Unity Developers Are Scared for Their Future 

😂

I guess he’s running unity the same way he ran EA: like the fxxking titanic

Well that explains a lot.

That's rough

Yeah, that explains it.

I agree, but the Japanese make their own and often exclusive due to Playstation and Switch having their own graphics APIs, and 95% of their gaming market being these two systems.

I never understood why Nintendo has only dipped their toe into third party engines (with Yoshi’s crafted world and Pikmin 4) and primarily stuck with in-house engines UNTIL now.

If true, this is actually hilarious. The man KNOWS he’s being stupid, he just doesn’t care. I’d almost admire him, if he wasn’t screwing over the entire game industry in the process.

Remember fellas! Insider trading is illegal! Unless you're above the law like a politician or Multi-millionaire!

That is litterally illegal.

Insider trading?

So insider trading then, remind me again how any of this allowed

Can't be legal. They want to retroactively apply this to deals they made with gaming companies. That is highly illegal. I don't see how they through this would be a good thing.

Ah, EA is involved, even tangentially. That explains a lot.

this is certainly legal. Anyone thinking otherwise doesn't understand legal basics. Is it STUPID yes, but also legal.

@@walktxrn but how? You can't alter a deal you've made after the fact and then start demanding more money for individual game downloads. You can't alter a deal post signing in almost every case so how is this any different?

@@joshbracken5450Unity licenses are subscription based, it is the same as Netflix or Gamepass raising prices, devs are free to cancel their subscription. It is insanely scummy, and I can’t imagine this will end up taking effect, but it is in no way illegal.

Lol fuck mobile games! Bunch of cash lootbox gacha garbage.

​@LetsPlayNintendoITAthat's still a download

@@edowardo1353and it's not even per download but per install

@@jeffmccloud905 the 12 months thing is about the games that respect the requirements in the LAST 12 months. You don't have a timer and then if you pass 200k revenue this won't apply to you

​​​@@jeffmccloud905 f2p games rely on having a high install base to offset the fact that individual people dont pay much. The fees they have to pay for that install base are going to be extremely disproportionate compared to the amount of revenue they actually get. People wouldnt be anywhere near this mad if Unity just did the reasonable thing and took a small cut of the revenue like other engines, the issue is that installs are completely fucking stupid metric to charge devs by because it says nothing about what their actual income is and it's extremely easy to exploit

Hello Godot here ;)

Thanks for saying this. As a dev with a game in EA who has spent all day in tears over this, knowing this is the exact scenario I'm headed for (rebuilding in Unreal). It was nice to hear.

@@glutenfreegames8789 To have the rug pulled out from you like this is brutal. I hope the general gaming audiences can understand how much of a negative impact this has, and I hope they know where to place the blame... With Unity not devs like you.

If they can't change engines, they'll probably need to add 5, prefably 10$ to the game price to have a safety net against Unity.

My prices just rose by 20 cents 😢

After 200k downloads, I'll just disable downloads and release my own cracked version of my game. Cuz fuck Riccitiello

@@jmanners You could actually pre-crack your own game, and release it as a physical release in that scenario.

the universe it makes sense in is the one where Unity execs see their primary customers as F2P Mobile Game skinnerboxes that they can extract *juuuuust* enough from to keep their whale-hunting business model viable. No other business model is even remotely compatible with this sort of setup. That's what video games are to the people who made this decision

@@Exarian Thats Dark : )

basically securom again.

Godot is close, and open source.

Riccitiello (the Unity CEO) has expressed strongly how he wants developers to lean more into monetization strategies for their games, going as far as calling developers who don't use predatory monetization practices as "fucking idiots" in an interview.

​​@@jmannersyeah, cuz he's a greedy sack of sh**. This isn't a recurring trend. Look what DnD tried to do earlier this year or how microtransactions have become flagrantly predatory at the expense of player experience over the past 15 years. This is just another normal day in corporate America where the jackals run the show and investors are insatiably greedy.

More than likely it just means a lot of free/cheap games are going to disappear now as developers are terrified of *losing* money on their games

Well if you had to pay extra to play Unity games no one would touch them with a ten foot pole. So let's hope they're not that stupid, I guess.

"Much less popular"? It'll outright *kill* them, because this means there's literally no incentive to use it instead of learning an alternative that doesn't pull this bs.

It also discourages them from including their games in humble bundles, or placing them on services like Gamepass. And it inherently discourages demos and trials because devs still need to pay fees.

“Only good for Unity” Is it even good for Unity? Indie devs, who are probably the ones most likely to use Unity, will absolute flee from Unity over the next few years if this sticks around. This seems pretty self-destructive, imo.

funny enough, doing the math for a company as large as Hoyoverse, this is actually several times cheaper than the revenue share they'd pay if they were on Unreal Engine. It mainly affects small businesses.

