the unity drama continues (FULL VIDEO)

[@st.altair4936]

Godot's development fund has nearly doubled over the last week thanks to all this lol And Re-Logic (yes the company behind Terraria) just donated 100k to Godot; things could not be better for FOSS 🤖🔪💠

[@MrLowbob]

uhh, i liked terraria, but now their devs are even more likable ;D

[@JazzyMaxine]

I've always been a Godot fan! This makes me feel proud for them. Go Godot!

[@mikemhz]

I love Godot

[@markhaus]

@@JazzyMaxine Go... dot

[@doctorgears9358]

How the hell are you supposed to dispute the bill? If you sell 10,000 dollars worth of game, that's well documented assuming you're using a storefront like steam or itch. So if Epic says you owe x but you should owe y, you have the receipts to back it up. If Unity, and their magical algorithm, tells you that you have 30k installs and your metrics say 20k... How do you dispute what they have? What do you do if it's consistently wrong and they waste your time with this bullshit every month? With sales you can rely on a third party to provide you all the data needed to make your case. Installs? Sure, Steam probably keeps track of them but if your game is being pirated or if you use a storefront that keeps track of sales well but doesn't keep track of individual installs... Well what do you do then? Rely on internal metrics? I'm sure appealing the bill using numbers sourced from your own software will be super easy.

[@NathanHedglin]

Great point! The fee is whatever they want it to be. They could make their own bots do downloads to increase profits

[@orbatos]

If we assume they are incompetent enough to believe this is reasonable it's very bad. If they are being intentionally criminal it's very bad. If they are crippling Unity for resale that's also very bad. There is no way to recover this without ejecting the current board and CEO, which isn't going to happen. What should developers do? Contact a contract lawyer to ensure old games are protected and Leave Unity.

[@jeremykothe2847]

@@NathanHedglinI don't think they'd need to make bots. They just put "+1m" into a spreadsheet somewhere. And yeah, if you're not a multi-million dollar customer to begin with, no chance they'll "investigate fraudulent downloads" to your satisfaction. No reason to.

[@darak2]

They have addressed this point specifically. Their answer mostly amounts to 'trust me, bro'.

[@Kane0123]

You’d just need to have enough people complain about your bill. Then Unity would say you were confused and that the bill wasn’t actually the bill, it’s only half of what you thought… again - you’re just confused.

[@SmileyJack.]

United against Unity

[@quintencabo]

😂

[@caduhidalgo4996]

That's some pretty smart slogan, huh? You probably should work on publicity, I guess 😂

[@Kane0123]

If I had to guess, Unity will move to a rev share model and everything will be business as usual. How many of these devs are able to take the necessary downtime to become as skilled in another engine to continue building new games… would take someone subsidising it.

[@Jabberwockybird]

Is this united front creating an open source game engine?

[@mbrofoc]

+1 reason to switch from unity

[@lamp007]

That joke at 8:10 is actually masterclass: subtle and perfectly timed

[@RadicalGaming1000]

18:35 - PirateSoftware joins stream 26:36 - Casey Muratori joins stream

[@insertoyouroemail]

The talk about using "a proprietary model" to determine how many installs you had sounds like a mechanism to allow them to simply just tell you how much you owe them.

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

proprietary... voluntarily .. they are the same right?

[@insertoyouroemail]

@@ThePrimeTimeagen They claim that they can determine how many installs you had with a vague reference to "a proprietary model"; ie they're probably taking a page out of the KZbin handbook on AI algorithms and not going to tell you how it works just "bro, you owe me three fiddy".

[@apollolux]

It's almost certainly gonna be some mandatory tracking phoning home in their already mandatory Unity frameworks that are likely built into every project that's created in the Unity editor.

[@ttuurrttlle]

It's a funny thing to pitch to game development companies that would intimately understand how this is so bullshit. You could probably trick some non-tech-savy execs into believing it's a robust system based on your word, but not programmers.

[@orbatos]

That is of course exactly what this is and simultaneously why it's actually illegal.

[@corprall]

What a time to be learning game design and programming at a university that's partnered with Unity.

[@MrLowbob]

imagine having student debt, and then you are done and unity is like "you forgot all those test projects in university that you had installed, here is your student unity debt on top of it"

[@ItsAllAboutGuitar]

Well, I've been doing game development for 25 years and never once have I used the same environment for two projects in a row. So, get used to it.

