Some developers are seriously considering de-listing their games from online shops when the Unity Runtime Fee kicks off at the start of next year, meaning some titles built on Unity could end up being temporarily — or permanently — unavailable. Here's what developers are saying about the Unity Runti...
1.5 years of learning unity gone down the shitter. here I come, godot
even if they backtrack, trust is ruined at this point. this only makes sense if you're trying to destroy the company intentionally and short your stock on the way out. what the fuck
1.5 years of learning unity gone down the shitter.
And this is the real damage to their business here. They clearly lost sight of their business model: Create an army of developers who know their product very well, so that it's on a short list of products studios are all but forced to consider.
A wave of developers who know soemthing other than Unity or Unreal has the potential to turn the games development ecosystem totally on its head. They didn't shoot themselves on the foot, they possibly shot themselves in the femoral artery.
Yes, but no. My company is working in a proprietary engine, so there is almost no one we can hire with that engine experience, but we still want people who became familiar and strong with other engines because they can do it again with ours.
Don't be too discouraged by this, but start learning your next engine.
Concept, yes. The actual infrastructure, tool chains, and processes are usually not. The IDE is different, the language is different, the keyboard shortcuts are different.
The only non-pain point are probably assets. But the code is not really transferable.
Most of the stuff needs to be completely rewritten.
It's actually neither of those, the biggest impact is free-to-play games. Hearthstone, Legends of Runeterra, virtually every Unity mobile game in the market... Having to pay per install has huge potential for abuse and can cost a fortune for games with millions of downloads.
JFC, I just learned that they are retroactively applying this new rule. This means that games that are out already or have been on sale for multiple years will have to pay the runtime fee too. Insane. They can bankrupt a studio before they even release their next game.
Yeah, I think that's straight up illegal and I would simply refuse to pay.
If they can retroactively change terms, why can't I, as a bonafide counterparty in that agreement? Maybe something like a 100% discount on runtime fees for days that end with 'y'.
Otherwise I could simply "retroactively apply" a 100% discount on my lease or new car purchase.
The correct answer and what all studios/devs should do: tell them to retroactively pound sand and ditch Unity for all future projects.
Pricing should protect indie and small businesses. When it destroys those, we need government to step in because we're on track to create oligarchs in every industry that are too big to fail.
This needs to turn into a class action suit that results in John Tortellini having his oxygen rights revoked. I can't imagine shareholders will be happy finding out that John Riceroni has been selling off Unity's stock, and I'm pretty sure what Unity's trying to do here is straight-up illegal in the US. Fuck John Rigatoni. God, I was so happy thinking he'd died and gone to hell after EA, but nope, still alive and well.
The Parties agree that any arbitration will be conducted in their individual capacities only and not as a class action or other representative action, and the Parties expressly waive their right to file a class action or seek relief on a class basis.
Forced arbitration is one of the most villainous legal practices still somehow allowed in the US.
Arbitration is often a good thing, by avoiding clogging up courts and arbitrators can sometimes be better than whatever judge you'd get (since both parties have to agree to the arbitrator). It's still legally binding and arbitrators have made lots of great rulings.
But not as a replacement for class action. The whole point of class actions is to make it much more viable for many people to be represented because only one affected person has to deal with managing an expensive lawsuit and there's just one case instead of hundreds of thousands of arbitration cases (which still cost a ton of money for lawyers). So IMO arbitration is great, but shouldn't be allowed to replace class actions specifically.
From their FAQ, looks like Unity doesn't have any real way of dealing with pirated or fake installs. Their FAQ says you have to work with them when that happens so they can correct your bill. It doesn't say Unity will automatically filter those installs out.
Officially no, but the wording on the FAQ says it's the developer's job to take it up with them to resolve it. So it's clear they don't have any safeguard and only after you're affected you can talk to them lmfao.
Does the Unity Runtime Fee apply to pirated copies of games?
We are happy to work with any developer who has been the victim of piracy so that they are not unfairly hurt by unwanted installs.
Same thing goes for "install-bombing":
We are not going to charge a fee for fraudulent installs or “install bombing.” We will work directly with you on cases where fraud or botnets are suspected of malicious intent.
