So basically unity wants money even for games made on their engine before this shitty update. All older versions of games with older versions of unity are eligible to be monetized. Forget ethical, how is that even legal?
Unity, I hope you die. Sorry to all the Devs who put their soul into developing it.
Jesus dude chill it. Somehow hating Unity is popular here, and don’t get me wrong I am also here because I hated the corporate asshole named spez, but this move Unity wants to make isn’t super unreasonable. They want to charge proportionally to the amount of usage. If they’d done this right out of the gate, nobody would have thought that is unreasonable. Unity is a great engine, they should be able to charge for it.
If they’d done this right out of the gate, nobody would have thought that is unreasonable.
That’s ridiculous. There’s no technical way they can accurately detect repeat installs on the same device, or pirated copies. Which means devs will pay out the nose for no reason. The outrage exists for a reason
“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.” - blog.unity.com/…/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updat…
Q: How are you going to collect installs? A: We leverage our own proprietary data model. We believe it gives an accurate determination of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project.
Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game, will that count as multiple installs? A: We are not going to charge a fee for reinstalls. The spirit of this program is and has always been to charge for the first install and we have no desire to charge for the same person doing ongoing installs. (Updated, Sep 14)
Note the update there. They completely walked back their previous answer:
Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs? A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data.
Which has lead to a lot of confusion. It seems like their “proprietary data model” is focused on another point, which is preventing install spamming. Or maybe it’s also about reinstalls, even though they “don’t receive end-player information” so that was impossible a few days ago.
Well, I am just going by what their own official statement is:
“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.”
But the link that you sent indeed sounds a lot more vague. It’d be a major mistake on their part if they are not going to be transparant on how they are going to do the counting.
It’s based on downloads. It is easy to track those.
“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.” blog.unity.com/…/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updat…
Games qualify for the Unity Runtime Fee after two criteria have been met: 1) the game has passed a minimum revenue threshold in the last 12 months
So revenue still need to be tracked like it was before so they know when to start charging. This just adds another metric to track, not replacing anything and does not make anything easier.
Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share
This from the CEO of unity John Riccitiello who introduced loot boxes at EA and famously called developers that don’t have ongoing monetisation of games fucking idiots. Yeah, fuck that shit. This will just penalise developers that sell their game and don’t constantly try to grab as much money from their user base as they can. Exactly what he wants to see. Fuck that guy he seems to destroy everything he touches.
Once you’ve begun collecting money for your product, you’ll need to track gross revenue and pay a 5% royalty on that amount after $1 million USD in gross revenue is earned.
Also, right now Unity forces you to take a subscription to their paid version when you make more than $100k a year.
I was wondering how they would do it with tiny companies using excel spreadsheets to track… but if it’s only 1M+ companies they have to have decent books, so that makes it easy.
Once you hit a $1m target, they’ll be wanting to see your books yeah. That is a much smaller number and doable. Believe me, tracking revenue of other companies is a pain in the ass though. I’ve done a number of OEM deals and revenue based OEM deals are much more complicated than usage based OEM deals.
You want to run a pearson correlation line throught the number of downloads and the amount of usage. You’ll find P approaches 1. I don’t have the data, but if you do I’m willing to take the bet.
Would you pay 20ct every time you open a pdf ? Why not then ?
No, but I would pay for a PDF reader based on the number of times I install this PDF reader if for some reason this PDF reader offers features that I can’t get from some open-source tool. Especially if that means I get support, bug fixes, support for different devices and the like, which Unity does. This is not an uncommon model at all.
Yes, if I would make more than 20 cents of of it, let’s say 40 cents, and the company that I am paying to is offering a major service to me that would make it otherwise near impossible for me to make such a PDF, then sure.
If I get payed 40 cents every time it is opened this isn’t a problem. He can open it as many times as he wants. I’ll happily pay the 20c and keep the rest as profits. If my income is proportional to usage and my costs are proportional to usage there is no problem. I don’t see why this could not hold for games or for PDFs?
The bottom line: if somehow you’ve made a game and it is installed a lot, but you don’t make enough money off of that such that you can’t pay your suppliers then you’ve just failed at commerce.
