This is of course not including the yearly Unity subscription, where Unity Pro costs $2,040 per seat (although they may have Enterprise pricing)
Absolutely ridiculous. Many Unity devs are saying they’re switching engines on social media.
The enshittification continues.
Watch for more products that enable normal people to do great things to become paywalled. Only your gatekeeper masters may direct the market, and the creativity. In their infinite wisdom, they demand the control of gods.
Billionaires are a mistake.
EDIT: and I love the bait-and-switch of charging anyone who ever used Unity, even under different terms. Electric chair for the CEO.
I’m starting to see enshittification as part of the cycle of renewal in capitalism. Don’t get me wrong…it’s a completely foolish and disasterous way of doing things, and billionaires are a black mark on society as a whole, but innovation happens when you take away the established tools.
Twitter is a good example. Elon seriously accelerated the enshittification, and now it’s tanking. Meanwhile, alternatives are springing up at breakneck speeds to replace it. Which one will win the war is anyone’s guess, but Twitter will be the loser regardless. Reddit is another one. And Digg before it. As one commits corporate seppuku, others step in to take its place.
While it sucks for anyone caught in the crossfire, and the ones responsible for nuking a corporate landscape often skip away with a golden parachute, it usually leads to a shakeup that can bring amazing innovations. The key is to get in on the next wave, hope you picked the winner, and make sure you get out before shit hits the fans this time.
But that cycle is bad for the advancement of society as a whole. Instead of having something others can build on, everyone has to start from scratch and redo a lot of the work that was already done.
Establishing new social networks for example take a whole lot of time. And then you tank them so others can do the same thing all over again? That’s not progress. That’s standstill being sold as progress.
I’m not saying it’s a good thing. In fact, I opened with the statement that it’s not a good thing. But it just seems to be the way things are done, intentional or not. It’s a constant 2 steps forward, 1 and a half steps back, but slowly we do make some progress. This is just an observation that I’ve noticed. I truly wish it were different, but that’s just how things seem to unfold.
Specifically on Twitter and Reddit, this has led to a massive jump in federated social media. That seems like an advancement to me.
That point about social networks is true, but it’s more of a symptom of the internet at large.
Running things on the web isn’t free and most of the major innovation has stemmed from trying to hide that fact from people.
It started in the late 80s with donations to the guy that ran your favorite BBS. But that was not sustainable, so banner ads started showing up, but they didn’t pay out enough. Then the pop-up and was born, but it turns out that people really hate those. So then they did away with them entirely, instead harvesting data about the users to sell to advertisers.
Now, there are basically 2 paths forward. Host your own microservices that connects to a larger network, widely spreading out hosting and storage costs across the userbase. Or, pay a subscription to access a service with the understanding that they won’t advertise or sell your data.
Donations are somewhat sustainable because the per-user cost of having stuff on the internet is super low. So even at $1 USD per month any remotely successful service becomes wildly profitable. People just thought that banner ads would be yet-even-more profitable since they can be applied to everyone who looks at the site, not just regular users.
In going to be dirt poor if I have to subscribe to every site I visit online.
But not every user donates
But in that case, it would be best to do a subscription model of like $10-ish per year.
This would involve an agreement not to sell data, to collect only data with a use demonstrated to be critical to the operation of the service, and a plan to dispose of that data within X amount of time. This also needs a written contract stating that the cost of subscription won’t go more than X% above the user’s pro-rata share of the demonstrated cost of providing the service, consisting of certain very specific purposes (building, servers, ISP, employee revenue, etc.) to avoid cheating for more profit. A subscription service, protected against privacy infringement and price gouging (a profit limit).
If it’s ever going to work this would need to be a government-mandated privacy act. I usually hate government intervention, but this is very much a necessary evil to prevent price gouging.
I only suggest this over donations, because realistically, after upscaling to a global audience, only 5-10% of traffic would be users that choose to donate, increasing costs to around $10-20/month, which yet again lowers the number of people who choose to donate. It stabilizes, but at such a low percentage that it’s unsustainable at a large scale without millionaire donors, and a very small percent willing to pledge $20-30 ish per month throughout the entire product lifetime…
In other words: everything turns to shit.
Yeah, at least these dominant corporations are now being forced to compete and become profitable without the advantages of free financing. This process is revealing the ghoulishness that their exaggerated ability to outspend their competition via borrowed capital had been hiding from the consumers.
Surprised nobody mentioned here, but Godot Engine people. It’s FOSS and will never charge you for anything. Don’t stay in an abusive relationship
Nevermind PC games, think about how this would impact mobile games. Where you get TONS of transient installs, and very few consistent players.
You could actually go into debt by using unity, and accidentally being successful if you aren’t abusively monitizing your game.
That’s what this is about. The CEO said that devs who don’t put ads in their games and monetize are “fucking idiots”
Unity isn’t a game engine company anymore, they’re an advertisement company that owns the rights to a game engine.
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Yes
Haha for real ? What a pedigree. What’s his name ?
John Riccitiello, dude looks, and behaves, like a bond villain
Or gacha/live service games, where you’ll get enough installs and overall revenue to push you over the 200k threshold, but never enough installs for the 1 mil discount, in a genre where it’s not uncommon for one person to have the same game on multiple devices (especially if you have a PC or console port), and for games to have a cycle of low revenue dead months that doesn’t always coincide with new player counts due to the whale rule.
Unity Engine taking a leaf out of reddits book. Lol
Their Twitter is even leaning into the “answering questions” angle. Just frame the backlash as a result of ignorance, rather than people being reasonably upset by a situation they understand perfectly well. Then they dodge inconvenient questions about things like malicious automated downloads. Of course, they’re happy to “listen to feedback.” Not act on it, of course, but the social media person is happy to scroll past whatever you have to say!
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Smells like a lawsuit to me. Retroactively devaluing software that they were already paid for.
It’s probably a scream test that they’ll walk back with something more reasonable in the next few days.
This happened to a crafting/cutting machine and its software a while back.
The company wanted to start charging once you hit a miniscule upload threshold, forcing you to pay if you wanted to upload more than, say, 20 images per day.
Folks who already owned the machine were furious that they’d essentially be limited out of their own machine, when there was previously no extra charges for use.
The company rolled back their statement and stated that they’d only start charging people who purchased & registered their machines after a certain date. Older users would not be charged.
Even so, after the shit they pulled, people no longer recommend that specific machine/brand/company anymore because of their nonsense.
Name and shame!
Guessing cricut.
You got it!
Cricut.
Also you can’t even use the machine offline! They force you to use their absolutely terrible software and I have to “calibrate” it myself to make things turn out how it’s supposed to! (eg. centered cuts, alignment, etc.)
If I would have known it was this bad, I wouldn’t have gotten one in the first place. I make it work but goddamn, so much of it is absolute garbage!
Any chance you’ve found alternatives to the machine, or its software? I still see these mentioned here & there in crafting discussions as good tools, but I wouldn’t want to be dependent on their software even if the machines are good tbh.
I can’t vouch for it myself, but I’ve heard great things about the “Silhouette” machines! Definitely check them out to see if they could meet your needs.
It’s crazy there isn’t an open source community around it. 3d printing and CNC have been democratized, it’s wild that printing and cutting vinyl hasn’t.
Thanks for the pointer! I’ll have to give’em a look!
Unity dev here. The Unity seats were always a subscription model, and this new fee system doesn’t kick in until January 1st.
So there’s no lawsuit, you don’t have to renew your subscription if you don’t want to though.
So if you don’t renew your subscription the new tax won’t effect you? From my understanding the change was retroactive and effected all previous unity games. If you don’t release a new build after the change will the tax still be applied?
They’re not gonna be able to charge you if you don’t have an active subscription
What about charging per download/install after the threshold? It sure sounds like it won’t matter if you’re subscribed or not, as their announcement mentioned Personal licenses would be charged USD 0,20 per download after the 200k lifetime
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You only need the sub to develop/update it
That’s still pretty awful really. If I have a game that’s halfway through development as a developer I am now disincentivized to finish it. They are changing the terms halfway through development.
January 1st isn’t exactly a lot of warning.
This would be borderline acceptable if we’d been given 6 months warning not 1 and 1/2 months
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Don’t you need a subscription if you’re above the 200k threshold though?
