Search Results for: unity
VFX House DNEG Acquires Exclusive License to Ziva Technologies From Unity
“Unity has also entered into an agreement with DNEG, a leading technology-enabled visual effects (VFX) and animation company for the creation of feature film, television, and multiplatform content, for an exclusive perpetual license of the Ziva IP. Unity will continue to retain ownership of all the technology acquired from Ziva Dynamics, and we will continue to evaluate the best way to enhance our core offerings with it over time.”
Unity Software to cut 3.8% of staff in ‘company reset’ mostly affecting WetaFX
https://www.reuters.com/technology/unity-software-cut-38-staff-company-reset-2023-11-28/
Tuesday’s announcement includes termination of the professional services piece of an agreement Unity struck with movie director Peter Jackson’s visual effects company Weta FX in 2021 after Unity purchased the technology and engineering division of Weta FX. As a result, 265 employees whose jobs are related to the agreement will be laid off, the company said.
UPDATE Statement from WētāFX
On November 25, 2023, Unity and Wētā FX mutually agreed to terminate Unity’s service agreement with Wētā FX effective December 10, 2023. This decision comes as Unity refocus their efforts on their core business. The termination of the agreement will see the reduction of 265 Unity roles. Wētā FX will be extending offers to as many of the team as possible as it looks to expand its research, development and support functions. Unity will retain ownership of the technology it acquired from Wētā in December 2021 and will be evaluating the best way to enhance its offerings with it over time. The technology will also remain fully available to Wētā FX. Wētā FX will continue to build and extend the IP, and develop its own tools and techniques, to continue its evolution as a leader in visual effects.
Unity3D – open letter on runtime fees
https://blog.unity.com/news/open-letter-on-runtime-fee
To our community:
I’m Marc Whitten, and I lead Unity Create which includes the Unity engine and editor teams.
I want to start with this: I am sorry.
We should have spoken with more of you and we should have incorporated more of your feedback before announcing our new Runtime Fee policy. Our goal with this policy is to ensure we can continue to support you today and tomorrow, and keep deeply investing in our game engine.
You are what makes Unity great, and we know we need to listen, and work hard to earn your trust. We have heard your concerns, and we are making changes in the policy we announced to address them.
Our Unity Personal plan will remain free and there will be no Runtime Fee for games built on Unity Personal. We will be increasing the cap from $100,000 to $200,000 and we will remove the requirement to use the Made with Unity splash screen.
No game with less than $1 million in trailing 12-month revenue will be subject to the fee.
For those creators on Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise, we are also making changes based on your feedback.
The Runtime Fee policy will only apply beginning with the next LTS version of Unity shipping in 2024 and beyond. Your games that are currently shipped and the projects you are currently working on will not be included – unless you choose to upgrade them to this new version of Unity.
We will make sure that you can stay on the terms applicable for the version of Unity editor you are using – as long as you keep using that version.
For games that are subject to the runtime fee, we are giving you a choice of either a 2.5% revenue share or the calculated amount based on the number of new people engaging with your game each month. Both of these numbers are self-reported from data you already have available. You will always be billed the lesser amount.
We want to continue to build the best engine for creators. We truly love this industry and you are the reason why.
I’d like to invite you to join me for a live fireside chat hosted by Jason Weimann today at 4:00 pm ET/1:00 pm PT, where I will do my best to answer your questions. In the meantime, here are some more details.*
Thank you for caring as deeply as you do, and thank you for giving us hard feedback.
Marc Whitten
On September 18, Unity Software held an all-hands meeting to discuss the rollout of per-install fees. The recording was reviewed by Bloomberg, which said the company is ready to backtrack on major aspects of its new pricing policy.
The changes are yet to be approved, but here are the first details:
➡ Unity plans to limit fees to 4% for games making over $1 million
➡ Instead of lifetime installs, the company intends to only count installs generated after January 1, 2024 (so the thresholds announced last week won’t be retroactive);
➡ Unity won’t reportedly track installs using its proprietary tools, instead relying on self-reported data from developers.