A friend of mine failed at commerce once. She had a clothing store. In the clothing business you’ve got seasons. So typically shop owners buy a whole lot of clothes in bulk for the entire season. Her shop didn’t survive the economic down turn of 2008/2009. So she was left with huge amounts of clothes and an enormous bill to pay, which she had to default on. Unity’s business model is extremely mild compared to that industry. I also still fail to see how it is not fair.
Proportional does not mean one equates the other. It means that while one goes up, the other goes up as well. It’s not going to be some constant factor and it’ll depend on the game, but you should expect that for every license you may have a handful of installs. You simply need to account for that. If you would have to come up with a mathematical function that estimates the number of installs your game is going to have and you know the amount of users, would you use the amount of users as a coefficient in your function? If so, then that means it is proportional. If not, then please enlighten me how you would guess the number of installs without the number of users.
Now the next question is, is it fair? Why not? One business model will be the license model, but another business model could be based on usage. Perhaps long time users are buying in-game items, doing upgrades, looking at ads, are willing to shell out extra money for different devices, etc. Unity’s business model should work for all business models in such a way that they can be paid their dues. Also, the more a game is used the more demand this puts on the developer for upgrades, bug/security fixes, supporting other devices, etc. This demand will translate into demand on Unity, which makes it only fair that Unity gets payed some amount based on installs.
Ok, whatever dude. I made a whole bunch of quality arguments, refuted all of yours thus far and you’re now only just repeating that it is stupid. I am truly and honestly willing to change my mind if you can come up with a good point that I’ve not thought of, but I’m not going to spend anymore time on you make until you make an argument.
And it’s not only you. I’ve debated the lot of you. Not a single good argument thus far. Just a bunch of haters who like to name call and tell me that it is stupid or that I am stupid without actually being able to properly provide reasoning for that claim. So at the risk of being the emperor without clothes, it just seems to me that a whole bunch of gamers love hating on Unity without actually understanding why this business model is actually not unreasonable because it threatens the status quo.
If you don’t see the problem of arbitrarily having to pay more than you earn using a shady number from their ass I won’t be able to convince you.
Maybe ask yourself why you are alone thinking this is a good system and why so much people are ready to yeet their projects or businesses and take the risk of switching to a more honest engine.
It’s not just “fail at commerce”. What about those who spent the last 10 years developing their projects and fine-tuning their business model, only to get thrown on the toilet like that ?
This is not failing at commerce. Unity failed at commerce, in fact unity failed almost everything, and now it’s also a big fucking lack of respect.
Let’s say you have a free game, that’s pretty popular. You offer some cosmetic stuff players can buy, and/or a few ads. The game gets really popular, and you exceed $200000 income. You also have millions of downloads of the game.
In that case you could end up owing unity money, because a download/install is not the same as a sale.
Now imagine you published this game a month ago and it’s popularity is climbing, and your income is slowly climbing too.
Do you gamble that the game will be profitable, or do you delist the game because you risk bankrupting yourself if you don’t?
Edit: also, what’s stopping them from changing it to $2 per install, or $20? You have no guarantee. Not something you’d feel comfortable building your business on, and sink years of development into.
Edit2:
geometry dash lite - 100M+ downloads
Roblox - 500M+ downloads
Solitaire - 10M+ downloads
angry Birds 2 - 100M+ downloads
If they’d be made in unity, they would each have owed unity millions just from downloads. I’m not sure they’re that profitable…
If it’s a free game then you shouldn’t be using a commercial engine. If you do use a commercial engine in a commercial setting then you need to make sure that you make a profit after you’ve payed your costs. This is not different from any other type of commercial enterprise.
If you are going to go with an ad based model for your game, like you suggest, then you should be able to make a profit if enough people use your game, which should be somewhat proportional to the amount of installs. People aren’t just going to install your product and never use it. What could happen of course is that they use it once or twice and determine it’s total crap and then don’t spend any time actually playing it, so not enough ads can be displayed. In that case you should indeed delist the game, because it isn’t viable. This should be easy to track based on the number of downloads and ads revenue. But of course if your game is crap then you can also expect people to not download it in the first place, so it isn’t a very realistic scenario. If your game is slowly becoming more popular, like you suggest, then you should be able to make enough of of it to pay your dues.
