Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes
gamerbraves.com
gamerbraves.com
Simply, they could have not made this retroactive on existing released games. Rather just be clear that going forward, games build using the new Unity versions would have a per-installation fee. And they would slowly discontinue support for the older versions on a specific schedule.
There are new devices coming out like the new Switch, the Apple Vision Pro, and then the new features Unity is adding like AI, just add those to the new versions that have the run-time fee. People will upgrade to it on their own terms!
By making it retroactive and forcing it on everyone, they have basically screwed over their existing customers who shipped games expecting a certain cost structure and now it is higher.
Deleting this GitHub license archive repo where they make it clear that their license changes are likely unenforceable is icing on the cake.
EDIT: To remove the claim that Unreal Engine had a similar per-install fee, it doesn't.
“A 5% royalty is due only if you are distributing an off-the-shelf product that incorporates Unreal Engine code (such as a game). Provided that you notify us on time using the Release Form, you will only owe royalties once the lifetime gross revenue from that product exceeds $1 million USD; in other words, the first $1 million will be royalty-exempt.”
Some mobile games have a ton of installs and a very small amount of revenue per user. Those 27cents per install are a lot of money for those type of games and will even make some business models no longer feasible.
Exactly. So if they did this in an upfront way, they would have said that starting with Unity 2024 there is this new cost structure. Then game devs can make informed choices if they want to build those types of games on the platform.
This retroactive stuff is insane and I cannot figure out how a company can make that type of move if they care about their users. Although I think I sort of answered my own question...
I can't even understand how it can possibly be legal. How on earth is it even possible to say "your game which was released before we updated this license is subject to the updated version"? IANAL but that sure seems like something which would require both parties to agree to the updated terms for them to be binding.
> Unity may update these Unity Software Additional Terms at any time for any reason and without notice (the “Updated Terms”) and those Updated Terms will apply to the most recent current-year version of the Unity Software, provided that, if the Updated Terms adversely impact your rights, you may elect to continue to use any current-year versions of the Unity Software (e.g., 2018.x and 2018.y and any Long Term Supported (LTS) versions for that current-year release) according to the terms that applied just prior to the Updated Terms (the “Prior Terms”). The Updated Terms will then not apply to your use of those current-year versions unless and until you update to a subsequent year version of the Unity Software (e.g. from 2019.4 to 2020.1). If material modifications are made to these Terms, Unity will endeavor to notify you of the modification. If a modification is required to comply with applicable law, the modification will apply notwithstanding this section. Except as explicitly set forth in this paragraph, your use of any new version or release of the Unity Software will be subject to the Updated Terms applicable to that release or version. You understand that it is your responsibility to maintain complete records establishing your entitlement to Prior Terms.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220716084623/https://github.co...
However, the clause was still in the October 2022 terms, and was still there in March 2023 [2], and was actually removed in April this year...
It's likely just an oversight, but it does feel pretty dishonest in the face of removing the github repo, its the difference between "that clause has been gone for a year" and "that clause was removed less than 6 months ago"
[1] https://unity.com/legal/terms-of-service/software-legacy
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20230303043022/https://unity.com...
I don’t know. I can see how it would be ridiculous if Amazon said “oh, by the way, starting next year you have to pay a cent every time you finish any of the books you bought on your kindle”
But if Netflix went “starting next year, there’s a surcharge of 1 cent per episode you watch” nobody would go “surely it can only count for episodes released from next year!
Which raises an interesting question to me: what if a developer wants out of the Unity contract? Does that mean they have to somehow break games consumers already purchased so as not to be liable to install fees?
We live in a dystopia lmao. Of course stuff like this is possible. Unity took one leap forward and pissed everyone off, they'll "fix" it by taking one or two steps back and then everyone will forget about it, just like we forget about everything else.
It's very different from the situation where one party retroactively changes conditions.
