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“This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

180 points by isaacfrond 3y ago

mindaslab 3y ago
Use Godot https://godotengine.org/ https://godotengine.org/
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- echelon 3y ago
  Or Bevy, if you're into Rust: https://bevyengine.org/ https://bevyengine.org/
  - CornishPasty 3y ago
    I would say Bevy isn't really similar to Unity. Something like Fyrox - https://fyrox.rs/ https://fyrox.rs/ - would be more similar. Bevy is more low level and lacks an editor (as of now, it's planned)
    - echelon 3y ago
      Fyrox is a one-person show. It's quite impressive, but it doesn't have the same massive community around it that Bevy does. Bevy has a very stable ECS architecture and is being intelligently designed and built for the long run. Bevy's lead developer is working on the editor now and it's getting closer to landing [1, 2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35998538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35998538 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36658488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36658488
      - devoice 3y ago
        Someone who needs to start developing right now should use Fyrox right now. I tested the same project in both, and can echo the sentiment that Fyrox is further along and much more similar to classical engines like Godot, Unity or a number of further-along C++ engines. Bevy breaks things every minor release and is missing key features. If more people supported the Fyrox effort, then the rust gamedev ecosystem would be less vulnerable to a change in bevy's pricing structure just as this Unity change has impacted the wider game dev ecosystem.
LarsDu88 3y ago
Switching to Godot, even though I'm a hobbyist who will never hit those thresholds
- datavirtue 3y ago
  Let us know how you deal with the threading model in Godot.
  - colordrops 3y ago
    What's wrong with it for the uninitiated?
    - moron4hire 3y ago
      Probably nothing that isn't also a problem in Unity. There have been some Unity shills trying to cut down Godot lately.
  - Kiro 3y ago
    Your comment worries me. I'm making games that usually rely heavily on multithreading and I'm looking at using Godot for my next game. Are you saying that would be a bad idea?
    - viccuad 3y ago
      A good architecture for fully parallel, deterministic, thread-safe, serializable and extensible games is the Entity-Component-System pattern. I'm sure that Godot has one or a way to integrate a library that implements it. I think Unity doesn't come with ECS anyways.
      - LarsDu88 3y ago
        This is why I feel an engine like Bevy will one day beat them all. ECS, rust, memory safety, thread safety. It just needs an editor (or even a gameplan for what an editor would look like), animation, halfway decent rendering pipeline... it's a very long way from production ready.
TekMol 3y ago
Does this mean the engine will phone home every time a software which contains it is installed? How is that compatible with the GDPR which has been interpreted by courts in a way that it forbids sending any network packets to the USA, no matter if the user consented to it or not? For reference, see the rulings which deemed Google analytics illegal independent of consent.
- Arnavion 3y ago
  Unity already has UnityEngine.Analytics.dll since 2018, and it claims to be GDPR-compliant.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  Are "corporate information", as PI for commercial entities, covered by GDPR?
  - kirun 3y ago
    They claim to have their own processes to count installs which would counter spoofing attacks. As well as being opaque to developers on how their installs are counted, this may be scooping up PII of users.
- agd 3y ago
  GDPR relates to personal data and it doesn’t forbid sending any network packets to the USA.
  - generic92034 3y ago
    In some contexts the IP address already counts as personal data. Wasn't there recently an issue with web sites using Google fonts and therefore transmitting the user's IP address to Google?
  - TekMol 3y ago
    Multiple curts have ruled that the information "IP soandso visited page soandso" and "IP soandso downloaded font soandso" are personal data. Therefore it is very likely they will rule the same for "IP soandso installed software soandso".
birracerveza 3y ago
On 4chan it immediately sparked a crowdsourced effort to make scripts that repeatedly install/uninstall games in creative ways (VMs, MAC spoofing) with the specific intention to hurt developers. This is definitely one of the dumbest choices I've seen a company do. Props to Unity for speeding up their own death.
- trinovantes 3y ago
  A least now the argument that piracy hurts the developers has some weight
  - vanchor3 3y ago
    You wouldn't even need "piracy" in this case, just buy one copy of the game and figure out how it phones home, and then pick your favorite method of tricking it into reporting ludicrous amounts of installs, which would significantly outnumber pirate copies.
  - dns_snek 3y ago
    No it doesn't, fraudulent install tracking by Unity could hurt the developers. If pirated copies count as valid installations, that means that the system is completely unauthenticated and will be abused.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bluescrn 3y ago
  You don't need to actually install/reinstall games if you can figure out how the Unity runtime is notifying its servers about this install. You could theoretically write an 'install bombing' tool that sends fake install notifications straight to their server (or modify the game executable to do it repeatedly). You can't trust the client, especially when dealing with PC games. Hopefully Unity will anticipate this potential abuse, and filter out repeated 'installs' from the same IP address. But they don't seem to have anticipated free demos, pirated copies, Game Pass, or charity bundles before announcing this...
Sakos 3y ago
I think it's absurd that Unity can push a new pricing scheme on existing customers regardless of circumstance and essentially little to no warning. Games are in development for years and they're basically telling people 3 months beforehand. How is this okay? This is something I'd expect when switching to a newer version of a service/product. Not a randomly changing contract for what I've already been using at no fault of my own.
- jimbob45 3y ago
  It’s mostly likely an application of the Door in the Face technique where one makes a huge ask followed by a smaller, more well-received ask after the first is rejected. Here, they put forward an unreasonable demand. Later, once the trolling emerges, they roll it back to be only on new devs with old devs keeping the old system. They get to seem like they “listened to the community” and the community ignores their still predatory pricing.
