Unity Run-time Fee Fallout Continues - Mark Whitten Is Quittin' - Is Everyone Responsible Gone Now?
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 มิ.ย. 2024
- At this point we all know that Unity shot themselves in the foot pretty heavily when they announced the runtime fee back in 2023. Developer backlash was severe and ongoing and as a result there have been massive changes at Unity. Perhaps the final person involved in the entire Unity run-time fee fiasco, Mark Whitten, head of Unity CREATE, has announced he is leaving Unity.
With all of the changes since that disaster, is basically everyone responsible now leaving or have already left?
Links
gamefromscratch.com/unity-cre...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Support : / gamefromscratch
GameDev News : gamefromscratch.com
GameDev Tutorials : devga.me
Discord : / discord
Twitter : / gamefromscratch
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
![[MPD직캠] 베이비몬스터 치키타 직캠 4K 'LIKE THAT' (BABYMONSTER CHIQUITA FanCam) | @MCOUNTDOWN_2024.6.13](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/h99J4vWm7Ew/mqdefault.jpg)
Links
gamefromscratch.com/unity-create-head-marc-whitten-resigning/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Support* : www.patreon.com/gamefromscratch
*GameDev News* : gamefromscratch.com
*GameDev Tutorials* : devga.me
*Discord* : discord.com/invite/R7tUVbD
*Twitter* : twitter.com/gamefromscratch
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Probably the best plan for Unity is to go private and fix all of its financial issues. Once a company goes public, you lose the control and direction of the company.
👍👍👍
Shareholders will have to agree to sell majority shares to one buyer, which probably might not happen. Once you go public, its hard to go back.
@@askeladden450 someone should tell Elon Musk to buy it lol
Going public possessed them to overextend and lose sight of their strengths. They are still the most powerful 2D and mobile (and arguably VR) engine. They need to jettison a lot of excess assets to pare themselves back down to their essence.
The sad part is they got a ton of money by going public, and then wasted it all on meaningless acquisitions that are mostly all shut down already and never helped the core business.
If they do not remove the runtime fee completely that means there are still some people in charge supporting it. So No, i don't think all the bad apples have been cleaned out yet.
There's nothing wrong with the fee though. You get to use Unity for free and only have to pay something if your game finds wild success. How is that unfair?
@@adriank8792There's a calculation out there somewhere, I forgot the video, but the amount they will get from every studio is absurd. And the studio itself will have less income than they are making today without the runtime fee.
@@adriank8792 refreshing to see someone say it how it is. no doubt the way they went about this was very moronic and deservedly so hurt the companys reputation but I feel like this was blown way out of proportion. waah if my game makes a zillion dollars I have to PAY UNITY???? preposterous!
Getting paid $800K to fail...sign me up!!!
Complete madness!!!!
I know what you mean but this kind of "golden parachutes" are kinda good when you need a CEO. If your pay as CEO depended on how good company runs people would run for CEO only for safe thriving companies. So this is the kind of deal when company says: "hey, we need a CEO to get things straight, if you agree then we will pay you even if things fail". It's good as long as your CEO isn't total piece of shit.
@@slesh3752 Most CEO's tend to be glorified beancounters and I honestly wonder what their added value is.
I have no problem with people making money when they do things well, but in teh case of Unity , I see a classic example of terrible management ... not bad, but terrible.
I mean a mentally disabled person could tell that the install fee was a bad idea ... but that's what happens when you hire people who only think about their quarterly bonus ... I've seen it happen at companies... it starts out with people talking about how great a product or service is ...beforelong the suits come in talking about ROI's, revenue streams and subscriptionmodels ...and poof gone is teh business
I like to call this "failing upwards" and so many big wigs in companies and industries across the board have this luxury.
@@slesh3752 You would think that a nice fat CEO salary and stock would be enough to make someone try to do a good job.