If I understand you correctly (I haven't really been following this), they changed the contract and are trying to retroactively collect license fees for installs done prior to the change in contract? I don't think this is legal. When you change a contract, it's on a go forward bases. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. It's definitely a money grab. If it's deemed illegal, i.e. fraud, I hope there is jail time. Gotta send a message.
Did Unity recently get acquired, new investors or new management?
EA's former CEO, John Riccitiello took over last year. He inaugurated himself with quite a few statements, one of which was discussed here:
For me personally, C:S goes in too much on building a nice looking city and not enough on the simulation aspect.
If it's illegal, it will just be invalid. What means that people could just not pay them. There's no jail time coming out of this.
Nope. They bought Weta tools and the investment haven't paid out and probably won't be soon if ever, now they are desperate for money.
They'll be able to get away with that then, the weasels. Sounds like they are trying to make a golden goose and kill it in one fell swoop. The latest Unreal demos look mighty fine. Sounds like we will be seeing a bunch of games use it in the near future.
I wonder if the older engines used by older games have any way to detect installs. I'd hate to see devs who abandoned their projects years ago but are still downloadable somewhere get caught up in this.
It seems more like, starting in 2024 when you get more downloads the fee would be applied.
I see people talking here about apps that have a huge user base and a very low price per purchase. I admit that segment didn’t pop into my mind initially. And I see the problem there. I also imagine the Unity execs may have missed that scenario too.
From reading all of their public communication, and with just a hint of principle of charity, I suspect they are trying to do this in the most fair minded and developer friendly manner possible.
You have to meet both volume and revenue minimums to even be subject to this. All free apps are safe. All non-profits are safe.
I think it is good Unity is receiving public feedback.
I am sad so many people are jumping to the conclusion this is a corrupt money grab.
What category of game has "a huge user base and a very low price per purchase?" Mobile free-to-play, that's what. How are those games monetized? Frequently with ads. And it's been noted elsewhere that if you use Unity's ad network, you will get a 100% discount on your per-install fees.
They knew exactly what they were doing. They merged with an ad company -- they are now an ad company. Their strategy is to make F2P games untenable on Unity if you're not getting advertisements from them.
I wonder how it'd have gone down if Unity had said, "From Unity version 2024 and beyond, if you have ads in your game, you must get them from us," and let that be the end of it.
That goes out the window when they make the changes retroactive.
Personally I’m wondering if Chinese gamedev industry would “buy Godot” or do something to that effect. Japanese publishers won’t be able to do that nor would be willing to pay, so I’m guessing they’ll migrate existing to UE or wind down Unity titles, just my speculations though.
(Or, at least they say they are.)
I was formerly heavily involved in the leadership of the other major US non-profit charity that does this kind of fiscal sponsorship (and which maintained a friendly and collaborative relationship with the charity that Godot previously used). They’re not scamming you in the way of a lot of executives at VC-funded for-profit startups (and their acquirers) when they make entirely legally unenforceable statements about what will or won’t happen in the future which they don’t necessarily even believe themselves.
Additionally the copyright isn’t even owned by those organizations but rather retained in full by all of the many individual contributors to Godot, without a Contributor License Agreement.
So any for-profit corporate acquirer would not be able to get the Godot name, and if they didn’t want to have to comply with the Godot copyright license, they’d have to get the agreement of every individual contributor whose work they don’t want to rewrite.
In short, they are safe from acquisition in the same way that Debian is, unlike most corporate-sponsored or small-team personally-owned “open source” projects that we see here on Hacker News.
When you put it that way, Unity could have come out of this price change looking like heroes with better messaging.
Serious games pay the $0.27 fee moving forward, and (hopefully) that comes with some new value add for end users (such as contractually enforced no advertising, cross-platform something something).
Ad-supported games use a different engine with different rules, and end users get the “free to play” benefit.
(The retroactive thing is obviously bullshit; I wonder how many studios will simply refuse to pay and jump ship for future titles.)
It was on HN this morning.
