Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume | Hacker News Reader

Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume

axios.com

79 pointsdanso74 comments

Recent and related:

The Death of Unity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37486431 - Sept 2023 (153 comments)

Unity plan pricing and packaging updates - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37481344 - Sept 2023 (457 comments)

From [1], it seems they intend on counting "loading a unity game in a browser" as an install:

> Q: Does this affect WebGL and streamed games? > A: Games on all platforms are eligible for the fee but will only incur costs if both the install and revenue thresholds are crossed. Installs - which involves initialization of the runtime on a client device - are counted on all platforms the same way (WebGL and streaming included).

[1] https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packa...

This has 'MBA who doesn't understand contemporary gaming paradigms whatsoever' written all over it.

That, or it's straight-up done with malevolent intent, for some unknown reason, because I genuinely can't fathom this decision-making.

Counting online uses in combination with demo installs means that any game that makes enough money and puts out a web demo (which is a totally valid option on places like itch.io) will have to pay whenever anyone loads the demo. No potential for abuse here, especially since reloads and reinstalls will be counted as new installs.

> malevolent intent, for some unknown reason, because I genuinely can't fathom this decision-making.

sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malevolence.

I think he does, unity bought WETA. They want to go toe to toe with Unreal in AAA games and Hollywood, but Unity has a terrible stigma due to all the shovelware and indie games made with it.

They need to jettison the "dead weight" to make the premium money. The core engine isn't as bad as people think it is especially if you hand code your game and avoid the editor. I've seen people pull nearly miraculous demos this way.

I'm going to pivot to godot maybe.

> the premium money

It's not really obvious to me that's true. Ad infested shovelware is where Unity makes most of its money from and that market is probably much easier for them to monetize than AAA (I don't think Unreal is really making that much from their engine business to be fair, it's just that they have Fortnite and way less bloat(employees) than Unity so they don't have to push that aggressively with their pricing.

I sometimes use NVidia's GeForce Now streaming platform. I like it because it hooks into my Steam library. Sometimes when I launch a game, it goes through an installation process on Steam. It's almost instant (there's no actual download, so there's something special happening here), but it's definitely hooked into Steam's "install a game" mechanism. If I was a game developer, I'd be very worried about these game streaming platforms.

You mean, sometimes it runs the installer again, even if you played the game before on that streaming service?

How does this pricing scheme even make sense? Why do they think "installs" is a relevant metric? I could uninstall and reinstall a game 100,000 times. Would I single handedly cost the developers a ton of money?

They are apparently attempting to prevent that... but installs on 'separate devices' still count. So I'm sure someone will find a way to do precisely that.

But if they are attempting to prevent that then why not charge per game sold? If they think a single person installing it more than once shouldn't count then what do they believe the difference is? It seems like the only purpose of this pricing scheme is because they want to be able to charge for a single person installing it multiple times.

I think they plan on including spyware that calls home to Unity when a game is installed. Despite being terrible, this is much easier for them than relying on or forcing developers to accurately report sales.

So people should run the games of developers they like in a network-less container, and for those they don't like they could keep launching the game in a fresh networked container instead of review bombing...

My first guess would be that this is by design to syphon off money from F2P game devs. They need to have large install bases because >90% of players never pay for anything.

Because they can't really track games sold. But if they add a call-home script into their engine, they can track how many times it is installed/opened.

I bet every install will require a "sign in"...

*edit: actually yeah, given that Unity is very heavily used in the walled gardens of mobile apps. this makes a lot of sense.

Malicious persons will spin up Windows in a VM with slightly different hardware, install the game, repeat.

They claim to have developed proprietary code to handle this situation. They don't offer up a lot of details.

https://x.com/unity/status/1701689241456021607

"trust me, bro"

I imagine there will be a lot of disputes around billing, as in, ever single bill from this system.

Based on this, it seems like Unity's real goal is to achieve perfect price discrimination.

