The Unity situation obviously effects the entire gaming industry- but given where VR is at right now, its dependance on Unity and proportion of indie developers.. it's a pretty disproportional effect. I'm interested to see if Unity rolls back the decision.
I hope this situation leads to Godot getting more funding, maybe it could have a Blender moment and become a genuinely great engine like how Blender became pretty competent software after 2.8. As for VRChat, I think it's going to be fine for now since VRChat Plus subscribers exist, and they're probably gonna push the Creator Economy system hard now that there's a fee
Unity doesn't need to do more profit, they are doing this after the financial fiasco the CEO has been doing since November 2021 since the company went public
@@SnrubSource Godot just started a development fund, so that combined with the new 4.1 release which are all pretty big, I think this is definitely possible. I'm definitely sticking with Godot, I know that much 😁
Unity's current CEO, John Riccitiello, was formerly the CEO of EA for about six years. It's unfortunately not too surprising that he would make such greedy, short-sighted pricing changes.
It's funny because they say CEOs get paid so well because of their competence... yet I can't think of a single group of people (aside from government) on this planet who are more incompetent than millionaire CEOs.
@@housemousemain Not neccessarily. Remember, other engines can pick up on VR too. The VR headsets and current VR capable computers can still run UE4 if not UE5 VR. THAT IS IF, VR is available for Unreal Engine. SO hold your apocalyptic horses, Death. Hope is still in the air. Oh yeah, and you can build an engine for VR, just saying.
@@angelofrevelation5822Unreal Engine has had VR support since as early as 2017, and have even been released with Quest games before. Some of which are some of the Quest’s best-looking games. Also, by the way, Godot Engine also has full support for VR. It’s just that nobody’s really made anything substantial yet due to how new it was implemented.
@@jeffmccloud905 they generally don't have phenomenal _3D_ support as it's a rather recent implementation, however the focus on it having strong support for mobile devices and the recent focus on implementing VR tools means that it could be a great bridge if it receives more development and funding. It reminds me of Blender's earlier phases.
Unity has pulled the greediest stunt I've ever seen in gaming history. I truly cannot think of anything worse. Maybe FIFA microtransactions are more profitable, maybe lootboxes are more outright greedy, but this is just MALICIOUS and evil. Absolutely ghoulish behaviour aimed directly at screwing people out of their honest living.
The changes to Unity are so insane. I can't believe they think it's a good idea, we will see what happens next. Chances are big a lot of devs will be switching to other engines like Unreal Engine. The fact that they are the ones who gather data to get an estimate on the amount of installs and reinstalls (which is just insane) is quite scary. They even admit it's not fully accurate.
@@Volker_A4 No, the main strength of unity over UE is accessibility. UE *can* produce more performant games but it's not as indie friendly so it's used less by.. indie developers.
The damage to Unity is permanent. Even if they roll back, the trust is lost. The only way to really mostly roll back this problem, is if they fire and sue the CEO. I've noticed that there seems to be a weird pattern of "failing upwards" with C suite officers.
I think that is mainly due to them being able to drop ship via a "golden parachute". As CEOs are basically encouraged to make short term gains rather than long time. Shareholders and the capitalist demands growth, even if everyone has/bought the thing, financial growth is still needed, no matter how impossible. In this case... I think the CEO decided that doing this will make the shareholders happen? Or maybe let him milk whatever he can before leaving and doing the same to another company? 🤔
Agreed, even if they reverse now, there is no guarantee that in a year they do it anyway when you are in the midst of creating a project. UE5 is then much safer.
@@legend8202 I'm not even sure they were trying for short term gains here. It's weird. Allegedly, a number of Unity executives sold stock the day before the announcement went out. They knew how bad it was going to be. Generally doing things they know will tank stock value isn't something executives are keen on doing.
@@st.altair4936He wants to either say he opened up a project and it wasn't magically doing what he had in mind or he tried the engine once 5 years ago and thought nothing has changed
@@scottcastle9119 Not quite. They said that developers could contest "suspicious activity". Illegal installs could well be counted, and it's up to the developer to develop procedures and dedicate time and effort to track and contest every single one. That's very different from "not being charged".
No the engine is garbage and none of the games made for it are even playable. They are all garbage. Just look at H3VR that is the worst game ever made. @@unsuspiciousdweller8967
Unity's never been the top spot for game development, just FYI. It's always been the underdog until recent changes. And most of those changes have been made in order to try to cultivate the funding to take Unity from "underdog" to "AAA quality competitor" against other engines like CryEngine and Unreal.
@@urzapolariz I don't know what criteria you're using, but Unity ranks #1 on a bunch of "most used game engine" lists. One list from 2019 ranks it as #2 behind Unreal. CryEngine is nowhere near overtaking either of them.
I'm honestly excited for the increased effort into Godot's VR Tools because when the Godot Marketplace launches, it's going to be a treasure trove for indie game developer
@@indriyantoYin Considering that the midas touch turns things into gold (current value) at the cost of essentially destroying everything touched including its ability to grow to be more valuable than gold in the future. I'd say he has the literal midas touch. Turn the current value of a compay into a big shareholder payout at the cost of the company's future profits.
The unity situation affects almost the entire vr industry, while the games might start to look better, unreal's support for vr is just not even close and will leave a lot of new devs feeling discouraged
@@drewo.127 It's the engine Valve used for Half Life: Alyx, Counter Strike 2, and their engine-swap port of Dota 2. ...the engine itself being _made_ by Valve.
They don't quite have the development tools in the engine ready yet. I've heard something about Gary Newman and the people at facepunch are helping valve with that I think. Not sure what's happening
You're 100% right about Unity being the best option for VR development out of the box. Unreal Engine never had great systems in place for VR but they've been deprecating those few existing systems in favor of OpenXR since the release of UE5 without actually replacing much of the functionality. I use Vive Trackers in all of my work but when I upgraded to UE 5.2 there was no way to get tracker data into Unreal Engine without live streaming it from an outside application, developed in Unity. Hopefully Epic Games stops messing around and starts taking VR seriously because the skill barrier for VR development in UE is WAY to high.
Interesting, I also was unable to stream headset tracking data unless I enabled the now deprecated SteamVR plugin, the OpenXR one alone didn't work. I was using ALVR on Ubuntu, but that is supposed to support OpenXR now.
Tracking data? As in the relative transforms of the HMD and motion controllers? GEngine->XRSystem should have all the stuff you need (unless you're BP only then RIP).
I'm most curious how Apple will react, as Unity integration was a talking point for Apple Vision Pro, and they have had a lawsuit with Epic games which may sour Unreal integration.
Might be the first time I'd crave for Apple to crush some company in a lawsuit, but I fear, the whole reason for this debacle, John Riccitiello, will get away with it anyways.
@@CakePrincessCelestiaThe sheer amount of parties that want to sue Unity would make it a class-action lawsuit on many fronts. If Unity gets away with it, we might even see something like Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony, Valve, ***AND*** Apple shutting the doors on Unity support for their platforms, which would kill off the engine completely.
Apple will be happy. Anything that allows them to charge more while providing less juices their stock. Remember the bravery of removing the headphone jack to shill their iPuds? Remember they refused to do USBC for over a decade because licensing made them bank. I think unity would make them happy, they can just charge more and get a bigger cut for every single game sale. Most big companies will have completely separate agreements that are not reflected in the FAQ and yes, the monopolistic practice of forcing users to use Unity ads and services does potentially cause legal woes for them due to the topic we're talking about.
@@WhatWillYouFind This makes no sense. Apple cares about profits, and a decision like this that makes developers leave, REDUCES profits. Even if some developers stayed, the fact that huge studios are tweeting that they are changing engines means that even those that stay won't offset the loss of losing big hitters.
It feels like the former EA CEO infiltrated Unity to sabotage it from within. I just can't understand how this and other questionable decisions were allowed to happen after all the years of earning user trust.
It's "to deliver maximum value to the shareholders." They have this stick so far up their asses they can't think straight and don't consider anything more important than this quarter's earnings.
I’m a cofounder of a startup working on a Unity based tool, and I can only hope the unity situation fixes itself or nearly a year worth of my team’s work and a company goes down the drain. Just a little worried
When your startup reveals this tool; it's DoA. Run back or not - nobody wants to touch anything with that logo slapped on it. Cut this sunk cost bs, pull out the rotting roots and either head back to the drawing board or rework it for something else.