The highest possible fee seems to the $0.20 (only if 100% of your users are in the US and a few other rich countries). Also it only seems to the there to encourage everyone on Personal/Plus to upgrade to Pro (before these changes you were already required to do that if you company revenue was above $200).
Realistically it's going to be closer to $0.02-0.05 per install.
Which you now need to pay to get rid of the Unity splash screen. Why they haven’t learned the lesson of only poor developers (and therefore, largely shovelware and bad games) showing their splash screen is a really bad idea I’ll never understand. I suppose this will technically help with that.
Realistically it’s closer to 3-5 cents per install. Where did you get 27? Even personal/plus is cheaper than that in the worst case (ie. 100% of your users are in NA, the richer parts of Western Europe etc)
How can they make this apply retroactively though? For already shipped titles, if I'm no longer providing updates anymore, how can they force me to pay money?
I'm aware that games no longer have a final shipping date, with early access and all, and as a dev I'd likely would want to offer continued support in such a scenario.
But the way I understand it from the overall public reaction, is that they're trying to charge customers for existing titles, retroactively, in perpetuity going onward. This would be a one sided ToS change which only benefits them, which they push the customer into agreeing. Such a practice is mostly unenforceable in a lot of jurisdictions around the world.
I guess they didn’t like the thought of not being able to perpetually milk their customers and wanted to increase their cut outside of the editor fee.
From what I understand though, Unreal is just licensed based on revenue and all the editing tools are free. Unity had the opposite approach previously. They’ve decided they want a cut of both pies.
The way the go about this makes it seem that you enter a contract that you can never reasonably exit out of, as in order for you to stop having to pay, you'd have to convincingly prove that you forced every customer to uninstall your app, i.e. that there isn't at least one install left.
This sounds absolutely bonkers to me.
They’re going to (already have) damaged their reputation beyond repair. This isn’t typical consumer strong arm tactics. Their clients are businesses who already have alternatives. If one of my vendors abruptly changed our agreement like this, there’s no question I’d quietly phase them out ASAP.
Another comment already said this, but I feel it's worth emphasizing: Unreal Engine does not have a runtime fee. You don't pay per install.
I would still oppose it because I don't want every installer to spy on me as a user. I'm glad it happened in a way that spurred so much resistance instead of a slow frog-boil.
No no, you don’t understand, that’s exactly what they want
The incentives don’t work that way. The CEO gets his bonus and ability to sell shares if he pleases VCs and VCs are looking for bagholders for the company. So the CEO creates a revenue narrative to sell to institutional investors so they take an increasingly mediocre asset from the VCs at a premium.
The pattern is all around, exactly the same as Reddit for example.
As a game designer - there is zero built in incentives for the C level of a publicly listed company to do what’s good for the company long term. It’s much better to get rich quick and cash out.
It’s just that the desperation is now now sky high and narratives for the next earnings call need to be generated quickly
This sounds like a plausible motive. There's a handful of huge games using Unity that together generate upwards of 20bln annually, such as Pokemon GO, Honor of Kings, and Genshin Impact. I'm guessing their soundbite of "developers being excited" over the change is with those behemoths in mind, and not the other games that are barely making ends meet.
These particular successful games are still going to save millions compared to Unreal, while the change means that everyone else would now be more profitable with Unreal. Pokemon GO alone would have made Unreal $100mln+ a year with the 5% royalty, while paying considerably less with Unity's new scheme. Even at a billion downloads it's only $10mln in comparison.
It sounds like Unity is shifting their focus from the long tail where they were successful charging annual subscription fees (and ads), to the head that's generating orders of magnitude more revenue.
https://blog.unity.com/news/unity-forms-new-venture-to-manag...
To be fair only F2P games that makes less than ~$2 per user might be more profitable. For almost everyone else above the 1 million threshold Unity would still be cheaper.
Over 1B games sold on the switch: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/1-billion-switch-games-hav...
We can assume at least one game per Quest was sold: https://www.roadtovr.com/quest-sales-20-million-retention-st...
