General Gaming News and Discussion

Pretty crazy that phones are on par with consoles for gaming now.

I noticed spam from them had ramped up in the past few years. That's usually a sign that dumbass marketing types are taking over.

Pyros said:

New Unreal Engine advertisement is weird

Unity plan pricing and packaging updates | Unity Blog

In January 2024, Unity will introduce a new Unity Runtime Fee based on game installs. Prior to this, Unity subscription plans will add cloud-based asset storage, Unity DevOps tools, and AI at runtime at no additional cost.

blog.unity.com

Unity basically adding a fee for every installation of a game that uses the engine, to be paid by the devs, retroactively(only once certain tresholds are met still, so only tax successful users). Some devs already talking about switching engines. Announcement went as well as you'd expect, they've already had to adress some concerns in a follow up announcement. Reddit thread has an interesting bit about the CEO having constantly been selling shares for the past year, probably just a coincidence though.

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The CEO was apparently also the CEO of EA during their scummiest period, which explains a lot of things.

don't remember if that game is xbox exclusive or not but it will be on gamepass

Pyros said:

CEO having constantly been selling shares for the past year, probably just a coincidence though.

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Springbok said:

They've been better than that shitty fucking switch for some time now

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They are like 4x the cost so I’d sure hope so.

Tuco said:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=company_global_blog_2023-09-13_updated-forums-faq

This FAQ is the most tone-def PR attempt I can remember. This pricing scheme is the worst I've ever heard of. It'd be like selling a carpenter a hammer and charging him everytime someone sits in a chair they make.

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Reading that thread is interesting, and I am only on page 2 atm...

Control posted a good deal of info about this Unity thing in Game Dev thread in grown up forum too.

It looks like there wont be any retroactive charges, so they will avoid some lawsuits there. They are just going to count all revenue acquired (edit: for 12 months) before 1JAN2024 when looking at what threshold you meet going forward.

So, on the Unity Personal/Plus plan, with the lowest up front cost (there are 3 plans, with varying levels of complexity), if your company has made $200,000+ on a Unity based game by December 2023 in 2023, come January, you will start to owe $0.15 PER install, that are installed after Jan 1, 2024. Did you make $200k or more on your Unity based game five...six...ten years ago? Well now Unity is going to start billing you every time your users reinstall the game in 2024 and beyond. Edit: Unity will only look at money made for the previous 12 months when figuring how much you currently owe per install (and reinstall? It sounds like even the sales/marketing people don't know yet, on reinstalls). They also have the qualifier of 200,000 installs over the life of the game, possibly including demos and such.

Also this: Mobile games are fine, until they hit $200k, then they go out of business... but I am having a difficult time having much sympathy for them, since they have a rep of being highly predatory themselves.

Burns said:

Reading that thread is interesting, and I am only on page 2 atm...

Control posted a good deal of info about this Unity thing in Game Dev thread in grown up forum too.

It looks like there wont be any retroactive charges, so they will avoid some lawsuits there. They are just going to count all revenue acquired before 1JAN2024 when looking at what threshold you meet going forward.

So, on the Unity Personal/Plus plan, with the lowest up front cost (there are 3 plans, with varying levels of complexity), if your company has made $200,000 on a Unity based game by December 2023, come January, you will start to owe $0.15 PER install, that are installed after Jan 1, 2024. Did you make $200k or more on your Unity based game five...six...ten years ago? Well now Unity is going to start billing you every time your users reinstall the game in 2024 and beyond.

Also this: Mobile games are fine, until they hit $200k, then they go out of business... but I am having a difficult time having much sympathy for them, since they have a rep of being highly predatory themselves.
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No retroactive charges, but attempting to retroactively enforce changes the TOS on a piece of software that you've already downloaded and developed a product in isn't really any better (especially when some of those versions specifically included provisions that excluded that possibility... can't imagine this actually goes into effect, but this is so fucked up already, why the hell not).

Tuco said:

I have sympathy for them because the mobile games that are least predatory are most impacted. This encourages mobile game devs to increase their $/install even if it decreases the number of installs (aka users). So they are motivating more ads and ingame purchases even if it drops the total users.

If you're running a non-predatory mobile game and have aspirations of being serious, Unity isn't the engine for you.

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And god forbid you have a free game that mostly runs on donations or pay-what-you-want

Control said:

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Did you see if they are changing the upfront costs of the various plans? I saw one person saying he was paying $400 for Unity Plus, just to remove Unity's splash screen and add his companies logo, but under this new plan he will have to pay $2040 for that same functionality, in addition to the per/install costs. Is that just because they are getting rid of Unity Plus, and moving to 3 plans?

I found their current prices online listed as: