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32:22 "To do an engine change it's just going to cost me more.." at this point point unity and the c-suites running it have proven they can't be trusted and yes to change engines this instant would probably cost more for most devs but is it really worth dealing with darth vader altering the deal further? o.O
@@agatasoda There is no guarantee they won't make it even worse in few months/years. Unreals license in perpetular so even if they change licensing, You can still use current version of engine with current license for the rest of Your life. I would say that should be a standard on any software license
So bizarre to worry if "too many" people download your product. Praying your game is CRITICALLY acclaimed but relatively unseen and overlooked by customers is the madness Unity has created. We truly live in fictional times.
@@johndodo2062what? of course they didn’t ‘just realize this’, that’s just what making a game with unity would mean if they did charge devs per install.
john riccitiello is completely incompetent. changing the deal on your business partners without consulting them isn't a mistake even a mom and pop business would make.
It's like a publishing company charging an author for each time someone reads their book. Like it's such an asinine solution to the idea of boosting revenue for a company when there are better ways to do it, esp when it seems to target the people keeping you in business
A large part of the problem is that the games industry is infested with a batch of executives who all come from the same school of thought: short term gains are always a higher priority than the long term stability of a company. They’re grifters and they’re proud of it
Look at the boardroom to understand who they are. If games are no longer their focus, that says everything and why nobody should expect any major changes to the plan. Business software installs are a wholly different financial and marketing environment. It also explains the slowdown in new game-focused features and suggests that won't be changing either.
As long as executive pay is largely driven by equity and stock grants, they by their fiduciary duty as well as their own personal gain, going to be motivated by whatever moves stock prices most, in the short term. And for better or worse, markets tend to over react to metrics (user count, play hours, profit, revenue, whatever the metric) in the short term micro view of things rather than long term macro views. For as long as this is the setup, regardless of industry, executive behavior will continue to be the same.
@@djbakasan Solution is to ban stock gambling, its actually worse than any other form since it destroys peoples lives that aren't even involved. But when the people that could do it are all war profiteers directly responsible for the DIRECT deaths of millions of innocent people its never going to happen peacefully.
Freshly founded indie dev company using Unity here. We sent out our prototype, had positive feedback, so set up a company and went full time to polish it up to a really pitchable level. We sent our polished pitches out on monday, tuesday Unity sets everything on fire. Sucks to get hamstrung like this the very second we were ready to hit the ground running after 3 years of prep. The problem for us is less the install fee itself, and more the question if anyone would even consider signing us.
Given what Unity is doing? Probably not. You just became a risk. I know it's heartbreaking, but you're probably screwed if you can't figure out how to port this.
I hope you'll be able to get pity funding to switch engines (perhaps Epic Games will make a fund available to spit in Unity's face? Here's hoping!) - best of luck to you and your team!
I don’t know or care what game your building, but if there is a public funding campaign to help you all switch engines, I would be happy to toss in a few bucks. I’m sure I’m not the only one. This kind of rug pull is heartbreaking for indies.
@@sangan3202 i also developing my first pc game on steam as early access and sadly cant just chance engine. It not sold too much but do they deserve further delay so i can just chance engine. I don't think so. So what i'm planning to do finish the game and remake it on Unreal later like remaster it same time.
Trust takes years to build and seconds to break, and John Riccitiello just proved that. I remember when Unity was mostly associated with low-quality asset flip and for some people finding out a game was even made with Unity was a dealbreaker. They were finally at a point where it was widely known that highly acclaimed game were made with Unity but all that was for nothing now. Even if they walk all this back (which I doubt they will) they'll never get the trust of devs back.
I remember an episode of the Jimquisition where the thesis statement was essentially "No the Unity engine isn't inherently garbage, it's just that their free tier requires the display of their logo where the paid tiers don't, so the big good games made by professional teams don't show the Unity logo at launch, but the hemorrhoid tier asset flips all do."
@@johndodo2062probably because that “psycho” is entertaining and does great commentary on the state of the industry. Sorry you can’t recognize quality media.
It's nice seeing the community stand up and saying "hell no." I wish people would do that with microtransactions and subscription fees. All of this would end.
The response is different because it's business to business and businesses fundamentally operate differently than consumers. A small increase in entertainment budget that can be avoided by not purchasing it is different than changes to your career and how you make a living.
Microtransactions and subscriptions aren't the end of the world. if done right. companies need money to pay for server cost, for there live games. subscriptions and microtransactions are the way to do this. removing them isn't a way forward, but i do agree that they need to be fair, and not outrages, or overdone. for the games i play, i rather have a subscription, and i do consume micro transactions. though the games i play have more fair pricing. FFXIV is one great exemple for this done right. Diablo imortal is this done ........... can't even say it without getting hit. unfortunaly, this bisness first model is being taken by way to many gaming companies. games are supposed to be fun and enteraininment first. is the game fun and entertaining, and it has a cash shop/subscription, money will flow on its own. this is what all those companies have forgotten. how to make a toy for people to play with. games are just that, toys. some like to play with cars, some like to play with dolls, some like bord games and some like video games. in the end, they are all meant for entertainment. only, the gaming comunity, is not entertained with this greedy corpret stuff. it is a headakge we all want to get rid off. unity is on its way to self destuct. take this bisness model, and people will stop using it and move to someting that does respect them. the games devoled on unity will be pulled after it has made inof money to switch over to a new engine with a new game to bring in money. and unity who is trying to make money, will lose all the income they had before the pollicy was live. it is shit that this will happen. and so maney people will be affected by it. but if unity wants to destroy there company, let them do it. unreal engine, RPG maker. there is still that, it is not the same as unity. but, some poeple working on unity wil be smart, and make a new unity with the coding knollidge they already had. if the company doesn't exsist any more, than all the coppy rights go down with it. my appologies for this long list, but this had to be mentiont. and i do hope unity CEO will wake up and realize that this is not how to save a company, and move to a difrend model for revenue.
One question is whether this is even legal in Europe, a lot of times when executives push something through without consulting anyone else, something that nobody else in the industry seems to have done before, they find out that's because it's illegal.
It's not, if you make such changes in a "contract" no matter the nature, the customer can opt out and cancel it, this is loony logic at work here, which makes me want them to enact it, they're gonna get ripped apart in european courts, especially with them changing their TOS silently and without announcement
They would have to announce the changes and give devs an option to cancel, at least in Sweden. I don't think it's possible to tell if anything was illegal from the info we have right now, depends on how things was announced and what happens if you opt out. The costs applying backwards certainly is a problem though, that might very well not go through. That might also not pass the EU directive that contracts have to be fair. If they raise the price retroactively - what do the devs get?
My question is is it even legal in US? I don't know much (or anything, really) about US law, but surely you cannot retroactively change ToS for games released using engine version prior to this change. Contract is not an NFT where you can just swap out an URL and suddenly change rules unilaterally.
Well, from what little info I have, the change itself isn't necessarily the problem, strictly legally speaking. It is how they executed it. In the EU, law gurantees you that when a contract is changed on behalf of the "giver", the "taker" then has the right to opt-out within a given period AFTER the announcement (usually around 14 days) AND they have to agree to the changes or they won't take effect. The contract "giver" then can of course cancel the contract and in this case, forbid a developer to further use Unity for their projects. But all of this first and foremost requires Unity to ANNOUNCE the change properly, with all the changes they're about to do to the contract. Else, it just won't take effect in the EU. But there's the other side of the coin: not that many studios have their main seat in the EU or Europe in general. And even those who have (most well known probably Dice in Sweden) are under the wings of a larger publisher, who pays their bills but sits in the USA. And I have no idea how american laws are when it comes to changing a running contract, but judging from the fact that basically any company reserves itself the right tho change them at any time, I guess they're not really strict. tl;dr: Unity doesn't care for the EU market, this is targeted at the US since oall the big players have their main seat there anyway and laws are less harsh regarding contract changes.
This has to be one of the clearest shareholder class action lawsuit situations in history. This CEO will be retiring shortly since his name alone will destroy any company he becomes associated with for life. This situation would be like Netflix saying "we're going to charge you a dollar for every show you started watching, and we're backdating this for one calendar year starting 1/1/2024". This CEO did do something right - he just made the best case for open source engines in history. I hope we'll be seeing a large uptick in open source engine development coming online.
There are open source licenses that are almost as bad as the crap the Riccitiellos of the world will push on folks. The problem is the corporate and legislative environment of modernity. There are no practical solutions currently available to effectively prosecute public corporations much less dissolve them or punish the shareholders/execs when they commit acts that would be outright crimes by any other entity than a government or a public corporation. Riccitiello wouldn't even be in the industry if EA and it's execs had been held accountable for their blatant contract violations and deliberate gaming marketing to minors, he'd still be serving that sentence on parole if not prison.
i don't care to look this guy up, but every time people say bobby kotick is destroying activision, he moves up the rating of the most successful CEOs ever so i don't see why are you so hopeful
You'd think, but it's likely "activist shareholders" (read: brainwormed venture capitalists) that are likely pushing this on the c-suite in the first place. Most shareholders now are a mix of institutions that never get involved and VC psychopaths. And those same VCs will ensure that Riccitiello gets another gig, because he follows orders.
Imagine a board meeting where they discuss the fact that, under their model, some of their customers can develop a successful product and go bankrupt and their answer is "they can grovel with our account managers and we'll jiggle the numbers to make sure they're not actually going belly up". Amazing sales pitch. I know I would be kicking their door down trying to get in on a deal that has even a remote fraction of a chance of me owing them more money than I earned despite selling an otherwise successful product. Why would you not?!
I wonder if anyone has considered the possibility that they sent the threats to themselves as a way to deflect the shitstorm and garner a little sympathy? I mean the FBI said the threats were coming from the inside.....
It's possible. But I think it's probably real. Imagine you've worked on a product for years and someone in the C-suite sabotages it with a foolish decision. There are enough angry Unity employees that one of them might have said something over the top.
It was an employee from out of state, threatening to kill the CEO. An employee who's livelihood just got called into question because this top-down forced decision is going to cripple Unity and force them to lay off a shitton of people. We know the normal Staff was also pushing back for weeks or longer before the C suite stepped over them. In this case I'd be willing to give the employee the benefit of the doubt that the threat was hyperbolic. And CEO $reload used this as an excuse to stop a staff meeting where he and his friends up top would have been facing some pretty harsh criticism from everyone else about Unity now being on a timer to bankruptcy and all of the regular employees going to lose their jobs in the near future.
I usually assume when people claim death threats, it's something like this. it's an easy way to generate some pity and temper the criticism coming at them. Although, if there ever was a scenario where I would believe, and even understand a company receiving death threats, it would be this one. Don't send death threats though.
"Unity needs to make more money, there's no other options." Unity's executives get some of the biggest compensation in the tech industry. A big reason they aren't profitable is because of the absurd amount of money they give to executives, even as those executives just keep making the product worse and driving away customers.
It is literally the executives versus the rest of the Unity company. Numerous developers have resigned and posted to social media how they've been trying to fight this in internal communications for months and then it was still pushed out without a notice to the rest of the company.
Good on them for showing a proper spine far too many devs keep their heads down and don't fight this shit if they did we would have less of this crap happening
@@michaelkeha It's all good to say they should fight more, but unfortunately this is their livelihood that they're risking. With how fucked corps are, i'm impressed there's even any speaking out against it. Not everyone can afford the threat of losing their job, and my heart goes out for them. I hope the ones that can take it are able to keep fighting in their stead.
@@unsuspiciousdweller8967 I gave up a job that was sustaining me because it pushed beyond my moral boundaries it's called having principles and their lack of will to fight is why the gaming industry has many of the issues it has now they need to speak up and stand up these execs won't stop unless they are pushed back at every turn doing the right thing isn't easy and it often comes at a cost but the cost of not doing it is often far far greater in the long run
The games' industry as a whole has concocted more than their fair share of ill-conceived money-making scams, but this one is up there among the worst. They don't even know how they're going to implement it or how they're going to ensure accuracy, and even admit that whatever method they use to implement it will likely be inaccurate ("we won't over-count, but we might under-count.") It's absolutely nuts.
so if a dev makes a bad game and someone makes a redit or tweet to access the download they can just destroy indie devs by convincing people to uninstall and reinstall said game? yeah this will go well, I mean no one on the internet is dishonest or band people together for any reason nowadays.
It's like a canvas maker claiming you owe them more money now that your painting done on their canvas (that you bought for $20) has sold for a million dollars. It's a complete scam and anyone who participates in it is being scammed. But people's willingness to be scammed is how the game industry got to the point where it is now with MTX and gambling mechanics.
the fact that genshin and other mihoyo games which generate billions and FGO which is at least 15% of Sony yearly revenue are some of the notable companies unity pissed off and they are scared of threats LITERALLY doesn't understand that they LITERALLY will pissed of companies that can crush them legally or silently if the go with this dumb plan just show how incompetent the leadership are
MTX didnt start off as a scam, at all. It wasnt until the advent of loot boxes and absolutely shitty "technicalities" such as saying "You can earn this really cool cosmetic (but its only a .002% drop rate after you spend money for a key to open your free loot box!)" that MTX got predatory. Like yeah, "Horse Armor" meme or whatever, but at the end of the day, MTX were simple and for Cosmetics. It was rare that a company had the cojones to even CONTEMPLATE doing something liek charging players a dollar to reload their gun in battlefield. I personally attribute the shitty MTX environment today to a bunch of macro desicions made by an involuntary congolomerate of the biggest gaming companies seeing how games like League of Legends are free but generate billions every year, so they all make such shitty decisions independent of each other, but all falling in line at the same time.
@@dogsbecute MTX has always been a scam. Selling things that should have been earnable in the game, whether that's power, cosmetic, or whatever, is, and will always be a scam. Paying for expansions to a game, that add significant portions of content? Not scam. You're basically paying for another game at that point. But charging for things that used to be rewards for actually playing the game will ALWAYS be a scam.
No it's worse than that. It's like the paint, primer, easel, brushes, solvent, additives, canvas, frame manufacturers making the artist pay for people simply looking at a painting.
I really hope this leads to more people switching to Godot. The more people who use the open-source alternative means the more people there are to improve and iterate upon it.
@jordanbauerly8843 Godot's open-source license makes a buyout impossible, because there's nobody to buy out. It's like, communism, the game engine. Godot is OUR engine, comrade.
The Godot Asset Library has done an influx of new updates this week... When this hit us (my company) we immediately started seeking out alternatives. So, not sure if it is a common place thing or not, but there's been a lot of asset updates this week alone. One of the selling points for Godot for us is that we can leverage our 12 years experience in Unity to make games in Godot. Especially with the latest version supporting C#. Also, iteration times are small in Godot. We can start our project in seconds, running the project to test something takes seconds, the Editor Just Works. The only sad part, I was used to being able to get up and get a cup of coffee while the editor of Unity started. As an example of that - half of our team uses Linux. Unity on linux... is not a fun experience. For almost a decade, you couldn't bake the lighting on Linux, with some of the editors just hard booting our systems after 170 ish seconds. 2022.3.1f12 Fails to handle "My Assets" without taking forever. (Like, you have to time out the editor to get the asset updates to show, so that you can do an Import.) And, 2023.1.x has texture importing errors. At first when I saw this, I thought that it was just the machine that it was running on - but it happened across all of our Linux systems. That cuts my team's productivity in half, because our Windows Devs have to do things that everyone should be able to do. Godot on Linux just works. With that alone, I'm making money by switching, even with training time and costs. For those wondering Why Linux?! well, Additional Market to sell our games. Also, Servers for our User accounts, multiplayer game lobbies & rooms, etc., are all Linux. So, we need to know that they will work properly rather than hoping and praying. Linux also has a lower overhead for running programs, so it tends to run a bit faster with the same resources than Windows. Just something that I noticed.
