Unity Is Doing What??? | Prime Reacts

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Reviewed articles (in order):
- blog.unity.com/news/plan-pric...
- finance.yahoo.com/news/unity-...
- www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unit...
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[@bigmiraclewhips]

The current CEO of Unity was previously the CEO of EA so I don't know why anybody is surprised something like this would happen.

[@orbatos]

It feels like a real possibility this was done to prompt an external purchase. It's typical venture capital thinking.

[@informativem5248]

He makes $22 mil a year

[@XDarkGreyX]

I see...

[@corwin.macleod]

Looks like they hire him specifically to destroy a business and lower it's value while squeezing every penny possible regardless of the consequences... To then sell whoever will buy i guess? #unitygate

[@adamjasinski1463]

I worked in Unity in a non-Game Engine related position (Ads mostly) The higher-ups are totally clueless and the decisions they made over the last 2 years just seemed so stupid

[@eidodk]

Steam has the refund policy as well. Even when people BUY a game, then install it, then people refund the game, zero sales has happened, yet you still pay for the install.

[@EnterpriseKnight]

every single time I read something regarding the Install/reinstall issue I learn something new.

[@grendelbiter303]

Steam also takes a cut even if the game is refunded.

[@anlumo1]

True, but those numbers are most likely not significant, unless the game is completely broken (like Cyberpunk 2077 on release).

[@ahettinger525]

It's worse then that, If the player installs it to multiple devices, you pay the multiple times. 1) They claim that pirate and bad faith installs won't be counted, but won't give anyone any information about how this supposedly works. 2) They claim that charity bundles won't be counted, but won't give any information about how this supposedly works. (although this is more plausible then solving piracy) 3) They claim that they can magically count a fully air gapped install. 4) Worst they are applying this to already released games, so you built on a certain contract, and they pull a Darth Vader on you. Pray they do not alter it any further.

[@Kconv1]

@@ahettinger525 The not counting bundles is actually pretty easy, you sell 10k charity bundles, you get 10k credits towards your install fee, the problem is that it will only assume 1 install.

[@priapulida]

hey programmers, as a user I also would like to announce that from now on I will charge you with a small fee depending on how much CPU and RAM your software uses on my devices. Thank you for your work..

[@paulrei00]

Greatest answer I've seen in my life yet😮 Excellent idea

[@priapulida]

Electron Apps will be charged by file btw

[@d.wolfin152]

They will finally optimise them better, and be REALLY sure they don’t have any memory leaks hah

[@DustInComp]

Charge them per GB of disk space too.

[@DamjanDimitrioski]

Would you charge google as well for wasting your battery while spying you on a daily basis :D? (just kidding, or am I)

[@bilbobeutlin3405]

IKEA just announced their new pricing model, every time someone sits down on a chair you bought, they will charge a fee of $0.5 per kg of body weight.

[@Losowy]

They're promoting being fit

[@mattymerr701]

The unity runtime uses the CSharp runtime, so they should be paying Microsoft per install, right?

[@vincei4252]

They should also pay Intel & AMD for their code running on that hardware. It's greed all the way down, baby.

[@Vode1234]

Unity uses electricity, which is dependent on fossil fuels. Unity should pay the dinosaurs

[@hermes6910]

Lovelace descendant: Oh yes, we're going to be rich!

[@vancomycinb1193]

Nah, they're using Mono, which is open source. Unfortunately. I wish MS could tell them, hey, you'll owe us $.40 for every install of the unity engine and installer...unless you knock this off.

[@mannanici8206]

The fossil fuels are not from dinosaurs, it's mostly of plankton and other small stuff@@Vode1234

[@hawkbirdtree3660]

Unity unified the gaming community... against Unity😂😂😂

[@jaysistar2711]

Bevy, Fyrox, and Godot are getting more attention from my colleagues than they've ever given. Unreal is not. Unity is not just destroying their own credibility, they're destroying paid game engine's credibility in general.

[@no_name4796]

Tbf, basically all prioprietary software from social medias to operating systems to game engine are getting their credibility destroyed by their prioritazing of profit over everything else. Heck, linux is now 3% of the desktop users just to make the biggest example!

[@diskpoppy]

@@no_name4796 It's a year of for-profit companies just plain exposing everything. However there will never be a year of Linux desktop - DE, user-space and kernel devs would need to get their shit together, but they could never manage to do it, even when the competition gave them freebies.

[@hermes6910]

Bevy, Fyrox or even Godot are also years behind Unreal, not really the same.

