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[Unity] The place where game devs unite to bitch about a game engine
Dibbit
Registered User, Transition Team regular
Registered User, Transition Team regular
Ooh No!
There has been an uproar in Unity land, the makers of a more-or-less fine Game Engine, more-or-less beloved by developers for working in the language C#, ooh, and it also has an easy to use visual editor, whatever.
The problem is this post:
https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates
Where they announce the following:
On the surface of it, it doesn't sound THAT bad, but the problem is in the fine print:
What's not really obvious unless you read it, is that the 20 cents is PER INSTALL. A lot of things are not clear , but there are concerns:
Now, there are some good counter points:
I would love to hear more people about this, I personally am uncertain on how it will affect me, as I have the following:
There has been an uproar in Unity land, the makers of a more-or-less fine Game Engine, more-or-less beloved by developers for working in the language C#, ooh, and it also has an easy to use visual editor, whatever.
The problem is this post:
https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates
Where they announce the following:
- Hey, going forward, we're going to charge a small amount (0.20$, but can be a lot lower if you have a higher tier of Unity) per game install for projects build on our engine.
- Don't worry, there is a generous threshold, below which, you never have to pay, there is a fancy table, but basically, there are no costs if you have less then $200k in revenue and less then 200k installs
- Every developer also gets access to a few of our dev tools, mostly useless things like "200 build minutes." As a developer, free build minutes are kind of like getting a free pencil from a company: Virtually useless, and if you want to do fancy things, you need to buy your own fancier pencil..euhm... CI/CD system anyway.
On the surface of it, it doesn't sound THAT bad, but the problem is in the fine print:
What's not really obvious unless you read it, is that the 20 cents is PER INSTALL. A lot of things are not clear , but there are concerns:
- If you have a demo version of the game, and 4000 people try it out, that's 800$ extra you have to account for.
- If you have a user base of 10.000 (and at 20$ as an "indie game price" that comes out to 200k in revenue) if you release a monthly patch --something that's not unreasonable nowadays with customers expectation of having at least a year of active support after release-- you're looking at a potential of 24k in costs just for releasing it. (This has the wildly optimist view of everyone playing your game, I would guess the retention rate to be more at the 20%, so you'll only be in the hole for 4k, but still, that's some money)
- Installs by pirates count, as normally pirated games are only cracked to remove obstacles, and will leave telemetry in tact. Some games have as high as a 90% piracy rate, and where it used to be just a potential "lost sale" to be angry about, and maybe some undeserving support time going to them, you now have pirates directly impacting your bottom line.
- While a sale is a one time thing, the price is per install, this means that you have a limited income stream, and an unknown, but potentially unlimited cost per copy of the game you sell, obviously, it will take a lot of installs before the game starts eating into your profits, but even 25 installs (easy to reach if you realize how patching is mostly just a new install over the old one) per customer is probably eating up all the profit you'll ever see from a game.
- There were promises that Unity would be a better then all those other engines, and not go for predatory per sales license fees, this has now been broken
Now, there are some good counter points:
- You need to make 200k and sell 200k copies before this all start, and if you make that much, then this is just another operating cost you can easily bear.
- Other studios, such as Unreal, also ask money per sale if you make over a million in revenue. (Although that's per sale, not per install)
- Most indie devs make exactly negative 2 dollars on their crapware, so this only impacts a handful of good studios, and they can bear it, and hopefully shovelware will cease.
I would love to hear more people about this, I personally am uncertain on how it will affect me, as I have the following:
- For this to be an issue, I have to have success, and if I have success, I can afford it.
- On the other hand, I already have a different company, and I can tell you, 200k in revenue is not really "success", that's 2 programmers worth of resources. Heck, it might be 1 good programmer worth of resources.
Dibbit on
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He is not a fan, and has some actual numbers in the indie field.
One remarkable thing is that he gave away his game in a free bundle to help out the war in Ukraine. There are still 800k claimed, but uninstalled keys from the free bundle. If the new terms would apply to this game (I don't think they go retroactively, but I'm not sure how that works with "Yet to be installed" games) there would be tens of thousands of dollars in cost. Making this kind of a sword of Damocles.
This is absurd that the makers of one of the biggest engines in game development did not know what charity bundles are.
Also this is what happens when John Riccitiello is running your company.
In the comments it's mostly about the mobile gaming space, where 20c per install quickly turns into a shitshow, especially with the small profit margins mobile game devs already work with. They also point out that Unity is willing to ask for less money if you use their ad-service shitfest.
It's all such a shitty PR bomb, that people suspect they only talk about this plan as a way to retract it later, and reveal their real plan that is slightly less shitty than this. All in the hopes that people will be more accepting of after getting a taste of the vile poison of the original plan.
That would make sense, kind of... make a totally unpalatable plan now, and retract it later. Most developers are too entrenched to switch quickly, so they'll go "I can live with that."
Messaging seems to be all over the place, I initially based my post on thigns like:
- If a player deletes a game and re-installs it, that's 2 installs, 2 charges
- Same if they install on 2 devices
- Charity games/bundles exempted from fees
and the blog post itself, where it's clear that basically, every time setup.exe runs, it counts as an install.
I'm now hearing reports that it's only once per device, making it better, but also leaving the consumer unfriendly taste that Unity is somehow (either locally with left behind code/data, or with a unique device fingerprint to a server) keeping track on if their software runs on your computer, and how and when.
Something that they probably already absolutely do, now that I think about it. (Besides the Game Analysis software for devs, that's opt-in, I forgot the name of it, Unity Insights?)
What entails a new device - new CPU? New Motherboard? New video card? New RAM? All of the above?
