Unity Are In EXTREME Trouble
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 21 авг 2024
- Just about the entire industry, from other engines, to developers and publishers, is outraged by this horrible development from Unity.
Purchase our debut game, The Pale Beyond: bit.ly/TPB_Steam
Check out The Pale Beyond Collection: store.bellular....
Sources:
x.com/rpgmaker...
• EA CEO John Riccitiell...
blog.unity.com...
/ 1701698313899356461
blog.unity.com...
/ 1701634419092607039
/ 1701598637514715250
/ 1701616388169781415
/ 1701621432894267593
/ 1701685282129539485
/ 1701610687150383299
/ 1701691036832309260
/ 1701621993240739875
/ 1701782194048401591
/ 1701689153476309115
/ 1701715971663425897
/ 1701606205423317181
x.com/GameMake...
/ 1701877174968492220
/ 1701654277461045640
/ 1701619220851617920
/ 1701720278189937099
/ 1701601702766670082
forum.unity.co...
www.axios.com/...
/ 1701892418826617092
/ 1701678249086992478
finance.yahoo....
x.com/unormal/...
tinyurl.com/Ri...
Purchase our debut game, The Pale Beyond: bit.ly/TPB_Steam
Check out The Pale Beyond Collection: store.bellular.games
Unity was clearly going bad over a decade ago.
You guys are fine, you can just switch to Godot for similar projects 🙂
guys right unity has gone downhill for over a decade and the pale beyond sucked
news flash: Unity cannibalizes on game industry and brings it crashing to the ground!
Define cannibalize (a machine or Game industry) as a source of spare parts for another, similar machine. (Unity)
Here begins the rise of Godot.
I was *completely* unaware that a former EA exec is the one serving as Unity’s CEO. That suddenly makes it clear to me why they’d make such a suicidal move for profit…
CEOs usually prove the proverb "shit floats to the top" true.
that same CEO sold stock days before this announcement :)
A guy that uses classy phrases like "fucking around" as a CEO , in an official interview.
A really classy person, indeed. Not even a used car salesman talks like that.
"We'll be bankrupt in a year. But we'll have an EXTREMELY profitable second quarter, giving us time to find other jobs before the collapse. It's a win win."
@@mariuspuiu9555 I kinda hope this is true, so the man has grounds, via criminal charges, to be ejected from the helm of the company. Otherwise their board of directors have proven to be too stupid to see this man sinking their company in real time, as this isn't the first time his EA mindset has been on full display in recent memory.
It blows my mind that their shot at damage control was to say "Guys, we arent gonna count downloads, we will just make it up as we go and send you a bill that you wont have the information or means to dispute". Who the hell do they think they are, a hospital?
Former EA CEO, let's just call it a surprise mechanic huh?
@@Jorendo anymore EA stands for Early Access, not Electronic Arts; i can count the amount of AAA game devs and publishers i consider to be producing electronic art on the fingers of 1 hand; i've been consistently far more happy with indie devs
Regardless of outcome it seems the direction this is all headed is turning Unity into spyware: Always online, constantly sending out user's data.
*American Hospital
hey what can you expect from a third world country like ours
The past few months have shown just how corporations think of their customers and workers.
1. Hasbro decides to screw their community by telling creators, "we want a cut".
2. An Australian property tycoon tells the works that they should be bloody grateful for what they have.
3. And now, just like Hasbro, we have Unity telling creators, "WE WANT A CUT", and a bloody big cut at that.
Yea, F them.
For corporations only one type of customer counts: those who buy their stock.
EVERYTHING else is there to be stepped on.
The bad thing is all they had to do was ape Epic's process ("first million is yours and we want 5% of your revenue after that") and nobody would bat an eye, but by the install without regard to whether that install is a sold copy? Charged to the dev and not distributor? No actual explanation of how this is protected against abuse/weaponization/exploitation? Wishy-washy disingenuous responses to real concerns? Basing it all on blind trust?
This was a bad idea implemented badly for bad reasons.
@@OddlyIncredible Epic's model wouldn't neccessarily work for Unity as they primarily eye the mobile market and since the merger with Ironforce even moreso as they are going for ad revenue rather than anything else. But the way they chose to deal with it is just bizzare and mind boggling. Not even evil and greedy, but plain idiotic.
On the one hand, hard to fathom this really happened., on the other though, between the IPO, the merger and hiring the guy who earned EA the title of "worst company in the US" (not just once, but 3 out of 4 consecutive years) as the CEO no less, I guess no one can really act surprised now.
The thought of what this will do to indie games and devs is downright vile. They deserve every lawsuit coming their way.
They will get destroyed in court.
John R: LET ME DIVIDE AND CONQUER YOU INTO 90% and 10%.... Unity devs, "YOU ARE DIVISION JOHN! WE ARE UNITY! WE ARE THE 100%!"
Has to be the most absurd decision I've seen in a while. Just guaranteeing people don't use your engine in the future.
Sounds like a bunch of MBAs who looked at what Wizards of the Cost tried to do some months ago and said, "Hey! That's a brilliant idea."
So uh... How long do you think it'll take to go from review bombing to install bombing?
And even when they walk this back - you can never trust unity in the future now. Which also means only developers that are bound to unity already will be there, so a smaller unity userbase, less income, less updates to unity, more greed on their end to exact money from whoever remains.
@@Deyzspyinonu
Only reason I haven't fully uninstalled unity is because there's some assets in there that I can port to unreal.
How NOT to compete with unreal engine
Even if they walk it back, everyone, current game devs and game devs coming into the field are going to know Unity's true colors and may end up considering not using Unity for future projects. No matter what, the damage has already been done.
Don't worry, the CEO apparently cashed out stocks just before this, so it's totally fine.
It reminds me a lot of what happened with DnD recently. Even if they walked it back the trust is gone and people will be looking for alternatives, they don't want to be suffering the intense stress again.
yeah there's no going back even if they backpedal the change, everyone now knows Unity can screw us in a heartbeat for literal cents, so why even try? all devs i follow share the same statement, their current project will be their last and they are not going back to unity again.
@@umbaupause That guy is a snake and I wish he stopped going around being this company ruining snake.
@@Elmithiantrue psychopaths run everything, because they don't care who or what their words and actions affect.
This is not just payment plan. This is a weapon. You could literally bankrupt any publisher using Unity just by using a script that installs and reinstall a game with the help of virtual machines.
I think they walked back on that. Now it will only charge for the 1st time a game is installed.
Classic Corpo move. 3 steps forward, 1 step back.
@@MeowLestyeven that wouldn't stop virtual machine abuse. How will they know that those are virtual machines? You can make them show any hardware configuration, which means you could make each VM install show as a different install.
I have my doubts about it even knowing the difference between a VPN let alone a virtual machine
apparently the rust cheating community already figured out the hardeware id spoofing to signal new install
This is the first thing I thought. Write a script to run 20 virtual machines at a time and have them loop installs. You can bankrupt any developer with such low effort... These money grubbing MBAs need to gtf out of gaming. They provide negative value and they need to go back to whatever evil spawn they came from.
There's one thing you didn't mention:
Regardless of the install fees and whether they walk them back or not - how can anyone use Unity without knowing what game-breaking/business-breaking retro-active changes they will come up with next year?
How can anyone starting a new game project accept that risk? Invest time and money into the development of a game, not knowing if by the time the game is ready for release, the rules for doing so will still be acceptable?
They may be extracting money from their "captive audience" - the game already made or in development that cannot easily switch away and change engines - but they are also making Unity unusable for any new game project. This is a short-term money grab, that completely sacrifices any longer term future.
_"This is a short-term money grab, that completely sacrifices any longer term future."_
Welcome to how CEOs at publicly-traded companies work. They are beholden first and foremost to their shareholders, and all concerns other than making those shareholders' numbers go up are secondary, including the long-term viability of the company. This is literally law in most countries - _increasing the company's value to its shareholders comes first, period._
What doesn't help is that the current CEO of Unity is very greedy and very anti-consumer and DGAF how much damage he does or how many people he pisses off, and was largely responsible for EA's terrible monetization practices a few years ago and terrible reputation today. His job is to make the most money possible before golden-parachuting off to the next thing, and he's reasonably good at it.
@@OddlyIncredible The problem is that this will not drive the stock value upwards if Unity loses too many customers. Short-term profits are usually sought only if the management does not see a future with the product. Or the company has made really bad bonus agreements with the management. Most of the stock owners do not care about the short-term value of the stock.
Unity is done as the engine of choice for anyone, indy or otherwise. How does one justify pouring time and resources using an engine from a company that's shown the level of greed displayed?
@@mmikael281 They're not doing that any more. The push for profits above all else is happening across most sectors/verticals and without regard for long-term prospects, even in companies with strong positions and no known weak points that warrant basically betting against long-term viability.
This is a big part of why "greedflation" is such a problem right now - companies all over the world are squeezing both their workforce and their customer base to eke out every last cent of profit for shareholders, the future be damned.
The fact that they are applying this policy retroactively seems like a lawsuit in waiting
Agreed, had they grandfathered in previous users, they MIGGGGGGGGGGHT have gotten away with this, but nope, lawyers are all laughing it up right now as they write up their class actions.
There no way they can pull this 💩 off . This like re -wrote the signed contract after 2 party already sign agreement year before
What do you mean the CEO who wanted to charge players every time they reloaded their gun in Battlefield is responsible for this?! Unthinkable!
I’m sorry, HUH? Please elaborate i need to hear more
Nevermind, i go to the comments too soon
@@crow2989 John Riccitiello current unity CEO was the CEO for EA 2007-2013. He once tried to make gamers pay for every bullet they would fire in an FPS game. During a 2011 stockholder meeting, the ex-EA CEO tried to introduce paid gun magazines in games such as Battlefield during the heat of gameplay.
@@Linkmitch Actual movie villain
@@Linkmitch and it would have worked. Too bad they didn't let him go with his idea
Oh it's THAT guy
And just like that, Unity has guaranteed they’ll become a footnote in history going forward. Unreal Engine 5 is literally right there and now there’s NO incentive to NOT choose it for everything.
unreal engine 5 isnt a good engine to amke 2D games, in that sense unity is still better... but of course there is other 2D motters like godot, or a new engine that rise due to this factor.
but i agree that unity has just make public, the fect they can't be trusted
I have a feeling Epic Games is considering a flipbook upgrade.@@poijnve3912
Not for VR games, but I really hope Unreal gets much better support for that
Godot is a pretty good engine. They do well with 2D to start, and now they're doing 3D as well. And it's free no matter how much $$$ you make.
There's no way this can go through. A friend told me about this yesterday and I thought it was just going to kill free-to-play games made in Unity, but it's so much worse now that I know it's going to be applied retroactively. It just went from disastrous and skips catastrophic straight to cataclysmic.
If you employ an EA management type then you know exactly what's going to happen.
Right? They're one of the most reviled game companies of all time for a reason. Blizz might have the spotlight now, but the EA's old leadership is still around and doing shit like this
Well shit then Netflix is fucked because they hired Activision Executives.
Yes. He'll sell his shares before the announcement.
@@ericneo2 And they are well on their way already if you have been keeping up.
@@matteste Oh yeah I've been keeping up.
Publishers will ban working with Unity games forcing devs to use a different engines. I think Unity just ended their company.
really interesting that Unity's CEO just sold a bunch of stock, too.
even if they completely backtrack on this developers and publishers will see unity as a huge risk, what if they try the same thing again in 5 years? Yes they might have actually just killed the entire business with this, lol.
Maybe not all but the "smaler" publisher are probably already considering this or calculating how much this is going to cost them. If you have published many unity games imagine how big a bill they will get at once or at least in a very short time. All those costs from years of selling games coming back to bite you at once. Not spread out over years.
Good hope they go out of business
You might not heard of it but Unity has been in red for years, they pretty much a high risk bankrupting company. I guess this drastic price change is to pull Unity out of bankruptcy. Regardless, not consumers' problems.
The only question remains is that who allowed an ex EA employee to become the CEO of Unity?
Cancer cells tend self-install themselves to vital organs through “connections”, our good ol' beloved Bobby might change company seats more often that it does his underwear, but you can be damn sure he ain't setting for anything less than the position of grand supreme CEO shareholder of everything.
It's like they thought it was a good idea to put a jackal in charge of guarding the henhouse.
Hey remember bud light
@@peterdenov4898Sounds like humanity as a whole
Shifting the Overton window. Instead of initially offering up a bad deal that would have been rejected out of hand, you first offer an insanely bad deal. Then when you offer the bad deal as a 'concession', it gets seriously considered. Even if that bad deal is ultimately rejected, odds are still good they end up getting more concessions than they otherwise would have.
Not shifting the window, this is ‘door in face’ marketing. Make an offer so bad that the customer slams the door in your face, then say “sorry, my bad, I can do (originally intended bad deal) instead”
This is the only thing that makes sense in this otherwise "what were they thinking?!?" situation.
Had the same thought. Also I think the big squeeze coming from so many companies since interest rates were raised is not a coincidence.
This needs more attention. This policy is so aggressively bad I can’t imagine any other possibility. The issue is, even a severely walked back version of this is still in my eyes so fundamentally evil that I hope others still take the (admittedly painful and likely prohibitively costly) steps to move on from this engine.
@@Dwellerinshadow it deonst make sense either way, cus this can be a shifting the window...
cus you are burning the trust in teh company, it doesn't matter if they 100% backtracked from this detition, they have change the game without any clarification. they have lost the trust of developer, and publisher... this is something you can't recover from lel
That is absolutely insane. Especially in the age of Steam when users can rightfully install games they've purchased to multiple devices and even across upgraded computers.
Also people install / uninstall owned games multiple times on same device because disk space
Not only that, imagine how many times a single user will install a game throughout their life time, because it clearly states "LIFETIME SCALE". This is insane.
@@themurmeli88 what if a competitor decides to download and uninstall your game one TRILLION times on the same PC ? will it make you go bust ? lol
@@davedogge2280 Who is stopping Unity to install games , and make ungodly amounts of money ?
@@scratchy996 nothing really, they could just farm out Unity game installs for 1 license on a PC farm full of virtual machines which ever changing PC IDs lol. Its an absolute joke. I don't like corporations or governments, that's my mantra - loads of constant ever changing problems they create.
This DEFINITELY feels very familiar. The Wizards of the Coast Open Gaming License debacle felt very similar in egregiousness.
Yeah but thankfully we had paizo step up an make it impossible for them to keep their players if they did change the ogl
@@johndoe-je2gi True, and hopefully one of the other engine creators does something similar. Different sort of industry, so I kinda doubt it. But we'll see. Lots of money to be made in severely undercutting competition in a way that is still profitable, id imagine
Yeah Hasbro is who I blame for that one along with the state of MTG
Seriously, why do these companies make these changes almost at same time (at least these 2-3 years). Is there some new law/ regulation or something?
This is much worse but on the same general direction yes.
This feels like a decision made by someone who's not just disconnected from how the video game market functions, but completely disconnected from this plane of existence.
That's psychopaths for you. Born with smaller brains without the parts necessary to feel empathy, they go through life hurting and destroying everything around them. They make up 1% of the population, so... There's a lot of them :(
Even if we developed a cure, I don't know if you could convince a psychopath to take it, since having no empathy is clearly an advantage in a capitalistic hierarchical system. Maybe we could ID it in utero and give parents the chance to terminate? 😐
ahaha :D
Correct. It's a plane.
There's also the legal issue behind retroactively charging people which is something that can and likely will get lawsuits lodged against them
As a customer, it's also great to know that Unity have turned every one of the games developed with their engine into spyware.
Or a gamer: see game makers this is how it feels to be charged after the fact.
