Effective January 1, 2024, we will introduce a new Unity Runtime Fee that’s based on game installs. We will also add cloud-based asset storage, Unity DevOps tools, and AI at runtime at no extra cost to Unity subscription plans this November.
https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates
Effective January 1st, 2024, every indie game developing studio will be dropping Unity like a hot potato.
More like effective immediately.
Something I completely missed, due to the insanity that is the runtime fee, is that they’re also getting rid of their Plus subscription.
While Plus never had a bunch of benefits, it was basically the edition for individuals and very small teams who just wanted to get rid of the splash screen. These users would have to use Pro now, which is 5x more expensive at 2040$/year/seat.
The roadmaps over last few years already showed that they don’t really care about indie devs anymore, but now it feels like they’ve become actively hostile.
My inclination is that something is screwy with their business model, to the point where they need to do this to stay afloat. But to be fair I don’t actually know a whole lot about Unity, this just seems like something that would drive away the majority of customers so I could only see this making sense under the context of being a move made in desperation.
That Parsec acquisition is likely not panning out the way they thought. The only thing unity did was kill Arcade….the main focus of it to pivot towards a mainstream corporate friendly product…. Which (shocker here) was not the main demographic of users
No, it’s the former EA CEO doing EA things in Unity. The one that called developers stupid for not using microtransactions.
Unity is seriously flawed and they had the audacity to say that this is necessary for them to fix their shit.
They’re desperate trying (and failing) to compete with Unreal without realizing that it’s mostly small indie devs or mid sized studios who use them, and those can just move to Godot…
Indie game devs: Godot will be happy to have you. Not nearly as large of an ecosystem of tutorials and for pay assets, but time will fix that if people start moving over in mass. I know for my gamejam games I’ll take Godot any day of the week.
Godot also has first-class Linux support, and built a solid foundation that allows for Wayland support in the future. Developing Unity games on Linux has been broken for a while now.
I hope people will also realise that in the future - if not already - every game they have installed and that is running unity, will report back to them.
Time to setup some firewall rules
RIP Project 06 I guess. Screw you, Unity.
It’s not being released on official sources like Steam so hopefully there’s no way for them to find out
If they just release a ZIP file with everything including EXEs ready to play, thats not an “install”
This is going to fuck over devs who have storefronts for their products like Steam, PlayStation Store and Xbox Store
Actually, this change would’ve affected everything originally. They said Personal was now the default, and they’re tracking the charges by engine analytics, so they’d have the necessary info regardless of install method.
That said, they’ve updated the fees to now be revenue and installs, rather than either, so free projects should be safe for now.