[@ticketforlife2103]

​@@hermes6910true but we gotta start somewhere

[@EwanMarshall]

What was cryengine and was forked to be lumberyard is now open MIT licensed as Open 3D Engine. Another one maybe thay can take a look at. C++ not rust, but that could be a good thing.

[@foxwhite25]

The fact that unity can track players using their "proprietary methods" is pretty sus, not to mention that they can also tell if the device has ever had a game installed.

[@elhazthorn918]

Invasive spyware and DRM, essentially.

[@Daniel_Zhu_a6f]

seems like IP is like #1 enemy of creativity and #2 enemy of privacy (#1 is police). also, very bad for the environment (so much resources are wasted on reinventing the wheel over and over again at this point)

[@EvanOfTheDarkness]

Those "proprietary methods" are probably just the Steam/Playstation/XBox downloads number, since they are looking to implement this for older titles, that they cannot update with any tracking code.

[@Daniel_Zhu_a6f]

@@EvanOfTheDarkness does it really matter, how exactly they track you, from a personal perspective? drm is a drm, it's made to turn owning program copy into renting it.

[@nanopi]

unity game phone home

[@embiem_]

The thing with Unreal Engine is, that their 5% royalty model only kicks in after the first $1M in gross revenue. That means that if you make $1,000,001, then you owe them 5 cents. This is per released title even. So it's actually free to use Unreal Engine for 5x longer and even then you'll be off much cheaper with UE until at some point the 5% rev share could become more expensive than Unity. Someone do the math please xD

[@TheMarkDrake]

PER application :)

[@fosteredlol]

Unreal also doesn't collect royalties on the first $10k made a quarter after the first million. So games with incredibly long legs (Terraria, No Man's Sky, Dwarf Fortress) gain some extra protection there too

[@Kane0123]

So what’s the trade off? I’m unfamiliar but it seems the general feedback is that UE is way more demanding and less usable for 2d type games?

[@johnyewtube2286]

@kanebaden3037 something that makes unreal suspicious is that it is an epic games product and epic games is partly owned by tencent.

[@amafi_poe]

You also don't need to pay the roughly 2000 bucks a year per seat of unity pro, since their royalty model is the same for standard and enterprise. I'm not a math guy but I can't imagine a point where it's cheaper unless you're talking games that make hundreds of millions of dollars, and if you're on that scale you're on a custom license with unreal anyways.

[@monad_tcp]

Unity is not a game company anymore, its an AD company. That's all you need to know to NOT do business with them.

[@mattymerr701]

This CEO is such a risk. Torpedoing the reputation, making some of the worst twitter takes...

[@SuperRedstoneman]

Remember when he said during interviews that "devs should be thinking of monetization from the very start of development process" and everyone shaved it off? This is the result.

[@elhazthorn918]

Remember when he entertained more aggressive monetization, like charging $1 per reload in Battlefield?

[@elhazthorn918]

Honestly, if I had shares in Unity and I found out he was tanking the company, he'd have to be constantly looking over his shoulder.

[@sacredgeometry]

he has no idea what hes doing

[@SuperRedstoneman]

@@elhazthorn918 I'd love to infiltrate rich people and backstab them as soon as their egos get in the way (not sure you mean that but that's my dream anyways)

[@kingcrimson123]

Hopefully more people will try out Godot with this news

[@elpupper_]

bevy

[@happygofishing]

Godot will become the standard for 2d games at least.

[@alexandredaubricourt5741]

​@@elpupper_bevy hardly run on more than 2 platforms..

[@WelshProgrammer]

yeah Godot or Bevy might get a small up tick in user base but the masses will most likely adopt Unreal, id Tech, Source or some other engine with full commercial support and feature-complete cross-platform support while trying to reuse as much of their existing code base as possible. Migrating a large code base from C++ to Rust or from C# to C++ would almost certainly mean financial doom for small businesses.

[@nomadshiba]

bevy

[@Spookyhoobster]

I don't know enough about the gamedev business to really say much on the nitty-gritty details, but the broad high-level idea of "we should start charging based on installs" sounds like the kind of garbage a non-technical executive that knows less-than-nothing would spew. That's just not how games make their money, and I struggle to see why Unity needs to disincentivize number of installs.

[@monad_tcp]

Unity is a garbage Ad company, that's why

[@user-ky9qn4pg3w]

not just a non-technical executive. it also tells me a lot about the work culture within the company if none of the devs had enough of the authority to object this. they all knew what would happen!!! the faeces in charge didn't care and were just looking and picking most aggressive monetesiation methods thinking everyone will eat it up anyway.