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    I don't think they'll even wait for the trolling. Small/mid tier studios are not going to accept it because they literally cannot afford to. New developers aren't going to accept it, because it now creates a poor value proposition for an ecosystems who's primary selling point is 'lower capability, but easier than Unreal.' The only people that might be able to accept are those big high revenue studies, but those are also the exact group capable of 'negotiating' for better terms. Even if this is a just an effort to roll out some less oppressive changes with less backlash than doing so immediately would entail (because they can now frame this initially planned roll out as indeed 'listening to the community'), this really just has clueless MBA stamped all over it, because the brand/trust damage here is serious, and that for a ship that's already sinking.
  - offices 3y ago
    This at the cost of every customer seriously considering the value proposition of changing engine.
- keikobadthebad 3y ago
dathinab 3y ago
> but the fact they are applying this retroactively to every game every made in Unity that also seems like it should not be legal no matter what you put in your TOS, at least in some jurisdictions it probably isn't (in the same way that e.g. conditional auto-termination contracts are no actually auto-terminating in many jurisdictions even if it's written in the contract)
- rjzzleep 3y ago
  In Germany it is not. SaaS apps can be particularly challenging because you cannot just change the terms for existing users and contracts. Ironically most customers don't know and don't react accordingly. Generally the customer behaviour is that customers get spooked and pay anyway. ... but if they were to sue it would be a problem, which is why typically small companies try to follow legislation and big company with big legal department, don't necessarily care.
  - alpaca128 3y ago
    I thought you can change the terms for existing users but if it's not 100% beneficial to them they are allowed to cancel without costs?
- realusername 3y ago
  > at least in some jurisdictions it probably isn't I also don't think "you'll agree to future unpublished terms" will work anywhere in the EU
- isilofi 3y ago
  I'm not so sure about that. You are totally right that e.g. here in the EU contracts and terms of service with ordinary consumers ("B2C") are restricted as you say, limiting what can possibly be agreed on in that contract. Generally this consumer protection only applies to individuals for their private use. E.g. later changes to the terms of a contract are a big no-no. Contracts between businesses ("B2B") are far less restricted, there is no such thing as consumer protection for businesses. Whereas for consumers, terms of service are heavily restricted by a special law ("AGBG", basically translates as "terms-of-service-law") It is generally thought that business people are savvy enough to know what they can and cannot agree on. Therefore legislation and courts lean strongly towards providing greater freedom of business and contract in anything B2B. And I think in most circumstances, a game developer who distributes its game to a wider audience is a business in the scope of the aforementioned discussion. It would only maybe not be a business if there were no monetary benefit of any kind, so no selling games, no advertisements, no publicity that could lead to monetary benefit in the future...
snehk 3y ago
[flagged]
- nmfisher 3y ago
  I don't think you can fairly accuse independent game developers (who are overwhelmingly building atop Unity) of nickel and diming customers. Most of them never even break even.
- oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
  That's unfair. A huge number of totally legitimate indie games, that do absolutely no nickel and diming, are built on Unity.
pvg 3y ago
Ongoing threads at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37491622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37491622, among others
fefe23 3y ago
I don't get it. If someone gives you something that is vital for your product for free, and the license does not guarantee your free usage in perpetuity, and you can't take the source code and maintain things yourself if the vendor changes their mind, ... surely that's on you then? Did you think they didn't need to buy food and pay rent? To me as a complete outsider this move reeks of desperation on their part, not malice. Maybe you should have taken steps to prevent this instead of complaining about it after the fact? Turns out you can't pay people in exposure forever.
- moron4hire 3y ago
  I quit on Unity several years ago for this sort and many other reasons. But honestly, that isn't a decision a lot of people can make. For me, I just went back to doing web development. For someone in the indie game market, you either develop in Unity or cut yourself out of the employee pool.
- gmerc 3y ago
  You know, we’re taking about decades here. That said - both Epic and Valve are private and that is probably the better razor. Be extremely vary VC/Public companies because they will come under pressure to slaughter golden geese when the time comes.
- oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
  Even if you agree with the overall move, surely you recognise that some of the details — charging developers for users installing the same product multiple times, or even pirating it — are flat-out wrong? Not even just wrong from a moral point of view, but from a "this can't possibly work" one too.
  - fefe23 3y ago
    Oh don't get me wrong! I don't agree with the overall move. I just think their customers should have seen it coming from a mile away. Capitalists are going to capitalist. Just like I thought the cloud customers should have anticipated that the cheap introductory lure offers would eventually run out and then they'll have to pay real money for the services. I'm a bit daft like that.
poulpy123 3y ago
Is there any software that is sold by installation ? I find that crazy even if I will never be concerned
- auxermen 3y ago
  Windows
  - stefs 3y ago
    i doubt that's correct. i can install windows as often as i like, i just have to pay for the key and afaik i can only use the key in one active install at a time (as a private user). so it's very different.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - alpaca128 3y ago
    No, Windows is paid per key. Reinstalling Windows doesn't cost anything.
_the_inflator 3y ago
From the article: "Enshittification [to describe what Unity is doing] refers to companies that create a good product, then ramp up fees and deteriorate the service to take advantage of users who are locked into it." Let's see, how many App Stores follow suit. Pay per play/install might sound like a wonderful option for some.
shuiling 3y ago
[dead]
loupol 3y ago
