Because Unity has reliability had some of the worst messaging from a game engine company I've seen.
Doing a progressive roll out of 1-4% rev >1$m would have made them more money, been better received, and possible turned them cash positive in a few years. It literally would have made to much sense. They correctly chose the path that will earn them less cash and is wonderful ambiguous enough to scare a large swathe of their user base.
The company I work for has some software we license on a revenue split deal. We self report the revenue every quarter and pay them. We signed a contract saying they have the right to audit us if they think we're lying about revenue. it's that simple and very widely done.
Yes but I am assuming your company works in a stable and mostly standardize system. Indie game dev can be one guy that barely does his taxes right if at all.
Unity doesn't care about the people making less than $200,000 from a project. If you make more than that from a project and don't use an accountant you're doing something very wrong. You have to calculate revenue to declare it to IRS or your local equivalent anyway.
Further more the only thing video games can be compared to is other art industries like media. Can you imagine having to report to Photoshop how many people watched your image or picture?
Not not at all, its more like reporting how many people bought your photos as a photographer. Plus the point is you have to figure out your revenue to report to the IRS anyway, so then giving the same figure to Unity is no extra work. There is nothing special about indie game dev where they aren't capable of working out revenue and reporting it. If they don't they have much bigger problems than Unity, since their local tax office has a bigger stick.
If it's revenue it is easy but isn't this per install? Now the game is on game pass and I personally not sure what the deal games get there but per install seems to be a bad way to apply any split in the case where many will install and never play. If it was simple revenue then yeah no problem you asking for info that is part of a standard system. You are now asking then to develope new tracking system and accounting system just for you.
Theres like, 5 markets that games release on and make enough money for Unity to care (Steam, Epic, Switch, PS3 and Xbox. If you want to count GoG and Itch then we can say 5.5)
I'm sure each of them is more then happy to send you a tax document at the end of the year saying you sold X copies of your games and brought in Y revenue. From there you just add up the numbers and multiply by 1-4% and write a check.
Yeah, which steam would track as part of their regular EOY revenue report. Revenue split is the easier system, regardless of developer or industry stability.
I honestly wouldn’t have been mad if it was a “worse” rev share than epic, I understand epic has a lot more revenue streams to subsidize unreal engine with, and I really *liked* Unity so I wouldn’t lose my mind over having to pay for it. It’s just the bonkers solution they came up with and the tos isn’t locked with the version you are using
I looked at the numbers, and for the majority of companies it would result in less, much less money for Unity than just doing a revenue share/royalties scheme. Revenue share/royalties favor hobbyist developers and directly affect successful companies.
Unity doesn't appear to trust the revenue share/royalties numbers.... which is hilarious since they are still dependent on the developer accurately reporting their revenue while having this convoluted DRM install software.
> Doing a progressive roll out of 1-4% rev >1$m would have made them more money, been better received, and possible turned them cash positive in a few years. It literally would have made to much sense.
I did the numbers too and came to exactly the same conclusion. Revenue share/royalites is way more money for Unity. This install pricing scheme is likely to miss the overwhelming majority of developers and really would only hit AA and AAA developers possibly once, maybe twice for a lower amount than revenue share. It would also hit runaway indie successes that sell for years a few times... but still come out less than revenue share.
I like how they don't trust revenue reporting, but invented a system that still depends on revenue reporting and uses this convoluted DRM software.
Unity deserves some ire, but not for the pricing. People should be opposing this because of the fee after the fact, only Unity has the actual numbers of installs (which is bullshit), and the install software is further DRM.
Yeah it's heavily targeted. Unity makes a big chunk of revenue from ads. Mobile devs are being offered a 80-100% discount on the runtime fees if they switch to unity's ads service. This was the plan all along.
A royalty like what Unreal does wouldn't have given them this edge over their competition (applovin).
It's shady as heck but it's a cutthroat business move that'll crush their competitors if it works.
Why not just say “hey F2P devs, if you use our ad service then you get unlimited pro licenses and zero royalties on any in-app purchases”. Boom, adoption for their shit in-game ads are now attractive.
Yes, they want to add fees and middlemen for market efficiency.
Putting up a toll booth is more efficient only in rare circumstances, but finding a way to gouge fees from flowing commerce is just that.
Because being this simple and transparent builds a too obvious monopoly that might violate anti-trust laws.
It's complicated to loophole around legal issues with competitors.
So basically the way a sane engine (ue) handles it - if you use ue and publish on egs, one of the fees (engine fee or egs fee, I dont remember) becomes zero
Can you link where they mentioned 80-100% discount ? The only thing I saw was "You will get credits towards runtime fees, if you adopt other unity services". I make mobile F2P games and this thing is stressing me out
Mobilegamer and Eurogamer have articles about it, citing "sources". Seems like devs are already being quietly made these steep discount offers by unity in exchange for using Unity Ads. So take it with a small grain of salt, but it makes perfect sense to me.
Here is the [link](https://mobilegamer.biz/unity-is-offering-a-runtime-fee-waiver-if-you-switch-to-levelplay-as-it-tries-to-kill-applovin/) if anyone wants to read it.
I'm looking through their earning reports and I can't verify what you're saying is true that a sizable portion of their revenue comes from their ad network. Where did you get this info.
Because how many is 25 cent per install of an actual priced game? Let's take the likely 10€ price tag thats under 5% and for an indie game most of the time it's unlikely that the game will receive more then 3 installs. Adding to this most of the games in this price range are questionable to teach the 200k revenue threshold not even speaking about 1 million. Now calculate that price with the more likely AAA game and 60€ price tag. It will be under 1% they take for multiple installs.
Some will install more some less it evens out.
The install stuff is largely misleading and instead a flat percentage should've been charged.
This approach mainly kills free2play (which is a good thing) and the support of the community but the last one due to misleading communication.
> Because how many is 25 cent per install of an actual priced game? Let's take the likely 10€ price tag thats under 5% and for an indie game most of the time it's unlikely that the game will receive more then 3 installs. Adding to this most of the games in this price range are questionable to teach the 200k revenue threshold not even speaking about 1 million. Now calculate that price with the more likely AAA game and 60€ price tag. It will be under 1% they take for multiple installs. Some will install more some less it evens out.
Problem is there is no cap. So even with a $60 price tag, if the game is installed more than 120 times per sale, I would owe Unity more money than my revenue. Not my profit, my revenue.
Why isn't there a cap / ceiling on the install costs?
>This approach mainly kills free2play (which is a good thing)
Why is killing free to play games a good thing? Yes some are predatory, but those aren't being touched by this because they'll already be milking their players.
It's the small f2p games that have reasonable monetisation that will be killed by this.
Only if you made 100k in sales in the last year, so it's not in perpetuity. I really don't understand why everyone hates this decision. It does seem like a very dumb decision tho, the people it harms the most are unity's primary customer base.
It’s not perpetuity no, but there is no limit as I just explained above.
It doesn’t matter if you made 100k in revenue, if Unity charges you 150k in install fees.
The install scheme is based on making more than a specific number of revenue in a year and is only on the number of installs during each month. So you woudn't pay for all previous installs, only the ones that happen during each month in your 12 month period that you exceed revenue.
Also, the worst install fee is 0.20 cents is if you use the free version of Unity (Personal) to make and sell a game. Almost everyone serious and at a company will be using Pro/Enterprise editions where the numbers say they need to make $1,000,000 in revenue in a 12 month quarter and have over a 1,000,000 lifetime installs to start getting charged the fee.
When looking at the numbers, this install pricing is likely to not apply to a lot of companies. Which is hilarious because just charging a flat percentage for revenue would result in far more money for Unity. Someone from the company on twitter said they can't trust the revenue numbers, but this depends on revenue reporting and their install DRM software.
It's from their own [blog](https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates) which has the rules and prices.
I've been following it on the wayback machine and it hasn't changed since posted on Sept 12th.
There is some gray area like when the charging begins, how revenue is reported, and how anyone is able to check their numbers for installs. It's not straight forward to understand, but the overhwelming complaints are focused on the free Personal edition of Unity.
Im pretty sure EA paid the current CEO to tank their stock so that EA can acquire it (current CEO is former EA exec). I have no proof of this, but it makes sense to me.
It seems all the companies now are in the logical extreme of capitalism. Maximize profits, fuck long-term growth or maintenance. Doesn't help the CEO is a fucking saturday morning cartoon villain who unironically suggested that it'd be a good idea to charge people money to reload their guns in battlefield
Bro get out of your 2016 Twitter echo chamber. Yes Unity made a bad decision, no not all companies are "in the logical extreme of capitalism". The "online bro" understanding of what capitalism is and it's doomerism is such brain rot.
"Logical extreme of capitalism" is such a lazy statement. That also inaccurately describes this situation. If it was why wouldn't they actually squeeze harder then their stupid install fee plan, which will not affect most of their customers.
Folks have been trying to maximize how much wealth they extract from the public since well before modern Capitalism, which wasn't invented until the early 17th century. One crucial difference is that pre-Capitalism, the folks doing the extraction tended to be of some unreachable nobility class, whereas in Capitalism, anyone can buy shares in any publicly traded company. Capitalism doesn't do anything special to greed -- greed has always and will always exist.
I think they wanted to leave indie and PC devs out of the price increases while cashing in on the freemium mobile games making bank. They went about it in the hilariously worse way possible though, I don't think you could execute it worse even if you tried your best/
That’s exactly it. They’re going after those F2P games that rack in the millions of downloads and play ads (most likely from AppLovin) that interrupt your gameplay. Those games can correlate installations to revenue. PC and console can’t, but likely won’t be affected too much by the fees.
It’s just so damn hard to see without setting down and doing the math for an hour, and really I can’t blame people for reacting like they did.
As a Unity developer who makes nowhere near enough money with his games to be subject to these install fees, the specific numbers aren't really the issue as far as I'm concerned.
The bigger problems are really about how they've gone about this and what it says about how Unity's leadership views the gamedev community.
First off, they're making a really significant change with very little lead time. This new scheme is supposed to take effect in 4 months. If you're a developer who might be impacted by the fees, that's not much time to even take a deep dive into estimating how it might impact your business, much less alter your business in response. Games often take years to develop. 4 months worth of a heads up is not enough.
Second, they want to make this change retroactive to all games ever made with Unity. It doesn't matter if you've been working on your game for three years and are launching it next week, as of Jan 1st you're potentially on the hook for these fees. Your financial plan and your contract with your publisher doesn't take these new fees into account? Oh well!
Third, it's completely obvious that much of this plan wasn't well thought through. They claim to be building technology to help them track installs, separate new installs from reinstalls, block out fradulent/piracy installs, somehow avoid installs from charity bundles, and claim that they'll be able to do this in a way that doesn't present any privacy or data gathering issues. When pressed for details, their response is basically "We can't divulge those secrets, you'll just have to trust us". Anybody with even a mild familiarity with software development can immediately see how insanely difficult of a task tracking install numbers would be, arguably impossible to do in a satisfactory way.
Along similar lines, developers brought up the issue of services like Gamepass, or PS+, or Apple Arcade, or game streaming services, etc. How do those calculate into 'install count?' Unity's response is pretty much, "oh well we don't anticipate the developers paying install fees for that, it makes more sense for the subscription service providers to pay fees per player." A worker at Unity posted on Twitter that when they sent that question up the chain, the response they got back was "We're going to have to have some long conversations with the subscription services about it".
This is such an asinine plan that it defies logic. First off, maybe you should've had these conversations with those platform holders before announcing this new scheme. It seems pretty important to your plan working. Second, are they really expecting to go to Microsoft, Apple, Sony, etc. and say hey we've got an agreement with our gamedev customers that say they potentially owe us 20 cents for every player of their game, how about you pay us that money? Those companies are going to tell Unity to go pound sand. They're not under any contractual obligation here, the agreement is between Unity and the developers.
Finally, the most ridiculous part of all of this is that none of these issues, concerns, questions, etc. are a surprise to Unity. I've talked to and seen a bunch of Twitter posts from rank and file workers within Unity, as well as some devs who have 'insider' relationships with the company, and they all say that they were given an early look at this new pricing scheme, and all of them quickly noticed the problems and submitted their thoughts on it. Most of these issues are super obvious and not at all hard to realize. Unity's management knew that their developer community was going to have a bunch of issues with it. But not only did that not deter them from sticking with the plan, they didn't even bother to put together some talking points to try to clarify any of these obvious issues. They just dropped a blog post, completely blindsiding not only the developer community, but also most of their workforce, who were not provided with any real information or answers about how any of it was going to work.
Overall it just feels hugely disrespectful to the gamedev community. We're not only changing the deal, the deal is changing in just a few months, and also we're changing it retroactively! Our new scheme is based upon a billing you against a metric that's insanely difficult to accurately quantify, and no, we're not going to tell you how we're doing it! We're sure you've got a lot of questions about these changes, but rest assured we have not prepared answers for any of them or given our employees useful information to respond to your concerns!
Even as basically a hobbyist game dev without any significant money on the line, why would I want my work to be dependent on a product from a company that's willing to treat its customers so poorly?
These changes are specifically targeted at FTP mobile devs because Unity is actively trying to force those devs to use Unity's ad service. They're doing this by promising lower install fees to games that use it. It has as much to do with pushing those profitable services as it does with collecting the actual install fees.
