Addressing The Unity "Runtime Fee" Pricing Debacle
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- čas přidán 28. 08. 2024
- It's been a rough couple of weeks for everyone who uses Unity as the company recently announced a rather egregious new pricing strategy with a "Runtime Fee" proposal. Due to a tonne of rather aggressive feedback from the majority of the game development community, they have now walked back most of their policies into something much more "acceptable".
I wanted to take a moment to give an update on this whole mess and what this means for myself and the channel going forward.
Mike's Channel: • Unity Run-time Fee Con...
Additional Info:
Freya Holmer's Reddit Post - / clarifying_a_few_thing...
Marc Whitten's Open Letter - blog.unity.com...
Jason's Chat With Marc - • Unity Create President...
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Exactly! Unity doesn't have an income problem... it has an expenditure problem.
They went on a shopping spree and want everybody else to pay for it.
I think they will announce a huge number of layoffs next year.
Hopefully starting with the board
@@geams
Unity has become an absolute joke over the past couple years. First they make tons of feature ideas, yet none of them ever get polished to production ready. They come up with about 5 different UI solutions, none of which are established industry standards and none of which are nice to use, and then they can't figure out how to do proper licensing. The leadership at Unity is a complete mess. The engine has no focus, no proper coding standards and is the only one in the .NET Foundation constantly working against established standards. It's a disgrace to the .NET world at this point.
And btw.. regarding the license change... this sort of crap has been pulled by a lot of the bigger people on the Unity Asset store as well and cause just as big of an outrage. So this seems to be the Unity club now. Money grabbing while never properly finishing anything.
@@SomeDudeSomewhere I think he means that some of the bigger developers want you to pay 50% of the price you already paid if you upgrade to a new version of unity, so if you buy an asset it will only work for example unity 2020, and if you somewhat want to upgrade to 2022 you now have to pay 50% of what you paid to upgrade to this new version.
Wich is annoying cause you already paid, and they say it is to cover cost of programming but they never needed that before, its just they got big and got greedy, same old story.
Unity has always been a joke
Without leadership change at Unity, I will have only the current game I'm working released with Unity. Then Unreal it is. Your quality of videos in Unreal would be a blessing
This is how I'm feeling too. Really wish this whole thing didn't happen, as it was so needless and obvious what the response was going to be.
While I'm glad to feel heard as a Unity Insider... I know most people don't get that opportunity. Moving forward Unity is walking on eggshells and even the slightest misstep at this point could be catastrophic.
Looking forward to the Unreal content, great video.
I'm glad to hear that you'll be making a move that makes sense for you. I'm a bit sad that I'm moving in a different direction (to Godot) because you make FANTASTIC content, but hopefully a few years down the line, Godot will be in a state where you feel you can start making content for them, too. :)
YES THE ULTIMATE PARENT FLEX!!!! "I'm not mad... I'm just disappointed. " Gold....😂
Yeah, I feel totally betrayed. Their email response time says two months. I've dumped somewhere around $3K in assets and a Unity Pro subscription for nothing. Probably no way to recoup any of that, either. That time - gone. Can't even begin to express my frustration as a solo artist/musician/writer and aspiring game dev studio. Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts and experience on the whole matter. Whoever made these terrible decisions should humble themselves and offer up an apology. Most likely, though for some of us it will be too little, too late. The two good things that will come out of it for myself anyway, is tons of space on my hard drive and knowing that some of the asset store purchases went to support other artists. Really don't know what to do with myself at this point. Probably drop my first album, animate the music videos in either Blender or iClone, dump drama on my therapist and start dating again. Unfortunately, there is really no proper justice in this world. Anyway, thanks.
I've jumped over to Unreal and not looking back! Welcome aboard 🎉
Alot of stuff beein caked up from the moment Brackeys said bye lol.
In all honesty though, Matt I'm in full support of your new direction, and how well you are also still able to inform us as things are changing. I pray that your future endeveours keep blazing, you're an amazing teacher, I would consider making ore time for Unreal if you're teaching it, you're always making tutorials fun and interesting.
I've really appreciated your takes over the past two weeks. And I'm happy to hear that you're not entirely leaving the ecosystem as voices like yours are needed to steer the ship back on course (if its not to late lmao)
The ToS thing already existed before, so it does sound a little bit like they are saying now "hey we wont change ToS now and you can stay on a version and keep that ToS if you want and you can also track in the Github again"... but like... They already have said these exact things before and their is a blog post about it a long time ago... so that part still feels hollow to me... Even though the changes are technically good for me since I dont have to use a splash screen now and the limits to revenue are pretty generous for me as a solo dev...
Our Company uses Unity so as an Employee I've had to carry on with Company decisions until made otherwise, but I did really hope to start developing my own project this year in Unity, but since this happened I've decided against it and chose Unreal for my own project.