In my mind the biggest issue of all of this is the trustworthiness of Unity moving forward. EVEN IF they completely walk all of this back, why would anyone EVER stake the wellbeing of their business on a partner (Unity) that can retroactively change how your entire business relationship works with zero warning, consultation, or negotiation? What is to stop them doing something similar in the future?
D&D fucked up horribly badly similarly recently enough. A lot of us switched to Pathfinder and other systems because of the Dungeons & Dragons' sudden onset of self-defeating greed. They even lost one of the best unintentional advertisements for their system, the Critical Roll team.
They erred hard on makign such changes so clsoe into the future. If it was an annoucement for 2 years ahead, then it would have been received much more smoothly
@@Call-me-Al Yeah, WOTC has been doing too much stupid shit lately and they don't even understand how 5E works themselves, so we're all glad we switched to PF2E. Sadly no extremely large easy tool like DND Beyond, but the loss is worth the net gain.
Hell, I listen to this video and I hear "it might be cheaper for x and y" or "its too expensive to switch now" and I have a simple question. You say this move is because of Unity's shareholders pushing the company to make a profit. What happens in 2025 when this has been implemented and the shareholders want more profit? And 26? And 27? Now that they made the push towards a microtransactions business model, their shareholders are GOING to push to squeeze that lemon for all it's worth. If you stay with unity, you are handcuffing yourself to every whim of their shareholders going forward
Also take in to account that the current price per install is currently the cheapest it will ever be. If Unity ever decide they need more money this is going to be the first thing they increase the price of.
Yep. It's a trap and only going to get worse from here. Three years of my life ruined by the greed of one man. I might stop game development for a few months and decide in the new Year if I can learn Godot. I'm only a hobbist game developer, so it's not like my life is ruined per say, but I was maybe a year or two away from launching my alpha to the public for feedback, and now that will never happen.
Upper Echelon brought up a good point that he learned about and that is unity following Twitters and Reddits api usage fees. If this is true, the issue is that unlike reddit and twitter, there are viable alternatives to unity because the end user base (gamers) are abstracted from the engine.
That's a good point, Although from unity's business perspective their clients aren't gamers, their clients are actually developers. Gamers are their client's consumers. In the same way that a company that makes cash registers would view a store as their actual customers
@@klaykid117 not wrong but Unity forgets what the product they produce is for. Its for game development meaning it doesn't just end with the Game devs. And they also are screwing over every software engineer/computer person in their own company. Because it is crystal clear this sorta decision never reached a "commoner's" ears till it hit public.
The main difference is not that there are alternatives but in the fact that for twitter and reddit providing api access was not their main service/revenue source, iirc they were providing it for free. So them hiking up the price doesnt matter in terms of retaining users utilizing api as they were either paying nothing or in case of reddit actually losing them money by avoiding being monetized by avoiding ads. You could even argue that such high prices were put in with a goal to kill those services to either cut costs or prevent users from avoiding ads using 3rd party clients. Unity however is directly attacking their source of revenue which makes 0 business sense unlike twitter/reddit.
@@klaykid117 I think your point of view is correct, as Nathan said, customer of customers. Which in regards to reddit, it was a free producer to a consumer (3rd party dev) to a customer/user (end user). They turned the consumer into a customer. Unity is trying to do a customer^2 (squared) kind of thing that has linear cost growth.
I love how the way unity is monetizing their product is the same perspective of a paper company wanting to charge you everytime their paper is put into a printer and used after they sold you the paper.
Big problem - they don't know how to count installs in an auditable way 4 months before this goes live. They really needed to have this figured out a year ago. The other big issue is the retroactive piece of this - how can you ever trust Unity again - they can change it whenever they like.
Well, Unity has some higher ups from IronSource in their higher staff, so Unity games may trigger a virus warning in the future as IronSource infamously was responsible for a type of malware.
I hate how we have no insight into how they're calculating the total installs. Unity just massively breached our trust and then expects us to trust them to calculate how much money we owe them
Those exact aspects are the most baffling thing about this to me - genuinely disgusting corporate nonsense has sort of become the norm the past couple years - should they actually stick with this decision, there is _no_ _way_ this won't end up getting taken to court via the European Commission or the like. This decision is standing on such shaky legs, it's crazy.
@@khatdubell Thats what it feels like. This way Unity can got and charge developers whatever they want. Ie they hear that Hoyoverse's new game ZZZ has been downloaded 40 million times = time for a new bill and more money for Unity lol. Or this whole thing is being done to destroy Unity share price so much that somebody big will consider to buy them.
As a single person team, I decided long ago to go with Godot... very glad I made that decision :) I think the cost involved with moving away from Unity, even for teams that are in deep with CURRENT projects, should look into it for their very next project, because you just can't trust Unity to change those terms again, to something even WORSE... get out while you can, as soon as it's reasonably possible... that's my advice.
Couple questions is godot free? Is it good for 2d? Is it good for 2d TO 3d? What about the input lag vs unreal? And are they optimized consitently enough and on the front of the wave as far as new tech like gausen splatting photogrametry blender workflow pipeline etc what im asking is it as good as an open source game engine app like blender is for modeling? And last but not least..what about a blender godot unreal workflow i want front of the wave functionality for future projects and consistantly evolving front of the wave tech and optimization..CAN GODOT RUN THE GAMAT IS IT WORTH IT or SHOULD I JUST CREATE MY OWN FRICKEN FRAMEWORK...im sorry im frustrated lol
@@whincorbin1553 Godot is free. Godot is open source. Godot is very good for 2D, and starting to get much better in 3D (I personally only plan to work in 2D). I cannot speak to comparisons with Unreal or some of the more technical things you asked. Given the large influx of ex-Unity users, I expect Godot's open source project to get much more community-fueled progress on the 3D front.
Unfortunately as I am not a game dev(nor have any experience) I can only answer the first question, in which the answer, is YES. It's open source and completely FREE. And I think it is being constantly updated.
The cost of making a change can be high but the cost of not making the change is potentially unlimited as Unity arbitrarily changes terms and conditions without any regard for your financial viability and even continues to charge you and send debt collectors after you for decades after you stop selling the game. I think that developers that are holding on to their Unity projects are seriously underestimating their potential long term financial liabilities if they release new Unity games or leave existing Unity based games on the market.
The recent developments in import tools such as those explained by gamefromscratch in his Unity to Godot in Seconds video should make migrating projects less painful. I think it is worth taking a day to try some of these import tweaks and just assess how much work would be remaining for a full migration to Godot for a specific project. It might be less work than feared.
I don't think they're underestimating anything, I think they're just hoping unity walks back on what they're trying to do. Everyone can see this is a horrible system just begging to be abused by unity, studio competition, and consumers. I bet before this change goes live (if it ever does) we'll see a majority of unity games deleted and a shit storm of lawsuits for trying to change a contract and then apply it retroactively
@@stupidburp It Would be AMAZING if the UNITY developers move to GODOT and help the engine become better than UNITY while stablishing a regime that is for developers by developers.
Vampire Survivors _just_ switched to using Unity for the engine. This monetization model would kill the game. Outpost is also made in Unity and just released its Kingdoms expansion. The base game is free but the DLC is paid, which seems like it could create another loophole where the dev has to pay for each install of the free game because DLC sales passed the requisite threshold.
I think Unity's lawyers will have a lot of work to do the next year, and the company will be facing some major losses. Nowhere in the world (civilized world that is) you can change a contract and apply it retroactively. This contradicts the law, and contracts can't be signed or changed if the contract stipulates clauses that contradict the state's law (like you can't sign a contract to become a slave, even if both parties agree, because slavery is illegal). I don't know on what world Unity's legal department lives on, but they're open to being sued and ripped apart in courts. I hope people start suing, especially the studios that made a lot of money and can trample them in courts.
most likely not, they wont get hit because they are most likely not the people to use free plan that unity provides, plus they swim in cash - at most, it will be a minor inconvenience. it will 100% hit indies and players (because remember - they gather data, but how its gathered, whats in there etc is unknown... boy do i love data breaches)@@Reynsoon
That is the _Biggest_ issue here. You cannot retroactively change laws and contracts. That is so fundamental to not only law, but a sane society. My God, how old is this idea?
This is pretty much management making a decision, announcing it to the public, then going to the devs: figure out how to do this. If the internal slack screenshot is accurate, it is crazy for them to be focusing on developing this money making mechanism instead of improving the engine, while Godot, Unreal, and others are continuing to make engine improvements.
I won't buy any Unity games going forward. They may try to charge me an install fee after the fact. Let the company die. Sorry devs who used Unity, it sucks but you need to move to another engine.
Hopefully this is an opportunity for open source engines like Godot to finally become mainstream. If any of these were to, say, become the next Blender, we could have an INSANE engine supported and funded by the dev community. And it also would show these companies that we do not depend on them, but the other way around.
There's nothing stopping Unreal or any other proprietary engine from doing exactly what Unity is doing. If Godot did it, then you could just fork the engine and develop it internally. Which is still bad, but it's better than developing an in-house engine from scratch, and at minimum would let you finish a project you're in the middle of before having to move to a new engine for your next project. This isn't an isolated incident, either; a lot of companies have gotten more whimsical in their decision making, and it can leave a customer high and dry with little notice and no recourse. I think we'll see a bigger push for products and services where the customer has full control over things and the company can't meddle.
@@Greywander87 There is something stopping it - the way game developers think. There are a lot of areas of work where people reliant on the whim of the providers of their tools. In Game dev - a large part of the people can make their own tools. If none of the available tools are profitable? You do not have to use ANY of them. Realistically even IF every engine in the world adopts the same rules - which I can't imagine happening - people would just continue to make games without using any of them
@@Vercusgames I'm not sure Steam _can_ remove a game. Once it's on Steam, and you've bought it, it's in your library forever. Games have been removed before, but anyone who had already bought it still has access to it. Likewise, I believe you always have the option to roll back to an earlier version of a game if you want to. So I don't think there's a way you could lose access to your Steam games unless Steam themselves intervenes.
@@Greywander87 If Godot went bad (in some other way, because it's MIT licensed, they literally can't do anything like this), it could be forked in public. No need to do internal development, just share the new non-ruined fork the same way the original was shared, and keep reaping the benefits of open source development.
@@Poldovico Yeah, my point was that there would be no way for them to stop people from taking the last "good" version and forking it. Developing it internally would be the worst case scenario, but there's a good chance a public fork would be created, as happened with e.g. OpenOffice into LibreOffice. Heck, something like this happened with Audacity and there were a whole bunch of new forks overnight.
RICO is generally used to blame higher ups in an organization for the bad actions they've ordered their mooks to do but have separated themselves from. Unity is openly driving this from the top, so there's not really a need for RICO.
That was what i was expecting to happen, the engines value to the studios is far more than what they were charging with the subscriptions. But this is the extreme other end where there is zero chance I'd trust them as a business partner without dramatic walk back of the policy by an entirely new executive team, the current ones are incredibly incompetent. Not only was this plan self-evident catastrophically dumb to anyone that isn't an empty suit but from what many are saying they were explained the error of their ways internally in excruciating detail for weeks before they decided to just blow off and go with the empty suit yes men.
They shouldn't. A lot of Unity's success is contributed by the huge library of store assets made by the community. Unity is nowhere near Unreal and would have gone out of business if not for the contribution of the communit
I've been working on my game in Godot 3 for over 2 years now, and it's been quite great, especially for 2D. 3D is a bit rough, and there is a bit of 3D I did for the game, but it seems that Godot 4 is much better with it. I didn't port it over because it seemed like a lot of work for what it would yield, as I didn't need tile based map editing, and I'm using 3D very sparingly. Really hope more devs move over to Godot, since it could use a lot of support, as Godot 4 didn't launch too well, and there was some weird funding shenanigans of some sort.
Godot is the one I've had my eye on learning for the RPG platforming affair that's been bouncing around my head for years now. If I could find people willing to help me learn what I need to get things rolling, I hope I'll help propel it to the success it deserves.
This whole situation is a remarkable parallel to what Wizards of the Coast did last December when they tried changing the terms of the Open Games License they had for 20 years and how them changing the terms of the OGL would affects dozens of tabletop rpg creators and players. The backlash was just as strong and resulted in Wizards of the Coast backing off but all trust is gone. Places like Critical Role are moving away from Dungeons and Dragons and are developing their own system, Paizo created the ORC license and multiple smaller ttrpg publishers are moving away from the OGL altogether now, some even had their projects destroyed because of the uncertainty of whether or not they could use their own content thanks to what WotC did. Trust in Unity is destroyed and even if they reverse course on this decision there isn't a single game developer or big publisher who will trust them ever again and people will be moving away from using Unity because Unity had proven that they can and will change preexisting agreements and contracts if they think they can get away with it.
The only positive thing about these kinds of situation is that people make their own brilliant thing or try out a new engine and realize they don't need to put up with bad behaviors. I like all the comments about gamedevs trying godot and liking it :)
It's not even remotely similar to the WotC snafu. They responded pretty much immediately with "oh sh*t, that's not what we meant, we see what you mean" and attempts to fix the problem. That wasn't enough for plenty of people, but WotC admitted culpability and that they screwed up, which is vastly different to doubling down with "no, this is EXACTLY what we meant, and yes, your interpretations of it ARE what we intended".
@@Ylyrra It is exactly like WoTC. They doubled down and EVENTUALLY tried to change the narrative by claiming "we've fixed things! we both win!" when by zero means they ever intended what they ended up with. They backtracked big time.
@@Ylyrra Your memory does not match actual events. It was clear in WoTC case that their *intention* was to destroy companies creating material for use with the rules system. And it was clear that WoTC's *intention* was to replace human GM's with AI GM's. First they literally attacked their own customers for a few weeks and then when they saw how bad it was getting, they backed down after about 5 weeks. And IMHO, it ruined buzz for one of the best D&D films ever created.
For me, I think this is proof that the middle-men of gaming: the publishers and storefronts, are starting to realize they aren't as valued as they want to be. But instead of trying to create value, to justify their positions...and their salaries, they're trying to TAKE value. The problem lies in telling your entire marketplace: "You'll do it our way, or you won't do it with our product..." Even if mobile is now the dominant factor in Unity's thinking, they lost sight of how THEY came up. Unity fought toe-to-toe with Unreal and Quake and Half-Life engines to become a brand in their own right. Now...they're acting exactly like the corporations they fight AGAINST. And in so doing, they're creating their own killer competitor.
The big thing for me is how everyone is okay with the fact that "90% of people will be unaffected"... in reality, 100% are affected. There is nothing stopping anyone from having a game become a huge success and it could happen to anyone. The end goal *business wise* is to be as profitable as possible, which isnt always the same as being successful with a game launch, but idealy, you'd want both and this just knocks that ladder down
It also means that a game with long life or replayability is actively detrimental to the devs since it risks players reinstalling the game on new hardwares as they replace computers. Also no free one off projects like Helltaker anymore as it's negative profit them.
100% of people are also affected, because Unity can just change the terms again to make it affect anyone. Even if it isnt a problem now, it can become one at anytime
only selfish egoistic people use that defence of "only minority effected"....When you don't care a problem when it not effect you who gonna care about you when it effect you
the sad part is, stuff like this is not so uncommon: CEO/Higher Ups (usually having no idea how it actually works) decide X without realy thinking about it and/or consulting devs. devs then have to bend the time-space-continuum to make it happen in the absurdly low amount of time they've got.
One of the main problems is that they should've waited to FIRST properly investigate how to properly and reasonably implement this change, before releasing this plan to the public. Because now, not only have they lost the trust of developers and customers alike, but they also just look totally incompetent with how they want to implement such a drastic change but don't fully seem to know how it will fully work or how to resolve some issues surrounding it. And it's not like they couldn't predict the response of the public, considering even the CEO sold his stock just before this (so you just know that some of them definitely knew what kind of response this would get).