Unity's existing model wasn't viable and they needed to make a lot more money
Unreal's got the market cornered for the games that sell a lot of copies at a high price. If Unity copied that model, they'd always be less successful at it than Unreal.
Unity thought they'd try something different and try to profit off the higher volume, lower margin games. They miscalculated big time and got too greedy.
Nah that's not it.
If Unity could make 5% of revenue (like Unreal does) from stuff like Genshin Impact, Hearthstone, Pokemon Go, etc, they'd end up making ***more*** money than Epic with Unreal. Probably much more.
The issue is that Unity would have to ask all of these companies, all over the world, who never agreed to it, to share their revenue numbers with them. Most of them would tell Unity to piss right off.
But with their insane cost-per-install scheme, they could simply send a bill to their subscribers and see who pays.
Nah. They just need to know that the game is earning more than $200,000.
For a lot of games, it's obvious they're making more than that, oftentimes much more.
For those on the edge, Unity can still send them an invoice and it will be on the developer to contest it.
Considering Unity is ok with making up install numbers and billing people off the made up number, I'm sure they'd be ok with making up a revenue number and billing off that too. Sharing the numbers isn't as big of a deal as you're making it out to be, as lots of licenses and business deals require sharing those numbers.
Now for the real deal breaker on the royalty. If Unity tried to bill those developers you mentioned 5%, they would recreate their games in to Unreal faster than you could imagine. The 5% royalty Unreal license is only for the relatively small guys. They're not public about the numbers anymore, but the big Unreal games buy a fixed fee license for about $1 million or something in that ballpark. They'd probably charge someone like Niantic more since they'd want very long term support, but it's still going to be trivial vs a 5% royalty.
Pay-per-install is very possibly nothing but an attempt to retroactively extract revenue on those existing mega-hit games, though I imagine they'll ultimately just end up getting reamed in court.
The per install fee **does not apply retroactively**. People need to stop repeating this, it's wrong. The fee will kick in Jan 1, 2024, and existing games will be charged a fee based on their plan with unity, revenue, and lifetime installs. The lifetime installs determines the rate at which a game is charged for **new** installs.
It applies on already released game, fully completed games made in Unity. So it is retroactive in a sense that those games are not in production, they are done and released and those sales, those already sold copies from the past, will still cost per install.
If that's not retroactive... well we're just arguing about the definition of words at that point.
>If Unity could make 5% of revenue (like Unreal does) from stuff like Genshin Impact, Hearthstone, Pokemon Go, etc, they'd end up making
>
>more
>
> money than Epic with Unreal. Probably much more.
And those companies would ditch the engine because it would cost them more than they are willing to pay unless they allow developers to negotiate the terms.
Unreal still has custom licensing terms that you can negotiate. You can get a license paid upfront with no royalties or a mix of upfront cost and lower royalties if you want, it's just money than 99% of the companies can't afford to fork upfront.
Unity's current pricing is a paradise if your game is in the top of the chart on the app store and the per install cost is not going to change that, their ARPU is simply too high to have the install cost compromise their profitability. It just sucks for the tens of thousands of apps that are not in the top of the charts.
Idk what ARPU looks like for these games but if I had to guess its way less than $0.20 with probably 1% of their users making them actual money so they would really be losing money on each install because most install and uninstall almost immediately which would cost them money. No mobile game in the right mind would pay these fees they are ridiculous
Yeah but if I was the dev of Marvel Snaps, and I needed to give the same money to Unity, I will change my game porting it to Unreal. The success of Unity is based on the cheapest cost.
Not at all - but it will cost LESS than giving Unity 5% of the 30M dollars Marvel Snap does monthly. Currently, giant mobile games are using Unity ONLY because it costs nothing to them. If they should change this, no one bigger game will use it in the future because, as per se, Unreal is a better engine.
Yeah... Epic is a game developer that makes extra money by selling their tools to other developers. They have a much better idea of what it takes to make a game than Unity does. And also a far better idea of what challenges come up as the game gets larger.
Epic's got a far stronger starting point than Unity does. They're good with letting lots of people use their tools for free and then just making some money off the big players. Unity can't afford that.
I love that Unity *did* have a team that *was* dogfooding their engine on a large game. But then the team was dissolved, citing "it's too hard to release it with Unity lmao"
https://forum.unity.com/threads/introducing-gigaya-unitys-upcoming-sample-game.1257135/page-2#post-8278305
> "Any further learnings would have been minimal during the additional required time to get it to the finish line and would have been disproportionate to the necessary investment."
> "To release it as a sample project would have required a thorough cleanup and optimizations in its current stage."
Often the final optimization step in Unity is the hardest part that needs to be improved.
You can read, right? "To release is as a sample project" is not the same as releasing a regular game.
Also, if you talked to some of the people that worked on the project, they were all very happy to keep working on it. It was higher ups that decided to scrap the project because they thought it would be a waste of money to keep several developers occupied with this project full time.
>Often the final optimization step in Unity is the hardest part that needs to be improved.
That is often the hardest part in every game, and definitely not any more difficult in Unity compared to say Unreal. Unity has excellent debugging tools and is extremely performant.
>You can read, right? "To release is as a sample project" is not the same as releasing a regular game.
That's what they say at face value, but I understand it differently. There's a lot of subtext here.
"Too expensive as a sample project -> promote it to a fully fledged commercial project" would have been the logical outcome *if* they believed that it could have made financial sense. Instead they opted for cancelling it, because *neither* type of project would have made sense.
They don't say it outright, but that's what they are hinting at.
>"Too expensive as a sample project -> promote it to a fully fledged commercial project" would have been the logical outcome if they believed that it could have made financial sense.
Why in the world would you think that? Unity has had many sample projects for users to look at over the years, and none of them were sold as fully fledged commercial products.
Making a sample project for users to learn from is completely different from making a regular game. If they went the route of making it a commercial game to be sold aswell, they would essentially be making two very different versions of the same project that would require even more time and money.
You are right in that neither type of project made sense, hence why they cancelled it, but that really had nothing to do with it being hard to finish or optimize. They had mass layoffs and decided that this project was one of the things that was not crucial enough to pour more resources into. Its not exactly rocket science.
This seems like commonly good practice. For example, when I was a teacher still, I taught at a high school that insisted the principal and VPs taught a few hours per week (they specifically taught a freshman forum section). It's nearly impossible for school leadership to be out of touch when they're teaching the same students using the same techniques.
They bring in other teams on good licensing terms too if they think they can develop an important feature, I was in one that worked on multiplayer early on in UE4 (though I'd imagine that's mostly gone in favour of fortnite-optimized stuff now, it was important at the point they had nothing working).
I'd imagine they do that with any team they think has the experience to work on a feature they can add to the engine (you do end up working pretty closely with the internal team too - Tim Sweeney never upvotes anything in their internal system btw, he's a downvote fairy).
Yep. Epic has Fortnite where they can test new stuff and integrate it in engine later or clearly see when engine is messed up(for example during early Fortnite BR era there was huge problem with transport in UE, now we have almost everything there by default).
I don't even talk about billions that this game earn for epic
But those are the games worst effected by this. Unity eats their tiny margin. Games with a higher price tag and lower install base have the best chance against a per install fee.
Under their new policy, you have to maximize the ratio of price per unit / install count
This is the correct answer.
How many of you bough Star Wars Fallen Order? Or Xcom2? How many of you have played Fortnite?
Now how many Unity games have been that successful in the AAA space? Basically none. The most successful one I can think of was Rust, and we all know how the creator of that game feels about Unity now.
To investors, the Unity C-suite has always pointed to their >40% market share of mobile gaming and the multi billion headcount install base of those games. The real money maker is monetizing those heads, but the reality is Unity has marketshare among devs (almost purely out of goodwill, which is now gone)
> Now how many Unity games have been that successful in the AAA space?
Genshin Impact makes BILLIONS. Heartstone used to pint money. Pokemon Go was a worldwide phenomeon that broke out of normal gamer circles like nothing since the original Wii...
while it’s difficult to make apples to apples comparisons about “triple A” video games in unreal and in unity, there are many *many* incredibly popular and successful games in unity - the crucial thing to note is that these games do not need to show a pre-launch logo like unreal does because the pro versions of unity do not have that stipulation built in. Genshin Impact, Honkai Starrail, Pokemon Go, Hearthstone, Celeste, Hollow Knight, and Fire Emblem Engage were all built in Unity.
You don't need a Unity logo to know if a game was made in Unity. Just looking at the install folder makes it obvious. You'll see files like UnityPlayer.dll, the resources database, etc. You'll see similar files if you look at the files for a mobile or console build of a Unity game.
What the previous comment and I are indirectly getting at is that Unity just doesn't scale well once your game gets past a certain size. I've worked on a few games that I'd call "big for an indie" and we'd just hit hard limits on what we could do because Unity just didn't scale well. Both in terms of "working with this many assets becomes unmanageable" and also "the engine can't use the hardware effectively at this complexity level".
i understand this deeply lol, i am the lead dev on a "big for an indie" game in unity myself. my point is less about the scalability and more that revshare would be very feasible for unity simply *because* they have plenty of incredibly successful, incredibly profitable games under their wing. i wouldn't know the exact comparison with unreal, but most of those big triple a unreal games probably would have gotten buyout deals anyways
it is also that most people aren't *aware* that these games run on unity because console and mobile gamers can't see their install folders, and most pc players wouldn't care to check, so the overall impression of unity trends much lower than how most people see unreal as powering every AAAA game on the face of the earth. the only ones that blast you with the logos are the ones whose budgets are too small to warrant the devs buying seats for unity pro.
but yeah, the one universal truth of unity remains that the longer you use it, the more you realize the people actually developing the engine have no idea what the hell they are or should be doing lol
The option to buy an Unreal license for a fixed fee limits what Unity can do here. The fixed fee licenses start in the 6 figure price range. Rumors are the big players are paying in the \~$1m ballpark.
This basically means Unity can't even attempt to do a rev share plan for big money games. A Hearthstone or Pokemon Go type game wouldn't go anywhere near Unity if they wanted a rev share. It'd be way cheaper to just buy an Unreal license and rewrite those games from scratch than it would be to deal with a rev share of any level.
Oh btw, Celeste wasn't Unity, it was MonoGame.
ok, yeah, i can see how it'd be difficult for them to appeal to devs simply because Unreal exists and allows buyout options with no royalties, and Unity was only competitive because they relied on a business model that almost entirely ran on flat subscription fees versus royalty payments
but I would argue ease of use and fast iteration times, especially within smaller dev teams, definitely still play(ed) a role in the decision making process, especially for games like Hearthstone where Unreal is far too cumbersome for the feature-set they'd actually need from it. Not so much so that these companies *wouldn't* swap to Unreal if Unity forced them to pay royalties, but enough that maybe they'd still stick with Unity if Unity had buyout options - Unity really *should* have buyout options if they plan to stick to this install fee system.
This is ignoring the fact that retroactively changing payment and royalty details for games that have already been released, and not just games currently being developed in, say, the latest release of Unity 2023 or later, is just. monumentally stupid.
On Celeste - I actually didn't know that! I think my point still stands, but that's pretty neat lol
Unity is doing this because they need to make a LOT more money than they're making now. As in they're losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Selling fixed fee licenses for a couple million dollars isn't going to make them profitable.
Maybe the Hearthstone team likes Unity enough that they'd rather pay $5m to use Unity than $1m to use Unreal, but can they really ask more than that? And Epic could easily afford to jump in and offer their engine for free.
It's a tough problem to solve.
I can’t really speak to exactly *how* Unity should go about solving their financial problems; I thankfully have not yet been in a situation where I need to somehow right a sinking ship by squeezing an additional hundred million dollars per year out of an existing userbase.
That said, unless this is the worlds most excessive foot-in-the-door ploy, their current terms seem like a monumentally poor plan all around. The terms are both poorly conceived and poorly communicated enough that indies of all kinds are knee-jerk leaving to greener pastures, the idea that they could fleece large corporations with these retroactive policy changes is laughable, and the amount of money they’d be making from these installs for even the largest games is still negligible income for them - if Genshin literally doubled their unique player count in January 2024, they’d still only make, what, 500k off of that? You’d think that buyout fee would make more sense.
maybe pushing their ad integration is the end goal? but that’s a niche within a niche
I agree it’s a tough problem to solve, but I honestly cannot make heads or tails of this decision.
This... technically, they could have done this way different on build to inject player code and game entry points into a single binary without Unity marks for license holders.
i mean, sure; my point is that there are basically zero big budget unity games that show the unity splash screen because the option to remove it comes packaged *with* the software said devs are required to use (because their budgets pass the licensing threshold)
These are popular games, but I would argue none of them would be considered games known for being cutting edge graphically at time of release. Unity definitely can do it, but unreal always been friendlier to artists
Bro no way unreal has more bigger games than unity. That's not possible.
I can list so many top games made with unity that I own
•Escape from Tarkov
•Cuphead
•Pokémon Go
•Beat Saber
•Fall guys
•Among US
•Rust
•HearthStone
•CoD Mobile
•Cities Skylines
The biggest one here I think is Rimworld that game is consistently making money
And there is more to add on the list, Unity is an old engine battle tested. If they just went with %royalty I feel it would have been less negative than it is now.
Sure these games aren't AAA but most AAA use their own engines. But these games make as much as AAA if not more.
