twitter.com/StayAtHomeDev/status/1702439987692622173 Post on Twitter with the hashtag: #NOUNITYWITHFEES And express your frustrations with this decision to let Unity know that this is NOT OK.

Blender is an excellent example of how open source can grow to rival industry-standard software.

I think the worst part to me is the gaslighting. One day they said they would be charging for reinstalls, and the very next the edited the answer to try to say they wouldn’t and that charging for reinstalls was never in the spirit of the program. At that point it’s just a lie with corporate words, I’ve lost all trust in the company.

Even if Unity walks it back this time, there’s no guarantee they will next time.

Man I have 2 years of exp as a unity dev for a small studio, released multiple games, after that job I worked for 6 years as a java backend developer and I'm still on that job. For the last half of the year I've been working on my own game in unity in my spare time, the plan was to have the prototype version until the end of the year. I just wanna say that I love Unity as a tool, but with these recent changes I decided that I will definetly invest the time to make that prototype version in Godot and see how it feels! EDIT: Also you've got a sub my guy!

What people aren't talking about is that Unity's primary money maker is no longer smaller indie games. They are diversifying their income based on AI, visualization, and other non-game applications. Their CEO is previously from EA and has low opinions of their user base who are not monetizing games made with their engine in predatory ways. This is sort of obvious when you think about how "mobile-centric" this new licensing and install-based fee scheme was handled. They likely have connections with big AAA game studios and other large non-game viz companies and do special licensing with them. This move could easily have been about destabilizing the indie dev market in favor of their bigger clients... in order to lower competition between small indie devs and large companies that want to sell you $70+ games, collect and sell data, train AI, use predatory advertising and payment schemes, etc. That's where their allegiances lie, in the big $$$.

Honestly, this does not only break the trust for people using Unity, this shows what "for profit" companies can do with their powers which makes people trust those companies less in general. The reason why so many people suddenly look at engines like Godot is because of the open source aspect. Not in the way like "I can contribute to the code" or "I want to extent upon the source code", but the main reason why people look at Godot is because things like these can not happen and if Godot would stop to exist, code is still available so you don't lose your entire project and other people would probably take over the Godot project if that would ever happen. Basically open source provides more security and financial stability because you know what you'll be paying in 10, 20, 30 years from now.

Unfortunately for them, the "warning shot" seems to have scattered most of their userbase. I've never seen so many Twitter accounts proclaim that they were actively looking into switching to Godot in such a short time.

And remember, Godot is not the only open source game engine!

It's truly sad what Unity has begun, I'm learning game dev as a hobby but I'm thinking of dropping unity even if their changes don't affect me

We would argue that the hiring of John Riccitelo was the warning shot. This is the man who seriously floated the idea of making _reloading_ in an *FPS* a _microtransaction_ #knowyourenemy

Already testing out Godot, its mad intimidating but I'll make it work. To all the Unity devs out there, we got this, this is our passion, and our flame will not be snuffed.

This is a tip for you coming in as a game developer: Godot is very strong in the 2D area but weak in 3D. Unreal is very strong in the 3D area but weak in 2D. And last,O3DE is a future strong game engine open source in 3D. (Update 23.10 arrives octuber 9)

For an engine named unity, they did a great job at dividing they're userbase.

Godot for 2D and Unreal for 3D(until O3DE matures), F Unity

Time to switch to godot everyone

Honestly, some of us who are severely impacted by this change appreciate the opportunity to grieve with videos like this. Obviously there are limits and we don't need to see this sort of thing for months to come, but watching it helps get over the disbelief and helps us feel a sense of support in this situation. For many this is not really impactful; for others it instantly undoes months or years of education and hard work. For others, this destroys their business and puts them at risk of not being able to support themselves and their dependents. It creates an aura of uncertainty for projects deep in development or already released. People could owe more money than they have made. If it doesn't effect you, then great. You can easily ignore videos like this, but those of us who nave been impacted can appreciate the feeling that we are not alone.