I'd say the bigger problem is that it's fucking illegal in several ways. Also, the stock sales part's been debunked. He's been selling small portions of stock regularily for his whole tenure - it's actually part of the payment structure they have for high-level executives - and his recent sales have been entirely within that trend.
I believe this is gonna be a big issue with Brazilian law. It falls within "Venda Casada" laws (would roughly translate to "Married Sales" or in a meaning of "Conjoined Sales"). Since you can't have unity without its runtime, but they are fervent that they are separate things that are acquired together but payed separately and you have to pay for both separately to get any one of them, then it absolutely would fall in "Venda casada". The law states: Law 8078/90 Article 39 It is forbidden to the supplier of products or services, between other abusive practices: Section 1- To condition the supply of a product or service to the acquisition of another product or service as well as, without just cause, to quantitative limits. It is within the consumers defense code. Since Unity also supplies services to Brasil and there are plenty of Brazilian game companies that use Unity, that will have to go through Brazilian court as well, and I believe there even is several previous cases in law where if it goes to court, Unity WILL lose this case and will be forced by the Brazilian court of law to revert this change.
Not only Brazil, but even the US cracked down this kind of stuff (remember United States v. Microsoft Corp. in 2001?) tho unfortunately this stuff doesn't happen that often anymore. Não só no Brasil, mas até os EUA metem o pau em quem faz esse tipo de coisa (United States v. Microsoft Corp. em 2001, por exemplo) apesar de que recentemente isso não vem acontecendo mais.
The fact that the CEO and their board, sold stock BEFORE even making that change, says something. Tbh I’m baffled as to why they would purposefully sabotage their own company, unless they wanted to get bought out, which I don’t see that happening as of yet. Although… is it a smart idea, to sell stock, let the stock tank so that you can buy the cheaper stock when investors panic and sell at a lower price? Which gives you more stock than you had without much of a loss? Was UNITY close to a hostile takeover? That’s the only option that I could see any of that happening.
From what I understand, the CEO selling their stock wasn't out of place as they seemed to be selling the same amount periodically throughout the last couple years. It doesn't sound like he dumped his socks since he didn't even sell a sizable chunk to begin with, and with the pattern of previous sells, this was most likely coincidence or the dude figured he'd sell what he knew he couldn't get in trouble for.
Unity is even closer to a hostile takeover now, all of Tencent's games use Unity, and the Chinese Government prefers to keep their spying data in house. Unity will be bought by Tencent, mark my words.
I am a programmer working in one of the mobile game development studios that Unity is targeting. What Unity does not realize is that much of us also rely on indie game developers that come up with rather unique, creative solutions that we actually adopt. One of the important reasons we chose Unity over Unreal for our projects, is that the availability of support/Q&A in the community as there is a large programming population in Unity. By driving out a bulk of the community would diminish the desire for Unity. Personally, in preparation for whatever business decisions that the executives in my company will make, I am porting most of the custom libraries that I have developed for use in Unity over to Godot. It is a pain to clean the C# code of Unity APIs but not technically difficult. I am also looking into the native Java/Swift source of plugins to port them out of Unity.
This is a non start issue, what unity is doing has about two dozen litigation points to it, more in some countries. All this is doing is killing the stock value an destroying trust ultimately. They have no way to enforce these new TOS updates.
Intentionally lowering stock value so one of the BlackRock or Vanguard owned giants can buy Unity cheaper. Riccitiello and friends will be richly rewarded. The question for me is who the buyer is. Maybe Microsoft after they're done buying Blizz, another company ruined by traitors from the inside to make it a cheaper buy.
@@Forakus If that's the case (I disbelieve) it was very poorly thought out, as major publishers will now not fucking touch you if you use unity because of the uncertainty of business. Businesses HATE uncertainty.
@@TsunamiWombat It's ironic you say "Businesses HATE uncertainty"; because, every business is a risk. I am not criticizing; just pointing that out LOL.
The amusing prt is the "GamePass" will pay for it. You can't incur costs on someone who hasn't made a deal with you. Sony/Microsoft only make a contract with the Devs of the game they're offering on the Xbox Live/GamePass. There is no ontract - no deal with Unity so asking them for money is 100% ilegal under any EU/US aw.
The long term prospects of this kind of plan is the same as DND and the Open License. Destroy the market now, capture all of the money, and then make the future market in this current image. Imagine a gaming market where EVERY company has "per-install." Imagine a market where companies just rug pull everyone and everything like we have watched the entire NFT lunacy that had overtaken the world during the pandemic.
The most important thing for us to remember as consumers of Unity's customers, the cost will be passed along to us. If this becomes a real thing, we can be looking at subscription fees on every game.
This whole thing is absolutely ridiculous. It comes across as two directors got drunk and came up with an idea to fund their new super yacht, announced it and then realised no one knows how to do it, meantime hammering the share price and all future trust in the company.
The company didn't do enough money, but I am sure THEY do enough. And the worst is even if the company close, this is not them who will get punish but the people who actually work hard in that company.
I think learning Godot is going to be the path for me. I've only done runner games on unity, and recently started a third person project. The way they did a sunk cost fallacy on the devs makes me cringe in an uncomfortable way. Even if they walk back, chances are high the next monetization is gonna be more egregious than the previous one. I'll probably go back to them if they fire the CEO, AND make reasonable changes in the company.
If I were Epic right now, I'd be having lawyers writing up a unique indie developer contract explicitly for refugees from Unity and another new devs looking for a good deal for start up. Good opportunity for them here to increase good will amongst devs and really hurt Unity execs AND make a profit.
If dev need to use unreal as there games need it the tools that unreal offer then do it, but it's best just don't go on a engine base around profit and stuck under contract that your games you made can't be sold anymore, even not using the engine anymore over some change in there contact ends up being shady.
I'm a fellow game developer. I'm glad I had the foresight to work with godot. Godot is harder to uses than the other engines because it still has bugs and doesn't have as much support, but now I see it was worth it. Plus, if your game blows up and scales, you can cut out the middleman and just directly develop your own branch of godot for internal use.
With this monetization scheme, would any Unity dev risk having "free-to-play" weekends? Would Microsoft want to have Unity games in their Game Pass (since they are the one being charged if the game is popular)? Would any Unity dev risk developing a mobile game with a "free--to-play + microtransactions/ads" business model?
I promise you Microsoft ain't paying a dime to Unity over this. This insanity would get laughed out of court. The idea that they can retroactively charge you for installs, AND that they can't even legally track individual installs, makes this absolute lunacy. They'll take them to court, go to discovery, and demand to see exactly how they determined the number they were billed. At that point either Unity admits they were illegally tracking individual installs, or they admit that they CAN'T actually track individual installs and are just 'guessing' how much they're charging them.
If they need to increase revenue, the obvious move would be to announce that Unity 2024 will only be available under a new license with a cut of sales revenue going back to Unity and to announce that support for earlier versions will end in, say, 2026 to provide incentive to upgrade. People would complain but go along with it as long as the royalty percentage isn't too high. There has to be some other motive behind this.
Clip Studio Paint relatively recently decided that your one time purchase lifetime license was no longer that and said that they needed to pay in order to keep upgrading the platform I just uninstalled it out of principle and picked up Krita but it was a change done somewhat tastefully. Multiple companies that don't hit the numbers they want note that "X" or "Y" is undermonetized and it's just now touching here. I hope companies will just move on and away from it to not support it but human nature says they will be outraged their bottom line will take a hit for a while but most companies that rely on this engine will at the end of the day suck it up and keep it feeding the thought that everything in your life is "undermonetized". Get ready for more monetization in the future. Have you seen mobile game margins? That's the new gold standard. I am waiting trepidation for pay to access youtube, steam online servers and google.
It's a lie for them to say it won't effect consumers, simply because any increase in costs to the Developer WILL get passed onto the consumer. And from a Developer perspective, I would imagine many simply won't accept using Unity going forward, partly because they can't be trusted to not change it again. If they lose a certain percentage of Devs from Unity they'll need to make up the shortfall by increasing the fees at some point.
Not the customers they're talking about. Unity has no direct connection to us as the people who buy games. Their customers - and the customers they're talking about - are the developers.
You’re missing OPs point. You as a customer WILL receive the burden of cost one way pr the other. Whether it’s higher price games, unfinished or unpolished, games or mtx and gambling mechanics. The developers cannot eat the costs and it will be passed down to consumers.
I'm devastated I have a unity project I started back in college that I was finishing the final bits and was about to enter the latter bit of my development. I spent hundreds of hours learning programming with unity and how to make engine tools for future games with unity. Thousands of hours of production. However as a single dev working a passion project that at the end of this year im going to be charged potentially per download is heartbreaking. I know the success rate of my game. I have already put hundreads of dollars on licensing for different platforms and then on top of this wont leave me with anything other then a potential bill every month. Good news is I have decided to move over to godot and I hope the conversion wont take more then a year.
Good for you for making the choice to move to an open source engine that literally _can't_ screw you over like this, even if they wanted to. It sucks that Unity did this, and frankly I think it's probably illegal in more than one way, but it's probably easier to switch engines than to navigate that legal minefield. I wish you the best of luck converting your project to Godot. If it's any consolation, this seems like it will probably destroy Unity. Even if they backtrack and completely reverse all the changes and fire the CEO, they've already lost significant trust and there are a lot of devs that will leave and not come back. If they survive this, it will be as a shriveled husk, a shadow of their former glory.
What you have done is not wasted. You are the best judge of what can be considered transferable skills. Parts of the workflow you have developed to bring your game to gold while juggling all your other commitments are platform agnostic. It does suck, you cannot get that time, sweat and money back but it is not a loss. I wish you the best of luck!
But if you expect to hit the threshold for personal, just upgrade to professional and get the $1M, 1M downloads, threshold. And with $1M in the bank you would probably afford the license cost?
I feel like their "somehow" for tracking came from their purchase of the malware company. Wonder if they built something hidden into the Unity engine that's not showing because it's something we voluntarily install.
Changing terms over night silently, charging a fee without giving a clear way to devs how they will count installs and shady practices from the higher-ups... Yeah, I lost trust in that company.
Constructive critique: A brief overview of the topic at hand would be nice. I have no idea what is going on and I had to stop and navigate away to know what you were talking about.
It's not just gaming, every aspect of (western) civilization is going down this path. A bunch of oligarchs at the top trying to sell us our own demise.
At the beginning of the year I was strongly considering moving to Unity, but fortunately I was too lazy to make the change at the time and was going to push it off till the next project. Seems like that was a good choice. Not a fan of gamemaker's subscription model but it makes a hell of a lot more sense than per install costs!
Another thing that's being forgotten is that this assumes Unity will never make a decision like this ever again. The reason people are pushing back is because if they didn't and felt the change was manageable, then the CEO would thing "gee howdy, guess they won't mind another price hike in a year or two"
All of those tiers and prices? Seems okay at first blush, but they are totally subject to change. Developers aren't stupid, and they know that today it might be "90% are unaffected," but in a year or two it will be "90% are affected."
Hi Michael! Great channel, subscribing from the early days, watching every episode. I'm a developer for 13 years now, working at least 8 years with Unity. Currently I'm working both Unreal Engine 5 and Unity for separate projects. Just to clarify from the start: Unreal Engine's source code is available for free without pro license. Pro licence is needed if you want to have UDN - internal network for developers and to have access to some additional forks & early fixes which is mostly helpful for experimental stuff. With Unity regarding premium is not about fee itself - devs would gladly pay up BUT they need clarity, predictable number / costs. The biggest issue is that under current conditions spoofing DeviceID / MAC address is still possible so generation of fake installs is a realistic threat. Currently I'm working on a smaller game on Unity - I'll definitely won't hit any threshold for now to be eligible for install fee. HOWEVER, since Unity can change ToS whenever they can - people can retroactively fell into certain space in the future. That raises uncertainty for which many developers now is not agreeing to.
I really recommend at least doing a feasibility study for Godot. Obviously I don't know what sort of tools you guys are using for Unity, but I'm a professional programmer and amateur gamedev, I found that the iteration cycle was about 10x faster in Godot than either Unreal or unity, which is why I chose to go with Godot ultimately. It was simply faster for me to work with. Just my 2c One thing from Pale beyond (great game btw) that COULD be a hurdle is the audio control tie in. I can't attest to the easy of use of 3rd party apps like wWise..
I feel that Switching Engines isn't as such a big of a deal. I Was Trained in 3D Modelling using 3DS MAX software, But after leaving school I didn't have access to the Lisences needed so I started learning Blender. It was a little struggle right at the start because everything was new, but Since you already have the knowledge like "How to champfer Edges" it's pretty easy to swap the knowledge over. It might be a bit different for Game Design but the principles still stand regardless of engine.
23:49 an additional note; mobile developers are only using Unity because said support/ people are there to help with learning the game engine and the tools; once enough people leave, you have less support/ tech support on issues BUT said issues can be fixed when you have more minds tackling the said issue.
I am doubting Unity even cares about accurate install count. From the CEO past outings I would posit the goal is to enroll every game into their add service that conveniently waves the fee. And it would make sense : if they can massively increase the ad targets numbers, they can get sweet deals from advertisers again.
Something that hasn't been said yet, but that's quite interesting is, that when a game is in gamepass and the cost fall upon the publisher, that cost is tied to the unity subscription of the developer. So not only does it matter to the publisher, that it's a unity game, but the subscription level is important as well.
I'm pretty sure Microsoft ( and other publisher ) will lawyer-up against those fees. Or...just refuse to host Unity-based games from now on and will take out those they have in their listing. Unity just blacklisted itself.
@@Itsumi_Nyanko I agree, there is no way they will pay the fees, but you are wrong in that unity has blacklisted itself: Unity blacklisted its developers
@@Falleris by blacklisting themselves I meant : they dug their own grave. They, by their own decision, made people exclude them from future project. I'm one of them...as I was working on developping my game on Unity in the near future but will 100% look for alternative now. Unity is on my blacklist and on the blacklist of a lot of people now too.
Just FYI: The source code for UE5 is completely available. I do quite a few changes inside the engine to make things more comfortable for me (if I can't put them in plugins) So the custom license of UE is probably more for direct access to professionals/learning directly from them.
The threats against Unity make sense tbh. Most times this kind of thing happens and it's just a bunch of spirited nerds who get upset because their favorite thing is going to be worse / more expensive Here, Unity is actually destroying people's livelihoods. People won't be able to pay their rent because of this, and that will make them desperate
Same thing happened to bungie when someone lashed out after they admitted that they hire behavioral psychologists to implement predatory monetary systems to exploit kids, I mean obviously it’s too far to threaten people but I can understand why they would, some peoples whole livelihood is based on these games and they take it super seriously
Police revealed the theeat came from a unity employee So either very disgruntled, or the company is openly fishing for sympathy to distract from this pr nightmare
@@leafgreenbeast "A unity employee" will have a name in the police's files, and their next few months are not likely to be fun. You don't pull that kind of threat for a lark when you're going to be identified. It might not have come to fruition either way, but it's not reasonable to think unity faked it.
In one of my CSC classes we were going to use Unity for a project, however, my professor said they are considering moving to a different tool as a result of the recent news. I was actually lol forward to using unity. Not sure if the new changes will impact students.
@@jonathansoko1085It won't impact students in the sense their projects won't be charged for it, but why would any student ever pursue a platform with these kinds of policies. There are legitimate situations where Unity's new policies could mean that if someone found success, they might actually owe Unity more than they earn and that's completely absurd. Nobody is gonna learn or make in Unity as it stands, cause why risk it when there's alternatives.
The mathematical concepts should be the same. A quaternion in Godot is equally as fucked up as a quaternion in Unity. I think the real hurdle is teachers having to learn how to implement the same concepts using Godot's API.