Subscription is only for compiling
founding your business on proprietary software is just a crazy gamble.
I turned down a job offer at a company that relied solely on twitter’s api in order to accomplish their goals. It was a sales lead generation tool that used a scripted approach to warming leads before handing them off to AE’s to bring home.
Within a year Twitter shut down their access and the company went under. That’s the day I learned not to trust another company to allow you to make money with their product permanently.
uncomfortable AWS noises
AWS is different as it’s a product marketed and sold as a product.
This company was using Twitters api in a novel way that want subject to an agreement, just Twitter’s whims to allow it to continue.
I worked for a company that used Google application engine for all of their cloud tools and services. Then one day Google flipped a new billing process and the entire thing became more expensive than self hosting. Sure gae would let us scale to support insane levels but the product was never going to need that scale.
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Developing a good and feature rich game engine which also runs performant is a huge effort. That alone can cost a good team 2 years at least. Even more if we consider todays graphic standards. That’s nothing which smaller studios can easily deliver. So yeah, it’s an obvious decision to buy a license for a proprietary engine, where a lot of work has already went into. That’s just business and nothing crazy about it. Companies using services or products of other companies is pretty ordinary.
FOSS alternatives to Unity exist though. And from my personal experience it looks like Godot seems like the better engine anyways. Not to mention the fact that there is no need for a game engine to create a game. Opengl + a windowing/utility library is ideal.
Until a few years ago there was barely any alternative afaik
People wrote their own game engines since the earliest of games, they just want the easy route today and a marketplace to monetize on. These are poisoned gifts, and always have been.
And if everyone invented their own wheel every time they wanted to build a new cart all we’d ever have is various different wheels and very few carts.
I mean that’s honestly true. There are so many “infant” small selfmade game engines that are just complete shit lol
Great analogy, but this is a wheel you’re being charged for, after you’ve installed it on your product. Maybe you would have been better suited with your own wheel.
You’re not picking an existing good wheel solution that you can use forever, you basically took a promise for a free wheel that you’re now being charged for, and you’re sad because the free wheel isn’t free anymore. Well, maybe you should have picked an actually free wheel to begin with.
Unity is not the only solution to your cart problem. You’re just using it, because it is convenient.
Are you being obtuse on purpose?
This isn’t a case of “I use unity because it is free,” because outside of recreational game developer use-cases, it isn’t free. There are very real costs associated with monetization that any developer, team, and studio should be aware of.
Developers who have been using unity with knowledge of their pricing mechanisms are being blindsided with new pricing, that you can’t opt-out of, with a little less than 3 months notice. Going back to the wheel analogy, these teams have designed entire vehicles around these wheels, with application-specific knowledge and workarounds to be told that “Hey, regarding that product which underpins your entire project, one with which we’ve already entered into a sales agreement… we decided we want to change the agreement and track its usage and charge you more money. You have 11 weeks to get over it. Your continued use of our product implies consent to the new terms of this agreement.”
You can’t just move to a different platform without significant amounts of rework.
Developers who have been using unity with knowledge of their pricing mechanisms are being blindsided with new pricing
I get that, and it sucks. But too many offerings on the market are nowadays accepted as normal operating procedure, when they seem like such obvious traps to me. There is no financially-driven company out there that you can rely on with your project. Go with an open-source project or write what you need yourself. I fully understand the challenge of writing a product from scratch and bringing it to market. Your dependencies can break your neck one way or the other.
You can’t just move to a different platform without significant amounts of rework.
I know and feel that. I am no longer in entertainment, but I also see these exact same patterns in my current line of work (IT infrastructure). People use “free” tools that they take for granted, and then they’re surprised by rug-pulls. This has been happening for so long in so many areas that it’s almost tiring.
Unity isn’t free, what are you on about, you pay money for it.
There really isn’t much point having this conversation if you’re going to operate on flights of fantasy.
It’s not “the easy route”. Making a game engine is a tremendous investment these days. If you are making anything other than a game that looks like early 2000s or earlier, you need a pretty capable engine that takes years to develop. That’s on top of the time it costs to make a game, which is also typically years. Not to mention that your proprietary engine will have subpar tooling and make your game development slower.
