It’s not the fact that Unity wants to make more money from its engine that has gotten people so up in arms about it, it’s the way it was structured.
If they simply took a percent of revenue, everyone would have shrugged, you might have had some indies complaining, and the world would have kept on turning. Instead, they made a couple of compounding missteps. An install based fee creates a massive amount of uncertainty about how much you will owe at the end of the month, creating potential cash flow issues. You are at the whims of Unity in terms of how they calculate it, and praying that they properly handle all the edge cases and potential abuses, despite all their incentives giving them plenty reasons not to care that much. And then on top of all of that they made it retroactive to all existing games on the market using their engine. Companies had a very reasonable expectation that they could rely on the terms their games were released under. All that trust has now been upended. Unity has shown they are willing to change terms retroactively with little notice. Now when evaluating Unity as an engine you will have to take into account not only the current fee structure, but also the risk that they will add additional fees retroactively that have the potential to completely disrupt your business model.
The Unity CEO and management team seem actively hostile to game developers. They view them more as adversaries than allies. Their first principle may be something like "How can we extract more revenue from our developers?" rather than "How can we make developers more successful on our platform [such that we all enjoy more success]?". I think that cultural value is the root of a lot of these tactical problems and missteps.
A couple of years ago the CEO called game developers "big fucking idiots" effectively for not extracting the most possible revenue out of the industry. There was the classic "well I actually meant [more innocuous but still dirtbag thing]" walkbacks, but we all knew what he meant.
It now makes a lot more sense when you view it from the perspective of Unity wanting to rip much more revenue out of devs and games using their engine.
He was saying not thinking about monetization during the creative process is idiotic in context of developers wanting to to do monetization.
As in don't tack on monetization at the end of spending years building out your big creative dream. Which is bluntly true, you're going to be in a world for pain.
I can see the reversal of previous terms of service getting challenged in court. But that's a lot of effort, of course. Maybe IGDA can take on the challenge.
Seems obvious, that if you did not agree to the ToS, you cannot be held accountable.
I certainly hope that at least, legally speaking, they would be forced to back down on games built using older version of the unity engine so that previous and upcoming projects aren't affected.
And, if I'm reading the details correctly, it seems like it's going to push developers toward charging recurring subscription fees for their games. If I install a game 20 times in the span of a decade, the devs are being charged over the long term while I only paid once.
>If they simply took a percent of revenue, everyone would have shrugged, you might have had some indies complaining, and the world would have kept on turning.
I think that's the issue. I did some math and it turns out that this is actually really cheap for f2p games, at least the heavily monetized ones that have a high attach rate. At Enterprise level, the install rate is only $0.01, which means as long as more than 1 out of every 500 people buy some monthly pack, the fee is paid for. And those monthly packs are the cheapest of very expensive packs modern mobile games charge. a whale dropping $100 on some big pack covers for 10k downloads. the install rate is nothing for the successful games.
In comparison, consider how Unreal after their threshold will take $5 out of that whale pack. Is it fair? debatable, but it's a more scalable option. However, for those large games with crazy expensive packs, UE is a much worse deal.
The big problem is that Unity is clearly targeting F2P games, but these deals are awful for console. Gamers with multiple devices (or upgrading devices. or simply changing whatever arbituuary metric they track) will cost you more money with zero return, which may be nothing for a f2p title but it adds up quickly for single purchase content. Then they just think they can walk over and ask Microsoft for their Gamepass money, which is laughable. MS could simply drop every Unity game from Gamepass (which wouldn't hurt as bad as you'd expect) and then take Unity to court over retroactive fees.
This could have easily been solved with two different payment plans based on platform and monetization, but this plan clearly wasn't properly thought through.
Not the best article. It basically entirely ignores how this is going to hurt the small/indie developers the most, who are the main reason Unity exists as it does today.
Indie games will have lower price points than AAA games, and thus Unity's cut is a larger piece of the ever-shrinking pie.
My personal opinion about this whole fiasco is that they'll go back on their original statement to something still quite greedy but less so than the prior. Perhaps they planned that all along?
I don't think it could have been planned all along, the damage done seems irreversible. No one is going to propose Unity ever again for upcoming projects even if the fees are actually a much better deal than the competitions (like Unreal 5%).
The audacity of asking everyone who have built a game using their engine (completely disregarding the TOS at the time) to be potentially on the hook to receive monthly bills from their own black box that estimate the number of installs ensure that their reputation is effectively ruined, the future is that no one is going to trust them to use their engine because at any point they can come up with new ridiculous fees...
But that's the thing, it isn't, it's simply good enough, get the job done and is so popular that employing people that knows it is easy. I agree it is a good value proposition which is why it is the industry standard for mobile games.
However, it isn't some marvelous piece of technology that's irreplaceable and when you factor the fact that they can come up with any kind of ridiculous fees and breaking their TOS at will, that value drop drastically to the point that everyone will be looking at alternative in the future, no one is going to use it, certainly not the people that right now helped making this one of the most popular game engine. Those people are pissed off and have been for a while but this is just too much. It cannot work.
Even before the recent upsets, for technical reasons the vibe I had been getting is that for a long time now Unity has been tolerated, not celebrated, and this latest move has tipped the scales and made tolerance no longer possible for many.
Unity suffers from an outdated and inefficient architecture, both in game logic and the rendering engine.
There have been multiple ambitious projects aimed at finding a more efficient way to process game entities, and more efficient ways of rendering them, but that has only resulted in a fragmentation of the ecosystem.
Despite spending countless millions on trying to stay technically relevant, Unity has been living on past merits.
Every new version is bloatier, slower and buggier. When you have a Unity version that works for your project, you stick to it and hope you won't be forced to update because Apple / Google changed something that now requires a new Unity version to be compatible.
Unity skated by on their freemium pricing and easy programming languages. Unreal has been technologically superior for _years_, only held back by the high revenue split, the footguns the Blueprints came with, and how daunting the C++ interface could be.