@@jonathansoko1085lol that's a pretty immature response. Typically when some one tells you to grow up that person is really the one who needs to grow up... Plenty of ways it would affect students, just gotta use a bit of critical thinking to understand. If the school is impacted by these policies, that cost is offloaded to the student in their tuition. Also, if those students learn and have great experience in unity, then they'll have an easier time getting a job that uses Unity, and if Unity doesn't backpedal then those companies probably won't exist to give those students jobs after graduation. Unity needs to backpedal otherwise no one will use their program and aspects of that education that don't carry to other engines goes to waste.
FYI All tiers have source code access on UE. Also the 5% revenue is the opening bid, if you contact Unreal sales you can get a MUCH better deal than 5%. They totally understand if you have 3k developers working on a project (like mega ubisoft game) that 5% is actually overly expensive.
As someone who's been spending way to many years being undecided on what engine to use when/if I ever start working on a game, UE or Unity, this whole thing has just ended up making my choice so much easier by removing Unity from the equation. Though now there's Godot instead, so I guess I'm still stuck choosing between two different engines :)
Grab Godot and start doing random crap in it. You're not going to know what you need until you have actually felt that need, so just fuck around with the cheapest option until you realize you need something else.
Hearing your personal POV as a developer really made this video. Way more valuable for adding depth to this story than reading/summarizing what's currently happening, even though that summary is pretty essential.
While our studio primarily use unreal and we did dodge this bullet. My hobby-projects has always been in Unity. This will no longer be the case. Thinking of looking into Godot for 2d and Flax for 3d. Also been experimenting with Bevy, but writing in Rust and ECS does require a change of mindset.
The problem with this per install fee, is lack of consistence effect across their customers. For some will be cheaper, to many will be very expansive. Maybe what they need is a better metric to be their reference when planning prices.
As an indie dev I decided to go with Unreal when Unity was gearing up to do their IPO. Between the IPO and their choice of CEO, it sealed my decision. Even with Epic's own issues, I have no regrets. May start tinkering with Godot more though in the future to make sure I have options.
29:45 Unreal Engine source code is available for everyone completely for free though. So I don't think that's what the custom license is for. The custom license is most likely for getting a different deal than the standard 5% revenue share
The scariest thing about the threat to Unity staff was that it came from inside the company - so... the sender definitely knows how to get access to the building.
in the UK we have "The Data Protection Act 2018 and the EU's GDPR" a lot of the unity "Tracking Tools" sounds like a massive breach to both. Then you have them changing TOS after the games were released gives at leased 2 ways to attack unity: Breach of contract and changing it without having the other party signing the contract; the other is: Any contract that is deemed as an unfair contract, will make that contract Null and Void!
not entirely accurate. yes everyone is talking about "installs" but are missing the part of where they also say "distributeables" which is the engine. so its the unique values for both installs and copies of the game already installed. thats where they get existing users, the distributeables.
Not sure if bellular just missed it on the UE stuff when talking about their tiers, but everyone automatically gets source code access no matter what. Thats always been a thing. I think the tiers are more for being able to negotiate the revenue share or per seat costs.
Even I have source code access - all it takes is like a two-click "NDA". Back when I was evaluating engines, I tried it on Gentoo, which, naturally meant I had to compile the engine and editor myself. Worked fine, still went for Godot because I can actually run that on BSD. ^^
I talked with my team. We are going back about 6-8 months of production with game that were to be published in February (due to volountary crunch on my side... without it it'd be year+). We are going to Godot and will enjoy MIT license. Check options for porting and rewriting stuff. Hire additional contractor who is capable in different engine. In long term it may be safer for Your project than sticking with Unity. Unreal would not be viable option for Unity game in mid-late stages of production, but Godot may be. Comunicate what is going on well to Your team and Your players. In such situation players will understand. Team probably also.
You didn’t mention Unity is pushing proprietary ad technology to waive fees. Clearly their new partnership has pushed them to try to take out other ad technology companies at the cost of good faith. Also, the github delete. So shady
I had never heard of “The Pale Beyond”. I am watching a let’s play by The Boring Dad. What beautiful artwork. I am thoroughly enjoying it. I would like to ask how many people worked on the project. I would also like to say thank you. If it was not for small studios putting out games the whole sector would be stagnant. You should be very proud. I can't afford to buy the game at present. Do you have it available on IOS? All am the best x
Unity: "We really need more money. I know our board members all have a million shares each, but we REALLY need the funds guys!" Blender: *Laughs in donations and open source code development team since 1994*
The only thing that I have a comment on is at the end talking about not being able to switch engines. Yes, I know that it can be very expensive and that it might simply not be an option in some cases, but I would caution about falling into a sunk cost fallacy here. I have seen and read about plenty of situations where it was determined that a fundamental technology change was too expensive, yet in the long run the companies ended up spending 10x or more what it would have cost to change. Of course the change has up front costs that can be harder to absorb than costs over time so it isn't really that simple, and every situation will have different economics that will determine what route is better. I just wanted to say that each developer this affects shouldn't just think about how much it costs to change, but also how much it costs to not change and look at short term and long term costs. Since this is a strong indication that you can't be sure that the license for the engine will stay the same even after a game is released, there is always going to be the possibility that more changes come in that simply make it impossible to continue selling games that you already released, so that would be something to take into account when deciding if you will continue using unity or not.
Engine re-training takes less than 2 weeks if people weren't born yesterday. I learned more or less everything there was to know about Unity in 3 weeks when I was hired on for a project with that engine. Artists don't care about the engine you work in. The art process is 99% the same. Designers are happy to use UE over Unity because visual scripting is easier, and it also means that artists can jump in and help script the game
Not being a game dev, but a regular Java dev: I'd say it depends on how much content you've made that is engine-exclusive. Learning the new engine isn't that hard; getting the content ported over is usually the bigger issue (especially if using bought assets) - at least that's what I have experienced in moving from Angular to React and then Vue (back-end wise, I've parked my rear in Spring and not really moved much since a few years back).
@anderskronquist9750 I can't speak for Java developers. I don't think there are any Java engines besides the one minecraft is running on, which is a text library, and not really an engine. Is it harder to move between engines with Java?
@@pawnix4122Nah, I was mostly trying to say when you move to another engine, it's is generally not a question of learning the new one - though it is still a cost - but of migrating assets (art/music/sound) and remaking others in the new engine. For instance, scripting is a thing that tends to be engine specific, and depending on how much you use it you can end up with a large quantity of things to rewrite. I'm an application/business developer, so I have only tried out Unity once or twice (it was far more interesting than writing business rules according to a specification that's written on a post-it note, for sure), though.
@@anderskronquist9750 I somewhat agree. The art assets take less than no time to move over. The only real issue I can think of would be programming since the API is different in many ways between the engines, so that side of a project would have to be re-written from scratch.
I'm a one trick pony dev, I spent 7 years getting good at unity and c#, I have my own way of doing things, and I mostly work alone (I did ship a game that's on gamepass!). I'm still not intending to switch engines for my next project, which is only a few months along, because I just don't know if I have the personal motivation to learn new tools from scratch. I'm an artist, and all the tech stuff is an obstacle for me.
Pretty much in the same boat as you are on this one. Been working on my game for the past 5 years and the idea of porting the game to a new engine is pretty much out of the question. A lot of my stuff uses Mechanim for both animating and event triggers and the like, and is heavily integrated with the scripts I use. It's spaghetti code, but it works well and I know my way around it. It's MY spaghetti code. However, because of the game's reliance of Mechanim, I pretty much have no choice but to stay with Unity, which I still think is a very good engine for making games if you ignore the utterly unhinged policy changes. I can only hope that the potential tidal wave of international lawsuits either prevents something like this from ever happening again or the company tanks and is bought out by people with actual souls who wont be blinded by greed and throw their consumer base into the meat grinder for short term gains.
Some corrections 19:55 - "They've already made efforts to suggest there's no way out for developers - retroactively updating their TOS/License that (unreal engine style) locks you into the License you signed on with." It seem like it's written that Unity changed to a Unreal engine style license, but actually they removed the unreal engine style, per engine version EULA license. Was added in 2019, because of Improbable debacle, but is now removed. Backstory: In 2019, there was an issue between Unity and Improbable (devs of middleware for distributed multiplayer infrastructure for games), where Unity changed their EULA to prevent use of such middleware with Unity Engine. Epic clarified that their EULA doesn't prevent such middleware and is per Unreal Engine version, so if you stick to Unreal 4.27, any updates to Unreal 5.0 or newer will not retroactivly apply to you as a dev. Unity received significant backlash, so it changed their EULA to remove the restriction for such middleware and the EULA to be per Unity Editor version. The thing pointed out in the reddit thread (in the video), was that they removed their GitHub repository where they stored the versions of the EULA and that they were not keeping their word from 2019, that older versions of the engine weren't affected. Why a lot of devs aren't thinking that Epic will do the same trick, is that Epic has a really great reputation in the game dev community, have been very dev-oriented their whole company life and are very profitable company. 29:36 - You get source access to Unreal Engine in all three licenses. Epic is very open to allowing Unreal devs to inspect, learn and request changes to the Unreal Engine. With a standard license, devs usually create custom builds of the engine, with specialized modifications for their game project. With the custom license, you can negotiate for a more favorable deal, but you are probably top 100 studios in the world at that point.
Even walking back some of this has made no difference to the backlash. The damage has been done, and now their greed and scumbaggery will continue to bite them on the butt. They'll be losing much of their profit and will be seeing a continued decline.
You got the source code access for Unreal wrong. I never actually made something in the Unreal engine but I do have source code access because I signes up for it out of interest. Its free to do so with no obligations. The custom package is purely for custom terms if the other packages don't work for a dev.
The issue with Unity leadership is that they've focused on the *wrong* areas of gaming. They're more focused on micro-transacting than they are supplying a good product. They've become so large that their product cannot support them. They need to cut back staff, limit CEO pay, and probably explain to the shareholders what kind of industry they're actually in. The people who use Unity and make a lot of money *also* pay Unity a considerably *large* amount of money *too.* There is a reason they were able to go public and trade shares for as high as they did during the pandemic. They *are* bringing in substantial capital. It's not that Unity isn't being paid for their services, it's that Unity is spending *too much* to sustain. Unless they find *another separate* revenue source, or cut back on spending, they're going to be in trouble. Nickel and diming developers is only going to lose them more customers.
this is unfortunately, the prevailing wisdom. "Good Games Do Not Make Money". We heard it right out of the horses mouth from XBox's CEO when he discussed the future of the platform vs Playstation - "Making better games simply won't turn this position around". They see consumers as service entrenched - product doesn't matter. This prevailing mentality is also why someone thought they could get away with this.
Been working on my own 3D project in unity for over a year and now I'm just gonna have to spend quite some time learning the intricacies of Godot's 3D features, which are still relatively limited comparatively, but it's better than dealing with this monetization bullshit or dealing with a company that can just up and change the terms of a contract one sidedly.
the lawsuits on this from Microsoft and Tencent are gonna be glorious to behold. Pragmatic concerns aside, the damage is done. The fact that unity would do this, means that even if they walk it back, there's no reason they couldn't try to do it again later. Anyone who keeps using Unity after this is just setting themselves up to get shafted later.
Microsoft, Tencent, Mihoyo, Sega, Nintendo, Disney might get involved, and then there's the 5000-pound gorilla in the room that is EU privacy laws. Like, if they want to put an actual install tracker in there? It's gonna break EU privacy laws so hard, european courts are gonna literally fine Unity out of existence.
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Your latest stream from Friday got claimed by Blizzard, any chance that means the leak screenshot was real?
🤔
Actually quite a cool sponsor for once, makes a nice change from the usual Raid type ones
32:22 "To do an engine change it's just going to cost me more.." at this point point unity and the c-suites running it have proven they can't be trusted and yes to change engines this instant would probably cost more for most devs but is it really worth dealing with darth vader altering the deal further? o.O
@@agatasoda There is no guarantee they won't make it even worse in few months/years. Unreals license in perpetular so even if they change licensing, You can still use current version of engine with current license for the rest of Your life. I would say that should be a standard on any software license
@@babytiny5807 I agree. This one I might even sign up for.
Once I found out the CEO is the same guy that destroyed EA with microtransactions, it all made perfect sense.
He offered to sell ammo to players. When he worked at EA.
And guess who bought all those microtransactions
@@ChickenJoe-tq6xdnot me.
@@SplittingOfPrides No, that was just used as an analogy. Although I don't know how much better that is to be fair
He sold Unity stocks recently, meaning he expects this to happen.
So bizarre to worry if "too many" people download your product. Praying your game is CRITICALLY acclaimed but relatively unseen and overlooked by customers is the madness Unity has created.
We truly live in fictional times.
You just realized this?
@@johndodo2062what? of course they didn’t ‘just realize this’, that’s just what making a game with unity would mean if they did charge devs per install.
"I play the lottery every day, and if I ever win it will bankrupt me."
john riccitiello is completely incompetent. changing the deal on your business partners without consulting them isn't a mistake even a mom and pop business would make.
It's like a publishing company charging an author for each time someone reads their book. Like it's such an asinine solution to the idea of boosting revenue for a company when there are better ways to do it, esp when it seems to target the people keeping you in business
A large part of the problem is that the games industry is infested with a batch of executives who all come from the same school of thought: short term gains are always a higher priority than the long term stability of a company. They’re grifters and they’re proud of it
If you want to know how most of the community feels, pause the video at 7:58
Look at the boardroom to understand who they are. If games are no longer their focus, that says everything and why nobody should expect any major changes to the plan. Business software installs are a wholly different financial and marketing environment. It also explains the slowdown in new game-focused features and suggests that won't be changing either.
thats every company too, it seems all the group thinkers are speedrunning bankruptcy this year
As long as executive pay is largely driven by equity and stock grants, they by their fiduciary duty as well as their own personal gain, going to be motivated by whatever moves stock prices most, in the short term. And for better or worse, markets tend to over react to metrics (user count, play hours, profit, revenue, whatever the metric) in the short term micro view of things rather than long term macro views. For as long as this is the setup, regardless of industry, executive behavior will continue to be the same.
@@djbakasan Solution is to ban stock gambling, its actually worse than any other form since it destroys peoples lives that aren't even involved. But when the people that could do it are all war profiteers directly responsible for the DIRECT deaths of millions of innocent people its never going to happen peacefully.
Freshly founded indie dev company using Unity here. We sent out our prototype, had positive feedback, so set up a company and went full time to polish it up to a really pitchable level. We sent our polished pitches out on monday, tuesday Unity sets everything on fire. Sucks to get hamstrung like this the very second we were ready to hit the ground running after 3 years of prep. The problem for us is less the install fee itself, and more the question if anyone would even consider signing us.
Given what Unity is doing? Probably not. You just became a risk. I know it's heartbreaking, but you're probably screwed if you can't figure out how to port this.
that sucks so much damn, time to change engines
I hope you'll be able to get pity funding to switch engines (perhaps Epic Games will make a fund available to spit in Unity's face? Here's hoping!) - best of luck to you and your team!
I don’t know or care what game your building, but if there is a public funding campaign to help you all switch engines, I would be happy to toss in a few bucks. I’m sure I’m not the only one.
This kind of rug pull is heartbreaking for indies.
@@sangan3202 i also developing my first pc game on steam as early access and sadly cant just chance engine. It not sold too much but do they deserve further delay so i can just chance engine. I don't think so. So what i'm planning to do finish the game and remake it on Unreal later like remaster it same time.
Trust takes years to build and seconds to break, and John Riccitiello just proved that. I remember when Unity was mostly associated with low-quality asset flip and for some people finding out a game was even made with Unity was a dealbreaker. They were finally at a point where it was widely known that highly acclaimed game were made with Unity but all that was for nothing now. Even if they walk all this back (which I doubt they will) they'll never get the trust of devs back.