[@bigben8502]

good goyim

[@tsunami870]

Skill issue

[@noirnerd]

Surely that doesn't mean you have to use Unity though? Just use a different game engine. A decent course shoudl teach you how to design / dev games not how to design / dev unity games

[@malikkissoum730]

The prime has magical powers, he literally summons developers

[@yuchant]

This has been the fastest information download into my brain about the industry of all time. Incredible. Shared everywhere.

[@deuswulf6193]

Open source engines need to make the commercial ones fight for their attention, not the other way around. That's how we are in this mess to begin with.

[@lostsauce0]

Open source is the only way forward

[@cariyaputta]

The rich seems to love feudalism.

[@briand1337]

I'd venture a guess that because Unity can't/won't do rev. share they can't do SaaS by itself because they have too many small devs that'd stop their subscriptions once their game is released/stable. Clearly some execs without industry experience thought this was the genius answer to that problem and were sorely mistaken.

[@davidk8699]

Next big startup - AI agents that watch ads instead of your gamer customers

[@bdafeesh]

I've been learning Godot and honestly enjoying it. It's not as fleshed out as Unity, but it's dymn close

[@gljames24]

Stuff like this continues to prove to me that worker cooperatives and open source are just better than traditional corporations.

[@MrLowbob]

corpo goes through enshittification eventually, if they are big enough. kinda hope that it'll not happen but waiting for unreals turn next. probably when fortnite doesnt rake in big money anymore and they aren't able to deliver another big hit

[@RillianGrant]

Open source yes. But how does any of this relate to coops?

[@KoltPenny]

Funny that this comes out right before Terraria devs donated 100,000 USD to the Godot project.

[@Subbestionix]

The age old story: 1. Tech company is nice to customers / users. 2. They grow cos ppl love the product and the terms 3. They go public cos they lack cash (flow) 4. Investors kill the niceness 5. Corporate milking of users cos switching away from something you rly know and love because of years of practice is painful and a giant waste of time

[@toothless.tarantula]

what a great stream and conversation

[@opensourcedev22]

I'm looking at the description and don't see the links for those 2. I thought you said you'll post these

[@gbb1983]

Soon: Github charging per commit or push?

[@johnyepthomi892]

😂

[@shitinsideyou]

When Richard Stallman was advocating for free software and warning everyone for software monopoly, everyone said he is crazy! Every other month a big project is closing its source code, adding up fees, and stealing more of your data... Stay happy everyone!

[@snakefinn]

:(

[@anarchoyeasty3908]

Richard Stallman is crazy for A.) Defending kiddy diddling B.) Picking crust from his toes mid talk and C.) Insisting that everything be his brand of free and denouncing OSS as evil. Closed source software being shitty doesn't mean Stallman is any more right.

[@0xKrem]

​@@anarchoyeasty3908based, also great profile pic ;)

[@nextlifeonearth]

@@anarchoyeasty3908 A broken clock is right twice a day. If it runs backwards it's right four times a day, and that's Stallman.

[@himbo754]

Switch to Godot or one of the other free/fully open source engines. It will take time, but it will gain freedom.

[@RuslanKovtun]

Imagine fee per install counted from number of unit tests you have.

[@danidotexe_]

the way they originally discussed their own magical algorithm in their FAQ said they would charge on reinstalls. that literally means cost for no money made if you, say, wipe your pc, or delete and reinstall on steam

[@j.r.8176]

They are putting tracker malware on your device and charging the developers for the server costs lmao.

[@tacokoneko]

A couple of years ago I was offered a job at a startup using unity. They showed me their projects and I thought about it, but I decided that *the more I saw of Unity, the more I viscerally hated it* (as opposed to UE and godot, which can both be fully compiled from source, which in my opinion *reduces the technical control the engine designers have over the project* , though it doesn't necessarily reduce their legal control)

[@tacokoneko]

this all makes me wonder how they feel about this situation, after i dodged it 😂

[@niamhleeson3522]

Godot is MIT licensed so cannot really yank control out of your hands like Unity or Unreal could.

[@TheK0tYaRa]

I think all piracy release creators will cut out that garbage as it technically allows tracking who installs the whatever.

[@raatti]

Hint: Look for Glassdoor reviews for Unity Helsinki 🤑

[@laughingvampire7555]

Unity should've been able to prove they can identify piracy by embedding watermarks in the games demanding the payment of licenses. Unity also should've allowed game devs to show a counter of installs per license per ip before proposing this fee mechanism.

