A message to our community: Unity is canceling the Runtime Fee

News & General Discussion
254

Dude, give it a week, everyone is busy with Unite. It’s understandable to be upset about things after everything that went down, but this is kinda what life is like. Win some lose some. Some people will fail you and show their true colors, but often times we can misunderstand each other and then we go in downward spirals. Companies are just full of people who are likewise fallible and sometimes misunderstand things. Once you understand this the tight lipped 0 tolerance nature of companies makes more sense. Everyone thinks they’re the good guys when they’re pointing figners and if everyone is pointing fingers the forums turns into a warzone where no one wants to engage… or turns into twitter :stuck_out_tongue:

Sometimes it’s best to take a deep breath and let things cool down.

I share a bit of this frustration though, lots of posts I put a lot of thought into just disappearing, but to be fair, we are causing a scene on their forums, these guys are fighting for survival and they don’t need this drama right now. People of all walks of life want to use this engine with all kinds of perspectives and agendas, and it’s best if in this corner of the internet we keep things civil. You don’t see anyone else going off and a great deal of criticism has been tolerated on their end, that’s commendable.

Here’s one way to look at it. Unity has changed a ton, and if you poke around these forums you’re going to find employees that give a darn and they’re working like heck to give us a quality product, they’ve also allowed quite a lot of crazy ramblings over these years. Way more than any other business i’ve seen so I find this frustration to be a BIT misplaced.

Things are moving in a positive direction, take solace in that.

255

The community flags your posts when they have nothing to do with the topic, and a moderator approved them.
The moderation tools don’t currently provide an easy path to issue formal warnings and notices, so all that has to be done manually. As you seem to find it necessary even with many people telling you to move on, I’ll do it for them: your flagged posts are off-topic, they have nothing to do with the runtime fee.

The community team are working on improving the moderation tooling, and will hopefully get to a backlog of necessary actions after Unite, but in the meantime you’ll just have to put two and two together sometimes.

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257

I’ll give one last post, I don’t want to derial this thread and I’ve shot my mouth off enough.

Again dude, the world is a very muddy and complex place. I hope you understand the entity of Unity is THOUSANDS of people.

There is no absolute truth to find. The people who made this runtime fee are largely gone. You are not holding those peoples’ feet to the fire here.

Current leadership is pivoting from this, and even if they wanted to tell you what happened that would be unproffesional.

This is a business, decisions are made and they must be safegaurded for a MULTITUDE of reasons, and not of all of them are nefarious. Again, we’re all people and if you just allow everyone to say whatever, especially internally, all heck will break loose.

You are badgering people who had nothing to do with this situation. These forum mods don’t work at Unity, those at Unity likely don’t even read these forums, again they’re super busy with other stuff right now anyway.

Those you are trying to get accountability from are likely gone, and if we started making high level executives accountable to every random gripe from each and every forum user on the internet, the world would implode.

Are big evil corporations trying to make money? Yes, that’s not a huge revelation. If we want to see if things are getting better only time will tell. We’re all trying to walk a line as best we can in our own ways, you have your perspectives and motivatoins and in certain lights they are commendable, you want to hold these places accountable. The same can be said for mods trying to keep the peace and for big CEO’s and community managers trying to keep their forums usable and their employees employed.

This is how the world is, how it’s always been, how it will always be, because there are no perfect solutions when we are all prone to our own biases. You gotta just play the game and try to roll with the punches. You’re not going to get the message from the people you want, because this system is not so simple, but that doesn’t mean its totally corrupt either.

258

No need to question it, staff have already acknowledged the original posts were off topic. If you want to continue the line of questioning I recommend you do it in that thread where it is actually on topic, instead of badgering random staff in this thread.

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259

On the topic though this remind me, do we still have runtime fee for industry license?

Is it still the case that runtime fee still apply if our product is not a game? Such as presentation or digital twin application

261

Still? It never did. Industry plans and non-game products were never affected by the fee and remain unaffected by these changes.

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262

Thank you for you clarification

263

Yes, not yet… but its coming early next year apparently.

And from the little info i received from unity,
it doesn’t matter what unity version you use,
so you are not safe in old editor version, due to that clause (which i’d like to know more about).

264

I’m not aware of this, but I’m not an industry customer.

Unity Pricing Changes & Runtime Fee Cancellation | Unity says

Will there be any changes to the Unity Industry subscription plan?

No, there are no changes being implemented that impact customers on the Unity Industry subscription plan at this time

Though there’ll be increases in the future of course, I don’t think any are public afaik.

265

After a few day’s of thinking, this Will be my last post till 2025 and than maybe not even.

Here is what money I would LIKE to give Unity Share holders …

I would like the opportunity to give 700.00 to 1100.00 for Permanent \ Perpetual license Licence for Unity 6 or and 7 … I would like to be able to have an option of rent to own …( like 3d coat ) and others. Being able to rent for like 20 - 50 $ a month till it is paid in full, then obtain a Perpetual license ( for that version )

I would gladly give $$ to UNITY and the share holders … this in my mind would help with shareholder(s)

( I do not hold any shares in any stocks … personal decision )

Beside the opportunity to give Unity Share holders real money for a Perpetual license … IF* I ever made a game, I would have ZERO problem with profit sharing what ever game sales take place.

