twitter.com/StayAtHomeDev/status/1702439987692622173 Post on Twitter with the hashtag: #NOUNITYWITHFEES And express your frustrations with this decision to let Unity know that this is NOT OK.
@@eduardoddutra Look for a RUclipsr called garbaj for the best Godot tutorials there for the old version of Godot but the only real difference between versions is that in the modern version its @onready var instead of onready var
It’s not a big deal. Only 10% of indie games make over $200k per year, and not all of those use Unity. So if you sell your game for, say $5, even after you hit $200k, you won’t have to start paying the runtime fees since that’s only 40,000 copies sold. If you’re still butthurt about it, you can pay for UnityPro which, if you are going to make that much on your game, is probably worth it. Nothing against Godot, but people are freaking out over something that won’t affect them. And for all those soying out about “microtransactions,” that’s not Unity’s fault. Microtransactions make TONS in the gaming industry. The consumers love microtransactions, so the industry will tailor itself to those.
@@tornadre the problem is also "installations" as he mentioned which means that 40,000 copies sold could mean double or triple that amount or more in installations.
@@tornadre Okay, fair point. Here's another fair point. The changed the contract, and you're stuck no matter what. Everyone who made a game is. There's nothing actually changing them from putting any fee or price in, at any level, against any one. This isn't even the first time they've done it. But, I mean, you just defended microtransactions and used language like "butthurt..." so...
This reminds me of horse armor. Sure, most devs will never cross the threshold where unity charges for installs, but it’s a way for them to test the boundaries of what people will put up with. Remember when microtransactions weren’t a thing? Good times.
what about mobile devs ? a small studio might cross that 200k , maybe they are targeting mobile devs more , and sadly i am making 2 of them and they are at 95% progress
@@darkstar3116 That’s what I meant by “test the boundaries”. The classic “I don’t care if they add micro transactions, if you don’t want it don’t buy it” is how we got here.
The harm is done, as an indie dev, f*ck Unity for such lame disgrace, total blatant disrespect and greedy arrogance. This is blatant fraud that could litterally bankrupt and severely indebt tons of people. I don't want them to have any single penny from me and from what I've read today all around, tons and tons of people got really fed up in only one day and wil merge. The more time they will take to backpedal on that and believe me there's a chance for them to go on with this premeditated fraud that will kill thousands of indie projects withour even giving a f*ck, the more money and devs, they will lose. It is already started, I've read comments from fellow devs all day and most of them on the matter were similars. For lots of people, it is the drop that broke the glass. Observe, there will be lots more of games that will merge to Unreal and Godot. Unreal is already popular and well known, so for them it won't be the "klondike", but for engines like Godot that people were maybe considering, but weren't giving it a chance, some will and Godot will gain popularity and that is a good thing. I was already considering for a while moving to Godot, now I'm just too pissed off at Unity for them to have any chance of having any penny from me, screw that, they are litteral crooks. That now, after the massive brutal layoffs from some time ago, nah this is bullsh*t, I'll get the f*ck out of this mess. And I will be happy to give money to Godot, because they deserve it, they never tried to blackmail their devs, because what Unity has done is even worse than blackmail and fraud, it is litteral theft premeditation. What would be the next fraud, charging devs each time we compile code locally in the engine ? Nah, screw that, never ever again that I will start a new project in Unity. For me, they are done, it is over and I will lose tons of time and money more than I could afford right now, but sorry when some coportate douchebag tries to sh*t on me like that, he can just go die and rot in hell, I won't care anymore about them, at all. And believe me, I was sold to them big time few years ago, I've worked numerous thousand of hours with this engine, as much that I don't even have any clear idea how many hours. But for some time already, things were going sketchy, I don't know a part of me saw that coming I guess... I feel it like literal treason. And you are right, I will never take this risk again, I would sue the sh*t out of them if only I could, big time.
there is no trust involved in unity development, they market the engine to studios that think about big profits. they dont market the engine to children and naive teens so to rely on trust me bro, its a totally diffrent scene from what poor engines like construct, godot, game maker`s scenes where they need to exploit naive people and children in order to remain alive. it is very ironic actually, but you need the capacity for it.
@@zendraw3468 Oh there is a lot of trust involved. Unity just said it will charge game studios for games RETROACTIVELY - they introduced a payment model of "you get money once, you pay us an infinite amount of times" - The only way for ANY Unity developer that reaches the treshold to not go bankrupt is to implement ads in every game they make. 70$ title? Better get ready to have ads in the game. And the thing is - big publishers are very unlikely to be willing to put up with this shit. Because while I see no reason why they WOULDN'T want to add ad revenue to their full price games - why give that ad revenue to Unity, when you can make a game in a different engine and keep the money in your pocket - another thing is. Unity is literally charging you on the basis of "trust us bro" - they specifically charge for INSTALLS because the developers have no way to track the amount of times their game got installed
@@RancorSnp the fee only kicks in over $1mil in revenue, which 99% of randos complaining about this will never ever reach. Go ahead, use another game engine, where the 10% or higher revenue share will be way higher than whatever unity ends up doing
to be clear, im not defending unity in any way, im just sayng, think for a moment. 1st you have to reach the revenue threshold to be charged with anything for the last 12 months, if you never reach that threshold then you dont need to care. and this is good for indies becouse the thresholds are now higher, 200k for free license, 1mil for paid ones. again, if you earn that in last 12 months. as an indie, solo dev this is good. as a company that earns alot more, this is not so good. about installs i alredy said, they have to make it accurate in order to not get sued. and like i sayd, installs are alredy counted in all stores and im sure it will be about paid installs, and not just any installs. of corse if its any kind of install then its a no brainer to switch to another engine. again im not defending unity, im just sayng the deal is still better then something else, atleast for some people.@@RancorSnp
Godot: We're looking for more funding to help with the future of Godot. Would be really cool if you guys could donate a bit more. Developers: HEY YOU JUST GOT A BUNCH OF MONEY DON'T BE GREEDY Unity: We're gonna start putting a static priced tax that is very hard to monitor or police Developers: well i guess Godot isn't so bad...
@@littleowlgaming-unity-tutorial I have about a year of Unity experience a long time ago and several years of Linux server software development since then. When I wanted to try a modern game engine Godot is the only one I managed to install. I got frustrated with Unity Hub in about an hour of trying to make it use a demo/trial license and EGS for Linux was just not a thing back then.
imagine having stock in your competitors, becoming CEO and applying all your EA kmowledge and trying to take it to the next stage, absolute win win, either make money or make money or ruin something and make other things more valuable. Foolproof plan. I really don't know what this means for the future but it looks horrible there's already many people that struggle making a life from this and now you can theorethically lose money from this? Only reason to use unity now feels like because I have to for school and haven't learned anything else yet :(.
So glad we switched from Unity3D to Godot a few years back! 🎉 We faced some discouragement along the way, and it was tough on the team, but looking back, it was totally worth it. Super happy with Godot! 👏🎮
I get the feeling Godot is about to get a good stress test from a lot of people, i suspect it'll fail in some ways that will hopefully propel its development forward, but you can't argue with ZERO.
he was forced to stepped down as ceo from EA for causing their numbers to drop and also the last 2 years he worked there EA was labeled the worst company to work for in america both 2 years in a row even beating Bank of America. He stepped down then 1 year after unity hires him. Makes no sense how that is even a thing.
Well, for 2D games Godot has already won over a while ago, now it just needs to catch up with 3D features (which is more of a dealbreaker for some people rather than just pricing model). However the fact that everyone can contribute and adds these features and they'll potentially be added to the core engine is super appealing (and the reason I finally got Godot and started fiddling with it :P )
That's the beauty of FOSS, the development time can take off and leave everyone behind, like a senior citizen on a pharmacy 70% off sale, if enough eyes are on the software.
If you need high fidelity 3d graphics, just use unreal. Anything with less fidelity than that and godot has you covered. Unity literally has no space in any scenario. It should be put in the trash, along with the unitg board members.
I had been seeing Unity as a sinking ship for quite some time (and I'm not just talking about its stock price), and this news only reaffirms my belief. I think the management's intention is to focus Unity as a game engine for smartphones while gradually moving away from PC and consoles. But these are good news for Godot. Unreal remains for high-end games, Godot for indies, and (I guess) Unity for casual games on the Apple Store
The first thing that comes to my mind is successful games that pass the thresholds... what happens when the devs want to heavily discount them? What about putting them in very cheap bundles? What about giving them free in giveaways or for charities? This is very common nowadays. Are they just gonna lose money giving them in humblebundle deals etc?
i think this is the big screw up. They should scrap this whole model and just go to 5% revenue sharing. It will cost more than this whole install based thing, but at least it makes sense
More Godot devs mean Godot gets better faster, means more games with better margins without raising prices for gamers. If you make it big using the GODOT engine remember to back-feed someone that boon back to Godot to help pay for future improvements, or upload some of your own custom improvements to the Godot boards so other devs can make use of them.