Choosing installs to collect revenue on is stupid because it isn't tightly correlated to revenue for a game: Demos, bundles, free week-end tryouts on Steam, free-to-play games and other specific cases all lead to high install counts without necessarily generating the matching sales. It's especially stupid because Unity has good market share on mobile, which is a juicy market but with a fixed price per install, free-to-play and low-priced (0.99$, etc...) games will never choose Unity for new projects, because the percentage of revenue you will lose on those is going to be prohibitive. A less worse metric to collect on would be actual game sales count, but that's still horrible for promotional sale events and low-priced games (assuming fixed cost per sale). The sensible and simpler option would simply be a percentage of revenue past a threshold like Unreal Engine and CryEngine for example. I see two possible outcomes: * They stick with this pricing policy, and cash in on the fact that a lot of game studios are heavily invested in Unity at the moment and will take time to move away to extract a shit-ton of money short term in the meantime. Long-term it will probably crash and burn, but they're fine with it as long as they can milk enough before that. * They wait for the outcry, say they've listened to the community, roll it back and introduce a more sensible royalty system with percentage of revenue, which the community grudgingly accepts since it's less worse than the initial option.
- manojlds 3y ago
  Third outcome - Microsoft acquires them ( given the impact to Gamepass and C#)
  - moron4hire 3y ago
    Unity is so wholly siloed away from the rest of the .NET ecosystem that I doubt Microsoft really cares about Unity regarding its impact on C#. Like, a lot of Unity developers think they know C#. They really don't. Most of the Unity developers I have met know a very, very small subset of C#, and almost nothing of .NET in general. That's not meant to be any shade-throwing at Unity developers. It's just that they are, for most purposes, completely different things. I can't take someone who has been working in Unity for the last 5 years and easily put them on any other kind of .NET project. The same for going the other way. The underlying language commonality is the least of the concerns. A small part of this is how most of the .NET framework isn't exactly great to execute in the middle of a hot update loop, but a much larger part is because of how Unity is built, having reinvented their own wheels for many things that could have been contributions to the larger .NET/Mono/CLR/etc ecosystem.
manojlds 3y ago
Given the impact to Gamepass (seeing tweets of many devs talking about it) and C#, what are the chances that Microsoft acquires Unity?
- oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
  Are you implying this move is intended to force Microsoft's hand? Because... that would be the most reasonable explanation I can think of!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
leke 3y ago
2nd time I'm saying this...2023 is the year of the greedy CEO.
- pjc50 3y ago
  Every year is the year of the greedy CEO.
- iopq 3y ago
  You're saying they weren't greedy in 2022? What changed?
  - pragmar 3y ago
    Interest rates and the cost of rolling over debt, likely.
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  It has been interesting and fun to watch what one simple knob turn of interest rates to more reasonable numbers does.
- joobus 3y ago
  Unity has lost $455 million dollars in the first 6 months of the fiscal year 2023. They lost $919 million in 2022. I don't think they have ever made a profit. Companies are not charities; they exist to make money, and Unity doesn't by a mile. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1810806/000181080623000126/a2023_q2shareholderlette.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1810806/000181080623...
  - the_gipsy 3y ago
    So what? They're doing classic bait & switch. The fact that they weren't profitable just makes it even more pathetic.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    Post-IPO unity may not have made a profit (although that link of yours shows positive EBITDA in recent quarters), but they only went public in 2020.
wkat4242 3y ago
I use unity only for free content and I'm glad they still except this from the policy (using the revenue threshold, obviously I don't have any revenue whatsoever). Obviously I can't pay for installs because I don't make any money from it. I don't think asking professional developers to pay fees is bad in principle. After all they get a lot of value from it. And they use it to make money. One thing I do find really bad is that they retroactively impose a monthly model on content developed with a once-off business model in mind. I don't think that's fair. If you're going to do this, do it only going forward so developers can incorporate the cost in their business model.
glimshe 3y ago
The old story... Be friends to the community, get everybody to believe you then increase prices when everybody is locked in. This time we have an answer: Godot.
- rollcat 3y ago
  An alternative engine (no matter how good) doesn't solve vendor lock-in. Gamedev is a cutthroat business. You can't afford a rewrite. Even for new productions, you can't throw away engine experience and start retooling. I expect backlash.
  - the_gipsy 3y ago
    Godot isn't yet another game engine.
    - kevinmgranger 3y ago
      Can you elaborate?
      - the_gipsy 3y ago
        It's open source. You can be pretty much 100% sure that they won't do a bait & switch.
  - krapp 3y ago
    I guess they'll just get bled by Unity until they die, then. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    It does when said vendor is an open source community.
- realusername 3y ago
  If I had to guess, Gogot is also the reason why they are scrambling to cash-out before it's too late.
ta8645 3y ago
Richard Stallman was right.
Maschinesky 3y ago
Who ever thought that a company who let in malware company is trustworthy should not complain. Anyway just use unreal engine.
hoseja 3y ago
How do they know I've installed a singleplayer offline game?
- alpaca128 3y ago
  How do you download and install a game without internet? Even the last few games sold outside Steam still need some launcher whether it's from Epic, Ubisoft or whatever. Sure, you can install a game from 2004 completely offline but that's not a Unity game.
  - 6581 3y ago
    > Even the last few games sold outside Steam still need some launcher The vast majority of indie games do not require a launcher.
    - alpaca128 3y ago
      We are talking about paid games using Unity engine. If you can name a market for those that even remotely comes close to the sales on Steam, PlayStation, XBox, Epic, etc I'd be curious to hear about it. Either way it doesn't matter because Unity will just require an internet connection during installation and 99% of players won't notice or complain.
- dgb23 3y ago
  By calling home. The implication here is that unity is malware.
sylware 3y ago
Weird, I always have thought unity was getting a share of each sale.
zigzag312 3y ago
So, Unity is now more expensive than for example AutoCAD and has a royalty fees. I see a bright future for Unity Technologies...
- bitcharmer 3y ago
