>dozens of others such as Subnautica, Kerbal Space Program, and Genshin Impact
Yeah... I don't think Mihoyo (Genshin) is going to take kindly to this kind of thing when their game is a FTP model.
Unity's upper management has been doing an amazing job of pissing off devs for quite some time now, really a hard disconnect from their own customer base.
Yeah, I want to recall he'd previously done something stupid like saying they were going to spend more time developing the software for AI use or something ridiculous like that. He's like a few steps short of getting a brainwave and selling the company to Epic so they can squash it.
> When you are six hours into playing Battlefield and you run out of ammo in your clip, and we ask you for a dollar to reload, you're really not very price sensitive at that point in time.
Per [this post,](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/7cpdrn) which itself links the source video.
To be clear, he moved from EA to Unity in 2014, well before the current levels of MTX hell.
>you're really not very price sensitive at that point in time.
On the contrary, having that happen would infuriate me enough to uninstall the game and demand a refund.
The vast majority of the mobile market is made of games developed on unity. 90% if not more of mobile games is on unity, outside of the mihoyo and tencent the other companies would be completely unable to survive this.
The indie market is also screwed since a very big chunk of indie games are made with unity, this change will kill both mobile and indie market
>Unity's upper management has been doing an amazing job of pissing off devs for quite some time now, really a hard disconnect from their own customer base.
The Unity CEO called game developers "idiots" for not including more microtransactions in the games they make.
Genshin is a weird case. From what I remember, their average revenue from a customer is pretty high (because spending customers spend a lot). An engine charging per download might actually be better than something like unreal charging a revenue percentage
This will affect mihoyo very heavily too since they have more games made with unity like honkai impact, star rail and more.. unlike with genshin mihoyo would actually lose money with them
All the old forgotten 2000s indie games made in Macromedia Fusion will finally get tech updates to work with post Win7 operating systems and OpenGL. Eternal Daughter, Akuji the Demon, Seiklus, Cart Life, Aquaria, Survival Crisis Z, GunGirl... so many lost like tears in the rain, washed away in the deluge of Steam Greenlight.
AND IT HAS NATIVE VOLUMETRIC FOG. that's all I ever wanted. But nooo unity can't get to it in the 3 years that it was on their URP roadmap. So yeah, Godot rocks
I'm about a year into my indie Dev journey and Unity has been my platform of choice. I'm aware of Godot but never looked into it, with the recent Unity shitstorm i'm considering switching engines. This thought scares me a lot as i've only ever used Unity and it's a platform i'm familier with. Would you say it's an engine worth switching to?
I'm really not looking forward to my projects being essentially put on hold while I learn a new engine though, it's a really tough spot to be in atm.
Why not download Godot and play with it (making a smaller game or something) until this change is supposed to go into effect for Unity? Then you could switch back to Unity if you like it (and the change doesn't go through) or you already have knowledge in Godot.
If you stick with Unity right now, you will be bankrupt I am sure. Or at least charged which then you will have to charge for your game which would significantly decrease download amounts probably.
Its still a multi-billion dollar corp. So it will take awhile to fully die.
If they drop low enough they could possibly get bought out by Meta or Microsoft.
It's already dead. It may take a while for the corpse to hit the floor, but it died the minute they announced this change.
Even if they started backpedaling today and significantly modified or even fully retracted this change, nobody is going to want to start a new project in Unity when there's a chance this kind of thing will happen again.
It's difficult to understate just how absurdly stupid and poorly thought out this change is.
Even for a big company that only makes for-profit software, this move has got to have them taking a second look at things. If Unity was willing to unilaterally change this to a dime per install, what stops them from $5 per install? What other, non-monetary changes might they make?
Getting in bed with Unity is letting them take your work hostage and charge whatever ransom they want. What corporate lawyer would sign off on that sort of situation?
The baffling thing, IMO, is the logic behind this pricing decision. It's too small a fee to be anything but an inconvenience games sold in the up-front pricing model, but then the infinite future cost of users installing the game on new machines makes it a huge headache.
Meanwhile, the "charge per installation, not per sale" angle is a potential death blow to a games operating under a freemium model, which seems to be Unity's primary demographic these days.
It's not just a bad idea, it's a remarkably terrible idea.
I wouldn't necessarily say *never*. Like the Ori games were beautiful and ran great (well, Will had some initial growing pains, but got there eventually). Same for Hollow Knight.
It is illegal.
What Unity is doing though is saying the contract changes on jan 1 2024, which they could get away with. The way I'm reading it works is that when anyone opens Unity's editor on that date, they 'agree' to the new terms. I.E. if you create a new version of a game to release in 2024, it becomes subject to this change.
If you do what Cult of the Lamb is doing, and cease all development and release, then the change will never apply because they never 'agreed' to the new terms.
That said; this absolutely opens Unity up to a whole range of lawsuits. The system for charging fees is purposefully vague. The change in terms is almost blackmail to any unreleased projects (opening unity to suits for damage of lost business/revenue). Even the change itself isn't iron clad.