Seriously. They'd just repaired their tarnished reputation only to cover themselves in gasoline and light a match.
I remember an episode of the Jimquisition where the thesis statement was essentially "No the Unity engine isn't inherently garbage, it's just that their free tier requires the display of their logo where the paid tiers don't, so the big good games made by professional teams don't show the Unity logo at launch, but the hemorrhoid tier asset flips all do."
@@thegardenofeatin5965why would you watch that psycho?
@@johndodo2062 In what way is Jim Sterling a "psycho"? Nice ableism btw.
@@johndodo2062probably because that “psycho” is entertaining and does great commentary on the state of the industry. Sorry you can’t recognize quality media.
It's nice seeing the community stand up and saying "hell no." I wish people would do that with microtransactions and subscription fees. All of this would end.
The response is different because it's business to business and businesses fundamentally operate differently than consumers. A small increase in entertainment budget that can be avoided by not purchasing it is different than changes to your career and how you make a living.
That ship sailed when we accepted the horse armour.
Microtransactions and subscriptions aren't the end of the world. if done right.
companies need money to pay for server cost, for there live games.
subscriptions and microtransactions are the way to do this.
removing them isn't a way forward, but i do agree that they need to be fair, and not outrages, or overdone.
for the games i play, i rather have a subscription, and i do consume micro transactions.
though the games i play have more fair pricing.
FFXIV is one great exemple for this done right.
Diablo imortal is this done ........... can't even say it without getting hit.
unfortunaly, this bisness first model is being taken by way to many gaming companies.
games are supposed to be fun and enteraininment first.
is the game fun and entertaining, and it has a cash shop/subscription, money will flow on its own.
this is what all those companies have forgotten.
how to make a toy for people to play with.
games are just that, toys.
some like to play with cars, some like to play with dolls, some like bord games and some like video games.
in the end, they are all meant for entertainment.
only, the gaming comunity, is not entertained with this greedy corpret stuff.
it is a headakge we all want to get rid off.
unity is on its way to self destuct.
take this bisness model, and people will stop using it and move to someting that does respect them.
the games devoled on unity will be pulled after it has made inof money to switch over to a new engine with a new game to bring in money.
and unity who is trying to make money, will lose all the income they had before the pollicy was live.
it is shit that this will happen.
and so maney people will be affected by it.
but if unity wants to destroy there company, let them do it.
unreal engine, RPG maker.
there is still that, it is not the same as unity.
but, some poeple working on unity wil be smart, and make a new unity with the coding knollidge they already had.
if the company doesn't exsist any more, than all the coppy rights go down with it.
my appologies for this long list, but this had to be mentiont.
and i do hope unity CEO will wake up and realize that this is not how to save a company, and move to a difrend model for revenue.
I wish the majority of people would have done that with the mask, the tests and vaccine mandate.
Pandemic would have been over in a month.
@@RyoMassaki but muh freedom 😒
Yea Murica idiots
One question is whether this is even legal in Europe, a lot of times when executives push something through without consulting anyone else, something that nobody else in the industry seems to have done before, they find out that's because it's illegal.
It's not, if you make such changes in a "contract" no matter the nature, the customer can opt out and cancel it, this is loony logic at work here, which makes me want them to enact it, they're gonna get ripped apart in european courts, especially with them changing their TOS silently and without announcement
They would have to announce the changes and give devs an option to cancel, at least in Sweden. I don't think it's possible to tell if anything was illegal from the info we have right now, depends on how things was announced and what happens if you opt out. The costs applying backwards certainly is a problem though, that might very well not go through. That might also not pass the EU directive that contracts have to be fair. If they raise the price retroactively - what do the devs get?
My question is is it even legal in US? I don't know much (or anything, really) about US law, but surely you cannot retroactively change ToS for games released using engine version prior to this change. Contract is not an NFT where you can just swap out an URL and suddenly change rules unilaterally.
Well, from what little info I have, the change itself isn't necessarily the problem, strictly legally speaking. It is how they executed it. In the EU, law gurantees you that when a contract is changed on behalf of the "giver", the "taker" then has the right to opt-out within a given period AFTER the announcement (usually around 14 days) AND they have to agree to the changes or they won't take effect. The contract "giver" then can of course cancel the contract and in this case, forbid a developer to further use Unity for their projects. But all of this first and foremost requires Unity to ANNOUNCE the change properly, with all the changes they're about to do to the contract. Else, it just won't take effect in the EU.
But there's the other side of the coin: not that many studios have their main seat in the EU or Europe in general. And even those who have (most well known probably Dice in Sweden) are under the wings of a larger publisher, who pays their bills but sits in the USA. And I have no idea how american laws are when it comes to changing a running contract, but judging from the fact that basically any company reserves itself the right tho change them at any time, I guess they're not really strict.
tl;dr: Unity doesn't care for the EU market, this is targeted at the US since oall the big players have their main seat there anyway and laws are less harsh regarding contract changes.
@@MPSmarujYeah, I doubt its legal in any western nation, be it in Europe, North America, Australia or otherwise.
This has to be one of the clearest shareholder class action lawsuit situations in history. This CEO will be retiring shortly since his name alone will destroy any company he becomes associated with for life. This situation would be like Netflix saying "we're going to charge you a dollar for every show you started watching, and we're backdating this for one calendar year starting 1/1/2024". This CEO did do something right - he just made the best case for open source engines in history. I hope we'll be seeing a large uptick in open source engine development coming online.
Unity is shady af anyway. They just merged with IronSource, a company that has produced malware in the past.
There are open source licenses that are almost as bad as the crap the Riccitiellos of the world will push on folks.
The problem is the corporate and legislative environment of modernity. There are no practical solutions currently available to effectively prosecute public corporations much less dissolve them or punish the shareholders/execs when they commit acts that would be outright crimes by any other entity than a government or a public corporation.
Riccitiello wouldn't even be in the industry if EA and it's execs had been held accountable for their blatant contract violations and deliberate gaming marketing to minors, he'd still be serving that sentence on parole if not prison.
i don't care to look this guy up, but every time people say bobby kotick is destroying activision, he moves up the rating of the most successful CEOs ever so i don't see why are you so hopeful
You'd think, but it's likely "activist shareholders" (read: brainwormed venture capitalists) that are likely pushing this on the c-suite in the first place. Most shareholders now are a mix of institutions that never get involved and VC psychopaths. And those same VCs will ensure that Riccitiello gets another gig, because he follows orders.
@@windy8544Succesful because his salary (that he set) is ridiculous. 😂
Imagine a board meeting where they discuss the fact that, under their model, some of their customers can develop a successful product and go bankrupt and their answer is "they can grovel with our account managers and we'll jiggle the numbers to make sure they're not actually going belly up".
Amazing sales pitch. I know I would be kicking their door down trying to get in on a deal that has even a remote fraction of a chance of me owing them more money than I earned despite selling an otherwise successful product.
Why would you not?!
I wonder if anyone has considered the possibility that they sent the threats to themselves as a way to deflect the shitstorm and garner a little sympathy? I mean the FBI said the threats were coming from the inside.....
It's possible. But I think it's probably real. Imagine you've worked on a product for years and someone in the C-suite sabotages it with a foolish decision. There are enough angry Unity employees that one of them might have said something over the top.
It was an employee from out of state, threatening to kill the CEO.
An employee who's livelihood just got called into question because this top-down forced decision is going to cripple Unity and force them to lay off a shitton of people.
We know the normal Staff was also pushing back for weeks or longer before the C suite stepped over them.
In this case I'd be willing to give the employee the benefit of the doubt that the threat was hyperbolic.
And CEO $reload used this as an excuse to stop a staff meeting where he and his friends up top would have been facing some pretty harsh criticism from everyone else about Unity now being on a timer to bankruptcy and all of the regular employees going to lose their jobs in the near future.
I usually assume when people claim death threats, it's something like this. it's an easy way to generate some pity and temper the criticism coming at them. Although, if there ever was a scenario where I would believe, and even understand a company receiving death threats, it would be this one. Don't send death threats though.
Seems more like an employee snapping with the stress of the changes. If they did fabricate it, their panic must be borne of desperation.
Absolutely plausible
"Unity needs to make more money, there's no other options." Unity's executives get some of the biggest compensation in the tech industry. A big reason they aren't profitable is because of the absurd amount of money they give to executives, even as those executives just keep making the product worse and driving away customers.
It is literally the executives versus the rest of the Unity company. Numerous developers have resigned and posted to social media how they've been trying to fight this in internal communications for months and then it was still pushed out without a notice to the rest of the company.
The C-suite vs the rest of society
Good on them for showing a proper spine far too many devs keep their heads down and don't fight this shit if they did we would have less of this crap happening
@@michaelkeha It's all good to say they should fight more, but unfortunately this is their livelihood that they're risking. With how fucked corps are, i'm impressed there's even any speaking out against it. Not everyone can afford the threat of losing their job, and my heart goes out for them. I hope the ones that can take it are able to keep fighting in their stead.
@@unsuspiciousdweller8967 I gave up a job that was sustaining me because it pushed beyond my moral boundaries it's called having principles and their lack of will to fight is why the gaming industry has many of the issues it has now they need to speak up and stand up these execs won't stop unless they are pushed back at every turn doing the right thing isn't easy and it often comes at a cost but the cost of not doing it is often far far greater in the long run
The games' industry as a whole has concocted more than their fair share of ill-conceived money-making scams, but this one is up there among the worst. They don't even know how they're going to implement it or how they're going to ensure accuracy, and even admit that whatever method they use to implement it will likely be inaccurate ("we won't over-count, but we might under-count.") It's absolutely nuts.
Because at their end, piracy/bullshit=more$. If piracy/bullshit = less$, this would never, ever, hit the market.
so if a dev makes a bad game and someone makes a redit or tweet to access the download they can just destroy indie devs by convincing people to uninstall and reinstall said game? yeah this will go well, I mean no one on the internet is dishonest or band people together for any reason nowadays.
It's like a canvas maker claiming you owe them more money now that your painting done on their canvas (that you bought for $20) has sold for a million dollars. It's a complete scam and anyone who participates in it is being scammed. But people's willingness to be scammed is how the game industry got to the point where it is now with MTX and gambling mechanics.
the fact that genshin and other mihoyo games which generate billions and FGO which is at least 15% of Sony yearly revenue are some of the notable companies unity pissed off
and they are scared of threats LITERALLY doesn't understand that they LITERALLY will pissed of companies that can crush them legally or silently if the go with this dumb plan just show how incompetent the leadership are
It's nothing like that.
MTX didnt start off as a scam, at all. It wasnt until the advent of loot boxes and absolutely shitty "technicalities" such as saying "You can earn this really cool cosmetic (but its only a .002% drop rate after you spend money for a key to open your free loot box!)" that MTX got predatory. Like yeah, "Horse Armor" meme or whatever, but at the end of the day, MTX were simple and for Cosmetics. It was rare that a company had the cojones to even CONTEMPLATE doing something liek charging players a dollar to reload their gun in battlefield. I personally attribute the shitty MTX environment today to a bunch of macro desicions made by an involuntary congolomerate of the biggest gaming companies seeing how games like League of Legends are free but generate billions every year, so they all make such shitty decisions independent of each other, but all falling in line at the same time.
@@dogsbecute MTX has always been a scam. Selling things that should have been earnable in the game, whether that's power, cosmetic, or whatever, is, and will always be a scam. Paying for expansions to a game, that add significant portions of content? Not scam. You're basically paying for another game at that point. But charging for things that used to be rewards for actually playing the game will ALWAYS be a scam.
No it's worse than that. It's like the paint, primer, easel, brushes, solvent, additives, canvas, frame manufacturers making the artist pay for people simply looking at a painting.
I really hope this leads to more people switching to Godot. The more people who use the open-source alternative means the more people there are to improve and iterate upon it.
So that Unity can buy Godot for an unreal amount of money, dismantle it, and make sure their engine is one of the few that actually hits the market.
If it is real OpenSource, that is impossible.
@jordanbauerly8843 Godot's open-source license makes a buyout impossible, because there's nobody to buy out. It's like, communism, the game engine. Godot is OUR engine, comrade.
The Godot Asset Library has done an influx of new updates this week... When this hit us (my company) we immediately started seeking out alternatives. So, not sure if it is a common place thing or not, but there's been a lot of asset updates this week alone. One of the selling points for Godot for us is that we can leverage our 12 years experience in Unity to make games in Godot. Especially with the latest version supporting C#. Also, iteration times are small in Godot. We can start our project in seconds, running the project to test something takes seconds, the Editor Just Works. The only sad part, I was used to being able to get up and get a cup of coffee while the editor of Unity started.
As an example of that - half of our team uses Linux. Unity on linux... is not a fun experience. For almost a decade, you couldn't bake the lighting on Linux, with some of the editors just hard booting our systems after 170 ish seconds. 2022.3.1f12 Fails to handle "My Assets" without taking forever. (Like, you have to time out the editor to get the asset updates to show, so that you can do an Import.) And, 2023.1.x has texture importing errors. At first when I saw this, I thought that it was just the machine that it was running on - but it happened across all of our Linux systems. That cuts my team's productivity in half, because our Windows Devs have to do things that everyone should be able to do. Godot on Linux just works. With that alone, I'm making money by switching, even with training time and costs.
For those wondering Why Linux?! well, Additional Market to sell our games. Also, Servers for our User accounts, multiplayer game lobbies & rooms, etc., are all Linux. So, we need to know that they will work properly rather than hoping and praying. Linux also has a lower overhead for running programs, so it tends to run a bit faster with the same resources than Windows. Just something that I noticed.
In my mind the biggest issue of all of this is the trustworthiness of Unity moving forward. EVEN IF they completely walk all of this back, why would anyone EVER stake the wellbeing of their business on a partner (Unity) that can retroactively change how your entire business relationship works with zero warning, consultation, or negotiation? What is to stop them doing something similar in the future?
One day we'll teach these companies that you can't put toothpaste back in the tube. Maybe that day is today.
D&D fucked up horribly badly similarly recently enough. A lot of us switched to Pathfinder and other systems because of the Dungeons & Dragons' sudden onset of self-defeating greed. They even lost one of the best unintentional advertisements for their system, the Critical Roll team.
They erred hard on makign such changes so clsoe into the future. If it was an annoucement for 2 years ahead, then it would have been received much more smoothly
@@Call-me-Al Yeah, WOTC has been doing too much stupid shit lately and they don't even understand how 5E works themselves, so we're all glad we switched to PF2E. Sadly no extremely large easy tool like DND Beyond, but the loss is worth the net gain.
Hell, I listen to this video and I hear "it might be cheaper for x and y" or "its too expensive to switch now" and I have a simple question. You say this move is because of Unity's shareholders pushing the company to make a profit. What happens in 2025 when this has been implemented and the shareholders want more profit? And 26? And 27? Now that they made the push towards a microtransactions business model, their shareholders are GOING to push to squeeze that lemon for all it's worth. If you stay with unity, you are handcuffing yourself to every whim of their shareholders going forward
Also take in to account that the current price per install is currently the cheapest it will ever be. If Unity ever decide they need more money this is going to be the first thing they increase the price of.
Yep. It's a trap and only going to get worse from here.
Three years of my life ruined by the greed of one man. I might stop game development for a few months and decide in the new Year if I can learn Godot. I'm only a hobbist game developer, so it's not like my life is ruined per say, but I was maybe a year or two away from launching my alpha to the public for feedback, and now that will never happen.
Upper Echelon brought up a good point that he learned about and that is unity following Twitters and Reddits api usage fees. If this is true, the issue is that unlike reddit and twitter, there are viable alternatives to unity because the end user base (gamers) are abstracted from the engine.
