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Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume
- pdntspa 3y agoAh, Unity... the only engine where vintage-inspired retro games take just as long to load into as Starfield (if not longer)
- izzydata 3y agoHow does this pricing scheme even make sense? Why do they think "installs" is a relevant metric? I could uninstall and reinstall a game 100,000 times. Would I single handedly cost the developers a ton of money?
- Filligree 3y agoThey are apparently attempting to prevent that... but installs on 'separate devices' still count. So I'm sure someone will find a way to do precisely that.
- izzydata 3y agoBut if they are attempting to prevent that then why not charge per game sold? If they think a single person installing it more than once shouldn't count then what do they believe the difference is? It seems like the only purpose of this pricing scheme is because they want to be able to charge for a single person installing it multiple times.
- sarchertech 3y agoI think they plan on including spyware that calls home to Unity when a game is installed. Despite being terrible, this is much easier for them than relying on or forcing developers to accurately report sales.
- seba_dos1 3y agoSo people should run the games of developers they like in a network-less container, and for those they don't like they could keep launching the game in a fresh networked container instead of review bombing...
- gmueckl 3y agoMy first guess would be that this is by design to syphon off money from F2P game devs. They need to have large install bases because >90% of players never pay for anything.
- XCSme 3y agoBecause they can't really track games sold. But if they add a call-home script into their engine, they can track how many times it is installed/opened.
- senectus1 3y agoI bet every install will require a "sign in"... *edit: actually yeah, given that Unity is very heavily used in the walled gardens of mobile apps. this makes a lot of sense.
- polski-g 3y agoMalicious persons will spin up Windows in a VM with slightly different hardware, install the game, repeat.
- SeanAnderson 3y agoThey claim to have developed proprietary code to handle this situation. They don't offer up a lot of details. https://x.com/unity/status/1701689241456021607 https://x.com/unity/status/1701689241456021607
- hightrix 3y ago"trust me, bro" I imagine there will be a lot of disputes around billing, as in, ever single bill from this system.
- teraflop 3y agoBased on this, it seems like Unity's real goal is to achieve perfect price discrimination. For each game that gets sufficiently popular, they can fiddle with their unreviewable "proprietary" metric until it matches whatever they think the developer is willing to pay, and then send them a bill for that amount. It's a clever plan if you assume your customers are too dumb to notice what you're doing.
- tavavex 3y agoI can't imagine that a black box "you'll find out eventually I guess" pricing scheme would be acceptable for these same big whales of game development that they want to target.
- Arrath 3y agoDo any companies pre-game this out with PR response plans for scenarios of "public acceptance", "public indifference", "public outrage" and so on? Or are the executive suites usually so high on their own supply that they expect everyone to accept whatever is doled out?
- gabereiser 3y agoThey are resting on the fact they have a near monopoly for indie and their only competitor is Unreal at this point.
- nvy 3y agoIsn't godot up and coming?
- Filligree 3y agoEspecially now.
- gabereiser 3y agoYes, and old engines are getting renewed life…
- rhtgrg 3y agoGodot is the new Unity, Unity is the new Unreal, and Unreal is the new Source engine, complete with the accompanying storefront.
- monkeydreams 3y agoYes. It doesn't have the asset store quantity behind it yet however the actual development side of things is quick and relatively simple.
- everyone 3y agoI used XNA, then MS killed it for no reason, then I switched to Unity, been using it since 2012, today I'm learning Godot. Imo Godot is the new indie engine. it has the same feel as XNA and Unity. There's nothing wrong with Unreal, its a great engine, but it does not feel the same. XNA / Unity / Godot / indie engines, u just sit down and start writing C# code and can write your whole game and ignore the engine features.. Unreal feels more like modding an existing game where you must use the existing systems. As a lone indie dev I find it very tedious and slow to use, but I can see how its good for big teams, there is a big rigid system already in place they everyone must follow in order to do anything.. So if u have 1000's of workers it will stop individuals going off and doing crazy stuff, cus they cant.
- hightrix 3y agoOof. So they are doubling down rather than taking the feedback and making changes based upon it. I do not see much growth in Unity's future.
- gabereiser 3y agoTheir responsibility is to their shareholders now. Good luck with that.
- vvanders 3y agoIMO it doesn't really matter if they do a 180, they've telegraphed the direction they want to go. If I had a dependency on Unity I'd be evaluating my options pretty seriously to migrate off of the engine. Hopefully it spurs further investment in things like godot and bevy.
- Buttons840 3y agoYeah. They heard all the commotion and rushed in. "We've heard a lot of bad rumors going around about our new pricing. We know you're upset, and we just wanted to confirm that all the bad rumors are true." They're so tone deaf.
