Was first not going to make a video about this, but this is just too ridiculous ... I really would like to have an interview with the person who came up with this. This video is mainly about my concerns for indie developers (as I am basically an indie developer myself) and what my thoughts are of why they started doing this of all things. Let me know your opinions in the comments about this one, am I seeing this too negatively or is this as bad as it seems?
I think many people now have an extra reason to be happy that they chose Godot, and many more people will be happy that Godot exists so they can switch over from Unity. ^^"
From Upper Echelon's second video on the topic, it seems highly likely this was done to have a strangle-hold on mobile apps and mainly Applovin, following Twitter and Reddit's similar moves which were successful. What they didn't realize it seems is that it only worked for Twitter and Reddit because their users are consumers, who are too lazy to switch; very few actually moved to Mastodon and Lemmy. Unity's customers meanwhile are companies and devs who will not risk sinking years of time and money in such a risky company, and won't hesitate to switch for their future projects.
Big companies being big companies, in many cases they do things, people complain but nothing changes, Unity is a good example for what happens when decisions being made do cause for people to change.
I'm glad I build my own game engine from scratch using C++ instead of using Unity. I could implement custom User Interface (Blender style, not Godot style), I could implement a custom programming language (GLSL style, not Python style which is too slot), I could impement 3D engine by using OpenGL. ... I'm not lying, if I lie then I cannot even say anything.
Only issue is animation rigging. Blender import. Shader graph options. And GPU based particle system for use of thousands of particles. Also a CPU based for collision. But at least you can implement multi threading and direct to hardware coding for performance.
I have been learning godot for months but I wanted to finish my game in unity before moving completely to godot.... until now. I'm thinking about porting the game completely to Godot. It's not that I think I'll be affected by those fees, but I don't want my first commercial game to have a company behind it that does those things. 🤔
Good luck porting your game! It would be better, what if your first game does well and meets those thresholds easily ... My biggest concern which I started thinking of is: They must have been planning this and putting some kind of trackers in the installs already which are phoning home, how else will they be able to track installs on already published games? o.o
Imagine a bunch of big fish companies making "One of the best games", soon as they reach close to $200,000 in revs they take it down and "Next Best Game" oddly 99% similar to the first one gets published next😆. All jokes aside, I am on board the "this has created a precedent" feel so w/e Unity may come up with next can't be GG... wasted ~7 months into assets and learning Unity, and now this... wow.
even if they roll it back... it's like you're married to someone who has tried to kill you and failed...you know it's in their capability AND desire now. even the people switching to unreal don't realize that it could happen to unreal. unreal could get sold by Tim Sweeney and go public, and we have the same vulture death spiral of shareholders sucking the juice out of Unreal, too. that's why free and open source is the future. after seeing how far Blender has come, Godot is moving at lightning speed to be the engine of choice.
Even if they roll this back, they have just shown that they are willing to try to collect more money from games which were previously made with Unity. I don't know how they can restore the trust in developers at this point.
The old Unity 5.6 doesnt have the new pricing system right? It also didnt got the subscription fee. So maybe peoples with the 5.6 Pro license can still develop without installation fees?
They have been changing a lot of the things, and I haven't kept up with what they decided as I feel that the trust is gone so whatever they decide now will most likely change again in the near future anyway. They need more money, but don't know how to properly get it with a free engine. The whole company feels very unstable at the moment 😅😓
Unity is like: "Hey, you wanna build a house?! Here is the tools! Use them! If you sell the house, just give me some royalties and we good homie. However whenever someone walks in the door i want a toll. From you."
unity served me well in my beginning, switching to godot over the past few months has been a breeze, partly because of that expedience I'll never go back
@@VoylinsGamedevJourney over the last few years I was disappointed/saddened by their direction, at this point they're too far gone for me to even miss how it was, but I get it
i3, running nvidia so wayland isn't an option yet ^^" Also from what I have tried, I think I'll stick with xorg and i3 for now as I am too used to it at this point :p Been tiling ever since I switched to Arch.
@@VoylinsGamedevJourney I am on i3 myself actually, same situation as yourself with Wayland (thanks Nvidia!). Great to see a fellow game developer using Linux! And by the way, love your green/purple theme :)
5:33 Correction, If you make your game free. You don't pay anything because you are below the threshhold. But yeah.. this new thing sucks. I think they are shooting their own feet.
