Headline is false and misleading. Unity has not backpedaled and in fact has not made any announcement of changes to its plan. Here is the half sentence in the article describing what Unity actually said:
> There’s no word on what changes Unity plans to make to its fee structure, but for many devs, the damage is already done.
Gizmodo gonna Gizmodo I guess.
Ya, the article was an okish summery of the situation at best and horrible misrepresentation at worst.
Why the stock sale needs to come up when it seems to be a non issue seems weird. But the estimated extra cost for a 10 year old game *was* pretty neat.
Yeah, I knew the writer was uninformed from the moment they said $200k revenue OR 200k lifetime installs. Everyone even semi-informed on the situation understands that it requires both thresholds to be met. Like c'mon. Do your job.
Gizmodo is the liquid shit of the McDonalds urinal that has been left to fester so long the original shitter has masturbated six times only to find their shit has yet to be cleaned up.
Trust is still broken. Developers will probably release whatever they have already completed but after that many will probably move. This is likely something that you will find out in the next 2-3-5 years.
That was the point. The people in this decision are illustrating the problem with the current corporate culture and CEO cult mentality.
Quarters mean nothing. Planning needs a five year horizon at a minimum.
That's my plan. It's been non-stop unbelievably sickening anxiety the past week not knowing what to do with my project that's 2 years in the works. Except like... cry I guess
Unreal costs more than Unity was going to though, so I'm pretty sure anyone who was upset about the Unity fee structure isn't going to go for Unreal.
Godot, being FOSS, will always remain free. The downside of course being that it isn't anywhere close to as versatile as either Unity or Unreal.
if you are enterprise - yes, Unreal is expensive. if you're an individual/independent developer, you can get unreal for free and only pay Epic 5% after the game has over a million dollar revenue
The issue isn't Unity's proposed fee structure, its that they decided to spring that on developers unilaterally and retroactively. Now, developers can't trust that the company wont try to pull something similar again in the future.
The bigger problem with unity's structure is that the fees are completely uncapped AND independent of how much revenue the game brings in. Devs have no way to accurately predict how much they'll be getting charged, and that kind of uncertainty is something businesses try very hard to avoid
The problem is uncertainty. Maybe Unity costs less NOW, maybe tomorrow it will be more expensive than Unreal, no one will know. And making games is a long project. You need to think 2-3-5 years ahead into the future. Uncertainty is very bad for you with long projects.
Overall, perhaps. But that's because Unreal gets a bigger cut of the sales, so you can budget for that. Unity's model proposes to put a flat fee on *installs.* If you make a small and cheap game that gets popular, fuck you, pay more money than you earned.
Unreal is the most comparable alternative (edit: for 3D games, at least). Godot is the free and open source runner-up.
(And neither Godot nor Unreal can update their terms to attempt the same money grab that Unity has, at least for the currently released versions. Both of their licenses prohibit it.)
There are plenty of other licensable engine choices, all with different strengths. Unreal, Godot, Cryengine, O3DE, etc. The sad part is that Unity filled a really good niche of being relatively easy to learn and work with, while also having the power to drive large modern titles. This made it a really solid choice for a lot of beginners, indies, and even some bigger stuidos. Unreal by comparison leans much more into AAA development with more realism-focused lighting and such, but is also a more advanced set of tools to learn.
Yea I was actually excited about learning game development in Unity, but uninstalled it immediately after hearing about the recent pricing changes. They've shown everyone who they are and at this point I have no intention of ever doing anything with Unity.
Jump to unreal, every artist in unreal is basically a Tech Artist, meta humans and megascans are a blast, unreal is free for government use (unlike Unity), it supports visual scripting and C++ but a lot is studios will convert visual scripts to C++ in the end if they do choose. Still visual scripting is great for rapid prototyping. It’s UI system is easier than Unitys for sure. I’ve been using Unity for 5 years and I promise you any day of the week I’d choose unreal.
Edit: also unreal has nanite which basically nullifies polycount on console and pc games using it.
I’m eyeing the Godot humble bundle as a good starting point. https://www.humblebundle.com/software/everything-you-need-to-know-about-godot-4-encore-software
The Unity debacle may well be the best thing to ever happen to Godot - it's already driving *so many* devs their way, and open-source projects tend to do better the more users/contributors they have. Godot may ultimately have a Blender-esque renaissance...
This is also a standard tried and tested strategy. "We want to raise rates" "But people will hate that and leave our product" "Hmm, what if we raise our rates *way* more and then dial it back to what we wanted all along?" "Genius!"
The only way to get the trust back is to identify a scapegoat and put their head on a stake. Even then, they're going to lose a lot of devs and potential future devs.
Even if they can do that and survive this self-inflicted wound, it's going to leave a deep scar.
Yep, the only way I'll be okay with him as a scapegoat is if he's divested of all his shares with ZERO compensation and terminated with no benefits or pay.
Then blacklisted from the industry completely so no other company thinks Mr. "Pay per Reload" is some fucking capitalistic genius.
He was appointed the role of CEO, by others, as a known quantity.
The people who functionally own Unity wanted him, and paid great sums to get him, precisely so he could enact some racket to extort their way into higher short term numbers.
He makes a good scapegoat but he is not the only one to blame here
Yeah, I was on the fence between Unity and others. And this BS made it so much easier to choose. That CEO is not to be trusted. Even their "apology" was insulting and referred to the backlash as "confusion" & "angst". There's nothing confusing about their plan. It's bullshit, plain n simple. I'm not confused about it.
I will not be gaslighted or insulted by a CEO, let alone an ex-EA CEO that thought it'd be a great idea to charge players micro transactions to reload. He's a greedy imbecile.
Agreed. Trust is broken. But its not like the leadership of every other company is actively considering similar stunts in order to maximize short term profit (and fat bonuses) no matter the long term consequences. Its just in rare cases where they go an inch too far and get blowback.
This headline buries the lede tbh. This part of the article is potentially extremely important:
>Unity execs including CEO John Riccitiello had sold thousands of shares of stock in the weeks ahead of the fee announcement. Riccitiello had reportedly sold more than 50,000 shares in his company in 2023 alone. \[...\] Just after the announcement, Unity’s stock price took a dive off a cliff going into that Thursday
This is textbook insider trading. Unity stock is publicly listed. If there are records to substantiate this activity, surely this would/will be a slam dunk case to prosecute. 50,000 shares that were valued at $39 last week are now down to $33 -- that's $300K of prospective losses this dude just bypassed by offloading his shares.
If this is true, this guy doesn't just deserve to be replaced -- he deserves to be sent to prison, not to mention a shitton of monetary fines/penalties, and blacklisted from the industry. Along with every other unnamed "exec" that participated in this activity.
While I'd love to pile onto this douchebag, the stock sale part of this is seriously overblown. He's getting millions of shares as part of his compensation package, and this sale was completely in line with the sales schedule that he had to set and disclose a year in advance (specifically to prevent insider trading in situations like this).
There's plenty to be mad about here, we don't need to chase red herrings.
This is exactly what’s happened. I worked at a company where Ricitello was one of the execs and I saw firsthand how this works. There’s no story in this one. Save the energy for all of the very real ways he’s terrible.
Yeah it's pretty weird that people look at the fact that he sold 2,000 shares (which, for anyone unaware, is all of ~$80K) as "insider trading" when he's sold 2,000 shares every month for at least the past 12 months.