Not least of all because the one area that Godot lacked a little - some of the documentation was a bit vague in places - will be filled in by new people figuring it out, discussing it online etc. Just the presence of more people using it will mean more problems collectively solved.
There is another issue not many has talked about. You mentioned the word trust. Here is the thing right now their licensing even unreal licensing is based on sale numbers. This can be tracked easy by both the devs and unity. So its easy to catch a lie or mistake from 1 side or the other eventually. With this new per install the only one that can truly track this is unity not the dev so the trust there is lop sided, how do I know if their metrics are accurate? How do I know if it came from a legate person buying the game or a pirate? How do I know unity is being honest here? there is no way to know, you would have to 100% rely on unity doing the right thing here. Which I do not trust any company that I cannot do an oversight on. Its like a bank giving me my balance without allowing me to look at all my transactions, how would I know if my transactions are correct if I cannot view them.
Also on the trust issue: don't trust any of their claims they will manage fraud or abuse detection when they are the beneficiaries of profits stemming from fraud or abuse. They will devote token resources to it to maintain the image of responsible caretaking.
Isn't there a way to send the signal that "the game was installed" without in fact installing a game? Because I can imagine someone doing it just to piss over some developers.
@@NTBXP1 i mean it would definitely be possible. how easy it would be to exploit such a thing would depend on the level of reverse engineering protections present, but it would be a permanent security vulnerability that, if found, could plunge a company into bankruptcy. its a level of power one should not have and only exists because of greedy fucks like that CEO (who needs to be fired and thrown to the curb before he ruins anymore products)
This is from their faq: "How is Unity collecting the number of installs?" "We leverage our own proprietary data model and will provide estimates of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project - this estimate will cover an invoice for all platforms" So they guess, don't explain how they got that guess, and you must pay based off that number.
As a programmer, I am amazed that there are still colleagues who defend proprietary software. It's so much more efficient to have a foundation who pulls funds from lots of companies who use the product and use these to develop them. Your comparison is perfect. These incredibly complex plans and licenses exist only to give jobs to sales people and intellectual property lawyers and allows scams like this. Hope they go down pretty fast.
I do not mind a proprietary software that you can pay for lifetime. I would not mind paying 10k for unity and having the engine for life and not having to use their shitty cloud "services". software is expensive to make so i do not mind paying for it. The problem i have is this predatory SaaS model
That's because large, complicated open-source software doesn't always make financial sense. Someone got to be doing the work here and if it's free, you don't get to recoup the cost while your competitors get to use it for free. In fact, we have seen a swing back in last couple years where a lot of businesses like MongoDB, ElasticSearch, Hashicorp are finding that the open-source model is not really working for them. It always kind of depends on the circumstances. Game engines are also complicated enough that most large companies prefer having their in-house solutions as they are designed to address their own needs, while they also want to have a competitive advantage. I do agree with you on principle on IP ownership/freedom but I think reality is somethings a little different.
That is an incredibly narrow and, frankly, stupid view. Most of the time, well-managed and well-monetized proprietary/premium software will be better than FOSS.
@@sujimayne Exactly. Only software devs have this free-cult mentality. Good software is not cheap to build. It requires tons of effort and money. I would like to see more AAA and indie games being released for free so that they can see how ridiculous their free-cult mentality is. My only problem is that unity's monetisation is just dumb. I would not even mind if they doubled the fee for all their tiers.
@@leeoiou7295 To be fair, a large part of the 'free' part is freedom (which is exactly the point of contention here with Unity), not "free as in free beer". While you said it would be cool to have proprietary software that you can pay for lifetime, in reality that doesn't exist, because you will eventually need support (e.g. a new game console, new features, bug fixes). If the proprietary software only lets you use it but forbids sharing the source code with others (if you even get the source to begin with), then you are basically still forced to pay up unless you are technical enough to port the entire engine to a new console. A large part of the open-source movement (I guess more the free software movement which is technically different) has more to concern with the ownership/freedom issue than costing $0. I think this is a common misunderstanding because English mixes the word "free".
I just got Godot prepped today after hearing the news. Unity completely broke me and my partner's trust, even if they roll this back it shows they are willing to see what they can get away with and will likely fully push something like this in the future. I don't want our games to be tied down with constant fees on top of needing to pay much more upfront just to use Unity as they removed Unity Plus.
My main reason to start with Godot, as well as Blender, was because I've never seen a good opensource platform that did not develop fast. I don't intend to create AAA games alone, but I do have the dream to create a cool game that will spread like fire, and for that I would NEVER be tied to any other company. I feel sorry for the people that decided to trust greedy companies.
Sadly most people are too stupid to see past capitalist marketing. I have been using mostly open source software like blender, godot, inkscape etc and its insane how fast they are developing. I consider them to be already better than any commercial competitors.
@@mat_max photoshop and premier pro/resolve have too strong a grip on the industry. Which means not enough people go to the FOSS alternatives and hence, devlopment is slower. Its a cycle which some software never break out of sadly.
Eunuchty (Unity) going IPO (that is: becoming a publicly traded company; and thus, becoming beholden to shareholders) should have been the game devs' first cue to ABANDON SHIP.
@@askeladden450No, the reason a lot of people still prefer Unity is because of the community. Also, different platforms. With Godot you cannot port to consoles, that is a problem.
It's incredible that you knew this was coming back in 90s when you was a kid and managed to discuss it with Tom Cruise back then, listed all pros and cons and persuaded him to make a collaboration video 30+ years later.
Recently, I started doing indie development. And I chose Unity as a more common engine with a lot of information about it, software libraries, etc. But with this move, unity hammers the last nail into the lid of its coffin. After all, this is one of the few engines that is suitable for single development. The same, Unreal was developing towards a large gaming industry, adding tools to create good graphics. But unity has been standing still all this time. And now came the moment when he lost his only dignity. Now my project, which I spent more than a month on, will have to be transferred to godot. I'm sorry, I don't know English well for the translation. Hello, from Russia.
I honestly did not even consider pirated versions of games, my main concern is the small indie dev studios which allready have to sell their games at very low prices to even compete and earn something will have nothing left at all. Also, when you don't like a developer, basically install and uninstall their games multiple times and you can make them bankrupt ... :/
Yep, this is an exploit I already saw being discussed people thought of in 5 seconds of the announcement, I wonder if the devs of Unity could actually do a class action over this but i'm not a lawyer.
How many of those small indies make $200.000 a year? Most indie devs make between $5k to $8k per game, so they will not affected. The problem is when those thresholds inevitably lower and the fees inevitably increase.
@@TheBayzent 200k installs would be easily achieved with bots, if people really want to take down a developer, they basically can as Unity just created the possibility.
Ive been working on a game for the last 7 months with unity engine and my trust is completely broken. Even if they roll back changes im still swapping to godot as they dont have shareholders to appease being open source.
Nothing like a system that punishes success to get people excited to pick up or keep working with Unity! It's also amusing to think of F2P games that reach the 200k threshold and suddenly every new download of their game costs them 20 cents a pop.
I'm excited for Godot, you can never have too many open source alternatives to programs. Maybe when Godot 5 or 6 rolls out it'll be feature rich enough for me to consider moving to it
@@Hietakissa I switched to Godot as my main engine from Unity awhile ago and I assure you Godot 4 can do everything Unity can do sometimes a bit better in some cases, it's just the classic thing of getting devs to really try and push the limits of the engine. People just assume Godot 4 is purely an indie dev engine for 'indie creators' purely because only a few 2D games have been released in the wild for the most part.
@@lethn2929 I watched a feature video on Godot 4.0, and it's a bit concerning to me that it just got basic features like SSAO and a proper AI navigation system. I wouldn't want to work in an engine only to find out mid-way through development that the engine doesn't support some crucial feature. There was also a comparison of Godot 3 vs 4 3D shadows and if there was that much room to improve then I can only assume there's way more for them to still catch up on. I also took a look at a 4.1 feature video if there were any significant improvements, and they mentioned something about C# being brought closer to parity with GDScript, not being able to use the primary language I use properly for all functions could be a dealbreaker.
@@HE360 I hope so. So far Godot hasn't been the fastest at releasing new updates, but maybe that'll change with the newly introduced development fund and the influx of devs.
That's amazing news actually. Minus one competitor, possibly more support for open solutions. And I just love watching how "talented" managers break everything apart.
This unity thing really is the epitome of 'poorly thought-out boardroom idea'. The fact that there are so many question and complications which arise from such an idea really does show you the people who came up with this idea would struggle to turn a computer on let alone install a game.
1: don't give them ideas 2: how about a fee for every time a button is pressed? press w, a, s, or d: 1 dollar press e: 2 dollars press f: F dollars (hex joke, it means 16)
True BUT this isn't a car you own outright. You just pay to have the right to use Unity. Lots of people already are tied to it so that's not much of a choice. Changing the rules this drastically with little notice is not really within their right and I'm sure they'll deal with it in court.
