Will the new Unity fees affect VAM 2.0 development?

[dusty]

Unity appears to be reaching a new low in their never-ending pursuit of more easy $$$. They are planning to charge developers every time a user installs a game made with unity:

MSN

It sounds like they are still figuring out how to do this, and it will be some time before it takes effect. But is this going to affect VAM 2.0 development?

 

[Ruvik]

very helpful video to explain it all

 

[meshedvr]

I posted this over on Discord this morning in response to the same question:

We are way too deep into VaM2 to switch engines now. A change to UE would cost years in development time. This move by Unity is ridiculous and they are facing huge backlash already. If they keep moving forward they are going to face a lot of legal battles, and I would join in on that if necessary. I'm hugely disappointed in Unity and this is killing whatever positivity the Unity brand had left. If I was starting over, I would not choose Unity for the project. I think Unity is going to have to rollback on this proposed change to save face. I don't think it will ultimately affect VaM or VaM2 because I can't see how they can possibly roll this out in the face of such negativity, and I also don't see how they can technically pull off accurate install and revenue numbers without companies self reporting.

VaM2 moves forward on Unity. The VaM2 addon kit is Unity based and highly tied to that. I'm not throwing away years of work to start over on another engine.

 

[gitrupop]

VaM2 was one of the first projects I thought of when I heard about this new Unity pricing. Hopefully they'll rollback and do reasonable and predictable revenue % structure that actually makes sense (not this "per install" crap).

It sucks that you and other developers have to stress about things like this on top of the technical difficulties of game development, but I certainly appreciate all the work you and the community have put into this.

 

[Sally Whitemane]

Have not looked deep into this. The installation tracking sound like the dumbest ever. Exploitable in so many ways. Reminds me of the 'Spore' copy protection that had limited installs. Also caused big backlash.
Hope that backfires hard for Unity.

Assuming the worst case scenario where they would start tracking installations, I'm sure people would find clever ways to 'patch that away'.
Then weird 'Unity Engine piracy' to avoid costs and support the developer could be become a thing.

 

[Curves3E]

I posted this over on Discord this morning in response to the same question:

We are way too deep into VaM2 to switch engines now. A change to UE would cost years in development time. This move by Unity is ridiculous and they are facing huge backlash already. If they keep moving forward they are going to face a lot of legal battles, and I would join in on that if necessary. I'm hugely disappointed in Unity and this is killing whatever positivity the Unity brand had left. If I was starting over, I would not choose Unity for the project. I think Unity is going to have to rollback on this proposed change to save face. I don't think it will ultimately affect VaM or VaM2 because I can't see how they can possibly roll this out in the face of such negativity, and I also don't see how they can technically pull off accurate install and revenue numbers without companies self reporting.

VaM2 moves forward on Unity. The VaM2 addon kit is Unity based and highly tied to that. I'm not throwing away years of work to start over on another engine.

Would you consider VAM 3.0 in UE5? Do any of the features in UE5 entice you, and make you wish you had started in UE? Fluid Flux 2.0 for example

 

[meshedvr]

I want VaM2 to have at least a 5 year lifetime, and hopefully more like 10. So I don't think there will be a VaM3. By that time AI software will be providing us with holodeck like experiences.

 

[meshedvr]

Oh and to answer your question I do like UE's features like Nanite (not really applicable to VaM, but very cool), Lumen (again it works with static and mostly static objects so not the best case for VaM with moving models as the focus), and MetaHumans (cool, but adding genitals is not that straightforward and they had some terms against NSFW use when I 1st looked at it). UE always seems to have a nice graphical finish that Unity lacks out of the box. I'm fairly sure Unity HDRP can match that fidelity with the right combination of shaders and effects.

 

[geo_gan]

People are angry...

 

[meshedvr]

Oh I am angry too, but I'm also too far into VaM2 development to change directions. VaM2 will likely be my last Unity project, but VaM2 might also be my last project before retirement anyway if it meets my 10 year lifetime goal.

 

[geo_gan]

Oh I am angry too, but I'm also too far into VaM2 development

Exactly as intended - Unity developers too invested to drop and change to UE, so no choice but to pay.

 

[lolmao500]

Not a big surprise that unity ceo received death threats after that announcement. Well no shit. The guy is screwing tons of people with years of work down the drain if he goes ahead with this BS. Thats expected from former EA ceo, FFS why in the hell did Unity hire this degenerate? The only winning move now is to fire his ass ASAP and cancel the whole thing, not to mention make the announcement like Epic the contract you sign is the contract you have until the end of time. If they want to make a new contract for new projects, they can do that but modifying old contracts? That cant be legal.

Whoever at Unity thought was a good idea to hire the ex-ceo of EA should be fired too.

 

[ghart976]

Interesting...