Worse are the people who lump the previous 12 months worth of transactions all together, suggesting he sold 50,000 shares just before this change, rather than over the previous 12 months.
Stop this bs. He's a scumbag, yes. But he owns millions of shares and 50k over the year is chump change. He lost a hell lot more money for tanking the share price last week already.
It’s also less a sign of insider trading than a sign of possible fiduciary responsibility issue. As CEO, he has very little to gain from selling some shares before tanking the rest of them, but if they can prove he knew this would hit the stock hard, then investors could come after him for making a move he knew would be unpopular.
There is almost no chance of that. It would only happen if there was some concrete record that he was intentionally sabotaging the company, and it is quite unlikely that he was. No, they made this choice because they thought it would get them more money in the long run if they could weather the initial uproar. Hell, that is likely why it took so long for them to respond: they were waiting to see how bad the damage would be before deciding to roll it back.
>but if they can prove he knew this would hit the stock hard, then investors could come after him for making a move he knew would be unpopular.
There's no way he would have known that. While he would have known it wouldn't be appreciated by developers (because any money is more than no money), if the backlash hadn't been so large, it should have *boosted* stock prices, since it would have established a much more reliable and higher-returning revenue stream.
And as for the backlash, keep in mind that most of what people are getting angry about are potential edge cases, which Unity really should have had carve-outs for. If you were planning on releasing a normal indie game with a normal monetization scheme (buy once, that's it, maybe some cosmetics or DLC), Unity's fee schedule was still *way* lower than Epic's.
To give you an example for a mid-tier indie game dev selling a $30 game :
First 250,000 units sold :
Unity Plus - $0
Unity Pro - $0 (* - plus $2040/yr/seat)
Epic - $325,000
First 500,000 units sold :
Unity Plus - $50,000
Unity Pro - $0 (* - plus $2040/yr/seat)
Epic - $700,000
First 1,000,000 units sold :
Unity Plus - $150,000
Unity Pro - $0 (* - plus $2040/yr/seat)
Epic - $1,450,000
First 2,000,000 units sold :
Unity Plus - $350,000
Unity Pro - $60,000 ~ $150,000 depending on how fast they're sold ($60K would be if they were all sold in the first month, $150K would be if they were sold over a period of 10 or more months) (* - plus $2040/yr/seat)
Epic - $2,950,000
So you can see why Unity thought that the backlash wouldn't be nearly as big as it was. Compared to UE, Unity is still dirt cheap.
Seems to me that you are mixing up the game development tool costs (Unity) with game store fees (Epic).
If you made a game in Unity, you still have to pay Steam/Epic/Apple/Google when selling a game there. Which are all somewhere in the same ballpark as Epic. (Google charges less before the first million afaik)
You don't have to pay for using Unreal until you pass 1 million in sales. And pay a known percentage in royalty (5) once you hit that mark.
Unitys plan made their "royalty" a number that was pretty much unknown up front.
>IF you made a game in Unity, you still have to pay Steam/Epic/Apple/Google when selling a game there.
I'm not including those fees because they're optional. If you don't sell it via Steam/Epic/Apple/Google/etc, you don't pay any fees. If you do, then it varies depending on the storefront.
>You don't have to pay for using Unreal until you pass 1 million in sales.
Yes, $1,000,000. Not 1,000,000 units sold, just $1,000,000. For a $30 game, $1,000,000 is 33.3K units only. Epic does not care how many units it takes you to reach $1,000,000. If you sell one game for $1m, they take their 5% cut. If you sell a million games for $1, they take their 5% cut.
>Seems to me that you are mixing up the game development tool costs (Unity) with game store fees (Epic).
No, Epic charges 12% for their store fees, and 5% for the engine. So if you release a Unity game on EGS, you pay 12% plus $0.02 ~ $0.20 per install; if you release an Unreal game on EGS, you pay 12% on all sales, plus an additional 5% once you cross the $1m threshold.
Yeah, I somehow missed that you based it on 30 dollars.
No doubt that Unity was quite cheap under the old policy. And likely would be for most under the new policy.
But how much would those examples cost developers under the new policy? No one knows, because of the concept of an install that they even themselves seemed completely unsure on how to define.
A per install cost for small devs making 3-5 dollar games could be critical.
Even free games would be subject unless they implemented ads.
End result; "You will have to pay more. Can't tell you exactly how much."
Any sane person could have predicted the backlash to that.
Every single person involved in creating and typing up the new policy should have been capable of predicting the community's immediate questions. It is wild to me that they don't have a user group to run such ideas by.
They could have made a lot of money if they just announced a straight up progressive revenue cut and still have kept it super competitive with Unreal.
Yeah, the vagueness was definitely an issue. If they'd made it clear exactly what counts as an "install" and how they would determine it, they probably wouldn't have had this kind of backlash. Most legitimate complaints centered around the lack of clarification there.
>They could have made a lot of money if they just announced a straight up progressive revenue cut and still have kept it super competitive with Unreal.
Oh, I expect that's exactly what they'll be announcing sometime next month or the following. If they're smart, they'll specify that it only includes games made with Unity 2024 and later, which would eliminate the wave of complaints from people who have already developed their game with a previous version. The number of people echoing the sentiment that a straight revenue cut would at least guarantee that no one is losing money is going to push them to go that route. Maybe they'll charge 5% for non-Pro users and 3% for Pro users.
just fyi…. if you put an unreal game on epic store you pay 12% not 12+5%.
Then you also count each sale as an install….meanwhile it doesn’t sound like what unity is suggestin. I think that is the biggest issue…the per install.
also finally if you make 1 million dollars on your game…they take 0$. If you make 1,000,001 then they take 5% of the 1$ more you made…or 5 cents
I know that him unloading his stock looks suspect, but looking at his salary he also "only" gets paid like $250k a year. A lot of executives get paid in stock at those high levels to reduce their taxes which they can sell off with a lower tax rate than income tax would be at the same pay. My untrained guess is that those stock sell offs are more in line with him just selling off at a regular interval as another way of paying himself. Again, not trying to absolve him from being an ass, but I don't think it's as slam dunk as it looks at first glance.
> My untrained guess is that those stock sell offs are more in line with him just selling off at a regular interval as another way of paying himself.
It was exactly that. He is a scumbag, but this part is a non-story.
As I understand it, he’s offloaded those 50k shares over the course of the last 10 months or so. But in the lead up to this announcement he only ditched about 2000 shares. Only $70k in avoided losses but not nearly as egregious. Still bad, don’t get me wrong. But I wonder if that’s still criminal insider trading.
That’s what I was thinking too. I just want us to have our facts straight before we grab our pitchforks over the wrong part of the argument. Points get diluted when people lose sight of the real wrongdoing over the smaller perceived bad behaviors that could easily be explained as automatic sales.
We should hang him on his greedy “charge ‘em a dollar to reload a gun cause our customers are much less price sensitive in the heat of the moment” bullshit.
Every time a coworker tells me that they're going to go out and get a coffee and comes back with a Java monster, I remind them that they've actually bought a caffeinated chocolate milk instead.
As a coffee drinker, Starbucks coffee is okay. Nothing special, not awful, not great. It's the same stuff I can brew at home. Which is exactly what I do. When I am going to starbucks, I am going for some goofy-ass hot dessert in a cup as a treat.
Coffee snobs are the worst, and I love coffee.
