Unity goes full Unity

[Edward850]

22 minutes ago, natashanightmare said:

Another good reason to play Doom in a sourceport instead of the UNITY version 

The Unity version is by definition and demonstration a source port, just FYI.

[Murdoch]

2 hours ago, Edward850 said:

That seems highly problematic and I suspect hasn't actually been fully tested. Sure, you can change fees of a typical ongoing subscription, but changing how the license even works isn't in the same ballpark. How does that even apply to games already shipped? How can it? For that to be allowed any business could effectively change their cost mechanism entirely and hold existing projects using it to ransom.

 

I agree. Sounds like vintage lawyer double speak that's designed to sound technically accurate but could be decimated in court if taken to task by another skilled lawyer. This system is ludicrously complicated and unworkable at a fundamental level. As someone who's designed a few database systems in my time, the complexity of it makes my head spin. As you and others have pointed out, it's ripe with potential for implementation nightmares, bugs, exploits, and customer and user confusion.

I wish I could run this by someone like Devin from Legal Eagle and get his take on it.

 

2 hours ago, Edward850 said:

I get the distinct impression they may have actually changed too much in this case for it to be applicable,  though it remains to be seen if anyone challenges it or if studios would rather just drop the whole thing like a hot potato. They are up against some very large studios on this one after all, I don't see this ending in Unity's favor.

 

This is literally no earthly way this ends well for Unity. It is one of the most idiotic, ill-considered corporate gaming moves I have ever seen, if not the most. It would only come from a company whose moron of a CEO once tried to argue that paying to reload your weapon in a game isn't gouging. Like, learn to read the fucking room, you absolute plank. They clearly have no concept of the value of good will, and this will absolute crater what little of it they have left. Even if they backpedal, the damage is done. No one with any sense would start a new Unity development now, as they have shown a willingness to consider such ill-considered, difficult to manage schemes and the best indicator of future behaviour is past behaviour. They are too entrenched to go away completely, but this can only hurt their sales and stock price.

Edited September 13, 2023 by Murdoch

[Daytime Waitress]

9 hours ago, june gloom said:

I'm pretty sure what John Riccitiello has been doing with the stocks qualifies as illegal insider trading. He has to know that this move will drive his stock down as companies flee the Unity engine like rats on a sinking ship.

Remember, kids: it's probably not illegal unless the Securities and Exchange Commission gives enough of a hoot to investigate your shenanigans!

[Gez]

This is what happens to people who weren't told the tale of the goose that laid golden eggs when they were children. They end up thinking that greed is good, especially short-term greed. Consequences? What are those?

 

Honestly people should have dropped all Unity-based projects the moment this guy became CEO. His track record was sufficient to tell that there was no way things were going to stay sane and mutually beneficial with him in charge.

[Wo0p]

CEOs are just addicts. That's why they seem to have no sense or care about any consequences. All that matters is the next fix. The next paycheck. They need therapy and no company comes to mind that has a mandatory annual mental health check put in place where the CEO has to "graduate" to continue being the CEO. It would take a self-insightful CEO to realise that's what he/she needs and get that put into practice. Good luck finding one ;(

[whybmonotacrab]

10 hours ago, june gloom said:

I'm pretty sure what John Riccitiello has been doing with the stocks qualifies as illegal insider trading. He has to know that this move will drive his stock down as companies flee the Unity engine like rats on a sinking ship.

Definitely not just him:

 

 

At the end of the day though, Unity is fucking with the profits of Nintendo, Genshin Impact, Microsoft, and Blizzard so if this goes through they are about to be sued off the fucking planet.

 

[natashanightmare]

2 hours ago, Edward850 said:

The Unity version is by definition and demonstration a source port, just FYI.

I know that, but i think you get what i mean :) . besides it is also really buggy

[Edward850]

11 minutes ago, natashanightmare said:

besides it is also really buggy

This thread here is where you go for any issues you may have with the port:

 

Edited September 13, 2023 by Edward850

[Karnasis]

There is no fucking way this was a decision made by a human, I am now inclined to believing that Lizard Men run the world in secret and decided to do this to make us suffer, then believe that an actual human being, did this believing it was a good idea.