Unity trying to nit destroy itself as company (impossible) next thing they would want is your ID and credit card number info

Or godot

As someone who trusted unity and now depends on them trust me just learn fucking unreal

It sucks because, personally,I don't really like the look and feel for the games I develop.

you should start building your skills in other engines, in parallel at least, and not wait to the last minute

Use Godot, cuz unreal can F you too. Never trust CorpoRAT. Learn in pararel.

Raise the price 20 cents I guess

@@astrahcat1212 it's per install, people who uninstall and re-install a lot (there are many of them) can tank the profits of even a high cost game, never mind an indie game.

Godot is free, Godot is fos

You should ask for crowdfunding to switch to Unreal or another engine. I’m sure you’d get support for it.

Godot is rather pretty easy to learn, especially when you already have experience in Unity.

You mean September 6th? But yea, that sounds illegal.

Oh god, imagine how scummy that would actually be. Sell stocks, announce this, buy them back for cheaper, then possibly "backpedal because of community feedback".

@@LillLizzertI think that’s exactly what’s gonna happen. Pure scum

Insiders sell stock all the time. 2000 shares isn't that much compared to what he likely has. He's sold wayyyy more over the past year which is far more concerning than the 2000 sold here.

"On September 6, 2023, John Riccitiello, President and CEO of Unity Software Inc (NYSE:U), sold 2,000 shares of the company. This move is part of a larger trend for the insider, who over the past year has sold a total of 50,610 shares and purchased none." from yahoo

If I knew this was gonna happen I would of learnt unreal back in 2009

or godot, regret for only learning unity on 2023

Godot is fos

Yea, it's not good....

Smaller devs are NOT making enough money for this to effect them. It only kicks in after you're making 200k annually on your games, and only while you're making that much off of them.

@@PixelDough They are still getting screwed over unfortunately. Unity is also taking away the payment tier that most indie developers use ($40 a year), only allowing a free splash screen version or one where you need to pay $2000+ a year instead. That prices tons of devs entirely out of the engine, unless they are okay with a very unprofessional splash screen.

imagine giving away 200k copies of a game to a charity event and getting charged for it by Unity.

​@@Haxx1337That's irrelevant because the fee is retroactive. Who's to say Unity will not decide those pre profit copies people downloaded should be considered actual copies and charge you for that?

No because this only affects developers who have made over a million dollars using Unity projects (Not trying to defend Unity)

@@jude4581 Thanks for the clarification

No since it's very unlikely that their budget will be more than $200000 or they would need to install over 2000000 computers

​@@jude4581its not 1M is 200k

Nothing because this only applies to games that hit a certain revenue threshold (for now)

Sonic P-06 also a Unity game.

​@@JakeLT64free demos also count apparently

Unfortunately, Sonic Utopia's creator seems to be a bigot who rants against trans people and drew stuff like a really offensive Chinese stereotype and yelling the hard R/N word because freedom or some crazy right wing baloney. It's a pity he is such a piece of work.

Damn it! If this kills Sonic P-06 I hope Sega pick it up as an official remake.@@bluestar5812

it's not. they will likely have many lawsuits if they go through with this.

Unity will be filing for bankruptcy next year.

​@matthewmorris8685 Could you explain specifically how it is illegal? I've gotten so many mixed signals, from panicked people (like me) saying it shouldn't be legal, and "realist'-sounding people just sighing and saying "Nope, nothing can be done about this"

@@GardenVarietea It's illegal because they are charging extra money from developers who have already shipped their games using a contract that did not stipulate that new charge. This means that they are modifying a pre-arranged and completed contract. it'd be like me selling you a car for $1000, then you buy the car for $1000, and then three years later i modify the contract to be $10,000 for that car that you had already bought for $1000. Obviously if i tried to charge you the extra $9000 after all that time it'd be illegal, and you would take me to court for trying to steal $9000 that you never agreed to pay for that product. This is essentially what unity is doing to these developers, by trying to force them to pay money for reasons that weren't stated on the contract, without notice, because the game is already out there in the market and the devs cannot stop people from installing the game and incurring that charge. Even if they removed the game from every store they will still be charged when people who already bought the game re-installed it. Sorry for the long reply, i wanted to go fully in-depth on this topic.

3d game = YES! 2d game = no (godot, Game Maker)

Also, this is a friendly reminder that Unreal 5 is royalty-free until your game makes $1M USD, and after that they only take 5%.

I could see myself switching to Godot from Unreal one day if Godot had better VR tools development options. Godot also still needs to get Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo support but I have high hopes for Godots future.

