@@ALEXANDERdk007 yes. That’s what I was indicating - but you need to be careful spreading the idea that it’s “charged retrospectively” - because that’s not the case. Saying it’s charged retrospectively means you will get a bill on Jan 1st for all previous installs. And a lot of people are freaking out thinking that that’s the case. It’s important we are accurate here. Not for Unity’s sake - for the sake of everyone who is suddenly trying to make sense of their exposure here. So yeah, you won’t get charged retroactively on Jan 1st. But because install counts are counted retrospectively, if you are already over that earnings threshold, you will begin being charged immediately for any new installs. Which sucks.
@@zoeherriot I recall hearing where Unity admitted that prior installs are going to be charged, as that is the basis for the determination of that fee. For example, say a game made a few years ago cleared the threshold prior to Jan 1st. They are going to be charged for all current installs, as the way it seems to be calculated is the Unity Runtime, and Unity is going to update that runtime on Jan 1st, and when that updates it will count as an install. To be clear, the game installs is not the issue, it is the Unity runtime. I also wonder if every time Unity updates the runtime counts as an install, because apparently the company is unable or unwilling to distinguish between demos of the game, and the actual game, thus I suspect that their method of determining payment is limited to the runtime, meaning any sort of update could be construed by Unity as a new install even if the game was not installed, because it is a 'new' install in respect to the updated software, as the update is 'new'.
@@zoeherriot You realize that this IS retroactively charging for installs, right ? A game having been wildly successfull 2018-2020, but not having been installed ONCE since 2021 could theoretically be retroactively CHARGED based on "lifetime installs" . Though I seriosuly wonder how Unity wants to go about that tbh XD .
It's definitely illegal if they think they can gather all the install data, weather its through aggregators or not. It's private data and violates privacy laws to gather it, no matter how they do it. If they want a cut per purchase, they have to make deals with steam/epic/nintendo/ms/etc , no other way to do it legally.
@@Redbeardflynn GDRP and other EU countries it is relevant. In America if they do have any spyware or ways to accurately account for installs, it would break the TOS for steam, epic, and GOG along with every other shop besides mobile where ad integration would allow them to do just that. Unity is in for a WORLD of hurt, because even the largest corporations or products " genshin comes to mind" would be excluded with their of special contracted rate might not appreciate what can happen. Anyway . . . . The current plan from Unity would allow rampant abuse since they do not have any way to ensure proper accounting of installed licenses. Here is one way to bankrupt someone: Create a script to start 1000x windows virtual machines that will install the game, start it, and then nuke the entire windows partition to clear everything out. This script can be automated to have different hardware thus triggering a unique id aka a new install. Script set to run indefinitely and loop forever, restart script after every VM has activated the game. This script could be smartly designed to act like legitimate installs over time. -- Bankrupt everyone. See instruction one until the desired effect is reached. This could all be done with a botnet too. Infinite expenses and fees for whoever still has their games on the various stores. It is a MASSIVE liability. Even if pirated games and games pass are excluded from those numbers, it is really grim that it is on a "per install" basis and there is a reason why it has never been done before. It is a self immolation on a scale that is beyond comprehension. It is a huge liability and it would be unsurprising if Valve, Microsoft, and other big hitting develops don't sue them into a ground out of spite for poisoning the well. Unity is essentially dead even if they do a 180 because nothing short of them being under "new management" AND codifying an unbreakable license outline for the future could reverse their current course. 2 days now and millions upon millions of interactions across social media has flooded the algorithm with this negative publicity. No sane person will stay with them. Studios are already abandoning ship and some plan to take their games off the store by January 1st "which won't protect them, because INSTALL doesnt mean SALE and anything sold is itself a massive risk to them." The other thing that people aren't talking about is how this could be WEAPONIZED. Imagine the negative press about corporations complaining that " western developers angry at Elden Ring/Baldurs Gate 3" nonsense. If a large corporation wanted to, they could discreetly send money over seas to a despotic country that is known to hack other nations or countries. Buy a contract for them to sink someones studio and no one would be the wiser. PER INSTALL is the kicker, it is the deathknell . . . because it is nearly effortless to spoof or create "unique identifiers" for each install and all it takes is ONE bad faith actor to end someones studio. The trust me bro responses from unity do NOT give me the confidence they will do their due diligence, just as insurance companies have a vested interest in denying claims . . . who is to say they wont leverage their own "aggregate/antifraud" data to enrich themselves. The more you think about it, the worse it gets . . . just like the picture meme where the longer you stare at it the more horrible it becomes.
I think one of their "clarification" posts they said that they don't gather 1 to 1 data, but still make estimates before billing the fee. "Just trust us, bro..." Whose to say they won't over-bill an indie dev out of spite, they're ignoring all reason so they'll ignore the protests of smaller devs while destroying them with inaccurate fees!
Imagine buying a car 5 years ago and then suddenly the manufacturer said hey you gotta pay monthly subscription for seat heater, here's the bill for the last 5 year 😂
It doesn't work that way. You won't get billed for those 5 years. However, you will have to pay every time you open the car door to ride somewhere, adding additional fee to every trip. Losing seat heater to avoid this fee is not that bad, but losing usability of a car is.
Development studios have a lot of things to be concerned about with this, but the most concerning thing to my mind is that the management at Unity thinks they can retroactively apply this pricing structure. Development is often a multi-year undertaking, with the decision to use an engine taken (mostly) at the beginning of the cycle. Unity had particular terms and conditions in place at that time when the engine was chosen. To even try to apply this retroactively as opposed to say with the latest version of the engine going forward is an act of utter bastardry and a betrayal of the decision to use the engine. A developer entering into using Unity agreed to a particular cost structure and that was factored in when choosing the engine. If they brought it in for their new versions of the Engine, then the fee structure is on any development studio stupid enough to persist with Unity, because at least then the people making the decision to use the engine would be aware of it. This is abysmal business practice, and development studios are right to say "WTMFF?!"
They know they are effectively dead, thats why they want to go ahead with the retroactivity in the first place. They knew from the get go this would stop devs using unity. But they know they can still make bank on games already made in unity. Greed is a sin for a reason, im not religious myself but uh.. yeah. Greed is definitely bad news.
@@unironicallydel7527 Ironically with how f*cked up the law is in the US, this means the strongest legal case against Unity upper management may come from investors. I'm pretty sure intentionally destroying the company so you can sell your shares and get out is not in the interest of shareholders.
as a developer. when they merged with a malware company known for developing this exact type of system to scam people out of their money. i saw this coming. so i ditched unity before i got too far in development. I'm developing on Epic Game's Unreal Engine. but know the challenges of switching engines. we need to stand united against these scummy practices.
Unity may even collapse. But they will not do it immediately, even if all devs will abandon Unity for all not released projects. Because bulk of the money comes from ads and it will not disapear until those games die or migrate to other engines. So with price increase and fees they may see increased profits next year, but I suspect it will be downward spiral from that point. They may react and increase the fees again, so devs should be ready for everything. And while I love Unity ENGINE, I think Unity corporation needs to fail as it is now.
For the record, I think there's no way Epic (owners of Unreal) would change their pricing model. They've specifically geared it toward being the engine of choice for both small and large developers. Also, the backlash and vitriol is going to make people flock to both Godot and Unreal anyway. Unity have just committed financial suicide by ensuring no indie developers, i.e. their entire customer base, will ever use their products or services ever again.
I'm not trusting any proprietary tools for dev ever again. I moved my current Unity project to Godot already. Unreal could very well decide to go this route or worse if they gain majority market share with Unity falling off, there's no guarantee. Tim Sweeny could disappear or turn full evil tomorrow, be replaced with a Kotick or Riccatello and devs would have the same problem, different day. A better use of dev's spare time would be to help improve open source projects rather than beg for change on the corner to eat because Unity took the last 14% of game revenue after Steam or Epic or other mobile store gets their cut, taxes, marketing and other dev costs if you're a studio.
"I am altering the deal. Pray that I do not alter it further." There will be a massive class-action lawsuit over this, but the real damage to Unity will be the complete loss of faith. Even if they "walk it back," they won't recover from that.
I am a game developer and I spent last 1.5 years developing a game in Unity. As you said, if the game is successful, Unity will punish us with this fees. But what is more scary is HOW this installs are going to be calculated. I cannot understand how can they stop install bombing that can potentially ruin any company once they are past this threshold. The risks are HUGE and people have their careers on the line. Unity also expects us to simply trust that they will be able to control fraudelent installs whilst its impossible to understand how is it done and they sre not being transparent about it either. Why would you take a risk?