@@mattirrodraca2807 Unity can't do that.. they have competition, too much greed would kill them and they know that very well. Imho that 0.2 cent is fair but there are some rough edge what they have to iron out.
Honestly, I'm hoping that this drives more development for Godot. A lot of Unity devs use C#, which isn't supported by Unreal. However, Godot supports it natively, allowing for easy porting of code from Unity to Godot, as long as assets can also be ported. And if Godot gets more exposure and funding, they can become the de facto engine for a lot of new game devs, much like Blender became the de facto animation suite for beginner animators.
@@spythere Yes but they use different API’s even if the language is the same. Moving a Sprite up in Unity is different code versus moving a Sprite up in Godot using C# Unity uses transform.Translate and extends from MonoBehavior. That class doesnt even exist in Godot, and it uses Position to move the Sprite
Before I watch the video, here is an initial thought. I hope... I really really hope Unity walks back this change. I don't think they will. Also: with the frequency that I need to delete and reinstall the VR programs that I use, I think the VR community of devs is in for way way way more pain on this point than we would expect. I super super hope that we can get the tools needed for VR development into other engines quickly. I know quite a few people who are talking about scrapping their whole project instead of moving forward with Unity. I have my eye on Godot
I'm just glad to see more devs looking into open source engines like godot. I've been using godot for years now and I'm building an open source social XR platform using godot because it gives me the ability to do things that just can't be done as cleanly with engines like Unity or Unreal.
Even if they go back on the decision, they changed the terms without consent and without a grandfather clause. That alone is a business negotiation taboo, and developers are going elsewhere to avoid being driven into narrow margins or closure. Though I am not surprised they would do that considering they abandoned lifetime licensing for subscriptions. Adobe is trash for a lot of people who aren't doing it as a business as it is just an excuse to take your money and abandon when you don't want to pay anymore.
@@FIoofle That was a complete and utter misjudge of rocket jump timing, ending them up at 1hp, trying to anxiously pick up some health packs somewhere while 15 other players could give you the final shot even by just randomly spamming razorblades throughout the whole level.
meh.. tbh the last time I tried (2 months ago) there was a lot of stuff missing on the rendering side. But I love Godot no matter what and with a bit more effort as of right now you can get some good looking stuff
@@iglobrothers645 If you mean visual fidelity then yeah, the engine is certainly not the go-to for photorealistic visuals, but I think it's enough for VR
I really hope this pushes development towards Godot. An open source game engine that's comparable to industry leaders would be amazing. I mean look at Blender, they pulled it off for the 3d modeling world
They'll gain but you could end up with many of the same problems down the line as UE5 becomes too dominant. Personally, I think we need an open alternative so these games can't be used against developers, maybe publishers and developers should pool their resources together to make an existing open source engine a lot better, something like Godot, which is quite good already, with the right investment and resources thrown at it, it could become a lot better. But in any event, it will be funny to watch if many of these disgruntled developers move onto UE5, only for the same kind of thing to happen to them there but 10 years from now lol. But don't get me wrong, Godot isn't ready for triple a gaming yet, but with enough resources thrown at it, that engine could develop quite rapidly just like Blender did to dominant the market, maybe this is the big wake-up call for big publishers and developers to make that happen.
My personal theory for how unity will track installs is by sending a unique API call to Unity's servers one time per IP where the ticker on their servers goes up to charge devs the fee. It's a thought I had earlier today when talking about this whole situation with a bunch of other comp sci students at my college
It will be interesting to see how they pull it off. They will either need to work with steam or other stores to send the api call on every install, or every unity game will be built with an always online portion that sends this information the first time the game is run.
@@xonor13Leave it to the piracy community to find a way around that shit. They’ve cracked every piece of DRM under the sun: do you think Unity has the means to create a sufficient protection method?
They said that the runtime doesnt phone home at all, so they are not actively tracking installations. Instead they are using an AI model to "track" installations that they dont explain how it works.
I think it's really hard to overstate that Unity Debacle is easily one of, if not THE single most destructive move the most valuable entertainment industry in the world has ever seen. If the fee as it stands goes through it will easily mark an event on the same level as the Crash of '83, if not even worse, which is very ironic given that this string of events too can probably be traced back to Activision, though of course history doesn't repeat, but rhymes, so this time it's because they're moving *counter* to worker's rights, rather than with them. Watching so much of the venture-capital driven entertainment and technology industries devour themselves in a fervor to become profitable has been an incredible thing to witness, but this might genuinely be the first full--on breaking point for one of them.
Honestly, probably would be best to at least have a minor crash, the industry definitely needs a reboot, because otherwise it's going to die in stagnation due to the only people will remain to develop these games doing it only for the cash rather than out of pure passion for a project. Like seriously, all these major house releases are done intentionally with a massive lack of content, even Bungie devs are being forced to take out content they're working on just so marketing can make more money over these tiny features that will get blown up like crazy to seem like this big new thing even though for a shitload of these delayed content releases, The content itself was an industry standard all the way back in the 2000s. Like seriously, look at Halo Infinite, it took us two years to have infection, a game mode that has been a staple ever since custom lobbies were a thing in the game. Additionally, you're still missing heavy amounts of legacy content too, like theater mode, legacy cosmetics (the EOD bootleg in the shop can't be bought!), skulls, split screen co-op, and stable servers. (Yes, it's a bit of a tangent since slipspace isn't unity, but it still shows a pattern in many other games as well, like cod, compare mw2 og to modern mw2, or 2010 fortnite to modern fortnite, these games are hollow shells of the IPs loved by many.)
It seems that Unity was poised to be dominant in the dev field for years to come, but they shot themselves in the foot with their new policies. On the flip side, competition is always good for industry, and I believe that in the short term there will be a slowdown, but in the long run Unity's policy change will be very beneficial to VR, but not so much to Unity. Another excellent video, Thrill. I really like how you break down and present the VR news.
Sucks to hear about what unity’s doing… the impact it’s had for developing VR games + configuring VRchat avatars and worlds is so much…. Fingers crossed that another engine can come out that can help devs make VR games much better than with unity. (Does anyone know if Gadot can make VR games? It seems like an interesting game engine) Edit: got to the part of the video where it’s mentioned! That’s pretty interesting!
I think godot have vr support. have seen few test projects. I will also think to move godot for my "hobby" project. so if I plan to release it in future and sell it I won't be f*cked.
@@crimson-foxtwitch2581 There's been several games released with Godot, just not VR games yet. Lumencraft, Cassette Beasts, Project Heartbeat, Dome Keeper, Of Blades & Tails, and Brotato just to name a few. (EDIT: was just informed that Friday Night Funkin' VR was made in Godot! So there is at least *one* VR Godot game so far. :D )
@@HealyHQ Friday Night Funkin VR isn’t really big enough of a game(it was mostly just an experiment a Godot dev made) and it’s not on Steam as well, but it’s cool. As for flat Godot games, honestly, Cruelty Squad was the first game that came to my mind. I want to see original indie games made for VR with Godot and we don’t really have that yet, but it’s absolutely possible
Unity higher ups been busy last week CEO and upper management privately sold off something like $13,000,000 in stocks for Unity days before the runtime fee announcement, Considering the stocks plummeted a solid amount after the runtime fee was announced, a bunch of people could be investigated for insider trading...
At 10:58 it was mentioned that tethering devices via a wifi hotspot is "something most standard windows PCs are simply not equipped to do." Yet setting up a Wi-Fi Hotspot is available on almost every Windows 10/11 device with a wifi adapter/card of some sort, whether it be USB or integrated. Depending on what wifi adapter your PC has you may even be able to do a hotspot over Wi-Fi 6. Go to Windows settings > Network & Internet > Mobile hotspot.
Until pretty recently it was a *garbage* implementation, and that baggage remains in a lot of people's heads. Only a few years ago it was pretty critical to get a dedicated modem for wireless-streamed VR, even if the windows hotspot is now ace for it. (source: i just use the wifi6 from my mobo instead of the formerly-dedicated router nowadays and the results are better)
@@Eunostos I feel that with wifi 5 it would have been challenging to get an ideal wifi-streamed vr setup that had decent latency and fps/res would require pretty specific setups. But now with wifi 6/e and wifi 7 on the horizon with incredible latency improvements and bandwidth that can well outpace is 3.0 and nearing some of the old HDMI/DP speeds I feel like onboard windows hotspot-based VR tethering might not be too outlandish anymore. On wifi and up devices it may be fairly reasonable as especially with 4x4 modems.
