This Company is Scamming Game Devs
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- čas přidán 12. 09. 2023
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This Video Took 69 Takes
#mogulmail #ludwig
I was aware but didn't mention that Unity execs (including the CEO) sold some stock shortly before this announcement. There's claims it's insider trading but that is too bold of a claim for me to throw around haphazardly. Figured I'd make a post to clear up some confusion
You’re the best, Mr mail.
It's always money
Pop the pimple
Oh John did that? The same guy who called developers that don't do monetization early 'f**king idiots' that one time?
that’s very clearly insider trading 😂
This has been the greatest week in the Unreal CEO's life. I imagine them just skipping around the office like a happy toddler, high fiving every employee they pass.
Unreal is out here releasing unreal 5 while Unity is out here releasing their user base. I don't understand how there are higher ups making millions a year and this is the choices they make. Not only is this a horrible idea but it was executed at literally the worst possible time they could ever implement it. The absolute worst time.
@@FoMScratch It's the f'ing EA CEO. What were people expecting?
They might get some new customers, but I believe a lot of the smaller unity developers are going to switch to other indie friendly platforms such as Godot.
Not stoked that the Apple VR thing only uses unity as the third-party platform
@@carlosmatthews1910 These bot creators are soulless man.
Unity: "the only reason we are relevant is because of the game developers."
Also Unity: let's exploit them.
idk in the example they take 14%. That seems generous when compared to steam which is just a store which takes 30% and not the foundation for you game
@@StreamerBS Yeah. Imagine that. 44% of your revenue being taken away just from steam and unity fees
Unity has a little customer called the US government, they are fine without gamers.
@@paradiseexpress3639 gamers are sure quick to be outraged on devs behalf for being taken advantage of. Unless of course it has to do with their favourite store.
@@paradiseexpress3639 i mean steam is one thing but 14% for a 3d engine is not expensive if you take into account what it costs to make.
I knew the pricing was ridiculous, but the fact it's actually cheaper to port games to an entirely different engine instead of continuing to use Unity is just amazing. Truly a revolutionary idea
one of the ideas of all time for sure
fr theyre making billions with this idea rn
@@Chee5eyou didn’t specify what you meant by billions, but i’m pretty sure you mean tears
@@HyperNova808 billions in losses baby 💪💪💪💪💪
they have switched the plan now.
“They might never make silksong”
This sentence echoed through my head and made me realise the seriousness of the situation
I’m still going insane after waiting all those years and then this 😭
They will. Many game developers including me will finish our current projects in Unity, because it's unrealistic to port. Next projects will be made somewhere else. Unity also has apologised and said that they're going to make some changes because of the backlash and will make another announcement in a few days.
I'm pissing and crying because of this scary possibility
@@n1ppei wonder how good they will be
remember we have mr."people who are in it purely for cash are dumbf*** re*****" also known as "i dont remember having a board of directors" aka "mr.monopoly" but you can politely call him "sir. greeds a captalis" as the head of all of this so good luck
HK gamers uniteee
Why are so many companies making the worst decisions all at the same time 😭
Because all they care about is making as much money as possible
greed
Only here about the mistakes
Covid messed with our heads collectively
In case of unity it's because the new CEO of unity is the same guy that was a CEO of EA when it was voted the most hated company in the world.
I used to work at an indie game dev not so long ago and as soon as I heard the news I asked my best friend (who still works there) how did my former boss take it and she told me he was crying nonstop through the whole day. Absolutely devastating news for all of us.
This is heartbreaking, I hope whatever their next steps forward are go really smoothly for them 🙏
@eeveeinspace worse is it looks like there maybe some retroactive fees from a video I saw if im remembering it right.
@@GalironRunner The "Retroactive" part of all of this is the removal of an old Unity Terms of Service clause. It used to be that if you used an older version of Unity for development (say Unity 2018) you were protected from any service changes to Unity in the future. They removed that. Meaning any game using Unity. Even as an example Slenderman 8 Pages from 2012 would be effected by this change once they started charging the 1st of January.
@@GalironRunner No.
@@carlosmatthews1910L bot
Can’t speak for other studios, but I work as an environment artist in a massive, lucrative one. A couple of years ago we made a switch to Blender for environment work and recently we’ve actually had meetings where we discussed whether to now invest in really niche Blender specialization and mastery for every artist, or whether to instead make the jump to Unreal. 24h after this news dropped, we’re slotting out bench time for groups of people at a time, from art to CI, to begin transitioning over to Unreal. That quickly a 10+ year studio that relied solely on Unity made the switch. And to be clear, I’m not relaying this as inherently good or bad. There’s nuance here. What I’m saying is: Unity isn’t doing this the smart way.
Your story is one that is like a ripple effect in the entire industry. Unity really underestimated how comfortable their users were with not switching, just the idea that people will now be open minded to not developing in Unity for emotional reasons is going to ruin their entire growth pace even if they snap their fingers and suddenly refuse to do any of this BS anymore. The damage is done, people are not trusting them, people are developing new skills and changing their path of learning and path of production. In 10 years Unity will still regret doing this, probably even more than they do now.
I think Unity always expected to have to change the plan. Their PR right now feels like a negotiation where they release the 100% shitty thing and then after backlash go “hey we’ve listened to your concerns and feedback and decided to adjust! Here’s the 50% shitty thing that was what we actually wanted and expected to release anyway, but now it feels like a compromise!”
They've slowed down with the changes to their statement, but... if this is their full, intended statement, it's more like 85% of the shitty thing. Plus, the fact that the DISTRIBUTOR has to pay money? I SERIOUSLY doubt that they want to do that. Who in their right mind wants to walk up to Microsoft, Nintendo, whoever-the-devs-of-Genshin-are, Epic Games, and so on, and tell them "Hey, people have Unity games... that's gonna be $2.1mil." and expect to get that cash?