SO, I would be giving Share holders around 1 K ? for a Perpetual license …with Every New Version!

To my thinking this would help a lot and seems to me easy to do ???

This is my last log in to any forums, barring one up and coming asset :smiley:

This is meant in good faith, any one wants to tear it down… not on me any more…

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266

I understand why some people would love to see a return to the inexpensive perpetual licenses that were available a decade ago but the simple truth is it’s impossible. Unity was “reasonably profitable” (a statement from Aras) back in the early days but a large part of that is because they had only about 200 employees (2013).

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Unity_Technologies&oldid=542350211 (Wikipedia entry from early 2013 showing approximately 200 employees)

Unity currently sits at 6,600 employees and inflation has increased prices by 45%. To achieve a $750 USD upgrade to the perpetual license Unity would have to at the very least lay off 98% of their employees. Would you be happy losing many of the current and future features of the engine? Would you be happy with no CoreCLR? With few if any updates to the SRPs including unified support? Because if the answer is “no” then you can’t pay $750 USD once every couple of years.

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267

Last words from me. Maybe I do not understand … fine no problem…

I am not getting into a back and forth…

Right now I pay nothing … seems very backwards.

I happen to believe, nothing is impossible with enough thought.

Unity share holders get zero from me now… I know that.

Apart from that … I am out as I said.

268

Unity being free to start is the hook to reel in new developers. Unity chose that tactic back in the very early days and it was wildly successful. Other companies have taken similar approaches. Apple back in the day gave massive discounts to schools for their Apple II’s. Because kids were using them in school when their parents starting talking about getting a computer the kids chimed in with “I want an Apple”. Apple sold millions of units of that model alone solely because of that hook.

Thanks to that Apple weathered the 8-bit era and once the kids were grown up they were still around and since they remembered how much they loved their Apple II’s why they just went ahead and bought a new model. When the first model of iPhone became available they bought that too even though at the time the idea at the time was crazy and no one seemed to think it would be successful.

That’s not surprising. It’s a marketing and business strategy, and that’s boring for most game developers.

269

so can anyone tell me, is it now safe to update to unity 6, without implicitly accepting the new TOS that says “future fees might be introduce at our leisure from now on”?

is there any legal protection granted from staying in 2021 LTS?

270

What about Unity Industry license?
is an unnecessarily expensive license that does not bring substantial technical advantages over Unity PRO for developers, but costs more than twice as much! (more precisely 2.4 times the price of PRO!).

This puts a serious strain on small studios that want to use Unity instead of Unreal to make non-game applications.
@Major_Nelson Is there any update idea for Unity Industry subscription?

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271

I also would really appreciate some input on this from the Unity staff.

I really don’t understand how this makes any sense even from the perspective of Unity, as @Ryiah already said the business model for games works great by being free until you actually have enough income to pay for Pro. That’s fair and makes financial sense for both parties.

So why are you immediately treated the exact same as the largest companies on the planet just for not making a game? I would love to use Unity for my startup, but under the current conditions I would be paying significantly more for Unity each month than I am for rent.

I don’t get how that makes any sense, it’s impossible to get started under those conditions. I agree that large companies that actually do have the financial means should be paying the full 4.5K, some of them even way more than that. But there needs to be a distinction between Apple, Microsoft, and me.

If there really are no plans for an industry plan that is actually based on how much income or funding you have, you are forcing everyone who is not purely a game developer or a an already established, large industry company out of your ecosystem for what seems to me like no good reason.

This is what everybody loses looks like.

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272

That would not make sense because Unity users despite that debacle are eclipsing Unreal. They are way ahead still.

The only thing they tried to do with regard to Unreal was to offer certain features that people comparing the two engines claimed were better in Unreal. But overall Unreal is still trying hard to become Unity. Same as other engines do in order to steal customers from Unity.

Unreal with version 5 really tried more to feel like Unity than Unity ever tried to feel like Unreal.

Unity overall is simply a better offer.
An entire and complete production and business ecosystem, not just an engine. DevOps, gameplay systems, multiplayer systems, ads, product management tools, etc etc. Everything a professional game that is meant to become a serious business needs.

Switch because you like graphics better in Unreal. Sure, if that is what is most important for your project you should. But that sounds like a solo dev or amateur approach.

A small team or a larger business, has a lot more to gain by choosing Unity than switching to Unreal.

273

Yes, that would not make sense. Exactly why it was worrisome that unity really trying to did that. With unity 6 and their graphic demo. As I have been said it obvious where their fund and resource was focused. It really was to compete with unreal

It’s true that unreal also try to be unity too, but unity also try to step up to be unreal instead is the problem unity have been doing in recent years

274

While I agree that they wanted to target similar markets I don’t believe for a moment that they were trying to compete with Epic. I think entirely too many people see improving visuals as competing with Epic but improving visuals is simply a requirement of every game engine that wants to retain their customers including the open source ones like Godot.

A direct competition with Epic would have led to Unity having similar features and technology to UE but if you actually use Unreal Engine you quickly realize that their features and technology don’t resemble anything we have in Unity (barring Unity China’s Nanite equivalent but they’re independent).

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