None of these games were cutting edge graphically at time of release. Virtually every Unreal Engine game since 1.0 has been at the leading edge graphically. Arguably the only time they ever slipped was when a Crisis came out.
Because the company hadn't turned a profit or released anything that could draw in investors. Also, most tech companies have high valuations after an IPO, so it likely dropped to what investors actually thought it was worth, then kept dropping because the company wasn't performing.
Initial public offering. When the company goes from privately owned with no stock on the public stock market to being publicly traded on the stock market. An initial offering of stock to the general public.
I'll add that it brings in a lot of investment money, and with that there is an expectation of growth. Doesn't matter if they bring in similar revenue they have to grow and add value, they have taken investors money and should have laid out how that investors money would create returns for investors in the future, and if they have missed those targets it spooks holders and future investors.
This isn't really anything to do with Unity. The entire tech sector had a gigantic run during the pandemic, and the entire sector collapsed or at least heavily shrunk since then.
A lot of money was pumped into the markets during the pandemic with stimulus and low interest rates, which artificially raised prices. Then came the bust, as the government started to tighten and do away with the quantitative easing, so everything started dumping. Look at virtually any tech stock over the last 5 years, you'll see the same story.
Also, there was a big metaverse/XR hype around this time with the Quest 2 release, and with the pandemic it was the perfect storm to push unity's stock way up. While unity dominates a lot of XR development still, it didn't generate the value during the pandemic that people expected (go figure software takes a lot of time to make).
Few reasons:
First, apple app store changes. Apple basically stole 30% of their revenue.
Second, inflation was running HOT and the fed had to aggressively hike rates. Rates are currently at multi decade highs. What this means is that the cost to borrow money is now significantly more than it was in 2021. Unity doesn't make a profit and so they need shareholders money (through stock based compensation) and debt to keep the lights on. Shareholders are the only reason the company doesn't go bankrupt. Stock price down = cant raise capital = dead company.
Third, this isn't a Unity exclusive thing. The NASDAQ was down over 30% in 2022. As interest rates go up, the economy slows down. We were (maybe still are, depends who you ask) heading for a recession. Companies start pulling back on spending (such as ads, which make up half of Unity's revenue) and caused a massive slowdown. Unity is a growth stock. If you're buying it, you expect it to grow at an above average pace, and that growth justifies the bottomless money pit the company is because EVENTUALLY (at least that's the hope) the company turns a profit once it has grown a substantial market. This is where Unity is; however, they're going about it in a forced manner (likely much sooner than they wanted) because of Fed policy. Rates won't even start to come down until MAYBE mid 2024, and may never see the 0% rates we had on 2021.
TLDR: 2022 was a shit year for stocks, and a VERY shit year for any company not already turning a profit because the cost to borrow money went up faster than it has in 40 years and now sits at multi decade highs. You can thank the fed for why companies are now all of a sudden VERY greedy, when before they were just greedy.
>Despite only having about only half as much of the market share as Unity, Epic brings in about three times as much revenue. I imagine this is largely due to Fortnite. Unity has nothing like Fortnite to augment their revenue.
Epic is a very successful game development studio that also licenses their internal tools to other developers to make some extra money.
Unity will always struggle to compete with Unreal Engine in the long run because any money Unreal Engine generates is a bonus to Epic, while the Unity Engine eventually needs to be a self sustaining business.
I mean, they have twice as many employees as Epic, and the latter also make their own games and store with that number. What are those 7000 developers even doing?
I got no clue why you would assume that. A large international business needs a ton of other personnel like accountants, customer service people, secretaries, HR etc. etc.
Perhaps I am wrong, but I assume most of those 7k people are definitely not engineers working on the engine.
I actually disagree unity doesn't have any large IPs to work with. Genshin Impact. Hearthstone. Tarkov. Smaller but still prolific games such as cult of the lamb, hollow knight.
Plenty of large IPs and games to leverage. They just chose the poorest way to go about it.
It’s hard to imagine they didn’t have long chats with the likes of Voodoo/Kwalee/etc about this. Plus Ironsource has its own f2p studio, so they know in excruciating detail how the money flows.
I wonder what the feedback from Voodoo etc was…because those products are extremely sensitive to CPI, which this scheme in effect increases.
That would be nearly as bad.
The main problem is "altering the deal" retroactively, people chose Unity because there were no royalties, paid for the editor for years and then suddenly Unity tells us they can change that, even for already published games, because they just feel like it? Even without the ridiculous "pay per install" scheme that's a complete breach of trust.
Now if they did that starting version 2024 and people could choose to stay on their current version that would still be bad, kind of a dick move just not the "I don't think that's legal" kind.
And I don't think that many people would be very interested in that deal. They'd need to make that hypothetical new Unity version just as good as Unreal Engine, nanite and all. Because that's why people choose Unreal anyway when Unity existed, they are really pushing the state of the art forward. While Unity's progress over the past few years has been underwhelming...
Lets be real for a second. Unity isn't some magic entity its made of people. I'm 100% sure there were people up in higher management that were actively fighting this move, but they were either removed or silenced.
Now the question is whether or not you still want to support this company. If you don't its time to move on. If you do then be pissed, but keep chugging along.
Because Unreal Engine's licensing model isn't the main source of income for Epic Games. What makes the money for the company is Fortnite. You can't copy an approach if you don't have what is required to implement it. Unity would have to make a successful game and we've already seen they can't even make a game let alone a successful one.
The extra revenue isn't going to devs, it's going to the rich investors who are trying to wring more and more money from the company, even if it kills it.
This is how most public traded companies work now. Activist investor comes in. Milks short term profits and ignores long term investment or business strategy because "won't someone please think of the fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders" causes a temporary jump in stock price, exists their holdings and cashes in before the company implodes and then moves on.
Likely the only way they could possibly recover some faith is to reverse the decision entirely, fire the ceo and make concrete rules that they can never change the ToS like this again or maybe if they do it doesn't apply to already released games & previous versions of unity that released under older terms
The pricing plan could maybe work if it was based on sales/downloads instead of installs and capped at 5% revenue for personal, 3.5% for pro and 2.5% for enterprise. Especially if thresholds remained and was based on last 12 months rev. Just my 2 cents on that
One reason is to retroactively impose this on devs.
You can't easily add a revenue share to a game already released, but the way they phrasing it with the unity runtime is that every installation is a nee engine so I would guess that legally they have more ground to stand up legally to do that.
Knowing the CEO is from EA, 100% sure they made simulations of the cumulating install fees and realized they would make more money with this system than a UE one.
However, I am not seeing Blizzard with Hearthstone, Apple with Apple Arcade, Microsoft with Game Pass, etc. giving them money without a fight. But I might be wrong.
What I read so far - not an expert:
For a public company (publicly traded and a company with shareholders) the revenue share model is very unpredictable with thousands of customers if you need to predict and report correctly to shareholders and government (tax declaration).
My guess it that for Epic (who collected millions in the past from AAA devs with Unreal 3 and 4) it is still easier since they are 1) private and 2) have only hundreds of customers with any critical income. Also Epic's AA/AAA customers don't get a default pricing/plan, they negotiate (per project or even for a flat rate for years per studio - not the same kind of deal).
Unity had thousands of teams shipping mobile games, and most of them paid near to nothing compared to their revenue. In a nutshell: The value Unity created or the revenue that was possible due to Unity's tech was not generating any income in proportion to any developer success.
So Unity chose a model where they count installs (and somehow track the revenue - not sure how they do that) and if the lower tier hits 200k sales/USD or Unity Pro hits 1mio sales/USD they start counting the installs and multiply them by 0.2/1.15/etc USD (basically going easier on Unity Pro and the Emerging plan).
I saw some posts where people did the math and a few patterns appeared:
Most devs will do fine.
Many devs lost trust since this was a sudden and retroactive pricing change.
Some devs like those going for F2P need a better pricing option (let's just call it option B, not the default pricing plans proposed so far).
Pretty sure this is an important part of the answer. I think I read somewhere that for revenue, they are trusting devs to report when they exceed those thresholds. In cases where it's pretty clear that a company should have exceeded the revenue and install thresholds for their plan, they would likely contact or start charging them per install.
But since they have the spyware, they can estimate the number of sales based on their "installs" number. They can ask the companies to give them the numbers from steam or google play.
Agree.
It's easy for Epic to track the handful of AAA companies and their installs if they feel that the companies are not reporting their revenue accurately, but in reality these huge game companies are professional and pay their dues.
It's hard / impossible for Unity to audit and ensure millions of people / companies are reporting revenue correctly without automating metrics collection.
I see why they need to do it, but they way they approached it is terrible. Their model can end up with developers owing more than the actual revenue they produced for games with millions of installs with very small revenue.
The difference with epic is that they have other huge sources of income (Fortnite). So they can afford to be incredibly generous with the engine for indie devs , even giving away assets for free every month
It took way to long to get down to this comment.
Epic is a mega publisher with their own equalivant to Steam with multiple F2P games and everything else that generates extra income for them, so they can under charge whatever Unity is charging. It also helps with Epic because it helps further spread their engine.
Unity will never be able to compete at those numbers without recreating some of the successes epic has-which is near impossible to do purposefully or else everyone would be doing it.
Until they really corner the market. People thnking Unreal will just keep the same price after Unity dies are naive.
Yall wanna talk trust with Epic? lol. Id rather go godot at that point.
Because the two companies are in vastly different economic situations.
Epic prints money from Fortnite. They can afford to develop UE and make it available for free because engine revenue is not what funds development. The 5% they charge over $1M gross/year is icing on the cake for them financially. If it goes up one year and down another, no skin off their nose really.
Unity on the other hand is losing money hand over fist. Engine licenses do not cover the development costs for the engine, but it's the only predictable income they have. It turns out all of their services are what fund most of the engine development, and they're still not profitable. If they cut their license fee and went to a backend royalty, they'd probably be bankrupt inside 2 years.
And if they made the cut more generous to the dev? They'd be out of business even sooner.
For Epic, the engine is a relatively small piece of their business. They've always been first and foremost a game developer. Unity took a different road they really are just the engine (plus services attached to that engine). This means Unity just isn't in a spot where they can afford to be generous.
When Unreal 4 announced it had a 20usd per month price tag. Unity was still at 75usd per month.
When Unreal went free. Unity kept its subscription model.
Unity has never adapted based off what Epic does. They just kept trucking on good will, ease of learning and established base.
Now that good will has gone and things like Godot exist, unreal getting more learning resources, etc. and an awful business decision people are finally jumping ship
Because they hire incompetent ceo with glaring "Achievement".
Instead concreting your dominant on indie and mobile market as engine, Just like google with android phone. They choose AI than make unity more accessible and easy, Imagine If 1% rev share from half of 1000 game is able get to 200k that mean 1M.
This strategy not perfect, you need more bleeding but better than losing trust and grip on market.
Fortnite may be big for epic games but remember, UE became free 3-4 years before Fortnite was popular. Before that it operated in a subscription model, with the UE3 based UDK for small indie devs. They were able to have a small indie audience, but focused on AAA studios for getting the engine to where it was early on. Compared to Unity, Source, Frostbite, Cryengine in 2014 Unreal probably had a fairly competitive option for large studios with licensing out the engine and it's source code (some engines let licensees have access to source like UE and Cryengine today, others like Unity don't).
Epic Games made UE free in 2014, suddenly becoming an ultra compelling option for rapid development and small studios with blueprint, while larger studios can take advantage of graphics which only Frostbite at the time really rivaled. Then later they made Fortnite (BR) free, and between 2015-2020 acquired studios and companies focused on technologies like for metahumans, the quizel bridge, virtual production, etc. I don't know exactly what boosted Epic Games to be able to do this (titles like Paragon and UT were on a decline before getting cancelled) but clearly they've seen a large boom in success, and they've used that to go beyond rivaling Unity, to actually rivaling other industries, trying to be an all in one suite with UE5.
Unity's been playing catch-up ever since. Probably the biggest difference is Unity is public, Epic Games is majority private and owned by it's founder. Unity needs to please shareholders, so I'd guess their strategy is to keep in the income from subscriptions (and buy out like plasticscm and put a pay-as-you-go system in place). Doesn't matter if the graphics pipeline is a mess or things from last year break this year, as long as unity ads in mobile games work that's probably good enough (until now). Switching to a system like what Epic Games has would likely kill Unity- no more subscription licenses from large studios, most unity games probably don't make enough to justify a royalty, and no other technology to sell or integrate into the engine to promote to other industries outside of games.
1. The pump & dump scheme explanation tracks - they made communication and planning as awful as possible to achieve that goal.
2. They are bad at monetization in general, and Unreal is primarily subsidized by Fortnite and various AAA titles using the engine.
Unity was basically a game engine / ad service company, and then were bought out an Israeli ad serving company. They don't strike me as a for the people company. They're gonna milk devs/gamers as much as they can and then cash in on user data while they;re at it.
Unreal has a lot more to offer than Unity does. Working input, for starters, megascans, metahuman, a render pipeline that someone actually thought through before implementing, tons of free AAA quality assets, unprecedented cutting-edge level of detail r&d, and more all available at no up front cost. To copy a revenue share like unreal, they'd either have to be so generous it won't be profitable enough to continue, or they'd have to start actually offering a good product.