- everyone 3y agoThe installs thing doesnt make any sense. But, I've been a professional Unity dev for 10+ years and I have started learning Godot today; the reason is because I am very concerned about how would Unity possibly implement these policies? They would need to put secret analytics calling back to Unity servers in every build + secret killswitch they can trigger if you dont pay up. That is the reason. Tbh I've been waiting for a good reason to hit the button and that was it.
- MrLeap 3y agoYou and I might as well be the same person.
- everyone 3y ago:)
- bufferoverflow 3y agoWhy not Unreal? Godot seems like a much simpler engine compared to Unity and Unreal.
- everyone 3y agoI go on about this in my other comment.. Unreal is great, but its not the same, it doesnt have that XNA / Unity / Godot "do what you want" feeling. It feels more like modding an existing game than writing your own game.
- GrygrFlzr 3y agoWait, they're planning on charging the Game Pass game fees to Microsoft? The Aggro Crab example alone could incur hundreds of thousands of dollars per game for Microsoft, they're not going to be happy about that. Surely that's going to drag Microsoft legal very quickly into this mess?
- minimaxir 3y agoGame publishers won't be happy either. Devolver Digital made a joke about it which might not be a joke: https://twitter.com/devolverdigital/status/1701685282129539485 https://twitter.com/devolverdigital/status/17016852821295394... > Definitely include what engine you’re using in game pitches. > It’s important information!
- eminence32 3y agoFrom [1], it seems they intend on counting "loading a unity game in a browser" as an install: > Q: Does this affect WebGL and streamed games? > A: Games on all platforms are eligible for the fee but will only incur costs if both the install and revenue thresholds are crossed. Installs - which involves initialization of the runtime on a client device - are counted on all platforms the same way (WebGL and streaming included). [1] https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/ https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packa...
- boppo1 3y agoThis has 'MBA who doesn't understand contemporary gaming paradigms whatsoever' written all over it.
- tavavex 3y agoThat, or it's straight-up done with malevolent intent, for some unknown reason, because I genuinely can't fathom this decision-making. Counting online uses in combination with demo installs means that any game that makes enough money and puts out a web demo (which is a totally valid option on places like itch.io) will have to pay whenever anyone loads the demo. No potential for abuse here, especially since reloads and reinstalls will be counted as new installs.
- chii 3y ago> malevolent intent, for some unknown reason, because I genuinely can't fathom this decision-making. sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malevolence.
- stuckinhell 3y agoI think he does, unity bought WETA. They want to go toe to toe with Unreal in AAA games and Hollywood, but Unity has a terrible stigma due to all the shovelware and indie games made with it. They need to jettison the "dead weight" to make the premium money. The core engine isn't as bad as people think it is especially if you hand code your game and avoid the editor. I've seen people pull nearly miraculous demos this way. I'm going to pivot to godot maybe.
- OnionBlender 3y agoIt sounds like they initially wanted to charge developers per install (including a reinstall) but changed it after the backlash. The relevant section: > After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unity's Whitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation. (A spokesperson told Axios that Unity had "regrouped" to discuss the issue.)
- johnnyanmac 3y agowell, kind of: >But an extra fee will be charged if a user installs a game on a second device, say a Steam Deck after installing a game on a PC. if you use multiple devices you can still incur larger costs on the developers, unfortunately. This just means that you can't be braindead and uninstall/re-install hundreds of times to incur costs. But someone slightly tech saavy just spoofs hardware, or spins up emulator instances to get around this.
- peteforde 3y agoI find it fascinating to consider that they will require free-tier developers to maintain an active internet connection to use the editor. This is such a self-evidently cursed idea that it veers into satire. No matter how quickly they try to walk back these intentions, this is Unity's elephant hunting moment.
- boppo1 3y agoThis whole debacle makes me glad I picked up Unreal instead of Unity.
- ilaksh 3y agoIt sounds like the WebGL initialization thing is ridiculous. They better fix that. But aside from that, collecting a minimal fee seems fair enough to me. If paying 20 cents per sale of your successful game is ruining your life, maybe consider investing in some of the open source game engines.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- teraflop 3y agoCharging a fee based on sales would be reasonable. That's what Unreal Engine does (5% of gross revenue after the first $1 million). Charging a flat fee per installation, even for games that have already been developed and released (many of them for free), is insane.
- izzydata 3y agoIt would be more sane if it was per sale, but they are talking about per install.
