https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv24RPSB0Ps&t=605s
I know, another Unity thread, but it's pretty significant news especially compared to the crap titles we've seen releasing left and right these days. There's been a huge developer backlash already and it seems that the trust is broken with a lot of large indie devs who have been lucky enough to make money of their games.
GamesFromScratch did some good coverage on this and tracked a bunch of developer responses and it seems the consensus is clear, leave Unity and don't come back. Loads of people have been making this point in dev circles that even if they do walk back this stupidity the trust is gone with the company because it shows that this has been on their mind this whole time and there's no reason they can't sneak it in some way when the heat has died down.
I'm somebody who switched from Unity to Godot as people here will know and there are so many things wrong with Unity beyond this but I think this will finally be what kills this company.
. They were dumb enough to put an ex-EA executive in charge who was allegedly responsible for the initial push for microtransactions in EA titles
. Unity has been a broken piece of mess for years with frequently deprecated code and especially quite broken multiplayer support, you often had to rely on third party plugins to even get things to work ( I know I went through the pain of learning this the hard way ) it was only until recently they've got multiplayer properly supported and working again
. To get an idea of how broken Unity is, even with the most basic base version and no extra plugins of the engine you would frequently get errors in the debugger while you were using the engine and it didn't seem like things were going to be fixed any time soon
. This was a bit of a minor one for me but even though the UI layout was fine, it also looked pretty ugly especially compared to modern engines, even the buttons were rather meh looking and everything is as grey as fuck
. They got rid of their in-house software for writing the actual code, instead opting for microsofts third party IDE, there's nothing wrong with this software by itself however in typical Microsoft fashion they try to make you sign up to their bullshit in order to get rid of pop ups and it was a clearly very deliberate choice on Unity's part to get rid of their completely offline software for writing code. Yes, you can technically hook Unity up to an IDE but this is me looking at the software as somebody who would just download the engine and work with what has been given
. The unity-ironsource merger, for those who won't know this particular bit of background, there's a company called Ironsource that has been involved with Unity fairly recently and everyone's alarm bells got set off when this company started to think they could do engine development. The reason being is they're a company that's allegedly notorious for putting telemetry in all their software and generally spying on people
. A Ukrainian activist somehow managed to hack Unity and Discord awhile back by exploiting a third party github tool for their auto-updating, apparently it targeted Russian IPs and what they did was wipe the drive through the auto-update which meant of course even if you were just somebody using a Russian server for your VPN you could be targeted and users who weren't on Russian IPs got a text file dumped on their desktop
Never heard of this? Then their PR team did their job, you weren't supposed to know, they swept it under the rug and the only reason I found out about it properly was because of alt-tech and I had to look into the forums and find an obscure official thread on the topic where a lot of the community was calling them out on it.
A very lengthy thread I know, but I thought this would give you guys plenty of background information on why Unity is bad beyond the meme shitposting. Unity's transgressions go way beyond this particular news story everyone is talking about. Which is why frankly anybody who tries to praise Unity as a great game engine and shits on other alternatives isn't very knowledgeable.
The CEO could have posted a video of himself snorting cocaine off a hooker's ass while he was wearing blackface and it would have done less damage to the company.
The CEO that sold 2000 shares right before the announcement was made?
Not just any EA fuck.
He INVENTED Ultimate Team loot boxes with FIFA 09, which have DESTROYED AAA sports video games.
Quote from the Slay the Spire dev, after saying they're either going to migrate the next thing they have in the works to a different engine or Unity walks it all back-
We have never made a public statement before. That is how badly you fucked up.
For people to understand how bad this is and they really need to, even I'd rather work with the Chinese than deal with Unity if I had to pick because no matter how much they walk this back the fact that they even considered this extremely arbitrary business model to rip off developers means they are completely untrustworthy now as a company.
Slay the Spire sold at least 1.5 million copies. It's a $25 game, although goes on sale to around $10. So, it made somewhere between $15-$37.5 million gross, lets say roughly $10-$25 mil after Steam/etc cut.
Unity's new plan charges $12,500 for the first 1.1 million installs. It charges $24,000 for 1.1-1.5 million installs, $10,000 for 1.5-2.0 million, and another $10,000 for 2.0-3.0 million. If Slay the Spire 2 sells the same as before, they're paying 0.2% to .1%. If Slay the Spire sells double compared to before, they're looking at paying 0.1% to 0.04%.
I don't see how they migrate to a different engine for less than $40k-$60k. Any delay in their game that sold tens of millions of dollars has to cost more than that. It seems like they made that statement as a knee jerk reaction and I would be surprised if they follow through with it except to virtue signal, since it's very obviously against their own interest to do so.
