It's such an insane pricing strategy. Imagine if Adobe charged you for every view your video gets that was edited in Premiere, or Ableton charging you for every time somebody streams your song that was produced in Live. Like, wtf.
As an indie dev myself, it's so weird to me that these companies think that using their tools is a privilege. Yes, we work in the field because we love games and want to share our visions with the world, but it takes so much effort that we need to make something from it. This is a major backstab on the indie side of the games industry.
@@davidcurtis8427They already paid for that privilege by buying that engine. Why should game developers have to pay a fee for letting people install something the game developer made?
It will only make Epic Games able to monopolize the game engine business and could potentially hike their prices to milk the game developers in the future
@@containedhurricane well, probably not. There are free software alternatives like Godot which is very powerful. There are places for us to thrive outside Unity and Unreal.
I know a lot of gaming companies have been getting greedy over the years, but I don't think I ever expected this from an engine developer. Is everybody really just that selfish?
The worst part of this nonsense it that it was completely unnecessary. If Unity had just said: "Ok you no longer have to upgrade to Pro after the 200000$. But we'll take a 5% royalty fee after it. Similer to Unreal." There would have been complaints about the death of Unity Plus. But almost no one would have complained since it would have been a choice. Unity would have had an increase in revenue. But now. With this, the vast majority of future and current developers will be very reluctant to stick with Unity. Even if they pull back this changes.
Yeah nah Unity's done for. I'm not gunna support them, cause I cant trust their executive leadership. If i worked there on the ground level i'd be getting out of there asap, so I see them losing most of their talent pretty rapidly.
And even worse it's a royalty based on something the devs can't see like actual earnings AND Unity says it's based off "estimates" and "predictions". So they wouldn't even be charging devs based on concrete numbers.
I just find this insane when it comes to F2P games. 90% of the player base on those games never spend a cent, so they'd be paying install fees for so many people who haven't ever put money in, it seems like such an insane concept.
Honestly, i think that's why Unity is making this a thing, seeing as Genshin and other games by those developers are bringing in so much money and Unity wants to profit off it
Im sorry, but theres quite some misinformation here. Unity's new pricing Model will only affect you if you make more than 200k revenue a year. Free to play games that dont produce any revenue will therefore not be affected by this.
@@IAmNotASandwich453Free to Play games tend to thrive on micro-transactions and such. I suppose Unity might want a cut of that pie. But if that is the reason this is the worst way to do so.
@@IAmNotASandwich453 "90% of the player base" So that 10% of the playerbase will make having that non-paying 90% be very expensive. If the game wasn't making money to start with then no problem.
The worst part about this is easily that Unity is a pretty dang good engine. It's not perfect and might not have the same toolset as something like Unreal, but that simplicity makes it more accessible, and it's still made some pretty dang good games. The obvious example is Hollow Knight, it was my favorite game of all time for years only recently trumped by Persona 4, it's still my favorite Metroidvania, and Silksong is my most anticipated game of all time at this point. Cuphead, both Ori games, Outer Wilds, Beat Saber, and freaking Pokemon Go are all games made on Unity, it's a REALLY dang open-ended engine and can make pretty much anything. But we can never have nice things, so we have this. Thanks, former CEO of everyone's favorite company EA John Riccitiello! You're doing great making sure gaming isn't fun anymore! The thing is there aren't even that many good alternatives beyond Unreal which, while it's good, is run by Epic Games who many people don't have the fondest opinion of. I've seen people talk about Godot a fair bit and it seems like a pretty good engine based on the few games I've played that use it (Your Only Move is Hustle for example), but it's still not all that popular and seems to be more a PC engine at this point with a few notable exceptions, like Cassette Beasts from earlier this year. Maybe it'll get an uptick in users after this, maybe Unity backs off and nothing changes, but it seems to be a pretty good alternative is things get dire enough.
I agree, it's such a foolish decision from the CEO and I feel so bad for developers who have learned from unity, like I did before I diversified into unreal. There are other engines like Godot, which is open source but I am sure that it won't be as flexible as unity, and even still, it will take time to learn and get comfortable with. I do hope more people start learning directly into Godot or ue, but like you said Godot and other niche engines aren't as popular, and tutorials won't be as common so it will not be as accessible to novice developers, which was one of the best things about unity.
The privacy implications for the consumer of Unity tracking downloads is also really really concerning. I'm certainly not going to be creating with Unity any more until this change is revisited by Unity. And I'm going to be making an effort not to download any Unity games for a little while either.
@@R.Williamsthe alternative is letting Unity invade your privacy and hurting the devs anyway by downloading it. This is a no win situation. Buy the game and maybe dont download it, get fucked by Unity, or just avoid it all together. But whichever way you cut it. Either the devs or the consumers lose.
I don't really understand why they couldn't just do the simple "You'll need to pay us a blah-blah percent royalty fee depending on the revenue you made". Wouldn't that have been a lot simpler and easier to calculate?
I wouldn't be surprised if after much backlash Unity ends up backtracking on there plans to charge developers each time a game using their engine gets installed. Its already creating quite the shit storm.
1. This is weirdly similar to the stuff Wizards of the Coast tried to do with DnD earlier this year. 2. Considering how games get review bombed for having marginalized characters and stories I can imagine a lot of ways this makes things more dangerous for small creators
As an Unity developer I’m used to having to work around Unity (be it missing features, clunky scripts or just pure bugs), but having to work against Unity is a new feeling. I’ve recently been moved to a maintainer role of a legacy game that doesn’t use Unity. But the vast majority of my smallish company works in Unity using a free to play model, meaning very low revenue per user value (let alone installs). If this goes through it will really eat into the profitability of the games, most of which have yet to turn an actual profit.
