Unity Blog

Only games that meet the following thresholds qualify for the Unity Runtime Fee: Unity Personal and Unity Plus: Those that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs. Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise: Those that have made $1,000,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 1,000,000 lifetime game installs.^ So, if you have the Pro or Enterprise that most studios have, they should have more than 1 million Revenue in the last year AND have more than 1 million game installs. https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates

Great news! Given the Unity price changes that dropped[1] I hope we see Godot get more funding. [1] https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates

It can, but with care you can largely resolve this. And you can always disable pipelining if the performance benefits aren't worth it to you. Unity has a great article on this topic here: https://blog.unity.com/technology/fixing-time-deltatime-in-unity-2020-…

The blog post: https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates You are likely already paying a recurring cost to Unity, as per https://unity.com/pricing: Excluding the free Student & Personal tiers, the starting list price is $2,040 per year per user (for Unity Pro), going up to $4,950 per year per user for the top tier (Unity Industry). So, this is a new charge, which becomes active when the following conditions are met for a particular game: • # of installs, over the life of the game, passes 200k (Personal) or 1MM (Pro/Enterprise). • Revenue, over the last 12 months, passes $200k (Personal) or 1MM (Pro/Enterprise). Once both of those thresholds have been met, then you get charged a flat fee per install over the threshold. So, if you meet the Revenue amount, and you've had 200k/1MM installs, your next install requires you to pay a fee to Unity. This is all covered in the table at https://unity.com/sites/default/files/2023-09/NewFeeTable.png For games that are not being distributed through a channel (Steam, GoG, console/app store, etc.), this is going to be really annoying to track and report on. This is also going to be annoying for games that are distributed through multiple channels. Unity's probably going to get into the auditing game at some point; à la Microsoft, Oracle, etc.

Unity also bought SpeedTree, which did the vegetation in Avatar 1 (and in many video games). They bought Weta Digital in 2021 (https://blog.unity.com/news/welcome-weta-digital). Blender has a FLIP plug-in I believe. The water in UE isn't great, but the "fluid flux" plug-in is surprisingly impressive for real-time water https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/fluid-flux Computational Fluid Dynamics is a tricky area. The science (Fluid Dynamics) was worked out over 100 years ago, with the Navier-Stokes equations (3D partial differential equations). The engineering (the Computational part) is a whole bunch of complex and clever tricks, to overcome surprising problems like instability and dissipation, and often for some particular engineering trade-off (rather than being universally true). Avatar 2 seems to use an underlying FLIP simulation for the water (which uses a (eularian) grid for pressure, and particles for movement), with cinematic tricks on top: foam, bubbles, and smaller (lagrangian) waves superimposed. The Fluid Flux plug-in uses a simplified version of the Navier-Stokes equations, which represents the upward direction as an average - so it's 2D internally but looks 3D. It also just calculates once, instead of iterating. Both make it much faster. It uses this paper, which has several other tricks: https://matthias-research.github.io/pages/publications/hfFluid.pdf

Usually when this pops up I drop in to tell people not to waste their time with it, but, people are relentlessly drawn to free content, no matter how questionable it is. Instead, today I'll link to different free content that is actually useful advice by people who know what they're talking about: https://blog.unity.com/games/level-up-your-code-with-game-programming-… ...also, checkout the link at the bottom to their forum where there's some (reasonably) thoughtful commentary on it by folk who've been down that rabbit hole themselves; including why "Game Programming Patterns" misses the boat in at least some respects.

Yeah, I was talking about retroactive changes of course (and not changes for future versions). Their founder/CTO (who seems to be MIA these days) published this back in 2019: https://blog.unity.com/news/updated-terms-of-service-and-commitment-to… "For this reason, we now allow users to continue to use the TOS for the same major (year-based) version number, including Long Term Stable (LTS) builds that you are using in your project." Which is something they presumably "forgot" about...

This and the apology post [1] are probably industry's (any industry's) first in how concise, to the point and with no bullshit they are. Goes to show how deeply Unity screwed up that they couldn't even corporate speak their way out of this. [1] https://blog.unity.com/news/open-letter-on-runtime-fee

> For all intents and purposes, this is meaningless until they update the old ToS to prevent this from happening again. Unity did just that the last time this happened, in 2019: https://blog.unity.com/community/updated-terms-of-service-and-commitme… They silently deleted the then-added clause allowing you to use the ToS you agreed to before this most recent attempt.

The history is cyclical here it seems: https://blog.unity.com/community/unityscripts-long-ride-off-into-the-s…

https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates I'd wager it won't affect most small studios, since most games never get close to the prerequisite $200k revenue in a year. But the thought that if you finally do see success you have to start paying danegeld to Unity...? Far worse is that Unity apparently has the ability and desire to do things like this. What's to stop them in the future from altering the deal further?