Perhaps what could happen is that you manage to stir up an incredible amount of hype around your game. A ton of people download it and then simultaneously determine it is crap without listening to game reviews and such. However, in this case I can hardly imagine that the business model was ad based revenue when you’ve got the marketing budget to stir up such a hype.
Nevertheless I wouldn’t say it is completely out of the realm of possibility to get cornered by Unity’s business model, or any third party business model as of fact, but it’s unlikely if you think it through. And that is actually part of the risk of entrepreneurship that you need manage. A friend of mine also had a clothing store and bought a bunch of clothes that in the end she couldn’t sell and needed to default on her payments. It happens. The clothing store industry is much harder than the game industry: you need to buy everything up front and then hope that you’re going to be able to sell it.
Unless you’re dealing with a liberal open-source license, you can’t just expect to go out into the world and use somebody else’s work without having to deal with these types of issues. And that is just fair, if you’d ask me.
If your revenue is above $100.000 the last 12 months, you need a professional license. Which you pay for. The “free for smaller games” is what allowed Unity to gain it’s current foothold in the market. This install fee will be in addition to that. And for all games, including older games or games made on older versions of unity.
It takes years to develop a game, and Unity announced this pretty recently (September 12). If you had a plan that would be profitable with ads or microtransactions and you and your team spent years making it, you’d suddenly might not have a business model any more. And for games already released, it might not be profitable keeping it up any more. Unless you have a way to predict the future, that point is completely moot. If you started developing a new game the last … 5 days, sure. But then you’d probably pick a different engine that doesn’t have such a requirement.
I can fully imagine that some people who counted on the old business model are really fucking bummed out by this change, need to rethink their business strategy and feel forced with their back against the wall. That has got to be a major pain in the ass and disappointment.
I am unsure why Unity is making this change. Perhaps they are just greedy bastards, perhaps they need it to survive or perhaps something in between. Regardless, if you would be in Unity’s position and would want to do this change then I don’t see a way an easy way around it. Even if they’d decide that older versions are licensed in the old way, then that would potentially mean you’d get a whole bunch of people sticking to an old version, which of course opens up a whole new can of worms that they might have good reasons for not wanting to open up.
While everyone is up in arms and hating on Unity my entire point was only to say that the business model that they are proposing isn’t unreasonable. Paying per installation. People are acting like it is totally unreasonable to charge for the number of installs, as if Unity isn’t a core ingredient of all those shipped products. It seems like people lose critical thinking skills when they get emotional.
This is not to say that it doesn’t suck monkeyballs for those affected. I use a free ferry service quite often where I live. It’s great and it would suck ass if the municipality would start charging for it, but I wouldn’t pretend that it is totally unfair that they decided to ask money for it.
PS some person accused me of using ChatGPT while directing their Unity hate onto me, but I truly don’t, so I am keeping my wall of text because I think it gets my point across more effectively.
If they’d done this right out of the gate, nobody would have thought that is unreasonable.
More realistically, a lot of Devs would’ve never have chosen it, thereby not having it to become as popular as it is today. Something else would’ve taken its place, simple.
But why do they want to charge based on usage? Their users are already subscribed. It’s not like they run cloud services or anything. There is literally no cost to them except for the self imposed analytics stuff.
Let me ask you the reverse with a hypothetical: imagine that you spend a great deal of time building a library for generating realistic engine sounds, like this guy. Now you make an OEM deal with Sony and your work goes into the next version of Gran Turismo. Now let’s say everybody loves the new version, because of the great engine sound and a number of other awesome features. Would you want your work to be rewarded by how much value Sony extracted from it? You would right? (otherwise tell me why not and we’ll have that discussion, but I can hardly imagine you’ll say no to this)
Then put yourself in Unity’s position. It’s not one company you’ve got to track, but perhaps hundreds of thousands. New ones popping up, old ones dying without a trace. You want to be rewarded for your continuous effort based on how much value people are getting from your product. This is only reasonable, right? Now you’ve got to come up with a way to do that. So one way to do that would be to track the revenue of each developer and charge a percentage. This is mission impossible. Perhaps you can do that with the larger companies, who are less likely to forge data and easy to get hold of, but you’ve got thousands on thousands of developers that are making peanuts or making just enough that are one man shops. There is also no reliable way to get accurate revenue data from developers across the world. You can’t just ask the tax office of the Philippines or Norway for income statements of random developers. So instead they use a heuristic, which is very common by the way. The heuristic goes like this: revenue ∝ usage ∝ installs ∝ downloads (∝ means “is proportional to”, but in this context I think it would be better to say: “correlates highly with”) .
