1y ago

Was Unity lying yesterday or are they lying today?

Can they tell the differences between installs or can't they? Either way, they're definitely lying to their users.

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Even worse, https://unity.com/pricing-updates is posted on their site:
"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."
Estimating how many copies you sold based on your own 'data models' which is impossible to track? Isn't that like a giant red flag for laundering money?
- Yeah I don't understand how that works. Will that even stand up to a lawsuit? Wouldn't they have to give up stuff in discovery if a game company sues to find how they were billed?
- I think it's crazy that they want to write invoices based on estimations. Why didn't I ever do that? "Oh yeah, I estimate that I worked about um... 2 weeks on that feature."

In my opinion, it's bad either way for different reasons
If they do tell the difference, then there is some tracking built into the machine that runs the engine, which is bad for the application user
If they don't tell the difference, then there will be exploits for intentionally reinstall multiple times, which is bad for the application developers
- Not bad for mega corporation's that only care about money
  
  It's still bad for their profit margins when their stocks fall by 8% in one day, when major indie developers announce they'll be moving their current projects off of Unity and future developers are deterred from using their software in the first place.
  Whether they care about money or care about public relations, their shooting themselves in the foot on both counts.

Don’t try to find a meaning in this, just switch to something FOSS. Look at how the 3D modeling world is since Blender became a real competitor.
- As an outsider: How is it?

This whole thing is absurd and overcomplicated - they could have just copied Unreal and slightly undercut them.
It isn't too complicated, but for example, a game which made $2 million in gross revenue would owe Epic Games $50,000, because it would pay 5 percent of $1 million, keeping the first million entirely—minus whatever other fees are owed, such as Steam's cut.
There should also absolutely have been a grandfather clause for games already released.
I get Unity needs to make money. They've never been profitable. But they've seriously overcomplicated the whole thing and gotten people angry at them.
- I'm not even sure this is a price increase. It probably is, but I think a lot of people will pay less.
  They are just reserving the right to bankrupt you, at random, without any previous warning, because they want. There's no good reasoning anywhere.
  
  I agree. I think a price increase can totally make sense. Shit's expensive nowadays, we get it.
  They seem to want to create a new revenue stream from games published on Unity retroactively.

Do installs of the same game by the same user across multiple devices count as different installs?
We treat different devices as different installs. We don’t want to track identity across different devices.
Jesus Christ. A single user can freely install the game repeatedly and bankrupt a creator.
- I can definitely see one of those "ree woke game" types doing this.
- I can see this going wrong with steam proton if each install gets it's own wine config, simply reinstalling or updating might look like a new machine

I guarantee they put zero thought into how this would actually work, and have just been making stuff up as they go.

They’re straight up gaslighting!
Before:
Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data.
After:
We are not going to charge a fee for reinstalls. The spirit of this program is and has always been to charge for the first install and we have no desire to charge for the same person doing ongoing installs.
- Someone tell them they can achieve the latter much more effectively if they simply charge once FOR EACH COPY SOLD.
  Hmmm... but then what about humble bundle sales or freemium games? Maybe the charge should change depending on the price of the game...
  OH WAIT THAT'S REVENUE SHARE. Seriusly this whole thing is just an attempt at taking more money than devs would be willing to pay, by using a model without an up front percentage.
- kind of hard to gaslight when hundreds of news sites already have copies of the thing you said before published
  
  Didn’t stop them from trying!

I may get downvoted to hell for this, but besides the shady business practices, Unity sucks as a game engine. You can just feel the engine eating resources for no good reason and the gfx don't come close to UE5.
- Oh, I don't think anybody will disagree that Unity is completely unoptimized and barebones compared to Unreal. It is also hard to learn and confusing compared to Godot.
  There used to be a huge amount of people that wanted exactly something easier to learn than Unreal and more featureful than Godot. But those two improved in a way that this niche may not even exist anymore. Anyway, currently Unity has that unbeatable marketplace, and I really don't know if there's a good enough replacement somewhere, but I don't see any other reason to use it.
  (But then, I'm not really a game developer. I've used those here or there, for fun.)
  
  Not quite. Unity isn't poorly optimized, but it's not great either. Unity also is very easy to learn, hence the number of really shit games put out from it.
  Source: have been using Unity for the past 10 years
- From a hobbyist dev who dabbled with Unity for several years: The worst part about the engine imo is the fragmentation of the entire ecosystem.
  There are three major rendering pipelines (HDRP, URP, Legacy), each with their own specific quirks, configurations and dependencies, which are entirely incompatible with eachother.
  Foundational packages (input handling, networking etc.) change/break way too often or have been deprecated for years without replacement (uNet) and rely on 3d party packages.
  And don't even start with the documentation for any of the above. Multiple times have I found documentation for a rendering callback or ShaderLab parameter claiming it would be compatible with URP only to find that the documentation was supposed to be for HRDP.

Wow, a proprietary quasi monopoly changes their business model into something extremely exploitative and hostile. I am totally surprised! Shocked even! Blimey!
Seriously, why spend years of your life learning to work with some technology that can at anytime be made instantly obsolete or impractical to use when some random asshole you don't know decides something dumb. If there's a FOSS alternative, always prefer that.
- Is there a Foss alternative to unity?
  
  I looked into it briefly after hearing this news and saw people talking about Godot. It's for 2D and 3D multi-platform games and you can use C#, C++ and others. Sounds pretty cool
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godot_(game_engine)

Wait why charging for an install? What is going on?
- It's why software needs to be open source, not just free.
  
  Godot is a good example of a free and well-developed open source game engine. It'll probably see a sharp rise in adoption following this controversy from Unity.
- sounds like you’ve missed a couple of days of the newest Unity drama
  [Gamesfromscratch] Unity’s New Pricing is … Awful
  [Gamesfromscratch] Develoers React to Unity Price Changes
  
  Yes, did not hear any of this yet. thanks
- Because greed. Is there any other explanation?
  
  Or because they got bigger than they can currently support and they don't want to lay off their employees.
- Instead of revenue sharing like some places do Unity want a $0.20 fee , less depending on your sales numbers, for installing a unity game.
  https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates
- They announced a new business model effective next year. It’s plastered all over the net, just look up “Unity news” and you’ll get a ton of hits on it. Lots of coverage on YouTube as well.

They could promise to pay the developer a fee per install and it wouldn't matter. You can't trust them anymore.

53 comments