Are you OK with Purchasing WebGL Add-On?

Not a chance - because a. it won't be to 'Pro' specs b. the only place to pub that you'd want to pub is Facebook. Everywhere else would be a waste of time. I know on Facebook somepeople spend as much time filtering out spammy game requests and other such spammy Facebook content it's not likely to be a profitable investment. Factor in the 'hardcore' Facebooks are using it on a cell phone that means no game support at all.

It UT is charging for this addon they are doing so knowing it is government, big business, and education that have interest in it - not the 'gaming market'.

 

So you don't think browser games are profitable?

 

Hello Jonas and graham

Since you are talking about the web player. i like to know why you don't have the web player right clip being able to be deactivate during build instead of in the html.. i working on something for Facebook and i like to use the right mouse button in my project. That all i really want any other thing that unity might not include i know will be address at the asset store. that right mouse click is my only complain.

 

asenetpro you should probably post this under the Support Forum Category as this isn't really a support thread, more of a ranting thread about how much paying for WebGL Sucks lol! Although your issue there is an annoying one, and i don't understand that either, but the generated HTML/Javascript to Disable it works OK.

 

I know this thread is for ranting. but it make no sense cause it is a done deal. instead you should rant about fixing what need to be fixed in order to get your game on the web. and i know that you can generate a HTML script to disable the right click, but as far as i know it goes into the html file on Facebook you only load the unity file. so that method is useless.. and in the support thread they really don't answer you or listen. they should fix the little thing first and any good fps player know you use the right mouse to run , left to shoot left and right arrow to strife down arrow to back up and up to jump. and this right click messes up the flow.... and this been an issue since the web player was introduce... with no hope of a simple fix now they want to push unity to Facebook were it is now a big issue.

also i read almost all thread and they seem to be responding that why i posted here. and until they release web/gl weather it free or pay they should address web player problems. specifically if we got to pay. which from a business stand point we going to pay at first cause they keeping the web player in unity 5 and that is the work around web/gl pay issue

 

Too early for me to vote... depends on features, cost, limitations. Especially Rift support. I want that... bad.

 

I've not played a game in a browser outside of Facebook or Travian and I know they are profitable - what I'm saying is Unity if they are charging for the WebGL it will be because of the interest of government, big business, and education and not because of indies trying to clone successful browser based games.

And to point out something else - if someone truly has the budget to create a server based browser game then they have the budget to buy Unity Pro and the WebGL addon. Management there hasn't just fallen off the turnip truck you know.

 

Glad unity has found the business case to build the WebGL add-on. They have been spot on BB and Tizen.
Release a Pro and standard WebGL+HTML5 add-on, if someone found a way to monetize, they have the option to upgrade to Pro.

Tizen, Mozilla and ubuntu has been prominently showcased in MWC2014. At the end of day, i still feel that unity should have a add-on for Tizen first in 2014. And they can have my cheque anytime....

 

I want to know how Unity will handle the size of WebGL builds, it will need everything in JS?!?!? Maybe they will have it all on Unity servers(Physics engine etc.) then our games connect to that? Currently a empty webplayer build is like 100KB compared to android which is something like 7MB if it is 7MB just for the engine then that will be quite a download on slow internet.

 

Hmmm why would a big WebGL Build matter? for example alot of really good web games that use Unity Webplayer just use the Streaming Method, they only load additional Content when the Player Loads the Level or something which minimizes the amount of time waiting for Downloading Content, instead of downloading the whole game at once just download bits and pieaces of it when you need it or when the client requests it. I don't see why they can't do Streaming with WebGL also.

 

I'm not talking about game content just the engine, in the webplayer I'm pretty sure the engine data is built into the webplayer then builds only hold scripts and assets.

 

Is that true?

Of all of the game developers I know, the people using Unity Pro (including me) are using that via an employer. The employer never had an indie seat in the first place, they just went straight to Pro as soon as they decided they needed licenses. I don't know of anyone who purchased Unity Pro after using the free version for non-professional stuff and being "converted" into a paying customer as a result of additional value.

That's of course a skewed impression based on my point of view of my own development ecosystem. But it's also a trend that I hear of happening elsewhere - developers get experience with Unity because it's free and they play around with it making their own stuff. They then at some point in the future use that skill for an employer who has purchased one or more Pro seats.

I expect that there's a fair number of exceptions to this. But the "primary source" of engine purchases? I doubt that. As discussions like this very thread demonstrate so well, as a commercial cost Unity's pricing is a non-issue, but for hobbyists it's a stumbling block.

