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Unity is offering a runtime fee waiver if you switch to LevelPlay

148 points by stuckinhell 3y ago

cratermoon 3y ago
Buried lede: AppLovin tried to buy Unity last year: https://www.wsj.com/articles/applovin-proposes-combination-with-unity-software-11660052115 https://www.wsj.com/articles/applovin-proposes-combination-w... LevelPlay is Unity's rebrand of IronSource's mobile game monetization platform. IronSource bought/merged with Unity about the same time, a move criticized by some: https://www.thegamer.com/unity-criticised-for-merging-with-known-malware-distributor/ https://www.thegamer.com/unity-criticised-for-merging-with-k...
- tacotacotaco 3y ago
  Unity may have damaged themself enough with this that AppLovin might get another chance to buy. Unity’s stock price has dropped 8% since this was announced. Another fun fact, the Unity CEO and several board members sold some of their stocks a few weeks ago. [1] [1] https://kotaku.com/unity-developer-fee-installs-john-riccitiello-sold-stoc-1850834439 https://kotaku.com/unity-developer-fee-installs-john-ricciti...
  - inemesitaffia 3y ago
    That article misrepresents what happened with the stock
Pulcinella 3y ago
This really does seem like Unity is destroying their business for pennies. Mobile game display ads seem like a very, very low value business to be in and I would imagine rates are going down all the time. Unity may manage to wipe out AppLovin by burning down the rest of their business, but winning king-of-the-hill on top a pile of ashes does not seem to be a high value position. Edit: It's as if Unreal wants to be king of glossy, fancy, high value brochures, magazines, and books. Unity wants to be king of phone book yellow page ads.
- sp332 3y ago
  Unity is already making more money from ads than from engine license sales. Most developers don't pay for using the engine. Ad sales pay for engine development.
  - gopher_space 3y ago
    The unity devs at my last game were constantly providing feedback and fixes to Unity. That’s a lost resource I haven’t seen anyone mention.
- TillE 3y ago
  There's just no way this change is actually gonna happen. Many prominent indie developers have already announced they'll be switching away from Unity for future projects, and you have to think that larger studios are drawing the same conclusions. The ship is sinking. Unity will retract this. Switch to revenue share or whatever. They'll eat a huge loss of trust because of this idiocy, but they'll remain a relevant game engine. I just can't see any other scenario.
  - mholm 3y ago
    > but they'll remain a relevant game engine For a little while. The problem is that Unity is a public company, merged with a malware company, and (currently) headed by somebody with no understanding of their own customers. But nobody looking to make games right now is going to start using Unity. Many indie developers are going to transition off, and the major players who still use it are likely going to find that Unity is going to start squeezing them to keep any semblance of profitability. Maybe big games like Genshin/Cities Skylines/Pokemon Go stick with it, but Unity doesn't survive that transition.
    - CactusOnFire 3y ago
      I'm not a gamedev, but I am hoping one of the actionable things from this situation is a call to action from the gaming community to put together more open-source game engine platforms, and for them to be more easily sharable. I am sure there are reasons this is difficult, but with so many industries built on open-source compliant tools, gamedev feels like a no-brainer for it as well.
doublerabbit 3y ago
What I'd like to see is that this fiasco encourages studios to produce their own engines rather than using the pre/existing selection. I'd happily wait another 5-7 years for a new game on a new engine then have a new game in two years that feels identical to others. And then open-source it and let the creativity roam free.
- armancdev 3y ago
  I disagree. It's not an engine problem if a game look like others. Most of the time, it's not lack of creativity too. It's often, not taking risk and applying what is already working.
  - JamesBarney 3y ago
    And using a game engine lets you take those risks because you can iterate and release faster. Studios will take more risk on a $3m game than a $6m game.
    - doublerabbit 3y ago
      Rightly so, but than the $3m game feels like every other $3m game. Without the risk, you don't get the whole innovated design of a new game.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  >encourages studios to produce their own engines rather than using the pre/existing selection. >And then open-source it and let the creativity roam free. These things are mutually exclusive.
- _the_inflator 3y ago
