I’m also wondering exactly how related this might be to the announcement…
So what this seems to be is a kind of “targeted” choice, going after large free-to-play games where the profits come from the cash shops instead of purchasing the game. Think like Genshin Impact or maybe candy crush kind of stuff. Games like that can kind of skip past the traditional model of having to share profits after making X amount of money. A lot of indies DO also make free android apps and such like this, but their payment model is often SO different than a gachapon (or skinnerbox townbuilder) that there’s no real way to recoup the amount you’d have to make to keep up, assuming you hit the install threshold. The only way to avoid these fees on the free tier is apparently to work with their in-game advertisement API?
This all is basically cementing the fact for me that Unity is no longer paying attention to or even accountable to indie teams - their sole focus is now on bigger free-to-play games. It’s worrying because if this works, it could become a standard other paid engines go for. I figure GameMaker also has a lot of free-to-play apps out there too…
Coupling this with the fact they are also getting rid of the unity plus subscription tier it seems like basically every indie team is rethinking their strategies right now. I feel pretty sad seeing posts like “good thing i switched to Godot last month” and such, because I think that’s a little blind to teams or individuals who have really tied their unity workflow into how they pay the bills. I think it’s one thing for an individual messing around as a hobby to jump around, but by the time you’re actually selling commercial projects you’ve committed magnitudes more than a hobbyist, you maybe even have custom tooling around your engine of choice. And if you work in a team, reorienting them around something new is easily 6-8 months or more of lost time.
So this is pretty bad! It’s getting a lot of harsh feedback, so I’m pretty hopeful that things will be clarified and adjusted by the time it rolls out, so I’ll try to keep this updated if I can.
It is absolutely reprehensible and unacceptable, and totally kills my enthusiasm for my project. I am years into development. I can’t release under conditions like this, but switching to another technology is likely more painful and time-consuming than I care to endure.
This is the first big project that I am anywhere close to finishing. Starting over NOW, after all the struggles I’ve had in getting this far, would be an absolute morale killer.
And even if I do just finish this game as-is, I still have to look at recreating all of that functionality, which took years to develop in the first place, if I want to make another RPG. It isn’t as easy as “new game, new engine.”
I haven’t really touched unity since maybe late 2021 (?) - and at this point all the choices they make and deals they seem to do just dont focus on anything I work with (mostly 2d pixel stuff) so it hasn’t really been enticing anyways. I don’t think I’ve seen anything enticing featurewise since the URP/HDRP pipeline switch (which I didn’t care for in the first place). Basically the only thing that could bring me back is if they enabled this again:
Makes me wonder if a way around this will be to just return to classic versions like 5.4.3 (Unity’s “gilded age” IMHO) and hope they don’t backport the installation-counting telemetry to those versions. Obviously it would probably keep you from doing web or exporting to modern consoles, so depending on intent it’s not a choice for everyone.
This is unfortunately the position Unity has which makes the whole thing so awful. For anyone working in teams too, that transition time costs money for very little productivity, and its super unlikely that any publisher would fund your studio during so. Unity has spent so many years becoming the de-facto for indies, it’s become ingrained - at a certain point a developer has no choice, so they can push whatever model they care for.
The only thing I can really think to do is not update unity hub or the editor, firewall them if possible. From what I understand, this change is coming as an update to the redistributable runtime in general, so it may be possible to avoid getting it?
The only thing I can really think to do is not update unity hub or the editor, firewall them if possible. From what I understand, this change is coming as an update to the redistributable runtime in general, so it may be possible to avoid getting it?
Possibly, but end users are also going to be spooked by this. Nobody wants Unity’s creepy unexplained telemetry spying on them.
Based on this it is sounding like they are trying hard to get these terms to apply as retroactively as possible, so it may not work out to just keep using older versions.
I still don’t know what I am going to do about this. I suppose I can’t really make a decision until the dust settles, but I haven’t ruled out just walking away from this hobby.
I’m sad to abandon Unity, first engine my dad showed me when I was young and I’ve been using it casually ever since. Seeing others pick up Godot so easily is inspiring at least.
my understanding is that over the last year unity’s board has been (mostly) focused on weeding out and firing a lot of the people involved in that concept? so its possible we are through with this but also… way too little too late here…
Yup. I said at the time that Unity literally cannot fix this, and I stand by that statement. They retroactively broke their own terms of service. If they did that once, they’ll do it again, because it shows that they consider the terms of service to be binding only for the end users, not for Unity. A breach of trust like that is literally impossible to repair, because what are they going to do? Promise in the terms of service?
if you are a game engine i think the lesson here is that you should never ever IPO
was reading this post by a former lead there that basically indicates pretty much everything thats gone wrong with the engine since its 5.X days where it really became the indie staple have started after they got VC.
i think at this point its completely transparent that they can’t get what they need to stay growing off the backs of users/developers alone. its why they started buying up in-game-ads companies; the base of ‘customers’ they needed had to expand. and i’d hazard that they are far more reliant on these elements than they are on the developers any more, so really any work that goes into the engine that benefits indies is pretty incidental.
it seems to me the engine’s recent focus, rather than continuing to make the thing easy and stable to use is to chase further after the AAA studio market that’s all-but-caputured by Epic already.
edit: to be clear i dont think unity is or really ever will be successful at this - but - they kind of don’t need to be. i think a lot of the work Unity does to push itself towards or label itself as a AAA tool is mostly for optics since investors don’t really know how to monitor how well AAA features like ray tracing, ‘meshlets’ and such are going after they are first announced. and this is exactly why modern Unity is completely ridden with fragmentation over unfinished or ancillary features/assets like HDRP, DOTS, burst compiler, so on. they kind of know as an engine those aren’t really the tools enabling developer success but if they can’t Say they are putting them out they look stagnant as a company to the shareholders.
also thinking about this article - the headline reads very ‘doth protest too much’ to me but hey lol. if anything godot was barely primed to take the place it did as all this went on with Unity. I remember getting more into Godot myself back in 2021 when I think unity was mostly doing military contract stuff, and conversations about people switching did take place but not nearly to the degree as this last year. C# fortunately was pretty mature even by that point, but if there was anything crucial about that being delayed into 4.0 i doubt we’d be where we are with it. there’s a bit of a double edged sword at play here, where the growing pangs are still pretty obvious for most folks - but a bulk of the work that’s been able to alleviate them is probably only because of the massive influx from Unity
