My thoughts on the Unity situation.
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- Опубликовано: 30 июн 2024
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📚 SOURCES
Unity original announcement ► / 1701650081403842851
Unity backlash and making changes ► / 1703547752205218265
Unity removes license GitHub repo ► www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comm...
Mobile market share ► newzoo.com/resources/blog/the...
Unity Q2 2023 Shareholder Letter ► s26.q4cdn.com/977690160/files...
Unity Acquisitions ► tracxn.com/d/acquisitions/acq...
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📚 CHAPTERS
0:00 - Hello
0:42 - Unity announces a change to their business model
8:35 - Why and what are installs
12:12 - Changing existing terms of service
14:33 - Why is Unity competing with Unreal?
16:43 - What Unity should focus on
19:08 - Unity vs Unreal Engine leadership
21:33 - Hazel Engine - the plan and pricing
#Unity #Hazel
This happens when *sales people start running companies* , I saw this happening, this literally sucks developers souls.
Yup, this.
And then they ask us, "Why do you hate sales? What did they ever do to you?"
@@Wo0dY101and then us to reply : " thats the point they dont do shit!"
I'd go a step further. As soon as you have non-eng people acting as VPs or PMs, you know your company is in for future tech debt. It is really hard to not grow disenfranchised with some of the stuff you see happen up the hierarchy.
No, this is what happens when a company goes public and answers to shareholders -- Unity went public in 2020. Salespeople are very important, don't give them a bad rep. It could've been accounting that made this "idea" or a c suite.
Prior Unity employee here. They have a lot of management in every area.
They also start initiatives with new employees and when that fails, they move them to other areas that need people.
They hired a metric crapton of people when they went public and had a lot of people doing nothing. Quite literally most of the day is slammed with meetings talking about nothing. This is outside the engine team, didn't work with them so I can't speak to that area.
👍👍!
this is typical of large slow moving companies, the executives think that throwing people at any situation is the solution to everything. So they will bring in more people than actually needed to get something done. And because a lot of those people are all managing the same thing, there is massive overlap and nothing gets done because these managers all have different opinions on how things should be done. This is just my experience working with a large company. ymmv
That's about what I figured, yeah. Typical middle-management holding meetings to waste people's time to make themselves feel important nad hide the fact that they do nothing, same as any generic office/corporate job. Going public was such a bad move on their part, I have no idea why they did that.
it reminds me of that google employee from tiktok whose working day consisted of drinking coffee and attending meetings lol
"Our company is failing due to having too many people who do nothing, what should we do?"
People whose only job it is to be in meetings all day: "Maybe make more meetings about it?"
Managers: "I could do something about it, but I can only do that if I have more underlings in my little kingdom. I need at least twice as many as Steve, that smug bastard."
I was also pretty shocked to find out that Unity has like double the employees of Epic Games. Seems like the right move should've been to cut costs rather than try and raise revenue.
They tried that and kept cutting developers
Would've been better actually using their resources and giving them a chance to get out a big Unity update instead of incremental yearly changes
Unreal actually has around 350 employees. Unity has thousands. It's insane.
@@typistkid9012 That's due to all the acquisitions they've bene making over the last few years. Epic has made acquisitions but they've been on the smaller scale of things and mostly have been services like Artstation and Quixel. There is something to be said to keep your core business manageable and to buy companies that fit the company culture.
Unity Workers Disagree
Unity having 2x employees compared to Epic is insane.
With 25% of the features as well...
That's because EPIC is a game company that also makes an engine.
Unity is an ad company that also makes an engine.
At least their new pricing method will impact lower quality high exposure ad and microware game developers more than higher quality game publishers.
@@Altrue well really EPIC is still an engine company that happened to make a test game that became the most famous game to the point most of their profits are from the game.
This is hilarious. This is literally every single engineers opinion on this.
Just total incredulity and awe at the stupidity of it.
Not even every engineer-- it goes across departments. Anyone who's held a phone for more than ten seconds and had to pay for something before stopped to think "Wait, does this mean the costs go up if I redownload it?" in _seconds._
I'm so sick of publicly traded companies. I don't use Netflix anymore because of their recent shenanigans. And you see it happening over and over. When a public company isn't constantly growing and growing and growing, the CEO gets booted. Nobody can grow forever, but investors don't care, because once the dividends dry up they can always just sell before the company self-destructs.
But what happens first is "scraping the bottom". Trying to suck the clients dry. Unless they have a monopoly, that's usually the beginning of the end.
This is one of the few problems I have with the current financial system we have that I think most people are completely apathetic to. These companies structures are incentivized to implode eventually rather than develop organic and sustainable products that breed competition and innovation and stability. Capitalism helps to supercharge innovation initially but then the "shares" and sales driven mantra ends up ruining so many good things. Over the last 30 years I have seen so many examples of this. Most of the time it is because the people in charge who are making all the decisions and raking in the bulk of the profit have absolutely no idea what they are doing. Not all of course.
