To say it's been a bad week for Unity is the understatement of 2023. First they announced a terrible new Pricing scheme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlP...

To say it’s been a bad week for Unity is the understatement of 2023. First they announced a terrible new Pricing scheme, then their customers revolted, as the week goes on though, it gets worse and worse for Unity, from threats from an employee shutting down their offices, to more studios threatening to leave, to scummy secret changes to their terms of service and back door deals with clients to get around the Unity Runtime Fee in an attempt to bury a competitor.

  • Weslee@lemmy.worldEnglish
    166·
    10 months ago

    Am I the only one that wishes these video posts had some text explaination for those of us at work and unable to watch videos in the middle of the office?

  • CosmoNova@lemmy.worldEnglish
    607·
    10 months ago

    One gripe I have with this video is that he said the situation at the unity office - namely the supposed death threat by an employee against their employer - was “understandable”. It absolutely isn’t understandable. No matter how shitty your tech CEO is, unless they happily throw puppies into a wood chipper in the office, death threats are definitely not understandable.

  • elouboub@kbin.social
    39·
    10 months ago

    If the studios don’t switch to Godot and contribute back, they’ll be setting themselves up for another Unity a few years down the line.

    • bighi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      133·
      10 months ago

      If we don’t get together and destroy capitalism itself, we WILL get another Unity every few years.

    • ExtraMedicated@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      10 months ago

      I’m also interested in checking out Stride tomorrow. Hopefully I can find a good alternative to Mirror for multiplayer networking and the FinalIk package I had in Unity.

      • elouboub@kbin.social
        1·
        10 months ago

        I’m curious why they chose C#. Maybe to be a Unity alternative without requiring to invest in a new language?

        • ExtraMedicated@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          10 months ago

          I don’t know, but I like C#. It’s got a lot of features that I like such as extension methods and custom attributes. And I feel comfortable with it.

  • Bri Guy @sopuli.xyzEnglish
    91·
    10 months ago

    Anyone know off the top of their head what the price difference is between Unity and Unreal now? And are there Unity engine alternatives that people can seek?

    • echo64@lemmy.worldEnglish
      34·
      10 months ago

      there is no “price difference” they use a completely different pricing model, unity is SaaS, and moving to pay per install. Unreal is free, if you make more than a million dollars then you have to pay 5% royalties to epic.

      there is no equating the two

      • JasSmith@kbin.social
        131·
        10 months ago

        They’re just different pricing models, not different verticals. Unity is still cheaper, but incurs significant risk now. Whereas Epic will take their 5% after $1M, Unity has no revenue split. However now that they’re charging per install, devs need to be sure their marginal profit clears this bar. No one is sure their pricing model works before launch, so I think this risk is unreasonable.

      • rigatti@lemmy.worldEnglish
        41·
        10 months ago

        Wouldn’t the new Unity pricing model be somewhat comparable to the current Unreal pricing model?

        • micka190@lemmy.worldEnglish
          8·
          10 months ago

          Not necessarily. Unity says they’re charging per initial install once you break $1M (they walked-back on the “every” install bit), but Unreal takes a cut of your royalties once you break $1M, so it’s still hard to really compare them properly. If you’re making a free to play game, your install number could be dramatically higher than what a non free-to-play game would need to break $1M, for example.

        • Stovetop@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          10 months ago

          They’re pretty different.

          Unity is planning to charge a flat fee of $0.20 per install over the entire life of a game. A Triple-A developer can release a game for $70 and it earns ten million dollars. Assuming every customer installs the game maybe three separate times on average over their lifespan, Unity’s gonna take maybe about $85,000 in total in runtime fees. If the game had been developed in Unreal, Epic would have taken $450,000.

          But let’s say an indie dev makes a great game in Unity, sells it for $5, and it goes viral (like Vampire Survivors). They make ten million dollars, Unity takes 20 cents per install, and assuming the same install rate, the bill comes to $1.2 million, over 14x what the AAA developer is paying. Epic would have still charged $450,000.

          With the AAA example, Epic’s 5% may seem steep for games that cost a lot per unit, but at least when a game stops making money, they stop charging money.

          For Unity’s runtime fee, though, as people buy new PCs/consoles/phones and install their library of games to them over and over, the developer keeps getting billed with no profit coming in. Effectively, the more games they have out there in the wild, the greater a financial burden a developer has. They’ll be living in fear of some Reddit post sending 10,000 people in /r/gaming down a sudden nostalgia trip and wake up to a $2000 bill the next day with seemingly no explanation.

          And this is to say nothing of the problematic nature of how Unity would even accurately assess the install count of a game, or differentiate paid copies from promotional or pirated copies (which I doubt they will). Or if a developer wants to bankrupt a rival developer, how they could just rent a click farm in Malaysia to install a game over and over again and rack up a bill too high to afford.

    • Haui@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      17·
      10 months ago

      Pretty sure godot is pretty up there from what I hear but that’s the extent of my knowledge.