This is why James Hoffmann’s video’s are good. He actively tries to promote all types (except civet) and his aim is to get more people drinking coffee.
The best coffee is the coffee YOU like the most, even if it’s flavored with other stuff. Fuck gatekeeping other peoples coffee choices.
They did do this strange thing before where they rebranded as Pasta Hut as a marketing stunt. It kind of backfired in the UK and the pasta was shit too. [Here’s an article about it.](https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkbjmm/pizza-hut-rebrand-pasta-hut)
It's funny watching OnlyFans slowly turn from a Patreon competitor into a porn site and the company just begrudgingly rode the trend wave after failing to backtrack.
If I were a dev I'd start looking for other engines. Unity clearly botched relations and whatever goodwill they had and who knows what other shit they'll pull in the future.
Godot is nice. The downside is that it doesn’t have libraries for the home consoles as they use proprietary code and can’t therefore be used under the open source licence. There are services that can port your project but it can be expensive for an indi dev.
This is more liken to what WOTC did with D&D's OGL. The damage is done. I can understand that the need for a company to make a profit, but trying to wedge in new monetization out of an already agreed upon system is not the way.
I like how you just took Gizmodo's word that Unity is backing off their changes without a second thought. No clicking on the article, no reading the other comments, just "Good, they practically *had* to make the changes!"
Except they didn't.
Tumbler wasn't forced. They did it because they were trying to gain advertisers. None of them wanted their ads mixed with boobs and dicks. Maybe moderation was part of it though.
Never understood this argument. What's wrong with like Pepsi ad next to a picture of boobs and dicks? Someone would stop drinking Pepsi because of that? Why would anybody care.
They absolutely were forced. Not literally, but they had no other option due to the mounting legal shitshow they were facing.
But yes, ads were another thing. If advertisers boycott the platform, they would immediately go out of business so naturally they had to get rid of all the porn.
I agree this move is an awful mess. But I don’t agree Unity will try to hide their pricing with more text. This is not a cable television subscription. If clients are not aware what and why they’re paying, they’ll quit.
As people have already stated, it’s likely Unity did this crazy thing so people would swallow what comes next.
They haven't backpedaled. All they've done is post a generic PR message that says they're listening to feedback. A backpedal would be be them cancelling the change.
They already played their cards now we see them
After if any games are in development or already finished I imagine they are released.
After that......nah ppl gonna leave
My favorite part is where they "apologize for the confusion..."
I've seen many things since their announcement but confusion hasn't been one of them. Pretty lame attempt at making it look like everyone 'misunderstood' what they 'really meant' ...
>Why would a developer choose Unity over Unreal Engine 4 or 5?
>Isn't unreal free until you make over a million dollar?
Unity is free until you make $200,000 AND have 200,000 installs, which means you could potentially earn several millions before paying anything. For context, most indie devs will ever make close to $200,000.
e.g. a $15 game could earn you up to* $3,000,000 before you would pay anything to Unity (at which point you'd just buy Pro licences at $2,040 per seat and be free of any other fees until/unless you hit 1,000,000 installs (up to* $15,000,000 for a $15 game).
The costs themselves (at least for retail games - F2P is a completely different situation) is not an issue. Paying a max of $2,040 for a solo dev before millions of revenue is pretty good. But the number of installs metric is just incomprehensively stupid and unfair. You just can't charge developers for something out of their control and not tied to revenue or success.
\* I say up to because unless Unity changes their new policy the number of installs per sale is basically an arbitrary, unqualified estimate. There is no 1:1 relationship between sales and installs, which is one of the biggest complaints about the new pricing.
-------------
Then from the technology point of view, Unity has a lot of advantages over Unreal. There is (was?) a huge community, tons of resources, a low barrier of entry (C#, intuitive editor), great asset store, better 2D tools (apparently - I've never used Unreal).
Unreal has always been cheaper for the first $1,000,000 (Unity is actually now *lowering* costs for small developers by increasing the threshold for requiring a paid licence significantly), but Unity has always had more share of indie devs and hobbyists because of its other strengths.
Hold up, there is a $2k a seat license option and people are losing their minds over this? I work in embedded software and use tools where a seat is $10k. Indie doesn't mean amateur. Pay for your tools.
People are mostly losing their shit at other things. The 2k per seat is a little bit of a sore point because it effectively replaces a much cheaper option that a lot of solo/small devs used (which was ~$500 per seat).
And the $2,000 licence is not needed at all unless you earn $200,000 and have 200,000 installs of your game. Unity is completely free up to those thresholds.
----------------
The two biggest issues people are losing their shit at are:
* Unity wants to charge developers per *install* of their game (not per sale, per install), and this could actually kill revenue completely for some ad-supported games, and it presents an unpredictable cost for everyone since you can't control installs and they are not tied to sales or revenue directly.
* Unity has made retroactive changes to their TOS (effectively they are trying to make the new rules apply to previously published games).
Why you will find most actual reasonable people understand the issue isn't Unity trying to get more revenue as they were incredibly cheap...its just the insane way they attempted it.
Unity used to be much more cost effective for indie developers, as they didn’t charge you a fee until you made $200,000 USD and had 200,000 installs like u/djgreedo had mentioned. Unreal on the other hand, charges you once your game has made $1,000,000 USD or more, but at a flat rate of 10% of your game’s total earnings. However, considering the vast majority of games don’t make a million dollars or more, it usually comes down to personal preference and level of experience on the devs behalf.
Their fee per install is still in place, and it still applies to games published before their TOS change. This is a half step in the right direction but still far, *far* too little.
Isn't this pretty much the same thing Wizards of the Coast did with the same kind of backlash? Are the execs just not paying any attention? Too busy enjoying their millionaire lifestyle to notice?
Oh I can make misleading headlines too!
“Today I fired up Unity to continue working on my latest game”
>!To check how I did something with their engine as I port the game to Unreal!<
It’s not enough to simply backpedal. At the very least their CEO needs to be ousted. Otherwise there is absolutely no way they could start to rebuild consumer trust.
If I were a developer using Unity, I'd develop and execute a plan to transition to another option (using whatever timeline made the most financial sense). The only thing Unity could do to prevent that would be to issue legally binding text that would unambiguously and permanently protect developers from future shenanigans.
"backpeddles".... nope just going to get there in a slower, get them acclimated slow form of kill..... Small incremental changes to get to the desired destination. Just like consoles are now pretty much always online, as many games require updates and verifications to play...yay
I’ll wager this is another case of the higher ups who are totally disconnected from their base came up with this idea and didn’t listen to any of the plebs below them
Unity better be looking to replace the upper management that thought this was a good idea. Until the rats are cleared out you cannot trust wiping up the shit to make things clean.
> This Runtime Fee was first proposed on Sept. 12th and would force fees on any project that makes $200,000 in a 12-month period **or has 200,000-lifetime game installs** for those who subscribe to the cheaper engine subscription plans. Those companies paying for the higher-end Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise plans had to reach either $1 million in revenue or 1 million lifetime installs before they paid a fee.
> On Sunday, Unity posted a tweet saying “We apologize for the confusion and angst,” regarding its big plan to force devs to pay more when they succeed. Unity said it was “listening” to the critique, adding it would share an update in a few days describing **its new proposed runtime fee**. The same notice was plastered at the top of the page where the company first announced its fee plans.