@@slesh3752but "being a total PoS" is a requirement for being a CEO. =\
I feel so sorry for the people who lost their jobs because a bunch of Exec's became oh so greedy. Destroying a community overnight, failure on THIS scale should never be 'rewarded'. But they are. $800k for costing people who work hard their jobs. Personally, I will NEVER touch Unity again until they return to foundations that made it a go to for developers and community alike.
Just buyout your company back tight your belts until your back to profit.. hard to do when everything is over inflated and those golden parachutes for the executives that dont know anything about this indutry
Seriously, the previous CEO David Helgason was a great guy, I'd love to see him back. I crashed the Unity party at GDC and ended up talking with him, and basically grilled him about how Unity was going to keep indies covered while they were doing a big triple a marketing push. He promised me they wouldn't forget us. That year they released the free version for indies. I passed by him again the next GDC, amazingly he recognized me and remembered my question and asked if that proved their dedication. PUT HIM BACK IN CHARGE.
Ain’t that simple. This is like telling someone two years into their 30 year mortgage to just buy back their debt from the bank.
Unity got a fuck ton of money but that’s long gone now.
I'll be honest. I know nothing about Whitten. However, seeing as he wasn't forced out when he was the one to publicly fall on the sword makes me think this is probably more related to him getting passed over as CEO given his now former position and how publicly he was doing the duties that you would have expected the former CEO to perform. I'm also thinking the stock options and the money to stay on until the end of the year was a settlement of sorts to keep him from dishing out the real story of the runtime fee as soon as he left the company; that cash allowed the non-disparagement clause - which would definitely have been violated if he came out and admitted that the runtime fee really was a JR idea, as we all seem to believe is the case.
I still have not reopened unity since the Ricetello incident.
I opened it few times to recreate shader graphs in Godot.
Same.
I think this is all trending in the right direction. I see the light at the end of the tunnel. One last request, just get rid of the runtime fee and go with royalty. Make it simple.
Royalty is a deal breaker for me. That's the reason why I don't use Unreal, that's why I migrated to Godot instead.
For one second I thought it was something like a Fallout game using Unity,like Fallout Shelter.
If they still plan to use the runtime fee going forward then it suggests that there are still bad actors sticking around.
0:18 Gonna sample that for the gunshots in my game.
I wanna play this game when you finish it
@@gordzen123 It comes with a 20 cent installation fee though
@@laurensdesmet70 Aw man :(
I already lost about 00,000$ on Godot's installation fees
It's weird for me, I think they did everything I needed them to, but well, it's too late. I'll miss unity and maybe I'll use it for odds and ends, but getting me angry enough to get over the hump with other tools was a fatal mistake.
runtime fees is COMPLETE AND UTTER BS
the old one or the new one? I'd agree if you're talking about the old one, but the new one not so much.
@@Hietakissa Bootlicker. Away with them both
unity, more like disunity💀
Ha, got em!! 😆
Good one bro😂
I remember back in the day when a Unity Build meant including all your C source code into one file and just compiling that one file. Then Unity came along and that term kinda went away. Then the community of Unity started to go away. . .
No real point, just reminiscing.
more like...
...discord
actually unity is fitting as it united all the developers whether unreal or godot against it.
They hired an CEO that failed at another Triple AAA game studio leaving it in flames.... /facepalm
What were they thinking?!!!!!
After getting into GoDot I don't see myself ever using Unity again. It might have more features atm but that is subject to change
Unity has been awesome in all sorts of ways but I can't create anything with the goal of distributing it without feeling uneasy in the back if my head. They messed up big time
Godot is amazing, I can build test apks in seconds. With newer unity version Oh my god. Keeps going and going. Very slow for iterations.
And even feature in godots so intuitive
the youtube brackeys gdscript suggestion at 2:16 was a nice easter egg
I hope they eventually figure things out, for the industry. Unity is an important cog in the machine along with a handful of other game engines. We need to have competitive options as game developers.
I think it was signed by the other CEO because Mark gave a 2 weeks notice period or something and this was the day that thing ended in a way.
Q: Is Everyone Responsible Gone Now?
A: Yes. They're all going.