At least I can carry on with what I've learnt and know about Unity so far but I can also learn and skill up in another engine.
Knowing you'll be doing Unreal content on your channel is such great news, will be following along as I do but am relieved that you're continuing.
A very accurate description of the whole situation and sound rationale for how you will proceed from here. I decided to drop Unity based on this whole thing. It was the final nail in the coffin after a lot of poor business decisions that has in no way lead to significant improvements to the engine for the core users in a very long time. I have had a blast with Unity for many many years, but since I am a hobbyist (and Unity frankly do not care about me as a customer) I have moved on.
While the whole situation is not great, I'm really waiting for your Unreal Engine content! I've moved on to Unreal even before Unity even went public, but I did use it to make a mobile game, which was fun.. Still though.. Thanks Unity for getting Game Dev Guide to create Unreal content!
How good is Unreal for mobile compared to Unity. I heard very bad about Unreal when it comes to mobile. Could you please clear the air?
6:40 yeah, my current game is the last Unity one and then I'm moving to Unreal. It's just not worth the hassle.
I agree entirely with this levelheaded analysis of the situation. If unity provided more value charging more for their product would be sensible, but that still doesn’t justify the runtime fee and it’s complexity, and it also doesn’t justify unity thinking that they can switch up the terms whenever they want to.
Overall, I think unity is in need of better management. The executives need to be people who genuinely care about game developers and making the engine the best thing it can be.
Thanks for the video. I've been thinking some of those points for a while now, and this video has really helped me decide that learning UE5 in my spare time is definitely going to help me for side projects, and maybe my career as well.
I'm a full time unity dev who works for a small company. I've been pushing around the idea of learning Unreal or Godot for a while now, but since godot isn't really production ready in a lot of ways, and I've been getting fed up fighting with Unity's engine to make it work, your words on how they're unlikely to funnel more money into fixing the engine has really solidified my choice to learn unreal and if its viable for companies my company makes then push it for our next project.
As a fellow professional Unity developer who is also switching to Unreal Engine, having your content for UE will be a godsend for me as I transition my skills to a new area.
Hopefully Unity can actually improve in future and regain the trust and confidence it's lost in recent times as I genuinely believe its a great easy to use engine. It's the core leadership who need to improve!
I'm in the same boat. I hear ya! Gonna finish up some stuff with Unity, and keep the Unity dooir open in hopes things get better, but while I'm doing that... I am also learning Unreal and C++, and spending sometime with ThreeJS, ReactThreeFiber, and dabbling in Rive. Eventually one of these will interest me more and I'll see where that takes me.
I'm looking forward to your videos on Unreal Engine 😊
As someone working mainly on tools for Unity. I would be happy to see some tutorials on how that stuff would work on Unreal
was surprisingly easy in unreal 3.. time to brush up i suppose
I switched to unreal, best decision ever made 🔥
epic says thank you!
Unreal has the best 3D and VR support, while Godot is a very lightweight 2D engine. I'd consider learning both, but my main focus is on VR so I'm excited to see some quality Unreal tutorials coming out soon. :)
I feel the exact same way.
Very well done. Bravo!
"Up until now, Unreal was the expensive option."
The first $1,000,000 you make is royalty free with Unreal. And the license is free. It's been that way for years. Why do people keep making the claim of Unreal being expensive? For 99% of indie developers, it's free. Completely free. You never pay a dime.
Yes, technically both engines are free to use up to a threshold. However, up until this point, for a small team Unity would only take around 10-20k of your revenue per year in subscription fees total until your game shipped... so, it *was* the cheaper alternative - because if you shipped a game that made $1m dollars Unity only ever saw the subscription fee. Unlike unreal, which then starts taking a 5% cut immediately -- which could easily total to more than Unity's subscription fee.
I am a professional developer working on games with a decent budget, so these are the considerations myself and peers make.
@@GameDevGuide Well if you are talking about strictly from your studios perspective, then I can't make any argument on whether it'd be cheaper or not. The context in which you make the statement, "Up until now, Unreal was the expensive option," seems to indicate you are talking in general. Which is wrong. The overwhelming majority of Unity developers are indie and not grossing $1m in revenue. 97% of games released on steam have grossed LESS THAN $1m in revenue. For 97% of games, had they been made in Unreal Engine, would have been completely free to develop (in term of engine costs, provided the games were eligible for that licensing at the time of release obvi). With that in mind, I don't see how one could consider a completely free option to be the expensive one. Which is a pretty significant thing to get correct when your speaking to an audience of no budget, or extremely tight budget, indie developers.
