If true, this is actually hilarious. The man KNOWS he’s being stupid, he just doesn’t care. I’d almost admire him, if he wasn’t screwing over the entire game industry in the process.
I fully support any dev who switches off Unity due to this, even if it means a game delay/restart. I also understand that not every dev can afford to do that or have enough control over their project to do that. Which sucks.
Thanks for saying this. As a dev with a game in EA who has spent all day in tears over this, knowing this is the exact scenario I'm headed for (rebuilding in Unreal). It was nice to hear.
@@glutenfreegames8789 To have the rug pulled out from you like this is brutal. I hope the general gaming audiences can understand how much of a negative impact this has, and I hope they know where to place the blame... With Unity not devs like you.
Stuff like this makes me understand better why some big japanese studios avoid using third party engines and make their own, you can't trust these companies to pull stuff like this or deprecate your software.
I agree, but the Japanese make their own and often exclusive due to Playstation and Switch having their own graphics APIs, and 95% of their gaming market being these two systems.
I never understood why Nintendo has only dipped their toe into third party engines (with Yoshi’s crafted world and Pikmin 4) and primarily stuck with in-house engines UNTIL now.
I honestly have a hard time believing that what they're trying to pull is even legal to begin with, hopefully the amount of backlash this will get will overturn their idiotic decisions.
Can't be legal. They want to retroactively apply this to deals they made with gaming companies. That is highly illegal. I don't see how they through this would be a good thing.
@@walktxrn but how? You can't alter a deal you've made after the fact and then start demanding more money for individual game downloads. You can't alter a deal post signing in almost every case so how is this any different?
@@joshbracken5450Unity licenses are subscription based, it is the same as Netflix or Gamepass raising prices, devs are free to cancel their subscription. It is insanely scummy, and I can’t imagine this will end up taking effect, but it is in no way illegal.
If this goes through, I imagine there will eventually be install limits on Unity games so that devs don't go bankrupt, which will trickle down to players getting extremely pissed. There is no universe where this makes sense. This will make .exe cracked versions of these games better for devs. Because they don't need an "install" to run.
the universe it makes sense in is the one where Unity execs see their primary customers as F2P Mobile Game skinnerboxes that they can extract *juuuuust* enough from to keep their whale-hunting business model viable. No other business model is even remotely compatible with this sort of setup. That's what video games are to the people who made this decision
This is really going to hurt mobile developers. The default way of fixing an error in a mobile game is to uninstall and reinstall it. If someone is having an issue with say, the game's folder on an iPhone which they cannot access, the developers shouldn't be penalized for that.
@@jeffmccloud905 the 12 months thing is about the games that respect the requirements in the LAST 12 months. You don't have a timer and then if you pass 200k revenue this won't apply to you
@@jeffmccloud905 f2p games rely on having a high install base to offset the fact that individual people dont pay much. The fees they have to pay for that install base are going to be extremely disproportionate compared to the amount of revenue they actually get. People wouldnt be anywhere near this mad if Unity just did the reasonable thing and took a small cut of the revenue like other engines, the issue is that installs are completely fucking stupid metric to charge devs by because it says nothing about what their actual income is and it's extremely easy to exploit
It might not harm big companies, but it will likely cause them to pull games from stores sooner too. Bad all around. Greedy. Bad for indie devs, bad for players, bad for AAA devs. Only good for Unity. I hope this gets reversed, because if it doesn't I forsee them becoming much less popular as an engine.
"Much less popular"? It'll outright *kill* them, because this means there's literally no incentive to use it instead of learning an alternative that doesn't pull this bs.
It also discourages them from including their games in humble bundles, or placing them on services like Gamepass. And it inherently discourages demos and trials because devs still need to pay fees.
“Only good for Unity” Is it even good for Unity? Indie devs, who are probably the ones most likely to use Unity, will absolute flee from Unity over the next few years if this sticks around. This seems pretty self-destructive, imo.
funny enough, doing the math for a company as large as Hoyoverse, this is actually several times cheaper than the revenue share they'd pay if they were on Unreal Engine. It mainly affects small businesses.
Not even the developers themselves can escape their own microtransactions. Incredibly scummy to charge developers on something they literally cannot control. Developers and publishers will direct to opt out of Unity for all new projects, and I i wouldn't be surprised if a new engine that's Unity-like comes to surface.
I've been working tirelessly on my game for 3 years now and I feel like this is yet another cruel financial roadblock that is totally unnecessary. RIP to us indie devs out there for trying to make fun games.
@@astrahcat1212 it's per install, people who uninstall and re-install a lot (there are many of them) can tank the profits of even a high cost game, never mind an indie game.
There's a recurring trend I've noticed where one positive thing after another always gets ruined by corporate greed. My biggest fear here is that this "install fee" will somehow get passed onto the consumers.
Riccitiello (the Unity CEO) has expressed strongly how he wants developers to lean more into monetization strategies for their games, going as far as calling developers who don't use predatory monetization practices as "fucking idiots" in an interview.
@@jmannersyeah, cuz he's a greedy sack of sh**. This isn't a recurring trend. Look what DnD tried to do earlier this year or how microtransactions have become flagrantly predatory at the expense of player experience over the past 15 years. This is just another normal day in corporate America where the jackals run the show and investors are insatiably greedy.
I feel like if this goes into effect and a smaller development team cannot switch from Unity, a couple bad things can happen: 1: No free demos as they are not free in terms of work and money. 2: Price increases on those games to try and offset the $0.20 install fee. This would probably turn more gamers away. For example, a once $10 game might have to be increased to $20 to effectively pay for 50 potential installs. (more like 49 if on one device or 48 if it’s a Steam Deck game) Smaller devs are massively harmed by this change, and I’m hoping Unity changes either the method they get this money or get rid of it all together. I want more of these creative games! Shame Unity is morally blind.
Smaller devs are NOT making enough money for this to effect them. It only kicks in after you're making 200k annually on your games, and only while you're making that much off of them.
@@PixelDough They are still getting screwed over unfortunately. Unity is also taking away the payment tier that most indie developers use ($40 a year), only allowing a free splash screen version or one where you need to pay $2000+ a year instead. That prices tons of devs entirely out of the engine, unless they are okay with a very unprofessional splash screen.
@@Haxx1337That's irrelevant because the fee is retroactive. Who's to say Unity will not decide those pre profit copies people downloaded should be considered actual copies and charge you for that?
This is how you tell devs to not use their engine and move to something else. I'm a college student in Game Design, if Unity doesn't change this by the time I graduate, I'm moving over to Unreal
I wanted to switch to Godot when the CEO called us f'ing idiots, but the time cost for starting over after years working in Unity kept me from actually doing it. This is the kind of crap that I saw coming, and gives me a real incentive to jump ship.
Some info that wasn't shared: The CEO sold 2000 shares on November 6th (6 days of this). If he doesn't get looked into for insider trading, it will be extremely bad.
Oh god, imagine how scummy that would actually be. Sell stocks, announce this, buy them back for cheaper, then possibly "backpedal because of community feedback".
Insiders sell stock all the time. 2000 shares isn't that much compared to what he likely has. He's sold wayyyy more over the past year which is far more concerning than the 2000 sold here.
