This is of course not including the yearly Unity subscription, where Unity Pro costs $2,040 per seat (although they may have Enterprise pricing)
Absolutely ridiculous. Many Unity devs are saying they're switching engines on social media.
Their Twitter is even leaning into the "answering questions" angle. Just frame the backlash as a result of ignorance, rather than people being reasonably upset by a situation they understand perfectly well. Then they dodge inconvenient questions about things like malicious automated downloads. Of course, they're happy to "listen to feedback." Not act on it, of course, but the social media person is happy to scroll past whatever you have to say!
founding your business on proprietary software is just a crazy gamble.
I turned down a job offer at a company that relied solely on twitter’s api in order to accomplish their goals. It was a sales lead generation tool that used a scripted approach to warming leads before handing them off to AE’s to bring home.
Within a year Twitter shut down their access and the company went under. That’s the day I learned not to trust another company to allow you to make money with their product permanently.
Yeah, and people nowadays don't even rewrite basic libraries! Everyone should have their version of glibc or they are just lazy!!!1!!1!
People wrote their own game engines since the earliest of games
Lazy gets, using someone else's programming language. They should have developed their own language and written the compiler before starting to write a games engine for the game they wanted to make.
To be honest even a home written language and compiler would be based on someone else's hardware.
Come to think of it, imagine if American Megatrends would start with a subscription model.
10 USD tier: 10 free boots a month, each subsequent boot shows an ad. You can skip the ad for 25 crystals.
Crystals are bought in packs of 10 or 35.
Everyone I know has been reaching about Unreal for the past few years anyway. I'm surprised Unity is pulling this controversial move in this situation, driving more customers to the competition. It's like if it was 2013 and AMD suddenly started charging double for their graphics cards even though Nvidia was way better
The enshittification continues.
Watch for more products that enable normal people to do great things to become paywalled. Only your gatekeeper masters may direct the market, and the creativity. In their infinite wisdom, they demand the control of gods.
Billionaires are a mistake.
EDIT: and I love the bait-and-switch of charging anyone who ever used Unity, even under different terms. Electric chair for the CEO.
Surprised nobody mentioned here, but Godot Engine people. It's FOSS and will never charge you for anything. Don't stay in an abusive relationship
Will Garry Newman decide to reskill his devs to use Godot? Will anybody with enough power decide to do so? Imagine if game studios big and small decided "we don't want to have to deal with this ever again, we're making a new or investing in an existing opensource game engine".
I wish people would see the light, but will they?
Will Garry Newman decide to reskill his devs to use Godot?
Ehhh, I doubt it. His team is currently working on Source 2 for their game S&Box. I would expect he's pretty close with Valve so he might just use Source 2 for the foreseeable future.
Rust was made about a decade ago, Source 2 wasn't a thing yet and there weren't many other engine options.
If I had a dollar for every time proprietary software users act surprised when it abuses them...
I think the reason beginners want to use Unity is because that is what they will need as professional game developers. But if professional game developers stop using Unity, then there is no reason to use Unity, no matter how beginner-friendly pricing it is.
Pretty much every gamedev course will teach either Unity, Unreal or both, so those students end up getting fucked either way.
It was the status quo in animation until a few years ago : every school would teach Maya or Max and the industry as well as aspiring professionals were kinda locked with those. Others players evened out the playing field (Houdini, Blender, etc) and today it's not the monopolistic situation it used to be.
From what I gathered it's more varied, it kinda mirrors how studios rely less on a single package. Houdini, Substance, Blender... back in my day it was Maya and Photoshop all the way
I'm now interested in UPBGE, a fork from Blender with game engine. It seems useful for learning modeling and gamedev.
Nevermind PC games, think about how this would impact mobile games. Where you get TONS of transient installs, and very few consistent players.
You could actually go into debt by using unity, and accidentally being successful if you aren't abusively monitizing your game.
What’s the tl:dr?
The creators of the unity engine are charging people extra for games they have already created?
Creators of the Unity engine want to charge developers per game install, the more people that install the game the more you have to pay. This includes games that already exist and never agreed to this. It also causes a lot of safety concerns, how will they confirm how many installs a game has? Are they bundling spyware with Unity games?
Sad times, I remember first learning from Tornado Twin tutorials way back in version 3. At this stage of my life, I basically develop exclusively for game jams, and give away my weekend warrior projects for free. The new pricing model, as currently described, would not affect me. However, trust has been eroding for a while. Trust is gone now. I do not trust Unity not to alter the deal further. I fear that I may become liable for fees that I did not agree to when I published, for lack of a better term, my games to the internet. I've been looking at features offered up in Unreal for a while. I guess it is time to start watching tutorials.
