Was Unity lying yesterday or are they lying today?

3 years ago by nothingcorporate to c/programmerhumor

Can they tell the differences between installs or can't they? Either way, they're definitely lying to their users.

toxic_cloud 132 points 3 years ago

Even worse, https://unity.com/pricing-updates is posted on their site:

"We leverage our own proprietary data model and will provide estimates of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project – this estimate will cover an invoice for all platforms."

Estimating how many copies you sold based on your own 'data models' which is impossible to track? Isn't that like a giant red flag for laundering money?

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mind 37 points 3 years ago

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SnipingNinja -5 points 3 years ago

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mind 9 points 3 years ago

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lobut 19 points 3 years ago

Yeah I don't understand how that works. Will that even stand up to a lawsuit? Wouldn't they have to give up stuff in discovery if a game company sues to find how they were billed?

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datendefekt 19 points 3 years ago

I think it's crazy that they want to write invoices based on estimations. Why didn't I ever do that? "Oh yeah, I estimate that I worked about um... 2 weeks on that feature."

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leo85811nardo 120 points 3 years ago

In my opinion, it's bad either way for different reasons

If they do tell the difference, then there is some tracking built into the machine that runs the engine, which is bad for the application user

If they don't tell the difference, then there will be exploits for intentionally reinstall multiple times, which is bad for the application developers

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x4740N 22 points 3 years ago

Not bad for mega corporation's that only care about money

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XYZinferno 32 points 3 years ago

It's still bad for their profit margins when their stocks fall by 8% in one day, when major indie developers announce they'll be moving their current projects off of Unity and future developers are deterred from using their software in the first place.

Whether they care about money or care about public relations, their shooting themselves in the foot on both counts.

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ripcord 1 point 3 years ago

Wow, 8 whole percent. And started going back up shortly after.

This should have been a 50% event. Sounds like the backlash hasn't been severe enough yet and wall street thinks it's probably mostly fine.

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wafer 6 points 3 years ago

Wall Street is probably hoping Unity gets away with it.

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carbonara 102 points 3 years ago

Don’t try to find a meaning in this, just switch to something FOSS. Look at how the 3D modeling world is since Blender became a real competitor.

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yanyuan 48 points 3 years ago

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c0mbatbag3l 11 points 3 years ago

Do the different ones have separate use cases? Or are they all pretty similar in terms of intended functionality and user knowledge requirements?

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yanyuan 7 points 3 years ago

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ignotum 5 points 3 years ago

Haven't tried any of those other ones you mentioned, but i can vouch for Godot, it's pretty amazing (granted, i'm not a professional developer, but Godot has worked great for my hobby projects)

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Appoxo 10 points 3 years ago

As an outsider: How is it?

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ryan 76 points 3 years ago

This whole thing is absurd and overcomplicated - they could have just copied Unreal and slightly undercut them.

It isn't too complicated, but for example, a game which made $2 million in gross revenue would owe Epic Games $50,000, because it would pay 5 percent of $1 million, keeping the first million entirely—minus whatever other fees are owed, such as Steam's cut.

There should also absolutely have been a grandfather clause for games already released.

I get Unity needs to make money. They've never been profitable. But they've seriously overcomplicated the whole thing and gotten people angry at them.

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marcos 42 points 3 years ago

I'm not even sure this is a price increase. It probably is, but I think a lot of people will pay less.

They are just reserving the right to bankrupt you, at random, without any previous warning, because they want. There's no good reasoning anywhere.

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lobut 7 points 3 years ago

I agree. I think a price increase can totally make sense. Shit's expensive nowadays, we get it.

They seem to want to create a new revenue stream from games published on Unity retroactively.

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epicsninja 65 points 3 years ago

I guarantee they put zero thought into how this would actually work, and have just been making stuff up as they go.

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GreenMario 19 points 3 years ago

Sounds like the idea came to Riccatello in a dream. Damn CEOs are so used to getting their way they just think and it will manifest bullshit.

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IzzyScissor 64 points 3 years ago

Do installs of the same game by the same user across multiple devices count as different installs?

We treat different devices as different installs. We don’t want to track identity across different devices.

Jesus Christ. A single user can freely install the game repeatedly and bankrupt a creator.

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fsxylo 24 points 3 years ago

I can definitely see one of those "ree woke game" types doing this.

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GreenMario 9 points 3 years ago

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anteaters 2 points 3 years ago

Fitting image host, too.

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Gerbler 1 point 3 years ago

Excellent

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DiagnosedADHD 11 points 3 years ago

I can see this going wrong with steam proton if each install gets it's own wine config, simply reinstalling or updating might look like a new machine

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MrPoopyButthole 34 points 3 years ago

I may get downvoted to hell for this, but besides the shady business practices, Unity sucks as a game engine. You can just feel the engine eating resources for no good reason and the gfx don't come close to UE5.