@@DT-GDS fun fact: during the 1980s (more towards the end of it) the purpose of companies as understood by "top" CEOs
before it was to provide services at reasonable prices while making a profit to reinvest into said services
since then it is to make as much money for their shareholders as possible
Unity *was* profitable when they were selling per-seat licenses and just doing their thing as a game engine company. It's when the VC money really got involved and they started chasing growth at any cost to eventually IPO (including buying up tangentially related companies to turn into PaaS) that they lost their small (but respectable) profitability.
Fiat Zombification is techs greatest cancer.
I think the key to Unity vs Unreal's pricing models is the feeling that Unreal aligns their success with your success. 5% royalty means if you do well, they do well. Unity seems to not care at all whether you're profitable, whether you make a good product, they are getting their money either way.
This. This is what people are scrambling over but no one has said it so clearly that I've heard. What a succinct and lucid explanation. This value difference is the source of every other problem people are complaining about.
Unity take 5% on sales over $1 million over 12 months
It would make so much more sense if instead of downloads, they said "units sold". Still a bad idea to have a flat price instead of a precentage rate, but far better than "instals", which is such a terrible way of going about it..
I'd have taken giving Unity a % of sales. That would've been fine. Might've meant profits would be less for me, but it would've been fine.
I think unity wants to make an ad network because that what they spent 4billion on acquisition
Problem is Unity is in one part targeting the mobile market. Where you could argue a free game is not a "unit sold."
Royalties suck ,but sure, it's better that whatever this is.
Trying to claim those free to play games money like genshin
I wish you the best of luck and success both with hazel and your game. Really hopeful for hazel 1.0 release.
Might I suggest for Hazel adding a feature bounty system so that people could pay for potential features they might want for Hazel?
Can you tell me how to use Hazel engine
?@@cnitrotimes
@programmer_uk 1. turn on computer 2. install 3. use 4. profit
@@m0-m0597👌
Hazel is shareware godot is freeware. I don’t see a reason to hype hazel if not only for following the development videos. Which you will have more quality of them in Godot domain.
I'm still trying to figure out 4D matrix manipulations. Thank you for bringing the complexities of Unity's pricing structure down to a level even I can understand.
I love how the tempo of this video gradually increases, like storm clouds slowly gathering. Actually I was kind of afraid at the start of this video that this was going too easy on Unity.
I googled the number of emploees at unity, and it is crazy that they have 7700 employees. But, just a few years ago, (2020) they only had 4000 employees, so they have nearly dubbled in size since the start of the pandemic
Head count targets are the latest in corporate excuses for more shareholder money. It's one of the things that absolutely destroys a business.
On wikipedia it is stated, that they had 2000 employees in 2018. That means they also doubled from 2018 to 2020 as well. Seems like thy expended the company a bit too fast
Contrary to how it seems. Unity the company does not just make the engine. Only 1k employees work on the engine.
How a game engine company could be less profitable than a game engine made by a community is amazing. Unity is used everywhere, it had tons of monetization services, but somehow still incurred a loss.
It be interesting to put out a poll for your Patreons to see if access to the source code vs access to other content/ supporting the development is a big factor for them.
Yes, why does Unity need so many people?
I guess it is needed to support multiple render pipelines. Not to mention the countless packages and tooling that Unity "claims" to provide. I say claims because they will stop development and ditch a lot of it. Unity has a prioritisation problem that is of massive scale. The truth is that the overwhelmingly many packages don't even help developers and seems like a marketing gimmick for amateurs.
They need to get profitable quickly and they should probably do it through reasonable monetisation or by introducing new streams of revenue that don't add too many employees. They could layoff too, but I guess that too will be a PR Nightmare. I always hated when people complained about how Unity is bloated and they should have few and focused options. I was like figure out what you need and then you can keep the bloat to minimum by importing fewer packages. But, bloat also means way too many engineers to support all kinds of tooling.
Moral of the story is that you cannot be everything to everyone. It is important to realise this quickly before things get out of hand.
It's called a pump and dump. You basically make the company look as valuable as possible, go public, then sell all your shares before reality hits.
@@blitzkreig4887 its so odd because unreal engine has multiple render pipelines as well in addition to secret sauce shit like nanite and lumen. as well as unreal engine has a ridiculous amount of packages and plugins.
@@peterino2 I am not in a position to perform a comprehensive (or even objective) comparison. But there is serious bloat in Unity. Way more than what is needed. There are multiple tools for similar tasks. Maybe they need to host these tools for their clients. Maybe they have a over-enthusiastic project management that keeps increasing the scope of tools. Difficult to say at what level the leaders are out of touch, but they are. An experienced game dev knows that you need constraints in game dev. Feature dump is the best way to kill a game/game engine.
