Unity is cancelling the runtime fee for games customers

Are those overall numbers? Looking at the "this week's projects", it's 230 for godot vs 147 for unity. Which is probably more interesting detail than overall numbers.

Profits do not "have to" take top priority for any company, this is a widely believed myth. Any company may choose to prioritise its mission over absolute profit as long as they are clear with their investors that that's what they're doing.

They also have kept the unity logo splash screen being optional which is nice.

IronSource & WETA acquisitions may have been expensive mistakes

The Runtime Fee was a new fee attached to Unity 6 that applied only to games (and only to games meeting certain number of downloads and revenue floors), so cancelling it for games customers is cancelling it entirely.

See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy

Honestly the best thing that ever happened to the Godot community was the Unity diaspora trying it out and complaining. A lot of that was written off as simply insisting that Godot act and feel like Unity, but given that Unity is the more mature and widely used platform, it sets the standard implicitly whether people like it or not. Also a lot of technical complaints, particularly around Godot's relatively lackluster 3D capabilities, were ironed out that may not have even been addressed if left to community momentum alone.

I like Godot but its open source nature means it does have some rough edges, mostly around GDScript but framework features like tilemap implementation, model imports and physics have always been a bit wonky.

The timing coincides with the release of Godot 3.6, so there’s that.

https://godotengine.org/article/godot-3-6-finally-released/

There's no such thing as “altruism”. The reasons don't matter. A good reputation, on the other hand, does matter, and I'm afraid that they've squandered it. It's difficult to regain people's trust.

As someone who has worked in the game industry for years both in AAA and indie, I’d say the switching costs are quite high and proportional to the team and code size. The reason it can be so challenging is a late change can easily double your preproduction time as you have to port over existing systems/tools/workflows and the bigger teams have many more of these systems. Usually this means bigger studios only changes engines at the start of new franchises or when fully rebooting old ones (For example, the new Mass Effect is porting from Frostbite to Unreal 5, but it’s only viable because it’s a super high budget reboot with new creative direction and the time to do it)

It easier to switch if you’re indie, of course, but the reality is if your game is great it’s better to launch with the engine you have. And if your game is struggling gameplay-wise porting it to another engine isn’t going to help make the game better and puts the release at risk.

Porting a game to another engine is going to be a monumental task.

If you were really paranoid you could use a framework like ceramic where unity is just one of the many output targets.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend it though.

https://ceramic-engine.com/

People were kind of sleeping on the fact that Unity could at any times alter the deal to their own benefit. It wasn't until Unity did what they did, that people realized that maybe it's not a mutually beneficial relationship when one of the parts can change the terms whenever they want.

So naturally, people start exploring other options that don't suffer from the same problem. Unity, realizing this, backpedals. Which yeah, makes sense, but people who got burned by the change already got burned, and they want to avoid it in the future.

I understand both sides, Unity needs to make money, otherwise it won't be around. And game developers need to feel like they're making a choice they can still justify and feel safe about in the future.

Yup. It’s the correct move. Late, but correct.

Yet, trust once lost is hard to regain. In the grand scheme of things it’s probably too late.

I work at a fairly large mobile gaming company. We are stuck on the old version of Unity that doesn't have this fee. But to Unity's credit they are still supporting that version and doing bugfixes for us, but it sucks to be walled off like that, trying to eke out our existence as long as possible until we have to pay a lot more money.

Developers spend hundreds of hours of their lives to learn these platforms. When that fee came out, many had to pivot, letting all that experience go to waste, and starting over in other platforms. It's hugely disruptive to their time, their careers, and income.

Many have moved on. Dropping the fee doesn't mean they will come back. Even if it made financial / career sense, they were burned, still with a bad taste in their mouth from the experience. They cannot trust that Unity won't screw them over some other way in the future, better to keep going with their newfound direction if it's starting to pay off.

When your users / developers lose trust in you, it's the beginning of the end.

you can't build a fledgling indie game dev business on broken trust. it's that simple really.

Once the magic smoke is let out, you can't put it back in.

They are constantly changing and abandoning things every six months.

How many times have they abandoned a networking library or built a new UI system that you have to relearn. Then right when you get the hang of it they release the next thing that maybe is better but also has big problems.

There are now so many half baked systems it just feels like a mess.

It isn't the first questionable move, and it really shook a lot of people. Flipping back again a year later is the right move, but it doesn't instill confidence. It merely ceases the erosion of it.

Firing the CEO did help, though.

It doesn't work like that. This is a business, not a family member or old buddy. Their move last year underscored the immense risk that business have when dealing with them. Your game is a single CEO change away from bankruptcy when you give them so much power.

> I don't understand the hate. They did a very bad decision and had major backlash. Fast-forward one year: they rectified it completely, they greatly improved the free terms compared to what was before, they replaced the CEO and other involved executives.

But nothing prevent them from doing the same again if their indicators say it would be profitable. Developers just don't want to take the risk anymore.

> I don't understand the hate. They did a very bad decision and had major backlash.

One element of why the recoil was so strong was that this wasn’t consumers reacting angrily when the price of their favorite widget went up. This was Unity threatening to bankrupt entire companies and destroy livelihoods.

Once that trust is broken, specific to the tech stack underpinning your whole business, it is very hard to get it back.