Thanks for the info, is there anyone else key to these decisions that is or may still be remaining beyond who you’ve mentioned?
I have read 1\2 way tho this text stream, but I have to leave \ log out very soon.
I saw one say people had been making millions, with very little benefit to Unity ?
I saw some talking about Revenue Sharing ?? This makes sense. If you make a lot,
so does Unity … that is good ?
I do not know if it is possible ? Since I am hobby only, I will probably never make a game…
But also, even tho I so buy assets, hobby people have zero incentive to pay a sub of any kind. BUT
I bought Unity 5 pro for like 1200$ I think … I was expecting ( Then ) to get Unity 6 permanent
licence, for like 6 - 700 hundred. Some places you can like " rent to own "
Would it not be possible to have both ? Pay for a Permanent licence … AND if you make a game … you have to share revenue of what you make. But yes only while you are making $$ ?
anyway I would be in favour of Revenue Sharing … it seems most honest.
P.S I agree , it was NOT the Fee that did it… it was the changing the agreed upon rules… imho …
Leadership when runtime fee was announced:
Leadership now:
Board of Directors when Unity runtime fee was announced:
Board of directors now:
Public info: Wondering what Unity is? Find out who we are, where we've been and where we're going | [site:name]
Notably, nearly everyone in leadership roles have been swapped out and the board is now lead by Whitehurst.
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Very interesting. I didn’t realize that Whiteburst had stayed on after he passed over the reigns of CEO. I also didn’t realize that so many former executives were just gone.
Yea, it’s more than just people trying to make up for their mistakes. They can’t. They’re not there anymore. I’m looking forward to Unite under the new leadership.
waaaay back when unity 5 there was a thing that was a more perminant license tag, but then the 20xx range happened and it was all sub only, so, I paid for plus for a couple of years because I believed… like you, Im a hobbiest, i have a few games, but they are 100% free, no ads, no nothing (and likely no good either but thats not the point) but theres no way Im paying 2k+ for pro.
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To be honest, most of the people who were mad at the time (me included) were only mad because of missinformation and poor communication (which is still valid, lol). But those things are changing. Yeah, I don’t really trust corporate talk either, but you have to understand that this is a huge company that went open and HAS to make profit. Monetisation is going to be the focal point of Unity’s development. Unity is still the best tooling out there. From the new announcements, it seems that it’s going to be even better.
Also, don’t really see how switching to Unreal makes you safe from sudden business changes? Both companies are open and are operating for profit first, meaning any of them can pull a stunt like this. Unity has already changed most of the C’s, and it’s the best thing that they could do in current situation. Funny enough, now that they’ve got that backlash, I don’t think they’re going to even try doing something like this in the future.
I love Unity. It is what I’ve spent 4 years of my life on, and it is something that earns me living. I really hope that they will change their direction for the better. Announcements like that only make me more sure that they’re on a right path.
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Are we talking before or after they changed the install fees to no longer charge more than the games actually made?
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After the adjustments. I think the forced analytics was an insane thing to do, and I think that was the lowest point of Unity.
Doesn’t necessarily mean that the people who left were the ones who instigated the mess, or that the replacements are different.
This year I’ve become much more aware of how Unity had been going along a particular trajectory for a long time, much longer than most realized, from which it can’t really reverse at this point. Naturally, people gravitate toward companies that are going where they want to go, and away from companies that are going places they don’t want to - even more so when events make the path of the company unavoidably clear. So the question is, what sort of people are going to gravitate toward Unity at this point?
I think the best we had hope for is a one-hundred-point turn back toward some semblance of product focus and organizational efficiency, but that would take a huge amount of patience and focus from people with a clear understanding of what went wrong (including a lot of other things that went wrong besides the runtime fee) and a clear idea of how to fix everything while enabling Unity to also succeed as a public company and keep the shareholders happy. I haven’t seen clear proof of that yet.
I’m happy to see the runtime fee canned, if only to prove that Unity have fully realized how bad of a move it was. But I wonder if it’s too little too late - they should have realized within a week that this move would need to be made at some point, and making it immediately would have restored some of the trust in initiative and decision making. But it took a full year for it to go through, even after the first ‘resignations’, which suggests that other key execs for a long time really, really didn’t want to back off. So who really is running Unity now, and to where are they taking it? That’s the question in my mind. I’d like to see a lot more decisive and direct action when it comes to setting course.
PS like others mentioned it’s pretty wild how low engagement this thread is getting, I remember what the runtime fee thread was like when it happened. Seems like the old community is a skeleton crew at this point.
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To be fair this will take a long time if as you say it isn’t too little too late. I wouldn’t expect to see any kind of proof for a few years.