For anyone but industry giants it’s not feasible to make a modern engine. Unless your game is not aiming to play and feel like a modern game, you have to run with an off-the-shelf engine.
I agree with everything you’re saying, but it’s still the easy route and it’s still a poisoned gift, as can be seen by this story. People rather pick the “free” and capable tool than investing time in an open-source solution that needs more work, or developing from scratch. Maybe they just want to reach more platforms to make more money, or use the super advanced tools, but that doesn’t change that you’re picking the path of least resistance, and you might pay for it in the end.
Chances are, if you’re expecting to compete with industry giants on the same level, you’re already investing massively into the production of assets and you’re project in general. You’re just skipping the investment in the engine and tooling. If you just want to make a small game, then maybe you don’t even need Unity and would be better off with something more tailored to your project.
I just can’t feel sorry for people who walked into this trap. I feel like this pattern has been occurring way too frequently to ignore the danger of “free” tools that really aren’t.
Plus when you break it down you’ll still need 3rd party software in order to do anything more than a console only application (OpenGL, directX, Havok, Bink etc)
Yeah let me just make my own fucking game engine right quick because that’s definitely easier than using another one that a team made and continues to make, support, and add onto because
“It’s easier”
Come on dude you’re just talking out of your ass. You should read about Cynicism and why nobody fucking likes that shit
You don’t have to reproduce Unity to create your game. You just need to write what you need. And you could also chose an actual free software project instead of something where they pull the rug right out from under you. If you look at the choice today, with the rug already having been pulled, would you not consider the choice an obvious mistake in hindsight? Every other project these days loses money by trying to build a following which they will then monetize on. I’m sorry for people who walked right into this trap, but it could have been avoided by making better choices in the past. Sorry if you disagree, but I’ve been around long enough to recognize these recurring patterns with “free” software.
This isn’t how you respond to people that have a problem. Total dude bro answer
Be better man. I’m not going to continue this conversation
Valid. I take that into consideration
Yeah, and people nowadays don’t even rewrite basic libraries! Everyone should have their version of glibc or they are just lazy!!!1!!1!
C implementations are available as open-source. The glibc especially is a great example of this. This comparison is not good. I’m all for using open source
People wrote their own game engines since the earliest of games
Lazy gets, using someone else’s programming language. They should have developed their own language and written the compiler before starting to write a games engine for the game they wanted to make.
To be honest even a home written language and compiler would be based on someone else’s hardware.
Come to think of it, imagine if American Megatrends would start with a subscription model.
10 USD tier: 10 free boots a month, each subsequent boot shows an ad. You can skip the ad for 25 crystals.
Crystals are bought in packs of 10 or 35.
Did they clear it with the owners first?
Because if you don’t, and later they pursue the legal route, there’s not much you can do, you agree to their terms or fight a lawsuit where they’ll likely take everything
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Game devs and engine devs don’t necessarily have the same skill sets though, right?
And who complained about Sync for Reddit? How would used foss alternatives to access Reddit have changed what happened to Reddit?
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I think the reason beginners want to use Unity is because that is what they will need as professional game developers. But if professional game developers stop using Unity, then there is no reason to use Unity, no matter how beginner-friendly pricing it is.
Pretty much every gamedev course will teach either Unity, Unreal or both, so those students end up getting fucked either way.
It was the status quo in animation until a few years ago : every school would teach Maya or Max and the industry as well as aspiring professionals were kinda locked with those. Others players evened out the playing field (Houdini, Blender, etc) and today it’s not the monopolistic situation it used to be.
How are they teaching nowaday?
From what I gathered it’s more varied, it kinda mirrors how studios rely less on a single package. Houdini, Substance, Blender… back in my day it was Maya and Photoshop all the way
I’m now interested in UPBGE, a fork from Blender with game engine. It seems useful for learning modeling and gamedev.