The real nail in the coffin is less the pricing changes in and of themself, but that they can make it retroactively applicable. This means that this pricing is also subject to change, so devs have no good insight into the future pricing models. IF you';re a solo dev or a small team, ;you simply can't afford that uncertainty.
Unreal isn't great for 2D games, and other small games that don't need all of its power. It's amazing and has unprecedented quality/perf, but being so powerful makes it hard for newbies to pick up.
Godot on the other end will be a perfect fit for what Unity is leaving behind. It's not only free, but OSS, and maintained by amazing people.
It only takes one 'whale' studio using unity to say 'you know what, we're going to give half of what we used to pay for unity to godot' to really speed development of key features. OSS is nothing if not persistent.
Other than the 'extremely' popular games, you'd be surprised who surpasses those numbers. A small game studio by me was showing their financials at a talk (unheard of!), and the 'long tail' of their games definitely went past those numbers - and more costs coming in after a certain point just make the game less likely to be supported and discounted/sold.
I see this being repeated over and over, but I'm not really understanding, say an indie Dev makes 500k in revenue in one year, how much is it going to unity? If it is anything below 50k it seems to me like a sweet deal for all the things Unity offers to devs.
There's no shortage of free and good game engines out there, but I guess Unity does offer a lot that those free options don't.
That's the thing: it's not possible to answer this question, since the cut Unity gets is not tied to the revenue of the developer anymore. You pay per user install. In the absolute worst case of people trying to abuse this structure, it would be possible for the developer to owe more than their revenue!
Initially, this applied to every single update, every single reinstall, and anything that changed your IP. Every load of a unity web game.
All of those counted as a new install, and this was stated to be intentional by unity to all the journalists who reached out and by their internal developers on the support forum.
So the long tail of things like your customers buying a new phone == old apps get transferred == that counts as a new install and you get charged. Reinstall a game from steam or change the install drive or directory? Same thing.
Beyond devs and game types that are affected by legitimate usage, there is the clear problem of malicious installs (what a phrase) and abuse. Unity's answer to that was that proprietary secret internal models would solve abuse, but also that developers would have to reach out with proof of being falsely billed after it happened. And just kinda hope that unity would have the support and billing staff to ever actually deal with that problem.
No, it applies to all games. Say you publish an iOS game for 1$, and a user installs it on two devices which he replaces after a couple of years - you'll owe Unity more money than you took in from the sale.
If it's 50k for 500k revenue then you think it's reasonable for Unity to charge twice the price of Unreal engine's royalties, plus additional liabilities for any future installs of the game that customers previously purchased and will no longer be paying for.
Right, but once a dev does hit that threshold, they could very easily be upside down on their income if the app goes viral and gets installed at a much higher rate than the revenue it generates and that's what people are mad about. You could instantly go from 200k revenue to being in the red on developer fees alone.
Indie devs actually selling their game should be fine right? If it's just the devs of F2P / adware crap that will be sunk, then maybe Unity's new pricing policies will be the unexpected savior of gaming. Imagine a world in which we're not racing to the bottom with ad-ridden shovel-ware but instead people try to make the best possible product and sell it for what it's worth... radical. Or maybe I've misunderstood something and this will hurt developers who sell their games too.
A semi-forgotten but viable and healthy business model (with roots in the Shareware tradition) for mobile games is the free-with-unlock. Not F2P where the IAPs are different quantities of “gems” or “coins,” but a single “unlock” IAP that gets you the rest of the game if you enjoyed the free content.
The per-install fee instantly makes this model unviable.
Unity should've talked to people before announcing the changes.
This is an unforced error on Unity's part and while historical performance does not promise future performance; you really can expect Unity to make large blast-radius changes in the future without consulting you.
Unity, for all its "clarifications," keeps promising it won't be a problem and then refusing to be transparent about any of the ways it could possibly be less of a problem.
Either they backtrack on this whole lifetime install count scheme or this blows up even more spectacularly when January rolls around.
I don't understand why this is a worry - they will do it the same way Valve/Microsoft/Epic/Blizzard identify how many machines you have their product installed on - with a unique hardware ID that will make sure you aren't charged twice for installing the game on the same machine. It's not rocket science, it's been used in the industry for ages.
Are you sure? As far as I'm aware, I'm able to install a game I own on multiple machines for all of these platforms. I figured that the game is tied to my account, not some hardware ID. Why would they need to make sure I'm not charged twice based on installing the game to a machine rather than just seeing if my account owns it? I have never been charged more than once for a game I own that I have installed on both my desktop and my laptop, even after replacing those machines.
Microsoft will stop you from downloading the game if it's installed on too many devices - it will tell you to deauthorize it on another device or sign it out entirely.
>> I figured that the game is tied to my account, not some hardware ID
Because it is. These platforms still use hardware ID matching for account bans and other functionality.
They're repurposing an existing telemetry system that already counts installs and cannot distinguish between a new install and a reinstall. They've been using it for at least five years.
I only know this because they specifically pointed it out when announcing the new pricing plan.
They initially said the exact opposite. They changed their mind after being shouted at about all of the above concerns.
They're clearly flying by the seat of their pants with this. There is no reason to give them any rope, any benefit of the doubt. There is no reason to believe that they will be able to do this right.
This is vastly more difficult than you think. For example, if you try to use the standard method, which is hard drive serial numbers, it's incredibly easy to spoof AND all prebuilt computers from Walmart share the same serials. Non-starter.
I have no idea why you think it's difficult at all. On windows Microsoft provides you directly with functionality to query the device ID, that's good enough but in reality if you pair it with some kind of online login system it's pretty much all you need.
> I have no idea why you think it's difficult at all.
Because I help develop a game engine / platform that deals with this problem and therefore done extensive research?
All of those Microsoft device ID variants are trivial to spoof or collide. If you're talking about GetSystemIdForPublisher() and friends like 'Product ID', you get the Walmart collision problems.
Furthermore, if you rely on an easy-to-spoof hardware ID system, if someone gets ahold of someone else's HWID (see: database breach, phishing), you can trivially mess with the data.
Valve/Microsoft/Epic get around this by spending tons of developer time on this problem and using techniques like fingerprinting and behavior analysis.