For each game that gets sufficiently popular, they can fiddle with their unreviewable "proprietary" metric until it matches whatever they think the developer is willing to pay, and then send them a bill for that amount.

It's a clever plan if you assume your customers are too dumb to notice what you're doing.

I can't imagine that a black box "you'll find out eventually I guess" pricing scheme would be acceptable for these same big whales of game development that they want to target.

Wait, they're planning on charging the Game Pass game fees to Microsoft? The Aggro Crab example alone could incur hundreds of thousands of dollars per game for Microsoft, they're not going to be happy about that. Surely that's going to drag Microsoft legal very quickly into this mess?

Game publishers won't be happy either. Devolver Digital made a joke about it which might not be a joke: https://twitter.com/devolverdigital/status/17016852821295394...

> Definitely include what engine you’re using in game pitches.

> It’s important information!

I find it fascinating to consider that they will require free-tier developers to maintain an active internet connection to use the editor. This is such a self-evidently cursed idea that it veers into satire.

No matter how quickly they try to walk back these intentions, this is Unity's elephant hunting moment.

This'll create such insane scenarios I do not see a world where Unity doesn't walk this back.

Imagine Rimworld having to patch in ads or microtransactions because their large playerbase continues to buy new computers.

How do you put a game on sale for a dollar anymore? It's all but guaranteed that your players will cost you more over their lifetime.

We're going to see indie games go "limited edition" when their rev edges near targets.

https://vxtwitter.com/cultofthelamb/status/17017159716634258... more of this will happen.

Lamentable how 1 word is all it's taken to take to make their whole ecosystem too risky to consider.

I've been a unity developer for about a decade, in that time I have given Unity more money than I have any other software company. It's become imminently clear that I need to transition to another engine. Even if they go and change "per install" to "per sale", the canary that Unity would never add untenable risk to the businesses of every one of their customers is dead.

The installs thing doesnt make any sense.

But, I've been a professional Unity dev for 10+ years and I have started learning Godot today; the reason is because I am very concerned about how would Unity possibly implement these policies? They would need to put secret analytics calling back to Unity servers in every build + secret killswitch they can trigger if you dont pay up.

That is the reason. Tbh I've been waiting for a good reason to hit the button and that was it.

You and I might as well be the same person.

Why not Unreal? Godot seems like a much simpler engine compared to Unity and Unreal.

I go on about this in my other comment.. Unreal is great, but its not the same, it doesnt have that XNA / Unity / Godot "do what you want" feeling. It feels more like modding an existing game than writing your own game.

Oof. So they are doubling down rather than taking the feedback and making changes based upon it.

I do not see much growth in Unity's future.

Their responsibility is to their shareholders now. Good luck with that.

IMO it doesn't really matter if they do a 180, they've telegraphed the direction they want to go. If I had a dependency on Unity I'd be evaluating my options pretty seriously to migrate off of the engine.

Hopefully it spurs further investment in things like godot and bevy.

Yeah. They heard all the commotion and rushed in. "We've heard a lot of bad rumors going around about our new pricing. We know you're upset, and we just wanted to confirm that all the bad rumors are true."

They're so tone deaf.

It sounds like they initially wanted to charge developers per install (including a reinstall) but changed it after the backlash. The relevant section:

> After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unity's Whitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation. (A spokesperson told Axios that Unity had "regrouped" to discuss the issue.)

well, kind of:

>But an extra fee will be charged if a user installs a game on a second device, say a Steam Deck after installing a game on a PC.

if you use multiple devices you can still incur larger costs on the developers, unfortunately. This just means that you can't be braindead and uninstall/re-install hundreds of times to incur costs.

But someone slightly tech saavy just spoofs hardware, or spins up emulator instances to get around this.

Do any companies pre-game this out with PR response plans for scenarios of "public acceptance", "public indifference", "public outrage" and so on? Or are the executive suites usually so high on their own supply that they expect everyone to accept whatever is doled out?

They are resting on the fact they have a near monopoly for indie and their only competitor is Unreal at this point.