[RileyXY1]

33 minutes ago, Karnasis said:

There is no fucking way this was a decision made by a human, I am now inclined to believing that Lizard Men run the world in secret and decided to do this to make us suffer, then believe that an actual human being, did this believing it was a good idea.

It is, and it's made by a former EA executive who wanted to make people pay real money to reload their weapons in Battlefield.

[mrthejoshmon]

As a personal challenge, I've been trying to fathom positives.

 

Wasted endeavour really, only thing is a reduction of Unity asset flips on Steam, but:

 

• At what cost? The affected projects worth a damn sure as hell outweigh the bad ones (like the literally definitive Unity Doom port).
• Unreal engine asset flips will probably double.
• The horrors of Game Guru may increase, God help.
• If we're really unlucky those hacks will notice Cryengine and that will be a disaster.

Can't even attempt to hypothetically play devil's advocate.

Edited September 13, 2023 by mrthejoshmon

[scalliano]

So I sat and worked it out:

 

I bought BNG with the beta grandfather discount back in the pre v1.0 days for £4. It has since been installed on 5 machines: my old gaming and dev/music rigs, my current gaming and dev/music rigs and my old crappy laptop for the laughs. At the Unity Plus tariff, that would mean that I would have wiped out a quarter of Neognosis' revenue from my purchase. 

 

That's fucked up. 

[Novaseer]

9 hours ago, Edward850 said:

How do you even track installs between charity bundles and regular? There's literally nothing that could, you don't know the origin of the key on that side assuming there even is one.

My guess is "they don't, it's just an excuse"

[Kinsie]

A Unity employee has gone off-script on the official forums to elaborate on details and express their own personal concerns. Sounds like this thing was rushed out the door half-cooked despite the protest of the devs.

 

Quote

Current Unity employee here. I feel compelled to post something because I'm completely appalled at some of the initial choices for this new pricing model and most importantly at the poor and confusing communications around it.

I and many, many of my colleagues have had a very bad last 12+ hours. We work hard to give you the tools to create amazing games all the way from indie to large studios. We love celebrating your successes with the Unity engine and many of us are up in arms internally about all this.

Let's explain what the changes are about in plain English:

1. Unity needs to generate more revenue to eventually be a profitable company so we can sustain developing Unity for many years to come. Employees need to be paid or there's no engine, as simple as that.
2. Many very profitable game studios pay very little to Unity compared to their other costs of business, despite the Unity engine being an essential part of their game/product. The price changes are aimed at this ~10% of customers as a way to scale their costs with success via revenue+installs.
3. Yes, there's also a will to bring more users on Unity pro when they use Unity to build a product for a business with meaningful revenue. Sadly, good news of the extended availability of Unity free to larger funding thresholds and some extra features were buried in everything else.

To focus on a few key points that have somewhat changed since the initial announcements... Sadly the OP and FAQs haven't been fully updated yet with some of these changes.

1. Installs
   1. Installs are meant to be per unique user.
   2. CI, tests, and other automations will not be charged
   3. We don't want to charge for fraudulent installs (install bombs, piracy, etc.)
   4. There will not be an embedded "phone home" mechanism
   5. Unity hasn't actually completely figured out how to count installs yet. Whatever the solution is, it will be conservative. It will potentially/probably undercount installs, but definitely not overcount.
2. We will not charge for charities
3. For subscription services, Unity will talk with the subscription service's distributor, not the game creator
4. There will be an online calculator very soon (TM) to model your potential costs
5. Yes, in this current form, it's possible for successful games with very high install counts and low enough per-install revenue to lose money when more people install their game.
   1. When this is raised internally, the answer is "we would fix this with the customer to not bankrupt them". It would be great to prevent this upstream in the actual policy.

