Wait, is Unity allowed to just change its fee structure like that?

Confusing, contradictory terms of service clauses leave potential opening for lawsuits.

See full article...

 

[dimathiel]

Is there a Musk virus going around or what ?
I think we should quarantine Musk just to be sure.

You don’t quarantine a virus, you quarantine the entity it infects. The virus you attempt to eradicate.

 

[TimeWinder]

An update posted in the Unity forum tonight:

We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days. Thank you for your honest and critical feedback.

237 page (!) Forum disaster over at the Unity Forums: https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/ (hope that's not login-walled), or the pricing updates FAQ page: https://unity.com/pricing-updates. Let's just say the positive comments are...a bit far between.

[Sorry, bunch of edits because the Unity Forum coding and the quote system here were fighting me...and winning.]

 

[MrWalrus]

I really resent the way all of these corporate pseudo-apologies start with 'we apologize for the confusion'. People aren't confused, and the problem isn't that you failed to communicate your plan clearly, the problem is that it's a bad plan that will hurt people and they understand that clearly which is why they're angry about it.

 

[Narayana]

Changing the game engine will probably be too much for most current games and already started projects. They might have to just suck up the costs... at least be prepared for it.

The problem for Unity is the next game development cycle. That cycle will not be using Unity. It will take a couple of years, but Unity will slowly die as more old projects fade away and fewer new projects are born. Unity's future is like that of a socity with no children born.

 

[Auie]

Unity is pretty much just some delayed ransomware against game devs, at this point.

 

[sjl]

Changing the game engine will probably be too much for most current games and already started projects. They might have to just suck up the costs... at least be prepared for it.

The problem for Unity is the next game development cycle. That cycle will not be using Unity. It will take a couple of years, but Unity will slowly die as more old projects fade away and fewer new projects are born. Unity's future is like that of a socity with no children born.

It's also possible/likely that Unity will be bought out for pennies in the dollar. After that, who knows - the new owners might manage to breathe new life into it, or it might just fade away into obscurity. A rebranding might be just the ticket to shake off the stigma of this move.

Time, as always, will tell. I certainly don't see it surviving as Unity for more than a couple of years.

 

[Pikolo]

I'd love to see how the accountants are going to value Goodwill on the balance sheet. Can it be a negative number? I'd be seriously pissed if I were a shareholder.

Goodwill is technically part of intangible assets, but it doesn't mean what it means in english - goodwill is how much you overpay for an acquisition.

 

[TVPaulD]

I really resent the way all of these corporate pseudo-apologies start with 'we apologize for the confusion'. People aren't confused, and the problem isn't that you failed to communicate your plan clearly, the problem is that it's a bad plan that will hurt people and they understand that clearly which is why they're angry about it.

It really is the “I’m sorry you feel that way” of corporate communications, isn’t it?

 

[Gary Patterson]

Unless they start their next corporate comms with "We've thrown our C-suite execs off the roof of the building, sacked the board and put actual human adults in charge," I don't think they're going to be able to salvage this. The total breakdown of trust requires a fundamental change to restore it, and just reversing course won't be enough now.
Unity needs a complete change in management to turn this around, if they even care to. They may decide all the indie devs are just noise they don't need now.

 

[scrimbul]

Now that we're on page 10, I can cite these by name while sounding like less of a raging alt-right 4chan asshat which is where I kept getting handed, unprompted, screenshots of derailed threads on this subject from. (There and the toxifying Unity subreddit because of course)

A quick Google search of the wikipedia articles for IronSource and InstallCore tells you in the first paragraph why Unity thought they could track install metrics by obfuscating the actual phone-home calls and other digital distribution and still filter out install bombs, reinstalls and charity work. (Spoilers: They can't, as everyone said if they can actually track metrics at this level as a direct result of buying and implementing nation-state level malware for a decade, then they are in the wrong business and should just ditch Unity. But it's easy to see from the sophistication of the software why they think they can pin this down at that level.)

Contrary to other posters who think they know enough about the situation to be able to say with certainty why Unity's new terms won't violate the GDPR, one glance at those pages shows why that cannot possibly be true to the casual observer no matter how much you claim the data is anonymized. That's simply not how nation-state level malware tracking works and has no reason or desire to obfuscate data it obtains in that way.