It's like being robbed and then forced to pay the robber for robbing you XD You pay for the games you play them then you get spied on/fucked by the Unity owners and i guess a positive or a negative depending on how you look at it you're at least not the only one f-ed cuz at the end of the day the game devs are unwilling acomplices to this.
This sadly happens with quite a lot of installers.
Even Nvidia drivers comes with quite some telemetry - both for the install, install process, and the drivers themselves once installed. No opt-out.
You need something like NvCleanInstall to get rid of the telemetry in the drivers. AMD too has it, but allows you to opt-out on the first install screen.
Shit we all need, the basics - graphics drivers.
It feels quite disgusting.
This really does sound like one of those "threaten something outrageous so that the change they actually plan to make seems more reasonable" kind of plot.
Except what sane studio would stay with this crazy company? You know they'll pull this again in a hear. Really shortsighted of Unity. Less risky to have your employees learn a different engine.
@@elhazthorn918 The problem is for all the games that are already out, you are faced with either pulling out the game (thus losing all futur revenu from it and antagonizing your players) or taking the risk of straight up losing money on the game if people are uninstalling/reinstalling too often.
They probably thought that they had a captive customer base, that Unity is so ubiquitous that people have no choice but to use it. Under that logic then their move makes sense.
Considering everyone is talking about switching to Unreal or Godot they thought extremely wrong.
Perma boycotts the Unity engine until it goes bankrupt. They don't deserve any money.
It's the Wizards of the Coast game plan to a T, even including a clause in the ToS that says if you don't like changes in the ToS you can use the old one.
The closing point about them having captured at least a portion of their userbase just shows how short sighted they are as a company. Sure, they may be able to convert a portion of those currently deep into development into profits in the next year or two. But good luck getting anyone to launch a new dev project at this point using the engine.
I was actually doing a bit of casual research into game engines this year. If this stands I'll NEVER touch Unity. Ever. If there is any chance using Unity might cost me money beyond the one-time sale of my project I'm out.
@@stevedixon921I wouldn't even use it if they went back on this, who says they won't just do it again later?
@@Pihsrosnec Exactly this. They have showed that they're willing to come out and announce something this mind bogglingly bad for developers, who's to say they won't come out with something even worse in the future?
The fact that a lot of large scale developers have unity games means they’re definitely getting Class actions their way. FGO by Type-Moon, and Nintendo alone is probably going to beat Unity back with their history of quick legal action against their profits…
Id bet blizzard would jump in too since hearthstone is probly the most profitable unity game of all time
Wait, fgo use unity for their engine?
@@indexwell6546 yeah apparently, I didn’t expect it either
@@starminer7z746yeah I was gonna comment this
Unity's absurd plan sounds too deliberate when you take into account the CEO is a former EA exec. Sounds like a plan to drive the value of Unity down so EA can buy it for a fraction of what it was worth before.
In a few hours every dev I've worked with has told me they're moving to either Unreal or Godot. Well done to unity I've never ever seen a company self immolate in this way, its oddly and tragically impressive.
bud light moment
This news was just what Godot 4.0 needed. It's decent now!
@@bobsinclair8990 The nice thing about Godot 4 as well is that since it has literally NO cost, like ever, this gives devs much more financial room to rebase their efforts on a new engine. And once it's done, they won't ever have to worry about paying engine costs or having to deal with rando decisions made by extremely out-of-touch execs ever again.
Sadly, they're not self-immolating... FOR NOW. They're aiming at the big boys that use Unity - think Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail. They want that cash, and don't care for the small devs. But this short-term profit will scare everyone from this company in the future. The CEO just wants to line his pockets before bailing out from a dying company.
I am going to use unreal for 3d and Godot for 2d at this point, this was just the last straw of crap they have pulled, never become a publicly traded companie it always ends up crap.
Small Indie Dev here. My friends and I are currently working on a WWII Naval game in Unity, and are a year deep. When you mention a captive audience, you're absolutely right. Our small 5 man studio simply can't afford to move over to Unreal and start over. We *have* to turn a profit or we close, as most indie teams starting out are. So, we suck it up, and deal. It does help we're using a more traditional model, IE: sell the game and a couple DLC down the road.
But provided we succeed, turn a profit and get to make another game, despite this BS? You can bet we're moving right over to Unreal, cause Unity's proven itself untrustworthy, as so many companies keep doing in this crazy industry of ours...
Which is exactly why this is such a short-sighted decision. Game dev takes years, and many current projects may be unaffected, but the next generation of projects won't be using Unity. Makes you wonder if Riccitiello has shorted Unity stock and is actively working to sabotage the company.
There are a few comments here mentioning that there are Unreal tools to help you port the game from Unity. You might want to look into that
@@fredriklindblom7957short term profit over long term sustainability? Brother that's just capitalism
Hope you make a profit and go to unreal, for the love of god don't make your next game in unity they are led by the EA ex-CEO
@@fredriklindblom7957
"Makes you wonder if Riccitiello has shorted Unity stock and is actively working to sabotage the company"
people have noted the guy doing things with the stocks of his company. (one youtuber I know who's noticed is a guy known as T9)
Since he sold a ton of shares, I'll be interested to see if there is a price drop and he buys them back before the walkback announcement, that would be some insider trading right there.
Just the fact that he sold a bunch of stonks prior the announcement IS already considered insider trading cuz that timing sure ain't "coincidental".
He sold 2000 shares. Even taking in the 50k number over the last year. He owns over 3.2 million shares still in the company. Trying to say it was insider trading is a distraction. There is no way anyone is going to say he did insider trading for unloading under 80k worth of his 128,400,000 dollars of shares. He probably just needed to have one of his yachts painted.
Selling the shares right before the announcement should count as insider trading.
The most insane point is that even if you do a sale and de-list the game on Jan 1st people will still be able to download it! People could install pirated or even legally backed up copies on new machines. You get charged PER INSTALL, FOREVER, long after you stopped making money Unity can just decide that their magic algorithm determined new instals and you have to send some sweet sweet money to them... INSANE.
It is going to be heartwarming to see countless devs band together and sue Unity into the ground.
I see what you meant right here, I mean there's 4 reasons why Unity failed against Unreal Engine in the 1st place:
1. Unreal Engine has Nanite Foliage that adapting clusters of model polygons according to distance, making games of this engine run smoother regardless of how high the detail is unlike what Unity gave to
2. Unity is bloated with oversaturaed amount of bootleg mobile games (worst cash grabs that ruined mobile platforms) with more ads which is more controversial to the rest of gaming platforms
3. Absurd management to Unity (as this video above stated) amid its bad optimisations and bug prones (this last half is offtopic but more relatable to this case)
4. Unreal Engine's visual coding (Godot also had it too) makes you game development more flexible unlike the usually hard Unity code language
If distributors are getting hit too, then they're kicking one of the world's biggest hornet's nests - that being Microsoft. They won't just crash and burn, they're going to get slam dunked into the ground at mach 7
@@alyasVictorioUnity did not fail against Unreal, they are focused on different things.
A lot of games are made with unity. Mobile is also a big part, but most of the indie PC games you love are made with Unity.
On point 4, if you mean blueprints, Unity has this system too. These systems are only for prototyping. You will have a hot mess quickly if you try to make your game completely with blueprints.
If you mean coding language, you can use anything you want with Unity. It works with VS and VSCode.
I am angry with this Unity change and looking for a new engine as well, but let us not spread misinformation.
I am VERY certain at least some european companies WILL sue and likely win. At least about the retroactive aspect!
That shit is insane. Moving forward is ONE thing. But I can easily see a number of companies willing to band together for like a class action lawsuit or something. Which could be beneficial actually. As it would set precedent to prevent ANY retroactive bs from just happening.
@@alyasVictorioman what are you talking about? More bug prone? Have you even used either unity or unreal? Game dev at all?
Remember, Unity's CEO is former EA who once said that ''gamers have to pay 1$ each time they reload in FPS''. Lol. You can't take a man from EA, but never EA from the man.
