There are people with problems, but i don’t think that is relevant, even for the developer (also, i think that would be less than 10% of the target)
idk, i don’t think that’s the reason…
Well i’m both surprised and not surprised by this announcement.
Surprised in that Unity have burnt all the bridges with the community and business, only to walk it back now is almost unthinkable. First with the awful initial announcement, and then with the revised version that still had countless issues. To have gone that far, clearly lost community share ( just look at the popularity jump of Godot by 20% in a single year, during the recent GMTK game Jam ) and paying customers, made it feel like they could never revert the decision.
Not surprised in that every few months this year I’d check to see if Unity had implemented the self-reporting required for the runtime license and unless I some how missed it, never found anything, other than a few references to it being in ‘beta’. The fact that originally this time last year they were wanting to have the runtime fee it in place by Jan 1st for all software ever made with Unity is laughable.
It just gives more credence to my original thoughts when all this was announced and how easy the community was able to poke holes in the original outline, that this was some pie-in-the-sky thinking by the CEO’s with zero practical implementation and maybe more importantly incompetently thought out. It feels like it was never going to actually work at all on a technical level, let alone in practice.
My biggest concern in all this is that while this certainly helps turn a corner for the better for Unity, is it too late? Certainly I think it will be years of effort for them to regain the lost trust and I find it difficult to believe any reasonably large business that already made the decision to abandon Unity due to this will come back just because they’ve changed the rules yet again - that doesn’t seem like sound business decision.
Having said all that, i’m now going to actually read the blog and details - hopefully the headline that ‘its dead’ is accurate enough and there are no other gotcha’s thast we as a community have to wade through again.
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All eyes on Unite. And the sort of key talent they’re able to bring on board in the near future.
If they can show they’ve got quality devs working on really cool tech and that they have a solid plan for building on key systems. It’s really that simple.
The $$$ means almost nothing, so long as they have the income (they do) to run a key group of quality devs.
The real question is do they have the means of finding and fostering this talent, both internally and externally/ Looking at the recent Appointments in key positions I’m optimistic. But this is hardly certain, it’s one thing to manage a company that’s already doing great, it’s another to bring one back rom the brink. I don’t know if anyone’s pulled off what Unity is currently seeking to do, revamp an engine this complex with so many moving parts with so much key talent recently gone. That said, never before has there been so much amazing talent looking for great opportunities.
Whatever happens it’ll be exciting to watch, and in the meantime, Unity will remain the best option for non hyper realistic games for I’d imagine at least a couple more years.
But as always, who knows!? That’s part of what makes gamedev exciting. Happy to see more and more good news as of late.
Oh, and it’s great to see @Major_Nelson posting around here! Welcome to the madhouse.
I hope someone at Unite asks the question “How is Unity now incentivized to focus on games instead of mainly ads, microtransactions, and services?”
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Edit: looks pretty clear how they plan to monetize Unity in the blog. Subscriptions. Really happy to see the super open and transparent pricing and knowing that pricing won’t change in the future retroactively.
This means Unity is putting them in a position where only if they create fantastic new tech can they entice you to a new pricing model.
That’s HUGE!
When the services can work on Unreal Engine and Godot, Unity might make the argument these services are best used on Unity.
But I don’t think that will be enough to move the needle.
EDIT: Subscriptions aren’t game sales, and don’t really scale with game sales.
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This is good news.
now if you can tell your staff to stop censoring and abusing critical users in the community from now on, that would be a great step.
I’ve been here since well before the decision, and not one time have I seen a person get censored for their critical takes.
In fact, there were some people that continually hung around just to insult Unity and it’s decision (which is fine), but they never had anything positive to say at all, and no one silenced them.
Unless there has been a crackdown since the forum changes, this is just a wrong statement, because I saw some really harsh stuff that was merely toxic, and not remotely constructive, and it never was censored before.
Has this been happening since the forum changes? Because I bowed out since then mostly. If not, people must have been getting impressively unconstructive to have their posts removed.
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You might find this post interesting:
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You’ve been breaking rules not providing constructive criticism. To the surprise of no one if your post breaks the rules it gets taken down.
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This is good. I hope they will also make an official game to showcase Unity, and stress test the engine so they find all the weak points to improve, like Gigaya was supposed to be. A Unity-Chan action adventure or something would be cool
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Alright now allow console development on unity personal. Or bring back preferred platform key…
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No way to revert some decisions for older versions? Projects made on Unity 2017-2022 will still have the splash screen logo… Projects made on older versions will still use the light theme on editor…
I was a Plus subscriber even way below the 100,000 USD earning limit. Now if I want to continue using the old versions I must switch to the Pro, which is way more expensive. Just to remove the splash or the dark theme…
Unity 2022 unfortunately seems unstable for certain projects, the editor keeps crashing here (there are many complaints on the forum). I would like to keep the PC version of my project forever on Unity 2020 (at least for 5+ years) and some on 2018, where everything works.
Just to fix everything a nice addition would be allowing the dark theme and the removal of the logo on the splash screen for older versions too 
Everytime we upgrade we get tons of problems, like with Blender models (wrong scale), removal of features (OpenGL ES 2 will impact games in low end devices that are very popular in poor countries like Brazil) and so on…
It was so sad the decision to cancel the Plus plan out of nowere last year.
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Completely agree, the runtime fee while appalling thought out and a huge time sync from a business perspective wasn’t my biggest gripe, losing the Plus subscription is.
I don’t particularly buy Unity’s claim that there were tiny numbers enrolled to it to justify getting rid of it.
So Plus users are still screwed over with no sign of a compromise. I wouldn’t even mind if it had the same 8% increase, but the fact that come next year I will either have to upgrade to Unity 6 to get rid of splash screen in free sub, or pay 5 times the yearly cost to get Pro is a real kick int the teeth and a problem I’ve just been kicking down the road until my sub runs out.
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i understand the issue with the light theme, but the splash screen is not a problem, you should not worry about that, i do get the impression that is not a profesional studio or something like that when the splash appears, but if i’m watching that splash screen is because i already have the game installed, which means my interest on the game is not about the splash screen 
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Woah that sounds great and insightful, thanks for sharing!
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More than a year and tons of the Unity community hate to take this decision?
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The problem with the splash screen is that it’s still considered a bad sign for a game. It doesn’t matter how you might try and rationalise it, there are simply way too many people online who for legitimate or illegitimate reasons have a hate boner for Unity. These people when they see the logo will give your product a bad review just for using Unity.
You only have to go and read the comments in the GameFromScratch YouTube video about the runtime fee is dead announcement to see how much some people can hate the engine.
Yes these are often merit less, baseless claims from these people, but they still get high visibility and influence others. So in an ideal world Unity would either remove splash screen/dark theme requirements from older versions or offer a new payment method to obtain the same thing, be it a sub or one-time fee.
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Splash screens appear on demos as well.
People will rate a game low for using unreal and having massive stuttering problems 
Maybe if everyone was informed better the hate wouldn’t be so bad. But imo much of the hate is things other than the RTF.
But now what created the need for the RTF hasn’t really changed, so what created those gripes with the engine hasn’t really changed either.
Maybe we’ll go back to when you had to pay to get shadows and render textures. Apparently, that was just fine.
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