Open letter to Unity...

News & General Discussion
1

This isn’t intended to be offensive:

With the upcoming Unity 5 and Unreal Engine 4 we, as a company of several developers, have had a few hard decisions to make and would like to share our thoughts (the result of several longwinded meetings) with you Unity as we may have to jump ship. It’s worth noting that we have evaluated Unreal Engine 4 (in it’s current state) and have been long time supporters of Unity (since the 1.x days). We hold several licenses to unity pro including Android pro, iOS pro, and asset server. We have several products that have been completed over the years, and have several more in the works for this year alone.

With all that being said, we find what you offer to not fully align with the price point you demand. Although Unreal Engine 4 has a steep learning curve, overall it is more powerful and offers an easier to attain polish then we have ever been able to accomplish with Unity. The architecture is built around networking which seems to be an afterthought in your tools. We are required to have Unity pro because, lets face it, few of the decent extensions/libraries purchasable from 3rd parties will work without it. We need to have mobile pro because, lets face it, performance is horrid without it. We made the HUGE mistake of buying the team license because, lets face it, asset server is garbage! You know it, we know it, it’s more headache than it’s worth (timeouts, corruption, bad states, loss of work, loss of time and money) and should honestly be taken out back and shot…

Now you introduce a subscription model which is 300+% greater than your competition and makes no sense to the one time cost model, we are curious, why offer the one time cost at all? Thank you for letting us pay $600 less for the subscription than the one time cost however we all know you’ll be releasing Unity 6.x shortly after so why the hell would we purchase the one time cost? It’s not like you’ll let us have multiple installs (for our whole team) with one time cost, right? Does the one time cost allow for our bug reports to be seen before the usual 6mo time period (statistically unlikely)? Thank you for the subscription, but it’s still really high for what your offering…

What ever happened to Unity’s new GUI? We’ve been waiting for it since 3.x and all we have is a back side full of smoke. When will interfaces (c#) be better supported? When will you support more of the native iOS and Android features so we can stop buying solutions from Prime31 and the like? Dynamic NavMesh support? What about multiple listeners in a scene? More robust EditorGUI controls, callbacks, events, etc? Access to source? Why do I still have to cache a reference to the darn Transform, you’d think we’d be passed this by now…

Your feature list for Unity 5 is very lack luster. On a basic overview, the list would seem impressive but once one gets more granular into what is really pitched (past the hype of it), it really is what should have been in Unity 4, what we paid for on the upgrade. If this is just another minor revision turned major, many will feel jaded…

It’s just a lot to swallow for the price you want to charge me for my team to stay. I’m sorry if this post comes off as offensive however it’s been building over the years. I can pay double, DOUBLE, for your competitions product and still be paying half than what I would be paying for yours and they already offer more of what I need. I strongly ask that you reconsider your pricing model. I understand you still need to pay your people and cover your expenses however you need to remember that we’re indies (and in some cases, hobbyists), we can’t afford this for much longer…

Afterthought: I know what will be said after this. yes, they [unreal] want to charge us 5% royalty. I’m ok with that! If we do well, they do well for supporting us. If we make 100k, we pay them 5k, not a problem there…

2

First of all, this belongs in Unity Gossip, not here. I’m not going to address your qualititative complaints (e.g. “UE4 is more powerful”), only the ones that are factually wrong.

Unity’s subscription model has been around longer than UE4’s. Unity didn’t offer an expensive alternative to UE4 - UE4 undercut Unity’s existing price. Unity has not made any business model changes nor major announcements since UE4’s subscription service. This is a hugely important distinction. If Unity makes any changes to the product roadmap without addressing the subscription price, then you’ll know they’ve made a decision to stay expensive. Until then, they have made zero response to UE4’s lower price.

I suspect Unity will indeed be forced to lower their prices soon to compete, and I further suspect that will happen near the time 5.0 is released.

Unity 4 was released November 2012. If Unity 5 is released when it is expected to, that will be about 2 years between major versions. 2 years of Unity Pro subscription is $7524=$1800 versus $1500 for buying it outright. If you buy 5.0 on launch date, you’ll likely save $300 versus getting a subscription. More importantly, your license will never expire, which makes it a more attractive option for pro studios. If Unity 6’s feature set doesn’t appeal to you, you can continue to use Unity 5 for free as long as you like. And, you can preorder 5.0 now and get an extra 6 months on top of that, meaning you’d further save $756=$450 on top of that, compared to the subscription cost.