Former NeosVR devs are developing a game called Resonite by Yellow Dog Man Studios. It’s thankfully going to use a custom engine. This was before the Unity announcement. Hopefully it turns out well for them. Their code is quite nice.
I kinda hope this mass exodus encourages people that used unity for vr development to work on some better features for godot vr. Wishful thinking for sure, but I'm allowed to dream
Godot seems really solid especially with their next 4.2 update. This update will integrate well into standalone VR (both Quest and Pico). It also will support variable rate shading for quest 3. BUT: Most Unity VR games have a set price you buy the game for. This means the per install fee is not the wordt for VR
I think this is a blessing in disguise, Unity is easy to learn but there is a glass ceiling to how good the game can look without taking up massive resources. Hopefully this will also force apple to get vrkit for unreal engine.
I honestly feel like Unity has been a crutch for a lot of indie developers. It's just so easy to rip a bunch of assets from the store and make hundreds of identical games, there are far too many of them and they all look almost exactly the same. It was getting really old anyways.
Thankfully, Godot 4 (open source and free) comes with out of the box OpenXR support (in addition to being able to support OpenVR). Another +1 for open source.
Thanks for covering this. As a Unity game developer of 10 years and close to the ground, I will say trust is broken, and Unity has not moved fast enough to rectify the situation. It's about so much more than the 0.20c tariff at this point. And even if they walked the whole thing back, it would still not change the community sentiment. Us developers are a fickle bunch, and this has effectively been the nail in the coffin after a series of bad will decisions. It might take a few dev cycles as studios finish off their current projects, but after that most will move to competing platforms that will step up in response to this. as Kenshiro said in Fist of the North Star: "you are already dead, you just don't know it yet". The best we can hope for at this point is a Microsoft buy out and re-direction.
Making a game is far too much work already without this shit. I wouldn't want to partner with a company that reserves the right to pull the rug out from under you at any point for any reason. The trust is GONE, they can't put the cat back in the bag.
Ok now I'm at 5:35 I noticed a couple things. You said your game "was" in Unity. I'm surprised to hear you say it past tense already! At the part of the video discussing how Meta and Apple have all their dev tools in Unity... This move really feels more like it is bait - to get one of those companies to buy out Unity just to keep the engine useable. Also, I've seen more than once that devs are talking about pulling their games once the change occurs on Jan 1... How great is that going to look when 55% of the VR library disappears overnight just after Meta and Apple launch new headsets? I didn't think it was possible to kill the VR market anymore, but this might just do it...
Unity Pro has always been around $2,000 a year I'm pretty sure. Unity Plus was the one that was $400 dollars a year. But I'm pretty sure they just got rid of Plus, so now the only one is 2K a year.
7:50 Humblebundle just announced a new bundle "The complete Godot software bundle". Now would be great chance to get started with it! Also thank you Thrill again for a insightful video!
I'm glad you made this video. VR development is the concern I've been trying to spread as there hasn't been much mention of it. However, as said the majority of VR games are made On Unity.
@@housemousemain That is way too sweeping a claim. There are competitors already moving into the VR space, just a bit slowly. And if I were to guess, Valve might see this as an opportunity to make a super VR-friendly engine to the public. The Source Engines already have a history of being something fans develop entire franchises with.
@@haruhirogrimgar6047exactly! As bad as this whole thing is, and as much of a hit VR may take if this goes through, using this as an excuse to say VR as a whole will die is just far FAR worse and will only give more power to people like the Unity CEO and close minded idiots who want dreams destroyed! After becoming stressed out over stuff I care about but can’t really control for so long, I’ve decided that whenever something like this happens, I’m going to simply calm down, do whatever I can, and just quietly fight back by either using alternatives to popular software, (GoDot game engine, or Cohost social platform or Newgrounds social platform,) or supporting all the good people and things within an otherwise problematic software! (Games from amazing devs, or gameplay vids of those games, or creators who I want to support, despite RUclips as a company being problematic!) Long story short, this all sucks! But allowing this or any depressing situation to stop you from doing what you love or believing in what you want, sucks even more!
I have been working on a VR dinosaur hunting game in my spare time for a couple years. I packed my bags and am moving to Unreal. I dont think ill ever hit the $$ threshold; but thats not the point. its the principal. its the fact that Unity just said 'screw you' to small devs that has left me saying 'well screw you too then'. Does it hurt? yea. but Unreal is probably going to serve this project better.
Also, any university major or courses that specializes in game development would be affected especially, because Unity would be the most likely software of choice in teaching the undergrads of game dev, since it was THE premier user-friendly game engine software. This would really screw them over, since most likely they'll have to relearn steps for Unreal (some might be faster, or it might just be painless), but it'll still just... You know.
Proposed by John Riccitiello, Unity CEO, former EA CEO, who previously proposed a pay-per-bullet model for FPS. Also dumped a load of high-value shares before the announcement.
As a unreal dev we benefit from unity's existance. We need both engines to compete against each other. Also Unity tends to have a wider range of visual styles and games.
👍👍👍 As idealistic as an open-source game engine becoming the #2 game engine sounds. There are still a lot of resources a for profit company can use to get themselves ahead. We need multiple engines with similar resources compeeting head to head near the same level. Unity dying and increasing the gap Unreal is ahead is a big problem. Think of it, a significant fraction of the games being made by an huge margin, being a monopoly by the one made by a company that still actively makes and profits of making their own games and competing with other game developers plus having their own game store they already play favourites with in their game engine.
It's worth noting that the current CEO of Unity is John Riccitelio- the former CEO of EA. Namely, the same one that proposed making players pay money to reload in Battlefield. While it'd be a stretch to say this was expected, with the context of who's calling the shots, it's nowhere near as surprising.
Those 60k in your example at 2:51 is in fact 1.2% on that first payment (it would be 2% for the subsequent payments) - just thought we could have it in perspective next to Valve's 30% cut :)
godot support openxr for vr wich is way easier to make than unity yes unity still have better support but if godot see that the vr is in demande the contributors will improve it way more since godot is opensource
I've been a Unity developer for over 10 years. I work professionally as a Unity developer. Not only do I now fear for my job, I am also moving over to Unreal in the hopes it'll help me find future work.
Sorry to hear that bro, it's a bummer but I'm sure with your experience you will be able to adapt quicker than most to Unreal if you decide to make that change. I guess it's not a consolation, but you will now have access to Lumen and Nanite at least - i'm sure you will be able to have some fun with that!
Unity might not be dead yet but they just swallowed a whole lot of deadly poison. They just lost any trust or credibility in the gaming community. New indi dev teams will not go for Unity after this, even if they take drastic measures like replacing high management and rolling back all the changes, it would be a huge uphill battle to regain the trust the just destroyed.
Hey @Thrill, what do u think of the Contact Gloves? I'd like to give you my opinion as I just received a pair. I worked with other VR Gloves for a few years (Noitom Hi5) so I got a lot to say. Wouldn't mind sharing my opinions with you.
I always thought unreal was the Superior engine for ANY genre you develop. They have presets for so many genres and has an amazing free learning course. I hope theres an easy tool devs can use to move as much of their game from unity over to unreal.
UE5 is looking mighty fine right about now, I develop stuff in Unity and I'm considering switching to UE5 thanks to this. Although I mostly know C#, JS etc C++ would be a new language to learn if I don't want to use their blueprint system.
As a VR game dev myself this is crazy to see, lucky for me I headed down the Unreal Engine rout from the start so no migration is required. Also I don't think nanite or lumen will be coming to many VR games any time soon. As of yet we still have no support for nanite or lumen on mobile processors like the quest has. Right now I think it'll be kept exclusive for PCVR and therefore left out of most games.
Hi there, would it be possible to get an overview of current VR Headsets from you? Like a top tier list or something? I'm thinking about buying a new one (still using the original HTC Vive) but I can't really decide wether I should buy one now (like an Old Index or the Quest 3) or if I should wait a bit longer for Valve making their move. If there is one person I'd trust to help with this decision, it's you. Would appreciate it. Thanks :)
Meta, etc. need to migrate tools to other engines such as Godot. A FOSS engine isn't going to pull this crap and if the devs do, it will just be forked. Plus, the more that migrate to Godot, the better it gets. Community addons are what made Unity good. They can do the same for a FOSS engine. This really pisses me off because of the large number of projects that rely on Unity, including the VRChat worlds.
