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by alexb_ 1006 days ago
People are going to continue to complain, but I honestly think this is a pretty good walk back. It addresses all of the more legitimate things people were upset about:

- $1,000,000 income floor for a trailing 12 months

- Doesn't apply to old versions

- Billed a lesser amount of 2.5% revenue if available, so low-cost indie games don't get destroyed

Not to mention, removing the requirement to have "Made with Unity" on the free version? Surprised they would change this - it wasn't really a problem for most people, and afaik getting rid of the "Made with Unity" was one of the main reasons people would buy the non-free versions of Unity.

I think this is probably the best they could have done for indie devs. As it turns out, pushback works. They did destroy a lot of trust with developers with this move though. Going to be hard to get any of that back.

3 comments

>People are going to continue to complain, but I honestly think this is a pretty good walk back.

If you come up to someone, point a gun at their head, and scream you're going to murder them it's very likely there is no walking back even if you put the gun away and then state more reasonable demands. Everyone knows you have a gun in your back pocket and you're insane enough to use it.

I agree - like I said at the end of my comment, the trust being broken is why the original pricing plan was such a disaster, and it's going to take a lot to build that back up.
Its going to take firing the people responsible, which means the CEO has to go.
I'm in a lot of gamedev communities and I'm not seeing any complaints. Everyone agrees this is fine. I believe if they announced this initially people probably would have complained but nothing close to the backlash there was. Most people just don't trust Unity after this. This is after all the second time we're getting a promise not to change the terms on an existing engine version as a result of backlash. How long until the third?
> - Doesn't apply to old versions

It's not beyond the realm of reasonable belief to assume they can or will roll out some breaking change eventually that forces upgrades.

Or shift other (possibly not yet existent) assets between versions.

The goodwill has been burned and now everything needs to be contractually spelled out.

Or, for a good number of people, they can bail out to Godot for 2D or Unreal for 3D or consoles.

That isn't really a thing they can do for already shipped games, unless your game has an online component with dedicated servers and you need to update unity on the server side for a security fix. Most games don't upgrade their engine post launch, unless they are a live service game intended to get constant, significant updates for a long time.
The old version of Unity can be used offline. Truly offline. How are they going to force you to upgrade? Hakc into your PC?
this is a pretty naive comment.
Except our stuido has been using Unity 2020 for 3 years :)