@@GardenVarieteathey can expect a coma
door in the face technique
@@normanmai7865 exactly
We legit sat down as a company all day and discussed alternatives and ways to move away from unity, regardless of if they change this or not, no smaller developer is ever going to trust this company again
I just downloaded unity to begin learning how to do game dev... Guess i've got to quickly turn that around?
perfect timing honestly, imagine getting this news a year later@@db5094
@@db5094 try godot
@@db5094Godot is pretty similar and nice to use, I’d recommend that it has GDscript which is like Python mashed with JavaScript and C#
@@db5094 if youre just starting out youre in a great position to try any of the great alternatives including Unreal Engine and Godot Engine
the fact they said 'yes, they will have to pay for every install' is absolutely insane. This is what the gaming industry is and has been, business suits squeezing every ounce of juice out of developers to buff a millionaires salary. It really would only be right for Unity to get in some sort of trouble for stunts like this
The gaming industry is within our current economy. So yeah, it was easy to forsee a company would want to exploit its very userbase and cashflow more for more money
tell me you know absolutely nothing about game engines and game development without telling me you know absolutely nothing about game engines and game development
@@someoneonyoutube181 why are you shilling for unity wtf. This is arguably a bad decision. I get that unity provides a lot for game devs, but this is obviously just an act of greed by the higher-ups lol
CEOs and investors out here playing IRL runescape. They aren't happy with their 100m bank. Just want to watch number go up.
If you check again, Unity has revised their statement to only charge the 1-15 cents (which is literally nothing if your game costs more than 5 dollars) on the FIRST install.
The funny thing is they want Genshin's money but there's no way Hoyoverse just lets this happens.
That company is so insanely greedy there is no way they will just go along with this. I could definitely see them choosing to just remake their game from scratch on another engine rather than lose out on 14% of their profits.
from scratch
*_on scratch_*
@@music_s73 Genshin Impact and Honkai star rail on scratch... i would play that
and that's where your wrong, Genshin already runs on a different engine BASED on unity, but legally theirs, Unity can't legally make Genshin pay anything to them
It would be cheaper for them to make their own engine than to pay this... And as one before me noted, hoyo has made their own engine based on unity.
But even if they didn't hoyo would likely go to court with many other big name companies because I'm pretty sure this is illegal.
Unless Unity wrote in their contracts that they could change policies at any time (and even that is a sketchy area), guaranteed a lawsuit is coming.
As an indie game developer, this is making me terrified, all my hard work ruined.
relatable
so fucking true
Now I’m extremely glad I’m a 2D game dev who uses GameMaker.
Use Godot or unreal
@@RandomDude1487 if it works, it works, but i personally think the 2d market is like 100x less valuable than 3d. also way less fun for me to do
Hearing the words "we may never see Silksong" made me realize how drastic of a situation this is
I died inside a little when he said that 😭
About to lose it
Keep in mind if they sell Silksong for $15 like Hollow Knight they will be likely be paying 1 cent per install. 1 cent is like 0.07% of $15.
no fucking way it'll be cancelled they worked on it for how many years now
The brazilian streamer known as "Cellbit" made a very good metaphor about this fiasco, he basically said that, this is the same as working as a chef, but everytime a client takes a bite of your food, that he bought, you have to pay 1 dollar, and the client can take infinite bites...
yeah, that would suck wouldn't it.
An easy way to see how ridiculous this change is, is to imagine you bought a car a year ago and then the company decided to now start charging you for every mile you go. All while you still have to pay for your own gas and your own maintenance costs as per usual.
As a developer myself, I will say with upmost confidence that this change alone, even if they revert it, will likely stop any new projects from using Unity. Effectively, Unity have just started a time bomb, where they will only earn money from existing projects. Once those projects die, so will Unity. Rest in peace Unity, your funeral will be in ~7 years time.
Same, there's no way I'm trusting unity after this with anything, especially since I'm not anywhere near done making my game. It sucks to have to learn a new software already, but they've shown they're willing to fuck over a large portion of devs for profit, and so I don't want to be even further into making a game if it happens again.
Man, this is the worst way to start a morning.
aight bois its time for us to go on a UE5 upskilling journey. abandoning unity also lol
Godot
i doubt they are able to change the contract so wholesale. if ur game have been released before any of this info was available. you are definatly not under a their new runtime fee contract. u can't change the terms of a contract if ur already done with ur project :P
but if subscribing into this new contract then yeah runtime fees baby!
@scno0B1 they clarified any sales/installs after Jan 1 even for games released before then will be subject to the changes
As an indie dev, this is terrifying and I am genuinely considering moving months of work in unity to a different engine purely because Unity cannot be trusted anymore.
Yeah even if it's back peddled completely this is incredibly concerning that they even attempted it in the first place.
You should do it. Start planning as your next thing. Drop whatever you're working on. It's easier to start over now. You don't want to put your bets on the company that already announced it wants to be your worst option. Leave while you can.
Calm down you’re not gonna get more than a million downloads
@KadenT8 you don't know that.
@@OKayD3NI mean you literally never know. Games from small developers blow up all time. I would never risk that
I'm an indie game dev. I can confidently say that I will never use Unity for my projects again, and only ever touch it if I have to for a job I may find. Even so, companies don't like this, and likely many more will switch to Godot as well.
Btw, to anyone confused - the real major problem here for majority of the devs like me isn't the pricing change per say, as they didn't lie about 90% of Unity developers not being affected by this change. Instead, the underlying issue is the fact that they just went ahead and did that - considering the total shit Unity's been doing for the last couple years, this just became the tipping point, and everybody just lost all the trust in Unity. We just don't want to use an engine that can do such decisions on the fly.
And the damage, of course, is real. Unity will lose a lot of money, I'm pretty sure this new policy just makes them go into negative profit considering how many big devs are leaving Unity now. There is no turning back, nothing can ever save Unity by this point.
In order for Unity to reliabily keep track of installs, their installers must be sending data back to their servers. They would also have to have a program running constantly to keep track of their installs when offline. I don't remember ever consenting to that kind of data monitoring, and i suspect it might breach European internet laws.
I really think they might just be basing it off the IP or MAC address of devices downloading the runtime from their servers
VPN be like:
Ludwig is correct. This is truly one of the most unproductive days for a game dev. As a developer myself, this conversation is now a main concern for our current and future projects. The volatility of Unity's monetization is a genuine problem for game devs
I was about to start coding on unity got a notification, watched the vid while coding and then swapped to Godot
Switch to Godot, for 2d games, it's so much lighter, faster and of course it's free. If you need 3d, I don't think anyone offers a better deal and software than Unreal. For mobile 3d, Godot is good enough, though maybe not ideal.