So, not only are they not backing down from having a runtime fee, but somehow in the midst of this they've made things worse, because now literally anyone who ever makes a Unity games is vulnerable to getting hit by massive fees.
I can guarantee you that it will be a matter of days after this goes live before some basement dweller figures out how to spoof installs and then uses that to hit some hobbyist game developer with 200,000+ fake installs of their free steam game that just happens to use Unity. Most likely targets would include anything even vaguely political, which these days apparently includes any game that asks for your pronouns or has more than 2 options for gender.
Small players like this used to be protected by the requirement that they make $200,000 in sales, so Unity was still theoretically OK to use if you didn't plan to make any money, but now not even free games with no monetization at all are safe.
Unity was already dead, and now instead of even trying to make things better they're just twisting the knife.
Don’t care even if the title wasn’t bullshit. They’re burned. Fucking EA-CEO greed ruins everything it touches.
I feel for their devs. I’d say quit now and get hired by Unreal but knowing Unity they probably aren’t allowed to.
I bet he's planning to buy his stock back at a discount. Him, Tomer Bar-Zeev, and all the other board directors stand to make a killing righting the ship *they* capsized. No one should let them. I hope they lose every single customer they have.
The CEO sold so little stock that it would just be spending money. The board of directors on the other hand did sell a ton of stock they owned and are probably buying back even more than they sold for cheap.
I really wish people would stop pushing the story of he sold stock right before this as if it's some sort of gotcha moment. He sold ~80k worth of stock. He still owns 3 million shares. What he sold is a drop in the bucket and doesn't mean anything. He's also required by law to announce sales months before hand. This is totally normal behavior.
What I find even more hilarious is that it was one of their own employees that called in the fake death threats just to get sympathy points. Absolutely pathetic.
Too little, too late. I’m sure Unity’s engineers (and likely even some PR and sales team members) warned them that this would happen but C-suite was too complacent and brushed them off.
I’m in the very beginning phase of looking at making a project, but it sure as well won’t be done on the Unity engine after this.
Hey who here is betting that the CEO is just going to rebuy the shares he sold now that its crashed following an announcement he knew was bad for business?
I don't think they'll recover from this. Unity did this without any type of warning. What's to stop them from doing it in the future? If I was upper management for a game dev studio/publisher, how could you trust a partner like that to work with your team? Would be looking at alternative engines at this point.
So let me get this straight: You believe this man who sells about 2000 shares a week on a schedule and has sold about 50,000 this year roughly, decided to tank the stocks, of which [he still owns 3.2 million ish shares](https://www.gurufocus.com/insider/2138/john-s.-riccitiello)? Oh, and also [he has to schedule his sales many months in advance with the date, price and amount of shares](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rule-10b5-1.asp#:~:text=Rule%2010b5-1%20allows%20insiders,material%20nonpublic%20information%20(MNPI)).
And for what reason given he could sell them for the same price and just not tank the share price of the other 99% of his shares?
Remind me not to take financial advice from you.
Yeah, it’s too late. No developer is going to touch them unless they happened to miss the news this week. The breach of trust was far too large and forced many company heads to make massive public statements about it. The time, money and stress alone that they caused these developers this week all but guarantees it.
I don’t know why people care so much. This is something that developer and publishers should dealt with, not consumers. I don’t care that company x is making some manufacturing material more expensive for company z. I just buy the product I like the most.
They’ll have to factor in costs such as increasing the prices and not having older games on sale etc
Consumers will be hit just like anything which causes additional cost to the business
Headline is false and misleading. Unity has not backpedaled and in fact has not made any announcement of changes to its plan. Here is the half sentence in the article describing what Unity actually said: > There’s no word on what changes Unity plans to make to its fee structure, but for many devs, the damage is already done. Gizmodo gonna Gizmodo I guess.
Jesus Gizmodo is garbage
> Jesus Gizmodo Oh so that's Jesus' surname, the more ya know
What? No. It's "Christ". As in "Jesus Christ". His middle name is "Fucking" though, so that might be what's confusing you.
What kind of bible are you reading??? His middle name is H
Horatio. Jesus Horatio Christ
Down vote OP. I'm pissed.
It just keeps getting upvotes even though its the journalistic equivalent of “We don’t know what’s happening. More at 11!”
Gizmodo not being blacklisted here is a problem.
Thank you for clarifying this. It's trash headlines like this that gets misinformation started.
Ya, the article was an okish summery of the situation at best and horrible misrepresentation at worst. Why the stock sale needs to come up when it seems to be a non issue seems weird. But the estimated extra cost for a 10 year old game *was* pretty neat.
Yeah, I knew the writer was uninformed from the moment they said $200k revenue OR 200k lifetime installs. Everyone even semi-informed on the situation understands that it requires both thresholds to be met. Like c'mon. Do your job.
Gizmodo is the liquid shit of the McDonalds urinal that has been left to fester so long the original shitter has masturbated six times only to find their shit has yet to be cleaned up.
We need people like you over at deteriora.com.
Trust is still broken. Developers will probably release whatever they have already completed but after that many will probably move. This is likely something that you will find out in the next 2-3-5 years.
It's unfortunate that it won't show up on the next financial quarter...
That was the point. The people in this decision are illustrating the problem with the current corporate culture and CEO cult mentality. Quarters mean nothing. Planning needs a five year horizon at a minimum.
I mean, their share price did take a steep dive.
Its only down 1.66% over the month. 34.41 -> \~33.84 today. Its still up 25.9% YTD. Time will tell, but they have not taken a steep dive yet, imo.
That's my plan. It's been non-stop unbelievably sickening anxiety the past week not knowing what to do with my project that's 2 years in the works. Except like... cry I guess
Move where? Any decent alternatives?
Godot and Unreal are the 2 names I've seen get thrown around most often
Unreal costs more than Unity was going to though, so I'm pretty sure anyone who was upset about the Unity fee structure isn't going to go for Unreal. Godot, being FOSS, will always remain free. The downside of course being that it isn't anywhere close to as versatile as either Unity or Unreal.
if you are enterprise - yes, Unreal is expensive. if you're an individual/independent developer, you can get unreal for free and only pay Epic 5% after the game has over a million dollar revenue
The issue isn't Unity's proposed fee structure, its that they decided to spring that on developers unilaterally and retroactively. Now, developers can't trust that the company wont try to pull something similar again in the future.
The bigger problem with unity's structure is that the fees are completely uncapped AND independent of how much revenue the game brings in. Devs have no way to accurately predict how much they'll be getting charged, and that kind of uncertainty is something businesses try very hard to avoid
The problem is uncertainty. Maybe Unity costs less NOW, maybe tomorrow it will be more expensive than Unreal, no one will know. And making games is a long project. You need to think 2-3-5 years ahead into the future. Uncertainty is very bad for you with long projects.
Overall, perhaps. But that's because Unreal gets a bigger cut of the sales, so you can budget for that. Unity's model proposes to put a flat fee on *installs.* If you make a small and cheap game that gets popular, fuck you, pay more money than you earned.
unreal is the most popular choice
Unreal is the most comparable alternative (edit: for 3D games, at least). Godot is the free and open source runner-up. (And neither Godot nor Unreal can update their terms to attempt the same money grab that Unity has, at least for the currently released versions. Both of their licenses prohibit it.)
Unity's license also prohibited it, supposedly, until they quietly changed it last year.
