Unity reveals plans to charge per game install, drawing criticism from development community

[Segata]

https://archive.ph/D49vV

Unity reveals plans to charge per game install, drawing criticism from development community

Unity has announced dramatic changes to its Unity Engine business model which will see it introduce a monthly fee per new game install beginning on 1st January next year - a move that has drawn considerable criticism from the development community.

Unity - the engine behind countless acclaimed games including Tunic, Cuphead, Hollow Knight, Citizen Sleeper, RimWorld, Outer Wilds, Fall Guys, Ori and the Blind Forest, and Cities: Skylines - was previously licenced to developers using a royalty free model built around subscription tiers. Anyone whose revenue or funding was less than $100k over the course of the year (and who didn't want access to features such as the ability to remove the Unity splash screen) could stick to the free Unity Personal licence, while a Unity Plus subscription was required up to $200k in revenue, and a Unity Pro or above subscription was needed for more.

As of 1st January, 2024, however, developers will be expected to pay an additional monthly Unity Runtime Fee per new game install - seemingly including re-installs and installs across multiple devices - on top of their existing licence subscription, with those fees kicking in for titles that have made $200k or more in the last 12 months and have at least 200k lifetime game installs. Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise subscribers, meanwhile, will see the fees applied after passing the $1m revenue and 1m lifetime installs threshold.

Once the fees kick in, developers using Unity Personal will be expected to pay $0.2 per new install above the 200k threshold each month, while Unity Pro and Enterprise subscribers will be required to pay $0.15 and $0.125 respectively after crossing the 1m line - a figure that will decrease as higher install thresholds are reached. Unity Plus, meanwhile, is being retired as of today, meaning access to advanced features will now require at least a $2k annual subscription - an increase of over $1,600 compared to Unity Plus.

Unity's new fees will be applied retroactively to all games already on the market that cross its revenue and install thresholds, and to all to all games regardless of price - raising questions around the viability of free game giveaways, game demos, bundles, and more - and there's concern developers may now face charges for pirated game installs. There are also questions around how the changes will complicate the logistics of being on services like Game Pass.

The industry response so far appears to be a mixture of outrage, disbelief, and confusion, with some developers already publicly pledging to switch engines. Eurogamer has reached out to number of studios for their response to today's changes, including Size Five Games' Dan Marshall, creator of the acclaimed Lair of the Clockwork God, The Swindle, and more.

"It's an absolute fucking catastrophe," Marshall told us, "and I'll be jumping ship to Unreal as soon as I can. Most indies simply don't have the resources to deal with these kind of batshit logistics. Publishers are less likely to take on Unity games, because there's now a cost and an overhead," he continued. "How this is being tracked is super vague and feels half-thought-through. It seems open to review-bombing exploits, but in a way that actually costs developers. If someone buys a game on Steam and installs in on three machines, are Devs liable for three payments? If so, that sucks. Gamepass is suddenly a massive headache... the list goes on.

"It's all just utterly horrible, and they need to backtrack on this instantly or every Dev I know is likely jumping ship tomorrow."

"I have a couple of projects on the go in Unity right now," Marshall continued, "and they're far enough along that changing engine isn't an option, and I get a sickly feeling in my stomach just thinking about this. A horrendous policy, presumably dreamed up by the money men. I'm legitimately quite angry. I've been using Unity for over 10 years, that's a lot of investment in a system I'm about to drop like a hot rock."

We'll continue to share developers reactions as we hear more.

[Segata]

[Acrux]

Glad to see an end to Unity. I can't imagine developers won't challenge this part in court, though:

Unity's new fees will be applied retroactively to all games already on the market that cross its revenue and install thresholds, and to all to all games regardless of price - raising questions around the viability of free game giveaways, game demos, bundles, and more - and there's concern developers may now face charges for pirated game installs. There are also questions around how the changes will complicate the logistics of being on services like Game Pass.

I'm pretty sure you can't change a contract this drastically to apply retroactively.

[Emphyrio]

Glad to see an end to Unity. I can't imagine developers won't challenge this part in court, though:

Unity's new fees will be applied retroactively to all games already on the market that cross its revenue and install thresholds, and to all to all games regardless of price - raising questions around the viability of free game giveaways, game demos, bundles, and more - and there's concern developers may now face charges for pirated game installs. There are also questions around how the changes will complicate the logistics of being on services like Game Pass.

I'm pretty sure you can't change a contract this drastically to apply retroactively.

the basic premise of a contract is that the two parties have to agree to it

good luck

[J1M]

The retroactive part looks like something someone slipped in there because they thought this was a bad idea and are trying to save the company, lol.

[rusty_shackleford]

Reminder that Unity employs >7,700 people and nobody knows what they even do.

[gerey]

It almost feels like whoever came up with this farce didn't consult their legal department beforehand, or did but decided to ignore their advice.