People more credible in cybersecurity communities than Unity's dev shop have categorized InstallCore as a nasty trojan, and if any flavor of that is seeded into every single Unity compiled code or development engine, then even if you came to the party 10 years late the mere existence of the software regardless of its origins is a reason for consumers to run, not walk, from having Unity games installed and hurts the developers chained to the use of the software further.

If, and when, Unity is purchased for pennies and rebranded, the first thing that will have to happen is direct high level coders to just flush the entire IronSource branding and codebase down the drain, untangle it from their developer metrics dashboard offerings, and be paranoid about what encrypted traffic is packet sniffed away from Unity-compiled games going forward. That move by itself would indirectly be a huge step toward beginning to heal the per-install licensing cockups and corrupt 100% discounts for using their ad platforms in the games. Then you'd have to tackle the latter two issues immediately as well, of course.

 

[Ildatch]

It's also possible/likely that Unity will be bought out for pennies in the dollar. After that, who knows - the new owners might manage to breathe new life into it, or it might just fade away into obscurity. A rebranding might be just the ticket to shake off the stigma of this move.

Time, as always, will tell. I certainly don't see it surviving as Unity for more than a couple of years.

Game developers aren't going to be fooled by a rebrand. This isn't a consumer good like can of corn chowder where you can swap a label and the public won't notice, it's a sophisticated software package with a relatively small pool of high-skill users with long memories who aren't easy to dupe.

 

[theSeb]

Ah there it is. Didn't know they had an ad service. You know what would elevate my Rimworld experience? Ads.

Actually I believe that the install fees are waived completely, if you use the Unity ad service in your game....

 

[theSeb]

Well... as predicted by like nearly everyone

 

[marsilies]

Actually I believe that the install fees are waived completely, if you use the Unity ad service in your game....

I haven't seen actual evidence of that. All the official FAQ states is that you may get "credits" against the runtime fee for using their ad platform, but it's unclear if that's a complete waiver, a discount, or they simply subtract the runtime fee from your ad revenue before paying you.

 

[TheFongz]

For anyone comparing this to Wizards of the Coast, just remember this: although it got so bad that WotC walked back their changes, all of that "irreparably broken trust" talk evaporated pretty quickly once Baldur's Gate 3 dropped and everyone remembered how much they loved the product. Nobody wanted to have to abandon D&D forever. And devs don't want to have to abandon the platform they have spent years mastering. Sure some will, but I'll bet as long as Unity can steady the ship over the next few months they'll get away with it and the world will move on, outside of a few more ideological pockets of the internet.
Me personally, I'm a hobbyist game developer in my spare time and Unity is the only thing I know. I'll be making an effort to learn a new platform but I'm definitely not looking forward to it.

 

[theSeb]

I haven't seen actual evidence of that. All the official FAQ states is that you may get "credits" against the runtime fee for using their ad platform, but it's unclear if that's a complete waiver, a discount, or they simply subtract the runtime fee from your ad revenue before paying you.

Ahh, fair enough. That's the trouble with things you read on the old tInternet.

 

[cerberusTI]

I haven't seen actual evidence of that. All the official FAQ states is that you may get "credits" against the runtime fee for using their ad platform, but it's unclear if that's a complete waiver, a discount, or they simply subtract the runtime fee from your ad revenue before paying you.

It also does not really help existing games.

If a game I paid for in the past moves to an ad model, I will request a refund of the original purchase price from the platform. If they decline this the refund request goes to the developer, and if they decline as well, it goes to small claims court.

 

[scrimbul]

I haven't seen actual evidence of that. All the official FAQ states is that you may get "credits" against the runtime fee for using their ad platform, but it's unclear if that's a complete waiver, a discount, or they simply subtract the runtime fee from your ad revenue before paying you.

The 'evidence' of this are screenshots shared from threads you don't want to read, on places you don't want to be, including the Unity3d subreddit where customers are sharing information that they are getting told by their account managers they get 100% discounts on those fees for using the ad platforms.

They're trying to milk the mobile game developers for enough revenue to stay alive, as they should and have every right to ask if 80% of their customers aren't paying.