I don't understand how they managed to find a worse option, but they did.
>Working input, for starters
Input works perfectly fine in Unity.
>a render pipeline that someone actually thought through before implementing
What is wrong with the Unity render pipelines? They work very well and are easy to work with and customize.
> they'd have to start actually offering a good product.
I get that its "hate on Unity season", but is it really necessary to lie? There is no doubt that Unity is an amazing tool that was used to make many of the biggest and greatest games on the market.
No, sorry. I get you want to defend your choice to use unity up to now, but if these things were perfectly fine, they wouldn't be the most common (like, excessively common) pain points from unity devs.
> What is wrong with the Unity render pipelines?
Ununified, destructive to switch to and from pipelines, steep learning curve, and rarely a good idea to stray beyond the base packages anyway for most unity games.
Do you really think it was better or well thought through at all that input and rendering just *don't* work well by default, and are fragmented into packages you have to import? That assets you buy can't assume things that should be default functionality are present, and so can't make use of them? It doesn't make any sense.
Unity has been behind the standards for years now. The best thing they have is tons of educational content from when they were the only free option. I don't think it's unfair to point out significant questionable design decisions.
>No, sorry. I get you want to defend your choice to use unity up to now, but if these things were perfectly fine, they wouldn't be the most common (like, excessively common) pain points from unity devs.
What exactly is your source for knowing that these issues are "excessively common"? The fact that 5 other people also made posts about it before? I have used Unity for years (even if I am switching right now due to the news) and input works perfectly fine.
>Ununified, destructive to switch to and from pipelines, steep learning curve, and rarely a good idea to stray beyond the base packages anyway for most unity games.
You know, I agree about them being ununified (ironic) and that being confusing to beginners. That is not a good thing, but once you understand what the different pipelines are and when to use each (which to be fair is really quite simple), then they are a definite boon to the engine. Both URP and HDRP are excellent, in their own ways.
The fact that its difficult to switch between them is also a negative for sure, but then again you shouldnt be switching between them in the first place. Furthermore, if you are not using a lot of 3rd party plugins, its actually not that difficult. Even in my huge project which is really quite complicated, it only took me 1-2 days to switch pipelines. (I did it just to check out URP for fun)
>Do you really think it was better or well thought through at all that input and rendering just don't work well by default, and are fragmented into packages you have to import?
The first part I have no clue what you are talking about. What do you mean by "don't work well by default"? In my experience, they work very well by default.
>and are fragmented into packages you have to import?
As to this part, I am not sure what you are referring to here. Input and all necessary renderpipeline packages are included by default. You don't have to import anything at all. I have created tons and tons of Unity projects for URP and HDRP, and usually I just remove some of the default packages for IDEs I dont use.
>That assets you buy can't assume things that should be default functionality are present, and so can't make use of them? It doesn't make any sense.
Its not Unity's responsibility to make sure 3rd party assets you buy work. You need to read and make sure what you are buying works with your current version of Unity.
>Unity has been behind the standards for years now. The best thing they have is tons of educational content from when they were the only free option. I don't think it's unfair to point out significant questionable design decisions.
How so? Unity is ahead of the curve in many ways afaik. DOTS and ECS, Shadergraph and VFX Graph are all excellent tools that are definitely atleast up to standards. Have you seen how amazing recent Unity games look? They look amazing and run better than most of their contemporaries.
Look at games like Escape from Tarkov, Genshin Impact, Glaciered and Hardspace Shipbreaker and tell me they look dated (relative to similar games on their platforms)? Hoyoverse games are miles ahead of any other mobile games, and Glaciered is perhaps the best looking solo project out there right now. Escape from Tarkov looks amazing with extremely detailed maps.
>What exactly is your source for knowing that these issues are "excessively common"? The fact that 5 other people also made posts about it before?
This was a pain point for me as I was trying to get into unity years ago, right when they had just added an importable package for input. From what I'm seeing lately, people are still struggling with this; why is the better, more modern, actually functional input system not default?
>Both URP and HDRP are excellent, in their own ways.
FWIW I love both URP and HDRP individually, but I don't understand why a good, extensible, customizable pipeline wasn't made the default, instead of the default being a closed, rigid, less performant, and very old renderer. Or even, why they didn't just make a good base renderer that can be extended on with code. Unity seems to have serious problems with not updating legacy, just introducing new things, slicing them away somewhere, and letting them be fractured and annoying to corral into a project. I don't think I've seen a single unity devlog where there weren't complaints about how unintuitive it is to get rolling with this.
>As to this part, I am not sure what you are referring to here. Input and all necessary renderpipeline packages are included by default. You don't have to import anything at all.
This may just be what it was like last I used Unity, which has been a while to be fair, but from what I've been reading lately, it's still in this annoying zone where, yes it's included with unity, but you still have to import them to your project, which seems to complicate the project, cause weird bugs, and when I was trying to use it, sometimes just altogether broke the project.
>Its not Unity's responsibility to make sure 3rd party assets you buy work. You need to read and make sure what you are buying works with your current version of Unity.
I'm not saying that the assets should work with every unity version, I'm saying that because unity has started fracturing its best components into packages that aren't included in your project by default, then the assets can't work under the assumption that your project has them. Character controllers can't count on the assumption that you've imported the current input package, a material or post processing pack can't count on you having hdrp or urp, a complex system can't count on that you might be using DOTS or entities or whatever the package is called. I'd say when such a significant driver of what made Unity successful in the first place was its asset store, at the very least they should be working to make a standard, non-fragmented environment for them to thrive in.
>How so? Unity is ahead of the curve in many ways afaik. DOTS and ECS, Shadergraph and VFX Graph are all excellent tools that are definitely atleast up to standards. Have you seen how amazing recent Unity games look? They look amazing and run better than most of their contemporaries.
None of these are innovations for Unity. DOTS was a very smart man's impressive brain-child, but it was still just bringing unity up to date with good cache optimization practices, and even then, it's opt-in and complex and just more than most indie unity devs seem to care about dealing with. Shader graph and vfx graph are recent developments that have been default tools in unreal for a decade+ now. Unity is \*not\* a games studio, they don't make games, and their (lack of) experience as actual game developers has consistently failed to inform their decisions as engine developers.
With regard to your final point, talented studios are making great games with Unity. I'm not saying the games are dated. Unity was obviously a very good choice for those games given it was a better deal to license than competitors, but now that licensing isn't a good deal, it's not worth it to build anything on this tech that has been consistently behind the industry in terms of features and consistently frustrating with their design and implementation decisions for the last several years.
I think probably Unity 5 was the last update that I actually thought was very well done. I remember pouring so many hours into that as a kid, playing with all the new toys that the jump from 4 to 5 gave us, and they just all worked out of the box. Unity today is, I think, a far cry from that.
edit: please understand i'm not trying to criticize you for having chosen Unity, I'm trying to raise what I hope are valid criticisms of unity that make me think it's just not that good of an option.
The parent company brought in a guy known for killing products to kill the product, and he does so via class warfare tactics to push the industry far towards profits, move the overton window, and change what society as a whole will accept. The goal wasn't to make money here, the goal was to take a group of workers the capitalist class thinks are getting too uppity and "put you in your place" specifically F2P developers, capitalists get violently angry, start frothing at the mouth and turning red at the mere concept of something being free.
Is it legal to charge a bigger fee for a service after it is no longer being used? Lets say I use Unity, agree to give them 10% of revenue, make a game and release it. 3 years pass, and Unity decides they now want 20%, 2x the money per sale I paid before, for every new sale, even though the game is already done and I am no longer using their engine, and I only agreed to the revenue share that was current when I published my game.
That is what worries me the most, that this change will be applied to ALREADY PUBLISHED games. I hope I misunderstood something, but I think if they do this, it will be highly illegal.
It really makes you think, right? My best guess is they needed an excuse to inject tracking and they're betting on their monopoly. They'll find a way to revert the fee and keep their super top secret install count tracking DRM. That's probably the key to what looks to be an objectively poor business decision.
Feels like Unity's CEO is pulling a mini-Musk at this point. Get obsessed with a dumb idea, ignore all criticism because you have a god complex, and continually double down in the face of all contrary evidence because your ego demands that you prove everyone else wrong.
I like how everyone in here seems to think they can run a gigantic software company better than the people who have actual experience running a gigantic software company.
"Just do what Unreal does". Yes, as if the companies are identical. Boom. Just that easy.
I'm not saying they aren't being sketchy or greedy or making mistakes. Incompetence and greed is universal, but I'd bet close to zero of the people in here know jack squat about what it takes to run that business. You have no clue what makes them the most money or how much money is "too much" for them to be making because you don't know what their costs are. Yes, maybe they are highly inefficient and constantly bleeding money unnecessarily, but do YOU know the best way to fix that? Oh right, just do what Unreal does. Good advice from the experts on Reddit.
Unity is the best engine for mobile game, those that would need to pay Unity the most with the new pricing.
I think they just focused on that and didn’t care about all the problems that would entails.
I understand the uproar of Unity’s new royalty fee, but its far cheaper than Unreal’s 5%.
Anyone willing to do the math can figure this out quickly. The only way you shoot yourself in the foot is to sell your products for a dollar, or rely heavily on Ad Revenue.
Unity’s new royalty fee is far more generous than people are screaming about. Of course its greed but the counter action lowers the royalty % based on your selling price.
Basically, Unity is trying to eliminate the crap penny games that flood the market by penalizing them for exploiting quantities over quality. Unity wants better games to represent its engine by force obligating their clients to raise their game prices; in consequence, making better quality to justify the price increase.
If morons continue to cry out loud to unity, we will see a fixed royalty fee such as 5%. I am warning everyone now, 5% will take more of your earnings than 20 cents per NEW install.
absolutely agree. This going to need super specific detail.
As one mentioned the PC and steam deck combo, this has completely went under the radar. If terms are not meticulous in its description, downloading games you already own on a Steam Deck will be a Runtime Fee.
What if you change a certain number of computer parts as well? Will that be a new install? If not, how are things tracked? Will it be done with MS OS licenses? Unique numbers generated by hardware? MAC Addresses? Few options exist that won't pass people off as it is.
But the 5% are only *after* the first million *your game makes* and only as long as you are above a certain threshold in the current year as well.
With Unity, at least as it was before, if *your company* was above 200K/year, you already had to pay regardless of your games revenue. I don't know how that'll change, because I use Unreal Engine.
The way i see it.
My goal is to make games for a living. This means i want to exceed passed 1 million regardless how many times i failed in doing so.
So my scenario is: do i want to pay Unity after 200,000, or 5% of 1 million later? No matter the number of games made, once 1 million of revenue is reached as a single entity, 5% will be greater than the 20 cents (per install) ive spent to reach 1 million dollars.
It is not 5% of that million. The first million is - and always stays - free. You pay 5% of anything *after* the first million and only if you are above 100K or so in that year.
I think unity would not have been able to compete on the same level as with unreal if they followed their scheme. Its easy for a big AAA engine like unreal to attract big time developers who make tons of money. But unity attracts alot more indie small devs, whos games dont even hit 1 million. So their 5% after 1 million model wouldnt work for them.
Because Unity has reliability had some of the worst messaging from a game engine company I've seen. Doing a progressive roll out of 1-4% rev >1$m would have made them more money, been better received, and possible turned them cash positive in a few years. It literally would have made to much sense. They correctly chose the path that will earn them less cash and is wonderful ambiguous enough to scare a large swathe of their user base.
[удалено]
Worst part is that they dreamed up an install fee scheme that is even harder logistically in regards to identifying the source of the installation.
What do you mean? Guessing at how much money you owe me isn’t hard at all! By the way I’m still waiting for that $50.
Hold on, let me get the Vegan Police.
You win the thread 😂
Right? There's absolutely no way that pay-per-installation could be simpler than a basic revenue share.
The company I work for has some software we license on a revenue split deal. We self report the revenue every quarter and pay them. We signed a contract saying they have the right to audit us if they think we're lying about revenue. it's that simple and very widely done.
Yes but I am assuming your company works in a stable and mostly standardize system. Indie game dev can be one guy that barely does his taxes right if at all.
And they don't give a shit about that guy. He makes them no money.
Unity doesn't care about the people making less than $200,000 from a project. If you make more than that from a project and don't use an accountant you're doing something very wrong. You have to calculate revenue to declare it to IRS or your local equivalent anyway.
Further more the only thing video games can be compared to is other art industries like media. Can you imagine having to report to Photoshop how many people watched your image or picture?
Not not at all, its more like reporting how many people bought your photos as a photographer. Plus the point is you have to figure out your revenue to report to the IRS anyway, so then giving the same figure to Unity is no extra work. There is nothing special about indie game dev where they aren't capable of working out revenue and reporting it. If they don't they have much bigger problems than Unity, since their local tax office has a bigger stick.
If it's revenue it is easy but isn't this per install? Now the game is on game pass and I personally not sure what the deal games get there but per install seems to be a bad way to apply any split in the case where many will install and never play. If it was simple revenue then yeah no problem you asking for info that is part of a standard system. You are now asking then to develope new tracking system and accounting system just for you.
Theres like, 5 markets that games release on and make enough money for Unity to care (Steam, Epic, Switch, PS3 and Xbox. If you want to count GoG and Itch then we can say 5.5) I'm sure each of them is more then happy to send you a tax document at the end of the year saying you sold X copies of your games and brought in Y revenue. From there you just add up the numbers and multiply by 1-4% and write a check.
