Garry Newman: The new Unity pricing would have cost him $410,000 of lifetime revenue
This is of course not including the yearly Unity subscription, where Unity Pro costs $2,040 per seat (although they may have Enterprise pricing)
Absolutely ridiculous. Many Unity devs are saying they're switching engines on social media.
The enshittification continues.
Watch for more products that enable normal people to do great things to become paywalled. Only your gatekeeper masters may direct the market, and the creativity. In their infinite wisdom, they demand the control of gods.
Billionaires are a mistake.
EDIT: and I love the bait-and-switch of charging anyone who ever used Unity, even under different terms. Electric chair for the CEO.
I'm starting to see enshittification as part of the cycle of renewal in capitalism. Don't get me wrong...it's a completely foolish and disasterous way of doing things, and billionaires are a black mark on society as a whole, but innovation happens when you take away the established tools.
Twitter is a good example. Elon seriously accelerated the enshittification, and now it's tanking. Meanwhile, alternatives are springing up at breakneck speeds to replace it. Which one will win the war is anyone's guess, but Twitter will be the loser regardless. Reddit is another one. And Digg before it. As one commits corporate seppuku, others step in to take its place.
While it sucks for anyone caught in the crossfire, and the ones responsible for nuking a corporate landscape often skip away with a golden parachute, it usually leads to a shakeup that can bring amazing innovations. The key is to get in on the next wave, hope you picked the winner, and make sure you get out before shit hits the fans this time.
But that cycle is bad for the advancement of society as a whole. Instead of having something others can build on, everyone has to start from scratch and redo a lot of the work that was already done.
Establishing new social networks for example take a whole lot of time. And then you tank them so others can do the same thing all over again? That's not progress. That's standstill being sold as progress.
In other words: everything turns to shit.
Yeah, at least these dominant corporations are now being forced to compete and become profitable without the advantages of free financing. This process is revealing the ghoulishness that their exaggerated ability to outspend their competition via borrowed capital had been hiding from the consumers.
Surprised nobody mentioned here, but Godot Engine people. It's FOSS and will never charge you for anything. Don't stay in an abusive relationship
They're going to back off on this and replace it with something bad but not as horrible. This is testing the water, and opens the door to charging everyone money every time you install a game, not just devs.
Have an install saved on your external and want to install it next week? You'll get charged for it as of you didn't already pay for it.
Games you have in your steam/gog backlog? Get charged again for it when you decide to play it.
I guarantee there are investors/publishers/whoever hitting themselves right now screaming "why didn't I think of that?".
I'd pirate the fuck out of everything if that happens.
The second Steam charges me for an install... Back to the high seas.
Not even about the money.
That's part of the problem; they aren't charging you for the install, they are remotely tracking that you've done so and then billing the dev for it.
If you grab a cracked version, did the person cracking that game also remove the install telemetry, or did they just make it functional? Can you be sure?
In many cases, the dev would still be billed for you installing the game you didn't even pay for. Unity has no incentive to ensure each install is legitimate, as they profit from failing to catch that.
I think they might actually get told to fuck off by publishers, strictly because they wouldn't be making any money out of it on top of the bad publicity being passed down to them by consumers.
Every major publisher including Trillion dollar Microsoft has Unity engine games in their catalog.
I don't think any of them really want to pay for that. MS would just scoop up Unity before paying that.
EA has been doing this for years. Except they were nearly infinitesimally nicer about it and gave you X installs per key, with the caveat that you had to burn hours on their support line to get it reset.
Probably where that guy got the idea since the Unity CEO was the EA CEO during that online pass era.
This is exactly how you make FOSS more popular.
Yep, had an idea for a game and when I read all this stuff I decided to check out Godot again since the last time I did it wasn't in a great state yet. So far it's looking pretty good now!
Be sure to learn how to harness the power of the AnimationPlayer node. You can make function calls and all sorts of property changes at key points of any animation. So, instead of writing code to check if a certain animation has begun and doing something, you can just call a function at 0.0 (start) of that animation. I'm doing this to spawn projectiles from a bow shooting enemy, it works like a charm.
Yes this is very likely the best advertising Godot could ask for.
Unity Engine taking a leaf out of reddits book. Lol
Their Twitter is even leaning into the "answering questions" angle. Just frame the backlash as a result of ignorance, rather than people being reasonably upset by a situation they understand perfectly well. Then they dodge inconvenient questions about things like malicious automated downloads. Of course, they're happy to "listen to feedback." Not act on it, of course, but the social media person is happy to scroll past whatever you have to say!
Remember that all these dudes spend most of their week reading each other's linked in posts and jerking each other off.
These things are happening now because it is in vogue among their peers
Smells like a lawsuit to me. Retroactively devaluing software that they were already paid for.
It's probably a scream test that they'll walk back with something more reasonable in the next few days.
This happened to a crafting/cutting machine and its software a while back.
The company wanted to start charging once you hit a miniscule upload threshold, forcing you to pay if you wanted to upload more than, say, 20 images per day.
Folks who already owned the machine were furious that they'd essentially be limited out of their own machine, when there was previously no extra charges for use.
The company rolled back their statement and stated that they'd only start charging people who purchased & registered their machines after a certain date. Older users would not be charged.
Even so, after the shit they pulled, people no longer recommend that specific machine/brand/company anymore because of their nonsense.
Unity dev here. The Unity seats were always a subscription model, and this new fee system doesn't kick in until January 1st.
So there's no lawsuit, you don't have to renew your subscription if you don't want to though.
Nevermind PC games, think about how this would impact mobile games. Where you get TONS of transient installs, and very few consistent players.
You could actually go into debt by using unity, and accidentally being successful if you aren't abusively monitizing your game.
That's what this is about. The CEO said that devs who don't put ads in their are "fucking idiots"
Unity isn't a game engine company anymore, they're an advertisement company that owns the rights to a game engine.
Or gacha/live service games, where you'll get enough installs and overall revenue to push you over the 200k threshold, but never enough installs for the 1 mil discount, in a genre where it's not uncommon for one person to have the same game on multiple devices (especially if you have a PC or console port), and for games to have a cycle of low revenue dead months that doesn't always coincide with new player counts due to the whale rule.
founding your business on proprietary software is just a crazy gamble.
I turned down a job offer at a company that relied solely on twitter’s api in order to accomplish their goals. It was a sales lead generation tool that used a scripted approach to warming leads before handing them off to AE’s to bring home.
Within a year Twitter shut down their access and the company went under. That’s the day I learned not to trust another company to allow you to make money with their product permanently.
Developing a good and feature rich game engine which also runs performant is a huge effort. That alone can cost a good team 2 years at least. Even more if we consider todays graphic standards. That's nothing which smaller studios can easily deliver. So yeah, it's an obvious decision to buy a license for a proprietary engine, where a lot of work has already went into. That's just business and nothing crazy about it. Companies using services or products of other companies is pretty ordinary.
FOSS alternatives to Unity exist though. And from my personal experience it looks like Godot seems like the better engine anyways. Not to mention the fact that there is no need for a game engine to create a game. Opengl + a windowing/utility library is ideal.
Until a few years ago there was barely any alternative afaik
Did they clear it with the owners first?
Because if you don't, and later they pursue the legal route, there's not much you can do, you agree to their terms or fight a lawsuit where they'll likely take everything
(Which, calling it now, this cycle will happen to Sync for Lemmy eventually. Come back to this comment in a few years.)
I think the reason beginners want to use Unity is because that is what they will need as professional game developers. But if professional game developers stop using Unity, then there is no reason to use Unity, no matter how beginner-friendly pricing it is.
Pretty much every gamedev course will teach either Unity, Unreal or both, so those students end up getting fucked either way.
It was the status quo in animation until a few years ago : every school would teach Maya or Max and the industry as well as aspiring professionals were kinda locked with those. Others players evened out the playing field (Houdini, Blender, etc) and today it's not the monopolistic situation it used to be.
Common proprietary L
Everyone I know has been reaching about Unreal for the past few years anyway. I'm surprised Unity is pulling this controversial move in this situation, driving more customers to the competition. It's like if it was 2013 and AMD suddenly started charging double for their graphics cards even though Nvidia was way better
Oh damn the whole day I was thinking it was about Unreal Engine, not unity. Was pretty sad that some of the projects I follow could be abandoned. Now I'm so glad, holy shit. Reading the articles caffeine starved at 5 am in a tram probably was the culprit for misreading
So whats the next step, everytime a start my car i have to pay?! F*ckin ridiculous
I gotta ask, considering the "per install" pricing, what exactly is an installation in the eyes of Unity?
A game download? In which case would a cancelled and restarted download result in two installations being logged?
Is it an API call during first start-up? What would keep malicious actors from simply modding their game to repeat this call a thousand times?
What about pirated copies? Do they count as being "installed"?
Unity's official response to those questions as of a few hours ago is akin to "we have ways... trust us."
Yup let's trust Unity's crummy ways, keeping in mind that it's actually in their best interest to NOT detect false installs, since they get money when it doesn't...
If I had to do something like that, I would make it every time the installer runs, every time it's installed by a launcher like Steam, and as a fallback every time the game executable runs for the first time unless an installer or launcher hands it a key to say "you've been paid for already." But I'm by no means a game dev so idk.
I think the real problem is how shady it seems. Like has everyone forgotten the concept of "grandfather in"? People will make new games in unity if they factor in the cost. I think people are understanding if they have the priory knowledge that unity needs to maybe start charging something. But sounds like they are asking for after these businesses already have created budgets. It sounds like it could be a bit of extortion depending on what the original agreement was. " Extortion might involve ... damage to a companies financial well being."
What’s the tl:dr?
The creators of the unity engine are charging people extra for games they have already created?
Creators of the Unity engine want to charge developers per game install, the more people that install the game the more you have to pay. This includes games that already exist and never agreed to this. It also causes a lot of safety concerns, how will they confirm how many installs a game has? Are they bundling spyware with Unity games?