[@vocassen]

@@monad_tcp The funny thing is, this is the WORST for ad-supported game. They often rely on many installs, and have very little revenue per user. So you'd have to have tens of millions of downloads to hit 200k revenue, but once you do, you are royally messed up, because you instantly owe unity many times more than you ever made with the game. A 5% revenue share is at least predictable, and it only comes in after the first $1M for unreal, so you don't even have a jump where you suddenly have to pay unity big bucks. it's fluid and predictable.

[@monad_tcp]

@@vocassen you're right, they totally screwed over their biggest user-base

[@EvanBoldt]

Seems like game dev is realizing the same thing as web dev. There’s no room for proprietary frameworks. You can’t control support or pricing long term. Either roll your own or use open source. I’m not sure why you’d start a new game in Unity at this point. At least Unreal is doing some crazy things with Nanite and Lumen. Apple must be hating having gone exclusive with Unity for the Vision system.

[@JFrameMan]

Yeah, the scariest thing for me is that you might sign up for a price, plan out and develop a game for 5+ years, factor all the pricing, and then suddenly the rug is pulled from under you and the pricing cripples your game to the point of bankruptcy. I'm fine with them taking a bigger cut. At the end of the day, people will buy as long as it's cheaper than making their own engine, but if you can't predict your costs, you can't release your product.

[@gljames24]

Apple has never been serious about 3D software since they decided to go with Metal over Vulkan.

[@BufordTJustice42069]

When you sign an EULA, you get what you fuckin' deserve...

[@EvanOfTheDarkness]

Rolling your own is not really an option any longer. Game engine development is getting ever more expensive, that's why we see the near monopoly of Unreal 5 in the PS 5/XBox 4 era. Proprietary frameworks are better then open source, whenever stability and longevity is a concern (unlike in web development). Capitalism tends to favour monopoly, and there is literally no reason to buy anything but Unreal Engine for AAA games. But there are plenty of cheaper, proprietary game engines if you don't need the best. Open source always had a problem (and will continue to have it) with long term support, with abandoned projects and slow development. Using an opensource project, without also financially supporting it, or actively developing it is a liability for any company. So "free" isn't always cheaper.

[@PhatPazzo]

Don’t you worry about Unity on the Vision. Apple customers are really good at rationalizing when they get screwed.

[@nullbeyondo]

Their model sounds exactly like Firebase's model where anyone can bankrupt you just by spamming your Firestore or Cloud functions since there's no rate limiting for firebase. Anyone could also hate-install your game countless times till you're bankrupt.

[@LimbaZero]

There was also discussion can someone reverse engineer how "fingerprint" is generated for installs and then just nuke some dev off the map.

[@stephenkolostyak4087]

@@LimbaZero why this sounds like an unfortunate party.

[@scififan698]

worse yet, that psychopath CEO could hire an Indian click-farm or use some scripted bots to install/uninstall-cycle you to bankruptcy and his number to the sky. Don't say he wouldn't because how would you even know?

[@zeuglcockatrice4633]

if this was Tom's idea than it's a 5d chess move, cuz Tom's a genius

[@David-id6jw]

That note on screen at 35:00 - "Whitten estimates that only about 10% of Unity's developers will wind up having to pay any fees, given the thresholds games need to hit." - sounds just like the arguments Wizards of the Coast was using when the OGL debacle happened at the start of the year. It feels like a single playbook of screwing over the users was passed around to a bunch of companies, and they all started implementing the same ideas this year.

[@anlumo1]

The commonality is CEOs that don't have any idea about the thing their company is producing.

[@bobbycrosby9765]

I'm sure the figure includes every random person that has downloaded Unity to follow a tutorial then never used it again.

[@avgchoobafan]

Thats a really soft way to say "you'll never pay anything because your games are garbage anyways so dont worry about it"

[@Bustermachine]

A lot of CEO's basically move in the same rarified circles without much contact with reality. Gamers need to touch grass. CEOs need to touch grass that isn't hyper manicured at their exclusive country club.

[@avihooilan5373]

If it really means "per install", as opposed to "per sale", then that's a death sentence to Unity as an enterprise product. Yes, it will squeeze more money in the short term because there are many studios that are already committed to Unity, but no one in their right mind will pick it up from that point on.

[@ea_naseer]

Prime: Edit that out ChatGPT: As a large language model...

[@TheMarkDrake]

I don’t believe Unity (or other apps for that matter) can access your device UID, so they fall back to proprietary algorithms (supported by ads) to try and uniquely identify you. This is why their response to our feedback is vague and full of holes. Time will tell - but I think John is a bad CEO. He’s leaned hard into advertising (over the editor and tools), crashed the stock price, and constantly upsets the community. Anyways… thanks for covering prime! Also I will check out her Unity game!