Q: Is runtime fee sticks around yet?
A: Not sure.
The Godot game engine has a decent PBR renderer, tons of excellent features, C#, GDScript, and C++ support, and full Blender integration. I would highly recommend it for your next game.
if more ppl switch to Godot it just makes it better, ppl can make plugins and stuff for it. there's a ton coming out lately
I want the board to be booted. Get them all out of there.
Indie development is going to grow. By A LOT. Think of all the thousands of employee, from the AAA industry that have been let go in the last two years alone, and under what circumstances and that they themselves might be a whole lot MORE interested in going independant with the people they know that facing that chance AGAIN to work for a major publisher that either a) blunders their product with nonsensical features/marketing/ company politics or just fires them regardless even when they are making profits. Unity can take FULL advantage of this. I predict that the "indie" is going to overtake the AAA industry in terms of revenue in a few years. Not too long from now. But I am little afraid that Microsoft will snatch up Unity at some point. With the people leading that company right now it would be just as disasterous as two Ricitellos and a Pitchfork.
The economically forced deconsolidation is likely the only savior of the games industry. It's gonna be rough for people caught in the crossfire, but a renaissance is sure to happen in the aftermath as developers are freed from corporate hacks
@@syloui Absolutely. A return to game idea and quality of gameplay.
I mean, when you look at it, THIS is where the art came from. There where only big publishers. And at at some point, it was THEM who lead to the first video game crash of 1983. Too much corporate greed, no more interest in quality.
Smaller teams, bigger dreams. But now, we actually have great tools to help even beginners attempt to get creative here.
hey Mike! just asking if you Godot 2 scripting tutorial could be used for Godot 3.
thank you for your time
Probably still 90% accurate but has things that have changed. Mostly new features that make GDScript easier to work with, not breaking changes. So. Mostly yes but probably better resources now.
@@gamefromscratch alr, taking your word for it.
the forward++ doesn't really work on my CPU integrated graphics, so wanted to goback. Also the 3.5 LTS version for steam is no longer visible , guess something happened, I asked the git hub but so far no response.
Edit: They do have a EULA now so 2/3 fixed but I still won't do install fee / 2.5% rev share. It's more the principle of the thing than the price. The rollback to a less bad deal instead of the original deal feels especially scummy to me.
Bad actors are gone but Unity's TOS is still untrustworthy and they still have a version of the runtime fee/rev share they added. The TOS needs to be fixed and the runtime fee/rev share needs to be removed in order for me to come back. Unity is now at 1/3 key things fixed.
Even at 3/3 things fixed Im starting to fall in love with Monogame so i may just never come back.
a heavily modified version of the runtime fee, and the TOS has already been fixed on Nov 7th of last year, GameFromScratch even made a video about it. If you have an issue with the max 2.5% revenue share, then sure you're entitled to that opinion, but don't act like it's a huge deal.
@@Hietakissaoh I must have missed that update. I still think the 2.5% is a big deal more so on principle than price so it's still a no for me. I'll have to check out the terms update to see how I feel about it but if it's good that's 2/3 fixed. I'll update my op.
The revenue share that used to be there was fine for me. But these guys literally tried to retroactively rewrite their terms of service to extract money out of us. I'll never trust them again.
@@DietChugg so what do you think about Epic's 5% cut? The same (or rather twice as lowly) as about Unity's fee, I presume.
@@Hietakissa Unity also charges a license per seat per month where Unreal does not. I felt like that was sufficient payment in and of itself.
It's why I picked Unity over Unreal.
Unreal is 5% and isn't charging per seat. I don't like revshare but at least it's not some annoying mix of both.
My main concern is the dev team leaving the company.
If I was them and could find an equivalent job I would leave.
This doesn't change anything for me. They still have a shady CEO and board members. Even if everyone leaves it is still very risky to use and rely on Unity. I will never use it. Too many great alternatives out there anyway.
Thanks for sharing. I hope you have great success with your projects whatever platform you use.
what is your alternative?