Yeah, especially since they already thrown their reputation into the dirt. Why wouldn't they decrease the threshold suddenly? Or remove it? You just don't know. Sorry if I fuel your anxieties, but I hope no developer will be surprised if something like this happens again, and I hope everyone calculates those risks correctly.
@@syriuszb8611 this is fine, my anxiety already hit rock bottom. As you said, there is no trust. I just feel like I am trapped, I can't change the engine now, the game is almost ready and these news are a disaster for me. Literally all my dreams and trust are all gone
They make it sound like the problem is fraudulent installs when I'm over here asking: Unity, _what the hell finger have you lifted to facilitate the act of installing a video game?_ Especially a game that may have been purchased years ago. Money is no longer exchanging hands. Where is this money going to come from?
It's an old thing we used to call a scam. It's retroactive (which I'm sure is illegal). I really wonder what some of the big games like Cities Skylines will do - not to mention CS2 is coming out in Oct. They will be charged for everyone who gets a new PC and decides to download a game they already own. We will pay more for games and lose games because of this. The other thing I'm upset about is how they are going to track these installs - I don't want my PC to call home to Unity -- I don't like it calling home to Microsoft much less anyone else. Unity might never recover from this - they broke trust - anyone who has time and enough rage will move their project and never look back. Anyone looking to get a publisher for their game is going to have problems. Publishers are going to be leery about making agreements on a game with the possibility of shifting revenue model based on engine shenanigans.
As it is right now, I doubt we will loose any premium games. Free games, cheap games, probably, but those above $10, I don't think so*. But the issue is, that Unity could change anything they want anyway, and remove threshold or change the way it works... *Not because they are net loss anyway, maybe out of principle, but I doubt that since it would hurt players more than Unity.
@@syriuszb8611even if we don't lose "premium" games it hurts those who support indy Devs. Some storefronts may delist or remove from accounts. I use gog, so I don't know what they can do. They promise once a game is purchased you get to keep it. They also promise no DRM for single player. If the system is tracking installs it seems like it goes against that potentially as well. Just because it won't hurt big games as much doesn't mean this won't be devastating for Devs and consumers who have already made and purchased indy games
Not really, devs can only blame themselves. I had this moment decades ago with Microsoft, switched to open source and actually learned a ton. Now granted, it also cost me time, but that was the expected trade.
Great video man, and I loved the ending. I've seen several reports of harassment to Unity employees already, and it's good to remember that most people are just doing their job, and aren't responsible for the actual decisions, and in fact are probably trying to change things and advocate for us. Tough times in the industry, this is going to hurt for a while.
The main problem of this news is not already the news itself, but what lies underneath that decision. I'm myself not a game-dev actually, more a hobbiest (but diving more and more into this field). I will never look in the direction of Unity until they fire that dumbass CEO and everybody else in the heads who were driving that dicision. That's where the company rots from.
Some of the suits at Unity are looking at trouble with the FTC over dumping a bunch of stock prior to the announcement. Corporate greed is getting so out of control.
The thing that NEEDS to be said, if you look back 100 years ago when the whole Labor and Consumer movements began. The rise of Unions and regulatory agencies that would regulate businesses. PHYSICAL ACTION is indeed necessary, look at the Civil Rights March and every union busting attempt from decades ago. The Jungle details how meat packing workers lived and died working in those factories and the atrocities people experienced. We have literal Company Towns in America and no one is batting an eye as mega corporations buy up and buy out communities. Consumer rights are born from blood. Regulations against child labor were enacted from the death and outrage of those times. Look at the modern era and ROBLOX which has 50% market capture on children in America. They take 30% cut at the point of sale and only pay out 30% the value when you try to cash out, with a total of a 10% to the creator and 90% to the corporation split after all is said and done. There needs to be action, there NEEDS to be a tangible felt inconvenience as seen in France. The only issue is that it should NOT be impacting the workers, it is entirely the Ex-CEO from EA and his managerial staff who enacted these horrible precedents. THEY should be the ones answering for their bad faith, rug pull on the market and not the poor sap that got hired to push papers in the offices.
Part of my RL job is reviewing licenses and UCC filings. Under U.S. law a licenser can't amend an existing license or attach terms that falls outside of the license. They have to give notice and allow licensees to opt out of the additions. Unity could be in legal hot water if they didn't go through the process of notices, mediation, etc. I've seen licensers violate their own license and have to do payouts to the licensees they tried to screw over.
I am so glad I have decided to go for GameMaker back then. I was looking at Unity, but thought it is to over-burdened with useless functions for the 2D game I was planning to make. I never regretted that decision, and now I feel really sorry for some other developers I know who work with Unity ...
I'm a developer, I've been with unity for over 2 years now. Luckily the game I'm working on will be completely free with no way for me to make money out of it anyway and i put too much time into it to just leave it. Probably any future big projects that i would want to make will be made in godot or other engines. I've heard that this could be a marketing manipulation, giving us an exaggerated unrealistic offer on witch they can cut down on a better still more expensive so people will be more likely to accept the new fees by comparation. Witch i think is a really shitty thing to do, just be open about it and tell us the truth that you need more money instead of doing something like this.
Or cause a serious bump in stock prices so people who have sold off sizeable quantities of stock can rebuy after the price drop? People have gone to prison for less.
Hey I think you have all the components of a great channel-- great speaking style, good production. Here's to 100K coming in the next couple months! Just make sure you keep the content coming on a regular basis, and I think you'll do great!
I've heard its a little easier to get into than Unreal for a new dev. But as someone who struggled to make anything work in Fortnite Creative...it's all well beyond me.
Plenty of tutorials online, and you can use AI now that is built into Unity. Still not for everyone however. Anyway, appreciate the heads up.@@Redbeardflynn
@@Redbeardflynn A lot of people say that, and that is the reason the college I went to for game design teaches it. But personally I've found Unreal way easier to get into. With Unity I kept finding out that a problem I'd been struggling with could have been solved immediately by getting a free thing from the market place and it drove me competely bonkers. In Unreal the vast majority of functionality is already there so you can see the terms used and can search for more info if you can't figure out how it works by yourself.
I have about 4-5 half finished games in various states and my ADHD keeps me trying and eventually just wandering away from them. But, you did nail that switching engines is very very hard. Even switching between game engine versions is insane. Even something as small as a patch for the engine has the chance to change something that was thought of as "normal" and turns out it was not supposed to work that way. Without a hell of a lot more detail about how those installs are calculated it would be insane to do this. I am a 1 person team and I "install" every build of a game on 4-5 machines just to see what it will do on a different OS, with low ram, on a Mac, I even test Linux when possible. I cannot imagine what a real developer goes through when just trying to find out if the game works.
It's a per install once you've reached 200k usd in 12 months and 200k downloads released version, i guess if you're testing it on the editor it probably woundn't count. But just in case i've already deleted my unity editor and started learning godot 😂
Nice work on this video dude, lots of info. I think it was a really good point about having compassion toward the regular unity eomployees. Pitch forks are too readily available sometimes.
When you said "unity has done something rare" I was surprised Unity is known to mess with their community more often then you think, the word unity for them is to unify all the worse kind of people with greed and screw with other people I'm not surprised by unity to be honest, they patiently waited for this
Just to point out.. Matt Rix- The Tweet that Ludwig uses for the example is wrong.. it's 23.5k fees paid through the last 12 month.. Not monthly fees.. So it's not 282k + $2000/seat/year.. Its $23.5k + $2k/seat/year. So 25.5k/year ~ 1.275% revenue share. But that's not really the problem to me.. The biggest problem is all the "trust me bro, We know how to calculate the installs correctly" and the fact that they altered the agreement that everyone who currently is making a game and those who have made a game, drastically and it's a slippery slope to allow them to do it, because it means they can do it again and this time increase the fees massively. This is why i think most people is outraged.
Lol they think they going to get more money when in reality they are just going to Scorched earth their own reputation and burn their company to the ground
The fact that Unity execs sold their own stock a couple of days begore this announcement says they knew how it would be received. More, it says it's *not about the money.* they knew this would gut Unity.