  I disagree. It is a lot of effort to build and maintain an engine. To be more precise, there is no such thing as a pure engine, but a platform with tools. Hardly anyone can build these things alone or even with a small team. Most indie games and devs would not exist without Unity and it makes perfectly sense to use services from 3rd parties. We all do, we all rely on others. On the other hand, a steady and trustworthy business relationship is key. While I understand Unity, they wanna earn money, I think it is bad to act in such a manner. Regarding the "look a like" feeling: This only shows, that the market works this way. How could an engine change that?
filiposnz 3y ago
>> “A fresh report…has thrown light on the situation” …no it hasn’t. This was in their original announcement. Discounts are available for those using other Unity products/services (which includes their ad stuff).
- i_am_jl 3y ago
  Describing a 100% fee waiver for studios that start a new engagement with one specific service as "discounts... for those using other Unity products/services" isn't exactly being forthcoming. This isn't my car insurance giving me a discount on my homeowner's policy, this is my landlord threatening to jack up my rent unless I use his garbage disposal company.
Robotbeat 3y ago
I feel like there ought to be a really good open source game engine competing with Unity and Unreal, but I’m unfamiliar with any.
- gustavus 3y ago
  Godot and yes although it isn't at parity at this point as more people adopt it it will increase in the number of features, especially if people choose to support it monetarily.
- lux 3y ago
  Godot Engine is coming along nicely https://godotengine.org/ https://godotengine.org/
  - ceeam 3y ago
    Sadly I haven't seen a (semi)professional, serious, 3D game made in Godot yet.
    - __loam 3y ago
      Cruelty Squad
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      Sonic Color's remaster. But it's not a good example when talking about stability. I feel half of it is on the engine and half on the fact that they were porting a Wii game to modern consoles (despite being gen 7, the Wii had ancient techniques for lighting and textures. Which is where many issues of the port came from).
      - minimaxir 3y ago
        The Sonic Colors Remaster had an infamous strobing issue on the Switch before it was fixed. Cassette Beasts, a great game on Godot (https://godotengine.org/article/godot-showcase-cassette-beasts/ https://godotengine.org/article/godot-showcase-cassette-beas... ), had weird performance issues for a relatively simple graphics game. Godot on consoles isn't as seamless as Unity, unfortunately.
jarsin 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Ekaros 3y ago
Hmm, I wonder if they get the 0.20 cents per install from adds? Then again it would be extremely ironic if they would charge more for install than they can provide revenue via adds...
linuxftw 3y ago
I had a feeling some detail like this was missing from previous reports (most of which I did not read entirely). This is the right move. It represents an opportunity to dethrone google in the ad display market, at least for gaming.
- pjc50 3y ago
  There really shouldn't be a gaming ad market. There are no good ad-supported games, it's more corrosive to the gameplay than even gatcha.
  - linuxftw 3y ago
    There are plenty of free to play games supported by ads that are fun to play. It's also a great funnel for converting a non-paying user into a paying user to disable the ads.
    - hutzlibu 3y ago
      It is also a great way to hook up kids as early as possible to get the best tracking data and condition them to whatever it is, that you want to sell them. With paying for games, the cost is clear. With ads, it isn't.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        The market already got hit hard last year over this issue. I think they are or already have worked around the "collecting minor's data" issue.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    We're well past "shouldn't be", unfortunately. Mobile tried premium games and it didn't work. They became free to play and there's only 3 real ways to monetize: ads, subscriptions (which include battle passes), and MTX. Gabe Newell is always quoted for saying "piracy is a service issue". But it turns out it's a issue you can eliminate if you keep all your content on a server and the app is just a free, thin client. Mobile found its own way around piracy, and it found new markets even when "core gamers" left.
olliej 3y ago
"Make your apps have a shitty UX, and sell your user's data without their consent, or we'll force you to discard all the work you did under our previous license" In other words, any unity products going forward should be considered suspect. Any new games should avoid the entire company as they are clearly dishonest and have no interest in maintaining whatever contract terms you might agree to today.
Havoc 3y ago
At this stage Unity could offer a free unicorn and it wouldn't move the needle. They literally smoked all their goodwill in a day with their retrospective revise the terms to something that fucks over ever dev thing
CaliforniaKarl 3y ago
That seems like monopolistic behavior on Unity's part. Wouldn't this action run afoul of antitrust laws?
- drexlspivey 3y ago
  30% market share is not a monopoly
  - charonn0 3y ago