So not only are the fees outrageous, but now devs are responsible for making sure this whole system isn't being abused. It's not gonna be long until people figure out how the install count is updated, and will proceed to weaponize it lmfao.
Not really. Assets are more or less portable with some effort, but not the logic. There are tools to help you port your code but it more or less requires a complete re-write.
Someone has pulled off porting an Unreal map over to Unity before, but a lot of the maps lighting and other effects were completely lost. Look up Stanley parable rocket league. It's definitely possible to port Unity maps to other engines and vice versa, but it would take a lot of work and a lot of rebuilding everything from scratch
You can port over a lot of C# code into Godot, but there are things that are engine specific. However, they are similar enough that you can just work on refactoring without sgarting from scratch.
I've ported a few of my projects from Unity and it's not impossible, it's just a lot of copy and pasting and making a few changes
Migrating really large software is incredibly time consuming and difficult. My background is with backend servers, not games, but some large framework migrations we've done were a multi year effort and IMO they weren't nearly as big or fundamental as game engines can be (though we did have to maintain near perfect uptime, which isn't a concern for an unreleased game).
No, they'd have to start from scratch. They're entirely different engines and everything is very specific to the engine, down to the tooling and languages used.
Unity is not a product, it's an ongoing subscription. You can distribute Unity as part of your game as long as you have a subscription.They changed the terms of the subscription for next year. If you don't have a subscription then you cannot redistribute Unity. So your choice is to either accept the new terms, or pull your game from the stores.
Why the ever loving fuck would any company willingly use a library or framework in their product that uses a subscription model instead of a licensing model? That's absolutely mind blowing. Having critical tools with subscriptions is bad enough, but at least those aren't shipped to customers.
If it's really true that Unity uses a perpetual subscription rather than a license I'm utterly flabbergasted that it ever got as popular as it was.
I'm waiting for a Legal Eagle breakdown or something. I've been thinking the exact same thing. Sneakily removing stuff from their TOS in GitHub a while back is dodgy.
I read somewhere that they removed their TOS entirely from GitHub but I would love a breakdown of this too. I’m not familiar with how the Unity agreement works.
So there’s a little nuance here. They aren’t going to charge you for the downloads that already happened, it’s on all downloads moving forward, even if the game has already been released. I still think it’s ridiculous, but it is not the same as suddenly hitting you with a bill for all the downloads the game already had. That would not hold up in any court. But the latter case…we’ll see. Depends on the specifics of the initial agreement I suppose. Totally possible they are within their rights even if it’s scummy.
Correct me if I’m wrong, that’s my understanding. I don’t think if you had a million downloads last year, for instance, you’ll be charged for those.
No, you won't be charged retroactively for previous downloads. But the change does retroactively affect games previously released on Unity.
So last year you made decisions on your game's price and revenue model that are no longer true. if you made your small game free to play with microtransactions and its had more than 200,000 installs you're probably shitting yourself. Unity will be charging $0.20 per install even if it's to the same device multiple times. A million installs of your game is you having to write a check to Unity for $160,000 for installations alone.
So your microtransactions game now must average a spend of at least $0.20 per install, plus per seat licensing of Unity, plus your overhead for it to even begin to make a profit.
And Unity has said that multiple installations on the same device will all be charged. So it's inevitable that script kiddies with bad attitudes are going to install a game thousands of times. Unity has said you can appeal this type of behavior, but that puts the onus of detecting and reporting this stuff on the devs, further increasing their workload and risk.
Per their lawyers it's in the TOS. Everyone just hits "I agree" when they get that EULA but there's always a "we reserve the right to fuck you over" buried in the fine print.
I don't think I've ever read one where the clause "we can change any if this at any point in the future and you automatically accept it" wasn't there. All the fucking time it's there. Everyone is always agreeing to this shit all the time. That's why many services can just change their prices and whatever how they want and only send an email "next month the price is X".
Depends what is in the contract. If the contract says devs on are the hook for any future fees they deem necessary, then the devs are on the hook. Unless they want to pay a lawyer big bucks to take on the company behind Unity with their billions of dollars of revenue and the lawyers that buys. How many indie devs do you think can afford to do that?