Was a massive blow to me, I mostly teach unity as a tutor and now ive had lots of customers withdrawing because of the announcment. On a personal side ive started learning godot now so Idk maybe i can recover
Make no mistake, annual fee is still there AND it is higher by factor of 10! We may start loosing games. We will also loose many DLCs because they are big incentive to reinstall. I do not believe they are able to differentiate first and subsequent installs. They are pulling numbers from their ass and say "trust me bro".
I'm kind of interested how they follow at Unity if you buy a game this year and install it next year... seems kind of hard. Think for example the Cult of the Lamb case.
I buy so many games in sales and might not install for a year or two after. I'd feel guilty installing games I bought now as it seems unfair to penalize the dev for extra installs (or belated ones). I assume many games will delist or stop working to prevent charges in old games as purchases. It's terrible for the industry as a whole.
I actually didn't know anything [except vague complaints] about this until watching your video. Thanks for making it plain. I wonder how much more Pantheon will be delayed now...
Not a video I wanted to make obviously but felt like I had to. It's going to have a huge impact but I expect them to backtrack on a lot of things. If I were to make a guess? Within the coming days or weeks we get an amendment that this will only impact games that sign up starting on Jan 1 and not impact any games currently in dev or released. That's the only thing that makes sense to me even legally.
One of the most disgusting things I've heard so far about this bull shit situation, is the CEO of Unity sold a chunk of their shares in the company 1 week before they announced this dumpster fire. I heard this on an Asmongold clip, not sure on its truth but...if it's true...oof, that's bad.
His stock sells were in pattern with previous sells. While it's fun to witch hunt, it's not solely connected to the announcement. Speculation, till harder evidence is found.
I know some people might argue against his example of charging to watch a video. So for clarification, the runtime fee also even applies to each time a web-based game is loaded, similar to when you watch a video. Even if you dont play it or open it by mistake and just looked at it, it was loaded, thats 20cents in the worst case a dev will have to pay. Terrible.
Unity is dead 😪😭 This is insane. Retroactivly charging people potentially millions of $. And now AFTER the backlash they say now its "only" the first install. They are evil
I've been working on a Unity game for 1 year now. Small team, slow development, low budget, but we are making it work. Imagine if we hit the mark, Imagine if our game sells 200.000 copies in the next year. Every month after the threshhold, even when the game doesn't sell anymore, we will get a bill from unity. An arbitrary bill based on their "proprietary data collection model" that we can't even verify because of "possible security issues". Any game made on Unity after january first will make their developers forever hostages of a fee they have no control over. Stopping sales won't prevent them from getting billed, they can't ensure they will be accurately billed, and there is no way of avoiding all of this. Basically an AWFUL deal they will force down the throats of anyone that is too deep to make the switch before january. Absolutely disgusting.
I’ll call it: polymorphic terms of service. Any sale is a contract and the side that wishes to make changes must accept to be in breach and compensate the other party. Too many examples of companies pulling the rug (Sony with the PS3, oracle with Java,etc…)
unreal will never do this becouse theyr market is diffrent and the TOS is baked into the engine versions, so if TOS for ue5.5 is diffrent from 5.4, you can use 5.4 and not worry for 5.5 TOS.
This will totally kill games like vampire survivors. Just a fun little game that cost like $3 when it came out on Steam. 6.2m downloads: $0.2 per install = $1.2m That's 8% of their reported revenue on Steam (note: revenue! not profits) That's some expensive software you're paying for as gamedev, they probably regret porting to Unity right now.
Prohibitions on retroactive changes to terms will hit them really hard, with the previous terms of service allowing that developers could persist on previous Unity Builds under previous Unity Terms of Service. That is to say, they can't go back now some years later to say, 'You can't continue to use the old terms of service for your old build', and start charging them under the new terms, they'd have to update to invalidate the older builds (which would make those downloads moot). There is also some talk that they're offering some 'tie-in' deals to developers, they'll be exempt if they switch from an unaffiliated app to an affiliated app, I believe for mediation, which could be a form of tortious interference with an outside market, or so I've heard alleged, I'm sure someone with better jargon and who has the correct names can fill in more.
Yo, what's the game at 6:42? Looks nice. Great video btw! Most accurate video I've seen on this so far. Most get it wrong. Even Linus Tech Tips got stuff wrong.
Also need to point out that the CEO has been caught red-handed offloading his majority shares in stocks. Just a day before the announcement was made public. Bastard knew it was likely to blow up and tank their short-term trading value. And cashed out while he could. So, at the very least. He should be getting slapped with insider trading charges.
You also have to think about us Linux users who use Wine and Proton to play games. Every change you make to your wine prefix and every time you change wine versions, or add/remove flags and launch variables to run a game is counted as a new install simply because it registers as a new machine.
Every time Unity will run their Runtime on my CPU & RAM that is powered by electricity I pay for I demand Unity to cover this costs. Morover I demand that Unity cover storage costs of their Runtime on my SSD/HDD + any internet bandwith. For unity installation is free, for us (gamers) is not, so who should pay who?
Israeli malware company buys Unity, dewelopers still makes video games on that engine, Unity announces charging devs per install, surprised pikachu face
I have the perfect legal trickery. Just sell bundles of 50 "games" (the main one you want) and (50 types of click the button as fast as you can) The revenue is shared over 50 games, because who would know why the user bought that bundle. So the revenue cap is 50x200k=10 million USD (Scale up as you see fit)
Game dev here. Why did unity did that move ? Unity is not making money. The original plan was to make money with Unity AD. A distributing service for mobile ads. But with Apple + EU putting an end to personnal data sells, that was a critical blow. Now ads cost nothing. So, they had to find something else. And did is a terrible choice. But if Microsoft step in and buy them, it will be alright !
I have use Unity from 2008 to date, but with this change I'm going to change to Unreal. I don't know what devs some of game I play what they will do? Arknights, Azur Lane, Blue Archives, Cod Mobile, Monument Valley, Pokemon Go, Genshin Impact ,Cult of the Lambs,Rain World, Blasphemous, Escape from Tarkov, Rust, Among Us, Fall guys, Phasmophobia, Ori and the Blind Forest, Cuphead, Subnautica, Hollow Knight and many others cuz they all are made with Unity.
When a company has top employees dump stock before an announcement like this, that should be a gigantic red flag for anyone even thinking about doing any kind of business with that company. The pricing is absurd, the stock dump before the pricing change is as underhanded as you can get.
It's Rugpullitiello. Business as usual. He probably sees free money in automotive and army and has decided to, essentially, ditch gaming entirely. In case everything crumbles - it is said he sold his shares preemptively. Uf Unity pulls through, he can buy back his shares from the bargain bin. A little loathing is in order.
Not only more expensive but more expensive and more risky than their main competitor. Who provides a much more mature and a much more complete solution. If I was about to build a game today I would pick unreal over unity. If I were a week ago it would have been Unity. Thats a huge PR failure.
Exactly this. for most the ONLY reason to go with unity is it is easier to learn. When that cost of learning is much lower than the risk of the contract, it becomes ignorable.
This will all trickle down to the consumer of the product. We will see higher prices on games to cover the charges Unity is leveling on the developers. It wont just be a $.20 increase either since the Develpopers will have to charge above and beyond to cover the "what if" portion of everything. Plus with this comes every other platform dipping their fingers in. Will Steam start charging more per download.. ect. Ugly greed at it's best.
I'd force the Publishers to absorb this cost - as part of dostribution. They often take 40-50% of profits anyways and let them deal with suong or arguing the (charges).
for me, the biggest issue with this whole thing is that it makes any kind of financial planning or predicatbility fly out the window.. if you have a huge trustfund sure.. no problem.. but if not then a sudden bout of success, can make you homeless
I wonder if there’s a tax dodge type loophole in this. Like your game is free but you sell stuff outside the game that you can say isn’t really profit from the game but actually is something you need to make the game playable/enjoyable. Like you have a web browser built into your game and you charge for access to a website(anyone who pays can access it) which doesn’t use unity and gives you access to things like tutorials, instructions, background music etc. that aren’t included with the base game. Possibly not since it seems like quite a risky thing to try and argue, legally.
Not a lawyer but this whole thing has to be straight up illegal especially when it comes to older games. You can’t just declare people owe you money because you changed your ToS that’s just not how things work. Imagine if Apple charged you .05 cents every time their algorithm thought you were listening to music you straight up bought on iTunes. They can’t even properly verify the number of installs so how can they charge for them? Its absolutely insane. The combination of bald faced greed and self immolating stupidly. I imagine they’ll walk this back the moment someone takes them to court.