I don't wanna sound negative, but I don't have alot of faith in Godot. I'm not really a game dev myself, I'm more likely to become an artist, character designer and animator for future game projects with a friend of mine, but let's put it this way. Say I wish to make a game that's quite complex in its mechanics. Let's say I want to make a survival horror immersive sim like Gloomwood or a character action game like Ultrakill or Heartless & Dreadful. Perhaps even make a carbon copy of Titanfall when it comes to player movement. I don't know about you, but I've seen some game showcases from Godot and while I know making an FPS is absolutely possible, I can't say I'm really that impressed. I'm doubtful Godot is capable of making the kinds of games I *truly* want to make.
The biggest problem right now is that a lot of talented game developers aren't really using Godot. The engine has the capabilities of creating fantastic looking games (especially with 4.0). Godot is not perfect and not nearly as advanced as Unreal engine, but talented game designers can work with limitations, that's how some of the best games were made imo. Something which Unreal does is remove those limitations, but this makes it possible to create amazing looking games which play terribly. Same for how many "bad" games have been made with Unity. I say, gave Godot a couple of months now that more unity developers are switching, I'm certain that we will see some great games being made with Godot soon.
@@wub9044 I think most skilled devs which use Godot are mainly making 2D games with it. 3D performance hasn't been excellent in Godot 3 but improved a lot with Godot 4. However, Godot 4 has only been released this year so I can imagine not many devs have had enough time yet to finish their games with it or to get their games to the point that showcasing it is possible.
as a long-time unity dev, this unity per-install fiasco finally made me start familiarizing myself with Godot, which has apparently gotten a lot beefier in the past year. after seeing how Blender, being free and open source, went from garbage to galaxy tier animation and modeling software, I believe in open source and think it's smart to bet on a FOSS game engine like Godot, which can only improve over time, as opposed to some corporate products, which can slowly degrade (like Unity.)
The moment making an income is involved, things turn bad. Good luck with using Godot, honestly since 4.0 Godot has improved a lot, still some bugs need to be squashed, but it is improving and being worked on daily. I'm making a Video editor now with Godot which I want to use to compete with the likes of adobe premiere and davinci. I want to create the best free Open Source video editor. (Still a long way to go though xp)
Everything I hear about the CEO is that he has made a lot of dumb statements and it's quite surprising that he is even CEO of a game engine at this point ...
Unity Technologies is a publicly traded company, and like many such companies, their shareholders only care about profits now, with no thought of the future. That's why they would fire someone like John Riccitiello.
I haven't really used Godot with C#yet as I find GDscript to be quite sufficient. But I do imagine this would be helpful for people who come from Unity
They have a revenue split when you reach some giant amount of money. People have been switching to Unreal for some time now, and if you make 3D games, probably no better engine out there right now imo.
Why would low quality games be affected? They'd have to surpass 200k dollars revenue IN A SINGLE MONTH AND 200k total installs before they could begin to need to pay Unity a penny. So those asset flip games would NEVER get close to having to pay Unity.
They WILL get close as those thresholds are total amounts, if they make 10 games and each get 20k installs then they qualify. And how many times do people also have to mention to Unity shills that install/uninstall bots will only take a matter of time before people start making them. We may not be able to manually uninstall/install so many times, but bots can. There will always be people who don't agree with a developer and will try to ruin them in any way possible, well Unity just gave those (review bombers) a new way of actually ruining them.
It's a giant corporation which wants to make a profit without doing actual work ... They basically have put up a giant middle finger to developers with this one imo.
Source? I mean like come on Godot recently launched a fundraising campaign to receive DONATIONS to support the engine. Godot is and always will be free because Godot is open-source and ran by a non-profit entity edit: given a more thorough search I can verify this copium of yours is just blatant misinformation lol
If someone does not like an indie dev, it would not take long to make some kind of bot which installs and uninstalls that dev's game. Will most indie devs reach 200k installs? Probably not, that's true. But that does not mean that this is a change which is OK and that people should just accept. If this change would only be for games being released from the moment this change is valid, I would have less of an issue with it, but the fact is still that this counts for all previously released games. I don't know how I can explain to you that those kind of practices are just not OK.