But they also picked the absolute stupidest way to go about it. You don't give less than fourth months' lead time on a decision like this, without having worked out the math, or told your customers 'lmao just trust us and work with your account managers to not bankrupt you' and then rely on nation-state level malware to track per-install fees (which are a terrible idea to do for customer/partner trust even if you can do them accurately, as doing them accurately means you're breaking a law, and any other situation means the billing is never accurate. You also don't freely admit out loud you're going to undercount it.)

But the reason you aren't seeing screenshots is half of it is hearsay leaked from employees in Unity to streamers and podcasters on the subject this past week or in the dumpster fire Reddit threads themselves.

For fuck sake even Intuit and Autodesk can do per-seat licensing and serial numbers and Unity can't seem to manage to price even that correctly and that solution has been keeping businesses afloat for 30+ years.

 

[jjmorris2000]

For anyone comparing this to Wizards of the Coast, just remember this: although it got so bad that WotC walked back their changes, all of that "irreparably broken trust" talk evaporated pretty quickly once Baldur's Gate 3 dropped and everyone remembered how much they loved the product.

No - it evaporated long before that. When Wizards released the core of the D&D game to the Creative Commons, guaranteeing that they couldn't make the kind of retroactive license changes that they claimed they could make. They basically fixed the problem they created by making it legally impossible to revoke the license through the legal loopholes they were creating to be able to revoke the original OGL license. The equivalent here would be Unity open sourcing the Unity engine under an MIT license or something. (Which they're not going to do - just that's what the equivalent would be in this situation).

After that the folks who were still upset at Wizards included pretty much the same people who have been upset at Wizards since they got bought by Hasbro, along with a few younger folks in the industry who didn't realize just how bad Wizards could actually be with stuff like that. (Because they hadn't seen the 4th edition GSL disaster where Wizards tried to rescind the license the first time by making a new game sufficiently different that they could release it under a different license - which led to backlash, and the creation of Pathfinder, and eventually slowing sales enough that Wizards had to release a 5th edition. Which they put back under the original license. Executives are consistently showing they're incapable of learning from the mistakes of other executives it seems.)

 

[marsilies]

The 'evidence' of this are screenshots shared from threads you don't want to read, on places you don't want to be, including the Unity3d subreddit where customers are sharing information that they are getting told by their account managers they get 100% discounts on those fees for using the ad platforms.

I mean, I think I do want to see those screenshots.

But the reason you aren't seeing screenshots is half of it is hearsay leaked from employees in Unity to streamers and podcasters on the subject this past week or in the dumpster fire Reddit threads themselves.

So.. nothing official.

It seems very odd Unity wouldn't make this offer to waive 100% of the runtime fee more public and official, if true, since they seem to think it's an incentive to use their ad platform, and would lessen the blow of the runtime fee on developers. Do they know it comes off as severely monopolistic and anticompetitive?

 

[marsilies]

OK, so all I can find about Unity waiving the runtime fee if you use their ad platform all links back to this article from MobileGamer:
https://mobilegamer.biz/unity-is-of...ch-to-levelplay-as-it-tries-to-kill-applovin/

Studios currently using Unity’s LevelPlay mediation platform have already been offered a 100% Runtime Fee waiver, sources have told us. Unity account managers are also telling developers not using LevelPlay that if they switch over from main rival AppLovin or any other UA platform they can then unlock a Runtime Fee waiver of 80-100%.

If true, it's pretty damning, but I can't find anyone "on the record" stating this.

 

[scrimbul]

I mean, I think I do want to see those screenshots.


So.. nothing official.

It seems very odd Unity wouldn't make this offer to waive 100% of the runtime fee more public and official, if true, since they seem to think it's an incentive to use their ad platform, and would lessen the blow of the runtime fee on developers. Do they know it comes off as severely monopolistic and anticompetitive?

I can grab what I was given and paste it here. It's past page 10 and I'd rather not be spreading conspiracies either. I just happened to get handed it unprompted because I'm an aspiring hobbyist developer and my erstwhile creative director handed it to me while we're sweating bullets glad we weren't learning to use Unity yet.

What I don't want to do is link to threads that were derailed and locked for anti-semitism for obvious reasons, it just keeps the threads alive for the reasons they were rightly locked to begin with. (the origin and use case of the malware is the problem, the ethnicity of the coders or contracting government is a distraction which is why I waited until page 10 to even mention it for people to pony folks discussing it in bad faith)

The screenshot I would be providing would probably be more reasonable to find just skimming the past week of /r/unity3d anyway.

