Still a sudden 4-5x price increase breaks trust… For a feature we were using for years. Old terms means nothing if we don’t have access to the same plan.
Without the logo the appearance is more professional.
2 Likes
Your target audience isn’t developers, although they might play your game and if someone refuses to play your game just because it was made with Unity, that’s more of their problem, not yours. I think those people represent a small and insignificant percentage, so it’s not something worth worrying about. There’s a recent project where someone is remaking Alone in the Dark (the original) in Unity. Everyone knows it’s being made with Unity, and no one is criticizing or hating the project because of that. In fact, the game is actually quite popular on itchio
4 Likes
It’s only their problem if the number of them doing this is small which in my opinion it is for most games. If for some reason though the number isn’t small it becomes the developer’s problem because it’s now eating into their revenue.
1 Like
yeah of course i agree, but it is never a big number. If the game is bad, gamers are going to say “it’s because was made in unity” which is not the main reason but ok, they don’t need to know, but that’s because the game IS bad
Please no… that would be the end of unity 
Wow, it’s been a whole year…
4 Likes
Well, at least the “Made with Unity” splash screen is going away too. I wonder which version that will be.
The splash screen is such a strange example of reverse thinking:
If you don’t pay a license Unity places an ad at the begining of your game.
That means Unity is exchanging the value of the license with this ad.
So Unity is paying you to have this ad in your game. That makes it a very expensive ad that is worth a license.
If you pay for the license you can hide that Unity ad. Unity is encouraging you to use the feature to stop promoting them.
Both the economic and moral values are completely inverted.
5 Likes
Yes we are a LOT of indies and solo developers that made games for console that dont make that quantity and that we were doomed because of the change in subscriptions last year…
2 Likes
I like Unity.
It needs to be said though, that your leadership should know why this install fee received backlash. It’s all the underhanded stuff, like deleting your public github repo that tracked license changes, and the absurdity of install tracking, and saying this would apply retroactively to all projects, and that you would even send the bill to Microsoft for Game Pass games - and literally everyone knew Microsoft wasn’t going to pay that.
It was all just so ridiculous - and the core issue was trust, not pricing. The thought was - why has Unity turned insane overnight? Were they taken over by gremlins? It’s not reassuring. It’s also not only the users who suffered - what about Unity employees lower down? The ones doing the good work, who had it all thrown into question on the decisions of some gremlins at the top?
Unity does need income and Epic is making a lot more money than you - I get it. I would have scrapped subscriptions, and gone with the revenue share instead. There’s nothing wrong with a revenue share - just a normal revenue share. No nonsense about install tracking e.t.c., and of course, not retroactively applied.
A revenue share ties Unity’s success to the success of products made with Unity. A subscription fee doesn’t achieve this and perhaps encourages milking the userbase. I like a lot of the work Unity has been doing and I want to see the engine continue to improve, and a simple revenue share would have been a better way to achieve this.
To make up for what happened - I would also have open-sourced the engine. This would be mutually beneficial.
I wasn’t aware of enterprise subscriptions. One of the things I hate - is when I find a company who sells something, and for the pricing, they write “contact us” or “custom”. Again, it lacks transparency. I will always look for an alternative. Is the pricing really so bad that it needs to be hidden? It’s not reassuring at all.
I’m making an open-world high-fidelity co-op VR game. I’m really enjoying a lot of the tools Unity has provided. A game like this requires a lot of custom systems because everything is intensive to run at this scale - but it’s going well. I chose Unity mainly because I was already familiar with ASP.NET, WPF, UWP - and many more .NET frameworks and adjacent technologies - and so Unity gave me a programming head-start, and I knew that programming was the limiting factor for this type of game.
Even though Epic potentially charges more, their pricing is completely transparent, and if I were starting my project today, I’d have to take a really hard look at Unreal. I experimented with Unreal before and I chose Unity, because I felt it was a better product at the time, but I still am not convinced that Unity’s path is optimal.
