| EpicRandy said: We mostly agree when it comes to the reach of the change in a nutshell, however, the dissension in opinion isn't about the change in itself but rather the breach of trust that it brought with it and the clear picture of unity's unsettling current priorities. I really don't feel there's misinformation here, all the modalities you have posted were known. I believe that your view differs only because you don't weigh the gravity of the move the same as me/others and not because we lack some infos. The only bad thing about this fee (apart from the fact that Unity hasn't given developers enough time to fully prepare for this) is that it's linked to installations, which is absolute and utter nonsense, and has the potential to cause many headaches and unfair situations. We agree it's the only bad if you take this change in a nutshell yet the fact that Unity CEO and board value their greed enough so that they implement such nonsense is really the crux of the issue. It's not like It's it can be treated as an oopsie to be forgotten as soon as it is reverted. Other than that, I'm totally fine paying a well-implemented fee if it was a well-implemented fee there would not be such a pushback right now, but it isn't. It's a change that has been half-assed and half thought and yet still implemented against all logic. it's the same as if Java started charging companies for clients' installation of the Java runtime environment or MS started charging companies for clients' installation of .net clients. Many people around the web (most likely here too) are giving their opinion based on other people's opinions, without having actually read the Unity announcement or the FAQ (particularly the FAQ, which is the most informative of the two), and therefore many people actually don't know for sure what they're talking about. I didn't read all of this thread tbh but as far as I'm concerned and as far as what I've seen this is not the case here. You are just minimizing the implications of such, garbage move and utter nonsense, and has the potential to cause many headaches and unfair situations, to make use of your own words. Also, Unity is not going anywhere anytime soon. Not even close to that. People are focused on the public reactions of a number of companies that have made a name for themselves in the industry thanks to a beloved game or two, sometimes a few of them, but this industry is way, way larger than that. There are already hundreds of those companies that have released statements against the recent change which this Twitter tracks: https://twitter.com/FuckedByUnity Those are not just a vocal minority, they literally represent the vast majority of Unity's customer base. |
I wrote that post in this thread because this is the only forum I visit. But, to be honest, I don't remember every post here either and, since I've also read a bunch of opinions in other places, maybe I'm contaminated from those. I've actually seen a good number of people (even in real life) forming their opinion based solely on that of some developers or youtubers that they follow, without actually consulting the original sources, but maybe I was wrong when I assumed that that's the case here too. In general, I think the level in VGChartz is higher than in many other webs.
That said, I'll expand on some of my points (although I agree with you on several of them).
About the well-implemented fee, what I meant was that, if the Unity Runtime Fee were well-implemented (which it isn't), I wouldn't mind it. That was probably bad wording on my part (because it was too late when I wrote my post and I was quite sleepy), but, yeah, I don't think this fee is well-implemented (rather the opposite, and I think that's something we strongly agree on).
Anyway, what I consider a well-implemented fee is one that is based on monthly revenue instead of monthly installations. If the Unity Runtime Fee was implemented like that, then all of its problems (but one) would magically disappear, in my opinion:
- No more worries about bundles, subscription services, demos or whatever. And no need for the developers to inform Unity when their games are included in a bundle.
- No more worries about piracy or frauds that would affect the recounting of installations.
- No more worries about potential situations where a high number of installations wouldn't translate directly into revenue.
The only problem that would still be left with a fee like that is that the companies that already have successful games in the market would have to pay from day one without having much time to fully prepare for that. And the solution, in my opinion, is to delay the fee to 2025 in order to give them enough time. Other than that, I think that the other aspects of the fee are not actually bad. I mean, they are bad for the consumers in the sense that we have to pay for something that was previously free, but nothing else.
So, regarding that and the other services that you mentioned (JRE and .NET), those are free because they are provided by companies that have other offers as their main source of revenue: Oracle sells cloud subscriptions for businesses, and Microsoft... well, tons of things. But Unity Technologies, apart from some occasional deals that they may have with some other company, only has one reliable source of income, which are the premium Unity subscriptions. For the sake of comparison, their main competitor (and the only one in the professional space), Epic Games, has a fee that applies from the very first dollar that you make using their engine, and that's despite them having other stable sources of income (particularly Fornite). So, in spite of this fee, Unity is still more user-friendly than its main competitor in terms of how much money it takes from its users, and therefore I wouldn't say that this measure is particularly greedy in this case.
That doesn't mean that the people behind it aren't greedy, because in some way part of their job is being greedy. But that's not a problem of Unity alone, but of the society as a whole, because this and other negative behaviours and ways of acting are deeply rooted in the way we've built our modern economical and sociopolitical systems. They just become more evident when we see them in certain scenarios where their reach is bigger, like when some big fishes decide that their company is not making enough money and want to find a solution for that.
