Shit. This is just atrocious. I get Unity needs some income to keep going, but this feels like one of the absolute worst ways to implement that. It just feels greedy. The fact they're also...
Shit. This is just atrocious. I get Unity needs some income to keep going, but this feels like one of the absolute worst ways to implement that. It just feels greedy. The fact they're also retiring Unity Plus so that, instead of $399, your next option is $2,000 is just... Bad. Very bad.
The blog post from Unity itself isn't much better:
We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user. We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share.
Downloading is separate from purchasing. The article already raised the big questions: how does it count installs? What if someone buys a game and installs it on multiple devices? What about re-installation? What about the logistics of Game Pass? Can it track pirated copies? What about bundles, and free giveaways? Game jams? Demos? Mobile games? How, exactly, does it track the revenue to determine if a game meets the threshold if they're only tracking downloads?
A big concern of my own: What about if the buyer refunds the game?? I know that smaller devs already have issues with that on Steam because Steam can process refunds before the developer is even paid for the sale, forcing the devs to pay it back with basically their own money. A friend mentioned his friend getting into some financial trouble after some people on 4chan bought and refunded her game in bulk. Unity's system is tracking downloads, so does it track uninstallation?
Also, how exactly is "retroactive" being taken into account here? Does that mean if you it will apply to all installs going forward for already released titles... Or will they apply it to the existing installs and try to get payment now? I feel like it HAS to be the first, but this announcement just reeks of enough greed it makes me uncertain. At the very least, I wonder if people will pull games made with Unity from stores.
This part of the article interviewing Dan Marshall sums it up best, I think:
"It's an absolute fucking catastrophe," Marshall told us, "and I'll be jumping ship to Unreal as soon as I can. Most indies simply don't have the resources to deal with these kind of batshit logistics. Publishers are less likely to take on Unity games, because there's now a cost and an overhead," he continued. "How this is being tracked is super vague and feels half-thought-through. It seems open to review-bombing exploits, but in a way that actually costs developers. If someone buys a game on Steam and installs in on three machines, are Devs liable for three payments? If so, that sucks. Gamepass is suddenly a massive headache... the list goes on.
"It's all just utterly horrible, and they need to backtrack on this instantly or every Dev I know is likely jumping ship tomorrow."
I like using Unity, but after this, I don't think I can anymore. I'd been talking with a friend about using Unreal for a game idea they have, and I guess this just clinches it.
I hope the instant backlash makes them backtrack on this quickly. I feel like this HAD to be implemented by investors who only see dollar signs and don't actually understand business.
Some of this is covered in the FAQ linked in their blog post. Not that it's the actual agreement, but they define installs as: And retroactive as: This is some bullshit and I'm guessing there's...
Downloading is separate from purchasing. The article already raised the big questions: how does it count installs? What if someone buys a game and installs it on multiple devices? What about re-installation? What about the logistics of Game Pass? Can it track pirated copies? What about bundles, and free giveaways? Game jams? Demos? Mobile games? How, exactly, does it track the revenue to determine if a game meets the threshold if they're only tracking downloads?
Also, how exactly is "retroactive" being taken into account here? Does that mean if you it will apply to all installs going forward for already released titles... Or will they apply it to the existing installs and try to get payment now? I feel like it HAS to be the first, but this announcement just reeks of enough greed it makes me uncertain. At the very least, I wonder if people will pull games made with Unity from stores.
Some of this is covered in the FAQ linked in their blog post. Not that it's the actual agreement, but they define installs as:
An install is defined as the installation and initialization of a project on an end user’s device.
And retroactive as:
Once my game passes both revenue and install count thresholds, will I be charged retroactively for all installs up to that point?
No. The install fee is only charged on incremental installs that happen after the thresholds have been met. While previous installs will be used to calculate threshold eligibility, you will not have to pay for installs generated prior to January 1, 2024.
This is some bullshit and I'm guessing there's going to be quite a few games that are pulled from the various platforms on December 31st of this year.
Holy fuck. That's insanity. It's also going to bankrupt some developer when some group elects to go from merely review bombing to "reinstall bombing" a Unity release. IF it even requires such. The...
Holy fuck.
That's insanity.
It's also going to bankrupt some developer when some group elects to go from merely review bombing to "reinstall bombing" a Unity release. IF it even requires such. The Unity Runtime is almost undoubtedly going to make a call to Unity for them to keep track of this, so all it'll take is a pirated copy without a block in the firewall and a script to install, initialize, uninstall, repeat to put a developer out of work.
Bet it won't even take that much, just a bit of checking to see what the call includes, and just spam it to Unity over and over.
Yep, just wrote a very long comment outlining how that exact scenario could work. Gamers can be some of the most malicious and tech-savvy people on the internet. It wouldn't be hard to automate...
Yep, just wrote a very long comment outlining how that exact scenario could work. Gamers can be some of the most malicious and tech-savvy people on the internet. It wouldn't be hard to automate the process and just have it running in the background.
I'm 100% certain it's at least going to go through some revision to remove that. Charges must be 1-to-1 with purchases, anything else is simply impractical. EDIT: already rolled back. Though they...
I'm 100% certain it's at least going to go through some revision to remove that. Charges must be 1-to-1 with purchases, anything else is simply impractical.
EDIT: already rolled back. Though they really have to tie the fees directly to purchases, or someone will find a way to exploit and rack up nonsensically high "install" charges.
There was a time when DRM meant that you could only reinstall your purchased copy of a game only a few times (for example: Spore could only ever be installed 3 times). This era of oppressive DRM...
There was a time when DRM meant that you could only reinstall your purchased copy of a game only a few times (for example: Spore could only ever be installed 3 times). This era of oppressive DRM meant that games always needed the ability to internet verify the installation and that legitimate games may eventually not work anymore because of installation limits.
Unity's plans encourage developers to reintroduce that sort of thing again...
I can only imagine this will sound the death knell for new Unity projects. Current and existing products will probably have a tail for Unity's owners, but I can only imagine the amount of people...
I can only imagine this will sound the death knell for new Unity projects. Current and existing products will probably have a tail for Unity's owners, but I can only imagine the amount of people picking the engine up for new games is going to dwindle.
Why not use Unreal instead when it's free up to $1 Million in revenue? Check my math here, but a game using Unreal, selling a million copies at $1 a piece would be $50k for the unreal engine (at a 5% cut). Where as, one million sales of a $1 game with Unity, assuming every user installed once would be $200000 in royalties to Unity. Seems like the obvious choice if my math is correct.
Unity's largest demographic, at least last I checked, was indie developers mostly. So with this news in mind, Godot is really a better switch than Unreal is, if you ask me. I'm honestly a bit...
Unity's largest demographic, at least last I checked, was indie developers mostly. So with this news in mind, Godot is really a better switch than Unreal is, if you ask me.
I'm honestly a bit surprised how Unreal's stealing most of the attention when Godot exists, especially these days. With Godot 4 out, the 3D tools improved massively, and are more than good enough for most indie projects AFAIK. Not to mention that it's completely free, forever, and open source from the get-go.
Unreal has an asset store, is easy to hire for, and has a marketing department that makes sure everyone knows Unreal is an option. The big feather in Godot's cap is C#, so I can see a lot of Unity...
Unreal has an asset store, is easy to hire for, and has a marketing department that makes sure everyone knows Unreal is an option.
The big feather in Godot's cap is C#, so I can see a lot of Unity devs switching to Godot based on that. C# is a fantastic language, and I think one of the biggest reasons for Unity's success thus far.
That actually seems like a huge problem. The big selling point of commercial game engines is that they simplify the porting process. For indie-scale games, Unreal and Unity trivialize this down to...
That actually seems like a huge problem. The big selling point of commercial game engines is that they simplify the porting process. For indie-scale games, Unreal and Unity trivialize this down to a few build options and some extra testing.
It's mainly due to licensing incompatibilities. But they're working on making it easier for developers. Godot and consoles, all you need to know Godot support for consoles is coming, brought to...
It's mainly due to licensing incompatibilities. But they're working on making it easier for developers.
I read all three links, but none say how you would port a game from Godot to console yourself. I guess the process would be: 1) get licensed by the platform owner (Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony), 2)...
I read all three links, but none say how you would port a game from Godot to console yourself. I guess the process would be: 1) get licensed by the platform owner (Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony), 2) sign NDA, 3) download platform SDK, 4) read SDK documentation, 5) figure out how to compile your Godot game for the platform, 6) test on dev kit, 7) iterate until Gold, and 8) submit to platform.
I think that's because the recommended way is to not do it yourself. There's a lot of bookkeeping to be done just to be compliant with XRs. With code that you're not allowed to distribute. And...
I think that's because the recommended way is to not do it yourself. There's a lot of bookkeeping to be done just to be compliant with XRs. With code that you're not allowed to distribute. And then there's the apis that differ of course. That's a large overhead, especially for a small developer.
Honestly, as time has passed, I've started to see C# as less and less of the boon it's described as. Don't get me wrong, it's a pretty good language, and its popularity means for a lot of...
Honestly, as time has passed, I've started to see C# as less and less of the boon it's described as.
Don't get me wrong, it's a pretty good language, and its popularity means for a lot of transferable skills. It's still the language I know best. But as I've used Godot I've found GDScript to be a very nice language to work with as well. It was designed to be easy to use, and it shows! Not to mention how nice it is to have a language that was made from the ground up specifically to work with the engine. A lot of things can get easier once you have integration like that.
But even then, Godot has more going for it than just language choice. Especially during news like this, it's hard to oversell how extremely good it is that Godot is FOSS, and that because of that things like this cannot happen. Any proprietary engine comes with risks like these as a result of you being locked in with it, but since you can fork Godot anytime you want, you don't need to worry about this so much.
I'll grant that Unreal has a huge community and marketing budget behind it, but I still feel like that engine is massive overkill when stuff like Godot or Game Maker exist. It's more powerful, yes, but how many indie devs will be taking advantage of that power that the other engines cannot provide them? I'd wager not very many.
While I definitely can see a lot of things in Unreals favor, especially depending on the type of game you're building. Hiring is not very easy from what I hear, at least not in Sweden, at least...
While I definitely can see a lot of things in Unreals favor, especially depending on the type of game you're building. Hiring is not very easy from what I hear, at least not in Sweden, at least for programmers. While there are many devs that know Unreal, there's also a lot of competition for those devs.
Unreal has been around longer and the hype around UE5 for devs and consumers alike made it alluring even before Unity started all this rent seeking. it's a two pronged problem: for solo/small...
I'm honestly a bit surprised how Unreal's stealing most of the attention when Godot exists, especially these days.
Unreal has been around longer and the hype around UE5 for devs and consumers alike made it alluring even before Unity started all this rent seeking.
it's a two pronged problem:
for solo/small teams, Godot is viable. But it currently lacks the community and battle testing of other engines. If you run into issues it will be harder to Google a godot bug or quirk. Unity has many quirks but a massive forum (SO and Unity's own forum... oh wait, they almost killed that too) to get around these quirks. This can only be solved with time and proper documentation. Whcih given Unity/UE, the doc standards are a very low bar to clear.
for mid+ devs, the most valuable part of UE and Unity devs is support. being able to call on someone to resolve issues is neede for complex projects, as well as someone on the inside to work with to suggest features or make deals with. Godot "kind of" started doing this recently by establishing W4 Games, but it's still in its infancy.
I've been using Unity for prototypes and game jams, now I'm weighing options but leaning towards Unreal moving forward. Or an open source, web-based, audio focused game engine. I would love to use...
I've been using Unity for prototypes and game jams, now I'm weighing options but leaning towards Unreal moving forward. Or an open source, web-based, audio focused game engine.
I would love to use Godot, but one thing holding me back is the maturity of the audio stack. I focus on audiogames/Blind and Visually Impaired accessible videogames; procedural audio is used extensively, which is a complicated beast for effects and mixing.
Spatialization support via HRTFs is on the roadmap (4.3 maybe?), not merged yet. It's not a huge deal for most devs, but stability and maturity of the audio features are crucial for the games I'm trying to make.
I've been seeing it more and more in recent AAA games, usually listed as "3D audio" or somesuch. Thanks to the PS5 having in-built features that are promoting this and Dolby Atmos taking off more...
I've been seeing it more and more in recent AAA games, usually listed as "3D audio" or somesuch. Thanks to the PS5 having in-built features that are promoting this and Dolby Atmos taking off more and more with developers, all these binaural audio solutions seem to be getting more prevalent.