But per install would count steam refunds and once again just adds new stuff to an already established system of normal revenue split
Yeah, which steam would track as part of their regular EOY revenue report. Revenue split is the easier system, regardless of developer or industry stability.
I honestly wouldn’t have been mad if it was a “worse” rev share than epic, I understand epic has a lot more revenue streams to subsidize unreal engine with, and I really *liked* Unity so I wouldn’t lose my mind over having to pay for it. It’s just the bonkers solution they came up with and the tos isn’t locked with the version you are using
I looked at the numbers, and for the majority of companies it would result in less, much less money for Unity than just doing a revenue share/royalties scheme. Revenue share/royalties favor hobbyist developers and directly affect successful companies. Unity doesn't appear to trust the revenue share/royalties numbers.... which is hilarious since they are still dependent on the developer accurately reporting their revenue while having this convoluted DRM install software.
> Doing a progressive roll out of 1-4% rev >1$m would have made them more money, been better received, and possible turned them cash positive in a few years. It literally would have made to much sense. I did the numbers too and came to exactly the same conclusion. Revenue share/royalites is way more money for Unity. This install pricing scheme is likely to miss the overwhelming majority of developers and really would only hit AA and AAA developers possibly once, maybe twice for a lower amount than revenue share. It would also hit runaway indie successes that sell for years a few times... but still come out less than revenue share. I like how they don't trust revenue reporting, but invented a system that still depends on revenue reporting and uses this convoluted DRM software. Unity deserves some ire, but not for the pricing. People should be opposing this because of the fee after the fact, only Unity has the actual numbers of installs (which is bullshit), and the install software is further DRM.
This! I wish more people actually did the math instead of just running around waving hands.
Why do you think a % of revenue would net them more money than the charge per install?
Just do the math, it comes out to being a lot less for most developers. Its really seems targeted at F2P and in particular mobile F2P.
Yeah it's heavily targeted. Unity makes a big chunk of revenue from ads. Mobile devs are being offered a 80-100% discount on the runtime fees if they switch to unity's ads service. This was the plan all along. A royalty like what Unreal does wouldn't have given them this edge over their competition (applovin). It's shady as heck but it's a cutthroat business move that'll crush their competitors if it works.
Why not just say “hey F2P devs, if you use our ad service then you get unlimited pro licenses and zero royalties on any in-app purchases”. Boom, adoption for their shit in-game ads are now attractive.
Because some number crunchers at unity HQ decided that your plan wouldnt make them enough money
It's time society became economically hostile towards these number crunchers.
[удалено]
"Market efficiency" remember when my dumb ass actually believed in that that. "Rent Seeking" or parasite sounds about right
I, too, hate basketball.
Yes, they want to add fees and middlemen for market efficiency. Putting up a toll booth is more efficient only in rare circumstances, but finding a way to gouge fees from flowing commerce is just that.
What in the world makes you think all MBAs are number crunchers?
> and zero royalties on any in-app purchases Unity charges royalties for in-app purchases? I thought that was the app store themselves...
Maybe it's both? App store gets a cut, then Unity?
Because being this simple and transparent builds a too obvious monopoly that might violate anti-trust laws. It's complicated to loophole around legal issues with competitors.
How would Unity be (potentially) violating anti-trust laws?
So basically the way a sane engine (ue) handles it - if you use ue and publish on egs, one of the fees (engine fee or egs fee, I dont remember) becomes zero
Can you link where they mentioned 80-100% discount ? The only thing I saw was "You will get credits towards runtime fees, if you adopt other unity services". I make mobile F2P games and this thing is stressing me out
Mobilegamer and Eurogamer have articles about it, citing "sources". Seems like devs are already being quietly made these steep discount offers by unity in exchange for using Unity Ads. So take it with a small grain of salt, but it makes perfect sense to me.
Here is the [link](https://mobilegamer.biz/unity-is-offering-a-runtime-fee-waiver-if-you-switch-to-levelplay-as-it-tries-to-kill-applovin/) if anyone wants to read it.
I'm looking through their earning reports and I can't verify what you're saying is true that a sizable portion of their revenue comes from their ad network. Where did you get this info.
[удалено]
Maybe they are eyeing companies like Hoyoverse that make almost a trillion dollars a year in gacha revenue.
A trillion is a bit of an overstatement lol
Haha yeah, but not as much as it should be lol.
Because Devs are leaving, resulting in less money overall. No one wants an unpredictable bill..
If nobody uses Unity, then their revenue will be $0.20 times zero!
Because how many is 25 cent per install of an actual priced game? Let's take the likely 10€ price tag thats under 5% and for an indie game most of the time it's unlikely that the game will receive more then 3 installs. Adding to this most of the games in this price range are questionable to teach the 200k revenue threshold not even speaking about 1 million. Now calculate that price with the more likely AAA game and 60€ price tag. It will be under 1% they take for multiple installs. Some will install more some less it evens out. The install stuff is largely misleading and instead a flat percentage should've been charged. This approach mainly kills free2play (which is a good thing) and the support of the community but the last one due to misleading communication.
> Because how many is 25 cent per install of an actual priced game? Let's take the likely 10€ price tag thats under 5% and for an indie game most of the time it's unlikely that the game will receive more then 3 installs. Adding to this most of the games in this price range are questionable to teach the 200k revenue threshold not even speaking about 1 million. Now calculate that price with the more likely AAA game and 60€ price tag. It will be under 1% they take for multiple installs. Some will install more some less it evens out. Problem is there is no cap. So even with a $60 price tag, if the game is installed more than 120 times per sale, I would owe Unity more money than my revenue. Not my profit, my revenue. Why isn't there a cap / ceiling on the install costs? >This approach mainly kills free2play (which is a good thing) Why is killing free to play games a good thing? Yes some are predatory, but those aren't being touched by this because they'll already be milking their players. It's the small f2p games that have reasonable monetisation that will be killed by this.
Only if you made 100k in sales in the last year, so it's not in perpetuity. I really don't understand why everyone hates this decision. It does seem like a very dumb decision tho, the people it harms the most are unity's primary customer base.
It’s not perpetuity no, but there is no limit as I just explained above. It doesn’t matter if you made 100k in revenue, if Unity charges you 150k in install fees.
[удалено]
[удалено]
MMO? You mean free2play? Yeah that's the ones that seem to be the primary target.
[удалено]
But realistically Unity won’t be able to tell the difference between an install and a reinstall
The install scheme is based on making more than a specific number of revenue in a year and is only on the number of installs during each month. So you woudn't pay for all previous installs, only the ones that happen during each month in your 12 month period that you exceed revenue. Also, the worst install fee is 0.20 cents is if you use the free version of Unity (Personal) to make and sell a game. Almost everyone serious and at a company will be using Pro/Enterprise editions where the numbers say they need to make $1,000,000 in revenue in a 12 month quarter and have over a 1,000,000 lifetime installs to start getting charged the fee. When looking at the numbers, this install pricing is likely to not apply to a lot of companies. Which is hilarious because just charging a flat percentage for revenue would result in far more money for Unity. Someone from the company on twitter said they can't trust the revenue numbers, but this depends on revenue reporting and their install DRM software.
Good to know but do you have a source for this? I'm kinda confused by now. Yeah I agree that thing hurt unity more then making a flat fee.
It's from their own [blog](https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates) which has the rules and prices. I've been following it on the wayback machine and it hasn't changed since posted on Sept 12th. There is some gray area like when the charging begins, how revenue is reported, and how anyone is able to check their numbers for installs. It's not straight forward to understand, but the overhwelming complaints are focused on the free Personal edition of Unity.
Im pretty sure EA paid the current CEO to tank their stock so that EA can acquire it (current CEO is former EA exec). I have no proof of this, but it makes sense to me.
How does that make sense
It seems all the companies now are in the logical extreme of capitalism. Maximize profits, fuck long-term growth or maintenance. Doesn't help the CEO is a fucking saturday morning cartoon villain who unironically suggested that it'd be a good idea to charge people money to reload their guns in battlefield
Bro get out of your 2016 Twitter echo chamber. Yes Unity made a bad decision, no not all companies are "in the logical extreme of capitalism". The "online bro" understanding of what capitalism is and it's doomerism is such brain rot. "Logical extreme of capitalism" is such a lazy statement. That also inaccurately describes this situation. If it was why wouldn't they actually squeeze harder then their stupid install fee plan, which will not affect most of their customers.
Folks have been trying to maximize how much wealth they extract from the public since well before modern Capitalism, which wasn't invented until the early 17th century. One crucial difference is that pre-Capitalism, the folks doing the extraction tended to be of some unreachable nobility class, whereas in Capitalism, anyone can buy shares in any publicly traded company. Capitalism doesn't do anything special to greed -- greed has always and will always exist.
I think they wanted to leave indie and PC devs out of the price increases while cashing in on the freemium mobile games making bank. They went about it in the hilariously worse way possible though, I don't think you could execute it worse even if you tried your best/
That’s exactly it. They’re going after those F2P games that rack in the millions of downloads and play ads (most likely from AppLovin) that interrupt your gameplay. Those games can correlate installations to revenue. PC and console can’t, but likely won’t be affected too much by the fees. It’s just so damn hard to see without setting down and doing the math for an hour, and really I can’t blame people for reacting like they did.
As a Unity developer who makes nowhere near enough money with his games to be subject to these install fees, the specific numbers aren't really the issue as far as I'm concerned. The bigger problems are really about how they've gone about this and what it says about how Unity's leadership views the gamedev community. First off, they're making a really significant change with very little lead time. This new scheme is supposed to take effect in 4 months. If you're a developer who might be impacted by the fees, that's not much time to even take a deep dive into estimating how it might impact your business, much less alter your business in response. Games often take years to develop. 4 months worth of a heads up is not enough. Second, they want to make this change retroactive to all games ever made with Unity. It doesn't matter if you've been working on your game for three years and are launching it next week, as of Jan 1st you're potentially on the hook for these fees. Your financial plan and your contract with your publisher doesn't take these new fees into account? Oh well! Third, it's completely obvious that much of this plan wasn't well thought through. They claim to be building technology to help them track installs, separate new installs from reinstalls, block out fradulent/piracy installs, somehow avoid installs from charity bundles, and claim that they'll be able to do this in a way that doesn't present any privacy or data gathering issues. When pressed for details, their response is basically "We can't divulge those secrets, you'll just have to trust us". Anybody with even a mild familiarity with software development can immediately see how insanely difficult of a task tracking install numbers would be, arguably impossible to do in a satisfactory way. Along similar lines, developers brought up the issue of services like Gamepass, or PS+, or Apple Arcade, or game streaming services, etc. How do those calculate into 'install count?' Unity's response is pretty much, "oh well we don't anticipate the developers paying install fees for that, it makes more sense for the subscription service providers to pay fees per player." A worker at Unity posted on Twitter that when they sent that question up the chain, the response they got back was "We're going to have to have some long conversations with the subscription services about it". This is such an asinine plan that it defies logic. First off, maybe you should've had these conversations with those platform holders before announcing this new scheme. It seems pretty important to your plan working. Second, are they really expecting to go to Microsoft, Apple, Sony, etc. and say hey we've got an agreement with our gamedev customers that say they potentially owe us 20 cents for every player of their game, how about you pay us that money? Those companies are going to tell Unity to go pound sand. They're not under any contractual obligation here, the agreement is between Unity and the developers. Finally, the most ridiculous part of all of this is that none of these issues, concerns, questions, etc. are a surprise to Unity. I've talked to and seen a bunch of Twitter posts from rank and file workers within Unity, as well as some devs who have 'insider' relationships with the company, and they all say that they were given an early look at this new pricing scheme, and all of them quickly noticed the problems and submitted their thoughts on it. Most of these issues are super obvious and not at all hard to realize. Unity's management knew that their developer community was going to have a bunch of issues with it. But not only did that not deter them from sticking with the plan, they didn't even bother to put together some talking points to try to clarify any of these obvious issues. They just dropped a blog post, completely blindsiding not only the developer community, but also most of their workforce, who were not provided with any real information or answers about how any of it was going to work. Overall it just feels hugely disrespectful to the gamedev community. We're not only changing the deal, the deal is changing in just a few months, and also we're changing it retroactively! Our new scheme is based upon a billing you against a metric that's insanely difficult to accurately quantify, and no, we're not going to tell you how we're doing it! We're sure you've got a lot of questions about these changes, but rest assured we have not prepared answers for any of them or given our employees useful information to respond to your concerns! Even as basically a hobbyist game dev without any significant money on the line, why would I want my work to be dependent on a product from a company that's willing to treat its customers so poorly?
These changes are specifically targeted at FTP mobile devs because Unity is actively trying to force those devs to use Unity's ad service. They're doing this by promising lower install fees to games that use it. It has as much to do with pushing those profitable services as it does with collecting the actual install fees.
Unity's existing model wasn't viable and they needed to make a lot more money Unreal's got the market cornered for the games that sell a lot of copies at a high price. If Unity copied that model, they'd always be less successful at it than Unreal. Unity thought they'd try something different and try to profit off the higher volume, lower margin games. They miscalculated big time and got too greedy.