That's a good point, Although from unity's business perspective their clients aren't gamers, their clients are actually developers. Gamers are their client's consumers. In the same way that a company that makes cash registers would view a store as their actual customers
@@klaykid117Good breakdown, us gamers are the customers of the customers.
@@klaykid117 not wrong but Unity forgets what the product they produce is for. Its for game development meaning it doesn't just end with the Game devs. And they also are screwing over every software engineer/computer person in their own company. Because it is crystal clear this sorta decision never reached a "commoner's" ears till it hit public.
The main difference is not that there are alternatives but in the fact that for twitter and reddit providing api access was not their main service/revenue source, iirc they were providing it for free. So them hiking up the price doesnt matter in terms of retaining users utilizing api as they were either paying nothing or in case of reddit actually losing them money by avoiding being monetized by avoiding ads. You could even argue that such high prices were put in with a goal to kill those services to either cut costs or prevent users from avoiding ads using 3rd party clients.
Unity however is directly attacking their source of revenue which makes 0 business sense unlike twitter/reddit.
@@klaykid117 I think your point of view is correct, as Nathan said, customer of customers. Which in regards to reddit, it was a free producer to a consumer (3rd party dev) to a customer/user (end user). They turned the consumer into a customer.
Unity is trying to do a customer^2 (squared) kind of thing that has linear cost growth.
I love how the way unity is monetizing their product is the same perspective of a paper company wanting to charge you everytime their paper is put into a printer and used after they sold you the paper.
Big problem - they don't know how to count installs in an auditable way 4 months before this goes live. They really needed to have this figured out a year ago. The other big issue is the retroactive piece of this - how can you ever trust Unity again - they can change it whenever they like.
Well, Unity has some higher ups from IronSource in their higher staff, so Unity games may trigger a virus warning in the future as IronSource infamously was responsible for a type of malware.
I hate how we have no insight into how they're calculating the total installs. Unity just massively breached our trust and then expects us to trust them to calculate how much money we owe them
Spoiler alert, they don't _care_ to know how to count installs in an audit-able way.
Those exact aspects are the most baffling thing about this to me - genuinely disgusting corporate nonsense has sort of become the norm the past couple years - should they actually stick with this decision, there is _no_ _way_ this won't end up getting taken to court via the European Commission or the like. This decision is standing on such shaky legs, it's crazy.
@@khatdubell Thats what it feels like. This way Unity can got and charge developers whatever they want. Ie they hear that Hoyoverse's new game ZZZ has been downloaded 40 million times = time for a new bill and more money for Unity lol. Or this whole thing is being done to destroy Unity share price so much that somebody big will consider to buy them.
As a single person team, I decided long ago to go with Godot... very glad I made that decision :)
I think the cost involved with moving away from Unity, even for teams that are in deep with CURRENT projects, should look into it for their very next project, because you just can't trust Unity to change those terms again, to something even WORSE... get out while you can, as soon as it's reasonably possible... that's my advice.
Couple questions is godot free? Is it good for 2d? Is it good for 2d TO 3d? What about the input lag vs unreal? And are they optimized consitently enough and on the front of the wave as far as new tech like gausen splatting photogrametry blender workflow pipeline etc what im asking is it as good as an open source game engine app like blender is for modeling? And last but not least..what about a blender godot unreal workflow i want front of the wave functionality for future projects and consistantly evolving front of the wave tech and optimization..CAN GODOT RUN THE GAMAT IS IT WORTH IT or SHOULD I JUST CREATE MY OWN FRICKEN FRAMEWORK...im sorry im frustrated lol
@@whincorbin1553 Godot is free. Godot is open source. Godot is very good for 2D, and starting to get much better in 3D (I personally only plan to work in 2D).
I cannot speak to comparisons with Unreal or some of the more technical things you asked.
Given the large influx of ex-Unity users, I expect Godot's open source project to get much more community-fueled progress on the 3D front.
Unfortunately as I am not a game dev(nor have any experience) I can only answer the first question, in which the answer, is YES. It's open source and completely FREE. And I think it is being constantly updated.
@@liengandriod55 thanks and also its small so im totally gonna get it and use it for my 2d projects it just makes more sense in the long run honestly
The cost of making a change can be high but the cost of not making the change is potentially unlimited as Unity arbitrarily changes terms and conditions without any regard for your financial viability and even continues to charge you and send debt collectors after you for decades after you stop selling the game. I think that developers that are holding on to their Unity projects are seriously underestimating their potential long term financial liabilities if they release new Unity games or leave existing Unity based games on the market.
The recent developments in import tools such as those explained by gamefromscratch in his Unity to Godot in Seconds video should make migrating projects less painful.
I think it is worth taking a day to try some of these import tweaks and just assess how much work would be remaining for a full migration to Godot for a specific project. It might be less work than feared.
I don't think they're underestimating anything, I think they're just hoping unity walks back on what they're trying to do. Everyone can see this is a horrible system just begging to be abused by unity, studio competition, and consumers. I bet before this change goes live (if it ever does) we'll see a majority of unity games deleted and a shit storm of lawsuits for trying to change a contract and then apply it retroactively
Yep, devs/companies are at risk of being affected by sunk cost fallacy if they don't look at the broader picture.
@@stupidburp It Would be AMAZING if the UNITY developers move to GODOT and help the engine become better than UNITY while stablishing a regime that is for developers by developers.
and the fact it's not merely an 'additional choice of finance format' to CHOOSE from, but just 'this is how it is, fuck your company, pay us money'.
Vampire Survivors _just_ switched to using Unity for the engine. This monetization model would kill the game. Outpost is also made in Unity and just released its Kingdoms expansion. The base game is free but the DLC is paid, which seems like it could create another loophole where the dev has to pay for each install of the free game because DLC sales passed the requisite threshold.
What was Vampire Survivors on originally, before unity?
I think Unity's lawyers will have a lot of work to do the next year, and the company will be facing some major losses. Nowhere in the world (civilized world that is) you can change a contract and apply it retroactively. This contradicts the law, and contracts can't be signed or changed if the contract stipulates clauses that contradict the state's law (like you can't sign a contract to become a slave, even if both parties agree, because slavery is illegal). I don't know on what world Unity's legal department lives on, but they're open to being sued and ripped apart in courts. I hope people start suing, especially the studios that made a lot of money and can trample them in courts.
Pokemon, Genshin Impact and Blizzard are among the ones hit. They will go for the mcfuckin' jugular, on that you can be sure,
most likely not, they wont get hit because they are most likely not the people to use free plan that unity provides, plus they swim in cash - at most, it will be a minor inconvenience.
it will 100% hit indies and players (because remember - they gather data, but how its gathered, whats in there etc is unknown... boy do i love data breaches)@@Reynsoon
Kinda wish Leonard French or Legal Eagle would cover it. Of course, that's entertainment only, but would still be interested to hear an opinion.
That is the _Biggest_ issue here. You cannot retroactively change laws and contracts. That is so fundamental to not only law, but a sane society. My God, how old is this idea?
I'm just saying fellas. You better grab your drinks and snacks. Cause I'm pretty sure the entire Asia game publisher, is gonna chew unity inside out.
This is pretty much management making a decision, announcing it to the public, then going to the devs: figure out how to do this. If the internal slack screenshot is accurate, it is crazy for them to be focusing on developing this money making mechanism instead of improving the engine, while Godot, Unreal, and others are continuing to make engine improvements.
Yes, imagine seeing this User Story appear on your backlog
The problem is that even if Unity puts up a solution to this, the trust is gone, for good.
They have killed themselves going forward no future developer is going to choose unity after this.
I won't buy any Unity games going forward. They may try to charge me an install fee after the fact. Let the company die. Sorry devs who used Unity, it sucks but you need to move to another engine.
pandora's box, once opened can't be closed again....unity will reap what they sowed.....
@@gnoclaude7945 Not how it works
It's sad because the board of directors and CEO are going to f off and go ruin another company. Meanwhile developers will likely lose their job
Hopefully this is an opportunity for open source engines like Godot to finally become mainstream. If any of these were to, say, become the next Blender, we could have an INSANE engine supported and funded by the dev community. And it also would show these companies that we do not depend on them, but the other way around.
There's nothing stopping Unreal or any other proprietary engine from doing exactly what Unity is doing. If Godot did it, then you could just fork the engine and develop it internally. Which is still bad, but it's better than developing an in-house engine from scratch, and at minimum would let you finish a project you're in the middle of before having to move to a new engine for your next project. This isn't an isolated incident, either; a lot of companies have gotten more whimsical in their decision making, and it can leave a customer high and dry with little notice and no recourse. I think we'll see a bigger push for products and services where the customer has full control over things and the company can't meddle.
@@Greywander87 There is something stopping it - the way game developers think. There are a lot of areas of work where people reliant on the whim of the providers of their tools. In Game dev - a large part of the people can make their own tools. If none of the available tools are profitable? You do not have to use ANY of them.
Realistically even IF every engine in the world adopts the same rules - which I can't imagine happening - people would just continue to make games without using any of them
@@Vercusgames I'm not sure Steam _can_ remove a game. Once it's on Steam, and you've bought it, it's in your library forever. Games have been removed before, but anyone who had already bought it still has access to it. Likewise, I believe you always have the option to roll back to an earlier version of a game if you want to. So I don't think there's a way you could lose access to your Steam games unless Steam themselves intervenes.
@@Greywander87 If Godot went bad (in some other way, because it's MIT licensed, they literally can't do anything like this), it could be forked in public. No need to do internal development, just share the new non-ruined fork the same way the original was shared, and keep reaping the benefits of open source development.
@@Poldovico Yeah, my point was that there would be no way for them to stop people from taking the last "good" version and forking it. Developing it internally would be the worst case scenario, but there's a good chance a public fork would be created, as happened with e.g. OpenOffice into LibreOffice. Heck, something like this happened with Audacity and there were a whole bunch of new forks overnight.
Frankly I'd like to see prosecution under RICO statutes on this. It's pretty clearly an attempt at extortion on an enterprise scale.
RICO is generally used to blame higher ups in an organization for the bad actions they've ordered their mooks to do but have separated themselves from.
Unity is openly driving this from the top, so there's not really a need for RICO.
If they just implemented a 3% revenue model similar to Unreal on future EULA versions they could have saved themselves so much trouble.
Yeah, but that isn't lining the current exec's pockets now.
That was what i was expecting to happen, the engines value to the studios is far more than what they were charging with the subscriptions. But this is the extreme other end where there is zero chance I'd trust them as a business partner without dramatic walk back of the policy by an entirely new executive team, the current ones are incredibly incompetent.
Not only was this plan self-evident catastrophically dumb to anyone that isn't an empty suit but from what many are saying they were explained the error of their ways internally in excruciating detail for weeks before they decided to just blow off and go with the empty suit yes men.
They likely rejected a plan that sane because then they couldn't get all that Genshin and Star Rail money.
They shouldn't. A lot of Unity's success is contributed by the huge library of store assets made by the community.
Unity is nowhere near Unreal and would have gone out of business if not for the contribution of the communit
I've been working on my game in Godot 3 for over 2 years now, and it's been quite great, especially for 2D. 3D is a bit rough, and there is a bit of 3D I did for the game, but it seems that Godot 4 is much better with it. I didn't port it over because it seemed like a lot of work for what it would yield, as I didn't need tile based map editing, and I'm using 3D very sparingly.
Really hope more devs move over to Godot, since it could use a lot of support, as Godot 4 didn't launch too well, and there was some weird funding shenanigans of some sort.
I have been seeing a lot of people trying out godot with positive results, so I do think godot will be able to grow a lot more moving forward :)
Godot is the one I've had my eye on learning for the RPG platforming affair that's been bouncing around my head for years now. If I could find people willing to help me learn what I need to get things rolling, I hope I'll help propel it to the success it deserves.
This whole situation is a remarkable parallel to what Wizards of the Coast did last December when they tried changing the terms of the Open Games License they had for 20 years and how them changing the terms of the OGL would affects dozens of tabletop rpg creators and players.
The backlash was just as strong and resulted in Wizards of the Coast backing off but all trust is gone. Places like Critical Role are moving away from Dungeons and Dragons and are developing their own system, Paizo created the ORC license and multiple smaller ttrpg publishers are moving away from the OGL altogether now, some even had their projects destroyed because of the uncertainty of whether or not they could use their own content thanks to what WotC did.
Trust in Unity is destroyed and even if they reverse course on this decision there isn't a single game developer or big publisher who will trust them ever again and people will be moving away from using Unity because Unity had proven that they can and will change preexisting agreements and contracts if they think they can get away with it.
The only positive thing about these kinds of situation is that people make their own brilliant thing or try out a new engine and realize they don't need to put up with bad behaviors. I like all the comments about gamedevs trying godot and liking it :)
It's not even remotely similar to the WotC snafu. They responded pretty much immediately with "oh sh*t, that's not what we meant, we see what you mean" and attempts to fix the problem. That wasn't enough for plenty of people, but WotC admitted culpability and that they screwed up, which is vastly different to doubling down with "no, this is EXACTLY what we meant, and yes, your interpretations of it ARE what we intended".
@@Ylyrra WotC doubled down for weeks. It took almost a month before they reversed course and by then it was too late, trust had been broken.
@@Ylyrra It is exactly like WoTC. They doubled down and EVENTUALLY tried to change the narrative by claiming "we've fixed things! we both win!" when by zero means they ever intended what they ended up with. They backtracked big time.
@@Ylyrra Your memory does not match actual events.
It was clear in WoTC case that their *intention* was to destroy companies creating material for use with the rules system. And it was clear that WoTC's *intention* was to replace human GM's with AI GM's. First they literally attacked their own customers for a few weeks and then when they saw how bad it was getting, they backed down after about 5 weeks.
And IMHO, it ruined buzz for one of the best D&D films ever created.
For me, I think this is proof that the middle-men of gaming: the publishers and storefronts, are starting to realize they aren't as valued as they want to be. But instead of trying to create value, to justify their positions...and their salaries, they're trying to TAKE value. The problem lies in telling your entire marketplace: "You'll do it our way, or you won't do it with our product..." Even if mobile is now the dominant factor in Unity's thinking, they lost sight of how THEY came up. Unity fought toe-to-toe with Unreal and Quake and Half-Life engines to become a brand in their own right. Now...they're acting exactly like the corporations they fight AGAINST. And in so doing, they're creating their own killer competitor.
The big thing for me is how everyone is okay with the fact that "90% of people will be unaffected"... in reality, 100% are affected. There is nothing stopping anyone from having a game become a huge success and it could happen to anyone. The end goal *business wise* is to be as profitable as possible, which isnt always the same as being successful with a game launch, but idealy, you'd want both and this just knocks that ladder down
Thats the big thing too, no one makes a game (or any product really) and hopes for only middling results
It also means that a game with long life or replayability is actively detrimental to the devs since it risks players reinstalling the game on new hardwares as they replace computers.
Also no free one off projects like Helltaker anymore as it's negative profit them.
I don't care if 1% of games are affected. Morally, it's wrong, therefore I'm against it. Simple as.
100% of people are also affected, because Unity can just change the terms again to make it affect anyone. Even if it isnt a problem now, it can become one at anytime
only selfish egoistic people use that defence of "only minority effected"....When you don't care a problem when it not effect you who gonna care about you when it effect you
the sad part is, stuff like this is not so uncommon:
CEO/Higher Ups (usually having no idea how it actually works) decide X without realy thinking about it and/or consulting devs.
devs then have to bend the time-space-continuum to make it happen in the absurdly low amount of time they've got.
It turned out the threat made to the Unity office was made by a Unity employee.
makes sense EZ day off hack
@@AniClips699 More likely a bonus or kickback to do something which would for the most part create some sympathy for Unity.