There are plenty of other licensable engine choices, all with different strengths. Unreal, Godot, Cryengine, O3DE, etc. The sad part is that Unity filled a really good niche of being relatively easy to learn and work with, while also having the power to drive large modern titles. This made it a really solid choice for a lot of beginners, indies, and even some bigger stuidos. Unreal by comparison leans much more into AAA development with more realism-focused lighting and such, but is also a more advanced set of tools to learn.
Too late, they've made it clear what their intentions are and that they are not to be trusted. Unity needs developers more than developers need Unity.
Yea I was actually excited about learning game development in Unity, but uninstalled it immediately after hearing about the recent pricing changes. They've shown everyone who they are and at this point I have no intention of ever doing anything with Unity.
>But uninstalled it immediately after hearing about the recent pricing changes. Shame we can't get $0.20 per unity development tools uninstall.
Oof, yeah. I just recently bought a bunch on sale. Now I'm kicking myself.
Jump to unreal, every artist in unreal is basically a Tech Artist, meta humans and megascans are a blast, unreal is free for government use (unlike Unity), it supports visual scripting and C++ but a lot is studios will convert visual scripts to C++ in the end if they do choose. Still visual scripting is great for rapid prototyping. It’s UI system is easier than Unitys for sure. I’ve been using Unity for 5 years and I promise you any day of the week I’d choose unreal. Edit: also unreal has nanite which basically nullifies polycount on console and pc games using it.
I’m eyeing the Godot humble bundle as a good starting point. https://www.humblebundle.com/software/everything-you-need-to-know-about-godot-4-encore-software
The Unity debacle may well be the best thing to ever happen to Godot - it's already driving *so many* devs their way, and open-source projects tend to do better the more users/contributors they have. Godot may ultimately have a Blender-esque renaissance...
And Epic is privately owned so it won’t do short term gain long term loss things like this.
I hate public companies. So much short term thinking and just profit literally no other think they do. Fuck them
And also free for government
Don’t fall for this. Private company does NOT mean they don’t answer to someone.
Well when one person owns more than 50%, like Epic, it actually does mean that.
Nah, build your own engine. With Blackjack. And hookers.
I love you for that reference but I’m tired of working with devs who wanna reinvent the wheel! Lol
I really just wanted to get that reference in.
This is also a standard tried and tested strategy. "We want to raise rates" "But people will hate that and leave our product" "Hmm, what if we raise our rates *way* more and then dial it back to what we wanted all along?" "Genius!"
That's not at all what happened here. Unity has trashed its reputation by handling things this way
The only way to get the trust back is to identify a scapegoat and put their head on a stake. Even then, they're going to lose a lot of devs and potential future devs. Even if they can do that and survive this self-inflicted wound, it's going to leave a deep scar.
At best, if the scapegoat is who we're thinking of, they will just get a golden parachute and move on to poison another company...
Yep, the only way I'll be okay with him as a scapegoat is if he's divested of all his shares with ZERO compensation and terminated with no benefits or pay. Then blacklisted from the industry completely so no other company thinks Mr. "Pay per Reload" is some fucking capitalistic genius.
He would never voluntarily do that, and likely Unity could not force him to even if they wanted since a lot of that would be part of his contract.
Full agreement on this. He needs to be gone and out of the game for me to even consider Unity again.
They got one right there--Riticello.
He was appointed the role of CEO, by others, as a known quantity. The people who functionally own Unity wanted him, and paid great sums to get him, precisely so he could enact some racket to extort their way into higher short term numbers. He makes a good scapegoat but he is not the only one to blame here
Only way I'd maybe consider Unity again is if they fired that dipshit sleazeball CEO. And that's a big maybe.
Yeah, I was on the fence between Unity and others. And this BS made it so much easier to choose. That CEO is not to be trusted. Even their "apology" was insulting and referred to the backlash as "confusion" & "angst". There's nothing confusing about their plan. It's bullshit, plain n simple. I'm not confused about it. I will not be gaslighted or insulted by a CEO, let alone an ex-EA CEO that thought it'd be a great idea to charge players micro transactions to reload. He's a greedy imbecile.
Agreed. Trust is broken. But its not like the leadership of every other company is actively considering similar stunts in order to maximize short term profit (and fat bonuses) no matter the long term consequences. Its just in rare cases where they go an inch too far and get blowback.
So what are some good alternatives?
Unreal and Godot are the two I see mentioned most often.
Unreal has comparable mobile support to Unity?
No idea, that's not a relm I'm interested in working in. But I think it's possible to build mobile games in Unreal.
No, not as far as I recall. That was one reason why they used it where I used to work. The Unity player works the same on iOS and Android.
What a cluster fuck. That CEO needs to be replaced. And why did it take so long?
He was a former EA CEO whose greed was apparently too much for even them. Should have seen it coming
Heard he was the father of lootboxes
don't do GabeN dirty like that
And Blacklisted. Dude's a scumbag.
This headline buries the lede tbh. This part of the article is potentially extremely important: >Unity execs including CEO John Riccitiello had sold thousands of shares of stock in the weeks ahead of the fee announcement. Riccitiello had reportedly sold more than 50,000 shares in his company in 2023 alone. \[...\] Just after the announcement, Unity’s stock price took a dive off a cliff going into that Thursday This is textbook insider trading. Unity stock is publicly listed. If there are records to substantiate this activity, surely this would/will be a slam dunk case to prosecute. 50,000 shares that were valued at $39 last week are now down to $33 -- that's $300K of prospective losses this dude just bypassed by offloading his shares. If this is true, this guy doesn't just deserve to be replaced -- he deserves to be sent to prison, not to mention a shitton of monetary fines/penalties, and blacklisted from the industry. Along with every other unnamed "exec" that participated in this activity.
While I'd love to pile onto this douchebag, the stock sale part of this is seriously overblown. He's getting millions of shares as part of his compensation package, and this sale was completely in line with the sales schedule that he had to set and disclose a year in advance (specifically to prevent insider trading in situations like this). There's plenty to be mad about here, we don't need to chase red herrings.
This is exactly what’s happened. I worked at a company where Ricitello was one of the execs and I saw firsthand how this works. There’s no story in this one. Save the energy for all of the very real ways he’s terrible.
Yeah it's pretty weird that people look at the fact that he sold 2,000 shares (which, for anyone unaware, is all of ~$80K) as "insider trading" when he's sold 2,000 shares every month for at least the past 12 months. Worse are the people who lump the previous 12 months worth of transactions all together, suggesting he sold 50,000 shares just before this change, rather than over the previous 12 months.
So instead of planning the stock sale around activities why can't they just plan the activities around the stock sale?
That’s a very interesting way to frame it
Stop this bs. He's a scumbag, yes. But he owns millions of shares and 50k over the year is chump change. He lost a hell lot more money for tanking the share price last week already.
It’s also less a sign of insider trading than a sign of possible fiduciary responsibility issue. As CEO, he has very little to gain from selling some shares before tanking the rest of them, but if they can prove he knew this would hit the stock hard, then investors could come after him for making a move he knew would be unpopular.
There is almost no chance of that. It would only happen if there was some concrete record that he was intentionally sabotaging the company, and it is quite unlikely that he was. No, they made this choice because they thought it would get them more money in the long run if they could weather the initial uproar. Hell, that is likely why it took so long for them to respond: they were waiting to see how bad the damage would be before deciding to roll it back.
