Game Dev PSA: Unity Just Shot Itself in the Foot Again.

[plantovision]

Ah, nothing gets you as tilted as software companies, ain't that right Adobe?

So Unity just recently released their plans to roll out a new pricing plan next year, and boy does it take a lot off the top. Here's the long and short of it... Unity has decided that games which reach a certain amount of revenue AND number of installs will be subject to fees based on how many times your game has been installed (even if the game was installed for free). This will be affecting games released before this change was made, to the contradiction of previous promises made by Unity...

"When you obtain a version of Unity and don’t upgrade your project, we think you should be able to stick to that version of the TOS."

Some details, however, are still unclear. Namely, we are unsure how or if Unity plans to do anything about malicious mass installations, as they have left themselves contradicted on the subject...

"In an interview with tech news site Axios on Tuesday night, Unity president for Create solutions Marc Whitten dialled back on the reach of the fees, claiming that developers would not now be charged for multiple installs of games by malicious users. There would instead be a charge for an initial installation, and then a second installation on a different device. This contradicts the company’s FAQ, however, which states: 'The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data.'"

Long story short... if you plan on trying to make a living off games, I would suggest you steer clear of Unity. Some people have suggested using Unreal Engine, but that does just seem like trading one giant corporation for another. Next year I plan to switch to Godot, which is open source and uses the MIT License. What do y'all plan on doing?

[Icey!]

I have a feeling they might revert this considering how much of an uprising this will cause both from studios and solo devs. I also feel we would not have many complaints if unity just did a tax on revenue like unreal engine does. But at the same time I just love FOSS and don't give a shit. Happy to see people realizing their mistake!  /s

Defold and Godot are great alternatives!

[Bede]

I can't help but feel like this is 100% the industry trying to reap the benefits of the "all digital! all online! physical copies are outdated!" shit that they've been pushing for the past few years.

Since this is going to retroactively effect games made in Unity, Cult of the Lamb (a VERY popular game made in Unity) has already said that they will be deleting their game ENTIRELY, before this goes into effect. Other games are definitely going to do the same. Games like Night in the Woods, Hollow Knight, Cuphead, and even Among Us are made in Unity, and they are just as likely to be taken off the store so that they don't retroactively owe Unity thousands upon thousands of dollars.

Not to mention the indie games that we're going to lose because of this... My archivist heart is crying for all of the indie games that could mean so much to someone, who just haven't found their audience yet, who could become cult hits in a few years. Now, they'll never get the chance to.

And, put on your tinfoil hat here... This is going to encourage developers to make their Unity games cost as much as possible. John Riccitiello (the owner of Unity) previously worked for EA (a triple A video game company), and has sold 2k stocks for Unity earlier this week, and has sold 50k+ over the last year, while buying none for himself. It's almost like he planned to tank this company; not only for short-term profit, but also to specifically fuck over the indie game market.

Honestly, I think we're heading for another video game crash. Not just because of this specific incident, but the state of the industry, all around. Absolutely HORRIBLE.

[Melooon]

Im a little confused here; Im not sure what the issue is??

In order to pay fees you must earn 200k+ (I assume from game sales, ads etc) and have had your games installed over 200k times. As far as I know you always had to pay fees if you earned more than 200k - so this seems to make it harder to have to pay?

And the TOS update seems to say that this change will not effect older versions of the Unity engine (as far as I know it would be illegal for them to change the terms on something you already agree too)

So, I don't see the issue is here  Am I just missing something?? @shevek knows the law, maybe you have an opinion!

At any rate I do agree that for indi devs Godot and other small engines are a much better way to go regardless 

[Cobra!]

I remember hearing about Riccitello taking over as Unity CEO when it first happened, being a Unity user for the time, and knowing his history with EA, I bailed as soon as I could, knowing it was only going to be bad news from there. Looks like I made the right call.

Also, loving the memes that are coming from this!

I can't help but feel like this is 100% the industry trying to reap the benefits of the "all digital! all online! physical copies are outdated!" shit that they've been pushing for the past few years.

I've been trying to warn people about the dangers of a digital only world for the past 15 years, and did anybody listen? Of course not! They called me crazy!

It seems I've been right on almost everything I've said so far. We've seen anti-consumer things like this happen that could only be possible with a digital game, games being taken from stores and people's accounts, etc.

This is going to encourage developers to make their Unity games cost as much as possible. John Riccitiello (the owner of Unity) previously worked for EA (a triple A video game company), and has sold 2k stocks for Unity earlier this week, and has sold 50k+ over the last year, while buying none for himself. It's almost like he planned to tank this company; not only for short-term profit, but also to specifically fuck over the indie game market.