Isn't godot up and coming?

Especially now.

Yes, and old engines are getting renewed life…

Godot is the new Unity, Unity is the new Unreal, and Unreal is the new Source engine, complete with the accompanying storefront.

Yes. It doesn't have the asset store quantity behind it yet however the actual development side of things is quick and relatively simple.

I used XNA, then MS killed it for no reason, then I switched to Unity, been using it since 2012, today I'm learning Godot.

Imo Godot is the new indie engine. it has the same feel as XNA and Unity. There's nothing wrong with Unreal, its a great engine, but it does not feel the same. XNA / Unity / Godot / indie engines, u just sit down and start writing C# code and can write your whole game and ignore the engine features.. Unreal feels more like modding an existing game where you must use the existing systems. As a lone indie dev I find it very tedious and slow to use, but I can see how its good for big teams, there is a big rigid system already in place they everyone must follow in order to do anything.. So if u have 1000's of workers it will stop individuals going off and doing crazy stuff, cus they cant.

One niche Godot (or any OSS game engine) can't fulfill is seamless console ports.

Godot can't but Godot* can, where Godot* is a downstream fork of Godot maintained by $COMPANY that provides a seamless console port. There are a couple of companies trying to do this.

In the long term, if Godot gets big enough then console makers have incentive to assist in this themselves, because if an engine with major marketshare can seamlessly port its games to Xbox but has difficulty porting to Playstation then Xbox will have a competitive advantage.

In such a scenario I don't think the difference between Godot and Godot* matters that much, IMO - I could imagine an Xbox devkit shipping with a Godot* compiler, for instance, so devs don't even have to think about the issue.

Exactly. After all, it’s not like consoles are magic black boxes. They are pc’s in brutalist form. If you get a console contract, you’ll be able to do a console port. Before then, don’t even worry about it. Just focus on making the game. All the Xbox services or PlayStation sdk stuff comes after.

$COMPANY in this case is called W4 games, by the way: https://w4games.com/

oh and speaking of Godot: https://godotengine.org/article/godot-developer-fund/

I have history with XNA. What’s your take on MonoGame?

I haven't used it but a friend of mine has. His opinion is yeah good. Basically they more or less made XNA work again using Mono, so if u liked XNA its very similar.

There’s been quite a few games released with MonoGame. It’s a direct port of XNA API to open source. Like I said, I have history with XNA. No one heard of our games but they heard about XNA/Silverlight. The precursor to MonoGame. Shout out to Bill Reiss wherever you are.

> There's nothing wrong with Unreal, its a great engine, but it does not feel the same

don't worry, I can do plenty of complaining about Unreal.

But in all seriousness, Unreal focuses on delivering content with graphical fidelity first, and iteration times are a distant 10th place in the priority list. Part of that is due to their choice to focus on C++ (and that's not a slight. UE is 25 years old, c++ itself was brand new back then. Let alone C# existing as an option). Part of it is a focus on highly spec'd computers with larger monitors. But the end result: developing a simple game with Unreal will feel slower because the compilation times and memory footprint are literally larger (even if you are really smart and take out a bunch of the unnecessary add-ons that are included by default).

>So if u have 1000's of workers it will stop individuals going off and doing crazy stuff, cus they cant.

oh you underestimate what crazy pitfalls designers can fall into :). But I can leave my rants about Blueprints and hard references for another post.

People who never developed a game on a large team like that don't know that there's nothing, nothing at all, stopping you from going crazy and doing crazy stuff. Often, it's a hack disguised as novel. Blueprints aside, even just doing hacky systems is allowed. Since it's C++, there's no stopping you.

"As for Game Pass and other subscription services, Whitten said that developers like Aggro Crab would not be on the hook, as the fees are charged to distributors, which in the Game Pass example would be Microsoft."

Expect Apple and Microsoft to drop all Unity games from their game subscriptions if this is still true in January.

My understanding is that Unity is losing A LOT of cash. They have been burning cash on thousands of devs building features they never ship or finish for like years.