The PS5 haivng this built-in is great. Unfortunately for me, I use my PS5 in my living room with my sound system, so it goes largely unused. For me it makes the biggest difference on PC, where I...
The PS5 haivng this built-in is great. Unfortunately for me, I use my PS5 in my living room with my sound system, so it goes largely unused. For me it makes the biggest difference on PC, where I primarily use headphones.
You can actually get Dolby Atmos as a "spatial audio" APO for Windows. Unfortunately, there is no way to make it not apply to everything. It would be nice if they had an option to disable the processing for stereo content like music. As it is, I paid $5 for the feature, and it works great, but I almost never use it because I forget to turn it back on every time I fire up a game.
Oh sorry, I was a bit unclear. I'm almost 100% a PC gamer myself these days, and I'm noticing these options on the PC versions of games. I meant it's thanks to those implementations on consoles...
Oh sorry, I was a bit unclear. I'm almost 100% a PC gamer myself these days, and I'm noticing these options on the PC versions of games. I meant it's thanks to those implementations on consoles that we're getting them in games at all. We had some coming out with the modding and enthusiast community making OpenAL more and more prominent but having these giant companies pushing 3D audio solutions really helped open the door too.
I believe Atmos is smart enough to understand a stereo vs audio signal but it does require manual adjustment in the Dolby Access app, to turn off "Performance Mode" under the game tab first, so it's effectively manual. And now that games are coming with their own built-in 3D Audio settings, I find myself using it less. But for the games that don't support 3D Audio and you can't throw OpenAL at it, it's a good virtual surround sound emulator.
Unity is HUGE in the mobile gaming world. Pretty much the de-facto standard for any company who hasn't rolled their own mobile engine for iOS/Android. This will hit some companies really hard in...
Unity is HUGE in the mobile gaming world. Pretty much the de-facto standard for any company who hasn't rolled their own mobile engine for iOS/Android.
This will hit some companies really hard in the wallet.
I'll be honest: I've never heard of Godot before this. And I'm pretty plugged into video games too, from the consumer side these days anyway. I don't miss a major release even in the indie world,...
I'll be honest: I've never heard of Godot before this. And I'm pretty plugged into video games too, from the consumer side these days anyway. I don't miss a major release even in the indie world, and I'm usually tracking a ton of smaller games that most people have never heard of. I'm friendly with a lot of indie devs in my local scene but all we've really talked about is Unity and Unreal.
And yet I've never heard of Godot. I don't recognize its logo at all. I looked up the list of games that run on Godot and I've played a ton of them, and had no idea. Maybe this is the gap that marketing fills because I feel like I heard about Unity when it was this size.
But hey, it's times like this that help launch things into the stratosphere so maybe this is the breakpoint for Godot to become a truly big name now that everyone is spreading information about it in the wake of this news.
iirc didn't (doesn't?) Unity's free/cheap plan require you to have a Unity logo when the game opens? That's probably a big factor. I know for sure one game I recently played was made in Godot but...
Maybe this is the gap that marketing fills because I feel like I heard about Unity when it was this size.
iirc didn't (doesn't?) Unity's free/cheap plan require you to have a Unity logo when the game opens? That's probably a big factor. I know for sure one game I recently played was made in Godot but only because they had the logo on the main menu.
That said, Godot's still pretty frequently recommended for indie devs, so I'm surprised you hadn't heard of it. It's definitely way less popular and robust than Unity but for 2-D stuff it's been pretty damn good for a while, and it was one of the frequent recs on a lot of "starter game dev" subreddits and such.
I'm pretty surprised too, really. I only ever saw Unity and RPG Game Maker suggested, but then again I'm not in indie developer circles and environments either. I'm purely a consumer these days....
I'm pretty surprised too, really. I only ever saw Unity and RPG Game Maker suggested, but then again I'm not in indie developer circles and environments either. I'm purely a consumer these days. But then again, that probably also means that the type of people talking a lot are more like me and only know about Unreal and other big name engines, and we really would have had to be more in the dev scene to know about other options.
I think you might be right about the startup logos because I definitely can't help but notice company logos when I see them often enough. That's the only reason I know about Oodle, thanks to their bizarre handrawn octopus logo after all.
Marketing is absolutely the reason why. Unlike Unity, Godot doesn't inject its branding into games made with it for any reason, and so unless a game actively chooses to include Godot's logo, it's...
Marketing is absolutely the reason why. Unlike Unity, Godot doesn't inject its branding into games made with it for any reason, and so unless a game actively chooses to include Godot's logo, it's not likely to be pointed out.
It was a bit of a double-edged sword for Unity anyways. Sure, it got a lot of free press for it, but a good chunk of that was negative; a lot of asset-flip hogwash had the Unity logo plastered all over it too, and that didn't do its reputation any favors.
All that seems like loss-leader pricing. "Wow, Unreal Engine is such a better deal!" Yea, maybe it currently is. Until they have enough of the market locked into their ecosystem to tighten the...
All that seems like loss-leader pricing. "Wow, Unreal Engine is such a better deal!" Yea, maybe it currently is. Until they have enough of the market locked into their ecosystem to tighten the noose. Only reason Unreal has such good deals is that Unity took such a large part of the game engine market share.
People laugh at game devs still writing their own engines but there is a price you pay for making yourself dependent on a third party license.
I don't know why people would mock game devs for writing and maintaining their own engines. Arguably it's always been the norm; it's just getting less common over time. And even today there are...
I don't know why people would mock game devs for writing and maintaining their own engines. Arguably it's always been the norm; it's just getting less common over time. And even today there are tons of in-house engines used by studios of all sizes. DICE has their frostbite engine, Id has Id Tech that they license out, Ubisoft has two or three of them, Frictional has HPL, Monolith has Lithtech.... I could continue but I think you get the idea.
Indie game developer communities (/r/gamedev comes to mind) tend to dissuade people from writing game engines because "writing a game engine is a full-time job, just like writing a game is a...
Indie game developer communities (/r/gamedev comes to mind) tend to dissuade people from writing game engines because "writing a game engine is a full-time job, just like writing a game is a full-time job. If you want to make games, you probably want to start with a full game engine already and then go from there; otherwise, at the end of development you'll just have a really cool game engine, and won't actually have made the game."
There's some wisdom there, as writing a game engine can indeed be a prolonged and somewhat difficult task, and if you're writing a game at the same time, there will always be a temptation to work on cool stuff for the engine instead of working on the actual game. That said, a lot of game developers prefer to make games in code, where the line between writing a game engine and writing a game using a gamedev framework is blurred.
Some people tend to think of game engines as "the thing that powers a game", but there's more nuance to game development than that. A game engine generally has a UI where you move stuff around (like Unity, Unreal, Game Maker, etc), but a game framework, while generally lacking a UI, could still be considered as "largely powering your game" as it handles the lion's share of the nitty-gritty middle-code that you wouldn't want to have to mess with yourself (like platform-specific input handling through a generalized API).
I think most of the advice is to turn people away from rolling literally everything themselves (including windowing, input, rendering, physics, audio playback, sound effects like delay or reverb, shaders, lighting, porting, etc), but most people probably won't do that and would just use a framework to make their game, which is easier, more realistic, and accelerates the process of development a lot.
TL;DR: People might "mock" gamedevs for writing their own engines because its seen as a waste of time. However, game development need not use a common engine or framework, and using these tools, even ones designed to save time, only makes sense for as long as they're helping you and actually saving time.
Ah, that makes sense to me. Actually I think it's pretty good advice to anyone starting out. It's generally better to dip your toes in a medium first before diving in, after all. Otherwise you get...
Ah, that makes sense to me. Actually I think it's pretty good advice to anyone starting out. It's generally better to dip your toes in a medium first before diving in, after all. Otherwise you get people who quit art because they can't paint the Mona Lisa.
There's a reason "Unity feel" and "Unreal feel" are a thing. Using a generic game engine gives you more freedom to do other things, but it also reduces the window for building a uniqueness that...
There's a reason "Unity feel" and "Unreal feel" are a thing.
Using a generic game engine gives you more freedom to do other things, but it also reduces the window for building a uniqueness that makes your game special.
While you're not entirely wrong, something "good enough" is acceptable. I don't think that it's controversial to say that a future change in Unreal is vastly different from a retroactive change to...
While you're not entirely wrong, something "good enough" is acceptable.
I don't think that it's controversial to say that a future change in Unreal is vastly different from a retroactive change to Unity, however. I'm sure there will either be another backpedal from Unity or lawyers getting involved from Microsoft and Sony as well as other dev studios over the retroactive part.
I think Unreal might be at less risk of this happening since it's not the only product. It's a major one for them, sure, but Epic has other income sources to milk like Fortnite. Meanwhile I can't...
I think Unreal might be at less risk of this happening since it's not the only product. It's a major one for them, sure, but Epic has other income sources to milk like Fortnite. Meanwhile I can't name anything else made by Unity besides the Unity engine. So when it comes to satisfying greedy investors and executives, Epic has multiple options compared to Unity.
Your math is off. Here's the blog post: https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates Scroll to the bottom for what the price is per tier.
In the data space, these pricing models are really painfully common. "Oh, it gets cheaper the more data you funnel through the system!" is an oft cry from these firms. The reality is that the...
Once the fees kick in, developers using Unity Personal will be expected to pay $0.2 per new install above the 200k threshold each month, while Unity Pro and Enterprise subscribers will be required to pay $0.15 and $0.125 respectively after crossing the 1m line - a figure that will decrease as higher install thresholds are reached. Unity Plus, meanwhile, is being retired as of today, meaning access to advanced features will now require at least a $2k annual subscription - an increase of over $1,600 compared to Unity Plus.
In the data space, these pricing models are really painfully common. "Oh, it gets cheaper the more data you funnel through the system!" is an oft cry from these firms. The reality is that the actual cost is fronted by smaller businesses doing smaller business, the enterprises get away with a few £k a month for Billions of rows.
To see this applied to something beyond the control of the developers though? That's just a cruel joke.
The bigger issue might even be all the accounting complexity this adds to small operations. Unity is basically telling all these small developers that they now need to track every time an existing...
The bigger issue might even be all the accounting complexity this adds to small operations. Unity is basically telling all these small developers that they now need to track every time an existing user re-downloads their game on Steam and feed that data to their accountant.
This whole thing is clearly rent seeking to the highest degree. Online storefronts like Steam do not charge developers when users re-download a product they already have a license to. And they're the ones footing the bill for all the infrastructure and bandwidth that actually makes it possible. Unity is essentially charging a $0.20 fee for a "feature" they do absolutely none of the legwork to provide.
I don't think it's rent-seeking, that would imply Unity has a monopoly. This is just your average, normal greed. Also, do the new terms apply to everyone? Or just people who update to the new...
I don't think it's rent-seeking, that would imply Unity has a monopoly. This is just your average, normal greed.
Also, do the new terms apply to everyone? Or just people who update to the new version of Unity? If the latter, then most existing not-being-actively-worked-on games just... won't update. This is super common for games; don't bother porting to a new engine version unless it fills a specific need. Nobody cares what engine-version your game is running, only whether it's fun and doesn't crash.
Unity has a bit in their TOC that they consider their most recent terms to supersede any previous versions.
Unity has a bit in their TOC that they consider their most recent terms to supersede any previous versions.
To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, Unity reserves the right from time to time to (and you acknowledge that Unity may) modify these Terms (including, for the avoidance of doubt, the Additional Terms) without prior notice. If we modify these Terms, we will post the modification on the Site or otherwise provide you with notice of the modification. We will also update the “Last updated” date at the top of these Terms. By continuing to access or use the Offerings after we have provided you with notice of a modification, you agree to be bound by the modified Terms. If the modified Terms are not acceptable to you, your only recourse is to cease using the Services.
This... Is that really legal? This is giving me flashbacks to the basement notice from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's not quite as obtuse to find the terms, but most people won't...
This... Is that really legal? This is giving me flashbacks to the basement notice from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's not quite as obtuse to find the terms, but most people won't bother to check the site regularly to see if it's updated after they initially agreed.
It's shady as fuck to use this to retroactively charge for services. My expectation is that is them trying, being dragged to court (and facing horrible damage to their public image) and then...