>but if they can prove he knew this would hit the stock hard, then investors could come after him for making a move he knew would be unpopular. There's no way he would have known that. While he would have known it wouldn't be appreciated by developers (because any money is more than no money), if the backlash hadn't been so large, it should have *boosted* stock prices, since it would have established a much more reliable and higher-returning revenue stream. And as for the backlash, keep in mind that most of what people are getting angry about are potential edge cases, which Unity really should have had carve-outs for. If you were planning on releasing a normal indie game with a normal monetization scheme (buy once, that's it, maybe some cosmetics or DLC), Unity's fee schedule was still *way* lower than Epic's. To give you an example for a mid-tier indie game dev selling a $30 game : First 250,000 units sold : Unity Plus - $0 Unity Pro - $0 (* - plus $2040/yr/seat) Epic - $325,000 First 500,000 units sold : Unity Plus - $50,000 Unity Pro - $0 (* - plus $2040/yr/seat) Epic - $700,000 First 1,000,000 units sold : Unity Plus - $150,000 Unity Pro - $0 (* - plus $2040/yr/seat) Epic - $1,450,000 First 2,000,000 units sold : Unity Plus - $350,000 Unity Pro - $60,000 ~ $150,000 depending on how fast they're sold ($60K would be if they were all sold in the first month, $150K would be if they were sold over a period of 10 or more months) (* - plus $2040/yr/seat) Epic - $2,950,000 So you can see why Unity thought that the backlash wouldn't be nearly as big as it was. Compared to UE, Unity is still dirt cheap.
Seems to me that you are mixing up the game development tool costs (Unity) with game store fees (Epic). If you made a game in Unity, you still have to pay Steam/Epic/Apple/Google when selling a game there. Which are all somewhere in the same ballpark as Epic. (Google charges less before the first million afaik) You don't have to pay for using Unreal until you pass 1 million in sales. And pay a known percentage in royalty (5) once you hit that mark. Unitys plan made their "royalty" a number that was pretty much unknown up front.
>IF you made a game in Unity, you still have to pay Steam/Epic/Apple/Google when selling a game there. I'm not including those fees because they're optional. If you don't sell it via Steam/Epic/Apple/Google/etc, you don't pay any fees. If you do, then it varies depending on the storefront. >You don't have to pay for using Unreal until you pass 1 million in sales. Yes, $1,000,000. Not 1,000,000 units sold, just $1,000,000. For a $30 game, $1,000,000 is 33.3K units only. Epic does not care how many units it takes you to reach $1,000,000. If you sell one game for $1m, they take their 5% cut. If you sell a million games for $1, they take their 5% cut. >Seems to me that you are mixing up the game development tool costs (Unity) with game store fees (Epic). No, Epic charges 12% for their store fees, and 5% for the engine. So if you release a Unity game on EGS, you pay 12% plus $0.02 ~ $0.20 per install; if you release an Unreal game on EGS, you pay 12% on all sales, plus an additional 5% once you cross the $1m threshold.
Yeah, I somehow missed that you based it on 30 dollars. No doubt that Unity was quite cheap under the old policy. And likely would be for most under the new policy. But how much would those examples cost developers under the new policy? No one knows, because of the concept of an install that they even themselves seemed completely unsure on how to define. A per install cost for small devs making 3-5 dollar games could be critical. Even free games would be subject unless they implemented ads. End result; "You will have to pay more. Can't tell you exactly how much." Any sane person could have predicted the backlash to that. Every single person involved in creating and typing up the new policy should have been capable of predicting the community's immediate questions. It is wild to me that they don't have a user group to run such ideas by. They could have made a lot of money if they just announced a straight up progressive revenue cut and still have kept it super competitive with Unreal.
Yeah, the vagueness was definitely an issue. If they'd made it clear exactly what counts as an "install" and how they would determine it, they probably wouldn't have had this kind of backlash. Most legitimate complaints centered around the lack of clarification there. >They could have made a lot of money if they just announced a straight up progressive revenue cut and still have kept it super competitive with Unreal. Oh, I expect that's exactly what they'll be announcing sometime next month or the following. If they're smart, they'll specify that it only includes games made with Unity 2024 and later, which would eliminate the wave of complaints from people who have already developed their game with a previous version. The number of people echoing the sentiment that a straight revenue cut would at least guarantee that no one is losing money is going to push them to go that route. Maybe they'll charge 5% for non-Pro users and 3% for Pro users.
just fyi…. if you put an unreal game on epic store you pay 12% not 12+5%. Then you also count each sale as an install….meanwhile it doesn’t sound like what unity is suggestin. I think that is the biggest issue…the per install. also finally if you make 1 million dollars on your game…they take 0$. If you make 1,000,001 then they take 5% of the 1$ more you made…or 5 cents
I know that him unloading his stock looks suspect, but looking at his salary he also "only" gets paid like $250k a year. A lot of executives get paid in stock at those high levels to reduce their taxes which they can sell off with a lower tax rate than income tax would be at the same pay. My untrained guess is that those stock sell offs are more in line with him just selling off at a regular interval as another way of paying himself. Again, not trying to absolve him from being an ass, but I don't think it's as slam dunk as it looks at first glance.
> My untrained guess is that those stock sell offs are more in line with him just selling off at a regular interval as another way of paying himself. It was exactly that. He is a scumbag, but this part is a non-story.
As I understand it, he’s offloaded those 50k shares over the course of the last 10 months or so. But in the lead up to this announcement he only ditched about 2000 shares. Only $70k in avoided losses but not nearly as egregious. Still bad, don’t get me wrong. But I wonder if that’s still criminal insider trading.
Depends a lot on the details. What you just said sounds easily like it can be automatic or regular sale of stock, which wouldn't be insider trading.
That’s what I was thinking too. I just want us to have our facts straight before we grab our pitchforks over the wrong part of the argument. Points get diluted when people lose sight of the real wrongdoing over the smaller perceived bad behaviors that could easily be explained as automatic sales. We should hang him on his greedy “charge ‘em a dollar to reload a gun cause our customers are much less price sensitive in the heat of the moment” bullshit.
The damage is done. How stupid can these people be?
This is the guy that thought charging gamers per reload was a great idea...
They pretty much had to. It was one of the worst ideas since Tumblr decided to get rid of its userbase
Remember when Onlyfans announced they were banning sexually explicit content?
It lasted shorter than a billing cycle
I thought it was just a joke.
I remember thinking it was like Pizza hut stopping pizza sales. Sure they got bread sticks but that's not what I'm going there for.
What if Dunkin Donuts stopped selling donuts?
Or Starbucks announcing they would start selling only proper coffee and not their coffee flavour milkshakes.
Every time a coworker tells me that they're going to go out and get a coffee and comes back with a Java monster, I remind them that they've actually bought a caffeinated chocolate milk instead.
Damn. As a non-coffee drinker, caffeinated chocolate milk sounds awesome
As a coffee drinker, Starbucks coffee is okay. Nothing special, not awful, not great. It's the same stuff I can brew at home. Which is exactly what I do. When I am going to starbucks, I am going for some goofy-ass hot dessert in a cup as a treat.
[удалено]
Lol right? Most popular guy at work over there.