Can you provide examples where this has been used in then industry?
With the examples you listed doesn't it require an account to authenticate first before achieving this?
Furthermore, is this not easy enough to spoof? Without account based authentication (which as far as I know Unity does not use/require?) what stops me from spinning up VMs or emulators repeatedly to attempt to install bomb?
Install count and hardware based DRM in games is notoriously bad. Reports of "I changed a graphics card and now the game is locking me out" are as old as time.
It is a solution that can be done more, or less, correctly or fairly. But the problem is that it is easy to get it wrong, it is easy to implement this incorrectly.
Given how slipshod and slapdash these announcements and responses and walkbacks have been, you can't really have any faith that they will fall into the "right" side of things.
It's a massive new change and requirement coming into force in only a few months, with basically every single report coming out of Unity internal engineering being that they don't have any systems in place to figure this out and have no idea how they will actually make it work while also still being GDPR compliant.
"Just trust us bro" and "you can file a support ticket if we get the numbers wrong" are not acceptable and are each reasons enough to worry about the potential for (or rather, guaranteed) abuse of this system.
One must assume the worst about any implementation with a system like this, in the same way that once must assume the worst about any implementation of telemetry or of DRM. You'll be right far more often than wrong.
I'm not sure that really fits well with GDPR... Or it has to be quite far removed from any actual identifier. I certainly believe that tracking number of game installs to bill someone else isn't legitimate reason to store any identifying data about my systems...
From what I can tell, it only applies on copies sold after 200k copies or 200k in sales.
So, if you've paid $X profit after 200k copies, after 201k copies you've made $X plus a bit more, unless you're actually selling your game at less than $0.20 per copy and whatever your payment fees are on the platform you're using. If you consider the IOS app store, where the minimum price is $0.99 and they take a maximum of 30% (including all payment fees etc), that still leaves you with at least $0.49 per extra copy sold.
> If you consider the IOS app store, where the minimum price is $0.99 and they take a maximum of 30% (including all payment fees etc), that still leaves you with at least $0.49 per extra copy sold.
This is assuming that all users only install the app on one device. Say a user has both a tablet and a phone, they install the app on both, and after a couple of years they upgrade both and reinstall the app - suddenly you owe Unity more money than you took in from the sale!
It's not unheard of for Ad-supported mobile games to have per-install revenues measured in the single cents or fractions of a cent, and total revenues over $200k.
Then those devs need to switch to Unity Enterprise and at 1M installs they will be paying 1c/install. If the product still doesn't make enough to pay 1 cent per install, then maybe........unity is not the product for them.
I don't know, on one hand I get why devs are complaining, but on the other I really don't - if your product gets installed millions of times but doesn't make even 1 cent per install then you're doing something wrong.
Not to forgot it is from revenue not profit. So give Steam/Google/Apple their cut and remove any external asset or work bought and 200k isn't that much for any non-low income country.
That's not what I mean when I say "indie" and I work in video games. I'm aware of some companies that employ 10+ people who still call themselves "indie" - I find that dishonest.
>>Any relatively successful game is going to hit those numbers.
Sure - and any relatively successful game should have no trouble paying those fees. The only real edge case that's going to be affected negatively by this change are f2p games that rely on having millions of installed copies to make miniscule amount of money from few paying people. Those games should consider switching away from Unity.
It's the same meaning of the world as in the movie and music industry - no publisher/label == indie.
Indie doesn't mean "small team" or "ugly game with interesting gameplay" or "game that makes less than 200k". All that means is that there aren't any external contractual obligations.
To mostly agree with you, note that the etymology is that "indie" is a shortening of "independent".
It does tend to carry connotations of small teams in video games, but that might just be because the margins in the industry make it super-hard for large studios to remain independent.
Note that I think Valve would count as an indie under a pure independence metric, thus making things like Half Life an indie game. Which feels a bit off.
Yeah, but that's still not them being affiliated with someone else. We'd probably call someone who self-publishes an indie, for instance, and that's what they're effectively doing...
To me indie means that there is no outside stakeholder that wants ROI, its all funded by the development team or customers.
This would then also include every public stock company and every company where the owner no longer works on the games in addition to having outside publishers. This would disqualify almost every bigger teams. There are still some big indie teams, but very few.
All the bad things that comes with a publisher also comes with having outside investors/owners in general, it means that now the game starts to be judges on ROI rather than the developers pride.
Well, a publisher is essentially a very hands-on and loud investor. Private or public, many have 3rd party investors that expect ROI. The difference is how much say those 3rd parties have.
Having EA as a publisher, for example, comes with having to use their engine and tools and in some cases it makes no sense (see ME: Andromeda and Frost Bite). Having some equity firm X as an investor comes with "you gotta make $$$"
> I'm aware of some companies that employ 10+ people who still call themselves "indie" - I find that dishonest.
how? my first failed app had about 7 staff at one point: 2 programmers, 2 artists, a writer, sound designer, and the founder himself. the founder was paying all of us out of pocket. What makes that "not indie" compared to right now where if it was just the owner using his own time?
>and any relatively successful game should have no trouble paying those fees.
accounts I've read from devs suggest not. For some devs it ends up paying more revenue than they take in, despite qualifying.
>The only real edge case that's going to be affected negatively by this change are f2p games that rely on having millions of installed copies to make miniscule amount of money from few paying people.
nah, it works best for them because whales can purchase continuously and with huge amounts.
It may not be what you mean, but you are responding to other people's takes on the situation with their usage of the word. What you mean does not matter.
There are really good reasons to choose Unity over Godot, but C# isn't one of them. You have to learn a whole new API, framework, workflow, etc. Learning GDScript is the least of the issues.
This isn't always true. C# outperform GDScript. Even GDScript 2. GDScript is great for quickly programming certains events. But if you want to create complicated systems that using require thousands or millions of data points, you will notice the speed difference.
And C++ outperforms C#, so native modules are always an option where you really need performance. Yes, you have to build for every platform but most projects really won't need it - but its there so you know you have options when you do. GDNative is also an option to avoid building the core engine, and its still at least as fast as C#.