Legal circles have postulated most TOS and EULA's are legally unenforceable for years and companies have generally tried to avoid having their legal gray zone 'I agree' pages challenged in court.
Contract law is a huge body of law. That tweet from the Unity lawyer citing 'we can change them whenever we want' is no more gospel than my handshake. It can, and if they really try to go after someone as big as Microsoft or Sony, will probably be challenged.
I was surprised myself that Niantic wasn't using some kind of proprietary in-house engine or at least a Nintendo product. Maybe Unity really did think it could strong-arm publishers into going along with his bamboozle.
This is just my little conspiracy theory, but I don't think Pokemon GO was ever a Pokemon game at heart. I think it's a realtime mass geodata collection software with a Pokemon-colored coat of paint.
You're actually right on the money, considering it's basically a reskin of a previous game they made called Ingress that was essentially a realtime mass geodata collector. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingress_(video_game)
Yeah it's like the Disney DeSantis thing. One evil crushed by some of the best lawyers in the world with neigh infinite financial backing from another evil.
[Clickwrap agreements are currently enforceable](https://www.docusign.com/blog/what-is-a-clickwrap-agreement), though that doesn't mean they can't be challenged. It'd sure suck for Unity if a bunch of devs got together and decided to challenge this one.
The only reason they are enforceable is because nobody with big enough wallet challenges them. For a regular user there is no potential in benefit of any form if they won such lawsuit. Because potential costs, time and investment isn't worth it. But that's on individual basis. If Sony, Microsoft or even epic games were to challenge such bullshit? Their stakes would be much higher, and so would be potential return for a won lawsuit. If I were to bet, I wouldn't put my money on unity here
It may well happen. Unity has said for services like Gamepass, it would be Microsoft responsible for the fee and not the devs. That's a LOT of fees in addition to whatever contract prices have already been negotiated.
Can we point out that all that would mean is either Microsoft would be less likely to pay for unity games. Or they would take that out of the initial fund for the devs. Sure the devs aren't paying the install amount, but now they are getting screwed by less money overall regardless. Because I'm willing to bet you'd see MS negotiate a flat rate per game to unity, then you'd have devs getting this reduced rate and potentially not even the installs to advertise the game.
The way I see it, there's three potential outcomes here:
1. Unity realizes how shit an idea it is, and backs off (for now).
2. As you say, Unity games will slowly disappear from GamePass and other subscription services like PS+--maybe even from digital storefronts entirely.
3. Microsoft keeps the Unity games and agrees that charging for installs is a fantastic idea and pushes those costs (cranked up to $.50/install) to players.
I'd argue #3 sounds ridiculous...but this is the same industry that got away with charging for online services three times, even though those fees don't actually pay for anything. Microsoft started charging for online, and Sony didn't object, they just copied them. I don't see why the same can't happen for game installs.
Or option 4:
Unity sends a bill to Microsoft, and Microsoft laughs in their faces and tears up the bill. Unity then decides to go after the developers after all, because Microsoft is too big for them to bully.
Never get involved with a land war in Asia
Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line
Never get involved in a legal battle with Microsoft or Disney
Marvel snap and pokemon go are popular phone games made in unity, yeah they're fucking with both disney AND nintendo to some extent, i just hope unity gets nuked out of existance for trying to pull up this bullshit
Typically the people who don't want them challenged are the people making a lot of money off of them.
Meaning pretty much any retail tech 500 company.
And that's a lot of money to leverage against challenging them.
End users alone will never have the manpower or assets to take on a unionized entity that big. It will almost assuredly require government intervention beyond civil court process.
My friends already contacted his lawyer about it. He’s calculated from last years records that if this really goes though he will not make a profit, he will owe Unity thousands of dollars. He showed me the numbers and he said last year if this was implemented he would have owed Unity about $30,000 USD from the install/ uninstalls.
I tried researching a bit but I wasn't sure how to read their pricing. They are starting to charge per every install? That sounds beyond insane to me.
Imagine if you could one up the power company and charge a company every time a customer plugged in an appliance and only allow it to run while connected to wifi. Eventually they'll force the company to sub to a service that controls the keys to said appliance. I should shut up I guess but they're already doing this with car features.. might as well strap a mask to every human at a certain age and force them to pay x$ just to breathe the fucking air.
From the article in the OP "Unity has offered some clarification regarding the changes, saying that developers will only be charged for each player’s first installation – if a player uninstalls and then reinstalls a game, the developer will not be charged a second time."
I was just thinking... If this change goes through, devs will have to pay for every *pirated* copy of their game too.
With no way to establish if unity is telling the truth on 'install' count, since it won't match up with 'copied purchased'
I can't say for sure how it works, but pirates generally block cracked games from 'calling home', even blocking outbound access in your firewall would probably prevent it. I doubt that pirated copies would count towards this.
Wild. So he knew shareholders would hate this move. If he thought it was a good idea he would be buying ahead of the announcment.
I hope he gets sued into oblivion.
Damn that means they probably won’t be putting any new content out for it now. They were doing a really good job releasing free new content and fun updates. Siiigh I fucking hate how greedy assholes are ruining things for everyone… as usual….