During the meeting on Monday, Unity CEO John Riccitiello noted that the new policy is “designed to generate more revenue from the company’s biggest customers and that more than 90% of Unity users won’t be affected.” When asked by several employees how the company would regain the trust of developers, execs said they will have to “show, not tell.”
David Helgason, founder of Unity and its former CEO (he is currently on the board), also commented on the controversy around the pricing changes. In a Facebook post (spotted by GamesBeat), he said “we f*cked up on many levels,” adding that the announcement of the new business model “missed a bunch of important “corner” cases, and in central ways ended up as the opposite of what it was supposed to be. […] Now to try again, and try harder,” Helgason wrote. “I am provisionally optimistic about the progress. So sorry about this mess.”
RESPONSES
Unilaterally removing Terms Of Services and making them retroactive is a HUGE loss of trust in Unity’s executive and management team. There is no going back there, no matter if they patch this mess. Using Unity moving forward will just be a gamble.
4% doesn’t change anything. It does not fix any of the problems that have been raised, and asked repeatedly. Install bombing still not addressed. So many “corner cases” still not addressed, especially in the mobile space.
To little to late tbh it’s a systematic problem with the ceo being so out of touch that it’s going to happen again. Remember this was a man who wanted a dollar per battlefield player revive
Mega Crit said Unity’s decision was “not only harmful in a myriad of ways” but was also “a violation of trust”, and pointed to Unity’s removal of its Terms of Service from GitHub, where changes can be easily tracked.
Why every game developer is mad with Unity right now, explained
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/unitys-self-combustion-engine-this-week-in-business
$1.3 billion – Unity’s lifetime accumulated deficit as of December 31, 2021. Unity has never had a profitable quarter in its history. It has posted modest operating profits in the past three quarters for the first time ever,
Unity lit money on fire for decades to buy a market advantage that overrules the basic economic incentives that supposedly ensure free markets work best for customers. It was successful in doing that because it’s very hard for a sustainable business to compete against one that is fine losing billions of dollars.
First, you make yourself essential to the market, even if it costs you billions to get there. Then once you hit a threshold – let’s say, I don’t know, 70% of the market – you lean into the enshittification process. You charge more for your services, you give your customers worse terms, you turn the heat up slowly and continuously, confident in the knowledge that people are so locked in to your business and have so few viable alternatives that they may grumble but they will ultimately put up with it.
And it’s such a common strategy in so many industries today that there’s just no sense of horror or outrage from the onlookers. Industry watchers and Serious Business People have seen this play out so many times they just acknowledge it’s happening and treat it as if it’s a perfectly cool and normal thing and not illegal predatory pricing.
I think this new Runtime Fee makes perfect sense from a mile-high point of view, if you think about Unity as a business where you just turn whichever dials and pull whatever levers will make the numbers go up the most.
The only problem is it makes no sense at all if you instead think about Unity as a game development tool that game developers should want to use.
https://www.pcgamer.com/why-every-game-developer-is-mad-right-now-explained
https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-marc-whitten
“The uproar is primarily driven by two factors: Unity is attaching a flat per-install fees to games that use its engine, and it’s arbitrarily scrapping existing deals and making the changes retroactive.
The policy announced yesterday will see a “Runtime Fee” charged to games that surpass certain installation and revenue thresholds. For Unity Personal, the free engine that many beginning and small indie developers use, those thresholds are $200,000 earned over the previous 12 months, and 200,000 installs; one those marks are met, developers will be charged 20 cents every time someone installs their game.
Another big issue is that Unity has made this change retroactive: It supersedes any existing agreements with Unity that developers may have made, and it applies to games that were released even before any of this happened. The revenue threshold will be based on sales after January 1, 2024, when the new pricing system takes effect, but sales that occurred before that date will count toward the install threshold.
