Changes to Unity Engine Licensing

[Rebel Friend]

The Unity devs announced today that the following changes would be made to the engine and its licensing effective January 1, 2024:

• After a certain threshold, developers will be charged a fee of $0.20 per install/download of a game made in Unity. This includes Steam re-installs of a game and will be applied retroactively to games running on older versions of Unity
• Unity Plus is being retired. You now have to pick between Unity Personal (free, games will show a Unity splash screen upon launch) and Unity Pro ($2040 per seat).
• Unity Personal will now require a constant online connection, will stop working three days after going offline

How will this affect the development of the game/workshop content going forward?

https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates

[SuperJesse64]

I smell an exodus.

[Sasha Mason]

Currently unknown.

Now, to be perfectly clear I am - not - talking on behalf of the developer, BUT, it is too early to say how exactly this will affect future developments. Until the fee is active, nothing should change. I'm certain that, as we get closer to the date, you will have proper announcements posted about this on Steam and on Discord.

That is, assuming Unity will actually go through with this, which I hope they won't because this will actively kill off any free Unity title, as each free Unity game becomes a financial death trap.

[Rebel Friend]

Guess it's just something to keep an eye on, then. Thanks!

[P. Good @ Ravenfield patching]

That's why I just changed the game's splash screen lol. The game's development will continue as normal for now, but tbh Unity's new pricing model is super unclear. At the very least, I'm never ever using Unity again for any future projects after Ravenfield is done!

[Smoked Turkey]

Originally posted by SteelRaven7:

That's why I just changed the game's splash screen lol. The game's development will continue as normal for now, but tbh Unity's new pricing model is super unclear. At the very least, I'm never ever using Unity again for any future projects after Ravenfield is done!

THE MAN IS HERE!

[Furry Slurry]

So i cant play this game well ♥♥♥♥

[Rebel Friend]

Originally posted by FurrySlurry (the sergal king):

So i cant play this game well ♥♥♥♥

no you can still play the game it's just that the people that made the game engine are trying to nickle and dime developers in the name of anti-piracy

[76561198365066223]

I hope they changed their mind. they're going to discourage indie/small developer going forward if they implement this. And big company like Sony, Konami, Mihoyo, etc. Definitely are going to fight this since their mobile games also run on unity.

[John27]

Yeah an UE4 powered Ravenfield would be nice!

[Furry Slurry]

Originally posted by Meyers07:

Yeah an UE4 powered Ravenfield would be nice!

But how about the older computers who cant run UE4?

[John27]

Originally posted by FurrySlurry (the sergal king):

Originally posted by Meyers07:

Yeah an UE4 powered Ravenfield would be nice!

But how about the older computers who cant run UE4?

1. They're slowly being phased out
2. Even my Core i3 3240 (11 years old CPU as of now), Nvidia GT 1030 GDDR5 (6 years old GPU), 1x8GB DDR3 (i install it in 2018), can run UE4 games well in around 30fps minimum (such as: Project Wingman, Borderlands 3, CODE VEIN, Ace Combat 7, Nightmare Reaper, and even Fortnite! idk about now) better than Unity games in heavier workload (i have switched to a Ryzen 5500u powered laptop that ran UE4 games marginally worse, but it did better on multi-core dependant games)

[LivingWithGames]

Originally posted by Funkbag Chimbelo:

The Unity devs announced today that the following changes would be made to the engine and its licensing effective January 1, 2024:

• After a certain threshold, developers will be charged a fee of $0.20 per install/download of a game made in Unity. This includes Steam re-installs of a game and will be applied retroactively to games running on older versions of Unity
• Unity Plus is being retired. You now have to pick between Unity Personal (free, games will show a Unity splash screen upon launch) and Unity Pro ($2040 per seat).
• Unity Personal will now require a constant online connection, will stop working three days after going offline

How will this affect the development of the game/workshop content going forward?

https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates

Minor update, reinstalls won't be charged apparently anymore, but only the very initial installation by an user.

That's still dogwater though.

[John27]

Originally posted by LivingWithGames:

Originally posted by Funkbag Chimbelo:

The Unity devs announced today that the following changes would be made to the engine and its licensing effective January 1, 2024:

• After a certain threshold, developers will be charged a fee of $0.20 per install/download of a game made in Unity. This includes Steam re-installs of a game and will be applied retroactively to games running on older versions of Unity
• Unity Plus is being retired. You now have to pick between Unity Personal (free, games will show a Unity splash screen upon launch) and Unity Pro ($2040 per seat).
• Unity Personal will now require a constant online connection, will stop working three days after going offline

How will this affect the development of the game/workshop content going forward?

https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates

Minor update, reinstalls won't be charged apparently anymore, but only the very initial installation by an user.

That's still dogwater though.

"reinstalls won't be charged apparently anymore" nuh uh still unclear.

Still how would they track install counts in the older builds? Retroactively made every single Unity executable there "phone home"?

There's also the ones that are designed to be DRM-free in the first place like games from GOG or Itchio.

Also Unity terms of use i believe (since i never use the engine apart from curiosity) doesn't state that developers must attach mandatory cookie, attestation, DRM, or whatever

[LivingWithGames]

Originally posted by Meyers07:

Originally posted by LivingWithGames:

Minor update, reinstalls won't be charged apparently anymore, but only the very initial installation by an user.

That's still dogwater though.

"reinstalls won't be charged apparently anymore" nuh uh still unclear.

Still how would they track install counts in the older builds? Retroactively made every single Unity executable there "phone home"?

There's also the ones that are designed to be DRM-free in the first place like games from GOG or Itchio.

Also Unity terms of use i believe (since i never use the engine apart from curiosity) doesn't state that developers must attach mandatory cookie, attestation, DRM, or whatever

That is a good point though, hrrm...I don't like this one bit. They need to backpedal this more, just making it less bad isn't enough. Otherwise we could live an age of people making more game engines, not just GameMaker and Godot being used. (Even Unreal, since I seen a few indies use it.)

[P. Good @ Ravenfield patching]

According to this official forum post: https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/ reinstalls do count towards the install count. Demos (such as the free demo on Itch.io also count. Oh but don't worry, pirated copies will be detected by Unity's so called fraud detection services. Basically I would need to bundle Unity's tracking software with Ravenfield to be able to do this. Which obviously is not something I want to do.

It's literally insane.