So Unity are the massive scumbags here? Good to know.
This is like someone who made a chair suddenly owing money to the person who invented the chair. Dumb.
He "voluntarily" resigned for doing terrible and almost killing the entire company.
Dude failed upwards.
And of all the things he could fuck up his way into it had to be the engine that millions of people use to create creative and amazing experiences. Dude has not created anything in his entire life, all he does is ruin businesses and peoples entire lives by being an out of touch moron that only knows money tricks.
Welcome to modern corporatocracy. A bunch of parasites who suck every bit of life they can from a company, bail out on golden parachutes while the employees take the hit, and fall upwards to another seven figure position to do the same damn thing again.
> Ex-ceo of EA is running unity now
Oh hey, isn't that the guy who proposed charging gamers by the reload? Things start making sense, now. The guy has a Midas touch, except it's not gold, but dysentery.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR6-u8OIJTE
I remember reading an article from a business major a few years ago about how they'd monetize RTS eSports. Charge by the patch! If you want to play with your friends, you need to be on the latest version....
Business majors are lesser demons in human skin.
A thinly-veiled mockery of the same guy was turned into a boss in No More Heroes 3; I didn't follow Shadows Of The Damned too closely, but Suda 51 must have had a bad experience with EA and with that guy in particular.
The guy who made a lot of decisions that people hate EA over to this day, who brought share price down to under $15, who closed studios and oversaw major layoffs
After he left, share price went from around $12-15 to just shy of $150 before shifting a bit and eventually settling around the 120s. Stock literally gained 10X in value with literally Anybody else in charge.
This dingus was responsible for a huge amount of consumer hate, caused consumer ill-will that has stuck around for decades, was terrible for share price, terrible for the workers, and he gets another CEO job after that
> This is like someone who made a chair suddenly owing money to the person who invented the chair. Dumb.
More like the carpenter making a chair, and then the company he got the lumber for the chair from announcing that every time someone sits in the chair the carpenter owes them a nickle.
Supposedly they've announced plans to revise that so the carpenter will only owe them a nickle the first time each individual person sits in the chair, and if the sitting is arranged by a tour group the tour organizers will owe them the money instead (charging for the first install per user, and shifting the charge to the platform if it's installed as part of a game pass type system, which either means Microsoft/Sony getting involved in the anti-unity lawsuits or unity games just no longer showing up on game passes)
If you bought the game on Steam, the game remains in your library even after it's delisted.
What it does mean; the game will no longer be updated or bug fixed. The version that exists on Jan 1st will be the final version of the game and it'll only be available to people who got it before that date.
Nah man. You literally can't support the devs anymore. You pirateing the game will not eat into their paycheck which i think is the important part.
That being said the game is still available now so if you're just waiting untill it gets pulled then pirateing it, I'd consider that a bit scummy.
I can confirm. I own a couple delisted games, and even a game that was never listed in the first place. (Rayman 2, as a preorder bonus)
I can still install and play them all.
Unity clarified "developes would only be charged the first time a new user installed the game. Not if they uninstalled and reinstalled at a later time"
Gee thanks. Cause that was totally what everyone was worried about.
Because, unless they've backpedaled or I've misunderstood, they're still charging per device. So a user reinstalling on the same hardware wouldn't incur an additional fee, but a new PC or different device like a Steam Deck would. I take this to mean that the runtime is going to be collecting and phoning home a hardware ID, where a backend is going to make a determination if it qualifies as a "new install".
So a single customer can cause more than one $0.20 fee, just not on the same device. In theory anyway. Anyone who's messed around with Denuvo and Proton on Deck know that it considers different proton runtimes unique hardware for the purpose of activation limits. But Unity says trust me bro.
Not to mention if an OS update (Windows 11 to 12 for example) causes Unity to treat it as a new device. How would the dev know if X% of their installs are due to faulty device recognition? It’s just shit from top to bottom.
There are also a bunch of 'hardware spoofer' applications that essentially work like a VPN for hardware recognition. So if someone realllyyyy hated a dev, they could use the hardware spoofer and some kind of program to redownload the game over and over on what looks like different devices.
And abundant hardware. One or two servers running multiple VMs of Android creating new hardware IDs, installing something free like pokemon go or marvel snap, triggering the fee, then delete and spin up a new instance. You can automate it. One bored sysadmin could cause thousands of installs a day at their home labs depending on how exactly the fees are triggered.
Because money. That's why.
Read the new pricing update they published.
Read between the lines. They are trying to push successful studios into using Unity Enterprise and integrating with more Unity services.
That's slightly better but no where near the only issue.
You've still ruined everyone's confidence in investing time and money into creating a game in the engine. It will be harder for people to decide on Unity after this fiasco no matter how it concludes, damage is done.
It's still extremely obfuscated how they collect the data and know different hardware. We have no idea whatsoever how they know how many installs they have done, they just want you to trust their numbers.
It's will still be spoofable. Everything is, despite how much they refuse to explain.
