This Company is Scamming Game Devs

This Video Took 69 Takes

#mogulmail #ludwig

[MogulMail]

I was aware but didn't mention that Unity execs (including the CEO) sold some stock shortly before this announcement. There's claims it's insider trading but that is too bold of a claim for me to throw around haphazardly. Figured I'd make a post to clear up some confusion

[Bbeaucha]

This has been the greatest week in the Unreal CEO's life. I imagine them just skipping around the office like a happy toddler, high fiving every employee they pass.

[luigiboyinblu]

I used to work at an indie game dev not so long ago and as soon as I heard the news I asked my best friend (who still works there) how did my former boss take it and she told me he was crying nonstop through the whole day. Absolutely devastating news for all of us.

[minecraftjunky]

I knew the pricing was ridiculous, but the fact it's actually cheaper to port games to an entirely different engine instead of continuing to use Unity is just amazing. Truly a revolutionary idea

[FreshMora]

Unity: "the only reason we are relevant is because of the game developers."
Also Unity: let's exploit them.

[VenikHue]

“They might never make silksong”
This sentence echoed through my head and made me realise the seriousness of the situation

[SatanDotExe]

As a developer myself, I will say with upmost confidence that this change alone, even if they revert it, will likely stop any new projects from using Unity. Effectively, Unity have just started a time bomb, where they will only earn money from existing projects. Once those projects die, so will Unity. Rest in peace Unity, your funeral will be in ~7 years time.

[izaan]

Ludwig is correct. This is truly one of the most unproductive days for a game dev. As a developer myself, this conversation is now a main concern for our current and future projects. The volatility of Unity's monetization is a genuine problem for game devs

[thelexicon]

Can’t speak for other studios, but I work as an environment artist in a massive, lucrative one. A couple of years ago we made a switch to Blender for environment work and recently we’ve actually had meetings where we discussed whether to now invest in really niche Blender specialization and mastery for every artist, or whether to instead make the jump to Unreal. 24h after this news dropped, we’re slotting out bench time for groups of people at a time, from art to CI, to begin transitioning over to Unreal. That quickly a 10+ year studio that relied solely on Unity made the switch. And to be clear, I’m not relaying this as inherently good or bad. There’s nuance here. What I’m saying is: Unity isn’t doing this the smart way.

[solarict]

We legit sat down as a company all day and discussed alternatives and ways to move away from unity, regardless of if they change this or not, no smaller developer is ever going to trust this company again

[PolyMars]

as a long time unity user, watching the soul of the company i fell in love with get absolutely gutted over the past few years has been heartbreaking. we built careers, relationships, entire lives around this platform. and now we're stuck watching it slowly die, with every one of these decisions another nail in the coffin

[VioletAeonSnowfield]

The funny thing is they want Genshin's money but there's no way Hoyoverse just lets this happens.

That company is so insanely greedy there is no way they will just go along with this. I could definitely see them choosing to just remake their game from scratch on another engine rather than lose out on 14% of their profits.

[awholebee]

Why are so many companies making the worst decisions all at the same time 😭

[chazimartin]

As an indie dev, this is terrifying and I am genuinely considering moving months of work in unity to a different engine purely because Unity cannot be trusted anymore.

[kurushimee]

I'm an indie game dev. I can confidently say that I will never use Unity for my projects again, and only ever touch it if I have to for a job I may find. Even so, companies don't like this, and likely many more will switch to Godot as well.

Btw, to anyone confused - the real major problem here for majority of the devs like me isn't the pricing change per say, as they didn't lie about 90% of Unity developers not being affected by this change. Instead, the underlying issue is the fact that they just went ahead and did that - considering the total shit Unity's been doing for the last couple years, this just became the tipping point, and everybody just lost all the trust in Unity. We just don't want to use an engine that can do such decisions on the fly.

And the damage, of course, is real. Unity will lose a lot of money, I'm pretty sure this new policy just makes them go into negative profit considering how many big devs are leaving Unity now. There is no turning back, nothing can ever save Unity by this point.

[SirShrimpey]

Just a side note: there's another thing in the fee update that is less talked about.
They removed the "Unity Plus" plan, which was the most affordable starting point for most solo and indie devs.
The most significant difference between "free" and "plus" plans was the removal of Unity intro when launching the game. Most serious devs want to remove that logo as it is usually associated with trash games and asset swaps. Now there's no way to do that affordably, "Plus" was removed, only "Pro" plan offers that functionality. The starting point moves from ~400.00 $/year for "Plus" plan to ~2000.00 $/year for "Pro" plan. And that price is per developer. If there are 5 developers in a studio, it's ~10k instead of 2k. For solo devs and starting studios that's absolutely crushing.

[moonymachine]

As a game dev with almost 10 years of full time professional Unity development (basically my career), you explained every bit of this to an outside audience perfectly. Thank you! One additional thing to keep in mind is that they are targeting the big fish, but it actually hurts the developers with a high-install business model (such as free to play) with alternative revenue streams, that are making *less* money. If making only around the 1 million dollar per year threshold, those businesses would be on the hook to pay the same bill as the big fish making much more money with a similar install count. It's a fundamentally broken concept. The community trust for creating with Unity has now been damaged permanently and developers are abandoning Unity simply for breaking trust. It's a betrayal. It will undoubtedly affect the entire game industry, no matter what happens next. Ironically, Unity created the F2P industry, now they have killed it.

[Hazlius]

I think Unity always expected to have to change the plan. Their PR right now feels like a negotiation where they release the 100% shitty thing and then after backlash go “hey we’ve listened to your concerns and feedback and decided to adjust! Here’s the 50% shitty thing that was what we actually wanted and expected to release anyway, but now it feels like a compromise!”

[The_BigB]

You know it bad when game devs rather talk about converting their games to other engines. It's not the end of the world but it's fundamentally one of those things that you typically do not do. Most games switch to engines for a sequal or something like that, but not during their life cycle usually.

[justpotato]

I don't even see this being fair with giant companies, imagine buying a painting set and the company charging you for how well YOUR ART does.