Why are people so misinformed and spreading misinfo around? Genshin is using a highly customized Unity Engine bound under Unity China and the developer hoyoverse is a major shareholder in Unity China as well. Unity China is a separate entity from Unity Technologies. https://blog.unity.com/news/unity-forms-new-venture-to-manage-china-op…

If you go to this Unity blogpost from 2019 [1] it states: > When you obtain a version of Unity, and don’t upgrade your project, we think you should be able to stick to that version of the TOS. > Moving forward, we will host TOS changes on Github to give developers full transparency about what changes are happening, and when. The link to the mentioned GitHub repo just recently became dead :/ [1]: https://blog.unity.com/community/updated-terms-of-service-and-commitme…

Here's the blog post where they announced they were creating a github repo: https://blog.unity.com/community/updated-terms-of-service-and-commitme… It's the easiest thing in the world to write another blog post announcing they're deleting the github repo.

Unity went public. Bombed, and merged with IronSource, a notorious malware spam mobile ad company. It’s always about milking their install base. https://blog.unity.com/news/welcome-ironsource

They're going to charge developers a fixed amount per install of their game. The amount varies based on license between $0.01 and $0.20 and they're applying it retroactively to all Unity games ever released. https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates

A more important issue that's not being considered here is that when they had their debacle with Improbable, they committed to a GitHub repo[1] with all the ToS changes and outright said that people could keep using the ToS of whatever major version of Unity they used[2]. They have now deleted the repo, so I wonder if they're just gonna pretend they never committed to that. 1. https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/TermsOfService 2. https://blog.unity.com/community/updated-terms-of-service-and-commitme…

... and added costs where there were none: $0.20 per install https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates

Yes and no, Unity uses its own fork of Mono. When .NET evolved it keeps on using the forked mono and apparently CoreCLR is one of their priorities accordingly to blogpost here https://blog.unity.com/engine-platform/unity-and-net-whats-next

Well say no more then https://blog.unity.com/technology/unity-and-net-whats-next

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7655460/ made in unity https://blog.unity.com/entertainment/neill-blomkamp-on-what-unitys-vol… https://blog.unity.com/entertainment/bugsbot-g-the-first-korean-tv-ani…

Dotnet Core is significantly faster than the old version of mono that Unity is currently stuck on. They've recently announced that they're finally upgrade to .net core over the next couple years, so that should help out a lot. https://blog.unity.com/technology/unity-and-net-whats-next

>https://blog.unity.com/news/bolt-visual-scripting-is-now-included-in-a… Bolt is also the visual programming language which the Unity game engine acquired in 2020. When I saw the HN title, my first thought was "Why does a video game scripting tool founder care about Stripe and YC?"

Luckily, this particular developer is still at Unity and still fixing bugs—and doing the world a service by writing fascinating breakdowns about them https://blog.unity.com/technology/fixing-time-deltatime-in-unity-2020-…

> In 2012...Unity was Mac-only The timeline is a bit off here. Unity was initially Mac-only, but only for a short time. It ran on Windows from version 2.5 in 2009.[1] [1]https://blog.unity.com/technology/unity-25-for-mac-and-windows-now-ava…

There is some kind of continuing relationship between the two: Weta FX will keep contributing assets to Weta Digital's (i.e. Unity's) asset library. Maybe that's in exchange for being able to continue to use the software? I haven't seen the deal spelled out anywhere. From the Unity blog post [1]: "Another exciting element of this acquisition is the asset library we’ll inherit from Weta Digital, which includes urban and natural environments, flora and fauna, humans, man-made objects, materials, textures, and more. The WetaFX team will continue their industry-leading VFX work for major film and TV productions and feed into this asset library for years to come." [1] https://blog.unity.com/news/welcome-weta-digital

In the unity announcement they go over some of the tools weta have created: https://blog.unity.com/news/welcome-weta-digital

Link is so riddled with ads I can't even load it. Alternate link: https://blog.unity.com/news/welcome-weta-digital

I believe Unity has just recently (I.e. since October 2020) taken steps to help mitigate this microstutter, unless I am misunderstanding you. https://blog.unity.com/technology/fixing-time-deltatime-in-unity-2020-…

Unity actually started doing this while I was working there[0], and then eventually axed it[1] as part of a broader shift towards low quality high revenue mobile development (acquiring ironSource, for example). This shift was highly demoralising for the entire organisation, as it included laying off huge swathes of creative staff from Gigaya development (and other teams) and hiring in areas of monetisation (read: advertising and tracking). Unity is no longer a games engine company, it is an ad company. It is taking surprisingly long for people to see it this way. It was really sad to me, because (possibly naively) I saw joining Unity as a potential opportunity to pivot more closely to game engine programming (from web), but that was an uphill battle given that the resource allocation was massively in the opposite direction. 0: https://blog.unity.com/games/introducing-unitys-latest-sample-game-gig… 1: https://80.lv/articles/unity-stopped-the-production-of-its-sample-game…