The biggest issue is no official asset store. The lead developer has mentioned is on the roadmap, but because the company is a non-profit, it's very complicated to start.
I think you missed the point of the article, which is that the professional game business has grown faster than the market and is likely to consolidate. The article is in gamesindutry.biz, not "indie developer" after all.
Indie devs have lots of choices for engines and Unity doesn't owe them a free engine. Lots of professional developers / publishers use Unity but in my experience that is because Unity is really easy to port across platforms and maintaining hardware compatibility across platforms is expensive work we are happy to outsource.
One of this big problems is that this change doesn't just apply to new Unity titles, but every single Unity title already released. This means that if a developer released a Unity game a few years ago, they're still on the hook for these new fees, despite the fact they never agreed to it. These developers are now forced to pay these new fees (even if the fees eclipse the ongoing revenue for a game), or de-list the game entirely. This also completely erodes trust with Unity, as even developers willing to pay the new fees are scared that Unity will unexpectedly add more costs in the future.
Unity has a very long history of obsoleting features before the replacement is ready.
Now they're doing the trick to themselves: they obsoleted themselves as an engine for mobile casual games and indies, but not ready as an AAA engine. That's what I call consistency.
I remember Unity web plugin for web browsers was starting to pop off but they axed it a while ago making some games unplayable. Now they have a webassembly option so you can still make 3d games for the browser, but those old games are still unplayable.
Shame because those were some of my favorite online games when I was a teen
Meanwhile Steam takes 30% of indie devs' hard earned revenue and is a monopoly, but Valve seems immune from any criticism or even mention of it, with the pc gamer community reacting with downvotes(like with this comment) and angry replies if it's ever brought up. Think about it, when did you ever see anything critical of Steam on HN or Reddit?
Its competitor Epic store which charged only 12% IIRC was demonized and got much more that it's share of criticism and every shortcoming was highlighted relentlessly. I guess Unity does not have much fan armor.
Your comment makes it sound like Epic Store was demonized because they charge 12%. I bet that's the only thing they did not get demonized about.
Their shady practices such as forcing exclusivity to Epic Store and suing Apple is what brought them shit all over them.
Developers are free to submit their game to Steam and release their game in any other platform. Epic handcuffs the devs to the Epic Store for a while.
> when did you ever see something critical of Steam on HN or Reddit?
Jesus are we forgetting EVERYBODY hated Steam when it got released? You know what Valve did? They fucking fixed their platform. They listened to consumer's feedback.
Now it's the best PC game store out there. That might change at some point, but today it's the best one.
Epic pays for temporary exclusivity. Lots of devs turn down that deal and release on both Epic and Steam. The reason so many devs take the offer is because it massively helps reduce risk.
Gamers got angry at Epic because they didn't want to have to install a new launcher for a game they wanted. That's really it. And to be clear, I feel the same way. I have a ton of free games on EGS that I've never installed because I don't want to install another launcher.
In several cases, they sought out games that were already coming out on Steam and even had preorders (or kickstarter backers) there, and then paid those developers to rip it out.
There is a seemingly minor but important distinction with what Epic does: they do not pay for exclusivity nor do most of their actions involve paying for a game to be made that otherwise would not have been. Either of those things are fine, even if begrudgingly.
What Epic actually does is pay to harm Steam specifically; the stipulation is always "don't put it on Steam", not "only put it on our platform". It is purposely targeted and antagonistic towards steam and steam users; "we have deprived you of a thing, now you have to come here if you want to get it" is how that comes across, when they should have aimed for "we are getting this new thing made for our platform, come over here to check it out!"
While they were doing this, their store was in a miserable state compared to its competitors, in terms of features and reliability (especially for the desktop app). So they were seen as prioritizing depriving another platform instead of prioritizing having a good platform and customer experience.
When all of the above is put together, it comes across as petty and malicious, rather than them trying to throw their fortnite dollars at bootstrapping their platform, and at making and having a quality platform for consumers.
If they had simply paid for a bunch of new exclusive games and IP to be made for their platform rather than seeking out existing, already advertised and in-development suitor games, it would have come across way differently. Or if so much more of the effort and money would have gone to making the store better and beyond feature parity with its main competitors (not that it necessarily reached even that), it would have been received quite differently.
>You know what Valve did? They fucking fixed their platform.
not really. The core complaints from 2003 are still there. Valve instead just conditioned users to not care about physical disks, not care about needing a store open to play a game, and undercut the competition. No different than Amazon in that regard.
Only difference is that it they got good PR out of it (unlike most tech companies doing the same), because gamers are young and they praise cheap stuff above all else. Valve was also smart because they can just take a cut out of already premium games, compared to how most other websites had to sell a free website and monetize it in less savory ways.
Steam scares me. The 30% cut isn't the thing that scares me though. What scares me is that the lack of a monthly subscription fee on top of that is not because of any legal framework that says steam can't charge an exorbitant monthly access fee. The lack of the fee is due to Gabe Newell being more or less a benevolent dictator.
One day steam will be bought out by private capital that seeks to massively increase returns. The 'just buy it on steam so it's in your steam list' will inevitably one day be a curse not a blessing.
>Think about it, when did you ever see anything critical of Steam on HN or Reddit?
I probably helped in that regard. I hate it but it's a harder battle to face since those rates have been standard for decades. I especially hate that Valve made deals for AAA's to get lower cuts after selling a bazillion copies. Shows where their loyaly lies.
If Unreal Engine is taking 5% after a large revenue floor in order to help make the game, a platform holder really can't ask for more than 2-3x that cost to host it.
To be fair "monopoly" is so abused now it basically means "entity that controls the market". eg. "amazon is a monopoly" despite the fact that there are obviously other e-commerce sites, "uber is a monopoly" despite the fact that there's other ride-hailing apps, "google is a monopoly" despite the fact that there are other search engines.
Almost every big US publisher has their own platform (i.e. Origin, EGL, whatever the hell Ubi is doing nowadays) for distribution.