  I can bet my money on this being yet another case of things going well until MBA imbeciles took over.
vlaaad 3y ago
Fees comparison with Defold: https://twitter.com/defold/status/1701877174968492220 https://twitter.com/defold/status/1701877174968492220
Espionage724 3y ago
I never was a fan of Unity. To me it felt like its selling-point was that it could run on multiple platforms, but not at optimal performance compared to other engines (basically like Android and Java). My introduction to Unity was with Hearthstone (the card game), and even then it didn't natively support Linux. On that presumption, I found it incredibly surprising people latching onto it for VR dev, and considering most Unity VR games all share the same look (cartoon-y; basically look at A Township Tale and compare it to Orbus and Zenith), that further cements my view of Unity not being a serious high-quality capable engine to be using, unless I want to throw quick non-sustainable projects together. This news about Unity being even more expensive definitely doesn't help my view :p
- ramesh31 3y ago
  You have to understand where it came from. Unity was the simple easy to use indie darling for years when it first came about. The corporatization and financialization of the company ruined it, but once upon a time it occupied the same space Godot does today.
- kriro 3y ago
  I think they were just pretty early in the VR space with good libraries/support/tutorials etc. I cannot say for sure because I have only done one Unity-VR tutorial "back in the day" but in the AR space there was a time window where they were pretty clearly #1 (imo). I shipped a couple of small projects based on their Vuforia integration (quite costly) and then later without Vuforia. Nothing big, mostly trivial product vizualizations for customers that had upcoming trade shows/excibitions with somewhat creative markers. 100% of my lifetime AR profits are based on Unity such a strange wild west time but I got out of that market very quickly when it became a lot easier to build these simple demo apps. I still remember the "wow factor" and people running around the office showing all their colleagues how you could see their products through a tables/phone.
chillbill 3y ago
[dead]
nomercy400 3y ago
How does this work retroactively on released products? Say five years ago, I paid a company to build a house, who hired a contractor to build it and it was completed in a year. Nowadays, I open the door daily. Now the contractor goes to the company, saying that from January 1st, every time I open the door, the company has to pay a small fee to the contractor, because they built the house with the door five years ago. How is that even legal, even in a B2B context? As a company, you have no control over the number of installations. How can they even measure the number of installations for games released 5-10 years ago?
- kalleboo 3y ago
  It works legally since you didn't buy Unity. You don't own anything. You're licensing the right to use it on an ongoing basis. It's like how I can't buy a Rolling Stones CD and then play it on the radio for millions of people without paying them. I never bought the music, just the right to listen to it privately.
  - nomercy400 3y ago
    In your example, it feels more like the distributor of the CD now has to pay the copyright holder 1ct everytime you play the CD, from January 1st next year. But it is license based? Wow, that is quite a risk to take as a gamedev, to tightly-couple your game with a third-party company's tooling, who can change their terms at will, so you can no longer use their tooling. I understand that you buy a license, but surely you can buy a permanent or fixed license for a lot more money, to take away the risks of having to pull your game from distribution due to licensing restrictions. It sounds like a dumb move from unity, to create so much uncertainty.
dgb23 3y ago
The video game market is a feast or famine kind of deal. Few games break even, even fewer make a profit. What Unity probably wants or needs is to take a cut off the large successes. That’s where all the money is. The problem is that they aren’t involved in distribution. This per/install model is trying to solve this by turning Unity into some kind of malware. A completely tone deaf move. Why not build business relationships with the companies that have been successful with Unity? It’s in the interest of both sides that Unity and its ecosystem are stable, improving and growing.
- thatwasunusual 3y ago
  > What Unity probably wants or needs is to take a cut off the large successes. That’s where all the money is. The problem is that they aren’t involved in distribution. Isn't the simple solution to just tax the companies a percentage of the revenue? Isn't that what Unreal do?
  - rishav_sharan 3y ago
    yep. Unreal has a much better deal. 5% of royalties once your sales cross 1 Million. So if you are an indie dev, you can pretty much use Unreal for free. But if you are a decently sized dev shop, you pay a % of your revenue.
nomercy400 3y ago
Why did/can game companies not protect themselves against this possible change of contract? I mean, if you spend millions on developing a game, taking two-three years to develop, surely you try to tackle any risks that might endanger the project. For example, by fixing the price on the foundation of your game, i.e. the game engine. This is a huge change in the way this game engine will be considered for new games. If now during the development and full lifetime of the game the contract rules can change, gamedev companies will start to avoid these kind of contracts. With this one change Unity made it so that they can now no longer be trusted to keep the agreed upon contract terms intact for the lifetime of the game. If only they said this would go in effect for new, not-already-in-development-and-paid-for-game-engine, projects from January 1st, it would have saved them this breach-in-trust issue.
- harimau777 3y ago
  A lot of games don't cost millions to develop. In particular, I associate Unity more with indy games rather than AAA. Those sorts of devs don't have a lot of leverage.
  - philistine 3y ago
    Cities: Skyline, Rust, Hearthstone, Cuphead, Disco Elysium, Kerbal Space Program. Those might not be the ginormous games you're thinking of but Unity is far from exclusively used by very small studios. Utlimately, I guess it's a question of definition: can you point me to a commonly agreed industry definition of AAA and indie?
    - littlekey 3y ago
      For what it's worth, I think Hearthstone in particular very much qualifies as "ginormous".
      - philistine 3y ago
        By the way, I learned that the latest Pokémon games, Shining Pearl and the other one are made with Unity. That is a 1000% ginormous. https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/11/looks-like-pokemon-brilliant-diamond-and-shining-pearl-are-unity-engine-games https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/11/looks-like-pokemon...
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
[dupe]