@@davidcurtis8427 It wouldn't be 20 cents for us since we have Unity Pro. But even so, since it's free-to-play games most users never spend any money. Further more most users already cost money to even bring in to the game (usually through ads). This combined means we're already counting cents per users as a metric. Essentially, the business model is bring in as many users as possible. A fraction of which will stick around for any meaningful time. And only a fraction of those will ever buy anything in-game. Unity's pricing model makes every user that much more expensive to bring in. It really pushes for us to try and bring up the value per user. This can be done by improving the games, making more people stick around (we're already trying to do this). But it can also be done by forcing ads on users, or increasing the incentive to buy by pushing the games towards pay-to-win. This is obviously not something we want to do, since it makes the games way worse and is also contraproductive since it reduces the number of players that will stick around to begin with.
@@davidcurtis8427 Unity is known for mobile games so consider f2p games that likely have far more installs than people who actually buy something. If a company makes 200k but has 1 million installs or maybe far more than that, that's of all their revenue gone not including what fees come out from whatever store front they're using.
Welp, I feel glad I switched to Godot just a bit ago. Still gonna use Unreal for some stills and animation renders, but Godot has been so refreshing for my hobby stuff, it's not even funny anymore how bad Unity vibes.
I'm part of a small group who's been working on our first game for quite a number of years now. We started back when Unity seemed like a good, clean option. The end is in sight, so we will finish and release this one, but our second game won't be built in Unity. We're looking into Godot as our new foundation to build on, and an open source engine literally can never pull BS like this. If anyone else is in the same boat, I recommend looking into this before you jump ship to Unreal. Epic Games can flip the same switch anytime they choose to, so don't choose "lesser of two evils" when "good, but still growing up" is an option.
I really don't know how developers feel when something is added Gamepass or PS Plus or when some discount is added, but it's moments like these that make me realize why price hikes have to happen at some point
Evidently they backpedaled to charging the distributor platform instead in those situations, but...well that means they'll get all the game industry giants on their asses, possibly in court?
I have no idea how much developers can possibly be making when their game gets added to services like that, it can't be nearly as much as they would get had the people who wanted the game simply buy it outright. We've been seeing just how much money they _aren't_ making, PS+ is increasing the prices dramatically because of course $120/year (for the highest plan) can't possibly cover what you would normally be paying for physical or digital copies. Heck if you play only 2 games a year that retail for $60 you're already getting your money's worth. I used to play 8-10 games a year between $30-60 a piece, now I stick on the $90/year plan and hardly buy anything. They're getting far less money out of me and so I ask.. how is this sustainable as the price of game development continues to rise? The economics of these gamepass plans have never made any sense to me.
I read that the CEO of Unity has sold 50K shares so far this year. Also other higher ups at Unity has sold equal amounts of shares. I feel that and then this 'Runtime Fee' is a greedy attempt to suck as much money out of the company as possible before it eventually gets shut down.
This model means that a developer could get dinged well after they no longer even have their game available for sale. If you had a small business that was struggling, you could pay off your existing debts and close the business to cut off the bleeding before it bankrupts you. But now imagine phantom fees you have no control over continue to be charged. There is no way to say "hey, this isn't working I have to stop" because you get charged when people install your game, not buy it. If anything you would almost be forced to keep the game on the market in hope that your sales still keep up with the install fees. We're probably going to see a lot of game get delisted before Jan 1 just from developers looking at their financial situation and realizing that it isn't worth the risk of continuing to offer a Unity developed game on a public platform. Even if they're under the threshold they can't properly plan financially if some sudden fee could get incurred. Some UA-camr could play your game and suddenly increase all this interest in it, which normally would be good, but you can't afford those install fees. So better to just step out while you can to be safe. Or maybe we'll see some games that are successful get temporarily delisted while the devs port it to something else so they can reintroduce it to the market without Unity getting a cut. But what's really astonishing is that they've said that for subscription services they'll charge the platform holder. So they're going to charge MS and Nintendo? Do they even have an existing contract with those companies beyond the fact that their engine runs on those platforms? You send a made-up bill to Microsoft and they're going to send legal threats as a response. And that all came out in response to the backlash. So did they just blurt that out? I don't see how they could even attempt that. "Hey you, giant corporation! Pay us a fee for this other guy's game!" My guess is that Unity will get sued, will back out of this either from pressure or court ruling, but development for future games will move to a different engine after all trust in this product has been destroyed.
Make things sound outrageous so you can tone it down later and everyone will say "oh this isn't so bad" and the company still gets what they want. I'm almost certain this is the plan.
Hi! Unity developer here- this sucks and is a very dumb and greedy decision. My studio is really hoping they backtrack because it’s such a pain to have an entire studio learn a new engine. Unity probably knows this which is part of the problem.
As an aspiring games developer, I do not see why I would use Unity anymore. Unreal Engine and Godot are already great competitors, and this will just push people to go to those. I feel sorry for indie developers that have already released games with unity, though. :( For the time being, it is unfortunately damaging to those developers as they move to different systems even if they hadn't released a game yet, or those that have been hard at work with another one, especially because unity uses its own systems, and things like the programming language and the UI will be different, and they'll have to learn that, too. I only see this ending badly for unity.
This reminds me of the OGL debacle earlier this year with WotC. This makes two of my hobbies/special interests that have been hit by greedy tactics this year.
The thing that really makes me sad about all this is the vast majority of indie games (and some AAA games) for switch rely on Unity as an engine, so this could have a big impact on games coming to the platform. Here's hoping the successor handles unreal better, and that there is viable 2d alternatives like Godot that people can move to
This would be like someone going to a hardware store to buy a handful of tools to make a couch, then, since everyone loved and bought that couch, the hardware store would be like, "Hey, you used our tools, now pony up." Ridiculous. Though I agree with initial licensing, I think it should be the artist getting most of the pay for their work, not the people who created the tools.