Windows XP used to make a hash of all device ID's, and I think if more then 2 changed, you had to reactivate? It's been a long time, and even then this was frowned --but barely tolerated-- behavior by Microsoft. (Also, I think the penalty wasn't that severe, it just prevented custom wallpapers and you got a "Hey! Activate windows!" bubble every day on the task-bar.
With new versions of Windows and Mac, Unity could conceivably use the TPM store to get a guaranteed unique identifier, meaning that only a full motherboard replacement (or soldering on a new TPM chip, I guess) would trigger a new install.
They'd get juicy data about you, though, but I suspect that unity already phones home right now.
It's like they picked these numbers based on a couple of AAA level companies and no one involved has any experience at all in indie game dev.
Unity: "Just trust me, bro."
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Dibbit said they heard the installs would be charged once per device.
They've said now it'll only count once per device. However, there's still questions like - I release 24 patreon updates of my game a year. Is that going to count as 24 installs for a single patron?
Wait.. how does this work with unity games that start in the Browser, is every run a "new install?"
I guess you'd be saved by these generally not making a profit, so you'll never get to the 200k money threshold.
Come to think of it, What about all those patreon funded games? Those are normally just distributed for free on itch.io (with a special patreon version for special patreon people)
Is the Furry community about to explode because Unity is taking away their fun? (Horny Women are safe, as Visual novels are mainly done in ren-py, a custom visual novel engine made in Python)
For a source of that, and please keep in mind that this is all developing, and the messaging is contradictionary:
https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-marc-whitten
To the bolded, that's changing. Unity has a framework called Naninovel that's catching on very quickly (well... was) with VN developers as it means porting to other platforms is far, far easier than manually porting Renpy games. Renpy also has a lot of idiosyncracies that Unity/Naninovel also doesn't have, the documentation for Renpy is a bit shit, and the included SDK is close to useless. As a VN developer, I'm usually working these days in Naninovel instead of Renpy and it does feel like a breath of fresh air to work with, the workflow is far better.
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Well.. Shit... I guess.. make sure you don't get more then 16k a month from Patreon and ad sources?
That sound glib, sorry. But this whole move just seems to not have considered anyone except the pockets of Unity.
It is what it is. Lots of back-room discussion around it in various developer and publisher channels, but in the end for VNs there's only two real options (Renpy or Naninovel) as the Godot frameworks are still very barebones and DIYing an engine is just adding more work before you even start making the game itself.
I suspect this will fizzle out and Unity will give up on the whole idea just from their sheer inabillity to even technically pull this off, let alone the legalities. It has the air of a CEO's captain call which internal staff have to scramble to try and accomplish, leading to the mixed public messaging as there's no agreed-on PR around it. Regardless though, what sane publisher would choose an engine owned by a company which will retroactively change the engine's fees on a whim because "fuck you, pay me".
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Here's a reddit thread of a company who will, come Jan. 2024, pay 108% of their gross revenue in licensing fees to unity.
So, yeah, their company either ends in 4 months, or they need to beg unity for alternate arrangements.
(On of the reasons they are going broke is that they make kids mobile games, and they refuse to do advertisement, relying on voluntary in app purchases.
Ooh, the thread also indicates that this all applies retroactively to already released games.
I wonder what happens if you try to discontinue a game from Steam because you can't afford people from downloading it anymore, I'm pretty sure that Steam takes a dim view on plucking games out of libraries, on the other hand, they're not going to cover the redownload cost, are they?
(Also, what happens to game companies that have dissolved, Will Unity send a collection agency to cover ongoing downloads while you now work at McDonalds?)
So many flaws that my 6 year old could probably figure out that clearly haven’t been thought about at all.
Even just things like “hey what if some script kid gets mad at a dev for nerfing their favorite character or something and makes a script to uninstall and reinstall the game on their computer over and over and runs up $50,000 in install fees over a week or two?”
Like these are questions you want answers to before announcing your insane plans.
Well, then Unity just earned themselves $50,000, they don't see a problem with that.
But yeah, they claim they have a proprietary way of detecting that, they won't disclose how, see Suriko's post: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/45874320/#Comment_45874320
"Just trust us, bro"
They might just be counting on the sunk cost fallacy: You can't really pivot away in 3 months, or they'll probably soften the costs to "manageable, but barely" after a few weeks.
Pppfff.. Gabe Newell can afford it.
Unsuprisingly, they also updated their TOS, particulary, the part that says "If we change the TOS, you can keep using the old one for old projects"
(source: Official Unity forums: https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/ )
I simplified the legalize to something not quite true, but this section was removed:
I forsee a lot of devs sticking with their 2018-2023 version of Unity and not upgrading in the forseeable future.
Wud yoo laek to lern aboot meatz? Look here!
Yeah, I feel like one-sidedly altering a contract out of the blue should not be legal. I'm pretty sure the case of Vader v. Calrissian did not set any kind of legal precedent.
Dear ChatGPT, was this a legitimate game install? Please answer in a concise manner and pretend that you are the Kermit the Frog.
And from the sounds of it a sizeable chunk of that remaining 10% will still be catastrophically affected.
To say nothing of people who made something successful six years from now and suddenly have to start paying bills on it..
You know, in theory, if there's no unity developer left to scream, it will also have stopped.
I'm responding to this immediately. I know it may seem this way to devs who have not operated a game that makes some money, but this is 100% false. These thresholds are based on revenue. Not profit. 200k in revenue is basically starvation wages for a full time indie team of 2 people. The higher tier threshold of $1m is also very meager wages for a team of 10, which is still small. And the install thresholds are based on... installs, which do not actually generate revenue. Astoundingly, a lot of Unity's business is in mobile free to play games, which can make extremely little per install depending on the genre and user demographic. There is real potential for mid-sized businesses to simply fold under these fees if they are actually forced to pay them, even at Pro or Enterprise tier. Installs are not something the dev has any control over, and they don't actually generate money!