Unity bosses sold stock days before development fees announcement, raising eyebrows
Unity executives sold thousands of shares in the weeks leading up to last night’s hugely controversial announcement it will soon charge developers when one of their games is downloaded.
Behind the scenes, CEO John Riccitiello shifted 2000 shares last week on 6th September, as noted by Yahoo Finance, which noted this move was part of a trend over the past year where the exec has sold more than 50,000 shares in total and bought none.
Unity Presents New “Runtime Fees” Based on Game Installs and Revenue
https://80.lv/articles/unity-presents-new-fees-based-on-game-installs-and-revenue/
The new program is called the Unity Runtime Fee and the main principle is based on how often users install games. Unity thinks “an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share”.
This is bound to kill all developers who count on free downloads but profitable venues of income like in-app purchase. Which count for a vast majority of the 30% of the market that Unity holds onto.
The extra bill will be estimated by Unity based on non-specific data.
Unity does not have a ‘known’ way to track installs. Likely due to privacy laws. Thus they will need to ‘estimate’ installs and bill clients based on that. … …. Data which is aggregated with no identifying features isn’t really prevented. Unity’s claim that they can’t distinguish between an install and reinstall or even a paid versus pirated copy actually reinforces the idea that they aren’t using any identifying information, so it would be compliant to privacy laws. … Assumption is that they will get some data from distributors like AppStore, GooglePlay, Valve, Sony, Microsoft, etc… and estimate from there.
“It hurts because we didn’t agree to this. We used the engine because you pay up front and then ship your product. We weren’t told this was going to happen. We weren’t warned. We weren’t consulted,” explained the Facepunch Studios founder. “We have spent 10 years making Rust on Unity’s engine. We’ve paid them every year. And now they changed the rules.”
“It’s our fault. All of our faults. We sleepwalked into it. We had a ton of warnings,” they added. “We should have been pressing the eject button when Unity IPO’d in 2020. Every single thing they’ve done since then has been the exact opposite of what was good for the engine.
Unity3D – Optimize your mobile game performance
https://images.response.unity3d.com/Web/Unity/%7B121b241a-e312-4763-a7a6-8f57878e6bec%7D_JW10233_Optimize_Your_Mobile_Game_Perfrormance_R4.3.pdf
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Peter Jackson Selling Weta Digital’s VFX Tech Division to Unity for $1.625 Billion
https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/unity-weta-deal/
variety.com/2021/digital/news/unity-acquires-weta-digital-1235107544/
Under the deal, Unity is obtaining the Weta Digital suite of VFX tools and technology and its team of 275 engineers, who will join Unity’s Create Solutions division.
Joe Marks, Weta’s chief technology officer, will join Unity as CTO of Weta Digital.
Weta Digital’s VFX and animation teams will continue to exist as a standalone entity, known as WetaFX, which is expected to become Unity’s largest customer in the media and entertainment space. WetaFX, with about 1,700 employees, will remain majority-owned by Jackson and led by CEO Prem Akkaraju. The proposed deal is expected to close before the end of 2021, subject to regulatory approvals.
Unity3D is finally going public
www.pcgamesinsider.biz/news/71461/unity-is-finally-going-public/
techcrunch.com/2020/08/24/unitys-ipo-numbers-look-pretty-unreal/
Between calendar 2018 and 2019, Unity’s revenue rose by 42 per cent year-on-year to $541.8m. Meanwhile, the firm’s revenue for the six months ending June 30th, 2020 was $351.3m, an increase of 39 per cent. The company has clocked up net losses of $163.2m for the year ending December 31st 2019 and $54.1m for the six months concluding June 30th, 2020.
Unity reckons the market it addresses around the world is worth around $29bn, across both video games and other creative industries it works in.
Unlike Epic Games, Unity has long worked with the major platforms and gaming companies to get their engine in front of as many developers and gamers as possible. In fact, the company estimates that 53% of the top 1,000 mobile games on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store and over 50% of mobile, personal computer and console games were made with Unity.