@@cookiemonster208well one problem with this is that games already made with Unity are actually bound with this new change even if they don't agree anymore. That's just scummy.
I discovered Unity few days ago. After some interactions, I've found it comfortable to myself. But that unremovable "Made with Unity" become an issue for me. I also like Unity's 8,5mb on web production, while Godot is ~50mb. Now it looks like I have no options except Godot. Welcome me to the club 🤖
@@ooOPizzaHeadOoo Godot is leagues better than Unity for 2D wtf are you talking about? :D and Unreal is better for professional/experienced devs than Unity in 3D... RIP Unity lol
But Godot hasn't supported C# for mobile yet and GDScript will only tie us up to another engine. I wonder if Stride Engine would be a better choice for 3D mobile games
@@containedhurricane If you can't easily figure out GDscript, game dev might be too much for you. I'd question how on Earth you managed in Unity to begin with
I completely new to game dev 6 days ... and this explanation was great .. im bummed about the situation... jason weiman should be upset abou this.. but i think he is incahoots with unity
Man don't get fooled those are unitys sponsored unofficial channels. Just look at any tutorial he will complete it with some premium asset from the store always. Always link you to the store too.
Unity REALLY shot themselves in the foot. Everyone is covering this, Kotaku, The Verge, Linus Tech Tips, Kinda Funny games... My local dev Discord has been on fire planning mass exodus. I don't really care personally at the moment since I won't be crossing that threshold anyway. BUT it reminds us of the uncertainty of proprietary software. Investing your time learning FOSS like Blender and Godot will always be the safe option and foundation to build upon that won't be priced or bought off the market.
The chart also actually says "standard monthly rate" - which a lot of videos/twitter posts seem to have overlooked. So this would then be 20c per install per month. Where as the threshold is calculated on a per year basis. This is an insane amount of money, especially for low price games with a high install base.
It is not per install per month. The invoice will be sent once per month. A unique user will only cost once. And the unique user will be calculated per device. So if you have 10 phones you could install it 1 time per phone and that will cost. But re-install will not.
Yes you are right, its calculated per month. I've looked at their FAQ, but I dont see how this makes it any better. For example, once you have hit the threshold, and have around 100K new installs every month, you will be charged 0.15c per new install per month. So in total you pay 15k per month to unity. This is still insane for low price games. This means a 15% rev share depending how your installs distribute over the year, after you hit the threshold. (assuming you made 1$ per download) Their FAQ says: For example, let’s look at a hypothetical game made by a team using Unity Pro with the following revenue and install numbers: Revenue from last 12 months - $2M USD Lifetime installs - 5M The Unity Runtime Fee will apply to this game, as it surpasses the $1M revenue and 1M lifetime install thresholds for Unity Pro. Let’s look at the game’s installs from the last month: Prior month installs (Standard fee countries) - 200K Prior month installs (Emerging market fee countries) - 100K The fee for install activity is $23.5K USD, calculated as follows: (100K x $0.15 (first tier for standard fee countries)) + (100K x $0.075 (second tier for standard fee countries)) + (100K x $0.01 (fee for emerging market countries)) = $23.5K USD @@eliasfrank8081
@@bexplosion Really, because that's not exactly what unity is saying here. They're saying, per install. Which can (and probably does) mean that if I buy and install the game. *Uninstall* the game, and then *reinstall* the game, that's 2 installs. If you think it means otherwise, you're not cynical enough.
Walk this back under pressure or not the trust is dead. How can any indie developer not look to move away from them for their next project. Obviously some who are already too committed on current projects may consider those if their publisher doesn't drop them. But it's mad to start a new unity project now.
It's almost like theres an inversely proportional relationship between the quality of FOSS software (like Godot) and the general scummieness of everything else. The better it gets, the more people use it, which means the corporations are more desparate to appease stockholders...and therefore become more scummy with stunts like this.
I'm waiting for the stockholders to actually understand the ramifications of the new pricing model and start pulling out hard - Unity is a dead man walking right now
To be fair, I've never understood Unity's pricing model. And I always felt turned off by it alone. That engine choice alone might double or even triple your per developer costs for basically nothing. Instead of paying 2-5k per user you could work with a different engine, double your team size, and possibly still make a profit…
So one doubt, if my mobile game got 250k downloads but only 5k$ revenue I won’t be charged? As I doubt both criteria should be me 200k + 200k dollars or any one ?
My project(s) were all done in C#, and I ported to Godot for the front-end. Didn't take me more than a month, leaving aside ongoing tweaking, upgrading and fine-tuning once I'd completed the port. Probably the most intuitive engine I've tried. Got all my products up and live on Steam really easily - found that they even worked on the Deck right out of the box, and that's with me using an older version of Godot that (probably due to my own incompetence) wasn't successfully building for Linux.
And some people call Godot a scam. :P Seriously though - this is a very Unity move in how sudden and uncoordinated it came. I loved Unity from the days it was Mac only, still. But over the last few years I just can't any more. It's not the company I so deeply supported over all these years.
I'm so glad I've mostly been staying away from game engines and trying to write things from scratch. It's been hard, REAL hard, but at least I control almost every aspect of what I'm designing.
I've never liked Godot (I also didn't hated it) but with this unity fee change, this is one of my best options to switch egine. Godot or Unreal, but I'm not staying with Unity after this
You're obviously free to not get committed to godot, but there are other alternatives than the trio Unity-Unreal-Godot that are also worth trying. Especially when Unreal is more for AAA games than indie games, like using a sledgehammer to kill a mosquito.
Very nice and creative way to react to the Unity news. Great way to welcome gamedevs who are transitioning to Godot. Please keep up the good work, as it's going to be busy. Your ahead of the curve, but better bring your A game as many more will start to champion Godot (and some are really good gamedevs)
What's weird is that even if the developer pulls the game off any stores right now, they will still owe installation fees starting next year. Not sure how Unity will know, given that the games would already be behind on updates, but that's there anyway.
There is one thing where GoDot will cost a bit of money (maybe) if you plan to develop for consoles. Long time GoDot didnt had this support - but with W4Games this changes. W4Games will release early 2024 their console exports and it will cost a bit of money - but i talked to them on Gamescom and they still dont know how much but will be less than unity license. So this will be now the time to do the switch and go the godot way. Its a shame what Unity did. And it was not the first time with a WTF change - last year we had the "console needs pro version" change - and that was the first time to really conside GoDot as an alternative.
Godot seems a good option but seems you have to make a few adjustments to get shading and lighting looking like Unity. I'm also not sure on the tools available I heavily rely on apps to help with code
I wonder how they are going to track this? Do you have to be online for this? Is it now impossible to make offline apps and games with Unity? Is it even legal to track installs based on certain data protection laws? Does the concern of the end-user's safety will affect sales on certain types of software?
From the way developers immediately looked into godot when this was announced kinda seems like godot was something they would already be using if they weren't already using unity. I was gonna get into unreal but I'll have a further look into godot
@@rahn45 People who want to pay their bills with the skills they spent years developing. I agree that life would be great if we weren't forced to be wage slaves in order to survive in this world, but we don't have much control over that.
But Godot hasn't supported C# for mobile yet and GDScript will only tie us up to another engine. I wonder if Stride Engine would be a better choice for 3D mobile games
If i made a game with unity and upload for example on apple app store and google play store, Is it possible to switch engine and update the current game on both stores ?
cant believe i wanted to get into Unity just a few months ago. My laptop kept giving me errors about it not installing properly, which is why i ended up getting godot. Guess I dodged a huge bullet lmao honestly it would affect me anyways bc of the threshhold but still lol
This would also mean that indie games that could usually be priced relatively cheap (around $5-10) would now have to be priced higher in case they’re install-bombed and charged ridiculous amounts.
All those who are before success won't be affected. But even a small/medium indie mobile company would be hit massivly by this. I am in touch with devs from such companies and there's big panic rn there. Such companies operate on thin profit margins and are often startups, and their games are installed like crazy. We are talking 3/4 updates a week. Which gives 3/4 installs per active users a week, then add couple thousand new users daily, who usually leave no money behind but now will leave costs. If Unity goes with it, I sayJanuary 2024 plenty games with 1/5 download millions total will close for good. Bad for players, bad for devs and bad for Unity. Its not just corporate greed, it's corporate stupidity more than greed.
And then, if Unity only works for devs before success and revenue, then what's the point using such an Engine? Market is poor rn and this is just the nail to the coffin for thousands devs.
Yup greedy sons of bitches, CEO even said, " we're doin it for the money to keep funding unity" like hello you already make enough money dip shit. So annoyed by this 😡
So how does this apply to free games, Ive spent like the past month working on a mobile game and I dont wanna abondon it, lets say I get heaps of installs but barely any money from it. Will I Still be charged? Mobile games often need large amounts of installs in order to make money so surely I could get well over the install amount but because the actual advertisement and game payment earn less than the 200,000 I would be all good? Or is it entirely based on installs? If so Godot it is.