180 points by isaacfrond 3y ago

mindaslab 3y ago

Use Godot https://godotengine.org/ https://godotengine.org/

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
echelon 3y ago
Or Bevy, if you're into Rust: https://bevyengine.org/ https://bevyengine.org/
- CornishPasty 3y ago
  I would say Bevy isn't really similar to Unity. Something like Fyrox - https://fyrox.rs/ https://fyrox.rs/ - would be more similar. Bevy is more low level and lacks an editor (as of now, it's planned)
  - echelon 3y ago
    Fyrox is a one-person show. It's quite impressive, but it doesn't have the same massive community around it that Bevy does. Bevy has a very stable ECS architecture and is being intelligently designed and built for the long run. Bevy's lead developer is working on the editor now and it's getting closer to landing [1, 2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35998538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35998538 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36658488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36658488
    - devoice 3y ago
      Someone who needs to start developing right now should use Fyrox right now. I tested the same project in both, and can echo the sentiment that Fyrox is further along and much more similar to classical engines like Godot, Unity or a number of further-along C++ engines. Bevy breaks things every minor release and is missing key features. If more people supported the Fyrox effort, then the rust gamedev ecosystem would be less vulnerable to a change in bevy's pricing structure just as this Unity change has impacted the wider game dev ecosystem.

LarsDu88 3y ago

Switching to Godot, even though I'm a hobbyist who will never hit those thresholds

datavirtue 3y ago
Let us know how you deal with the threading model in Godot.
- colordrops 3y ago
  What's wrong with it for the uninitiated?
  - moron4hire 3y ago
    Probably nothing that isn't also a problem in Unity. There have been some Unity shills trying to cut down Godot lately.
- Kiro 3y ago
  Your comment worries me. I'm making games that usually rely heavily on multithreading and I'm looking at using Godot for my next game. Are you saying that would be a bad idea?
  - viccuad 3y ago
    A good architecture for fully parallel, deterministic, thread-safe, serializable and extensible games is the Entity-Component-System pattern. I'm sure that Godot has one or a way to integrate a library that implements it. I think Unity doesn't come with ECS anyways.
    - LarsDu88 3y ago
      This is why I feel an engine like Bevy will one day beat them all. ECS, rust, memory safety, thread safety. It just needs an editor (or even a gameplan for what an editor would look like), animation, halfway decent rendering pipeline... it's a very long way from production ready.

TekMol 3y ago

Does this mean the engine will phone home every time a software which contains it is installed? How is that compatible with the GDPR which has been interpreted by courts in a way that it forbids sending any network packets to the USA, no matter if the user consented to it or not? For reference, see the rulings which deemed Google analytics illegal independent of consent.

Arnavion 3y ago
Unity already has UnityEngine.Analytics.dll since 2018, and it claims to be GDPR-compliant.
rightbyte 3y ago
Are "corporate information", as PI for commercial entities, covered by GDPR?
- kirun 3y ago
  They claim to have their own processes to count installs which would counter spoofing attacks. As well as being opaque to developers on how their installs are counted, this may be scooping up PII of users.
agd 3y ago
GDPR relates to personal data and it doesn’t forbid sending any network packets to the USA.
- generic92034 3y ago
  In some contexts the IP address already counts as personal data. Wasn't there recently an issue with web sites using Google fonts and therefore transmitting the user's IP address to Google?
- TekMol 3y ago
  Multiple curts have ruled that the information "IP soandso visited page soandso" and "IP soandso downloaded font soandso" are personal data. Therefore it is very likely they will rule the same for "IP soandso installed software soandso".

birracerveza 3y ago

On 4chan it immediately sparked a crowdsourced effort to make scripts that repeatedly install/uninstall games in creative ways (VMs, MAC spoofing) with the specific intention to hurt developers. This is definitely one of the dumbest choices I've seen a company do. Props to Unity for speeding up their own death.

trinovantes 3y ago
A least now the argument that piracy hurts the developers has some weight
- vanchor3 3y ago
  You wouldn't even need "piracy" in this case, just buy one copy of the game and figure out how it phones home, and then pick your favorite method of tricking it into reporting ludicrous amounts of installs, which would significantly outnumber pirate copies.
- dns_snek 3y ago
  No it doesn't, fraudulent install tracking by Unity could hurt the developers. If pirated copies count as valid installations, that means that the system is completely unauthenticated and will be abused.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bluescrn 3y ago
You don't need to actually install/reinstall games if you can figure out how the Unity runtime is notifying its servers about this install. You could theoretically write an 'install bombing' tool that sends fake install notifications straight to their server (or modify the game executable to do it repeatedly). You can't trust the client, especially when dealing with PC games. Hopefully Unity will anticipate this potential abuse, and filter out repeated 'installs' from the same IP address. But they don't seem to have anticipated free demos, pirated copies, Game Pass, or charity bundles before announcing this...