I highly recommend you can get your team to move to an entirely different engine, unity has been making questionable choices for quite some time.
I've loved working with UE5 in recent times.
Godot and unreal are the only good ones really left
@@yakubmohammed2053 you owe unity 100k for thinking of using it
as a long time unity user, watching the soul of the company i fell in love with get absolutely gutted over the past few years has been heartbreaking. we built careers, relationships, entire lives around this platform. and now we're stuck watching it slowly die, with every one of these decisions another nail in the coffin
we watched unity become the villain
Love your content dude. Curious, planning on doing anything cuz of this? Moving to something else maybe?
@@st.altair4936it is hard, essentially what Unity did was build trust and kept it super accessible and affordable. As such they have tons of users and with these changes due to the new CEO (formerly from EA when it was at its worst) they have a captive audience.
Wasn't expecting you here! Glad to see devs in the comments on these videos.
damn guess that sucks for people who made their whole lives a game dev engine
Im legitimately shocked Hoyoverse hasnt said anything about this. This would affect them hugely wouldn't it?
I think Unity has a new WR for successfully destroying their brand in a single announcement 💀
We're long due for a giant company to actually have to face severe repercussions for a horribly misguided decision. I hope Unity truly suffers for this so companies once again learn that there is a limit to the shit they can pull.
It's intentional, the ceos were brought in to lower the stock price so they can sell unity to a larger conglomerate. Just wait
They 100% will suffer. People are just going to stop using Unity.
Yeah but it is also the scorched earth variant since it will mean a lot of games might be permanently unavailable@@zeltzamer4010
@@zeltzamer4010Unity thinks that it’s just like gamers where they will play regardless because they’re such big fanboys
But these are game developers, their livelihoods depend on making games
This isn’t an amazon situation either, you can’t exploit somebody who can simply just jump ship the moment you do something they don’t like
How about someone more like Microsoft? I'd prefer them get it instead.
I don't even see this being fair with giant companies, imagine buying a painting set and the company charging you for how well YOUR ART does.
Well, that stands for standard revenue share as well but they have to get paid somehow.
A flat fee sucks for small devs. A rev share sucks for big devs. This here sucks for all devs that make any meaningful amount of money.
I argue its even worse. Its more like the you have to pay them for each time a person looks at the comes in and looks at the art piece
It's a funny analogy but not really a fair comparison. Using the painting set analogy it needs to be changed constantly so that it works on any medium, and the painting set can repaint the same painting millions of times all over around the world by other people with the painting set.
Shopify uses it too. Once you get a sale you have to pay a percentage. Everyone is upset with Unity doing this. But it's their choice and no one is forced to use it.
You make really good analogies
isnt Unity's CEO the same that wanted to charge you $1 to reload on BF3? I think at one point he was the CEO at EA
Oh yeah, he had the beautiful idea of paywalling reloading and making the process instant (with a saved card) so people who are in the middle of their game would do it just to be able to complete a match. I don’t think he thought about the buyer’s regret and subsequent uninstalling that would happen immediately after the round.
Imagine punishing your own users for making you money.
God rest the soul of the game devs who make 100% free non-monetized games, and they get millions of downloads
Fan projects are really going to stall
Your game has to make at least $200k yearly before the fee applies. This will not affect non-monetized games in any way. Still a major blow for small dev studios though.
@@alexcheese9163 Yeah I just heard about that recently. That seems like a pretty important note. Can't believe Mogul mail's Journalistic integrity is so much lower than of my favorite streamer Ludwig
@alexcheese9163 I mean that'll totally change seeing how greedy they are
@@alexcheese9163 No, Its Written.. For "Installs over install threshold", revenue threshold wasn't mentioned for the per install fee ... which means only install threshold triggers the per install fee
I hope u get what i mean
Reminder that this is the same CEO from EA that wanted to implement a system where you have to pay for the bullets in a Battlefield game
He what
a battlefield game with only melee weapons and the occasional guy burning money to win
@@jazon80r13basically he suggested letting players pay 1 or 2 dollars per reload in order to make them more accepting to pay higher prices in other areas like cosmetics and so on
@@mikadosannoji553so fucking true, I don’t even play shooters much but I can absolutely believe that to be how it would’ve ended up
that was fake
This should be terrifying from a financial perspective for studios. Scary enough to completely back away from Unity and go somewhere else. Imagine being the chief financial officer for a studio and saying "I deem it okay to stay with Unity". Like, NO. Not going to happen.
This change is so horrendous that Dani had to wake up from the dead
Just a side note: there's another thing in the fee update that is less talked about.
They removed the "Unity Plus" plan, which was the most affordable starting point for most solo and indie devs.
The most significant difference between "free" and "plus" plans was the removal of Unity intro when launching the game. Most serious devs want to remove that logo as it is usually associated with trash games and asset swaps. Now there's no way to do that affordably, "Plus" was removed, only "Pro" plan offers that functionality. The starting point moves from ~400.00 $/year for "Plus" plan to ~2000.00 $/year for "Pro" plan. And that price is per developer. If there are 5 developers in a studio, it's ~10k instead of 2k. For solo devs and starting studios that's absolutely crushing.
"The company announced full-year 2022 revenue of $1.39 billion, a growth of 25% year-over-year."
It's not like they are losing money. Just greed on greed, that's why cost of living so high. Cost of everything. Just a thought, maybe we don't need to bleed every little cent from the customer?
Oh so that's why Dinkum now has the Unity logo when it didn't before. I think much like with the (lack of a) Twitter checkmark, having that Unity logo is soon going to become a mark of integrity.
@@kaynkayn9870in fact they are. That's just revenue. They lost almost 1billion last year.
I mean.. they literally created a product that ANYONE can develop a game for cheap or even completely free. It definitely wasn't the logo flash that made the game seem shitty, it was the fact that people didn't KNOW it was in unreal, so they didn't associate it with the plethora of cheaply made content. It would be like if every time you mentioned photoshop, I mention that one time some guy drew a terrible stick figure, which is why photoshop is 100% the worst software on the entire planet. If you release a cheap or free product that can be used to make substandard content, you have to accept that THOSE projects also represent your company the same as the massive billion dollar programs do.