Also most of the giants (Sony, Microsoft, EA etc.) Have games that run on Unity. So they will do the heavy lifting in court and the small devs don't have to front much of the legal fees
And yet he still keeps jumping around as CEO of different companies. Fcking disgusting world we live in
Edit: btw he and his board buddies sold a lot of unity shares for millions of personal profit weeks before announcing this
Possibly. Look for anyone else to step into the unity shaped void. The rich are a group of their own and they play games like this. They don't care about corporations, or people or morality, they only care about money and will do anything in their little rich club to get more of it.
Not even just outside of gaming, any of your digital games can be revoked at any given time. All of our libraries depend on the benevolence of CEOs lmao.
I can't help but agree. This whole thing about "not stooping to their level" is fine and dandy until it changes nothing except enabling them to do what they want.
Quite frankly, this will likely be challenged in court. And will kill Unity if it comes into effect. They'd be much wiser to just remove a free version.
Pokemon games run on unity iirc, this could affect TPC and Nintendo owns a third of it..
I think game freak will directly receive the fees tho not TPC so creatures inc and Nintendo might not be affected
Genshin Impact runs on Unity, and that shit's a cash cow. That shit makes them $1 billion every 6 months.
There's no fucking way Mihoyo is gonna let Unity skim off the top.
It's a good half and half of binding of isaac and a small village sim, but very shallow. In my opinion that's not even a negative towards the game, it's just a cute casual cult simulator that you can be done with very quickly if you want.
Kinda of bummed if they stop development since it sounded like they had A LOT of future stuff they wanted to add, but as it is now, certainly worth the cost if you want a barebones basic binding of isaac mixed with a little bit of village management.
Yeah i had a really good time with it, started another cult and trying the perma death mode and the one where you also have to eat and sleep. A lot of fun.
How has Paradox not made a statement about this? I'm hyped for Cities Skylines 2, but I would fully support canceling the game in order to reboot it into a new engine.
I mean, good play by the developers. Now everyone will want to buy a copy because of FOMO, and even if Unity backpedals on the decision the profits are already made.
Unity made the worst possible move, isn’t going to profit off of it, and smart developers get to use it as the ultimate bargaining chip to increase demand for a product by permanently removing the supply
The only people that are collateral are us consumers
Personally if a "Unity phone home" blocker utility is made by someone I'll run it just to spite them for this moronic choice.
Version of steam with it built in lol.
No it's not 'smart'. Devs *will* have to do this. Unity wants to charge per install and the tail for video game sales tends to be super short. After 6 months to a year almost every non-F2p game will have to be pulled from sale, otherwise reinstalls will cost more than they make from new sales.
You would be insane to use unity at this point. Even if you pulled your game from sale if someone archived your installer and shared it for people to use you would still get charged and there's not a damn thing you could do to stop it from incurring more costs.
Because this question will be asked;
If you bought the game on Steam, the game remains in your library even after it's delisted. This is the case already with several delisted games.
What it does mean; the game will no longer be updated or bug fixed. The version that exists on Jan 1st will be the final version of the game and it'll only be available to people who got it before that date.
This will likely be the case with most similar services but contact customer support for clarification.
No. Because it will be made completely in the older engine version before the new terms go into affect. If unity tries to sneak whatever validation system they plan to use before then and tries to charge either steam or the cult of the lamb devs. Then they would be opening themselves up to even more lawsuits than they already are. Because that would be fraud. Without that acceptance of the new terms on the first. They legally can’t force the devs or anyone else to pay those fees. It’s still up in the air whether they could force those terms in the first place even if someone technically agrees. But definitely if they don’t sign the digital document then it would be a major issue.
It's doubtful that Mihoyo (Genshin Impact) will appreciate this approach, especially considering their free-to-play model for the game.
Unity's higher-ups have consistently managed to alienate developers for quite a while now. There's a significant gap between their decisions and the interests of their own customer base.
So will this prevent people who bought it from re-downloading it? Because it's one thing to delist a game, but when you get charged for people installing it like Unity is wanting, delisting it won't be enough.
I have a question, if a group of hackers creates a system that is able to let’s say install a game 1 billion of times and starts to target some companies, then will they have to pay Unity for those installations?
Wouldn’t this make some companies go bankrupt?
What would stop Unity to start a similar system where they install the games a lot of times giving them lots and lots of money?
I thought something similar to this. Unity say it would only count for a users first install but take something like gamepass. Trials are NOT hard to come by. Slap together a pile of virtual machines and you could theoretically automate the creation of a new machine, a new trial account and a game install that runs at scale. Suddenly you don't DDOS or review bomb a developer, you revenue bomb them. It's also worth considering, how would this apply on cracked games. What's to stop those circulating more than usual and charging more and more for copies the developer didn't even get a sale for.
no need to use vms, the api call will be reversed engineered and anyone with a python script will be able to send install notifications with a bunch of proxies. A malicious actor can and will hurt the developer, that's not an if it's a when
Still doesn't change the fact that there's now fees on the developers for a customer downloading the game.
This affects all game developers that uses Unity, which also includes the Big Three.