"On September 6, 2023, John Riccitiello, President and CEO of Unity Software Inc (NYSE:U), sold 2,000 shares of the company. This move is part of a larger trend for the insider, who over the past year has sold a total of 50,610 shares and purchased none." from yahoo
If you're a "Unity" developer this is a good opportunity to start expanding your skills and exploring other tools. Yes, it's difficult learning a new tool, but the most difficult parts of game development are not learning the tool and will transfer to any tool you use. Learning a new tool will also help you by exposing you to other ways of doing things, which will make you a better developer even if you end up going back to Unity.
My immediate thought is what will happen to fan game devs who aren't really supposed to make money off them. I know at least one Sonic fan game uses Unity. Namely Sonic Utopia but I know there are others that are currently more active. It especially bothers me since I have older, weaker hardware and I've found better compatibility with Unity games.
Unfortunately, Sonic Utopia's creator seems to be a bigot who rants against trans people and drew stuff like a really offensive Chinese stereotype and yelling the hard R/N word because freedom or some crazy right wing baloney. It's a pity he is such a piece of work.
Apart from the stupidity of a per install fee, the scary thing is they are trying to apply it retroactively. You paid for unity subscription, accepting certain conditions, you worked on your game and released it. Now they want to change these conditions and have you to pay more than what agreed upon. It's scary and it destroy what little of reputation was left of them.
I use Unity for my game and have been in development for the last three years and I am concerned that even porting it to another engine could be difficult and costly in the future.
I've been making pixel art for a game the last two months or so and I was thinking of using Unity after messing around with it. I just stumbled across this video and you just helped me dodge a bullet. Thanks 👍
I’m going into my final year at university for games development and literally every plan I’ve made for my final project is Unity related so this is incredibly disheartening, and gives me great concern for what I’m gonna do for my future, as I genuinely don’t know whether I should move over to unreal or not, as I don’t believe my unreal skills are up to snuff enough to make anything that good.
@matthewmorris8685 Could you explain specifically how it is illegal? I've gotten so many mixed signals, from panicked people (like me) saying it shouldn't be legal, and "realist'-sounding people just sighing and saying "Nope, nothing can be done about this"
@@GardenVarietea It's illegal because they are charging extra money from developers who have already shipped their games using a contract that did not stipulate that new charge. This means that they are modifying a pre-arranged and completed contract. it'd be like me selling you a car for $1000, then you buy the car for $1000, and then three years later i modify the contract to be $10,000 for that car that you had already bought for $1000. Obviously if i tried to charge you the extra $9000 after all that time it'd be illegal, and you would take me to court for trying to steal $9000 that you never agreed to pay for that product. This is essentially what unity is doing to these developers, by trying to force them to pay money for reasons that weren't stated on the contract, without notice, because the game is already out there in the market and the devs cannot stop people from installing the game and incurring that charge. Even if they removed the game from every store they will still be charged when people who already bought the game re-installed it. Sorry for the long reply, i wanted to go fully in-depth on this topic.
As someone who started game dev with unity and has a decent amount of experience with it, I feel like the engine itself is pretty good. The idea that I would have to leave it and use something else because of business stuff like this is sad, and I hope they don’t go through with it
To help with the popularity risk argument, David Szymanski famously made Dusk and Iron Lung, and all his projects run on Unity. Iron Lung is about exploring a blood ocean in a ramshackle submarine. Game already got a sales boost from streamers like Jerma playing it, youtubers like Pyrocynical dissecting the game and lore and Markiplier making a movie with the help of David himself. That all gave it already a pretty nice boost in popularity, but when the Oceangate sub disaster happened sales SKYROCKETED. Now you might be thinking. How much was he charging for the game? 20? 30? No, 5. Just 5 bucks. Doing the math, this gives David a low margin for each reinstall of the game and this is assuming every sale was at full price.
Good to see Steve back in front of the camera! This is upsetting. I understand that unity needs money to function but this feels incredibly invasive and unnecessary. Hope they roll this back and developers keep rallying against this type of corporate behavior.
They could literally just ask for 3% revenue in royalties if you make enough money and still be cheaper than their biggest competitor, Unreal. This charges their biggest clients like Hoyoverse only 1% split, but their smallest customers with 2$ games will pay 80%, more than they get from the game after they pay Steam or Apple their cut.
I've been working on something that was supposed to hopefully be my ticket out. The plan was to build a demo and use some of the dough from it to escape to the city. But if use of the Unity engine would drain what little cash I have rather than increase it...
I'm learning on Godot. Not that I think I'd ever have to worry about licenses, auditing, and legal crap, but not EVER having to worry about licenses, auditing, and legal crap seems pretty nice.
I could see myself switching to Godot from Unreal one day if Godot had better VR tools development options. Godot also still needs to get Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo support but I have high hopes for Godots future.
So basically, what I'm hearing is that Unity's owners want to commit corporate suicide. Because that's exactly what this is; no one, not any indie developer, no AAA developer, not even Hoyoverse, will pay this new fee, so everyone will have to migrate their games and assets to another middleware like Unreal, effectively cutting Unity's reach and killing it slowly. There is no possible way this can end well for anyone.
Can't say I'm too sad about developers ditching Unity at last, the engine was always kinda crummy tech-wise (claims to be scalable but it's unstable on low-end devices anyways) and other engines like Godot which is open-source, and even Unreal have lowered the barrier of entry tremendously in recent years for both small-sized to big-sized developers
It's been happening so frequently it has to be more than a coincidence. I wonder if inflation is putting greater pressure on companies to make these stupid decisions to ensure they keep netting a profit for their shareholders.
If you are looking to make a 2d game, I strongly recommend Godot. It is a little trickier to learn for beginners, but you get a lightweight engine with plenty power, actually maintained tools, great documentation, etc. I haven't looked back since I made the change.
I already didn't love unity but I thought it was the only free 3d engine for individuals, but this led to me finding out that unreal is free now and godot has a 3d engine, so I'll probably be switching to godot
@@gxguy2906epic may be grubby but they ain't dumb. Also the engine is source accessible, you could easily strip out anything that phones home before cooking. Unity is closed source. Getting away with this kind of shit is way easier for them.
this is so wild it's like Adobe asking a fee to architects because a building they designed is going to generate X amount of money, or charging TH-camrs when a video hits a specific amount of view. this model does not make any sense this is wild and i really hope this huge backlash makes them roll back
I uninstall and reinstall games a dozen plus times over the years easily so I can't imagine how big of a financial risk this could create for something you can't control.
Fun part is, even if they do go back on and abandon this... It's still going to destroy, or at least massively harm, Unity itself. Developers won't be willing to trust Unity anymore -- it's tried to pull this once, what's to stop it from pulling it again, time to get out while the getting's good. Unity definitely *does* need to walk this back, if only to avoid hurting devs who are at the point where they CAN'T switch to another platform. But even if they do, their popularity and usage in the industry is going to take a major hit from this. And then you factor in developers who work for Unity, who I've heard tried their best to stop this and were completely ignored by management... they're probably going to try and get out too. Wouldn't be at all surprised if this marks the beginning of the death of Unity, as a product and a company. Good luck and my most fervent prayers to any devs or Unity employees caught in the middle of this nightmarish situation.