This.
Eat, and I cannot stress this enough, the rich!
Literally came here to make sure someone else caught this. As soon as he said “former EA exec” it all made sense.
The spirit of your comment is good and I agree with your sentiment. But please, bruh. Learn to spell and make basic sense. I had to re-read your comment about five times to understand what you actually meant, which is: "You CAN (you wrote 'can't') take the man out of EA, but you can't take the EA out of the man."
@@d4mephistoit’s not there fault you lack reading comprehension or understand the literal second grade concept of context clues.
You know you're screwed when even GameMaker now looks like a better option now
Hahahahaha 😂🤣
nice joke
Or the Super Mario Bros. Level editor
Hotline Miami was made with Game Maker, what are you talking about
@@KyrieFortune I'm not saying is bad engine (at most I call it limited), but the company behind it is not shine and rainbows either
I'm looking forward to the inevitable discovery/whistleblower reveal that the engine does, in fact, "phone home" in some fashion. And that will make the response to this look like a sniff and a .01-second side eye.
Nah, your missing the real slight-of-hand. The engine doesn't phone home, but they didn't say anything about their other "services."
You should check up on how often Nvidia drivers phone home 😅
Fairly sure it's still taking the top spot on my PiHole.
Speaking as an application software developer, there's no realistic way it doesn't, based on the process they describe. Tracking installs? Tracking first run? Making sure you're not double-counting reinstalls? This stuff taken collectively _requires_ locally run code sending back data in order to use it for billing purposes.
Example: making sure you don't multi-count a reinstall on one specific machine ("only the first install counts") - they'd need a hardware-based machine "fingerprint" for this, and this _requires_ that there be code that generates the fingerprint on the machine (say, on the game's first launch) and sends its result back for storage/comparison. There's no way to prevent double-counting unless you can discern machines from each other, which requires a locally-generated machine ID and a list of known machine IDs to compare against, and you're only going to achieve that with a call home.
I hope that even if they walk it back, EVERYONE stops using Unity. They need to feel the pain from this. Maybe even collapse entirely.
That won't cure the cancer that is the former EA ceo. He will just move to another company and do the same shit.
@@ladeao1552 True. I really hope people dogpile his reputation with this so he can't get any more work
@@ladeao1552 there should be a new law that blacklists failed ceos from ever working in management positions.
It doesn't need to be a law, the companies just need to look at their potential new Ceo's history and ask, 'is this applicant going to permanently ruin our brand?'
The yield of the nuke Unity just exploded on the trust they had with their users is impressive. Nothing could survive that.
Just like Castle Bravo, they completely underestimated the crapstorm they unleashed upon themselves
Even if they walk it back, the fear they'll instil in future developers will last forever.
Anyone that has ever been in a position to make decisions or monetization suggestions at EA should be forced to explicitly let everyone know they are an ex EA executive. With how much software s**cide these ex EA execs are causing it's like a mark of death.
they should get the "black mark"
As a former D&D player I can’t help feeling like I’ve seen this all before… new contract means the big company is trying to drain all the money they can get away with from creators. Only for massive backlash and many to leave their platform. Where have I heard that one before?
In all seriousness this seems like almost exactly what WotC tried to do for D&D and it sucks. I’ll be following this situation to see if they can recover from this massive blunder but the odds are they won’t if you ask me.
Unlike D&D, there are multiple other popular options. Even if Unity completely retracts this change, they've destroyed all trust in their company, and as such have eliminated themselved as a viable option for huge groups of developers.
@@azareii incorrect. there were other popular options with dnd too. do not try to erase history. you've proven you are one of unity's people
Not only that... the same CEO SOLD over 2000 stock in Unity a week before announcing this. Kotaku has an article on this. Looking at the stock after the announcement and obviously the stock has dropped quite a bit. That is insider trading.
Lawsuit in 3,2,1...
@@Josh_728 How so? Insider trade is illegal, isn't it?
@@Josh_728to an extent.
@@Chareidosit is and yet politicians do it fine just fine, and talks against insider trading with stricter regulations gets brushed aside
Don't worry. Money talks. They have big money. That makes them important. More important than you. Shut up, step back in line, you're disturbing the elites peace.
As someone who was looking into making a game in UE5 but was considering unity due to recommendations from friends, the fact that this happened, even if they walk it back, guarantees that I will never use unity on any project I ever make in the future. Absolutely insane move, and charging people retroactively is so scummy.
And of course, there's 4 reasons why Unity failed against Unreal Engine in the 1st place:
1. Unreal Engine has Nanite Foliage that adapting clusters of model polygons according to distance, making games of this engine run smoother regardless of how high the detail is unlike what Unity gave to
2. Unity is bloated with oversaturaed amount of bootleg mobile games (worst cash grabs that ruined mobile platforms) with more ads which is more controversial to the rest of gaming platforms
3. Absurd management to Unity (as this video above stated) amid its bad optimisations and bug prones (this last half is offtopic but more relatable to this case)
4. Unreal Engine's visual coding (Godot also had it too) makes you game development easier and more flexible unlike the usually hard Unity code language
@@alyasVictorioC# programming is not challenging, it’s actually a lot easier than C++ used by Unreal. However you’re more or less correct on the other things.
@@RicardoSanchez-es5wl Yeah! Other than that, UE's visual code-scripting made the C++ feel easier tho-
@@alyasVictorio very true
@@alyasVictorioAppreciate you, but you should probably stop spamming before you get flagged as a bot 😅
What I see happening:
Some piracy site is gonna get ahold of 1 copy of every unity game, clean them, and preserve them for future gamers. It’s similar to what happened with flash and I’m sure it’s gonna happen with this.
Agreed. Ethical piracy? In this case, with Unity, yes it sure is in my mind. Torrents for the win against greedy corporate slobs. Clever developers will make deals with the crackers and really stick it to Unity.
It's not often we get to witness such a huge, widely beloved company self destruct in such a fast and definitive way. Pure greed and incompetence. Really, really sad to see. Im lucky to have chosen Unreal as my career choice many years ago, but i started game development in Unity and have so many friends and colleagues who rely on Unity for many of their projects, this really breaks my heart.
not usually no, however this has been a red letter year for such events, namely Wizards of the Coast and Disney.
I've been telling people for ages to switch to Unreal. The creator of Epic Games seems passionate, the interface and blue print system makes it really easy to script logic. Lucky us eh? I've been using Unreal since UDK3. Made the right choice.
Best closing statement: The poor people at Unity have had to put up with being lead by these donkeys.
It seems like every time Unity is in the news, it's from extremely poorly made executive decisions.
"have had to put up with" is a really funny way of saying "Continue to take a paycheck from these scummy practices, when they could move to working for literally any other tech company."
At what point do the grunts 'just following orders' become complicit?
@@ThoraeJenkinspost covid economy
The same places where people are working 3 jobs to just get by
The same field where less and less medical vacation and retirement packages are made available to new hires. I.e. you leave a company for another one in the tech field you loose vacation time medical care quality and retirement support
@@Forgetthereality i love your name to your comment :D (im trying!!!!!)
@@MannIchFindKeinName Their name definately checks out.
@@Forgetthereality so if the third reich took hold right now, its okay cuz post covid economy. lol BS cope. In that position you could walk in to any studio.
im pretty sure this falls under the category of "bad faith business"
gotta love to see how european lawmakers are gonna look at that
Yeah I was gonna say, there has to be something about this in contract law even in the U.S.
Unity is not stupid. Its not like they dont know the laws in the EU. Likely tbere is a loophole which due to burocracy will take some time to close, but until then they will make money hand over fist.
@@HahsJejeThe loophole is that EU parliament tend to sleep on things, until it wakes and decide that it's violence day.
I feel like Unity was just hoping EU wouldn't notice. Which might still be the case.
But if they will notice, whooo boi.