The thing that makes me angry is that unity employees didn't even agree with this shit. It was the ceo which chose this alone. Because he thought it would be a good idea. I am sick of ceo's doing things like they know everything.
Actually in Windows if you have a wireless adapter, if you turn on Mobile hotspot in Windows, you can connect your headset directly to it. Unfortunately Windows puts an arbitrary bandwidth limit on it, but latency is very little.
Thanks so much @ThrillSeekerVR for giving the Unity issue more discussion. Terrible for indie devs and “up and comers”. Also @SadlyItsBradley is the man as you know. P.S. yes please do a NMS PSVR2 video talking about the Echoes update and the amazing power of foveated rendering. What an amazing redemption story for Hello Games. Cheers!
I already read about the Unity hell. It's really sad, what they are doing. I myself started to create a game using Godot at first but wanted to try Unity again after years but with this news and what they are doing i'm not okay with it and won't make the switch and stay with Godot for now. I'm not making a VR game (yet) but still it's really bad for indie devs and such. But now to your videos. Thank you really much for the new you do! Without your Videos I mostly wouldn't get any news on VR-Stuff. I really like your videos. Keep up the great work!
I just looked on their site and compared to the chart that Thrill posted it looks like they may have updated it. The version I'm seeing has an addition that both thresholds (revenue and installs) have to be met for the tiered rates to apply. Only passing on the observation, make of it what you will.
should make a VR version of something similar to "only up"- but you get different tools along the way to climb different ways kinda like what is going on at 8:24
honestly VR needs more engine variety so might be bad in short term but good for long term would be interesting to see ue5 vr game. Ideally we get something open source like blender for a game engine so things like this don't happen.
I mean, Half Life Alyx and Into the Radius weren't made with Unity, and those are two amazing VR games that blow everything else out of the water. I feel like Unity has been a crutch for a lot of indie game developers, and the ceiling for what is possible in that engine is very low.
I highly highly highly recommend looking at Godot as an engine instead of unreal. Unreal is also run by a greedy corporation that can change the deal on you at anytime like unity did, Godot is free and opensource, and while I can't comment on how well it's VR support is implemented, it does have vr and xr support. Similavr is building their VR desktop environment in Godot for example. Godot being free and opensource provides protections against shit like this because if anyone tries to pull something like this the project would just be forked. Boycott using greedy corporate tolls as the backbone of your own projects, embrace using community developed free and open source tools
I actually wonder if this change is in part _because_ Apple was giving so much support to Unity. They thought they could bank on that extra support and the accompanying rush of Apple aficionados that buy Apple's VR. They figure there is guaranteed money in it. Obviously this would be incredibly short sighted and couldn't be their sole hope of maintaining (let alone increasing) their market share for VR development in particular, but it could very well have given them some extra confidence in going ahead with this pricing plan.
I think a lot of the Unity issues really come down to the question of how they'll be counting the number of installs, and how they'll guarantee accuracy beyond "trust us, bro". The pricing itself isn't nearly as bad as many people are making it out to be, and while it *technically* can end up costing more in fees than it earns in revenue, it's pretty unrealistic scenarios that would lead to that, requiring extremely low-value micro-transactions that have low sell rates. It's based on the assumption that you somehow are earning less than $0.20 per user on average, but also earning at least $200K/yr. On the other hand, Epic takes 5% on all revenues above $1m. While that does ensure that you can't *lose* money, if you have a normal monetization model (particularly if your game isn't free-to-play), Unity would wind up costing significantly less, since worst-case scenario, you're paying $0.20 per install.
One core issue with the pricing is that it's virtually impossible to guarantee unfakable uniqueness on user-controlled hardware. How bad the pricing would be if they solved that problem's basically irrelevant, because not only is it super hard to solve, they have a monetary incentive _not_ to solve it.
As someone who has actually worked on video games, both vr and non-vr, in Unity, there have been a ton of questionable changes over the years. Tons of promised new features in the next update, while they let other areas rot or leave it incomplete all together. This change doesn't surprise me. Clearly the higher ups/shareholders only care about their short term profits over polishing their existing product to perfection. This is why publicly traded companies usually go to shit. The constant goal to push for new revenue streams on their existing customers instead of getting more people to use their product...
The Unity situation obviously effects the entire gaming industry- but given where VR is at right now, its dependance on Unity and proportion of indie developers.. it's a pretty disproportional effect.
I'm interested to see if Unity rolls back the decision.
I hope this situation leads to Godot getting more funding, maybe it could have a Blender moment and become a genuinely great engine like how Blender became pretty competent software after 2.8.
As for VRChat, I think it's going to be fine for now since VRChat Plus subscribers exist, and they're probably gonna push the Creator Economy system hard now that there's a fee
couldn't the game devs just charge 0.15 more for the game?
Third reply...
Unity doesn't need to do more profit, they are doing this after the financial fiasco the CEO has been doing since November 2021 since the company went public
@@SnrubSource Godot just started a development fund, so that combined with the new 4.1 release which are all pretty big, I think this is definitely possible. I'm definitely sticking with Godot, I know that much 😁
Unity's current CEO, John Riccitiello, was formerly the CEO of EA for about six years. It's unfortunately not too surprising that he would make such greedy, short-sighted pricing changes.
It's funny because they say CEOs get paid so well because of their competence... yet I can't think of a single group of people (aside from government) on this planet who are more incompetent than millionaire CEOs.
He was also CEO during their worst years, when they were voted worst company in America twice.
The really unfortunate part is that these CEO's get away with it almost every time.
@@AngryAlfonse bro insulted CEOs and the government at the same time, amazing 10/10 i love it
Is this the same one that earned EA its reputation for shuttering otherwise award winning developers?
Shout-out to the Goddot engine. And Bevy for the Rust programmers.
Godot is honestly pretty goated
@@housemousemain Not neccessarily. Remember, other engines can pick up on VR too. The VR headsets and current VR capable computers can still run UE4 if not UE5 VR. THAT IS IF, VR is available for Unreal Engine.
SO hold your apocalyptic horses, Death. Hope is still in the air.
Oh yeah, and you can build an engine for VR, just saying.
@@angelofrevelation5822Unreal Engine has had VR support since as early as 2017, and have even been released with Quest games before. Some of which are some of the Quest’s best-looking games.
Also, by the way, Godot Engine also has full support for VR. It’s just that nobody’s really made anything substantial yet due to how new it was implemented.
Godot also has _heavy_ mobile support, so I imagine it will be a great option moving forward for developing apps on devices like the Quest series.
@@jeffmccloud905 they generally don't have phenomenal _3D_ support as it's a rather recent implementation, however the focus on it having strong support for mobile devices and the recent focus on implementing VR tools means that it could be a great bridge if it receives more development and funding.
It reminds me of Blender's earlier phases.
Unity has pulled the greediest stunt I've ever seen in gaming history. I truly cannot think of anything worse. Maybe FIFA microtransactions are more profitable, maybe lootboxes are more outright greedy, but this is just MALICIOUS and evil. Absolutely ghoulish behaviour aimed directly at screwing people out of their honest living.
And even worse, it can be abused by people who aren't even the greedy corporation
>FIFA Microtransactions
The current CEO of Unity used to be high up in EA, that’s not surprising.
same person who made fifa a microtransaction hell is the same person in charge of unity right now!
@@housemousemain Unreal will come in clutch
@@gandev5285 I wouldn't imagine Quest 2 games would handle unreal engine games looking how they do so that still fucks over millions of people
The changes to Unity are so insane. I can't believe they think it's a good idea, we will see what happens next. Chances are big a lot of devs will be switching to other engines like Unreal Engine. The fact that they are the ones who gather data to get an estimate on the amount of installs and reinstalls (which is just insane) is quite scary. They even admit it's not fully accurate.
Correction: a handful of idiots think it's a good idea, and the rest of the company is screaming silently in their heads
somebody trying to destroy the company, but why? Meta to control??
Godot makes more sense for a lot of Unity Devs. The main strength of Unity over UE is performance.
@@Volker_A4 No, the main strength of unity over UE is accessibility. UE *can* produce more performant games but it's not as indie friendly so it's used less by.. indie developers.
Yeah, the fact that they're counting on their own and you can't verify how is the worst part by far
The damage to Unity is permanent. Even if they roll back, the trust is lost.
