Community MetaSteam | September 2023 - The galaxy awaits
- Thread starter Mor
- Start date
- Status
Unity single-handedly trying to slaughter any kind of indie dev that picked their engine
Thinking about it, is the guy in charge of Unity the same one at EA that thought limiting a PC game to a maximum of 5 installations was a good idea?
He was an EA CEO years agso maybe it's him.
What if i install a game from a studio that is dead? Who pays? The anime gods?
So I am guessing Mihoyo will be looking to move over to UE5. I mean they won't be happy with the sudden bill they are going to get from Genshin and Star Rail.
Looking at some of the Mobile games as well, Fate Grand Order, Nikke Goddess of Victory, Hearthstone and the list goes on and on. These games bring in a lot of money and are installed on a lot of devices. I will quite often have the same game installed on both a mobile and tablet.
I know these are the sort of people they are probably going after. But these are the sort of companies that are raking in enough money that it's a no brainer to make the transition to another engine.
So a succesful indie is more likely to be screwed over than the companies they are targeting.
Looking at some of the Mobile games as well, Fate Grand Order, Nikke Goddess of Victory, Hearthstone and the list goes on and on. These games bring in a lot of money and are installed on a lot of devices. I will quite often have the same game installed on both a mobile and tablet.
I know these are the sort of people they are probably going after. But these are the sort of companies that are raking in enough money that it's a no brainer to make the transition to another engine.
So a succesful indie is more likely to be screwed over than the companies they are targeting.
Pretty much all the mobile games are on unity lmao so unless they have some special contract (which may be i guess) it’s gonna be wild
That said they'll also climb very fast to the threshold where they pay 1 cent for install which isn't much for them.
that's like what? 250.000 for 25 millions installs?
FGO is estimated to have generated over $7 billions so far, probably the most successful game for Sony ever lmao
Last edited:
This Unity shithousery might be the worst fuck up of the year on par with Sony increasing the price of online play.
Actually no, this is the worst by far, this is pure scum.
Actually no, this is the worst by far, this is pure scum.
Final thoughts. This is an absolute shitshow for consumers as well.
No more Demo's for any game in the Unity engine. That's probably going to reduce the amount of games in the Steam Next demo's (plus fuck dev's over as this was meant to be a big boost for them).
No more Gamepass/PS+/Nvidia Streaming for them. All of this counts towards an install, possible even every time you play.
No more free games on Steam/GoG/EGS.
So yeah, thanks Unity.
No more Demo's for any game in the Unity engine. That's probably going to reduce the amount of games in the Steam Next demo's (plus fuck dev's over as this was meant to be a big boost for them).
No more Gamepass/PS+/Nvidia Streaming for them. All of this counts towards an install, possible even every time you play.
No more free games on Steam/GoG/EGS.
So yeah, thanks Unity.
You forgot a serving of mass-delisting coming right up!
Pretty sure devs would set your PC on fire if they could right now
Apparently if you use the Pro/Enterprise edition the charges aren't anywhere near as bad. Having read a little bit more something like Genshin or Star Rail would "ONLY" be costing them $10,000 extra (think that may be a month).
The thing that I don't understand in this Unity nonsense is why is the fee tied to the instalation of the application? Why not tie it to the purchase? It would still be shitty and a burden most dev teams can't afford but at least it would be somewhat logical.
That unity announcement is so obviously stupid that i am sure the company is very well aware.
I'm certain this is a fairly typical case of bad news negotiation, where you announce something extremely shitty to pass of a less shitty deal (the one you actually wand to have) as a compromise afterwards
I'm certain this is a fairly typical case of bad news negotiation, where you announce something extremely shitty to pass of a less shitty deal (the one you actually wand to have) as a compromise afterwards
Got pinged from the Godot discord server today, soliciting donations. I gotta imagine they're doing good numbers today.
so once again anime is at the heart of all evil
does anybody here know how to reset a Global Steam Controller configuration? i installed GlossI and unfortunely had some issues, so I uninstalled it as well as the associated software. However, my controller continues to behave as a global steam controller regardless
Live action Meet the Heavy remake with the Heavy's voice actor:
Demos count same as a full game install/reinstall. Fucking what I can't even this is just so fucking what? Are they on drugs?