It's shady as fuck to use this to retroactively charge for services. My expectation is that is them trying, being dragged to court (and facing horrible damage to their public image) and then "generously" waiving the retroactive part. It seems so common in the gaming industry that it could be a strategy "see? we listened to your feedback!". Just that this is on the business side of things which isn't as stupid as consumers. I expect this to have consequences for them. Maybe their plan is to stick with the few multi-billion-dollar F2P cash cows and drop annoying indie devs and whatnot.
The monopoly in this context is games that have already shipped or are about to ship on Unity. The company is "seeking rent" from customers that they already have in a vice grip, since a game...
The monopoly in this context is games that have already shipped or are about to ship on Unity. The company is "seeking rent" from customers that they already have in a vice grip, since a game engine isn't something you can just replace in your software product with a few weeks of playing hackerman on your laptop. Unity can more or less act exactly like a monopoly towards these customers.
To me, it seems like Unity is throwing away the potential to sell future licenses in exchange for wringing a lot more money out of their existing customer base.
There's also the fact that bigger businesses can afford to move their development to other platforms -- if Unity makes it worth it to them, that is. Which then might actually cause more...
The reality is that the actual cost is fronted by smaller businesses doing smaller business, the enterprises get away with a few £k a month for Billions of rows.
There's also the fact that bigger businesses can afford to move their development to other platforms -- if Unity makes it worth it to them, that is. Which then might actually cause more competition in the field. Right now it seems like Unity is dominating the market?
But yeah you're right they're just squeezing everything they can out of the little guy.
Aye, you're spot on. We've just moved from one of these tools and actually seen our costs drop significantly, and we're one of the big boys! Christ knows how much of a % of budgets these tools...
Aye, you're spot on. We've just moved from one of these tools and actually seen our costs drop significantly, and we're one of the big boys! Christ knows how much of a % of budgets these tools make up in smaller places.
And then you've got the migration cost. Do you choose to improve your product, or save money? Or do you do both and burn your staff out... it's not easy.
This just smacks of money-grubbing VC's or something in the background.
Dominating in mobile, yup. Their efforts to break into AAA console space has been less ambitous, though. They have the highest marketshare on PC/console games as well, but much of that is due to...
Dominating in mobile, yup. Their efforts to break into AAA console space has been less ambitous, though.
They have the highest marketshare on PC/console games as well, but much of that is due to the indie market. You'd be hard pressed to find a AAA Unity game.
This is clearly targeting mobile, but I wonder how they will track this down with the PC/console market. Making it based on installs and not purchases nor unique users is especially scummy (given that I tend to use apps and games across multiple devices. I don't want to cost some dev 5x as much for something I've done for decades).
EDIT: oh god, it's worse than I though, I just read Aggro Crab's statement on the matter. I wasn't even considering Gamepass or PS+. Sony/Microsoft is going to raise some hell in these coming weeks
How does Xbox cloud gaming even work with this runtime fee? I try nearly every Game Pass game, many without installing via Cloud Gaming. Is it considered an install every time I start a cloud...
I wasn't even considering Gamepass or PS+.
How does Xbox cloud gaming even work with this runtime fee? I try nearly every Game Pass game, many without installing via Cloud Gaming. Is it considered an install every time I start a cloud game? That would be nuts.
Is also terrible business for them, as (in my experience) a lot of large corporates are not interested in reducing money as managers do not have a good handle on how to evaluate the quality of...
Is also terrible business for them, as (in my experience) a lot of large corporates are not interested in reducing money as managers do not have a good handle on how to evaluate the quality of different pieces of software they are leasing and therefore assume "it's expensive, so it must be the best".
My personal summary of the article: Dan Marshall could not possibly be more accurate in the assessment. Can you imagine someone running an installer over and over again, making the indie creator...
My personal summary of the article:
"It's an absolute fucking catastrophe, (...) batshit logistics"
Dan Marshall could not possibly be more accurate in the assessment. Can you imagine someone running an installer over and over again, making the indie creator owe thousands to Unity?
UPDATE: Great, so now we can't even define what an "install" is publicly. Just a "trust us we know when we see it". batshit logistics indeed. Nothing new, but this does confirm what many feared...
UPDATE:
The company has also failed to assuage concerns in other areas. It has, for instance, revealed developers will be charged based on its own internal assessment of what it believes to be an accurate number of new installs - as determined by a "proprietary data model" it says it won't fully detail, only noting it believes the system "gives an accurate determination of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project."
Great, so now we can't even define what an "install" is publicly. Just a "trust us we know when we see it".
batshit logistics indeed.
Stephen Totilo has received clarification from Unity that a developer will be charged every time a user installs a game, including each time they choose to delete then reinstall it. Additionally, every new device a game is installed on will count as a chargeable install, making it clear the company plans to accrue fees far and above the number of individual sales of a game.
Nothing new, but this does confirm what many feared from the announcement
Update: it's been confirmed that Unity is counting installs repeatedly. So this means that, developers can actually LOSE money. Not decrease their profit, but actively lose money from the game....
I got some clarifications from Unity regarding their plan to charge developers per game install (after clearing thresholds)
If a player deletes a game and re-installs it, that's 2 installs, 2 charges
Same if they install on 2 devices
Charity games/bundles exempted from fees
So this means that, developers can actually LOSE money. Not decrease their profit, but actively lose money from the game.
$0.20 per install doesn't sound like much at first. But consider this: gamers can be some of the most tech-savvy and malicious people on the internet. Just look at GamerGate.
So. Imagine someone becomes the target of a harassment campaign, and they happen to have a game made with Unity. People would absolutely set up an automated process to uninstall and reinstall the game, on repeat, until the $0.20 adds up to exceed the cost of the game. If the game costs, say, $5, it only needs to do the process 25 times to break even. Most are around $20, so that would be 100 downloads. Any additional downloads will then cost the developer money. If they're doing it maliciously, they'll probably have the program running hundreds, if not thousands of times, in the background.
If you add in refunds from Steam, that's even worse. Steam can process refunds before the developer is paid for the original sale, meaning they have to pay back the purchaser from their own money. That can be DEVASTATING when done in bulk. I mentioned in my other comment that a friend knows a developer who got screwed over by 4chan bulk refunding her game on Steam. Steam's requirements for refunds are it needs to be within 14 days of purchase and less than two hours of gameplay. That's plenty of time to rack up downloads and utterly screw over the developer. As far as I'm aware there's no word on whether Unity will take refunds into account.
And that's assuming this system doesn't track pirated downloads. While they apparently won't charge for games included in bundles, it's still tracking based on the download of Unity Runtime, so I'm not sure whatever method they use to track it would also track whether it's legitimately purchased. In that case, the developer is losing money from the very start.
Even if the game doesn't meet the $200k threshold, I could see some people being petty enough to organize a mass purchase JUST to make it meet the threshold. I remember articles a few years ago about a man spending thousands on the Rosalina Amiibo figures out spite so other people couldn't. Not sure how true it is, but I could absolutely see some people being spiteful enough towards a real person to organize people to spend $200k.
If the game is $20, it would take 10,000 copies to hit the $200k threshold. If you can get 3,334 people to buy three copies for a total of $60, you'd have enough. And most likely the game will already have some sales, which means you don't need to have that many. So add in multiple individuals willing to spend hundreds of dollars, if not thousands, for the sake of spite, I can see it happening. Not every time it's attempted of course, but just one successful campaign could have potential to ruin multiple lives.
This is all just the malicious scenario. Meanwhile, there are legitimate reasons to reinstall games just due to troubleshooting or having multiple devices. So developers still have risks of suddenly having $0.20 invoiced without knowing.
Unity's FAQ on the runtime fees states they already have technology in place with Unity Ads to detect and combat fraud, and will leverage that as a starting point with this... But can we really trust them?
This is people's livelihoods at stake. If Unity doesn't respond promptly to combat these sorts of abuses when they arise, and it isn't fixed before the monthly invoice arrives, either due to a slow response or people organizing this to occur right before the invoice... It will screw over developers. Their bank accounts can be overdrawn. They'll miss bills. They might not be able to buy food or medicine. It can take potentially MONTHS to undo the damage even if Unity refunds them thanks to bureaucracy. There's potential to be totally fine one month, and come invoice day, find yourself scrambling for money to pay for electricity.
We're basically gambling on Unity being able to respond instantly to malicious activity and abuse of the download fee. It boils down to whether we trust them to be able to respond in time before our lives are potentially ruined.
With this announcement though, trust in Unity is pretty much demolished.
This is all hypothetical of course, but the fact we can even discuss this as a genuine possibility due to this specific decision is atrocious.
UPDATE 2: Unity is already backpedaling: https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-marc-whitten To take Totilo's summary: So it went an "absolute travesty" to "really damn stupid...
Unity "regrouped" and now says ONLY the initial installation of a game triggers a fee**
Demos mostly won't trigger fees (I can't believe this even a factor. Do we need to further discourage game demos?)
Devs not on the hook for Game Pass*
So it went an "absolute travesty" to "really damn stupid and scummy". The fight continues, don't let up.
EDIT: *well, the devs aren't on the hook. Microsoft is:
As for Game Pass and other subscription services, Whitten said that developers like Aggro Crab would not be on the hook, as the fees are charged to distributors, which in the Game Pass example would be Microsoft.
So, there's still going to be fighting up top wrt game subscription services. Though, this may also sadly mean that many services will not accept Unity games.
EDIT 2:
But an extra fee will be charged if a user installs a game on a second device, say a Steam Deck after installing a game on a PC.
Okay, this isn't even a good backpedal. I take back my "really damn stupid" and upgraded this back to travesty. Not absolute travesty, but close.
I can STILL see some very determined saboteurs whipping up thousands of server instances to download some app with. or someone spoofing hardware specs and re-downloading an app. Heck, you can still whip up mobile emulators and download the app on each one. This does not "allay fears of 'install-bombing,' "
It's like they don't even have the policy ironed out before they went public with it. Are they close to bankruptcy or is this a cash grab with no backing.
It's like they don't even have the policy ironed out before they went public with it. Are they close to bankruptcy or is this a cash grab with no backing.
I'm chalking this up to the "10lb shit sandwich theory". Everyone from local gov't to giant corporations do this all the time. First they propose some outrageous proposed change like "Everyone...
I'm chalking this up to the "10lb shit sandwich theory". Everyone from local gov't to giant corporations do this all the time.
First they propose some outrageous proposed change like "Everyone needs to eat a 10lb shit sandwich" and people, predictably, get worked up over eating a shit sandwich. Then, they "listen" to their voters/clients/customers and roll back only some of the proposal to "We listened to your concerns and have heard you, from now on you'll only have to eat a 3lb shit sandwich" and a good portion of people are happy to only have to eat 3lbs of shit.
You would think that people wouldn't want to eat any of said sandwich but they're too busy thinking about "what could have been" instead of "what is/will be" to care.
That is why every time any kind of school budget cut comes up the very first thing that is threatened are school busses. People get so worked up about it that they'll gladly accept cutting music and the library budget and not giving teachers raises instead of demanding more budget money for the school.
This has been studied for roughly half a century now; the more socially acceptable term to use for this is the door-in-the-face technique. It's commonly studied when referring to psychological...
This has been studied for roughly half a century now; the more socially acceptable term to use for this is the door-in-the-face technique. It's commonly studied when referring to psychological compliance methods.
I'm kind of hoping that this will have more people jumping over to Godot and away from patent-encumbered semi-closed-source software in general. From what I can tell Unity isn't really used in any...
I'm kind of hoping that this will have more people jumping over to Godot and away from patent-encumbered semi-closed-source software in general. From what I can tell Unity isn't really used in any recent AAA games the same way as Unreal is; the games that this article mentions are big, yes, but are all made by relatively tiny studios who don't necessarily have a need for super cutting-edge stuff.
That being said, reliability and ease of use are very important features, and I have no idea how well Godot fares in those respects. Given that I can't think of any major game I've played that was made in it, it might not quite be ready for the spotlight. Gamedev is very much outside of my wheelhouse.
Most people use Unity and Unreal due to their versatility in developing for multiple platforms and documentation. There are PLENTY of tutorials, guides and other resources for using them. While a...
Most people use Unity and Unreal due to their versatility in developing for multiple platforms and documentation. There are PLENTY of tutorials, guides and other resources for using them. While a lot of indie studios don't NEED every single cutting edge feature for their games... Well, a lot of professional artists don't use every single cutting edge feature of Photoshop, either. What matters is having the options, should the need arise.