Thanks, a few Lemmy posts later and I saw this article that explain
From what I've heard, from January 2024, any for-profit game made in Unity that meet a certain profit and download threshold will have to pay a fee to Unity per install of said game, including those released before these changes are being introduced.
Unity also said it will track installs with its own proprietary data. Speaking to Axios, Unity also confirmed that if a player deletes a game and re-installs it, that counts as two installs, and two separate fees.
From the article linked in comments here. That's unbelievable. I'm at a lose for words.
I guess they don't want anyone to use Unity at all
I wonder how that works.
Like if I released a Unity game in 2016... if I tell Unity to fuck off, would they then try to get my game off of Steam?
It's a truly horrible chain of events. Unity has been continually scaling back it's development objectives, canning their developer game samples and overall it feels like they're struggling.
While overall I'm fairly happy with Unity as a game engine, I'm not happy with Unity as a company, which seems to prioritize the strangest things while features and optimisations seem to languish
Unity was never profitable, so this makes sense
Will Garry Newman decide to reskill his devs to use Godot? Will anybody with enough power decide to do so? Imagine if game studios big and small decided "we don't want to have to deal with this ever again, we're making a new or investing in an existing opensource game engine".
I wish people would see the light, but will they?
This is the java business model, there's two ways it could go: total flop, everyone hates it and because video games aren't as deeply entrenched as legacy codethe java business model won't work. OR the Java business model works great and there's now a 10% unity tax passed on to the consumers
Edit lmao the most pedantic Mfs alive in the replies
What the hell is the Java business model? Do you mean Oracle, when you say Java?
Sad times, I remember first learning from Tornado Twin tutorials way back in version 3. At this stage of my life, I basically develop exclusively for game jams, and give away my weekend warrior projects for free. The new pricing model, as currently described, would not affect me. However, trust has been eroding for a while. Trust is gone now. I do not trust Unity not to alter the deal further. I fear that I may become liable for fees that I did not agree to when I published, for lack of a better term, my games to the internet. I've been looking at features offered up in Unreal for a while. I guess it is time to start watching tutorials.
Nobody will ever be able to force changes on a contract retroactively on you. The only time this ever happens is if the original contract violated some law, and then the retroactive change will be ordered by a Court of law only to revert illicit gains made. So even if this current change were to affect you, you simply would not renew the subscription. You would then still be able to distribute all your previous works, because they only have to fulfill the old license agreement. Things only get more complicated if it's a continuous development project and you want to be able to provide updates and/or new content.
Shareholder greed is astounding
If I had a dollar for every time proprietary software users act surprised when it abuses them...
🤔 So what's stopping people from simply making games under the free license and selling them anyway without paying Unity ridiculous taxes and fees?
Also now would be a great time to just use Godot and be done with it.
Licenses and copyright laws. When you make a game with Unity, you're using proprietary code from Unity which has a license stating that the free version can only be used under certain circumstances. You'd be braking this license agreement if you distribute a game outside those conditions
Last time I checked out Godot it wasn't exactly what you called fully featured. So really it isn't an unequivalent replacement.
Wait. All libraries will go this model.
This has always been the risk.
Now, I'm a Linux user and really don't like Unity the game engine. Unity the desktop was cool, on a side note, even though I've never used it for long periods of time.
I‘m pretty sure those two aren’t related.
Use godot then, or write your own engine. If the licensing permits retroactive changes to old games, I'd migrate away from unity asap. Sooner or later they want a bigger piece of the pie
how much did they make with it?
Here in my car I feel safest of all. I can lock all my doors, it’s the only way to live in cars
I’m not a fan of the new licensing scheme, but at 20 cents or less per install, I have a difficult time feeling sorry for a dev losing $400k. That means he’s already made a shit ton of money (like over $20 million if the game is sold for $10).
https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates
Taking a cut from my initial purchase, sure, but to charge the developer everytime I decide to re-install the game?
That's absolutely absurd.
Then you get into developers being billed for potentially millions of installs of a free to play game while only profiting off a small percentage of users willing to make in-game purchases. That ratio can be so massive that the total revenue from those paying players pales in comparison to the free-to-play bill.
Finally; retro-actively applying this to developers that have been building their projects through Unity for years and never agreed to these terms to begin with is such a ridiculously scummy move... Want new terms for new projects going forward? Fine. Leave the existing devs alone with the terms they actually agreed to.
Forcing someone to accept your new harmful terms because they're already too invested in your service to reasonably change course should be criminal.
I think the main issue here is the precedent it sets. Every time we see a new awful thing rear it's ugly head, people don't scream loud enough or for long enough. Because of that, these things become ingrained and part of the norm.
We certainly don't want "installations" (whatever that actually means to them, which isn't even explained well) to get a foothold.
30% of which already go to Steam in the case of Garry. Plus wages, taxes, rent, equipment. You add another 10-20%+ on top which you can't predict now because of Unity. Plus all the paid libraries and licenses already charging per seats or game revenue.
That being said, devs like Garry absolutely make banks and 400k is not that huge of a chunk for him. He, and a lot of devs, would probably be paying more on a royalty system like UE, which is the real irony here. But yeah, what most people lament is the slimeyness of the move and the terms.