Now if you proof to me that downloads does not positively or significantly correlate with revenue made then I’ll agree with all the people who feel they need to hate on Unity right now, but the way I see it this isn’t an unreasonable business model.
One last thing. It is an oversimplification to say that Unity doesn’t have any cost to usage. Sure once the binaries have been built, there are no costs to those binaries being copied across the globe, but more usage means more demands on the developer, which translates to demands on Unity to make sure their engine works well on all platforms and devices and is able to keep up with the queries and demands of the developer. Imagine just having to QA the Unity engine; it’s gotta be an enormous undertaking. They’ve got to offer active support on a number of versions (n) of their platform for a number of platforms (m) and supported devices/hardware (o). That makes n^m^o combinations that could cause issues and then still that is an oversimplification. A game that is used a lot is going to hit a lot of these combinations and that’ll certainly translate into a lot more work for Unity to ship updates. So I would even argue that usage ∝ costs.
Yes you did. But, to be fair, in case you didn’t, why don’t we say chatGPT-like then, to make you feel better.
And I’ve seen others say the same thing about those huge walls of text that are semi-nonsensical lazy ramblings to other people, so I’m not the only one expressing this opinion.
Honestly I didn’t. Have a nice life, I’ll not be responding anymore.
If you’re being truthful, then my only advice would be that if you want people to actually consider what you’re saying then you should be less verbose and more straightforward when you say it.
And also, maybe modify your writing style, it reads very much like chatGPT.
If they’d done this right out of the gate, they would not have nearly the market share they have today, let alone all of the free advertising in the form of guides, courses, Q&As, and general expertise.
Imagine you buy a licence for Microsoft Office, you make a word document, share it with friends/colleagues and you are charged a penny for every single time someone downloads that document on their device.
That’s only fair if I am making three pennies for every single time someone downloads that document. Microsoft Office made it possible and so the deserve a share.
Unity isn’t only a tool. Unity is also an ingredient. It’s shipped with the product and is an integral part of what makes the product work. Most OEM deal out there also depend on usage.
You want to ship a product with Neo4j (or any other software developer) under the hood? Go make an OEM deal with Neo4j and I’ll bet you it is going to be some deal that will be proportional to the amount of usage your product is going to get. Which is only fair of course.
Your race car driver analogy makes no sense by the way. A developer makes a product and that product is shipped many times to a lot of people. You could think of Unity as a pizza bottom and a pizza oven. The developer puts stuff on top, bakes it in the oven and then it is shipped to people. The developer has to pay for the pizza bottom and the cost of the tool will be discounted. The developer charges a price such that after subtracting the cost of the pizza bottom there will be a nice profit. Profit and cost will be proportional to the amount of pizza’s eaten.
In your altered (before it was a race driver?) car rental company analogy, the developer would be the car rental company and Unity the car company? This would mean the developer would rent Unity to its users? Still not making any sense dude.
Apart from analogies. Here are some facts.
A commercial game is a product made by a developer
Unity is a tool that can be used by developer to make commercial games
Unity is also a part of what makes the product work and is shipped with the product.
Unity itself is a commercial product
Take any other kind of commercial product that is shipped along with a commercial product. Is it unfair to charge based upon the number of times that product is shipped?
In your altered (before it was a race driver?) car rental company analogy,
Nope, was always a rental car company analogy.
the developer would be the car rental company and Unity the car company? This would mean the developer would rent Unity to its users?
No, a car manufacturer makes the car (that would be Unity (and then sells it to their customers (which would be the developers).
Now if a developer was a rental car company, and they rented the car out to their customers, the rental car company doesn’t do payback to the car manufacturer, Unity.
Still not making any sense dude.
You’re overthinking it to win an Internet argument.
No, a car manufacturer makes the car (that would be Unity (and then sells it to their customers (which would be the developers).
Now if a developer was a rental car company, and they rented the car out to their customers, the rental car company doesn’t do payback to the car manufacturer, Unity.