Hard to figure out the mobile numbers.
As for the quest sales, that's another 4mn.
It seems extremely foolhardy to cause this much damage to their reputation and potential growth as a multi-billion dollar company (market cap of 13bn) for 50-100mn a year of additional revenue.
Zero of them would be paying $0.2 per instal. Probably much closer to $0.03-0.05.
Nobody could ship games in the Switch using the personal edition and nobody who understands basic math would be paying $0.2 even after these prices go into effect
For people who are not paying as much attention to this I'd like to summarize the main points of frustration.
1. Unity has just shown they believe they are able, and they are willing, to change the terms on what you have to pay them. What are the bounds to terms like this? What if Unity is tight on money and decide to squeeze developers further? The risk to continuing business with Unity is very high as you have unknown future exposure.
2. The monetization model they've chosen is tied to installs, not revenue. On the initial day of announcement they even claimed re-installs would count but they've since walked that back (or "clarified a miscommunication"). Unity has been extremely wishy-washy on how they even plan to track this mentioning proprietary systems they can't elaborate on and your only recourse is to appeal if you think they got the numbers wrong. This is not a metric tied to your revenue and is difficult to plan around.
There are a lot of people arguing against a strawman of people who don't want to pay unity but that is not at all what this is about. Unity chose a terrible model they can't even explain for how they want to bill people and apply it to all past games that use the engine for all future sales.
This would be similar to if Microsoft said everyone who ever built anything on C# has to start paying a fee for every future install because it includes the .net runtime.
Literally "I am altering the deal, pray I do not alter it any further"
The way it works is that company insiders can’t freely sell or buy stock, instead they have to submit a form (Form 4) to the SEC on which they report the sale, almost always based on a prior setup plan (called Rule 10b5-1 plan) that can’t be changed and automatically effectuates. These forms get published.
The CEO’s Form 4 can be found here: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1810806/000181080623... It shows the plan to sell shares was created in May this year.
The other executives also sold shares, which can be found under “Ownership Disclosures” here: https://www.sec.gov/edgar/browse/?CIK=0001810806
This is of course silly because the CEO can just plan something detrimental for September all the way back in April (which the fuckery with the terms suggests happens), create a plan in May to sell shares in September just before the announcement is made and make sure that the drop in stock price doesn’t affect his wallet.
But in the good old US of A that all considered above board.
Every once in a while they’ll pick a “sacrificial lamb” for a slap on the wrist and call it a day.
So unless their anti-fraud system is asking Valve, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Apple, Google, Epic, GOG, itch.io, etc. how many downloads have occurred (no chance that they'll all agree to that), then their system is just going to make a guess, which they'll charge you for, and hope that holds up in court.
ROFL
They must know that their methods will ultimately be revealed during discovery during the inevitable lawsuits. So I’m wondering if they haven’t actually figured out how they’re doing it yet.
That wording is changed in the new terms [1] to say "If the modified Terms are not acceptable to you, your only recourse is to cease using the Services." Just in case you were wondering how one-sided this new agreement is intended to be.
[0] Section 8, "Modifications": https://web.archive.org/web/20201111183311/https://github.co...
Overview of the Spatial OS stuff for those that didn’t follow it: https://www.engadget.com/2019-01-10-unity-improbable-epic-ga...
And Unity can continue to raise the per-installation price as well. If they lose a bunch of customers but want to maintain their current income, why not raise it to $1 instead of just $0.27?
What jurisdictions recognize this term and legally protect those who agree to them?
So if you've ever released a Unity game (even if it hasn't been updated in years), even if you delist your game from the store today, presumably you could still get charged if people who already own your game reinstall it.
I'm not a lawyer, but I really don't see how that'd hold up in court — you created a product under different terms years ago, and now your product, which isn't even for sale, can be charged for something that your business has no control over. Even if the ToS says Unity reserves the right to change their fees, I don't see how that can apply to products that aren't even being sold anymore.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220716084623/https://github.co...