I wouldn’t learn game development on it
Everyone I know has been reaching about Unreal for the past few years anyway. I’m surprised Unity is pulling this controversial move in this situation, driving more customers to the competition. It’s like if it was 2013 and AMD suddenly started charging double for their graphics cards even though Nvidia was way better
Oh damn the whole day I was thinking it was about Unreal Engine, not unity. Was pretty sad that some of the projects I follow could be abandoned. Now I’m so glad, holy shit. Reading the articles caffeine starved at 5 am in a tram probably was the culprit for misreading
So whats the next step, everytime a start my car i have to pay?! F*ckin ridiculous
God dammit, don’t give the ideas!
That’s just Uber and lyft
it’s not your car tho
Can I interest you in some heated seats monthly subscription?
Thank you very much for your offer sir, but I prefer my idea more.
🤔
Oh fck me
I just gave this idea out for free…
P.S. Hopefully it wont ever come to this!
Common proprietary L
I gotta ask, considering the “per install” pricing, what exactly is an installation in the eyes of Unity?
A game download? In which case would a cancelled and restarted download result in two installations being logged?
Is it an API call during first start-up? What would keep malicious actors from simply modding their game to repeat this call a thousand times?
What about pirated copies? Do they count as being “installed”?
Unity’s official response to those questions as of a few hours ago is akin to “we have ways… trust us.”
Yup let’s trust Unity’s crummy ways, keeping in mind that it’s actually in their best interest to NOT detect false installs, since they get money when it doesn’t…
If I had to do something like that, I would make it every time the installer runs, every time it’s installed by a launcher like Steam, and as a fallback every time the game executable runs for the first time unless an installer or launcher hands it a key to say “you’ve been paid for already.” But I’m by no means a game dev so idk.
Cool, find a game dev you hate and set up a script to install their game and run it once as many times as possible. Let that run on a machine you don’t use for a while, then drink their tears
I’m not saying it’s a good idea, that’s just how I’d implement it - no matter how you do it it’s evil, unsafe and evasive.
This is the java business model, there’s two ways it could go: total flop, everyone hates it and because video games aren’t as deeply entrenched as legacy codethe java business model won’t work. OR the Java business model works great and there’s now a 10% unity tax passed on to the consumers
Edit lmao the most pedantic Mfs alive in the replies
What the hell is the Java business model? Do you mean Oracle, when you say Java?
I’ve literally developed Java applications and never heard of the “Java business model”, Java costs nothing for its developers or users, other than dignity.
I presume you mean the open-source versions of the JVM published by other companies like IBM, or maybe there’s some other distinction that I don’t understand? As far as I know, Oracle Java has required a paid license for the last few years: https://redresscompliance.com/decoding-oracle-java-licensing-java-licensing-changes-2023/
Right. I’ve been working with Java ever since 1.1.6 back in the late 1990s (so, yeah, 25 years now). I get having opinions about Java and the JVM, but there is no business model associated with it unless they’re referring to what Oracle has tried to do with Java in the past (the licensing and whatnot) which is immaterial these days due to OpenJDK and various other Java/JVM providers.
This is probably simple confusion is all. Because the poster isn’t wrong about everything being taxed and the consumer always having to pay for it. Greed is running rampant and unchecked now and while it has been this way for some time, it seems to have accelerated during and since the pandemic.
Dignity AND sanity.
Oh you don’t know which company sells the most licenses for a jdk?
What?
I’m just shocked you didn’t know Oracle™️ Java™️ runs on 3 billion devices!
- Of course I know about Oracle, I’m the one who asked you because you clearly do not understand how Java is actually used and distributed.
- Oracle JDK and OpenJDK are actually not the dominant Java distribution and most developers don’t even bother with Oracle JDK anymore.
- OpenJDK doesn’t require any huge licensing like Oracle JDK does, hence why there are numerous vendors supplying OpenJDK distributions.
- Aside from very large corporations, anecdotally I’ve not encountered anyone in the last decade who has had any issues with licensing solely because they’re using an OpenJDK distribution.
- I have 25 years experience in the Java ecosystem. You’re not going to be successful trying to zing me.
.
If you’re going to say things, it might be helpful to have a clue about what you’re saying.
t. God’s most pedantic redditor
If you knew I was talking about oracle and just wanted to make a point that oracle wasn’t the only one that licensed the JDK first of all, why not just say that, and what the hell does it have to do with my comment?