- MrLeap 3y agoYou don't understand, the language says _per install_ not per sale. This seems to include re-installs, multiple devices, new computers. I wouldn't have batted an eye at 20 cents per sale. Per _install_ is catastrophic.
- yetanotherasian 3y agoGetting fee isn't wrong maybe, but getting a fee by install is. They should instead ask for a percent of revenue. So if 1 billion people install my flappy bird clone but I only make $300k I don't owe them $15 million dollars.
- oefrha 3y agoPer sale would still be very problematic because they consider sale as part of a deeply discounted bundle/subscription a sale, unless it’s a charity bundle. A fixed fee like that also effectively kills popular $1 games.
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- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe]
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoLots of discussion on the official post over here earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37481344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37481344
- dang 3y agoRecent and related: The Death of Unity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37486431 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37486431 - Sept 2023 (153 comments) Unity plan pricing and packaging updates - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37481344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37481344 - Sept 2023 (457 comments)
- MrLeap 3y agoThis'll create such insane scenarios I do not see a world where Unity doesn't walk this back. Imagine Rimworld having to patch in ads or microtransactions because their large playerbase continues to buy new computers. How do you put a game on sale for a dollar anymore? It's all but guaranteed that your players will cost you more over their lifetime. We're going to see indie games go "limited edition" when their rev edges near targets. https://vxtwitter.com/cultofthelamb/status/1701715971663425897 https://vxtwitter.com/cultofthelamb/status/17017159716634258... more of this will happen. Lamentable how 1 word is all it's taken to take to make their whole ecosystem too risky to consider. I've been a unity developer for about a decade, in that time I have given Unity more money than I have any other software company. It's become imminently clear that I need to transition to another engine. Even if they go and change "per install" to "per sale", the canary that Unity would never add untenable risk to the businesses of every one of their customers is dead.
- vinyl7 3y agoI hope this fiasco gets people to realize that it’s better to write your own code. But probably not. After decades of platform jumping after enshittification, people continue to to do it to platforms that they have no control over
- gizmo385 3y agoAre you really suggesting that every hobbyist game developer should build their own game engine from scratch…?
- vinyl7 3y agoYes and no. Firstly, hobbyists should make games...not engines [1]. You don't need an engine to make a game. Secondly, people don't need every imaginable feature like what Unreal or Unity provide. It just needs to do what they need it to do to make the game, thus it can be greatly simplified compared to the big guys. [1] https://geometrian.com/programming/tutorials/write-games-not-engines/ https://geometrian.com/programming/tutorials/write-games-not...
- tavavex 3y agoIf this decision stands then I genuinely don't see how any developers will be motivated to use Unity long-term. I know that it's almost customary for companies to start pushing the limits hard as soon as they feel like they got too big to fail, but since the biggest Unity moneymakers are professionals and large companies, they'll probably have higher standards. The only reasons why someone would possibly consider using Unity now would be if: - They're already supporting or developing a Unity game - They have a lot of staff that's only experienced with Unity - They simply must use one of Unity's features and no other replacements are available How is this going to be good for them in anywhere but the extreme short-term?
- donatj 3y agoAny way you slice it, it's a stupid regressive way to charge for an engine by a company that already makes an unimaginable amount of money. Their "fix" requires fingerprinting people's computers and phoning home, both of which should really be seen as privacy violations. And all that said, at it's heart there no justifiable reason the developer should be charged for every device I install something on. The developers are not making more money, why should the engine makers get a larger cut.
- tavavex 3y ago> And all that said, at it's heart there no justifiable reason the developer should be charged for every device I install something on. The developers are not making more money, why should the engine makers get a larger cut. There is a reason that's justifiable to the company - it makes more money. The modern-day push to collect recurring payments and offer everything as an ongoing service is driving large companies into this strange form of software rent-seeking, including whatever this is.
- donatj 3y ago[flagged]
- mrguyorama 3y agoMy understanding is that Unity is losing A LOT of cash. They have been burning cash on thousands of devs building features they never ship or finish for like years. Other's have pointed at this CEO's history at EA as indicative of how terrible he is (and yet he still gets crazy money, because execs only fall up). They might just have no fucking clue what they are doing.
- Semaphor 3y agoAll news coming out of Unity in recent times is making me sad, I’ll never develop a game, but as a player, Unity games made mods (both using and creating) so easy even without any official mod support at all.
- gamblor956 3y ago"As for Game Pass and other subscription services, Whitten said that developers like Aggro Crab would not be on the hook, as the fees are charged to distributors, which in the Game Pass example would be Microsoft." Expect Apple and Microsoft to drop all Unity games from their game subscriptions if this is still true in January.