Literally same here, started learning unity yesterday and now I’m not sure 🤔

​@@Gecko_buildsif you're just 1 day from starting, just change engine, no reason to risk

@@edowardo1353fair point, better to be safe 🫡

I find Godot better for pure 2D games anyways

Any experience with 3D in godot?

For every day the shareholders are not setting up a massive lawsuit to sue his ass for intentional sabotage, I lose faith in the shareholders

It's been happening so frequently it has to be more than a coincidence. I wonder if inflation is putting greater pressure on companies to make these stupid decisions to ensure they keep netting a profit for their shareholders.

They could literally just ask for 3% revenue in royalties if you make enough money and still be cheaper than their biggest competitor, Unreal. This charges their biggest clients like Hoyoverse only 1% split, but their smallest customers with 2$ games will pay 80%, more than they get from the game after they pay Steam or Apple their cut.

This would be better, Unreal is doing that too.

I've been learning Godot the last few months. It has its issues but is a very promising piece of software.

GoDot is probably the way to go. Unreal will probably pull a shiit move like this too or even worse by the time you're almost done learning it.

​@@gxguy2906epic may be grubby but they ain't dumb. Also the engine is source accessible, you could easily strip out anything that phones home before cooking. Unity is closed source. Getting away with this kind of shit is way easier for them.

Max installation count DRMs are already ancient, I remember having to wrestle with Ubisoft to get my Anno 2070 working again.

Nah piracy isn't an issue unless you're a bad company Check out Gaben's talks about it

@@karamelapple8007 It will be an issue for Unity devs here because every time someone install a pirated version, the dev are getting charged more by Unity on top of not getting paid for those versions in the first place.

Someone is going to be Naka'ed soon.

​@@Toonrick12not soon enough!

Doesn't matter- damage is done

Fucking oof

How much would it cost to run the farm? Low costs would mean high probability of attacks. This can easily turn into extortion.

Roll it back don't wait too long unity!

AAA either has custom deals or they have to fight in court.

EVERYTHING has to be a fucking license or a sub based model. And its annoying as fuck

Why don’t you like unreal?

@@dele1763 It's too resource heavy even with very basic scenes which makes it difficult for some members on my team to work on from their systems. But the main thing I don't like about it is honestly the blueprints system. We always keep running into walls when trying to implement things that SHOULD be relatively simple but turns into a nightmare and requires us to have to find some convoluted workaround. Working via regular C# scripts in Unity is a lot easier and gives me much more control since you have to manually script it. Like I get that we could do C++ in Unreal but there's also not as many resources out there as there are for Unity. Lastly is source control. Unity having uilt in free source control for a few seats and very little headache to setup is a god-send. I cannot believe that Unreal with all of their purchases and Mega Grants haven't done anything for making it easier to work with teams.

​@@dele1763Maybe laziness ( Time unemployed) to learn something new. On the other hand, maybe the European Union (GDPR) will save us from this cataclysm.

All thats needed to be done is to forge "new installation" message for the server. And then depends how its implemented, clearing single registry key/file and running file integrity check might already count as "new installation". Heck, even if you were to introduce hardware signature, which is already sus, you can set up virtual machines, how many you like and each will be "new" installation if you want to "install bomb" someone. Which is going to be much more effective than review bombing (instead scaring away potential new customers, you WILL inflict financial loss) AND easier to implement on mass scale for little bit of business takeover.

100% this ... open source will win as long as people keep giving back from the cash they make using the engine it will only get better.

That's all good and nice for sure, but the main problem is around how they go about installs, first on the user side the fact they just flat out said they will and all ready do have something built in to check installations can be considered spyware only hanging on the "trust me bro im not taking any other info". Hell if pushed enough it might make unity games not playable in EU as they at the very least require some sort of opt out. But that aside the same "trust me bro" is also pointed at the developers, they wont disclose how exactly they count them so what stops them from counting updates, free copies or from countries that deny the data exchange, pirated games or just making them the f up, after all they are incentivized to do so and we have no way to check. There is just such a big window to abuse w zero transparency and clear answer to possible problems. Have a nice day!

Because Wario has standards.

To be honest of the engines I have used, Blender, Godot, Unity, and Unreal, my favorite is Unreal

If that actually is the case, (I doubt it is.) people are definitely going to abuse that.

The skills are largely transferable, but yeah just learn what you'll use

I hear you. I am in the same position. I have been an Unity dev since the start of my game dev journey, and all my games are built in it. This announcement caught me completely by surprise. Thankfully my new project is very early in development so I am rebuilding it in Unreal, but will still cost months of lost time to learn a new engine and rebuild. Still... Unity as a company has completely lost my trust. Good luck to you though.