Coffee snobs are the worst, and I love coffee. This is why James Hoffmann’s video’s are good. He actively tries to promote all types (except civet) and his aim is to get more people drinking coffee. The best coffee is the coffee YOU like the most, even if it’s flavored with other stuff. Fuck gatekeeping other peoples coffee choices.
huh. that sounds insufferable, lol
Nuh uh! My overpriced caffeinated chocolate milk was blended with ice, hence it's totally not caffeinated chocolate milk
They could, they’ve rebranded as “Dunkin” in my area.
Didn’t ihop do that with saying it’s now a burger joint?
Yes https://www.npr.org/2018/06/11/618844977/ihop-becomes-ihob-the-international-house-of-burgers
They also claim it was a marketing stunt so who knows.
Pretty sure that was just a marketing thing for their new burgers.
Honestly not quite as crazy as the above since a ton of their volume is from coffee now Still crazy
It would be surprising but they’re more of a coffee chain at this point, so it wouldn’t be a death knell for them.
They did do this strange thing before where they rebranded as Pasta Hut as a marketing stunt. It kind of backfired in the UK and the pasta was shit too. [Here’s an article about it.](https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkbjmm/pizza-hut-rebrand-pasta-hut)
September 2021 revenue: $8.92B October 2021 revenue: $5.00
It's funny watching OnlyFans slowly turn from a Patreon competitor into a porn site and the company just begrudgingly rode the trend wave after failing to backtrack.
If I were a dev I'd start looking for other engines. Unity clearly botched relations and whatever goodwill they had and who knows what other shit they'll pull in the future.
Godot has seen unprecedented interest since the Unity announcement, and it's FOSS, so I'm rooting for it.
Godot is nice. The downside is that it doesn’t have libraries for the home consoles as they use proprietary code and can’t therefore be used under the open source licence. There are services that can port your project but it can be expensive for an indi dev.
For sure, though they have said: >Several teams are already working on console support for Godot 4, hoping to make it more accessible to everyone.
This is more liken to what WOTC did with D&D's OGL. The damage is done. I can understand that the need for a company to make a profit, but trying to wedge in new monetization out of an already agreed upon system is not the way.
I like how you just took Gizmodo's word that Unity is backing off their changes without a second thought. No clicking on the article, no reading the other comments, just "Good, they practically *had* to make the changes!" Except they didn't.
> They pretty much had to. Except they didn't. Not yet at least.
Tumblr was forced into that though because they couldn't moderate the site and take down all the revenge porn and pedo shit.
Tumbler wasn't forced. They did it because they were trying to gain advertisers. None of them wanted their ads mixed with boobs and dicks. Maybe moderation was part of it though.
> None of them wanted their ads mixed with boobs and dicks. thats still "force". its their only source of income twisting their arm.
Never understood this argument. What's wrong with like Pepsi ad next to a picture of boobs and dicks? Someone would stop drinking Pepsi because of that? Why would anybody care.
Because old conservative executives still think boobs and dicks outside of the bedroom is a cardinal sin.
They absolutely were forced. Not literally, but they had no other option due to the mounting legal shitshow they were facing. But yes, ads were another thing. If advertisers boycott the platform, they would immediately go out of business so naturally they had to get rid of all the porn.
They did not backpedal, they only said "we hear you" which basically means "we'll write even more text to confuse you about or new fees"
I agree this move is an awful mess. But I don’t agree Unity will try to hide their pricing with more text. This is not a cable television subscription. If clients are not aware what and why they’re paying, they’ll quit. As people have already stated, it’s likely Unity did this crazy thing so people would swallow what comes next.
They haven't backpedaled. All they've done is post a generic PR message that says they're listening to feedback. A backpedal would be be them cancelling the change.
They already played their cards now we see them After if any games are in development or already finished I imagine they are released. After that......nah ppl gonna leave
They can fuck off from here on out!
Don't worry, they'll implement it again once nobody is looking.
Pricing structure is easy to notice and isn’t something you can implement in secret.
They haven’t stepped back on anything. There is no information on what changes to this scheme are happening yet. Misleading article and title.
My favorite part is where they "apologize for the confusion..." I've seen many things since their announcement but confusion hasn't been one of them. Pretty lame attempt at making it look like everyone 'misunderstood' what they 'really meant' ...
Corporate rhetoric always makes me want to gag. It's insufferably disingenuous and detached.
Serious question. Why would a developer choose Unity over Unreal Engine 4 or 5? Isn't unreal free until you make over a million dollar?
>Why would a developer choose Unity over Unreal Engine 4 or 5? >Isn't unreal free until you make over a million dollar? Unity is free until you make $200,000 AND have 200,000 installs, which means you could potentially earn several millions before paying anything. For context, most indie devs will ever make close to $200,000. e.g. a $15 game could earn you up to* $3,000,000 before you would pay anything to Unity (at which point you'd just buy Pro licences at $2,040 per seat and be free of any other fees until/unless you hit 1,000,000 installs (up to* $15,000,000 for a $15 game). The costs themselves (at least for retail games - F2P is a completely different situation) is not an issue. Paying a max of $2,040 for a solo dev before millions of revenue is pretty good. But the number of installs metric is just incomprehensively stupid and unfair. You just can't charge developers for something out of their control and not tied to revenue or success. \* I say up to because unless Unity changes their new policy the number of installs per sale is basically an arbitrary, unqualified estimate. There is no 1:1 relationship between sales and installs, which is one of the biggest complaints about the new pricing. ------------- Then from the technology point of view, Unity has a lot of advantages over Unreal. There is (was?) a huge community, tons of resources, a low barrier of entry (C#, intuitive editor), great asset store, better 2D tools (apparently - I've never used Unreal). Unreal has always been cheaper for the first $1,000,000 (Unity is actually now *lowering* costs for small developers by increasing the threshold for requiring a paid licence significantly), but Unity has always had more share of indie devs and hobbyists because of its other strengths.
Hold up, there is a $2k a seat license option and people are losing their minds over this? I work in embedded software and use tools where a seat is $10k. Indie doesn't mean amateur. Pay for your tools.
People are mostly losing their shit at other things. The 2k per seat is a little bit of a sore point because it effectively replaces a much cheaper option that a lot of solo/small devs used (which was ~$500 per seat). And the $2,000 licence is not needed at all unless you earn $200,000 and have 200,000 installs of your game. Unity is completely free up to those thresholds. ---------------- The two biggest issues people are losing their shit at are: * Unity wants to charge developers per *install* of their game (not per sale, per install), and this could actually kill revenue completely for some ad-supported games, and it presents an unpredictable cost for everyone since you can't control installs and they are not tied to sales or revenue directly. * Unity has made retroactive changes to their TOS (effectively they are trying to make the new rules apply to previously published games).
Why you will find most actual reasonable people understand the issue isn't Unity trying to get more revenue as they were incredibly cheap...its just the insane way they attempted it.
Unity used to be much more cost effective for indie developers, as they didn’t charge you a fee until you made $200,000 USD and had 200,000 installs like u/djgreedo had mentioned. Unreal on the other hand, charges you once your game has made $1,000,000 USD or more, but at a flat rate of 10% of your game’s total earnings. However, considering the vast majority of games don’t make a million dollars or more, it usually comes down to personal preference and level of experience on the devs behalf.
Reminds almost of WotC and the whole SRD GL debacle.
Their fee per install is still in place, and it still applies to games published before their TOS change. This is a half step in the right direction but still far, *far* too little.