@@psyker4321 no they are not losing a billion dollars per year, what that really means is that their profits are a billion dollars less then what they projected
The threshold are both conditions: "The Unity Runtime Fee will apply to games that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 per-game lifetime installs.".@@VoylinsGamedevJourney
Was first not going to make a video about this, but this is just too ridiculous ... I really would like to have an interview with the person who came up with this.
This video is mainly about my concerns for indie developers (as I am basically an indie developer myself) and what my thoughts are of why they started doing this of all things.
Let me know your opinions in the comments about this one, am I seeing this too negatively or is this as bad as it seems?
I'm glad I learned godot instead of unity
I think many people now have an extra reason to be happy that they chose Godot, and many more people will be happy that Godot exists so they can switch over from Unity. ^^"
From Upper Echelon's second video on the topic, it seems highly likely this was done to have a strangle-hold on mobile apps and mainly Applovin, following Twitter and Reddit's similar moves which were successful.
What they didn't realize it seems is that it only worked for Twitter and Reddit because their users are consumers, who are too lazy to switch; very few actually moved to Mastodon and Lemmy.
Unity's customers meanwhile are companies and devs who will not risk sinking years of time and money in such a risky company, and won't hesitate to switch for their future projects.
Big companies being big companies, in many cases they do things, people complain but nothing changes, Unity is a good example for what happens when decisions being made do cause for people to change.
I'm glad I build my own game engine from scratch using C++ instead of using Unity. I could implement custom User Interface (Blender style, not Godot style), I could implement a custom programming language (GLSL style, not Python style which is too slot), I could impement 3D engine by using OpenGL. ... I'm not lying, if I lie then I cannot even say anything.
Only issue is animation rigging.
Blender import.
Shader graph options.
And GPU based particle system for use of thousands of particles. Also a CPU based for collision.
But at least you can implement multi threading and direct to hardware coding for performance.
I have been learning godot for months but I wanted to finish my game in unity before moving completely to godot.... until now. I'm thinking about porting the game completely to Godot. It's not that I think I'll be affected by those fees, but I don't want my first commercial game to have a company behind it that does those things. 🤔
Good luck porting your game! It would be better, what if your first game does well and meets those thresholds easily ... My biggest concern which I started thinking of is:
They must have been planning this and putting some kind of trackers in the installs already which are phoning home, how else will they be able to track installs on already published games? o.o
DO IT! full port! that's what i'm doing. of course, my work is probably not as far advanced as yours.
Unhinged Former EA CEO: "Developers are fucking idiots".
Also Unhinged Former EA CEO: "I just had a great idea..."
RIP Unity
You can charge me to use a tool. You can't charge me for what I do with the stuff I built using the tool.
We're gonna have Adobe and maybe even Epic do something similar in a few years lol, now that Unity has shown it is possible.
@@st.altair4936 How's Unity's stock doing this past week?
It's more of an installation fee not a tax. A tax would be a percentage and would be better than a flat fee.
Godot gang assemble!
unity cons: tax
every other engine pros: no tax
Imagine a bunch of big fish companies making "One of the best games", soon as they reach close to $200,000 in revs they take it down and "Next Best Game" oddly 99% similar to the first one gets published next😆. All jokes aside, I am on board the "this has created a precedent" feel so w/e Unity may come up with next can't be GG... wasted ~7 months into assets and learning Unity, and now this... wow.
I think the 200k installs is the sum of all published games in total. So re-releasing their game would not even save them 😂
@@VoylinsGamedevJourney Oh no that would be a bummer... off to changing the company name then 😁
Whatever was the reason, did not worked as expected. Their stocks haven't stopped falling and is almost reaching their all time low
I pray that they roll this back, I love Unity as an engine but god how do they manage to piss on developer trust this hard...
even if they roll it back... it's like you're married to someone who has tried to kill you and failed...you know it's in their capability AND desire now. even the people switching to unreal don't realize that it could happen to unreal. unreal could get sold by Tim Sweeney and go public, and we have the same vulture death spiral of shareholders sucking the juice out of Unreal, too. that's why free and open source is the future. after seeing how far Blender has come, Godot is moving at lightning speed to be the engine of choice.