[@Jzhongzhi]

Imagine hiring a former EA CEO and expecting your product to get better 😂

[@ARCCommanderOrar]

He also sold stock before this announcement

[@animanaut]

they probably do some checksum/fingerprinting to avoid having personal identifiable information on hand in order to be compliant. but this also means buying a new graphicscard will end up counting as a new install as a result and therefor also being gameable/exploitable. btw, rumors has it that the CEO blarted/brainfarted/riffed in one meeting that battlefield players could pay for ammo ... just as an idea ... like ... wtf

[@ahettinger525]

@@ARCCommanderOrar in fairness, he's been selling regularly for a while, so it's highly unlikely to be _legally_ insider trading.

[@bobbycrosby9765]

Yes. Their "reinstalls don't count" is basically "trust me bro".

[@JoshWithoutLeave]

"Hey Flip, edit that out" Flip: Never edits that out

[@zachcake6231]

The big issue is that existing games now have an added expense. If it was for unreleased games it's still awful but it's navigable, however for games that have been out for years the studios now have an unexpected and unavoidable expense that was never in the terms they originally had when they set out to use the engine. I work on a pretty successful game in a medium sized studio that works with unity and this was a surprise to us aswell, we found out through twitter.

[@Robin_Goodfellow]

Never thought I'd have to hurt a developer by installing their game, but here we are

[@JosifovGjorgi]

If only CEOs knew what a numbers in excel really represent in real world this won't be happening. The CEOs looks at excel report and asks questions like Why don't we make money from this column - 'Runtime installations' ?

[@Pasakoye]

They should have slashed the numbers by 10. 20c is lunacy. 2c is more reasonable for pushing you to join their subscription. I will just use Unreal. 5% does not get effected by pirates or markets in places like India or various Asian countries.

[@Gigusx]

CEOs job isn't to be your friend, it's to make or keep the company stable and profitable. Those goals don't necessarily have to coincide with interests of the users (no matter how much we like to think that it's all about us).

[@lorenzo42p]

I'm telling ya, this is the year of corporate greed. I wouldn't give them the logs from my toilet.

[@PythonPlusPlus]

Unity: We got tired of only getting a slice from the pie… we want the whole pie.

[@mehmedcavas3069]

as a game dev who used unity for over 4 years, I always wanted to try out other engines and tool but didn't want to lose my know how but now I'm pretty sure if unity will keep this changes than I will change to UE or godot

[@monad_tcp]

how about if you could keep most of the logic of your game in C# and could swap the Engine from under the game ? How about a meta-engine that only takes care of the pipeline, because the pipeline is what matters, isn't ? You have 3D resources, and logic and that ends up in a runtime environment. I'm thinking about that because I see some market opportunities. Lets commodify runtime environment. What matters is tooling and pipeline. Imagine if you took your finished Unity game, reverse engineered its assets (automatically), and replaced the Unity runtime and kept the game running. As you own the assets and the logic, why wouldn't you do that if you could ? Specially now that you have to pay a fee ?

[@connorhagerty537]

You should switch regardless. Why you'd want your hopes and dreams overshadowed by a scumbag corpo is beyond me

[@araarathisyomama787]

​@@monad_tcp Just write your own engine at this point...

[@monad_tcp]

@@araarathisyomama787 well, that's the idea. the hardest part is the pipeline, if you buy a tool for that, the engine isn't that big of a deal.

[@flynnfittz]

I wouldn't think of Unity as being "cheaper" than Unreal 'cause you simple have no control of how much Unity will cost you. In Unreal you know exactly. Other than that, Unreal offers lots off free high quality props monthly for free, for an indie dev this certainly adds up. Not to mention it is in a whole different level of quality as a tool. There's really no advantage for anyone to use Unity in new projects, if it's a 2D game, Godot will do great, else, Unreal is the obvious choice.

[@nomadshiba]

bevy

[@fosteredlol]

I feel like this is one of the most important points. There's just so much extra risk for absolutely no reason.

[@nullbeyondo]

thought ur ben shapiro

[@haraldbackfisch1981]

​@@nullbeyondohahahah it does look alike

[@michaelnjensen]

Not just the free stuff monthly, their whole megascans library as well.