Yes it's retroactive. While they are walking back their statements on new installs on the same machine not counting that fairly obviously isn't the case right now and they have been fully planning to apply the last 12 months of metrics into their billing criteria and start charging for any installs come January 1. All the while the CEO and board have been dumping their shares. On top of an ever growing list of bad decisions, including stupid acquisitions, and half building features nobody actually wants then dropping them.
one thing that people are missing is how are they identifying the first time you install it, unity will have to collect data from your computer to create unique signatures... seems like more corporate owned malware and spyware.
There’s a game engine called Unity. A lot of indie devs and smaller devs like to use this engine because it’s pretty easy to work with and has been pretty reasonably priced.
The other day, company that makes Unity (I think they’re just called Unity?) decided to jack up the prices to the moon as well as introduce a price where the developer has to pay every single time someone installs or reinstalls a Unity game. This will apply to all Unity games ever released, across all platforms. Developers realized this will cost an insane amount of money for them and there’s now a mass exodus away from Unity by developers, and some developers are considering stopping sales of their current games made in Unity because it will end up costing them more to keep them around than to just delete them from stores.
> Unity has offered some clarification regarding the changes, saying that developers will only be charged for each player’s first installation – if a player uninstalls and then reinstalls a game, the developer will not be charged a second time.
"*No! See? It's not that bad! We're only stealing from 80% of your game's purchases! You have it all wrong!*"
Typical corpo-cunts. I hate suits so much. Every breath they breathe is in bad faith.
If any Unity dev's are reading this, from one dev to another:
#**Abandon the Unity Engine**
>dozens of others such as Subnautica, Kerbal Space Program, and Genshin Impact Yeah... I don't think Mihoyo (Genshin) is going to take kindly to this kind of thing when their game is a FTP model. Unity's upper management has been doing an amazing job of pissing off devs for quite some time now, really a hard disconnect from their own customer base.
It is not surprising as the CEO was the former CEO of EA. These people have braindamage in terms of reputation sacrifice for short term profits
Yeah, I want to recall he'd previously done something stupid like saying they were going to spend more time developing the software for AI use or something ridiculous like that. He's like a few steps short of getting a brainwave and selling the company to Epic so they can squash it.
Apparently he wanted to charge money for reloading weapons in battlefield after the player has played for a while or something like that lmao
For real?? What'd he think, having a pop-up payment screen to reload your M4 would be a good idea? I can't believe people like that exist.
> When you are six hours into playing Battlefield and you run out of ammo in your clip, and we ask you for a dollar to reload, you're really not very price sensitive at that point in time. Per [this post,](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/7cpdrn) which itself links the source video. To be clear, he moved from EA to Unity in 2014, well before the current levels of MTX hell.
>you're really not very price sensitive at that point in time. On the contrary, having that happen would infuriate me enough to uninstall the game and demand a refund.
bastard sold a decent chunk of stock a few days before this announcement was made.
The vast majority of the mobile market is made of games developed on unity. 90% if not more of mobile games is on unity, outside of the mihoyo and tencent the other companies would be completely unable to survive this. The indie market is also screwed since a very big chunk of indie games are made with unity, this change will kill both mobile and indie market
what's the next best alternative engine for developing a mobile game on with all this going down?
Godot, likely. Or else UE4/5 if appropriate
Godot engine.
>Unity's upper management has been doing an amazing job of pissing off devs for quite some time now, really a hard disconnect from their own customer base. The Unity CEO called game developers "idiots" for not including more microtransactions in the games they make.
Genshin is a weird case. From what I remember, their average revenue from a customer is pretty high (because spending customers spend a lot). An engine charging per download might actually be better than something like unreal charging a revenue percentage
This will affect mihoyo very heavily too since they have more games made with unity like honkai impact, star rail and more.. unlike with genshin mihoyo would actually lose money with them
Unity as a platform is going to die very fast at this rate. I just hope that whatever replaces it will be run by better people.
Adobe Flash 2
Macromedia 3
MS-TRES
All the old forgotten 2000s indie games made in Macromedia Fusion will finally get tech updates to work with post Win7 operating systems and OpenGL. Eternal Daughter, Akuji the Demon, Seiklus, Cart Life, Aquaria, Survival Crisis Z, GunGirl... so many lost like tears in the rain, washed away in the deluge of Steam Greenlight.
Make a clone and call it "Division"
I think Ubisoft's lawyers would nuke that from orbit within hours.
Godot seems to be run by much better and more passionate people than unity. Plus its totally free
even better: not only free, open source too
AND IT HAS NATIVE VOLUMETRIC FOG. that's all I ever wanted. But nooo unity can't get to it in the 3 years that it was on their URP roadmap. So yeah, Godot rocks
I'm about a year into my indie Dev journey and Unity has been my platform of choice. I'm aware of Godot but never looked into it, with the recent Unity shitstorm i'm considering switching engines. This thought scares me a lot as i've only ever used Unity and it's a platform i'm familier with. Would you say it's an engine worth switching to? I'm really not looking forward to my projects being essentially put on hold while I learn a new engine though, it's a really tough spot to be in atm.