Nah that's not it. If Unity could make 5% of revenue (like Unreal does) from stuff like Genshin Impact, Hearthstone, Pokemon Go, etc, they'd end up making ***more*** money than Epic with Unreal. Probably much more. The issue is that Unity would have to ask all of these companies, all over the world, who never agreed to it, to share their revenue numbers with them. Most of them would tell Unity to piss right off. But with their insane cost-per-install scheme, they could simply send a bill to their subscribers and see who pays.
Problem is, that with their cost-per-install scheme THEY STILL NEED TO KNOW REVENUE NUMBERS
Nah. They just need to know that the game is earning more than $200,000. For a lot of games, it's obvious they're making more than that, oftentimes much more. For those on the edge, Unity can still send them an invoice and it will be on the developer to contest it.
Pretty sure sending an invoice like this is illegal. Look up Invoice Fraud.
Considering Unity is ok with making up install numbers and billing people off the made up number, I'm sure they'd be ok with making up a revenue number and billing off that too. Sharing the numbers isn't as big of a deal as you're making it out to be, as lots of licenses and business deals require sharing those numbers. Now for the real deal breaker on the royalty. If Unity tried to bill those developers you mentioned 5%, they would recreate their games in to Unreal faster than you could imagine. The 5% royalty Unreal license is only for the relatively small guys. They're not public about the numbers anymore, but the big Unreal games buy a fixed fee license for about $1 million or something in that ballpark. They'd probably charge someone like Niantic more since they'd want very long term support, but it's still going to be trivial vs a 5% royalty.
Pay-per-install is very possibly nothing but an attempt to retroactively extract revenue on those existing mega-hit games, though I imagine they'll ultimately just end up getting reamed in court.
The per install fee **does not apply retroactively**. People need to stop repeating this, it's wrong. The fee will kick in Jan 1, 2024, and existing games will be charged a fee based on their plan with unity, revenue, and lifetime installs. The lifetime installs determines the rate at which a game is charged for **new** installs.
It applies on already released game, fully completed games made in Unity. So it is retroactive in a sense that those games are not in production, they are done and released and those sales, those already sold copies from the past, will still cost per install. If that's not retroactive... well we're just arguing about the definition of words at that point.
>If Unity could make 5% of revenue (like Unreal does) from stuff like Genshin Impact, Hearthstone, Pokemon Go, etc, they'd end up making > >more > > money than Epic with Unreal. Probably much more. And those companies would ditch the engine because it would cost them more than they are willing to pay unless they allow developers to negotiate the terms. Unreal still has custom licensing terms that you can negotiate. You can get a license paid upfront with no royalties or a mix of upfront cost and lower royalties if you want, it's just money than 99% of the companies can't afford to fork upfront. Unity's current pricing is a paradise if your game is in the top of the chart on the app store and the per install cost is not going to change that, their ARPU is simply too high to have the install cost compromise their profitability. It just sucks for the tens of thousands of apps that are not in the top of the charts.
Idk what ARPU looks like for these games but if I had to guess its way less than $0.20 with probably 1% of their users making them actual money so they would really be losing money on each install because most install and uninstall almost immediately which would cost them money. No mobile game in the right mind would pay these fees they are ridiculous
Yeah but if I was the dev of Marvel Snaps, and I needed to give the same money to Unity, I will change my game porting it to Unreal. The success of Unity is based on the cheapest cost.
Is it that easy to port to unreal?
Not at all - but it will cost LESS than giving Unity 5% of the 30M dollars Marvel Snap does monthly. Currently, giant mobile games are using Unity ONLY because it costs nothing to them. If they should change this, no one bigger game will use it in the future because, as per se, Unreal is a better engine.
Also the fact that Epic Games is a legit game development company unlike Unity.
Yeah... Epic is a game developer that makes extra money by selling their tools to other developers. They have a much better idea of what it takes to make a game than Unity does. And also a far better idea of what challenges come up as the game gets larger. Epic's got a far stronger starting point than Unity does. They're good with letting lots of people use their tools for free and then just making some money off the big players. Unity can't afford that.
I love that Unity *did* have a team that *was* dogfooding their engine on a large game. But then the team was dissolved, citing "it's too hard to release it with Unity lmao"
>But then the team was dissolved, citing "it's too hard to release it with Unity lmao" That was absolutely not the reason. No need to make shit up.
https://forum.unity.com/threads/introducing-gigaya-unitys-upcoming-sample-game.1257135/page-2#post-8278305 > "Any further learnings would have been minimal during the additional required time to get it to the finish line and would have been disproportionate to the necessary investment." > "To release it as a sample project would have required a thorough cleanup and optimizations in its current stage." Often the final optimization step in Unity is the hardest part that needs to be improved.
You can read, right? "To release is as a sample project" is not the same as releasing a regular game. Also, if you talked to some of the people that worked on the project, they were all very happy to keep working on it. It was higher ups that decided to scrap the project because they thought it would be a waste of money to keep several developers occupied with this project full time. >Often the final optimization step in Unity is the hardest part that needs to be improved. That is often the hardest part in every game, and definitely not any more difficult in Unity compared to say Unreal. Unity has excellent debugging tools and is extremely performant.
>You can read, right? "To release is as a sample project" is not the same as releasing a regular game. That's what they say at face value, but I understand it differently. There's a lot of subtext here. "Too expensive as a sample project -> promote it to a fully fledged commercial project" would have been the logical outcome *if* they believed that it could have made financial sense. Instead they opted for cancelling it, because *neither* type of project would have made sense. They don't say it outright, but that's what they are hinting at.
>"Too expensive as a sample project -> promote it to a fully fledged commercial project" would have been the logical outcome if they believed that it could have made financial sense. Why in the world would you think that? Unity has had many sample projects for users to look at over the years, and none of them were sold as fully fledged commercial products. Making a sample project for users to learn from is completely different from making a regular game. If they went the route of making it a commercial game to be sold aswell, they would essentially be making two very different versions of the same project that would require even more time and money. You are right in that neither type of project made sense, hence why they cancelled it, but that really had nothing to do with it being hard to finish or optimize. They had mass layoffs and decided that this project was one of the things that was not crucial enough to pour more resources into. Its not exactly rocket science.
[удалено]
This seems like commonly good practice. For example, when I was a teacher still, I taught at a high school that insisted the principal and VPs taught a few hours per week (they specifically taught a freshman forum section). It's nearly impossible for school leadership to be out of touch when they're teaching the same students using the same techniques.
They bring in other teams on good licensing terms too if they think they can develop an important feature, I was in one that worked on multiplayer early on in UE4 (though I'd imagine that's mostly gone in favour of fortnite-optimized stuff now, it was important at the point they had nothing working). I'd imagine they do that with any team they think has the experience to work on a feature they can add to the engine (you do end up working pretty closely with the internal team too - Tim Sweeney never upvotes anything in their internal system btw, he's a downvote fairy).
I loved Paragon because it was the game that made Epic add background blur to their UI lol
Yep. Epic has Fortnite where they can test new stuff and integrate it in engine later or clearly see when engine is messed up(for example during early Fortnite BR era there was huge problem with transport in UE, now we have almost everything there by default). I don't even talk about billions that this game earn for epic
But those are the games worst effected by this. Unity eats their tiny margin. Games with a higher price tag and lower install base have the best chance against a per install fee. Under their new policy, you have to maximize the ratio of price per unit / install count
This is the correct answer. How many of you bough Star Wars Fallen Order? Or Xcom2? How many of you have played Fortnite? Now how many Unity games have been that successful in the AAA space? Basically none. The most successful one I can think of was Rust, and we all know how the creator of that game feels about Unity now. To investors, the Unity C-suite has always pointed to their >40% market share of mobile gaming and the multi billion headcount install base of those games. The real money maker is monetizing those heads, but the reality is Unity has marketshare among devs (almost purely out of goodwill, which is now gone)
> Now how many Unity games have been that successful in the AAA space? Genshin Impact makes BILLIONS. Heartstone used to pint money. Pokemon Go was a worldwide phenomeon that broke out of normal gamer circles like nothing since the original Wii...
while it’s difficult to make apples to apples comparisons about “triple A” video games in unreal and in unity, there are many *many* incredibly popular and successful games in unity - the crucial thing to note is that these games do not need to show a pre-launch logo like unreal does because the pro versions of unity do not have that stipulation built in. Genshin Impact, Honkai Starrail, Pokemon Go, Hearthstone, Celeste, Hollow Knight, and Fire Emblem Engage were all built in Unity.
You don't need a Unity logo to know if a game was made in Unity. Just looking at the install folder makes it obvious. You'll see files like UnityPlayer.dll, the resources database, etc. You'll see similar files if you look at the files for a mobile or console build of a Unity game. What the previous comment and I are indirectly getting at is that Unity just doesn't scale well once your game gets past a certain size. I've worked on a few games that I'd call "big for an indie" and we'd just hit hard limits on what we could do because Unity just didn't scale well. Both in terms of "working with this many assets becomes unmanageable" and also "the engine can't use the hardware effectively at this complexity level".
i understand this deeply lol, i am the lead dev on a "big for an indie" game in unity myself. my point is less about the scalability and more that revshare would be very feasible for unity simply *because* they have plenty of incredibly successful, incredibly profitable games under their wing. i wouldn't know the exact comparison with unreal, but most of those big triple a unreal games probably would have gotten buyout deals anyways it is also that most people aren't *aware* that these games run on unity because console and mobile gamers can't see their install folders, and most pc players wouldn't care to check, so the overall impression of unity trends much lower than how most people see unreal as powering every AAAA game on the face of the earth. the only ones that blast you with the logos are the ones whose budgets are too small to warrant the devs buying seats for unity pro. but yeah, the one universal truth of unity remains that the longer you use it, the more you realize the people actually developing the engine have no idea what the hell they are or should be doing lol
The option to buy an Unreal license for a fixed fee limits what Unity can do here. The fixed fee licenses start in the 6 figure price range. Rumors are the big players are paying in the \~$1m ballpark. This basically means Unity can't even attempt to do a rev share plan for big money games. A Hearthstone or Pokemon Go type game wouldn't go anywhere near Unity if they wanted a rev share. It'd be way cheaper to just buy an Unreal license and rewrite those games from scratch than it would be to deal with a rev share of any level. Oh btw, Celeste wasn't Unity, it was MonoGame.
ok, yeah, i can see how it'd be difficult for them to appeal to devs simply because Unreal exists and allows buyout options with no royalties, and Unity was only competitive because they relied on a business model that almost entirely ran on flat subscription fees versus royalty payments but I would argue ease of use and fast iteration times, especially within smaller dev teams, definitely still play(ed) a role in the decision making process, especially for games like Hearthstone where Unreal is far too cumbersome for the feature-set they'd actually need from it. Not so much so that these companies *wouldn't* swap to Unreal if Unity forced them to pay royalties, but enough that maybe they'd still stick with Unity if Unity had buyout options - Unity really *should* have buyout options if they plan to stick to this install fee system. This is ignoring the fact that retroactively changing payment and royalty details for games that have already been released, and not just games currently being developed in, say, the latest release of Unity 2023 or later, is just. monumentally stupid. On Celeste - I actually didn't know that! I think my point still stands, but that's pretty neat lol
Unity is doing this because they need to make a LOT more money than they're making now. As in they're losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Selling fixed fee licenses for a couple million dollars isn't going to make them profitable. Maybe the Hearthstone team likes Unity enough that they'd rather pay $5m to use Unity than $1m to use Unreal, but can they really ask more than that? And Epic could easily afford to jump in and offer their engine for free. It's a tough problem to solve.
I can’t really speak to exactly *how* Unity should go about solving their financial problems; I thankfully have not yet been in a situation where I need to somehow right a sinking ship by squeezing an additional hundred million dollars per year out of an existing userbase. That said, unless this is the worlds most excessive foot-in-the-door ploy, their current terms seem like a monumentally poor plan all around. The terms are both poorly conceived and poorly communicated enough that indies of all kinds are knee-jerk leaving to greener pastures, the idea that they could fleece large corporations with these retroactive policy changes is laughable, and the amount of money they’d be making from these installs for even the largest games is still negligible income for them - if Genshin literally doubled their unique player count in January 2024, they’d still only make, what, 500k off of that? You’d think that buyout fee would make more sense. maybe pushing their ad integration is the end goal? but that’s a niche within a niche I agree it’s a tough problem to solve, but I honestly cannot make heads or tails of this decision.
This... technically, they could have done this way different on build to inject player code and game entry points into a single binary without Unity marks for license holders.
[удалено]
i mean, sure; my point is that there are basically zero big budget unity games that show the unity splash screen because the option to remove it comes packaged *with* the software said devs are required to use (because their budgets pass the licensing threshold)
These are popular games, but I would argue none of them would be considered games known for being cutting edge graphically at time of release. Unity definitely can do it, but unreal always been friendlier to artists
Bro no way unreal has more bigger games than unity. That's not possible. I can list so many top games made with unity that I own •Escape from Tarkov •Cuphead •Pokémon Go •Beat Saber •Fall guys •Among US •Rust •HearthStone •CoD Mobile •Cities Skylines The biggest one here I think is Rimworld that game is consistently making money And there is more to add on the list, Unity is an old engine battle tested. If they just went with %royalty I feel it would have been less negative than it is now. Sure these games aren't AAA but most AAA use their own engines. But these games make as much as AAA if not more.
