This is not exactly a complain thread as you might be expecting.
It is all just legit wondering of what is going around Unity’s mind and their procedure for the new plans and prices announcement.
Reasons:
-Release new pricing plans revealing only the subscription plans and putting ‘perpetual licenses plan coming later’. This has written ‘complaints storm’ all over it in the sense even if the subscription plans are the best subscription plans ever conceived, some of us DO NOT LIKE subscription plans. You are forcing people(humans) into things they are against.
-Release new pricing plans that force Desktop users into purchasing things(features) they are not looking to purchase. This has written ‘complaints storm’ all over it.
So my deduction for you going with decisions that everyone knows would have caused controversy and complaining is that you were feeling cornered with your current monetizing strategy.
But I don’t think ‘making things worse’ is good for anyone.
Let’s be honest, this is all counter-intuitive for various reasons:
All of the latest Unity upgrades and R&D efforts have been directed at strong performance platforms like Desktop and Consoles. Enlighten right now is not even good performing in mobile, neither your terrain features, or anything really outside of 2D, and you have barely done anything for 2D in this 5.x cycle.
I said counter-intuitive for this reason: you are now gluing desktop users into a contract that they do not desire.
Desktop users right now don’t have a lot of incentive to use Unity when Unreal is as good as it is, and with these decisions you are only making things worse.
In other words, you already have the mobile market and yet decide to release a monetizing strategy that screws over desktop developers even when all of the engine’s latest R&D have been aimed mostly at rendering features for desktop and consoles.
Of course, now I wonder: could this also have to do with a 20 person studio being able to purchase 15 pro licenses and 5 mobile licenses when you want all 20 of them to also purchase the mobile licenses?
That might be it, but again, then that means you are being petty again hiding motive from customers and trying to implement change in their backs.
The worst part of this is that even my old thread that was perceived as trolling stopped being trolling and became a legit concern after you put so much emphasis on the splashscreen in the Unite presentation.
You should rethink your strategy around selling licenses around the splash screen and dark skin UI as the main driver because for your position as a software company in the market they sound as a petty and cheap device to display the appeal of your product. It didn’t look that way when you were a small company, but you no longer are a small company. Unity is no longer $99.
The message being sent with ‘Purchase Pro to get rid/disable the splashscreen’ is not a good one between. It is funny coming from those of us trolling but it is legit scary when it comes from Unity.
So let’s stop to think, which customers do you currently have in the palm of your hand/in a basket?
-Mobile users. The new $125 subscription plan is really a good value for your money. That was a fine decision.
-Some PC and Console users. Who are now disgruntled because they must pay for a features they won’t make use of and Unreal Engine is becoming more and more enticing with each passing day. Really, the Unreal Engine projects by epic already carry all of the knowledge necessary to create an AAA game with no exaggeration, from dcc workflow, to dcc authoring and invent things like how to import explosion simulations from Houdini. And tons of animation and cinematic tools. [Unless Unity makes use of the Asset Store for their projects, we will be locked in this cycle of your projects featuring tools made in-house that are not production friendly (not tried and tested) unlike some Asset Store assets that do the same function and are under constant testing and development. In that sense, you did a really good job by making use of CaronteFX for your Adam cinematic instead of going for APEX tools like you did before with the Butterfly Project, tools that have yet to this day not be released.]
Who do you want to monetize from (those who aren’t currently paying you)?
-Free users. Which rarely break the $100,000 wall.
On the other hand, they are REALLY effective at staining the reputation of the engine with the splashscreen ensuring that the really good devs feel less enticed to use it.
So with that said, some suggestions:
-Stop to think: is the splashscreen worth all the bad press within developer circles that you get?
Reading Youtube comments, all I read is ‘See Unity screen on start = no play’ next to ‘Unity has a hacked PBR implementation’ (Don’t know what this means exactly, I don’t use PBR).
Who exactly benefits from the splashscreen?
It is currently not Unity. Neither the customers. And no one will learn about Unity as a game engine through the splashscreen, and if they do, it is ‘so I never again play an Unity game’.
When I was a kid playing videogames, I never knew that there was a game engine called Renderware, and I played TONS of renderware games! Means that renderware still got tons of contracts even when none ever heard about it.
-5% like Epic until $25,000-50,000, isn’t a plan like that also functional? Does not even have to work like ’ 5% of $3000 every quarter’, but just ‘We take 5% of your profit until you go pass $50,000.’ rather than some unsubconscious ‘Better not get close to $100,000!’
It would be the equivalent to ‘We subsidize you until you break the $50,000 wall’. It might even give incentive to go pass $50,000 to indies.
-Unity splashscreen could be displayed when exiting the game, and maybe some incentive to use it.
-Allow users to author their own splashscreen animations.