    Antitrust laws prohibit anti-competitive practices generally, not just literal monopolies.
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    Unity itself claims more than 70% of the top mobile games in the market. https://unity.com/solutions/mobile https://unity.com/solutions/mobile
  - __loam 3y ago
    You can still break anti-trust laws even with a 30% market share.
  - iaw 3y ago
    Lets call it as it is, an oligopoly share.
- badRNG 3y ago
  Typically antitrust laws apply to a company using a monopoly in one industry to behave anti-competitively in another. Unity is behaving terribly, but they aren't a monopoly, and this isn't really even anti-competitive, it's just shitty. There's a greater case that they aren't properly representing the fiduciary interests of their shareholders.
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    In this case, it seems that they are wanting to leverage Unity's dominance in mobile gaming as a way to out-compete rivals in the mobile advertising space. Questions for lawyers: Is Unity's share (more than 70% of the top mobile games in the market) large enough to be a monopoly? Is this move to displace rivals in advertising behaving anti-competitively?
Renaud 3y ago
Wondering if Microsoft shouldn't have bought Unity, It could have made sense, because of its focus on developer, because of its interests in gaming and because it's a huge showcase for C# and .Net as many of the features of unity could have been folded into regular .Net or there could have been an opportunity to have a '.GameNet' version, maybe.
- asabla 3y ago
  I guess this could also be a play to make Microsoft interested in buying them out when money crisis hit. But I don't know, it could just be an ordinary bad bussiness decision
  - Someone 3y ago
    > I guess this could also be a play to make Microsoft interested in buying them out when money crisis hit. That would be a stupid idea. Companies that are in financial trouble tend to be cheaper to buy, typically a lot cheaper if there’s only one serious buyer candidate. If they think “when we’re almost broke, we can sell out to Microsoft for X million”, certainly they can get at least the same amount now that they aren’t?
- pc_edwin 3y ago
  They really want to but Lina Khan will blow up the acquisition before the ink even has a chance to dry. Especially after the bruising FTC for from the Activision fight. Unlike Activision, the FTC actually has a case here.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  ~Microsoft already has XBox, and CryEngine is also C#/.NET.~ see reply comment
  - bmalicoat 3y ago
    Xbox doesn't provide a game engine, just lower level APIs. Unity is a popular way to get games on Xbox for folks who can't build their own engine. Further, things like HoloLens run Unity as a first class dev environment. I used to work on both Xbox and HoloLens at Microsoft, but this is all public info.
Fordec 3y ago
What a lovely way of saying that everyone who doesn't leave the platform is about to become a Ubisoft tier Developer filled with spyware. Burning even their users that don't quit the platform. How absolute this decimation of their user base will be is almost impressive in how destructive this move has been. I almost have to commend it's comprehensiveness.
brundolf 3y ago
You can almost hear the lawsuits being prepared
hcks 3y ago
[flagged]
- TheIronMark 3y ago
  Unity already has license fees if your game earns money. This new license change comes across like a shameless money grab.
- vore 3y ago
  A per-installation fee model is bonkers: of course Unity is allowed to charge for their product, but if your margins are already pretty thin, it's pretty hard to budget for a per-installation fee – not even per sale!
  - WillPostForFood 3y ago
    How many apps are successful enough to meet the revenue thresholds (over $1mil), but are sub $1 ARPU, and aren't ad revenue driven? I'm sure there are some, but that's going to be a small number, and there likely can be some carve out for them.
    - squeaky-clean 3y ago
      Those thresholds are just the point when you'll be net negative. There's still a large range above that ARPU where you're making less money than before or with a different engine. Cult of The Lamb has already announced they will delist their game, and the Slay The Spire dev team have announced they're halting development on their new game to port it to a new engine.
      - thowfaraway 3y ago
        Those are exactly the types of games that would be much worse off under an Unreal style royalty. Cult of the Lamb is $24.99 on Steam Unreal royalty is 5%, so $1.25 per sale Unity is $0.20 So royalty is ~6x more If there was a reasonable way to count installs (I don't think it is technically possible), install fee is much better than royalty for most devs who are not F2P apps.
failrate 3y ago
Godot is pretty good. GameMaker Studio is all right for 2D stuff.
jarsin 3y ago
Switch over to Unreal. There is no risk over there. Tim Sweeney (Dec 2022): Epic Games will ‘fight on to victory, whatever it costs’ in Apple legal battle Psst...that cost will be Unreal.