Know also that all of the concerns that are understandably blowing up at the moment have been raised internally by many weeks before this announcement. Why it was decided to rush this out anyway in this way I can only speculate about.

Personal hopes for further corrections to this pricing model:

1. Address point 5 above so we don't punish success
2. Reverse course to charge per-install fees to already published games (that still generate sizable revenue)
   1. And change the terms to guarantee that a similar retroactive price change can never happen again!
3. Get our act together in terms of comms and marketing to avoid generating so much needless panic and anxiety both from you all and internally.

Take care of each other, and take a break from all this for your mental health if you need it.
And don't stop respectfully yelling at crazy ideas so they can be corrected.

 

[OniriA]

So Unity has turned into a scam basically. 

 

Another result of predatory capitalist apes manning the helm.

 

 

[SpaceCat_2001]

This reminds me... 4 years ago there was an edgy generic battleroyale game that forced you to buy entries into game matches with real money, like 3-4 dollars for one "ticket", you could go into matches for free only if you were winning them nonstop from the start or something like this. Cant remeber this junks name. And as you can guess it, it got infamous and then flopped pretty fast. Same will happen here

Edited September 13, 2023 by SpaceCat_2001

[scalliano]

5 minutes ago, SpaceCat_2001 said:

This reminds me... 4 years ago there was an edgy generic battleroyale game that forced you to buy entries into game matches with real money, like 3-4 dollars for one "ticket", you could go into matches for free only if you were winning them nonstop from the start or something like this. Cant remeber this junks name 

The Culling 2, IIRC.

[Midway64]

That game flopped on it's first day IIRC.

After that the servers were pretty much dead, no players online.

Edited September 13, 2023 by Midway64

[Lucius Wooding]

5 hours ago, Kinsie said:

-There will not be an embedded "phone home" mechanism

 

-Unity hasn't actually completely figured out how to count installs yet. Whatever the solution is, it will be conservative. It will potentially/probably undercount installs, but definitely not overcount.

 

The second point here pretty much guarantees the first will be invalidated. Of course Unity will want to overcount installs while the studios will want to undercount. So either the studios will embed their own "phone home" mechanism or Unity will do so in some form. Either way, it's the only way to count installs. No wonder they're having this dilemma. Counting installs is a fucking idiotic way to do things. There are already middle men in place like Steam and the console game marketplaces that tie licenses to your account and generally limit installs/devices and it's tolerated the way it is. Forcing a change like this without even getting their shit together first is always going to be seen as greedy. 

 

Also if they're not planning to charge charities, then surely the best model for indies will be to make their games free or donation based with the proceeds going to charity, and rely on merch/patreon for their revenue? It's not like Unity can do shit about it with that exception in place. This whole idea is not only extremely tone deaf, it's just poorly thought out in general. Piracy and circumvention measures will come about quickly, if only out of sheer spite alone. 

 

I don't like where the game industry is heading in general. I get that the devs have to eat, but the company has been around for 18 fucking years already. Clearly none of the big studios are willing to spend more to bankroll Unity's expansion with new features because the product works fine and they can easily afford coders to write proprietary code in house (for cheaper, and it only benefits them rather than all developers). The indie developers are relying on sheer heart and creativity and will work out ways to use free or alternative tools. But all of them who have been putting in work over the last few years are getting completely fucked without any warning and now face tons of work if they choose to migrate to a new platform.

 

It's definitely preferable to have limits on the scope of new features but still maintain everything on their existing revenue and licensing costs than to increase costs like they propose to. This claim that they'll put 100% of the profits into the product to improve it is the oldest lie in the history of capitalism. And the claim that the top 10% of games are the only ones they really want to shake down is also complete bullshit. It's completely possible to negotiate directly with the large studios they partner with but they have far more leverage over the indie/smaller devs and can hurt them more than the big studios. We really don't need yet another company trying to be the mafia just so they can have a piece of everything.

 

This also reminds me of the Wizards of the Coast dustup that happened some months back. Expect massive backlash followed by Unity walking back the entire thing publicly, followed by boycotts and a booming interest in competitors, and most likely Unity will do whatever they want in the end anyway whether they have any good name left or not. 