Can't you just up your subscription plan if you do enough sales for the 0.2 fee? I thought that was the appeal for new devs previously, it was free til you started doing numbers then you'd select the pricing teir to fit sales. But i haven't looked at unity in a lot of years so maybe its be different for a bit I also wanna clarify my understanding of that chart is you need 200k DLs before fees apply
No, in business especially wall street type. They all follow the greedy trends. They have been talking about this for years. Even carmakers are trying to implement some sort of nickel and diming crap. CEO want to start charging people on the videos, pictures and so on that they create. "You owned nothing, and will be happy"
A lot of the free and indie games I play are made in unity. I can imagine a lot of them will be removing their games from steam or web platforms. This is going to hurt everyone.
That's pretty scummy! Even if no one uses Unity from now on, they will still make tons of money with the old games that run their software. Imagine your local DIY store retro-actively charging you a monthly fee for all the materials you bought to build or renovate your house... or Nike charging you for every mile you walk with their shoes (using GPS-data)... etc. Crazy and greedy world!
They won't, you will see something that never happened before, you will see games deleted from every store in the coming months..... no one is insane enough to pay for installs.
The pricing structure did not change though, right? Old tier was free until game makes $100k and must upgrade to plus, that’s $400 bucks, and if the game makes more than $200k the next tier is pro for $2k a seat… The new pricing structure basically is just forcing you to up your tier base on that or you will get charged with runtime install fees
The table we got from Unity that I used in the video has tiered pricing so you get a better deal if you pay more up front (Unity Pro and Enterprise) versus Personal and Plus which have the lower 200k thresholds + $0.20c per install for all installs over the threshold while the higher paid plans decrease the cost per install. This is the best article I've found to see the pricing www.theverge.com/2023/9/12/23870547/unit-price-change-game-development Basically just an additional fee that costs more than what they were already charging while adding no value to the developer or the player.
don't forget valve apparently also takes 30% of the developers money for every purchase also you need to read into unreal engine more the ceo said about unity's decision saying that they couldn't do something like that even if they wanted to it's in the contract so no epic games will not do the same thing at all
Valve would be in line with other providers. Yt takes 30% of any memberships here for example. Amazon takes 30% of ebooks. It's because they're intermediaries that are providing the platform on which to sell. Unity isnt a sales platform. This price change is weird for several reasons, not being percentage based would mean a game that costs 20c is levied a 100% fee while a $1 game is being levied a 20% fee. That's ontop of how and where they'd get installed data, the fact that they're trying to apply this to games made or in development under a prior agreed upon pricing structure, and so much more. It's mind boggling to watch.
oh i am not backing up unity what so ever i have been using unreal engine for 9 years and what unity is doing is wrong i feel really bad for unity developers because this move could wreck their lives as they have literally bet their lives on that engine because how much time it takes to learn game developing @@Redbeardflynn
The sad thing is, everyone affected can't really boycot Unity for this nonsense. It's just not possible to move development to a different engine if you already put a year+ of work into your Unity project without massive cost, time and effort. Let alone the cost to the motivation of the team for all that extra work without actually adding anything to the product. As a gamer you can't boycot since you're not buying Unity, you're buying a Unity Game. You'd only hurt the game developers even more. I just hope there's laws in place that can be used to slap Unitys greedy hand away as it reaches into the pockets of exisiting projects. IF a gamedev decides to agree to these terms for their future project, that's their decision. But for someone to go "Oh your hard work is paying of greatly? Let us have a bigger piece of that, retroactivly....yikes"
I hope indie developers can find a way to exploit the charity loophole to still get good returns on their games without fees. If they can, Humble Bundle is about to BLOW UP!!
After letting the emotion pass... They did this on purpose. It's not a mistake. They are not confused. THEY KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING. Funny thing is, there are more indie's than AAA's and the rise of open source software is here. Good luck Unity, you're going to need it.
It seems the new CEO and people in charge have marketing degrees not development so that is why, greed, Unity is dead now my kid was making a game in Unity so now I got him a ton of stuff to switch and learn Unreal Engine 5, I also got him Godot and some others for him to see which he likes better, this is insane???
I better not lose not only the game I play but my Pre-alpha status on AdventureQuest 3D. I supported the devs sense before it was even a game. Unity axing my Alpha benefits would make me not play adventure quest 3D anymore. I EARNED those benefits Unity has no rights to Axe or revoke my Alpha Benefits that shows we been with Artix sense its early AdventureQuest 3D Stages. Why does it have anything to do with it? Well if Artix goes down and the game I lose those things forever there not gonna come back.
The focus on "install" is also a lie from Unity. They can't actually detect installs, and Unity doesn't provide an installer. Steam and other stores do the installs. Unity can only detect when the game is launched, and they refuse to explain what criteria when a game launches do they consider an install or not.
I'm most confused that Unity thinks that it is a fair business practice to charge a company for a good or service that they themselves didn't provide. Unity does not support any infrastructure that facilitates *the installation of video games.* What right do they have to charge companies every time two third parties, their customer and the app distributor, engage in the act of re-downloading a piece of software? Especially software that has already been paid for, and may have been paid for, *for years.* Has anyone else ever tried this kind of nonsense that was not a mobster? "Nice successful game you got there, would be a shame if it's been popular for several years."
I have said it in another vídeo, but remember that cool and sick game you participated in The crowdfund in some site a few years ago? What about them as Well?
I had a casual mobile game in the works with viral potential built on Unity. Now i have a casual mobile game in the works built on Godot. I was willing to give Unity their cut before, but now i won't give them the time of day, greedy bastards. Who's REALLY running the company, Logan Paul? This is a massive rug pull. Never again. I'll never consider Unity ever again even if they do back down, because we can't trust them not to try to screw us. I'm not trusting any proprietary engines or tools ever again.
What do you expect. Look at who the ceo for unity is now. It's the same ceo from EA. During the whole star wats battlefield 2 loot box scandal. It shouldn't shock anyone that this is happening. Unity ceo is ruining the game engine like he ruined EA.
Update: ua-cam.com/video/lS8T8OrpSIE/v-deo.html&ab_channel=Redbeardflynn
The fact that they declared the charges to be retroactive seems like they are opening themselves to one HELL of a lawsuit.
It is and isn't retroactive. The charges aren't retroactive, but the counter for the lifetime installs is.
@@zoeherriot you say that, but it will hit every Unity game that has already been released, as long as they earn at lest 200k in a period of 12 months
@@ALEXANDERdk007 yes. That’s what I was indicating - but you need to be careful spreading the idea that it’s “charged retrospectively” - because that’s not the case. Saying it’s charged retrospectively means you will get a bill on Jan 1st for all previous installs.
And a lot of people are freaking out thinking that that’s the case. It’s important we are accurate here. Not for Unity’s sake - for the sake of everyone who is suddenly trying to make sense of their exposure here.
So yeah, you won’t get charged retroactively on Jan 1st. But because install counts are counted retrospectively, if you are already over that earnings threshold, you will begin being charged immediately for any new installs.
Which sucks.
@@zoeherriot I recall hearing where Unity admitted that prior installs are going to be charged, as that is the basis for the determination of that fee. For example, say a game made a few years ago cleared the threshold prior to Jan 1st. They are going to be charged for all current installs, as the way it seems to be calculated is the Unity Runtime, and Unity is going to update that runtime on Jan 1st, and when that updates it will count as an install.
To be clear, the game installs is not the issue, it is the Unity runtime. I also wonder if every time Unity updates the runtime counts as an install, because apparently the company is unable or unwilling to distinguish between demos of the game, and the actual game, thus I suspect that their method of determining payment is limited to the runtime, meaning any sort of update could be construed by Unity as a new install even if the game was not installed, because it is a 'new' install in respect to the updated software, as the update is 'new'.
@@zoeherriot You realize that this IS retroactively charging for installs, right ? A game having been wildly successfull 2018-2020, but not having been installed ONCE since 2021 could theoretically be retroactively CHARGED based on "lifetime installs" .
Though I seriosuly wonder how Unity wants to go about that tbh XD .
It's definitely illegal if they think they can gather all the install data, weather its through aggregators or not. It's private data and violates privacy laws to gather it, no matter how they do it. If they want a cut per purchase, they have to make deals with steam/epic/nintendo/ms/etc , no other way to do it legally.
Very good point!