Honestly, I think we're heading for another video game crash. Not just because of this specific incident, but the state of the industry, all around. Absolutely HORRIBLE.

Honestly, that makes sense. Riccitello and other high ups in the industry would stand to gain from that.

As a European born in the 90s, I was never there for the video game crash, but from what I hear, the crash never actually affected consumers necessarily, in fact I've heard about some people recalling that they weren't aware anything was going on at the time. From the sounds of it, people were just sick of the sheer volume of low quality games out there. Companies were suffering as a result.

We're kind of experiencing that now. Ubisoft is apparently in the verge of bankruptcy, EA is looking to be bought out because they're also suffering financially, which came out shortly after the news that Activision did it first. Also, we're seeing loads of low quality games, not just from the AAA industry, but also from shady indie devs trying to scam you with unfinished content.
There's no way that's sustainable, something's got to give eventually, and perhaps we're starting to see it do just that.

[bugholder's epiphany]

Im a little confused here; Im not sure what the issue is??

In order to pay fees you must earn 200k+ (I assume from game sales, ads etc) and have had your games installed over 200k times. As far as I know you always had to pay fees if you earned more than 200k - so this seems to make it harder to have to pay?

And the TOS update seems to say that this change will not effect older versions of the Unity engine (as far as I know it would be illegal for them to change the terms on something you already agree too)

So here's the thing right

The issue i've seen said is that just about ANYTHING relating to the installs will charge you. And you can be charged for someone installing a game multiple time, using systems that no one else except has Unity has access to. If you're a successful game dev you'd be fine, but if you're someone who makes a game that's free that explodes in popularity, you're going to have to pay up.

Also, apparently if you pirate a game, the dev will be charged for it anyway because Unity has no idea how to actually combat that right now.

Basically they made this real.

Also apparently, I'm seeing mixed messaging on this but in cases where there's a distributor involved, Unity intends to have it be so that the distributor pays the fee. Which I'm pretty sure spontaniously forcing a new policy onto them that says "YOU WILL HAVE TO PAY" is probably not a good idea. Last time a gamedev company tried to make a distributor pay for something (refunds in this particular case), it resulted in Sony delisting Cyberpunk 2077 because CDPR thought they could get Sony to handle all of the refunds.

⚑ Moderators Note ⚑

Just a minor note! I edited this post and the one above; memes (no matter how funny or timely) are not supposed to be used on the forum! (I converted them into links so you can still see them) -Melon

[shevek]

Am I just missing something?? @shevek knows the law, maybe you have an opinion!

Hehe

I don't know any of the contract and TOS stuff of Unity that they have in general or that they may have with specific creators. That said, it is usually legally questionable and oftentimes unenforceable to change any terms retroactively - you deserve to know that you are not currently racking up future fees that will be due in a few years suddenly when they decide to switch terms, which this does. It's a bait and switch, not consumer friendly, and a bad business practice which is why such things are frequently challenged. I know German law has quite a few protections against similar things.

If I understood correctly, they have already given in and removed the retroactive fees - probably would not even hold up legally, but depends on the country; I assume though that the EU would be interested - but they seemingly did not back off from the idea that the time before this went into effect is already calculated in in whether you owe these new fees or not. It's not ethical, especially for smaller creators.

Especially concerning is that there are no objective measurement tools. They have said that it won't be sales data, instead they use a "composite model" with a data model which has fraud detection, and other detections running, to determine installs - so allegedly, piracy installs wouldn't count, just the rest. But that means the games are reporting back to Unity and the consumer doesn't know what, in what way, and how. Consumers will likely be unable to shut it off. It isn't known how reliable it is, how it really handles piracy and reinstalls. That means Unity can just go up to any creator using Unity for their mildly successful game and pull a random install number out and demand pay. There is no way for creators to check how these numbers came to be and how reliable they are.

Interesting for you maybe, Melon: you're in luck that you used X3DOM, because websites with Unity+WebGL (which I think, Jades World and other browser projects by cinni are) cost now as well. Now you can clickspam a website using these to rack up a bill for someone. If I was anyone with a Unity 3D browser world online I would take it down probably.
I've seen calculations by indie developers whose games are eligible: some are allegedly owing over 100% of what they have earned with their game.

It is also worth saying that people have discovered that the CEO sold 2,000 shares right before this announcement...

[lime360]

it's a shame for unity to take a worst decision, now that i have this unity book in russian idk what it is for

i really want to try godot but because i am too lazy to find a good material to learn gdscript i'll just use clickteam fusion

[plantovision]

it's a shame for unity to take a worst decision, now that i have this unity book in russian idk what it is for

i really want to try godot but because i am too lazy to find a good material to learn gdscript i'll just use clickteam fusion

Godot also supports C# if you install the .NET version, and there are a ton of good resources online for it.