It is absolutely fucking chaos that they are able to retroactively start charging games that have already been released under the old system. How does that even work? That's like if I bought a hammer, built a house with it, then the hammer company wanted to charge me a fee for every time the door is opened. I feel like from the videos I've seen on this, this really is not discussed enough. Even if Unity walks it back 100%, you can not continue to use the engine. They will try again and they will succeed. It might be a better deal, but it will slowly creep back up to the same level or worse.

Welcome to Godot, I jumped from Unity a year ago, and I don’t regret it!

I think at the end of the day, Unity is still going to stick with the exact model, but possibly more watered down, then back to the original pricing that is right now. Unity as a company is not gonna back away from this if they put the time and money into executing it. Unity has dug their own grave right now. Just depends on how shallow the grave goes

I'm baffling to see some people still protecting Unity just because "it won't affect him". Does that mean the company can have a free pass to ruin other people's lives as long as it doesn't concern them? That's a sickening mentality, TBH. People are totally missing to point. It's NOT the fee that generated a backlash. It's HOW they implemented it. Retroactively applying a new ToS upon the already shipped game is unethical at best; and scummy at worst. And without transparency on how they collect the installation data, it might land some devs in a legal problem that's beyond their control. I don't understand why Unity advocates never saw this. It's not like game devs are stinky and don't want to pay them money. No one complained about Epic's 5% royalties and that already proved my point. Better yet, UE has more complete tools most of which need to be purchased separately from Unity Asset Store; with FULL source codes, even. I'm gonna stick to Unreal and Godot from this point onward while looking for other alternatives, just in case. In case anyone wants to try Unity-like open-source engines, Stride and Flax might be good choices to start.

Can you please make a video tutorial on how to deploy a game made in Godot to iOS and Android. That’s what’s holding a lot of people back using unity to switch to Godot. There no videos that show this. I would switch to Godot if someone can show this in detail

They didn't think about their customers at all with this decision, they didn't think about the art either, it spares no thought for preservation, legacy, supporting small developers or the future, they didn't ask for opinions before doing it, they just did it, with no thought or remorse. If i was willing to sacrifice my life to make video games and they do walk this back, i would not want to take that chance with Unity ever again.

I'm an asset store developer. I make creatures and environments. Its hard to (sniffle) believe that the really cool and high quality asset I'm just about to release wont sell at all because Unity chased off all the game devs.

I can't explain to you how we feel. I am a Unity developer for over a decade, and this has mentally drained me. I've been using Unity since I was twelve, created hundreds of games, taught at the university, led projects for companies, and dedicated my whole life to it, only to now be contemplating whether it's better to choose Unreal or Godot. I'm in a pretty tricky situation, and I can't imagine what it's like for others with twice as much experience.

Several board members, including the CEO sold a bunch of shares before this announcement. They knew exactly what they were doing.

This is not only about Unity. But also about every other service software (MS Office, Photoshop, and so on): As soon as Unity gets away with it, other companies will follow this example! Everyone is watching this now! Not just gamers, developers, but every other company too!

I'm curious how many AAA companies would be willing to deal with that kind of fee structure, it's just so bad.

Ever since the unity fees, my entire KZfaq page became filled with godot tutorials

I just watch Callum Upton's video on this. He's a Unreal dev, but still raised a great question: If Unity is tracking installs, isn't that against GDPR / CPPA? Because for stuff like this you'd need to opt in, or at least have a chance to opt out. If the company is tracking that without the consent... That raises so many issues and problems, including, but not limited to: Security.

I've been using Unity for 9 years but I've never actually shipped a game (largely due to my games exploding in scope to well beyond what a single person could completely in a lifetime). I've worked on a variety of projects for varying lengths of time whilst working jobs in other industries. I've only spent about $100 on Unity market assets. With that in mind, I can walk away from Unity and it's not a huge issue for me. Yeah, Ive wasted a lot if time learning to use Unity but I've also learned a lot about writing clean, efficient code, designing games that are fun to play, and establishing work flows that make good use of my time. That being said, I'm going to go one step further. I'm not just going to stop using Unity, but I'm going to stop buying games that utilise the Unity engine, if they began development after 14/09/23.