Yeah i think Nintendo used unity to make levels for kirbo and the forgotten land (which was a really great game, and a great job at introducing kirbo to 3d)
Isnt unity a private company? It was going to happen sooner or later. It seems like the best way forward is going to be community driven/funded engines/ software.
Unity Technologies is publicly traded company with stockholders and everything that is wrong with constant delivery of profits to those people who have no clue how game industry works. They only care how much their shares are paying dividends and always want more.
I'm learning game development and I never publisher a game so far, so take my opinion for the situation I'm in now: if they try to charge gamedevs and studios for past installations, they're gonna pass through a living hell of lawsuits. If they say that the threshold is reset on the date these changes will take place, the developers will have to take these changes into account when they have to establish the price of the game they want to release. Fun fact: I was learning Unity 2D and, at 50% of the course completion I stopped understanding. I thought, ok I probably have to switch to an easier game engine and I found a Godot course on Udemy held by one of the best teachers I ever listened to and now I'm at 85% completion, eager to finish it to start developing my first game. Unity has some no contest pros, like the asset store, full of everything you need and the community. Maybe some of those people will switch to Godot and other to UE5. Will see
I honestly believe that this is a choice to "fight" free to play games or mobile games. Console and PC developers have been paying fees for a long time. However, if this measures allows us to see more Godot, MonoDevelop, GameMaker etc developers, then welcome
so in the end its all about YOU is the PRODUCT, rather than Combating F2P "Trash" Games but its also such an irony, 2 years ago we were thinking that we ware the product and the devs were just a cash cow, now Even devs also a product
Makes a lot of sense, considering the "f'ing idiots" comment the ceo made a few months back about the dev's that chose not to use it... all coming together lol@12feetup
I know that Unity and Godot shares C# language, but Its really looks onesided when people starts to say that Godot is a great choice. Sometimes I find that Godot was literally missing on some exotic, but mandatory features that allow more flexibility inside the engine without modifying the actual code, so for those who seeks new engine I'd rather recommend to look into Godot and other engines (like Bevy, Hazel, UniEngine, Unreal Engine, Wiked Engine). For me Godot is not a great choice because of its not so flexible render model (its not about Vulkan, Its about the way of how things implemented in the engine)
My main worry now is making a game in Godot, just for Godot to start a pricing plan somewhere in the future that who knows what it will be like. Like it's hard to believe it will stay free forever... Or maybe I'm not understanding the situation right?
the trust damage is already done. if they walk it back they also need to earn the trust back. i don't necessarily have a problem with the new fees but the fact that unity makes up new license fees just like that is deeply worrying to me
I may actually believe Unity may just end up slowly dying because of these terrible decisions as more people move to Godot/Unreal. Already off to install Godot
As an ex unity dev that's working through Godot right now, I do get that Unity is within its rights to charge. I actually liked their model where you only pay past a certain amount of revenue. But what the hell have they done?? Why add this weird tiering system? It's going to end them in court.
The funny thing is - all they had to do is take a cut out of the profits - People would be upset for a couple days, and then shrug and go "business as usual, I guess I earn a couple cents less on every dollar" - But nooooo, they went ahead with a pricing model that can outright bankrupt developers, makes absolutely no sense for any AAA publisher to want to have to deal with any of this bullshit - and the implementation appears to be illegal in most countries in the world. How do you fuck this up so hard?
@@RancorSnp Unity fees are lower than Unreal fees if a game gets 3 dollars or more revenue per game installation. This is assuming the user is using Unity Pro.
@@RancorSnp in fact, AAA developers actually benefit from this the most. A game that has about 40 dollars of revenue per installation will have at least about 40mil revenue before it even hits the 1mil installation mark. If this same dev was using Unreal, they would have already been paying 5% when the game hit 1mil revenue. On top of that, most AAA studios usually get custom revenue deals anyway, so this change might not even affect them.
@@tailez606 But they do not have 40 dollars of revenue per installation. They have 40 dollars of revenue per PURCHASE. The user then may install the game an infinite amount of times for the next 10 years and as long as the company earns enough money - they have to pay for every single installation, even though they only get paid once
@@RancorSnp how do you actually expect this to get tracked? You're assuming the worst case scenario and that Unity didn't consider the legal implications of things. Plenty of other videos bashing Unity said that phoning home to the mothership is likely very illegal. Why would they do that if it's illegal? It's most likely going to rely on self reporting by developers, or be based on storefront data, both of which are difficult for an end user to manipulate in any meaningful way. It's already been clarified that installations represents "unique" installations. If you uninstall and reinstall it doesn't count. If you wanted to meaningfully impact some poor dev with dud installations, you'd have to set up a system that would automatically generate a fresh VM with a new hardware ID for it to be counted (assuming, again, that's what's being considered when counting). Then you'd leave this system running automatically logging in and installing a game from a chosen storefront. Now you're generating some numbers. All of those numbers can then be audited by the storefront, the dev or Unity to make sure they're legit and not the equivalent of "review bombing". But I guess what you're afraid of is that Unity wouldn't audit them in the name of profit, which is a reasonable fear to have (although unlikely). Finally if it seems like too much, these fees can be entirely waived by opting into certain Unity services. Still a cheaper offering than Unreal.
The Unity CEO that pushed through the fee, John Riccitiello, previously suggested charging Battlefield players every time they reload. He was the CEO of EA during the FIFA 09 release that popularized lootboxes. He also called creatives that don't want to use microtransactions in their games "biggest f-ing idiots".
twitter.com/StayAtHomeDev/status/1702439987692622173
Post on Twitter with the hashtag: #NOUNITYWITHFEES
And express your frustrations with this decision to let Unity know that this is NOT OK.
What do i think? I think i'll start learning Godot...
@@eduardoddutra Look for a RUclipsr called garbaj for the best Godot tutorials there for the old version of Godot but the only real difference between versions is that in the modern version its @onready var instead of onready var
It’s not a big deal. Only 10% of indie games make over $200k per year, and not all of those use Unity.
So if you sell your game for, say $5, even after you hit $200k, you won’t have to start paying the runtime fees since that’s only 40,000 copies sold.
If you’re still butthurt about it, you can pay for UnityPro which, if you are going to make that much on your game, is probably worth it.
Nothing against Godot, but people are freaking out over something that won’t affect them.
And for all those soying out about “microtransactions,” that’s not Unity’s fault. Microtransactions make TONS in the gaming industry. The consumers love microtransactions, so the industry will tailor itself to those.
@@tornadre the problem is also "installations" as he mentioned which means that 40,000 copies sold could mean double or triple that amount or more in installations.
@@tornadre Okay, fair point. Here's another fair point.
The changed the contract, and you're stuck no matter what. Everyone who made a game is. There's nothing actually changing them from putting any fee or price in, at any level, against any one. This isn't even the first time they've done it.
But, I mean, you just defended microtransactions and used language like "butthurt..." so...
The current CEO of Unity, was the CEO of EA at the time they got voted worst company in America two years in a row (2012, 2013).
How is that not surprising... Whee
When I got a whiff of that guy being involved that made me switch to Godot, the Ukrainian activist stuff also helped but this is just hilarious.
Seems like doing layoffs is just one of the ways they're trying to score big cash.
This explains a lot
Little reminder that managers don't get fired or bad business reputation for bad performance
This reminds me of horse armor. Sure, most devs will never cross the threshold where unity charges for installs, but it’s a way for them to test the boundaries of what people will put up with. Remember when microtransactions weren’t a thing? Good times.
Bingo...
what about mobile devs ? a small studio might cross that 200k , maybe they are targeting mobile devs more , and sadly i am making 2 of them and they are at 95% progress
They're also targeting games on game pass.
@@darkstar3116 That’s what I meant by “test the boundaries”. The classic “I don’t care if they add micro transactions, if you don’t want it don’t buy it” is how we got here.
Is both mobile game microtransaction and MOBA skins the 1st implementing it before the Horse Armor that popularized it?
Even if they walk it back they might not recover. Trust is already lost. Being dependent on Unity is a risk that many game studios won't like taking.
The harm is done, as an indie dev, f*ck Unity for such lame disgrace, total blatant disrespect and greedy arrogance. This is blatant fraud that could litterally bankrupt and severely indebt tons of people.
I don't want them to have any single penny from me and from what I've read today all around, tons and tons of people got really fed up in only one day and wil merge. The more time they will take to backpedal on that and believe me there's a chance for them to go on with this premeditated fraud that will kill thousands of indie projects withour even giving a f*ck, the more money and devs, they will lose.
It is already started, I've read comments from fellow devs all day and most of them on the matter were similars. For lots of people, it is the drop that broke the glass. Observe, there will be lots more of games that will merge to Unreal and Godot. Unreal is already popular and well known, so for them it won't be the "klondike", but for engines like Godot that people were maybe considering, but weren't giving it a chance, some will and Godot will gain popularity and that is a good thing.