Meanwhile, Godot is just... young. There aren't nearly as many resources on it compared to Unity and Unreal, and also not nearly as many major hits yet. I distantly recall looking into it years and years ago, and deciding there wasn't enough support and tutorials at the time to consider it.
That said, it might see a spike in indie devs now, so hopefully that will increase the available resources and guides.
the only AAA example is the remaster for Sonic Colors, where the port devs forked off Godot to work on a custom engine. But it unfortunately had review issues over its performance and stability....
the only AAA example is the remaster for Sonic Colors, where the port devs forked off Godot to work on a custom engine. But it unfortunately had review issues over its performance and stability. Very rough growing pains
A few other standouts include Brotato and Cruelty Squad.
Also Cassette Beasts (a pokemon-like). Not AAA obviously but a great example of a solid game made in Godot that's seen some promotion by major platforms (ID@Xbox if memory serves).
Also Cassette Beasts (a pokemon-like). Not AAA obviously but a great example of a solid game made in Godot that's seen some promotion by major platforms (ID@Xbox if memory serves).
Godot is the future, but for 3D it's not necessarily the present. For instance, in most major 3D engines heightmaps are built into the engine, but with Godot its heightmaps are, IIRC, an...
Godot is the future, but for 3D it's not necessarily the present. For instance, in most major 3D engines heightmaps are built into the engine, but with Godot its heightmaps are, IIRC, an unofficial extension on the Godot asset store, that's a pain to work with in some way that I forget. Heightmaps are a pretty basic feature that you'll have to tackle the moment your 3D game needs hills.
Well. So long, Unity! Thanks for all the fish. I've been on the fence for the past few game jams I've participated in. Others have wanted to use Unity, and I haven't seen fit to fight it. But I've...
Well. So long, Unity! Thanks for all the fish.
I've been on the fence for the past few game jams I've participated in. Others have wanted to use Unity, and I haven't seen fit to fight it.
But I've wanted to try Godot.
Now I have a more serious reason to find a team that also wants to try Godot for my next game jam.
I've enjoyed Unity. This likely marks the last time I use it.
Godot users do exist and we're here on Tildes! Glad to hear people are interested. I'm not a professional but if you have any questions about learning Godot I'd be happy to help as much as I can.
Godot users do exist and we're here on Tildes! Glad to hear people are interested. I'm not a professional but if you have any questions about learning Godot I'd be happy to help as much as I can.
I just started learning gamedev this year, so glad I chose Godot! I'm really enjoying it. (I haven't tried Unity-- I've heard it's harder than Godot.) Here's a link to a good Godot tutorial series...
I just started learning gamedev this year, so glad I chose Godot! I'm really enjoying it. (I haven't tried Unity-- I've heard it's harder than Godot.)
A technical question for those of you in the know and with experience in this sort of thing: Can the per-install fee be applied to older games without the developers updating their builds? If a...
A technical question for those of you in the know and with experience in this sort of thing:
Can the per-install fee be applied to older games without the developers updating their builds? If a dev uploaded a game years ago and just... leaves it as is... will they still be subject to this? Can Unity even tell it's being installed or not?
I'm really hoping they can't, because, if they can, this is going to hurt game availability and preservation a ton. I feel like a lot of smaller games might risk pulling builds down now that their moment in the sun is over.
The game is, in my opinion, a masterpiece, but it's also clearly something that has pretty much come and gone. Its moment was a while ago. I doubt it's going to have a sudden resurgence of interest.
Under these new Unity rules, all of the people who are continuing to play it are just trickling away money from the dev team. If I were to reinstall the game myself, as I do every so often, I now have to consider that I'm costing them money (and the time and energy it takes to continually manage that now ongoing expense).
Also, if they do take the game down and refuse Unity's new terms, and I still have the game on my Steam account -- will I even be able to install it? Will Unity simply lock out any new installs because it can?
As much as I assume the devs of the game (and others like it) would like for it to live on in perpetuity (as it should), keeping it up and available now incurs an actual cost. I think it puts devs in a very unfair position -- like their game is being held hostage unless they pay up. If they don't pay (and just so we're clear where I stand, I do NOT think that they should have to), could we conceivably lose access to a ton of games that can't even be installed anymore?
Is my thinking right on this? To me the whole announcement, initially, isn't that shocking because rent-seeking is so common nowadays. If they applied it to all games moving forward it would be one thing (almost expected), but the fact that they made it comprehensively retroactive feels like a gigantic, earth-shaking bomb went off in the gaming scene. I've probably played hundreds of games made with Unity at this point, and my stomach turns at the idea of even a few of them going away because of this.
Unity's blog post states that it will be applying the fee retroactively to any games that meet the thresholds. Any new downloads after January 1, 2024, will have the fee attached going forward. It...
Unity's blog post states that it will be applying the fee retroactively to any games that meet the thresholds. Any new downloads after January 1, 2024, will have the fee attached going forward. It also counts distribution via streaming and web browsers, though unsure how.
The retroactive part might be the worst part to me. If someone left game dev but has a game that met the requirements, they can be blindsided. It can also be abused for spite, because gamers can be malicious.
I might be spending a lot of money on indie games in the next few days, because I'm starting to fear that they'll be deleted by devs as the full potential ramifications set in. It's honestly bleak and disturbing to think about it, because the devs have no control over this. If they've uploaded a game and it's hit $200k, there's basically no escape. They can delete the game from stores, but if people reinstall it or add it to new devices, or if the tracking counts pirated copies... They will forever have to deal with sudden fees they can't predict.
Not sure about it being illegal. They won't force them to pay for previous downloads, but any downloads AFTER January 1, 2024, will be subject to the fee.
Not sure about it being illegal. They won't force them to pay for previous downloads, but any downloads AFTER January 1, 2024, will be subject to the fee.
This is really about law, and in (non US) law in general, retroactive changes are a big no no. And it doesn't matter if the terms say they can do it, some things are illegal to even put in...
This is really about law, and in (non US) law in general, retroactive changes are a big no no. And it doesn't matter if the terms say they can do it, some things are illegal to even put in writing. I won't be surprised if this is challenged in some places.
I hope it is challenged then and they strike that part down ASAP. The fact it applies to existing games is possibly the most disturbing part to me, since the developers wouldn't have any say in...
I hope it is challenged then and they strike that part down ASAP. The fact it applies to existing games is possibly the most disturbing part to me, since the developers wouldn't have any say in it. The idea of suddenly getting charged for a game you made 5 years ago is just chilling.
Everything else to me is business as usual. Awful, but it's to be expected. Don't like it? Don't use it. You have the option. The retroactiveness though is just immoral and perverse. Those...
Everything else to me is business as usual. Awful, but it's to be expected. Don't like it? Don't use it. You have the option.
The retroactiveness though is just immoral and perverse. Those companies chose Unity under different conditions and that should be honored. They don't have the option to retroactively not choose Unity.
That's the kind of decision that can remove Unity from the face of the Earth and now I hope it does.
Yeah. As long as they cut the retroactive part, they can keep the rest of the awful fees. Then people can finish up current projects if they're too far to start over and then switch to another...
Yeah. As long as they cut the retroactive part, they can keep the rest of the awful fees. Then people can finish up current projects if they're too far to start over and then switch to another engine forevermore, and never have to think about Unity again outside the fees.
I hope whoever proposed and instigates this bullshit is proud. Even if Unity backtracks tomorrow and retracts every single part of this decision, it's too late. This just totally shattered trust in them. I think a lot of people will switch to other engines.
It's unclear how Unity will track installs. The suspicion is that the installed games will phone home to unity. A game has to both have a certain number of lifetime installs, and also have earned...
It's unclear how Unity will track installs. The suspicion is that the installed games will phone home to unity.
A game has to both have a certain number of lifetime installs, and also have earned a certain amount of money over the previous 12 months to be at risk of extra fees per installation. So your particular game might not be affected if it's not earning much money anymore.
It's also unclear whether Unity can retroactively apply these fees to projects which shipped under older agreements. My guess is, without having poured over the Unity agreement recently, is that there is language which state that Unity only provides the developer a license to distribute their software for a specific term (ie, you can only distribute software for a year after signing, or only distribute software while you have a valid unity account, or only distribute the software until Unity sends a Cease & Desist, etc). In any case, once Unity finds out that a developer is distributing unity runtime software, Unity probably has the right to force the developer to either stop distribution or agree to updated terms.
As far as I could tell, you also need 200k in sales in the last 12 months. So that game may be exempt. Not defending the practice. The fact it's unclear is also why this is troublesome.
As far as I could tell, you also need 200k in sales in the last 12 months. So that game may be exempt.
Not defending the practice. The fact it's unclear is also why this is troublesome.
I did a few game jams with friends and wrote some smaller games in Unity, we always had a bad experience with Unity. It feels like multiple teams work on their own parts of the engine, but there...
I did a few game jams with friends and wrote some smaller games in Unity, we always had a bad experience with Unity. It feels like multiple teams work on their own parts of the engine, but there is no cohesive link between them. It never feels polished or correctly tweaked. It feels like big parts of Unitys game dev is writing messy glue code.
The last game jam was our last game in Unity. While the development phase was fun, it was not because of Unity. The only reason we kept using Unity for so long was its asset store, the bought assets and our previous experience with it. I eventually switched to Unreal and I was really delighted how well all parts worked together. The spent time learning it was really worth it.
I miss C# as a language but the C++ in Unreal almost feels like C# anyway.
It is definitely not the C++ you would write for normal applications/micro controllers and feels very abstracted from the lower level and is able to make you concentrate on normal game logic.
This decision is amusing at best, Unreal is having a fast pace with the recent addition of Lumen and especially Nanite combined with the free Quixel Bridge.
It is more complex, but it feels easier to handle in general. The Unreal tutorials appeared to have better quality. It just feels more mature and more professional. The shipped functionality (For example path finding) works way better than the Unity one. I had to buy an A* lib from the store to get results worth using.
At this point keeping Unity was more a proof of sunken cost fallacy for me, than actual usefulness, which is why I find this idea of "taxing" installations rather amusing. I'm not surprised about the current state of Unity considering the CEOs past. But Unity was already a dead for me after the CEO said, that indie devs are dumb because they don't monetize their games. https://www.pcgamer.com/unity-ceo-sparks-fury-by-saying-developers-who-dont-consider-monetization-are-fing-idiots/
Typical spreadsheet warrior CEO with no heart or passion for games as an art.
I also want to take a look into Godot, another friend is really liking it. But for now I concentrate on Unreal.
I found this interesting: https://steamdb.info/instantsearch/?range%5Breviews%5D=10000%3A&refinementList%5Btechnologies%5D%5B0%5D=Engine.Unity These are all games with over 10k reviews(arbitrary...
These are all games with over 10k reviews(arbitrary number) which use Unity. Really puts it into perspective. Few examples: Rimworld, Vampire survivors, Slime Rancher, Hollow Knight, Subnautica....
This is absolutely huge and potentially devastating. What a needless greed this is. Wow.
With their pricing model, all of those games will likely get way more revenue per unit, since it'll be 2 cents per user instead of their total revenue percentage (a little more accounting for...
With their pricing model, all of those games will likely get way more revenue per unit, since it'll be 2 cents per user instead of their total revenue percentage (a little more accounting for reinstalls). This will hurt indie free-to-play developers who make less than a dollar per user more than the big fish.
True, but that wasn't really the point I was trying to make. On the Unity subreddit a developer of some children's mobile game showed some statistics where they would have to pay more than the...
True, but that wasn't really the point I was trying to make. On the Unity subreddit a developer of some children's mobile game showed some statistics where they would have to pay more than the actual revenue from that game, showing how ludicrous and thoughtless this fee is.
Unity is essentially the standard for indie games. And I kind of wish it wasn’t, because my understanding is that it’s a mess of crappy code and disjoint features glued together. Many times there...
Unity is essentially the standard for indie games. And I kind of wish it wasn’t, because my understanding is that it’s a mess of crappy code and disjoint features glued together.
Many times there are 2 or more ways to do the same thing: the legacy way which is “deprecated” but has less bugs and more community resources, or the new way which is extremely finicky/buggy and doesn’t yet have many resources. Naturally, most people choose the legacy option.
My understanding is that Unreal is much better than Unity despite having bugs and legacy of its own, but it’s way too much for indie devs. Coding is done in C , which is a lot harder to get into than C#, and Blueprints aren’t a suitable replacement. But they’re allegedly coming out with a new language, Verse, which may make it easier for newcomers.