Watch this reintroduce maximum installation count DRM. Installed it three times? Time to pay full price to buy another copy! Since developers are being charged for installations, they'll likely try and find ways to get around it. Learning a completely different engine takes a lot of time and resources which some aren't even going to bother.
Another thing I can see harming developers even harder is piracy. In the past, piracy harms devs for not paying them. Now piracy harms devs by causing them even more charges from Unity.
@@karamelapple8007 It will be an issue for Unity devs here because every time someone install a pirated version, the dev are getting charged more by Unity on top of not getting paid for those versions in the first place.
It really seems the industry, and it's not just Unity. Will do everything it can to undermine and cutout smaller developers. This policy won't affect AAA companies. SEGA, Nintendo, Microsoft, EA, Blizzard. They can eat the costs. They have millions to just throw away. Smaller developers, they are the ones that will be affected by this the most.
Even if they role it back three damage is done. You can never be sure they won't do it again so people will look to gradually shift to other engines, although this will take time and effort.
Forget about accidental harm. This system is Ripe for people to set up some kind of automated system, that simply re-downloads and installs a game over and over again. and acting as a legal financial attack directed at an indie developers. or heck, even bigger games released on Unity.
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. And it's bound to be a buggy-as-shit system when not even Steam has concrete data on install numbers. Given that this is backed by an ex-CEO at EA, i imagine this system is going to have an IQ at the bottom of your average thermometer, it might just register started/incomplete installs, or other, random, unrelated data. Lots of room for false positives.
Not to even mention what happens if they games are on mass sale on something like humble bundle. They are fully responsible for those sales and thus DOWNLOADS too.
relevent note, unity has confirmed that previous sales before 2024 will count to your free limit. so if you have 190k installs in 2023, in 2024 you get 10k before you start getting charged.
Also, as a player, I'll feel bad about installing a game in several computers (including my Steam Deck), because I know I'd be making life harder for the developers. And how can I, in good conscience, recommend masterpieces like Outer Wilds or Hollow Knight to my friends? This is an awful policy that has to be reversed immediately.
The only thing we have going for this being overturned before it takes effect are some legal protections that are in place for situations like this. They also have been dodgy in answering HOW they're going to be able to track installs because that very well could be the thing that makes it illegal. It's like for every good thing that comes to Unity we get hit with one MAJORLY bad thing, its a very monkey's paw situation. I've been eyeing switching back to Unity for development with my team because I've really grown to dislike Unreal the more we work in it but we may just have to look at Godot instead
@@dele1763 It's too resource heavy even with very basic scenes which makes it difficult for some members on my team to work on from their systems. But the main thing I don't like about it is honestly the blueprints system. We always keep running into walls when trying to implement things that SHOULD be relatively simple but turns into a nightmare and requires us to have to find some convoluted workaround. Working via regular C# scripts in Unity is a lot easier and gives me much more control since you have to manually script it. Like I get that we could do C++ in Unreal but there's also not as many resources out there as there are for Unity. Lastly is source control. Unity having uilt in free source control for a few seats and very little headache to setup is a god-send. I cannot believe that Unreal with all of their purchases and Mega Grants haven't done anything for making it easier to work with teams.
@@dele1763Maybe laziness ( Time unemployed) to learn something new. On the other hand, maybe the European Union (GDPR) will save us from this cataclysm.
To all Silksong fans: It was nice to be on this journey with you for looking forward to what looked like yet another beautiful metroidvania. Hopefully by the time I post this, team cherry will clarify something and switch engines or maybe unity will go back on their decision. But for now…I’m not so sure. It was great going on this beautiful journey with all of you and I wish every single one of you, a wonderful day. Sincerely, whu
As vague as you have pointed tracking installs sounds, there is no way this is considered an option for Unity. Larger developers will move away from the platform as you mentioned and it will die. Whomever needs to change this decision for the sake of the company, needs to do so before they find themselves out of business or a costly legal battle they will more than likely lose. The ONLY way I see this actually working is if the installation is somehow uniquely tracked and charged only once, but that brings even bigger privacy issues to legal precedent.
All thats needed to be done is to forge "new installation" message for the server. And then depends how its implemented, clearing single registry key/file and running file integrity check might already count as "new installation". Heck, even if you were to introduce hardware signature, which is already sus, you can set up virtual machines, how many you like and each will be "new" installation if you want to "install bomb" someone. Which is going to be much more effective than review bombing (instead scaring away potential new customers, you WILL inflict financial loss) AND easier to implement on mass scale for little bit of business takeover.
As a Unity Dev, Im just very dissapointed and disturbed with this action. Even if they roll it back, i dont trust that they wont pull something like this again. Im in the fortunate position of having a project in early development that I am planning to transfer over to Unreal in the coming days. I hope Unity reverses this, and am saddened that such a good engine has to be ruined by such a bad leadership.
I hear you. I am in the same position. I have been an Unity dev since the start of my game dev journey, and all my games are built in it. This announcement caught me completely by surprise. Thankfully my new project is very early in development so I am rebuilding it in Unreal, but will still cost months of lost time to learn a new engine and rebuild. Still... Unity as a company has completely lost my trust. Good luck to you though.
As a long-time unity dev, this unity per-install fiasco finally made me start familiarizing myself with Godot, which has apparently gotten a lot beefier in the past year. after seeing how Blender, being free and open source, went from garbage to galaxy tier animation and modeling software, I believe in open source and think it's smart to bet on a FOSS game engine like Godot, which can only improve over time, as opposed to some corporate products, which can slowly degrade (like Unity.)
This is a bad Idea and will probably land them in court. Since as they are applying this to all games. Past and present. Many developers would on the off chance their old games had a resurgence. pay in a contract they never agreed to. Even if the vast majority of indie devs won't ever qualify for the fee. This is a BAD Idea and can't be allowed to gain ground.
Honestly, no matter how I look at it, this is a bad change for all parties involved, including Unity themselves. What this change will bring about is people who previously used Unity abandoning it due to the cost. Free to download games and cheaper games will become unviable if said games were made using Unity and had any degree of popularity. Overall, I wouldn't be surprised if Unity died as a platform for developing smaller indie games due to the change. (Which actually kills the flow of up and coming developers using the platform, which would kill the platform itself given enough time. So yeah, Unity is in serious trouble if this goes ahead.)
If the Pokemon BW remakes are being made on the same Unity engine as BDSP, I imagine The Pokemon Company would rather sue them than have to pay royalty fees for every copy sold/installed 😂
I doubt it will be implemented in the worst version of how it looks like now. The Unity would fail. But even if they will fix all the issues, they will make it clearly per sale or revenue, it just shows once again, that high management is detached from reality, don't care about devs or players, but just about stonks. Many devs will start shifting to Unreal instead, even if they are more expensive (5% of revenue above $1M) just because Unreal is stable and doesn't pull stunts like this. With Unity, you just don't know.
Honestly at first I just assumed this was for game that were being purchased. Which in the grand scheme of things is still annoying, but likely more than manageable. Correct me if I’m wrong, but did Unity not have a thing already in place of Developer payments? But *EVERY* install or download? I’m sorry, but that’s just Mr. Krabs walking fee from that episode of SpongeBob. Like if feels like the higher ups from Unity have seen that Sonic 06 Remake and for whatever reason are upset they aren’t making money off it.