[aloysiusfreeman]

Welp, guess I'll stop learning Unity and explore Godot

 

 

[TheShep]

14 hours ago, Wo0p said:

CEOs are just addicts. That's why they seem to have no sense or care about any consequences. All that matters is the next fix. The next paycheck. They need therapy and no company comes to mind that has a mandatory annual mental health check put in place where the CEO has to "graduate" to continue being the CEO. It would take a self-insightful CEO to realise that's what he/she needs and get that put into practice. Good luck finding one ;(

 

They say that CEOs tend towards psychopathy.

[lazygecko]

15 hours ago, Daytime Waitress said:

Remember, kids: it's probably not illegal unless the Securities and Exchange Commission gives enough of a hoot to investigate your shenanigans!

 

I can see why Yuji Naka thought he'd get away with it given how much time he spent living in the US.

[AmethystViper]

Corporate greed is killing so many great games built on Unity...

[Lila Feuer]

For your overwhelmingly monstrous behavior, you have become vilified by the community.

[roadworx]

On 9/13/2023 at 1:01 AM, Bridgeburner56 said:

According to Unity's legal team (which I trust as far as I could spit them), it's built into the licensing agreement. Remember this is under 'murican jurisdiction as well which is notoriously pro corporation.

-snip-

yeah, no. consent is absolutely required. as much of a capitalist hellhole as america is, it's pretty basic contract law that you can't force someone to pay a fee when they don't even agree to the contract in the first place.

 

not to mention that their previous terms of service agreements explicitly state that you're able to use prior versions and agree to the terms that said version uses. contract amendments legally cannot be done without both parties mutually agreeing on the terms, no matter how much their lawyers say that it can. it'll never hold up in court.

Edited September 14, 2023 by roadworx

[Gez]

10 hours ago, Lucius Wooding said:

Counting installs is a fucking idiotic way to do things.

Yeah. The only case where it makes sense is for things like Game Pass where you can install the game without purchasing it. Outside of Game Pass and similar offers, it should be per purchase, not per install.

[Redneckerz]

This is more stupid than launching the 3DO console at 699 bucks or making more copies of 3DO Doom than there are consoles. No surprise that Riccitiello comes from the same tree stem that is Electronic Arts.

 

All this proves is that Riccitiello thinks you can monetize anything, to the point where unironically one suggested to pay to reload your weapon. It is full blown Idiocracy.

 

The downside is that a lot of projects rely on Unity, Godot isn't yet where it is at and alternatives such as Ultra Engine, Haxe and C4 have less support. So that leaves most folks with Unreal Engine (4 or 5). A lot of delays would ensue if conversion is needed.

 

The suggestion is pure insanity, so i hope some backpedaling will be in order. In either case it is a signal that Unity''s CEO is capable of playing trump cards that make no sense to anyone with a logical mind except for the pure moneygrabbing that this entails. And like i get it, you need more revenue to get the engine going. This isn't the way however.

 

[Gez]

As a sidenote, the so-called Unity port is probably in the best position possible for switching to a different engine since it's only using Unity as a shell so as to offload basically all cross-platform portability issues to middleware and not have to worry about it too much. This built on work previously made for the BFG edition where they got Doom Classic working inside Doom 3. So switching from Unity to something else, like Kex for example, would not be more difficult than switching from Doom 3 to Unity has been in the first place.

[Daytime Waitress]

What's to stop the shareholders of this publicly-traded company from ousting someone so obviously injurious to their own financial interests?

I mean, I assume it's something along the lines of, "the board of directors heard 'revenue increase' and are also going along with it", but I'm curious.

[Dimon12321]

On 9/13/2023 at 2:18 AM, RichardDS90 said:

While thinking about the Unity port, I do kind of wonder how long until Nightdive Studios put Doom on the KEX engine and completely replace the Unity port.

They're likely to stop releasing patches, rather than keeping the maintenance.