Unity can get fucked
Yesterday Unity announced that starting next year, all games that use their engine will pay a tax per user install. The tax has a high-profit threshold before it kicks in, which I think they assumed would make it okay.
Over the last 24 hours there have been many reasons pointed out why this is a bad idea. Tracking installs is messy. Piracy, reinstalls, new computers, giveaways, bad actors. There are a lot of reasons why it isn't feasible.
It makes you wonder how they could think it's a good idea. And maybe it is a good idea if you think of Unity as a mobile game engine. If you view it through that lens maybe it makes sense to them.
Maybe they forgot about PC gaming. Again.
Over the last 24 hours there have been many reasons pointed out why this is a bad idea. Tracking installs is messy. Piracy, reinstalls, new computers, giveaways, bad actors. There are a lot of reasons why it isn't feasible.
It makes you wonder how they could think it's a good idea. And maybe it is a good idea if you think of Unity as a mobile game engine. If you view it through that lens maybe it makes sense to them.
Maybe they forgot about PC gaming. Again.
The Cost
Let me be clear.. the cost isn't a big issue to us. If everything worked out, the tracking was flawless and it was 10p per sale, no biggy really. If that's what it costs, then that's what it costs.
But that's not why we're furious. It hurts because we didn't agree to this. We used the engine because you pay up front and then ship your product. We weren't told this was going to happen. We weren't warned. We weren't consulted.
We have spent 10 years making Rust on Unity's engine. We've paid them every year. And now they changed the rules.
But that's not why we're furious. It hurts because we didn't agree to this. We used the engine because you pay up front and then ship your product. We weren't told this was going to happen. We weren't warned. We weren't consulted.
We have spent 10 years making Rust on Unity's engine. We've paid them every year. And now they changed the rules.
Broken Trust
Unity has shown its power. We can see what they can and are willing to do. You can't un-ring that bell.
If you'd have asked me last week whether it was in Unity's power to start charging us PER SALE of our games, I'd have said that was crazy and no.
Surely that's not possible.
That would be like Adobe charging all users of Photoshop per image view.. and trying to invent a system in which they can track and invoice you every month. And not only the new images, but all the images that you created over the last 20 years. Then automatically invoicing you every month.
But that's what happened. And now we know they can do that, and that they're willing to do that. Unity is the worst company to be in charge of the Unity Engine.
The trust is gone.
If you'd have asked me last week whether it was in Unity's power to start charging us PER SALE of our games, I'd have said that was crazy and no.
Surely that's not possible.
That would be like Adobe charging all users of Photoshop per image view.. and trying to invent a system in which they can track and invoice you every month. And not only the new images, but all the images that you created over the last 20 years. Then automatically invoicing you every month.
But that's what happened. And now we know they can do that, and that they're willing to do that. Unity is the worst company to be in charge of the Unity Engine.
The trust is gone.
Retrospect
It's our fault. All of our faults. We sleepwalked into it. We had a ton of warnings. We should have been pressing the eject button when Unity IPO'd in 2020. Every single thing they've done since then has been the exact opposite of what was good for the engine.
We had 10 years to make our own engine and never did. I'm sure a lot of game companies are feeling the same today.
Let's not make the same mistake again, Rust 2 definitely won't be a Unity game.
We had 10 years to make our own engine and never did. I'm sure a lot of game companies are feeling the same today.
Let's not make the same mistake again, Rust 2 definitely won't be a Unity game.
teehee
If I wish for 1 thing its that they revert this change ASAP.
Either way godot is much better unity alternative (and open source)
Id rather do what ever I can to see rust survive as long as possible as I believe in your game. Thanks to you I have made memories and made life long friendships that I would not trade for anything in the world. -Nox
They intend to do this by, (trust me as much as you like) the 'discount' for using their ad mediation service being 100%, so if you run ads with them, you have no runtime fee, anybody other mediation tool, you're fucked.
As much as you can dislike mobile business models or F2P it is their largest money maker, and this is just an insane corporate checkmate, that is wildly anti-competitor, disguised as revenue seeking.
We should have seen this coming as soon as they Merged with Ironsource.
Hello, there is some incorrect information in this post.
"The tax has a high-profit threshold before it kicks in"
The threshold is for revenue, not profit.
In addition, I got the impression that you understand Unity is charging the fee per sale, which is false. They have written directly in official FAQ that the fee is per install, including reinstalls.
As many of you know, the Unity Engine is in fact two substantial software components โ the Unity Editor and the Unity Runtime. The Unity Runtime is code that executes on player devices and makes Made with Unity games work at scale, with billions of monthly downloads.
Please delete this post or we will be forced to proceed in court. Thanks for understanding.
that said I can't wait for S&box 1.0 public release. I might even try to port some of my Unity projects to it, maybe make some helper tools to make porting easier.
I wonder if it would be possibl eto cheese th enew rules. Like, if I distribute a free version of my game (a demo) with the Unity Runtime, I have no fees. But the full version I wouldn't bundle the Unity Runtime (would this get me out of fees?) and the user must provide their own copy (which conveniently they can get from the demo). Not sure if this is actually technically in compliance with the new rules though.
This could still affect Unity free/offline games if they could be forced to have an internet connection to notify unity of an install. Also fee per install is just an insane idea on its own.
To Dan Clipca: Are you joking? Are you AI generated?
"Are we going to inconvenience 99% of our users (gamers) or 0.1% of our users (devs)?" - some idiot on the unity team, probably.
I hope windows decides to do the same one day.