Personally, I think all logo flashes should be mandatory at the start of the screen JUST the same as movie companies get THEIR logos into the project at the start. Guess what? Companies don't grow based on how much money they collect, they grow based on marketing... if you want one of the BEST revenue split contracts in the industry, you're going to have to flash the logo for 10 seconds out of your whole game. I mean, I would NEVER know what unity OR unreal was if their logo didn't pop up and I didn't associate the amazing game with that engine.
@@ryanthompson3737 except unity engine is known for being used to make asset flips, MOST people would automatically think bad of the game
You know it bad when game devs rather talk about converting their games to other engines. It's not the end of the world but it's fundamentally one of those things that you typically do not do. Most games switch to engines for a sequal or something like that, but not during their life cycle usually.
I'm not a game dev but a software dev - I imagine it being quite similar in that regard. I'd also try to avoid switching tech stacks during the ongoing development of a solution. On a new one, sure, why not if there's enough reason to do so but not in the midst of development.
Doing this indicates a really huge issue. Not only does it require an at least "big" re-write of the entire code base but it also might require your entire team to either learn an entirely new skill set (which will ofc prolong the development time and thus cost) or require to replace your entire team, which is obviously something you probably don't want to do and this would also cost a lot of money and time.
Big AAA game companies might have it a bit easier in that regard since they probably have teams that already are proficient in other game engines but this hits small/indie game devs really hard though.
Pokemon BDSP is made in Unity.
Marvel Snap is made in Unity.
I don't think Unity is going to win this one, boys
You know is a problem if DaniDev comes back to life on twitter
I don't know how many times I've uninstalled a game when I stopped playing it so I can clear up data on my drives and then installed it again later to play it again. Charging devs for that is utterly insane. They're not making money on that reinstall. That's crazy.
They don't profit on reinstalls, however they take a toll for every install in a different platform
@@canuto5508 did they go back on what they said? because that's what was said in the video.
@@kingwrightdev irrc they sent a communicate afterwards pointing out a few things about the changes (after the wave of well deserved criticism)
@@canuto5508 ahh ok. Glad they went back on that. I don't know how they're going to be able to tell, though.
There's literally no conceivable reason to have a runtime fee other than:
A) yoinking and selling aggregate player data
B) Thieving and lying about money owed(Unity is the singular authority)
C) Destroying medium developers to cut competition for the giants(disproportionately affects medium sized devs)
For all we know it's all 3. The CEO of Unity has time and time again proven himself to be absolute scum worthy of the cruelest fates imaginable.
Revenue share has been the standard for a reason.
There is a very legitimate reason. Essentially, Unity is on the hook, indefinitely, for the Unity runtime software to be updated for new OSes for old games. If Unity decided to say “okay, you don’t want to pay, now it won’t run on future consoles and PCs”, that’s untenable for everyone involved.
Unity’s work doesn’t end at making and updating the current X version of Unity for their developers. They are expected to keep extending the runtime for decades.
@@tokidoki9651And their profits increased by 25% last year. They can handle it without pulling this incredibly stupid move.
@@tokidoki9651 From the start of history, a runtime of a toolchain, be it Unity and Unity Runtime or C# and its Mono runtime, the pricing has always been linked to the base product (Unity or C# for example). Hell, even Unity uses the Mono runtime and a platform specific C++ runtime for its own runtime to even function... They use these runtimes FOR FREE and they still have to be so hostile to people who pay for their game engine to start charging for a runtime. Having a runtime is Unity's choice, you can always make a game engine without a runtime and Unity chose not so, it is therefore Unity's responsibility to maintain it.
@tokidoki9651 that's a load of shit and you know it. They get their fees from the devs as is they keep deving the engine which means more people with dev games on it hence providing financial incentives to keep deving the runtime. Remember this is the ceo that floated the idea of charging for reloading guns in a game.
@@tokidoki9651 Sorry, did they just find out that this was the deal that they themselves were writing when they made the engine available to others? You're saying this as if something has changed at any point when no... they would be making the original contracts that they're now changing fully knowing that they need to update the runtime right?
Come on, stop living in denial.
my problem is that $1M is not a lot of money in certain contexts. Lets say you have a small studio of five people, all five of those people are going to expect a paycheck once the game is out.
Steam takes a 30% cut, Epic takes around 12%, Unity doesn't take a cut but would cost around 10,000 for pro for all people, if you have a publisher as well: they need to be paid too. Adding the .20 cents per install would hurt small studios who make enough to apply for the fee, but aren't huge enough to grantee everyone on their team is getting paid well.
Also, for Unity's personal use version, the cap is set to $200,000 and not the one million, and the same issue applies. Its very unlikely that all of that 200,000 is going to the developer even before the new Unity fee. Unity calculates revenue BEFORE deductions as well, so a developer can reach the 200k threshold on both money and installs, they pay their publisher, Steam, and whatever else they use. And now Unity wants a cut of that from installs as well. this is horribly for small developers, imagine getting a decent amount of success and now you owe MORE than you would have if you weren't as successful. Fees like that can kill indie projects that are being worked on right now in Unity.
There's a chance that it won't affect indies as much as some people think it will, but putting a low threshold and bigger fines on the free version of Unity doesn't look great for smaller developers. Plus, a lot of developers have been working on projects for a long time now, and now they have the choice of switching engines, or feeling forced to agree with the change since their project is almost complete using Unity anyway. Its a really scummy way to basically grantee that some developers are going to keep using Unity because they feel forced to.
Revenue share is the most simple way for them to change their business model. The way they are going adds so many "well what if.."s and, in all honesty, work for Unity. The constant battle of fraud and refining a way to collect accurate numbers is nullified with a simple "you pay this yearly and we get X% of the sales."
Slight correction, it's not when an indie makes a million dollars but reaches 200k. This would destroy anyone funding a small studio with 10-15 employees, forcing per download would bankrupt anyone not raking in millions and crush the freemium markets
I think if you make more then 200k you can afford to make the economical choice to pay the 2k per dev to upgrade to a corporate plan that uses the 1mill number
@@cosmicelectronbruh if you underpay your developers/designers like crazy, you'll still pay them at least 50k/year, so that's barely 4 people's salary. This is worded like it's based on raw revenue, not net income, so on top of that, you have taxes, material and all the other expenses related to the development eating from that same pie.