I was already considering for a while moving to Godot, now I'm just too pissed off at Unity for them to have any chance of having any penny from me, screw that, they are litteral crooks. That now, after the massive brutal layoffs from some time ago, nah this is bullsh*t, I'll get the f*ck out of this mess. And I will be happy to give money to Godot, because they deserve it, they never tried to blackmail their devs, because what Unity has done is even worse than blackmail and fraud, it is litteral theft premeditation. What would be the next fraud, charging devs each time we compile code locally in the engine ? Nah, screw that, never ever again that I will start a new project in Unity.
For me, they are done, it is over and I will lose tons of time and money more than I could afford right now, but sorry when some coportate douchebag tries to sh*t on me like that, he can just go die and rot in hell, I won't care anymore about them, at all. And believe me, I was sold to them big time few years ago, I've worked numerous thousand of hours with this engine, as much that I don't even have any clear idea how many hours. But for some time already, things were going sketchy, I don't know a part of me saw that coming I guess... I feel it like literal treason.
And you are right, I will never take this risk again, I would sue the sh*t out of them if only I could, big time.
there is no trust involved in unity development, they market the engine to studios that think about big profits. they dont market the engine to children and naive teens so to rely on trust me bro, its a totally diffrent scene from what poor engines like construct, godot, game maker`s scenes where they need to exploit naive people and children in order to remain alive.
it is very ironic actually, but you need the capacity for it.
@@zendraw3468 Oh there is a lot of trust involved. Unity just said it will charge game studios for games RETROACTIVELY - they introduced a payment model of "you get money once, you pay us an infinite amount of times" - The only way for ANY Unity developer that reaches the treshold to not go bankrupt is to implement ads in every game they make. 70$ title? Better get ready to have ads in the game. And the thing is - big publishers are very unlikely to be willing to put up with this shit. Because while I see no reason why they WOULDN'T want to add ad revenue to their full price games - why give that ad revenue to Unity, when you can make a game in a different engine and keep the money in your pocket - another thing is. Unity is literally charging you on the basis of "trust us bro" - they specifically charge for INSTALLS because the developers have no way to track the amount of times their game got installed
@@RancorSnp the fee only kicks in over $1mil in revenue, which 99% of randos complaining about this will never ever reach. Go ahead, use another game engine, where the 10% or higher revenue share will be way higher than whatever unity ends up doing
to be clear, im not defending unity in any way, im just sayng, think for a moment.
1st you have to reach the revenue threshold to be charged with anything for the last 12 months, if you never reach that threshold then you dont need to care. and this is good for indies becouse the thresholds are now higher, 200k for free license, 1mil for paid ones. again, if you earn that in last 12 months. as an indie, solo dev this is good. as a company that earns alot more, this is not so good.
about installs i alredy said, they have to make it accurate in order to not get sued. and like i sayd, installs are alredy counted in all stores and im sure it will be about paid installs, and not just any installs. of corse if its any kind of install then its a no brainer to switch to another engine. again im not defending unity, im just sayng the deal is still better then something else, atleast for some people.@@RancorSnp
Godot: We're looking for more funding to help with the future of Godot. Would be really cool if you guys could donate a bit more.
Developers: HEY YOU JUST GOT A BUNCH OF MONEY DON'T BE GREEDY
Unity: We're gonna start putting a static priced tax that is very hard to monitor or police
Developers: well i guess Godot isn't so bad...
-POV of people with beggar mentality.
Unreal: wanna see something cool?
Developers : Holy shit....
@@littleowlgaming-unity-tutorialUnreal: Wanna see something bloated?
FIXED
LOL there is a price to pay for grand awesomeness @@NuttachaiTipprasert
@@littleowlgaming-unity-tutorial I have about a year of Unity experience a long time ago and several years of Linux server software development since then. When I wanted to try a modern game engine Godot is the only one I managed to install. I got frustrated with Unity Hub in about an hour of trying to make it use a demo/trial license and EGS for Linux was just not a thing back then.
Unity sure is making an effort to make developers choose other engines!
imagine having stock in your competitors, becoming CEO and applying all your EA kmowledge and trying to take it to the next stage, absolute win win, either make money or make money or ruin something and make other things more valuable. Foolproof plan.
I really don't know what this means for the future but it looks horrible there's already many people that struggle making a life from this and now you can theorethically lose money from this?
Only reason to use unity now feels like because I have to for school and haven't learned anything else yet :(.
Have you earned $200K on any of your games that you created with the free version of Unity?
So glad we switched from Unity3D to Godot a few years back! 🎉
We faced some discouragement along the way, and it was tough on the team, but looking back, it was totally worth it.
Super happy with Godot! 👏🎮
Can you show the finished projects?
I get the feeling Godot is about to get a good stress test from a lot of people, i suspect it'll fail in some ways that will hopefully propel its development forward, but you can't argue with ZERO.
Its very similar to what EA does. You can only install it 5 times or you can only install it once on that one machine. It does remind me of that.
CEO came from EA so...
well the guy who's the CEO of Unity now used to be the CEO of EA
he was forced to stepped down as ceo from EA for causing their numbers to drop and also the last 2 years he worked there EA was labeled the worst company to work for in america both 2 years in a row even beating Bank of America. He stepped down then 1 year after unity hires him. Makes no sense how that is even a thing.
yup, makes more sense now doesnt it @@sleepCircle ?
The is that you cannot relaunch & relogin the FIFA game more than 5 times a day or you would be banned for 1 day XDDD
Unity is dragging game industry to days when we had to insert coin to actually play a game. But weird thing is developer has to pay for players 😅
😂😂😂
Well, for 2D games Godot has already won over a while ago, now it just needs to catch up with 3D features (which is more of a dealbreaker for some people rather than just pricing model). However the fact that everyone can contribute and adds these features and they'll potentially be added to the core engine is super appealing (and the reason I finally got Godot and started fiddling with it :P )
How about performance and when complex shaders are being used? I'm sure unity does perform 2-3x more efficient and faster.
@@shtr86 unity stan
That's the beauty of FOSS, the development time can take off and leave everyone behind, like a senior citizen on a pharmacy 70% off sale, if enough eyes are on the software.
If you need high fidelity 3d graphics, just use unreal. Anything with less fidelity than that and godot has you covered. Unity literally has no space in any scenario. It should be put in the trash, along with the unitg board members.
@@YeeLeeHaw "Like a senior citizen on a pharmacy 70% off sale..." LMAOOOO
I had been seeing Unity as a sinking ship for quite some time (and I'm not just talking about its stock price), and this news only reaffirms my belief. I think the management's intention is to focus Unity as a game engine for smartphones while gradually moving away from PC and consoles. But these are good news for Godot. Unreal remains for high-end games, Godot for indies, and (I guess) Unity for casual games on the Apple Store
nah, Unity is gonna be a shit app for apple store items too. this price shit will primarily impact phone products.
The first thing that comes to my mind is successful games that pass the thresholds... what happens when the devs want to heavily discount them? What about putting them in very cheap bundles? What about giving them free in giveaways or for charities? This is very common nowadays. Are they just gonna lose money giving them in humblebundle deals etc?
i think this is the big screw up. They should scrap this whole model and just go to 5% revenue sharing. It will cost more than this whole install based thing, but at least it makes sense
This bullshit better not delay hollow knight 2
@@moonashano the %5 is nothing to their install charge fee
@@moonashaone is a price you can expect the other can retro activity bankrupt you
More Godot devs mean Godot gets better faster, means more games with better margins without raising prices for gamers. If you make it big using the GODOT engine remember to back-feed someone that boon back to Godot to help pay for future improvements, or upload some of your own custom improvements to the Godot boards so other devs can make use of them.
Not least of all because the one area that Godot lacked a little - some of the documentation was a bit vague in places - will be filled in by new people figuring it out, discussing it online etc. Just the presence of more people using it will mean more problems collectively solved.
There is another issue not many has talked about. You mentioned the word trust. Here is the thing right now their licensing even unreal licensing is based on sale numbers. This can be tracked easy by both the devs and unity. So its easy to catch a lie or mistake from 1 side or the other eventually. With this new per install the only one that can truly track this is unity not the dev so the trust there is lop sided, how do I know if their metrics are accurate? How do I know if it came from a legate person buying the game or a pirate? How do I know unity is being honest here?
there is no way to know, you would have to 100% rely on unity doing the right thing here. Which I do not trust any company that I cannot do an oversight on. Its like a bank giving me my balance without allowing me to look at all my transactions, how would I know if my transactions are correct if I cannot view them.
Seen this argument too...how can they track it and have it be transparent?
Also on the trust issue: don't trust any of their claims they will manage fraud or abuse detection when they are the beneficiaries of profits stemming from fraud or abuse. They will devote token resources to it to maintain the image of responsible caretaking.
Isn't there a way to send the signal that "the game was installed" without in fact installing a game? Because I can imagine someone doing it just to piss over some developers.