@@theresamorgavi9196 Godot
You just need a reason not to use Unity, and you used the runtime fee as signboard. Do whatever you want, no one asked for it. Make some laggu sh!t with Unreal or some Garb@ge sh!t with godot 😂😂
@@theresamorgavi9196nothing, unity has too much documentation compared to the others
what does that meaan now for thefee policy? is it probable that this will be get revoked?
So, has evil been banished from the land ... or is the new boss the same as the old boss?
I'm leaning toward the latter, but we'll see.
this is exactly the reason I kept as far as possible from unity, AND UNREAL.
Never become dependent from shady people.
but you can trust FOSS
especially the free software.
Ubisoft: Hold my Saki.
Damn $800k. Imagine making an easy almost $1Million for fucking up and doing a shitty job. Being a CEO is the most corrupt job ever.
With unity going down this direction,I think what unity should do overall is to restructure their directive board and remove their runtime fee completely of they want us to use i again in my humble opinion
They try to improve their image by installing someone from Zynga?!? Not a great plan.
Unity CEO from Zynga, Amtrak CEO from Airline, Post Office CEO from private package delivery company, see a pattern of conflict of interest…. None of these have done good things for the organizations.
Ah yes, Zynga, famous for screaming "We don't f###ing innovate!" As they pumped out "vampire mafia wars reskin #2357"
LMAO this is painful to watch.
Wouldn't it be hilarious if they turn around and decide to make Unity 6 pricing back to what it was after all these terminations, long after they gave Epic and Godot a giant W
We can see CEO is still eating salary. And they are not the owners and that is why they can quit at their will, while the owners remains and hidden from public.
This wouldn't have been so bad if unity wasn't so shit at PR, and hopefully under new leadership they will improve.
I can't believe how bad they are at PR, just goes to show how much they care.
I am still waiting for the moment Unity source code becomes publically available.
" Mark Whitten, he'sa' quittin' " lmao gamesfromscratch you bastard 😄Take my upvote!
That's exactly when I upvoted
I know I'll still keep using Unity even after the fiasco, but still I really hope Unity gets their sh*t together again and fix everything back.
I have stopped learning Unity because of all this happened with Unity. I don’t feel comfortable with what will happen with it. I have switched to investing more in learning Houdini because it is also in my toolset and it is more reliable in terms of future development. From my personal perspective the only thing that may save it is acquisition by Meta or Apple.
@@ShaolinDaveIt can't go open source anymore.
There are already open source unity repositories which contain a large amount of the engine code.
A lot of the other closed sourced code is licensed. So unity would have to negotiate an open source license with their partner companies like I don't know physx, and open source that. Not going to happen.
Same thing for like the Sony PlayStation SDK bindings, not going to get Sony or Nintendo to move a millimeter on open sourcing anything relating to binding to their sdks.
So, not going to happen in my view.
If they can pull off a "Hello Games" scenario then good on them. But for my personal projects outside of our studio, I have no choice but to change into open source. Simply for the sanity. I believe that is the future for all creative tools going forward.
Making games, and other digital products, is a craft. And like many craftsmen, we sometimes have to make our own tools.
I was fully expecting Bobby Kotick to be tapped as the new CEO.
These people have not only failed the community but also their own employees.
People who betray their own are the worst. No matter if it's called business decision or anything else.
Don't let the door hit you.
Even if you ignore the people, all the tools that were created/started to cross compile Unity to Godot or similar still exist and will exist forever.
I just had to download Unity so I could make my own landscape for a game coming out and I heard hysterical laughing and then I realized it was me.
Okay, so some of the people responsible are gone... but has the policy been revoked? Last time I checked they were going ahead with it on new versions of the engine. Meaning there WILL be a distinct split in the community between people who will refuse to use the version that falls under the new worthless policy, and those die-hards who don't mind getting ripped off.... and I guess students who don't think they will be making any money from their work, but even those people probably don't want to learn an engine they can't then use.
As i stopped using unity(after the anoucment) this made me smile lol
Man, John really just had to poison the lake, didn’t he.