Source for steam analytics: vginsights.com/steam-analytics
My channel is mostly focused towards professional developers, or non beginners. I'm almost always expecting most of my audience to be working in professional positions or similar, or understand the nuance of that context at least. I also mention in the same sentence that these opinions come from myself "and my peers"
But yeah, sure... to most folk Unreal will be free -- but that caveat is always there. With unity, it wasn't. Now it is.
Unreal yay!
Although this won't have a direct affect on my projects, I might reevaluate my game engine choice for the next project.
Ugh, this has been a nightmare...
Im left feeling disappointed about all of this. And my main issue is that frankly, I don't see Unity as an engine being improved. I mean come on! I speedran learning Godot and learned it has realtime GI?? *Unity still dosent have it* Most of my projects are procedural so its important...
But unreal is terrifying, and godot feels a little hacky? Idk.
Unity has one, but it's... really has a lot to be desired.
I really want to start with Godot instead of Unity. But for me there are 2 features missing that I use a lot to make my games: 1) using GPU buffers in vertex/pixel shaders and 2) getting buffer data from the GPU to the CPU without stalling the pipeline. Other then that I'm so ready to jump to Godot!
I have tested Godot for a week, and switch back to Unity, Godot have a LOT of problems
@@Feynman.R Really? What problems did you encounter?
@@liosnel mobile payments integration, c# export on mobile, GDsctipt a lot slower then c#
I'll also switch to Unreal for long term. And it's makes me happy to see you also switching to Unreal instead of Godot in this situation. Because most of the "Unreal for Unity devs" videos are basic stuff i most of the time i feel like i learn nothing, but your video type is usually covers "weird things you eventually should do to make full game" stuff and it's a better learning experiance for me.
Btw, don't get me wrong by saying "happy" this whole incident is sucks, i hope it didn't happened but sadly it did.
Why happy about unreal and not Godot? Unreal is owned by epic and will just do the same as unity. Supporting open source is better in the long run.
@@iaminyourballs that wasnt the point. Im not that expert, idk what engines will do in long term. But the reason me switching to unreal is most companies who make pc and console games uses it, so if i want to work with them i need to learn unreal.
Also im not trying to make an engine fight if its misunderstood im sorry.
Unreal has consistently innovated and improved, investing in game developers, while Unity has stagnated. Even if they turned this around, they are so far behind at this point. For anyone considering a future in AAA game development, then Unreal is the way to go.
What a shame! Thanks Matt!
I've yet to bump into a heavy-hitter, using Unity, that isn't declaring themselves done with them after their current product is released.
Yeah a lot of my colleagues working on reasonably scaled projects are jumping ship for their next project. I don't think we'll see the impact of all this for a year or two...
Hit the nail on the head. It’s all too volatile to stay with Unity without some more definitive change *cough cough* CEO.
Feeling the same way about Godot and Unreal, but going to give Godot a chance before, so I don’t fall into the same trap as with Unity.
Make videos helping the transition to Unreal.
The core concepts, similar functionalities, etc.
Unreal content would be awesome!
I'm not Matt, I'm just disappointed :D
having a small fee might help prevent people from being hacked or using a server or router of someone who doesn't even play the game otherwise being hacked so yes there should be a law in fact because we'll see where the money is coming from
I personally left the game industry some months ago and decided to make games just as a hobby. Turns out this whole situation made me switch to Godot since it's easier to use and I've seen some of those values in each iteration of the engine, but i completely agree that a career change to Godot is not a wise one, at least for now. A simple search for job positions with Godot can confirm you that.
So yeah, switching to unreal if you are professional developer makes 100% sense and I don't think Unity can be trusted for some time
Yeah, as a Blender fan I absolutely see the appeal of a FOSS option but until I can make upwards of $80k using it, it's not a serious contender. Just the way it is, unfortunately.
@@GameDevGuide Unreal is definitely better for more professional developers, I made the switch some time ago and it was well worth it. Also to note Ue4.27 will give you the best performance. UE5 is nice and all but expect to lose a good chunk of performance using it
thanks for reminding me why its good I left Unity
Do you think Unity is still a good option for some developers?
What I enjoy the most about Unity, is that everything translates over to my programming ambitions.
I've heard that making systems in Unreal is quite different.
Any comment on that?
It's never a bad thing to take some of your eggs and pop them in a different basket :)
I don’t want to defend Unity here but I think saying they are not improving it is unfair to say.
NGO, DOTS, UI Toolkit just to name a few
I understand where you're coming from but it's worth pointing out that many of these were released in a buggy, broken or fractured state.
For instance DOTS was announced almost 5 years ago as a way to market the engine's quality -- and has gone through so many permutations it's barely recognisable anymore and only been considered production safe this last year.