Plus, for a small dev team starting up with their first game, that enterprise license fee you have to pay upfront is not necessarily something they can afford.
@@cosmicelectron not if you're app is a freemium model. 200k profit for a small studio and a *2 million installs* means you owe 200% what your app has made during that time in Unity fees. "Just upgrade plans bro" doesn't work for all cases, as that's ontop of 30% publisher + 30% platform + % taxes. Charging % after a million profit (not per installs) like Unreal does is the solution that won't bankrupt small studios
@@rekindledphoenix I'm not saying its a good thing, or that it isn't terrible for smaller Devs, I'm just saying that it's more economical to upgrade rather than pay the per install fee for the personal plan, I don't disagree that the unreal method is better
@@cosmicelectrongoogle “profit margin”
Something kind of being left out is that there has basically been nothing but bad press streaming out of Unity every since they went public a few years back. Almost all their interesting projects got canned and they blew billions on dubious acquisitions, not to mentioned hired one of EA's most infamous execs to run the show.
Nothing good ever comes out of a company going public. Once that happens every single decision they make is about getting that stock price up no matter what.
They hired an EA exec? Well that explains the sudden unbelievable greed.
@@holdintheaces7468Current CEO used to be EA's CEO.
What isn't mentioned is that Unity is already legendary for it's terrible customer support and slow bug fix time - they've had core critical bugs in the engine for years now that the community has to work on. For example you're trying to implement a popular cloth simulator, it doesn't work on current version. You go back to previous version and it breaks five other things. You put up with this because Unity is far cheaper to dev on than unreal or building your own engine, but if they literally make it more expensive then unreal, then it's unreal all the way since unreal has better feature support
The same fucker sold his shares before crashing the company. The dude is so destructive I'd be surprised if he wasn't paid to ruin the company by UE.
Yikes, I knew Unity execs were scum, but this is a whole other level. I've never been more glad I chose Godot for my personal projects.
i should have stayed with godot 😢
@@podcastlegends3671hey man, there was no way to predict this, just try your best to make it out of this!
the "un"retweet in the middle of the rant was everything and more
As a game dev with almost 10 years of full time professional Unity development (basically my career), you explained every bit of this to an outside audience perfectly. Thank you! One additional thing to keep in mind is that they are targeting the big fish, but it actually hurts the developers with a high-install business model (such as free to play) with alternative revenue streams, that are making *less* money. If making only around the 1 million dollar per year threshold, those businesses would be on the hook to pay the same bill as the big fish making much more money with a similar install count. It's a fundamentally broken concept. The community trust for creating with Unity has now been damaged permanently and developers are abandoning Unity simply for breaking trust. It's a betrayal. It will undoubtedly affect the entire game industry, no matter what happens next. Ironically, Unity created the F2P industry, now they have killed it.
Are we sure they're targeting the big fish? Won't those guys just either shoot it down before it can stand or just wager so hard that it no longer applies to them?
They want more than a few thousand for developer seat licenses from the companies that make the lion's share of profit in the games industry. That part actually makes sense to most people, I think. Unreal takes 5%, marketplaces take even more. But, the way they architected (or failed to architect) this "license" is basically dead on arrival, impossible to enforce, IMHO. But, that won't stop them from trying, or backpedaling to a simple rev share percentage. It's too late though. The damage is done, and it was actually a long time coming in hindsight.
@moonymachine8125 I see. I mean, I suppose I'm just seeing it through Silk-tinted lenses and a cup of Cherry-flavored anxiety (and they're not the only devs I worry for, it's just the only ones I know [outside of Aggro Crab] who are sooo close to finishing their product), it just didn't make sense logically to wrestle with the likes of Microsoft when even the likes of Innersloth likely couldn't do anything but leave.
Yeah, if it affects Silksong, that will be the real betrayal.
@@GardenVarietea yeah how are they targeting the big fish when they charge indie devs more per download??
I'm a unity dev and our company chose unity because the pricing model was much better than unreal for what we were doing. But now I worry that the company's higher ups might change their minds and we'd have to start all over again in a different engine.
Isn't unreal free until you made 1mil?
@@fernando4959 the company makes well over 1M probably closer to 20M unity had a fixed price regardless of the companies income unreal wants a cut of the companies entire profits.
@@fernando4959it wasn’t in the past. Now it’s 5% once you hit 1m.
@@fernando4959sure, but as a company of more than ~5-10, you wanna make a lot more than 1 million to pay all your devs.
@@fernando4959 Yeah but Unity was a flat fee per dev per year for paid versions over a certain gross revenue whereas Unreal takes 5% of gross revenue after 1M. Unreal will at least waive some of their royalties for revenue from the Epic Store, though most people only use it for the free stuff anyways.
I have been learning Unity for a while, messing around and making some prototypes here and there. I finally want to settle on one game and see it through to completion, but now I don't know if I should stick with Unity, or switch to something else. It's especially difficult because the kind of game I want to make Unity is really good for.
This video felt like a 10/10 class presentation
R.I.P. Unity, you were great while you lasted. I haven't seen a company try to cut in to game Dev profits like that since Apple. Sucks because now everything is going to have to be rewritten to other engines. There are so many Devs that release free games using Unity.... this is going to bee a dumpster fire.
Uh Hello? Steam? epic Games? You must be new around here. Welcome to the internet kiddo. Sucks your getting your info from Ludwig. You really really shouldn't expect any real info. if you want to learn about this do your own research. Thats how the internet works youll figure it out some day. Your just in the baby step stage we get it.
@Foxexar those arent engines tho
@@Foxexarthose aren't game engines??
@@Foxexarso what have you learned from your research
@@Foxexar bro you need to get your info from somewhere in general. Your dome isn't equipped with enough processing power.
I don’t understand why they didn’t just try to go with the Unreal model. 5% of game sales seems perfectly reasonable to me. Charging per install is insane, especially if they’ll be charged per reinstall. I could see that being weaponized very easily.
To me it feels even weirder as an install is something that costs Unity themselves $0. They are not a distribution platform. Unless I have missed something. I know they have some asset storage / management cloud services and their tools can help you upload the game to different distribution platforms, but that doesn't really connect with the number of game installs at all...
I feel like a royalty fee is a pretty fair price model: "We helped you speed up your development by taking care of one of the hardest parts of making a game - the engine - therefore we get part of your profit once you sell it". Atleast fair compared to this craziness.