Devs dont get 100% of the sale money. They get a cut of a cut and unity charges per install, so they stand to lose basically all their revenue and profits from a computer running a script...
Actually they're looking at paying whatever the fuck unity decides to charge them because unity decides how many installs you've had using their magic algorithm and they can change the deal at any moment to decide you owe them more money. I honestly think the whole thing could be ruled unconscionable in court if it ever comes to that.
Yeah it borders on extortion. "We updated our terms so you now owe us 100 million dollars" isn't something you can just do out of nowhere
Remind me at the end of the year to make a post saying 'which company inflicted the biggest self harm in one move this year' as I think Unity is at least in the top 5
The warning signs were all there from your post, just seems they were waiting, soaked in gasoline for it to spark and this one decision is the match that burns them to the ground.
Off the top of my head, for this year, serious contenders for the Top 5 should be:
Dove (lookat dis hamplanet washin heself)
Volition (haters gonna hate). InBev (tranny pisswasser). Textron (you will buy our knockoff Pilatus and be happy). Unity (lol you thought this shit was free as in speech).
Serious runners up could be Ford (Chinese cars and EV trucks), Boeing (fuck you, Delta, who run airplane market).
I'll be honest after that MAJOR fuck up where their planes LITERALLY fell out of the sky, I'm surprised Boeing still exist.
They've driven Delta to the point that Delta is buying Airbuses willingly. There have been a few cases where a Boeing executive has essentially told Delta "lol you will buy what we build, and fuck the 757".
Don't forget wizards of the coast with the ogl debacle
Dove has been doing this for years. It's their whole business plan at this point.
It's really annoying because there are very few big time engines out there. I tried making something with Torque and felt bad for it.
A friend of mine has made sure Unity is now an enemy in his game.
John Riccitello -my spellcheck wants it to be spelled Reinstall- has been fairly scummy this entire time. It makes me wonder why the company bent so far so hard to hire him.
I hope most devs move to Godot or blender based engines rather than unreal. UE is nice and all but Timmy could die tomorrow and then there's no telling what would happen. This is when you realize how important open sourcing is.
Back to Unity, I think the only thing that would save the engine + share price would be a Microsoft acquisition. That would actually be a really good move for them.
Also because unreal is just so samey. Everything looks like fortnite.
That isnt the engines fault. That is devs too lazy to tweat the defaults in the "stock" components like the character controller.
Everyone said unity games are all the same but genshin impact is unity and i wouldnt know it until someone told me.
Yeah, my biggest worry about Unreal is what'll happen once management transfers to some corporate asshole. I'm sure there's people who might have a beef with Tim, but I think most would agree that Epic could be so much worse under different management.
Epic tried forcing exclusivity onto pc, is actively a front for chinese spyware and has one of the biggest if not the biggest freemium cancer ass game, which IIRC pioneered the faggot "battlepass" thing.
Steam let developers screw around with your games and spy on you first and we have the same problem when gabe disappears.
Difference between a store selling a bad product and the store being the bad product. For now, steam is miles better than epic has ever been.
To be fair.. fortnite battlepass was generous. Finish battlepass, get next battlepass for free and extra vbucks to save for cash shop.
But yeah. I hate all battlepasses. I miss loot boxes that you can get from playing the game. I never not gotten a skin from overwatch. I had all the coomer skins and i had so many duplicates, i had 80000 legacy coins. If its a fun game, you naturally play alot and you naturally get stuff.
Selling temporary bullshit, manufacturing grind to get the skinnerbox addiction effect, cutting out cosmetics from a game to resell to the players - that shit is never generous. It's cancerous.
Epic cannot possibly be worse.
Nah, Microsoft would make some decent changes on the frontend for usability and improve code formatting like they did with XNA in the first few years, and then forget it exists like a ton of their other API (Microsoft Works, anyone? Silverlight ring a bell? Spark?).
Unfortunately Microsoft has had a horrible track record with design services and sustained scalability.
Suddenly the post purchase surcharge idea makes sense.
as a shitty hobbyist dev who published shitty games before, part of me is like "hey if I ever made 200k off a single game you can take your 20 cents from my future installs."
I'll just raise the price of my games from $2.99 to $3.29 (extra dime to offset pimp daddy Steam's piece)
But the other part of me is like... man there are these steam sales and 99 cents mobile games and they're gonna get dinged 30 percent by the store and 20 cents from Unity, that leaves them with 50% of their $1 ask. That really messes with the sales strategy.
I should just go to gamemaker or say fuck it and do pico-8 and give up my dreams of making the next Fear and Hunger, Vampire Survivor, or whatever jank indie smash hit.