Sakos 3y ago

I think it's absurd that Unity can push a new pricing scheme on existing customers regardless of circumstance and essentially little to no warning. Games are in development for years and they're basically telling people 3 months beforehand. How is this okay? This is something I'd expect when switching to a newer version of a service/product. Not a randomly changing contract for what I've already been using at no fault of my own.

jimbob45 3y ago
It’s mostly likely an application of the Door in the Face technique where one makes a huge ask followed by a smaller, more well-received ask after the first is rejected. Here, they put forward an unreasonable demand. Later, once the trolling emerges, they roll it back to be only on new devs with old devs keeping the old system. They get to seem like they “listened to the community” and the community ignores their still predatory pricing.
- somenameforme 3y ago
  I don't think they'll even wait for the trolling. Small/mid tier studios are not going to accept it because they literally cannot afford to. New developers aren't going to accept it, because it now creates a poor value proposition for an ecosystems who's primary selling point is 'lower capability, but easier than Unreal.' The only people that might be able to accept are those big high revenue studies, but those are also the exact group capable of 'negotiating' for better terms. Even if this is a just an effort to roll out some less oppressive changes with less backlash than doing so immediately would entail (because they can now frame this initially planned roll out as indeed 'listening to the community'), this really just has clueless MBA stamped all over it, because the brand/trust damage here is serious, and that for a ship that's already sinking.
- offices 3y ago
  This at the cost of every customer seriously considering the value proposition of changing engine.
keikobadthebad 3y ago

dathinab 3y ago

> but the fact they are applying this retroactively to every game every made in Unity that also seems like it should not be legal no matter what you put in your TOS, at least in some jurisdictions it probably isn't (in the same way that e.g. conditional auto-termination contracts are no actually auto-terminating in many jurisdictions even if it's written in the contract)

rjzzleep 3y ago
In Germany it is not. SaaS apps can be particularly challenging because you cannot just change the terms for existing users and contracts. Ironically most customers don't know and don't react accordingly. Generally the customer behaviour is that customers get spooked and pay anyway. ... but if they were to sue it would be a problem, which is why typically small companies try to follow legislation and big company with big legal department, don't necessarily care.
- alpaca128 3y ago
  I thought you can change the terms for existing users but if it's not 100% beneficial to them they are allowed to cancel without costs?
realusername 3y ago
> at least in some jurisdictions it probably isn't I also don't think "you'll agree to future unpublished terms" will work anywhere in the EU
isilofi 3y ago
I'm not so sure about that. You are totally right that e.g. here in the EU contracts and terms of service with ordinary consumers ("B2C") are restricted as you say, limiting what can possibly be agreed on in that contract. Generally this consumer protection only applies to individuals for their private use. E.g. later changes to the terms of a contract are a big no-no. Contracts between businesses ("B2B") are far less restricted, there is no such thing as consumer protection for businesses. Whereas for consumers, terms of service are heavily restricted by a special law ("AGBG", basically translates as "terms-of-service-law") It is generally thought that business people are savvy enough to know what they can and cannot agree on. Therefore legislation and courts lean strongly towards providing greater freedom of business and contract in anything B2B. And I think in most circumstances, a game developer who distributes its game to a wider audience is a business in the scope of the aforementioned discussion. It would only maybe not be a business if there were no monetary benefit of any kind, so no selling games, no advertisements, no publicity that could lead to monetary benefit in the future...

snehk 3y ago

[flagged]

nmfisher 3y ago
I don't think you can fairly accuse independent game developers (who are overwhelmingly building atop Unity) of nickel and diming customers. Most of them never even break even.
oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
That's unfair. A huge number of totally legitimate indie games, that do absolutely no nickel and diming, are built on Unity.

pvg 3y ago

Ongoing threads at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37491622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37491622, among others

fefe23 3y ago

I don't get it. If someone gives you something that is vital for your product for free, and the license does not guarantee your free usage in perpetuity, and you can't take the source code and maintain things yourself if the vendor changes their mind, ... surely that's on you then? Did you think they didn't need to buy food and pay rent? To me as a complete outsider this move reeks of desperation on their part, not malice. Maybe you should have taken steps to prevent this instead of complaining about it after the fact? Turns out you can't pay people in exposure forever.

moron4hire 3y ago
I quit on Unity several years ago for this sort and many other reasons. But honestly, that isn't a decision a lot of people can make. For me, I just went back to doing web development. For someone in the indie game market, you either develop in Unity or cut yourself out of the employee pool.
gmerc 3y ago
You know, we’re taking about decades here. That said - both Epic and Valve are private and that is probably the better razor. Be extremely vary VC/Public companies because they will come under pressure to slaughter golden geese when the time comes.
oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
Even if you agree with the overall move, surely you recognise that some of the details — charging developers for users installing the same product multiple times, or even pirating it — are flat-out wrong? Not even just wrong from a moral point of view, but from a "this can't possibly work" one too.
- fefe23 3y ago
  Oh don't get me wrong! I don't agree with the overall move. I just think their customers should have seen it coming from a mile away. Capitalists are going to capitalist. Just like I thought the cloud customers should have anticipated that the cheap introductory lure offers would eventually run out and then they'll have to pay real money for the services. I'm a bit daft like that.

poulpy123 3y ago

Is there any software that is sold by installation ? I find that crazy even if I will never be concerned

auxermen 3y ago
Windows
- stefs 3y ago
  i doubt that's correct. i can install windows as often as i like, i just have to pay for the key and afaik i can only use the key in one active install at a time (as a private user). so it's very different.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- alpaca128 3y ago
  No, Windows is paid per key. Reinstalling Windows doesn't cost anything.