Then again, this might just be a retarded ploy - come up with an outrageous offer and then scale it back to what you originally wanted, coming over as reasonable and willing to listen. If that was indeed the plan, I don't imagine it's going to work out that well - developers are going to be spooked and seek alternatives (basically Unreal or Godot), and Unity will fade into irrelevance.

[rusty_shackleford]

Unity >>>>>>>>>>>>>> Unreal

UE4/5 games are nearly unmoddable at anything beyond basic content due to using C++ as a scripting language.

[Acrux]

Then again, this might just be a retarded ploy - come up with an outrageous offer and then scale it back to what you originally wanted, coming over as reasonable and willing to listen.

I have a feeling it's this. That's the same thing WOTC did when they changed the OGL, and it seems like it's the current day MO for these companies trying to allocate more xoomerbucks to themselves.

[gerey]

Reminder that Unity employs >7,700 people and nobody knows what they even do.

Typical tech company tumor growths. HR, ethics department, marketing - all staffed with more women and minorities than necessary to make up for their lack of intelligence and competence.

Only reason I can imagine they'd need more than 100 employes (of whom 90% should be programmers) is a tech support department for their various clients.

UE4/5 games are nearly unmoddable at anything beyond basic content due to using C++ as a scripting language.

I do agree, but retards are apparently in charge of Unity - or they got bribed by Epic to deliberately tank the company, wouldn't put it past them. If they go through with this then the only viable engine on the market is going to be Unreal, with a tiny percentage of developers using legacy or in-house ones.

[Shillitron]

> Unreal Wants More $$$$
> Revolutionizes High Tricount Rendering, far exceeding the current AAA engine ecosystem, free of charge
> Revolutionizes Real Time Global Illumination Tech, something traditionally massively expensive to license, free of charge
> Creates a High Poly 3D Character generator that rivals AAA companies in quality, free of charge
> Many AAA companies dumping their in house engines (Frostbite, Cry, RED Engine) to switch to Unreal
> Customers flock in droves


> Unity Wants more $$$
> Splits their engine into 2 rendering pipelines that breaks everything before, and drives all their shader developers up a wall supporting both, (Middleware Shader language been on roadmap for almost 6 years now)
> Terrain tools still broken
> RTGI ripped out, then put back in, still sucks
> DOTS started... then dropped (On roadmap for 10 years)
> Purchases a Shady AD rev company that was known to package malware in their software
> Purchases a movie production company that specializes in kitbashing assets unfit for game rendering
> Hires an internal team to do "High quality asset" releases then nickel and dimes their customers for it, it goes nowhere, dropped in a year, the assets were shit anyways
> Creates poorly documented tech demo's that can't even run on the latest version of their own engine
> Unity looks at dwindling customer base shackled to their engine still - "Uhm.. I dunno... Pay us more then.. I guess??"

[rusty_shackleford]

> Unreal Wants More $$$$
> Revolutionizes Holy Proly Rendering, far exceeding the current AAA engine ecosystem, free of charge
> Revolutionizes Real Time Global Illumination Tech, something traditionally massively expensive to license, free of charge

I think you mean "creates revolutionary way to balloon game install sizes and make them run even worse"

[Vergil]

The retroactive aspect to it is wild. I think there might be some tiny hats in tel aviv saying this is a bit much.

[Shillitron]

Unity >>>>>>>>>>>>>> Unreal

UE4/5 games are nearly unmoddable at anything beyond basic content due to using C++ as a scripting language.

Shit take from self taught developer.

[J1M]

Reminder that Unity employs >7,700 people and nobody knows what they even do.

Typical tech company tumor growths. HR, ethics department, marketing - all staffed with more women and minorities than necessary to make up for their lack of intelligence and competence.

Only reason I can imagine they'd need more than 100 employes (of whom 90% should be programmers) is a tech support department for their various clients.

UE4/5 games are nearly unmoddable at anything beyond basic content due to using C++ as a scripting language.

I do agree, but retards are apparently in charge of Unity - or they got bribed by Epic to deliberately tank the company, wouldn't put it past them. If they go through with this then the only viable engine on the market is going to be Unreal, with a tiny percentage of developers using legacy or in-house ones.

Their primary software product is not the engine. It is the advertising platform, surveillance system to extract revenue, and the tools that allow the engine to be used as a visualization tool for tv production.

[rusty_shackleford]

Unity >>>>>>>>>>>>>> Unreal

UE4/5 games are nearly unmoddable at anything beyond basic content due to using C++ as a scripting language.

Shit take from self taught developer.

Nobody except a few autists that play games like skyrim want to spend time reverse engineering a native binary. Reversing .NET takes 15 seconds.

[wndrbr]

Looks like Tim Sweeney is going to become a monopolist very soon.

RIP Unity.

[Pretty Princess]

What a coincidence!

[Shillitron]

I got another one.