@garry have you spoke to the Unknown Worlds guys about creating an engine from scratch? They did that for Natural Selection 2 (Spark engine I think it was called?) and it seemed to have more negatives than positives.
I Subnautica, its sequel; Below Zero and Moon Breaker have all been on Unity?
Might be worth speaking to Charlie & Max. (Worth make for a good podcast too!)
So, Garry...how do we figure out a class action lawsuit for the devaluing this will do to all the skins we currently own and trade on the open market?
Help us to help you.
they've United game devs against them and their shitty greedy corporate bullshit!
Rust 2 on Unreal Engine 5.3, which was just released last week 😁
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/unreal-engine-5-3-is-now-available
"5% royalty only kicks in if and when your title earns over $1 million USD."
https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy
John Riccitiello, Tim Sweeney and all other greedy fucks will reap what they sow.
Big respect for the choice to never use them again, I'm looking forward to them going bankrupt in the near future hopefully.
Sincerely,
Vincent Van-Go Fuckyourself
Let's take as an example my mobile games that are created on Unity:
At the moment there are already 1.2 million installations and I do not have a Unity Pro subscription.
I earned a little over 200k dollars, that is, I fall under these criteria.
But letโs not exactly calculate how much gross I received for one installation: $0.16
At the moment the game is in the charts in poorer countries and now I have even less income, but at the same time I have already crossed the threshold for paying for installations)))
That is, I already need to pay more than I earn....
If we assume my statistics for the future, I will have about 100k installations per month, I will buy a Unity Pro subscription and pay $0.15 per installation, and even with this situation I will become bankrupt after half a year (since I still need to pay for the backend server and server multiplayer).
I hope they reconsider their policy especially for f2p
But at the moment I am freezing absolutely all my Unity projects.
And there you go, a little evidence to back up my prior comment that this was the case. Believe me as much as you like. This is all just a corporate checkmate, that the average dev is caught in - as usual.
Fuck Unity. Shortsighted greedy scumbags.
@Garry,
Rust is my favorite game! You and the team are the best! I grabbed it bundled with Garry's Mod (I think, I forget, I do have the gmod gun and frog boots...) because Half-Life 1 then 2 were the most innovative games of their times. When I saw someone sandboxing up HL-2 engine, I went crazy! While Garry's Mod was a shit ton of fun, Rust is my favorite game and as others above have mentioned, in my ~2400 hrs I have made some very close online friends. Especially since I am pretty much locked into one server full of nerds.
I am on Linux. Shoutout to Jim Deadlock! I know you guys get a lot of shit from the community. It is unfortunate how people toxic towards you guys. There are so many people that know even less than me about coding that say "to enable EAC, just flip one bit" and stuff like that. I am pretty sure you guys would have done that if it was that simple. I thought Steam Deck would be the game changer that finally got us EAC. You guys are smarter than me, so it must be more than just a switch to flip to make it work. I am sure you wouldn't choose to miss out on market share, even if it is only a few %.
As I get older, my fanboyism is really fading and the hate towards you guys looks pretty nasty. Whether it be recoil, cheaters, Linux, DLC's, blah blah, whatever, etc... Even the loudmouths are still playing the damn game. We have no EAC where I play, I just want to express my appreciation for you allowing us to go do our thing in a tiny corner of the internet.
On the topic of cheaters, it seems an active admin is key in any fps game these days. Watching streamers and content creators, I see just as many, if not more cheaters in other servers with a lower admin to player ratio... People don't realize that for a smooth experience how many things have to be client side. I was playing World of Tanks for a long time, and it was great knowing that if I can't see a tank that is because my PC, as a client, doesn't know it is there. If the average gamer understood why having more latency on a game like that is acceptable because tanks move slower than people, there would be way less drama about this kind of thing.
Player-base vs Devs feels so yucky, especially in this case where you are no CD Projekt Red. Tiny in comparison by team size, but massive by the quality you produceโฆ The internet in general is pretty yucky, I suppose. Please don't ever let it impact your decisions, you guys are doing great!
This is my first time seeing smaller game devs vs Apple/Google/(insert huge monopoly here)-like engine devs. I would not mind playing an unpolished game if it meant you guys have full control in the future. I have been here to see the game evolve and trust the work you guys do.
Not sure exactly why I wrote you a book or if you will read it, but thank god for you and your team! If you guys can keep the game (the possible sequel! Holy shit!) playable for us few Linux nerds I promise to door camp, grief, landmine, raid and terrorize any player I see shitting on FP! I am not even asking for EAC for Linux, that would be great, but I would still spend most of my time on Deadlock as long as it exists.
On another note, as a developer myself, I would love to hear that face punch was building a game engine in Rust to power Rust! 😎
Meaning it will bankrupt the developers and allow the filthy rich to buy up their titles. Thats the behind the curtain part you might be missing. ;)
I mean, Unity wants to charge per install, which is not fair because an install is not a sale, and will screw up any low cost project.
I have 2 desktops (office and livingroom),1 laptop, and the steam deck. That's 4 computers. I format these in a regular basis (once per year, but this year I'd formatted these twice because I upgraded ALL system drives, including SD). Then after formatting these I install my favourite games, which I replay. I have some games that cost me like 2 or 3 bucks, like Vampire Survivor, that I've installed eight times in the last year, so my cost for the developers will be a mortgage for these if they need to pay the unity fee... I'm generating a net cost of about 0,80cent anually for games that had generated less than a dollar of revenue for their developers after steam's 30% and taxes... So next year I would be generating loses to that developer. Is that sustainable?
To not even give us the option of playing old recoil servers with old music and gun sounds shows how little they care about their loyal players.
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