everyone 3y ago
I've been a pro Unity dev, as an employee and then a freelancer running a small team doing contracts for 10 years. I think this was in the back of my mind for a long time but yesterday a switch just flipped in my head and I decided Unity are just not to be trusted anymore, the company has lost all credibility and I never want to use Unity for another project. I'm learning Godot atm.
- Zhyl 3y ago
  It seems everyone is switching to Godot.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    I hope it happens for real this time. I remember last year's kerfuffle when they merged/aquired Ironsource. Either way, I want to get in on the early Godot waves while I can.
salynchnew 3y ago
When the anonymous source in the article said "they've been killing it," then I knew that the quote came from a source internal to AppLovin. Their exec team loves to say stuff like that.
- tough 3y ago
  They need some google lawyer talk over there
Figs 3y ago
Am I misunderstanding something here? This seems like a racket scheme! (As in a "shame if some 'hacker' on 4chan were to 'install' your already shipped game a million times a second racking up our new fee... unless you do what we want" type of extortionary deal.) Has anyone called the FBI about this?
- xref 3y ago
  They claim to have developed “proprietary technology” to detect this, but of course the better it works the worse their income would be…
  - freeAgent 3y ago
    Yeah, I’m sure it works, but not /too/ well.
blindriver 3y ago
Right now it's 0.20 per install. In a year, it could be $1 or $5 now that the door are open to it.
extesy 3y ago
This situation with Unity looks very similar to the recent blunder by Wizards of the Coast attempting to change their license and triggering the exodus of their customers: https://www.ign.com/articles/wizards-of-the-coasts-new-dungeons-dragons-license-ogl-controversy https://www.ign.com/articles/wizards-of-the-coasts-new-dunge...
- SXX 3y ago
  It is not the same. D&D fans can of course shit on WotC and Hasbro, but they would still be D&D fans in the end of day even if changes were not reverted. Fans can't just go and become fans of "free and open source D&D". Individual people are weak and not rational. Majority will always continue to pay for entertainment companies products and bring money no matter how bad they treated by said companies. Think of Disney or Electronic Arts games. Unity Technologies is a B2B software and service provider. Their decision to do a rag pull under 10,000+ of businesses will force everyone in industry to diversify. Unity not going under anytime soon, but now every single CEO and CTO in gamedev will be doing research on alternatives simply because pricing Unity come up with is not viable for a lot of games.
  - nwallin 3y ago
    It's a lot easier, I think, to switch from D&D 5E to Pathfinder 2e than it is to switch from Unity to Unreal/Godot or whatever. The stakes are a lot lower, that's for sure.
    - SXX 3y ago
      Yeah you can switch to Pathfinder, but you wont just forget about D&D existence and there still gonna be tons of friends unaware of drama who prefer D&D. Like there is still tons of Star Wars fans who continue bring money to Disney even though they might hate the company. At the same time gamedev business is still a business and Unity is now unreliable supplier. Today we are lucky, but their ToS and fee changes could literally kill my company overnight in slightly different circumstances. Businesses that not mitigate risks like this go bankrupt really fast so no one sane will ever trust Unity after this rug pull.
tech-historian 3y ago
TFA mentions "UA platform" several times but doesn't mention what that means. Can someone enlighten me? Google isn't disambiguating things much either. Thx!
- k_c_lin 3y ago
  UA = User Acquisition, so other app/mobile game publishers will run ads through a UA platform in the hopes of attracting new users.
  - tech-historian 3y ago
    Thank you :)
User23 3y ago
Has any real lawyer got any idea whether the unity license update is unconscionable? I have this vague notion that the bar is lower for contracts of adhesion.
teawrecks 3y ago
RIP Unity.
CatWChainsaw 3y ago
Enshittification/late stage capitalism comment. I don't find this particularly surprising. This wasn't much of an extrapolation. I stopped playing many computer/video games years ago because I had a sense that monetization was going to suck the delight out of them. Capitalism as it works right now demands continuous, ever-increasing growth. When you saturate one source of income, you have to create an entirely new one. We went from games that were complete at shipping to games with DLC. Then we got microtransactions, lootboxes, invasive advertisements, platform revenue cuts, forcing always-online, and now this. I suspect their next trick will be that play time of games that use their engine needs to be monitored and they'll demand some sort of royalty for every X minutes played. Some day companies will find a way to monitor every breath you make and every step you take, too. The money machine must be fed.

