After Using Unity For 10 Years, I Have Some Thoughts

oh so look at this we've got this really cool thing I'm I'm not sure if you guys have heard of this it's called Unreal Engine um looks pretty cool I've never heard of it I'm going to check it out now obviously I'm being sarcastic guys um I did download unreal today and I'm going to start learning it now before a lot of you who use Unity freak out I am still going to be using Unity for our current game Twisted Tower and hey we might use unity in the future I mean frankly everything's up in the air um it's been kind of a hell week in terms of just game development and I wanted to just wait and be patient before posting anything because frankly guys well I'll be honest with you when the unity news dropped I got a million text messages and everyone was asking me what do you think about Unity dying it's unity's funeral blah blah blah and it was like this big chaos uh a ton of uh attention and that kind of stuff kind of annoys me

on social media when something becomes chaotic and news stories get blown out of proportion so I first thought this is ridiculous everyone needs to calm down but then I actually looked at the pricing structure so in this video I want to talk about the pricing structure or the news announcement a couple of leaks that have come out about Unity um and how they're probably going to walk all this back but why I think that the wise decision I'm just want to be completely honest with you guys I think the wisest decision for those of you who are using unity and I'm I'm using it as well I think the wisest decision is to at least start learning unreal okay um and I hate saying this because I I I'll be honest I have friends in at unity and unity has been nice to me in the past but I don't care I mean if you're going to do a stupid uh pricing structure I'm going to talk about your stupid pricing structure and even if you walk it back you're still going to have to hear about the stupid pricing structure from Thomas

brush okay so um let's talk about the stupid pricing structure really quick okay so nobody cares that Unity is going to charge us to use their engine nobody cares um and in fact I thought that that's why people were frustrated and I thought well y'all need to just pay your fair share pay the piper we're all grown-ups here let's pay our fair share but then I looked at the pricing structure now the structure here is not necessarily the problem it's actually how it's tracked that's the problem so you can see here that if your Revenue threshold is over $200,000 USD and your install threshold is over 200,000 then you're going to start owing 20 cents per install okay now if you have Unity Pro things are a little bit different right over a million dollars over a million copies then you start owing um per install and unity Enterprise same sort of thing right it slowly becomes less expensive for the studios so this actually when

you look at it it's like well I I might be okay for example if I pay for Unity Pro it's a couple Grand I own a business so I'm okay with spending $2,000 for my primary software that I'm making games with um that doesn't bother me and if I'm over a million dollars and over a million units I mean I probably won't even do that let's be honest so okay no big deal right I could just pay you know 15 cents per in right now the problem is I'm looking at this chart and even still my brain is having trouble figuring out what the what this is okay so you have to hit your threshold and then new installs per month is 100 one to 100,000 okay so you go it's so freaking confusing that that off the bat is it's already confusing but if you're let's say I'm over a million then I do 100,000 one to 100,000 installs for the next month I owe 15

cents and it goes down the more installs there are okay whatever Unity that's confusing enough but here's the problem okay I know what a lot of you are thinking who are like sort of have rose-colored glasses about this you're thinking well I'll never get there well we'll talk about that but here's the big problem how do they know how many installs you have that's the ultimate question how do they know how many installs you have well they're putting an algorithm some kind of I mean it feels like malware putting it into your build of your game you upload it to steam and then that data is tracked and sent back to Unity so basically big brother is going to figure out how many installs you have not you so you're not going to self-report your data so it's different than unreal unreal is self-reported data 5% of the revenue goes to Unreal Based on self-reported data from developers over a million million units or over a

million dollars okay this is different Unity is actually the one tracking the data that's the big problem in fact I've confirmed this okay what's the real reason you're upset about Unity I wanted to get an idea from you guys about why you guys are upset because I knew why I was upset okay once I looked into the tracking data and you could see here the problem is f 54% of you guys say you don't trust their install numbers okay that's the big issue you can see from treeall I think it's mostly about the CEO the leadership of the company and pulling the rug out from under developers the changing of terms of service and hiding that one overnight no one can trust them at all anymore they can just do something worse down the road and we're going to talk about that in just a minute that's the the there's a leak that came out that says they're actually not going to be using their own algorithm and instead we're actually just going to self-report but the problem is we can't trust that that's going to stay true we'll talk about it

in a second um but here's a a wonderful statement from jpops not a developer but this stuff aside you need to consider the look that Unity will now be loaded with malware to track installs consumers will likely not take kindly to that and avoid games made in unity so again the tracking of installs is really really the problem here okay I don't use unity and I never have I'm still upset about it though so someone who valued it space in the industry especially among Indie devs as upsetting as the model is what upsets me more is the shadiness about it and again it has to do with this sort of opaque algorithm okay if it was just send us your gross revenue numbers send us your send us how much money your games has made and then you pay a 5% fee that's you know people would probably still be upset about it but I don't think they would be as upset as let's say