In short: Unity’s subscription price is balanced properly with its buy-outright cost. (Perhaps not balanced with the cost of UE4, but I’ve already addressed that)

Coming in Unity 4.6 this summer. Already in beta testing. It’s been discussed to death on the forums, please do pay attention.

The native iOS/Android features are a constantly moving target, and most Unity updates bring the API close to or up to feature parity with the native features. Prime31 reacts quicker than UT, but the majority of Prime31’s historical offerings are currently obsoleted by a more recent Unity version.

Dynamic NavMesh support is partly addressed by carving in 4.3.

Unity 5’s “lack luster” feature set includes a complete overhaul of the audio system.

I’ve never seen this suggestion on either forums or the Feedback page. What exactly do you with it to do differently? Can you link to somewhere it’s been discussed? (And if not, do you expect UT to read your mind?)

Available for the right price, and always has been.

If you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about (that gameObject.transform is a slow function call), we have indeed been past this for a long while.

3

Can you post links to the work you’ve done in Unity and other engines? Thanks.

4

People have invested a lot in Unity, and it’s a good system (sometimes great, but sometimes horrible too). But the industry is coming to a crossroads where Unity developers have to decide whether increasing investment in Unity upgrades is worthwhile.

Of course all of these complaints have been stated before, and I don’t know if we need another thread going through them. However it’s important to say the reason that these threads keep popping up is because of Unity’s lack of response… which get’s increasingly depressing with every new announcement from the competition. :frowning:

5

Unity did respond, if I recall correctly. I mean, it’s possible it was just some sort of community representative who’s position on the matter was not official, but it was clearly stated that they feel the price of Unity is still justified and doesn’t need to change.

6

Where?

7

Where is the link to the comment?

8

I don’t remember, it was one of those giant threads that sprung up talking about the new pricing model of UE4. I think it was somewhere in this thread specifically; http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/235219-Why-Unity-5-0-is-STILL-a-good-deal
But the thing is 24 pages long, and I don’t wanna search through it. Especially since it may not even be the right thread.
I know for a fact it was in one of those, because that post was what made me decide not to develop games with Unity, and instead just use it for selling assets.
I posted as much in the very same thread, but my post history doesn’t go back that far.

9

He can’t hear you because he’s gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooone! Perhaps you got caught up in the details and missed the main thrust of the post?

Is that a definite fixed in stone date? http://isthenewguioutyet.com/ still says it ‘should be’ in 4.6. Can you direct us to the post where it is guaranteed that it will be in 4.6? I mean, what with all the broken promises and lack of communication pre-broken promises saying promises would be broken, would it really be that surprising if it slipped again? It’s nice that you still believe what Unity say though. It shows the loyalty of a dog that just hasn’t quite been kicked in the face enough times. Didn’t the NGUI developer get hired by Unity only to leave Unity shortly thereafter because of… well, we’re not sure are we?

Anyway, I don’t think criticising his reasons for switching will make him change his mind. It might work on someone else though.

10

Pricing was discussed in this thread by a developer:

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/235248-Are-you-OK-with-Purchasing-WebGL-Add-On

Is that the one you were thinking of Grimwolf?

11

Just vote with your wallets. Don’t like it? move on.

Get sick of other engines? move back.

Posting yet more threads about it helps how?

12

You may have taken that as complaining, it was intended as comparison. Regardless of your opinion of my opinions I am still a customer who spends thousands of dollars with Unity a year. Take my opinion of comparison as you wish I suppose (constructively or destructively). When talking about 2 video game tools, a qualitative comparison is very appropriate. Why I would put in in “gossip” (something that is unconfirmed) was counter to the objective of writing. I wanted to know if Unity would become more cost effective and scale with the competition.

Palm’s webOS was around a longer than ChromOS, that doesn’t make it better or viable… It’s my understanding that Unity’s subscription model hasn’t been around all that long. It’s also my knowledge that UE4 has been in the works for a lot longer than their marketing would indicate. I understand that UE4 undercut them, and I wasn’t directly asking for UE4 pricing, I’m saying that side-by-side comparison would indicate that UE4 is a bigger bang for the buck. I’m not asking Unity to be $20 a month, I’m asking if they can lower their price a bit to support the smaller teams more. The fact that they haven’t responded would suggest to me that they want to loose the smaller teams to the competition…

not including all the mobile pro stuff (which I’ve addressed)… Not nickel-and-diming at all

Pay attention to what? trolling the forums? I get work done, thank you very much. I read the news letters and visit the marketing pages every so often to see what I’m missing. I’ve watched the videos where they demoed the new GUI. I’ve waited patiently. Now you say 4.6 where I say I was originally told 4.0. It may have been discussed to death on some forum, but I see no official word about it…

Constantly moving? Did iOS drop support for advertising all of a sudden? has their native dialog UI gone away? Has Android’s native dialog UI gone away all of a sudden? Yes, they have brought it closer, I’ll give you that, but it’s a HUGE market and if they are going to charge x3 the price for Android and iOS, perhaps reacting a bit quicker to a fast moving market (which you get to boast on your marketing pages to attract customers who you charge) is a requirement.