 

If this is the case then why has Web Player backwards compatibility been cited as a reason not to do things? If the plugin already manages that transparently... isn't that a non-issue?

 

I **bought** the Unity 5 Pre-Order thinking that WebGL was only available if people invested in the Early access it was going to be provided free as a bonus (paragraph from clicking on the WebGL -Learn More button ).. VERY DISAPPOINTED in your advertising! I don't put trust in companies with sly advertising. I think it would be better that Unity has its own (optional) add-ons listed beside the main ad and not include it as a MAIN supported feature because it sounds like it is NOT a core feature. Another concern I had coming to invest in Unity is that the developers are creating WebGL yet sometimes it seems like the developers either buy rights to third party developer add-ons or writes their own from scratch so It's hard for me to know what add-ons I should or should not buy considering that some or many new upgrades of Unity may be implementing technologies such as "Coherent UI Standard" providing WebGL as well.. is this one superior than Unity or will Unity provide everything that is needed.. basically what's under the hood in Unity's WebGL engine? Are both add-ons required to make a decent WebGL webpage interface gaming environment or does Unity mainly support WebGL through the core for 3D gaming tech without going into UI Website Resolution compatibility etc?

 

if there is any reason to give us WebGL Early Access for Free it's this reason alone! I don't have the cash right now for Unity 5 PRO but I honestly thought the same exact thing... from the Pre-Order Page, there is no mention of Add-on Cost for WebGL! So who knows how many people you have tricked into buying a PRO License thinking they'd get WebGL Early Access with it, until they decide to wonder into the Forums to find out the Truth... very sad and screwed up!!

i mean does this quote from the unity3d.com/5 page actually say or indicate cost anywhere?

"Available as an early-access add-on with Unity 5.0"

add-on doesn't mean cost, add-on could easily be interrupted as and addition feature that you get with Unity 5... :|

if I had the cash, I would have purchase Unity 5 PRO right now thinking i'd get WebGL... does unity just say ops to this and take our money? how does this work... hope there is a refund or compensation for anyone who purchased Unity 5 with this same thought...

 

Hold on to your horses.

Has Unity officially announced it will cost 1500 extra yet? it's not official anywhere, and subject to change, so no need for pitchforks yet guys!

 

But ya'll should keep ye pitchforks sharpened and in a place you can easily get to just in case.

 

i'm simply asking for clarity on a factual matter at hand... if i was one of the pre-order customers, i would have been thinking i'd get WebGL for free, but it's already been stated that it's not for free.... so what does it matter that they haven't announced what the price is going to be? fact is there is going to be a price for WebGL regardless, and frankly it's unfair to anyone who may have purchased Unity 5 Pro on Impulse after just reviewing that Pre-Order Page alone without asking questions, or digging deeper into the FAQ or Forums.

They don't make Pre-Order Pages or Promo's Look Fancy for No Reason! it's part of any sales marketing strategy to make something look awesome, get people excited with features, and get them to buy buy buy... they do state in the Unity 5 FAQ that WebGL will have a price for the add-on, but i'm not the only one who didn't first dive into the FAQ, but just got my impressions from the Pre-Order Page alone, and although it would be my fault as a customer for not asking in a way or researching further before buying something, Unity still has a responsibility to properly make certain things clear to it's customers, otherwise you just end up with threads like these lol...

 

lmao!! :d

 

Are you one of those people?

I suspect that if those people contact Unity and put forward their case they'd have little trouble getting a refund on their pre-order.

 

no i'm not one of those people... i said "if" or should we have another conversation about how i'm using my words against your semantics or dictionary? lol...

man i'm just ranting about why we should get WebGL Early Access for Free lol, i mean it's odd it's been a couple days already people have been making this complaint on the forums already before me that the Pre-Order page is not clear about WebGL costing anything, but yet they still haven't updated the page to reflect what "add-on" really means, instead probably a number of Unity Pro Pre-Order Customers who are not on the Forums probably have No Clue still that WebGL is Not Free... so if you think i'm complaining wait until all the Angry Customers come back flaming, or with there pitchforks back at Unity soon enough because they were not clear on this matter either...

 

I'm fully aware that you said "if", which has nothing to do with anything I said. My point was precisely the next thing you said - mentioning that is just a pretence for your rant about wanting something for free.

Something that we probably will get for free as a part of a trial like almost every other tech Unity has had on offer. I can't remember the last time they got us us to blind-purchase anything (aside from major upgrade pre-orders, but I don't think that's really 'blind' since it's an update to a thing we're already using).