Godot seems like the best competitor, and I really want it to succeed. But it just doesn’t have nearly as many features or community support as Unity, as well as having its own bugs and legacy features (though I believe the situation is better even with Godot 4.0, not all features have been ported to 4.0 yet). Maybe in the future.
Other than those, there are IDE-based like Defold and Construct 2; engines without an IDE like heaps (Haxe), libGDX, and Bevy. The first 2 are more niche and have their own issues; and the latter are more niche and much harder for new developers to get into and even seasoned developers, to prototype and experiment with.
So for now game-dev is kind of a mess. But maybe it always will be, because games are much more complicated than most programs. You won’t find most other kinds of software which need real-time rendering, real-time physics, real-time input, real-time network communication, fancy UI, and AI; plus art, music, advertising; all with super-interactive, rapidly-iterable development. Except game engines, which have all that in their provided libraries; in the editor, super complicated UI, efficient "preview" rendering, some form of collaboration or version control, configurability, and extensibility; plus code generation, integration with the generated executables (pause/resume, toggle debug info and widgets), and hot code reloading. (If those hugs lists didn’t have enough, I’m sure I’m missing at least 10 more things).
Re: Godot 4: it's worth noting that since the release of 4.0 in March(?), development pace has picked up considerably. We're already seeing dev builds for 4.2 released for public testing. So it's...
Re: Godot 4: it's worth noting that since the release of 4.0 in March(?), development pace has picked up considerably. We're already seeing dev builds for 4.2 released for public testing. So it's likely that many features it's missing are coming sooner than we might think.
Is anyone familiar with Unity as well as Godot/Unreal/other simliar engines? I'm trying to figure out which engine to move to, and want to find the one that will facilitate the easiest transition....
Is anyone familiar with Unity as well as Godot/Unreal/other simliar engines? I'm trying to figure out which engine to move to, and want to find the one that will facilitate the easiest transition. I've started doing research but want to get opinions here, if anyones willing to share their experiences. My main concerns / soft requirements are:
Preferably looking to work with C#, just because I'm super familiar with how the language works on a professional level, but I'm not opposed to working with other languages. I just read Godot supports C# and Unreals C++ isn't far off.
I generally work with 2D, but would like the option for both 2D and 3D.
I'm worried about not having access to built in components I'm familiar with like Cinemachine, TextMesh, Animator and all the things Unity has out of the box. I know other engines will have similiar things, but am trying to minimize the amount of time I'm spending learning new tools or building things from scratch.
If possible, an engine that allows building projects out as something simliar to WebGL. I've only "released" game jam games as WebGL apps, and like the idea of throwing demos out for people to play in their browser for some of my bigger projects.
I want to delve into Unreal, but it seems like it would be like learning Unity from scratch all over again and I see conflicting things on its 2D support. I was leaning towards Godot because it seemed more friendly, but I'm worried it might be too friendly, to the point its not powerful enough.
Godot definitely has better 2D support than Unreal, so if you principally work in 2D I think that makes more sense. I know it can export to the web but the details go over my head a bit so here's...
Godot definitely has better 2D support than Unreal, so if you principally work in 2D I think that makes more sense. I know it can export to the web but the details go over my head a bit so here's their documentation on that. I unfortunately can't speak much for the specific built-in components you mention, though -- you might have luck asking around in a more Godot-centric community.
Unreal is more of a AAA industry standard, if you're looking to work as a member of a department of a larger studio or team, or plan on working for a first-party studio at Sony or Microsoft, it's...
Unreal is more of a AAA industry standard, if you're looking to work as a member of a department of a larger studio or team, or plan on working for a first-party studio at Sony or Microsoft, it's worth cracking into and making some small games in. For smaller projects, I found it to be...unwieldy.
If you're looking for Unity but not Unity, Godot is probably going to be your closest bet. There isn't an art asset store, but there are a bunch of scripts from what I've seen for things like player controllers to tools that you can pull down just like the unity asset store. I don't know if you'll have the same level of control that Unity provides when it comes to things like rendering and sound management though... It is definitely more friendly than Unity, but I think you could scale your project to work within the engine's limitations if you don't want to spend money on software licenses.
I think the best shot would be Godot and Unreal combined, there is not really much of an alternative there. For 3D I would primarily go towards Unreal and for 2D towards Godot. Godot supports 3D,...
I think the best shot would be Godot and Unreal combined, there is not really much of an alternative there.
For 3D I would primarily go towards Unreal and for 2D towards Godot. Godot supports 3D, but Unreal offers much more tooling, more graphic fidelity and I would argue better performance. For simple 3D games, Godot might be enough. Depends on the use case.
In terms of differences, many aspects and concepts remain the same, so you don't need to learn Unreal as if it's your first day.
It has a similar (but way better) shader editor like the shader graph in Unity, of course, the idea of textures remains the same, you still work with Vectors. Unreal has an amazing AI system and also offers the visual scripting language Blueprints. Although I wouldn't want to write my whole game with it, it's nice for behavior patterns or similar logic that can be better represented in a visual way.
I would suggest to create a simple 3D game with both engines and see what fits you better. I would argue that Unreal will be more complex and take more time to get into compared to Godot, but you will also have more options in the end.
If you understand the basic concept of game development, I would argue that switching between the engines wont be too hard as the same concepts apply for any.
Currently an ex EA Engine developer is working on his own engine called Hazel and I am following its development. But afaik it's only available to Patreon supporters, might be worth looking into it. He seems to know his craft very well. His youtube channel is full of info and he documents his development, gives code reviews, and even gives a full tutorial in how to build your own engine: https://www.youtube.com/@TheCherno I always find it interesting to see how inner parts work.
The CEO just sold a bunch of shares. Sure looks like market manipulation to try and sell high and buy low to me: https://twitter.com/ScottTRichmond/status/1701631419125276721
So he sold 2,000 of 3,211,394 shares? That doesn't seem so outrageous. It's only 0.06%. Plus, it's not uncommon for stock prices to rise after announcements of unpopular news like new monetization...
So he sold 2,000 of 3,211,394 shares? That doesn't seem so outrageous. It's only 0.06%.
Plus, it's not uncommon for stock prices to rise after announcements of unpopular news like new monetization or layoffs. That is how they make money and reduce costs, after all. With the possible exception of "meme stocks", financial markets are driven by different forces than online outrage.
We'll have to see how this one goes, but it doesn't strike me as market manipulation.
Just a few years ago I would have expected to see something like this on The Onion. There is ridiculously large number of problems with this which are pretty well outlined already in the thread. I...
Just a few years ago I would have expected to see something like this on The Onion.
There is ridiculously large number of problems with this which are pretty well outlined already in the thread.
I am also just going to go and say that this is an indirect result of the monetization models of the software in the previous decade/s. People not caring about the problems of mobile platforms, not caring about the massive problems of Windows after 10, not caring about problems with Chrome, accepting ridiculous rent seeking SaaS models and more, so much more, are not the cause.
But they are how things like this can be accepted because now this insane move is something that can perhaps be pulled off. I have no idea how this is going to go, if it will stand and if in what form.
I said it already, I will say it and I will think it when you need to run Windows as an online only subscription that runs ads before you login(hopefully not, but what is The Onion is getting pushed frighteningly far away). Convenience is nice but I question the convenience of being on the wrong end of one sided agreement that can be altered anytime.
Relevant simpsons clip: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7uQNPS9v_VU&pp=ygUXSG9tZXIgZWxlcGhhbnQgbmV3IGNvc3Q%3D This is just crazy and out of touch. This decision was made with so little competence...
This is just crazy and out of touch. This decision was made with so little competence that theyve already backpedaled on some things because there was clearly little thought put into this, just desire to squeeze blood from a rock. Infuriating
Shit. This is just atrocious. I get Unity needs some income to keep going, but this feels like one of the absolute worst ways to implement that. It just feels greedy. The fact they're also retiring Unity Plus so that, instead of $399, your next option is $2,000 is just... Bad. Very bad.
The blog post from Unity itself isn't much better:
Downloading is separate from purchasing. The article already raised the big questions: how does it count installs? What if someone buys a game and installs it on multiple devices? What about re-installation? What about the logistics of Game Pass? Can it track pirated copies? What about bundles, and free giveaways? Game jams? Demos? Mobile games? How, exactly, does it track the revenue to determine if a game meets the threshold if they're only tracking downloads?
A big concern of my own: What about if the buyer refunds the game?? I know that smaller devs already have issues with that on Steam because Steam can process refunds before the developer is even paid for the sale, forcing the devs to pay it back with basically their own money. A friend mentioned his friend getting into some financial trouble after some people on 4chan bought and refunded her game in bulk. Unity's system is tracking downloads, so does it track uninstallation?
Also, how exactly is "retroactive" being taken into account here? Does that mean if you it will apply to all installs going forward for already released titles... Or will they apply it to the existing installs and try to get payment now? I feel like it HAS to be the first, but this announcement just reeks of enough greed it makes me uncertain. At the very least, I wonder if people will pull games made with Unity from stores.
This part of the article interviewing Dan Marshall sums it up best, I think:
I like using Unity, but after this, I don't think I can anymore. I'd been talking with a friend about using Unreal for a game idea they have, and I guess this just clinches it.
I hope the instant backlash makes them backtrack on this quickly. I feel like this HAD to be implemented by investors who only see dollar signs and don't actually understand business.
Some of this is covered in the FAQ linked in their blog post. Not that it's the actual agreement, but they define installs as:
And retroactive as:
This is some bullshit and I'm guessing there's going to be quite a few games that are pulled from the various platforms on December 31st of this year.
It has since been confirmed that reinstalls DO count. So. Wow. That's really, really, REALLY bad.
Holy fuck.
That's insanity.
It's also going to bankrupt some developer when some group elects to go from merely review bombing to "reinstall bombing" a Unity release.
IF it even requires such. The Unity Runtime is almost undoubtedly going to make a call to Unity for them to keep track of this, so all it'll take is a pirated copy without a block in the firewall and a script to install, initialize, uninstall, repeat to put a developer out of work.
Bet it won't even take that much, just a bit of checking to see what the call includes, and just spam it to Unity over and over.
Yep, just wrote a very long comment outlining how that exact scenario could work. Gamers can be some of the most malicious and tech-savvy people on the internet. It wouldn't be hard to automate the process and just have it running in the background.
I'm 100% certain it's at least going to go through some revision to remove that. Charges must be 1-to-1 with purchases, anything else is simply impractical.
EDIT: already rolled back. Though they really have to tie the fees directly to purchases, or someone will find a way to exploit and rack up nonsensically high "install" charges.
There was a time when DRM meant that you could only reinstall your purchased copy of a game only a few times (for example: Spore could only ever be installed 3 times). This era of oppressive DRM meant that games always needed the ability to internet verify the installation and that legitimate games may eventually not work anymore because of installation limits.
Unity's plans encourage developers to reintroduce that sort of thing again...
I can only imagine this will sound the death knell for new Unity projects. Current and existing products will probably have a tail for Unity's owners, but I can only imagine the amount of people picking the engine up for new games is going to dwindle.
Why not use Unreal instead when it's free up to $1 Million in revenue? Check my math here, but a game using Unreal, selling a million copies at $1 a piece would be $50k for the unreal engine (at a 5% cut). Where as, one million sales of a $1 game with Unity, assuming every user installed once would be $200000 in royalties to Unity. Seems like the obvious choice if my math is correct.
Unity's largest demographic, at least last I checked, was indie developers mostly. So with this news in mind, Godot is really a better switch than Unreal is, if you ask me.
I'm honestly a bit surprised how Unreal's stealing most of the attention when Godot exists, especially these days. With Godot 4 out, the 3D tools improved massively, and are more than good enough for most indie projects AFAIK. Not to mention that it's completely free, forever, and open source from the get-go.
Unreal has an asset store, is easy to hire for, and has a marketing department that makes sure everyone knows Unreal is an option.
The big feather in Godot's cap is C#, so I can see a lot of Unity devs switching to Godot based on that. C# is a fantastic language, and I think one of the biggest reasons for Unity's success thus far.
Godot does not natively export to consoles, though.
That actually seems like a huge problem. The big selling point of commercial game engines is that they simplify the porting process. For indie-scale games, Unreal and Unity trivialize this down to a few build options and some extra testing.
It's mainly due to licensing incompatibilities. But they're working on making it easier for developers.
I read all three links, but none say how you would port a game from Godot to console yourself. I guess the process would be: 1) get licensed by the platform owner (Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony), 2) sign NDA, 3) download platform SDK, 4) read SDK documentation, 5) figure out how to compile your Godot game for the platform, 6) test on dev kit, 7) iterate until Gold, and 8) submit to platform.
I think that's because the recommended way is to not do it yourself. There's a lot of bookkeeping to be done just to be compliant with XRs. With code that you're not allowed to distribute. And then there's the apis that differ of course. That's a large overhead, especially for a small developer.
Honestly, as time has passed, I've started to see C# as less and less of the boon it's described as.
Don't get me wrong, it's a pretty good language, and its popularity means for a lot of transferable skills. It's still the language I know best. But as I've used Godot I've found GDScript to be a very nice language to work with as well. It was designed to be easy to use, and it shows! Not to mention how nice it is to have a language that was made from the ground up specifically to work with the engine. A lot of things can get easier once you have integration like that.
But even then, Godot has more going for it than just language choice. Especially during news like this, it's hard to oversell how extremely good it is that Godot is FOSS, and that because of that things like this cannot happen. Any proprietary engine comes with risks like these as a result of you being locked in with it, but since you can fork Godot anytime you want, you don't need to worry about this so much.
I'll grant that Unreal has a huge community and marketing budget behind it, but I still feel like that engine is massive overkill when stuff like Godot or Game Maker exist. It's more powerful, yes, but how many indie devs will be taking advantage of that power that the other engines cannot provide them? I'd wager not very many.
While I definitely can see a lot of things in Unreals favor, especially depending on the type of game you're building. Hiring is not very easy from what I hear, at least not in Sweden, at least for programmers. While there are many devs that know Unreal, there's also a lot of competition for those devs.
Unreal has been around longer and the hype around UE5 for devs and consumers alike made it alluring even before Unity started all this rent seeking.
it's a two pronged problem:
for solo/small teams, Godot is viable. But it currently lacks the community and battle testing of other engines. If you run into issues it will be harder to Google a godot bug or quirk. Unity has many quirks but a massive forum (SO and Unity's own forum... oh wait, they almost killed that too) to get around these quirks. This can only be solved with time and proper documentation. Whcih given Unity/UE, the doc standards are a very low bar to clear.
for mid+ devs, the most valuable part of UE and Unity devs is support. being able to call on someone to resolve issues is neede for complex projects, as well as someone on the inside to work with to suggest features or make deals with. Godot "kind of" started doing this recently by establishing W4 Games, but it's still in its infancy.
I've been using Unity for prototypes and game jams, now I'm weighing options but leaning towards Unreal moving forward. Or an open source, web-based, audio focused game engine.
I would love to use Godot, but one thing holding me back is the maturity of the audio stack. I focus on audiogames/Blind and Visually Impaired accessible videogames; procedural audio is used extensively, which is a complicated beast for effects and mixing.
Spatialization support via HRTFs is on the roadmap (4.3 maybe?), not merged yet. It's not a huge deal for most devs, but stability and maturity of the audio features are crucial for the games I'm trying to make.
I wish HRTF was on more developers radars, especially when shipping PC versions of their games.
I've been seeing it more and more in recent AAA games, usually listed as "3D audio" or somesuch. Thanks to the PS5 having in-built features that are promoting this and Dolby Atmos taking off more and more with developers, all these binaural audio solutions seem to be getting more prevalent.
The PS5 haivng this built-in is great. Unfortunately for me, I use my PS5 in my living room with my sound system, so it goes largely unused. For me it makes the biggest difference on PC, where I primarily use headphones.
You can actually get Dolby Atmos as a "spatial audio" APO for Windows. Unfortunately, there is no way to make it not apply to everything. It would be nice if they had an option to disable the processing for stereo content like music. As it is, I paid $5 for the feature, and it works great, but I almost never use it because I forget to turn it back on every time I fire up a game.
Oh sorry, I was a bit unclear. I'm almost 100% a PC gamer myself these days, and I'm noticing these options on the PC versions of games. I meant it's thanks to those implementations on consoles that we're getting them in games at all. We had some coming out with the modding and enthusiast community making OpenAL more and more prominent but having these giant companies pushing 3D audio solutions really helped open the door too.
I believe Atmos is smart enough to understand a stereo vs audio signal but it does require manual adjustment in the Dolby Access app, to turn off "Performance Mode" under the game tab first, so it's effectively manual. And now that games are coming with their own built-in 3D Audio settings, I find myself using it less. But for the games that don't support 3D Audio and you can't throw OpenAL at it, it's a good virtual surround sound emulator.
Unity is HUGE in the mobile gaming world. Pretty much the de-facto standard for any company who hasn't rolled their own mobile engine for iOS/Android.
This will hit some companies really hard in the wallet.
I'll be honest: I've never heard of Godot before this. And I'm pretty plugged into video games too, from the consumer side these days anyway. I don't miss a major release even in the indie world, and I'm usually tracking a ton of smaller games that most people have never heard of. I'm friendly with a lot of indie devs in my local scene but all we've really talked about is Unity and Unreal.
And yet I've never heard of Godot. I don't recognize its logo at all. I looked up the list of games that run on Godot and I've played a ton of them, and had no idea. Maybe this is the gap that marketing fills because I feel like I heard about Unity when it was this size.
But hey, it's times like this that help launch things into the stratosphere so maybe this is the breakpoint for Godot to become a truly big name now that everyone is spreading information about it in the wake of this news.
iirc didn't (doesn't?) Unity's free/cheap plan require you to have a Unity logo when the game opens? That's probably a big factor. I know for sure one game I recently played was made in Godot but only because they had the logo on the main menu.
That said, Godot's still pretty frequently recommended for indie devs, so I'm surprised you hadn't heard of it. It's definitely way less popular and robust than Unity but for 2-D stuff it's been pretty damn good for a while, and it was one of the frequent recs on a lot of "starter game dev" subreddits and such.
I'm pretty surprised too, really. I only ever saw Unity and RPG Game Maker suggested, but then again I'm not in indie developer circles and environments either. I'm purely a consumer these days. But then again, that probably also means that the type of people talking a lot are more like me and only know about Unreal and other big name engines, and we really would have had to be more in the dev scene to know about other options.
I think you might be right about the startup logos because I definitely can't help but notice company logos when I see them often enough. That's the only reason I know about Oodle, thanks to their bizarre handrawn octopus logo after all.
Marketing is absolutely the reason why. Unlike Unity, Godot doesn't inject its branding into games made with it for any reason, and so unless a game actively chooses to include Godot's logo, it's not likely to be pointed out.
It was a bit of a double-edged sword for Unity anyways. Sure, it got a lot of free press for it, but a good chunk of that was negative; a lot of asset-flip hogwash had the Unity logo plastered all over it too, and that didn't do its reputation any favors.
Better: using Unreal, you pay for revenue above $1M. At least that's how I understand this bit from their official page:
All that seems like loss-leader pricing. "Wow, Unreal Engine is such a better deal!" Yea, maybe it currently is. Until they have enough of the market locked into their ecosystem to tighten the noose. Only reason Unreal has such good deals is that Unity took such a large part of the game engine market share.
People laugh at game devs still writing their own engines but there is a price you pay for making yourself dependent on a third party license.
I don't know why people would mock game devs for writing and maintaining their own engines. Arguably it's always been the norm; it's just getting less common over time. And even today there are tons of in-house engines used by studios of all sizes. DICE has their frostbite engine, Id has Id Tech that they license out, Ubisoft has two or three of them, Frictional has HPL, Monolith has Lithtech.... I could continue but I think you get the idea.
Indie game developer communities (/r/gamedev comes to mind) tend to dissuade people from writing game engines because "writing a game engine is a full-time job, just like writing a game is a full-time job. If you want to make games, you probably want to start with a full game engine already and then go from there; otherwise, at the end of development you'll just have a really cool game engine, and won't actually have made the game."
There's some wisdom there, as writing a game engine can indeed be a prolonged and somewhat difficult task, and if you're writing a game at the same time, there will always be a temptation to work on cool stuff for the engine instead of working on the actual game. That said, a lot of game developers prefer to make games in code, where the line between writing a game engine and writing a game using a gamedev framework is blurred.
Some people tend to think of game engines as "the thing that powers a game", but there's more nuance to game development than that. A game engine generally has a UI where you move stuff around (like Unity, Unreal, Game Maker, etc), but a game framework, while generally lacking a UI, could still be considered as "largely powering your game" as it handles the lion's share of the nitty-gritty middle-code that you wouldn't want to have to mess with yourself (like platform-specific input handling through a generalized API).
I think most of the advice is to turn people away from rolling literally everything themselves (including windowing, input, rendering, physics, audio playback, sound effects like delay or reverb, shaders, lighting, porting, etc), but most people probably won't do that and would just use a framework to make their game, which is easier, more realistic, and accelerates the process of development a lot.
TL;DR: People might "mock" gamedevs for writing their own engines because its seen as a waste of time. However, game development need not use a common engine or framework, and using these tools, even ones designed to save time, only makes sense for as long as they're helping you and actually saving time.
Ah, that makes sense to me. Actually I think it's pretty good advice to anyone starting out. It's generally better to dip your toes in a medium first before diving in, after all. Otherwise you get people who quit art because they can't paint the Mona Lisa.
Or more like they never get to painting because they are too busy mining and gathering the materials to make the paint and canvas
There's a reason "Unity feel" and "Unreal feel" are a thing.
Using a generic game engine gives you more freedom to do other things, but it also reduces the window for building a uniqueness that makes your game special.
While you're not entirely wrong, something "good enough" is acceptable.
I don't think that it's controversial to say that a future change in Unreal is vastly different from a retroactive change to Unity, however. I'm sure there will either be another backpedal from Unity or lawyers getting involved from Microsoft and Sony as well as other dev studios over the retroactive part.
I think Unreal might be at less risk of this happening since it's not the only product. It's a major one for them, sure, but Epic has other income sources to milk like Fortnite. Meanwhile I can't name anything else made by Unity besides the Unity engine. So when it comes to satisfying greedy investors and executives, Epic has multiple options compared to Unity.
Your math is off. Here's the blog post:
https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates
Scroll to the bottom for what the price is per tier.
In the data space, these pricing models are really painfully common. "Oh, it gets cheaper the more data you funnel through the system!" is an oft cry from these firms. The reality is that the actual cost is fronted by smaller businesses doing smaller business, the enterprises get away with a few £k a month for Billions of rows.
To see this applied to something beyond the control of the developers though? That's just a cruel joke.
The bigger issue might even be all the accounting complexity this adds to small operations. Unity is basically telling all these small developers that they now need to track every time an existing user re-downloads their game on Steam and feed that data to their accountant.
This whole thing is clearly rent seeking to the highest degree. Online storefronts like Steam do not charge developers when users re-download a product they already have a license to. And they're the ones footing the bill for all the infrastructure and bandwidth that actually makes it possible. Unity is essentially charging a $0.20 fee for a "feature" they do absolutely none of the legwork to provide.
I don't think it's rent-seeking, that would imply Unity has a monopoly. This is just your average, normal greed.
Also, do the new terms apply to everyone? Or just people who update to the new version of Unity? If the latter, then most existing not-being-actively-worked-on games just... won't update. This is super common for games; don't bother porting to a new engine version unless it fills a specific need. Nobody cares what engine-version your game is running, only whether it's fun and doesn't crash.
Unity has a bit in their TOC that they consider their most recent terms to supersede any previous versions.
This... Is that really legal? This is giving me flashbacks to the basement notice from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's not quite as obtuse to find the terms, but most people won't bother to check the site regularly to see if it's updated after they initially agreed.
It's shady as fuck to use this to retroactively charge for services. My expectation is that is them trying, being dragged to court (and facing horrible damage to their public image) and then "generously" waiving the retroactive part. It seems so common in the gaming industry that it could be a strategy "see? we listened to your feedback!". Just that this is on the business side of things which isn't as stupid as consumers. I expect this to have consequences for them. Maybe their plan is to stick with the few multi-billion-dollar F2P cash cows and drop annoying indie devs and whatnot.
Yeah, there is absolutely 0 chance my legal dept would let me sign a contract with that in it.