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I’m 99% sure that they were indeed the people who made the mess and tanked the stock, which is why the house was cleaned since their style of management didn’t work past going public.
What is that trajectory and why it isn’t reversible? Why would the new leadership continue on the trajectory that got previous leadership fired?
Professionals rarely make feelings based decisions. It happens if the circumstances allow, but the rest of us have to deal with technical realities like alternatives not having the same stability and/or platform reach.
Professionals doing their jobs on a platform that still dominates the game engine market as well as several gaming niches like mobile and XR.
They fired the last leadership guy just this August. Unity can’t undo years of degradation in a matter of months. If it’ s happening, it’ll take years.
I doubt rubberbanding all over the place on decisions like this would have restored trust even if they backtracked. The trust was broken as soon as they tried to retroactively apply it to all Unity games in existence and when they threw their TOS out the window, followed by failing to clarify anything like how they’d track installs without spyware.
Turns out pulling off a coup takes a lot of time and effort.
Public information: Wondering what Unity is? Find out who we are, where we've been and where we're going | [site:name]
Unite literally starts tomorrow. No one can answer that just yet.
Indeed, discussion in general seems way more sparse in older active threads as well. Many have definitely left the forums.
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Yeah it’s hard to tell what would approach would work at this point, now that Unity is so beholden to the shareholders and has gained so much momentum along its current path.
In my opinion the right move technically would involve cutting out lots of bloat and focusing on the product again. But that’s exactly what would send the shareholders running. They only get excited when more things are added.
What can Unity become right now to make enough revenue relative to its costs and save itself? If the product is insufficient and the acquisitions were all bad, what’s left? Whatever the answer is, it’s going to be painful for a lot of people.
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The direction Unity has been going for almost a decade can be summed up in “keeping shareholders happy”, mainly involving:
- Bloating the once elegant engine with horrendously tacked-on stuff like the render pipelines fiasco
- Acquiring useless companies and then quietly selling them while bleeding money
- Starting lots of things and then binning them as soon as excitement stopped rising
- Trying to jump onto anything that seems to be going somewhere fast
Any one of these is enough to cause a lot of damage to a company, its culture, and its bottom line. And in my view, the runtime fee was just a crude way to try and avoid the inevitable debt from following the above practices.
Anyway, I’m only pessimistic to try and offset my innate optimism, so I remain ever hopeful, but my rational side is not seeing any great options right now.
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- Yea, that was a travesty that keeps on giving. At least they’re trying to unify, I hope they still are trying to achieve that. I haven’t followed. Right now URP is decently usable and I hope they have learned from past mistakes. Games get shipped with SRPs every day now.
- The age of 0 interest rates and IPO investment is over, this won’t happen again. Riccitiello is also gone and can’t continue his acquisition addiction he’s pulled off in every company he’s been part of.
- Any examples?
- Trend chasing is one thing I hope they’ll stop under new leadership, it has never worked out for them. AI won’t either, it’s not profitable for anyone but founders looking to cash out big while the trend is hot. I do suspect trend chasing for optics will continue to happen because Unity has to appear to be with the times in the eyes of investors. But in that sense they’re no different from any other public company. Stock value is perception based, unfortunately.
In my opinion, it had more to do with global economic situation rapidly deteriorating due to pandemic and war, which they couldn’t predict. And also because their main business - ads is coming under threat of both legislation and platform holders limiting their reach.
I think Unite will give a decent idea on where this is going now.
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don’t forget:
5. Follow buzzwords
small side question, what does this mean?
16.2:
(q) Monetize any runtime version of Software, including Unity Materials, without a separate grant of rights from Unity or otherwise provided for in the applicable Additional Terms;
Since unity support is pointing into this clause, that Industry customers might get runtime fees, even if you are using older unity versions…
** There is no separate Industry area/topic here(?), posting in this thread…
it means you can’t go outside the license terms when monetizing unity.
down to earth example, you create a site that gives access to the unity editor for a fee. let’s say you inject a new set of unity interface icons and then you ask for monthly payments from someone that uses the unity editor with those icons.
very unlikely that someone will pay you for this scenario but the idea is the license doesn’t allow for this and you can’t say it was not specified in the license terms.
its a broad rule that say that if not specified in the license of use or you don’t have specific clear contractual permission from unity, you can’t do anything else with unity software.
all commercial software have this type of restriction.
and yes, they own the software and they can change the rules any time they like, how they did now and how they did a year ago.
and if is not clear I’m actually saying that you should never trust unity or other companies like this. they keep deleting my posts here while they claim “they have changed”
do not trust them. you are free to chose to use this engine but always have a backup plan if things gone sideways at any moment.