Other's have pointed at this CEO's history at EA as indicative of how terrible he is (and yet he still gets crazy money, because execs only fall up).

They might just have no fucking clue what they are doing.

Ah, Unity... the only engine where vintage-inspired retro games take just as long to load into as Starfield (if not longer)

If this decision stands then I genuinely don't see how any developers will be motivated to use Unity long-term. I know that it's almost customary for companies to start pushing the limits hard as soon as they feel like they got too big to fail, but since the biggest Unity moneymakers are professionals and large companies, they'll probably have higher standards.

The only reasons why someone would possibly consider using Unity now would be if:

- They're already supporting or developing a Unity game

- They have a lot of staff that's only experienced with Unity

- They simply must use one of Unity's features and no other replacements are available

How is this going to be good for them in anywhere but the extreme short-term?

All news coming out of Unity in recent times is making me sad, I’ll never develop a game, but as a player, Unity games made mods (both using and creating) so easy even without any official mod support at all.

Any way you slice it, it's a stupid regressive way to charge for an engine by a company that already makes an unimaginable amount of money.

Their "fix" requires fingerprinting people's computers and phoning home, both of which should really be seen as privacy violations.

And all that said, at it's heart there no justifiable reason the developer should be charged for every device I install something on. The developers are not making more money, why should the engine makers get a larger cut.

> And all that said, at it's heart there no justifiable reason the developer should be charged for every device I install something on. The developers are not making more money, why should the engine makers get a larger cut.

There is a reason that's justifiable to the company - it makes more money. The modern-day push to collect recurring payments and offer everything as an ongoing service is driving large companies into this strange form of software rent-seeking, including whatever this is.

It sounds like the WebGL initialization thing is ridiculous. They better fix that.

But aside from that, collecting a minimal fee seems fair enough to me. If paying 20 cents per sale of your successful game is ruining your life, maybe consider investing in some of the open source game engines.

Charging a fee based on sales would be reasonable. That's what Unreal Engine does (5% of gross revenue after the first $1 million).

Charging a flat fee per installation, even for games that have already been developed and released (many of them for free), is insane.

It would be more sane if it was per sale, but they are talking about per install.

You don't understand, the language says _per install_ not per sale.

This seems to include re-installs, multiple devices, new computers. I wouldn't have batted an eye at 20 cents per sale. Per _install_ is catastrophic.

Getting fee isn't wrong maybe, but getting a fee by install is. They should instead ask for a percent of revenue. So if 1 billion people install my flappy bird clone but I only make $300k I don't owe them $15 million dollars.

Per sale would still be very problematic because they consider sale as part of a deeply discounted bundle/subscription a sale, unless it’s a charity bundle.

A fixed fee like that also effectively kills popular $1 games.

Per install, not sale, which includes demos, pirated copies (yes, really) and, say, a web browser spinning up the browser version of a game. Or a cloud service running it in a VM (each executable startup in that case is an "install"). Or any download from a service like gamepass.

Above all, a single player/user redownloading the game on their device counts as a separate install. They've now said that they're using proprietary "fraud detection" and IP address uniqueness to prevent fraud, and seemingly requiring devs to reach out if they think they've been overcharged.

This whole debacle makes me glad I picked up Unreal instead of Unity.

I hope this fiasco gets people to realize that it’s better to write your own code. But probably not. After decades of platform jumping after enshittification, people continue to to do it to platforms that they have no control over

Are you really suggesting that every hobbyist game developer should build their own game engine from scratch…?

Yes and no. Firstly, hobbyists should make games...not engines [1]. You don't need an engine to make a game. Secondly, people don't need every imaginable feature like what Unreal or Unity provide. It just needs to do what they need it to do to make the game, thus it can be greatly simplified compared to the big guys.

[1] https://geometrian.com/programming/tutorials/write-games-not...

[dupe]

Lots of discussion on the official post over here earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37481344

Reply on news.ycombinator.com