I guess they didn't want to hold that town hall after all, I mean, they literally did this behind half of their staff's back
fake but funny
@@xXx_Regulus_xXx No, it's true
One of the main problems is that they should've waited to FIRST properly investigate how to properly and reasonably implement this change, before releasing this plan to the public.
Because now, not only have they lost the trust of developers and customers alike, but they also just look totally incompetent with how they want to implement such a drastic change but don't fully seem to know how it will fully work or how to resolve some issues surrounding it.
And it's not like they couldn't predict the response of the public, considering even the CEO sold his stock just before this (so you just know that some of them definitely knew what kind of response this would get).
I am pretty sure they didn't even checked if that was legal in other countries before hand.
I'd say the bigger problem is that it's fucking illegal in several ways.
Also, the stock sales part's been debunked. He's been selling small portions of stock regularily for his whole tenure - it's actually part of the payment structure they have for high-level executives - and his recent sales have been entirely within that trend.
I’m proud the community is standing up for itself and telling these greedy companies enough is enough
Some of them are, the bigger names are too deep to change the environment like being trapped by a corrupt landlord. Its the exact same situation.
I believe this is gonna be a big issue with Brazilian law. It falls within "Venda Casada" laws (would roughly translate to "Married Sales" or in a meaning of "Conjoined Sales").
Since you can't have unity without its runtime, but they are fervent that they are separate things that are acquired together but payed separately and you have to pay for both separately to get any one of them, then it absolutely would fall in "Venda casada".
The law states:
Law 8078/90
Article 39 It is forbidden to the supplier of products or services, between other abusive practices:
Section 1- To condition the supply of a product or service to the acquisition of another product or service as well as, without just cause, to quantitative limits.
It is within the consumers defense code.
Since Unity also supplies services to Brasil and there are plenty of Brazilian game companies that use Unity, that will have to go through Brazilian court as well, and I believe there even is several previous cases in law where if it goes to court, Unity WILL lose this case and will be forced by the Brazilian court of law to revert this change.
Not only Brazil, but even the US cracked down this kind of stuff (remember United States v. Microsoft Corp. in 2001?) tho unfortunately this stuff doesn't happen that often anymore.
Não só no Brasil, mas até os EUA metem o pau em quem faz esse tipo de coisa (United States v. Microsoft Corp. em 2001, por exemplo) apesar de que recentemente isso não vem acontecendo mais.
The fact that the CEO and their board, sold stock BEFORE even making that change, says something. Tbh I’m baffled as to why they would purposefully sabotage their own company, unless they wanted to get bought out, which I don’t see that happening as of yet.
Although… is it a smart idea, to sell stock, let the stock tank so that you can buy the cheaper stock when investors panic and sell at a lower price? Which gives you more stock than you had without much of a loss? Was UNITY close to a hostile takeover? That’s the only option that I could see any of that happening.
Sell stock high, tank the company, buy it back low, use a fraction of the profit to settle the lawsuits.
With Devs in mass abandoning platform the company will continue to die and as result buying back will not bring profit but bankrupt company.
From what I understand, the CEO selling their stock wasn't out of place as they seemed to be selling the same amount periodically throughout the last couple years.
It doesn't sound like he dumped his socks since he didn't even sell a sizable chunk to begin with, and with the pattern of previous sells, this was most likely coincidence or the dude figured he'd sell what he knew he couldn't get in trouble for.
Unity is even closer to a hostile takeover now, all of Tencent's games use Unity, and the Chinese Government prefers to keep their spying data in house.
Unity will be bought by Tencent, mark my words.
@@dragonheart967 Unless he knows he has to sell off over time so as to not be suspected of blatant stock manipulation.
I am a programmer working in one of the mobile game development studios that Unity is targeting. What Unity does not realize is that much of us also rely on indie game developers that come up with rather unique, creative solutions that we actually adopt. One of the important reasons we chose Unity over Unreal for our projects, is that the availability of support/Q&A in the community as there is a large programming population in Unity. By driving out a bulk of the community would diminish the desire for Unity.
Personally, in preparation for whatever business decisions that the executives in my company will make, I am porting most of the custom libraries that I have developed for use in Unity over to Godot. It is a pain to clean the C# code of Unity APIs but not technically difficult. I am also looking into the native Java/Swift source of plugins to port them out of Unity.
This is a non start issue, what unity is doing has about two dozen litigation points to it, more in some countries. All this is doing is killing the stock value an destroying trust ultimately. They have no way to enforce these new TOS updates.
Intentionally lowering stock value so one of the BlackRock or Vanguard owned giants can buy Unity cheaper. Riccitiello and friends will be richly rewarded. The question for me is who the buyer is. Maybe Microsoft after they're done buying Blizz, another company ruined by traitors from the inside to make it a cheaper buy.
@@Forakus If that's the case (I disbelieve) it was very poorly thought out, as major publishers will now not fucking touch you if you use unity because of the uncertainty of business. Businesses HATE uncertainty.
@@TsunamiWombat It's ironic you say "Businesses HATE uncertainty"; because, every business is a risk. I am not criticizing; just pointing that out LOL.
The amusing prt is the "GamePass" will pay for it. You can't incur costs on someone who hasn't made a deal with you. Sony/Microsoft only make a contract with the Devs of the game they're offering on the Xbox Live/GamePass. There is no ontract - no deal with Unity so asking them for money is 100% ilegal under any EU/US aw.
The long term prospects of this kind of plan is the same as DND and the Open License. Destroy the market now, capture all of the money, and then make the future market in this current image. Imagine a gaming market where EVERY company has "per-install." Imagine a market where companies just rug pull everyone and everything like we have watched the entire NFT lunacy that had overtaken the world during the pandemic.
The most important thing for us to remember as consumers of Unity's customers, the cost will be passed along to us. If this becomes a real thing, we can be looking at subscription fees on every game.
Nah you'll just buy the right to install for $50 and just have a pay-per-install fee when you download off steam. Ez solution.
This whole thing is absolutely ridiculous. It comes across as two directors got drunk and came up with an idea to fund their new super yacht, announced it and then realised no one knows how to do it, meantime hammering the share price and all future trust in the company.
The company didn't do enough money, but I am sure THEY do enough.
And the worst is even if the company close, this is not them who will get punish but the people who actually work hard in that company.
I think learning Godot is going to be the path for me. I've only done runner games on unity, and recently started a third person project. The way they did a sunk cost fallacy on the devs makes me cringe in an uncomfortable way. Even if they walk back, chances are high the next monetization is gonna be more egregious than the previous one. I'll probably go back to them if they fire the CEO, AND make reasonable changes in the company.
If I were Epic right now, I'd be having lawyers writing up a unique indie developer contract explicitly for refugees from Unity and another new devs looking for a good deal for start up. Good opportunity for them here to increase good will amongst devs and really hurt Unity execs AND make a profit.
and also a plan/tools to ease migration. I'm sure Tim is smart enough to realize he's got a golden opportunity.
i would have my devs write a tool for portatinng unity into UE ...
exactly. Make it as seamless and quick as possible.@@Mucknuggle
No need for unique indie dev contract, with epic you don't have to pay anything up to a million dollars of sales.
If dev need to use unreal as there games need it the tools that unreal offer then do it, but it's best just don't go on a engine base around profit and stuck under contract that your games you made can't be sold anymore, even not using the engine anymore over some change in there contact ends up being shady.
I'm a fellow game developer. I'm glad I had the foresight to work with godot. Godot is harder to uses than the other engines because it still has bugs and doesn't have as much support, but now I see it was worth it. Plus, if your game blows up and scales, you can cut out the middleman and just directly develop your own branch of godot for internal use.
With this monetization scheme, would any Unity dev risk having "free-to-play" weekends? Would Microsoft want to have Unity games in their Game Pass (since they are the one being charged if the game is popular)? Would any Unity dev risk developing a mobile game with a "free--to-play + microtransactions/ads" business model?
I promise you Microsoft ain't paying a dime to Unity over this. This insanity would get laughed out of court. The idea that they can retroactively charge you for installs, AND that they can't even legally track individual installs, makes this absolute lunacy. They'll take them to court, go to discovery, and demand to see exactly how they determined the number they were billed. At that point either Unity admits they were illegally tracking individual installs, or they admit that they CAN'T actually track individual installs and are just 'guessing' how much they're charging them.
If they need to increase revenue, the obvious move would be to announce that Unity 2024 will only be available under a new license with a cut of sales revenue going back to Unity and to announce that support for earlier versions will end in, say, 2026 to provide incentive to upgrade. People would complain but go along with it as long as the royalty percentage isn't too high. There has to be some other motive behind this.
Destroying the company to benefit someone else. Watch who makes active moves to take Unity's market share.
Clip Studio Paint relatively recently decided that your one time purchase lifetime license was no longer that and said that they needed to pay in order to keep upgrading the platform I just uninstalled it out of principle and picked up Krita but it was a change done somewhat tastefully. Multiple companies that don't hit the numbers they want note that "X" or "Y" is undermonetized and it's just now touching here. I hope companies will just move on and away from it to not support it but human nature says they will be outraged their bottom line will take a hit for a while but most companies that rely on this engine will at the end of the day suck it up and keep it feeding the thought that everything in your life is "undermonetized".
Get ready for more monetization in the future. Have you seen mobile game margins? That's the new gold standard. I am waiting trepidation for pay to access youtube, steam online servers and google.
It's a lie for them to say it won't effect consumers, simply because any increase in costs to the Developer WILL get passed onto the consumer.
And from a Developer perspective, I would imagine many simply won't accept using Unity going forward, partly because they can't be trusted to not change it again.
If they lose a certain percentage of Devs from Unity they'll need to make up the shortfall by increasing the fees at some point.
Not the customers they're talking about. Unity has no direct connection to us as the people who buy games.
Their customers - and the customers they're talking about - are the developers.
You’re missing OPs point.
You as a customer WILL receive the burden of cost one way pr the other. Whether it’s higher price games, unfinished or unpolished, games or mtx and gambling mechanics. The developers cannot eat the costs and it will be passed down to consumers.
@@HH-hd7ndper install fees on the dev side means we won’t see as low priced games we see now, also deep discount sales will not be as deep anymore
Unity be like
"I am altering the deal, Pray I don’t alter it any further."
I'm devastated I have a unity project I started back in college that I was finishing the final bits and was about to enter the latter bit of my development. I spent hundreds of hours learning programming with unity and how to make engine tools for future games with unity. Thousands of hours of production. However as a single dev working a passion project that at the end of this year im going to be charged potentially per download is heartbreaking. I know the success rate of my game. I have already put hundreads of dollars on licensing for different platforms and then on top of this wont leave me with anything other then a potential bill every month.
Good news is I have decided to move over to godot and I hope the conversion wont take more then a year.
Good luck.
Good for you for making the choice to move to an open source engine that literally _can't_ screw you over like this, even if they wanted to. It sucks that Unity did this, and frankly I think it's probably illegal in more than one way, but it's probably easier to switch engines than to navigate that legal minefield. I wish you the best of luck converting your project to Godot.
If it's any consolation, this seems like it will probably destroy Unity. Even if they backtrack and completely reverse all the changes and fire the CEO, they've already lost significant trust and there are a lot of devs that will leave and not come back. If they survive this, it will be as a shriveled husk, a shadow of their former glory.
I hope you also will have a positive experience transferring your game.
What you have done is not wasted. You are the best judge of what can be considered transferable skills. Parts of the workflow you have developed to bring your game to gold while juggling all your other commitments are platform agnostic. It does suck, you cannot get that time, sweat and money back but it is not a loss. I wish you the best of luck!
But if you expect to hit the threshold for personal, just upgrade to professional and get the $1M, 1M downloads, threshold. And with $1M in the bank you would probably afford the license cost?
I feel like their "somehow" for tracking came from their purchase of the malware company. Wonder if they built something hidden into the Unity engine that's not showing because it's something we voluntarily install.
Can't wait for the FCC to get wind of the fact Unity may have collected data from minors for years
Changing terms over night silently, charging a fee without giving a clear way to devs how they will count installs and shady practices from the higher-ups... Yeah, I lost trust in that company.
Constructive critique: A brief overview of the topic at hand would be nice. I have no idea what is going on and I had to stop and navigate away to know what you were talking about.
welcome to 2023 where gaming means give us your money and recive nothing
give us your money and receive privilege to give us even more money
Unity has turned into corporate version of DSPGaming the last few days.
Welcome to capitalism
@mychal3408 Cringe. Also wrong.
It's not just gaming, every aspect of (western) civilization is going down this path. A bunch of oligarchs at the top trying to sell us our own demise.
At the beginning of the year I was strongly considering moving to Unity, but fortunately I was too lazy to make the change at the time and was going to push it off till the next project. Seems like that was a good choice. Not a fan of gamemaker's subscription model but it makes a hell of a lot more sense than per install costs!
Godot, Defold, Construct can be solid alternatives too, depending on your needs of course
Another thing that's being forgotten is that this assumes Unity will never make a decision like this ever again. The reason people are pushing back is because if they didn't and felt the change was manageable, then the CEO would thing "gee howdy, guess they won't mind another price hike in a year or two"
All of those tiers and prices? Seems okay at first blush, but they are totally subject to change. Developers aren't stupid, and they know that today it might be "90% are unaffected," but in a year or two it will be "90% are affected."
Sounds like a Class Action Lawsuit waiting to happen! They are playing Russian Roulette with 5 in the cylinder.
Hi Michael! Great channel, subscribing from the early days, watching every episode. I'm a developer for 13 years now, working at least 8 years with Unity. Currently I'm working both Unreal Engine 5 and Unity for separate projects. Just to clarify from the start: Unreal Engine's source code is available for free without pro license. Pro licence is needed if you want to have UDN - internal network for developers and to have access to some additional forks & early fixes which is mostly helpful for experimental stuff.
With Unity regarding premium is not about fee itself - devs would gladly pay up BUT they need clarity, predictable number / costs. The biggest issue is that under current conditions spoofing DeviceID / MAC address is still possible so generation of fake installs is a realistic threat.
Currently I'm working on a smaller game on Unity - I'll definitely won't hit any threshold for now to be eligible for install fee. HOWEVER, since Unity can change ToS whenever they can - people can retroactively fell into certain space in the future. That raises uncertainty for which many developers now is not agreeing to.
I really recommend at least doing a feasibility study for Godot. Obviously I don't know what sort of tools you guys are using for Unity, but I'm a professional programmer and amateur gamedev, I found that the iteration cycle was about 10x faster in Godot than either Unreal or unity, which is why I chose to go with Godot ultimately. It was simply faster for me to work with. Just my 2c
One thing from Pale beyond (great game btw) that COULD be a hurdle is the audio control tie in. I can't attest to the easy of use of 3rd party apps like wWise..
I feel that Switching Engines isn't as such a big of a deal. I Was Trained in 3D Modelling using 3DS MAX software, But after leaving school I didn't have access to the Lisences needed so I started learning Blender. It was a little struggle right at the start because everything was new, but Since you already have the knowledge like "How to champfer Edges" it's pretty easy to swap the knowledge over. It might be a bit different for Game Design but the principles still stand regardless of engine.
23:49 an additional note; mobile developers are only using Unity because said support/ people are there to help with learning the game engine and the tools; once enough people leave, you have less support/ tech support on issues BUT said issues can be fixed when you have more minds tackling the said issue.
I am doubting Unity even cares about accurate install count. From the CEO past outings I would posit the goal is to enroll every game into their add service that conveniently waves the fee. And it would make sense : if they can massively increase the ad targets numbers, they can get sweet deals from advertisers again.
Something that hasn't been said yet, but that's quite interesting is, that when a game is in gamepass and the cost fall upon the publisher, that cost is tied to the unity subscription of the developer. So not only does it matter to the publisher, that it's a unity game, but the subscription level is important as well.