148 points by stuckinhell 3y ago

Buried lede: AppLovin tried to buy Unity last year: https://www.wsj.com/articles/applovin-proposes-combination-with-unity-software-11660052115 https://www.wsj.com/articles/applovin-proposes-combination-w... LevelPlay is Unity's rebrand of IronSource's mobile game monetization platform. IronSource bought/merged with Unity about the same time, a move criticized by some: https://www.thegamer.com/unity-criticised-for-merging-with-known-malware-distributor/ https://www.thegamer.com/unity-criticised-for-merging-with-k...

tacotacotaco 3y ago
Unity may have damaged themself enough with this that AppLovin might get another chance to buy. Unity’s stock price has dropped 8% since this was announced. Another fun fact, the Unity CEO and several board members sold some of their stocks a few weeks ago. [1] [1] https://kotaku.com/unity-developer-fee-installs-john-riccitiello-sold-stoc-1850834439 https://kotaku.com/unity-developer-fee-installs-john-ricciti...
- inemesitaffia 3y ago
  That article misrepresents what happened with the stock

Pulcinella 3y ago

This really does seem like Unity is destroying their business for pennies. Mobile game display ads seem like a very, very low value business to be in and I would imagine rates are going down all the time. Unity may manage to wipe out AppLovin by burning down the rest of their business, but winning king-of-the-hill on top a pile of ashes does not seem to be a high value position. Edit: It's as if Unreal wants to be king of glossy, fancy, high value brochures, magazines, and books. Unity wants to be king of phone book yellow page ads.

sp332 3y ago
Unity is already making more money from ads than from engine license sales. Most developers don't pay for using the engine. Ad sales pay for engine development.
- gopher_space 3y ago
  The unity devs at my last game were constantly providing feedback and fixes to Unity. That’s a lost resource I haven’t seen anyone mention.
TillE 3y ago
There's just no way this change is actually gonna happen. Many prominent indie developers have already announced they'll be switching away from Unity for future projects, and you have to think that larger studios are drawing the same conclusions. The ship is sinking. Unity will retract this. Switch to revenue share or whatever. They'll eat a huge loss of trust because of this idiocy, but they'll remain a relevant game engine. I just can't see any other scenario.
- mholm 3y ago
  > but they'll remain a relevant game engine For a little while. The problem is that Unity is a public company, merged with a malware company, and (currently) headed by somebody with no understanding of their own customers. But nobody looking to make games right now is going to start using Unity. Many indie developers are going to transition off, and the major players who still use it are likely going to find that Unity is going to start squeezing them to keep any semblance of profitability. Maybe big games like Genshin/Cities Skylines/Pokemon Go stick with it, but Unity doesn't survive that transition.
  - CactusOnFire 3y ago
    I'm not a gamedev, but I am hoping one of the actionable things from this situation is a call to action from the gaming community to put together more open-source game engine platforms, and for them to be more easily sharable. I am sure there are reasons this is difficult, but with so many industries built on open-source compliant tools, gamedev feels like a no-brainer for it as well.

doublerabbit 3y ago

What I'd like to see is that this fiasco encourages studios to produce their own engines rather than using the pre/existing selection. I'd happily wait another 5-7 years for a new game on a new engine then have a new game in two years that feels identical to others. And then open-source it and let the creativity roam free.

armancdev 3y ago
I disagree. It's not an engine problem if a game look like others. Most of the time, it's not lack of creativity too. It's often, not taking risk and applying what is already working.
- JamesBarney 3y ago
  And using a game engine lets you take those risks because you can iterate and release faster. Studios will take more risk on a $3m game than a $6m game.
  - doublerabbit 3y ago
    Rightly so, but than the $3m game feels like every other $3m game. Without the risk, you don't get the whole innovated design of a new game.
Dalewyn 3y ago
>encourages studios to produce their own engines rather than using the pre/existing selection. >And then open-source it and let the creativity roam free. These things are mutually exclusive.
_the_inflator 3y ago
I disagree. It is a lot of effort to build and maintain an engine. To be more precise, there is no such thing as a pure engine, but a platform with tools. Hardly anyone can build these things alone or even with a small team. Most indie games and devs would not exist without Unity and it makes perfectly sense to use services from 3rd parties. We all do, we all rely on others. On the other hand, a steady and trustworthy business relationship is key. While I understand Unity, they wanna earn money, I think it is bad to act in such a manner. Regarding the "look a like" feeling: This only shows, that the market works this way. How could an engine change that?