I'll grab popcorn
@@HahsJeje "unity is not stupid" i mean you say that now... in 2023, companies being STUPID is nothing new
Your honest coverage is appreciated. I've been chatting to hundreds of developers in the community over the past day, and it's abundantly clear that it would at the very least take of a full walk back, CEO stepping down immediately, and some additional good will concessions. And even then. Trust is the glue that holds society together, and us developers are a fickle bunch.
When current dev cycles complete, the extent of the damage will be revealed.
This is brilliant. Im going to start a construction company, insist on periodic payments during construction, and then once the houses are almost built advise everyone the property developer will be billed a fee every time someone enters the home, in perpetuity.
Or Microsoft chargning you everytime someone opens a excel file that you created
I didn’t realize how complicated Unity’s monetization was, and now even more complicated.
Will devs FINALLY, actually start abandoning Unity? Godot is looking better and better. It could certainly use extra brains to help improve it.
Is Unity trying to speed run into irrelevancy? 😳
1) Sell company shares if you have them
2) Short the company stock in a way that can't be traced to you
3) Announce a change in licencing fees that will fuck everyone
4) Profit?
Pump pump pump
@@Shajirr_ and then Jail !! nothing is untraceable especially if u keep doing it
Oh my sweet summer child... Jail is for poor people.
@@Shajirr_ Wouldn't this be considered insider trading? I actually hope the FTC gets involved
I don't understand how they could change the licensing retroactively for existing projects. I"m gonna have to get Legal Eagle in on this.
i think as a gaming community there should be a hall of shame on these CEOs so we can avoid and remember them whatever company they are helming
Honestly it feels like we're at sociopath breaking point in today's society
Welcome to Late Stage Capitalism. The beginning of the end...
I guess your feelings are kind of right.
How are they going to charge if the developers went under?
From all software devs, we are beyond that.
Lots of sociopaths lead perfectly normal lives. It's not any different than other variant neurologists and doesn't mean the person is necessarily harmful to those around them. What we have is perfectly normal capitalists making moves to extract more and more of our wealth.
It's quite shocking that their answer to any all concerns about pirated installs, etc. is a: "They won't count. Trust me bro!" ; while they are actively out there destroying any trust they had.
Nah dudes they have their best unity install goblin checkers they would not make a mistake
imo this reminds me how Oracle changed the terms of licensing for Java. What happened is instead of getting a nice subscription revenue from the big town of business, it incentivised businesses to translate their code. Now java is defunct, no-one learns it, only maintain it at best. Seems like unity wants the exact same thing to happen to them. This is absolutely baffling as a business decision as it actively kills any marketing for your product.
And if Unity wants more money from some "unfriendly" dev, they can a make tool to install/uninstall automatically dev's game on VMs with different virtualized hardware and say they need to pay up, who's gonna verify this "fraudulent" installs?
How would they know if a particular copy has been pirated or not? How would they know if repeated installs are being done maliciously or if it's just the result of someone with limited drive space? Maybe they had a bad install or some other kind technical issue? I really can't see how they would acquire that sort of information without some spying functionality ingrained into the engine itself.
@@ivoryowlThey DID buy out a Malware company a while back...
I work in the gambling industry making casino games. It seems strange to me that this is happening right when Unity is making a huge push into this space. In the past year or two I’ve seen just about every studio move from their own proprietary engines to Unity. Even my studio is in the process of moving to Unity.
I wonder if the discovery of this additional revenue stream is making the indie space look like peanuts. And they simply don’t feel the need to cater to indie developers anymore.
As for why this new model doesn’t apply to gambling, it’s because there’s no point. Most casino games are 1 install per machine and run for months without restarting.
Very interesting.
"Most casino games are 1 install per machine and run for months without restarting."
More that there is no feasible manner in which they could EVER, figure out money "earned" from gambling games, not to mention how you would calculate players winning which "costs" the casino.
But also, it is to keep the gambling industry from getting scared about their dumpster fire of an idea.
Gambling stuff are totally exempt!* Nothing to worry about! Be sure to lock yourself into the Unity eco-system, and why not use the New Unity Payment Processor, with just a small tiny 30% cut + 2$ transaction fee! It's super convenient!
* for now.
This came out yesterday... and yes, they walked back to a watered down version. Which is literally the 101 of gaslighting and manipulation. Propose something absolutely absurd that you know peeps will lash out against, then walk back 90% to something watered down which the person will agree to just to stop the argument.
I find it very interesting that Unity proposes to charge hard, concrete values of cash in exchange for "estimates" of downloads/installs.
a lawsuit would reveal all of the methods they use to calculate billing. imagine a utility company billing you for "an estimate" of your energy usage. thats so stupid and grounds for a lawsuit. unity is gonna get sued all over the place and in all holes
@@jjnoUtility companies do this in my part of the world. It's funny how the estimates always cost up to 50% more then when they actually do a reading and get the actual usage. Surely it's just a coincidence that it always favors them.
@@jjno As joshuacraies8671 said, in several countries utility companies do just that. And their "estimates" are always 50-100% more than when they make a reading in our places. In my country, our natural gas company even shows up unannounced at random times during workdays, just so they can say we were "not home" for them to make a reading, so poor them were 'forced' to use their "estimates".
this is literally how utilities work in the US if you are a renter, you are charged based on an estimate of how much power you used from the meter. @@jjno
@@joshuacraies8671 Pretty sure a corporation can't pick which country's laws they will follow while ignoring all the rest though. So because Unity is already operating on an international scale, it needs to follow each region's own laws. If it breaks the laws of a country with this stuff, then it either needs to stop doing business entirely in the countries with laws that prohibits that stuff, or it'll open itself up to legal actions taken against them in each of those regions.
This is what happens when artists and developers are pushed out of the important roles in Game development and are replaced by Marketing Agents and "business" men.
Sadly that is everywhere these days. Not many in management or at the office have ever worked on the workfloor themselves. Meaning a lot of experience is not used, cause now some higher degree dipshit is making the decisions based on pure numbers, not on reality and ALWAYS with the drive to cut costs so their own bonus is secured. Let's start with removing bonuses for higher ups hm? Their bonus is the fact that they get paid a whole lot more then the people who actually work for their money, who are the backbone of the company. Why the F do they need to get rewarded with a extra bonus when they manage to cut costs? That is not efficient at all, reward those who work hard, AKA the employees, it makes them motivated and work even harder and being less sick. Make it again that someone from the workfloor can grow into management, so you have a healthy balance between the number guys and the experiences guys, but nope, just put the greedy boot lickers at the office and mangements jobs, while keeping the experienced folks with low wage jobs while the companies are burning. Many great companies are but a mere shell of what they once were. Phillips is a great example, used to be a great company to work for with great products. These day's its a hell to work for and the real Phillips only makes medical devices these days, while the TV's, and other electronics are different companies who just use the Phillips name. How the might have fallen.
Anytime work becomes a job it loses all creativity and passion. It's why I don't trust anyone who works for money.
This is just Capitalism man. We haven't regulated the market properly in the last 70 years. This is just the end result of an unresponsive and ineffectually bought, paid for government. If a company can rug pull and do so legally, they will. Look at NFT projects, nearly all of them did that . . . because there are no laws or mechanisms to prevent any malfeasance. Bye bye Unity :D
@@boobalooba5786and why pray tell would anyone work? For the glory? Does glory pay bills?
My first semester as a CS major just started 4 weeks ago. I've been around the internet debating on whether to go with godot or unity for weeks now. I decided to download unity and went to youtube and typed in "unity 101" and was instantly hit with all these videos about unity's new business model. Turns out the second I hit install on Unity was the moment Unity instituted this new pay-model lmao
I guess its between godot and unreal now cuz I uninstalled unity 10 mins after installing lol
I managed to steer clear of Unity last year. There were already warning signs back then.
This new "feature" doesn't surprise me
Be smart and go with Unreal. I've been using it for 10 years now and it's better than anything on the market by far. The amount of free assets, the technology is way ahead of everything else. It's completely free. It's a no brainer.