@@NTBXP1 i mean it would definitely be possible. how easy it would be to exploit such a thing would depend on the level of reverse engineering protections present, but it would be a permanent security vulnerability that, if found, could plunge a company into bankruptcy. its a level of power one should not have and only exists because of greedy fucks like that CEO (who needs to be fired and thrown to the curb before he ruins anymore products)
This is from their faq:
"How is Unity collecting the number of installs?"
"We leverage our own proprietary data model and will provide estimates of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project - this estimate will cover an invoice for all platforms"
So they guess, don't explain how they got that guess, and you must pay based off that number.
As a programmer, I am amazed that there are still colleagues who defend proprietary software. It's so much more efficient to have a foundation who pulls funds from lots of companies who use the product and use these to develop them. Your comparison is perfect. These incredibly complex plans and licenses exist only to give jobs to sales people and intellectual property lawyers and allows scams like this. Hope they go down pretty fast.
I do not mind a proprietary software that you can pay for lifetime. I would not mind paying 10k for unity and having the engine for life and not having to use their shitty cloud "services". software is expensive to make so i do not mind paying for it. The problem i have is this predatory SaaS model
That's because large, complicated open-source software doesn't always make financial sense. Someone got to be doing the work here and if it's free, you don't get to recoup the cost while your competitors get to use it for free. In fact, we have seen a swing back in last couple years where a lot of businesses like MongoDB, ElasticSearch, Hashicorp are finding that the open-source model is not really working for them. It always kind of depends on the circumstances.
Game engines are also complicated enough that most large companies prefer having their in-house solutions as they are designed to address their own needs, while they also want to have a competitive advantage.
I do agree with you on principle on IP ownership/freedom but I think reality is somethings a little different.
That is an incredibly narrow and, frankly, stupid view. Most of the time, well-managed and well-monetized proprietary/premium software will be better than FOSS.
@@sujimayne Exactly. Only software devs have this free-cult mentality. Good software is not cheap to build. It requires tons of effort and money. I would like to see more AAA and indie games being released for free so that they can see how ridiculous their free-cult mentality is. My only problem is that unity's monetisation is just dumb. I would not even mind if they doubled the fee for all their tiers.
@@leeoiou7295 To be fair, a large part of the 'free' part is freedom (which is exactly the point of contention here with Unity), not "free as in free beer". While you said it would be cool to have proprietary software that you can pay for lifetime, in reality that doesn't exist, because you will eventually need support (e.g. a new game console, new features, bug fixes). If the proprietary software only lets you use it but forbids sharing the source code with others (if you even get the source to begin with), then you are basically still forced to pay up unless you are technical enough to port the entire engine to a new console. A large part of the open-source movement (I guess more the free software movement which is technically different) has more to concern with the ownership/freedom issue than costing $0. I think this is a common misunderstanding because English mixes the word "free".
I just got Godot prepped today after hearing the news. Unity completely broke me and my partner's trust, even if they roll this back it shows they are willing to see what they can get away with and will likely fully push something like this in the future. I don't want our games to be tied down with constant fees on top of needing to pay much more upfront just to use Unity as they removed Unity Plus.
My main reason to start with Godot, as well as Blender, was because I've never seen a good opensource platform that did not develop fast. I don't intend to create AAA games alone, but I do have the dream to create a cool game that will spread like fire, and for that I would NEVER be tied to any other company. I feel sorry for the people that decided to trust greedy companies.
Sadly most people are too stupid to see past capitalist marketing. I have been using mostly open source software like blender, godot, inkscape etc and its insane how fast they are developing. I consider them to be already better than any commercial competitors.
I wish gimp and olive had such a fast development
@@mat_max photoshop and premier pro/resolve have too strong a grip on the industry. Which means not enough people go to the FOSS alternatives and hence, devlopment is slower. Its a cycle which some software never break out of sadly.
Eunuchty (Unity) going IPO (that is: becoming a publicly traded company; and thus, becoming beholden to shareholders) should have been the game devs' first cue to ABANDON SHIP.
@@askeladden450No, the reason a lot of people still prefer Unity is because of the community. Also, different platforms. With Godot you cannot port to consoles, that is a problem.
It's incredible that you knew this was coming back in 90s when you was a kid and managed to discuss it with Tom Cruise back then, listed all pros and cons and persuaded him to make a collaboration video 30+ years later.
I expect they'll walk it back after the community uproar, but they've already shown where their priorities lie.
I think they have dementia
Recently, I started doing indie development. And I chose Unity as a more common engine with a lot of information about it, software libraries, etc. But with this move, unity hammers the last nail into the lid of its coffin. After all, this is one of the few engines that is suitable for single development. The same, Unreal was developing towards a large gaming industry, adding tools to create good graphics. But unity has been standing still all this time. And now came the moment when he lost his only dignity. Now my project, which I spent more than a month on, will have to be transferred to godot.
I'm sorry, I don't know English well for the translation. Hello, from Russia.
I honestly did not even consider pirated versions of games, my main concern is the small indie dev studios which allready have to sell their games at very low prices to even compete and earn something will have nothing left at all. Also, when you don't like a developer, basically install and uninstall their games multiple times and you can make them bankrupt ... :/
Yep, this is an exploit I already saw being discussed people thought of in 5 seconds of the announcement, I wonder if the devs of Unity could actually do a class action over this but i'm not a lawyer.
How many of those small indies make $200.000 a year? Most indie devs make between $5k to $8k per game, so they will not affected.
The problem is when those thresholds inevitably lower and the fees inevitably increase.
@@TheBayzent 200k installs would be easily achieved with bots, if people really want to take down a developer, they basically can as Unity just created the possibility.
Ive been working on a game for the last 7 months with unity engine and my trust is completely broken. Even if they roll back changes im still swapping to godot as they dont have shareholders to appease being open source.
This is why we need beautiful free software like Godot
And efficient beautiful free software like Bevy
Most people won’t get to that point but this is RIP, Unity.
Nothing like a system that punishes success to get people excited to pick up or keep working with Unity!
It's also amusing to think of F2P games that reach the 200k threshold and suddenly every new download of their game costs them 20 cents a pop.
This is why I stopped using Unity as far back as when there was Godot 2.0. I never liked the way that Unity did business.
I'm excited for Godot, you can never have too many open source alternatives to programs. Maybe when Godot 5 or 6 rolls out it'll be feature rich enough for me to consider moving to it
@@Hietakissa I switched to Godot as my main engine from Unity awhile ago and I assure you Godot 4 can do everything Unity can do sometimes a bit better in some cases, it's just the classic thing of getting devs to really try and push the limits of the engine. People just assume Godot 4 is purely an indie dev engine for 'indie creators' purely because only a few 2D games have been released in the wild for the most part.
@@lethn2929 I watched a feature video on Godot 4.0, and it's a bit concerning to me that it just got basic features like SSAO and a proper AI navigation system. I wouldn't want to work in an engine only to find out mid-way through development that the engine doesn't support some crucial feature.
There was also a comparison of Godot 3 vs 4 3D shadows and if there was that much room to improve then I can only assume there's way more for them to still catch up on.
I also took a look at a 4.1 feature video if there were any significant improvements, and they mentioned something about C# being brought closer to parity with GDScript, not being able to use the primary language I use properly for all functions could be a dealbreaker.
I agree. Godot is awesome! With what's happening with Unity, it's only going to grow and keep getting better@@Hietakissa
@@HE360 I hope so. So far Godot hasn't been the fastest at releasing new updates, but maybe that'll change with the newly introduced development fund and the influx of devs.
This video is the best! Love your channel and it’s made me get into working on my own godot rally game :)
Let's go! That's awesome!
That's amazing news actually. Minus one competitor, possibly more support for open solutions. And I just love watching how "talented" managers break everything apart.
Then we can get more fan content so I won’t have to mooch off Fnf.
This unity thing really is the epitome of 'poorly thought-out boardroom idea'. The fact that there are so many question and complications which arise from such an idea really does show you the people who came up with this idea would struggle to turn a computer on let alone install a game.
I love how unity has become the biggest reason to install godot
They should add another fees like per launch, changing settings or for each extra rendered pixel
1: don't give them ideas
2: how about a fee for every time a button is pressed?
press w, a, s, or d: 1 dollar
press e: 2 dollars
press f: F dollars (hex joke, it means 16)
its becoming EA 💀
Problem is even if they walk it back the trust is gone.
Great video. Can't believe you got Tom Cruise for this, and on such short notice too!
You'll own nothing, and you'll be happy. Even stuff you've made yourself will become a service.
True BUT this isn't a car you own outright. You just pay to have the right to use Unity. Lots of people already are tied to it so that's not much of a choice. Changing the rules this drastically with little notice is not really within their right and I'm sure they'll deal with it in court.
So, are you up for hearing OUR plan?
@@cookiemonster208well one problem with this is that games already made with Unity are actually bound with this new change even if they don't agree anymore. That's just scummy.
@@cookiemonster208 oh to hell with the capitalist shilling, capitalism sucks let go of it
@@cookiemonster208 I don't use it. I'm on a Godot video, and so are you.
