Unity Special no.3: The reckoning. They are sorry, but the trust is gone!

unfortunately no added value there like I'm I'm sorry like Mark really tried hard to kind of remain on good com corporate PR like excellent training literally like pretty much every single questions was completely deflected I'm sorry like yeah he the the guy from the YouTube channel he asked something and then Mark was like oh blah blah blah blah blah blah blah and answered nothing this is no [ __ ] gaming podcast 2 and a half gamer sharing actionable insights dropping Knowledge from our day-to-day user acquisition game design and AD monetization jobs we are definitely not discussing the latest industry news but having so much fun let's not forget this is a 400 a.m. conference discussion Vibe so let's not take it too seriously never mind welcome everybody my name is m I'm Felix Brer

hosts today hello hello hello welcome to what we all hope is the third and final installment in The Hectic drama that has been the unity pricing update yes short is the last this is yeah I really hope so I have a feeling it won't but I really hope it like it will of course but in short summary not to bore our listeners two weeks ago Unity changed their pricing uh structure angering the whole whole industry this in turn forced developers last week to unite and boycott unity and the iron Source monetization SDK yesterday Unity rolled back on their pricing update and apologized the apology came in the form of a written blog from president of create Mark witon who uh who start off his blog post with like a south South Park style like I'm sorry I'm sorry yeah um sorry uh and the main takeway way the

the it's going to be showing around yeah yeah yeah okay good we're sorry the main takeaways from the blog post were that in summary uh Unity personal plan will remain free there will be no runtime fee for Games built on un uh Unity personal uh they will be increasing the cap from 100,000 to 200,000 uh and then they will also remove the requirement to use made with the unit the splash screen by the like what the [ __ ] like yeah yeah he not does anyone care about this like splash screen peas like potatoes that no one cares right okay so no game with less than 1 million in trailing 12 month Revenue will be subject to the fee okay uh and for games that are subject to the runtime fee uh basically you have the choice of either a two and a half% revenue share uh uh yeah uh that's calculated on the number of new people

engaging with your game each month and basically yeah the numbers are always self-reported and yeah for me what's the most interesting thing here is that the apology came from the president of create and not the CEO and my taking from this is that either it was his idea to begin with OR basically John retto has damaged his reputation enough and doesn't want to roll back like what you guys stop please anyway this blog post was Fallen up with an open invitation to join a fireside chat that was held yesterday which the both of you watched correct yeah it's [ __ ] terrible unfortunately no added value there like I'm I'm sorry like Mark really tried hard to kind of remain on good corporate PR like excellent training literally like pretty much every single questions was completely deflected I'm sorry yeah he the the guy from the YouTube channel he asked something and then why was like

oh blah blah blah blah blah blah blah and answered nothing I like but like some of those questions he wouldn't answer even if he you know was forced to like like did you see a drop in your whatever clients or something or like you know how do you or did you did you didn't did didn't you anticipate the backlash or like some of those kind of very obvious ones so it was yeah but honestly like was this a fireside chat or just like uh covering ass type of PR moment this was even worse than when Diablo developed ERS came on the fir side chat because they screw up the season literally that was better no seriously he asked like like few few questions and it was just like so bad I I didn't feel he actually answered anything yeah but how happy are you that you were not Mark yesterday during that Fireside shot I would have hated doing that like that fire side sh was like a PR standun seriously like it wasn't no new edit no

close to like asking like very tough questions it was like yeah well well okay well I thought you know we are a big company it will take some time to actually blah blah it's PR exercise unfortunate like even if you go to to to Twitter or like X how it's called now into the post there there's like Unity support people answering the questions of some people there that that was even more informative than what was the whole hour fires side chat there actually they clarified something there I think but still like it's kind of wake in some some some things like there's all a lot of these kind of like people were posting in the chat on the fire side like trust me bro 2023 this whole thing trust me bro we're not going to change the terms again pray that we don't do it again so going to happen no no no no how how what's the official response from all this then from the fireside chat and the updated blog like everybody's [ __ ] angry yeah everybody's angry it's like literally the Darth Vader scene from Star Wars like I have Al the deal pred I don't

alter it anymore it's the same like yeah people well the thing is like uh they apologize like multiple times yes okay they [ __ ] up they said it on on the the fire side sh yes but honestly the trust is broken huh yeah that like exactly everybody's [ __ ] angry about like what they did and like nobody is trusting them not to do it again yeah let's talk Maybe about little bit of facts was actually changed here so people know yeah what's what's the deal is about like I mean the actual points there want to go through them Felix now you go I go okay so the unity personal plan was added there because it was taken out before completely so I think this is a kind of push towards silencing the Indie community that they are kind allowed to live and not not really kind of do much anger there or something like that allowed to live there they're are vocal like they're vocal mostal say like