Even if they roll this back, they have just shown that they are willing to try to collect more money from games which were previously made with Unity. I don't know how they can restore the trust in developers at this point.
@@VoylinsGamedevJourney yup... this current ceo seems hellbent on ruining unity as a whole...
The old Unity 5.6 doesnt have the new pricing system right? It also didnt got the subscription fee. So maybe peoples with the 5.6 Pro license can still develop without installation fees?
They have been changing a lot of the things, and I haven't kept up with what they decided as I feel that the trust is gone so whatever they decide now will most likely change again in the near future anyway. They need more money, but don't know how to properly get it with a free engine. The whole company feels very unstable at the moment 😅😓
Unity is like:
"Hey, you wanna build a house?! Here is the tools! Use them! If you sell the house, just give me some royalties and we good homie. However whenever someone walks in the door i want a toll. From you."
its also difficult to cancel subscription
Aren't all services difficult to cancel their subscription with nowadays?
unity served me well in my beginning,
switching to godot over the past few months has been a breeze, partly because of that expedience
I'll never go back
Was my entry point into game development and also in more advanced programming. Kind of sad to see them turn like that :s
@@VoylinsGamedevJourney
over the last few years I was disappointed/saddened by their direction, at this point they're too far gone
for me to even miss how it was,
but I get it
Is that i3/Sway I can spot on your monitor? I love Tiling WMs. Great job with the video!
i3, running nvidia so wayland isn't an option yet ^^" Also from what I have tried, I think I'll stick with xorg and i3 for now as I am too used to it at this point :p Been tiling ever since I switched to Arch.
@@VoylinsGamedevJourney I am on i3 myself actually, same situation as yourself with Wayland (thanks Nvidia!). Great to see a fellow game developer using Linux! And by the way, love your green/purple theme :)
5:33 Correction, If you make your game free. You don't pay anything because you are below the threshhold. But yeah.. this new thing sucks. I think they are shooting their own feet.
Thanks for correcting me, I checked the page again and it indeed says 200k dollars AND 200k installs.
this whole situation is insane and im glad i switched to godot a while ago. the only reason ill ever touch unity again is to mod other games.
What are the chances that they will charge people for using Unity who want to make mods? ^^"
@@VoylinsGamedevJourney i dont even wanna think about it -_-
I don't wanna sound negative, but I don't have alot of faith in Godot.
I'm not really a game dev myself, I'm more likely to become an artist, character designer and animator for future game projects with a friend of mine, but let's put it this way.
Say I wish to make a game that's quite complex in its mechanics. Let's say I want to make a survival horror immersive sim like Gloomwood or a character action game like Ultrakill or Heartless & Dreadful. Perhaps even make a carbon copy of Titanfall when it comes to player movement.
I don't know about you, but I've seen some game showcases from Godot and while I know making an FPS is absolutely possible, I can't say I'm really that impressed. I'm doubtful Godot is capable of making the kinds of games I *truly* want to make.
The biggest problem right now is that a lot of talented game developers aren't really using Godot. The engine has the capabilities of creating fantastic looking games (especially with 4.0). Godot is not perfect and not nearly as advanced as Unreal engine, but talented game designers can work with limitations, that's how some of the best games were made imo. Something which Unreal does is remove those limitations, but this makes it possible to create amazing looking games which play terribly. Same for how many "bad" games have been made with Unity.
I say, gave Godot a couple of months now that more unity developers are switching, I'm certain that we will see some great games being made with Godot soon.
@@VoylinsGamedevJourney Is the low amount of very skilled devs the reason why it's quite hard to find games like those I mentioned?
@@wub9044 I think most skilled devs which use Godot are mainly making 2D games with it. 3D performance hasn't been excellent in Godot 3 but improved a lot with Godot 4. However, Godot 4 has only been released this year so I can imagine not many devs have had enough time yet to finish their games with it or to get their games to the point that showcasing it is possible.
I use gDevelop with my own AllBinary game engine, but even Godot looks better today. Unity management is just silly.
dead engine, special kind of stupid is correct
Yeah, I think by this they killed the little trust they still had left. Dead engine indeed, gone are their glory days
This is gonna suck for game devs who are making their game on unity. Especially if they have been working on it for years, or are making a free game.