[@deshawnwilliams338]

It’s pretty cool you put Lana in the description a lot of people don’t do that for guest you’re a good dude 👍

[@phazechange3345]

I've heard a few developers state that they may be forced to pull their game off of the stores, but that doesn't help and may even hurt them! Making piracy the only way to get their game will mean that they still have to pay for the download, but have no pathway to money. We additionally do not know what unity calls "an install, or an initial install". Their model for charging is "trust us bro!" Please note that Unity has already suffered issues and revenue loss directly due to their poor management and processing of data.

[@user-sl6gn1ss8p]

I think they said pirated copies will somehow not count. I'm curious what that means, like, you can't make a drm-free game with unity then?

[@notapplicable7292]

It should obviously be a revenue share, it's insane that someone else's action is charging you money.

[@gregory-of-tours]

It's just weird. If they need a new revenue stream it should be per sale (or up the percentage on revenue). Per install is just nuts.

[@EnterpriseKnight]

above all, I see a rise in C++ developers in the near future.

[@ajkulac9895]

Flax engine says no

[@nomadshiba]

i was really happy with what unity was doing with c# and dots with their compiler magic and stuff but nope, this changes everything, let's go bevy!

[@FrankJonen]

That’ll be interesting in the EU. We as users have to get full transparency of which data is collected and how it is used. Unity just said “you can appreciate” it.

[@u9vata]

You say Godot is hard because even you could make a game in unity - but honestly sounds like it would be just as super-easy for you to make with Godot (maybe easier - especially for 2D). Quite interesting that support for importing unitypackage in Godot was made just a few weeks ago usable by the community - as if the universe prepared for this haha. This hits free/fremium games the most: Imagine that their 90% revenue is either from ads (and a lot of installs!) or in app purchase. I am not big fan of IAP, but some ad-games are actually cool and sustainable and this totally kills loads of studios even in its changed form. Thankfully not affecting me: I only use unity for AR headset dev in project where install count is very low (custom install for business customer), and Godot for everything else. It actually currently benefits me in this new setup - but I can see that most people really are hindered by this.

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

Hey, Lana has her own Hot take, YT channel, and Twitch channel. CHECK HER OUT twitch.tv/lana_lux Her Hot Take: kzbin.info/www/bejne/poHVeHqcl6uEm6ssi=hn8zlwkes88Rz Twitter: twitter.com/wtfLanaLux

[@delofon]

this somehow reminds me of Reddit API drama, and because of this something tells me Unity may not revert this policy change... Always hope for the best though I guess? If they don't I can't see Unity being used for anything other than small funtime projects (like games made for gamejams). Even if they do revert these changes, people probably won't be fond of using Unity for bigger projects as much as they were in the past...

[@brunoais]

IMO, this is a 2 steps forward and 1 step back. It's been done so so many times already. It's annoying but they are using that to manipulate people.

[@Woeden]

Can you imagine getting charged by Adobe Premiere/ Sony vegas / ETC for each viewers you get on youtube? That's literally the Unity is doing

[@orbatos]

I have to point out that contact law does *not* allow for changes like this retroactively, but it *is* constructed in such a way that a court filing is necessary to dispute attempts to force one-sided changes that only benefit one party at an unreasonable burden to the other. The point is we need someone with funding to challenge this *now*.

[@ItsAllAboutGuitar]

Do devs wanna deal with that headache though???

[@shedar]

It feels like a push for free to play games towards even more aggressive monetization or endless games with battle passes/seasons/VIPs etc. Creating of a nice short mobile games with small revenue per user (without ads every minute), but broad audience becomes not sustainable.

[@ea_naseer]

It's weird how all of this happened after Elon Musk monetised twitter.

[@EvanOfTheDarkness]

No, because that's just not gonna work. F2P makes money primarily from whales (who are a tiny fraction of the user base), and they just do not have this money. And, I think, just suing the living hell out of Unity is a much more cost effective way for a company to solve this.

[@JiggyJones0]

​@@ea_naseeryou're only making that correlation because you don't like him. These things have been happening way before he bought Twitter. It wasn't long after Fortnite introduced battle passes that every game started to add them.

[@anhi399]

If your f2p game is generating, on average, less than thirteen cents per user then your game has issues. Especially if in the future Unity games have features, like cloud based asset storage, that will be costing Unity to provide. A better model than freemiums would be a demo/full where the demo installs don't incur these runtime fees. How many freemium games even retain players passed the first fifteen minutes of play?

[@josh95734]

I'd say the opposite. This is going to push devs to no longer offer free games. Everyone is going to try to maximize profits with minimal downloads. At least if the game is paid, it could cover some of the download fee without needing the user to spend money on in game purchases

[@PlayBASIC-Developer]

If they can get away with it, then everybody will start doing it..