This is some turbo enshittification.
I’m half expecting the emergence of a small cottage industry of developers offering De-Unity porting of games to Godot, UE and so on.
I bet the plan will be dropped within the next few days because every platform holder will fucking call Unity. No one will want to continue doing business with you if you want to piss off everyone in the videogame industry.
It takes me a lot to give a crap about gaming industry news these days but holy crap that Unity thing is so fucking vile. And the transparent probably insider trading going on beforehand. What. The. Fuck.
Seriously, to have it retroactive, where seemingly they could be sending $500,000+ bills to developers and saying 'oh but if you upgrade to Enterprise, in addition to Enterprise fees, you only have to pay us $25,000!
And, yeah - no doubt this will literally kill Unity...
What if the CEO of Unity is such a fucking idiot, he just asked ChatGPT how to improve his business and went with whatever it said no matter what?
Seriously, to have it retroactive, where seemingly they could be sending $500,000+ bills to developers and saying 'oh but if you upgrade to Enterprise, in addition to Enterprise fees, you only have to pay us $25,000!
And, yeah - no doubt this will literally kill Unity...
What if the CEO of Unity is such a fucking idiot, he just asked ChatGPT how to improve his business and went with whatever it said no matter what?
You'd have to be insane to ever willingly do business with Unity ever again even if they reverse this. Even if they make the plan the opposite giving you money for every install. Everyone is going to have to slowly move off it.
I said this elsewhere as well, but I imagine this is how a lot of devs feel. Even if and when they walk that back, lots of devs will feel that they can't trust Unitys management anymore.
Ricciatello is an inside man, a double agent. He probably works for Epic.
As already mentioned this impacts demos, probably any pirated games which use an exe compiled under updated Unity, and a ton of other stuff. After looking over the responses Unity had to questions I immediately assumed some bigger users were going to try to sue them if this went forward because it seems like an insane burden of changed terms - mainly because of it being retroactive (the install count isn't, but it applies to people who made games on Unity at any point).
Worth noting the CEO sold 2,000 shares of Unity less than a week ago. Also the CEO has ONLY sold shares since he's been at the company, and Unity has had announcement after announcement be incredibly unpopular. I have to imagine their numbers have dropped month over month and this is actually a bigger foot-shot than the Twitter nonsense that keeps happening and Twitter is largely dead compared to what it was.
With Unreal actually being moderately more dev-forward lately (the engine, not EGS), Godot maturing a fair bit by all accounts, and the continued success of engines like GameMaker, you have to imagine Unity is well and truly on the way out regardless of if they walk this back or not - saying they're going to change something that can literally cost indie devs more than they made with no warning or counter is going to lose every non-AAA dev.
Just need a sarah mclachlan "For just .20 cents a day you too can sponsor this poor unity developer" like the animal cruelty ads
Yeah this whole ordeal is such a massive mess. In one hand, there's very little game engine competition outside of Unreal and maybe Godot, one which has really massive problems that have been ignored for a while, and the other that might shape up to be the Blender of game engines, in all senses of the word.
Unity is Canceling the Runtime Fee
After deep consultation with our community, customers, and partners, we’ve made the decision to cancel the Runtime Fee, effective immediately.blog.unity.com
Fuck off Unity
UnrealCLR (A C# plugin for Unreal Engine) really needs more contributors and the rest of the engine's problems (that affect the majority of games using it) really need to be patched already. Unity is just way more modular, and custom shaders and BSDFs are easy to do. I stopped using Unreal, because the amount of things that need to be patched from a low-level C++ sense is very difficult with retaining the ability to distribute modding tools.
So if you delist the game from storefronts you don't have to pay fees?
In that case they better do a deep 99% off sale right before deleting it.
No matter what happens now, that's what important.