@@blitzkreig4887 A lot of those employees are probably not directly working on the engine, but are part of Unity's services team which they have a lot of. Running the asset store, the cloud services, their ad platform etc and they also merged with IronSource. So the large majority of employees have nothing to do with the engine. In-fact there were some layoffs in the engineering team not long ago. When you are a public company, growth is all that matters to shareholders and having a large cache of employees that you can discard when the share price is a little soft is what they consider a "good thing". They can just let go %10 of those users, then hire more people the next year and keep churning that way. Epic doesn't need to do that, they are a private company and they hire the best to work on their engine.
What I'm seeing here is that if I got 10M installs (which is still low considering some games having billion downloads in 1 mobile platform) and only got $200k revenue on a f2p game, then Unity would bill me $240k so I'm left -$40k profit.
This is like Unity indirectly telling me to put a predatory mtx on my game otherwise I'll be one of the greatest idiots that their CEO considers to be.
Unless you use their ads platform, in which case they don’t charge you at all
@@jesuschris9543so they hold you at gunpoint if you use their engine to make a standard mobile game - either go bankrupt or use our ad platform, and this change is retroactive. Great job Unity
Tbh if you got 10m installs and you'd only make 200k, something is very wrong with your business.
Thats so dumb what are they even thinking.
@@TheDiepzone For a mobile F2P game that's not big at all. Install doesn't necessarily means play, people can just try it for a bit and then uninstall it and reinstall it again and so on.
Honestly so far this is the most amazing take on the situation.
Yan I love your insights into the industry like this. I've heard takes about the Unity situation from WAN show and the like but your first-hand experience in the industry really helped break this situation down into its most important and digestible parts.
I'd be interested to see more industry knowledge type videos from you. For example, I've never quite understood how triple A game companies organize and streamline their processes at such a massive scale like how you briefly mentioned at 15:47, could be an insightful video topic!
You touched on it briefly but I feel the reason a lot of people are upset is the shadiness with the TOS. There was originally a section in the TOS stating that the current version you are using eg. 2022.X would have a static pricing model that would never change. They removed that section from the TOS then deleted their TOS leading developers to infer that they want this to be a retroactive change to every version of Unity rather than just the new ones. I'm no lawyer but I don't feel this should be legal. Thomas Brush put it a very good way: "Imagine Papa Johns charged you $1 for every pizza you've ordered in your entire lifetime." It just feels like something you aren't able to do, and the fact they did this intentionally by removing the TOS section, then TOS entirely shows they had malicious intent.
Not to mention the insider trading going on with the CEO and many higher-ups selling stock before the announcement went live.
Hey, I am an UE5 engineer and i want to wish more feature like networking, like Lockstep, state sync etc. i think now making game is fine, but networking was still worse in UE5
unity networking is bad as well if you want update 64516 varieties at once you need write your one solution and compresion. I like that Unity rewrite stuff so it works on almost all hardware (when you want to get laptop and simply write some code, unreal sadly needs more resource and better gpu and working only on main pc can be less productive or sometimes annoying), godot do not work with older laptops.
The fundamental difference between UE and Unity is that Epic is a games company who let's you use their engine whereas Unity is a game monetization services company who happens to have an engine to sell. I don't see how you can make the best engine with that cart-before-the-horse mentality. The fact that their cancelled their own internal game project really should have been the nail in the coffin for Unity. This is just flogging the dead engine.
I really hope you can make a profitable open-source software company like Blender Foundation. As for Unity, their proprietary data technology makes their software sound like a spyware
There's been talk of Godot one day being the Blender of game engines, and that view was held before Unity messed up here, clearly, there's a long way for Godot to get that status, but maybe this is the moment it needed to shine, especially if they start getting enough investment and resources thrown at it to really develop the engine to do what gamers want of it.
Another factor, a lot of the issues we are seeing with Unity, the same thing could happen to other engines like UE5, especially if they become too dominant in the industry, which they quickly are becoming.
I also do wonder how much of a pause this is giving many developers in trusting of closed engines, after all, if you were a developer, would you really want to invest years into a project, only for them to screw you over? Open source seems like the way to go, you won't have to worry about that, there's no fees or restrictions, and you have full access to the engine so if you have the skill set, you could change the engine or help to develop it to do what you want.
Yea that would be great!
@@paul1979uk2000 Epic Games is 40% owned by Tencent and their shares could increase in the future. We have seen it happened to Adobe, Autodesk and Unity. It will only be a matter of time before Epic Games start to capitalize on their win against Unity and other big 3D game engine companies, by increasing their prices in the future.