This is why I fanboi so hard for Godot, you've been doing the same sort of maths I have on steam itself and it's also why I'm against steam, there's so many costs even associated with putting yourself out there as an indie title then to make things worse they're trying to target your active installs as well.
My upload plan is to use Godot for development so I owe nobody money and it's a very capable engine so you can do what you want to do with your game and more and then Itch and GameJolt if necessary but Itch will probably be my main shill space. If worse comes to worse and the left tries to politically cancel me hopefully by then I'll be important enough to self-host to a degree and I'd probably use GabPay to get around any restrictions. Less to worry about when it comes to fees per sale that way too so that means lower prices for my customers.
Yeah, I think I should pivot to Godot, mostly used Unity because I paid for a Humble Bundle course a few years ago and learned from that. But I think I can handle GDScript especially since its close to Python based on the last 30ish minutes of learning it. Static typing for variables but can inference within dictionary variables... wtf? (not a big deal but it's like "You better be explicit as I cannot inference an int from a string but I totally could if its in a container!" made me chuckle)
Open source, free, I'm not working on anything atm, perfect time to pivot.
Feel free to ask me any questions about GDScript if you have any, I would recommend that over C# potentially just because it's built into the engine and you don't need visual studio or anything. You're right in that it works very similar to python, honestly I think once you try it you'll probably enjoy it and wonder how you put up with Unity because that's how I felt once I switched. Godot 4 especially is a way more flexible engine than people appreciate.
Notch was on twitter saying "Oh just write your own engine, I did it".
Maybe he doesn't realize that he is like the 0.01%
Yeah, but from a consumer perspective the bottom 99.9% of Devs are useless trash, so his relevancy really shoots up within the remainder.
One small caveat, which I only mention because it might be one of the few options for devs who've already released a game made on Unity (and don't want to get retroactively fucked), is that they might be immune to the bullshitty "charge per game installation" and likely the 200k gross profit thing if they never update their Unity software.
Essentially, they can't be held by the contract changes if they never sign and agree to the new terms.
Otherwise, absolutely everyone should fucking abandon Unity right now and make them pay for even trying to set such an insane precedent in the software industry.
The Cities Skylines sequel is on Unity, as is one indie game I play that uses it, Star Valor. The Star Valor dev has already said on Discord that he won't be switching engines, as it would be years of work to do that. I have no idea what Paradox is going to do with Cities Skylines 2, which was supposed to release next month, and I was naturally inclined to buy as I have well over 1k hours into the first one.
I expect very few Devs to react to this to by actually switching engines. I expect ongoing support and expansion plans to just suddenly crater for most of them.
I believe you are right. Most I have seen comment on it say that new projects will use something else.
From the sound of it, it's too late to walk something like that back.
We can add Unity to list of things EA has killed, even if EA is a former job for the Unity CEO.
The real question is does this kill C#?
Godot has C# support that the back end devs are working on fairly consistently so no.
C# is here to say.
This is disappointing news. A decade ago I released three games using the Unity engine which combined got hundreds of thousands of downloads. There were a lot of bumps in the road (looking at you, mobile provisioning and constantly outdated API's) but the games were pretty solid and the developer community and plugin ecosystems were supportive.
I know Unreal is not immune to this happening someday, but I hope it won't happen before my upcoming game begins to sunset. There are other good engines to consider if it does...but my days of writing my own engine are well behind me.
Two things.
Unity was a joke a decade ago not only because of l33t 10x real Dev snobbery at the easy engine for noon devs, but because of weird early tech faults. IIRC there was a physical god object in the game world (or at least a single game) that represented the back-end code; don't delete this object. The consensus now is that it's a serious engine being corporately mismanaged and a mess. The only thing that piques my interest is their somewhat recent work on incremental garbage collection.
Up until today, I thought big companies didn't have source access to the c++ core, the way Source, IdTech3, and other licensed engines do/did (enterprise and industry plans do). It's still ridiculous that the $2000 seat/year plan doesn't, but what do I know about mid-large business expenses. Ideally, all stable companies would give more of a shit about vendor lock in, but we're governed by the Gervais principle. UE4-5 being source available at all levels makes it stupid for a 50+ employee studio to utilize Unity.
I mean, other people have been memeing on it hard but the fact that it's an ex-EA executive making all the decisions means everything they're doing suddenly makes sense. This whole shitshow reeks of boomerism as well since the guy is pretty old, I'll bet there are people who if they had any balls told him it wasn't feasible to implement his plans because of how many security exploits there are which is the first thing I'd say to him then I'd exit fast because I wouldn't want to have my name associated with the project.