[@bendgk123]

this will never work, sufficiently skilled pirates can remove any watermark 😂

[@oivinf]

57:39 Unity, despite having 7000+ employees, can _NOT_ build things quite quick. In fact, the most basic new features regularly take 3-5 years and are still broken and too risky to use in production

[@NuncNuncNuncNunc]

Bar-Zeev looks to have sold only about ~500k shares since November 2022 from the chart and still holds 1.26 million shares in direct ownership. His I don't see how this shredded any goodwill. @UpperEchelon is just flat out wrong about about Silver Lake/Durban having no stock. If it sounds so utterly absurd as to be unbelievable, maybe don't believe it.

[@robmorgan1214]

Too late. Switched to Godot. It's pretty good. Unity juice not worth squeeze. VC's ruin everything.

[@Frozander]

Hey Prime will you ever enable stream VODs? I was looking for this segment after missing the livestream due to work. I am lucky you decided to upload the whole segment but being able to find VODs could be nice.

[@CC21200]

6:27 "It [executives selling shares right before bad news] doesn't always mean that [illegal insider trading]." I conjecture that it essentially NEVER means that. Illegal insider trading does happen, but it isn't done in such a painfully obvious smooth-brained manner that would get you caught by the SEC immediately.

[@YeehahLiz]

the only thing in common with these services / tools is that they are unprofitable, and now exist in an economy where debt is no longer free.

[@stevenpike7857]

You can trust the people who sold shares in the company right before they decided to exploit developers. At least until the CEO decides he want's a 5th summer home in Italy. Then His Majesty will squeeze the peasant developers for more taxes. It was brazen, naked exploitation.

[@maxfrischdev]

Ironsource.. those names remind me of the secret program names in Jason Bourne 😂😂😂

[@oivinf]

0:54 IANAL but destroying US currency in the US is not illegal in itself. It's all about intent, like melting pennies for scrap metal _is_ illegal, but just destroying one is not.

[@nixdskilly4786]

Yeah... this entire fiasco really deterred me away from diving into Unity... not touching it with a ten foot pole as long as other engines exist in the market. Gotta stand for the message that this kind of braindead executive decision is not tolerable professionally.

[@apollolux]

I commented on one of Code Monkey's videos (edit: originally said GameFromScratch) that the original language made it sound like they were trying to go after the aftermarket or something, like manufacturers trying to take a cut of used car sales or movie studios trying to take a cut of used DVD and Blu-ray sales even though legally they can't after first sale. It's one thing if Unity just increased the royalties on the front-end and there would probably be some whining and moaning from devs and publishers, but if what was said in this video is indeed true that they had some legal language or some explicit promise earlier saying that they wouldn't raise the up-front revenue share then adding potentially uncapped fees on the back-end just because a digital item is easier to copy than a physical one is the most scumbag way possible to implement the royalty increase they wanted and a nearly guaranteed way to burn the company down.

[@DigitalNomadOnFIRE]

"Why would you want somebody on your board who doesn't have stock"? You mean how almost zero employees of most companies have stock? Because they're paid to do a job. Not all board members of companies always have stock.

[@sneezyrider1]

Just watching this now. Indie solo game developer. At the time this happened I had just completed a Unity course. As soon as this happened I switched to Godot. I'm now developing my game in Godot. 4 levels in and not looking back.

[@pbkobold]

Very Upper Echelon Gamers to not get to the point (unity is pushing their ad network and a rev share would have been better) and then have his thunder stolen by the people reacting. I don’t watch UEG anymore cuz it feels like he wastes my time.

[@spectr__]

Same!

[@glidersuzuki5572]

I think he researches a lot, gathers lot of information and don't want any of it to be wasted. So he tries to add them in the video somehow

[@AJ213Probably]

The problem with per seat is that companies will go around that instead of actually paying per seat

[@gfdgdfgdfgdfggfdgdfgdfgdfg9709]

If you use Unity it's your own fault. Use Flash like a person that is intelligent.

[@Nicoder6884]

The per install does only take effect after you make 200k, so it doesn't make sense to say "paying 20 cents on 0 dollars made"

[@xkali8119]

It does make sense. Imagine following situation - you made a successful game, first months gave your company over 1 million. Then, for the years that follow, every time an user installs the game, from any source, you lose 20 cents. Some malicious people that hate your company can install and uninstall your game 24/7 using vms and some scripts. How many years would it take to lose most of your profits? Even if we don't account for malicious activity, simple piracy or just users reinstalling the game over years will drain your profits pretty badly.