> Be Unity Indie Developer making LGBT bi-racial game
> suddenly lots of frog postiers show up in my forum
> demand I remove body types and socialist fetishization from my game
> tell chuds to fuck off and ban them all
> Have to pay 20 cents every time someone installs my game with a uniquely generated hash in a phone home call from the unity runtime
> hash key derived from a uniquely generated key written to windows registry
> nothing_can_go_wrong.png
> suddenly 2 million people have installed my game.. only sold 20 copies

[Shillitron]

Reversing .NET takes 15 seconds.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/IL2CPP.html

[rusty_shackleford]

Reversing .NET takes 15 seconds.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/IL2CPP.html

barely any games use it beyond iphone games

you know it was created because the app store doesn't allow JIT-compiled applications, right?

[Shillitron]

Reversing .NET takes 15 seconds.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/IL2CPP.html

barely any games use it beyond iphone games

Anything published by Unity in the last 5 years will use AOT for a shipped release.
Welcome to 2023, JIT is slow.

Unreal also has a 1 click Dev Kit deployment.. your favorite game Conan Exiles literally uses it. It exposes your entire blueprint ecosystem and makes it 100% moddable. Unity you have to write modding tools from scratch.

INB4 your typical "heh I was pretending to be retarded"

[rusty_shackleford]

Anything published by Unity in the last 5 years will use AOT for a shipped release.

List games that use IL2CPP so that I can prove you wrong, please.

Right off the top of my head, WotR is one of the major Unity releases lately and it definitely does not use it. Trudograd? Same deal.

[Vergil]

I got another one.

> Be Unity Indie Developer making LGBT bi-racial game
> suddenly lots of frog postiers show up in my forum
> demand I remove body types and socialist fetishization from my game
> tell chuds to fuck off and ban them all
> Have to pay 20 cents every time someone installs my game with a uniquely generated hash in a phone home call from the unity runtime
> hash key derived from a uniquely generated key written to windows registry
> nothing_can_go_wrong.png
> suddenly 2 million people have installed my game.. only sold 20 copies

BIG if true.

[Shillitron]

Anything published by Unity in the last 5 years will use AOT for a shipped release.

List games that use IL2CPP so that I can prove you wrong, please.

"List 5 Unity games"

I can't.. you win.

[rusty_shackleford]

Anything published by Unity in the last 5 years will use AOT for a shipped release.

List games that use IL2CPP so that I can prove you wrong, please.

"List 5 Unity games"

I can't.. you win.

Good to see you admit you're being retarded.

Mod a unity game:
decompile with dnspy/ilspy, use something like bepin to make a mod, takes 10-15 minutes

Mod a UE game:
start by buying a book on x86 reverse engineering

Mod a UE game that provides a version of Unreal with blueprint modding support:
start by downloading a 300gb sdk

Yes, a shift to Unreal hurts PC gaming. Denying it is just fanboyism.

[rusty_shackleford]

Mod a UE game that provides a version of Unreal with blueprint modding support:
start by downloading a 300gb sdk

"nooooo that's not troo!!!!"


UE4/5 is an unholy abomination.

[Shillitron]

List games that use IL2CPP so that I can prove you wrong, please.

"List 5 Unity games"

I can't.. you win.

Good to see you admit you're being retarded.

Mod a unity game:
decompile with dnspy/ilspy, use something like bepin to make a mod, takes 10-15 minutes

Mod a UE game:
start by buying a book on x86 reverse engineering

Mod a UE game that provides a version of Unreal with blueprint modding support:
start by downloading a 300gb sdk

Yes, a shift to Unreal hurts PC gaming. Denying it is just fanboyism.

Your argument of "but but.. I can decompile MSIL / Mono games and make my leet mods" is whatever.. the performance cost of processing a frame() in a managed language is shit.

And I wasn't joking.. The only Unity games I can think of are Wrath / PoE / Hearthstone..
Obsidian switched from Unity to Unreal.
CDPR is using Unreal

I'm not really joking.. what fucking Unity games have come out in the last 5 years? I can think of Zero.
Forget last 5 years, what shippable titles even come out for Unity that aren't gacha mobile shit at all? Or just scammy asset flips on Steam?


And have you seen the reaction to this announcement..?
You think a large company is gonna wanna use this shit with their hand in your pocket on every-game-installation?

Pffbbff. Dead engine.
Better fire up that Youtube series on C++ by Punjabi Abadar mr.self-taught-dev.. Do the Needful sirs.. today we will be discussing the poly of the morphisms.

[rusty_shackleford]

Your argument of "but but.. I can decompile MSIL / Mono games and make my leet mods" is whatever.. the performance cost of processing a frame() in a managed language is shit.

Unity's lower level parts are in C++ tho.

Also, the argument that Unity games on average run worse than UE games is just bullshit. Most of the worst performing recent releases are all UE slop.

[Shillitron]

Hidden Content

This board requires you to be registered and logged-in to view hidden content.