@@Redbeardflynn GDRP and other EU countries it is relevant. In America if they do have any spyware or ways to accurately account for installs, it would break the TOS for steam, epic, and GOG along with every other shop besides mobile where ad integration would allow them to do just that. Unity is in for a WORLD of hurt, because even the largest corporations or products " genshin comes to mind" would be excluded with their of special contracted rate might not appreciate what can happen. Anyway . . . .
The current plan from Unity would allow rampant abuse since they do not have any way to ensure proper accounting of installed licenses. Here is one way to bankrupt someone:
Create a script to start 1000x windows virtual machines that will install the game, start it, and then nuke the entire windows partition to clear everything out. This script can be automated to have different hardware thus triggering a unique id aka a new install.
Script set to run indefinitely and loop forever, restart script after every VM has activated the game. This script could be smartly designed to act like legitimate installs over time.
--
Bankrupt everyone.
See instruction one until the desired effect is reached.
This could all be done with a botnet too. Infinite expenses and fees for whoever still has their games on the various stores. It is a MASSIVE liability. Even if pirated games and games pass are excluded from those numbers, it is really grim that it is on a "per install" basis and there is a reason why it has never been done before.
It is a self immolation on a scale that is beyond comprehension. It is a huge liability and it would be unsurprising if Valve, Microsoft, and other big hitting develops don't sue them into a ground out of spite for poisoning the well. Unity is essentially dead even if they do a 180 because nothing short of them being under "new management" AND codifying an unbreakable license outline for the future could reverse their current course. 2 days now and millions upon millions of interactions across social media has flooded the algorithm with this negative publicity. No sane person will stay with them. Studios are already abandoning ship and some plan to take their games off the store by January 1st "which won't protect them, because INSTALL doesnt mean SALE and anything sold is itself a massive risk to them."
The other thing that people aren't talking about is how this could be WEAPONIZED. Imagine the negative press about corporations complaining that " western developers angry at Elden Ring/Baldurs Gate 3" nonsense. If a large corporation wanted to, they could discreetly send money over seas to a despotic country that is known to hack other nations or countries. Buy a contract for them to sink someones studio and no one would be the wiser. PER INSTALL is the kicker, it is the deathknell . . . because it is nearly effortless to spoof or create "unique identifiers" for each install and all it takes is ONE bad faith actor to end someones studio. The trust me bro responses from unity do NOT give me the confidence they will do their due diligence, just as insurance companies have a vested interest in denying claims . . . who is to say they wont leverage their own "aggregate/antifraud" data to enrich themselves.
The more you think about it, the worse it gets . . . just like the picture meme where the longer you stare at it the more horrible it becomes.
Hopefully the distributers just go "Hah, not happening"
I think one of their "clarification" posts they said that they don't gather 1 to 1 data, but still make estimates before billing the fee.
"Just trust us, bro..."
Whose to say they won't over-bill an indie dev out of spite, they're ignoring all reason so they'll ignore the protests of smaller devs while destroying them with inaccurate fees!
Their CEO is a man without limits. He's shooting at a trajectory that's too high and the bullet is gonna come back down and hit him in the face.
Imagine buying a car 5 years ago and then suddenly the manufacturer said hey you gotta pay monthly subscription for seat heater, here's the bill for the last 5 year 😂
It doesn't work that way. You won't get billed for those 5 years. However, you will have to pay every time you open the car door to ride somewhere, adding additional fee to every trip. Losing seat heater to avoid this fee is not that bad, but losing usability of a car is.
Development studios have a lot of things to be concerned about with this, but the most concerning thing to my mind is that the management at Unity thinks they can retroactively apply this pricing structure. Development is often a multi-year undertaking, with the decision to use an engine taken (mostly) at the beginning of the cycle. Unity had particular terms and conditions in place at that time when the engine was chosen.
To even try to apply this retroactively as opposed to say with the latest version of the engine going forward is an act of utter bastardry and a betrayal of the decision to use the engine. A developer entering into using Unity agreed to a particular cost structure and that was factored in when choosing the engine. If they brought it in for their new versions of the Engine, then the fee structure is on any development studio stupid enough to persist with Unity, because at least then the people making the decision to use the engine would be aware of it. This is abysmal business practice, and development studios are right to say "WTMFF?!"
They know they are effectively dead, thats why they want to go ahead with the retroactivity in the first place. They knew from the get go this would stop devs using unity. But they know they can still make bank on games already made in unity. Greed is a sin for a reason, im not religious myself but uh.. yeah. Greed is definitely bad news.
^ This was my biggest frustration. Changing of terms in something that takes multiple years.
@@unironicallydel7527 Ironically with how f*cked up the law is in the US, this means the strongest legal case against Unity upper management may come from investors. I'm pretty sure intentionally destroying the company so you can sell your shares and get out is not in the interest of shareholders.
@@unironicallydel7527 There isn't a snowball's chance in Hell that this doesn't get them destroyed in court.
as a developer. when they merged with a malware company known for developing this exact type of system to scam people out of their money. i saw this coming. so i ditched unity before i got too far in development. I'm developing on Epic Game's Unreal Engine. but know the challenges of switching engines. we need to stand united against these scummy practices.
Unity may even collapse. But they will not do it immediately, even if all devs will abandon Unity for all not released projects. Because bulk of the money comes from ads and it will not disapear until those games die or migrate to other engines. So with price increase and fees they may see increased profits next year, but I suspect it will be downward spiral from that point. They may react and increase the fees again, so devs should be ready for everything. And while I love Unity ENGINE, I think Unity corporation needs to fail as it is now.
For the record, I think there's no way Epic (owners of Unreal) would change their pricing model. They've specifically geared it toward being the engine of choice for both small and large developers. Also, the backlash and vitriol is going to make people flock to both Godot and Unreal anyway. Unity have just committed financial suicide by ensuring no indie developers, i.e. their entire customer base, will ever use their products or services ever again.
I'm not trusting any proprietary tools for dev ever again. I moved my current Unity project to Godot already. Unreal could very well decide to go this route or worse if they gain majority market share with Unity falling off, there's no guarantee. Tim Sweeny could disappear or turn full evil tomorrow, be replaced with a Kotick or Riccatello and devs would have the same problem, different day.
A better use of dev's spare time would be to help improve open source projects rather than beg for change on the corner to eat because Unity took the last 14% of game revenue after Steam or Epic or other mobile store gets their cut, taxes, marketing and other dev costs if you're a studio.
"I am altering the deal. Pray that I do not alter it further."
There will be a massive class-action lawsuit over this, but the real damage to Unity will be the complete loss of faith. Even if they "walk it back," they won't recover from that.
I am a game developer and I spent last 1.5 years developing a game in Unity. As you said, if the game is successful, Unity will punish us with this fees. But what is more scary is HOW this installs are going to be calculated. I cannot understand how can they stop install bombing that can potentially ruin any company once they are past this threshold. The risks are HUGE and people have their careers on the line. Unity also expects us to simply trust that they will be able to control fraudelent installs whilst its impossible to understand how is it done and they sre not being transparent about it either.
Why would you take a risk?
Yeah, especially since they already thrown their reputation into the dirt. Why wouldn't they decrease the threshold suddenly? Or remove it? You just don't know. Sorry if I fuel your anxieties, but I hope no developer will be surprised if something like this happens again, and I hope everyone calculates those risks correctly.
@@syriuszb8611 this is fine, my anxiety already hit rock bottom. As you said, there is no trust. I just feel like I am trapped, I can't change the engine now, the game is almost ready and these news are a disaster for me. Literally all my dreams and trust are all gone
@@Diana-zp7kk I'm sorry to hear that, I hope you figure it out.
@@Diana-zp7kk Good luck, and take care
They make it sound like the problem is fraudulent installs when I'm over here asking: Unity, _what the hell finger have you lifted to facilitate the act of installing a video game?_ Especially a game that may have been purchased years ago.
Money is no longer exchanging hands. Where is this money going to come from?
It's an old thing we used to call a scam. It's retroactive (which I'm sure is illegal). I really wonder what some of the big games like Cities Skylines will do - not to mention CS2 is coming out in Oct. They will be charged for everyone who gets a new PC and decides to download a game they already own. We will pay more for games and lose games because of this. The other thing I'm upset about is how they are going to track these installs - I don't want my PC to call home to Unity -- I don't like it calling home to Microsoft much less anyone else. Unity might never recover from this - they broke trust - anyone who has time and enough rage will move their project and never look back. Anyone looking to get a publisher for their game is going to have problems. Publishers are going to be leery about making agreements on a game with the possibility of shifting revenue model based on engine shenanigans.