If Unity keep this model, then they should fix it to only apply to new games & change the pricing for mobile. and while I hate price changes, many people misunderstood & misreported this pricing change, so here is some info: compared to Unreal 5%, this is a very small fee for steam games, except for some mobile games & some edge cases where you're making less than 2 cents per install. because for any game making above 200k per year, you basically need to buy the pro license ( which was always the case ) on the pro license, the fees would only apply when you make over 1 million dollars per year the fee would effectively be 2 or 3 cents not 20 cents ( once you get to the extra 500k & then 1 million download thresholds ) most people are reporting the fee of the free plan, which if you're making above 200k per year, then you have to buy the pro plan for pricing to make sense as the case always was
That's all good and nice for sure, but the main problem is around how they go about installs, first on the user side the fact they just flat out said they will and all ready do have something built in to check installations can be considered spyware only hanging on the "trust me bro im not taking any other info". Hell if pushed enough it might make unity games not playable in EU as they at the very least require some sort of opt out. But that aside the same "trust me bro" is also pointed at the developers, they wont disclose how exactly they count them so what stops them from counting updates, free copies or from countries that deny the data exchange, pirated games or just making them the f up, after all they are incentivized to do so and we have no way to check. There is just such a big window to abuse w zero transparency and clear answer to possible problems. Have a nice day!
>Buy a unity game $20 >The install fee for them is $0,20 >Install and reinstall the game 100+ times >congratulation, you made a company lose money for selling a game
What will actually happen is every dev (literally all of them) stops using Unity altogether and many many existing Unity games get delisted from every store front. So Unity isn't even going to be making that much from this plan anyway.
Very well explained, Steve, I completely agree (also it's great to see one of your videos again, I missed it)! The only way this makes sense is greed, nothing but! I hope the backlash is immense and they back track on this. Otherwise, and depending on the aftermath, maybe other idiots will join in on this nonsense...
I hope that with the outcry against this bs practice that Unity rolls back their awful decision. Thanks for the informative video Steve, its appreciated. However, you mentioned in the six minute mark that Hollow Knight: Silksong is DLC to the original game. In fact, Silksong is a sequel to Hollow Knight. It was originally going to be DLC, but the game got so big, that Team Cherry went the full mile and turned Silksong into its own game. Thanks again for the content, I look forward to seeing more videos from you!
By doing this it allows for people to have the "Sense of pride and accomplishment" by ether being rich and affording Unity or being able to make their own engine.
As this 200,000 threshold is more than likely account based, it could also affect game preservations as developers would actually have an incentive to de-list older (usually cheaper) games from being accessible to buy-download-install.
Man I’ve been using unity for about a year now and I’m really mad that there doing this because if a lot of people download my game I won’t be able to afford all of it I’m honestly might switch to unreal engine but unity is REALLY FUN so idk what I’m gunna do
The current CEO of Unity, was the CEO of EA at the time they got voted worst company in America two years in a row (2012, 2013).
😂
I guess he’s running unity the same way he ran EA: like the fxxking titanic
Well that explains a lot.
That's rough
Yeah, that explains it.
Fun fact! The CEO sold an enormous amount of shares days before this announcement - totally coincidental, I'm sure!
If true, this is actually hilarious. The man KNOWS he’s being stupid, he just doesn’t care. I’d almost admire him, if he wasn’t screwing over the entire game industry in the process.
Remember fellas!
Insider trading is illegal!
Unless you're above the law like a politician or Multi-millionaire!
That is litterally illegal.
Insider trading?
So insider trading then, remind me again how any of this allowed
I fully support any dev who switches off Unity due to this, even if it means a game delay/restart.
I also understand that not every dev can afford to do that or have enough control over their project to do that. Which sucks.
Hello Godot here ;)
Thanks for saying this. As a dev with a game in EA who has spent all day in tears over this, knowing this is the exact scenario I'm headed for (rebuilding in Unreal). It was nice to hear.
@@glutenfreegames8789 To have the rug pulled out from you like this is brutal. I hope the general gaming audiences can understand how much of a negative impact this has, and I hope they know where to place the blame... With Unity not devs like you.
If they can't change engines, they'll probably need to add 5, prefably 10$ to the game price to have a safety net against Unity.
My prices just rose by 20 cents 😢
Stuff like this makes me understand better why some big japanese studios avoid using third party engines and make their own, you can't trust these companies to pull stuff like this or deprecate your software.
I agree, but the Japanese make their own and often exclusive due to Playstation and Switch having their own graphics APIs, and 95% of their gaming market being these two systems.
I never understood why Nintendo has only dipped their toe into third party engines (with Yoshi’s crafted world and Pikmin 4) and primarily stuck with in-house engines UNTIL now.
I honestly have a hard time believing that what they're trying to pull is even legal to begin with, hopefully the amount of backlash this will get will overturn their idiotic decisions.
Can't be legal. They want to retroactively apply this to deals they made with gaming companies. That is highly illegal. I don't see how they through this would be a good thing.
Ah, EA is involved, even tangentially. That explains a lot.
this is certainly legal. Anyone thinking otherwise doesn't understand legal basics. Is it STUPID yes, but also legal.
@@walktxrn but how? You can't alter a deal you've made after the fact and then start demanding more money for individual game downloads.
You can't alter a deal post signing in almost every case so how is this any different?
@@joshbracken5450Unity licenses are subscription based, it is the same as Netflix or Gamepass raising prices, devs are free to cancel their subscription. It is insanely scummy, and I can’t imagine this will end up taking effect, but it is in no way illegal.
If this goes through, I imagine there will eventually be install limits on Unity games so that devs don't go bankrupt, which will trickle down to players getting extremely pissed.
There is no universe where this makes sense.
This will make .exe cracked versions of these games better for devs. Because they don't need an "install" to run.
After 200k downloads, I'll just disable downloads and release my own cracked version of my game. Cuz fuck Riccitiello
@@jmanners You could actually pre-crack your own game, and release it as a physical release in that scenario.
the universe it makes sense in is the one where Unity execs see their primary customers as F2P Mobile Game skinnerboxes that they can extract *juuuuust* enough from to keep their whale-hunting business model viable. No other business model is even remotely compatible with this sort of setup. That's what video games are to the people who made this decision
@@Exarian Thats Dark : )
basically securom again.
This is really going to hurt mobile developers. The default way of fixing an error in a mobile game is to uninstall and reinstall it. If someone is having an issue with say, the game's folder on an iPhone which they cannot access, the developers shouldn't be penalized for that.
Lol fuck mobile games!
Bunch of cash lootbox gacha garbage.