YEAY partly addressed! So now I can save a NavMesh as a prefab and load/unload it as any other prefab? (if so, please post a link, cause we’ve been trying to figure this one out for 5 months now).

And much like the promise of the new GUI with 4.x, the same promise of a “game audio system of your dreams, then add some” (taken right from their promise on why I should buy) comes with a truck load of salt.

Got it! I guess we can agree that competition +1

If your genuinely interested, sure. But if your going to validate my opinions based on work our team has produced then no; as I think, in this matter, the money we spend a year should speak just as loudly as our productive quantity/quality. We have several licenses (pro everything) of Unity and we want to know if it will be more cost effective for us as a small team than UE4. We don’t need Unity to beat UE4 in price, because there are many benefits to using Unity over UE4, but with such a big cost difference it’s hard to outweigh the benefits of moving to UE4 on price vs quality alone.

Very well said, and very to the point!

Exactly! I’m not going to waste the day away searching through the forums and guessing on who is actually from Unity for an “official” response. If Unity chooses to ignore this thread (my attempt to get an answer) then so be it, the official response is that they have no response and my decision for our team becomes that much clearer (and our wallet can remain much heavier next year).

That is the very definition of conjecture…

13

Correct me if i’m wrong but that is 5% of gross profits, not net. With taxes and other fees it will likely work out to be a lot more than a 5% on net profits.

14

you are correct. I’m not going to defend it, sucks to loose profits, but at least the entry cost is super low.

15

Are you suggesting that a forum (definition: a place, meeting, or medium where ideas and views on a particular issue can be exchanged. ) is not a place for such things?

Vote with my wallet? Are you kidding? -vote with your wallet-, what nonsense… We’ve [our team)]spent thousands (10k+) on Unity over the many years and you suggest we should just move on without asking any questions? Like I’m wasting your time or something right? “poor stupid customer, wanting things and asking us questions. Doesn’t he realize he should be happy we don’t beat him with the money he gives us hahahaha, dumb customers…”

All I want is a simple answer. Is the price point set in stone, or will Unity put in a little wiggle room in a couple months to stay competitive. So far the only official Unity response [Super Moderator hippocoder] is that I should take my business elsewhere… GG!

16

It’s not conjecture, a member of Unity made that post, I’m 100% certain. I just don’t know if it was made as an official stance and/or represented the feelings of the Unity team as a whole. There was no guess-work involved.
I’d link it if I could find it if that were really necessary, but there were at least three similar threads that reached 20+ pages.

I never claimed that was their official stance. I’m just saying there has been a response on the issue, and it was not good.

17

Then if you are a big enough dev shop it is likely that the costs could increase substantially, IE more than the cost of Unity’s licence where you are not paying gross royalties per game. Also IMHO its a bigger risk, as you could make a largish gross profit but still come out with a net profit margin of less than 5%, in which case you would be making a loss. At least you know your definite risks and costs with prepayment. Don’t get me wrong though I do agree with some of your qualitative arguments, just the business end seems risky.

18

You make it sound like there was a fallout or scandal. Unless I hear otherwise, I assume Michael has done his part and then it was up to Unity. He has talked relatively openly about his work (1, 2, 3).

Unity Tech has made a lot of mistakes since I am on board (2012), but I see the integration of NGUI as a positive example - it only took too long. In my opinion, more community contributions should be picked up and integrated.

19

The Integration of NGUI didn’t took too long, the problem was in the decision making. They started their own GUI, weren’t fully satisfied, started over… and started over again. That doesn’t make it better, but at least it isn’t an example of lacking willingness to bring unity forward.

20

The 5% is taken from gross profits before ‘store fronts’ take their cut and Epic pays taxes on that 5% of the gross - $3000 per quarter. You will pay taxes on the remainder after ‘store fronts’ take their cut so you will pay taxes on something like the remaining 65% of the gross in most situations.

Epic is clearly angling on 5% of a rare blockbuster being more profitable that $6000 up front and 0% of the profits every two years from a tiny minority of users. What I see is they must both have some sweet contracts with governments and big businesses to even try for such markets.