I'm pretty sure Microsoft ( and other publisher ) will lawyer-up against those fees. Or...just refuse to host Unity-based games from now on and will take out those they have in their listing. Unity just blacklisted itself.
@@Itsumi_Nyanko I agree, there is no way they will pay the fees, but you are wrong in that unity has blacklisted itself: Unity blacklisted its developers
@@Falleris by blacklisting themselves I meant : they dug their own grave. They, by their own decision, made people exclude them from future project. I'm one of them...as I was working on developping my game on Unity in the near future but will 100% look for alternative now. Unity is on my blacklist and on the blacklist of a lot of people now too.
Just FYI: The source code for UE5 is completely available. I do quite a few changes inside the engine to make things more comfortable for me (if I can't put them in plugins)
So the custom license of UE is probably more for direct access to professionals/learning directly from them.
The threats against Unity make sense tbh. Most times this kind of thing happens and it's just a bunch of spirited nerds who get upset because their favorite thing is going to be worse / more expensive
Here, Unity is actually destroying people's livelihoods. People won't be able to pay their rent because of this, and that will make them desperate
Same thing happened to bungie when someone lashed out after they admitted that they hire behavioral psychologists to implement predatory monetary systems to exploit kids, I mean obviously it’s too far to threaten people but I can understand why they would, some peoples whole livelihood is based on these games and they take it super seriously
Police revealed the theeat came from a unity employee
So either very disgruntled, or the company is openly fishing for sympathy to distract from this pr nightmare
@@leafgreenbeast i assume jonny very dramatically threatened himself
@@leafgreenbeast "A unity employee" will have a name in the police's files, and their next few months are not likely to be fun.
You don't pull that kind of threat for a lark when you're going to be identified. It might not have come to fruition either way, but it's not reasonable to think unity faked it.
Maybe we should've listened to the spirited nerds so slimy corpos wouldn't think this is acceptable in the first place 😂
Goes public>Chases mobile for profit> kills/punishes the core users in money grab, likely for a mobile model> dies slowly.
Tale as old as time, or rather, the stock market. It's alway sacrificing the long term for the short term.
In one of my CSC classes we were going to use Unity for a project, however, my professor said they are considering moving to a different tool as a result of the recent news. I was actually lol forward to using unity. Not sure if the new changes will impact students.
It won't impact students. Grow up a bit
@@jonathansoko1085It won't impact students in the sense their projects won't be charged for it, but why would any student ever pursue a platform with these kinds of policies.
There are legitimate situations where Unity's new policies could mean that if someone found success, they might actually owe Unity more than they earn and that's completely absurd.
Nobody is gonna learn or make in Unity as it stands, cause why risk it when there's alternatives.
The mathematical concepts should be the same. A quaternion in Godot is equally as fucked up as a quaternion in Unity. I think the real hurdle is teachers having to learn how to implement the same concepts using Godot's API.
@@jonathansoko1085lol that's a pretty immature response. Typically when some one tells you to grow up that person is really the one who needs to grow up... Plenty of ways it would affect students, just gotta use a bit of critical thinking to understand. If the school is impacted by these policies, that cost is offloaded to the student in their tuition. Also, if those students learn and have great experience in unity, then they'll have an easier time getting a job that uses Unity, and if Unity doesn't backpedal then those companies probably won't exist to give those students jobs after graduation. Unity needs to backpedal otherwise no one will use their program and aspects of that education that don't carry to other engines goes to waste.
@@Slimjim2147 nice try kiddo
FYI All tiers have source code access on UE. Also the 5% revenue is the opening bid, if you contact Unreal sales you can get a MUCH better deal than 5%. They totally understand if you have 3k developers working on a project (like mega ubisoft game) that 5% is actually overly expensive.
As someone who's been spending way to many years being undecided on what engine to use when/if I ever start working on a game, UE or Unity, this whole thing has just ended up making my choice so much easier by removing Unity from the equation. Though now there's Godot instead, so I guess I'm still stuck choosing between two different engines :)
It is hard to decided :) It gets even worse when you have not fully decided what you want to make.
Grab Godot and start doing random crap in it. You're not going to know what you need until you have actually felt that need, so just fuck around with the cheapest option until you realize you need something else.
Hearing your personal POV as a developer really made this video. Way more valuable for adding depth to this story than reading/summarizing what's currently happening, even though that summary is pretty essential.
While our studio primarily use unreal and we did dodge this bullet. My hobby-projects has always been in Unity. This will no longer be the case. Thinking of looking into Godot for 2d and Flax for 3d. Also been experimenting with Bevy, but writing in Rust and ECS does require a change of mindset.
The problem with this per install fee, is lack of consistence effect across their customers. For some will be cheaper, to many will be very expansive. Maybe what they need is a better metric to be their reference when planning prices.
Never hire someone who was president of EA.
Use them as gunnery targets instead.
@@stage6fan475 Punching bag is enough.
unless you want to make gazillions of money like EA
@@windy8544 I don't think it's going to pan out nearly as well this time. You're dealing with business customers, not regular customers.
As an indie dev I decided to go with Unreal when Unity was gearing up to do their IPO. Between the IPO and their choice of CEO, it sealed my decision. Even with Epic's own issues, I have no regrets. May start tinkering with Godot more though in the future to make sure I have options.
Man.. I really wanted to start with gamedev on unity.. but now..
Find a new tool.
There are *plenty* if others depending on what you need.
Same me and a friend are going to godot instead man am i glad we didnt start coding/programming yet...
29:45 Unreal Engine source code is available for everyone completely for free though. So I don't think that's what the custom license is for. The custom license is most likely for getting a different deal than the standard 5% revenue share
The scariest thing about the threat to Unity staff was that it came from inside the company - so... the sender definitely knows how to get access to the building.
Or, just consider the possibility that the "threat" was simply made to garner sympathy and steer the conversation away from the actual issue.
@@MechMK1 That's not likely. Shit like that gets to the police with receipts.
Someone will pay for making that threat.
in the UK we have "The Data Protection Act 2018 and the EU's GDPR" a lot of the unity "Tracking Tools" sounds like a massive breach to both. Then you have them changing TOS after the games were released gives at leased 2 ways to attack unity: Breach of contract and changing it without having the other party signing the contract; the other is: Any contract that is deemed as an unfair contract, will make that contract Null and Void!
The threats against Unity were made by a unity employee. How did you miss that?
In fairness this situation has been moving quickly, and this might have been recorded before that came out
not entirely accurate. yes everyone is talking about "installs" but are missing the part of where they also say "distributeables" which is the engine. so its the unique values for both installs and copies of the game already installed. thats where they get existing users, the distributeables.
The issue with these Unity decisions is that it shows that they can do w/E they want, whenever they want. So trust is totally broken with the company
Not sure if bellular just missed it on the UE stuff when talking about their tiers, but everyone automatically gets source code access no matter what. Thats always been a thing. I think the tiers are more for being able to negotiate the revenue share or per seat costs.
Even I have source code access - all it takes is like a two-click "NDA". Back when I was evaluating engines, I tried it on Gentoo, which, naturally meant I had to compile the engine and editor myself. Worked fine, still went for Godot because I can actually run that on BSD. ^^
This is a great oppertunity for other engine providers to get some more customers !
I talked with my team. We are going back about 6-8 months of production with game that were to be published in February (due to volountary crunch on my side... without it it'd be year+). We are going to Godot and will enjoy MIT license.
Check options for porting and rewriting stuff. Hire additional contractor who is capable in different engine. In long term it may be safer for Your project than sticking with Unity.
Unreal would not be viable option for Unity game in mid-late stages of production, but Godot may be. Comunicate what is going on well to Your team and Your players. In such situation players will understand. Team probably also.
You didn’t mention Unity is pushing proprietary ad technology to waive fees. Clearly their new partnership has pushed them to try to take out other ad technology companies at the cost of good faith. Also, the github delete. So shady
I had never heard of “The Pale Beyond”. I am watching a let’s play by The Boring Dad. What beautiful artwork. I am thoroughly enjoying it. I would like to ask how many people worked on the project. I would also like to say thank you. If it was not for small studios putting out games the whole sector would be stagnant. You should be very proud. I can't afford to buy the game at present. Do you have it available on IOS?
All am the best x
Unity: "We really need more money. I know our board members all have a million shares each, but we REALLY need the funds guys!"
Blender: *Laughs in donations and open source code development team since 1994*
Based Blender
The only thing that I have a comment on is at the end talking about not being able to switch engines. Yes, I know that it can be very expensive and that it might simply not be an option in some cases, but I would caution about falling into a sunk cost fallacy here. I have seen and read about plenty of situations where it was determined that a fundamental technology change was too expensive, yet in the long run the companies ended up spending 10x or more what it would have cost to change. Of course the change has up front costs that can be harder to absorb than costs over time so it isn't really that simple, and every situation will have different economics that will determine what route is better. I just wanted to say that each developer this affects shouldn't just think about how much it costs to change, but also how much it costs to not change and look at short term and long term costs. Since this is a strong indication that you can't be sure that the license for the engine will stay the same even after a game is released, there is always going to be the possibility that more changes come in that simply make it impossible to continue selling games that you already released, so that would be something to take into account when deciding if you will continue using unity or not.
Engine re-training takes less than 2 weeks if people weren't born yesterday. I learned more or less everything there was to know about Unity in 3 weeks when I was hired on for a project with that engine. Artists don't care about the engine you work in. The art process is 99% the same.
Designers are happy to use UE over Unity because visual scripting is easier, and it also means that artists can jump in and help script the game
Not being a game dev, but a regular Java dev: I'd say it depends on how much content you've made that is engine-exclusive. Learning the new engine isn't that hard; getting the content ported over is usually the bigger issue (especially if using bought assets) - at least that's what I have experienced in moving from Angular to React and then Vue (back-end wise, I've parked my rear in Spring and not really moved much since a few years back).
@anderskronquist9750 I can't speak for Java developers. I don't think there are any Java engines besides the one minecraft is running on, which is a text library, and not really an engine.
Is it harder to move between engines with Java?
@@pawnix4122Nah, I was mostly trying to say when you move to another engine, it's is generally not a question of learning the new one - though it is still a cost - but of migrating assets (art/music/sound) and remaking others in the new engine.
For instance, scripting is a thing that tends to be engine specific, and depending on how much you use it you can end up with a large quantity of things to rewrite.
I'm an application/business developer, so I have only tried out Unity once or twice (it was far more interesting than writing business rules according to a specification that's written on a post-it note, for sure), though.
@@anderskronquist9750 I somewhat agree. The art assets take less than no time to move over. The only real issue I can think of would be programming since the API is different in many ways between the engines, so that side of a project would have to be re-written from scratch.
I'm a one trick pony dev, I spent 7 years getting good at unity and c#, I have my own way of doing things, and I mostly work alone (I did ship a game that's on gamepass!). I'm still not intending to switch engines for my next project, which is only a few months along, because I just don't know if I have the personal motivation to learn new tools from scratch. I'm an artist, and all the tech stuff is an obstacle for me.
Pretty much in the same boat as you are on this one. Been working on my game for the past 5 years and the idea of porting the game to a new engine is pretty much out of the question. A lot of my stuff uses Mechanim for both animating and event triggers and the like, and is heavily integrated with the scripts I use. It's spaghetti code, but it works well and I know my way around it. It's MY spaghetti code.
However, because of the game's reliance of Mechanim, I pretty much have no choice but to stay with Unity, which I still think is a very good engine for making games if you ignore the utterly unhinged policy changes. I can only hope that the potential tidal wave of international lawsuits either prevents something like this from ever happening again or the company tanks and is bought out by people with actual souls who wont be blinded by greed and throw their consumer base into the meat grinder for short term gains.
Can't wait for Microsoft to change Unity's EULA and charge them a $1000000 per every windows update they've received for the past 10 years per device.
that's... a very good idea, microsoft should retroactively charge unity for running unity in windows
@windy8544 and if Unity was using iOS, Apple will happily back invoice Unity as well...
Some corrections
19:55 - "They've already made efforts to suggest there's no way out for developers - retroactively updating their TOS/License that (unreal engine style) locks you into the License you signed on with." It seem like it's written that Unity changed to a Unreal engine style license, but actually they removed the unreal engine style, per engine version EULA license. Was added in 2019, because of Improbable debacle, but is now removed.
Backstory: In 2019, there was an issue between Unity and Improbable (devs of middleware for distributed multiplayer infrastructure for games), where Unity changed their EULA to prevent use of such middleware with Unity Engine. Epic clarified that their EULA doesn't prevent such middleware and is per Unreal Engine version, so if you stick to Unreal 4.27, any updates to Unreal 5.0 or newer will not retroactivly apply to you as a dev. Unity received significant backlash, so it changed their EULA to remove the restriction for such middleware and the EULA to be per Unity Editor version. The thing pointed out in the reddit thread (in the video), was that they removed their GitHub repository where they stored the versions of the EULA and that they were not keeping their word from 2019, that older versions of the engine weren't affected. Why a lot of devs aren't thinking that Epic will do the same trick, is that Epic has a really great reputation in the game dev community, have been very dev-oriented their whole company life and are very profitable company.
29:36 - You get source access to Unreal Engine in all three licenses. Epic is very open to allowing Unreal devs to inspect, learn and request changes to the Unreal Engine. With a standard license, devs usually create custom builds of the engine, with specialized modifications for their game project. With the custom license, you can negotiate for a more favorable deal, but you are probably top 100 studios in the world at that point.
Even walking back some of this has made no difference to the backlash.
The damage has been done, and now their greed and scumbaggery will continue to bite them on the butt.
They'll be losing much of their profit and will be seeing a continued decline.
You got the source code access for Unreal wrong. I never actually made something in the Unreal engine but I do have source code access because I signes up for it out of interest. Its free to do so with no obligations. The custom package is purely for custom terms if the other packages don't work for a dev.
The issue with Unity leadership is that they've focused on the *wrong* areas of gaming.
They're more focused on micro-transacting than they are supplying a good product. They've become so large that their product cannot support them. They need to cut back staff, limit CEO pay, and probably explain to the shareholders what kind of industry they're actually in.
The people who use Unity and make a lot of money *also* pay Unity a considerably *large* amount of money *too.* There is a reason they were able to go public and trade shares for as high as they did during the pandemic. They *are* bringing in substantial capital.
It's not that Unity isn't being paid for their services, it's that Unity is spending *too much* to sustain. Unless they find *another separate* revenue source, or cut back on spending, they're going to be in trouble. Nickel and diming developers is only going to lose them more customers.
this is unfortunately, the prevailing wisdom. "Good Games Do Not Make Money". We heard it right out of the horses mouth from XBox's CEO when he discussed the future of the platform vs Playstation - "Making better games simply won't turn this position around". They see consumers as service entrenched - product doesn't matter. This prevailing mentality is also why someone thought they could get away with this.
Been working on my own 3D project in unity for over a year and now I'm just gonna have to spend quite some time learning the intricacies of Godot's 3D features, which are still relatively limited comparatively, but it's better than dealing with this monetization bullshit or dealing with a company that can just up and change the terms of a contract one sidedly.
the lawsuits on this from Microsoft and Tencent are gonna be glorious to behold. Pragmatic concerns aside, the damage is done. The fact that unity would do this, means that even if they walk it back, there's no reason they couldn't try to do it again later. Anyone who keeps using Unity after this is just setting themselves up to get shafted later.
Microsoft, Tencent, Mihoyo, Sega, Nintendo, Disney might get involved, and then there's the 5000-pound gorilla in the room that is EU privacy laws.
Like, if they want to put an actual install tracker in there? It's gonna break EU privacy laws so hard, european courts are gonna literally fine Unity out of existence.
Did I miss the explanation of this? What is a 'seat'?? Seems to be highly relevant!