 

No No actually that is Blind Purchasing!!! You know what since we are on the topic, and this is my Official "I want free sh#! rant thread" I say Unity should give us FREE TRAIL to UNITY 5 PRO Right Now!!!... early access... yes for free too before we even pre-order.... this is all screwed up!!! LOL!!

 

IMO we should be able to buy Pro features a la carte. You want post processing? You pay small bit. You want profiler? You pay small bit. You don't want splashscreen? You pay small bit. Every feature would be cheap on its own, but all would add up to $1500 which is current price of full Pro.

 

I am hoping that if we are going to be charged for the early access WebGL add-on, we should also be granted access to the source code of the add-on so that we can also contribute to the source code and improve any issues that may arise from different browsers and platforms, and thus benefit everyone who uses it. Especially now that Epic Games is allowing access to the source code for subscribers of their Unreal Engine 4, it would be nice for Unity to make some steps in that direction as well.

 

I was one of those people that pre-ordered Unity 5 thinking that this feature was included. I didn't realize it would be a separate purchase. It was misleading to have it listed on the Unity 5 features for the pre-order page and yet not actually something that's included with that purchase.

 

The only thing I don't like about the Web AddOn is that it will make publishing to FaceBook cost $3000. And let's face it: if you're publishing to mobile you want to be publishing to Facebook. Is there a Web AddOn Basic?

 

No.. It appears that your cussing when he nailed your attitude for what it was is why he is not continuing to stoke your vituperative fires. I don't blame him.

HTH

 

I may suggest rather humbly that if any have an issue with Chrome not handling Unity via plugin that it may be better to vent your anger at Chrome and not at Unity. It ain't like Unity got on the blower to google and told them "we need to develop WebGL so please drop the use of our plugin".

HTH

 

I already purchased it, so yes.

 

That's interesting as it's not even on sale yet?

 

How do see 'AddOn' and imply 'built in and free'?
AddOn means you can get it separately if you want.
Free/vs. paid isn't mentioned or implied.

 

My thinking is that Chrome will drop NPAPI soon and Mozilla will follow ("Click to Play" being an early hint). Even if Mozilla and others would continue to support it, developers long-term would trend towards WebGL to cater to all plattforms with the least effort, right?

And wasn't the HTML5/WebGL future pretty much set in stone years ago (hence Unity Tech starting work on it years ago)? First time I heard of WebGL was maybe in 2010(?) with the in-browser WebGL version of Quake II. And later I noticed it again when a UDK mod spin-off I had an eye on announced they would switch to WebGL.

In the end, the argument of a plugin-free experience is such a big pro argument it trumps all other smaller contrary arguments. So I guess we might see Flash and the Unity Web Plugin as depreciated basically tomorrow, especially since Firefox and Chrome adopted a "release major versions every other month" attitude that keeps people's browsers current.

Are you talking about mobile browsers supporting WebGL, thus making Android, Windows8 and iOS export options obsolete?
Sure there are some pro arguments to this, but:

Mobile platform holders are big on curation, tracking, big data aggregation etc. Forcing developers to deliver native, stand-alone apps through their store front allows for that. A WebGL app in a mobile browser does not. Isn't that an argument for mobile platform holders to not allow WebGL? What about security concerns?

And what if long-term mobile devs publish their games only through WebGL? Then mobile platform holders might as well close their stores, saying good bye to their 30% cut?

What about performance? WebGL in a mobile browser on mobile hardware? This problem solving itself through increasing mobile performance is how far out - 3 years? 5 years?

 

I think the question is more, would it cost you more than the plugin to develop your own webgl plugin, and would it be as professional. I'm willing to bet that the answer to both, unless you're a fully qualified pro programmer, is no. Even then, the answer is maybe.

If you can get a plugin cheaper and easier than making it yourself or paying somebody else to do it, consider yourself lucky the resource exists.

 

Here is my pov: I understand your business perspective to some degree. But I don't think it's a clear thing. a) You also have customers that didn't get a return from the investment into the flash addon. b) in the meanwhile you have enough industry and community impact to lobby the chrome team because you are not the only ones to think that their behaviour is very premature. c) The last point is that web publishing is included and part of your democratisation drive but with chrome your customers loose 40% of that publishing ability but you don't replace it out-of-the-box. d) If the webplayer plugin would have been pre-bundled with browsers like flash - would you ask for extra fees due to the increased reach?

Hopefully you find something that works for you and us.

ps. you want to consider adding the WebGL addon without price (TBA) to the buy/shop-page so people see it right away when doing preorders.

pps. cool demos, congratz!