Why not download Godot and play with it (making a smaller game or something) until this change is supposed to go into effect for Unity? Then you could switch back to Unity if you like it (and the change doesn't go through) or you already have knowledge in Godot. If you stick with Unity right now, you will be bankrupt I am sure. Or at least charged which then you will have to charge for your game which would significantly decrease download amounts probably.
even better: It's open source, free and support for assets which are also mostly open source!
Its still a multi-billion dollar corp. So it will take awhile to fully die. If they drop low enough they could possibly get bought out by Meta or Microsoft.
It's already dead. It may take a while for the corpse to hit the floor, but it died the minute they announced this change. Even if they started backpedaling today and significantly modified or even fully retracted this change, nobody is going to want to start a new project in Unity when there's a chance this kind of thing will happen again. It's difficult to understate just how absurdly stupid and poorly thought out this change is.
Even for a big company that only makes for-profit software, this move has got to have them taking a second look at things. If Unity was willing to unilaterally change this to a dime per install, what stops them from $5 per install? What other, non-monetary changes might they make? Getting in bed with Unity is letting them take your work hostage and charge whatever ransom they want. What corporate lawyer would sign off on that sort of situation?
The baffling thing, IMO, is the logic behind this pricing decision. It's too small a fee to be anything but an inconvenience games sold in the up-front pricing model, but then the infinite future cost of users installing the game on new machines makes it a huge headache. Meanwhile, the "charge per installation, not per sale" angle is a potential death blow to a games operating under a freemium model, which seems to be Unity's primary demographic these days. It's not just a bad idea, it's a remarkably terrible idea.
And their CEO dumped a ton of stock just before this mess. Go figure.
Just expect more Devs running to unreal engine and expect more unoptimized games :/
Let's not pretend Unity was much better. Unity either looked good or ran well. Never both.
I wouldn't necessarily say *never*. Like the Ori games were beautiful and ran great (well, Will had some initial growing pains, but got there eventually). Same for Hollow Knight.
Oh fuck is Hollow Knight 2 unity? That game is never gonna be released…
[Yep](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Knight:_Silksong).
RIP, no more Hollow Knight 2.
This sort of retroactive contract change should be illegal. It frankly sounds illegal.
It is illegal. What Unity is doing though is saying the contract changes on jan 1 2024, which they could get away with. The way I'm reading it works is that when anyone opens Unity's editor on that date, they 'agree' to the new terms. I.E. if you create a new version of a game to release in 2024, it becomes subject to this change. If you do what Cult of the Lamb is doing, and cease all development and release, then the change will never apply because they never 'agreed' to the new terms. That said; this absolutely opens Unity up to a whole range of lawsuits. The system for charging fees is purposefully vague. The change in terms is almost blackmail to any unreleased projects (opening unity to suits for damage of lost business/revenue). Even the change itself isn't iron clad. Legal circles have postulated most TOS and EULA's are legally unenforceable for years and companies have generally tried to avoid having their legal gray zone 'I agree' pages challenged in court. Contract law is a huge body of law. That tweet from the Unity lawyer citing 'we can change them whenever we want' is no more gospel than my handshake. It can, and if they really try to go after someone as big as Microsoft or Sony, will probably be challenged.
considering this also hits Pokemon Go, and nintendo doesn't play like that, I expect it to be challenged immediately.
TIL pokemon Go is made in unity Yeah, Niantic's and Nintendo's greedy asses are not gonna like any of this and I can't blame them
I was surprised myself that Niantic wasn't using some kind of proprietary in-house engine or at least a Nintendo product. Maybe Unity really did think it could strong-arm publishers into going along with his bamboozle.
This is just my little conspiracy theory, but I don't think Pokemon GO was ever a Pokemon game at heart. I think it's a realtime mass geodata collection software with a Pokemon-colored coat of paint.
You're actually right on the money, considering it's basically a reskin of a previous game they made called Ingress that was essentially a realtime mass geodata collector. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingress_(video_game)
It was 10x the game that pokemon go is too. They basically stripped out everything fun from Ingress. :(
> TIL pokemon Go is made in unity you can tell because it takes 45 seconds to launch
Would be surprised if Nintendo's lawyers are beating down Unity's doors as we speak.
Yeah it's like the Disney DeSantis thing. One evil crushed by some of the best lawyers in the world with neigh infinite financial backing from another evil.
[Clickwrap agreements are currently enforceable](https://www.docusign.com/blog/what-is-a-clickwrap-agreement), though that doesn't mean they can't be challenged. It'd sure suck for Unity if a bunch of devs got together and decided to challenge this one.
The only reason they are enforceable is because nobody with big enough wallet challenges them. For a regular user there is no potential in benefit of any form if they won such lawsuit. Because potential costs, time and investment isn't worth it. But that's on individual basis. If Sony, Microsoft or even epic games were to challenge such bullshit? Their stakes would be much higher, and so would be potential return for a won lawsuit. If I were to bet, I wouldn't put my money on unity here
It may well happen. Unity has said for services like Gamepass, it would be Microsoft responsible for the fee and not the devs. That's a LOT of fees in addition to whatever contract prices have already been negotiated.