Remember about their drama in the 2000s where Epic was deliberately withholding features and support for UE third party licensees so that Epic's first party games would look and run better?
Another notable wrongdoing was their intentional breach of contract with Apple refusing to pay the stipulated percentage for in-app purchases in Fortnite. When Apple retaliated by removing Fortnite, Epic Games was quick to release a video trying to manipulate and agitate their Fortnite user base to exert pressure on Apple
@@paul1979uk2000Unreal compets in the high tech AAA game engine market, you do not really want to piss off big studios. And some of those big studios could just make their own engine, because they have money for that.
It literally is going to be spyware it sounds like. How else do they know every time your game is installed? They're literally injecting some code in your game that phones back home to a C&C center.
I feel like their thought process was that they wanted a cut of mobile game profits, but mobile games are often free, and they might not want to do what apple does (take a cut of all purchases in app, etc), so they then came up with the brilliant idea to take a cut every time it is installed, and then somehow ignored/forgot about all the downsides and ways to abuse that.
yup
when Genshin Impact made $4.5 Billion, and Unity could have for their share only received $1,800 for 1 pro licence.
You mean a salesperson tried to apply their idea of economics without having any understanding of how the games community works and operates? Imagine that.
people gotta understand that in a public company the CEO can't reaaaaaally steer the ship that much, the board has a huge influence in how things go... so it's not just a matter of removing the guy and things will be fine, for it to be going in this direction it means the board itself is corrupt
no, a money extraction scheme to charge developers for installs 100% came from the man who suggested charging players a dollar to reload their gun
@@jamesbrooks9321oh I'm sorry if I wasn't clear... I don't doubt for a moment that the guy is 100% onboard with this nonsense and probably was his idea, he's slimy and horrible... my point was more that it's not just him, the problem is even worse and more widespread
The CEO has more influence than you might think. Just look at Microsoft (Gates to Ballmer to Nadella).
Not to say the board isn't accountable as well (I have my opinions on VC / publicly traded companies / shareholder value), but I think it's well deserved to point at least a few fingers at the CEO for this one.
I agree with you entirely. Pretty much every point you've made. Why 7000 employees? Get rid of 1000 of them and they are likely profitable and don't need to do any of this. Epic is just smarter, all around. When Epic opened it's asset Marketplace, they started at 30%, the same as Unity. Few artist put their products there, so Epic asked us why. Soon after, Epic announced a 12% commission rate on the marketplace, the lowest in the industry, saying it's just enough to cover costs, and do a little development with. They understood that the Marketplace helps users, and the company. Making a big profit on it wouldn't further their goals but hamper them.
Keep in mind that Epic has a competing store to Steam and that is the real reason they like to drive developers there. They are willing to take less money on it as selling the engine is not their main source of income.
@@deanwilliams433 Again, it just shows how smart Epic is. To anyone with a brain, Steam is charging far too much, and pretty much anyone could do the same for less money. Of course, not everyone will have Steam's reach, but that is tackled with time.
It sometimes feels like Unity develops every feature to about 80% completion and then abandons it to chase after the next shiny thing.
I agree that Unity does not have to compete with Unreal, and its technology is not as amazing as Unreal. However, at the end of the day, Unity is not a bad engine, and you can make a good-looking 3D game with it. Still, Unreal is easier to use for creating visually impressive games, even for indie or solo developers.
If working with a team in Unreal projects was a little bit better, maybe there is no other engine that could compete with it. Additionally, being able to write code in C++ is a significant advantage in my opinion 😁
Not everyone cares about photorealistic graphics and that's the only thing Unreal is good at. Unity is a way better overall engine and that's why it's the top choice outside of 3d AAA games.
@@theairaccumulator7144 Having used both engines: No Unity is not the better overall engine. It was cheaper for a long time, but that's about it.
@@theairaccumulator7144 yeah I literally see people making like ps1 style games in unreal and I'm like whyyyy, you're just artificially bloating the game size and hardware requirements for literally 0 reasons, you'd be way better off using godot or unity for that sort of thing, imo unreal should only really be used for games that actually require the features unreal offers compared to other engines
@@anchorlightforge Excellent, thank you for mentioning Nano, I haven't heard about it. Good tool / option to have in our toolbox.
@@anchorlightforge true I mean a basic raylib game that does nothing but display a window is only about 1mb but in that case you're left doing a lot of things yourself, I mean raylib doesn't even have an entity/game object system built in, you have to do all that yourself. But it is one of the more light and optimized options out there so if hardware backwards compatibility is important to you and you aren't making a particularly demanding game to begin with it can be a decent option
My thoughts on the Unity situation: here's a hazel link
Always Be Closing
actually, if you look at the pricing: if someone makes a 5-15$ indie game, then the amount of money they'd make would depend linearly on the install count, since 100% players make 100% income. BUT, if we're talking about f2p games, and specifically mobile market, the 5% of the players make over 90% of the income. Thus, f2p and mobile developers would be hurt even more, than indie developers.