The only way to really mostly roll back this problem, is if they fire and sue the CEO.
I've noticed that there seems to be a weird pattern of "failing upwards" with C suite officers.
I think that is mainly due to them being able to drop ship via a "golden parachute". As CEOs are basically encouraged to make short term gains rather than long time. Shareholders and the capitalist demands growth, even if everyone has/bought the thing, financial growth is still needed, no matter how impossible. In this case... I think the CEO decided that doing this will make the shareholders happen? Or maybe let him milk whatever he can before leaving and doing the same to another company? 🤔
Fire, sue, imprison, I don’t know how many laws they broke but I’m actually pretty sure they broke some.
The stock price hasn't tanked, so that's unlikely.
Agreed, even if they reverse now, there is no guarantee that in a year they do it anyway when you are in the midst of creating a project.
UE5 is then much safer.
@@legend8202 I'm not even sure they were trying for short term gains here. It's weird. Allegedly, a number of Unity executives sold stock the day before the announcement went out. They knew how bad it was going to be. Generally doing things they know will tank stock value isn't something executives are keen on doing.
Unity woke up and chose to make the ultimate marketing campaign for Godot
I tryied it but he don't have basic things like hindge joint2d
@@bigsmoke8344 It literally does though?
@@st.altair4936 it has only 3d joints, in 2d it has only 3 joints
@@st.altair4936He wants to either say he opened up a project and it wasn't magically doing what he had in mind or he tried the engine once 5 years ago and thought nothing has changed
Horrible C# tutorials
The “pirate a game 1,000,000 times” meme may actually become a reality. 😅
NIKO!!
They made it so they get paid for pirated copies booting up too
Unity literally said they are not charging for pirated games
niko pfp spotted let's go
@@scottcastle9119
Not quite. They said that developers could contest "suspicious activity". Illegal installs could well be counted, and it's up to the developer to develop procedures and dedicate time and effort to track and contest every single one. That's very different from "not being charged".
The Unity Enterprise License is now going from 1,800 to 7,500 per year. We are using it daily in our company and this is already insane 🤯
well time to move to unreal engine eh :D
how the hell are Devs supposed to compensate for this
Use a different engine, don't ever go back unless the Unity CEO is fired and major changes are made.
@@akiraakiraakiraakira They aren't. They're supposed to cut their losses and move on to a different engine.
Just riot my friend
The main problem is that unity changed the deal, making it retroactive and destroying the model of exposure to the game being paramont.
The biggest problem with unity is that is is a garbage engine and all the games made for it are also pure garbage.
@@robertsears8323lol nah. Company sucks, engine is good
Including Dusk, Ultrakill, TABS, Hollow Knight, etc?
All those things are unplayable crap. @@jmanners
No the engine is garbage and none of the games made for it are even playable. They are all garbage. Just look at H3VR that is the worst game ever made. @@unsuspiciousdweller8967
Welp, this makes room for a new better engine to take the top spot.
Godot has been rising for a while. But I haven't wanted to jump ship, u til now
Rise, and shine, Mr. Godot. Rise, and…shine.
Unity's never been the top spot for game development, just FYI. It's always been the underdog until recent changes. And most of those changes have been made in order to try to cultivate the funding to take Unity from "underdog" to "AAA quality competitor" against other engines like CryEngine and Unreal.
@@urzapolariz
I don't know what criteria you're using, but Unity ranks #1 on a bunch of "most used game engine" lists. One list from 2019 ranks it as #2 behind Unreal. CryEngine is nowhere near overtaking either of them.
Godot, if they make metallic materials actually look acceptable
I'm honestly excited for the increased effort into Godot's VR Tools because when the Godot Marketplace launches, it's going to be a treasure trove for indie game developer
The EA guy burns all that he touches.
they always do.
It's the yours truly The Devil himself. Just look at that smirky smug smile he's always putting up on photos... it's the Purest Of All Evil.
he has a reverse midas touch
@@indriyantoYin Considering that the midas touch turns things into gold (current value) at the cost of essentially destroying everything touched including its ability to grow to be more valuable than gold in the future. I'd say he has the literal midas touch. Turn the current value of a compay into a big shareholder payout at the cost of the company's future profits.
Thursday Newsday is always the best show. If the episode takes enough time to be delayed until Thursday, you know the shit's gonna be good.
Not a surprise from the former CEO of EA
The unity situation affects almost the entire vr industry, while the games might start to look better, unreal's support for vr is just not even close and will leave a lot of new devs feeling discouraged
Vr has the potential to die because of this
I dunno, in my experience, Unreal Engine was pretty much drag and drop babymode VR development. It was the easiest skill I've ever picked up.
This is the time where Gabe Newwel should release Source 2, its a good engine with vr support. I wanna see what people will do with that engine.
Source 2? As in Source Filmmaker? GMod stuff?
(I’m not complaining! That sounds great if Source 2 is from the same guys!)
@@drewo.127 It's the engine Valve used for Half Life: Alyx, Counter Strike 2, and their engine-swap port of Dota 2.
...the engine itself being _made_ by Valve.
They don't quite have the development tools in the engine ready yet. I've heard something about Gary Newman and the people at facepunch are helping valve with that I think. Not sure what's happening
Can’t get a third one though.
@@Autumn-Foxxo That entertains an interesting thought, maybe they can bring rust to Source 2.
You're 100% right about Unity being the best option for VR development out of the box. Unreal Engine never had great systems in place for VR but they've been deprecating those few existing systems in favor of OpenXR since the release of UE5 without actually replacing much of the functionality. I use Vive Trackers in all of my work but when I upgraded to UE 5.2 there was no way to get tracker data into Unreal Engine without live streaming it from an outside application, developed in Unity. Hopefully Epic Games stops messing around and starts taking VR seriously because the skill barrier for VR development in UE is WAY to high.
Interesting, I also was unable to stream headset tracking data unless I enabled the now deprecated SteamVR plugin, the OpenXR one alone didn't work. I was using ALVR on Ubuntu, but that is supposed to support OpenXR now.
Tracking data? As in the relative transforms of the HMD and motion controllers? GEngine->XRSystem should have all the stuff you need (unless you're BP only then RIP).
@@gandev5285 as in the tracking data for Vive Trackers 3.0
I'm most curious how Apple will react, as Unity integration was a talking point for Apple Vision Pro, and they have had a lawsuit with Epic games which may sour Unreal integration.
Tons of app store apps and gamed are unity too, if they are going to force publishers like apple to pay they will be in a lawsuit with unity too
Might be the first time I'd crave for Apple to crush some company in a lawsuit, but I fear, the whole reason for this debacle, John Riccitiello, will get away with it anyways.
@@CakePrincessCelestiaThe sheer amount of parties that want to sue Unity would make it a class-action lawsuit on many fronts. If Unity gets away with it, we might even see something like Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony, Valve, ***AND*** Apple shutting the doors on Unity support for their platforms, which would kill off the engine completely.
Apple will be happy. Anything that allows them to charge more while providing less juices their stock. Remember the bravery of removing the headphone jack to shill their iPuds? Remember they refused to do USBC for over a decade because licensing made them bank. I think unity would make them happy, they can just charge more and get a bigger cut for every single game sale. Most big companies will have completely separate agreements that are not reflected in the FAQ and yes, the monopolistic practice of forcing users to use Unity ads and services does potentially cause legal woes for them due to the topic we're talking about.
@@WhatWillYouFind This makes no sense. Apple cares about profits, and a decision like this that makes developers leave, REDUCES profits. Even if some developers stayed, the fact that huge studios are tweeting that they are changing engines means that even those that stay won't offset the loss of losing big hitters.
It feels like the former EA CEO infiltrated Unity to sabotage it from within. I just can't understand how this and other questionable decisions were allowed to happen after all the years of earning user trust.
i mean he wanted to charge people to reload in battlefield, he's known for doing that kind of stuff.....
It's "to deliver maximum value to the shareholders." They have this stick so far up their asses they can't think straight and don't consider anything more important than this quarter's earnings.
when its a Thursday but thrill says Tuesday you know its a good day
I’m a cofounder of a startup working on a Unity based tool, and I can only hope the unity situation fixes itself or nearly a year worth of my team’s work and a company goes down the drain. Just a little worried
You have my condolences
When your startup reveals this tool; it's DoA. Run back or not - nobody wants to touch anything with that logo slapped on it.