To be fair, Unity has always been trying to self-destruct. They are finally succeeding.

I am switching to Godot, I am worried about the login requirement for Unity and potential malware to track game installs. Even without fees there were too many red flags for me, but I am early in my project.

Luckily I started with Godot but I almost started with Unity. I see now that it was a good choice.

Even if they announce and promise that they wouldn't do this again, I'm never using Unity again; even though it would never effect me

Godot looks good. I have a a bit of work to change over but so angry about this , but my motivation is through the roof, just to make a point. My game is 4 player Mahjong 10k lines but its mostly game logic , so its just about changing the UI/UX

Glad that I switched to Artificial Intelligence college program over a month ago. Most likely the features that got integrated into Unity might also jump ship to other game engines like Godot.

This is the best take of the issue that I’ve seen all day. You just earned a subscriber.

Could you make a tutorial on how to change the Godot engine and submit improvements please? I have no idea where to start.

This is a dangerous precedent not only for Unity but for the entire creative software market. All the CEOs are watching and wondering if they can pull stuff like this and get away with it. If Unity gets away with even a 100x smaller runtime fee, next year you'll see Tesla charging users for opening the door, Apply charging for taking pictures, Adobe charging for publishing your work made with their tools, COD charging you for reloads, etc etc. This is incredibly dangerous not just in game development, and not just about money - all games made with Unity are now going to be spyware (even more so, because they already use these surveillance tools in their ad stuff). They must reverse this 100% or everyone's gonna pay dearly in the future.

Awesome work as always. Clear, concise, credible. Anyone new, or recently new to game development should absolutely take your advice and run away from Unity. However, I'd also add that there may be a bigger reason to run away from Unity. Success and experience in making games with Unity will make you a good game maker in Unity. Success and experience in making games in Unreal, Godot and some other engines will make you a good game maker regardless of tool. I would argue that there is too much in Unity that is either Unity specific or so constrained by the Unity workflow that it limits you when adapting to other tools. Why is this important? As a developer, you will never use just the one tool for the rest of your career. It just wont happen. Using Unreal or Godot will give you a little bit more control, understanding and appreciation of the fundamentals, elements that you'll much more readily apply and use in other tools. I would say this applies to all levels of capabilty, from beginner to expert. Of course, for as long as you are in the Unity bubble, this is not a problem and you'll be safe... For as long as Unity allows you to be profitable...

Great and valid observations! Thanks a lot!

5:40 _Exactly_ my thoughts when I see another "B-But Godot can't do X and Y!" First, try it today. Chances are thing you were looking for is improved already. Second, it's open source. You're free to help out instead of spending time on writing a comment. Third, what, 3D is lacking? Oh, so that's why I see so many games with AAA-level graphics on Steam. /s Not to mention it's not really true. Top level? No. Good enough? Yes.

I’ve used multiple game engines and I think people fear the learning curves of changing engines. Could you make a video about how the skills translate since you used to use unreal?

My biggest worry with godot is reverse engineering. It's already possible to decompile entire godot games back into godot projects within the engine... including scripts, models, audio & other resources. I understand reverse engineering will always be an issue, however the fact that scripts can be extracted back into native format worries me for multiplayer gaming.

Here's hoping that all the asset makers for Unity will now make them specifically for Godot. Could be really good for the prospect of an asset store for Godot.

I had heard that Godot was working on an official asset store, not the "library" they have now. Is this true? if so, any idea when?

I started looking at Godot and it looks super user friendly, I might play around with it.