@LetsPlayNintendoITAthat's still a download
@@edowardo1353and it's not even per download but per install
@@jeffmccloud905 the 12 months thing is about the games that respect the requirements in the LAST 12 months. You don't have a timer and then if you pass 200k revenue this won't apply to you
@@jeffmccloud905 f2p games rely on having a high install base to offset the fact that individual people dont pay much. The fees they have to pay for that install base are going to be extremely disproportionate compared to the amount of revenue they actually get. People wouldnt be anywhere near this mad if Unity just did the reasonable thing and took a small cut of the revenue like other engines, the issue is that installs are completely fucking stupid metric to charge devs by because it says nothing about what their actual income is and it's extremely easy to exploit
It might not harm big companies, but it will likely cause them to pull games from stores sooner too. Bad all around. Greedy. Bad for indie devs, bad for players, bad for AAA devs. Only good for Unity. I hope this gets reversed, because if it doesn't I forsee them becoming much less popular as an engine.
"Much less popular"? It'll outright *kill* them, because this means there's literally no incentive to use it instead of learning an alternative that doesn't pull this bs.
It also discourages them from including their games in humble bundles, or placing them on services like Gamepass.
And it inherently discourages demos and trials because devs still need to pay fees.
“Only good for Unity”
Is it even good for Unity? Indie devs, who are probably the ones most likely to use Unity, will absolute flee from Unity over the next few years if this sticks around. This seems pretty self-destructive, imo.
funny enough, doing the math for a company as large as Hoyoverse, this is actually several times cheaper than the revenue share they'd pay if they were on Unreal Engine.
It mainly affects small businesses.
Unity trying to nit destroy itself as company (impossible) next thing they would want is your ID and credit card number info
Not even the developers themselves can escape their own microtransactions. Incredibly scummy to charge developers on something they literally cannot control. Developers and publishers will direct to opt out of Unity for all new projects, and I i wouldn't be surprised if a new engine that's Unity-like comes to surface.
Godot is close, and open source.
It's insane that they charge by install/download. And what's even crazier is that DEMOS COUNT TOO. Unity is absolutely mad
I've been working tirelessly on my game for 3 years now and I feel like this is yet another cruel financial roadblock that is totally unnecessary. RIP to us indie devs out there for trying to make fun games.
Raise the price 20 cents I guess
@@astrahcat1212 it's per install, people who uninstall and re-install a lot (there are many of them) can tank the profits of even a high cost game, never mind an indie game.
Godot is free, Godot is fos
I have a game that is to release next year and is projected to hit this, and we are absolutely livid over #Unitys use of this.
You should ask for crowdfunding to switch to Unreal or another engine.
I’m sure you’d get support for it.
There's a recurring trend I've noticed where one positive thing after another always gets ruined by corporate greed.
My biggest fear here is that this "install fee" will somehow get passed onto the consumers.
Riccitiello (the Unity CEO) has expressed strongly how he wants developers to lean more into monetization strategies for their games, going as far as calling developers who don't use predatory monetization practices as "fucking idiots" in an interview.
@@jmannersyeah, cuz he's a greedy sack of sh**.
This isn't a recurring trend. Look what DnD tried to do earlier this year or how microtransactions have become flagrantly predatory at the expense of player experience over the past 15 years. This is just another normal day in corporate America where the jackals run the show and investors are insatiably greedy.
More than likely it just means a lot of free/cheap games are going to disappear now as developers are terrified of *losing* money on their games
Well if you had to pay extra to play Unity games no one would touch them with a ten foot pole. So let's hope they're not that stupid, I guess.
I feel like if this goes into effect and a smaller development team cannot switch from Unity, a couple bad things can happen:
1: No free demos as they are not free in terms of work and money.
2: Price increases on those games to try and offset the $0.20 install fee. This would probably turn more gamers away. For example, a once $10 game might have to be increased to $20 to effectively pay for 50 potential installs. (more like 49 if on one device or 48 if it’s a Steam Deck game)
Smaller devs are massively harmed by this change, and I’m hoping Unity changes either the method they get this money or get rid of it all together. I want more of these creative games! Shame Unity is morally blind.
Yea, it's not good....
Smaller devs are NOT making enough money for this to effect them. It only kicks in after you're making 200k annually on your games, and only while you're making that much off of them.
@@PixelDough They are still getting screwed over unfortunately. Unity is also taking away the payment tier that most indie developers use ($40 a year), only allowing a free splash screen version or one where you need to pay $2000+ a year instead. That prices tons of devs entirely out of the engine, unless they are okay with a very unprofessional splash screen.
imagine giving away 200k copies of a game to a charity event and getting charged for it by Unity.
@@Haxx1337That's irrelevant because the fee is retroactive. Who's to say Unity will not decide those pre profit copies people downloaded should be considered actual copies and charge you for that?
This is how you tell devs to not use their engine and move to something else. I'm a college student in Game Design, if Unity doesn't change this by the time I graduate, I'm moving over to Unreal
Or godot
As someone who trusted unity and now depends on them trust me just learn fucking unreal
It sucks because, personally,I don't really like the look and feel for the games I develop.
you should start building your skills in other engines, in parallel at least, and not wait to the last minute
Use Godot, cuz unreal can F you too. Never trust CorpoRAT. Learn in pararel.
As a person learning game development using Unity I will be switching to learning Unreal Engine.
If I knew this was gonna happen I would of learnt unreal back in 2009
or godot, regret for only learning unity on 2023
Godot is fos
I wanted to switch to Godot when the CEO called us f'ing idiots, but the time cost for starting over after years working in Unity kept me from actually doing it. This is the kind of crap that I saw coming, and gives me a real incentive to jump ship.
Godot is rather pretty easy to learn, especially when you already have experience in Unity.
It's the lesser spotted Steve! Hope all is going well for you after what sounds like a turbulent time.
Not a pleasant situation by any means, but you know what IS pleasant? Seeing Steve in a video! Great to see you man!
Some info that wasn't shared: The CEO sold 2000 shares on November 6th (6 days of this). If he doesn't get looked into for insider trading, it will be extremely bad.
You mean September 6th? But yea, that sounds illegal.
Oh god, imagine how scummy that would actually be. Sell stocks, announce this, buy them back for cheaper, then possibly "backpedal because of community feedback".
@@LillLizzertI think that’s exactly what’s gonna happen.
Pure scum
Insiders sell stock all the time. 2000 shares isn't that much compared to what he likely has. He's sold wayyyy more over the past year which is far more concerning than the 2000 sold here.
"On September 6, 2023, John Riccitiello, President and CEO of Unity Software Inc (NYSE:U), sold 2,000 shares of the company. This move is part of a larger trend for the insider, who over the past year has sold a total of 50,610 shares and purchased none." from yahoo
Hold on, isn't that an issue? Many students use Unity to develop projects for their school projects. This affects them too. No?
No because this only affects developers who have made over a million dollars using Unity projects (Not trying to defend Unity)
@@jude4581 Thanks for the clarification
No since it's very unlikely that their budget will be more than $200000 or they would need to install over 2000000 computers
@@jude4581its not 1M is 200k
If you're a "Unity" developer this is a good opportunity to start expanding your skills and exploring other tools. Yes, it's difficult learning a new tool, but the most difficult parts of game development are not learning the tool and will transfer to any tool you use. Learning a new tool will also help you by exposing you to other ways of doing things, which will make you a better developer even if you end up going back to Unity.
Minor correction, but Silksong is a full game. It was going to originally be dlc, but was switched to being a full game instead.