[@rafalfaro]

5:53 I didn't see this crossover coming. The primeagen and Lana Lux?! The matrix is real. I guess the Avengers unite when the world is in trouble.

[@McCoreman]

Unity has made an announcement. "Hello unity devs. You now want to download Unreal."

[@bobbycrosby9765]

Unity is big in the mobile space. At 20 cents per install, for many indie companies it will be significantly more expensive than Unreal's 5% revenue share - potentially even bankrupting.

[@michaelnjensen]

And that's 5% after $1M revenue per title/game, and protections for you if the game decreases in sales/popularity down the line, then it's gets cheaper as a dev.

[@klaudyw3]

Here's another fun possibility, you make a great game and sell it for $x. You eventually cross over the thresholds so you have to pay some money. Everything's cool so far. What if you create a huge expansion for the game, and decide to make the base game free? Are you still on the hook for all new installs, even if they are for free? What happens to expansion packs as well? Are you going to be charged separately for those? Are they not going to be charged at all?

[@BrunodeSouzaLino]

Yes. You'll have to update the game to make it compatible with the expansion and as fast as updates go, that's a new install. So you're paying twice.

[@pirat87pl]

Only way to accurately measure install numbers is for the installer to phone home, which is illegal without user consent. Are they going to start illegally collecting PII? Changes to Unity EULA coming up? They said some marketing nonsense about a black box 'proprietary tracking method' which IMO just means "We're going to be making these numbers up". Not sure which is worse. Am I going to have to stop playing ALL Unity games because of this?

[@BlackLilySoftware]

Happy I did start with Godot 😆

[@nomadshiba]

bevy

[@Rafael-vi4to]

​@@nomadshibabevy is in its infancy and shoulnd't be recommended for serious game development

[@KoboldAdvocate]

Even private companies are taxing us now

[@johanngambolputty5351]

rent seeking

[@Zed_Oud]

This is the Apple featured apps curse. They featured Apollo on their VR announcement and there goes the Reddit API. Now for iPhone 15 Apple featured Honkai and Genshin, two Unity games, and this policy is tailor targeted to their business models.

[@sesemevibes]

Thanks flip for not editing that out

[@popeye6590]

I like how hesitant she was to plug herself without permission, and how overwhelmingly willing to promote her game prime was, class acts both of you.

[@Waitwhat469]

Dude, Prime's promotion game is on point. I need to start doing this like he does at work to make sure teams get the recognition they deserve when I talk about them.

[@hermes6910]

For Unreal, it's 5% if your income exceeds $1M.(And 5% after the 1M, the 1M didn't count if I understood correctly) So yes, it's not "cheap", but the threshold is also much higher than for Unity. So, Unity cheaper than Unreal ? Not for many games...

[@NopeNopeNope9124]

The fact that it still charges you for installs on different devices makes me wonder if its possible, and if so how easy it would be, to set up a ton of VM instances and just install the game once, delete the instance, make a new one, etc.

[@oumardicko5593]

to me, the fact that you have to pay to 2grands per user in order to use unity has always been a big no.

[@KingJellyfishII]

I genuinely think companies intentionally introduce flaws into their ideas such that the public gets enraged over their intentional flaws and doesn't notice what they're actually trying to do.

[@alr2157]

yeah... like the online obligation for example...

[@Definesleepalt]

the one thing that worries me is that i install and remove windows all the time and everytime i re install windows , reinstall a game , that would count as a new device and a new install. with that in mind people could spam install on new virtual machines to then "hate install" games.

[@dominikp.3153]

I'm so curious to see how they are going to verify the installation. If the verification has been poorly implemented, then the game may not even need to be re-installed to spam the fee.

[@NdxtremePro]

Remember when Java wanted to do this? Also, how well has it worked out for the Video Codec industry?

[@MichaelLazarski]

So I have 3 Apple devices... dose this mean they would need to pay 3 times for me?

[@mbevinn]

Yes

[@user-ky9qn4pg3w]

if you have 3 apple devices that's 3 too many. you're a sucker

[@user-fr2fm3ri3w]

@@user-ky9qn4pg3wandroid fanboy cringe

[@adsfsadsadfafsd]

I love how I just started makeing a game in unity and this came up. At least I can still change the engine.

[@LuealEythernddare]

I’m aiming for web dev. But this cemented that if I choose to learn any game dev, I’ll just learn Godot, pygame, and maybe phaser JS.