I immediately think of Lixian and how everyone was playing his games recently. He's no big studio, but people know of him and essentially the same goes for anyone else that's small yet happens to start trending and suddenly rack up installs. Unity is just destroying any incentive to stick with them.
I've had the Toree games in my wishlist for a while (thanks to Nintendo Life). Didn't want to buy it yet until I cleared my backlog a bit, but after this announcement I immediately went to buy them when I saw they were built in unity. Don't want the dev to foot that bill for providing good value.
I feel like this and so many other dumb decisions in tech right now (reddit, looking at you) is just another symptom of the wider tech industry struggling with all the ways the economy has shifted in the last few years, and trying to stay above water. Basically, I don't think it's only simple corporate greed, but I think this will harm them in the long run
Just spent the last two years learning Unity part time and was about to start my first serious game project. Now it’s time to switch to Unreal, hopefully I can learn it in a fraction of that time. Still f* Unity.
I started learning Unity this year, but this leaves a sour taste in general for everyone affected. At least I didn't spend too much time learning it for it to be difficult to change to another engine. Sorry Marcus and all other indie developers for this news :(
All I wanted is a game making Application that is not Unreal Engine made by I can use to make my game to life with no fees, but nope some Stupid CEO with a greed for money decided install a "Unity Runtime Fee" Policy that makes me stir my heart into Pure hatred and rage.
I don't think I've ever felt thus much fury and disappointment in a long time. One path I was contemplating for the future was becoming an indie game dev, and this has all but put a hamper on it...
Same here. Luckily for me i have just been theorycrafting up to this point... but i did spend a lot of money on a laptop with the main intention to be developing games on unity! Feel bad for people who have put a few years into developing their game before this was announced.
Looking through the comments and see a lot of people like me. I bought a laptop specifically for game development... and have watched a lot of videos about unity cos that was the engine of choice. Glad i am still in the process of "writing" my game. Feel bad for people who have been working on their game for a few years only for this to be announced. Going to finish writing my game, and then find an engine to just steamroll through the actual development.
I'm not lying when I say I'm always looking forward to Marcus's games, and that said games are a highlight of my year! This news just suck to hear, because I want to do everything I can to support Siactro games! I love Toree!
This is really scary. I honestly wish they don't go forward with this. It would be catastrophic for a ton of indie devs. I want to get into game development and I was wondering which way to go, in terms of a game engine. Unreal or Unity...this decision definitely pushes me towards Unreal. Even though most courses I have on Udemy are geared towards Unity :-/ Truly a baffling choice.
I'm genuinely shocked this is legal? As far as unity is concerned, the transaction is over - devs pay for a unity licence while they are developing. I cannot comprehend how they can turn up 3 years down the line of a product being made and say "you owe me money because you used the product you already bought from us"??? Oh your cafe is using mugs you bought from IKEA 3 years ago? Well now you owe IKEA 10p every time you pour a drink into it, thanks. As far as I know, you can publish a game and not renew your unity licence, presumably? And even if it does need ongoing support to be connected to the engine... that's what... the license is for...? Literally boggles my mind how companies get away with this stuff
I really hope they don't do this, it's going to be so bad for so many people. I think that also potential future developers will be turned off by this, Unity is going to lose a lot users this way. I cannot understand this entire decision, so weird
As an accountant, this makes me angry because the calculation by installs is confusing and unreliable to determine. Why didn’t they just simplify the calculation by determining it by purchases which is a more concrete and reliable number? 🤦🏽♂️ Regardless of the calculation, I hope there is a solution benefiting game developers.
Doesn't this give publishers and distributors an incentive to reject developers projects using Unity just so they don't have to deal with the unknowns with internal profit predictions?
Not a fan of the F2P + Microtransactions model, but they would get hit pretty hard. A F2P game could easily make enough money to qualify for the install fees, and they can have a massive number of installs.
I’ve been learning Unity for the past two years. This is certainly very gross, and sets a scary precedent I don’t want to see repeated. But… I’m not trying to be snarky here or anything, I’m genuinely asking, why is 20 cents per install being framed as this number that could kill small studios, unless they’re charging like a dollar or two per game? Your game has to make over $200K AND reach 200K downloads. It definitely punishes success, but you could say the same about Unity’s licensing in general, since iirc they force you into a higher plan once your game makes a certain amount of money anyway. Again, I’m not trying to be funny or anything, I think per install is legit really scummy, and actual developers are clearly worried about this. But I legit want someone to ELI5 why the amount of 20 cents per install in particular puts studios in danger.
I see someone creating a few virtual machines, perpetually deinstalling and reinstalling the same game from the same owner on the "different" systems with a bot script. Bankrupting the developers.
This is an insane new rule that Unity has come up with and will only hurt all the indie developers using their engine and it seems they seek to only make some profit off of the people putting in the work, effort and time to make games for others. IMO I don't see people using the Unity engine a lot in the future.
what people doesn't understand is this crisis is not limited only of the runtime fee problem, its origin comes from years ago, how the company is handled and how the quality of the engine is slowly declining because of bad managment decisions of the company, driven by investors. now enough is enough, people are expressing their legitimate frustration and angriness.
All it would take for Unity to do a 180 on this is for at least one of the big three to announce they're stopping the sale of all games that use the engine.