Very, very appreciative of videos like this one to gain a broader understanding of the industry as a whole.
Full support to developers
My immediate thought is what will happen to fan game devs who aren't really supposed to make money off them. I know at least one Sonic fan game uses Unity. Namely Sonic Utopia but I know there are others that are currently more active. It especially bothers me since I have older, weaker hardware and I've found better compatibility with Unity games.
Nothing because this only applies to games that hit a certain revenue threshold (for now)
Sonic P-06 also a Unity game.
@@JakeLT64free demos also count apparently
Unfortunately, Sonic Utopia's creator seems to be a bigot who rants against trans people and drew stuff like a really offensive Chinese stereotype and yelling the hard R/N word because freedom or some crazy right wing baloney. It's a pity he is such a piece of work.
Damn it! If this kills Sonic P-06 I hope Sega pick it up as an official remake.@@bluestar5812
Apart from the stupidity of a per install fee, the scary thing is they are trying to apply it retroactively. You paid for unity subscription, accepting certain conditions, you worked on your game and released it. Now they want to change these conditions and have you to pay more than what agreed upon. It's scary and it destroy what little of reputation was left of them.
I use Unity for my game and have been in development for the last three years and I am concerned that even porting it to another engine could be difficult and costly in the future.
This will have a ripple effect though. Companies might think twice about not creating an in house engine to avoid problems like this in the future.
I've been making pixel art for a game the last two months or so and I was thinking of using Unity after messing around with it. I just stumbled across this video and you just helped me dodge a bullet.
Thanks 👍
Literally same here, started learning unity yesterday and now I’m not sure 🤔
@@Gecko_buildsif you're just 1 day from starting, just change engine, no reason to risk
@@edowardo1353fair point, better to be safe 🫡
I find Godot better for pure 2D games anyways
Any experience with 3D in godot?
I’m going into my final year at university for games development and literally every plan I’ve made for my final project is Unity related so this is incredibly disheartening, and gives me great concern for what I’m gonna do for my future, as I genuinely don’t know whether I should move over to unreal or not, as I don’t believe my unreal skills are up to snuff enough to make anything that good.
3d game = YES!
2d game = no (godot, Game Maker)
The scary thing is the fact that this is even legal.
it's not. they will likely have many lawsuits if they go through with this.
Unity will be filing for bankruptcy next year.
@matthewmorris8685 Could you explain specifically how it is illegal? I've gotten so many mixed signals, from panicked people (like me) saying it shouldn't be legal, and "realist'-sounding people just sighing and saying "Nope, nothing can be done about this"
@@GardenVarietea It's illegal because they are charging extra money from developers who have already shipped their games using a contract that did not stipulate that new charge.
This means that they are modifying a pre-arranged and completed contract. it'd be like me selling you a car for $1000, then you buy the car for $1000, and then three years later i modify the contract to be $10,000 for that car that you had already bought for $1000.
Obviously if i tried to charge you the extra $9000 after all that time it'd be illegal, and you would take me to court for trying to steal $9000 that you never agreed to pay for that product.
This is essentially what unity is doing to these developers, by trying to force them to pay money for reasons that weren't stated on the contract, without notice, because the game is already out there in the market and the devs cannot stop people from installing the game and incurring that charge.
Even if they removed the game from every store they will still be charged when people who already bought the game re-installed it.
Sorry for the long reply, i wanted to go fully in-depth on this topic.
As someone who started game dev with unity and has a decent amount of experience with it, I feel like the engine itself is pretty good. The idea that I would have to leave it and use something else because of business stuff like this is sad, and I hope they don’t go through with it
To help with the popularity risk argument, David Szymanski famously made Dusk and Iron Lung, and all his projects run on Unity. Iron Lung is about exploring a blood ocean in a ramshackle submarine. Game already got a sales boost from streamers like Jerma playing it, youtubers like Pyrocynical dissecting the game and lore and Markiplier making a movie with the help of David himself. That all gave it already a pretty nice boost in popularity, but when the Oceangate sub disaster happened sales SKYROCKETED.
Now you might be thinking. How much was he charging for the game? 20? 30? No, 5. Just 5 bucks.
Doing the math, this gives David a low margin for each reinstall of the game and this is assuming every sale was at full price.
Good to see Steve back in front of the camera! This is upsetting. I understand that unity needs money to function but this feels incredibly invasive and unnecessary. Hope they roll this back and developers keep rallying against this type of corporate behavior.
They could literally just ask for 3% revenue in royalties if you make enough money and still be cheaper than their biggest competitor, Unreal.
This charges their biggest clients like Hoyoverse only 1% split, but their smallest customers with 2$ games will pay 80%, more than they get from the game after they pay Steam or Apple their cut.
This would be better, Unreal is doing that too.
Holy shit, that’s the equivalent of having to pay money for every single image you save. Even if it’s just a meme. Is this a new low for an EA ceo?!
I've been working on something that was supposed to hopefully be my ticket out. The plan was to build a demo and use some of the dough from it to escape to the city. But if use of the Unity engine would drain what little cash I have rather than increase it...
I'm learning on Godot. Not that I think I'd ever have to worry about licenses, auditing, and legal crap, but not EVER having to worry about licenses, auditing, and legal crap seems pretty nice.
I could see myself switching to Godot from Unreal one day if Godot had better VR tools development options. Godot also still needs to get Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo support but I have high hopes for Godots future.
So basically, what I'm hearing is that Unity's owners want to commit corporate suicide. Because that's exactly what this is; no one, not any indie developer, no AAA developer, not even Hoyoverse, will pay this new fee, so everyone will have to migrate their games and assets to another middleware like Unreal, effectively cutting Unity's reach and killing it slowly. There is no possible way this can end well for anyone.
Also, this is a friendly reminder that Unreal 5 is royalty-free until your game makes $1M USD, and after that they only take 5%.
Can't say I'm too sad about developers ditching Unity at last, the engine was always kinda crummy tech-wise (claims to be scalable but it's unstable on low-end devices anyways) and other engines like Godot which is open-source, and even Unreal have lowered the barrier of entry tremendously in recent years for both small-sized to big-sized developers
The trend of bad buisness practices lately has been so baffling. I feel it's companies and people's decisions that are ruining gaming.
It's been happening so frequently it has to be more than a coincidence.
I wonder if inflation is putting greater pressure on companies to make these stupid decisions to ensure they keep netting a profit for their shareholders.
If you are looking to make a 2d game, I strongly recommend Godot. It is a little trickier to learn for beginners, but you get a lightweight engine with plenty power, actually maintained tools, great documentation, etc. I haven't looked back since I made the change.
Corporate: "this is ingenious!"
The people: *takes a big slap in the face*
I already didn't love unity but I thought it was the only free 3d engine for individuals, but this led to me finding out that unreal is free now and godot has a 3d engine, so I'll probably be switching to godot
I've been learning Godot the last few months. It has its issues but is a very promising piece of software.
GoDot is probably the way to go. Unreal will probably pull a shiit move like this too or even worse by the time you're almost done learning it.
@@gxguy2906epic may be grubby but they ain't dumb. Also the engine is source accessible, you could easily strip out anything that phones home before cooking. Unity is closed source. Getting away with this kind of shit is way easier for them.