As it is right now, I doubt we will loose any premium games. Free games, cheap games, probably, but those above $10, I don't think so*. But the issue is, that Unity could change anything they want anyway, and remove threshold or change the way it works...
*Not because they are net loss anyway, maybe out of principle, but I doubt that since it would hurt players more than Unity.
@@syriuszb8611even if we don't lose "premium" games it hurts those who support indy Devs. Some storefronts may delist or remove from accounts. I use gog, so I don't know what they can do. They promise once a game is purchased you get to keep it. They also promise no DRM for single player. If the system is tracking installs it seems like it goes against that potentially as well. Just because it won't hurt big games as much doesn't mean this won't be devastating for Devs and consumers who have already made and purchased indy games
As a Unity gamedev, I am devastated and feel robbed from my dreams and future.
Not really, devs can only blame themselves. I had this moment decades ago with Microsoft, switched to open source and actually learned a ton. Now granted, it also cost me time, but that was the expected trade.
@@jooch_exe Is there a powerful and versatile open source alternative comparable to the likes of Unity or Unreal?
My own immediate question is where the money is supposed to come from in cases where a game's developers no longer exist to be either paid or billed?
The publisher that is still selling the game or whoever has the copyright and allows the game to be sold.
@@Delta-2-0 That's fine if the game is being sold, and/or there exists any copyright. Not really what I was thinking about.
Great video man, and I loved the ending. I've seen several reports of harassment to Unity employees already, and it's good to remember that most people are just doing their job, and aren't responsible for the actual decisions, and in fact are probably trying to change things and advocate for us.
Tough times in the industry, this is going to hurt for a while.
The main problem of this news is not already the news itself, but what lies underneath that decision. I'm myself not a game-dev actually, more a hobbiest (but diving more and more into this field). I will never look in the direction of Unity until they fire that dumbass CEO and everybody else in the heads who were driving that dicision. That's where the company rots from.
Some of the suits at Unity are looking at trouble with the FTC over dumping a bunch of stock prior to the announcement. Corporate greed is getting so out of control.
The thing that NEEDS to be said, if you look back 100 years ago when the whole Labor and Consumer movements began. The rise of Unions and regulatory agencies that would regulate businesses. PHYSICAL ACTION is indeed necessary, look at the Civil Rights March and every union busting attempt from decades ago. The Jungle details how meat packing workers lived and died working in those factories and the atrocities people experienced. We have literal Company Towns in America and no one is batting an eye as mega corporations buy up and buy out communities. Consumer rights are born from blood. Regulations against child labor were enacted from the death and outrage of those times. Look at the modern era and ROBLOX which has 50% market capture on children in America. They take 30% cut at the point of sale and only pay out 30% the value when you try to cash out, with a total of a 10% to the creator and 90% to the corporation split after all is said and done. There needs to be action, there NEEDS to be a tangible felt inconvenience as seen in France. The only issue is that it should NOT be impacting the workers, it is entirely the Ex-CEO from EA and his managerial staff who enacted these horrible precedents. THEY should be the ones answering for their bad faith, rug pull on the market and not the poor sap that got hired to push papers in the offices.
Part of my RL job is reviewing licenses and UCC filings. Under U.S. law a licenser can't amend an existing license or attach terms that falls outside of the license. They have to give notice and allow licensees to opt out of the additions. Unity could be in legal hot water if they didn't go through the process of notices, mediation, etc. I've seen licensers violate their own license and have to do payouts to the licensees they tried to screw over.
I am so glad I have decided to go for GameMaker back then. I was looking at Unity, but thought it is to over-burdened with useless functions for the 2D game I was planning to make. I never regretted that decision, and now I feel really sorry for some other developers I know who work with Unity ...
Nicely dodged a bullet there.
..Kay Yu, is that you?
Unity wants to compete with Activision, Artisan, Twitter and Reddit as the worst management ever.
I'm a developer, I've been with unity for over 2 years now. Luckily the game I'm working on will be completely free with no way for me to make money out of it anyway and i put too much time into it to just leave it. Probably any future big projects that i would want to make will be made in godot or other engines.
I've heard that this could be a marketing manipulation, giving us an exaggerated unrealistic offer on witch they can cut down on a better still more expensive so people will be more likely to accept the new fees by comparation. Witch i think is a really shitty thing to do, just be open about it and tell us the truth that you need more money instead of doing something like this.
Or cause a serious bump in stock prices so people who have sold off sizeable quantities of stock can rebuy after the price drop? People have gone to prison for less.
With the WotC drama, Sony talking of increasing the price of playstation plus, and now this, 2023 is the year of Greed.
If 2023 is the year of greed, 2024 will be the year of recession.
Hey I think you have all the components of a great channel-- great speaking style, good production. Here's to 100K coming in the next couple months! Just make sure you keep the content coming on a regular basis, and I think you'll do great!
Thank you so much for the kind words and the vote of confidence! It means a lot to me!
I loved playing with Unity before. I used to take programming in college. This is kind of like pay to win for devs however.
I've heard its a little easier to get into than Unreal for a new dev. But as someone who struggled to make anything work in Fortnite Creative...it's all well beyond me.
Plenty of tutorials online, and you can use AI now that is built into Unity. Still not for everyone however. Anyway, appreciate the heads up.@@Redbeardflynn
@@Redbeardflynn A lot of people say that, and that is the reason the college I went to for game design teaches it. But personally I've found Unreal way easier to get into. With Unity I kept finding out that a problem I'd been struggling with could have been solved immediately by getting a free thing from the market place and it drove me competely bonkers. In Unreal the vast majority of functionality is already there so you can see the terms used and can search for more info if you can't figure out how it works by yourself.
There is no "Unity mess". Unity WANTED to go out of business. So just LET them.
Abandon Unity.
If not now, your next project.
RUN....
I have about 4-5 half finished games in various states and my ADHD keeps me trying and eventually just wandering away from them. But, you did nail that switching engines is very very hard. Even switching between game engine versions is insane. Even something as small as a patch for the engine has the chance to change something that was thought of as "normal" and turns out it was not supposed to work that way.
Without a hell of a lot more detail about how those installs are calculated it would be insane to do this. I am a 1 person team and I "install" every build of a game on 4-5 machines just to see what it will do on a different OS, with low ram, on a Mac, I even test Linux when possible. I cannot imagine what a real developer goes through when just trying to find out if the game works.
It's a per install once you've reached 200k usd in 12 months and 200k downloads released version, i guess if you're testing it on the editor it probably woundn't count. But just in case i've already deleted my unity editor and started learning godot 😂
Nice work on this video dude, lots of info. I think it was a really good point about having compassion toward the regular unity eomployees. Pitch forks are too readily available sometimes.
Thank you, Zukan. I tried to do this subject justice.
This is going to kill companies that build assets for Unity too.
When you said "unity has done something rare" I was surprised
Unity is known to mess with their community more often then you think, the word unity for them is to unify all the worse kind of people with greed and screw with other people
I'm not surprised by unity to be honest, they patiently waited for this
Just to point out.. Matt Rix- The Tweet that Ludwig uses for the example is wrong.. it's 23.5k fees paid through the last 12 month.. Not monthly fees.. So it's not 282k + $2000/seat/year..
Its $23.5k + $2k/seat/year. So 25.5k/year ~ 1.275% revenue share.
But that's not really the problem to me..
The biggest problem is all the "trust me bro, We know how to calculate the installs correctly" and the fact that they altered the agreement that everyone who currently is making a game and those who have made a game, drastically and it's a slippery slope to allow them to do it, because it means they can do it again and this time increase the fees massively.
This is why i think most people is outraged.
Lol they think they going to get more money when in reality they are just going to Scorched earth their own reputation and burn their company to the ground
The fact that Unity execs sold their own stock a couple of days begore this announcement says they knew how it would be received. More, it says it's *not about the money.* they knew this would gut Unity.
It wasn't just an Exec, *it was the CEO himself.*
Same CEO who was behind most of the shittier practices EA had done when they became shit, btw.
I suspected some kind of corporate piracy or sabotage. It's too stupid to NOT be intentional brand damage.
Was a massive blow to me, I mostly teach unity as a tutor and now ive had lots of customers withdrawing because of the announcment.