[Melooon]

Iv read into this more and I understand it better now! There is a good article on the legals here: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/09/wait-is-unity-allowed-to-just-change-its-fee-structure-like-that/

Interesting for you maybe, Melon: you're in luck that you used X3DOM, because websites with Unity+WebGL (which I think, Jades World and other browser projects by cinni are) cost now as well. Now you can clickspam a website using these to rack up a bill for someone. If I was anyone with a Unity 3D browser world online I would take it down probably.
I've seen calculations by indie developers whose games are eligible: some are allegedly owing over 100% of what they have earned with their game.

It is also worth saying that people have discovered that the CEO sold 2,000 shares right before this announcement...

Thank you for this! Also not all of them; I have a handful of older Unity games on my itch and Ozwomps Voyage is Unity! None of them are very popular; but I live in hope  I'll be keeping an eye on this! For now at least I wont be updating any Unity games and wont be starting any new ones thats for sure; depending on how things go I might delist all unity games at the end of the year 

it's a shame for unity to take a worst decision, now that i have this unity book in russian idk what it is for

Unity is still a great way to prototype ideas and test things out; even if you end up making the final game in another engine; Unity is super fast and easy for doing drafts and tests!

[lime360]

Unity is still a great way to prototype ideas and test things out; even if you end up making the final game in another engine; Unity is super fast and easy for doing drafts and tests!

the same thing may apply to clickteam and scratch

Godot also supports C# if you install the .NET version, and there are a ton of good resources online for it.

nobody really cares about c# in godot, i prefer learning c# in making wpf apps

[Cobra!]

A friend of mine who has been working on his big game on Unity for years is looking for a programmer to help them migrate to Unreal or Godot. They said they were on the verge of tears at the thought of years of work going down the drain. They still have all of the assets, but they have to start the programming again from scratch.

It was genuinely sad to see, and I'm certain he wasn't the only one going through this. He's old enough to live through the Video Game Crash of 1983 (Granted, they live in Europe, but they've always kept where they've lived throughout their life a bit of a secret, so who knows?), and he said this Unity debacle might turn out to be much worse, which says a lot.

There's also been a bit of an update on the whole thing, MoistKritical did a video summarising it, so I'd reccomend that as a starting point.

It's becoming a worrying trend that companies are going all out on their anti-consumer practices, and not really pretending to care about end users like us any more. I think the difference with Unity compared to Reddit and Twitter is that Unity's decision is actually affecting people's livelihoods and financial situation, so people are rightly up in arms more than usual.

It's worrying, though, that companies are now deciding this is an acceptable thing to do.

[bugholder's epiphany]

A friend of mine who has been working on his big game on Unity for years is looking for a programmer to help them migrate to Unreal or Godot. They said they were on the verge of tears at the thought of years of work going down the drain. They still have all of the assets, but they have to start the programming again from scratch.

If it helps your friend any, not only are there apparently tools that can help with the transition from Unity over to other engines such as Godot (of which im not familiar with, sadly, so research would have to be done on that front), apparently AppLoving is working on a tool called Project Unifree, which apparently will use LLMs to help transfer massive amounts of code from Unity to Godot.

https://gamefromscratch.com/applovin-launch-project-unifree/

Might be good for them to keep an eye out!

[Icey!]

If it helps your friend any, not only are there apparently tools that can help with the transition from Unity over to other engines such as Godot (of which im not familiar with, sadly, so research would have to be done on that front), apparently AppLoving is working on a tool called Project Unifree, which apparently will use LLMs to help transfer massive amounts of code from Unity to Godot.

https://gamefromscratch.com/applovin-launch-project-unifree/

Might be good for them to keep an eye out!

Never heard of this, infact, I didn't know that this all was a plot to kill of a competitor. A pretty dumb one if you ask me. I'm interested to see how the project unifree goes despite being a Godot dev who has never touched Unity.

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

Yo.
As a fan of obscure, non-commercial games this was indeed bad news; I guess that many games will be taken down, and many won't be ported to another engine.

If you do games and want to migrate, I strongly suggest to use Godot/GDevelop/Twine or even better: Learn a bit of programming and use SDL2/Allegro or one of the various engines. It might cost you more time, and it might miss features at first - but you'll be independent with it - and this is a worth on it's own, even if such a freak decision by a engine provider is unlikely to repeat. I also have made the experience that the freedom you win helps to do what you want to do ;).