Additionally it's been a week since the announcement, trying to find anything credible in writing that they are giving 100% discounts for the per-install feeds if you use their ad platform is unlikely in this fog of war. More concrete information would be easier to find 2 or 4 weeks out.

 

[marsilies]

I can grab what I was given and paste it here.

OK, please do that.

 

[xoe]

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1114380/announcements/detail/7132068756342000700

It was stated that Charity games would be spared, so we asked Unity to get a confirmation that we would not be affected, but they believe our targets (Planned Parenthood and C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital.) would NOT counts as “valid charities” and more “political groups”...

 

[J.King]

It was stated that Charity games would be spared, so we asked Unity to get a confirmation that we would not be affected, but they believe our targets (Planned Parenthood and C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital.) would NOT counts as “valid charities” and more “political groups”...

I can kind of understand mistaking Planned Parenthood for a political group, but a children's hospital? Seems they just want the appearance of doing the right thing, without having to do it.

 

[TheGreenMonkey]

If it's a jury trial I don't see how Unity could win. Simply tell the jury that allowing such a change would mean their computer, tablet, mobile phone, smart tv, etc. could start charging them by the minute simply by the manufacturer deciding to unilaterally change the TOS. I don't think there's a person alive with two brain cells to rub together who would think this would be a good precedent to set.

Civil suits don't set precedent. Those rulings apply only to the immediate case. Cases can be similar and be resolved with the the same results, but each is judged on its own merits.

 

[marsilies]

Idle thought: Could a developer us ChatGPT to convert Unity game code to another game engine? It'd probably be rife with errors, but it may be easier to clean up the translated code than translate from scratch. I don't know if ChatGPT or similar can provide game-engine specific code though.

 

[neuroklinik]

it’s worth remembering that companies put unenforceable (even illegal, occasionally) stuff in their tos all the time. most courts recognize that for contract law to be viable, it has to be reliable. if companies are allowed to get to cutesy with contracts, the whole system falls apart.

It fell apart for individual consumers a long time ago. For big corporations with well-lined pockets, "won't fix ; working as intended".

 

[warr10r_za]

Changing the game engine will probably be too much for most current games and already started projects. They might have to just suck up the costs... at least be prepared for it.

The problem for Unity is the next game development cycle. That cycle will not be using Unity. It will take a couple of years, but Unity will slowly die as more old projects fade away and fewer new projects are born. Unity's future is like that of a socity with no children born.

This is precisely it. That one note to their client-base sealed the end of their business. Intentions were outlined, trust was broken. The entire client-base was appalled. Unity stalwarts called it quits overnight.

The decline will be fast after 1 Jan 2024. Like the once-ubiquitous Macromedia Flash they will simply cease to exist.

 

[marsilies]

Civil suits don't set precedent. Those rulings apply only to the immediate case. Cases can be similar and be resolved with the the same results, but each is judged on its own merits.

I'm not sure you understand what "precedent" means. Any previous case absolutely is precedent. Whether it's binding precedent is another matter. Some of that depends on the district the case is in, for the federal courts. Civil suits that get appealed and make it to SCUTOS absolutely set precedent, for all lower courts. That doesn't mean all similar cases get ruled the same way though; differences between two cases can result in two different rulings.

 

[NetMage]

The massive amount of assets, templates, plugins and controllers is part of what makes unity so appealing. It will take years for that to develop (they are working on an official asset store)

Possibly a lot fewer years now.

 

[scrimbul]

OK, please do that.

Please check your PMs. If you feel the need to move it out in the open here, I'm all for it.

The screenshot did not have censored usernames for the poster or moderator so I didn't just drop it here openly to gossip, I hope you can understand that.

 

[NetMage]

One person who develops Android games said this could be the end of more free-to-play games. Android games are typically hard pressed to make more than 20 cents per download, even through ads.

A lot of people seem to be forgetting the $200k revenue requirement for the fee to kick-in. Classic games, small FTP and free games won’t meet that in their last twelve months and will be fine.

Not to say this isn’t the best example of shooting yourself in the foot with both barrels that we’ve seen lately. With any luck Microsoft and Apple will team up to create an open source alternative (Microsoft with their gaming interests and C# interests, Apple with their mobile gaming interests and Vision Pro?) or massively contribute to an open source existing engine.