They could hand wave all their bullshit, that's too late, the harm is already done.
Nobody will trust Unity ever again, at any point they can just alter the contract and force you to backpay X dollars on 10+years old projects. How is that even legal? Sounds like a lot of "ackshually, you signed the agreement that we can do whatever we want in the future so it's legal", that will have much more profound implications than just for Unity.
You can't do that shit when you have competition. You're not Apple (give them ideas, they need it to make more money).
My personal feeling about this Unity change is that they have identified some specific type of game where they feel they are not getting paid or not getting paid enough. The obvious target seems to be free to play mobile games like Genshin Impact but those games are also at the lowest tier of cost per install so I'm not sure about that. Either way, it seems like they designed this bespoke revenue model to target that segment and then just extended it to all their customers and it just falls apart in the current PC and console space when you consider how games are distributed these days. It must a big segment of revenue that they're targeting to actually give up on the licensing model altogether.
Anyway I expect they will delay the implementation and walk back the changes that mess up the models for PC and console. Meaning they won't count demos and they won't count gamepass install (unless gamepass type services are the target to begin with). I wonder if they'll walk it all the way back to licensing again.
I doubt this will have a big impact on the industry because ultimately, Unity is the best tool for the job it is designed for which is allowing developers to deliver scalable output with limited input, Unreal engine is universally accepted as being far more feature rich and cutting edge but it is an immensely more complex set of tools. It is generally designed for projects with a larger scope than Indies typically aspire to. Yeah a single developer can learn Unreal and release a game but it will take much more input than if they had done it in Unity. And I suspect other tools like Godot are far behind Unity in terms of the general developer ecosystem of knowledge and documentation and add-ons and such.
Someone mentioned that this might cause companies to port their games to Unreal (like Genshin for example). The scale of that kind of project is mindboggling to me. Let's say mihoyo has 500 developers who have spent the last 7 years learning and perfecting their Unity content pipeline. Asking them to learn Unreal to port the game over will take years. Asking them to do so while keeping the current content pipeline active is literally impossible. Hiring 500 other Unreal specialists to port the game is like setting up a whole new company. And on top of all this, you're not building a brand new experience. You are porting an existing game which has tens of millions of users who will expect the new version to run, look, feel and play exactly like what they are already used to. Off the top of my head I can't think of many games that have done full engine changes after release and nothing with this level of popularity. I recall when Valve transitioned Dota from Source to Source 2. That was mostly an engine upgrade rather than an engine swap and it still took years for the game to feel 'good' again. Mihoyo would have to be really, really, really pissed off at Unity to greenlight this kind of project.
Anyway Unity is going to walk this back. Their plan is just unworkable on a practical implementation level even if they stick with the philosophy that led to these changes.
Anyway I expect they will delay the implementation and walk back the changes that mess up the models for PC and console. Meaning they won't count demos and they won't count gamepass install (unless gamepass type services are the target to begin with). I wonder if they'll walk it all the way back to licensing again.
I doubt this will have a big impact on the industry because ultimately, Unity is the best tool for the job it is designed for which is allowing developers to deliver scalable output with limited input, Unreal engine is universally accepted as being far more feature rich and cutting edge but it is an immensely more complex set of tools. It is generally designed for projects with a larger scope than Indies typically aspire to. Yeah a single developer can learn Unreal and release a game but it will take much more input than if they had done it in Unity. And I suspect other tools like Godot are far behind Unity in terms of the general developer ecosystem of knowledge and documentation and add-ons and such.
Someone mentioned that this might cause companies to port their games to Unreal (like Genshin for example). The scale of that kind of project is mindboggling to me. Let's say mihoyo has 500 developers who have spent the last 7 years learning and perfecting their Unity content pipeline. Asking them to learn Unreal to port the game over will take years. Asking them to do so while keeping the current content pipeline active is literally impossible. Hiring 500 other Unreal specialists to port the game is like setting up a whole new company. And on top of all this, you're not building a brand new experience. You are porting an existing game which has tens of millions of users who will expect the new version to run, look, feel and play exactly like what they are already used to. Off the top of my head I can't think of many games that have done full engine changes after release and nothing with this level of popularity. I recall when Valve transitioned Dota from Source to Source 2. That was mostly an engine upgrade rather than an engine swap and it still took years for the game to feel 'good' again. Mihoyo would have to be really, really, really pissed off at Unity to greenlight this kind of project.