the thing is if this like all Revol didn't happen they would just go with yeah whatever they just uh said yeah it's that's the worst part but but but even the thing that I don't think so it changed that much to be honest like it's not really like 80% degree reverse here it's just kind of some things were ironed out in a way that like kind of Suits them because then the other think uh that was added of course is a 2.5% ref share now which is something to kind of cap the overall monthly runtime fee so it wouldn't bankrupt you if your high volume install game if I understand correctly this is all it is about maybe ridiculous that we're having this discussion anyway yeah like this is all about is it because they finally this time they were able to put the calculator themselves on the site not like before so you don't have to rely on the third party she now but you know like the thing is

what the [ __ ] does it mean self-reported instance yeah because I'm just like you know nobody knows nobody knows it's it's it's not be really really adamant that they want to help out Unity get paid as well so it's seriously like it's not written anywhere like how can you like yeah let me just go straight with the example so so there's the calculator I just punched in the numbers that we thought about um share screen share screen share screen my my perfect Hotel uh that we covered last week yeah why not my perfect Hotel like okay we're going to go there so I was looking I was looking into the the number of Impressions that the change was like 100% after they take out the the unity but we'll get there yeah yeah so um so funny there's there's like three things that you need to click here when it finally loads hopefully uh where there's like my game exceeds 1 million USD cross Revenue trailing last 12 months my game

has over 1 million initial engagements by the way they [ __ ] completely stopped using the word installs it's now called engagement that's the new mantra like they're afraid just just tell installs and they're scared no of course like because the the guy on on the fire side he said oh wow engagement all the [ __ ] things they they pretty much B the word install for now like the whole company policy like because they don't know how to track yeah in so down there called engagement altered game play man I'm seeing it Al come on finish example my game has over 1 million initial engagements live to date my game is created in 2023 LTS release or later and this is really important thing we haven't talked about it yet but this is the other loophole that people are probably going to use now because they said that only no games created with any currently supported verion will be impacted by the runtime until they

update to the pretty much new engine version that will be released somewhere next year and by the looks of it it seems people are kind of hoping and they can just stay for a long time on the old engine version and be Exempted out of this whole fee thing that's very naive yeah which is very naive we'll get back to the [ __ ] next year pretty much yeah well yeah because they stop they said that I think some it was written that the that the engine versions have like two years of support and updates and after that they're dead and you need to you know move on further so this effectively puts this whole thing up to like 2025 like half of 20 that's it that's the time that God currently God currently has to kind of do something with it so that's my guess anyway so we assume that this is there and then we estimate monthly Revenue by the way include all revenue generated from retail sales inner purchases subscription fees web payments offline payments and AD base Revenue so everything that's net right that's yeah that's everything % and everything or

it's gross gross I think it's gross yeah and then estimated monthly initial engagement so yeah we talk about around 8 million a month for my my perfect hotel and then we see like 13 million or something like that for month yes 13 so which estimates the monthly rtime fee at 141 K and yeah yeah so Prett pretty much literally like one 150,000 or 1.77% of the revenue which is on the Enterprise version if we would go to Pro it kind of goes a little bit higher regarding the percent blah blah blah mathematics whatever so and this is month a month that's like 10 amazing developers like the best like yeah so yeah um that's going to be pretty interesting like my guess is that uh everybody on the hyper casual hybrid

side is just kind of scrambling away from this because this is what like what's the what's the United Collective of game developers that rose up last week what are they saying about this oh yeah so um there's already a reaction from that group because it already has more than um I think over thousand signatures there yeah I think thousand yeah yeah it was it was 800 but now it's 1,53 25 plus billion total game install or whatever metric you have there there's pretty much all the kind of all the high volume install games people I would say don't not only high volume it became like a lot of other developers as well yeah so I guess all the Indies assign it in a way what are they say so they said that um there's a statement [ __ ] off yeah Collective response to recent decision main problem is that an update to Unity rant if it doesn't solve its fundamental issue it exist potential impact on the Game Dev Community

Building A Game's business while playing run paying runtime fees even with its proposed Revenue cap is not an option and many developers will use the old version of unity engine to avoid that feed that's think what we talked before that's pretty much how how people will get the leeway on their life until 2025 because they stay on the old version of unity the latest announcement shows again that the game developer Community has no choice but to explore and focus on other engines sadly Unity is also unwilling to openly communicate with it community in a true dialogue to find common ground and workable Solutions instead it chooses again to inform its community of it changes as effect the market rules are simple everyone prefers to do business with Partners whose changes in terms and conditions are transparent and considered developers interests this is why the community will not rely on unity in Long Run and already started migrating to other engines as United game Des will focus on fostering can I throw up already investing in open source engines Jesus Christ just shut up Ser