Not gonna lie, moment I saw the news the response was "nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure" and even left all the assets behind. I'll start over and rely on my newfound design skills (I made my 3D mascot!!!)

gamefromscratch mentioned they've had this in the works for a few months as unity changed TOS earlier this year to include the price change with 2023 version. and something about it's all executive decisions as there have been death threats from within the company along with resignations. they also have 'quietly' given some games the option to have the new fees waived by changing over to unity's ads monetization system

To those on the fence for an open source game engine, look at Linux and where it is today. All because Linux is open source and an Open Ecosystem. Guess what? People are working hard right now to make Godot an Open Ecosystem itself! Yeah, man. I'm sticking with Godot.

I'm working on a VR game in Unity. Just working out the gameplay. I have a backpack inventory, melee weapon and gun in a sandbox level I test stuff. I had tried to replicate that in Godot 3.5 a while ago and had problems. I retried this week and got further with 4. Would you recommend to me trying to convert my project over and continue? Or maybe some other engine for VR? I don't require fancy graphics as this is PS2 era inspired.

I'd love to hear input from Ex-unity users who have learned Godot inside and out, and compare the two. I'm ready to switch, but Unity has so many matured tools (and many that are lacking, I know!), and I'm wondering if Godot is truly production ready. Especially for VR deployment to the Quest.

Literally just made a bachelors thesis on how to make a 3D video game for beginners, and even tho i work as a front end programer i found it fun to make a game, but will switch to godot because of this

Curious, what are the engines shown on the thumbnail? I recognize Gamemaker, Godot and Unreal (wait, Unreal does require fees eventually, don't they?), but I don't recognize the rest

All the books and online courses that I bought… all those nights from 12 midnight to 9am…. No one will give me that time back to me. However, I am the kind of person who loves to see the glass half full… I am moving to a more reliable engine/company and I know that a lot of the things that I learned in Unity will help me in Godot(and Unreal). It’s a bit confusing but I love this too much and feel ready for the new challenges ahead!!

If unity cant reverse its discussion then we are looking for unreal or others engine but its take time and big effort to shift on other options

maybe also include monogame in your list, even though it's a more like a framework and not an engine.

Thanks dude , it had been a week sice i was using unity(just started gamedev) , i think i will try gaddot now

For me Unity died 2/3 days ago. Our whole Staff change the Engine.

What really hurts is that I have all these Unity assets that I have been working on getting for years just for Unity to screw things up. As a hobbyist, I have a bunch of Synty Studios assets I purchased from Unity Asset Store and wanted to know how to import those Unity Assets into Unreal or Godot. Is there an easy way to import it over to Unreal or Godot along with the character skins and animations? If there isn't a video, I would love to see someone like you to give us a detailed way on how to do that.

I always loved unity back in the day. I would religiously purchase a license each year but once they went public. I stop and I slowly have been losing love for unity. They only thing that keeps me coming back is that it supports so many different platforms but that may not hold me any longer.

Remember that this also can very much set a precedent for other companies. This is a line where seriously no partial walk back should be accepted. This crosses a very, very dangerous line for the future. If Unity gets away with this even just partially then this will set an example for others. And it also will if they have to backpedal 100% or even just lose a lot of their product and market share. I really feel for all of the people invested in a project too far in development to abandon right now. And also for the developers at unity who did not have anything to do with the decision or even tried to stop it and may now lose their job over it. This is a terrible situation for everybody involved and I sincerely hope that whoever made the decision will take their hat and leave and never ruin another company the same ways they did with unity.

I have hated the way Unity works. I just used it because I didn't realize there were open source engine

Love how direct this video is. I've literally started my game dev journey 1 month ago with Unity and then this happened. Blender is the most amazing piece of software I have ever seen. I think Godot might become another. The decision to abandon Unity has been made, now its only a question of using C++ or C#.

So glad i chose UE4 over Unity, time proved me right.

There is no going back. No serious developer will trust Unity ever again...

lmao i feel like i've gone through the stages of grief for what to do cuz of this and i'm at the stage where i've accepted this and i'm ready to try godot and see if it works for me and i'm kind of excited to try it out. it'll be interested recreated the game i was working on . i'd try unreal but im on my potato back up laptop but oh well

Started working on a game 6 months ago. Sucks to restart, but it's not as bad as it could have been.

