Unity, I’m getting concerned. We now have another cool new extension (MARS), and just like ArtEngine your cool hype video says nothing about a paywall, nevermind that it is $50,-! Next time I see something cool from you, will I have to Google it before deciding it is worth watching?
Of course AR is a niche market, but how many niches are there to receive paywalls to the point of inaccessibility? How long before you start charging for, I dunno, having Stable Stacking for your DOTS game? Oh wait…
What I am concerned, and fearful, about is not knowing the long-term plan. Expecting paywalls is a different thing than coming to expect paywalls. If Unity is heading in a more commercial direction, I’d rather have this explained to me than become frustrated with it and leave with a bad taste.
So what is the philosophy behind these products, why do they cost too much for individual creatives to use and what can we expect in the future to be separately payed for as well?
Seems we are heading to a place where you pay for the core, but that doesnt actually give you all the features. ANd then you pay again and again for the features you need.
Pretty disgusting thing to see really when this is the engine that was supposed to democratise development, and did exactly that for so long.
But absolutely no tier for a company not making $100,000 in revenue? “Oh but we have a 45 day trial” - Great, what about once you finish that? You still have to absorb a cost that you cant, stopping you from making a project that COULD net enough to push you over the $100k tier and help you to suceed. This is a stupid oversight as many VR/AR companies and clients I have worked with simply DO NOT have that revenue yet, as they often are doing a startup venture etc and will be having a max of $75,000 seed funding to start with.
Anyway, its up to unity how much of the userbase they want to push towards competitors. Certainly siphoning off all the actual interesting features they have made into their own paid packages is a good way to do it, given that the competition for 2 years has done the opposite and made every major “hey look at how cool this feature is” type feature a free part of their engine and focused their marketing around that.
More and more unreals motto seems to be : “We suceed when you suceed, and we want you to suceed”
While unitys seems to be more and more: “We dont give a **** about whether you are successful, but we want as much cash as we can get out of you regardless. Oh you didnt end up being successful? Glad we got your monies while we could! Also, look at this new feature, its amazing and pretty vital and definately a USP. Oh did I not mention its another full subscription? Well it is, now give me your damn cashmoney! I promise if you buy all this extra crap we will eventually make the engine usable and not a bug fest again!”
Obviously there is a degree of sarcasm and over-exageration above as I am british, but you get the idea.
TLDR: This sucks and makes me unhappy. Also some due whining.
Chinese users with personal editon have to activate licence every day, and it’s obviously Unity wants to sell more pro or profeesional copies to these users.
And Unity deleted my thread about this complaint twice by the reason spam.
They overstretch themselves and have to pay that cost, seems like they made a fews bad bet and are scrambling to recoup, but at the same time the concurrence had become fiercer, godot make headline with an innovative sdfGI solution and unreal is becoming the new democratization. All while unity is becoming less and less agile to adress a moving target. They might be on a decline. There is more and more switching from unity to godot on my yt feed for some reason, and they are mostly positive.
A few people actually warned unity would go that direction but were laugh away by people.
I think they know what they are doing with this move. AR isn’t really that big market and It currently doesn’t have big potentiall to become one. The most important question everyone should ask themselves, “Is there any tool made by concurency that can achieve as much as this one?” and If yes, “How much does It cost?”.
From what I know most of the companies that are doing anything with AR have to make most of the tools themselves because unreal and unity doesn’t provide anything. At the same time there are very few companies making actual good profit out of AR. Unity probably has noticed that, will make some easy money out of that, concurrency is going to catch up, provide better and cheaper content soon.
Remember, unity has almost never really made themselves a product that is worth buying because of the quality (exception is Unity cloud, which can be worth the money in very few cases). They always have to make sure that you pay because you make too much money, because otherwise you can’t finish your product or because you are stuck with the engine and want one basic functionality every single other engine does have. This MARS thingy isn’t any different. It’s just a bunch of super basic, and really not worth 600$/y for a 1 user (maybe 600$ per project) basic tool. It does have a lot of super nice features but also remember Unity made It which can always potentially mean It is unusable in the long-term and support for It will be a joke.