that's um I think the the thing is like this is a sign from the the developers that basically they're clever enough to realize that you know at some point they will be forced to update the engine and then they will be subject to the runtime fee like shame on you right now it's shame on you because you know they're going to update it at some point you're an idiot if you think they're not going to like update it at some point in the next two years for me this is the biggest change that's not really like that kind of obvious into the whole thing that we just gave you three more years basically yes on the old version of unity but keep in mind that like being on an obsolete version of unity and not getting the new updates and keeping with the market is kind of [ __ ] anyway you know what I just realized that means that probably in two to three years the biggest hyper casual studio in the world will be super sonic probably yes why why because it's they won't be subject to the runtime fee come on man why why do you think that they won't be you know why do you keep forgetting that Super Sonic is own by

that's the big question man what I'm saying is do I do you underestimate all the other people not bending together and having like a that can okay okay fair yeah okay fair because these games are not that complex man it's not 3D it's not like whatever photo real be such a game designer don't be such a game designer they're complicated don't be such an ignorant person exactly it's not the game design it's like trying to solve the problem at least okay anyway regarding the boycott uh uh like uh so also the boycott this United group of game developers uh they also started like yeah turning off the unity and iron Source SDK and we've actually been given some pretty interesting information from our friend uh Kaizen the self- served DPS and amazing information K thank you very much for sharing this yeah yeah can you share the image so this is an image uh of the amount of bid requests coming from the unity Exchange so it's the

closest thing we have to a proxy of how large Unity is in terms of ads shown and AD requested so you can see some of the biggest worlds in the pubs here on the list and how many bid requests they were getting uh on the fourth of September compared to the 18th of September when the boycott started and there's some pretty big companies like say games is down 99.92% I was Studios 99 like I was looking Excel sheet and I was like my per perfect Hotel minus 100% I was like okay anyway just just uh yeah if if you're listening to this just pop up the the video and just have a look but like yeah there's some pretty big numbers like everyone's down like either 50% or 99% uh on unity and I also asked Kaizen to pull some overall like metadata or overall on the unity exchange so uh normally uh on a given day they see about 17 to 20 billion bid requests uh

from Unity exchange per day on the 18th when they pulled the numbers for me uh they saw around 14 billion B request which means that the boycott could have decreased the unity like Network by about 30% so this is a bit of a simplified assumption because it doesn't take into some like account some DSP terminology stuff like just like swings and yeah but anyway like this is the closest estimate we probably going to get unless you're working inside of unity so 30% like that could be as big a number as how much has decreased but like before they actually backtracked right this boycott had really started to gain a lot of momentum a lot of signatures and it wouldn't have surprised me if probably Unity Network could have haved if this went on for another week like is there anything you've noticed on the the UA fronts as well honestly not that much on the UA front no but I heard from few of these companies that actually signed this open

letter that they were actually banned from running UA on unity and iron Source I was like what the [ __ ] seriously I've heard I've heard that too it's it's whoa it's just like wow sorry for non at nonua people so this basically means that people are throwing away Unity mediation from their waterfall the graph that I'm looking at which no no not mediation the network network network okay so network is taken out that means that 100% Dro that's easy like it's like it's out of the yeah and then the numbers that you said is what from like 70 Bill to 14 bill so is the amount of uh bid requests that Kaizen which is a self served DSP sees on their like DSP from Unity every day so like this can go up and down for many reasons like un can also throttle this so it's like it's not clear 100% this is what's happened but it's the closest thing as us from the outside can get to indicate how much the unity like Network decreased in size by so like I would say like these numbers looks like it's decreased by about 30%

that's probably not the truth but it's the closest thing we'll get by not being inside of unity like 30 to 40% for sure 70 to 14 17 17 okay it's like to 40 not 7 like 70 to 40 maybe I have no no so they see 17 to 20 billion B request thank than yeah but yeah crazy thing is like everyone who signed up on this like list they get banned from doing UA on Unity like I was not expecting that to happen just like whoa but isn't it's like Unity shooting the themselves in the foot no well look it's it's like well you [ __ ] us we [ __ ] you well but then yes it's basically shooting themselves in theot definitely um okay shouldn't do that that's interesting yeah um because you know

like what happens is your inventory is getting lower like smaller basically and then you actually ban the other advertisers that can actually beat on the small inventory it's like okay doesn't make any sense yeah you're not going to make any friends what's the what's the unity share price saying on this because it I was looking there was still half a trading day left I was looking at it from the day of release the share price went down by from 30 what 38.97 to 30 1.61 so like 18.9% decrease like 20% decrease by the way so so around that um but yeah they like if you look at the stock overall like you know pretty much from the usual bull market that every Tech stock kind of collapse in November 2021 they haven't recovered that's like normal and my guess is that we see more blood bad

after their quarterly earnings after this quarter when this whole kind of battle happened so that will be when like uh this was the on a week oh quot yeah a week or two couple weeks a couple weeks okay okay okay I mean we'll see it at tail end of Q3 right so when they release Q3 numbers which is going to be in a Yeah couple of weeks that's when you'll see it yeah okay so that's that's there because um so I think there was an update on to FAQ or what was there that uh was so the credits thing I want to get there so it still still works or is still mentioned in on the website that still like if you use the unity other services level play you're going to get rid of the Run we yeah we talked about like the the custom deals and suddenly it appeared in the FAQ I don't know maybe the the 40% of the unity.com traffic that we had for the the first episode was actually true uh but anyway they said that uh developers and