I suspect that games like Genshin Impact, which are free to download and install, would circumvent that sales percentage. As stated in the video, this fee does seem tailor made to target massive games using free to play monetization models, but it oversteps so many boundaries that even that can't justify it.
@@0skuro Not true. You can read in the FAQ on UE5 for example that DLC or microtransactions count towards their threshold and royalty fee, so there are definitely ways Unity could have worked around that.
And sure, it might seem like it is tailored towards only targeting the largest games, but the thresholds Unity has announced are not targeted towards that at all imo. Their highest threshold (if you pay the highest sub) is $1 million over 1y. That is not that large amount of money. I would say that is kinda what a 5 dev indie studio would have to make their first year after release if they spent ~3y developing the game ($1mil / (48months * 5devs) = $4167 per month per dev which is an ok dev pay where I come from atleast). That is an example of the kinds of studios they are gonna hit with this (unless I miscalculated I guess, correct me if thats the case).
Install costs 0$, except for the R&D of the original runtime (already long made up) and the ongoing maintenance of the runtime for new consoles and computers. They don’t want to continue doing work for decades for free.
@@tokidoki9651 Weirdest argument ever. Then charge customers for the number of platforms they release on. I agree that it costs Unity to keep the compatibility of their runtime to the systems they support. But once they have payed for the development of that compatibility it doesn't cost them anything "per install" on those platforms. I agree Unity should be payed for their work - but "installing software on any of these systems" is not their work. I don't know if you know how software works but Unity isn't paying anything for the software running on other people's systems.
Finally a chill approach on this drama!
"Well, mostly no, but sometimes maybe" is my favourite quote of the week thanks mogul mail
The CEO so stupid he sold the important thing you can't buy back, brand reputation and trust. How business people keep making this mistake is beyond me, they just cut down the base of their money tree with blind greed.
Tht CEO is the same one that utterly ruined EA (John Riccitiello). That guy needs to be dealt with, ASAP.
@@gargarmikejaphett.3840
vinegar in the eyes level shit until they learn a fucking lesson.
Don't worry. Unity apologyised today, made a new policy and unity game devs are already kissing their feet. Nothing has changed. People are still spineless as long as companies don't shove their phalluses in their ass to the point their organs get pierced. Look at some new videos from these unity game devs. Spineless to the core.
@@gargarmikejaphett.3840 I'm shocked the board of Unity actually let that guy run things considering his less than stellar track record
Really happy for Godot, they deserve the new developers who will be migrating to them
@@carlosmatthews1910 every single coment you coment that, shut up xd
agreed. I'm hoping over time Godot's community gets larger. Seeing more quality games out on Godot would be great too. I think it has a lot of potential that a lot of people haven't seen yet since Godot doesn't get a lot of big releases. Godot 4.0 also fixed a ton of issues I had with it in the past so maybe that can draw some people in as well.
Genuine question, what are the biggest games that came from godot ?
@@shenji28642 I know are Halls of Torment and Cruelty squad but I’m sure there are many more popular games
@@shenji2864Cruelty Squad, but that’s gonna change soon.
sneaky line in that qna about unity not receiving data. good chance they will request that user data and then sell it.
About the last part of the video, while yes Unity most likely is making this change specifically to target large games, it doesn't change the fact that they made the runtime fee much more impactful to smaller indie studios than it does for larger companies. Things like the price per install becoming cheaper as the game gets more installs, the fact that the fees are cheaper for people who can afford Unity Enterprise, and the fact that these values are just significantly more impactful to devs who have less money to throw around. If they REALLY wanted to exclusively target larger game publishers and producers, then they should've made these runtime fees either cheaper for indie devs or made them exclusively impact larger devs. They could've just as easily increased their subscription costs or implemented a profit sharing model where they take a small percentage of earnings for smaller devs while taking larger percentages after a certain amount of gross profit has been earned.
The amount of companies and organizations throwing away their goodwill with their customers (unity, twitter, reddit, Rust org, etc.) right now is pretty astounding. Feels like a new one every week
What did Rust do recently? Was always interested in learning it.
@@Living_Target Rust is a great, I really enjoy using it! But there's been a couple issues mostly stemming from the defacto nature of the organisation. Recently there was a dev who controls most of the top packages including serde who has been throwing their weight around making controversial decisions. He unilaterally forced a binary dependency in a package used in almost every rust project which broke quite a few builds. This alone almost caused a fork. The same person was revealed to be the person behind the cancellation of an upcoming keynote talk because it featured competing technology. It has made some rust users concerned about investing time in building projects with rust when one unelected person, unwilling to consider feedback, could upend years of your work on a whim.
The reason they are doing it is because all the other companies that are throwing their customers under the bus have had their profits increase after doing so
They know they can get away with it so they don't care
There was also the Hasbro D&D incident
@ThomasFFoolery8383 Thank god that situation disarmed. But also thank god for it happening, wouldn't of found pathfinder without it.
Thank you ludwig for spreading awareness of these heinous decisions by unity. Btw the CEO John Riccitiello is the same guy who tanked EA's reputation and has made multiple absolutely insane takes before
There go my college years spent learning Unity
I gotta pick up the pieces and start again, again
The fact that Dani himself literally appeared in the thumbnail talking abt it just shows how bad shit is. Edit.(Sorry for the foul language)
How are they planning on stopping piracy for counting when in order to do that, you need to know if the game’s pirated? Which won’t be the case because you know, piracy means bypassing piracy detection.
That was my reaction lol… if you had a way to detect piracy, wouldn’t piracy itself already not be a problem? Makes no sense lmao.
@@Shumoku438 that's been a thing for well over 2 Decades, and it'll never be resolved as there'll always be people whom have both way too much time and Way too much skill that just get to work on breaking it, and then there are companies like Denuvo whom with their anti-Piracy software Promote Piracy because Nobody sane and knowledgeable would willingly break their PC with it because the only place it "Works" is at the meeting room of the CEO's who have no idea what they're signing on for
That’s the thing, they won’t and they can’t. People will always find a way to get what they want.
To be fair, most pirated games should have the DRM removed, so Unity won't even be able to track installs (and so, can't charge the devs). Having said that, that's by no means a guarantee.