There is also GoG, but I feel like that is not a good option for Indies. Still, they get a huge shout out because of their retro collection and friendliness to that subgenre.
For indie developers, there's always Itch.io with the option to try Steam or somewhere else later. As it stands I still have more options from where to buy a given game than 10, even 20 years ago.
Not to say this current course is sustainable, of course...
And many of those publishers are now also publishing on Steam because it's close to a monopoly. Like Blizzard recently with Overwatch and soon their other games. And Microsoft published games.
Once WoW is on Steam, then this argument might hold water. Overwatch being put on steam was a desperate attempt at boosting the player count of a game suffering severe player drop-off. Steam was simply an untapped well of users to draw from for Blizzard.
Epic is losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year on it and will eventually shut it down. The only reason it ran for so long was because it's not a publicly held company and Tim Sweeney never liked stores taking a lot of developers' revenue.
>A monopoly (from Greek μόνος, mónos, 'single, alone' and πωλεῖν, pōleîn, 'to sell'), as described by Irving Fisher, is a market with the "absence of competition", creating a situation where a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular thing.
>Steam is taking a big cut, but they've never tried to fuck me over as a consumer.
most consumers. If you were ever a part of the certain niche games that were bizarrely removed/rejected for no reason, you can be frustrated at valve's vauge lines of what's allowed.
I mean every time something like a dev tool starts charging, or there is some tax or regulation, someone arrives and says it's gonna hurt the small indie devs, but who cares? If they can't contribute to anything and require the whole society worse off, then its likely that they'd better do something else
They were already paying for it. The subscription model should be enough. It scales well enough for small devs to make decent amounts of money, and for Unity to get paid.
You act as though indie studios are using this tool for free when that is hardly the case. Past a certain revenue amount, they are required to upgrade to a paid license which is totally fair. Game not taking off? No worries. It is just wasted effort. Game take off and you make lots of money? GREAT! You get to upgrade to a paid model of a tool you already use.
It was a WAY more fair model. If they are that hard up for money, they should have just announced a subscription price increase. Not retroactively price gouging for games that have already been released.
Pragmatically, many people enjoy indie games as much (or more) than AAA games. AAA games are more oriented towards making money and mass market appeal, and if we don't provide a market for indie games then we lose out on the specialty and variety of them.
But....there is a thriving market for indie games, even with this change. If you make a fantastic little indie game and release it for free = nothing changes, you pay nothing. If you make a little indie game and sell 100k copies = nothing changes, you still pay nothing. If you make a little indie game and sell 200k copies - you will now have to pay a small fee per install, but if you reached 200k sales you are way out of what I'd consider "small indie dev". I think dev tools should be provided for free or cheap to people experimenting or starting out, but there is a point where people are taking the piss if they sell 200k copies and they still think they should be able to use the tools for free(or nearly free).
> I think dev tools should be provided for free or cheap to people experimenting or starting out, but there is a point where people are taking the piss if they sell 200k copies and they still think they should be able to use the tools for free(or nearly free).
You have completely misunderstood the discussions if you think the issue is indie devs wanting to use the engine for free. If it were just a percentage of revenue, few people would complain. Instead the pricing structure is explicitly made in a way that puts small developers at risk if their cheap small game happens to go viral.
>> puts small developers at risk if their cheap small game happens to go viral.
Please explain how exactly, because I'm really not grokking it.
If your small free game goes viral = you pay nothing.
If your small paid game goes viral = you pay a small fee per install, but since you are making money on these sales this is functionality identical to perfentage of revenue(please convince me otherwise) and I don't see the problem.
From my perspective it seems like a lot of complaining is being done by people on Unity Personal licences who are now upset they will have to pay to use the engine if they actually make money - I don't support those people. I'm yet to see a legitimate example of a business that would be put in any kind of danger because of these rules.
> If your small paid game goes viral = you pay a small fee per install, but since you are making money on these sales this is functionality identical to perfentage of revenue(please convince me otherwise) and I don't see the problem.
No, that's the issue! It's possible for you to owe more to Unity than you took in from the sale. It's not tied to your revenue. If a user re-installs your game too many times you will literally owe Unity more money than you earned.
I'm not sure how you want me to convince you otherwise. The formula for calculating how much devs owe due to installs is: install_count * amount_per_install. There simply is no revenue involved.
>>It's possible for you to owe more to Unity than you took in from the sale. It's not tied to your revenue
I think you don't understand what revenue is. It's entirely possible for a revenue based percentage system where you lose money on every sale. In that sense this system is the same - under some circumstances you can lose money on a sale.
>> If a user re-installs your game too many times you will literally owe Unity more money than you earned.
I agree that Unity shouldn't be charging per install if the dev can prove all installations were done by the same user.
> I think you don't understand what revenue is. It's entirely possible for a revenue based percentage system where you lose money on every sale. In that sense this system is the same - under some circumstances you can lose money on a sale.
I perfectly understand what revenue is, thank you. I am not talking about a revenue based percentage system where you lose money on every sale.
Please explain to me how a developer can owe more than their revenue in a system where they owe a percentage of their revenue. You literally stated "but since you are making money on these sales this is functionality identical to perfentage of revenue". How can this situation happen in such a system?
> I agree that Unity shouldn't be charging per install if the dev can prove all installations were done by the same user.
But that is exactly the issue. Unity is charging per install, even if the dev can prove all installations were done by the same user. So why are you saying:
> From my perspective it seems like a lot of complaining is being done by people on Unity Personal licences who are now upset they will have to pay to use the engine if they actually make money
if you yourself agree with the point people are making, which is that Unity should not be charging per install?
I don't want to get in to deep. But they said "lose money on each sale" not that the fee would be greater than your revenue. If you make $1 in revenue, pay 90 cents in various fees, and then 20% (20 cents) to unity, you've lost money on the sale, despite them taking only a percentage of the sales revenue.
And my point is: you make 1$ in revenue, and it's possible for you to owe more than 1$ to Unity. That is the problem with the per-install fee, and it's the reason it's not comparable with a cut of revenue.