I discovered Unity few days ago. After some interactions, I've found it comfortable to myself. But that unremovable "Made with Unity" become an issue for me. I also like Unity's 8,5mb on web production, while Godot is ~50mb. Now it looks like I have no options except Godot. Welcome me to the club 🤖
problem is Godot doesn't even mildly compare to Unity, unreal is a better option to be honest but who knows if we can even trust them now as well
@@ooOPizzaHeadOoo Godot is leagues better than Unity for 2D wtf are you talking about? :D and Unreal is better for professional/experienced devs than Unity in 3D... RIP Unity lol
But Godot hasn't supported C# for mobile yet and GDScript will only tie us up to another engine. I wonder if Stride Engine would be a better choice for 3D mobile games
@@containedhurricane If you can't easily figure out GDscript, game dev might be too much for you. I'd question how on Earth you managed in Unity to begin with
@@Freek314 It would tie me up to Godot, which is similar to Unreal's Blueprint
I was waiting for this video. I was not disappointed.
😎👍
I completely new to game dev 6 days ... and this explanation was great .. im bummed about the situation... jason weiman should be upset abou this.. but i think he is incahoots with unity
Man don't get fooled those are unitys sponsored unofficial channels. Just look at any tutorial he will complete it with some premium asset from the store always. Always link you to the store too.
Godot also has an integrated editor for coding so no need to connect to visual studio and back and forth so bonus, you can just do it in engine
Back to making our own game engines
Or we can make psych engine, an engine used for Fnf mods, have it be used for more than that. Some guy got fnaf 1 to work on psych engine.
Unity REALLY shot themselves in the foot. Everyone is covering this, Kotaku, The Verge, Linus Tech Tips, Kinda Funny games... My local dev Discord has been on fire planning mass exodus.
I don't really care personally at the moment since I won't be crossing that threshold anyway. BUT it reminds us of the uncertainty of proprietary software. Investing your time learning FOSS like Blender and Godot will always be the safe option and foundation to build upon that won't be priced or bought off the market.
So unity pricing for Pro went from 125$ to 2000$? Are they insane?
From being on the Godot boat. Seeing a big yacht like unity just sinking is so... unreal
With the gamemakers feel famished with rage. They went to other developers who Construct a better game engine for them.
I'm giving up unity now after over a decade of using it. Thanks for the video
Not to mention you have to buy plugins to finish any game due to their endless count of deprecated features with nothing to replace them.
One important thing to note is this fee also applies to free games, trials and demos. Yes, a game you make no money on will actually cost you money.
it doesnt apply to completely free games AFAIK, but it would definitely impact people who make monetized games.
Fee doesn't apply until you make $200k. How long will that take for free games?
The chart also actually says "standard monthly rate" - which a lot of videos/twitter posts seem to have overlooked. So this would then be 20c per install per month. Where as the threshold is calculated on a per year basis. This is an insane amount of money, especially for low price games with a high install base.
It is not per install per month.
The invoice will be sent once per month. A unique user will only cost once. And the unique user will be calculated per device. So if you have 10 phones you could install it 1 time per phone and that will cost. But re-install will not.
You don't pay for the same install twice. The fee for installs that have not already been paid is calculated and paid each month
Yes you are right, its calculated per month. I've looked at their FAQ, but I dont see how this makes it any better. For example, once you have hit the threshold, and have around 100K new installs every month, you will be charged 0.15c per new install per month. So in total you pay 15k per month to unity. This is still insane for low price games. This means a 15% rev share depending how your installs distribute over the year, after you hit the threshold. (assuming you made 1$ per download)
Their FAQ says:
For example, let’s look at a hypothetical game made by a team using Unity Pro with the following revenue and install numbers:
Revenue from last 12 months - $2M USD
Lifetime installs - 5M
The Unity Runtime Fee will apply to this game, as it surpasses the $1M revenue and 1M lifetime install thresholds for Unity Pro. Let’s look at the game’s installs from the last month:
Prior month installs (Standard fee countries) - 200K
Prior month installs (Emerging market fee countries) - 100K
The fee for install activity is $23.5K USD, calculated as follows:
(100K x $0.15 (first tier for standard fee countries)) + (100K x $0.075 (second tier for standard fee countries)) + (100K x $0.01 (fee for emerging market countries)) = $23.5K USD
@@eliasfrank8081
@@bexplosion Really, because that's not exactly what unity is saying here. They're saying, per install. Which can (and probably does) mean that if I buy and install the game. *Uninstall* the game, and then *reinstall* the game, that's 2 installs.
If you think it means otherwise, you're not cynical enough.
the more i use godot, the more i am glad i made the right choice
Same, brother. Make some great things !
yeah same
Walk this back under pressure or not the trust is dead. How can any indie developer not look to move away from them for their next project. Obviously some who are already too committed on current projects may consider those if their publisher doesn't drop them. But it's mad to start a new unity project now.
It's almost like theres an inversely proportional relationship between the quality of FOSS software (like Godot) and the general scummieness of everything else. The better it gets, the more people use it, which means the corporations are more desparate to appease stockholders...and therefore become more scummy with stunts like this.
I'm waiting for the stockholders to actually understand the ramifications of the new pricing model and start pulling out hard - Unity is a dead man walking right now
To be fair, I've never understood Unity's pricing model. And I always felt turned off by it alone. That engine choice alone might double or even triple your per developer costs for basically nothing. Instead of paying 2-5k per user you could work with a different engine, double your team size, and possibly still make a profit…
So one doubt, if my mobile game got 250k downloads but only 5k$ revenue I won’t be charged?
As I doubt both criteria should be me 200k + 200k dollars or any one ?
My project(s) were all done in C#, and I ported to Godot for the front-end. Didn't take me more than a month, leaving aside ongoing tweaking, upgrading and fine-tuning once I'd completed the port. Probably the most intuitive engine I've tried. Got all my products up and live on Steam really easily - found that they even worked on the Deck right out of the box, and that's with me using an older version of Godot that (probably due to my own incompetence) wasn't successfully building for Linux.
And some people call Godot a scam. :P
Seriously though - this is a very Unity move in how sudden and uncoordinated it came. I loved Unity from the days it was Mac only, still. But over the last few years I just can't any more. It's not the company I so deeply supported over all these years.
I'm so glad I've mostly been staying away from game engines and trying to write things from scratch.
It's been hard, REAL hard, but at least I control almost every aspect of what I'm designing.
I am officially done with Unity. 10 years of experience out the window.
I've never liked Godot (I also didn't hated it) but with this unity fee change, this is one of my best options to switch egine. Godot or Unreal, but I'm not staying with Unity after this
You're obviously free to not get committed to godot, but there are other alternatives than the trio Unity-Unreal-Godot that are also worth trying. Especially when Unreal is more for AAA games than indie games, like using a sledgehammer to kill a mosquito.
Gamemaker is an option too
You did a great job with this video. I felt Tom's performance was a bit flat. I don't think he fully expressed the severity of the situation.
"What if we charged 1 dollar per reload?" -- John Riccitiello
I'm more and more glad I started with Godot and not Unity
Very nice and creative way to react to the Unity news. Great way to welcome gamedevs who are transitioning to Godot. Please keep up the good work, as it's going to be busy. Your ahead of the curve, but better bring your A game as many more will start to champion Godot (and some are really good gamedevs)
This is an absolute win for Godot amd possibly even Unreal. If only Godot had a proper asset store.
Godotxc.com
What's weird is that even if the developer pulls the game off any stores right now, they will still owe installation fees starting next year. Not sure how Unity will know, given that the games would already be behind on updates, but that's there anyway.
There is one thing where GoDot will cost a bit of money (maybe) if you plan to develop for consoles. Long time GoDot didnt had this support - but with W4Games this changes.
W4Games will release early 2024 their console exports and it will cost a bit of money - but i talked to them on Gamescom and they still dont know how much but will be less than unity license.
So this will be now the time to do the switch and go the godot way.
Its a shame what Unity did. And it was not the first time with a WTF change - last year we had the "console needs pro version" change - and that was the first time to really conside GoDot as an alternative.
Imagine if Davici Resolve charged Hollywood every time a movie is watched made with there software.
Godot seems a good option but seems you have to make a few adjustments to get shading and lighting looking like Unity. I'm also not sure on the tools available I heavily rely on apps to help with code
I wonder how they are going to track this? Do you have to be online for this? Is it now impossible to make offline apps and games with Unity? Is it even legal to track installs based on certain data protection laws? Does the concern of the end-user's safety will affect sales on certain types of software?
From the way developers immediately looked into godot when this was announced kinda seems like godot was something they would already be using if they weren't already using unity. I was gonna get into unreal but I'll have a further look into godot
Seeing on the Unity Developers Reddit page people are jumping to Godot.
R.I.P. Unity
What if you just don’t pay it? Will they block users from playing the game ?
I spent learning C# for about 1 month, and I just started Unity yesterday. And then this news comes out. Guess i'll have to make 2D/3D games in Unreal
Welp best time now to learn Godot I guess!