@@addison_reilly5904 It's practically a guarantee they won't try to fix the issue if it arises. If they're willing to go behind the backs of developers to renegotiate their terms without their consent. Why would they care if an exploit exists that makes Unity more money? The CEO certainly doesn't believe/care in the future of the company, he's sold tens of thousands of shares over the last year without buying any back.
The fact that Lud can pronounce Godot correctly while tons of it’s users can’t is really funny to me
Yet he somehow messed up devolver digital
Blame that French blood. Silent T's don't make sense to most the rest of Europe.
The developers of godot all pronounce godot differently so there might not be an objective correct way of pronouncing the name
Is is go dot or go dough
@@Researcher_Jimgodough
I think the problem is also that the fee i flat. A popular small indie game with MSRP of $5 will have to pay the same amount in runtime fees as a popular big game with MSRP of $70 (given that they use the same license) as long as they have the same amount of installs, which seems kinda unfair.
The DeFranco style jump cut had me laughing. Great job all around.
This going to result in old unity games getting fully removed from steam by their own devs to avoid paying fees. Its going to be like when adobe flash went away
Old apps shouldn't be included in this pricing fee. One, they mostly likely couldn't track them anyway since the game is already built and published before they had the tracker thing. Two, that's retroactive rulesetting which -- I think -- could be interpreted as an unfair business practice to their customers, which could make the liable to be sued. That said, they could already had some way to track installs and have ToS that covers it. In that case, they really are the villain here.
@@xaf15001the old games are still being targeted here. Unity explained that after this goes into effect the previous titles that are installed after January 2024 will be charged a install fee to the devs.
Thank you for bringing attention to this. As a unity developer, this is a big hit. I want to support unity but they continuously make really horrible decisions. The engine has not changed enough in the past 6-7 years to justify something like this. Lighting is still a nightmare, there's no huge features like unreal. The main benefit to using unity is the community. And they continually fuck us
Why do you want to support Unity?
@@FreshToast-qm8ki Um. because it's a game engine and they're a unity developer? They problably didn't mean they want to support the company. Just the game engine.
"Developer Digital" 💀
Are you saying, that every time I uninstall a game so that I have enough storage to reinstall another game, that reinstall costs the developers money?! That's bullshit
Corporate greed is so dumb. So many companies try to exploit their customers and end up just ruining themselves. They never seem to learn
"Ah but what if we made just a liiiiitle bit more."
It's hardly even corporate green, it's just how capitalism works. Making the most money is the best outcome for the higher ups. It's inherent to the system. Us little guys have to fight so hard to not get fucked over.
They could just keep going along as they've been doing and getting profits, but no, they need more profit in the short term. Ruining companies for short term profit is not capitalism, it's just pure greed.
The CEO so stupid he sold the important thing you can't buy back, reputation and trust. How business people keep making this mistake is beyond me, they just cut down the base of their money tree.
Say capitalism.
One small thing to note is that while, yes, Unity does update their runtime all the time, many game developers don't actually install any of these updates to existing projects. This is because the game developers would have to fix a lot of their code to work on the new runtime which usually isn't worth all the effort.
EDIT: Correction on "this doesn't charge a developer who hasn't made at least $1m with their game" -- yes it does. The figure for Personal (free) customers is $200K and 200k installs. The figure for Pro and Enterprise customers is $1M and 1M installs. Dani uses the Personal version of Unity, hence his usage of the $0.20 cut figure.
I think it’s more accurate to say it would cost someone using the free version $2000 it’d be really dumb to pay the higher install fee and not the higher subscription fee
@@ludwigwow Ludwig I didn't expect to see you here! You and mogul mail should Collab!
@@ludwig Still worth mentioning. Maybe it's not as simple to switch over from personal as it appears.
@@ismailozer1he should really collaborate with Linus Tech tips with this kind of misinformation!
JUST kidding lmao saw a good time for a little jokerooo
@@ludwig I see your point, though it would be more of an up front cost to buy the subscription which I think devs of free games and software might struggle to pay. Also, while I could imagine Game Pass footing some of the bill for these fees, I can't imagine them buying whole Unity licenses for devs, but I guess we'll see
They weren’t happy with a slice, they’d rather have the whole cake
As expected of ex-CEO of EA, the greed never leaves, it will only spread.
This seems like a corporation doing something extreme so they can walk it back slightly and seem like the good guys while its way worse than it was before.
It’s a bit late for that it’s been several days now
Ignore the bot, please reply to the comment or any other reply thanks!
As a big company dev thank you for getting more eyes on this, with more pressure hopefully they will reconsider this awful decision
@@carlosmatthews1910stop existing bot
@@carlosmatthews1910that is a sad bot message
@@hotdog10_ don't reply to bots, just report em
BEGONE! *proceeds to obliterate your computer*@@carlosmatthews1910
@@carlosmatthews1910 but dan have father,, shouldn't that make dan superior?
This is like if a paint company charged you for what colors you mixed and sold
As a player, I'm not going to be playing anything made in un*tiy ever again.
They should start charging the end-user $0.50 every time they run a game.
If I wanted to go to an Arcade, I would. Fu*k Unity.
Don't give them the idea now...
THANK YOU LUDWIG!!!
As a programmer / game developer, I've wanted this video because the public needs to know that the devs are in pain because of Unity.
Using Unity particle system must have backfired huh. Real scummy work here.
I'm not too effected directly, I use Godot myself, but a lot of my friends are and it indirectly effects me because of how I can't trust Unity to do anything now.
Unity is making it really hard for me to not switch to Unreal.
It feels like Unity needed cash fast so they had to do this which is most likely illegal in some states and countries. Iike 7 years ago I said they should have had a model closer to UE (of course cheaper) because I know a one time fee isn't going to keep them afloat in the long run. Even if they just had a 2% revenue share they would be much better off now.
No more unity particle system and Karlson
“Oh, you don’t know what kalson is. It’s just a game Dani is making.”
As an indie developer who transitioned from Unity to Godot (amazing open source engine), I keep getting more and more confirmation that it was a good choice.
Im trying to start being a game developer with 2 months of very beginner work with Unity. Is it worth switching to Godot?