[@GonziHere]

Game from scratch isn't that hard. To illustrate it with more familiar topic, It's like saying that making a website without Angular is incredibly hard. You'd be really surprised how easy it is to have a game without an engine (as in, you won't write an engine, but your game, directly) and it has many benefits that you would enjoy from not using a framework (as in, learning the problem and solution, not it's buggy abstraction that doesn't actually help you, etc).

[@user-ky9qn4pg3w]

it's not hard but it is a fully concentrated effort you have to immerse yourself into for hours everyday especially if you go cross platform, you literally have to port your whole codebase everytime. beauty of engines is you just bring content together and script just enough shit to make your ideas come to life and you can take a week/months break and jump back into it like nothing happened.

[@nopnop4790]

If I understood this right, this sucks. If a dev makes a game and sells it for 5 bucks (or whatever amount), and you buy and install/uninstall a number of times throughout the years, it's basically the same as Unity lending money from the purchase to the dev, because sooner or later that install count will effectively remove sales from the dev, but not from Unity.

[@arnorhs]

I suppose devs will figure out ways of proxying the downloads/install and/or unity api calls.. probably depends on the platform

[@filipstudeny]

I used Unity for my Diploma work, I was planning on using it again for my Bachelor. I had spend 7 years slowly learning Unity, creating all kinds of smaller projects implementing different features, so that I could create a proper game that I could sell. I even bought a course on Udemy 6 months ago so that I could learn how to properly implement pathfinding and turn based combat. And they do this bu**shi*. Looks like I'll be switching to Unreal.

[@the_manifold]

I feel for you, The majority of resources for learning Game Dev are overwhelmingly geared towards Unity and Unreal Engine, and then the CEO drops a steamer on everyone's hard work. Totally despicable

[@Tw33ty271]

Unless I'm missing something, there's no real need for them to collect customer PII to enforce this. The installer just has to phone home, and there's a lot of ways to do that don't run afoul of the GDPR

[@luanxpg9]

Unity just pointed a gun to every unity developer who is bounded to it and said: pay now or perish

[@jercle]

Happiest moment of my day was that part at 3:00 not being edited out

[@55sombreroman]

The Fed turned the money printer off months ago, so now all these tech companies are charging now. Unity, Terraform, etc.

[@complexity5545]

Stock prices == tumbling down, tum-bl-ing down.....

[@basdfgwe]

The worst part of this is that because it is per install, it can easily be gamed by disgruntled players. If they are against developer, a player group make it difficult whenever a game dev makes a bad decision .

[@alexhiatt3374]

I hope they have good security against how installs are counted. Forget having to actually re-install the game... if someone can find the code that triggers that phone home, they could just make a little script that spams fake installs for a game hundreds of times a second. Also, I'm sure someone could find a way to unset whatever flag they use to mark that it's already installed and to not phone home again. So even if they can't do it with a script you could probably get it to THINK it's just been re-installed.

[@Optimus6128]

Glorious 80s-90s, when everyone build their own engine..

[@thegreenxeno9430]

Stopping sales of your game won't prevent Unity from tracking reinstalls, pirate installs... Oh yeah and if the runtime updates itself, a reinstall may be required.

[@alr2157]

Let's make a legal case against these kind of pratices. This is CRAZY

[@zhulikkulik]

It feels like this decision was proposed and reviewed by people who not only don't make games nor play them but have no idea how people use PCs and software.

[@harambeexpress]

Flip. Flip edit that out.

[@teilzeitbernd]

It's even worse, as they can't legally track installs, they make up a random number on a "Trust us, bro"-basis, and send an invoice for that. Overall a great and legally sound idea.

[@rosehogenson1398]

Why not just charge per sale like Unreal? It seems like that would easily resolve the concerns about reinstalls and piracy

[@tim.martin]

Unity's Cash-cow is the asset store. UNITY should make the editor *great* again, fix package manager, and drive traffic to their asset store. So easy.

[@sacredgeometry]

Unity shouldnt have a package manager at all. .net/C# has a very mature package manager that unity could utilise if it wasnt built so ass backwards.

[@BrunodeSouzaLino]

That would require actual work and that's not what Unity does.

[@alexander3293]

how would that work technically? it seems like the installation count is machine based and not integrated with steam etc. So in the end there has to be a network request from the installer to unity. I am pretty sure you could reverse engeneer it and spam fake installation notifications to unity (the only information they have is the ip (but according to them it would be possible to have mutliple installs per ip e.g. multiple devices or you could just use some proxies for that).

[@uzbekistanplaystaion4BIOScrek]

there are ways to uniquely identify windows installs (most of the time) that do not require pii (machineguid, motherboard uuid, smbios data, drive serial ids, etc.). i imagine similar approaches can be used on osx/linux/android/ios. they're not foolproof (pretty much nothing is, apart from requesting government-issued id data), but based on what unity has said, i'd imagine they're using some form of heuristic analysis/fingerprinting which could get them a good enough answer.