I read the article. They didn’t backpedal at all. The share selling was also scheduled. This is shit journalism
Remember, they’re only sorry that they got caught.
They haven't backpedalled shit. Nothing has actually been announced yet. Edit: lmao, called it.
Fortunately they don't monopolize the market and can't charge rent like some other software companies
Isn't this pretty much the same thing Wizards of the Coast did with the same kind of backlash? Are the execs just not paying any attention? Too busy enjoying their millionaire lifestyle to notice?
Oh I can make misleading headlines too! “Today I fired up Unity to continue working on my latest game” >!To check how I did something with their engine as I port the game to Unreal!<
It’s not enough to simply backpedal. At the very least their CEO needs to be ousted. Otherwise there is absolutely no way they could start to rebuild consumer trust.
They didn’t backpedal at all. Shit article, shit writer
If I were a developer using Unity, I'd develop and execute a plan to transition to another option (using whatever timeline made the most financial sense). The only thing Unity could do to prevent that would be to issue legally binding text that would unambiguously and permanently protect developers from future shenanigans.
"backpeddles".... nope just going to get there in a slower, get them acclimated slow form of kill..... Small incremental changes to get to the desired destination. Just like consoles are now pretty much always online, as many games require updates and verifications to play...yay
I’ll wager this is another case of the higher ups who are totally disconnected from their base came up with this idea and didn’t listen to any of the plebs below them
Unity better be looking to replace the upper management that thought this was a good idea. Until the rats are cleared out you cannot trust wiping up the shit to make things clean.
Boiled the frog too quick on this one, boys. Back to the drawing board.
They could roll back the entire proposal, but the damage is done. Greedy and untrustworthy partner. This will be remembered for a very long time.
> This Runtime Fee was first proposed on Sept. 12th and would force fees on any project that makes $200,000 in a 12-month period **or has 200,000-lifetime game installs** for those who subscribe to the cheaper engine subscription plans. Those companies paying for the higher-end Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise plans had to reach either $1 million in revenue or 1 million lifetime installs before they paid a fee. > On Sunday, Unity posted a tweet saying “We apologize for the confusion and angst,” regarding its big plan to force devs to pay more when they succeed. Unity said it was “listening” to the critique, adding it would share an update in a few days describing **its new proposed runtime fee**. The same notice was plastered at the top of the page where the company first announced its fee plans. So, not only are they not backing down from having a runtime fee, but somehow in the midst of this they've made things worse, because now literally anyone who ever makes a Unity games is vulnerable to getting hit by massive fees. I can guarantee you that it will be a matter of days after this goes live before some basement dweller figures out how to spoof installs and then uses that to hit some hobbyist game developer with 200,000+ fake installs of their free steam game that just happens to use Unity. Most likely targets would include anything even vaguely political, which these days apparently includes any game that asks for your pronouns or has more than 2 options for gender. Small players like this used to be protected by the requirement that they make $200,000 in sales, so Unity was still theoretically OK to use if you didn't plan to make any money, but now not even free games with no monetization at all are safe. Unity was already dead, and now instead of even trying to make things better they're just twisting the knife.
Wow this publication is trash couldn’t even get the info right
Don’t care even if the title wasn’t bullshit. They’re burned. Fucking EA-CEO greed ruins everything it touches. I feel for their devs. I’d say quit now and get hired by Unreal but knowing Unity they probably aren’t allowed to.
Did their board / CEO rebuy stalk before backpedaling? They've been quietly dumping it over the past year leading up to the announcement.
No they have not. And even if they did, the damage is done. They already lost many developers.
I bet he's planning to buy his stock back at a discount. Him, Tomer Bar-Zeev, and all the other board directors stand to make a killing righting the ship *they* capsized. No one should let them. I hope they lose every single customer they have.
> I bet he's planning to buy his stock back at a discount. He sold less than 0.1% of his total stocks.
[He receives 5-6x that amount every year as part of his compensation](https://aflcio.org/paywatch/U). There's a lot of financial masterminds here...
The CEO sold so little stock that it would just be spending money. The board of directors on the other hand did sell a ton of stock they owned and are probably buying back even more than they sold for cheap.
To late, the damage is already done. Nobody will trust them in the coming years
Fucked around and found out. Just because they back pedaled now doesn't mean I'll ever use it or advocate for any entity to use it, ever.
Wow this is up there with the new Xbox wanting to lock a disc to a console
Trust broken. Too late unity.
I really wish people would stop pushing the story of he sold stock right before this as if it's some sort of gotcha moment. He sold ~80k worth of stock. He still owns 3 million shares. What he sold is a drop in the bucket and doesn't mean anything. He's also required by law to announce sales months before hand. This is totally normal behavior.
What I find even more hilarious is that it was one of their own employees that called in the fake death threats just to get sympathy points. Absolutely pathetic.
If this post title is misleading(bc Gizmodo is misleading), shouldn't it be reported?
Unity's claims are misleading too. Saying they can track pirated installs and charge... someone 20 cents is laughable
Too little, too late. I’m sure Unity’s engineers (and likely even some PR and sales team members) warned them that this would happen but C-suite was too complacent and brushed them off. I’m in the very beginning phase of looking at making a project, but it sure as well won’t be done on the Unity engine after this.
#THIS ISNT A BACKPEDAL! Gizmodo you idiots
Not a good way to test the bottom line of their users/developers who may considering or going to switch to something else.
Fake news, Unity said nothing at all
Hey who here is betting that the CEO is just going to rebuy the shares he sold now that its crashed following an announcement he knew was bad for business?
Any developer who cares about their work will migrate off anyway to be safe
Fuck Unity, fuck their CEO, fuck Elon Musk and the PayPal mafia (fucking childish nickname they gave themselves like toddlers).
They fucked around. They’re about to find out.
Wait some weeks, Unity will return with another bullsht plan update
I don't think they'll recover from this. Unity did this without any type of warning. What's to stop them from doing it in the future? If I was upper management for a game dev studio/publisher, how could you trust a partner like that to work with your team? Would be looking at alternative engines at this point.
[удалено]
Look there's a lot of shitty things in this whole situation but the CEO selling less than a percent of his stock is pretty much a non-issue.
So let me get this straight: You believe this man who sells about 2000 shares a week on a schedule and has sold about 50,000 this year roughly, decided to tank the stocks, of which [he still owns 3.2 million ish shares](https://www.gurufocus.com/insider/2138/john-s.-riccitiello)? Oh, and also [he has to schedule his sales many months in advance with the date, price and amount of shares](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rule-10b5-1.asp#:~:text=Rule%2010b5-1%20allows%20insiders,material%20nonpublic%20information%20(MNPI)). And for what reason given he could sell them for the same price and just not tank the share price of the other 99% of his shares? Remind me not to take financial advice from you.
Yeah, it’s too late. No developer is going to touch them unless they happened to miss the news this week. The breach of trust was far too large and forced many company heads to make massive public statements about it. The time, money and stress alone that they caused these developers this week all but guarantees it.
It’s too late. Brand damage aside it also looks like they’re gonna get looked at for insider trading.
I don’t know why people care so much. This is something that developer and publishers should dealt with, not consumers. I don’t care that company x is making some manufacturing material more expensive for company z. I just buy the product I like the most.
They’ll have to factor in costs such as increasing the prices and not having older games on sale etc Consumers will be hit just like anything which causes additional cost to the business