The monopoly in this context is games that have already shipped or are about to ship on Unity. The company is "seeking rent" from customers that they already have in a vice grip, since a game engine isn't something you can just replace in your software product with a few weeks of playing hackerman on your laptop. Unity can more or less act exactly like a monopoly towards these customers.
To me, it seems like Unity is throwing away the potential to sell future licenses in exchange for wringing a lot more money out of their existing customer base.
There's also the fact that bigger businesses can afford to move their development to other platforms -- if Unity makes it worth it to them, that is. Which then might actually cause more competition in the field. Right now it seems like Unity is dominating the market?
But yeah you're right they're just squeezing everything they can out of the little guy.
Aye, you're spot on. We've just moved from one of these tools and actually seen our costs drop significantly, and we're one of the big boys! Christ knows how much of a % of budgets these tools make up in smaller places.
And then you've got the migration cost. Do you choose to improve your product, or save money? Or do you do both and burn your staff out... it's not easy.
This just smacks of money-grubbing VC's or something in the background.
Dominating in mobile, yup. Their efforts to break into AAA console space has been less ambitous, though.
They have the highest marketshare on PC/console games as well, but much of that is due to the indie market. You'd be hard pressed to find a AAA Unity game.
This is clearly targeting mobile, but I wonder how they will track this down with the PC/console market. Making it based on installs and not purchases nor unique users is especially scummy (given that I tend to use apps and games across multiple devices. I don't want to cost some dev 5x as much for something I've done for decades).
EDIT: oh god, it's worse than I though, I just read Aggro Crab's statement on the matter. I wasn't even considering Gamepass or PS+. Sony/Microsoft is going to raise some hell in these coming weeks
How does Xbox cloud gaming even work with this runtime fee? I try nearly every Game Pass game, many without installing via Cloud Gaming. Is it considered an install every time I start a cloud game? That would be nuts.
Is also terrible business for them, as (in my experience) a lot of large corporates are not interested in reducing money as managers do not have a good handle on how to evaluate the quality of different pieces of software they are leasing and therefore assume "it's expensive, so it must be the best".
My personal summary of the article:
Dan Marshall could not possibly be more accurate in the assessment. Can you imagine someone running an installer over and over again, making the indie creator owe thousands to Unity?
UPDATE:
Great, so now we can't even define what an "install" is publicly. Just a "trust us we know when we see it".
batshit logistics indeed.
Nothing new, but this does confirm what many feared from the announcement
Update: it's been confirmed that Unity is counting installs repeatedly.
So this means that, developers can actually LOSE money. Not decrease their profit, but actively lose money from the game.
$0.20 per install doesn't sound like much at first. But consider this: gamers can be some of the most tech-savvy and malicious people on the internet. Just look at GamerGate.
So. Imagine someone becomes the target of a harassment campaign, and they happen to have a game made with Unity. People would absolutely set up an automated process to uninstall and reinstall the game, on repeat, until the $0.20 adds up to exceed the cost of the game. If the game costs, say, $5, it only needs to do the process 25 times to break even. Most are around $20, so that would be 100 downloads. Any additional downloads will then cost the developer money. If they're doing it maliciously, they'll probably have the program running hundreds, if not thousands of times, in the background.
If you add in refunds from Steam, that's even worse. Steam can process refunds before the developer is paid for the original sale, meaning they have to pay back the purchaser from their own money. That can be DEVASTATING when done in bulk. I mentioned in my other comment that a friend knows a developer who got screwed over by 4chan bulk refunding her game on Steam. Steam's requirements for refunds are it needs to be within 14 days of purchase and less than two hours of gameplay. That's plenty of time to rack up downloads and utterly screw over the developer. As far as I'm aware there's no word on whether Unity will take refunds into account.
And that's assuming this system doesn't track pirated downloads. While they apparently won't charge for games included in bundles, it's still tracking based on the download of Unity Runtime, so I'm not sure whatever method they use to track it would also track whether it's legitimately purchased. In that case, the developer is losing money from the very start.
Even if the game doesn't meet the $200k threshold, I could see some people being petty enough to organize a mass purchase JUST to make it meet the threshold. I remember articles a few years ago about a man spending thousands on the Rosalina Amiibo figures out spite so other people couldn't. Not sure how true it is, but I could absolutely see some people being spiteful enough towards a real person to organize people to spend $200k.
If the game is $20, it would take 10,000 copies to hit the $200k threshold. If you can get 3,334 people to buy three copies for a total of $60, you'd have enough. And most likely the game will already have some sales, which means you don't need to have that many. So add in multiple individuals willing to spend hundreds of dollars, if not thousands, for the sake of spite, I can see it happening. Not every time it's attempted of course, but just one successful campaign could have potential to ruin multiple lives.
This is all just the malicious scenario. Meanwhile, there are legitimate reasons to reinstall games just due to troubleshooting or having multiple devices. So developers still have risks of suddenly having $0.20 invoiced without knowing.
Unity's FAQ on the runtime fees states they already have technology in place with Unity Ads to detect and combat fraud, and will leverage that as a starting point with this... But can we really trust them?
This is people's livelihoods at stake. If Unity doesn't respond promptly to combat these sorts of abuses when they arise, and it isn't fixed before the monthly invoice arrives, either due to a slow response or people organizing this to occur right before the invoice... It will screw over developers. Their bank accounts can be overdrawn. They'll miss bills. They might not be able to buy food or medicine. It can take potentially MONTHS to undo the damage even if Unity refunds them thanks to bureaucracy. There's potential to be totally fine one month, and come invoice day, find yourself scrambling for money to pay for electricity.
We're basically gambling on Unity being able to respond instantly to malicious activity and abuse of the download fee. It boils down to whether we trust them to be able to respond in time before our lives are potentially ruined.
With this announcement though, trust in Unity is pretty much demolished.
This is all hypothetical of course, but the fact we can even discuss this as a genuine possibility due to this specific decision is atrocious.
UPDATE 2: Unity is already backpedaling: https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-marc-whitten
To take Totilo's summary:
So it went an "absolute travesty" to "really damn stupid and scummy". The fight continues, don't let up.
EDIT: *well, the devs aren't on the hook. Microsoft is:
So, there's still going to be fighting up top wrt game subscription services. Though, this may also sadly mean that many services will not accept Unity games.
EDIT 2:
Okay, this isn't even a good backpedal. I take back my "really damn stupid" and upgraded this back to travesty. Not absolute travesty, but close.
I can STILL see some very determined saboteurs whipping up thousands of server instances to download some app with. or someone spoofing hardware specs and re-downloading an app. Heck, you can still whip up mobile emulators and download the app on each one. This does not "allay fears of 'install-bombing,' "
It's like they don't even have the policy ironed out before they went public with it. Are they close to bankruptcy or is this a cash grab with no backing.
I'm chalking this up to the "10lb shit sandwich theory". Everyone from local gov't to giant corporations do this all the time.
First they propose some outrageous proposed change like "Everyone needs to eat a 10lb shit sandwich" and people, predictably, get worked up over eating a shit sandwich. Then, they "listen" to their voters/clients/customers and roll back only some of the proposal to "We listened to your concerns and have heard you, from now on you'll only have to eat a 3lb shit sandwich" and a good portion of people are happy to only have to eat 3lbs of shit.
You would think that people wouldn't want to eat any of said sandwich but they're too busy thinking about "what could have been" instead of "what is/will be" to care.
That is why every time any kind of school budget cut comes up the very first thing that is threatened are school busses. People get so worked up about it that they'll gladly accept cutting music and the library budget and not giving teachers raises instead of demanding more budget money for the school.
We see it time and time again.
This has been studied for roughly half a century now; the more socially acceptable term to use for this is the door-in-the-face technique. It's commonly studied when referring to psychological compliance methods.
I'm kind of hoping that this will have more people jumping over to Godot and away from patent-encumbered semi-closed-source software in general. From what I can tell Unity isn't really used in any recent AAA games the same way as Unreal is; the games that this article mentions are big, yes, but are all made by relatively tiny studios who don't necessarily have a need for super cutting-edge stuff.
That being said, reliability and ease of use are very important features, and I have no idea how well Godot fares in those respects. Given that I can't think of any major game I've played that was made in it, it might not quite be ready for the spotlight. Gamedev is very much outside of my wheelhouse.
Most people use Unity and Unreal due to their versatility in developing for multiple platforms and documentation. There are PLENTY of tutorials, guides and other resources for using them. While a lot of indie studios don't NEED every single cutting edge feature for their games... Well, a lot of professional artists don't use every single cutting edge feature of Photoshop, either. What matters is having the options, should the need arise.
Meanwhile, Godot is just... young. There aren't nearly as many resources on it compared to Unity and Unreal, and also not nearly as many major hits yet. I distantly recall looking into it years and years ago, and deciding there wasn't enough support and tutorials at the time to consider it.
That said, it might see a spike in indie devs now, so hopefully that will increase the available resources and guides.
the only AAA example is the remaster for Sonic Colors, where the port devs forked off Godot to work on a custom engine. But it unfortunately had review issues over its performance and stability. Very rough growing pains
A few other standouts include Brotato and Cruelty Squad.
Also Cassette Beasts (a pokemon-like). Not AAA obviously but a great example of a solid game made in Godot that's seen some promotion by major platforms (ID@Xbox if memory serves).
Godot is the future, but for 3D it's not necessarily the present. For instance, in most major 3D engines heightmaps are built into the engine, but with Godot its heightmaps are, IIRC, an unofficial extension on the Godot asset store, that's a pain to work with in some way that I forget. Heightmaps are a pretty basic feature that you'll have to tackle the moment your 3D game needs hills.
Well. So long, Unity! Thanks for all the fish.
I've been on the fence for the past few game jams I've participated in. Others have wanted to use Unity, and I haven't seen fit to fight it.
But I've wanted to try Godot.
Now I have a more serious reason to find a team that also wants to try Godot for my next game jam.
I've enjoyed Unity. This likely marks the last time I use it.
Godot users do exist and we're here on Tildes! Glad to hear people are interested. I'm not a professional but if you have any questions about learning Godot I'd be happy to help as much as I can.
I just started learning gamedev this year, so glad I chose Godot! I'm really enjoying it. (I haven't tried Unity-- I've heard it's harder than Godot.)
Here's a link to a good Godot tutorial series in case anyone's interested :)
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9FzW-m48fn2SlrW0KoLT4n5egNdX-W9a&si=qJxWfJzthx0uClfK
A technical question for those of you in the know and with experience in this sort of thing:
Can the per-install fee be applied to older games without the developers updating their builds? If a dev uploaded a game years ago and just... leaves it as is... will they still be subject to this? Can Unity even tell it's being installed or not?
I'm really hoping they can't, because, if they can, this is going to hurt game availability and preservation a ton. I feel like a lot of smaller games might risk pulling builds down now that their moment in the sun is over.
I'm thinking of games like Distance.
It was released by a small team five years ago (and hasn't seen an update in three and a half).
It has over 200K installs if we go based on the number of Steam reviews and the game's NB number, which means it would be subject to the new fees.
On any given day, its max number of concurrent players is maybe a couple dozen.
The game is, in my opinion, a masterpiece, but it's also clearly something that has pretty much come and gone. Its moment was a while ago. I doubt it's going to have a sudden resurgence of interest.
Under these new Unity rules, all of the people who are continuing to play it are just trickling away money from the dev team. If I were to reinstall the game myself, as I do every so often, I now have to consider that I'm costing them money (and the time and energy it takes to continually manage that now ongoing expense).
Also, if they do take the game down and refuse Unity's new terms, and I still have the game on my Steam account -- will I even be able to install it? Will Unity simply lock out any new installs because it can?
As much as I assume the devs of the game (and others like it) would like for it to live on in perpetuity (as it should), keeping it up and available now incurs an actual cost. I think it puts devs in a very unfair position -- like their game is being held hostage unless they pay up. If they don't pay (and just so we're clear where I stand, I do NOT think that they should have to), could we conceivably lose access to a ton of games that can't even be installed anymore?
Is my thinking right on this? To me the whole announcement, initially, isn't that shocking because rent-seeking is so common nowadays. If they applied it to all games moving forward it would be one thing (almost expected), but the fact that they made it comprehensively retroactive feels like a gigantic, earth-shaking bomb went off in the gaming scene. I've probably played hundreds of games made with Unity at this point, and my stomach turns at the idea of even a few of them going away because of this.
