About the recent Unity disunity

Usually only address stuffs like this on my Discord, but been getting some contacts about this, so want to address it, kinda, here. Nothing to do with BR, so feel free to skip this whole thing if it doesn't interest you :-)

First off, let's get this out of the way, most games developers won't be listening to me, I am aware, and while I have made a best effort to understand this whole thing, and keeping everything straight, I may be misunderstanding something. Unity did not take care to be very understandable, so a lot of corporate language decoding needed here. Most of you will be end users, those receiving and buying the game on the end user side of the equation, so would usually be spared from this whole mess, but leave it to mr ex-EA exec to make a mess of a level that it spills over into the mainstream, good job!

Let's just mark 2023 with year of idiotic corporate moves, shall we? Be it Reddit, Twat'ter, Unity or Illusion, this year is a corporate mess.

I do have some stake in how this plays out as well, though none that I can discuss directly here at this point in time, so keep in mind that I stand to gain more, the less strict the Unity policy is.

Also, I want all of you to keep in mind that engines aren't magic, it's how they're used that determines the outcome. Skilful use of a tool will make for a good product, failure to apply skill will make for a awful product, that is the same for any engine. Some have some quirks, but they all can produce literal works of art.

Before we start, it's important to know how the Unity fees worked before this all went down:

Unity Personal:
This edition is meant for low income projects. It's free to use, but once you reach $100.000 in annual revenue, you can no longer use this edition, and need to update to Unity Plus or Unity Pro.

Unity Plus:
This edition cost $399 per seat, per year (so 10 devs = 10 x $399). This includes some data analytics and that fun stuff, but the main selling point is the ability to remove the "Made in Unity" Splash screen (more on this later). You can use this edition until you reach $200.000 in annual revenue.

Unity Pro:
The highest "normal" tier (There also is Enterprise, but for the vast amount of developments studios, this is not really an option, and details around this plan is also not super clear). They keep moving features out of the Pro tier it seems, so not really clear on what is really included here, but this edition have no revenue roof, so the price, $1.800 per seat, per year (so 10 devs = 10 x $1.800).

Now, this calls for a question... "Wait, hiding the engine logo actually costs money?!"... Yes, here I want to address something of a Marketing Disaster from the Unity of old.

Let's take two engines, let's call them E1 and E2. E1 requires all users of their high income usage to carry the engine logo, so that it targets AAA developers. Meanwhile E2 is requiring all users that are using the engine for free to do the same... What would be the end result?

The end result is that Asset Flips, Shovelware, Low effort games and student projects all carry the logo of E2, meanwhile only high budget powerhouses carry the logo of E1. To the average consumer, this will be experienced in this way:

"Oh, This game made in E2 is obviously awful, and the same happened the last 10 times I saw that logo. Obviously this engine must be responsible for the games being bad, since there are so many games where this fits. This E1 though, I have never seen a game that wasn't at least eye candy carrying its logo, so obviously, making games in that is superior, and I should take care to prefer games made in this engine."

Of course, E1 is the Unreal Engine, while E2 is Unity. Let's just say, developers are VERY willing to pay to make sure that their users aren't presented with the Unity logo before anything else. Actually, leaving the logo there can be the kiss of death for a game project if the developer is very unlucky with their audience.

Trust is gone, Trust is gone and Trust is gone

Fast forward to a bit over a week ago, Unity made an announcement (Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20230912151806/https://unity.com/pricing-updates), and this lit the tech world on fire quite immediately. Let's have a look shall we?

ok, so what do we have here. To make a very long story very short, Unity Plus is gone (It's mentioned, but removed from the site plans), and it's no longer possible to sign up for it. Users already on it have been offered a discounted upgrade to Pro. The Price for Pro have also gone up a tad. Unpleasant, but fair, I guess.

Now to the meat of the issue, Runtime Fees, retroactively applied to all Unity games released in the span of... ever.

Let's inspect the Personal plan here. OK, the earnings limit has increased to $200.000, nice, but what is this "$0.20 per install"?

We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that applies to certain Unity subscription plans based on per-game installs across any Unity-supported game platform. Creators only pay once per download.

Good lord almighty, are they quite sane? (Spoiler: no, they weren't)

Let's run some numbers. A little case study. Let's say we've developed a game, let's call it "BR-Chans great adventure" and we sell it on steam, here's the numbers:

Sales Price: $20
Unity fee: $0.20 per install/reinstall per user (Provided the limit for your plan is reached)
Steam fee: $6.66 (30%)
Plus applicable taxes depending on country and region where the developer is situated.
Developer takehome per sale: ca $13.14. That's not too bad, cost of doing business and all that right?

Now, let's adjust things, let's say that our game goes viral, and some power users dig up something you've said that they dislike. May be politics, may be they don't like your choice of food, reason doesn't matter, just that they didn't like it.

