This whole thing is absurd and overcomplicated - they could have just copied Unreal and slightly undercut them.
It isn't too complicated, but for example, a game which made $2 million in gross revenue would owe Epic Games $50,000, because it would pay 5 percent of $1 million, keeping the first million entirely—minus whatever other fees are owed, such as Steam's cut.
There should also absolutely have been a grandfather clause for games already released.
I get Unity needs to make money. They've never been profitable. But they've seriously overcomplicated the whole thing and gotten people angry at them.
“We leverage our own proprietary data model and will provide estimates of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project – this estimate will cover an invoice for all platforms.”
Estimating how many copies you sold based on your own ‘data models’ which is impossible to track? Isn’t that like a giant red flag for laundering money?
Yeah I don’t understand how that works. Will that even stand up to a lawsuit? Wouldn’t they have to give up stuff in discovery if a game company sues to find how they were billed?
I think it’s crazy that they want to write invoices based on estimations. Why didn’t I ever do that? “Oh yeah, I estimate that I worked about um… 2 weeks on that feature.”
I may get downvoted to hell for this, but besides the shady business practices, Unity sucks as a game engine. You can just feel the engine eating resources for no good reason and the gfx don’t come close to UE5.
Oh, I don’t think anybody will disagree that Unity is completely unoptimized and barebones compared to Unreal. It is also hard to learn and confusing compared to Godot.
There used to be a huge amount of people that wanted exactly something easier to learn than Unreal and more featureful than Godot. But those two improved in a way that this niche may not even exist anymore. Anyway, currently Unity has that unbeatable marketplace, and I really don’t know if there’s a good enough replacement somewhere, but I don’t see any other reason to use it.
(But then, I’m not really a game developer. I’ve used those here or there, for fun.)
Not quite. Unity isn’t poorly optimized, but it’s not great either. Unity also is very easy to learn, hence the number of really shit games put out from it.
Source: have been using Unity for the past 10 years
From a hobbyist dev who dabbled with Unity for several years: The worst part about the engine imo is the fragmentation of the entire ecosystem.
There are three major rendering pipelines (HDRP, URP, Legacy), each with their own specific quirks, configurations and dependencies, which are entirely incompatible with eachother.
Foundational packages (input handling, networking etc.) change/break way too often or have been deprecated for years without replacement (uNet) and rely on 3d party packages.
And don’t even start with the documentation for any of the above. Multiple times have I found documentation for a rendering callback or ShaderLab parameter claiming it would be compatible with URP only to find that the documentation was supposed to be for HRDP.
I only just googled them, but they do look quite different. I assume some are specialised in 2D games, platformers or role playing or mobile games. Godot seems to be the most sophisticated engine and supports 2D as well as 3D.
Haven’t tried any of those other ones you mentioned, but i can vouch for Godot, it’s pretty amazing (granted, i’m not a professional developer, but Godot has worked great for my hobby projects)
Unity’s current CEO is an ex-exec from EA. but at least it looks like in 2021 they got around to replacing the CFO from 2015, who was previously also an EA ex-exec that was hired as such the year after the CEO was brought on board from EA. The hirings coincided with many rapid, scummy changes to their subscriptions and dev support. I expect many lies yesterday, today, tomorrow, and beyond as they now focus on squeezing their non-subbed devs
Wow, a proprietary quasi monopoly changes their business model into something extremely exploitative and hostile. I am totally surprised! Shocked even! Blimey!
Seriously, why spend years of your life learning to work with some technology that can at anytime be made instantly obsolete or impractical to use when some random asshole you don’t know decides something dumb. If there’s a FOSS alternative, always prefer that.
I looked into it briefly after hearing this news and saw people talking about Godot. It’s for 2D and 3D multi-platform games and you can use C#, C++ and others. Sounds pretty cool
The other cool kid on the block right now is bevy. It’s less of an engine for people who just want something to write their game in, though, but more of a framework for people looking to write their own engine. There’s practically nothing you can’t customise or replace in that thing, it’s built to be both flexible and performant.
I’m really hoping some of the bigger Unity devs, like the people that made Rust or Among Us sue, as most of us don’t have enough money to even stand a chance in court against Unity’s lawyers…especially once they have all that nice runtime money to spend. 😒
Thinking small there, there are several Unity games published by big dick AAA corps.
Like Hearthstone, most of Kings catalog, the Doom ports were wrapped in Unity. Plus there’s a lot of Unity games on Gamepass and that’s Xbox 's bread and butter right now so Microsoft could just slap the shit out of em or just buy em out entirely (might be smart just for the King purchase itself).
My guess is that AAA developers will just negotiate individual contracts that are more favorable for the developers. They’re not going to sue when they can just work out a special deal.
I've seen the "Microsoft should just buy Unity" argument a lot lately. And while I think it's probably a better management than current, I imagine Microsoft is hesitant having only just come out of a, what, 6 month long legal battle in US and EU courts regarding acquisition of ActiBliz? So a good idea, but one I can imagine might not happen...