Unity is doing this to get microsoft to buy them out. They'd either have to remove hundreds of their games off of gamepass, or buy them out to stop this change. There's potentially hundreds of unity games at risk on gamepass that would trigger install fees. This is their real plan.

Don't build your skills/livelihood on top of platforms that are owned by others. Look how many products and platforms have crapped on their users just make quick buck. That's like building on a rented plot. If you don't have a long contract that guarantees that the terms won't shift under you .. don't do it. Use proper open source or stuff you've built yourself.

Even though I'm not a game developer, I always avoid vendor lock-in, I'm learning Godot and will avoid others who prioritise money over their developer community.

With the right funding and resources, Godot could be the Blender of game engines, and Unity might have got the ball rolling on that to make it happen. Regardless of what Unity does now, trust will have gone that even if they roll back on this, it's probably too little too late for most. There's Unreal Engine 5, the problem is that it's closed source and becoming too dominant in the industry, who is to say that 10 years from now Epic can't do the same thing? Epic are putting themselves in a powerful position with how dominant UE5 is becoming and that could backfire on the ones that adopted it. The truth is, there needs to be an open source engine, maybe a lot of publishers and developers can pool resources together to make it happen, the foundations with something like Godot is already there, all it needs is a lot more investment and resources to make it a lot better for what's needed in the industry. But I do know one thing, if I was a developer and I got burnt by Unity, there's no way I would go to another closed engine like UE5, only to potentially get burnt years down the line, at least with open source engines, you have full control and this can never happen. At the end of the day, any of the for-profit companies can do this, and they have more leverage to do it if they become dominant like UE5 is becoming, would you really want to switch from Unity to UE5, only for Epic to pull the same BS 5 or 10 years from now?

one more alternative: KZfaqr "TheCherno" also works actively on a Unity like engine called Hazel .

Can you please turn up your microphone sensitivity, my speakers are at 80% and the voice is low comparatively

Thank you for the GDevelop shoutout!

working to create a 3d game with godot coming from unity. Any tips and heads up?

I've never heard anyone pronounce Godot like that.

So John Riccitiello (Unity's CEO) sells a lot of his company shares and, after a week or so, his company divulges pricing changes that are cleary meant for making that same company look bad. Surely stock price dropped because of that. I wonder if those shares were bought again meanwhile, before they say that after all "it doesn't affect reinstalls"? I'm no legal expert buy I suspect that guy is committing a few crimes (and getting richer) with this move.

This is also a cool fact, usually when you translate company names from Latin to English it's something satanic but godot Latin to English is just "Enjoy". That's legit

I've walked. I moved from Unreal to Unity because I wasn't happy with epic and now I'm not happy with Unity. I've played around with Godot and even though it's not feature perfect it can do what I want it to do and I'm guaranteed to not be screwed over by greed. I wish I was skilled enough to help improve Godot myself instead of relying on everyone else. If I'm lucky maybe enough skilled Devs will migrate over from Unity.

I think that Unity might be trying the old sim city trick where you increased the taxes by 50% then reduced it by 40%, so everybody still happy but you get them sweet 10% tax increase. So a couple of days later they're gonna say that they listened to the consumers and instead of fees they just add 10% royalty cut.

Great video, super down to earth advice. Keep up the great work you are doing!