Any developer asking someone to pay real money to download something off the internet is doing something just as shady. We should just go back to all games getting actual releases in stores and none of these "digital storefronts"
If anyones been following whats been happening recently the flack and universal condemnation that they've received, from employees leaving, office's closing due to death threats and share prices dropping not to mention that game devs dropping Unity to alternatives by the droves. Without hyperbole its basically corporate suicide for Unity at this stage 🤦🏽♂️
There's so many questions that are just completely unanswered. How would they track an "install". How would they track "revenue" for that matter? Does paid DLC count? Do microtransactions count? Is the revenue tracked per game or per license? What if I made more than $200,000 in revenue, and then decided to make my game free to play? Does that mean I'm now losing ¢20 per "install"? If 1,000,000 people install my game at that point, am I now $200,000 in debt?
Isnt as easy as that. Its not as simple as taking a game and moving it to a different engine. The frameworks, source code and engine feel is completely different. It would be like starting from the beginning of development for many games. This decision is dumb and is due to the corporate greed of the Ceo of Unity who used to work at EA and started selling shares illegally. Thing is Unreal Engine is open source so like whats to stop this from happening to other engines?? Its disgusting.. 20 cents may not seem like a ton but when you factor in for each install and how so many developers make more then 200K. First of all why should there even be a limit to ones success. That alone is dumb. What really annoyed me is reinstalls as well. Someone could potentially abuse this, keep installing, reinstalling a game just to make developers pay up. This alone will force them to only allow a user to install a game a certain number of times. Like why is this even nessasary? They are just making things less convenient not only for developers but also the end user who want to support their favourite studios but now will resort to piracy instead cuz they dont want to force this fee upon devs.
Another thing is its a popularity problem as well on a games sales. Sometimes a game gets marketted so well naturally. The developers cant really control the exact mass amount of people if they choose to download their game. So the more people that install a game, the more the devs will take a hit. Will people just stop playing games made in Unity altogether?? I certainly hope it doesnt come to this cause the engine itself is great and accessible for beginner developers. Theres also a ton of tutorials readily available unlike with other engines which you dont see talked about as much. Sometimes the decisions made at Unity Technologies are so stupid. They are literally backstabbing themselves in the process as well since now a crap ton of people will stop using the engine altogether and they wont get anymore sales.
They might even go bankrupt who knows. This would be a big shift if that happened as all the free tutorials on youtube along with paid courses talking about Unity development will become obsolete and irrelevant. There is a ton of negativity that comes out of this and it isnt going to make anyone happy. I bet even the developers who work at Unity Technologies are questioning the stupidity of the CEO's decision to come up with this.
I've wrote quite a bit of comments so let me just state. What the CEO from Unity Technologies is doing is fully illegal. He started selling Unity shares even before this change took place. This is also known as inside trading which is fully illegal. If someone exposed him for doing this in court he could be quite literally screwed lol. If only..
@@toonzelda3353 thanks for explaining,I was wondering whether it was a way to combat these subscription services like gamepass and psplus because only Sony and Microsoft really profit game developers/publishers must lose out
It's such an insane pricing strategy. Imagine if Adobe charged you for every view your video gets that was edited in Premiere, or Ableton charging you for every time somebody streams your song that was produced in Live. Like, wtf.
That was actually an analogy from this video, and you commented a few minutes before it would've got to that part. Can you see the future?
Don’t give them any ideas.
@@duckymouth Of course I can. F-Zero GX HD shadow dropping tomorrow
@@Howitchewstofeel5gumgive us news on Metroid Prime 4.
@@Howitchewstofeel5gumHopefully, that was fun but VERY difficult story mode, each story mission was a pain!
As an indie dev myself, it's so weird to me that these companies think that using their tools is a privilege. Yes, we work in the field because we love games and want to share our visions with the world, but it takes so much effort that we need to make something from it. This is a major backstab on the indie side of the games industry.
I mean, it is a privilege bc without you're not making anything
@@davidcurtis8427 it is not a privilege when you share your revenue with them. It's a paid product.
@@davidcurtis8427They already paid for that privilege by buying that engine. Why should game developers have to pay a fee for letting people install something the game developer made?
It will only make Epic Games able to monopolize the game engine business and could potentially hike their prices to milk the game developers in the future
@@containedhurricane well, probably not. There are free software alternatives like Godot which is very powerful. There are places for us to thrive outside Unity and Unreal.
I know a lot of gaming companies have been getting greedy over the years, but I don't think I ever expected this from an engine developer. Is everybody really just that selfish?
CEO of Unity used to be the CEO of EA. That right there should explain it
@@DanTheMan33088Woah that does explain alot actually.
This is why more and more people (rightfully) oppose capitalism.
@@That_Lady_Charlie Did your brain just die? :)
@@That_Lady_Charlie*corporatism
The worst part of this nonsense it that it was completely unnecessary.
If Unity had just said: "Ok you no longer have to upgrade to Pro after the 200000$. But we'll take a 5% royalty fee after it. Similer to Unreal."
There would have been complaints about the death of Unity Plus. But almost no one would have complained since it would have been a choice.
Unity would have had an increase in revenue. But now.
With this, the vast majority of future and current developers will be very reluctant to stick with Unity.
Even if they pull back this changes.
THISSSS
Yeah nah Unity's done for. I'm not gunna support them, cause I cant trust their executive leadership.
If i worked there on the ground level i'd be getting out of there asap, so I see them losing most of their talent pretty rapidly.
And even worse it's a royalty based on something the devs can't see like actual earnings AND Unity says it's based off "estimates" and "predictions". So they wouldn't even be charging devs based on concrete numbers.
It was really cool to hear marcus talk about his field, I'd love to see more casual talks with devs moving forwards.
I just find this insane when it comes to F2P games. 90% of the player base on those games never spend a cent, so they'd be paying install fees for so many people who haven't ever put money in, it seems like such an insane concept.
Honestly, i think that's why Unity is making this a thing, seeing as Genshin and other games by those developers are bringing in so much money and Unity wants to profit off it
Im sorry, but theres quite some misinformation here. Unity's new pricing Model will only affect you if you make more than 200k revenue a year. Free to play games that dont produce any revenue will therefore not be affected by this.
@@IAmNotASandwich453Free to Play games tend to thrive on micro-transactions and such. I suppose Unity might want a cut of that pie.
But if that is the reason this is the worst way to do so.
@@PauLtus_B True,, but jiraw was talking about games people "dont spend a Single cent on"
@@IAmNotASandwich453 "90% of the player base"
So that 10% of the playerbase will make having that non-paying 90% be very expensive. If the game wasn't making money to start with then no problem.
The fact that some troll can buy a game
uninstall a game
reinstall It
uninstall It
and potentially put someone out of business Is scary
The worst part about this is easily that Unity is a pretty dang good engine. It's not perfect and might not have the same toolset as something like Unreal, but that simplicity makes it more accessible, and it's still made some pretty dang good games. The obvious example is Hollow Knight, it was my favorite game of all time for years only recently trumped by Persona 4, it's still my favorite Metroidvania, and Silksong is my most anticipated game of all time at this point. Cuphead, both Ori games, Outer Wilds, Beat Saber, and freaking Pokemon Go are all games made on Unity, it's a REALLY dang open-ended engine and can make pretty much anything. But we can never have nice things, so we have this. Thanks, former CEO of everyone's favorite company EA John Riccitiello! You're doing great making sure gaming isn't fun anymore!
The thing is there aren't even that many good alternatives beyond Unreal which, while it's good, is run by Epic Games who many people don't have the fondest opinion of. I've seen people talk about Godot a fair bit and it seems like a pretty good engine based on the few games I've played that use it (Your Only Move is Hustle for example), but it's still not all that popular and seems to be more a PC engine at this point with a few notable exceptions, like Cassette Beasts from earlier this year. Maybe it'll get an uptick in users after this, maybe Unity backs off and nothing changes, but it seems to be a pretty good alternative is things get dire enough.
I agree, it's such a foolish decision from the CEO and I feel so bad for developers who have learned from unity, like I did before I diversified into unreal. There are other engines like Godot, which is open source but I am sure that it won't be as flexible as unity, and even still, it will take time to learn and get comfortable with. I do hope more people start learning directly into Godot or ue, but like you said Godot and other niche engines aren't as popular, and tutorials won't be as common so it will not be as accessible to novice developers, which was one of the best things about unity.
The privacy implications for the consumer of Unity tracking downloads is also really really concerning. I'm certainly not going to be creating with Unity any more until this change is revisited by Unity. And I'm going to be making an effort not to download any Unity games for a little while either.
Wouldn't you really be hurting the developer more than Unity by not downloading any games?
@@R.Williamsthe alternative is letting Unity invade your privacy and hurting the devs anyway by downloading it. This is a no win situation. Buy the game and maybe dont download it, get fucked by Unity, or just avoid it all together. But whichever way you cut it. Either the devs or the consumers lose.
I don't really understand why they couldn't just do the simple "You'll need to pay us a blah-blah percent royalty fee depending on the revenue you made". Wouldn't that have been a lot simpler and easier to calculate?
I wouldn't be surprised if after much backlash Unity ends up backtracking on there plans to charge developers each time a game using their engine gets installed. Its already creating quite the shit storm.
With power comes greed.
1. This is weirdly similar to the stuff Wizards of the Coast tried to do with DnD earlier this year.
2. Considering how games get review bombed for having marginalized characters and stories I can imagine a lot of ways this makes things more dangerous for small creators
As an Unity developer I’m used to having to work around Unity (be it missing features, clunky scripts or just pure bugs), but having to work against Unity is a new feeling. I’ve recently been moved to a maintainer role of a legacy game that doesn’t use Unity. But the vast majority of my smallish company works in Unity using a free to play model, meaning very low revenue per user value (let alone installs). If this goes through it will really eat into the profitability of the games, most of which have yet to turn an actual profit.
How is 20cents per download that detrimental
@@davidcurtis8427 It wouldn't be 20 cents for us since we have Unity Pro. But even so, since it's free-to-play games most users never spend any money. Further more most users already cost money to even bring in to the game (usually through ads). This combined means we're already counting cents per users as a metric.
Essentially, the business model is bring in as many users as possible. A fraction of which will stick around for any meaningful time. And only a fraction of those will ever buy anything in-game. Unity's pricing model makes every user that much more expensive to bring in.
It really pushes for us to try and bring up the value per user. This can be done by improving the games, making more people stick around (we're already trying to do this). But it can also be done by forcing ads on users, or increasing the incentive to buy by pushing the games towards pay-to-win. This is obviously not something we want to do, since it makes the games way worse and is also contraproductive since it reduces the number of players that will stick around to begin with.
Because 20cents times 10k downloads is $2,000. So if they're using the free to play model, then they are literally giving away games *and* money.
@@davidcurtis8427 Unity is known for mobile games so consider f2p games that likely have far more installs than people who actually buy something. If a company makes 200k but has 1 million installs or maybe far more than that, that's of all their revenue gone not including what fees come out from whatever store front they're using.
I can't see how this isn't going to end up in the courts.
Welp, I feel glad I switched to Godot just a bit ago.
Still gonna use Unreal for some stills and animation renders, but Godot has been so refreshing for my hobby stuff, it's not even funny anymore how bad Unity vibes.
I'm part of a small group who's been working on our first game for quite a number of years now. We started back when Unity seemed like a good, clean option. The end is in sight, so we will finish and release this one, but our second game won't be built in Unity. We're looking into Godot as our new foundation to build on, and an open source engine literally can never pull BS like this. If anyone else is in the same boat, I recommend looking into this before you jump ship to Unreal. Epic Games can flip the same switch anytime they choose to, so don't choose "lesser of two evils" when "good, but still growing up" is an option.