@eriklarson6362 Yes, my fellow Larson, since Unity has showed their hand and it would be pretty dangerous to trust them now. I have been working with Unity for years but now I need to change too.
@@eriklarson6362 yes
@@eriklarson6362I'd recommend giving it a shot! There are definitely differences between the two, but it's not an entirely separate universe. There are some great Godot 4 tutorials out there for both the 2d and 3d workflows, just need to search!
@@eriklarson6362 Sure, Godot is amazing and I personally can 100% reccomend it.
But look it up and decide for yourself mate!
The real problem is if they can unilaterally and retroactively change terms once, they can do it again, and again. Sure they might be only targeting bigger games for now, but who's to say those thresholds won't suddenly change again if they want more money
They may be breaking contract law by doing that. Nullifying all previous contracts.
“It is not illegal to alter a contract once it has been signed. However, it must be materially changed, meaning that if an important part of the contract is altered by the change, it must be made by mutual consent of both parties.”
Dont forget, Unity's CEO was fired from EA for being too greedy. THIS MAN WAS TOO GREEDY FOR EA.
I literally have unity open as I saw this video. This is terrifying for us fellow indie devs
I love how Unity actually seems like its trying to make itself more useless. It's almost like they're trying to give people more reasons to just use Unreal Engine. What are they doing???
they are like roblox lmao
@@jarster1in life you have unity
Good to see Ludwig cover the Unity topic. It's so asinine and scummy that I'm surprised this is even legal since it's basically a breach of contract. We could lose so many great indie games like Cuphead, Hollow Knight and Subnautica because of this.
Companies really be exploiting the footnotes on the EULA these days
Ethicality in Capitalism is a myth. The more people that realize this the better.
@@rasengdori13 Honestly there's no ethics in any financial system
In my opinion, I'm glad it's legal, as when a company does something as asinine as this, it's a clear red flag 🚩 to the consumer, allowing us to know the distributors' intentions. In another world, you have distributors working even harder to create smoke and mirrors for us consumers.
-
To add, even if they walk this back completely, it's going to leave a sour taste in the mouths of every single company wanting to use Unity,
"this is what the company wants to do, who you're working with, if they could."
@rasengdori13 maybe that's why we should revolt against it instead of just throwing our hands up and going "it is what it is"
Just maybe.
runtime is like the fuel system on an engine, leave it to decay and it shits out, runtime not updated shits out with newer OS updates
Lud looks more and more like an off-duty cop each day.
Mogul Mail finally going through puberty faster than Ludwig
Absolutely insane that they thought people wouldn't just use a different engine in a world full of multiple good engines
There isn't that many... Why do you think a lot of studios are either using Unreal Engine or Unity?
@@wateo1782it’s less of there isn’t good engines, there is plenty but unity and unreal has the biggest use which translates to a lot of community support/knowledge
@@wateo1782Yes but there is an alternative, one that isn’t actively worse.
never in my life would i ever witness Nappa from dbz talk about a companies bad PR practices with a game engine
Update: they changed their answers as of September 14th on the Q&A shown in the video. This does not however excuse Unity.
The second you mentioned them backtracking multiple install fees I had to laugh. They really thought the whole “start too high then ‘compromise’ to what you actually want” thing was just going to fly over peoples heads? What a joke.
This was INSANE. At first I thought it was reasonable, but then he said it was 14% OF THE EARNINGS. Some companies only get like a 20-25% profit margin after expenses, which is divided among multiple people AND new projects, so TAKING MORE THAN HALF OF THEIR PROFITS IS INSANITY. The moment Ludwig said we might never see silk song I could FEEL the devastation of the community. The clock is ticking for unity to repair this mess, and they have VERY limited time to do it.
FWIW retained earnings =\= profit margins. Income =/= earnings. They aren’t taking more than half of their profits.
@@tokidoki9651paying the workers, the marketing, the licenses, can get some small companies to spend 70-80% on a product to then return with a 20-25% profit, taking 14% of the total earnings (not revenue Cuz they don't Calc that but total earnings instead) is, in fact, more than half the revenue in this particular example, ofc multimillionaire games won't be as afflicted but it sure does destroy small games
It's the model, and it's fair. Publisher's used to take 30-40%, for distribution, marketing, Steam and First Party take 10-30%, I think Unreal is 5%, it adds up.
Steam taking 30% is excessive, why big publishers tend to have their own distribution service.
An Engine is a big part of a game's development. It's only fair for them to get a cut of the profits.
The issue, is this is PER-INSTALL, not per units sold. That's a whole new can of worms. And it's retroactive (they'll backtrack on that quickly, seems highly illegal to me). And they want to dance with Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo to get their per-install money. Good luck with that.
In short, they cannot be trusted to be reasonable, their contract and decision-making is garbage, and nobody will now work with them.
The fact that developers are saying they are going to switch away from Unity is insane. Changing just the _version_ of game engine you are using for a game can be complex. The game engine is the fundemental structure that everything is built upon. Switch away from Unity is commiting to rewriting basically ever part of your game.
I believe the bigger game devs will negotiate some kind of revenue share agreement with Unity that will cost much less than the install fees.
The indies that want to have a shot at the GOTY award will be the ones that hurts the most.
You either have to be a monopoly or overwhelmingly superior product to pull something like this off, and unity is neither
I wonder if there are any relevant companies that are one of the above though...
*hmmmmmmm*
and yet the most profitable games, as Lud pointed out in this video, uses Unity
I came here as soon as I heard about the Unity changes to see your take. On my Monday stream, I literally taught my chat how to use Unity and talked about how great their pricing plan was. Emphasis on was. The main problem with their new plan is that games in development need to change their monetization plan. $0.99 phone games are no longer commercially viable if you're hoping it goes viral. Now every time apple upgrades their OS and users click the "update all" button on their phone, you lose another % of the revenue you made for that game - $0.60 after apple store fees. So after 3 OS upgrades, your hit game that went viral starts costing you money.
Devs need at least 10 years of advanced notice to come up with game concepts that fit the new pricing model. I really feel for devs who have spent years in development and are close to release.
if this goes through and silk song isnt able to come out after waiting this many years im ngl i dont know what ima do.
If it was a percentage of sales instead of a fixed rate per install (either all installs as originally stated or -trust me bro our malware can def distinguish repeated sales- as they said later) then at least it would be survivable.