I have created a mirror of this more up-to-date version at https://github.com/thaliaarchi/unity-termsofservice.
Here's how to “cook”[1] an archive from the vault, if you want to do it yourself:
curl -X POST https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/vault/git-bare/swh:1:rev:28fdae008c61d98d0d9ec55b8cc016ce61809f58/
wget https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/vault/git-bare/swh:1:rev:28fdae008c61d98d0d9ec55b8cc016ce61809f58/raw/ --content-disposition
tar xf swh_1_rev_28fdae008c61d98d0d9ec55b8cc016ce61809f58.git.tar
git clone swh:1:rev:28fdae008c61d98d0d9ec55b8cc016ce61809f58.git TermsOfService
[1]: https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/vault/git-bare/do...
Their current move is either because they being extremely greedy, or because they're burning a lot of cash. We make simple games, and we're using Unity because of its community support and assets, not because we love Unity, the company. The community moves, we move.
Now if they're changing the terms arbitrarily, and hide that behind the "I agree" button, it proves that they have turned evil. We, along with several other fellow game companies don't support evil, and already migrating our games to Godot. We were prepared for something like this, but didn't anticipate Unity will flip their face this soon. This move only promotes Godot or Unreal; a far more different result than whatever they expected.
This seems extremely shady.
Every year Apple releases a new version of their Apple Developer Program License Agreement and Paid Applications agreement. I always download both as TXT files and diff against the previous one to see what changed. I practically don't even need to read any of the WWDC news to know what new things they are releasing.
It'd be awesome if someone automated that and threw it up on github but that's just me being lazy.
Was it a time based thing that applies to everyone or something?
Asking because a friend is playing a lot of ancient flash games recently using Ruffle (OSS flash player written in Rust), and doesn't seem to be having problems like that.
To be clear, Ruffle only [fully] emulates Actionscript 1/2, which was the Flash language prior to 2006. The games you see resurrected in Ruffle are mostly what people associate with the casual single-player Flash games and funky art projects from the early 2000s. Most of my work was in the Actionscript 3 language, which came out in 2006 and featured GPU support, networking via sockets, peer to peer RTMP messaging, and lots of other modern features to make fast 2D/3D gaming and multiplayer possible. With AS3 you could deploy a game with the browser plugin and compile the same code to iOS and Android "native" apps with Adobe Air, which basically shoehorned the plugin into the binaries. Air is still around, but the whole ecosystem is dead.
When Adobe pulled the plug, I'd just spent almost two years building the second entire game engine I wrote in AS3, this one for open/endless isometric worlds with terrain generation, character spawning, physics, particle systems, 3D embeds, networking, chat, lobbies... and our 3-person team had only deployed our first game with it. The idea of rewriting half a million lines of code in Unity or TS+Pixijs or something else... I just gave up on making games after that.
Ruffle is a great project for the older Flash stuff, and they've made some progress with coverage of AS3 now, but they don't support a lot of the critical things needed to run these games (particularly with networking APIs and Stage3D), and they probably never will. None of my advanced work runs under Ruffle, not even my old AS3 website from 2009. In theory I could rewrite that code to work around Ruffle's limitations, but I can't even run the Adobe tools anymore to recompile or modify assets unless I go back to an ancient laptop that never got the death-update.
Hopefully Ruffle keeps gaining traction and eventually is able to run all AS3 stuff.
There were some really interesting things that worked well in Flash, that HTML5 has never really seemed to equal.
Right now, the "gotcha" power is entirely one-sided. A wiki-like approach towards documenting TOS might make the user better aware of what to really watch out for when using a particular software.
It's been going for several years and has very thorough analyses of various ToS, done by volunteers who are often legal professionals.
If anyone is interested in supporting them, here's the link (so many clicks later!) https://opencollective.com/tosdr/donate
They seem to have attempted the "boiling the frog" strategy.