They DO understand their target market, and these per-install costs target exactly that
😅 i do not think you have played that much mobile games to say that they earn form every player i mean they run advertisments(20cents-1 dollar) per adds watched. Also they are not all pubg . Most games are like give me 5 dollars and take this one shot kill with 1000 rpm and slay everyone.
The prices didn't really hurt any developer. At least, not yet. Most people raised concerns because of 3 issues:
1) If they've introduced this fee, they can and most likely will raise it at their whims' desire
2) Unity did not consult its developers (including the large companies), and pushed on despite backlash from a majority of its employees. This was a blatant disregard for its commUnity
3) They backhandedly changed their ToS to remove the clause that protects users using older version from being affected by new ToS
@@pro_gammerd.k.-ed4hj they didn't say "mobile games earn from every player"- they quite literally said the exact opposite
As a Unity developer, I've worked with various companies that have requested both large and small games and apps using Unity for platforms like WebGL, mobile, PC, as well as VR, AR, and XR. I require enhanced graphical capability. I hope Unity continues its plans to enhance the engine's graphics fidelity and flexibility because my career and roles at these companies depend on it.
UNITY, ever since they went public, stupid decisions is all they ever made. Severe employee bloat, pointless unused company acquisitions, etc... I'm more than certain that UNITY can be ran with 200 employees max. like 100 engineers, and the remaining to handle other parts, like marketing, sanitation, HR, etc.
Companies going public is their doom.
I really like the points you are bringing up. Most people seem to be saying that "yes unity needs more money but this is the wrong way to do it", but you bring up a good point which is that Unity needs more money because it's horribly bloated and mismanaged
Wow, that was a quick response! You're speedunnin' it!
My guy THE MOMENT that Hazel has a release I am jumping ship and learning it! I am constantly amazed and impressed with the videos you release on it and I want to see you succeed!
How can their operating cost be that much? Thats insanity.
... holy shit they have how many employees?
Doing what? What the fuck are they all even doing?
They bought weta??
What the fuck is going on over there?
@@sacredgeometry They wanted to win against both mobile and Unreal, and invest 110% into three different markets while rolling out first party AI tools. The problem is they only have 100% and this is a math fail. But they also thought runtime install fees were a good idea, so at least their math is consistent I guess.
@@anchorlightforge That still doesn't explain why their operating cost is so high and why they have 7,700 employees.
Even after acquisitions. Even after expanding into new sectors and targeting different markets.
Even after all is said and done thats still at least 60% more staff than they should have.
@@sacredgeometry I guess that's what happens when your company wants to add value to its IPO and build stock. It's frustrating, I'm inclined to agree. And sadly the layoffs usually target the developer branches.
Word is Unity's probably going to have something EULA related to share today-- for the sake of fellow devs I hope it's enough to save them, but I have my doubts.
@@anchorlightforge Considering the rate of feature releases either they are working on some big things at the moment or they are not paying the right sort of people.
Something has gone seriously wrong and they need a top down independent audit to figure out why and who is responsible. I have a feeling a lot of the problems are nothing to do with the devs ... but who knows? It could be.
Either way it needs sorting out because they are haemorrhaging money.
Not sure I expected you to make a video on this (I don't feel you had to), but I am glad you did. :)
And in all that "nothing is perfect" you didn't mention Hazel not being perfect.. so I guess that it is perfect? :)
You mentioned that Unity is doing well in 2D and mobile. Its particularly perplexing that the 20c/install model they are going has the biggest impact on their core demographic, since the price per install is lower. Particularly for mobile.
It makes sense to target the core demographic, as that's where the potential money is to be made.
@@deadwingjockey7642 The core demographic turned off unity ads in protest so now they're not even making money off their core demographic lol.
I think this might be your greatest ever video, informative, very entertaining and in the end you could make your point about Hazel pricing. Well done, mate!
Do not forget that Unity did something similar in 2019 (which in fact as part of the backpeddaling after that they made the git repo to track the EULA changes)
I have been eager to hear your thoughts ever since this unity debacle started... Finally, we have been blessed!
TheCherno I learned C++ thanks to your courses, my first Fire Emblem inspired RPG game is going to be made in Hazel Engine.
Holy shitte! I knew I like your videos but an honest take about unity and unreal. Love it. Now how do I give you 100 thumbs up instead of a lousy 1? Excellent job!
7700 employees??? When I worked at Rockstar, we only had 1000 developers worldwide. And that was during the production of GTA5.
17:00 This very very interesting part. Great points. Unity staff have to watch this!