They are retroactively applying the new pricing model to games that have been out for years. That’s what I meant. So they’re not back-billing for previous downloads, but already-released games don’t get grandfathered in.
Pretty standard really. You don't want contributions to the codebase come under questionable copyright concerns, or the original creator to revoke the code 4 years later causing huge headaches potentially.
You typically have to sign these types of CLA's whenever you need to contribute to any serious project. I've had to do it for Google and Microsoft recently, and I've done it for various other open source projects as well.
Still that shouldn't concern users/gamedevs as they don't contribute to the engine code typically. Only if they want to upstream changes back into the engine publicly they would need to sign it ofcourse
I understand the controversy, especially in light of the recent Reddit bullshit. But I don't think I understand the tech.
For the sake of it, let's focus only on games that are paid for, installed on a system (or downloaded using Game Pass), and do not involve a multiplayer element. (Hollow Knight, Cuphead, etc)
Is there some ongoing resource use (on Unity's end) when people download or play these games? Like, when I play Hollow Knight, my system isn't connecting to Unity to use their servers to run the game on my home system, is it? When I download a game to my system, an I downloading the engine separately from the software, thereby using Unity's servers?
As abhorrent as the Reddit API change was, at least they were charging for the ongoing consumption of some digital resource (Reddit data). Unless I'm misunderstanding something, this just seems more like trying to collect a residual after the fact.
No, there are no costs for Unity in this situation. The way they'll need to track installs is with the unity runtime, which gets packaged with games made using Unity.
This is what economists call "rent-seeking", where companies seek to extract more profit by charging subscriptions, rather than introducing desirable products. Adobe, AutoCAD, Microsoft Office, and the Reddit API are all high profile examples of rent-seeking.
Unity Revenue reporting has always been "self-reported" by users. If they think you're lying and aren't on the right license they send the complkance team to make sure you're giving enough. Unity has no way of knowing installs because as you said it doesn't connect to Unity.
You don't download anything separately, the runtime is included with the game.
Unity hasn't been very profitable, for most of its users it's completely free. I don't blame them for needing money to improve the engine, but not like this
This is basically like if John Deere started following everyone around so they could charge a farmer 1 cent every time you bite into a vegetable you bought at Walmart.
Apparently they snuck a clause into an update to the ToS at some point, after years of saying they'd never do such a thing. So people agreed to a loophole without realizing. The legality of such a thing is highly questionable, hence the rumblings of potential lawsuits are already brewing.
If you want to change the terms of contract then you have to contact every affected individual or company and make it explicitly clear what terms of contract are being changed and then get explicit approval that these changes can go ahead. Obviously you do otherwise we live in a world of anarchy and business couldn't possibly happen.
When companies want to renegotiate tiny intricate details of contracts it often takes months because of these requirements, even when both parties are already in verbal agreement.
They can't just announce they are changing the contract and then provide less than 2 months worth of warning and say you don't get a choice this is the new contract now and forever and also in the past. They have to get explicit approval of this change, and obviously no one's going to give them it.
Honestly I don't see most of the indie companies keep working with Unity unless they have no choice. Even if they roll it back, who's to say that they won't do that again next year?
The fact that they count you retroactively for eligibility means they want to try and rake as much money as possible.
There was some sort of similar issue a year or two ago and it wasn't enough to drive people away. I suspect the long-term picture is that any given business either slowly grows to the scale that Unreal Engine is a better fit anyway and abandon Unity or very very very slowly we see Indies move to Godot. Though it'll be more that new indies will form studios around breakthrough hits made in Godot and be Godot studios from the start (and replace older Unity studios as part of the natural turnover of small to medium sized studios) until there is a tipping point where there's enough Godot developers floating around that it becomes easier for existing Unity studios to switch than to keep putting up with Unity's shit. That's a slow process though. 5-10 years imho (if ever.)
I know Valve has a good reputation but I really don't want another company owning both a major storefront and a major game engine. It's not great to have Epic in that situation, but at least they provide competition to Steam.
If Unity fails hopefully that means another game engine company can grow and take their place and keep market competition strong.
The only way I see Unity being saved is by developers buying it out, only to render it Open-Source. And for the purpose of an open-source 3D game engine, you've got Godot.