We are eternally in a power struggle against the greed-addled suits
this is so wild it's like Adobe asking a fee to architects because a building they designed is going to generate X amount of money, or charging TH-camrs when a video hits a specific amount of view. this model does not make any sense this is wild and i really hope this huge backlash makes them roll back
I uninstall and reinstall games a dozen plus times over the years easily so I can't imagine how big of a financial risk this could create for something you can't control.
For every day that passes with Unity's current CEO, my trust in the company dips lower than I ever thought it could.
For every day the shareholders are not setting up a massive lawsuit to sue his ass for intentional sabotage, I lose faith in the shareholders
Fun part is, even if they do go back on and abandon this... It's still going to destroy, or at least massively harm, Unity itself. Developers won't be willing to trust Unity anymore -- it's tried to pull this once, what's to stop it from pulling it again, time to get out while the getting's good. Unity definitely *does* need to walk this back, if only to avoid hurting devs who are at the point where they CAN'T switch to another platform. But even if they do, their popularity and usage in the industry is going to take a major hit from this.
And then you factor in developers who work for Unity, who I've heard tried their best to stop this and were completely ignored by management... they're probably going to try and get out too.
Wouldn't be at all surprised if this marks the beginning of the death of Unity, as a product and a company. Good luck and my most fervent prayers to any devs or Unity employees caught in the middle of this nightmarish situation.
Watch this reintroduce maximum installation count DRM. Installed it three times? Time to pay full price to buy another copy! Since developers are being charged for installations, they'll likely try and find ways to get around it. Learning a completely different engine takes a lot of time and resources which some aren't even going to bother.
Max installation count DRMs are already ancient, I remember having to wrestle with Ubisoft to get my Anno 2070 working again.
8:14
Even if they pull back on the changes, any trust they had is completely gone.
And I wouldn’t trust them again after this.
I'm surprised the Wario music didn't come out for the background of this one too.
Because Wario has standards.
This whole situation feels like a shakedown. They already got the money and now they want more. It's complete BS
Also great to see you back Steve
Another thing I can see harming developers even harder is piracy. In the past, piracy harms devs for not paying them. Now piracy harms devs by causing them even more charges from Unity.
Nah piracy isn't an issue unless you're a bad company
Check out Gaben's talks about it
@@karamelapple8007 It will be an issue for Unity devs here because every time someone install a pirated version, the dev are getting charged more by Unity on top of not getting paid for those versions in the first place.
At first I thought it was a per sale fee, bad as a fixed value but could handle. Couldn’t believe it was really per install, that’s just insane.
I can’t believe this bru
It really seems the industry, and it's not just Unity. Will do everything it can to undermine and cutout smaller developers. This policy won't affect AAA companies. SEGA, Nintendo, Microsoft, EA, Blizzard. They can eat the costs. They have millions to just throw away. Smaller developers, they are the ones that will be affected by this the most.
AAA either has custom deals or they have to fight in court.
Explains a lot about the Unity CEO dumping stock shares this past Friday (Sept. 8th).
Someone is going to be Naka'ed soon.
@@Toonrick12not soon enough!
Heard a lot about Unity but didn't know what was going on. Great informative video.
Even if they role it back three damage is done. You can never be sure they won't do it again so people will look to gradually shift to other engines, although this will take time and effort.
Forget about accidental harm.
This system is Ripe for people to set up some kind of automated system, that simply re-downloads and installs a game over and over again. and acting as a legal financial attack directed at an indie developers. or heck, even bigger games released on Unity.
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. And it's bound to be a buggy-as-shit system when not even Steam has concrete data on install numbers. Given that this is backed by an ex-CEO at EA, i imagine this system is going to have an IQ at the bottom of your average thermometer, it might just register started/incomplete installs, or other, random, unrelated data. Lots of room for false positives.
Not to even mention what happens if they games are on mass sale on something like humble bundle. They are fully responsible for those sales and thus DOWNLOADS too.
The team behind Cult of the Lamb sent a message saying they will be pulling the game in January.
The juxtaposition of the cheery, bubbly music playing throughout this video is actually hilarious.
relevent note, unity has confirmed that previous sales before 2024 will count to your free limit. so if you have 190k installs in 2023, in 2024 you get 10k before you start getting charged.
Doesn't matter- damage is done
Fucking oof
Ah yes, nobody can just own something anymore
EVERYTHING has to be a fucking license or a sub based model.
And its annoying as fuck
That's some Real corporate greed right there :(
And basically a scam!
Also, as a player, I'll feel bad about installing a game in several computers (including my Steam Deck), because I know I'd be making life harder for the developers. And how can I, in good conscience, recommend masterpieces like Outer Wilds or Hollow Knight to my friends? This is an awful policy that has to be reversed immediately.
The only thing we have going for this being overturned before it takes effect are some legal protections that are in place for situations like this. They also have been dodgy in answering HOW they're going to be able to track installs because that very well could be the thing that makes it illegal.
It's like for every good thing that comes to Unity we get hit with one MAJORLY bad thing, its a very monkey's paw situation.
I've been eyeing switching back to Unity for development with my team because I've really grown to dislike Unreal the more we work in it but we may just have to look at Godot instead
Why don’t you like unreal?
@@dele1763 It's too resource heavy even with very basic scenes which makes it difficult for some members on my team to work on from their systems.
But the main thing I don't like about it is honestly the blueprints system. We always keep running into walls when trying to implement things that SHOULD be relatively simple but turns into a nightmare and requires us to have to find some convoluted workaround.
Working via regular C# scripts in Unity is a lot easier and gives me much more control since you have to manually script it. Like I get that we could do C++ in Unreal but there's also not as many resources out there as there are for Unity.
Lastly is source control. Unity having uilt in free source control for a few seats and very little headache to setup is a god-send. I cannot believe that Unreal with all of their purchases and Mega Grants haven't done anything for making it easier to work with teams.
@@dele1763Maybe laziness ( Time unemployed) to learn something new.
On the other hand, maybe the European Union (GDPR) will save us from this cataclysm.
To all Silksong fans:
It was nice to be on this journey with you for looking forward to what looked like yet another beautiful metroidvania. Hopefully by the time I post this, team cherry will clarify something and switch engines or maybe unity will go back on their decision. But for now…I’m not so sure.
It was great going on this beautiful journey with all of you and I wish every single one of you, a wonderful day.
Sincerely, whu
Steve! Great to see you back!!
Figured something like this was coming when last year they merged with a company that made adware.
The CEO is basically a game industry villain at this point
People like that need to be forced out of the industry
As vague as you have pointed tracking installs sounds, there is no way this is considered an option for Unity. Larger developers will move away from the platform as you mentioned and it will die. Whomever needs to change this decision for the sake of the company, needs to do so before they find themselves out of business or a costly legal battle they will more than likely lose.
The ONLY way I see this actually working is if the installation is somehow uniquely tracked and charged only once, but that brings even bigger privacy issues to legal precedent.