Finally I just want to say, thank you, to all of the Unity employees making useful and cool tech. Mike Acton’s C++con talk was really enlightening, I love the profiling tools, Burst, Job System, that’s the stuff I’m working with most at the moment. I know there are a lot of other important systems in Unity too. It is you people making these systems, who make Unity a viable and attractive engine.
6 Likes
There will be no more splash screen. From the Blog post
Unity Personal: As announced last year, Unity Personal will remain free, and we’ll be doubling the current revenue and funding ceiling from $100,000 to $200,000 USD. This means more of you can use Unity at no cost. The Made with Unity splash screen will become optional for Unity Personal games made with Unity 6 when it launches later this year.
The italics are mine.
This hits doubly hard in negative to small businesses and indies that make games for consoles and have less than $200,000 USD in revenue, since not only are we now forced to buy Unity Pro, but they are also going to raise the price by 8%, which makes it almost impossible for us to use Unity Pro. Also, what happens to those of us who have been working on a project for consoles for years and can no longer continue because we are forced to buy Unity Pro? They are simply destroying us. This is terrible news for us, remember the term intersectionality.
3 Likes
thats why i wont go back to unity. i cant even update my game anymore on console.
2 Likes
Heh, you read my mind! While I absolutely commend the decision to cancel the runtime fee, I feel like there’s a gap from free to paid license that’s missing now that was filled previously with Unity Plus.
Unity Pro is the, I have high enough annual revenue and make console games, license. What if I’m not making console games?
Maybe I’m just uninformed but I was a long time Plus subscriber who is now in the free tier. Can’t complain about free stuff but, you know… 
2 Likes
Sheesh. If you’re company is working with Unity you need a dedicated employee just to follow policy, pricing, and product changes/deprecation.
2 Likes
Yay! Can I go back to making games now? Please stop distracting me!
1 Like
But it didn’t really happen overnight.
Everyone points at greed, but I tend to think there were some good intentions mixed in there too, or they at least believed them to be good intentions to justify these large moves.
It was 2 extremes “we can make a lot of money” and also “we can employ tons of people and empower them with cool new AI tech. We can dominate these markets while being the good guys.”
If you look into the digital twin stuff and the sheer scope of their plans it’s pretty crazy and ambitiious. It’s kind of impressive they even took such a big gamble, but at the same time it sure cratered hard in the long run. This 100% stems from the money thirsty element that Venture captial brings in.
Lots of untested people with deep pockets think raw ambition can somehow outsmart technical limitations, as if potential earnings and empire can fundamentally alter the process of creating tech. At the end of the day you have to know the limits. No ammount of funding, no ambitious dream can subvert that.
My crazy guess is thats where the runtime fee sprang from. They had all those people, everyone had scratched each other’s backs at that point and everyone was locked into this. They had to try something crazy to afford this huge empire they were trying to build.
I feel crazy even typing this out, but look into this stuff. It was very real. Lots of “digital twin” stuff on youtube. And more power to them if they want to continue persueing businesses that are more prone to being able to pay for their software, just hope they persue this in a manner that enriches the engine as a whole.
The same features that make great games would be the same features that enable great business tech.
Yes, vulture capitalists are absolutely a problem. I think a bigger problem though, is how the leadership seemed to be technically inept - and I know most of them have been replaced now, but for them to be running Unity and to know nothing about technology, that’s weird - and it’s even more weird because Unity employs people who are really smart and do understand things. The discrepancy is mind-boggling and must have created a lot of internal struggles.
I’m not familiar with the Digital Twin stuff but I’ll look into it.
1 Like
At least this looks like a good move, for now, and this makes me a little bit interested in Unity now
2 Likes
Since today’s update about their plans, what would Plus give you that their latest free tier does not include?
Edit: It looks like everything that was “Plus” is now part of the new free tier. What am I missing?
hard to see when they apply censorship. that is the point, for you to not see.