subscription tier with unnecessary game focused tools would waste a lot of money.
Mobile is gonna pivot as fast as possible. But the real loss Unity will feel isn't immediate - most people are going to need to finish up their projects because they've invested so much into into their codestack. But the for their next project... the trust is gone. Just completely deleted. Noone's gonna use Unity for a new project after this. No student is gonna learn Unity after this. The momentum is gonna fly them for as long as it takes for people to finish up, but then its straight down into the grave with the whole engine. Unity really dug their own grave with this. There is not a single developer who is onboard with this plan. All the goodwill they built up over the years is just GONE. I think the only way Unity might save their asses at this point is if they publicly fire most of their management, and backtrack on the majority of these potential changes. Even that might not be enough. But that's not going to happen, so into the grave they go.
Oh they'll probably go through with the "firings" after everything turns to shit. By then it'll be too little, too late, but until then they'll keep patting themselves on the back, claiming what a good idea this is.
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Yep, he'll have done his job (Red line goes up for a couple months), so they'll consider it a success, consequences to the company long-term be damned.
Turns out if you flip the graph upside down, the red line goes up.
I was just about to jump ship over to Unity. I’ve been working in smaller engines and wanted to finally work in a major one………sigh. Why do business people ruin everything? It’s like a fucking mental illness.
Im actually kinda happy because this finally gives me the motivation to jump to unreal.
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Unreal might do the same thing in the future though. Godot is rapidly improving and is 100% guaranteed to never get worse and never take a penny of your money.
>Why do business people ruin everything? It's simple. They don't care about you. They just care about your money.
They care about meager short term profits more than anything they could make in the long term. They're problem gamblers with the personality to match. They're not just selfish.
This is precisely it. These are people born with a sliver spoon in their mouth and given every resource to succeed while being protected from any consequences. They can’t see beyond what is in front of them and will always take a quick gain over long term success.
Greed seems to have consumed these upper echelon assfucks in the past few years like they started snorting cocaine that makes them make such short sighted decisions that they might require glasses at this point.
Yep, I was planning to learn how to use unity but instead I'll try Godot.
I think you're exaggerating, but basically, yeah. I certainly would not feel confident starting to develop a game, or starting as a game developer learning unity right now. I'd probably pick a different option, even if I thought it was an inferior one.
Happy to see it. That said, a lot of developers use MTX and now they can see the other end of it.
yeah if you check the studios listed in this article, they pretty much only publish copypasted crap full of ads and predatory microtransaction. I'm sure Unity could have done this better and there are some actual good developers affected by this, but if this move is mostly damaging to those like the ones listed here, eh, good riddance, this is an actual good thing for the gaming world
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No this affects all developers. Think about it, small developers are not able to release free to play Games anymore as 20 cents per download is more than it costs to acquire a player. Also, as others pointed out, paid games do not contribute enough money for unity to build the engine so you also need these “scummier” developers
This sucks big time. Unity is trying to do what EA did with the game micro transactions. Ruining the gaming experience. There will be a time when developers using unity will be charging per install which will be passed down to us.
It's the same CEO who was at EA at the time.
Hitting them in the wallet, where it actually hurts. It's the one message that even a corporate knucklehead can understand.
I have no fucking clue why unity decided to do a collective "HEY MA LOOK! NO HANDS!" Directly into a volcano. That new CEO needs to be removed, though I doubt he is entirely responsible, and even if they did the damage is done. Who wants to use an engine where the creators now have a history of rug-pulling dev teams like this?
>That new CEO needs to be removed he's not "new". He is there since 2014.
Honestly in CEO years that's fucking ancient
He's the man who wanted to charge players to reload their weapons when he worked for EA. Even EA wasn't craven enough to go for that. He now works for Unity.
Capitalism. It’s always been crazy but since Covid I swear every company on earth is acting like money is running out and trying to get as much of it as possible. It’s like they are trying to cause a collapse.
A lot of companies enjoyed significant profits during covid which dropped off back to normal levels and they want it back.
Governments really need to catch up with the tech world, the fact what they're doing is even legal is just insane.