Here’s a fun fact; you know who ELSE uses Unity? Hoyoverse, a rising star of the gacha industry. They used it to build Genshin Impact. There’s no way they’re happy about this, and they’re BIG. They also own stock in Unity’s CN branch so they probably have some clout.
So did Unity just functionally admit they created a security hole in their app for unauthorized and undisclosed data collection?
Their claim of no info being sent back simply isn't possible. What they've described is that they're already illicitly wiretapping and tracking data through their runtime. They may have just implicated themselves in a pretty major crime no matter what country you are in.
they have "internal data models" to represent that.
Basically it's "we're just fucking guessing the amounts, we'll charge you wtf we want"
The answer is yes, they did...
@@quelqunderandom6143 Which if true would be in itself admitting to willfully commiting fraud.
@@RKNGL no it wouldn't. They are a private company and can charge whatever they think it's worth.
Fraud doesn't mean they are assholes screwing you our of money, it has a specific legal definition.
Are they pieces of shit though? Yes, yes they absolutely are.
@@Michael-bn1oi
Being a private company doesn't allow you to selectively change the bill of a single customer after an agreement is made.
A customer is entitled to something called Benefit of Bargain which prevents retroactive changes to charges, as well as shielding "surprise mechanics" someone tries to add to contractual agreements.
If the seller is providing a digital good like this they must be able to verifiably track the amount. Otherwise a baseline amount would be charged and any extra unverified uses would be "profit" granted in favor of the customer.
What an awful analogy from the Unity CEO. While the people “6 hours in” might feel compelled to pay to reload (“worthwhile?” Lol no), what about the people on the fence who haven’t started playing yet? There’s no way in hell they’ll even consider *starting.*
🤦♂️
just play 5:59 and then bail, then restart. Modern problems require modern solutions
He's literally describing a bait-and-switch, which is precisely what Unity have just done. There is no way this doesn't end up in court.
The goal of any publicly traded company is to make money for shareholders *right now*. Forcing those with a vested interest in using your product to pay more qualifies. Next quarter, next year, five years down the road is a future problem including whether those hypothetical future customers come into the pipeline or not. For people that would value long term stability, it is a crazy way to do business.
I dont know a lot about game development. But retroactively charging a client with a change in user terms is literally the worst, doesnt matter what industry. Everyone placed a price tag on their products based on their cost. Its like farmers saying "Lets ask everyone who has ever bought eggs from us to pay more for the eggs they bought" like... What??
Perhaps my understanding and example is weak. But this was how i understood what happened.
The fact that their new business model is basically a Darth Vader quote ("I have altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it further."), and the fact that gambling apps have a special exemption, have to make you wonder if they'll have an "Are we the baddies?" moment before their entire business (except for online gambling apps) is bludgeoned to death with bad press.
Game Devs I saw the writing on the wall after one dev streamer was harassed for streaming his game development and getting harassed by Unity's staff; I F-ING CALLED IT!
wait so a dev was streaming themselves making their game in unity and unity staff harassed them is that correct? If so WTF that dev was basically behaving like free advertisement for unity and they attacked them for it
Way to kill your golden geese, unity…
@@drayle71Yup and after I saw that interaction; I knew to stay clear of Unity.
I feel sorry for that dev. Getting harassed like that is uncalled for. I saw a similar interaction with a Dev streamer before and it baffled me
Seriously? Why would they do that, do they have some kind of rule against showing how the software works or something?
kinda bold of them to decide they want to be bankrupt by the end of the year
The comment at the end regarding captive pipelines reminded me about the Thermocline of Trust - the concept that people will put up with a lot of crap as long as the cost to *stay* is less than the cost to *leave*, but once that balance is reversed they WILL leave, and the cost to *return* will be massively higher than the cost to remain gone.
Unity's C-suite is taking a gamble on where that line is, not unlike blackjack: if they estimate right, they'll make a sizable chunk of money; if they blow past that critical threshold, they'll *lose* a sizable chunk of money.
UE becomes a no brainer with stunts like this. At least EG hasn't pulled a stunt like this, and their terms are reasonable.
I can't imagine its even slightly legal to do it retroactively, and unit will find themselves in court, but they could do it in future if you 'accept' thier deal, but nobody in right mind would accept that deal so they would cease to exist.
aren't there laws in the EU against what unity is trying to do?
Applying something like this retroactively feels like a massive lawsuit in the making tbh.
Time to bother your local EU MEP to kick some techbro butt.
@@verskartonthis sounds illegal even in the US
For the retroactive thing? I would say absolutely. For what *they* are saying will be billing via an estimated data model? For the developers with enough cash on hand to afford legal fees, they can probably stomp on that as well. I think that's why the class action suite is so important as it helps a lot of devs out that don't have that cash lying around.
For the retroactive count, not necessarily. For not giving access to the exact data they use to charge you and methods to contest a bill based on that data, pretty sure.
The fact that Unity will only follow estimations using "aggregate data from various sources" and how they don't want to be transparent about what those sources are, probably means there's a way to avoid it.
yea, i think dev companies in the europen union might be able say something, backed by some pesky european privacy and data laws...
the EU lawsuit is practically guaranteed now
Also isn't this just straight up fraud if you are being charged by estimation? When do you ever bill something by estimations rather than itemized invoice? " 10000000 people installed your game across 5 seperate devices, TRUST US."
@@HellecticMojo A lot more than you think.
My guess is that they'll probably try to get the sales data from the major platforms like Steam or the PS store. If that's the case, they shouldn't be able to get the sales from independent platforms like the developer's website for example. It would also work as a "counter measure to fraud", as it wouldn't pick up any of the pirated copies.
Reminds me of that DnD situation a few months back. Years and years of trust eroded in an insane cash grab that completely ruins your platform for a decade to come.
This is such an insane thing to announce because the tech industry in general is such an incredibly scuffed place and people are so willing to eat whatever pile of shit you put in front of them, particularly SaaS platforms but this annihilates the ability for developers to make money on a huge number of distribution methods. It's like the one nerve that you can actually hit where people will make a decision to move away from your platform because it is literally impossible to make money.
When companies make a misstep like this you would be a fool to trust them going forward.
Thank God people, and gamers especially are very good at recognizing this and boycotting companies (that's ironic btw)
What do you think is gonna happen? A big boycott? The gaming community for years is bashing on all the big companies but every year you look at their earnings and they again made more money than the year before. We are unable to hurt these companies and the people who are responsible for that. Even if EA or unity went bankrupt, investors and CEOs would move on to the next company.
It is not possible for us to punish these people and if you think it will hurt the people who make these decisions, it's not. Low level employees who will lose their job are getting hurt. Nothing more nothing less.
@@HahsJeje The difference here is Unity's not delivering a mid product. Unity's reaching their hand into the wallets of the studios that are making them money, including the big companies like Xbox and Nintendo. What Unity's proposing is illegal in a lot of countries and if they carry this out, will get murdered in court. That's before breaching contract with the studios who are going to jump ship and move to a different engine.
Right ?
@@HahsJeje First off if you don't know who the bad apples are at the top and blindly patron a company or buy a product then you're partly to blame for the consumer landscape.
Second we are all in charge of our own destiny and happiness. If you haven't the strength to stand during a collapse then you get crushed, its simple. We're all adults and we have to plan and take responsibility for our situations in life. It's called being an adult.
Things like this should be exposed and people should be aware. Bad business practices from a leadership cause pain to everyone below them. Sunlight is the best disinfectant and continuing to promote and use a company that pushes something insane like this is irresponsible.
I work in QA and most games I work on are based on Unity. This is insane, that will give such a hard time to small time devs and free to play games.
It might be too late for Unity now. Even if they go back on this now. The minute they arbitrarily changed their rules they broke the trust the industry had in them as a company. Reputation has a lot to do with the success of a company in any industry. Hostile moves against its own users will have long term effects on their viability. Even if they walk it back, developers, publishers and others will reconsider working with it in the future.