_the_inflator 3y ago

From the article: "Enshittification [to describe what Unity is doing] refers to companies that create a good product, then ramp up fees and deteriorate the service to take advantage of users who are locked into it." Let's see, how many App Stores follow suit. Pay per play/install might sound like a wonderful option for some.

shuiling 3y ago

[dead]

loupol 3y ago

Choosing installs to collect revenue on is stupid because it isn't tightly correlated to revenue for a game: Demos, bundles, free week-end tryouts on Steam, free-to-play games and other specific cases all lead to high install counts without necessarily generating the matching sales. It's especially stupid because Unity has good market share on mobile, which is a juicy market but with a fixed price per install, free-to-play and low-priced (0.99$, etc...) games will never choose Unity for new projects, because the percentage of revenue you will lose on those is going to be prohibitive. A less worse metric to collect on would be actual game sales count, but that's still horrible for promotional sale events and low-priced games (assuming fixed cost per sale). The sensible and simpler option would simply be a percentage of revenue past a threshold like Unreal Engine and CryEngine for example. I see two possible outcomes: * They stick with this pricing policy, and cash in on the fact that a lot of game studios are heavily invested in Unity at the moment and will take time to move away to extract a shit-ton of money short term in the meantime. Long-term it will probably crash and burn, but they're fine with it as long as they can milk enough before that. * They wait for the outcry, say they've listened to the community, roll it back and introduce a more sensible royalty system with percentage of revenue, which the community grudgingly accepts since it's less worse than the initial option.

manojlds 3y ago
Third outcome - Microsoft acquires them ( given the impact to Gamepass and C#)
- moron4hire 3y ago
  Unity is so wholly siloed away from the rest of the .NET ecosystem that I doubt Microsoft really cares about Unity regarding its impact on C#. Like, a lot of Unity developers think they know C#. They really don't. Most of the Unity developers I have met know a very, very small subset of C#, and almost nothing of .NET in general. That's not meant to be any shade-throwing at Unity developers. It's just that they are, for most purposes, completely different things. I can't take someone who has been working in Unity for the last 5 years and easily put them on any other kind of .NET project. The same for going the other way. The underlying language commonality is the least of the concerns. A small part of this is how most of the .NET framework isn't exactly great to execute in the middle of a hot update loop, but a much larger part is because of how Unity is built, having reinvented their own wheels for many things that could have been contributions to the larger .NET/Mono/CLR/etc ecosystem.

manojlds 3y ago

Given the impact to Gamepass (seeing tweets of many devs talking about it) and C#, what are the chances that Microsoft acquires Unity?

oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
Are you implying this move is intended to force Microsoft's hand? Because... that would be the most reasonable explanation I can think of!

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

leke 3y ago

2nd time I'm saying this...2023 is the year of the greedy CEO.

pjc50 3y ago
Every year is the year of the greedy CEO.
iopq 3y ago
You're saying they weren't greedy in 2022? What changed?
- pragmar 3y ago
  Interest rates and the cost of rolling over debt, likely.
Mistletoe 3y ago
It has been interesting and fun to watch what one simple knob turn of interest rates to more reasonable numbers does.
joobus 3y ago
Unity has lost $455 million dollars in the first 6 months of the fiscal year 2023. They lost $919 million in 2022. I don't think they have ever made a profit. Companies are not charities; they exist to make money, and Unity doesn't by a mile. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1810806/000181080623000126/a2023_q2shareholderlette.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1810806/000181080623...
- the_gipsy 3y ago
  So what? They're doing classic bait & switch. The fact that they weren't profitable just makes it even more pathetic.
- pjc50 3y ago
  Post-IPO unity may not have made a profit (although that link of yours shows positive EBITDA in recent quarters), but they only went public in 2020.

wkat4242 3y ago

I use unity only for free content and I'm glad they still except this from the policy (using the revenue threshold, obviously I don't have any revenue whatsoever). Obviously I can't pay for installs because I don't make any money from it. I don't think asking professional developers to pay fees is bad in principle. After all they get a lot of value from it. And they use it to make money. One thing I do find really bad is that they retroactively impose a monthly model on content developed with a once-off business model in mind. I don't think that's fair. If you're going to do this, do it only going forward so developers can incorporate the cost in their business model.

glimshe 3y ago

The old story... Be friends to the community, get everybody to believe you then increase prices when everybody is locked in. This time we have an answer: Godot.

rollcat 3y ago
An alternative engine (no matter how good) doesn't solve vendor lock-in. Gamedev is a cutthroat business. You can't afford a rewrite. Even for new productions, you can't throw away engine experience and start retooling. I expect backlash.
- the_gipsy 3y ago
  Godot isn't yet another game engine.
  - kevinmgranger 3y ago
    Can you elaborate?
    - the_gipsy 3y ago
      It's open source. You can be pretty much 100% sure that they won't do a bait & switch.
- krapp 3y ago
  I guess they'll just get bled by Unity until they die, then. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- moffkalast 3y ago
  It does when said vendor is an open source community.
realusername 3y ago
If I had to guess, Gogot is also the reason why they are scrambling to cash-out before it's too late.

ta8645 3y ago

Richard Stallman was right.

Maschinesky 3y ago

Who ever thought that a company who let in malware company is trustworthy should not complain. Anyway just use unreal engine.

hoseja 3y ago

How do they know I've installed a singleplayer offline game?

alpaca128 3y ago
How do you download and install a game without internet? Even the last few games sold outside Steam still need some launcher whether it's from Epic, Ubisoft or whatever. Sure, you can install a game from 2004 completely offline but that's not a Unity game.
- 6581 3y ago
  > Even the last few games sold outside Steam still need some launcher The vast majority of indie games do not require a launcher.
  - alpaca128 3y ago
    We are talking about paid games using Unity engine. If you can name a market for those that even remotely comes close to the sales on Steam, PlayStation, XBox, Epic, etc I'd be curious to hear about it. Either way it doesn't matter because Unity will just require an internet connection during installation and 99% of players won't notice or complain.
dgb23 3y ago
By calling home. The implication here is that unity is malware.

sylware 3y ago

Weird, I always have thought unity was getting a share of each sale.

zigzag312 3y ago

So, Unity is now more expensive than for example AutoCAD and has a royalty fees. I see a bright future for Unity Technologies...