So you could just look at a game and it'd have bubbles like "phone homes > sends your data > IP, operating system, language," "not responsible for online interactions," etc whatever other legal nonsense they stuff in those things. There's tens of millions of them so I assume they can be compressed into some couple thousand of rote legal "chunks" that can be filtered and sorted on.
I tried making this once for employment contracts, which would string-replace difficult phrases with a version that uncle Jack on his horse would understand. This was back when a computer's understanding capabilities barely amounted to decompose a sentence into what the subject is you're talking about in the first place. However, the simple string replacements worked so well that I figured we should just crowdsource a dozen contracts and that should be able to kill 90% of the difficult language in any employment contract.
Example replacements: "to come to a transfer of the concerning intellectual property rights" with "to transfer copyright", or "Employee shall henceforth" with "you will" (I have trouble identifying "employee" versus "employer" in texts, so replacing it with 'you' and 'we' is a lot easier for me to read). It also just killed lesser-known words, like replacing "forthwith" with "immediately".
Example paragraph: If and insofar as Employee as part of the execution of their work activities on behalf of Employer whether or not together with others produces a work or other type of something on which intellectual property rights rest or can rest, Employee transfers these intellectual property rights already now just in case, or alternatively Employee grants an unlimited and irrevocable license and Employee lends at the first request of Employer forthwith all required cooperation to achieve a transfer of the concerning intellectual property rights. (Translated from a Dutch work contract I once received.)
Its replacement: If you make something during your work for us which can be copyrighted, you always transfer the copyright and grant a license and on request you immediately help transfer the copyright.
The project never went anywhere because I didn't pursue getting other contracts and seeing how well it works before marketing it as a useful tool for others. The main unknown is whether it would scale, or if the string replacements that work well in one contract start messing things up in others. Nowadays, though, I'd probably start by telling an LLM what kind of transformation it should make and then inputting the contract; that's probably 99% of the result in 0.1% of the time spent.
In legal settings, I would rather trust your approach than an LLM. Your approach has "backtraceability" - you can build a log of how each transform worked, from the original, to the final : it's a series of localized transforms.
LLMs (at least to my understanding) cannot have that, because it is based on a global approach. So there is a good chance that, what it spits out might be readable, but it's one-to-one correspondence with the original legal document may not exist. So it may lead you to a false sense of security.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/16hnibp/unity_sile...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20220716084623/https://github.co...
The ripples and unintended consequences of this move could really be significant for years.
they can continue using old terms of service if they do not upgrade
Unity is trying to hide this.
Same goes for youtube, discord, zoom, aws. Invest in the alternarives you idiots, don't wait until it's too late. You won't garner any sympathy when they tighten the strings.
Switching mid development is already prohibitively difficult and you’re talking about putting eggs in multiple baskets as if you could easily mix and match different engines.
As for alternatives, there aren’t that many with feature parity (or close to it), especially not one that is FOSS. You can mock people all you want with your disingenuous “unity is better” quote, but the sad reality is that for anything serious it’s going to be either Unity or Unreal.
Even Godot, which is arguably the most fleshed out FOSS option, isn’t viable in its current state and they themselves know it[0].
So spare me the ill conceived “I told you so” nonsense.
0: https://godotengine.org/article/whats-missing-in-godot-for-a...
“Thinking of using Unity today? Think again!”
“Unity hates puppies and babies”
Why hate reporting that fairly represents what they did?
> How else are the supposed to do it? By throwing a press event?
Sure. That's one way to uphold the standards of full transparency about what changes are happening and when - that Unity promised.
It's the easiest thing in the world to write another blog post announcing they're deleting the github repo.
As you noted, deleting something doesn’t make a sound. So if they don’t voluntarily make a sound, then they have silently deleted it.
So yeah, a fucking blog post telling people that they’re pulling the plug on the repo is the least they could do.
Anything short of that is doing it “silently”, especially considering that the old ToS stated that you can choose to stay on the old ToS if a newer one is detrimental to your interest and the new one removes that.