filiposnz 3y ago

>> “A fresh report…has thrown light on the situation” …no it hasn’t. This was in their original announcement. Discounts are available for those using other Unity products/services (which includes their ad stuff).

i_am_jl 3y ago
Describing a 100% fee waiver for studios that start a new engagement with one specific service as "discounts... for those using other Unity products/services" isn't exactly being forthcoming. This isn't my car insurance giving me a discount on my homeowner's policy, this is my landlord threatening to jack up my rent unless I use his garbage disposal company.

Robotbeat 3y ago

I feel like there ought to be a really good open source game engine competing with Unity and Unreal, but I’m unfamiliar with any.

gustavus 3y ago
Godot and yes although it isn't at parity at this point as more people adopt it it will increase in the number of features, especially if people choose to support it monetarily.
lux 3y ago
Godot Engine is coming along nicely https://godotengine.org/ https://godotengine.org/
- ceeam 3y ago
  Sadly I haven't seen a (semi)professional, serious, 3D game made in Godot yet.
  - __loam 3y ago
    Cruelty Squad
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    Sonic Color's remaster. But it's not a good example when talking about stability. I feel half of it is on the engine and half on the fact that they were porting a Wii game to modern consoles (despite being gen 7, the Wii had ancient techniques for lighting and textures. Which is where many issues of the port came from).
    - minimaxir 3y ago
      The Sonic Colors Remaster had an infamous strobing issue on the Switch before it was fixed. Cassette Beasts, a great game on Godot (https://godotengine.org/article/godot-showcase-cassette-beasts/ https://godotengine.org/article/godot-showcase-cassette-beas... ), had weird performance issues for a relatively simple graphics game. Godot on consoles isn't as seamless as Unity, unfortunately.

jarsin 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

Ekaros 3y ago

Hmm, I wonder if they get the 0.20 cents per install from adds? Then again it would be extremely ironic if they would charge more for install than they can provide revenue via adds...

linuxftw 3y ago

I had a feeling some detail like this was missing from previous reports (most of which I did not read entirely). This is the right move. It represents an opportunity to dethrone google in the ad display market, at least for gaming.

pjc50 3y ago
There really shouldn't be a gaming ad market. There are no good ad-supported games, it's more corrosive to the gameplay than even gatcha.
- linuxftw 3y ago
  There are plenty of free to play games supported by ads that are fun to play. It's also a great funnel for converting a non-paying user into a paying user to disable the ads.
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    It is also a great way to hook up kids as early as possible to get the best tracking data and condition them to whatever it is, that you want to sell them. With paying for games, the cost is clear. With ads, it isn't.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      The market already got hit hard last year over this issue. I think they are or already have worked around the "collecting minor's data" issue.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  We're well past "shouldn't be", unfortunately. Mobile tried premium games and it didn't work. They became free to play and there's only 3 real ways to monetize: ads, subscriptions (which include battle passes), and MTX. Gabe Newell is always quoted for saying "piracy is a service issue". But it turns out it's a issue you can eliminate if you keep all your content on a server and the app is just a free, thin client. Mobile found its own way around piracy, and it found new markets even when "core gamers" left.

olliej 3y ago

"Make your apps have a shitty UX, and sell your user's data without their consent, or we'll force you to discard all the work you did under our previous license" In other words, any unity products going forward should be considered suspect. Any new games should avoid the entire company as they are clearly dishonest and have no interest in maintaining whatever contract terms you might agree to today.

