It’s just much more likely that they massively overestimated what they could get away with and were surprised they couldn’t. They were almost definitely scrambling here when the bad press and reactions started.

The situation and plan is shitty either way, but your case implies a level of intent and competence that I’m really skeptical about. Much more likely they figured all the app cash cows would grumble but mostly accept it after some mild pushback. Really unlikely they expected it to become front-page tech news everywhere.

I guarantee their original goal didn’t include “and now only stupid clients will work with us”, which is my point.

Yeah I have. There’s a couple of promising programs that everyone should know about:

https://github.com/V-Sekai/unidot_importer

https://github.com/barcoderdev/unitypackage_godot

But for me, I’m too new to programming to pick up another language very quickly to do all the manual stuff right now. Anyone more skilled than me should definitely check those links out.

Unity employs a small army (about 3K) of senior software engineers, that can definitely command upwards of 200K per year, which puts the estimate at 600 million, plus a number of specialists (mathematicians, physicists) for things like cloth and hair simulation, large water body dynamics etc. They maintain compatibility for a huge and growing list of varying hardware devices, computer operating systems, VR headsets, phones, consoles, i think unity games can even run on apple tv, this means they have to get things like floating point operation results reliable on all machines, older x86 processors, RISC chips, etc going back several decades, and even get experts directly from places like Microsoft for features like DOTS C# to native/burst compiler. Most devs don’t appreciate just how much commercial game engines handle in the background and make your build process so much easier. It’s definitely would take a slew of specialists years to get something basic and usable enough, just to display a couple moving shaded triangles, let alone something robust.

Godot on the other hand while a highly capable engine, is a much lighter weight as by design (Juan L says so himself on the Godot blog). Features like plug and play multiplayer servers, machine learning for NPC behavior, encryption for credit card IAP, either aren’t included or havent been implemented as heavily or are only included in the asset store, as a product of a volunteer contributer, as most FOSS software is known to have. Just going through the unity package manager will show off the disgustingly bloated pile of software that is the unity engine. Probably several tens of thousands of packages available that most people will never use.

You’re not counting the several millions of dollars required for executive salaries yearly. Those executives are important because how else are you going to drain the life out of the developers who are actually maintaining the thing with useless meetings, bureaucracy, “cultural transitions”, and other forms of daily torment?

Context, I work for Unity, but this is my own understanding of things and doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of my employer nor should it be considered “official” positions of the company. We have folks where communication is their job. Mine is helping build a better engine. There’s been a lot of misinformation since the changes were announced and hopefully I can help straighten some of this out, but again if there are other questions, there are others who are better qualified to address that.

The limit for using Personal was 100k. That has been raised to 200k. For the original terms, and these new terms, it is the same; no per-seat price until you reach the threshold. Once you reach the threshold, then you have to upgrade to Professional or Enterprise, and then there is a per-seat charge for the editor. When you hit the revenue or instance thresholds, then there is an additional charge… But you will be doing very well at that point and the amount is insignificant for most developers at that scale. Compared with Unreal, it is still significantly less, even with the announced terms last week. Unity continues to try and make it possible to create highly portable games for multiple platforms, and devices, and to do so with terms that encourage anyone to become a creator and build your dream game. The last thing Unity wants to do is stifle innovation and creativity.

If you watch the Q&A, the reason for the change, so that it was “retroactive” was to apply these term changes to companies pulling in high revenue, think millions of dollars, and who were releasing what amounted to DLCs and Season types of updates but without doing anything except maybe changing assets. Some of these games are even repackaged and re-released as “new” games. In other cases they may sometimes radically change the game so that it might be more accurately described as a new game, but they continue to release using an unsupported version of the engine. If a developer did this every time they approached the threshold, they could technically have millions of users, all while skirting around the TOS. Do this on Personal, delist at 90k, and release a “new” game to perpetually circumvent the licensing fees. The change wasn’t intended to harm the good developers or studios who are trying to make high quality games, it was intended to go after the businesses releasing “Banana Slots 2022.1 (updated).” If that’s the content you release, I’m sorry, but I think your games are kind of scummy. Please stop. The app stores don’t need more of this sort of cash grab content.

If you are making great content and the terms would severally impact you, then Unity was intending to work with you to reach agreeable terms.

Under the new terms, the same applies. If you or your studio are greatly impacted by the new trerms, Unity doesn’t want to sink your business, they are trying to find a way to keep investing in the development of tools and services which will allow you to reach the greatest number of users and want to work with you to make that happen, as that works best for the creator and for Unity.

For those making games for charity which were told they were going to be impacted, that was bad communication and you inadvertently spoke to the wrong person who didn’t fully understand your request. Content made for charity was always intended to be treated with favorable terms. The specifics of those terms I’m not deeply familiar with, so I don’t know how that applies to per-seat licensing or the details of such a contract, but I know that Unity works hard to support humanitarian efforts and I’m sure if you were making content for charities, nothing has changed.

The bottom line is this. If you feel like the terms are going to make you insolvent, work with Unity to resolve that. Unity is a partner, not an overbearing entity. Unity wants you to be successful.

Yeah, if they didn’t do this and literally just said “from this future version royalties from high earners will need to be paid, as we need an income source. The old version will be a LTS release.” and it would have been literally fine.

But retroactively screwing people like this? Obviously they will lose trust, and I do not understand how they didn’t understand that.

Yeah, I suppose the reputational harm from the announcement in the first place is going to set them back quite a bit, regardless. I suppose that’s why things like this are supposed to be reviewed before they get announced.