bitcharmer 3y ago
I can bet my money on this being yet another case of things going well until MBA imbeciles took over.

vlaaad 3y ago

Fees comparison with Defold: https://twitter.com/defold/status/1701877174968492220 https://twitter.com/defold/status/1701877174968492220

Espionage724 3y ago

I never was a fan of Unity. To me it felt like its selling-point was that it could run on multiple platforms, but not at optimal performance compared to other engines (basically like Android and Java). My introduction to Unity was with Hearthstone (the card game), and even then it didn't natively support Linux. On that presumption, I found it incredibly surprising people latching onto it for VR dev, and considering most Unity VR games all share the same look (cartoon-y; basically look at A Township Tale and compare it to Orbus and Zenith), that further cements my view of Unity not being a serious high-quality capable engine to be using, unless I want to throw quick non-sustainable projects together. This news about Unity being even more expensive definitely doesn't help my view :p

ramesh31 3y ago
You have to understand where it came from. Unity was the simple easy to use indie darling for years when it first came about. The corporatization and financialization of the company ruined it, but once upon a time it occupied the same space Godot does today.
kriro 3y ago
I think they were just pretty early in the VR space with good libraries/support/tutorials etc. I cannot say for sure because I have only done one Unity-VR tutorial "back in the day" but in the AR space there was a time window where they were pretty clearly #1 (imo). I shipped a couple of small projects based on their Vuforia integration (quite costly) and then later without Vuforia. Nothing big, mostly trivial product vizualizations for customers that had upcoming trade shows/excibitions with somewhat creative markers. 100% of my lifetime AR profits are based on Unity such a strange wild west time but I got out of that market very quickly when it became a lot easier to build these simple demo apps. I still remember the "wow factor" and people running around the office showing all their colleagues how you could see their products through a tables/phone.

chillbill 3y ago

[dead]

nomercy400 3y ago

How does this work retroactively on released products? Say five years ago, I paid a company to build a house, who hired a contractor to build it and it was completed in a year. Nowadays, I open the door daily. Now the contractor goes to the company, saying that from January 1st, every time I open the door, the company has to pay a small fee to the contractor, because they built the house with the door five years ago. How is that even legal, even in a B2B context? As a company, you have no control over the number of installations. How can they even measure the number of installations for games released 5-10 years ago?

kalleboo 3y ago
It works legally since you didn't buy Unity. You don't own anything. You're licensing the right to use it on an ongoing basis. It's like how I can't buy a Rolling Stones CD and then play it on the radio for millions of people without paying them. I never bought the music, just the right to listen to it privately.
- nomercy400 3y ago
  In your example, it feels more like the distributor of the CD now has to pay the copyright holder 1ct everytime you play the CD, from January 1st next year. But it is license based? Wow, that is quite a risk to take as a gamedev, to tightly-couple your game with a third-party company's tooling, who can change their terms at will, so you can no longer use their tooling. I understand that you buy a license, but surely you can buy a permanent or fixed license for a lot more money, to take away the risks of having to pull your game from distribution due to licensing restrictions. It sounds like a dumb move from unity, to create so much uncertainty.

dgb23 3y ago

The video game market is a feast or famine kind of deal. Few games break even, even fewer make a profit. What Unity probably wants or needs is to take a cut off the large successes. That’s where all the money is. The problem is that they aren’t involved in distribution. This per/install model is trying to solve this by turning Unity into some kind of malware. A completely tone deaf move. Why not build business relationships with the companies that have been successful with Unity? It’s in the interest of both sides that Unity and its ecosystem are stable, improving and growing.

thatwasunusual 3y ago
> What Unity probably wants or needs is to take a cut off the large successes. That’s where all the money is. The problem is that they aren’t involved in distribution. Isn't the simple solution to just tax the companies a percentage of the revenue? Isn't that what Unreal do?
- rishav_sharan 3y ago
  yep. Unreal has a much better deal. 5% of royalties once your sales cross 1 Million. So if you are an indie dev, you can pretty much use Unreal for free. But if you are a decently sized dev shop, you pay a % of your revenue.

nomercy400 3y ago

Why did/can game companies not protect themselves against this possible change of contract? I mean, if you spend millions on developing a game, taking two-three years to develop, surely you try to tackle any risks that might endanger the project. For example, by fixing the price on the foundation of your game, i.e. the game engine. This is a huge change in the way this game engine will be considered for new games. If now during the development and full lifetime of the game the contract rules can change, gamedev companies will start to avoid these kind of contracts. With this one change Unity made it so that they can now no longer be trusted to keep the agreed upon contract terms intact for the lifetime of the game. If only they said this would go in effect for new, not-already-in-development-and-paid-for-game-engine, projects from January 1st, it would have saved them this breach-in-trust issue.

harimau777 3y ago
A lot of games don't cost millions to develop. In particular, I associate Unity more with indy games rather than AAA. Those sorts of devs don't have a lot of leverage.
- philistine 3y ago
  Cities: Skyline, Rust, Hearthstone, Cuphead, Disco Elysium, Kerbal Space Program. Those might not be the ginormous games you're thinking of but Unity is far from exclusively used by very small studios. Utlimately, I guess it's a question of definition: can you point me to a commonly agreed industry definition of AAA and indie?
  - littlekey 3y ago
    For what it's worth, I think Hearthstone in particular very much qualifies as "ginormous".
    - philistine 3y ago
      By the way, I learned that the latest Pokémon games, Shining Pearl and the other one are made with Unity. That is a 1000% ginormous. https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/11/looks-like-pokemon-brilliant-diamond-and-shining-pearl-are-unity-engine-games https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/11/looks-like-pokemon...

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

[dupe]