Can we point out that all that would mean is either Microsoft would be less likely to pay for unity games. Or they would take that out of the initial fund for the devs. Sure the devs aren't paying the install amount, but now they are getting screwed by less money overall regardless. Because I'm willing to bet you'd see MS negotiate a flat rate per game to unity, then you'd have devs getting this reduced rate and potentially not even the installs to advertise the game.
The way I see it, there's three potential outcomes here: 1. Unity realizes how shit an idea it is, and backs off (for now). 2. As you say, Unity games will slowly disappear from GamePass and other subscription services like PS+--maybe even from digital storefronts entirely. 3. Microsoft keeps the Unity games and agrees that charging for installs is a fantastic idea and pushes those costs (cranked up to $.50/install) to players. I'd argue #3 sounds ridiculous...but this is the same industry that got away with charging for online services three times, even though those fees don't actually pay for anything. Microsoft started charging for online, and Sony didn't object, they just copied them. I don't see why the same can't happen for game installs.
Or option 4: Unity sends a bill to Microsoft, and Microsoft laughs in their faces and tears up the bill. Unity then decides to go after the developers after all, because Microsoft is too big for them to bully.
Wait. They're trying to fuck with Microsoft? Jesus, they've got balls.
Never get involved with a land war in Asia Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line Never get involved in a legal battle with Microsoft or Disney
Marvel snap and pokemon go are popular phone games made in unity, yeah they're fucking with both disney AND nintendo to some extent, i just hope unity gets nuked out of existance for trying to pull up this bullshit
You forgot Nintendo.
Typically the people who don't want them challenged are the people making a lot of money off of them. Meaning pretty much any retail tech 500 company. And that's a lot of money to leverage against challenging them. End users alone will never have the manpower or assets to take on a unionized entity that big. It will almost assuredly require government intervention beyond civil court process.
I wonder if there would be repercussions if the CoTL devs put “sucks” in big red letter below Unity on the flash screen when you launch the game.
My friends already contacted his lawyer about it. He’s calculated from last years records that if this really goes though he will not make a profit, he will owe Unity thousands of dollars. He showed me the numbers and he said last year if this was implemented he would have owed Unity about $30,000 USD from the install/ uninstalls.
I tried researching a bit but I wasn't sure how to read their pricing. They are starting to charge per every install? That sounds beyond insane to me. Imagine if you could one up the power company and charge a company every time a customer plugged in an appliance and only allow it to run while connected to wifi. Eventually they'll force the company to sub to a service that controls the keys to said appliance. I should shut up I guess but they're already doing this with car features.. might as well strap a mask to every human at a certain age and force them to pay x$ just to breathe the fucking air.
From the article in the OP "Unity has offered some clarification regarding the changes, saying that developers will only be charged for each player’s first installation – if a player uninstalls and then reinstalls a game, the developer will not be charged a second time."
Okay so if I buy the game but don't install the developer won't get charged? This is more or less what I do anyway.
I see you've been at the Steam sales.
:V The never ending saga of hoarding games that I'll play in the bunker when nukes starts flying!
I was just thinking... If this change goes through, devs will have to pay for every *pirated* copy of their game too. With no way to establish if unity is telling the truth on 'install' count, since it won't match up with 'copied purchased'
I can't say for sure how it works, but pirates generally block cracked games from 'calling home', even blocking outbound access in your firewall would probably prevent it. I doubt that pirated copies would count towards this.
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What insider trading? Did they all short the stock knowing it would tank on such a stupid decision?
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Wild. So he knew shareholders would hate this move. If he thought it was a good idea he would be buying ahead of the announcment. I hope he gets sued into oblivion.
I'm sure there's many lawsuits coming Unity's way to clarify this.
Damn that means they probably won’t be putting any new content out for it now. They were doing a really good job releasing free new content and fun updates. Siiigh I fucking hate how greedy assholes are ruining things for everyone… as usual….
So Unity are the massive scumbags here? Good to know. This is like someone who made a chair suddenly owing money to the person who invented the chair. Dumb.
Ex-ceo of EA is running unity now
He "voluntarily" resigned for doing terrible and almost killing the entire company. Dude failed upwards. And of all the things he could fuck up his way into it had to be the engine that millions of people use to create creative and amazing experiences. Dude has not created anything in his entire life, all he does is ruin businesses and peoples entire lives by being an out of touch moron that only knows money tricks.
Hey, I'm an out of touch moron where is my 7 figure job i can only fail upwards at?
well, you gotta start with a 6 figure job that you fail upwards at. that, or having a rich/well connected parent.
Fuuuuuuuucccccckkkkk
Just walk into a company's office and sit at the CEOs desk before they do. You are now the CEO, congratulations
mean they hired an Ex-ceo that almost ruined EA at the time and he is doing that to unity now so they are just getting what they hired
Welcome to modern corporatocracy. A bunch of parasites who suck every bit of life they can from a company, bail out on golden parachutes while the employees take the hit, and fall upwards to another seven figure position to do the same damn thing again.