Publishers adopting Unity Services beyond the editor which is unity game serving hosting vvo no idea what it is level play obviously and then other Unity cloud services may be eligible for credits for the rtime fee well we'll see so basically what they really updated with wait wa in cases the game Publishers may want partnership structures that more specifically meet their development need high volume games please contact your Unity representative so you know like they say well well we don't do custom deals but well we can it out we might we might yeah we might Jesus [ __ ] Christ the thing is the limits as well for sure if you want to get exemp from these credits right like and get credits right you probably need to earn such really big amounts that probably even attainable for most companies anyway think think is no

nobody knows like what the what's the the credit kind of like amount is and still is a blur couple of Millie probably couple of Millie a month honestly like if you think about it in like the entrepreneurship kind of way they need to give you deals or like Credits based on your Revenue doesn't make any other sense because they said in the Fireside [ __ ] as well like the guy asked like why the [ __ ] he even like did this like the price change and he was like well because you know we need to run the sustainable business and he repeated that exact sentence like 10 times doing the fire s we need to run a sustainable business which is fair enough and I get it they should have thought about this 10 years ago and they wouldn't be an issue like it's their fault like you don't even even think about it like 10 years ago like you you can think about it like two two weeks

ago you just need to you just need to talk to your customers and he said oh well we were talking to a big client small clients independent developers I was like yeah I don't I don't bu knew about this thing I don't buy that at all like it's [ __ ] [ __ ] if you really talk to your customers then you wouldn't really like release this type of deal anyone all right future predictions what do you think happens to Unity three years down the line um so I think Edward continues like this is not over definitely from like the hybrid hyper casual people andin and all these other things like we saw with the Kaizen report so this this is still on table and I guess we'll just get worse as we go um other engines like I've seen already like let's say guys from Terraria pledge what like 200k donations for open source stuff and like this will just increase these kind of other open source engines initiatives to kind of get a reliable alternative at some point not now but like you know 2025 is kind

of long time to get there go already like announced they're going to have an outet store we've seen like uh hiring spree from Mi hoyo or like hoyo hiring engine developers stuff like that so yeah the push will continue definitely because I don't think so like yeah this maybe helped some to some degree but the trust is still broken like it didn't like you know they didn't put in any policy about like you can say sorry forever yeah yeah of course just [ __ ] so the main thing is they wouldn't back or like backtrack any of this fee if we just if the developers didn't push back yeah exactly that's the main thing yeah nobody nobody cares nobody cares so so that that that continues um as I said I think the main kind of a way to go forward now for people is that if your game don't really

needs Advance features that these other engine builds will have you will pretty much stay on the old one until 2025 if I get it right or if at some point Unity doesn't come back and forces you to do it because this kind of just like you know kicks the can down the road because oh yeah we will'll be okay we like leave you for like 20 25 support but but what happens if next year they said oh you know like we're sorry but you need to update because something Happ h they're they're a publicly traded company right so you always can assume what they will do will always be the interest of like increasing share price so in two years they will force people to move on and be faced to pH question and every answer was we need to build a sustainable company yes but why do you even think this yeah this is it why do you even think it it will be like uh two years why why don't you think already next year they're going to force everybody to go there could be very big risk who's who know who's bearing them from doing it like just next year they force every

bam if I'm a Unity shareholder I'd want them to do it you know like he he said he basically said like we are actually changing the terms of service like every year that's what he has that's what he said on the fires side yet and like how how the [ __ ] you can't even work with this yeah like stuff man like I I altered the deal pray that I don't alter it again exactly yeah and know not on that note thank you very much for listening yeah yeah yeah see you on the next one hopefully not that last hopefully this is the last one yeah yeah yeah yeah yeahh thank you Unity by the way did a very good job uh next time you want to just talk uh PR [ __ ] just come to us that that Fireside [ __ ] was like [ __ ] terrible because it only answered your question not but man honestly what we would do if he would be on our podcast like he was just deflect with corporate

Shield all the way like all the time I don't blame him I don't blame him always ask the question but if you if if someone doesn't answer you ask again yeah I know but you can then spend the whole podcast just asking the same question yeah until he replies and I or he answers I don't [ __ ] care that like that's that's what it should be about okay never mind never mind anyway anyway anyway I'm want to go back to my weekend yes thank you very much [ __ ] Saturday night ciao see you next time bye-bye [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music]