Yep, sadly this is also valid for people who have made their games already with Unity :/ Kind of glad I never finished anything with Unity now
as a long-time unity dev, this unity per-install fiasco finally made me start familiarizing myself with Godot, which has apparently gotten a lot beefier in the past year. after seeing how Blender, being free and open source, went from garbage to galaxy tier animation and modeling software, I believe in open source and think it's smart to bet on a FOSS game engine like Godot, which can only improve over time, as opposed to some corporate products, which can slowly degrade (like Unity.)
The moment making an income is involved, things turn bad.
Good luck with using Godot, honestly since 4.0 Godot has improved a lot, still some bugs need to be squashed, but it is improving and being worked on daily.
I'm making a Video editor now with Godot which I want to use to compete with the likes of adobe premiere and davinci. I want to create the best free Open Source video editor. (Still a long way to go though xp)
that's awesome about making a VIDEO EDITOR. that's insanely versatile if Godot can do that. @@VoylinsGamedevJourney
The Unity's CEO, previous at EA, a long time ago (~10 years) said that they could charge players for reloads, like 1$, and it will be good.
Everything I hear about the CEO is that he has made a lot of dumb statements and it's quite surprising that he is even CEO of a game engine at this point ...
Unity Technologies is a publicly traded company, and like many such companies, their shareholders only care about profits now, with no thought of the future. That's why they would fire someone like John Riccitiello.
I hope godot C# will improve fast
this
I haven't really used Godot with C#yet as I find GDscript to be quite sufficient. But I do imagine this would be helpful for people who come from Unity
Why not contribute yourself to the C# support (which is already really good at this point) instead of hoping
How about unreal engine??
They have a revenue split when you reach some giant amount of money. People have been switching to Unreal for some time now, and if you make 3D games, probably no better engine out there right now imo.
@@VoylinsGamedevJourney thanks
Why would low quality games be affected? They'd have to surpass 200k dollars revenue IN A SINGLE MONTH AND 200k total installs before they could begin to need to pay Unity a penny. So those asset flip games would NEVER get close to having to pay Unity.
They WILL get close as those thresholds are total amounts, if they make 10 games and each get 20k installs then they qualify. And how many times do people also have to mention to Unity shills that install/uninstall bots will only take a matter of time before people start making them. We may not be able to manually uninstall/install so many times, but bots can. There will always be people who don't agree with a developer and will try to ruin them in any way possible, well Unity just gave those (review bombers) a new way of actually ruining them.
#boycottUnity
Else fix it, or we switching!
It's a giant corporation which wants to make a profit without doing actual work ... They basically have put up a giant middle finger to developers with this one imo.
Don’t get too happy, Godot just dropped their prices changes too.
Source? I mean like come on Godot recently launched a fundraising campaign to receive DONATIONS to support the engine. Godot is and always will be free because Godot is open-source and ran by a non-profit entity
edit: given a more thorough search I can verify this copium of yours is just blatant misinformation lol
Its a joke calm down
Yeah I've heard, the big price change from 0 to 0 was something I didn't see coming hahaha
Anyone tried Stride engine?
It's C# and looks like Unity in the editor. Seems pretty good.
Haven't tried it yet, but videos to see what other people think of it :o
99% of indie devs do not have to be concerned with this as they will not go past the $100K threshold or 200 000 installs
If someone does not like an indie dev, it would not take long to make some kind of bot which installs and uninstalls that dev's game. Will most indie devs reach 200k installs? Probably not, that's true. But that does not mean that this is a change which is OK and that people should just accept. If this change would only be for games being released from the moment this change is valid, I would have less of an issue with it, but the fact is still that this counts for all previously released games. I don't know how I can explain to you that those kind of practices are just not OK.
@@VoylinsGamedevJourney Agreed
@@psyker4321 no they are not losing a billion dollars per year, what that really means is that their profits are a billion dollars less then what they projected
The threshold are both conditions: "The Unity Runtime Fee will apply to games that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 per-game lifetime installs.".@@VoylinsGamedevJourney