Unity in the last two years feels like a few nice features stuffed together, with all the user interesting parts left out: Stability, performance, usability, etc. I, as an asset plugin dev, followed the package manager debacle and how internal packages are treated differently (and much more nicely) as asset store plugins.
Congrats on your progress with your game engine 😊
I'm so curious about your engine man! I'm an artist not a game dev. But I've been working with videogame for about 2 decades now. I wish Hazel all the luck in the market.
The Unity vs Unreal part is SO on point
There are games in my Steam account I have probably installed more than 10 times over the years because I keep getting back to them and I do not want them taking so much disk space or have a file server just for Steam.. Since the download speeds these days are much faster there is no reason to keep everything installed all the time. The approach they made at Unity was soooo wrong.
Their method potentially makes lower quality and satisfaction games pay more than high quality, higher install retention, and average purchase value games. This could be beneficial for the large-exposure exploitive game creators and titles.
Interesting hearing your thoughts. I think if the fee was per sale instead of install it would make more sense. That is basically how book publishers often do it. But Unity needs a way to automate that calculation as well, if not already.
Also worth noting, from someone who's responsible for a similar engine (not gaming tho): Making games with your own engine not only pushes the engine to new heights and much further because of internal pressure, but it also benefits everyone else, making it a win/win
Developers know this as "eating your own dog food".
That was an awesome and funny off the cuff commentary. The whole Unity chasing Unreal thing and not sticking to what they do best is puzzling now that you have thrown that thought in the mix. Apparently, the making losses was a long term plan for something greater (greater for who is the mystery!), kinda like what Meta is hoping for...it all sounds innocent and admirable...but then I think of Darth Sidious long term plan! All the sweet talk, support, loving democracy...then gotcha. Sounds like a great narrative to base a game on with hmm, Hazel Engine :)
For those who don't know, Unity offers a large amount of products related to game dev, aside from the engine, and that's where they make most of their money, and also why they have so many employees.
Lmao been making games for 14 years have never used anything besides the core engine their tools are shit and so not require that many employees unreal has a more comprehensive toolset and half the employees
lol - that was exactly the first thing that came to mind when I first learned about this a few days ago. "Pray I don't alter it further."
Im making my current game in Unity. I just discovered you and will consider Hazel in the future. Come look what I'm making. A tilemap editor would be pretty important to me.
"This is not a news channel. This is a 'Cherno puts out whatever he wants channel'. " 😂
Best disclaimer I've heard, lol.
I love how you managed to keep it together for about 10 minutes until you lashed out at them XD
Unity has had ambitions far beyond what more than a per seat license model could ever float, given their billion dollar+ debt they had to change their pricing model at one point, chickens coming home to roost and so on. This was always going to be an uncomfortable situation, they decided to make it even more so with a complicated pricing model.
When your engine is in a good spot and you have solid customers it would be kind of interesting to have a video about how different business plans will work for different people.
From my understanding, there are two obvious models for a game engine. A regular fee for using the engine on a pay me so I can deliver basis. And use it for free but if you cash out I'm getting my share like Unreal. And well we have EA, Blizz, and Ubisoft with their own engines as they needed to build one historical.
Your model of free-to-use but pay-to-participate is interesting: pay me to make you a better dev basis. Probably free to build games and open-source code but a revenue share and paid courses/certificates would make a good model.
What software do you use to zoom and annotate the screen when explaining things?
I know it was already asked and you mentioned it in some video, but I can't remember where.
One thing as well is Unreal works off a license model, where as Unity is a subscription. Thats how they are able to retroactively do these changes. With Unreal, you own the license to the engine which you released your game on. Even if they decide later to change their fee structure with say Unreal engine 6, you still own your license to 5.2. You still would have to pay 5% after a mil for that game in perpetuity and for any game or DLC released by your studio under that license.
With Unity, every time you pay your subscription fee, you are agreeing to the new terms. So the two business models are very different.
Unreals model is very standard in a B2B relationship, business to business. Its a big reason why a lot of larger studios opt to use Unreal over Unity. Unity's terms of service have always been very vague and you can't in good conscious run your business and invest all that time and money into something as critical as your projects engine without knowing what the next 3-5 years will be; and have an airtight contract you can fall back on and not face a rugpull like what Unity has done.
Thank you for painting the whole picture. I think mentioning the internals of each company is very important to predict the future success of the company. Unity seems like a sinking ship to me, where its passengers try to make as much money as possible before reaching for a lifebelt. I believe VR / AR apps will play a major role in the future with Unreal Engine being one of the main tools for that technology. This is also a vision that Tim Sweeney himself pointed out.
I'm crying LOL there was something so satisfying watching you lose your mind over this the way basically everyone has been.