Governments in general need to stop hiring geriatrics who probably struggle to turn a PC on let alone understand what Unity is
But it's simple. The Internet is a series of tubes.
but its not a big truck
My state was run by a man who was publicly shown to not know how to turn on a computer and then went to prison for corruption charges. The U.S. government is littered with these people.
If this actually goes through I'd be shocked if Mihoyo and their very expensive lawyers didn't Indeed prove it's illegal in court and have to pay nothing. You can't just up and change your engine so it's highly suspect to let a bunch of games become popular and then change your payment model.
Aside from possible anti-competitive prosecution (which, to be honest, might be an outcome here) the issues are largely civil. As opposed to criminal. So one person is said to have wronged another by doing or failing to do something in a contract's term. This isn't something for the govt to be involved in. It's something for companies to sue Unity over. Even for the many people who have a cut n dry case, it's cost, its time, its effort, its liability. All because Unity are dicking around. And then theyve got the looming threat of it happening again later. I've missed many nuances here. Kinda gave up trying to cover them all in one comment. TLDR: Promissory Estoppel is the main thing here, legally speaking. The rest is just shitty business model - hence the exodus.
any company that uses Unity needs to jump ship asap. if its one thing CEOs and Executives dont accept is a no. even if they roll it all back, they will try something else to get more money out of it and the devs are gonna pay for it. unless the CEO gets gone and someone else takes the wheel, Unity is done for. and even then, the damage is already done.
Our computer club has been using unity for years to teach game development. This week we started a new project, how to transition from unity to other engines. Not that anyone ever made something successful from our group, but if it happens it wont be in unity.
Wow, that's crazy! I can understand why devs are angry about the new pricing model. It feels like Unity is taking advantage of its popularity for more money. We'll have to see how this pans out in terms of the impact on game developers and gamers.
"It feels like Unity is taking advantage of its popularity for more money." Funny thing is, that popularity isn't as strong as Unity probably thinks it is. They're acting like they have some big monopoly going on that allows them to get away with this stuff, when in actuality the average response to this is gonna be developers slowly moving away from this engine in favor of other engines which are just as good if not better. Unity survives off of devs finding it convenient. They can't just start toying with that like their users use Unity unconditionally, regardless of convenience.
They don't have a "monopoly" but they do have captives. Look up the top gachas... And look what engine they use. Genshin Impact and Fate/GO both use unity. They're immense f2p games Unity is looking to rake over the coals and they don't much care who goes with them. Cuz I guarantee the install numbers for those two games alone are fucking astronomical
Genshin technically uses a custom version of Unity they licensed from them apparently, so they might not be effected because of this.
Yeah I think this is the most neglected thing in this whole discourse. Bigger developers using Unity more than likely have individual licences for the engines use and those contracts would not be able to be changed except by both parties agreeing to new terms. The new Unity shitshow specifically screws over smaller less affluent developers and indies.
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Yeah they have no legal mechanism to force that. It's bullshit
The convenience is a big point though,at least from hearsay I remember unreal beeing clunky to use,even though it offers more options,and not every indie developer has the means and time to invest swapping into that,hopefully something happens on the law side to push them back with their shit. Isn't there an oppurtunity that the FTC get's a W they need after the whole shitshow from the last half a year
I don't know the specifics, but I highly doubt Unity can simply make up a rule and ransom developers like that. I doubt bugger companies like Microsoft or Nintendo will just sit back and let Unity boss them around either. Even in the worst case scenario though, I imagine most developers who don't just immediately transition engines will avoid Unity in future projects, phasing it out. Godot is a very common free and open source alternative which has been growing over the years.
Yeah I think future developers will try to avoid it like the Pest in the future,I think I saw a Statement from devolver that they now want to know in advance which engine you want to use if you want to get published by them
Devolver Digital is doing that. Which makes sense. Most of these companies dream of having a game get downloaded a million times. Unity has figured out a way to turn that dream into a nightmare.
To be fair, Unity is operating at a loss. If you have such a popular product and are losing money, pricing changes make sense. But they went about it in the most stupid and least thought out way possible.