Havoc 3y ago

At this stage Unity could offer a free unicorn and it wouldn't move the needle. They literally smoked all their goodwill in a day with their retrospective revise the terms to something that fucks over ever dev thing

CaliforniaKarl 3y ago

That seems like monopolistic behavior on Unity's part. Wouldn't this action run afoul of antitrust laws?

drexlspivey 3y ago
30% market share is not a monopoly
- charonn0 3y ago
  Antitrust laws prohibit anti-competitive practices generally, not just literal monopolies.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  Unity itself claims more than 70% of the top mobile games in the market. https://unity.com/solutions/mobile https://unity.com/solutions/mobile
- __loam 3y ago
  You can still break anti-trust laws even with a 30% market share.
- iaw 3y ago
  Lets call it as it is, an oligopoly share.
badRNG 3y ago
Typically antitrust laws apply to a company using a monopoly in one industry to behave anti-competitively in another. Unity is behaving terribly, but they aren't a monopoly, and this isn't really even anti-competitive, it's just shitty. There's a greater case that they aren't properly representing the fiduciary interests of their shareholders.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  In this case, it seems that they are wanting to leverage Unity's dominance in mobile gaming as a way to out-compete rivals in the mobile advertising space. Questions for lawyers: Is Unity's share (more than 70% of the top mobile games in the market) large enough to be a monopoly? Is this move to displace rivals in advertising behaving anti-competitively?

Renaud 3y ago

Wondering if Microsoft shouldn't have bought Unity, It could have made sense, because of its focus on developer, because of its interests in gaming and because it's a huge showcase for C# and .Net as many of the features of unity could have been folded into regular .Net or there could have been an opportunity to have a '.GameNet' version, maybe.

asabla 3y ago
I guess this could also be a play to make Microsoft interested in buying them out when money crisis hit. But I don't know, it could just be an ordinary bad bussiness decision
- Someone 3y ago
  > I guess this could also be a play to make Microsoft interested in buying them out when money crisis hit. That would be a stupid idea. Companies that are in financial trouble tend to be cheaper to buy, typically a lot cheaper if there’s only one serious buyer candidate. If they think “when we’re almost broke, we can sell out to Microsoft for X million”, certainly they can get at least the same amount now that they aren’t?
pc_edwin 3y ago
They really want to but Lina Khan will blow up the acquisition before the ink even has a chance to dry. Especially after the bruising FTC for from the Activision fight. Unlike Activision, the FTC actually has a case here.
cratermoon 3y ago
~Microsoft already has XBox, and CryEngine is also C#/.NET.~ see reply comment
- bmalicoat 3y ago
  Xbox doesn't provide a game engine, just lower level APIs. Unity is a popular way to get games on Xbox for folks who can't build their own engine. Further, things like HoloLens run Unity as a first class dev environment. I used to work on both Xbox and HoloLens at Microsoft, but this is all public info.

Fordec 3y ago

What a lovely way of saying that everyone who doesn't leave the platform is about to become a Ubisoft tier Developer filled with spyware. Burning even their users that don't quit the platform. How absolute this decimation of their user base will be is almost impressive in how destructive this move has been. I almost have to commend it's comprehensiveness.

brundolf 3y ago

You can almost hear the lawsuits being prepared

hcks 3y ago

[flagged]

TheIronMark 3y ago
Unity already has license fees if your game earns money. This new license change comes across like a shameless money grab.
vore 3y ago
A per-installation fee model is bonkers: of course Unity is allowed to charge for their product, but if your margins are already pretty thin, it's pretty hard to budget for a per-installation fee – not even per sale!
- WillPostForFood 3y ago
  How many apps are successful enough to meet the revenue thresholds (over $1mil), but are sub $1 ARPU, and aren't ad revenue driven? I'm sure there are some, but that's going to be a small number, and there likely can be some carve out for them.
  - squeaky-clean 3y ago
    Those thresholds are just the point when you'll be net negative. There's still a large range above that ARPU where you're making less money than before or with a different engine. Cult of The Lamb has already announced they will delist their game, and the Slay The Spire dev team have announced they're halting development on their new game to port it to a new engine.
    - thowfaraway 3y ago
      Those are exactly the types of games that would be much worse off under an Unreal style royalty. Cult of the Lamb is $24.99 on Steam Unreal royalty is 5%, so $1.25 per sale Unity is $0.20 So royalty is ~6x more If there was a reasonable way to count installs (I don't think it is technically possible), install fee is much better than royalty for most devs who are not F2P apps.

failrate 3y ago

Godot is pretty good. GameMaker Studio is all right for 2D stuff.

jarsin 3y ago

Switch over to Unreal. There is no risk over there. Tim Sweeney (Dec 2022): Epic Games will ‘fight on to victory, whatever it costs’ in Apple legal battle Psst...that cost will be Unreal.

everyone 3y ago

I've been a pro Unity dev, as an employee and then a freelancer running a small team doing contracts for 10 years. I think this was in the back of my mind for a long time but yesterday a switch just flipped in my head and I decided Unity are just not to be trusted anymore, the company has lost all credibility and I never want to use Unity for another project. I'm learning Godot atm.

