Unity Apologises, Partially Walks Back Contentious Monetization Scheme

Ok good. Now don't be naughty again.

Unity is done, why devs will develop games for it in the future when unity can just change the rule again. The only way devs can trust unity again is if unity fire their ceo and goes back to old rule, no stupid installation fee.

The damage is so bad that even if they completely reversed their plans it would still be hard to trust Unity going forward.

why not make it simple 2.5% revenue share across the board no tiers. no subs no versions

your under cutting unreals 5% revenue share

@Powerplay94 there's been a lot of chatter going on in indie dev spheres about Godot, which is an open source alternative 3d engine, and also FNA or Monodevelop, which are both basically XNA but cross platform (FNA aims to be a strict reimplementation of XNA 4.0, but doesn't support Android or PlayStation. Monodevelop aims to be "what if development had continued after 4.0")

[Edit for more info:] XNA was the Microsoft framework all the indie darlings on the XBox 360 used, designed to be a lightweight .Net alternative to DirectX, and retained popularity until it was discontinued around 2013 because Microsoft were moving towards all the silly Metro App stuff they introduced with Windows 8.

@theheadofabroom The issue is Unity is mature and has a low barrier of entry. If Godot fits a dev's needs, then I'm certain many will choose it in the future and Godot will continue to grow and mature. If a dev is capable of developing in Unreal, they probably will. However, many I know are stuck with Unity for now. AR/VR developers, Apple Vision Pro developers, or developers who do not have C++ experience will likely continue to use Unity in the near future.

The trust is lost though. The new terms are workable, but devs will need to vigilantly watch for terms of service changes in the future. Unfortunately, until Godot matures a bit more, or another player enters the engine market, Unity will be a necessary evil for many small developers.

Well i think unity is pretty much done for now and its their own fault for trying it on. Unity is not even that great of an engine and whilst i'm sure there are games out there that use it to great effect those that i've played personally have been quite janky and appear quite rigid.

@OmniHawk that's certainly the perception, but anyone who's worked with Unity will tell you of its many frustrating shortcomings. Unity's strength was in being a default option. That's something it has now lost. Some people will stick with it, but a lot of people are choosing alternatives for their next project and that's going to have an impact going forward.

Still think Unity is finished. I hope most continue not to use it.

@theheadofabroom I hope you are right about most people switching. I have published games in Unity off and on for 15 years. The engine is not great, but is one of the best options for quickly putting together a 3D game. I have also developed games using Unreal Engine and GameMaker and in the 90s was responsible for creating the custom engine for a then major publisher. I can confidently say that Unity has its flaws but also has a lack of viable competitors that tick off all the same boxes. That's the reality that many small developers will face as they try to shift to existing alternatives. As an example, Godot's VR support isn't quite to the level of Unity at the moment. This will change of course, but for now, it is not the best option.

I do believe Unity will die from its self inflicted wounds but it will be due to larger developers and publishers abandoning it. Many smaller devs may test the waters a bit but will find themselves stuck until alternatives mature a bit more. Unfortunately for Unity, those small developers will not bring in the revenue to help them.

"For now".
Here's how this works: they failed this time. They said sorry. Couple of months time everyone forgets about it. Then they start again, slower, methodically, bit-by-bit. A charge here, a fee there. Before you know it, we are back here again, only this time, there is no backlash because everyone has become accustomed to it. Microtransactions are a prime example of this method in action. But hey, we "won" right?

@Powerplay94 I heard that there's open source engine called godot that's quite good, while it's not as good as unity right now, but if there's influx of developers using and developing it, it can be better than unity in the future.

The classic tactic. Take 2 steps forward > backlash > take 1 step back > acceptance

It’s a really shame if this stops smaller developers updating existing games (anything making close to or over £200k). It will probably cause delays in upcoming games too. If that causes less people to use the engine, Unity could have just created their own death spiral. It depends if they can still make enough money from the companies that stick with them

The damage is done, I'm already noodling around with other engines to see what best will suit my hobby projects.