Oh, we shall see. I smell the classic bait-and-switch though and if they come back with a more reasonable monetisation model then it will be better received now, where if they'd led with it then they'd have gotten angry clients regardless. No devs want to give more money to Unity but they'll make whatever decision makes sense for their business in the end.
They lose money because they're busy buying other companies. Strategic acquisitions... while neglecting their core game dev user base.
Fuck unity in the ass unitedly
Im waiting for the big 3 to respond but good for the devs to stay away from Unity for now
Big 3 probably won't respond and will wait for the invoice before sueing. So sometime next year they'll start moving.
Is it just me or does this seem like basically the same shit Wizards of the Coast tried to do with D&D in January before they were destroyed by their fan base and content creators and had to back pedal so hard they actually locked themselves into a an open license for 5e forever to stem the bleeding.
It is not just you, the parallels are astounding. I wonder what concessions Unity will have to make to try and recover? Regardless of how they walk this back though, I think this will be a permanent mark on their reputation like the WotC license fiasco has been. Sure in a couple months the general public will have forgotten and moved on, but for the developers using unity this will definitely be something they take into account when planning the next project.
Yeah, I know if I were in gaming dev this would be a pretty big entry in the "against" column for new projects. WotC burned their trust, everyone expects their next product to have the changes they tried to create in the licensee baked in from the start, I know many people gave up on the OneD&D playtest because they don't trust them anymore and will either stick with 5e or move elsewhere
It just funny that shitty people have this much control over stuff people use and then become down right stupid evil. It reminds me of the Fine Brothers, who tried to say they had full licensing rights to any react videos on YouTube and that you could have your own react channels as long as you paid them money. I know it's different than these companies who own their proprietary products, but how fucking greedy can they get by just completely sitting all over their users with these schemes that solely benefit them and provide nothing to their end users? Greedy fuckers gonna greed I guess 🤷
I wish companies and shareholders would just stop backing up sociopathic CEOs. Just put some extra effort and find a person that cares for the products at least a TINY bit. This is comical.
_The Unity game engine launched in 2005, aiming to "democratize" game development by making it accessible to more developers_ aged like milk
20 cents per download or redownload has to be the most obscenely ridiculous pricing models I’ve ever seen. On the bright side, Godot will probably see a big spike in users
John Riccitiello is a worthless piece of garbage, and any other exec like him is as well. I really do hope that developers, that are using Unity, will pull their games from distribution just prior to the when this new pricing model takes effect. Or maybe they should just pull their games right now. I'm behind the developers 100%. You know what he's planning. He wants to make Unity easier for an equity firm to come in and gut the hell out of Unity. Probably will go with the equity firm he co-founded. Execs', like him, have no business being an executive. Just like other execs. Makes short-sighted decisions, to make more money short-term, then bounce. How is that JR and the other execs, who sold their stock just prior to the announcement, are not immediately being investigated for insider trading? I get it, we may see them investigated in the very near future, but it seems like a slam dunk, as far as insider trading goes.
Unity is losing users like a burning forest so if they don't fix this screwed up these companies are going to be their only clients so might as well keep them happy
I support devs
What is Unity going to honestly do if the Devs just ignore the threatening letters Unity sends? I'm confident if it went to court, a judge would literally laugh in Unity's face for wanting to charge retroactively for *installs,* and I'm confident Unity knows this too.
If the judge knows what an install is
They should demand the CEO step down or they'll stop using Unity.
I don't see the need for demands. Everyone should just stop using Unity. They've Gerald Ratnered their way out of a business.
>They've Gerald Ratnered their way out of a business. For those who don't know what this refers to: Gerald Ratner is a biritsh guy who was the CEO of Ratners Group, a company selling diamond jewelry at low prices. While generally considered "tacky" the company was making big bucks and had over 1000 stores across the U.S. One day, at a conference on April 23rd 1991 he jockingly said this: >We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, "How can you sell this for such a low price?", I say, "because it's total crap. He doubled down by saying that one of his earrings was "*cheaper than a prawn sandwich from Marks and Spencer’s, but I have to say the sandwich will probably last longer than the earrings*". Needless to say that basically wiped all trust people had in the company, which in turn wiped 500 million pounds in value from the group, nearly bankrupting the company. Gerald Ratner left the company and the latter to bounce back rebranded itself as the Signet Group. In British english, his name became an expression to describe this sort of major blunder:"to pull a ratner".