I really don't know how developers feel when something is added Gamepass or PS Plus or when some discount is added, but it's moments like these that make me realize why price hikes have to happen at some point
rare good take from knuclear200x
Evidently they backpedaled to charging the distributor platform instead in those situations, but...well that means they'll get all the game industry giants on their asses, possibly in court?
I have no idea how much developers can possibly be making when their game gets added to services like that, it can't be nearly as much as they would get had the people who wanted the game simply buy it outright.
We've been seeing just how much money they _aren't_ making, PS+ is increasing the prices dramatically because of course $120/year (for the highest plan) can't possibly cover what you would normally be paying for physical or digital copies. Heck if you play only 2 games a year that retail for $60 you're already getting your money's worth. I used to play 8-10 games a year between $30-60 a piece, now I stick on the $90/year plan and hardly buy anything. They're getting far less money out of me and so I ask.. how is this sustainable as the price of game development continues to rise?
The economics of these gamepass plans have never made any sense to me.
I don't see this ending well 👀. There will be so many more "sailing the seven seas". I hope they backtrack on all of it.
I think someone on Twitter has said the guy behind the Unity company now....used to work at EA, so, uhhhhh....
That would explain everything.
I read that the CEO of Unity has sold 50K shares so far this year. Also other higher ups at Unity has sold equal amounts of shares. I feel that and then this 'Runtime Fee' is a greedy attempt to suck as much money out of the company as possible before it eventually gets shut down.
This model means that a developer could get dinged well after they no longer even have their game available for sale. If you had a small business that was struggling, you could pay off your existing debts and close the business to cut off the bleeding before it bankrupts you. But now imagine phantom fees you have no control over continue to be charged. There is no way to say "hey, this isn't working I have to stop" because you get charged when people install your game, not buy it. If anything you would almost be forced to keep the game on the market in hope that your sales still keep up with the install fees.
We're probably going to see a lot of game get delisted before Jan 1 just from developers looking at their financial situation and realizing that it isn't worth the risk of continuing to offer a Unity developed game on a public platform. Even if they're under the threshold they can't properly plan financially if some sudden fee could get incurred. Some UA-camr could play your game and suddenly increase all this interest in it, which normally would be good, but you can't afford those install fees. So better to just step out while you can to be safe. Or maybe we'll see some games that are successful get temporarily delisted while the devs port it to something else so they can reintroduce it to the market without Unity getting a cut.
But what's really astonishing is that they've said that for subscription services they'll charge the platform holder. So they're going to charge MS and Nintendo? Do they even have an existing contract with those companies beyond the fact that their engine runs on those platforms? You send a made-up bill to Microsoft and they're going to send legal threats as a response. And that all came out in response to the backlash. So did they just blurt that out? I don't see how they could even attempt that. "Hey you, giant corporation! Pay us a fee for this other guy's game!"
My guess is that Unity will get sued, will back out of this either from pressure or court ruling, but development for future games will move to a different engine after all trust in this product has been destroyed.
Sounds like I'm not using Unity after all, damn. Guess I need a better PC so I can use UE5 instead. RIP Unity
Make things sound outrageous so you can tone it down later and everyone will say "oh this isn't so bad" and the company still gets what they want. I'm almost certain this is the plan.
Hi! Unity developer here- this sucks and is a very dumb and greedy decision. My studio is really hoping they backtrack because it’s such a pain to have an entire studio learn a new engine. Unity probably knows this which is part of the problem.
I can't see them charging for past downloads. That sounds like the basis for a class action lawsuit to me.
And THAT'S why I'm using Godot!
godot is rapidly catching up to the competition
I keep hearing this and i thought of ace attorney godot lol
As an aspiring games developer, I do not see why I would use Unity anymore. Unreal Engine and Godot are already great competitors, and this will just push people to go to those. I feel sorry for indie developers that have already released games with unity, though. :(
For the time being, it is unfortunately damaging to those developers as they move to different systems even if they hadn't released a game yet, or those that have been hard at work with another one, especially because unity uses its own systems, and things like the programming language and the UI will be different, and they'll have to learn that, too. I only see this ending badly for unity.
This reminds me of the OGL debacle earlier this year with WotC. This makes two of my hobbies/special interests that have been hit by greedy tactics this year.
And away we 'GO'DOT! Tired of being milked in all the wrong ways.
The thing that really makes me sad about all this is the vast majority of indie games (and some AAA games) for switch rely on Unity as an engine, so this could have a big impact on games coming to the platform.
Here's hoping the successor handles unreal better, and that there is viable 2d alternatives like Godot that people can move to
I was going to get into unity for an upcoming project I had in mind, I guess I'll have to go with another engine 😅
not surprised when you find out that Unity's CEO came from EA.
This would be like someone going to a hardware store to buy a handful of tools to make a couch, then, since everyone loved and bought that couch, the hardware store would be like, "Hey, you used our tools, now pony up." Ridiculous. Though I agree with initial licensing, I think it should be the artist getting most of the pay for their work, not the people who created the tools.
I immediately think of Lixian and how everyone was playing his games recently. He's no big studio, but people know of him and essentially the same goes for anyone else that's small yet happens to start trending and suddenly rack up installs. Unity is just destroying any incentive to stick with them.
Unity just killed Unity.
Every project that can ditch Unity WILL ditch Unity for any other engine.
They've altered the deal, they're so getting dropped by Indie devs
I've had the Toree games in my wishlist for a while (thanks to Nintendo Life). Didn't want to buy it yet until I cleared my backlog a bit, but after this announcement I immediately went to buy them when I saw they were built in unity. Don't want the dev to foot that bill for providing good value.