All thats needed to be done is to forge "new installation" message for the server. And then depends how its implemented, clearing single registry key/file and running file integrity check might already count as "new installation". Heck, even if you were to introduce hardware signature, which is already sus, you can set up virtual machines, how many you like and each will be "new" installation if you want to "install bomb" someone. Which is going to be much more effective than review bombing (instead scaring away potential new customers, you WILL inflict financial loss) AND easier to implement on mass scale for little bit of business takeover.
As a Unity Dev, Im just very dissapointed and disturbed with this action. Even if they roll it back, i dont trust that they wont pull something like this again. Im in the fortunate position of having a project in early development that I am planning to transfer over to Unreal in the coming days. I hope Unity reverses this, and am saddened that such a good engine has to be ruined by such a bad leadership.
I hear you. I am in the same position. I have been an Unity dev since the start of my game dev journey, and all my games are built in it. This announcement caught me completely by surprise. Thankfully my new project is very early in development so I am rebuilding it in Unreal, but will still cost months of lost time to learn a new engine and rebuild. Still... Unity as a company has completely lost my trust. Good luck to you though.
As a long-time unity dev, this unity per-install fiasco finally made me start familiarizing myself with Godot, which has apparently gotten a lot beefier in the past year. after seeing how Blender, being free and open source, went from garbage to galaxy tier animation and modeling software, I believe in open source and think it's smart to bet on a FOSS game engine like Godot, which can only improve over time, as opposed to some corporate products, which can slowly degrade (like Unity.)
100% this ... open source will win as long as people keep giving back from the cash they make using the engine it will only get better.
Good to see you back, Steve
This is a bad Idea and will probably land them in court.
Since as they are applying this to all games. Past and present.
Many developers would on the off chance their old games had a resurgence. pay in a contract they never agreed to.
Even if the vast majority of indie devs won't ever qualify for the fee. This is a BAD Idea and can't be allowed to gain ground.
Honestly, no matter how I look at it, this is a bad change for all parties involved, including Unity themselves. What this change will bring about is people who previously used Unity abandoning it due to the cost. Free to download games and cheaper games will become unviable if said games were made using Unity and had any degree of popularity.
Overall, I wouldn't be surprised if Unity died as a platform for developing smaller indie games due to the change. (Which actually kills the flow of up and coming developers using the platform, which would kill the platform itself given enough time. So yeah, Unity is in serious trouble if this goes ahead.)
If the Pokemon BW remakes are being made on the same Unity engine as BDSP, I imagine The Pokemon Company would rather sue them than have to pay royalty fees for every copy sold/installed 😂
So if I uninstall and reinstall Mario Kart Tour a bunch of times, it charges Nintendo money? Interesting...
If that actually is the case, (I doubt it is.) people are definitely going to abuse that.
I doubt it will be implemented in the worst version of how it looks like now. The Unity would fail. But even if they will fix all the issues, they will make it clearly per sale or revenue, it just shows once again, that high management is detached from reality, don't care about devs or players, but just about stonks. Many devs will start shifting to Unreal instead, even if they are more expensive (5% of revenue above $1M) just because Unreal is stable and doesn't pull stunts like this. With Unity, you just don't know.
Man who could expect that the ex-ceo o ea would do this 😮
Honestly at first I just assumed this was for game that were being purchased. Which in the grand scheme of things is still annoying, but likely more than manageable. Correct me if I’m wrong, but did Unity not have a thing already in place of Developer payments?
But *EVERY* install or download? I’m sorry, but that’s just Mr. Krabs walking fee from that episode of SpongeBob. Like if feels like the higher ups from Unity have seen that Sonic 06 Remake and for whatever reason are upset they aren’t making money off it.
If Unity keep this model, then they should fix it to only apply to new games & change the pricing for mobile.
and while I hate price changes, many people misunderstood & misreported this pricing change, so here is some info:
compared to Unreal 5%, this is a very small fee for steam games, except for some mobile games & some edge cases where you're making less than 2 cents per install.
because for any game making above 200k per year, you basically need to buy the pro license ( which was always the case )
on the pro license, the fees would only apply when you make over 1 million dollars per year
the fee would effectively be 2 or 3 cents not 20 cents ( once you get to the extra 500k & then 1 million download thresholds )
most people are reporting the fee of the free plan, which if you're making above 200k per year, then you have to buy the pro plan for pricing to make sense as the case always was
That's all good and nice for sure, but the main problem is around how they go about installs, first on the user side the fact they just flat out said they will and all ready do have something built in to check installations can be considered spyware only hanging on the "trust me bro im not taking any other info". Hell if pushed enough it might make unity games not playable in EU as they at the very least require some sort of opt out. But that aside the same "trust me bro" is also pointed at the developers, they wont disclose how exactly they count them so what stops them from counting updates, free copies or from countries that deny the data exchange, pirated games or just making them the f up, after all they are incentivized to do so and we have no way to check.
There is just such a big window to abuse w zero transparency and clear answer to possible problems. Have a nice day!
Good to see you back papa steve!
>Buy a unity game $20
>The install fee for them is $0,20
>Install and reinstall the game 100+ times
>congratulation, you made a company lose money for selling a game
I have a sneaking suspicion that Unity is going to expect developers to report installation numbers.
This is why I’m happy about hesitating to use Unity.
Hmm, this will be worth keeping track of. Thanks for the update!
Roll it back don't wait too long unity!
Now I’m really glad I didn’t get into Unity development. I wouldn’t be too surprised if indie Unity developers start de-listing their games.
What will actually happen is every dev (literally all of them) stops using Unity altogether and many many existing Unity games get delisted from every store front. So Unity isn't even going to be making that much from this plan anyway.
Very well explained, Steve, I completely agree (also it's great to see one of your videos again, I missed it)!
The only way this makes sense is greed, nothing but! I hope the backlash is immense and they back track on this. Otherwise, and depending on the aftermath, maybe other idiots will join in on this nonsense...
I hope that with the outcry against this bs practice that Unity rolls back their awful decision. Thanks for the informative video Steve, its appreciated. However, you mentioned in the six minute mark that Hollow Knight: Silksong is DLC to the original game. In fact, Silksong is a sequel to Hollow Knight. It was originally going to be DLC, but the game got so big, that Team Cherry went the full mile and turned Silksong into its own game. Thanks again for the content, I look forward to seeing more videos from you!
By doing this it allows for people to have the "Sense of pride and accomplishment" by ether being rich and affording Unity or being able to make their own engine.
To be honest of the engines I have used, Blender, Godot, Unity, and Unreal, my favorite is Unreal
Sounds like a class-action suit in progress.
So internet trolls can just uninstall and reinstall said product over and over again to drain money from the devs and pubs?
I didn't htought it made any sense why Unity was doing this but then you mentioned Genshin Impact and it all started to make sense
As this 200,000 threshold is more than likely account based, it could also affect game preservations as developers would actually have an incentive to de-list older (usually cheaper) games from being accessible to buy-download-install.
Man I’ve been using unity for about a year now and I’m really mad that there doing this because if a lot of people download my game I won’t be able to afford all of it I’m honestly might switch to unreal engine but unity is REALLY FUN so idk what I’m gunna do
Unreal is fun too. Godot is fun. The fun is in making games, not the engine.
Steve is back and with a banger of a video! 👍
Unity broke my heart.
I'm jumping back to where I left off from learning Unreal Engine today.