 

I'd like to bring up one point, and that is fragmentation. From an asset store author's perspective the number of secondary licenses there are in Unity directly contributes to the complexity and inability to develop for Unity users as a whole. While targeting assets specifically to mobile users or unity pro users or eventually WebGL users is all well and good, there are inevitable trade-offs in not being able to develop for "Unity" as a whole consistent package.

As competing engines increasingly step away from fragmentation and embrace an "all-the-tools-in-one-bucket" approach... I expect Unity to eventually have to follow suit, regardless of their technological investments in this or that. (or not, but they won't continue to be competetive, imho). In the end having an all-in-one approach makes much more sense and would/could benefit everyone involved.

 

Epic just recently updated their polices for 5% royalties after the first $3,000 per product per quarter and it still makes business sense for them to give us the sources for webgl development and promote its growth, meanwhile unity3d developers are strategizing their own business demise. So much for democratizing development when Jonas just said they don't want to cannibalize their revenue. Unity should change their motto to democratizing game development if you have our collections of addons.

 

Jonas, thanks for responding, I appreciate. Anyways looking forward to the new impressive release and WebGL.

 

+1

 

Giving the user unique chance ay being able to specialise extremely well given the opportunities agiven by the asset stote, nd you may end up with a few things that didnt cost all that and coulda been worth many, many times that in pay-time, research and so on, or just wouldnt ever feasibly pop up in another engines collection of features yet be exactly the tool for the job

It has some crap but it has some gems

 

Is there any Web GL based multi platform game engine (iOS,Android,web) somewhere out there you would recommend to start working with?

 

If Unity developers want to entice people to switch to their gaming platform they should just make flexibility like this free for the pro version then it would be an easy decision to buy the pro version but if people have to buy that additional extra for half or the same price as pro when other engines simply offer it as a standard feature then I'm sure people may either not buy it and just use a different engine. The only reason why I see Unity should/is charging is to possibly entice/pay web browser companies to support WebGL so it can become a web standard and continue to develop and so Unity itself develops a higher standard/feature rich of WebGL over other game engines.

 

If you're just interested in 2D then check out Flambe(used by Disney/Nickelodeon, and many others), it is built on top of Haxe which is actually a pretty fun language to use.

 

WebGL should be included in the Pro version. No free rides..let them whine.. Hippocoder said that a job will pay for it.. Have you checked the work for hire forum here or the oDesk jobs pricings for work for hire?.. heh.. Not true pal..Here and there people pay the proper money for Unity development..often to pay the rent you gotta suck it up and take crap pay or hit the curb with your belongings. I am branching away from game dev and into other things that use Unity due to the way the freelance market had become with the free for all and the children charging way under market prices..one guy on the work offered here was charging $6.25 an hour for C#.. That's about $69.75 less than the going rate for non game dev programming in that language. Yes he probably sux..but oDesk is loaded with reskin jobs and do my endless runner for 350.00 bucks and less. Unity should help the game devs by not charging the so monikered arm and a leg.. And the US economy is in crashing mode now so good money from smart folks who know what is proper pay for game dev is being held tight fisted.

 

Murgilod spoke facts, put any price on free and unity have lost their 'curious' people to Unreal with its popularity and shinies and they have no concept of what the royalty means (5 sounds like a small number!)

hippocoder said it, as usual, the best way in these conversations - for proper work the cost is trivial, otherwise he won't bother. You have people who will be using this for real world profitable applications and these people will get the broadest use and provide the most focussed feedback in a support situation

Everyones else is just sad they can't play with the shiny new toy. If it's freely available, who does it actually suit in terms of a return? How much does it suit UT who have invested so much in it? How quickly will it improve when the forums become a cacophany of entitled babies over every last bug and anything relevant never get through the noise. Should the UT staff even continue posting in here given this outcome (ive noticed that the concerns of a few weeks ago about the staff seeming inattentive regarding the forums seem to be being addressed althought maybe Unity 5 explains that)

 

For those of us who are using Unity for web-based applications, the combination of the end of the webplayer combined with a steep price and (even worse) uncertain compatibility for its only replacement (WebGL) might be a game-ender. I've been working on a project for several years, and now I'm not sure whether I can deploy it. I can't even get WebGL applications to run reliably on my brand new PC, and it's a given that it won't work at all on older PCs and browsers, to say nothing of mobile devices. So that pretty much wipes out a huge chunk of my intended target audience right there. But I'm supposed to fork over an extra $1,500 for this?
The least Unity can do is to either make WebGL free or at a low cost.

 

they could maybe do a deal similar to the free mobile licenses, leaving the obvious prompts to pro - youd like rendertextures or a profiler or actually make a sustainable income from your project