> How does Unity estimate the Runtime Fee when I have not supplied data?
> While we always recommend you supply your own data, in the absence of that, we will use our own data from Unity services that you have agreed to integrate into your project, and readily available external data.
> Does the Unity Runtime phone home by default?
> It does not, unless you have hardware stats enabled.
----
I'm not a gamedev nor have ever used Unity to develop something, but those two sections seem conflicting. Can anyone kindly explain how they have their "own data from Unity services" while the runtime does not phone home by default? Thanks!
Unity has way more services than turning on hardware stats. If you use them they can make some estimate of unique users. Unity would now prefer you give them the information yourself.
> Unity would now prefer you give them the information yourself.
I’m sure they’d prefer to capture the data themselves, but they’re now allowing you to self report in order to placate the outrage from the recent announcements.
Thank you so much for clarifying that! It makes sense now. I just wonder if folks are required to use at least one of those services in order for Unity to have at least some kind of information regarding titles sold or something like that.
So they rolled back the most abusive aspects of the new fees but are still going forward with some fees...
Seems like they win on the end.
Looks to me like the good old strategy of we'll start with a very high proposal then come back with a more watered down version thst people will accept as being more reasonnable than the initial terms. But they still get to charge more and seem reasonnable doing so.
Our Unity rep has been applying a ton of pressure to purchase more licenses and I've heard similar stories from other companies.
I think Unity has some bad financials right now and are pressing every part of the business to generate more revenue.
I don't think this was some grand scheme - I think they're panicking about money and acting without thinking through the long term consequences of their actions.
When this started happening I thought it was bog-standard enshittification. They can't sustain user-base growth so they turn to squeezing existing users as a source of revenue.
Unity recently forced us to upgrade to their Industrial tier. We had to cut back on the number of licenses we use because our costs went up at least 10x.
Fortunately the rest of their pricing changes don't affect us, but it's still a real pain in the ass
Downvotes notwithstanding, the reality is that Unity is not profitable. They desperately need a revenue stream.
And sure, they should have gone with plain old revenue sharing from the get go ("we get X% of your sales, so if you sell nothing, we get nothing, and if you move 2 million units, we get an amount you can quite easily part with"), instead they came up with a batshit insane plan, and their CEO should have been fired already.
That doesn't mean they can backpaddle on the part where they need to put a sales-based revenue stream in place. Either they do, or they go out of business (which is an even worse deal for everyone. Folks seem to vastly underestimate how close to failing Unity was even before this debacle).
As much as people will want to go raise pitchforks despite these changes, reading through them these changes are actually massive. The part where it only applied to Unity 2023LTS and beyond is a HUGE change. It's aggressive, and and a grandfather clause for already in-progress games is clearly missing so fuck em, they have more work to do, but it's also nowhere near as insane as the previous arrangement. And it almost certainly won't be their last change as long as the dev/studio world goes "good start, but this is still unacceptable".
Unity having financial trouble is like a shovel-factory going bankrupt during a gold rush. It means they screwed up /pretty/ bad on the business side... You likely don't need 7000 people to build a top-notch game engine, and likely invested way too much in side-bets which haven't panned out.
Yeah, the main outcome of this seems to have been a massive amount of distrust seeded amongst game developers, and nobody planning to start a new project on Unity.
Also, Godot has mysteriously acquired a large surge in their funding, and has a much less abusable license structure...
The engine is such a central part of a game company's stack. On one hand that makes it harder to just up and switch, so there is some lock-in there, but on the other hand, if developers don't regard Unity as a reliable partner, they are going to be taking a hard look around at alternatives.
I think the real problem with this pricing move is that it made a lot of Unity users think "hey, we can't trust Unity not to screw us over." That is something that is hard to take back.
In the process though they've made many game devs start a transition to a more open or reasonable game engine. It's not much of a win when their userbase is now essentially falling.
I think the damage is already done. Going with a game engine is a long term commitment - investment in learning and assets etc.
Given clean slate would you really pick these guys for your new game? Knowing they’re keen to pull a fast one on you for profit and may well have a 2nd go at it.
I think if they had initially released this page there would have been very minimal outage. Not just the change in plans, but the language itself seems more thought out.
The question is whether or not they have damaged their user's trust to an irreparable degree.
Streamers don't really play much of a role in gamedev communities though. The professional perception of the developer community is what will really be tested here.
I would beg to differ. A lot of game developers watch gaming streams. There's a reason why cohhcarnage was asked to voice in cyberpunk and baldur's gate 3, and why blizzard personnels will respond to asmongold directly
These two things, game devs watching streamers and game companies engaging with streamers are largely orthogonal. The latter is to appeal to the streamers general audience as they are influential. It is however excellent that these two have game developers backs.
From the perspective of understanding and reacting to this the OP is correct that streamers aren’t really driving this.
I feel that it's lacking in accountability, like what the hell happened that made them go through with these plans despite them being obviously poorly thought out? Who was responsible for this scheme and how do they ensure it will not happen again.
Games take such a long time to develop and you have to be able to trust that your engine won't change the terms of service when you are like 3 year into development. They have shown that they either don't care about or understand that, neither of which is great.
Like what is to say they won't pull another one of these in like 3 years.
I'm glad to see Unity finally choosing to play to its strengths here from an economic standpoint by offering rev share. It's an insurance business model, which a game engine is uniquely able to offer due to its horizontal reach.
There's big financial risk inherent in game development for which studios naturally would "pay" some sum to hedge against, in the format of trading away some upside in the success case for a lower cost in the failure case. In fact, risk aversion, which at least in aggregate often models much real world behavior, dictates that studios would be willing to pay generously, entering into a deal that yields negative EV in exchange for flattening the risk curve. On the other hand, underwriting the risk on Unity's part is basically risk-free because of its horizontal reach across studios. Because of the asymmetrical risk, there's considerable economic surplus to be captured in a way that leaves both parties better off.
Of course all of this only works out if Unity only sufficiently benefits from the big successes. To that end, while generous, the choice to let developers pay the lower of rev share vs. per-install fee seems perplexing to me. When customers can pick after they already know whether their game is successful, Unity fails to set up an effective insurance business and ultimately will lose out on the surplus. The winners will no longer automatically subsidize the losers, Unity may have to raise the costs of both deals to cover its operations, and this all just becomes a more convoluted price increase.
the stock is doomed, check out asmongold's video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNXQ2bYik78. more importantly, insiders have been selling a ton, for example the founder of iron source. Silver lake sold all of theirs direct stocks for example.
Also Sequoia lent Unity 1 billion (using convertible notes which will be exchanged for stock at maturity) to finance the IronSource deal. Why would they do that?
> While we always recommend you supply your own data, in the absence of that, we will use our own data from Unity services that you have agreed to integrate into your project, and readily available external data.
> Does the Unity Runtime phone home by default?
> It does not, unless you have hardware stats enabled.
----
I'm not a gamedev nor have ever used Unity to develop something, but those two sections seem conflicting. Can anyone kindly explain how they have their "own data from Unity services" while the runtime does not phone home by default? Thanks!