Anyway Unity is going to walk this back. Their plan is just unworkable on a practical implementation level even if they stick with the philosophy that led to these changes.
This is not noteworthy at all. Executive compensation is often in the form of stock and they are not allowed to sell in bulk (to protect share prices). So they sell small amounts often. In fact, there are probably mandatory regulatory filings to ensure there is no stock price manipulation.
What's the state of Source 2 these days? It seems that Unity is about to leave a sizable gap in the market.
I am well aware of stocks being a common award for executives, although it is rarely the sole benefit. It is noteworthy here because of the timing, also the fact it's a pattern, given that Unity has had made multiple negatively received announcements since he took over and he has sold significant amounts of stock preceding each. The laws around insider trading are intended to curb that behavior but of course, decades of erosion on regulations (and defunding enforcement agencies). As you say he sells small amounts often except right before a big announcement that tanks the value, where he does a bigger sale. This is well within the textbook definition of insider trading, but it is unlikely anything will come of it (despite being a clear pattern and bigger than usual by a factor of 2-10x depending on which time this happened, it's probably under some loophole limit).
This is assuming they are still headquartered in San Fransisco which I believe they are, I know they started out in an EU country.
A lot of the evidence is that bigger devs won't have to deal with any of the big changes - the high-tier plans are getting more expensive but not a big overhaul. Hoyo would have to pay more per month but there's no "per install" thing for the higher tiers, and it's likely the biggest of the big like Hoyo have unique contracts.
The problem is the rest of the devs, and plans, and contracts. A lot of what the Unity team is responding with to questions is straight up unenforceable or some manner of illegal, so it's quite possible this plan was always 100% intended to be walked back (this is another assumption a lot of people have made, and with good reason given it's a very common tactic).
Last edited:
Valve updated the look on that menu and made it much cleaner looking.
It's certainly a blow to Hollow Knight Silksong. But they are so far in development or maybe soon complete I don't think they will go back and change the engine to something else. Or maybe they just drop the game
I don't think this was realistically have any effect on games already far ahead in development.
For one, because changing engines midway is not easy, but also because I fully expect Unity to walk this back because quite frankly this sounds like some idiot executive pushing things through with his fingers in his ears while all other folks are trying to explain this isn't even feasible. (Seriously, apparently a Unity person said they currently do not even have install tracking in place and they somehow want something smart enough to distinguish between regular installs, bundle installs, gamepass, etc (I would be shocked if this is even remotely feasible)! And some of the things they are trying to pull sound like they could be of dubious legality).
I fully expect devs who are early in development or people just learning an engine to pivot asap, and using Unity is going to be seen as a very unpopular option if not outright liability going forward, even if they were to reverse course.
Source 2 is dead in the water as far as third party licensing goes. To be a middleware vendor you need a dedicated team of developers delivering consistent improvements on a reliable schedule and you need good communication with and support for your customers (in this case, developers). Valve does exactly none of this. Some of these ideas seem like an anthesis to the way they believe business works. So no, Source will never be a viable alternative.
Okay I'm not sure how it works in whichever country Unity is incorporated in but in my country there are mandatory regulatory filings where you have to inform the securities and exchange board about stock divestment. I'm certain this is how it works everywhere. The stocks he sold are likely scheduled and regulated. This is a completely normal occurrence and not a case "Let me get that bag before I tank the share price".
Also, 2000 shares sold at $40 each is $80,000. I just checked Google to see his net worth and every result is different but the range is between 120 million dollars and over a billion dollars. 80k is a drop in the bucket for this guy and he is certainly not committing securities fraud for that kind of money.
- Status