Yeah, it kind of sucks that Microsoft being an even bigger unstoppable monopoly would have actually helped in these instances… at least in the short term… hopefully something less future terrible comes along to solve the short term problems instead at least.
Gaming isn’t the only thing they do though, cornering multiple markets as one company is the definition of a monopoly. The merger was thoroughly investigated as to whether it would be unfair competitively, that is a different way of saying they were worried it was gonna be a monopoly, and in that case they were even only concerned about the gaming market.
I’m not just throwing around random terms, it is indeed approaching a monopoly. And could indeed be bad long term, even if it gets rid of kotick and helps clean up blizzard in the short term. And that’s a pretty big if.
I honestly don’t think MS really wants to own Unity. Like, sure, there’s a small amount of synergy because some of their games use it, but owning Unity also means committing resources to support and improve it and competing with Unreal to an extent.
If anyone would be interested in buying Unity I’d think it’d be a Chinese corp like Tencent or NetEase or else a publisher that works with a lot of indies like Devolver or maybe Embracer.
Well yesterday, Unity decided they were gonna get Sony and Nintendo and Microsoft to pay the fees for smaller studios (lmao wat).
I don’t think Unity understands exactly how many top-tier lawyers those companies are going to bring to the table in the interest of legally curbstomping then.
Maybe that’s the point. Unity caves immediately to the big lawyers and says “Sorry guys, we tried. Looks like all you little studios will have to pay up after all. Blame Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft”
And then their customers sue the ever loving fuck out of Unity and win, because they’re not only looking at breach of contract, but also monopolistic and predatory business practices (they were basically forcing smaller studios to switch from a competitor mobile analytics platform to their in house platform). Either Unity’s exec suite didn’t consult the lawyers, like, at all… or their legal team should be disbarred. Unity is fucked unless they do a complete 180 and clean out the C-suite.
Does this mean that the “Report on install” feature is already in the old release? It’s a reasonable feature to already have, I assume Unity gives you a handful of statistics “for free” as part of using the engine.
However there is a difference between “installs” the number and “installs” the billing number. A website might have 1,000 page views. So 1,000 users? Well we need unique page views. What makes a page view unique? What if someone visits your website but leaves after 2 seconds, do we count those?
In addition to being a terrible decision I don’t think the company is prepared at all for this decision.
No, they have some magical “proprietary method” for determining those, with additional hand-waving for not counting “illegitimate” installs. Translation: they pull these numbers out of their ass, fuck you.
A pre-sale cut could be considered “reasonable” since there’s a paper trail with real numbers that basically everyone can agree on. Unity is just trying to muddy the waters.
My understanding is that one of the services Unity provides Devs is analytics telemetry, and they just have to hook into that to read some telemetry of their own.
Lmao when you’re trying to turn your company into a bloodsucking vampire but you forgot that long ago, you told your lawyer to chain the coffin in case this very thing happened.
Facebook (a long time ago), Twitter, Reddit, Google (they even removed the don’t be evil modo), now Unity. Apple being Apple… Arduino going closed source, Raspberry Pi becoming for profit. Samsung, at least never ever even tried to look nice.
It’s a time where the kings are pulling as hard as they can on their rope until the day it breaks and their heads start flying. The people can be stepped on but only for so long.
Sure, but they also say you can use an old version if you prefer the old terms. Basically, that if they update the terms, it’ll only apply to the current/future versions.
So just stop using the current version. Just use the old version which still has the old terms. You never agreed to the new terms, and under the terms you agreed to, you can continue to use the old terms.
That poses an interesting question. If they can change the terms, and say that you agree to the changes by continuing to use their software, and they remove the clause allowing you to use the previous agreement, then can you use the previous agreement? It’s a bit of a buried shovel problem. Have you agreed to not use a previous agreement by continuing to use the software, or can you stick to the old agreement that lets you use the old agreement?
They can change the terms, but if you don’t sign the new terms then you have never accepted the new terms.
For some reason, companies think they can write anything into their terms and think it matters. It doesn’t. Most contracts aren’t worth the paper it’s written on.
“By continuing to use the software, you agree to the new terms…” which is, of course, hogwash, but wouldn’t stop them from say “Sorry, the new terms were released and you agreed, so pay up.”
Depends on how long your license is for. If you have a 1 year license and they change the terms, you are going to have to sign new terms for the next year’s license.
“Your right Gary! The best way to endear our current users to us AND make more money is to take a big, heaping, smelly shit right into their mouths. While they are coping with that amazing gift we’ll just sneak off with their wallets. BAM! Money motherfucker!”
Reddit, Twitter, Google, Twitch, Meta, you name it, they’re all having to find new ways to make money now that the decade-long bullrun of low interest rates and endless VC money is over.
Looks like 2023 will be remembered as the year of big size enshittification. So many companies going to shit. Reddit with restricting API access, Twitter with…everything really, Google with its DRM and now Unity…great year so far, right?
lemmy.today
Oldest