Like other folks, I'm disappointed in the author for deliberately misunderstanding the actual scenario here.
As I understand it Unity has said it would not do exactly what it has done. This isn't even a "rug-pull" in the sense that people assumed wrongly that Unity wouldn't do these things without explicit assurances. This is a company expressly going back on its word after people have gone all-in on its platform.
And the fact that Unity is trying to switch terms out from under people who've already agreed to and planned on different terms.
Hashicorp is rightfully getting slammed for abruptly changing licenses, but its community has the final releases under the old licenses to fall back on. With Unity it's a major bait-and-switch.
I don't buy the argument that developers shouldn't be angry at Unity. If Unity's model is not profitable or profitable enough there are plenty of ways that it could've approached this that might have been a bit painful but not nearly as harmful.
With the rise of free-to-play, cloud gaming and live ops, the power (and revenue) will increasingly become concentrated among a smaller number of games companies as games production and publishing become a lower margin business (just like any business that experiences content commoditisation via streaming).
The number of installs / downloads / plays will not go down (neither will the number of gamers), but the number of developers and publishers likely will.
Hence Unity's per-download pricing decision. It is recognising tougher times ahead and de-risking against the coming consolidation of the games industry's landscape – which is, strategically speaking, sound thinking for a company that spent a lot of time and money to move towards profitability and is looking to maintain it in the current landscape.
Roblox is an example of this, and Fortnite is following its lead: the game is the social network, the distribution platform, the development target, and the runtime for other games. There's an entire generation of kids for whom "Video Gaming" is synonymous with Roblox or Fortnite, rather than Steam, Xbox or Playstation.
Interestingly, it seems like Nintendo is still its stalwart and indefatigable self; unrelentingly unstoppable and irreplaceable.
And Minecraft before those and call of duty before that, and wow/RuneScape before that. Call of Duty at least relied on Xbox Live, I guess but the others were their own ecosystems
Has there been any explanation, from Unity themselves or anyone else, as to why Unity thinks it deserves a cut based on install count? Do installs have to connect to Unity servers to download something? Anything like that?
Everything I've seen so far points to no baser an explanation than Unity realizing it had an avenue of attack and deciding to employ it--and an attack is exactly what it is, a raid on other people's business model.
All I can think of is perhaps they feel like their own reputation is under attack for being associated with F2P adware games, and they're trying to mount a defense against that.
> Has there been any explanation, from Unity themselves or anyone else, as to why Unity thinks it deserves a cut based on install count?
The simplest is that by using Unity, the developer reduces their development costs compared to creating a game without using an engine and the tooling that comes with it.
If they don't think the advantages that using Unity gives them is worth $0.20 per copy, they should probably work out how much it'd cost to hire more developers to do the extra work they'd have to do to create their game without Unity.
Let me rephrase this with a different tool to point out how poor the argument is:
>If they don't think the advantages that using YouTube gives them is worth $0.20 per 1000 views, they should probably work out how much it'd cost to switch to a different platform altogether
>If they don't think the advantages that using Adobe Photoshop gives them is worth $0.20 per image, they should probably work out how much it'd cost to edit their photos without photoshop.
>If they don't think the advantages that using Google gives them is worth $0.20 per 1000 clicks, they should probably work out how much it'd cost to hire more developers to do the extra work they'd have to do to promote their website without Google.
The point is it's a stupid payment model that is predatory. People were already paying for Unity subscriptions over $200k...why should they pay for Unity AND pay an extra 20 cent tax per install on top of that? The issue isn't that people aren't paying for Unity. It's that subscriptions seemingly aren't enough to satisfy them, so they decided to price gouge.
Unity definitely deserves to get paid for the value they provide. But why should that value scale with install count? Doesn't it already charge for licenses to develop the game?
There is a big disconnect between "We make tools for game developers" and "we should get revenue share of the game developer's income"
I'm sure one of these days the office furniture companies will be coming for recurring revenue shares, since after all, you can't retain the devs you need to make the game if they're sitting on the floor. Think of all the value those chairs provided. Shouldn't the furniture company get a cut of that? It's hard to predict revenue when you don't how long people will hold onto their chairs on a fixed purchase model too. (/s)
Retail store rentals have long required a cut of monthly sales.
Actors/writers in the US are currently striking over their residual cut of entertainment sales, essentially forever.
Architects have negotiated for lifetime payments over the rental payments of buildings, so why shouldn't iconic furniture producers get a cut of sales using their most excellent chairs forever?
Do you include a massive chunk of Unity code in every game made with Unity? Yes.
If you make a song that includes samples from other songs, you have to pay the original creators royalties too. You might negotiate a deal for a one-off payment, or per-copy sold, or percentage. AFAIK Unity offers all of those options.
I guess you're probably unaware that if you release a game on any of the consoles, you also have to pay a license fee per copy. Not sure of the current prices, but it used to be around $7-$15 depending on expected sales volume. If you release a game on mobile, you have to pay 15-30% cut to be on the app stores. If you release on steam, you have to pay them, etc.
Repeating my response to a sister comment for visibility:
Unity definitely deserves to get paid for the value they provide. But why should that value scale with install count? Doesn't it already charge for licenses to develop the game?
There is a big disconnect between "We make tools for game developers" and "we should get revenue share of the game developer's income". In what way does this proposes business model sync up with the value they provide?
With the phrase 'throwing their toys out of the pram' I immediately knew there was a problem with this article. There might be overblown anxiety over uncertain outcomes related to fees or from developers that would never realistically be affected, but it's totally reasonable to be pissed that terms of service can change retroactively to include both products in development and existing games. Having a Unity based game available for download suddenly becomes an undefined liability that might bite out of nowhere based on it going viral, or even malicious intent.
> Is there any reason everyone won't/can't just switch to Unreal Engine?
Switching engines mean to rewrite most of your codebase. Actually if you're 1) not using an additional scripting layer or 2) not willing to lose performance, it means to rewrite about... 100% of your codebase.