 

[stefan_lec]

A lot of people seem to be forgetting the $200k revenue requirement for the fee to kick-in. Classic games, small FTP and free games won’t meet that in their last twelve months and will be fine.

Yeah, that makes this even more nonsensical for me. If they're already collecting revenue data, why not just do a percentage of revenue charge? It would take almost no effort to implement.

Whereas with the per-install thing, they're introducing a far less predictable pricing method that's much harder to implement, produces uncertain/estimated numbers, and may very well be illegal in some jurisdictions.

Makes no sense, even if you're looking at it as a person only thinking of short-term profit.

 

[Thad Boyd]

Game developers aren't going to be fooled by a rebrand. This isn't a consumer good like can of corn chowder where you can swap a label and the public won't notice, it's a sophisticated software package with a relatively small pool of high-skill users with long memories who aren't easy to dupe.

Which is why "somebody else buys them out and fires the board" is a necessary step.

 

[marsilies]

A lot of people seem to be forgetting the $200k revenue requirement for the fee to kick-in. Classic games, small FTP and free games won’t meet that in their last twelve months and will be fine.

I've been playing Vampire Survivors recently, and it's very popular, and estimates are it made $19 million in revenue on Steam.

The same game is on iOS and Android as a F2P game. The ads in it are barely there, and basically optional an unobtrusive (watch an ad to revive your character once if you want, and watch an ad to increase the amount of gold earned on a run). I wouldn't be surprised if they make an average of less than $0.20 per install on those platforms.

The new runtime fee may make their current sales plan on iOS and Android untenable. They may have to charge an upfront fee for it, which could drop their revenue, and increase piracy, which may also affect the runtime fee, since I doubt Unity can fully filter those out.

So while it won't affect most F2P games, it's going to affect the good ones, or at least the popular ones, which introduces the irony of a game becoming so successful it actually costs the developer/publisher money.

 

[Thad Boyd]

I can kind of understand mistaking Planned Parenthood for a political group, but a children's hospital?

A children's hospital that provides gender-affirming care.

You know the joke about how there are two genders, male and political; two races, white and political; etc.?

This is one of those. There are two types of gender identification: cis and political.

 

[jjmorris2000]

Yeah, that makes this even more nonsensical for me. If they're already collecting revenue data, why not just do a percentage of revenue charge? It would take almost no effort to implement.

Whereas with the per-install thing, they're introducing a far less predictable pricing method that's much harder to implement, produces uncertain/estimated numbers, and may very well be illegal in some jurisdictions.

Makes no sense, even if you're looking at it as a person only thinking of short-term profit.

Makes perfect sense if you weren't trying to directly make a profit but instead juice the stock price by showing investors that you're doing something "innovative" and "disruptive" though.

A simple revenue sharing agreement with high revenue publishers would be the kind of thing that long term investors would appreciate but it wouldn't move the needle on the market value. Claiming to have a bold new technology that allows you track per install and a revenue model based off that? That's the kind of pitch the Silicon Valley guys fall for - they're looking to invest in high risk disruptive models not solid business models that might eventually pay out on their investments over the long term.

That's my suspicion anyway. The PR was bungled and it backfired, but it absolutely smells like a move to get high risk investors interested again.

 

[SplatMan_DK]

And they are all part of the same set of regulations. The privacy regulations of the EU go all the way back to the Data Protection Directive of '95. The data privacy regulations have been updated many times since then. The ePrivacy directive of 2009 was one of those updates to DPD, but that didn't actually give us the cookie prompts (do you remember the internet of 2010?). The cookie prompts only came with the GPDR update that finally put some enforcement behind the regulations and forced companies everywhere to take them serious.

I am old enough to have been an active Gopher user.

And no, the laws in question are not "the same". I work with this sh*t and they are different domains, enacted at different times, and pushed through parliament in separate processes. In fact, the actual text off the GDPR mentions cookies only one single time throughout the entire regulation. Why do you keep this up? I mean, anyone can just look the facts up in EUR Lex and see for themselves?

 

[xoe]

I am old enough to have been an active Gopher user.

And no, the laws in question are not "the same". I work with this sh*t and they are different domains of the law. In fact, the actual text off the GDPR mentions cookies only one single time throughout the entire regulation.

Just take the L.