On a personal side ive started learning godot now so Idk maybe i can recover
I'm so sorry to hear that. Hopefully it's reverted. Cheers bud, hope it turns around for you.
Make no mistake, annual fee is still there AND it is higher by factor of 10!
We may start loosing games. We will also loose many DLCs because they are big incentive to reinstall. I do not believe they are able to differentiate first and subsequent installs. They are pulling numbers from their ass and say "trust me bro".
I'm kind of interested how they follow at Unity if you buy a game this year and install it next year... seems kind of hard. Think for example the Cult of the Lamb case.
I buy so many games in sales and might not install for a year or two after. I'd feel guilty installing games I bought now as it seems unfair to penalize the dev for extra installs (or belated ones). I assume many games will delist or stop working to prevent charges in old games as purchases. It's terrible for the industry as a whole.
I actually didn't know anything [except vague complaints] about this until watching your video. Thanks for making it plain. I wonder how much more Pantheon will be delayed now...
Not a video I wanted to make obviously but felt like I had to. It's going to have a huge impact but I expect them to backtrack on a lot of things. If I were to make a guess? Within the coming days or weeks we get an amendment that this will only impact games that sign up starting on Jan 1 and not impact any games currently in dev or released. That's the only thing that makes sense to me even legally.
One of the most disgusting things I've heard so far about this bull shit situation, is the CEO of Unity sold a chunk of their shares in the company 1 week before they announced this dumpster fire. I heard this on an Asmongold clip, not sure on its truth but...if it's true...oof, that's bad.
His stock sells were in pattern with previous sells. While it's fun to witch hunt, it's not solely connected to the announcement.
Speculation, till harder evidence is found.
If this is true sounds like their preparing their golden parachute. 🤨
The Algorithm demands a Twenty Cent Fee per View!
Haha!
I know some people might argue against his example of charging to watch a video. So for clarification, the runtime fee also even applies to each time a web-based game is loaded, similar to when you watch a video. Even if you dont play it or open it by mistake and just looked at it, it was loaded, thats 20cents in the worst case a dev will have to pay.
Terrible.
Unity is dead 😪😭
This is insane. Retroactivly charging people potentially millions of $. And now AFTER the backlash they say now its "only" the first install. They are evil
Great video Red. What a world.
I'm sure their C-level know what their doing ;)
Thank you! And yes I for one always trust C-suit to know what they're doing 🤣
this is the same CEO who make an idea that player pay $1 every time they reload in battlefield
I've been working on a Unity game for 1 year now. Small team, slow development, low budget, but we are making it work.
Imagine if we hit the mark, Imagine if our game sells 200.000 copies in the next year.
Every month after the threshhold, even when the game doesn't sell anymore, we will get a bill from unity. An arbitrary bill based on their "proprietary data collection model" that we can't even verify because of "possible security issues".
Any game made on Unity after january first will make their developers forever hostages of a fee they have no control over. Stopping sales won't prevent them from getting billed, they can't ensure they will be accurately billed, and there is no way of avoiding all of this.
Basically an AWFUL deal they will force down the throats of anyone that is too deep to make the switch before january.
Absolutely disgusting.
If it feels like it is illegal, it's because it is.
I’ll call it: polymorphic terms of service. Any sale is a contract and the side that wishes to make changes must accept to be in breach and compensate the other party. Too many examples of companies pulling the rug (Sony with the PS3, oracle with Java,etc…)
unreal will never do this becouse theyr market is diffrent and the TOS is baked into the engine versions, so if TOS for ue5.5 is diffrent from 5.4, you can use 5.4 and not worry for 5.5 TOS.
This will totally kill games like vampire survivors.
Just a fun little game that cost like $3 when it came out on Steam.
6.2m downloads: $0.2 per install = $1.2m
That's 8% of their reported revenue on Steam (note: revenue! not profits)
That's some expensive software you're paying for as gamedev, they probably regret porting to Unity right now.
Prohibitions on retroactive changes to terms will hit them really hard, with the previous terms of service allowing that developers could persist on previous Unity Builds under previous Unity Terms of Service. That is to say, they can't go back now some years later to say, 'You can't continue to use the old terms of service for your old build', and start charging them under the new terms, they'd have to update to invalidate the older builds (which would make those downloads moot).
There is also some talk that they're offering some 'tie-in' deals to developers, they'll be exempt if they switch from an unaffiliated app to an affiliated app, I believe for mediation, which could be a form of tortious interference with an outside market, or so I've heard alleged, I'm sure someone with better jargon and who has the correct names can fill in more.
Yo, what's the game at 6:42? Looks nice. Great video btw! Most accurate video I've seen on this so far. Most get it wrong. Even Linus Tech Tips got stuff wrong.
Albion Online. Long-standing MMO that's also made in Unity. And thank you for the kind words!
@@Redbeardflynn Ty for the reply! :)
Of course!@@AviusL
Also need to point out that the CEO has been caught red-handed offloading his majority shares in stocks. Just a day before the announcement was made public. Bastard knew it was likely to blow up and tank their short-term trading value. And cashed out while he could. So, at the very least. He should be getting slapped with insider trading charges.
You also have to think about us Linux users who use Wine and Proton to play games. Every change you make to your wine prefix and every time you change wine versions, or add/remove flags and launch variables to run a game is counted as a new install simply because it registers as a new machine.
Every time Unity will run their Runtime on my CPU & RAM that is powered by electricity I pay for I demand Unity to cover this costs. Morover I demand that Unity cover storage costs of their Runtime on my SSD/HDD + any internet bandwith.
For unity installation is free, for us (gamers) is not, so who should pay who?
R.I.P Unity
Nice shirt, best debut album ever!
Hell yeah!
ok so what happens if you dont pay? but you alredy finish game and its selling?
Israeli malware company buys Unity, dewelopers still makes video games on that engine, Unity announces charging devs per install, surprised pikachu face
Like someone said:
Oh, My GODot!
It's so Unreal ))
I have the perfect legal trickery. Just sell bundles of 50 "games" (the main one you want) and (50 types of click the button as fast as you can) The revenue is shared over 50 games, because who would know why the user bought that bundle. So the revenue cap is 50x200k=10 million USD (Scale up as you see fit)
Game dev here. Why did unity did that move ? Unity is not making money. The original plan was to make money with Unity AD. A distributing service for mobile ads. But with Apple + EU putting an end to personnal data sells, that was a critical blow. Now ads cost nothing. So, they had to find something else. And did is a terrible choice. But if Microsoft step in and buy them, it will be alright !
I have use Unity from 2008 to date, but with this change I'm going to change to Unreal.
I don't know what devs some of game I play what they will do?
Arknights, Azur Lane, Blue Archives, Cod Mobile, Monument Valley, Pokemon Go, Genshin Impact ,Cult of the Lambs,Rain World, Blasphemous, Escape from Tarkov, Rust, Among Us, Fall guys, Phasmophobia, Ori and the Blind Forest, Cuphead, Subnautica, Hollow Knight and many others cuz they all are made with Unity.
When a company has top employees dump stock before an announcement like this, that should be a gigantic red flag for anyone even thinking about doing any kind of business with that company. The pricing is absurd, the stock dump before the pricing change is as underhanded as you can get.
I wonder if this will play out the same way Wizards' OGL licensing fiasco from early 2023 did?
One can only hope.
It's Rugpullitiello. Business as usual.
He probably sees free money in automotive and army and has decided to, essentially, ditch gaming entirely. In case everything crumbles - it is said he sold his shares preemptively. Uf Unity pulls through, he can buy back his shares from the bargain bin. A little loathing is in order.
16:10 - Yet
this is going to kill some of the favorite games i play
in response to you asking if epic might get ideas about this. ceo of epic said they have no plans to change their pricing at all.
Not only more expensive but more expensive and more risky than their main competitor. Who provides a much more mature and a much more complete solution.
If I was about to build a game today I would pick unreal over unity. If I were a week ago it would have been Unity. Thats a huge PR failure.
Exactly this. for most the ONLY reason to go with unity is it is easier to learn. When that cost of learning is much lower than the risk of the contract, it becomes ignorable.
This will all trickle down to the consumer of the product. We will see higher prices on games to cover the charges Unity is leveling on the developers. It wont just be a $.20 increase either since the Develpopers will have to charge above and beyond to cover the "what if" portion of everything. Plus with this comes every other platform dipping their fingers in. Will Steam start charging more per download.. ect. Ugly greed at it's best.