There are a lot of studios and devs now saying they won't use Unity for new projects. Some will be able to switch to new engines, others are just completely cancelling in-progress projects.
The economics for in progress games means probably only a few particularly early in development or strong feeling dev teams are going to switch engines mid stream so I think in the worst case unity thinks they have buffer to climb down if needed.
I can't see future projects building on unity with this "we have changed the deal and can do it again" attitude on the other hand.
So I'd put the level of customer power here as more than Reddit users but less than Dungeons & Dragons users.
Porting is a relatively big issue. Core game systems often intertwine closely with how the engine operates, especially graphics systems like the renderer or particles/effects. It's totally possible though. One of the game projects I help with switched from SFML to Godot to an in-house engine.
There's also the 'skilling up' of a dev team. If a studio has developed on Unity for 10 years, switching to Unreal or Godot or similar will be... Challenging.
Makes sense. Is there anything about Unity that would make the community grit it's teeth and take the terms? Or is it all just economics at this point?
Theres a lot of value in the ecosystem through the asset store, that allows yoi to get up and running much more quickly than if you had to built subsystems from scratch (i.e. You can buy a good water package for <100 usd, whereas implementing state of the art would probably take you at least two months of dev time).
Additionally, from theres lots of educational resources, that might be harder to find for smaller engines
On the other hand, unity has a habit of shooting itself in the foot with incredibly messy and poor documentation, fragmented and duplicated functionality across multiple implementations (theres a common refrain in the unity community that every system in unity is either in beta or deprecated), so an engine that can provide an easier onboarding / dev experience could definitely compete there.
The main benefit of Unity over all other engines (from my perspective, anyways) is the large amount of skilled developers trained in it. If studios and devs start abandoning it, there goes your value proposal.
> Meanwhile, time-spent-centric business models mean that games are not competing with just games (like they once used to), but with other entertainment propositions for the limited 24 hours of the day.
Yet gaming is winning, it surpassed film and music combined over the last few years.
I've been thinking about this a lot the last few days because it doesn't make a ton of sense. They're charging the people who make the least money the highest fees (past a relatively low revenue threshold). Normally you'd do the opposite because the biggest customers have the most to lose and cost the most in maintenance resources.
And the other way to make money is to innovate and create products that create more value for your customers, but they're giving them away for free with the new model. That's tacitly admitting they suck (or suck at selling them).
The explanation I can think of is that they're hemorrhaging money and the C suite is going to lose their jobs if they don't have cash flow ASAP
Short term cash flow but with a potential future of 0 new projects ever being greenlight using Unity...
I guess it is still better than going even deeper into debt short term but the thing is that there is so many more ways they could have done that, yet they seems to have picked the one that ensure them in practice no future at all.
Unity is selling picks and shovels to a gold rush, but they aren't as good as Epic's. My guess is their reaching into their customers' pockets today to pay for better picks and shovels tomorrow, but they don't know how to do the latter yet only that they know they need the money today.
>As a side note, I always find it quite amusing when for-profit companies accuse another for-profit company of being unfair by wanting to make more money.
Maybe because most people think you shouldn't announce that you are going to fundamentally alter the way your payment model works for the reason of "We didn't make ENOUGH profits last quarter".
Article was written by a soulless mba-style cretin. Into the garbage it goes.
Why is a perspective from a "soulless mba-style cretin"
discarded, if it is presented in a logical way? Unity is a for-profit business after all, and a public one.
Because mba-style cretins with no souls are the overseers pushing these extractive and rent-seeking decisions into every facet of our lives. The article's title, if I am being fair, is correct, but the author never mentions that people such as himself are cause of these symptoms.
> Meanwhile, time-spent-centric business models mean that games are not competing with just games (like they once used to), but with other entertainment propositions for the limited 24 hours of the day.
Interesting. Theoretical "(number of people) x 24h/day" is the max limit for attention economy. Has it already hit the ceiling?
I believe (with no evidence) that infinite-scrolling social media sites have already consumed most available attention. To get a share of attention you now have to compete with them, instead of simply being an alternative to boredom.
Personally I feel it's the second one. When you're competing with boredom, a piece of entertainment can be pretty 'swingy' in how rewarding it feels, which I think is a desirable thing - dynamic range for feelings. When you're competing with social media scrolling, you have to beat that baseline of constant rewards.
I think there are people who like to do things, and people who like to do nothing.
Next, there is an effort threshold between these choices for some people. For me, IRL activities and mouse/keyboard means that I "do things".
At a moment I'm bound only to a touchscreen (phone, ipad, android tablet, etc.) with no access to better activities, I will likely read or watch YouTube videos. You can categorize those activities as doing something or doing nothing if you like, but the effort threshold for my regular keyboard/mouse activities is just too high to accomplish on a phone on-demand.
I think in the general case, there are varying degrees of laziness and varying degress of inaccessibility for better activities in the general population.
I hate tiktok, but I understand why you would watch pointless 30 second clips for an hour when the perceived alternative may be a pointless microtransaction farmville clone.
> Interesting. Theoretical "(number of people) x 24h/day" is the max limit for attention economy. Has it already hit the ceiling?
Everyone is always paying attention to something or they are asleep. There's increasing competition for what people are paying attention to, but the amount of attention is directly tied to population.
It's got me thinking we might have hit "peak content" too.
Is there is just enough high quality historical media and endless free cheap modern media to consume ?
A Fox network executive was saying that if the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strikes aren't resolved by October 1, the US TV season is effectively cancelled[0], so we may be about to find out. Disney has already dipped their toes in airing things that were exclusive to Disney+ -- Ms. Marvel and Andor both got limited showings on ABC (Disney's broadcast network) as promos for other materials, but I could see more of that happening if the strikes force new work to be abandoned.
If the author understood games, he would know that the ecosystem just does not have the capacity to sustain tech like margins.
Of course that’s ultimately what Bay Area Companies, especially EA and Unity and their (ex/current CEO) dream off and want to sell their investors but they slept through the part where the tech giants took those margins from the people that initially made them big.