The same with UIToolkit which was UIElements originally. When I worked at unity in 2017 I produced some of the first videos on this toolset and to this day it's barely functioning in game-mode -- plus its absolutely fractured as there are now IMGui, UGui and now UIToolkit. Massively confusing new users.
Let's not even get started on how the SRPs have absolutely fractured the core codebase. Also something that was introduced almost 6 years ago...
So yeah, half-baked. 😂 I love Unity's tools but it's been obvious for years that the company and direction of the product has been spread incredibly thin to inflate its market potential.
Unreal feels like the "pro" more expensive engine, Unity felt like the simpler "okay" enough cheap engine. If you are a semi-pro developer now, with the changes it feels like you have little reason to stick with unity.
They made a terrible mistake... they maintained Runtime Fee, that just means one thing, THEY WILL DO IT AGAIN.
There's no reason to maintain IF you undestand WHY you did that.
And it goes even against the "They need money", some defenders said.
Ok, they need money, 2.5%, why the lesser of the two, where one of them is confusing as hell (And now self reported)?
Why not partnering with Steam for example, to make a better cut for Unity devs as Unreal have their own "Steam"? Or having some of it on games made from Unity, why not starting a small company to make some games in Unity and then selling it...
AND FINISH A F***** Feature.
I opened Unreal and My God, you have templates, and I know we have it on Unity, but, I changed it so fast that I was amazed, didn't had to go to assetstore and download a third person template.
If I was Unity, I would create a team only to create "templates" like the Assetstore have, but, official, like WHY you need Character Movement from a third party or creating your own, when you have a component called CHARACTER CONTROLLER? I don't know, couldn't they just you know, create the BASIC for us? they have a lot of amazing half things, but, they could just finish something like this.
Learn a little with RPG Maker for example (Way simpler, ok, but, you need to walk? Then start the game AND walk), and on Unreal, you walk and you hit the boxes, that's it, you don't need to have anything advance, a bullettime walking on walls, but, WHY not the BASIC? Then leave it open, if you want to f*** around with it and make it never work? Cool... No problem, download again.
And come on getting Git projects is not the way.
GL with Unreal Engine, you will need it :D
There's no trust, but what trust is there in Unreal? It's more expensive than Unity right now. However, I agree that Godot is not an option at all.
You're boned because they want to up the charge to 2.5% revenue, but the main competitor charges 5%? I agree the notice period for the change is on the short side, but I don't see anything else about this that isn't a typical business approach at the moment. I'm glad they didn't put everyone on a per-user subscription like a lot of companies do. Your mates there want to keep their jobs, right?
Do what you gotta do man, but I'm not supporting anyone who supports UT moving forward. This isn't a problem with their management, or even the executives. Unity Engine needs a new owner. Unity Technologies is run by a bunch of gambling industry leeches. At this point they've ripped off the mask and declared themselves to be the villain. What kind of changes could they make that would make you allow them to put the mask back on? The only way Unity Engine survives AND its good for gaming in the long run is if Unity Technologies goes bankrupt and a better company buys the Unity Engine IP and makes better decisions with it. Don't ever let Unity apologize for being honest.
I will not follow you along to Unreal, thanks for the great content but now i will claim for the divorce. 🙂 Cya bud, wish you the best.
so many tutorials only voice finally face 🤭🤭
Unreal will inevitably follow in unity's footsteps, use godot and dont put your trust into a big corporation (especiaslly epic 🤮)
ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
7:15 Unity is not a government that is obligated by law to listen to their customers. I think many people are accustomed to believing Unity is THEIR own engine, not a commercial engine made by another company that does not have to provide free services to them.
If a person has given you an apple every day non-stop for years, and one day start charging for the apple, would you be angry to the person? Or would you be thankful for all the free apples?
Heck, Unity has been so kind to grant you access to be the insider, and ask for feedbacks before committing their terrible crime. They did the crime, but at least they made a system that help them from repeating it again. Lots of people has been so harsh to Unity, and I haven't seen one person thanked them for providing a free game engine that has helped them enter the gaming industry.
2s ago 💪
The reaction to the runtime fee was pretty disheartening, I thought people were a little more mature.
Were there serious issues and oversights with the new model? Yes. But nothing that couldn't be fixed with clearheaded and mature conversation. (Which they did, and its now even better than the old one)
Instead so many just acted like chimps throwing shit everywhere... Most didn't even understand it.
And then there were those that didn't really know much about it but jumped in anyways to capitalize on the drama for some easy views.
Most of the conversation around it was just a cesspool of misinformation and immaturity...
There was definitely a lot of misinformation that went around, but I saw a lot of this debacle first hand, and while I can't say much I will tell you that many people were justified in their concerns. The final policy is a direct result of the negative feedback, and the number of people who came out against it.
third hooray 🎉 🎉
hi!!! first
24 seconds ago