I feel like this and so many other dumb decisions in tech right now (reddit, looking at you) is just another symptom of the wider tech industry struggling with all the ways the economy has shifted in the last few years, and trying to stay above water. Basically, I don't think it's only simple corporate greed, but I think this will harm them in the long run
Don’t know what this is but it’s Nintendo life so time to tune in ❤
Just spent the last two years learning Unity part time and was about to start my first serious game project. Now it’s time to switch to Unreal, hopefully I can learn it in a fraction of that time. Still f* Unity.
Unity needs to take this decision back. *This* is how you drive developers away from using your engine!
(Nintendo life uploads twice in one day)
Everyone: surprised pikachu face
😯😯😯
@@sparkypack Lmbo
I started learning Unity this year, but this leaves a sour taste in general for everyone affected. At least I didn't spend too much time learning it for it to be difficult to change to another engine. Sorry Marcus and all other indie developers for this news :(
Kinda unrelated but thanks Alex for clueing me unto Toree 3D a while back in that hidden gem video you guys did. Great little game
Anyone know what game that is in the video?
Never mind found it. Toree 3d
Silksong is in Unity. You think they’re ever going to want to release it now?
All I wanted is a game making Application that is not Unreal Engine made by I can use to make my game to life with no fees, but nope some Stupid CEO with a greed for money decided install a "Unity Runtime Fee" Policy that makes me stir my heart into Pure hatred and rage.
It's such an awful situation. The Toree games are great too!
I don't think I've ever felt thus much fury and disappointment in a long time. One path I was contemplating for the future was becoming an indie game dev, and this has all but put a hamper on it...
Same here. Luckily for me i have just been theorycrafting up to this point... but i did spend a lot of money on a laptop with the main intention to be developing games on unity!
Feel bad for people who have put a few years into developing their game before this was announced.
How to end your engine in one easy step!
Thank you for sharing this news! Really interesting. And sad.
Without reading the fine print, how does it work with DLCs?
Looking through the comments and see a lot of people like me. I bought a laptop specifically for game development... and have watched a lot of videos about unity cos that was the engine of choice.
Glad i am still in the process of "writing" my game. Feel bad for people who have been working on their game for a few years only for this to be announced.
Going to finish writing my game, and then find an engine to just steamroll through the actual development.
I'm not lying when I say I'm always looking forward to Marcus's games, and that said games are a highlight of my year! This news just suck to hear, because I want to do everything I can to support Siactro games! I love Toree!
This is really scary. I honestly wish they don't go forward with this. It would be catastrophic for a ton of indie devs.
I want to get into game development and I was wondering which way to go, in terms of a game engine. Unreal or Unity...this decision definitely pushes me towards Unreal.
Even though most courses I have on Udemy are geared towards Unity :-/ Truly a baffling choice.
Let’s go another video, I’m assuming this is the video recorded one hour before the Nintendo direct announcement
Never mind I was wrong
What is the game being shown on the video? Looks cool
I'm genuinely shocked this is legal? As far as unity is concerned, the transaction is over - devs pay for a unity licence while they are developing. I cannot comprehend how they can turn up 3 years down the line of a product being made and say "you owe me money because you used the product you already bought from us"???
Oh your cafe is using mugs you bought from IKEA 3 years ago? Well now you owe IKEA 10p every time you pour a drink into it, thanks.
As far as I know, you can publish a game and not renew your unity licence, presumably? And even if it does need ongoing support to be connected to the engine... that's what... the license is for...?
Literally boggles my mind how companies get away with this stuff
I really hope they don't do this, it's going to be so bad for so many people. I think that also potential future developers will be turned off by this, Unity is going to lose a lot users this way. I cannot understand this entire decision, so weird
There is no competition for unity at least on 2d mobile, that's what have them the courage to do what they did
yes majority use unity, not all, but majority use, i think only a few of major games use something different than unity
What about GameMaker?
Do physical games count towards the install count?
The whole photoshop analogy was almost word for word used on the wulffden podcast. Its kind of uncanny.
As an accountant, this makes me angry because the calculation by installs is confusing and unreliable to determine. Why didn’t they just simplify the calculation by determining it by purchases which is a more concrete and reliable number? 🤦🏽♂️ Regardless of the calculation, I hope there is a solution benefiting game developers.
Thank you for covering this!
Doesn't this give publishers and distributors an incentive to reject developers projects using Unity just so they don't have to deal with the unknowns with internal profit predictions?
Not a fan of the F2P + Microtransactions model, but they would get hit pretty hard. A F2P game could easily make enough money to qualify for the install fees, and they can have a massive number of installs.
I’ve been learning Unity for the past two years. This is certainly very gross, and sets a scary precedent I don’t want to see repeated. But… I’m not trying to be snarky here or anything, I’m genuinely asking, why is 20 cents per install being framed as this number that could kill small studios, unless they’re charging like a dollar or two per game? Your game has to make over $200K AND reach 200K downloads. It definitely punishes success, but you could say the same about Unity’s licensing in general, since iirc they force you into a higher plan once your game makes a certain amount of money anyway.
Again, I’m not trying to be funny or anything, I think per install is legit really scummy, and actual developers are clearly worried about this. But I legit want someone to ELI5 why the amount of 20 cents per install in particular puts studios in danger.
Unity looked at those "If EA made a car" video where they charge you for pusing the throttle and said, Yeah, that is a very good idea.
Funny thing actually...
This came from a former EA ceo
Stock fell nearly 6% on the news.
I’ll be buying the Toree games before January then! They look really fun!
What a blithering mess. Unity, really?