Samez
UE is also the clear choice if you want to transition into a corporate job compared to unity
@@NihongoWakannai Who got into game development to be a corporate slave?
@@rahn45 People who want to pay their bills with the skills they spent years developing. I agree that life would be great if we weren't forced to be wage slaves in order to survive in this world, but we don't have much control over that.
But Godot hasn't supported C# for mobile yet and GDScript will only tie us up to another engine. I wonder if Stride Engine would be a better choice for 3D mobile games
If i made a game with unity and upload for example on apple app store and google play store, Is it possible to switch engine and update the current game on both stores ?
cant believe i wanted to get into Unity just a few months ago. My laptop kept giving me errors about it not installing properly, which is why i ended up getting godot. Guess I dodged a huge bullet lmao
honestly it would affect me anyways bc of the threshhold but still lol
John Riccitiello - that's reason number one. The company's policy is aimed at making a profit, and not about the convenience of developers.
Man, I'm a newbie and was just starting to learn some Unity, but, um... dunno if that's the best idea anymore...
This would also mean that indie games that could usually be priced relatively cheap (around $5-10) would now have to be priced higher in case they’re install-bombed and charged ridiculous amounts.
what movie is that with tom?
A Few Good Men 👍
All those who are before success won't be affected. But even a small/medium indie mobile company would be hit massivly by this. I am in touch with devs from such companies and there's big panic rn there. Such companies operate on thin profit margins and are often startups, and their games are installed like crazy. We are talking 3/4 updates a week. Which gives 3/4 installs per active users a week, then add couple thousand new users daily, who usually leave no money behind but now will leave costs. If Unity goes with it, I sayJanuary 2024 plenty games with 1/5 download millions total will close for good.
Bad for players, bad for devs and bad for Unity. Its not just corporate greed, it's corporate stupidity more than greed.
And then, if Unity only works for devs before success and revenue, then what's the point using such an Engine? Market is poor rn and this is just the nail to the coffin for thousands devs.
Yup greedy sons of bitches, CEO even said, " we're doin it for the money to keep funding unity" like hello you already make enough money dip shit. So annoyed by this 😡
So how does this apply to free games, Ive spent like the past month working on a mobile game and I dont wanna abondon it, lets say I get heaps of installs but barely any money from it. Will I Still be charged? Mobile games often need large amounts of installs in order to make money so surely I could get well over the install amount but because the actual advertisement and game payment earn less than the 200,000 I would be all good? Or is it entirely based on installs? If so Godot it is.
To be honest, I don't know if retroactively putting this in is even legal. Hope Unity is prepared for lots of Court cases. >_
Yeah i think Nintendo used unity to make levels for kirbo and the forgotten land (which was a really great game, and a great job at introducing kirbo to 3d)
Isnt unity a private company? It was going to happen sooner or later. It seems like the best way forward is going to be community driven/funded engines/ software.
Unity Technologies is publicly traded company with stockholders and everything that is wrong with constant delivery of profits to those people who have no clue how game industry works. They only care how much their shares are paying dividends and always want more.
Thanks Tom.
This basically means for me: Yt, show me Godot tutorials
I'm learning game development and I never publisher a game so far, so take my opinion for the situation I'm in now: if they try to charge gamedevs and studios for past installations, they're gonna pass through a living hell of lawsuits. If they say that the threshold is reset on the date these changes will take place, the developers will have to take these changes into account when they have to establish the price of the game they want to release.
Fun fact: I was learning Unity 2D and, at 50% of the course completion I stopped understanding. I thought, ok I probably have to switch to an easier game engine and I found a Godot course on Udemy held by one of the best teachers I ever listened to and now I'm at 85% completion, eager to finish it to start developing my first game. Unity has some no contest pros, like the asset store, full of everything you need and the community. Maybe some of those people will switch to Godot and other to UE5. Will see
Hey mate, could you tell me that Godot course in Udemy please? :)
I honestly believe that this is a choice to "fight" free to play games or mobile games. Console and PC developers have been paying fees for a long time. However, if this measures allows us to see more Godot, MonoDevelop, GameMaker etc developers, then welcome
Interesting....
so in the end its all about YOU is the PRODUCT, rather than Combating F2P "Trash" Games
but its also such an irony, 2 years ago we were thinking that we ware the product and the devs were just a cash cow, now Even devs also a product
@@ShiroCh_ID Sad but true
Makes a lot of sense, considering the "f'ing idiots" comment the ceo made a few months back about the dev's that chose not to use it... all coming together lol@12feetup
I know that Unity and Godot shares C# language, but Its really looks onesided when people starts to say that Godot is a great choice. Sometimes I find that Godot was literally missing on some exotic, but mandatory features that allow more flexibility inside the engine without modifying the actual code, so for those who seeks new engine I'd rather recommend to look into Godot and other engines (like Bevy, Hazel, UniEngine, Unreal Engine, Wiked Engine). For me Godot is not a great choice because of its not so flexible render model (its not about Vulkan, Its about the way of how things implemented in the engine)
My main worry now is making a game in Godot, just for Godot to start a pricing plan somewhere in the future that who knows what it will be like. Like it's hard to believe it will stay free forever... Or maybe I'm not understanding the situation right?
It's free software. Even if, impossibly, they charged for it, you can fork it. It will never be NOT free because no one controls it.
the trust damage is already done. if they walk it back they also need to earn the trust back. i don't necessarily have a problem with the new fees but the fact that unity makes up new license fees just like that is deeply worrying to me
I may actually believe Unity may just end up slowly dying because of these terrible decisions as more people move to Godot/Unreal.
Already off to install Godot
I already had experiences with the unity engine, but ever since the fee they announced, it's best to switch to godot for better services
Tom, how many Unity devs will there be in 2024?
I love how "unity vs unreal engine" becomes "Godot vs unreal engine", that's crazy.
I never heard of GADO. Is it like Godot?
It is!
Planned on learning Unity, bit I guess I will go with Godot.
What people aren't asking is what if Unity increases the price of per install at a later date...
“Zero!!!!”
Sold, I was mostly hobby prototyping crappy stuff on unity but I will just take a look at Godot.
As an ex unity dev that's working through Godot right now, I do get that Unity is within its rights to charge. I actually liked their model where you only pay past a certain amount of revenue.
But what the hell have they done?? Why add this weird tiering system?
It's going to end them in court.
The funny thing is - all they had to do is take a cut out of the profits - People would be upset for a couple days, and then shrug and go "business as usual, I guess I earn a couple cents less on every dollar" - But nooooo, they went ahead with a pricing model that can outright bankrupt developers, makes absolutely no sense for any AAA publisher to want to have to deal with any of this bullshit - and the implementation appears to be illegal in most countries in the world. How do you fuck this up so hard?
@@RancorSnp Unity fees are lower than Unreal fees if a game gets 3 dollars or more revenue per game installation. This is assuming the user is using Unity Pro.
@@RancorSnp in fact, AAA developers actually benefit from this the most. A game that has about 40 dollars of revenue per installation will have at least about 40mil revenue before it even hits the 1mil installation mark. If this same dev was using Unreal, they would have already been paying 5% when the game hit 1mil revenue.
On top of that, most AAA studios usually get custom revenue deals anyway, so this change might not even affect them.
@@tailez606 But they do not have 40 dollars of revenue per installation. They have 40 dollars of revenue per PURCHASE. The user then may install the game an infinite amount of times for the next 10 years and as long as the company earns enough money - they have to pay for every single installation, even though they only get paid once
@@RancorSnp how do you actually expect this to get tracked? You're assuming the worst case scenario and that Unity didn't consider the legal implications of things. Plenty of other videos bashing Unity said that phoning home to the mothership is likely very illegal. Why would they do that if it's illegal?
It's most likely going to rely on self reporting by developers, or be based on storefront data, both of which are difficult for an end user to manipulate in any meaningful way. It's already been clarified that installations represents "unique" installations. If you uninstall and reinstall it doesn't count.
If you wanted to meaningfully impact some poor dev with dud installations, you'd have to set up a system that would automatically generate a fresh VM with a new hardware ID for it to be counted (assuming, again, that's what's being considered when counting). Then you'd leave this system running automatically logging in and installing a game from a chosen storefront. Now you're generating some numbers. All of those numbers can then be audited by the storefront, the dev or Unity to make sure they're legit and not the equivalent of "review bombing". But I guess what you're afraid of is that Unity wouldn't audit them in the name of profit, which is a reasonable fear to have (although unlikely).
Finally if it seems like too much, these fees can be entirely waived by opting into certain Unity services. Still a cheaper offering than Unreal.
Unity - Tom, what are the Unity fee plans for the future?
"SHOW ME THE MONEEEYYYY"
The Unity CEO that pushed through the fee, John Riccitiello, previously suggested charging Battlefield players every time they reload. He was the CEO of EA during the FIFA 09 release that popularized lootboxes. He also called creatives that don't want to use microtransactions in their games "biggest f-ing idiots".