Cut this sunk cost bs, pull out the rotting roots and either head back to the drawing board or rework it for something else.
0.2 cent (at max) is not that much if the user have to pay like 20-30 euros for the game.
@TheVektast and how long tell that 20 cent is upped to 5 dollars hmm?
@@mattirrodraca2807 Unity can't do that.. they have competition, too much greed would kill them and they know that very well. Imho that 0.2 cent is fair but there are some rough edge what they have to iron out.
Honestly, I'm hoping that this drives more development for Godot. A lot of Unity devs use C#, which isn't supported by Unreal. However, Godot supports it natively, allowing for easy porting of code from Unity to Godot, as long as assets can also be ported. And if Godot gets more exposure and funding, they can become the de facto engine for a lot of new game devs, much like Blender became the de facto animation suite for beginner animators.
c# is a language for unity, which means it uses unity information to make it work.
@@indiegamesonly6617Yeah, not sure how the OP missed the fact that the classes and methods will be obviously different
@@SubparProgrammerDo you know what porting means?...
@@spythere Yes but they use different API’s even if the language is the same. Moving a Sprite up in Unity is different code versus moving a Sprite up in Godot using C#
Unity uses transform.Translate and extends from MonoBehavior.
That class doesnt even exist in Godot, and it uses Position to move the Sprite
Before I watch the video, here is an initial thought.
I hope... I really really hope Unity walks back this change. I don't think they will.
Also: with the frequency that I need to delete and reinstall the VR programs that I use, I think the VR community of devs is in for way way way more pain on this point than we would expect.
I super super hope that we can get the tools needed for VR development into other engines quickly. I know quite a few people who are talking about scrapping their whole project instead of moving forward with Unity.
I have my eye on Godot
Supposedly, reinstalling on the same machine won't count.
This week's news has been unreal
...I see what you did there. lol
Amazing to see Unity supporting FOSS software like Godot!
I'm just glad to see more devs looking into open source engines like godot. I've been using godot for years now and I'm building an open source social XR platform using godot because it gives me the ability to do things that just can't be done as cleanly with engines like Unity or Unreal.
I hope their going to go back on their decision... I also hope godot gets to grow so that the big guys think before acting...
You and me both!
Even if they go back on the decision, they changed the terms without consent and without a grandfather clause.
That alone is a business negotiation taboo, and developers are going elsewhere to avoid being driven into narrow margins or closure.
Though I am not surprised they would do that considering they abandoned lifetime licensing for subscriptions. Adobe is trash for a lot of people who aren't doing it as a business as it is just an excuse to take your money and abandon when you don't want to pay anymore.
Unity really shot it's own feet this time
Bit of an understatement, I’d probably say knees.
@@Cr_nch shot itself right in the chest
more like blasted it with a rocket launcher
@@itsMapleLeaf rocket jump!?
@@FIoofle That was a complete and utter misjudge of rocket jump timing, ending them up at 1hp, trying to anxiously pick up some health packs somewhere while 15 other players could give you the final shot even by just randomly spamming razorblades throughout the whole level.
For the record to any VR developer friends: Godot has *excellent* VR support. Getting set up is very simple and the API is easy.
meh.. tbh the last time I tried (2 months ago) there was a lot of stuff missing on the rendering side. But I love Godot no matter what and with a bit more effort as of right now you can get some good looking stuff
@@iglobrothers645 If you mean visual fidelity then yeah, the engine is certainly not the go-to for photorealistic visuals, but I think it's enough for VR
I already know c# so it’s very hard to switch
@@coolpuppykid1455You can use C#, I forgot the name of it. I think it was called GD Native
Oh boy... What did unity frick up this time?
I really hope this pushes development towards Godot. An open source game engine that's comparable to industry leaders would be amazing. I mean look at Blender, they pulled it off for the 3d modeling world
This is going to be HUGE for Unreal.
They'll gain but you could end up with many of the same problems down the line as UE5 becomes too dominant.
Personally, I think we need an open alternative so these games can't be used against developers, maybe publishers and developers should pool their resources together to make an existing open source engine a lot better, something like Godot, which is quite good already, with the right investment and resources thrown at it, it could become a lot better.
But in any event, it will be funny to watch if many of these disgruntled developers move onto UE5, only for the same kind of thing to happen to them there but 10 years from now lol.
But don't get me wrong, Godot isn't ready for triple a gaming yet, but with enough resources thrown at it, that engine could develop quite rapidly just like Blender did to dominant the market, maybe this is the big wake-up call for big publishers and developers to make that happen.
My personal theory for how unity will track installs is by sending a unique API call to Unity's servers one time per IP where the ticker on their servers goes up to charge devs the fee. It's a thought I had earlier today when talking about this whole situation with a bunch of other comp sci students at my college
It will be interesting to see how they pull it off. They will either need to work with steam or other stores to send the api call on every install, or every unity game will be built with an always online portion that sends this information the first time the game is run.
@@xonor13Leave it to the piracy community to find a way around that shit. They’ve cracked every piece of DRM under the sun: do you think Unity has the means to create a sufficient protection method?
It can't just be per IP - last I checked, each individual install on a separate machine counted.
They said that the runtime doesnt phone home at all, so they are not actively tracking installations. Instead they are using an AI model to "track" installations that they dont explain how it works.
They're guessing. They can prove me wrong if they want that invoice paid.
I think it's really hard to overstate that Unity Debacle is easily one of, if not THE single most destructive move the most valuable entertainment industry in the world has ever seen.
If the fee as it stands goes through it will easily mark an event on the same level as the Crash of '83, if not even worse, which is very ironic given that this string of events too can probably be traced back to Activision, though of course history doesn't repeat, but rhymes, so this time it's because they're moving *counter* to worker's rights, rather than with them.
Watching so much of the venture-capital driven entertainment and technology industries devour themselves in a fervor to become profitable has been an incredible thing to witness, but this might genuinely be the first full--on breaking point for one of them.
I think the government should step in honest
Honestly, probably would be best to at least have a minor crash, the industry definitely needs a reboot, because otherwise it's going to die in stagnation due to the only people will remain to develop these games doing it only for the cash rather than out of pure passion for a project.
Like seriously, all these major house releases are done intentionally with a massive lack of content, even Bungie devs are being forced to take out content they're working on just so marketing can make more money over these tiny features that will get blown up like crazy to seem like this big new thing even though for a shitload of these delayed content releases, The content itself was an industry standard all the way back in the 2000s. Like seriously, look at Halo Infinite, it took us two years to have infection, a game mode that has been a staple ever since custom lobbies were a thing in the game. Additionally, you're still missing heavy amounts of legacy content too, like theater mode, legacy cosmetics (the EOD bootleg in the shop can't be bought!), skulls, split screen co-op, and stable servers. (Yes, it's a bit of a tangent since slipspace isn't unity, but it still shows a pattern in many other games as well, like cod, compare mw2 og to modern mw2, or 2010 fortnite to modern fortnite, these games are hollow shells of the IPs loved by many.)
@@andywest5773 regardless of what the national debt is, insider trading is still very much illegal. And they did it so blatantly
It seems that Unity was poised to be dominant in the dev field for years to come, but they shot themselves in the foot with their new policies. On the flip side, competition is always good for industry, and I believe that in the short term there will be a slowdown, but in the long run Unity's policy change will be very beneficial to VR, but not so much to Unity.
Another excellent video, Thrill. I really like how you break down and present the VR news.
You joined a dev team? Oh! Nice! Was that the impetus for the move? 😆Anyway nice video.
#savememebreak
Sucks to hear about what unity’s doing… the impact it’s had for developing VR games + configuring VRchat avatars and worlds is so much…. Fingers crossed that another engine can come out that can help devs make VR games much better than with unity.
(Does anyone know if Gadot can make VR games? It seems like an interesting game engine)
Edit: got to the part of the video where it’s mentioned! That’s pretty interesting!
I think godot have vr support. have seen few test projects. I will also think to move godot for my "hobby" project. so if I plan to release it in future and sell it I won't be f*cked.
Godot has full support for VR, it’s just that nobody’s made a full game with it yet.
@@crimson-foxtwitch2581 that's probably about to change _really_ soon.