Imagine being the number 1 engine that people just kind of default to and then fumbling the bag after you got payed
I have a feeling Unity is going for a short term bump in profits so they can make things look better before they sell the company. This obviously will not be good for their business in the long run, but they are obviously not thinking about the future.
who would want to buy unity after that "bump"?
they will probably see as well as you that this is just a short term effect because unity caught a bunch of developers off guard.
@@masterix4021 it is an exceptionally stupid and expensive way to buy talent (Assuming the talent doesn't jump ship as its sinking, which they will) and a way to buy (old versions of) unity software. not a very good investment, but capitalists and CEOs especially are known to be incompetent.
Could be, the problem is this would affect their sale price too.
Who's going to want to deal with regenerating the Public Relations after buying out Unity?
I’m seeing some talk in the comments that the CEO sold off stock just before this announcement, so it could very well be some kind of insider trading job.
@@masterix4021Pension funds and other holding companies. Their due diligence is done by accountants who generally know nothing about the actual business.
The other option is vulture fund - style, without the pretense of helping out. You prop up margins of the company you run but don't own, get loans with the fictionally profitable business as collateral, use those to pay yourself obscenely, and get out before the bankruptcy.
Been using Unity to make a passion project in my free time over the past year or so. Looks like it's time to learn Unreal Engine
Yeah, you definitely don't want to stick with an engine whose company is like this.
Unreal is miles better then Unity. (Unless you’re 2d then switch to Godot maybe) It feels like it’s harder at first but I found that Unreal generally works better out of the box once you learn it and the workflow keeps getting better. Plus Unreal is used much more in other industries such as film so you got flexibility.
@pizzaman11 yea it's a 2d game, inspired by the og final fantasy (but with action combat). Originally I only went with Unity because all the Unreal ads I was seeing put like sole focus on absurd level of graphics. I've since heard they operate very similarly tho
Yup! There's three reasons why Unity failed against Unreal Engine in the 1st place:
1. Unreal Engine has Nanite Foliage that adapting clusters of model polygons according to distance, making games of this engine run smoother regardless of how high the detail is unlike what Unity gave to; plus has its own unique shadow/lighting maker feature "Lumen" that is way better than you 1st knew about
2. Unity is bloated with oversaturaed amount of bootleg mobile games (worst cash grabs that ruined mobile platforms) with more ads which is more controversial to the rest of gaming platforms
3. Absurd management to Unity (as this video above stated) amid its bad optimisations and bug prones (this last half is offtopic but more relatable to this case)
@@ExTwigg yah don’t do Unreal then. It’d probably be easier and more profitable to make the game from scratch then using that. While I’m not completely familiar with either, I’d try using Godot or even something like gamemaker/rpg maker.
15:28
I have another possible scenario here.
Say I install a game on my computer, which uses Unity. A few months later, I replaced one piece of hardware or added hardware to my computer. Does this mean that Unity is going to charge the developer again?
Most likely.
Good job Unity in getting your engine effectivly blacklisted from any future projects both due to the new deal costs and complete lack of confidence in you not pulling another worse move.
Also, the whole retroactive part, I can see Microsoft etc taking that to court as it can't be legal to change the deal after it's completed.
As someone who wants to learn video game making as a hobby, I was torn between Unreal Engine 5 and Unity, but it seems like the choice has been made for me, even if these new pricing would realistically never apply to me.
If you're a hobbyist, I honestly recommend Godot instead. Waaaay friendlier learning curve. Unreal is almost certainly better for AAA-tier game engines/graphical fidelity, but it has a fairly complex production pipeline and the documentation isn't great.
If you don't see yourself ever having to figure out whether your users can tolerate the performance loss of raytracing on grass simulations, Godot is probably going to suit your needs better.
take godot for small game dev if u want to try to land a hit like vampire survivors
was in the same place ... just installed Unreal Engine a day ago ... now really happy with my decision
Same here. Unity always smelled fishy to me. You can tell they are not only greedy but stupid charging small devs double what they charge the AAA ones.
The new pricing kicks in at 200k per year of income. That's a business with three to five people, so you can easily run into this even as a tiny indie dev.
its telling that Unity executives sold their shares in the company just days before this announcement came about.
Yeah! Insider selling is usually a huge warning sign for investors, so if I were invested in Unity I would think hard about getting out. I see now that the share has dropped over 5 % today. Ouch!
@@oliver_twistorsounds like a good time to buy!
@@oliver_twistor I wonder if the other shareholders can sue them for insider trading the way some Disney investors are with some of their executives. Hitting those making these brain-dead decisions in their own personal finances seems like an effective way to drive the lesson home to others
@@B.D.E. Buying the dip, so to speak, is generally only a good idea if one believes that the price drop is temporary and not because of a change in the company's ability to make money.
Add it to the long list of things that are ruined by monetization. Not just with gaming, I am so incredibly sick of being nick-and-dimed to exist.
I've been trying to decide which engine to use. This made my choice a hell of a lot easier.
Unreal or Godot?
@@amayasasaki2848 Godot. I decided UE was overkill for my purposes this time. And the way you do 2D is a little weird.
They have also admitted repeat installs are treated as new installs too... so when you have an issue on a game and you have to reinstall that's another charge to the Devs...
It takes just one person to find out how those "installs" are counted. And people will use that knowledge. I'm sure there will be bots made just for that reason.
Currently, when a developer fucks up, they get review bombed, in the hope that it hurts them. What if people could financially hurt them instead?
Download a little program that just fakes installs of that game and overnight, they'll have a few million additional installs on that counter. Keep that running until the developer goes bankrupt.
Supposedly, multiple installs on same machine won't be charged.
I legitimately refunded a game on Steam yesterday that I played the first 14 minutes of and just didn't like the tone. Downloads don't reflect the number of players actually using the Unity Runtime. Unity is essentially claiming they can profit off a developer using their engine even if the developer doesn't profit off that refund.
out of pure random yet intense curiosity... what game was it
@@RagdollWraith Star-crosst. Visual novel romance novel. I'm not prone to buy games like that but a former Warframe content creator was part of the dev team so I decided to give it a look.
Immediately opened with characters hooking up while bar-crawling. That's not romance, if I wanted to buy pron I would have.
I used to work as a producer for a title that has seen an 8 figure number of installs, before game pass and free weekends. The engine was of course unity. I wish I could have listened in on the meeting where this was first discussed.
I remember the day when Unity 5 was announced and suddenly it was an engine for us little guys/gals. I was happy. I never liked the EA CEO because of his damage to my favorite games, but....I was told to give him a chance. I did. Years later, after using Unity, I have to feel like I cannot trust the CEO. While I am mostly not affected, so many of my friends are. Sad to lose so many asset devs and so many games out there telling their story.
Funny thing here is, Unity has couple times done these extremely open and outspoken ways to change monetization, or planned for it. Their ex-EA leadership made it very clear in old interviews and their public opinions about the business models with games and game engines. Even if Unity fixes this, how long are people daring to risk it? One mistake, ok, that can happen. But repeated behavior just shakes up all the foundation of trust and predictability. I would simply not dare to take the risk with Unity. The uncertainty is not worth it. This kind behavior can very quickly start destroying them, and they have grown to this point with word of mouth and friendly recommendations. It can just as fast loose that userbase.
Its a breach of trust, the damage is done. Every game developer will have to make serious consideration now to stick to Unity or to change engine, if possible. Every future developer will avoid Unity in the first place out of fear something like this will happen again.
Nowadays they have lost what gave them market share to begin with; free access to development tools and ability to build across web, mobile, PC and consoles. After Unity took off other large engines became free like Unreal Engine and CryEngine. Last I checked (couple years now), UE can build to more platforms consistently than Unity. Since they haven't really continued to innovate their technology other than graphics and animations, Unity just doesn't offer anything different than the rest. For indies, there are now engines like Godot which are kind of the new Unity.