Zhyl 3y ago
It seems everyone is switching to Godot.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  I hope it happens for real this time. I remember last year's kerfuffle when they merged/aquired Ironsource. Either way, I want to get in on the early Godot waves while I can.

salynchnew 3y ago

When the anonymous source in the article said "they've been killing it," then I knew that the quote came from a source internal to AppLovin. Their exec team loves to say stuff like that.

tough 3y ago
They need some google lawyer talk over there

Figs 3y ago

Am I misunderstanding something here? This seems like a racket scheme! (As in a "shame if some 'hacker' on 4chan were to 'install' your already shipped game a million times a second racking up our new fee... unless you do what we want" type of extortionary deal.) Has anyone called the FBI about this?

xref 3y ago
They claim to have developed “proprietary technology” to detect this, but of course the better it works the worse their income would be…
- freeAgent 3y ago
  Yeah, I’m sure it works, but not /too/ well.

blindriver 3y ago

Right now it's 0.20 per install. In a year, it could be $1 or $5 now that the door are open to it.

extesy 3y ago

This situation with Unity looks very similar to the recent blunder by Wizards of the Coast attempting to change their license and triggering the exodus of their customers: https://www.ign.com/articles/wizards-of-the-coasts-new-dungeons-dragons-license-ogl-controversy https://www.ign.com/articles/wizards-of-the-coasts-new-dunge...

SXX 3y ago
It is not the same. D&D fans can of course shit on WotC and Hasbro, but they would still be D&D fans in the end of day even if changes were not reverted. Fans can't just go and become fans of "free and open source D&D". Individual people are weak and not rational. Majority will always continue to pay for entertainment companies products and bring money no matter how bad they treated by said companies. Think of Disney or Electronic Arts games. Unity Technologies is a B2B software and service provider. Their decision to do a rag pull under 10,000+ of businesses will force everyone in industry to diversify. Unity not going under anytime soon, but now every single CEO and CTO in gamedev will be doing research on alternatives simply because pricing Unity come up with is not viable for a lot of games.
- nwallin 3y ago
  It's a lot easier, I think, to switch from D&D 5E to Pathfinder 2e than it is to switch from Unity to Unreal/Godot or whatever. The stakes are a lot lower, that's for sure.
  - SXX 3y ago
    Yeah you can switch to Pathfinder, but you wont just forget about D&D existence and there still gonna be tons of friends unaware of drama who prefer D&D. Like there is still tons of Star Wars fans who continue bring money to Disney even though they might hate the company. At the same time gamedev business is still a business and Unity is now unreliable supplier. Today we are lucky, but their ToS and fee changes could literally kill my company overnight in slightly different circumstances. Businesses that not mitigate risks like this go bankrupt really fast so no one sane will ever trust Unity after this rug pull.

tech-historian 3y ago

TFA mentions "UA platform" several times but doesn't mention what that means. Can someone enlighten me? Google isn't disambiguating things much either. Thx!

k_c_lin 3y ago
UA = User Acquisition, so other app/mobile game publishers will run ads through a UA platform in the hopes of attracting new users.
- tech-historian 3y ago
  Thank you :)

User23 3y ago

Has any real lawyer got any idea whether the unity license update is unconscionable? I have this vague notion that the bar is lower for contracts of adhesion.

teawrecks 3y ago

RIP Unity.

CatWChainsaw 3y ago

Enshittification/late stage capitalism comment. I don't find this particularly surprising. This wasn't much of an extrapolation. I stopped playing many computer/video games years ago because I had a sense that monetization was going to suck the delight out of them. Capitalism as it works right now demands continuous, ever-increasing growth. When you saturate one source of income, you have to create an entirely new one. We went from games that were complete at shipping to games with DLC. Then we got microtransactions, lootboxes, invasive advertisements, platform revenue cuts, forcing always-online, and now this. I suspect their next trick will be that play time of games that use their engine needs to be monitored and they'll demand some sort of royalty for every X minutes played. Some day companies will find a way to monitor every breath you make and every step you take, too. The money machine must be fed.