Dude makes $400k/year and gets an entire year's salary as a bonus!? WTF is wrong with the world that execs get that much money and the working folk get nearly nada by comparison?
I was introduced to Unity through a free seminar led by one of their evangelists. I've used it as a teaching tool ever since, until the runtime fee stuff went down. If I were in the same position of teaching middle and high schoolers how to make their own games, I will pick Godot without hesitation.
Gee, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to outgoing employees, no wonder this company is having money problems
New CEO is effective May 15, so Jim is technically still CEO until tomorrow.
Its a good step but the engine is in a terrible state, but adding a proper replacement for Enlighten, fixing and getting the internal light mapper to a state where you dont need Bakery, kicking out the deprecated internal renderer, focus on URP and HDRP and some needed bugfixing would be a start. But it will be long before it deserves trust again.
I used Unity since version 2 so didn’t want to switch. But I started looking when the fee was announced and settled on Godot for a class I was teaching. I’ve used it multiple times now for teaching and development. It’s not perfect but I can’t see myself going back to Unity no matter what they do.
Yeah...bonuses, bonuses, bonuses. Too bad they couldn't have used some of those funds to keep on engineers. Sheesh.
When a company goes public it loses its spirit.
somehow thia the second fallout I heard in previous five minutes.
We got a better ceo now! I can’t wait to invest….
Just need to move the HQ out of the US and were gangbusters!
They have no idea what they're doing now, pretty wild.
Currently uninsured, have been to see a doctor. Paid around $8 for medical examination and in total around $25 for ear infection treatment and pills.
Europe is built different, I guess.
Yeah it's a similar situation in Canada. Although our dental coverage sucks.
@@gamefromscratch US no better.
In Scotland, medical treatment and prescriptions are free (not really, you pay NI contributions through your income tax but there's no mention of billing at hospital)
Is neither free or efficient. The result of a public system is having to wait sometimes 3 or more months for an xray just to figure out what is your problem. At least, private insurances try to be competitive....
lol, I got braces for free and an ear examination for free in the uk, nhs is good but the wait times is 😂
OOOOOOOOOOOH What happened again ? Let's watch
They made numbers public to make position more appealing.
Glad I made the move to UPBGE 2 years ago
I still love and use Unity but I don’t have to depend on Unity anymore.
Unreal isn’t an option right now, don’t have the specs for that yet
This is the first step for me to consider using unity again. the second is for them to have in their license that they can never pull bs like this again for shipped games with retarded install fees.
Taking Unity private right now would cost approximately $10.98 billion, assuming a 30% premium on the current share price and based on 382 million outstanding shares at 22 dollars. It would be spicy but technically possible. Anyone have 11 billion lying around? If so, take it private then make it FOSS.
Marc Whitten also did a Q&A with Jason Weimann shortly after the runtime fiasco. Check it out, and judge for yourselves.
Meanwhile, Godot has an editor that runs on your phone. I'm so happy I switched over.
I lost all trust in Unity whatsoever they should sell their source code and close the company they should sue all involved instead of giving them money.
brackeys has already taught me most I need to understand gdscript, so I have long abandoned unity
Ive ported my game to Godot. There's lots of things I prefer about unity, from performance to being able to see my whole scene during run time.
But I can live with the annoyances in return to knowing what price im paying with no future surprises (0)
They just catch a break can they
The fallout is not done though, there's still more to come, and the most important one gonna be the number of install of Unity 6 when it'll be released. That's gonna be a very big indicator of how they shot themselves in the foot. More drama incoming I guess! lol
I doubt it will be high unless they add "AI, generate me a game" button.
I was about to start a side project in Unity when the Runtime nonsense happened. Was a no brainer to choose Godot instead.
Why would anyone (especially Unity) hire Riccitiello in the first place?