The user can, if low skilled, reinstall the game over and over on their computer. If they're more advanced, they can easily script the game to uninstall and install in loop, or if there's some anti fraud thing happening, a high skill user may just script setup virtual computers, and have that install and uninstall times thousands.

Suddenly the $0.20 is no longer insignificant, with 200 installs on a single sale, the developer is de facto paying its users to play the game, and that is... not great, so with thousands of installs from a single user, that may literally cause companies to go bust overnight.

Now, what was worse is that this applies to all games ever made with unity. "You made a game in 2010? cool, more money please" And to make it even worse, the technology they were proposing to use to track this would at best be wildly illegal in large parts of the world, including the whole of the EU and large parts of the US to my understanding.

Sum total, "BR-Chans great adventure" could make a per sale revenue of between $13.14 and negative unlimited. Basically making the process of releasing a game something akin to shorting a stock (betting that a stock will go down). Not something any sane person would do when the potential gains are this low to start with.

As most of you can imagine, Unity developers did not take this lying down, some larger studios are currently hiring for engine developers (hmm, wonder what they're up to), others scrambled to port their games to Godot or Unreal, depending on the project and the engine knowledge inhouse, some turned off all Unity Ads (yes, Unity is also a adhouse) and close to everyone yelled at close to everywhere on the internet allowing users to write posts or comments (Reddit has been very entertaining of late).

There was also a "Credible life threat" issued by a Unity employee in the aftermath, which cancelled some events held by Unity as well as closing down their offices for a time. (aside: Don't go around issuing life threats, that shit is vile)

So... what was the end to the uproar?

After spending a significant amount of time saying how confused Unity Devs were, Unity finally decided to actually engage with their community and cap any fees at 2.5% of income if you've overperformed the limit of your version, or a per user fee, whichever is lower (Trailing 12 months). That is on top of the per seat fees. Oh, also devs can hide the splash screen in Personal now. (Expect that splash screen to go extinct when this goes into effect) This is... reasonable. Unreal takes 5%, and that is found reasonable, so I can absolutely see this as reasonable, and even without them pulling the 'door in the face' manoeuvre (making a unreasonable starting position to roll back to something less unreasonable and make it feel more reasonable), I think most devs would be understanding of this move.

They didn't though. They went so extreme that it broke any and all trust existing between Unity and their Developers.

A lot of resources have been thrown behind Godot (Open source, MIT license, No fee or revenue sharing) in the aftermath, and I believe we will see a lot of development on it going forward and start seeing a lot of games being released from it, though the effect will take a few years, as it's insane to throw away ongoing Unity projects now that the terms are reasonable.

So, what can we take away from this? Trust. It's everything. It's important in all aspects of life, but doubly so with B2B (Business to Business interactions).

Business leaders are in a... interesting position. They are directly responsible for the well being and income of any person they employ, and while some go at it as a cold calculating "The business must survive" mindset, for others, the main cause of the business is to take care of its employees and ensure the good times keep rolling. Of course, a successful business needs at least some combination of the two, but those are the two extremes that I'm familiar with.

It would be madness to stake your business on a partner that has shown, not once, but twice, that they're willing to change the terms on you retroactively (happened in 2019 as well), and makes sweeping changes without care to how their users may be effected. Goodwill towards Unity is shattered, and from what I hear, developers are still scrambling to make code engine agnostic (so that it can be easily ported if something happens) or straight up just learning Godot or Unreal.

The natural end result of this is that we will see more games made in other engines, especially Unreal and Godot.

So, what are my thoughts on the matter?

I despise this whole thing. A lot of people have lost sleep over this, it has scrambled time, that should've been used on actually making games, to try to react to this all, while Unity has been busy blaming said developers for being "confused".

In the long term, this is quite good overall though. Unitys share in the market will undoubtably take a hit, and I wouldn't be surprised to see schooling for game developers focus less on Unity and more on an engine agnostic approach. I am excited to see Godot getting a lot of love, and am looking forward to see where that all leads.

I do like Unity, administration notwithstanding, don't get me wrong, but seeing less market dominance of a single company is a win in my book.

After all is said and done, this won't affect end users much, maybe a modest price jump in some games (ILLGAMES: You're already way overpriced, don't you dare)? Hard to say, things like these tend to trickle down all the way into the wallet of the end user. That's the way of the world though, so just gonna need to live with that.

If you're still reading, thank you for your attention, now back to my own projects \o/

TLDR:

Unity did something dumb that pissed off literally everyone, they walked it back to a reasonable position, and nothing has changed much for most end users. You will see the Unity logo a lot rarer going forward though, and you may find yourself familiar with the Godot logo as well. =P