I quit. I've been using Unity for the last 5-6 years. I taught myself C# through tutorials, and I haven't made any money at game development anyway. I don't really care for learning another engine without any kind of return. So, I just quit, and I will soon be removing my games from all platforms and deleting my unity accounts.
I just don't want to wake up one day and be in debt to Unity.
If you're using Unity Engine (or were but already left it since the pricing), there is a list of good alternatives made by @alienmelon
/blog/588977/the-generous-space-of-alternative-game-engines-a-cur...
So good luck, and if you know someone who also has this problem too, share it(or simply if you can)
I used to use Unity as an example for indie game's dependence on a single tool. As a Flash developer it seemed like a disaster waiting to happen.
I think this sums it up.
The amount of trust Unity lost is priceless. And judging by the linked article in that post, there is also rot inside the engine environment for quite a while now. People beginning to see Unity in a critical light might no longer ignore those faults. This is a downward spiral about to happen. Maybe it will survive for some consoles and mobile. Most of those alternative engines are not very friendly to export to a gaming console. Godot for instance can only export to Steam Deck and that is half a lie, because that only works, because that "console" is a linux device.
To put it into perspective, according to this here
/game-development/engines/most-projects
from the projects that identify the used engines, Unity is most popular by far. So while most of those devs surly will not meet the threshold, it still may affect them indirectly. And since the pricing policy is especially hostile to the pay-what-you-want model so popular on itch, it is a looming danger in the future, as Unity might decide to change policy yet again.
Also the collection of data is problematic and might alienate players, so they try to avoid Unity-made, the same way some avoid AI assetts, drm or adware.
Oh, and if you want a popular example, Among Us costs a 5er on itch, steam and so on. But it is free on mobile and has 500 million downloads on google store. I believe the maths is not very hard on this one. Calculate with 1 cent or 20 cent. It does not matter.
Not directly, no.
It seems they silently replaced tos for some versions. So it is unclear. There are some shady things done, in addition to that fee pricing scheme.
I also read, that the intended target might acutally be mobile advertising, as they apparantly give out price reduction of 100 % on the fee to users of their own advertising service, so those devs would not have to pay the fee. Effectivly undercutting the other advertising services and trying to run them out of business.
If Unity is seen as toxic poison by players, they might not look at the Unity game, even if it is free. There are so many games. Why bother with some that support such a scammy engine developer. Also, they changed it once on such short notice, they might do it again. This is not future proof. As you said with the older versions, we are not sure currently. What if you make your free game today and in 5 years you suddenly have to pay for installs too. Also, the installation tracking is affecting users. There are already users avoiding certain games because of the implemented drm. You can see that on some AAA games reviews on Steam. "Tracking installs" is drm. It is supposed to affect the developer, but the tracked one is the user. Users do not like such things.
Yeah, the unity situation is a mess. I would like to switch to some other engine just out of principle, but the king of projects I tend to work on take a looong time to make and I'm in a middle of making a game. I'm afraid to even image how huge of a pain it would be to recreate( or hopefully transfer) everything I made in unity to another engine. I think I kinda have to finish this before trying to learn a different engine or else it's going to be months of my free time just doing that. When I work on a game for two years and there is still a fair bit left to finish it it's not exactly easy to switch.
The monetization thing won't be an issue for someone like me who makes no money on these projects anyway, but who knows what kind of nonsense they will announce next after they quite likely go back on this monetization model.
Wow. I just realized that Unity games already report "telemetry" by phoning home for quite a while. I have serious doubts that this is legal. My main point is, that I have a contract with the game developer/platform where I buy the game. But not with Unity. They have no consent to collect any data from the user.
Thanks greedy Unity CEO for making people look closer at Unity, so they see what a mess this thing really is.
I first read Unity's announcement before hearing what the media had to say, I calculated what they were asking and how it would affect me and I thought it was not going to break my business model. It makes sense that Unity needs more money to stay up to date and bring new features, they have always struggled when compared to Unreal, so I figured if these fee's allow them to bring better features and make Unity a more competitive engine then I support this change.