No one cares about your Java dev experience, this post wasn’t about Java, or OpenJDK, you just wanted to be a dick, and that makes you a dork
This is the java business model, there’s two ways it could go: total flop, everyone hates it and because video games aren’t as deeply entrenched as legacy codethe java business model won’t work. OR the Java business model works great and there’s now a 10% unity tax passed on to the consumers
Edit lmao the most pedantic Mfs alive in the replies
This you?
this post wasn’t about Java
This also you?
You are clearly insane. Good bye.
I think the real problem is how shady it seems. Like has everyone forgotten the concept of “grandfather in”? People will make new games in unity if they factor in the cost. I think people are understanding if they have the priory knowledge that unity needs to maybe start charging something. But sounds like they are asking for after these businesses already have created budgets. It sounds like it could be a bit of extortion depending on what the original agreement was. " Extortion might involve … damage to a companies financial well being."
What’s the tl:dr?
The creators of the unity engine are charging people extra for games they have already created?
Creators of the Unity engine want to charge developers per game install, the more people that install the game the more you have to pay. This includes games that already exist and never agreed to this. It also causes a lot of safety concerns, how will they confirm how many installs a game has? Are they bundling spyware with Unity games?
What will they do when 50 angry incels run a script that downloads/installs/deletes your game hundreds of times a day?
They said they have a fraud detection system for their ads business and will use that as a starting point.
I don’t see how they are going to be able to move forward with this change.
Agreed. Terrible ideas here
The obvious rebuttal to that is that it is in the financial interest not to detect false installs because the developer will owe them money for those. Why would ANYONE trust their word on this?
That is a great point. I bet they are going to walk this back on games that have been released already. Hopefully, devs will just move to an opensource game engine or make their own.
Thanks, a few Lemmy posts later and I saw this article that explain
Great link, thanks!
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From what I’ve heard, from January 2024, any for-profit game made in Unity that meet a certain profit and download threshold will have to pay a fee to Unity per install of said game, including those released before these changes are being introduced.
I wonder how that works.
Like if I released a Unity game in 2016… if I tell Unity to fuck off, would they then try to get my game off of Steam?
How are post facto agreement changes working retroactively legal?
They’re only legal until someone challenges it. Shouldn’t take long before Microsoft has a nice little letter for them in the mail.
Up until now companies have been getting away with this because of “user agreements.” Nobody has had the money and interest to get them in court.
I don’t see any possible way this survives a lawsuit, for exactly the reason you said. This is almost certainly not legal but nobody has had a reason to get precedent to say it until now.
They want to charge game devs $0.20 per install. Yes, that’s right, they want to charge devs 20 cents every time somebody installs their game.
Thanks for responding to my post.
That will be uhh… 0.20.
Ah fuck, ya got me. pays up
… wait a minute… pays up again
Now, everyone who has ever responded to one of my comments also has to pay me.
Why a terrible company. I don’t even want to redeem their free games any more.
So 1000 installs per day (small numbers for a global title) = $200/day x 30 = $6000/mo, and then at like 10% after the hype wears off, $600/mo for the entire product lifetime (even installing on a new computer charges, so this cost doesn’t go away when new users stop coming)…
Edit: this is actually similar to the numbers given in the original post, of an average settling at $40k / yr (so like 200k installs per year or only 550 per day across the entire world). Which like they said, yeah, is about half a million dollars over product lifetime.
So do game developers have lobbyists to ban this shit?
It’s already illegal, so it’s not like it needs any banning.
Wait, it is?
As far as I know, and as far as I’ve seen in other discussions, they are essentially changing the terms of service of signed contracts unilaterally, which in many places should be an instant lose if taken to court.
Edit: forgot a word
I think Unity would be the one losing in court, especially since they changed the terms of service right before making this change, which is applied retroactively. That’s not how a contract works.
I can’t just write “Btw the house is being given free of charge from the bank to the tenant” on my lease to get rid of my mortgage
Yeah yeah, that’s exactly the point.
With your own example, the bank can’t just come one day and say “btw, the house you bought 10 years ago? Yeah, we just decided that it’s price is now double, so you owe us for the 10 years you paid half of what you should”