Unity's blog post states that it will be applying the fee retroactively to any games that meet the thresholds. Any new downloads after January 1, 2024, will have the fee attached going forward. It also counts distribution via streaming and web browsers, though unsure how.
The retroactive part might be the worst part to me. If someone left game dev but has a game that met the requirements, they can be blindsided. It can also be abused for spite, because gamers can be malicious.
I might be spending a lot of money on indie games in the next few days, because I'm starting to fear that they'll be deleted by devs as the full potential ramifications set in. It's honestly bleak and disturbing to think about it, because the devs have no control over this. If they've uploaded a game and it's hit $200k, there's basically no escape. They can delete the game from stores, but if people reinstall it or add it to new devices, or if the tracking counts pirated copies... They will forever have to deal with sudden fees they can't predict.
Holy shit that's brutal! Downright evil. And, I believe, illegal in many places.
Not sure about it being illegal. They won't force them to pay for previous downloads, but any downloads AFTER January 1, 2024, will be subject to the fee.
This is really about law, and in (non US) law in general, retroactive changes are a big no no. And it doesn't matter if the terms say they can do it, some things are illegal to even put in writing. I won't be surprised if this is challenged in some places.
I hope it is challenged then and they strike that part down ASAP. The fact it applies to existing games is possibly the most disturbing part to me, since the developers wouldn't have any say in it. The idea of suddenly getting charged for a game you made 5 years ago is just chilling.
Everything else to me is business as usual. Awful, but it's to be expected. Don't like it? Don't use it. You have the option.
The retroactiveness though is just immoral and perverse. Those companies chose Unity under different conditions and that should be honored. They don't have the option to retroactively not choose Unity.
That's the kind of decision that can remove Unity from the face of the Earth and now I hope it does.
Yeah. As long as they cut the retroactive part, they can keep the rest of the awful fees. Then people can finish up current projects if they're too far to start over and then switch to another engine forevermore, and never have to think about Unity again outside the fees.
I hope whoever proposed and instigates this bullshit is proud. Even if Unity backtracks tomorrow and retracts every single part of this decision, it's too late. This just totally shattered trust in them. I think a lot of people will switch to other engines.
It's unclear how Unity will track installs. The suspicion is that the installed games will phone home to unity.
A game has to both have a certain number of lifetime installs, and also have earned a certain amount of money over the previous 12 months to be at risk of extra fees per installation. So your particular game might not be affected if it's not earning much money anymore.
It's also unclear whether Unity can retroactively apply these fees to projects which shipped under older agreements. My guess is, without having poured over the Unity agreement recently, is that there is language which state that Unity only provides the developer a license to distribute their software for a specific term (ie, you can only distribute software for a year after signing, or only distribute software while you have a valid unity account, or only distribute the software until Unity sends a Cease & Desist, etc). In any case, once Unity finds out that a developer is distributing unity runtime software, Unity probably has the right to force the developer to either stop distribution or agree to updated terms.
As far as I could tell, you also need 200k in sales in the last 12 months. So that game may be exempt.
Not defending the practice. The fact it's unclear is also why this is troublesome.
I did a few game jams with friends and wrote some smaller games in Unity, we always had a bad experience with Unity. It feels like multiple teams work on their own parts of the engine, but there is no cohesive link between them. It never feels polished or correctly tweaked. It feels like big parts of Unitys game dev is writing messy glue code.
The last game jam was our last game in Unity. While the development phase was fun, it was not because of Unity. The only reason we kept using Unity for so long was its asset store, the bought assets and our previous experience with it. I eventually switched to Unreal and I was really delighted how well all parts worked together. The spent time learning it was really worth it.
I miss C# as a language but the C++ in Unreal almost feels like C# anyway.
It is definitely not the C++ you would write for normal applications/micro controllers and feels very abstracted from the lower level and is able to make you concentrate on normal game logic.
This decision is amusing at best, Unreal is having a fast pace with the recent addition of Lumen and especially Nanite combined with the free Quixel Bridge.
It is more complex, but it feels easier to handle in general. The Unreal tutorials appeared to have better quality. It just feels more mature and more professional. The shipped functionality (For example path finding) works way better than the Unity one. I had to buy an A* lib from the store to get results worth using.
At this point keeping Unity was more a proof of sunken cost fallacy for me, than actual usefulness, which is why I find this idea of "taxing" installations rather amusing. I'm not surprised about the current state of Unity considering the CEOs past. But Unity was already a dead for me after the CEO said, that indie devs are dumb because they don't monetize their games. https://www.pcgamer.com/unity-ceo-sparks-fury-by-saying-developers-who-dont-consider-monetization-are-fing-idiots/
Typical spreadsheet warrior CEO with no heart or passion for games as an art.
I also want to take a look into Godot, another friend is really liking it. But for now I concentrate on Unreal.
I found this interesting:
https://steamdb.info/instantsearch/?range%5Breviews%5D=10000%3A&refinementList%5Btechnologies%5D%5B0%5D=Engine.Unity
These are all games with over 10k reviews(arbitrary number) which use Unity. Really puts it into perspective. Few examples: Rimworld, Vampire survivors, Slime Rancher, Hollow Knight, Subnautica....
This is absolutely huge and potentially devastating. What a needless greed this is. Wow.
With their pricing model, all of those games will likely get way more revenue per unit, since it'll be 2 cents per user instead of their total revenue percentage (a little more accounting for reinstalls). This will hurt indie free-to-play developers who make less than a dollar per user more than the big fish.
True, but that wasn't really the point I was trying to make. On the Unity subreddit a developer of some children's mobile game showed some statistics where they would have to pay more than the actual revenue from that game, showing how ludicrous and thoughtless this fee is.
Unity is essentially the standard for indie games. And I kind of wish it wasn’t, because my understanding is that it’s a mess of crappy code and disjoint features glued together.
Many times there are 2 or more ways to do the same thing: the legacy way which is “deprecated” but has less bugs and more community resources, or the new way which is extremely finicky/buggy and doesn’t yet have many resources. Naturally, most people choose the legacy option.
My understanding is that Unreal is much better than Unity despite having bugs and legacy of its own, but it’s way too much for indie devs. Coding is done in C , which is a lot harder to get into than C#, and Blueprints aren’t a suitable replacement. But they’re allegedly coming out with a new language, Verse, which may make it easier for newcomers.
Godot seems like the best competitor, and I really want it to succeed. But it just doesn’t have nearly as many features or community support as Unity, as well as having its own bugs and legacy features (though I believe the situation is better even with Godot 4.0, not all features have been ported to 4.0 yet). Maybe in the future.
Other than those, there are IDE-based like Defold and Construct 2; engines without an IDE like heaps (Haxe), libGDX, and Bevy. The first 2 are more niche and have their own issues; and the latter are more niche and much harder for new developers to get into and even seasoned developers, to prototype and experiment with.
So for now game-dev is kind of a mess. But maybe it always will be, because games are much more complicated than most programs. You won’t find most other kinds of software which need real-time rendering, real-time physics, real-time input, real-time network communication, fancy UI, and AI; plus art, music, advertising; all with super-interactive, rapidly-iterable development. Except game engines, which have all that in their provided libraries; in the editor, super complicated UI, efficient "preview" rendering, some form of collaboration or version control, configurability, and extensibility; plus code generation, integration with the generated executables (pause/resume, toggle debug info and widgets), and hot code reloading. (If those hugs lists didn’t have enough, I’m sure I’m missing at least 10 more things).
Re: Godot 4: it's worth noting that since the release of 4.0 in March(?), development pace has picked up considerably. We're already seeing dev builds for 4.2 released for public testing. So it's likely that many features it's missing are coming sooner than we might think.
Is anyone familiar with Unity as well as Godot/Unreal/other simliar engines? I'm trying to figure out which engine to move to, and want to find the one that will facilitate the easiest transition. I've started doing research but want to get opinions here, if anyones willing to share their experiences. My main concerns / soft requirements are:
I want to delve into Unreal, but it seems like it would be like learning Unity from scratch all over again and I see conflicting things on its 2D support. I was leaning towards Godot because it seemed more friendly, but I'm worried it might be too friendly, to the point its not powerful enough.
Godot definitely has better 2D support than Unreal, so if you principally work in 2D I think that makes more sense. I know it can export to the web but the details go over my head a bit so here's their documentation on that. I unfortunately can't speak much for the specific built-in components you mention, though -- you might have luck asking around in a more Godot-centric community.
Unreal is more of a AAA industry standard, if you're looking to work as a member of a department of a larger studio or team, or plan on working for a first-party studio at Sony or Microsoft, it's worth cracking into and making some small games in. For smaller projects, I found it to be...unwieldy.
If you're looking for Unity but not Unity, Godot is probably going to be your closest bet. There isn't an art asset store, but there are a bunch of scripts from what I've seen for things like player controllers to tools that you can pull down just like the unity asset store. I don't know if you'll have the same level of control that Unity provides when it comes to things like rendering and sound management though... It is definitely more friendly than Unity, but I think you could scale your project to work within the engine's limitations if you don't want to spend money on software licenses.
I think the best shot would be Godot and Unreal combined, there is not really much of an alternative there.
For 3D I would primarily go towards Unreal and for 2D towards Godot. Godot supports 3D, but Unreal offers much more tooling, more graphic fidelity and I would argue better performance. For simple 3D games, Godot might be enough. Depends on the use case.
In terms of differences, many aspects and concepts remain the same, so you don't need to learn Unreal as if it's your first day.
It has a similar (but way better) shader editor like the shader graph in Unity, of course, the idea of textures remains the same, you still work with Vectors. Unreal has an amazing AI system and also offers the visual scripting language Blueprints. Although I wouldn't want to write my whole game with it, it's nice for behavior patterns or similar logic that can be better represented in a visual way.
I would suggest to create a simple 3D game with both engines and see what fits you better. I would argue that Unreal will be more complex and take more time to get into compared to Godot, but you will also have more options in the end.
If you understand the basic concept of game development, I would argue that switching between the engines wont be too hard as the same concepts apply for any.
Currently an ex EA Engine developer is working on his own engine called Hazel and I am following its development. But afaik it's only available to Patreon supporters, might be worth looking into it. He seems to know his craft very well. His youtube channel is full of info and he documents his development, gives code reviews, and even gives a full tutorial in how to build your own engine: https://www.youtube.com/@TheCherno I always find it interesting to see how inner parts work.
They really want everyone in the industry to switch to Unreal (or even Godot), don't they?
Raylib is another pretty good one, though might be a bit difficult to migrate to from Unity
The CEO just sold a bunch of shares. Sure looks like market manipulation to try and sell high and buy low to me: https://twitter.com/ScottTRichmond/status/1701631419125276721
So he sold 2,000 of 3,211,394 shares? That doesn't seem so outrageous. It's only 0.06%.
Plus, it's not uncommon for stock prices to rise after announcements of unpopular news like new monetization or layoffs. That is how they make money and reduce costs, after all. With the possible exception of "meme stocks", financial markets are driven by different forces than online outrage.
We'll have to see how this one goes, but it doesn't strike me as market manipulation.
good catch. probably just a brokerage moving stuff around then.
that does just make me ask how fucking stupid these guys are though.
Just a few years ago I would have expected to see something like this on The Onion.
There is ridiculously large number of problems with this which are pretty well outlined already in the thread.
I am also just going to go and say that this is an indirect result of the monetization models of the software in the previous decade/s. People not caring about the problems of mobile platforms, not caring about the massive problems of Windows after 10, not caring about problems with Chrome, accepting ridiculous rent seeking SaaS models and more, so much more, are not the cause.
But they are how things like this can be accepted because now this insane move is something that can perhaps be pulled off. I have no idea how this is going to go, if it will stand and if in what form.
I said it already, I will say it and I will think it when you need to run Windows as an online only subscription that runs ads before you login(hopefully not, but what is The Onion is getting pushed frighteningly far away). Convenience is nice but I question the convenience of being on the wrong end of one sided agreement that can be altered anytime.
Edit: Grammar
Relevant simpsons clip: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7uQNPS9v_VU&pp=ygUXSG9tZXIgZWxlcGhhbnQgbmV3IGNvc3Q%3D
This is just crazy and out of touch. This decision was made with so little competence that theyve already backpedaled on some things because there was clearly little thought put into this, just desire to squeeze blood from a rock. Infuriating
This is so wild. Sounds like a joke until you realise they are serious. So out of touch.