@@crimson-foxtwitch2581 There's been several games released with Godot, just not VR games yet. Lumencraft, Cassette Beasts, Project Heartbeat, Dome Keeper, Of Blades & Tails, and Brotato just to name a few. (EDIT: was just informed that Friday Night Funkin' VR was made in Godot! So there is at least *one* VR Godot game so far. :D )
@@HealyHQ Friday Night Funkin VR isn’t really big enough of a game(it was mostly just an experiment a Godot dev made) and it’s not on Steam as well, but it’s cool. As for flat Godot games, honestly, Cruelty Squad was the first game that came to my mind.
I want to see original indie games made for VR with Godot and we don’t really have that yet, but it’s absolutely possible
Unity higher ups been busy last week
CEO and upper management privately sold off something like $13,000,000 in stocks for Unity days before the runtime fee announcement,
Considering the stocks plummeted a solid amount after the runtime fee was announced, a bunch of people could be investigated for insider trading...
At 10:58 it was mentioned that tethering devices via a wifi hotspot is "something most standard windows PCs are simply not equipped to do." Yet setting up a Wi-Fi Hotspot is available on almost every Windows 10/11 device with a wifi adapter/card of some sort, whether it be USB or integrated. Depending on what wifi adapter your PC has you may even be able to do a hotspot over Wi-Fi 6.
Go to Windows settings > Network & Internet > Mobile hotspot.
Until pretty recently it was a *garbage* implementation, and that baggage remains in a lot of people's heads.
Only a few years ago it was pretty critical to get a dedicated modem for wireless-streamed VR, even if the windows hotspot is now ace for it. (source: i just use the wifi6 from my mobo instead of the formerly-dedicated router nowadays and the results are better)
@@Eunostos I feel that with wifi 5 it would have been challenging to get an ideal wifi-streamed vr setup that had decent latency and fps/res would require pretty specific setups. But now with wifi 6/e and wifi 7 on the horizon with incredible latency improvements and bandwidth that can well outpace is 3.0 and nearing some of the old HDMI/DP speeds I feel like onboard windows hotspot-based VR tethering might not be too outlandish anymore. On wifi and up devices it may be fairly reasonable as especially with 4x4 modems.
Goodbye Unity. Hello Godot!
Former NeosVR devs are developing a game called Resonite by Yellow Dog Man Studios. It’s thankfully going to use a custom engine. This was before the Unity announcement. Hopefully it turns out well for them. Their code is quite nice.
I kinda hope this mass exodus encourages people that used unity for vr development to work on some better features for godot vr. Wishful thinking for sure, but I'm allowed to dream
Damn I was already looking into changing from Unity to Unreal but I guess I am just gonna do it now without comparing them lol
Godot seems really solid especially with their next 4.2 update.
This update will integrate well into standalone VR (both Quest and Pico).
It also will support variable rate shading for quest 3.
BUT: Most Unity VR games have a set price you buy the game for. This means the per install fee is not the wordt for VR
I think this is a blessing in disguise, Unity is easy to learn but there is a glass ceiling to how good the game can look without taking up massive resources. Hopefully this will also force apple to get vrkit for unreal engine.
I honestly feel like Unity has been a crutch for a lot of indie developers. It's just so easy to rip a bunch of assets from the store and make hundreds of identical games, there are far too many of them and they all look almost exactly the same. It was getting really old anyways.
Gotta love Tuesday newsday video that game out less than a minute ago
Cool! Just noticed my "how to make a VR game in 12 minutes in Godot" video popup! Happy Dance!! :)
You deserve the recognition for all you have done to help bring XR to Godot, Thank you. 😀
Thankfully, Godot 4 (open source and free) comes with out of the box OpenXR support (in addition to being able to support OpenVR). Another +1 for open source.
Thanks for covering this. As a Unity game developer of 10 years and close to the ground, I will say trust is broken, and Unity has not moved fast enough to rectify the situation.
It's about so much more than the 0.20c tariff at this point. And even if they walked the whole thing back, it would still not change the community sentiment. Us developers are a fickle bunch, and this has effectively been the nail in the coffin after a series of bad will decisions. It might take a few dev cycles as studios finish off their current projects, but after that most will move to competing platforms that will step up in response to this. as Kenshiro said in Fist of the North Star: "you are already dead, you just don't know it yet".
The best we can hope for at this point is a Microsoft buy out and re-direction.
Making a game is far too much work already without this shit. I wouldn't want to partner with a company that reserves the right to pull the rug out from under you at any point for any reason. The trust is GONE, they can't put the cat back in the bag.
Godot finally has its chance to be the best Game Engine for Indie Devs
Ok now I'm at 5:35
I noticed a couple things. You said your game "was" in Unity. I'm surprised to hear you say it past tense already!
At the part of the video discussing how Meta and Apple have all their dev tools in Unity... This move really feels more like it is bait - to get one of those companies to buy out Unity just to keep the engine useable.
Also, I've seen more than once that devs are talking about pulling their games once the change occurs on Jan 1... How great is that going to look when 55% of the VR library disappears overnight just after Meta and Apple launch new headsets?
I didn't think it was possible to kill the VR market anymore, but this might just do it...
Unity Pro has always been around $2,000 a year I'm pretty sure. Unity Plus was the one that was $400 dollars a year. But I'm pretty sure they just got rid of Plus, so now the only one is 2K a year.
How nice xd
7:50 Humblebundle just announced a new bundle "The complete Godot software bundle". Now would be great chance to get started with it!
Also thank you Thrill again for a insightful video!
Training seminars for those who want a guided Learn by Demonstration and Doing.
I'm glad you made this video. VR development is the concern I've been trying to spread as there hasn't been much mention of it. However, as said the majority of VR games are made On Unity.
@@housemousemain That is way too sweeping a claim. There are competitors already moving into the VR space, just a bit slowly. And if I were to guess, Valve might see this as an opportunity to make a super VR-friendly engine to the public. The Source Engines already have a history of being something fans develop entire franchises with.
@@haruhirogrimgar6047exactly!
As bad as this whole thing is, and as much of a hit VR may take if this goes through, using this as an excuse to say VR as a whole will die is just far FAR worse and will only give more power to people like the Unity CEO and close minded idiots who want dreams destroyed!
After becoming stressed out over stuff I care about but can’t really control for so long, I’ve decided that whenever something like this happens, I’m going to simply calm down, do whatever I can, and just quietly fight back by either using alternatives to popular software, (GoDot game engine, or Cohost social platform or Newgrounds social platform,) or supporting all the good people and things within an otherwise problematic software! (Games from amazing devs, or gameplay vids of those games, or creators who I want to support, despite RUclips as a company being problematic!)
Long story short, this all sucks! But allowing this or any depressing situation to stop you from doing what you love or believing in what you want, sucks even more!
Posted 12 minutes ago, 3k views. Nice job Thrill!
This is really concerning stuff
I’d love to see a section of Tuesday Newsday where you find a vr game to have in the video that you talk about for a bit
Godot stay winning 💪
I have been working on a VR dinosaur hunting game in my spare time for a couple years. I packed my bags and am moving to Unreal. I dont think ill ever hit the $$ threshold; but thats not the point. its the principal. its the fact that Unity just said 'screw you' to small devs that has left me saying 'well screw you too then'. Does it hurt? yea. but Unreal is probably going to serve this project better.
It's Godot time.
Also, any university major or courses that specializes in game development would be affected especially, because Unity would be the most likely software of choice in teaching the undergrads of game dev, since it was THE premier user-friendly game engine software. This would really screw them over, since most likely they'll have to relearn steps for Unreal (some might be faster, or it might just be painless), but it'll still just... You know.
Welp, time to look into using "Godot" lol
Proposed by John Riccitiello, Unity CEO, former EA CEO, who previously proposed a pay-per-bullet model for FPS. Also dumped a load of high-value shares before the announcement.
As a unreal dev we benefit from unity's existance. We need both engines to compete against each other. Also Unity tends to have a wider range of visual styles and games.
👍👍👍 As idealistic as an open-source game engine becoming the #2 game engine sounds. There are still a lot of resources a for profit company can use to get themselves ahead. We need multiple engines with similar resources compeeting head to head near the same level. Unity dying and increasing the gap Unreal is ahead is a big problem. Think of it, a significant fraction of the games being made by an huge margin, being a monopoly by the one made by a company that still actively makes and profits of making their own games and competing with other game developers plus having their own game store they already play favourites with in their game engine.
It's worth noting that the current CEO of Unity is John Riccitelio- the former CEO of EA. Namely, the same one that proposed making players pay money to reload in Battlefield.