As of right now, Unity has stepped back quite a bit on the new pricing model and from memory, I believe they're making it so that it only applies to a certain (currently the newest?) version of the engine and won't be applied retroactively or to older versions. Which is great, but... the trust has been broken, and the damage has been done. The great thing to come out of this, is that now developers have ample time to comfortably switch to a different engine.
It's very good to talk about it given that you are about to release your engine xd
Have a friend there, they basically have an army of game devs outsorced to companies using unity
This makes some sense, if they act as an employee reservoir for many smaller companies that need full time support sometimes but not always. Hopefully more insiders will speak up.
It's crazy to have so much confirmation coming from other people. I guess executives really are completely out of touch with their company's product and user base. I hope to see more engineers getting promoted to C-suit from within in large companies as time goes, people should understand their clients and the products that they manage.
No matter how much you earn, if you're spending uncontrollably enough, you'll loose money
Which is why it's important to manage your own finances too
Well, I can explain the dev count at least:
There is this phenomenon in programming, that the complexity of the solution doesn't scale with the task itself, but with the amount of people working on it.
This means you'll get enterprise fizz buzz if you throw more than 50 engineers at it.
If management doesn't know about this basic fact, all they will see is that even 50 engineers are not enough to complete this task in a fast and effective manner.
Hence they increase the head count even more.
And if the employees don't know about this, the result will be that they think that this is necessary too.
They are working their 40-hour work weeks and stuff just doesn't get done.
Of course, they would appreciate help if that's the reality.
The obvious way of escaping this reality is just having classic "2 pizza teams" or "Dunbar number" teams or whatever you want to call them.
Then you let them work for 2 or 3 months and check back if they could accept more people.
Combine this with self-managing teams and you eliminated all the unnecessary communication overhead.
But this will require letting people go... A lot of them... And they will not like losing their job.
So if they know that they will be fired (probably), they will not argue against the current system.
You're awesome Cherno, thanks!
I would be interested to hear your goal for where you want Hazel to wind up, like, are you trying to make it capable of those super crazy graphics that unreal is capable of, or are you looking at making something more unity tier, you know, just where is the bullseye
14:35 to me it seems like the main reason unreal and unity are compared to each other as competitors is mostly for historical reasons, iirc back when Unity came out there weren't too many options for pre made 3d engines, much less pre made 3d engines with a built in editor. The 2 big ones that I personally can think of that were around at the time were roblox and unreal, and well people sure weren't going to be making any money off roblox games back when unity first released so that option was pretty much already off the table. There were a lot of editorless engines around at the time, most notably the idtech engines, but having an editor to work with makes things so much simpler that sadly those never really caught on outside of source ports, imo it would have been really cool to see someone take something like the doom 3 engine and turn it into a full editor suite but sadly that never happened and we had to wait until godot to get a good open source 3d engine with an editor
Dude, I love this. The first two things I said was "wtf do they need 7000 employees for" and "pray I don't alter the deal further". You have such a clear take on things. And Unity should not competing in the 'HD game' space is also something I'm always saying. They just can't seem to get their render pipelines and ECS stuff finished and documented, and then (I can't believe it was over 3 years ago) Unreal 5 is announced with Nanite and Lumen and it was clear: Unity suddenly jumped from having about 80% of the render quality of Unreal (with some effort) to ... 20%? Having invested years and years into Unity made me hope it would somehow turn around. I was very hopeful when they hired Mike Acton in 2017, but it didn't work out.
18:23 Sounds like when someone new to gamedev is planning a game, and keeps adding things to it.
True!
It's a feature creep.
Folowing up on patreon could we have access to all development videos of hazel engine?
Companies acquiring other companies is often used to raise stock prices and get CEOs raises.
Whats the direction of your game engine? in terms of going mostly 2d/mobile games? 3d/high fidelity games? or VR/AR??
I think they are focused on Desktop/3D
Unrelated to the video but I only just realised halfway through it that the chair in the background is identical to my office chair. What a coincidence. 😂
My take on unity situation is that I started learning C++ to get to a level where I can use either UE or Hazel to create my dreams :)
Btw are you planing to continue the ray casting series after the hazel release?
I really appreciate your more passionate talking approach on this topic. I had my five year anniversary at my current games job a month ago and this month I got a little emotional breakdown, because I felt the last five years of working as a Unity partner, and for Unity solutions directly have been just thrown in the shitter.
There's so many nice employees in the company but the fact that no one interdepartmentally from the dev team knows really what's going on elsewhere and now the news of the higher ups being out of touch is super disheartening.
Whenever I see a new feature being introduced at Epic and shortly after it is out of preview, I think of the GPU Lightmapper in Unity which is in preview since 2018....
Unity is not keeping up with anything on the Market. There's absolutely friendlier options for mobile. Native UI and UI builder is super inflexible. Input system is better but still default events take up lots of performance. Every corner on this engine is not amazing, yet still 5 years of amazing Devs have gotten me to love the engine.