“I have my own theory about why the decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The product starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company.”
saw this quote by Steve Jobs from an interview long ago…
not a fan of his but it did jump in my head after reading this thread
god forbid instead of wasting money on dead acquisitions and crazy endeavors
they can start improving the engine like adding simple grass on HDRP terrain
now its getting more worrisome with nickel and diming
Its alright mate, no harm done. I get the intentions just a bit weird way to start a thread thats pretty clearly going to get firey and then like 10 mins later say your going to report people with certain views and stuff like that. Just seemed a bit of a weird approach to starting a discussion on a public forum about this specific topic given your original posts content.
I believe it is my fault, I admit I used a tad bit more strong language than it was right. Mea culpa. My post was deleted by the moderators and they were absolutely right. And I intended it sarcastically, but it does not make it right.
There has always been a gap between the software and services offered to those who pay and those who don’t. This gap has reduced significantly over the years, and now Unity offers a surprisingly large amount of their software and services up via some kind of free tier.
Since the very early days there have also been separate modules or services available for an additional cost. From teams to enterprise support to source code access.
Remember Unity is a business, any decision they make is driven by the eventual goal of making money. Free software and services are provided to get people in to the ecosystem with the hope they will eventually become paying customers, or at the very least will promote Unity to other paying customers.
So they made a business decision that this new software was best launched with an associated cost. A decision similar to other decisions they have made in the past. Despite this I’d say its very unlikely that a significant amount of Unity software and services will not be available for free in the short to medium term, the recent trend, both for Unity, and for the wider industry, is the opposite.
How all this that affects your own personal choice about using Unity and its future direction, well that’s not for me to say.
Exactly. People have this weird belief that Unity must be hurting if they’re resorting to these business practices but the truth is they’re maintaining these practices because they’re very effective. Getting them to shift away from them will first require people stop buying into them.
Unity’s Personal tier came into existence because of Unreal but since then the company hasn’t actually been threatened by anything Epic Games have done. If anything Epic Games is the one that has had to constantly give away incentives to attract new developers. Epic Games gave away Quixel but Unity can keep selling Bolt because people keep buying it.
Unity used to be much more ‘piecemeal’ than it is today. Back in the 3.x/4.x days it was a small fortune if you wanted to do any sort of mobile development on top of pc.
That said, I don’t necessarily want them to include everything for free… think about it. If they include every single engine feature for free, that means they have to raise the subscription costs to cover acquisition/r&d. At their current rate of acquisition, that gets expensive fast. I don’t want to pay for engine features I will never use. This is how/why subscription prices become outrageously expensive, you have to constantly pay for ALL features, even if you don’t use them. I’d much rather pay a small subscription fee per each of the parts of the engine I use. If it is too expensive/not needed, let everyone decide that with their wallets. Eventually this kills off features that no one uses and wants, and the company doesn’t have to maintain them (Remember BlackBerry support anyone?).
Is MARS too expensive? probably. But only time and dev interest will tell. Would I like ArtEngine for free? Yeah… definitely, but its something I will probably use very rarely. Pricing based on use makes more sense to me in the long run. Why should an artist have to pay a full subscription fee if they never touch DOTS?
My 2c. I don’t get involved in these threads much because people on here can be rather dramatic.
No they don’t have to raise the subscription costs, they have 80% Gross Margin. They recently DID raise the subscriptions by the way, was it because they were giving us more features, or was it just because they thought they could get away with it? I am not getting more features I am actually using, are you? They just made their value proposition worse because… they could.
They don’t have to raise anything. If they thought it would gain them marketshare they could be giving more stuff away with the current prices and raise the perceived value of their current monetization methods, but I guess they don’t feel threatened by the competition yet, and “democratizing development” has stopped being their motto (even as surface level as it was) for a while, so…