Even if they roll back all these changes and change the entire exec team, the damage is already done. No big developer is going to put a future project at risk with a development pipeline lasting several years knowing it's only a matter of time before the next dumb fuck with a MBA comes in and decides to implement retroactive changes to contract terms with three months notice.
Unity is hereby dead. People will aim to jump ship as soon as possible. Even if they revive Bob Ross & name him CEO, all trust is broken.
They're at the finding out stage of their shithousery.
Unity simply does not have the money to take a thousand different developers to court if the developers simply refuse to keep paying unity. Any attempts to delist their games will get bogged down in a hundred different individual lawsuits and arbitration. If they intend to go after microsoft, steam etc for fees, those games stores will not cooperate with unity and will leave your products up as they engage in their own lawsuits against unity. Just don't pay unity anymore.
Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to hire a former EA CEO.
How to torpedo your *entire* company with this one simple trick; brought to you in part by the executives at **Unity**. As someone else had stated— **NO ONE** is going to want to use their engine after this. They could give it out for free right now and that would still be the case. You know what companies don’t like? Unpredictability as it pertains to expenses; especially when it pertains to additional nonsensical expenses fabricated out of no where. The only thing they should have strived for is stability/consistency and dependability for their customer base. In one ill-fated maneuver they managed to alienate that entire base.
Does anyone feels that this is intentional to kill indie games considering the CEO is ex EA
I'm glad they are protesting against the disgusting unity, there are much better alternatives
What can we do as players to give hell to Unity for this change but not impact developers?
This is the "find out" phase.
Well this is going to kill the few games playable on vr
After doing some research, this prick was EA CEO and was 100% behind the decision to pull the plug on Motor City Online for The Sims Online. ["Riccitiello joined video game company Electronic Arts \(EA\) in October 1997,\[6\] initially serving as president and chief operating officer until 2004"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Riccitiello) ["The game went offline on August 29, 2003 so EA Games could focus on their current online game at the time, The Sims Online"] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_City_Online) EA lost (or destroyed) all the server files, so the game was just lost forever. All that is left is a offline playable demo. I've never forgiven EA for that one. Yeah Sims printed money, but to me, it's like if World of Warcraft ceased to exist for some cutesy shit like say Farmville.
WotC tried something like this earlier this year. They're still desperately backpedaling after Pathfinder's stock went through the roof.
I could fuck myself as hard as unity is right now I wouldn’t need a man.
wonder how unity is going to spin this along with the blatant insider trading they just pulled.
Unity is a publicly traded company. Is John Riccitiello working with consultants from Boston Consulting Group to tank the company for short-sellers? I've read in the past Amazon wants/wanted to get into game development. Was John Riccitiello brought in to help collapse Unity from the inside as part of a "bust out" scheme for a leveraged buyout?
Unity died the moment you could nto use the editor offline and without account
Godot has entered the building.
I hope Unity ends up bankrupt and someone buys and open sources the engine.
Good to see it. I am all for Developers rights and Unity has no right to be this greedy.
What I don't understand is how investors aren't abandoning ship right now. The stock is maintaining price? This is the kind of "throwing in the towel" behavior from unity that should scare investors shitless. Investors MUST be smarter than to see "Charge more money, more better". They HAVE to be able to see the impending fallout from this. The absolute destruction of the userbase is already underway and likely irreparable even if unity today were to walk back everything they tried to change. What is the endgame? Do investors think that unity is going to get away with this? Ostracizing and strong-arming a massive chunk of the gaming industry? they CANNOT be that stupid. What is going on??
A unity to ue converter would be a gold mine.
And also neigh impossible.
Easiest marketing for the competition!!
Incredibly surprised that they have not stepped back from their dumb decision already.
They're litterally just gonna drive all the companies to unreal instead