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marcos 19 points 3 years ago

Oh, I don't think anybody will disagree that Unity is completely unoptimized and barebones compared to Unreal. It is also hard to learn and confusing compared to Godot.

There used to be a huge amount of people that wanted exactly something easier to learn than Unreal and more featureful than Godot. But those two improved in a way that this niche may not even exist anymore. Anyway, currently Unity has that unbeatable marketplace, and I really don't know if there's a good enough replacement somewhere, but I don't see any other reason to use it.

(But then, I'm not really a game developer. I've used those here or there, for fun.)

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BassaForte 11 points 3 years ago

Not quite. Unity isn't poorly optimized, but it's not great either. Unity also is very easy to learn, hence the number of really shit games put out from it.

Source: have been using Unity for the past 10 years

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arrowmax 2 points 3 years ago

From a hobbyist dev who dabbled with Unity for several years: The worst part about the engine imo is the fragmentation of the entire ecosystem.

There are three major rendering pipelines (HDRP, URP, Legacy), each with their own specific quirks, configurations and dependencies, which are entirely incompatible with eachother.
Foundational packages (input handling, networking etc.) change/break way too often or have been deprecated for years without replacement (uNet) and rely on 3d party packages.

And don't even start with the documentation for any of the above. Multiple times have I found documentation for a rendering callback or ShaderLab parameter claiming it would be compatible with URP only to find that the documentation was supposed to be for HRDP.

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words_number 25 points 3 years ago

Wow, a proprietary quasi monopoly changes their business model into something extremely exploitative and hostile. I am totally surprised! Shocked even! Blimey!

Seriously, why spend years of your life learning to work with some technology that can at anytime be made instantly obsolete or impractical to use when some random asshole you don't know decides something dumb. If there's a FOSS alternative, always prefer that.

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bouh 2 points 3 years ago

Is there a Foss alternative to unity?

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Rambi 21 points 3 years ago

I looked into it briefly after hearing this news and saw people talking about Godot. It's for 2D and 3D multi-platform games and you can use C#, C++ and others. Sounds pretty cool

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/...

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barsoap 7 points 3 years ago

The other cool kid on the block right now is bevy. It's less of an engine for people who just want something to write their game in, though, but more of a framework for people looking to write their own engine. There's practically nothing you can't customise or replace in that thing, it's built to be both flexible and performant.

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far_university1990 18 points 3 years ago

Wait why charging for an install? What is going on?

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JackGreenEarth 39 points 3 years ago

It's why software needs to be open source, not just free.

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XYZinferno 41 points 3 years ago

Godot is a good example of a free and well-developed open source game engine. It'll probably see a sharp rise in adoption following this controversy from Unity.

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evilgiraffe666 18 points 3 years ago

See a sharp rise? Was that an intentional C# reference?

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XYZinferno 13 points 3 years ago

LMAO

I work with C# daily and even I didn't realize I made a pun there xD

Maybe it's just embedded in my subconscious at this point...

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Maven 3 points 3 years ago

Yo, is C# named that because a # is made of four plusses?

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PlexSheep 11 points 3 years ago

The year of Godot games is coming

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fsxylo 2 points 3 years ago

I've looked into Godot for 2 hours and I already am learning how to write shaders. I feel like the available assets are going to skyrocket.

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cerement 13 points 3 years ago

sounds like you’ve missed a couple of days of the newest Unity drama

[Gamesfromscratch] Unity’s New Pricing is … Awful
[Gamesfromscratch] Develoers React to Unity Price Changes

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far_university1990 1 point 3 years ago

Yes, did not hear any of this yet. thanks

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slazer2au 12 points 3 years ago

Instead of revenue sharing like some places do Unity want a $0.20 fee , less depending on your sales numbers, for installing a unity game.

https://blog.unity.com/...

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fckreddit 12 points 3 years ago

Because greed. Is there any other explanation?

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transigence -16 points 3 years ago

Or because they got bigger than they can currently support and they don't want to lay off their employees.

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cerement 20 points 3 years ago

Unity has absolutely no qualms about laying off employees …

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Swedneck 12 points 3 years ago

Then they'd use an actually sensible payment model like, gee, say taking a cut of the revenue made from unity games?

This is like being charged every time you eat off of a plate rather than just charging for the fucking plate.

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Russianranger 5 points 3 years ago

They announced a new business model effective next year. It’s plastered all over the net, just look up “Unity news” and you’ll get a ton of hits on it. Lots of coverage on YouTube as well.

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metaStatic 10 points 3 years ago

They could promise to pay the developer a fee per install and it wouldn't matter. You can't trust them anymore.

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WhyIDie 5 points 3 years ago

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WhyIDie 13 points 3 years ago

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LetterboxPancake 1 point 3 years ago

EA: it's cancer

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