And how much did all the grunt workers get when they were sacked? I bet it was nowhere near $800k, ffs!
just waiting until Unity says sorry and undo their stupid runtime fee shit, if that happens, I'll give Unity a chance
Face it, they are gutting the company and following the trend of "everything is a service now". RIP
It’s just normal to have some turnovers in companies that big. And honestly I’m confident about the future of the engine. Global tech corporations are being washed out currently unity isn’t a exception. I think they taking the right direction
JR: burn unity to the ground
JW: restoring unity to the right path
New CEO: JR second form
Looks like the Unity Runtime fee was designed to force developers to run away from the engine.
IronSource still controls the board.
Does any of this change the runtime fee thing? is it still in existence?
The runtime fee thing only exists if it is less than a 2.5% royalty - you'd pay whichever is less. And only on earnings over $1m in previous 12 months. And only after 1 million initial engagements (unit sales). It's a total non-issue now.
It still exists, it still sucks. Don't use unity.
Use whatever you want. Ignore the whiny babies.
Ignore the shills
@@lpnp9477 Waaaa.
Think it's too late for them, maybe they can have new costumers in the future.
Hopefully Unity will not die. So many devs using it. Shutting it down in an instant is such a massive loss for Unity devs.
It has to survive long enough for Godot to get up and running.
It won't. I also don't think that this is hurting Unity as a company too much any more at this point. I just find the amount of money he gets really a bit difficult to take. Can we please stop overpaying managers and CEOs that much while at the same time underpaying eployees?
Though to be fair I don't know how much unity employees actually earn. The amount he got just for leaving is still crazy high.
@@indieguy7297 It might take a while. It has years to catch up, tho I am excited for it too. I still hope Unity doesn't die regardless. Competition is always healthy.
@@indieguy7297 There is no fucking way Godot compete with Unity at anytime ever. I dont understand this comment section, there are so many Unity developers and so many Mobile companies still using Unity because of the features and expertise. Yes everyone hates those but the majority still use Unity today. I'm not defending Unity's stupid decisions as a company, but I also don't believe Godot is a program that can become an industry standard.
@@wmetz1869 I won't argue with your opinion about the current Godot being insufficient, but why can't you allow a possibility that Godot will be a good software, or even industry standard in the future? It seems to be going in the correct direction and it's already a solid base. I'm not saying it will happen, but why do you think it can't? Blender is now widely used in the industry and it was seen the same way several years ago. Godot has a long road before reaching Unreal 3d level but in 2d, competing with Unity, I think it could reach ar least the "it's a matter of taste which one you want to use" level. If they continue in the good direction.
Im getting so tired of this unity drama. Really would like to switch to Godot, but hoping they will expand the 3d capabilities soon in terms of performance. Is it usable yet?
Is this usable enough for you? th-cam.com/video/zLY7aTRl0Ow/w-d-xo.html
What about Unreal, Flax or O3DE?
@@tiredlocke not sure about the latter 2 but idk if I'm ready for c++ lol
Developed mostly by a lone developer in Godot : th-cam.com/video/Atb3yFNazmU/w-d-xo.html
@@emmanuelrenquin2567 and it works awfully on AMD R7 260X, which runs Crysis 3 perfectly. Performance of Godot is awful.
I'm glad they did so much to raise awareness for Godot
Great way to write something off on your taxes.
3:18 - pre-story skip
Nice rhyme in the title.
My proprietary model tells me that Unity is going to continue to lose market share.
There is no version of Unity after 2022 🤷🏽♀️
I don't know man CEOs getting big payouts while people are struggling to pay for healthcare is cool with me :D
I don't really care about the people. What I care about is the fee. It it still there or did the bad actors take it along with them?
Someone purchase Unity and make it open source.
Mr. Beast 🖐️😃✋
Boy, I hope Unity recovers from this sillyness. Because if Unity closes down, that would be a huge loss for gaming, especially indie gaming.😧
unity is done once you destroy the trust of your users you never get it back. that guy got $800k to leave the company and thats a lot of subscriptions to get that money back.
just because they main crooks left they still have the same investors and board of directors.
For me Unity is done, my and my company we selected Unreal!