Sounds like the CEO and board members are out of touch
I don't think any of them played a video game in their life
I'd force the Publishers to absorb this cost - as part of dostribution. They often take 40-50% of profits anyways and let them deal with suong or arguing the (charges).
for me, the biggest issue with this whole thing is that it makes any kind of financial planning or predicatbility fly out the window.. if you have a huge trustfund sure.. no problem.. but if not then a sudden bout of success, can make you homeless
Is it possible to make _one_ install on a server and let many play the game as clients? ;-)
I wonder if there’s a tax dodge type loophole in this. Like your game is free but you sell stuff outside the game that you can say isn’t really profit from the game but actually is something you need to make the game playable/enjoyable. Like you have a web browser built into your game and you charge for access to a website(anyone who pays can access it) which doesn’t use unity and gives you access to things like tutorials, instructions, background music etc. that aren’t included with the base game. Possibly not since it seems like quite a risky thing to try and argue, legally.
Event the CEO sold his stock before the news release which raise flags and I wonder if insider trading? As well other people selling stocks...
This is very sad indeed. How can we (as gamers) help fight this change?
Not a lawyer but this whole thing has to be straight up illegal especially when it comes to older games. You can’t just declare people owe you money because you changed your ToS that’s just not how things work. Imagine if Apple charged you .05 cents every time their algorithm thought you were listening to music you straight up bought on iTunes. They can’t even properly verify the number of installs so how can they charge for them?
Its absolutely insane. The combination of bald faced greed and self immolating stupidly. I imagine they’ll walk this back the moment someone takes them to court.
Buying games without unity.
Can't you just up your subscription plan if you do enough sales for the 0.2 fee? I thought that was the appeal for new devs previously, it was free til you started doing numbers then you'd select the pricing teir to fit sales. But i haven't looked at unity in a lot of years so maybe its be different for a bit
I also wanna clarify my understanding of that chart is you need 200k DLs before fees apply
No, in business especially wall street type. They all follow the greedy trends. They have been talking about this for years. Even carmakers are trying to implement some sort of nickel and diming crap. CEO want to start charging people on the videos, pictures and so on that they create. "You owned nothing, and will be happy"
A lot of the free and indie games I play are made in unity. I can imagine a lot of them will be removing their games from steam or web platforms. This is going to hurt everyone.
I mean the executives took out stocks immediately before the announcement.
That reeks of insider trading.
I like the LP tee shirt. They were the first band I listened to and liked as a kid (after Red Hot Chilli Peppers ofc)
That's pretty scummy! Even if no one uses Unity from now on, they will still make tons of money with the old games that run their software.
Imagine your local DIY store retro-actively charging you a monthly fee for all the materials you bought to build or renovate your house... or Nike charging you for every mile you walk with their shoes (using GPS-data)... etc. Crazy and greedy world!
They won't, you will see something that never happened before, you will see games deleted from every store in the coming months..... no one is insane enough to pay for installs.
The pricing structure did not change though, right?
Old tier was free until game makes $100k and must upgrade to plus, that’s $400 bucks, and if the game makes more than $200k the next tier is pro for $2k a seat…
The new pricing structure basically is just forcing you to up your tier base on that or you will get charged with runtime install fees
The table we got from Unity that I used in the video has tiered pricing so you get a better deal if you pay more up front (Unity Pro and Enterprise) versus Personal and Plus which have the lower 200k thresholds + $0.20c per install for all installs over the threshold while the higher paid plans decrease the cost per install. This is the best article I've found to see the pricing www.theverge.com/2023/9/12/23870547/unit-price-change-game-development
Basically just an additional fee that costs more than what they were already charging while adding no value to the developer or the player.
don't forget valve apparently also takes 30% of the developers money for every purchase also you need to read into unreal engine more the ceo said about unity's decision saying that they couldn't do something like that even if they wanted to it's in the contract so no epic games will not do the same thing at all
Valve would be in line with other providers. Yt takes 30% of any memberships here for example. Amazon takes 30% of ebooks. It's because they're intermediaries that are providing the platform on which to sell. Unity isnt a sales platform. This price change is weird for several reasons, not being percentage based would mean a game that costs 20c is levied a 100% fee while a $1 game is being levied a 20% fee. That's ontop of how and where they'd get installed data, the fact that they're trying to apply this to games made or in development under a prior agreed upon pricing structure, and so much more. It's mind boggling to watch.
oh i am not backing up unity what so ever i have been using unreal engine for 9 years and what unity is doing is wrong i feel really bad for unity developers because this move could wreck their lives as they have literally bet their lives on that engine because how much time it takes to learn game developing @@Redbeardflynn
It's sad, but hopefully we have Godot.
The sad thing is, everyone affected can't really boycot Unity for this nonsense.
It's just not possible to move development to a different engine if you already put a year+ of work into your Unity project without massive cost, time and effort.
Let alone the cost to the motivation of the team for all that extra work without actually adding anything to the product.
As a gamer you can't boycot since you're not buying Unity, you're buying a Unity Game. You'd only hurt the game developers even more.
I just hope there's laws in place that can be used to slap Unitys greedy hand away as it reaches into the pockets of exisiting projects.
IF a gamedev decides to agree to these terms for their future project, that's their decision.
But for someone to go "Oh your hard work is paying of greatly? Let us have a bigger piece of that, retroactivly....yikes"
I hope indie developers can find a way to exploit the charity loophole to still get good returns on their games without fees. If they can, Humble Bundle is about to BLOW UP!!
Now it's time for steam to cash in on that and charge 0.4$ per install for all games made in unity xD
whats you take on this on a deeper and future looking stand point?
After letting the emotion pass... They did this on purpose. It's not a mistake. They are not confused. THEY KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING.
Funny thing is, there are more indie's than AAA's and the rise of open source software is here. Good luck Unity, you're going to need it.
It seems the new CEO and people in charge have marketing degrees not development so that is why, greed, Unity is dead now my kid was making a game in Unity so now I got him a ton of stuff to switch and learn Unreal Engine 5, I also got him Godot and some others for him to see which he likes better, this is insane???
Honestly you'd think a marketing degree would be more beneficial here because this is a pr nightmare...
I better not lose not only the game I play but my Pre-alpha status on AdventureQuest 3D. I supported the devs sense before it was even a game. Unity axing my Alpha benefits would make me not play adventure quest 3D anymore. I EARNED those benefits Unity has no rights to Axe or revoke my Alpha Benefits that shows we been with Artix sense its early AdventureQuest 3D Stages. Why does it have anything to do with it? Well if Artix goes down and the game I lose those things forever there not gonna come back.
Their only way out. Is to make the engine open source & free for indie.
The focus on "install" is also a lie from Unity. They can't actually detect installs, and Unity doesn't provide an installer. Steam and other stores do the installs.
Unity can only detect when the game is launched, and they refuse to explain what criteria when a game launches do they consider an install or not.
I'm most confused that Unity thinks that it is a fair business practice to charge a company for a good or service that they themselves didn't provide. Unity does not support any infrastructure that facilitates *the installation of video games.* What right do they have to charge companies every time two third parties, their customer and the app distributor, engage in the act of re-downloading a piece of software?
Especially software that has already been paid for, and may have been paid for, *for years.*
Has anyone else ever tried this kind of nonsense that was not a mobster?
"Nice successful game you got there, would be a shame if it's been popular for several years."
It almost feels like the CEO is still trying to help out EA and destroying the small developers.
I have said it in another vídeo, but remember that cool and sick game you participated in The crowdfund in some site a few years ago? What about them as Well?
I had a casual mobile game in the works with viral potential built on Unity. Now i have a casual mobile game in the works built on Godot. I was willing to give Unity their cut before, but now i won't give them the time of day, greedy bastards. Who's REALLY running the company, Logan Paul? This is a massive rug pull.
Never again. I'll never consider Unity ever again even if they do back down, because we can't trust them not to try to screw us. I'm not trusting any proprietary engines or tools ever again.
Hopefully, Unity won't be able to come back from the damage of their mistake.
Must be yacht buying season soon for the CEOs over at Unity.
It is
What do you expect. Look at who the ceo for unity is now. It's the same ceo from EA. During the whole star wats battlefield 2 loot box scandal. It shouldn't shock anyone that this is happening. Unity ceo is ruining the game engine like he ruined EA.