[@Nicoder6884]

@@xkali8119 I agree that that's awful, but that's not "on 0 dollars made"

[@xkali8119]

@@Nicoder6884 sure. I could push it saying that after some point with this policy you reach deficit, after which you really just pay, but it probably (hopefuly) wont happen in real life.

[@thewhitefalcon8539]

Casey Muratori! All I know about him is he made a bunch of the cool stuff in The Witness.

[@iceyrazor]

Primes camera was scared of Thor lol

[@MuskW-e9x]

Someone should take them to court and prove they can only charge on the first instance of the unity engine install.

[@agatasoda]

Prime said in a previous video "Godot isn't unity it just isn't..." it'll be more difficult to get 3d games to the same visual fidelity but yes that's point... Don't let darth unity vader alter the deal further.

[@teenspirit1]

All Unity had to do to keep the entire mad max scheme and not implode immediately was to say "this is for games released after 2025".

[@pif5023]

Musk was there to enable the term Pay Pal Mafia. He is the boss of the clan.

[@kyuss789]

Prime becoming a reporter

[@devops1044]

Step one, lock out LLM's from accessing X. Step two, Grok, trained on exclusive data source. Step three, profit.

[@electroman9173]

As a person who doesn't even make videogames with Unity (I make assets for unity), I have pulled all my paid assets and now I'm only selling them & posting updates through my discord server. I'm now designing the same things I have already made, but reprogramming it for Unreal.

[@pif5023]

Occam’s razor makes sense only if you dissect the argument in its formal logic statements which 99.99% of people (me included) can’t or is not bothered to do.

[@CaptTerrific]

Wow, that is a GIANT board

[@albyx]

The overall feel to all of this is "scam". A bunch of scammers have gotten into positions of power and are ruining companies to line up their own pockets. This is so eerie.

[@ficolas2]

18:50 wait wait what? From gamedev, to hacking powerplants for the federal government, to gamedev?

[@kmfdm303]

Upper Echelon is trying to explain techno feudalism. Buy a wide enough market, then charging a thin layer of rent on any value producer.

[@cooltune]

Damn does the Godot engine have a way to invest? cause that project is about to get mad focus. Unreal too, but I guess Game devs have had their fair share of proprietary nonsense right about now. It's a sad (but yet arguably better) world now where big platforms are now the riskier alternative to open source. But regarding the conspiracy antics, this feels alot like a couple of years ago where game companies purposely shotgun their own foot, so insiders can sell their stock. Yes you, activision/blizzard. Yes you, Bethesda right before the MS purchase.

[@f-person]

they do accept donations, yes

[@nitrovent]

Cheaper for 95% must mean more expensive for the remaining 5%. As they won't want to make less money, what they get from these 5% must over-compensate what they get less from most of their customers?

[@dejfcold]

But ... can you just add a firewall rule to block the unity servers or outbound connections to a pre-install script? Windows allows per-program rules. Linux is a bit more problematic, but can be done with users/groups and a freedesktop entry to start it as that user. Not sure about Mac, but probably possible. Android and iOS probably can't do that, though.

[@tobiasnickel3750]

Ohh the app is installed via microtransactions, but the install is charged. I would love to see prices directly in the play/app store / market.

[@Shocker99]

5 months later... Reddit sells data to AI company for $60 million.

[@Axl124124]

I was going to start using Unreal. Now I am worried that if they can change the terms out of nowhere, is it worth building an indie game for a long period of time on any third party engine. I am thinking I am just going to build my own game engine now. This is actually scary if they can change the terms out of nowhere on a dev team and the game they worked on with a certain pricing model just doesn't work on the new conditions.

[@Axl124124]

@ayesaac I wanted to make one to learn how game engines are built as well. Did you feel you your skills enhanced as a developer when building it? I was planning on reading the book "Game engine architecture" and see if I can learn how to make one.

[@Master-ls2op]

i have uninstalled and installed games 3-4 times. uninstall re-install is troubleshooting step 1...

[@PhilfreezeCH]

13:15 I agree in principle but paying people also has lead to a huge amount of rage/engagement bait, which I would assume degrades data quality for LLMs somewhat, not sure if this is a good move overall.

[@holdthetruthhostage]

Piracy Games saying your enemies would just create alternative servers to just install your games 😮 crazy

[@shawn576]

Cohost has an awesome voice

[@devops1044]

The best case is everyone switches to something else and Unity is forced to reverse course.