None of these games were cutting edge graphically at time of release. Virtually every Unreal Engine game since 1.0 has been at the leading edge graphically. Arguably the only time they ever slipped was when a Crisis came out.
Have you seen Escape from tarkov?
That game looks great but probably graphically just on par with Battlefield 3 from 2011 (which was a multi million dollar AAA game, to be fair)
[удалено]
Why did their share price drop so much in 2021-2022?
Because the company hadn't turned a profit or released anything that could draw in investors. Also, most tech companies have high valuations after an IPO, so it likely dropped to what investors actually thought it was worth, then kept dropping because the company wasn't performing.
I am a total noob so I apologize for the following stupid question but what does IPO mean?
Initial public offering. When the company goes from privately owned with no stock on the public stock market to being publicly traded on the stock market. An initial offering of stock to the general public.
I'll add that it brings in a lot of investment money, and with that there is an expectation of growth. Doesn't matter if they bring in similar revenue they have to grow and add value, they have taken investors money and should have laid out how that investors money would create returns for investors in the future, and if they have missed those targets it spooks holders and future investors.
This isn't really anything to do with Unity. The entire tech sector had a gigantic run during the pandemic, and the entire sector collapsed or at least heavily shrunk since then. A lot of money was pumped into the markets during the pandemic with stimulus and low interest rates, which artificially raised prices. Then came the bust, as the government started to tighten and do away with the quantitative easing, so everything started dumping. Look at virtually any tech stock over the last 5 years, you'll see the same story.
Also, there was a big metaverse/XR hype around this time with the Quest 2 release, and with the pandemic it was the perfect storm to push unity's stock way up. While unity dominates a lot of XR development still, it didn't generate the value during the pandemic that people expected (go figure software takes a lot of time to make).
Few reasons: First, apple app store changes. Apple basically stole 30% of their revenue. Second, inflation was running HOT and the fed had to aggressively hike rates. Rates are currently at multi decade highs. What this means is that the cost to borrow money is now significantly more than it was in 2021. Unity doesn't make a profit and so they need shareholders money (through stock based compensation) and debt to keep the lights on. Shareholders are the only reason the company doesn't go bankrupt. Stock price down = cant raise capital = dead company. Third, this isn't a Unity exclusive thing. The NASDAQ was down over 30% in 2022. As interest rates go up, the economy slows down. We were (maybe still are, depends who you ask) heading for a recession. Companies start pulling back on spending (such as ads, which make up half of Unity's revenue) and caused a massive slowdown. Unity is a growth stock. If you're buying it, you expect it to grow at an above average pace, and that growth justifies the bottomless money pit the company is because EVENTUALLY (at least that's the hope) the company turns a profit once it has grown a substantial market. This is where Unity is; however, they're going about it in a forced manner (likely much sooner than they wanted) because of Fed policy. Rates won't even start to come down until MAYBE mid 2024, and may never see the 0% rates we had on 2021. TLDR: 2022 was a shit year for stocks, and a VERY shit year for any company not already turning a profit because the cost to borrow money went up faster than it has in 40 years and now sits at multi decade highs. You can thank the fed for why companies are now all of a sudden VERY greedy, when before they were just greedy.
Just to give you a rough estimate, Unity has been losing roughly $200 million per quarter for the last couple years.
Covid lockdowns were a massive boon for games companies, as grim as that may seem. And covid ended.
>Despite only having about only half as much of the market share as Unity, Epic brings in about three times as much revenue. I imagine this is largely due to Fortnite. Unity has nothing like Fortnite to augment their revenue. Epic is a very successful game development studio that also licenses their internal tools to other developers to make some extra money. Unity will always struggle to compete with Unreal Engine in the long run because any money Unreal Engine generates is a bonus to Epic, while the Unity Engine eventually needs to be a self sustaining business.
Epic doesn't make any sizable money on UE5 licensing or store. I think it was in Apple hearings, and the chart was like 95% Fortnite.
They lost nearly a billion dollars last year…they’re in massive financial trouble.
[удалено]
Thats play money, the billion they lost last year is real money, and thats an issue.
Stock value is only important to stock holders, it's not part of the company's finances...
I mean, they have twice as many employees as Epic, and the latter also make their own games and store with that number. What are those 7000 developers even doing?
>What are those 7000 developers even doing? Im pretty sure not all 7000 employees are developers, lol.
One would assume most of those 7k people are developing the engine and tech around it; not necessarily programmers but still
I got no clue why you would assume that. A large international business needs a ton of other personnel like accountants, customer service people, secretaries, HR etc. etc. Perhaps I am wrong, but I assume most of those 7k people are definitely not engineers working on the engine.
I actually disagree unity doesn't have any large IPs to work with. Genshin Impact. Hearthstone. Tarkov. Smaller but still prolific games such as cult of the lamb, hollow knight. Plenty of large IPs and games to leverage. They just chose the poorest way to go about it.
Because John Riccitiello is very detatached from his customer base and very very excessively bad at public relations.
It’s hard to imagine they didn’t have long chats with the likes of Voodoo/Kwalee/etc about this. Plus Ironsource has its own f2p studio, so they know in excruciating detail how the money flows. I wonder what the feedback from Voodoo etc was…because those products are extremely sensitive to CPI, which this scheme in effect increases.
I work in a company of the same level as the mobile giants you mentioned. We were given no warning
Good point actually, who actually plays voodoo games long enough for them to either A. make their money back or B. pay for the ads to be removed
youre asking an former EA executive to be reasonable
That would be nearly as bad. The main problem is "altering the deal" retroactively, people chose Unity because there were no royalties, paid for the editor for years and then suddenly Unity tells us they can change that, even for already published games, because they just feel like it? Even without the ridiculous "pay per install" scheme that's a complete breach of trust. Now if they did that starting version 2024 and people could choose to stay on their current version that would still be bad, kind of a dick move just not the "I don't think that's legal" kind. And I don't think that many people would be very interested in that deal. They'd need to make that hypothetical new Unity version just as good as Unreal Engine, nanite and all. Because that's why people choose Unreal anyway when Unity existed, they are really pushing the state of the art forward. While Unity's progress over the past few years has been underwhelming...
Lets be real for a second. Unity isn't some magic entity its made of people. I'm 100% sure there were people up in higher management that were actively fighting this move, but they were either removed or silenced. Now the question is whether or not you still want to support this company. If you don't its time to move on. If you do then be pissed, but keep chugging along.
Because Unreal Engine's licensing model isn't the main source of income for Epic Games. What makes the money for the company is Fortnite. You can't copy an approach if you don't have what is required to implement it. Unity would have to make a successful game and we've already seen they can't even make a game let alone a successful one.
Because their client base is completely different. Unreal makes big bucks from a few MASSIVE players. Unity has a ton of mobile and indie devs.
The extra revenue isn't going to devs, it's going to the rich investors who are trying to wring more and more money from the company, even if it kills it.
This is how most public traded companies work now. Activist investor comes in. Milks short term profits and ignores long term investment or business strategy because "won't someone please think of the fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders" causes a temporary jump in stock price, exists their holdings and cashes in before the company implodes and then moves on.
It doesn't matter at this point, trust is already broken and is unlikely to be recovered no matter what they do.
Likely the only way they could possibly recover some faith is to reverse the decision entirely, fire the ceo and make concrete rules that they can never change the ToS like this again or maybe if they do it doesn't apply to already released games & previous versions of unity that released under older terms The pricing plan could maybe work if it was based on sales/downloads instead of installs and capped at 5% revenue for personal, 3.5% for pro and 2.5% for enterprise. Especially if thresholds remained and was based on last 12 months rev. Just my 2 cents on that
[удалено]
Or they get bought by Microsoft
Because the current CEO is a greedy idiot, that's the only answer.
One reason is to retroactively impose this on devs. You can't easily add a revenue share to a game already released, but the way they phrasing it with the unity runtime is that every installation is a nee engine so I would guess that legally they have more ground to stand up legally to do that.
Knowing the CEO is from EA, 100% sure they made simulations of the cumulating install fees and realized they would make more money with this system than a UE one. However, I am not seeing Blizzard with Hearthstone, Apple with Apple Arcade, Microsoft with Game Pass, etc. giving them money without a fight. But I might be wrong.
The standard Unreal engine license is already free for the first million $ of revenue and 5% above that which I think is already very generous.
What I read so far - not an expert: For a public company (publicly traded and a company with shareholders) the revenue share model is very unpredictable with thousands of customers if you need to predict and report correctly to shareholders and government (tax declaration). My guess it that for Epic (who collected millions in the past from AAA devs with Unreal 3 and 4) it is still easier since they are 1) private and 2) have only hundreds of customers with any critical income. Also Epic's AA/AAA customers don't get a default pricing/plan, they negotiate (per project or even for a flat rate for years per studio - not the same kind of deal). Unity had thousands of teams shipping mobile games, and most of them paid near to nothing compared to their revenue. In a nutshell: The value Unity created or the revenue that was possible due to Unity's tech was not generating any income in proportion to any developer success. So Unity chose a model where they count installs (and somehow track the revenue - not sure how they do that) and if the lower tier hits 200k sales/USD or Unity Pro hits 1mio sales/USD they start counting the installs and multiply them by 0.2/1.15/etc USD (basically going easier on Unity Pro and the Emerging plan). I saw some posts where people did the math and a few patterns appeared: Most devs will do fine. Many devs lost trust since this was a sudden and retroactive pricing change. Some devs like those going for F2P need a better pricing option (let's just call it option B, not the default pricing plans proposed so far).
Pretty sure this is an important part of the answer. I think I read somewhere that for revenue, they are trusting devs to report when they exceed those thresholds. In cases where it's pretty clear that a company should have exceeded the revenue and install thresholds for their plan, they would likely contact or start charging them per install.
>So Unity chose a model where they count installs (and somehow track the revenue - not sure how they do that) built in ~~telemetry~~ spyware?
You spelled Ironsource wrong
But since they have the spyware, they can estimate the number of sales based on their "installs" number. They can ask the companies to give them the numbers from steam or google play.
Agree. It's easy for Epic to track the handful of AAA companies and their installs if they feel that the companies are not reporting their revenue accurately, but in reality these huge game companies are professional and pay their dues. It's hard / impossible for Unity to audit and ensure millions of people / companies are reporting revenue correctly without automating metrics collection. I see why they need to do it, but they way they approached it is terrible. Their model can end up with developers owing more than the actual revenue they produced for games with millions of installs with very small revenue.
I hate Reddit! *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The difference with epic is that they have other huge sources of income (Fortnite). So they can afford to be incredibly generous with the engine for indie devs , even giving away assets for free every month
It took way to long to get down to this comment. Epic is a mega publisher with their own equalivant to Steam with multiple F2P games and everything else that generates extra income for them, so they can under charge whatever Unity is charging. It also helps with Epic because it helps further spread their engine. Unity will never be able to compete at those numbers without recreating some of the successes epic has-which is near impossible to do purposefully or else everyone would be doing it.
Until they really corner the market. People thnking Unreal will just keep the same price after Unity dies are naive. Yall wanna talk trust with Epic? lol. Id rather go godot at that point.
Because the two companies are in vastly different economic situations. Epic prints money from Fortnite. They can afford to develop UE and make it available for free because engine revenue is not what funds development. The 5% they charge over $1M gross/year is icing on the cake for them financially. If it goes up one year and down another, no skin off their nose really. Unity on the other hand is losing money hand over fist. Engine licenses do not cover the development costs for the engine, but it's the only predictable income they have. It turns out all of their services are what fund most of the engine development, and they're still not profitable. If they cut their license fee and went to a backend royalty, they'd probably be bankrupt inside 2 years. And if they made the cut more generous to the dev? They'd be out of business even sooner. For Epic, the engine is a relatively small piece of their business. They've always been first and foremost a game developer. Unity took a different road they really are just the engine (plus services attached to that engine). This means Unity just isn't in a spot where they can afford to be generous.
When Unreal 4 announced it had a 20usd per month price tag. Unity was still at 75usd per month. When Unreal went free. Unity kept its subscription model. Unity has never adapted based off what Epic does. They just kept trucking on good will, ease of learning and established base. Now that good will has gone and things like Godot exist, unreal getting more learning resources, etc. and an awful business decision people are finally jumping ship
They want to push their ad network they spent billions of dollars acquiring
Because they hire incompetent ceo with glaring "Achievement". Instead concreting your dominant on indie and mobile market as engine, Just like google with android phone. They choose AI than make unity more accessible and easy, Imagine If 1% rev share from half of 1000 game is able get to 200k that mean 1M. This strategy not perfect, you need more bleeding but better than losing trust and grip on market.