While it'd be a stretch to say this was expected, with the context of who's calling the shots, it's nowhere near as surprising.
let me guess. its about the pay to install thing?
edit: it is.
Well what else would it be about
Those 60k in your example at 2:51 is in fact 1.2% on that first payment (it would be 2% for the subsequent payments) - just thought we could have it in perspective next to Valve's 30% cut :)
godot support openxr for vr wich is way easier to make than unity yes unity still have better support but if godot see that the vr is in demande the contributors will improve it way more since godot is opensource
I've been a Unity developer for over 10 years.
I work professionally as a Unity developer.
Not only do I now fear for my job, I am also moving over to Unreal in the hopes it'll help me find future work.
Sorry to hear that bro, it's a bummer but I'm sure with your experience you will be able to adapt quicker than most to Unreal if you decide to make that change. I guess it's not a consolation, but you will now have access to Lumen and Nanite at least - i'm sure you will be able to have some fun with that!
Unity might not be dead yet but they just swallowed a whole lot of deadly poison. They just lost any trust or credibility in the gaming community. New indi dev teams will not go for Unity after this, even if they take drastic measures like replacing high management and rolling back all the changes, it would be a huge uphill battle to regain the trust the just destroyed.
Hey @Thrill, what do u think of the Contact Gloves? I'd like to give you my opinion as I just received a pair. I worked with other VR Gloves for a few years (Noitom Hi5) so I got a lot to say. Wouldn't mind sharing my opinions with you.
Honestly, a Source 2 SDK would go hard right now
When I first heard of the Unity incident I thought my half a year project was just gone, but if games are small enough, it's fine
At least Godot (Open-source game engine) is trying to figure out VR so probably expect more Godot games (both PC and VR) in the future.
I always thought unreal was the Superior engine for ANY genre you develop. They have presets for so many genres and has an amazing free learning course. I hope theres an easy tool devs can use to move as much of their game from unity over to unreal.
UE5 is looking mighty fine right about now, I develop stuff in Unity and I'm considering switching to UE5 thanks to this.
Although I mostly know C#, JS etc C++ would be a new language to learn if I don't want to use their blueprint system.
Decent chance Valve announces the VR hardware during Oculus Connect Keynote next week like they did last time.
Thanks for the news! Excited to see what Valve is up to.
As a VR game dev myself this is crazy to see, lucky for me I headed down the Unreal Engine rout from the start so no migration is required. Also I don't think nanite or lumen will be coming to many VR games any time soon. As of yet we still have no support for nanite or lumen on mobile processors like the quest has. Right now I think it'll be kept exclusive for PCVR and therefore left out of most games.
Wow Thrill, hearing that you're ON THE DEV TEAM for a new VR title is SOO COOOL!! Congrats!!!
Hi there, would it be possible to get an overview of current VR Headsets from you? Like a top tier list or something?
I'm thinking about buying a new one (still using the original HTC Vive) but I can't really decide wether I should buy one now (like an Old Index or the Quest 3) or if I should wait a bit longer for Valve making their move.
If there is one person I'd trust to help with this decision, it's you. Would appreciate it. Thanks :)
Meta, etc. need to migrate tools to other engines such as Godot. A FOSS engine isn't going to pull this crap and if the devs do, it will just be forked. Plus, the more that migrate to Godot, the better it gets. Community addons are what made Unity good. They can do the same for a FOSS engine.
This really pisses me off because of the large number of projects that rely on Unity, including the VRChat worlds.
I'm so happy that Unity cares so much about their competitors, literally making every other game engine look better.
The thing that makes me angry is that unity employees didn't even agree with this shit. It was the ceo which chose this alone. Because he thought it would be a good idea.
I am sick of ceo's doing things like they know everything.
Actually in Windows if you have a wireless adapter, if you turn on Mobile hotspot in Windows, you can connect your headset directly to it.
Unfortunately Windows puts an arbitrary bandwidth limit on it, but latency is very little.
Thanks so much @ThrillSeekerVR for giving the Unity issue more discussion. Terrible for indie devs and “up and comers”. Also @SadlyItsBradley is the man as you know. P.S. yes please do a NMS PSVR2 video talking about the Echoes update and the amazing power of foveated rendering. What an amazing redemption story for Hello Games. Cheers!
I already read about the Unity hell. It's really sad, what they are doing. I myself started to create a game using Godot at first but wanted to try Unity again after years but with this news and what they are doing i'm not okay with it and won't make the switch and stay with Godot for now. I'm not making a VR game (yet) but still it's really bad for indie devs and such.
But now to your videos. Thank you really much for the new you do! Without your Videos I mostly wouldn't get any news on VR-Stuff. I really like your videos. Keep up the great work!
i still find it hilarious how every company is trying their HARDEST to speedrun losing so much reputation everyone moves on from their products.
But thank you for always keeping us up to date on the vr news, it makes my week when u post these
I just looked on their site and compared to the chart that Thrill posted it looks like they may have updated it. The version I'm seeing has an addition that both thresholds (revenue and installs) have to be met for the tiered rates to apply. Only passing on the observation, make of it what you will.
should make a VR version of something similar to "only up"- but you get different tools along the way to climb different ways kinda like what is going on at 8:24
This sucks a lot and I don't know what the future holds but on the other hand
IM HAPPY THAT YOU MENTIONED GODOT I LOVE IT SO MUCH
honestly VR needs more engine variety so might be bad in short term but good for long term would be interesting to see ue5 vr game. Ideally we get something open source like blender for a game engine so things like this don't happen.
I mean, Half Life Alyx and Into the Radius weren't made with Unity, and those are two amazing VR games that blow everything else out of the water. I feel like Unity has been a crutch for a lot of indie game developers, and the ceiling for what is possible in that engine is very low.
I highly highly highly recommend looking at Godot as an engine instead of unreal. Unreal is also run by a greedy corporation that can change the deal on you at anytime like unity did, Godot is free and opensource, and while I can't comment on how well it's VR support is implemented, it does have vr and xr support. Similavr is building their VR desktop environment in Godot for example. Godot being free and opensource provides protections against shit like this because if anyone tries to pull something like this the project would just be forked.
Boycott using greedy corporate tolls as the backbone of your own projects, embrace using community developed free and open source tools
Godot somewhat recently went 3D and has VR support. free n good
I actually wonder if this change is in part _because_ Apple was giving so much support to Unity. They thought they could bank on that extra support and the accompanying rush of Apple aficionados that buy Apple's VR. They figure there is guaranteed money in it.
Obviously this would be incredibly short sighted and couldn't be their sole hope of maintaining (let alone increasing) their market share for VR development in particular, but it could very well have given them some extra confidence in going ahead with this pricing plan.
I think a lot of the Unity issues really come down to the question of how they'll be counting the number of installs, and how they'll guarantee accuracy beyond "trust us, bro". The pricing itself isn't nearly as bad as many people are making it out to be, and while it *technically* can end up costing more in fees than it earns in revenue, it's pretty unrealistic scenarios that would lead to that, requiring extremely low-value micro-transactions that have low sell rates. It's based on the assumption that you somehow are earning less than $0.20 per user on average, but also earning at least $200K/yr. On the other hand, Epic takes 5% on all revenues above $1m. While that does ensure that you can't *lose* money, if you have a normal monetization model (particularly if your game isn't free-to-play), Unity would wind up costing significantly less, since worst-case scenario, you're paying $0.20 per install.
One core issue with the pricing is that it's virtually impossible to guarantee unfakable uniqueness on user-controlled hardware. How bad the pricing would be if they solved that problem's basically irrelevant, because not only is it super hard to solve, they have a monetary incentive _not_ to solve it.
Them expecting people to simply just trust them, after all this, is truly incredible.
They tried to come out with an "innovative" pricing model - but its instead predatory and unpredictable. Adobe and Unreal both have better models.
As someone who has actually worked on video games, both vr and non-vr, in Unity, there have been a ton of questionable changes over the years.
Tons of promised new features in the next update, while they let other areas rot or leave it incomplete all together. This change doesn't surprise me. Clearly the higher ups/shareholders only care about their short term profits over polishing their existing product to perfection. This is why publicly traded companies usually go to shit. The constant goal to push for new revenue streams on their existing customers instead of getting more people to use their product...
At long last I have finished 😢. All 181 episodes of tuesday Newsday; finished