[@lowwastehighmelanin]

I feel like Occams razor said "f this" and walked out

[@conceptrat]

So are these advertising deals going to just cover the cost of the install fees which are basically taking all the money that the game devs could possibly make? So it's a zero profit for the devs?

[@phantomapprentice6749]

I might take a 20bn$ loan to buy out your company , What's wrong with that?! How dare you refuse?

[@Mike-vj2vc]

Thank you for the video reupload :)

[@wiloghby]

Thor has a great broadcast voice.

[@lorenzo42p]

where do you work? I heard you work at hulu or something

[@philosoaper]

I don't care if 99% of all game developers would have a cheaper time than with Unreal because Unity is now 100% unpredictable. Financial predictability is super fucking important!

[@LiveErrors]

Once again I wonder, how viable is Cry Engine?

[@redpillsatori3020]

28:15 - I've always felt that Unity was too good to be true. I guess we all should have seen this coming

[@MuhsinFatih]

Unreal guests

[@boppins]

Unity has never gave the impression of being a bait and switch company. I don't think that was ever the plan, to undercut everyone and build up a userbase. I also don't think they are trying to build some massive ad network with Iron Source -- that would be great, sure, but there are much easier, friendlier ways to do that other than this "install revenue" thing. The big red flag is going public, and being beholden to stockholders. They want to make money, and chose a really poor, naive path.

[@succatash]

How is it 0$, you dont download a game unless u buy it, if we remove piracy downloads and they have to hit x sales before the runtime.

[@iggyboo]

5:00 "What happened to the old days of Blizzard" ... See current days of Blizzard for the answer then apply to the rest of the gaming industry. As soon as gaming became a Billion+ industry, the C-Level corpo types and investment only groups take over. It will be a very sad day when Lord Gaben finally leaves Valve/Steam

[@martijn3151]

What will happen is they will apologize and opt for a rev share model instead. And then everybody is like: yes that’s acceptable. Taken directly from the political playbook; if you want to change something that will upset everyone, aim even higher so everyone is on the fence. And then backtrack to the result you initially wanted. And everyone will accept and think it’s fair.

[@isaackoz]

Love the collab stream!

[@remiwi2399]

"We demand 1 billion dollars per install (or 4% of your revenue, whichever is smaller)

[@smokin6716]

Can someone share the twitch/twitter of the guests?

[@spectr__]

A year or so ago, Unity merged with a malware company. I feel for devs locked in long projects, but whoever else still choosing to use Unity does not respect their customers and deserve this.

[@ahmadjames151]

WE NEED PART 2 This is Awesome ! 🫠👌

[@MJSmithGroup]

Trust is gone. I don't see how they can ever get it back. I am not even a game developer, but if I were to maybe try a side/hobby game project, Unity is permanently crossed off the list from consideration.

[@lorenzo42p]

race to the bottom. as a dev, I need to make a game more people will buy but not actually install and continue to play.

[@aaronevans6442]

You'll pay more than 20 cents per click just for advertising your game -- whether they install it or not. If you happen to get a million users for your free game, you can afford to cough up $2K for a license and pay 2 cents / user for Unity. Or choose to use something else. Jerk move for changing the license though.

[@oivinf]

14:53 Remember that Steam, Epic Games Store, AppStore and Google Play all take 30% too Edit: actually EGS takes 12%

[@alexnik1181]

Let's make Bunity in ZIG and open source it.

[@grugiv]

a loooong video, very nice

[@u-def]

Unity, they should cut non sense marketing fees, it just eat up half of revenue. WTF they cost same amount as much as R&D cost as game engine company???

[@djmo00]

Is grabbing a MAC address a common thing for games? Feels like a serious privacy problem. Never mind the problem of VMs being able to use a random string as a MAC address.

[@BlueSquareInWhiteCircle]

How about you let the end user eat the cost instead of the developer, problem solved! You pay for the game, you pay for downloading the game, you pay subscription for internet acces to the game, you pay for opening and playing the game. You pay for levels, upgrades, experience points, for extra life, for more speed and for better framerate, higher download speed and for every game tic or for how many buttons you push….now we just gotta figure out a way to get people to pay for breathing.🤔

[@greendsnow]

That 5% of download intensive game creators have a too loud voice.

[@elmasheavy89]

Even if you sell your game, they will still get a piece of the pie