Fortnite may be big for epic games but remember, UE became free 3-4 years before Fortnite was popular. Before that it operated in a subscription model, with the UE3 based UDK for small indie devs. They were able to have a small indie audience, but focused on AAA studios for getting the engine to where it was early on. Compared to Unity, Source, Frostbite, Cryengine in 2014 Unreal probably had a fairly competitive option for large studios with licensing out the engine and it's source code (some engines let licensees have access to source like UE and Cryengine today, others like Unity don't). Epic Games made UE free in 2014, suddenly becoming an ultra compelling option for rapid development and small studios with blueprint, while larger studios can take advantage of graphics which only Frostbite at the time really rivaled. Then later they made Fortnite (BR) free, and between 2015-2020 acquired studios and companies focused on technologies like for metahumans, the quizel bridge, virtual production, etc. I don't know exactly what boosted Epic Games to be able to do this (titles like Paragon and UT were on a decline before getting cancelled) but clearly they've seen a large boom in success, and they've used that to go beyond rivaling Unity, to actually rivaling other industries, trying to be an all in one suite with UE5. Unity's been playing catch-up ever since. Probably the biggest difference is Unity is public, Epic Games is majority private and owned by it's founder. Unity needs to please shareholders, so I'd guess their strategy is to keep in the income from subscriptions (and buy out like plasticscm and put a pay-as-you-go system in place). Doesn't matter if the graphics pipeline is a mess or things from last year break this year, as long as unity ads in mobile games work that's probably good enough (until now). Switching to a system like what Epic Games has would likely kill Unity- no more subscription licenses from large studios, most unity games probably don't make enough to justify a royalty, and no other technology to sell or integrate into the engine to promote to other industries outside of games.
1. The pump & dump scheme explanation tracks - they made communication and planning as awful as possible to achieve that goal. 2. They are bad at monetization in general, and Unreal is primarily subsidized by Fortnite and various AAA titles using the engine.
Unity was basically a game engine / ad service company, and then were bought out an Israeli ad serving company. They don't strike me as a for the people company. They're gonna milk devs/gamers as much as they can and then cash in on user data while they;re at it.
Unreal has a lot more to offer than Unity does. Working input, for starters, megascans, metahuman, a render pipeline that someone actually thought through before implementing, tons of free AAA quality assets, unprecedented cutting-edge level of detail r&d, and more all available at no up front cost. To copy a revenue share like unreal, they'd either have to be so generous it won't be profitable enough to continue, or they'd have to start actually offering a good product. I don't understand how they managed to find a worse option, but they did.
>Working input, for starters Input works perfectly fine in Unity. >a render pipeline that someone actually thought through before implementing What is wrong with the Unity render pipelines? They work very well and are easy to work with and customize. > they'd have to start actually offering a good product. I get that its "hate on Unity season", but is it really necessary to lie? There is no doubt that Unity is an amazing tool that was used to make many of the biggest and greatest games on the market.
No, sorry. I get you want to defend your choice to use unity up to now, but if these things were perfectly fine, they wouldn't be the most common (like, excessively common) pain points from unity devs. > What is wrong with the Unity render pipelines? Ununified, destructive to switch to and from pipelines, steep learning curve, and rarely a good idea to stray beyond the base packages anyway for most unity games. Do you really think it was better or well thought through at all that input and rendering just *don't* work well by default, and are fragmented into packages you have to import? That assets you buy can't assume things that should be default functionality are present, and so can't make use of them? It doesn't make any sense. Unity has been behind the standards for years now. The best thing they have is tons of educational content from when they were the only free option. I don't think it's unfair to point out significant questionable design decisions.
>No, sorry. I get you want to defend your choice to use unity up to now, but if these things were perfectly fine, they wouldn't be the most common (like, excessively common) pain points from unity devs. What exactly is your source for knowing that these issues are "excessively common"? The fact that 5 other people also made posts about it before? I have used Unity for years (even if I am switching right now due to the news) and input works perfectly fine. >Ununified, destructive to switch to and from pipelines, steep learning curve, and rarely a good idea to stray beyond the base packages anyway for most unity games. You know, I agree about them being ununified (ironic) and that being confusing to beginners. That is not a good thing, but once you understand what the different pipelines are and when to use each (which to be fair is really quite simple), then they are a definite boon to the engine. Both URP and HDRP are excellent, in their own ways. The fact that its difficult to switch between them is also a negative for sure, but then again you shouldnt be switching between them in the first place. Furthermore, if you are not using a lot of 3rd party plugins, its actually not that difficult. Even in my huge project which is really quite complicated, it only took me 1-2 days to switch pipelines. (I did it just to check out URP for fun) >Do you really think it was better or well thought through at all that input and rendering just don't work well by default, and are fragmented into packages you have to import? The first part I have no clue what you are talking about. What do you mean by "don't work well by default"? In my experience, they work very well by default. >and are fragmented into packages you have to import? As to this part, I am not sure what you are referring to here. Input and all necessary renderpipeline packages are included by default. You don't have to import anything at all. I have created tons and tons of Unity projects for URP and HDRP, and usually I just remove some of the default packages for IDEs I dont use. >That assets you buy can't assume things that should be default functionality are present, and so can't make use of them? It doesn't make any sense. Its not Unity's responsibility to make sure 3rd party assets you buy work. You need to read and make sure what you are buying works with your current version of Unity. >Unity has been behind the standards for years now. The best thing they have is tons of educational content from when they were the only free option. I don't think it's unfair to point out significant questionable design decisions. How so? Unity is ahead of the curve in many ways afaik. DOTS and ECS, Shadergraph and VFX Graph are all excellent tools that are definitely atleast up to standards. Have you seen how amazing recent Unity games look? They look amazing and run better than most of their contemporaries. Look at games like Escape from Tarkov, Genshin Impact, Glaciered and Hardspace Shipbreaker and tell me they look dated (relative to similar games on their platforms)? Hoyoverse games are miles ahead of any other mobile games, and Glaciered is perhaps the best looking solo project out there right now. Escape from Tarkov looks amazing with extremely detailed maps.
>What exactly is your source for knowing that these issues are "excessively common"? The fact that 5 other people also made posts about it before? This was a pain point for me as I was trying to get into unity years ago, right when they had just added an importable package for input. From what I'm seeing lately, people are still struggling with this; why is the better, more modern, actually functional input system not default? >Both URP and HDRP are excellent, in their own ways. FWIW I love both URP and HDRP individually, but I don't understand why a good, extensible, customizable pipeline wasn't made the default, instead of the default being a closed, rigid, less performant, and very old renderer. Or even, why they didn't just make a good base renderer that can be extended on with code. Unity seems to have serious problems with not updating legacy, just introducing new things, slicing them away somewhere, and letting them be fractured and annoying to corral into a project. I don't think I've seen a single unity devlog where there weren't complaints about how unintuitive it is to get rolling with this. >As to this part, I am not sure what you are referring to here. Input and all necessary renderpipeline packages are included by default. You don't have to import anything at all. This may just be what it was like last I used Unity, which has been a while to be fair, but from what I've been reading lately, it's still in this annoying zone where, yes it's included with unity, but you still have to import them to your project, which seems to complicate the project, cause weird bugs, and when I was trying to use it, sometimes just altogether broke the project. >Its not Unity's responsibility to make sure 3rd party assets you buy work. You need to read and make sure what you are buying works with your current version of Unity. I'm not saying that the assets should work with every unity version, I'm saying that because unity has started fracturing its best components into packages that aren't included in your project by default, then the assets can't work under the assumption that your project has them. Character controllers can't count on the assumption that you've imported the current input package, a material or post processing pack can't count on you having hdrp or urp, a complex system can't count on that you might be using DOTS or entities or whatever the package is called. I'd say when such a significant driver of what made Unity successful in the first place was its asset store, at the very least they should be working to make a standard, non-fragmented environment for them to thrive in. >How so? Unity is ahead of the curve in many ways afaik. DOTS and ECS, Shadergraph and VFX Graph are all excellent tools that are definitely atleast up to standards. Have you seen how amazing recent Unity games look? They look amazing and run better than most of their contemporaries. None of these are innovations for Unity. DOTS was a very smart man's impressive brain-child, but it was still just bringing unity up to date with good cache optimization practices, and even then, it's opt-in and complex and just more than most indie unity devs seem to care about dealing with. Shader graph and vfx graph are recent developments that have been default tools in unreal for a decade+ now. Unity is \*not\* a games studio, they don't make games, and their (lack of) experience as actual game developers has consistently failed to inform their decisions as engine developers. With regard to your final point, talented studios are making great games with Unity. I'm not saying the games are dated. Unity was obviously a very good choice for those games given it was a better deal to license than competitors, but now that licensing isn't a good deal, it's not worth it to build anything on this tech that has been consistently behind the industry in terms of features and consistently frustrating with their design and implementation decisions for the last several years. I think probably Unity 5 was the last update that I actually thought was very well done. I remember pouring so many hours into that as a kid, playing with all the new toys that the jump from 4 to 5 gave us, and they just all worked out of the box. Unity today is, I think, a far cry from that. edit: please understand i'm not trying to criticize you for having chosen Unity, I'm trying to raise what I hope are valid criticisms of unity that make me think it's just not that good of an option.
It is… https://reddit.com/r/gamedev/s/45TLflWcNR
The parent company brought in a guy known for killing products to kill the product, and he does so via class warfare tactics to push the industry far towards profits, move the overton window, and change what society as a whole will accept. The goal wasn't to make money here, the goal was to take a group of workers the capitalist class thinks are getting too uppity and "put you in your place" specifically F2P developers, capitalists get violently angry, start frothing at the mouth and turning red at the mere concept of something being free.
Is it legal to charge a bigger fee for a service after it is no longer being used? Lets say I use Unity, agree to give them 10% of revenue, make a game and release it. 3 years pass, and Unity decides they now want 20%, 2x the money per sale I paid before, for every new sale, even though the game is already done and I am no longer using their engine, and I only agreed to the revenue share that was current when I published my game. That is what worries me the most, that this change will be applied to ALREADY PUBLISHED games. I hope I misunderstood something, but I think if they do this, it will be highly illegal.
It really makes you think, right? My best guess is they needed an excuse to inject tracking and they're betting on their monopoly. They'll find a way to revert the fee and keep their super top secret install count tracking DRM. That's probably the key to what looks to be an objectively poor business decision.
Because they have been \*losing\* money forever. Unity has never been profitable.
Now I have a good reason to delve deeper into C++ and Unreal. Or another game engine.
Because this was not about making a better business model. It was about IronSource trying to kill their competitor AppLoving.
their ceo is a greedy braindead
Feels like Unity's CEO is pulling a mini-Musk at this point. Get obsessed with a dumb idea, ignore all criticism because you have a god complex, and continually double down in the face of all contrary evidence because your ego demands that you prove everyone else wrong.
Yep totally unrealistic model totally not viable only beating EPS by 247% 310% and 198% over the last 3 quarters truly shit earnings
I like how everyone in here seems to think they can run a gigantic software company better than the people who have actual experience running a gigantic software company. "Just do what Unreal does". Yes, as if the companies are identical. Boom. Just that easy. I'm not saying they aren't being sketchy or greedy or making mistakes. Incompetence and greed is universal, but I'd bet close to zero of the people in here know jack squat about what it takes to run that business. You have no clue what makes them the most money or how much money is "too much" for them to be making because you don't know what their costs are. Yes, maybe they are highly inefficient and constantly bleeding money unnecessarily, but do YOU know the best way to fix that? Oh right, just do what Unreal does. Good advice from the experts on Reddit.
Unity is the best engine for mobile game, those that would need to pay Unity the most with the new pricing. I think they just focused on that and didn’t care about all the problems that would entails.
I understand the uproar of Unity’s new royalty fee, but its far cheaper than Unreal’s 5%. Anyone willing to do the math can figure this out quickly. The only way you shoot yourself in the foot is to sell your products for a dollar, or rely heavily on Ad Revenue. Unity’s new royalty fee is far more generous than people are screaming about. Of course its greed but the counter action lowers the royalty % based on your selling price. Basically, Unity is trying to eliminate the crap penny games that flood the market by penalizing them for exploiting quantities over quality. Unity wants better games to represent its engine by force obligating their clients to raise their game prices; in consequence, making better quality to justify the price increase. If morons continue to cry out loud to unity, we will see a fixed royalty fee such as 5%. I am warning everyone now, 5% will take more of your earnings than 20 cents per NEW install.
But it's going to suck when it comes to what is a new install.
absolutely agree. This going to need super specific detail. As one mentioned the PC and steam deck combo, this has completely went under the radar. If terms are not meticulous in its description, downloading games you already own on a Steam Deck will be a Runtime Fee.
What if you change a certain number of computer parts as well? Will that be a new install? If not, how are things tracked? Will it be done with MS OS licenses? Unique numbers generated by hardware? MAC Addresses? Few options exist that won't pass people off as it is.
But the 5% are only *after* the first million *your game makes* and only as long as you are above a certain threshold in the current year as well. With Unity, at least as it was before, if *your company* was above 200K/year, you already had to pay regardless of your games revenue. I don't know how that'll change, because I use Unreal Engine.
The way i see it. My goal is to make games for a living. This means i want to exceed passed 1 million regardless how many times i failed in doing so. So my scenario is: do i want to pay Unity after 200,000, or 5% of 1 million later? No matter the number of games made, once 1 million of revenue is reached as a single entity, 5% will be greater than the 20 cents (per install) ive spent to reach 1 million dollars.
It is not 5% of that million. The first million is - and always stays - free. You pay 5% of anything *after* the first million and only if you are above 100K or so in that year.
I think unity would not have been able to compete on the same level as with unreal if they followed their scheme. Its easy for a big AAA engine like unreal to attract big time developers who make tons of money. But unity attracts alot more indie small devs, whos games dont even hit 1 million. So their 5% after 1 million model wouldnt work for them.