But I'm digressing. Back to the topic in question, those hundreds of developers that you shared that are uniting against Unity are indeed a vocal minority. You're severely underestimating how HUGE Unity is: according to the figures provided by Unity themselves in a report from 2022 (which is the last one in which they provide those figures), they get their data from 230,000 users. Even if one tweet from the Twitter account that you posted would equate to one developer (which is not the case), that's still less than 600. Of course, I know that the number of tweets will keep increasing over time, so let's say that it reaches 10,000 in the end... That's still less than 4.35% out of 230,000.
And, from that little percentage of developers, only a portion of them is actually going to switch to another engine, because the reality is that switching to another engine is not that easy: not only it takes time (and in many cases money) to learn how to use a different engine from scratch, but it's also likely that you've created your own extensions for it, or you've bought assets from the Unity Store (which are optimized for the Unity engine and in some cases exclusive to it), or you already have a list of professionals who you've worked with and who you know you can trust, and who are of course Unity specialists, etc. So, yes, there are many developers who have lost trust in Unity, and of course Unity is going to lose some market share after this, but I believe that the actual impact is not going to be as big as many people think.
And that's without taking into account the fact that there are only two trully professional game engines, Unity and Unreal. People are talking about Godot and other engines like GameMaker, but the reality is that all those are mostly out of the professional circuits. Good luck finding companies that are hiring Godot or GameMaker developers.
Which leads me to another point: most of the developers who are united against Unity are independent solo devs or small teams (of about 10-20 people at most) making their own games, but those are not representative of the industry at all. In reality, the vast majority of Unity developers are wage earners who work for big or midsized companies and therefore are not going to be affected by these measures in the slightest, because at the end of the month they're going to get paid no matter what. And those companies where they work, which have tens or even hundreds of Unity developers working for them, are not going to switch to another engine, because that would be really expensive for them. What they're going to do instead is increase a bit the price of their future games, or add a couple more microtransactions here and there, or charge a bit more for the MTX that they already plan to implement, or put one or more ads in their games... In summary, thinking of ways to make their games more profitable. So, in the end, they're not going to pay for the Unity fee —they're going to make their customers pay for it instead, and their customers aren't even going to notice.
In fact, that's one of the shittiest parts of this Unity fee, more that the retroactivity (in my opinion): if the fee is tied to installations instead of revenue, the amount of revenue you get doesn't affect how much you pay for the fee, so to compensate... you just increase your revenue. If you charge 20$ for your game instead of 19, and one million people install your game, that means that, by the time you've got to actually pay the fee, you've earned one extra million dollars. You can pay a lot of Unity fees with that money... And how many customers have you actually lost in the process of adding that extra dollar to the price? Maybe a chunk, but not as big an amount to make it not worth it. Of course, this is just a theoretical example, but I believe things like this are actually way more likely to happen that the fall of Unity or a generalized loss of trust in the company. Do you remember Netflix and the password sharing outrage, for example? Well, I'll let you guess which company has increased its number of users in the last quarter and its revenue year-on-year. And in a few months from now many people will not even remember or care about what happened.
Of course, this is not the same situation, but there may be some similarities. My guess is that Unity will initially lose some market share (nothing huge, maybe not even two digits), but increase its revenue when the fee starts rolling. And, after enough time has passed, most developers will get accustomed to the new status quo and just accept it as the norm. Unity has already said that they're willing to lower the fee for those who are retroactively affected by it, and the rest of developers will start to plan their games with that fee already in mind. So, once the dust settles, most of its users won't care that much, except for a few annoyances. And, if Unity decides to make something that is not actual crap and link the fee to the revenue instead of the installations, then even less users will care about it, because those unnecessary annoyances won't be there.
Also, there has been no shift in priorities, like the developers united against Unity are saying, because, in the end, even if the implementation of the fee is quite shitty (which it is), the fee itself is only a natural step in the common cycle of a business: attract customers, retain customers, exploit customers, repeat. We just happen to be in the "exploit customers" phase with Unity. But the vast majority of companies in the industry are run by people who actually share that bussiness-oriented mentality, and they themselves are most likely applying those same principles to their own businesses, so those people won't mind much about this issue, because, as I said, they will just find ways to pass the fee to their own customers. And, as for those other developers who don't share the same mentality and actually think that there has been a shift in priorities for Unity, they are either working for the former or complaining on Twitter. That's quite sad (and a bit raw), but mostly true, I'd say.
The most positive scenario, in my opinion, is that this controversy gives enough impulse to Godot (or any other engine, for that matter) to eventually become a relevant actor in the professional space, because that would mean more competition, which is good. I'm not sure how likely that is to happen, however. And, in any case, most of what I said is just an opinion and I could be wrong (I kind of hope I'm wrong, actually).
Last edited by Verter - on 20 September 2023I'm mostly a lurker now.