[@alexander3293]

@@uzbekistanplaystaion4BIOScrek just send a randomly generated "fingerprint id/hash" in the install request

[@BSDrumming]

Surely they’re not back charging the downloads prior to the initial 2 thresholds. Is there something I’m missing?

[@andreasbrandenberger9108]

I've become an expert in the Unity editor over 10+ years, so I'm definitely gonna keep using Unity as a tool to migrate my assets to Godot Engine.

[@Pence128]

They don't even have to adjust the thresholds. They can just buy the game themselves and download it millions of times.

[@sinayagubi8805]

In a simple percentage fee like that of Unreal your success is is connected with that of Unreal, but in case of Unity they created a pricing that disconnects them from your success leaning in their favor.

[@erisonveshi8406]

The editor deserves a raise XD

[@KaylanNaidu]

Uni-deez nuts

[@WelshProgrammer]

GODOTEM

[@thatsalot3577]

Bruh you guys are Epic.

[@quelchx]

Love hearing the "billions" of downloads. My process of thoughts after hearing that go deep with math.

[@tipplewick]

Their own arbitrary example has a $.40 RPU and that is before Apple/Google/Steam 30% cut, server costs, license costs, user acquisition costs, salaries, rent and taxes. You'd be very lucky if you end up netting $20 cents out of that. And if Unity's cost averages 10 cents, that is 50% of the revenue. AND THAT'S THEIR OWN EXAMPLE Now imagine if the scenario had $1M or less in revenue; Unity's cost would exceed 100% royalty!!! You can't make this stuff up!

[@DePhoegonIsle]

Here is the problem that also results in privacy tracking issues. 1. What's an install. 2. What's a reinstall? 3. What is used to tell the difference between them. 4. What about the same machine doing multiple unity games? 5. What exactly is used as the 'This is first install' critera? - Is it data left on the computer - Is it account tracking --- If so, what about those selling on indiegala, or services like gog, where there isn't an managing acount for games (like steam) - Is it a hardware profile? 6. When this blows up in the developers and unity faces about privacy tracking, who is going to be on the hook for it? 7. What happens when MS takes a exceptional quick knee jerk and easy 'win' by stepping up and kneecapping any unity data collection, preventing any EU issues to splashback onto them.

[@stalinthomas9850]

Is the install for a particular build version? If yes, keep upgrading the version

[@rickwoods5274]

The thing that's absolutely insane to me about this entire affair -- *separately* from the new model itself (which would be enough to keep me from ever wanting to use Unity for anything) -- is that it applies to games already in development. It seems like the kind of thing that should be (or maybe even already is) illegal. It's very "pray I do not alter it further".

[@ALEXANDERdk007]

Not just games already in development, but also games that has already been released before the changes where made

[@burrybondz225]

It also applies to games already released.

[@logon-oe6un]

"This is the logical end point of treating intellectual property as goods" piracy argument acquired.

[@RenderingUser]

Stuff like this makes me glad I made the right choice choosing godot 5 years ago.

[@insylogo]

Step 1: determine how unity determines 'number of installs' Step 2: come up with a way to do prevent them from calculating the number of installs for a game (i.e. run inside a sandboxed process, set up firewall rules, use your own CDN for the parts of their runtime that they could track installs from their website from, whatever) Step 3: sell your solution to all the unity devs Example: if they're basing this on number of downloads from their CDN or one of the primary distributors, allow your users to opt into a torrent-based distribution network where all of them can distribute at most 0.9999 copies of the run time, preventing anyone from being individually responsible for distribution. Then, you just pay for the small fraction of the distribution cost based on what users don't seed.

[@Hobbitstomper]

All games will eventually stop selling, but fans will always reinstall them, especially those with active communities and mod support, leading many games to eventually making a loss 5-10 years later.

[@jocdiazm]

You gotta love Flip not listening to the "take that part out" while editing lol

[@SimGunther]

Some guy on YT: Hey guys, today we're gonna make a game engine from scratch because I literally can't trust anyone to not do this whole install tax move that Unity did a couple days ago, so that's why we're gonna spend a few months or so on a basic game engine before I just forget about it and change web pages for a living instead 😢

[@Pence128]

21:12 I think it just never occurs to them, like how a farmer would never think to ask a cow's permission to milk it.

[@kmfdm303]

The problem is that Unity is introducing risk that the developers can't manage.