Having run multiple P&L for major studios - it’s just not feasible; it’s not a high margin industry like ads, even in mobile and there are many rentseekeers already leeching from developers on mobile:
- Apple
- Facebook/Tiktok. CPI is massive and entirely unavoidable in mobile precisely because Facebook and Unity have drive commodisation of Games over the last decade. There’s more supply than demand and Facebook sits right in the middle matching it (and increasingly tiktok), pitting Chinese fake game video ads against serious developers.
Most independent studios in the world are barely profitable, a stunning number of them are reliant on tax credits.
Mobile Gaming is insanely competitive, Apple’s landgrab has destroyed competitiveness of smaller ad solutions who can’t compete with Facebook’s AI powered mitigations. The lucrative China market (China is a mobile gaming exporter and devs are large spenders on ads) has been wingclipped and seen powerful competitors like Tiktok rise.
Unity is out of their mind with this move and out of their class on expectations.
They went with VCs and sold promises anyone with understanding of games knew you cannot cash. It’s a bit driven game and almost every highly profitable hit game (the top 10 that account for the majority of revenue at any time) is using their own engine.
Fun fact: Even in the best times, BioWare’s profitability was highly tied to tax credits. Alberta ramping them down forced during an investment / console cycle for ed the sale to VG Holdings (CEO:John Riccitello) who promptly switched to EA and influenced them to buy his own investment, VG holdings at a 4x ROI.
He then instituted various investor focused profitability drives such as the infamous swipe your credit card to reload your gun in battlefield pitch, the Mobile F2P defoliation of Dungeon Keeper and Ultima forever and eventually got fired and went to Unity where he made various deals, including with Facebook that died the moment he got greedy and asked them for ads RevShare which instantly ended the relationship.
Tons of other ad tech investments and the occasional molestation charges from fellow C-Level executives followed and neither seem to have not paid off (except for Riccitello Pizza in NY who may be puzzled why they suddenly were the first hits globally on the name after reputation management consultants got dispatched) or they wouldn’t have to start squeezing devs.
No, Mr. Riccitello is a very typical CEO on a mission to get very rich as fast as possible by optimizing on short term investor pitches and delusions of joining the ranks of the people he hangs out with in Silicon Valley.
Nothing new, the industry is full of these types at the top and they mingle with the people they want to become (See Bobby Kotik dating Sheryl Sandberg which fits so well with her focus on women given the corporate culture he created at Blizzard ).
The real crux though is the sudden altering of the deal with little communication, care and expectation settings. This happens because they knew it would not be a good sell, especially internally.
Their own people would have rebelled so they black-opsed it without internal consultation of the people actually understanding developers to avoid internal riots and as a result missed every single edge case.
What will happen now is mass abandonment of Unity for new projects. Interestingly, AI is reducing the costs of engine changes rather dramatically right now.
The timing suggests this was a “shareholders won’t like next quarter and must be placated” emergency ripcord, especially coupled with the stock sales by insiders that have been going into overdrive recently.
Low interest party is over - and VCs may find it hard to find a bag holder for Unity. Games is a fickle business.
Now Unity is under increased pressure to provide their VCs with a bag-holder exit (sell a growth story to institutional investors to con them into taking the sinking stock off the hands of the VCs. Where have we seen the same pattern recently ... ah, yes, reddit. Same symptoms, same disease.
> but of course, the games industry declined in 2022
I suppose the article author would have me believe that is indicative of a broader trend, but does anybody think a drop in games profits in 2022 isn't simply a consequence of covid policies ending?
So.. What if I have one unity instance, installed once, loading other games as package? Nothing gets "installed" engine wise but the app becomes a perma installed store
?
Capitalism requires up-and-to-the-right progress on stock performance. The main ways to achieve this are through legitimate innovation and/or squeezing existing innovations.
Unity finds itself becoming an ad-tech company. There aren't a lot of technical innovations in that space, so they're left with squeezing their users. If their business model had stayed more focused on monetizing the sale of their tooling, rather than ads within, then they'd be rewarded more heavily for innovation.
I get the impression that this is exacerbated by us all having existed in a low interest rate world for a while. There wasn't a ton of pressure. You could take on debt for projects that made money, but not a ton of money, and that was still sufficient to appease investors.
Now that money is worth something again, thanks to high interest rates, and with some pressure from inflation - it's not such an easy world. Previous choices now have ramifications that become apparent. One of those is users getting squeezed by companies that don't have reasonable ways to sustainably innovate their way to higher returns. Companies which overplayed their hands will go under as users reject them outright. This makes space for newcomers.
While there might not be much innovation available in the ad tech space, there's plenty to address in gaming (and ad tech may have lots of arbitrage given different legal regimes)
If Unity made their engine just more usable, much less more capable, than UnReal and others they would gain market share. That's ignoring the other lucrative arenas games engines have entered like movie vfx and vr.
The CEO going full tilt into enshittification is just a symptom of terrible leadership
Do they have the capital to do that, though? My impression is that the Unity software is a quagmire of tech debt. and that napkin math on trying to fix those issues, then wait for sentiment to change, then grow, then capture value from the growth - doesn't pan out.
Their stock is trading down 50% from IPO. I can't imagine investors are very supportive of burning a ton on technically complex, long-term initiatives?
If they simply took a percent of revenue, everyone would have shrugged, you might have had some indies complaining, and the world would have kept on turning. Instead, they made a couple of compounding missteps. An install based fee creates a massive amount of uncertainty about how much you will owe at the end of the month, creating potential cash flow issues. You are at the whims of Unity in terms of how they calculate it, and praying that they properly handle all the edge cases and potential abuses, despite all their incentives giving them plenty reasons not to care that much. And then on top of all of that they made it retroactive to all existing games on the market using their engine. Companies had a very reasonable expectation that they could rely on the terms their games were released under. All that trust has now been upended. Unity has shown they are willing to change terms retroactively with little notice. Now when evaluating Unity as an engine you will have to take into account not only the current fee structure, but also the risk that they will add additional fees retroactively that have the potential to completely disrupt your business model.