Best case scenario is that this Unity debacle serves as a wake up call for the indie development community to sort of band together and collectively move towards an indie-friendly, open-source engine. Godot seems to be the most likely name that keeps popping up, but I don't really know much about it. It's obviously not something that can happen overnight, but perhaps it could eventually result in a more mature and widely supported engine, with lots of documentation out there.

It'll be a painful road for many small developers to relearn years worth of experience in another engine, but the end result of freeing themselves from a terrible company that can change their licencing on a whim would be worth it in my opinion.

Anyone have a clue how this works for the assassin's creed games?
It was my understanding they used some sort of a unity engine for the base but modified it 🤔

@Cherip-the-Ripper as far a I'm aware, the only link between AnvilNext (the engine used for the AC franchise) and Unity is that AnvilNext was the engine used for the game called Assassin's Creed Unity, but that there's a load of confusion that's come from that.

AnvilNext is based on Anvil, which was called Scimitar until 2009. All of that time its been Ubisoft's engine.

@theheadofabroom lol thanks for clearing that up, always thought it's weird for them to be unity games but this makes more sense.

Unity has moved into "untrusted" category. This all "clarifications" is just finding size of bite developers are still willing to eat... If I were Unity, I would cancel all this fee crap, fire that Ricitiello b!tch and sue him for all damage he made to company.

Unity has never been profitable, so I can see why they want to increase the price - it's existential. And when you consider how many engineers they have working to make the engine better, then compare to a simple mobile game built on Unity that suddenly goes viral, well I can see how Unity HQ are looking at that and thinking "when you tally up the man-hours that went into making that game possible, we put more time in than that dev who just imported a few assets in and played with the physics model a bit to make their infinite runner" (for the sake of argument). If the status quo continues, then Unity will eventually go pop, and then where will the indie devs that rely on it be?
That being said, the way they have gone about trying to make the changes happen has been cack-handed in the extreme. If it were up to me, I'd say that no game that was released on the old fee-structure should be affected, and that there will be a 3 year period before the fee changes come into effect (giving devs who are still making their games plenty of time to consider their options). And I'd make the new fee-structure a lot simpler, a straight forward revenue split, regardless of how well the game does, no tiers at all, and maybe whack it up to 5% or something. That's easy enough for everyone to get their heads around, and if indie games need to become ~5% more expensive to account for that, then fine, it's £3 on a £60 game, I think the market would swallow it.
But then Unity seems in an awful hurry to do something now, so maybe they are closer to running out of financial lifelines than we appreciate or they are letting on.

@theheadofabroom An you expect people to navigate all that nonsense, that why unity was popular, no politics, just engine you could use to make games for basically anything.

@StrickenBiged For a company that never been profitable they have spent billions on acquisition . I don't think they are in any real danger of disappearing, surely apple or Google will buy them or at least the game engine, Google would have to get rid of the ads parts of the company.

@knowles2 I'm not sure which people you're referring to. I certainly don't expect gamers to navigate it all, it should be irrelevant to the players, but I'm talking about it because there seems to be some interest at the moment.

When it comes to studios and developers, a game takes an incredible amount of time and effort to make, so yes it's reasonable to expect a bit of due diligence in picking the tools you use to do so and making sure that they'll be able to produce an acceptable compromise on your vision (no creative vision manifests uncompromised, reality always imposes itself one way or another) and that the end product will be financially viable.

In addition to the handful of engines mentioned here (Unreal, Unity, Godot, FNA, MonoGame) there are plenty of smaller projects which are working to indie studios like Construct (uses web technologies to make 2d games like Vampire Survivor), GameMaker, CryEngine, Lumberyard, Cocos, Marmalade, Panda3D, GameSalad, Phaser, Defold...

There's too many to evaluate them all individually for a given project, but there's enough out there to consider a few alternatives to Unity.