Dreamchaser here who says that look it's Shady this whole thing is Shady and that's why platforms like gdau um and even unreal but gdau is I mean it's really growing in popularity right now because it's open source right Unity is the opposite of gdau okay now again I'm still going to use Unity for Twisted Tower um because we've invested over six figures in this game we have a team size of three um frankly the the the software itself and the the people I've met at Unity are fine it has to do with the shadiness of number one this weird algorithm that determines the end stalls and number two the leadership now I really want to really quickly I want to clarify why the shadiness is scary okay if or most most of you are probably thinking well I will never hit a million installs

maybe you will so there's there's a couple there's three different business models that get destroyed by this um this weird Shady algorithm number one your business model for a $15 game if you if most of you I think are probably going to sell like a$1 15 to $20 game when you release a game you're screwed because piracy that's just the way things are your game is going to get pirated Unity says that and we'll we'll talk about their tweet in a second Unity says that piracy is not going to be an issue that they will ignore piracy I don't know how but we'll talk about that number two um Game Pass and Humble Bundle and and um uh Playstation uh plus how exactly do they determine millions of copies being sold for free on a subscription service like Game Pass how do they know that they say they're not going to track that data and charge for it and they say they're going to put that burden on Microsoft no they won't micro well they they say they're going to do that but Microsoft is in the

end going to put the burden on the developers in the form of lower or smaller payments right um an advance is given a development fee or a license is given from Microsoft or Sony to developers to participate in game pass those fees are going to go down because now they're going especially for Unity developers because of that install fee okay so it's going to be passed down to the developers Okay the third person who's going to get hurt and this is the biggest one is the person who makes a mobile game for a dollar okay those individuals can easily sell a million copies or 200,000 copies and they're not charged on 5% of it of of their let's say dollar game it's 20% because of that 20 cent per install so that is what's Sinister about this they're destroying the mobile market okay now let's talk about unity's tweet clarifying A lot of this okay

I'm not going to go through this whole tweet but basically they just said look we we understand the confusion and frustration and they say this in fact more than 90% of our customers will not be affected by this change okay this is true in the sense that yes 90% of our customers are not going to hit this threshold but number one this is kind of a slap in the face saying most of our developers will never get there they'll never make enough money but number two how many of you right now are not the 10% of game developers actually making a good living from their games but one day you want to be right it's it's like investing in the stock market I would not invest my time and my money in the stock market if I didn't think it was going to pay off in the long run 90% of these game developers these customers that they're talking about these customers are going uh they're going in full force picking a software like Unity because they trust that in 2 years it'll be a viable option for them to make a lot of money they're Dreamer right we're all dreaming big

what if I told you that if you run a marathon at the end of the marathon there's a black hole for you to fall into and you have no idea what it is that that is what these 90% of customers are thinking they're thinking I I'm going to learn Unity I'm going to master it I'm going to release a great game and then at the end of the Finish Line when I launch my game I am going to make a million dollars but I have no idea what Unity is going to do I have no idea how they're going to track my data how much I'm going to owe them and if my game is pirated to hell I'm still not going to know what to do or I'm not going to know uh how many installs that is and unity is going to tell me how many installs that is and finally nobody knows if they're actually going to change it right are they going to change this continually frankly it sucks because I I there's so many people at Unity I love but the trust has been broken and so when I see a leak like this okay when I see a leak that says unity's policies they they're

going to backpedal okay it says Unity has briefed staff on changes to its runtime policy intended for announcement in the coming days according to Bloomberg Unity is expected to limit install fees to 4% of the game's revenue for customers making over a million doar oh wow better than unreal further Bloomberg understands the installations counting towards that threshold will not be added retroactive retroactively that's good and then also it's based on self-reported data and I'm not sure where that is in the article but I did read that yesterday it's based on self-reported data these are all really good things right guys except for the fact that the credibility has been lost so how long that's the big question how long is this going to last right how long is Unity going to keep this it's better than it's frankly it's better than unreal or at least on the surface but how long is that going to last right we have no idea so if if trust is broken it's like if the stock market if

the stock market was a company and they were like one day they randomly said by the way we're going to charge you 15 cents on every on your net gain per dollar blah blah blah or whatever you'd be like wait what I had no idea you could do this and now I can't trust the stock market at all you would see everybody pulling their money out of the stock market immediately because they a faith faith in a software or a system is what holds the whole thing together and I I'm I'm just I'm so shocked they did this it it makes it doesn't even make sense from a profitability pers because everyone saying like Unity is all about the money you would think that they wouldn't do this if they were about the money because they acquired all these customers over the last decade or more and now they're just completely losing faith with those customers so that's why we see this guys what's crazy here about this poll that I posted is the majority of my audience is is Unity

developers I mean if you're a Unity developer let me know in the chat uh or or the comments below if you're a Unity developer look at this what engine are you going to be using in 2024 almost 7,000 votes overwhelmingly unreal 42% It's scary uh Unity is at 22% how do they recover from this I don't think they do um now if you're making a unity game my advice to you is that make the game get it done if you're if you're deep in the weeds with your game in unity finish your game cuz frankly I don't think Unity is going to change their pricing structure for maybe the next year fingers crossed knock on wood I because I feel like it would just be suicide um so I think they're going to stay put on this 4% um which is fine uh but I would not count on that for the long term and so I'm not saying saying unreal is the future I'm not

saying I'm going to use unreal in the future I am telling you right now I'm going to click this button right here that big old download button and I'm going to start learning it right now okay because number one I I'm a YouTuber and I'm a teacher and a game developer and it's important for me to be on top of this stuff but number two for you guys um you got to learn the tools you got to learn the tools that um and you got to sort of just go with the punches right right um it's tough It's not fun this has been a weird week I love you guys cheers