I am really hoping this get reserved, the idea of charging people any time they install a game seem so utterly evil.
Yeah. We already pay to install the game *WHEN WE BUY THE FUCKING GAME.*
this is not a fee the costumer pays, its the devs who have to pay, this definetly wont result in some insane things like evolving review bombs into install bombs right? bankrupting devs using a little install-uninstall script because gamers were never vindictive
@@sheshin Wouldn't surprise me if devs used this as an excuse to increase the price of their games even more though as publishers are not just going to take a lower cut to pay for this, I wouldn't even hold it against them in this case, but still sucks all round.
Have you seen the games industry lately
the idea is not evil, thats idiotic, the current pricing is wack tho. also, if this is evil, what is genocide to you?
Well here's another question. Any updates to Unity that might necessitate a game patch and a reutilization of said engine, will that too count as an install when they flip the switch and need an update?
You have to trust that their Proprietary Methods would never, ever do something that would give them more money!
And even if not, changing the TOS and deal for the developers is apparently super easy, barely an inconvenience, so it'll likely change to counting updates as reinstalls at some point anyhow.
As a dad of a toddler and self employed commission artist I had blanked out of a lot of news, just saw The Pale Beyond CE, its lovely. As a guy who used to have an office job with decent cash I always tried to get a CE of a game I like. However now as a commission artist I've much less free cash than I used to, so it's great to see a CE and Art book within reach. I was going to get your game on steam when I've got more free time, but going to grab a CE and Art book bundle to hold onto :)
This is a major slap in the face to devs. Literally today finished a course with a bootcamp on Unity and now they do this...
I just finished a course and started looking for jobs recently, while it's already hard to look for unity-related job here in Vietnam ( not that popular yet ) , now I'm being slapped in the face with this shit...
@@kelvindai1994 pivot to unreal engine.
This just seems insane. I add and remove games from steam and each time I reinstall it the dev would have to pay money. I am sure that devs will just refuse to pay for older games and then what happens? Will the older game no longer install and work? I think that Valve needs to push back at Unity on this one for the good of the ecosystem.
It's almost as if the Unity devs saw what WotC tried with OGL earlier in the year and thought "we should do that too", but missed seeing the giant consumer and industry backlash...
They 'bout to find out...
One thing I worry about with this new system is that If I make a game and list it on steam, I may not get to the 250,000 limit right away but what about over the next couple of years as people uninstall and reinstall the game? I think anyone using unity should be worried even if they don't expect much from their game as these rules could change at any point and you would have to delete your project or end up paying unity more than your game makes
@@restfulori212 I'm a small time game dev and all of the above worries me (not on a personal level but more out of empathy for others in the industry.
I was really on the fence when I saw shares being sold from three parties within the company and swapped over go Godot right away. Don't regret it at all, I've been using it for the past half year and it seems to be the better engine with how fast things are moving for it.
I don't see how anyone at Unity HQ expected any of this to go over with anyone and if they were going to do this they probably should have done it early last year before Godot was blowing up. Now it's almost as capable and free for the foreseeable future.
@@restfulori212 When I first heard the news I calculated how much the likes of vampire survivors make currently (knowing internally what their developer costs are) They would make less than 28 cents per copy seeing as they're in the 2 million copy bracket. They couldn't afford to keep their game up as as the costs rise and development starts costing more the returns become not worth it.
I can’t see how they would win in court, they can’t prove the exact numbers they’re charging people for without pinging back to their servers on install, and since they’re not doing that it’s like they can just makeup whatever numbers they want, how the hell could that win in court, really hope the class action lawsuit happens
And pinging back to their servers is already a crime because of stealing information of the user and breaking policy of privacy...
There are so many reasons this doesn't hold up to legal scrutiny. It simply won't be enforceable in many countries for not complying with contract law.
They would also have to share exact details with the court on how they are counting numbers of installs during the discovery phase of the case. This is why every dev simply refusing to pay the outrageous bill that Unity will send will force Unity to massively overhaul this new policy.
Reading their Q&A is insane. Either they really miscommunicated in it badly or they just admitted in an answer about WebGL that basically means you have to pay an install fee every time the user PLAYS THE GAME. The move Unity is making is stupid and how they are addressing everyones concerns is compounding it with misinformation cause they can't communicate. They can't be that stupid.
It's laughable really, I couldn't believe the Q&A was real lol. It's like a criminal confessing they murdered 20 people and thinking there'll be no consequences and they can go home like nothing happened lol
They posted an update, were they stated that WebGL games are excluded. I quote
"Web and streaming games - we are not going to count web and streaming games toward your install count either."
Not that it makes this huge pile of shit less stinky...
@@luka188 SBF be like
@@uMadBrudi Lol, that still doesn't make anything better. Go from per install to per purchase, and we can start having a conversation.
There are still dozens of things wrong with it even then, which must be completely eliminated from this bill before it would even be worth considering unity ever again.
" you have to pay an install fee every time the user PLAYS THE GAME" so, we're back to the time of Arcade machines?
I foresee at least a few developers filing ( or at least attempting to file) a lawsuit on grounds of Detrimental Reliance... They chose the game engine based on specs and the contract required to use it; suddenly Unity screws them by going full Darth Vader ("I've altered the deal. Pray I don't change it further...") It's the kind of thing companies go to court over every day.
i hope more gamer understand what this change mean and support their favourite game developer if they can
in fact if you can support them by buying merch,patreon or anything that give 100% of the money that you pay for to them is even better
Not only is this an attack on publishers. It's an attack on drm free gaming. I bought Cult of the Lamb on GOG and downloaded the offline installer to install it to an offline machine. Is that to be impossible in the future? Gotta be online to protect their precious metrics. Screw them.
No they guess. They can't legally look at how many people install stuff they have an internal mathematics model
@@Valadion1 My point is that they might disallow these types of installs if they stick the path.
Ever since the move to make games available to download instead of shipping physical media, publishers and developers have had to introduce ways to protect their IPs. I'm not entirely convinced the way they've gone about doing so is in anyone's best interests, but how else is software piracy supposed to be handled?
@@ResidentWeevil2077 I make sure to never give a company money that requires online access for their content. I happily buy off gog without issue.
If Piracy were such a big issue, how does gog even exist.
Balfurs Gate 3 released there day 1 as well. And most pirates pirate because they can't afford a copy regardless. Not being able to pirate doesn't make them automatically able to afford it.
I will forever fight against always online drm controlled content.
@@ResidentWeevil2077 It's not 'supposed' to be handled. You can argue all day about the morality, but there are no actual losses incurred by piracy of software - any estimation thereof is _literally_ publishers fantasizing about potential profits which would never actually manifest, and DRM only punishes legitimate customers on the basis of that greed.
Imagine being a dev with a Unity game that doesn't follow the news and suddenly gets a bill in the mail next year
Yo, I don't live on the forums, or follow the news. I'm heads down for most of the month actually working, Just last week we found out all our Unity licenses were being revoked as we didn't catch the EULA change which invalidated our PRO licenses requiring Industry/Enterprise variants and no one from unity notified us when our yearly resub happened. (Our 'games' aren't commercial entertainment games) That pissed off the accountants royally as it doubled our costs overnight, now this. Mayhaps I need to code up an automated web bot to follow and scrape only EULA changes to the softwares I use.
@@reahreic7698 Now you've considered, best do it and share the bot around (maybe charge a $1 "honesty box" fee for the bot? You win if you collect, you don't lose if you don't because the primary purpose is met)
@@reahreic7698 Usually its a good faith agreement to not be a dick, seems like Unity didn't get the memo.
Is it even possible to bill the amount of installs retroactively, legally speaking? It's easy to tell that Unity can categorize developers arbitrarily going forward using retroactive data, but the actual billing itself seems very iffy if it can even be billed retroactively like that.
@@Joppi1992 Just trust them bro
Unity bosses sold their stocks a week before making this announcement making millions. Snakes all of them.