Ill be going back to your C++ tutorials now. Thanks for the video!
Nice short rant starting at 11:31 👍
Well, it matches good with the CEO, who said years ago something like that players could also spend real money for ammunition in a shooter to reload their weapons. It matches somewhat to paying for every installation. It is pretty much the similar mindset behind it.
You have here some really good points. I also think the better direction would be focusing where Unity is strong and reducing also their employee numbers.
Hazel sounds dope and I'd be happy to pay more on a one-off to support for sure. Looking forward to it for sure. Unreal lover here.
And as for Unity, I'm not gonna even think of working with that engine.
Hi Cherno, I need to buy a laptop for python develop and CI/CD which my need to run VMWare Workstation for several virtual machines. Which laptop will you suggest? Thank you!
I am no developer, I do work in IT but thats about it, I mainly did IT servicedesk and software support. I have seen multiple videos on this now and thiis video kind of solidified my thoughts on the situation.
Unity is being very odd right now, tey had a good thing going. Unity is, as far as i'm aware, much better at Crossplatform titles. UE is not, its also a much heavier engine to run in general and much harder to optimize your game in compared to unity. Furthermore, Unity is out of the box better for VR games, and with the plethora of VR related SDK's that are available on Unity's marketplace it becomes a no brainer for this market as wel, as is evident by the multitude of VR games that run on Unity. It baffles me they didn't just double down on this This could be their bread and butter.
This move seems weirdly malicious on purpose. Becuse its often not the change that causes people to riot but the communication around it. and this... this was not good communication, they dropped it liek a bombshell and are now backpeddling. no thought was given to this at all. its a VERY out of touch move.
I don't know about game industry, but in mine nowadays in a typical team there are 3 programmers, 2 product owners, 1 scrum master, 3 project managers, and some more bullshit roles sprinkled around
Unity is just like that!
If we could believe some people that are saying that they worked on Unity.
Solid rant, Yan. The mind boggles.
I imagine the runtime will reference the UUID for the computer stored in the UEFI to generate a unique id per machine. Probably hash that and send the data up to their database, and that would determine if it is a reinstall or new install. If bad actors wanted to spam the licensing counts, In theory someone could script creating a virtual machine with a new UUID, then os install, then game install, then game first run, delete virtual machine and repeat. A bad actor could also debug the URLs for their licensing service, and build a synthetic licensing service that users could access with a dns rewrite on their PC or home firewall. This would artificially keep the install counts down, and could be defeated with an signing mechanism. Hopefully with 7k employees there are a few security people on the team for licensing, and they have already thought of a mitigation for these two scenarios.
Im old enough (and jaded enough) that every time I hear a conpany say "we hear ou and are taking our concerns into consideration" i translate that as "here's some lip service until this blows over, we're not changing anything because you all will forget in a couple of months". In a year the survivors will be paying Unity their stated rates, people will occasionally gripe, and - like EA or Nestle - the company will laugh its way to the bank. Individuals might behave with rational self interest, but the consumer market is more likea flowing fluid that won't respond to calls for apending in your own best interests.
What you said about Hazel, this basically can mean (not necessarily that it does) is that you won’t be interested in the engine development unless somebody pays for its development. Whenever someone wants an enhancement you will be interested in not doing the suggested stuff, but will rather prefer someone paying you to access the engine code and do it himself, or pay you to implement the suggested feature and release it for everyone in the next engine version. This is not me saying that it will necessarily be so, this is how business works. No money no honey.
LMAO I love this off-the-cuff candid rant. You're very enjoyable to listen to rant actually
spot on. cheers!
Wow, more angry cherno!! I love the fire
Unreal in reality is probably a fair amount under 5% rev share unless you make a lot of money. I believe the first $1,000,000 lifetime gross revenue is royalty free, but additionally the first $250,000 gross revenue each quarter is royalty free as well.
I'm writing this only 8 minutes in, but the wildest part of the pricing model is that there are plenty of mobile games or whatever which... make enough money to be charged, but less than $0.20 per install or whatever, whether that's free games that run adds or just games with a limited micro-transaction model where the vast majority of players pay nothing and like... these people can be charged more than their revenue under this model.
It's funny when you mention that Ex EA CEO is probably the core problem XD
Thanks for the info that the future of Hazel will be free, I'll sure to give it a try even tho I'm using Unity now >,<
Would've love to try it now, but need to save up if I want to be a patron :v
I assumed they used the term “per-install” because people might construe “per-sale” to not include free games (with or without in-game purchases).
Unreal has blueprints which is an easy entry for game programming. They released Fortnite editor which will attract many young people who at the moment want just to tinker, but soon they might be serious programmers.
Tim Sweeney reminds me of good times when making games wasn't all about money, but creating what enjoy others.