That’s what I thought also. I mean they could legally also add that for every instalation of an old game the developer would have to send nude pics to Unity CEO?
Be warned, Zenva runs on cloudflare and if you’re on mobile, you’ll be rate limited. I’m currently locked out of my brand new zenva purchases because of this stupid shit.
The general sentiment is that the publisher did all the work, and the charity needs the money the most. Humble Bundle is a fantastic platform, but they are a middle man than takes a slice for bundling the products and presenting them to you. That has value, but the other two options deserve a majority of the pie.
They could easily make more money with the same image by limiting how much revenue goes to the charities. You can choose to not give them anything.
I'm not saying they aren't in it for the money. Most people need to make money to survive. But I think it's disingenuous to say they don't care at all. I think they do good and I feel many others agree.
A corporate marketing tool that costs such a large portion of your revenue is an inefficient tool. There must be some other value in it for them.
I have no idea what their motivation was, but the charity angle is a great way to differentiate themselves from Steam. I would guess they would not be so successful without it.
You haven't been able to give them nothing for over 2 years now. For this particular bundle, the minimum split for Humble is 30% and the default split is an insane 45% to Humble, 50% to the company and 5% to charity.
Humble is unfortunately still coursing by on their old reputation of being charity-friendly, but they changed to be one of the worst players around years ago. That goodwill from back then has really been depleted.
I’m fine with them even without the charity honestly. They sell DRM free books for cheap which is the only way I’m actually going to pay for digital books. We need more of that.
Humble has coincidentally been a lot more shit since then too. I used to buy game bundles all the time, now it’s $20 to get maybe 2-3 games worth playing instead of $15 for 5-6 indie titles that were genuinely good.
Wouldn't be bad at all, since Dollar is the only language John Riticiello (the guy doesn't deserve me looking up how he's spelled... so that's what I go for...) speaks. Not fluently, but still.
I want to know who hired that fucking CEO and put him up to purposefully tank Unity.
This can’t be anything less than a blatant attempt to destroy a company so who would have a vested interest in destroying Unity? It can’t just be for money.
Sadly, there often comes a time when a critical mass of the business leaders decide “you know what, I want to cash out and no matter how disastrous this will be long term, I think short term this will milk some revenue out of some captive audience”.
In the IT industry, that time is usually when Broadcom buys you.
Oh, plenty of business “geniuses” make some pretty boneheaded moves, especially when they feel a need to try to produce huge growth after saturating a market, or if their business results somehow fall short of some need (either actually losing money, or some arbitrary self-imposed “goal” not being hit).
Currently there’s an epidemic of businesses making some pretty dubious long term decisions for the sake of trying to prop up numbers amidst a receding market reality. Recessions are, in part, a self-fulfilling prophecy, where whatever impetus exists, it’s exacerbated by every participant screwing things up further.
In the software side of IT, this is usually when you start seeing layoffs and a mass replacement of talented developers with bottom-of-the-barrel offshore contractors. Beware the following fail cascade.
It is Big Godot pulling the strings to entice people to jump ship to their free and open source game engine. The plan is dastardly, but effective. Can’t use other game engines if there are no other engines left standing.
I see these bundles but I always assume they are trash.
Are they trash? I haven’t been interested until now, but I’ve been meaning to learn a bit of game dev as a hobby and unity isn’t really an option anymore.
I did buy one of those Zenva bundles some time ago for Godot - seems to have very similar content to this one. It’s alright. Target audience are beginners but I suspect that we’ll get a lot more beginner tutorials on YT anyways.
That’s always the conflict here, the free content on YouTube is just frequently so good. I guess I’ll just take a look for godot stuff right now and then decide.
I much prefer written guides for anything that interests me over YouTube videos that are unnecessarily long. Plus the false attempts to get engagement (sometimes by making statements that are maliciously stupid) to appease the algorithm like:
What are your preferred ways to consume content? I prefer carrier pigeon, it’s easily the best. Let me know in the comments below if you have a preferred way, and don’t forget to like and subscribe.
Depends if you’re interested in them or not. I bought the NisiOisiN (Monogatari series) bundle a few years ago and got my value out of it. Too bad the Metadata wasn’t in the same format on all of them and I had to edit it afterwards.
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