The only thing that can save Unity is a complete backtrack, and firing that joke of a CEO, with a full apology. (also I hope he goes to jail for insider trading, but I'm fuzzy on the laws about this)

John Riccitiello, or any Unity stakeholder, would also be able to buy the games based on Unity, and reinstall the games a gazillion times = $$$

I have one and only question - Can we use C# in Godot and create anything, that gdscript is capable! Is C# well integrated in Godot like gdscript?

what if we make an open source runtime and just patch out the unity runtime in older games and movie to a new engine

Not to play the devil's advocate here, but why is everyone so confused and surprised by this? If you use commercial software you will always be at the mercy of their licensing agreements or potential changes. There's hardly any "ethical" (if any) software company, that's why we have the Free Software and Open Source movements. Objectively, this has been blown out of proportion. If your game sells for $9.99 and you you use Unity Free/Plus and you have a revenue over $200K, the $0.20 fee per new install (not for re-installs) roughly translates to a 2% royalty. For Unreal Engine it's actually a 5% (although it's once you hit $1M but it is lifetime and Unity is per year) royalty. The downside is that with Unity even though they don't charge the fee for re-installs, they do per device, so if you have a creative user that has 10 computers and he buys your game on Steam and installs it on his 10 computers, then it's $2.00 for you which in the previous case would be around a 20% royalty, ouch. So, that policy definitely needs to change. Ideally they would charge about a 1.5% royalty on revenue over $500K for instance, and [maybe?] that would probably be much fairer for all. For anyone fully invested in Unity it shouldn't be much issue, in any case if you foresee large revenues you should have some budget for your project, some of that would be better spent acquiring Unity Pro and lowering the royalty fees. But still take in consideration that you actually pay around 15% - 30% (most cases) royalties to the marketplaces (Steam, Epic, Google Play, App Store, etc). So, they probably see it that since they are providing you an enterprise quality game engine that what they are charging is peanuts (in their point of view). In any case I would love for everyone to adopt Godot 4 which is an amazing engine and games like Cassette Beasts and Sonic Colors Ultimate have been made on it. If we support Godot, create content for it, create assets for it, extensions for it, etc., we can grow its community to rival Unity and Unreal Engine. I've been using Unreal Engine 5 for a bit since I come from a C++ background, but once I tried Godot 4 and saw how lovely it is and how everything is so well organized in scenes and nodes and how lovely and intuitive GDScript is I don't want to go back to UE5 🤣.

Something else to consider we are effectively being forced to force our users to install shit that is tracking and reporting installs and god knows what else to a third party without our users consent... This not only is a horrid pricing model BUT also forces the install of software we cannot vouch for because we dont have access to the source code... theres no telling how far this invasiveness for the end user goes or will go will they use the runtime to auto install adware or monitor other metrics of any game installed... so forth... this is utterly disgusting

The only thing Unity is good for now is rapid prototyping a 3D game. For everything else, Godot wins. If you actually learn to program, you can add tons of libraries to it too.

Thank you for your fair stand, that deserves a like, share and sub 👍

Why are people so upset? If you don’t like the product, switch to something else. These complaints just smack of people who would rather spew out a lot of noise than make an effective decision with their lives.

Unfollow Unity as form of protest

Unity has pulled the greediest stunt I've ever seen in gaming history. I truly cannot think of anything worse. Maybe FIFA microtransactions are more profitable, maybe lootboxes are more outright greedy, but this is just MALICIOUS and evil. Absolutely ghoulish behaviour aimed directly at screwing people out of their honest living.

"Godot is the future" but developers are in the present and they can't wait months for a promise. 'Yay open source, crowdsourcing!' whatever crap you are talking won't make godot a viable choice for a lot of people

PEOPLE with years of experience in unity leaving is heartbreaking, but yes adapting new things is also good... Unity is full of Yt tutorial, asset store, and big community, but seeing people moving to either ue5 or godot seems like unity will godown ! Godot have a great chance to prove it and become a blender in terms of game engine ... I'm learning unity for months, but now thinking to learn either godot or ue5...

They don't think... They BELIEVE it.

Corporate must learn, these "warning shots" are not without consequences. Trust is broken forever.

this will never become an industry standard. even if ALL game engines do it, what will happen is that people will stop licensing engines and just go back to making their own. it's that simple. but that won't happen to begin with, since there will always be someone willing to give the people what they need. unity just served their space in this industry to godot in a silver platter. i would develop games in the quake 3 engine before i touch unity at this point.

#NOUNITYWITHFEES indeed