They bought a lot of random stuffs and now they're gonna charge the devs for their mistake.
Brand damage is done. Trust has been broken.
What’s the name of the games the developer he’s speaking with makes?
Well, that is certainly one way for a company to remove itself from the market eventually, if they decide to do that. 🤷♂
I see someone creating a few virtual machines, perpetually deinstalling and reinstalling the same game from the same owner on the "different" systems with a bot script. Bankrupting the developers.
what game footage is playing in this video? looks fun
Toree 2.
This is an insane new rule that Unity has come up with and will only hurt all the indie developers using their engine and it seems they seek to only make some profit off of the people putting in the work, effort and time to make games for others. IMO I don't see people using the Unity engine a lot in the future.
Ty for reminding me of these games i had forgotten about them got the 2 of them
Id guess the EU courts will knock this garbage off
what people doesn't understand is this crisis is not limited only of the runtime fee problem, its origin comes from years ago, how the company is handled and how the quality of the engine is slowly declining because of bad managment decisions of the company, driven by investors. now enough is enough, people are expressing their legitimate frustration and angriness.
I was planning on downloading toree genesis to play it sometime soon but i gueas I won't because it will actively harm the developer.
Unity is feeling the heat from UE5. They won't be around for long so they are taking what they can on the way out.
We need to stop calling them bad actors. Most pirates are good actors, they work hard to archive and preserve video gaming history.
All it would take for Unity to do a 180 on this is for at least one of the big three to announce they're stopping the sale of all games that use the engine.
This is terrible indeed!
Any developer asking someone to pay real money to download something off the internet is doing something just as shady. We should just go back to all games getting actual releases in stores and none of these "digital storefronts"
We need lawsuits. We need boycots. We should call these people to go to trial.
I suppose a competitor to Unity will be scrambling to create an approximate engine so people can use that instead… hopefully
Unreal and Godot are popular alternatives! (I'm an Unreal Engine enjoyer myself)
If anyones been following whats been happening recently the flack and universal condemnation that they've received, from employees leaving, office's closing due to death threats and share prices dropping not to mention that game devs dropping Unity to alternatives by the droves.
Without hyperbole its basically corporate suicide for Unity at this stage 🤦🏽♂️
My old art school was talking about this last year.
There's so many questions that are just completely unanswered. How would they track an "install". How would they track "revenue" for that matter? Does paid DLC count? Do microtransactions count? Is the revenue tracked per game or per license? What if I made more than $200,000 in revenue, and then decided to make my game free to play? Does that mean I'm now losing ¢20 per "install"? If 1,000,000 people install my game at that point, am I now $200,000 in debt?
Unity pulling a Twitch right here! And just like with with Kick, engines like Godot will be the ones able to save the devs
Taking a cut from sales would be annoying but at it least it would make sense. A fee per install makes zero sense.
Sounds like Unity doesn't want anyone to use them anymore and game developers should go to their competition for their game development needs.
Don’t forget to request refunds if you paid for Plus or Pro! If you use PayPal, Unity can’t ignore your request!
fun fact: this idea came from the same guy that though about paid reload when he worked on EA
Can developers not just stop using unity and use another engine or isn't it as easy as that
Isnt as easy as that. Its not as simple as taking a game and moving it to a different engine. The frameworks, source code and engine feel is completely different. It would be like starting from the beginning of development for many games. This decision is dumb and is due to the corporate greed of the Ceo of Unity who used to work at EA and started selling shares illegally. Thing is Unreal Engine is open source so like whats to stop this from happening to other engines?? Its disgusting.. 20 cents may not seem like a ton but when you factor in for each install and how so many developers make more then 200K. First of all why should there even be a limit to ones success. That alone is dumb. What really annoyed me is reinstalls as well. Someone could potentially abuse this, keep installing, reinstalling a game just to make developers pay up.
This alone will force them to only allow a user to install a game a certain number of times. Like why is this even nessasary? They are just making things less convenient not only for developers but also the end user who want to support their favourite studios but now will resort to piracy instead cuz they dont want to force this fee upon devs.
Another thing is its a popularity problem as well on a games sales. Sometimes a game gets marketted so well naturally. The developers cant really control the exact mass amount of people if they choose to download their game. So the more people that install a game, the more the devs will take a hit.
Will people just stop playing games made in Unity altogether?? I certainly hope it doesnt come to this cause the engine itself is great and accessible for beginner developers. Theres also a ton of tutorials readily available unlike with other engines which you dont see talked about as much.
Sometimes the decisions made at Unity Technologies are so stupid. They are literally backstabbing themselves in the process as well since now a crap ton of people will stop using the engine altogether and they wont get anymore sales.
They might even go bankrupt who knows. This would be a big shift if that happened as all the free tutorials on youtube along with paid courses talking about Unity development will become obsolete and irrelevant. There is a ton of negativity that comes out of this and it isnt going to make anyone happy.
I bet even the developers who work at Unity Technologies are questioning the stupidity of the CEO's decision to come up with this.
I've wrote quite a bit of comments so let me just state. What the CEO from Unity Technologies is doing is fully illegal. He started selling Unity shares even before this change took place.
This is also known as inside trading which is fully illegal.
If someone exposed him for doing this in court he could be quite literally screwed lol. If only..
@@toonzelda3353 thanks for explaining,I was wondering whether it was a way to combat these subscription services like gamepass and psplus because only Sony and Microsoft really profit game developers/publishers must lose out
Pokémon go uses unity. How badly will this affect a free to play game, not everyone uses micro transactions in that game
Well considering it’s only 20 sense for install and they make 300 million or more a year they will be fine
here's the video they filmed before the dreaded nintendo direct announcement
Ay, Siactro! Love your stuff!