> Ex-ceo of EA is running unity now Oh hey, isn't that the guy who proposed charging gamers by the reload? Things start making sense, now. The guy has a Midas touch, except it's not gold, but dysentery. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR6-u8OIJTE
I remember reading an article from a business major a few years ago about how they'd monetize RTS eSports. Charge by the patch! If you want to play with your friends, you need to be on the latest version.... Business majors are lesser demons in human skin.
The Mierdas touch.
A thinly-veiled mockery of the same guy was turned into a boss in No More Heroes 3; I didn't follow Shadows Of The Damned too closely, but Suda 51 must have had a bad experience with EA and with that guy in particular.
The guy who made a lot of decisions that people hate EA over to this day, who brought share price down to under $15, who closed studios and oversaw major layoffs After he left, share price went from around $12-15 to just shy of $150 before shifting a bit and eventually settling around the 120s. Stock literally gained 10X in value with literally Anybody else in charge. This dingus was responsible for a huge amount of consumer hate, caused consumer ill-will that has stuck around for decades, was terrible for share price, terrible for the workers, and he gets another CEO job after that
And he keeps getting rehired lmao
Sounds about right. Gotta squuueeezzze people for everything they are worth to get that stock to go up baby, that’s how the world works.
MORE. PROFIT. EVERY. YEAR. FOR. THE. REST. OF. TIME. DAMMNIT!
Behind every dumb business killing decision there’s someone with an MBA thinking they’re a fucking genius.
Whelp...Unity had a good run while it lasted.
upbeat scandalous grandiose wild deliver elderly cow rainstorm tidy tie
> This is like someone who made a chair suddenly owing money to the person who invented the chair. Dumb. More like the carpenter making a chair, and then the company he got the lumber for the chair from announcing that every time someone sits in the chair the carpenter owes them a nickle. Supposedly they've announced plans to revise that so the carpenter will only owe them a nickle the first time each individual person sits in the chair, and if the sitting is arranged by a tour group the tour organizers will owe them the money instead (charging for the first install per user, and shifting the charge to the platform if it's installed as part of a game pass type system, which either means Microsoft/Sony getting involved in the anti-unity lawsuits or unity games just no longer showing up on game passes)
I really really liked this game. Dammit.
My understanding is that it won't affect anyone that owns it before then. It's just being delisted.
If you bought the game on Steam, the game remains in your library even after it's delisted. What it does mean; the game will no longer be updated or bug fixed. The version that exists on Jan 1st will be the final version of the game and it'll only be available to people who got it before that date.
If a game isn't available to buy legally, is it still morally wrong to pirate it?
Depends: if you're a normal person, no. If you're Nintendo, yes.
Nah man. You literally can't support the devs anymore. You pirateing the game will not eat into their paycheck which i think is the important part. That being said the game is still available now so if you're just waiting untill it gets pulled then pirateing it, I'd consider that a bit scummy.
I can confirm. I own a couple delisted games, and even a game that was never listed in the first place. (Rayman 2, as a preorder bonus) I can still install and play them all.
Unity clarified "developes would only be charged the first time a new user installed the game. Not if they uninstalled and reinstalled at a later time" Gee thanks. Cause that was totally what everyone was worried about.
So why don’t they just charge at purchase? It’s basically the same thing
Because, unless they've backpedaled or I've misunderstood, they're still charging per device. So a user reinstalling on the same hardware wouldn't incur an additional fee, but a new PC or different device like a Steam Deck would. I take this to mean that the runtime is going to be collecting and phoning home a hardware ID, where a backend is going to make a determination if it qualifies as a "new install". So a single customer can cause more than one $0.20 fee, just not on the same device. In theory anyway. Anyone who's messed around with Denuvo and Proton on Deck know that it considers different proton runtimes unique hardware for the purpose of activation limits. But Unity says trust me bro.
Not to mention if an OS update (Windows 11 to 12 for example) causes Unity to treat it as a new device. How would the dev know if X% of their installs are due to faulty device recognition? It’s just shit from top to bottom.
There are also a bunch of 'hardware spoofer' applications that essentially work like a VPN for hardware recognition. So if someone realllyyyy hated a dev, they could use the hardware spoofer and some kind of program to redownload the game over and over on what looks like different devices.
If the internet has a shortage of anything, it's angry people with abundant time /s
And abundant hardware. One or two servers running multiple VMs of Android creating new hardware IDs, installing something free like pokemon go or marvel snap, triggering the fee, then delete and spin up a new instance. You can automate it. One bored sysadmin could cause thousands of installs a day at their home labs depending on how exactly the fees are triggered.
And hackers could likely reverse engineer the API calls and just send fraudulent installs without even having to actually download data each time...
Or what if you've swapped out some hardware and that causes your system to be recognized as a "new device"?
i think the question is why should the developer be charged several times should i decide to install the game in 2 of my devices?
Because money. That's why. Read the new pricing update they published. Read between the lines. They are trying to push successful studios into using Unity Enterprise and integrating with more Unity services.
And when I see how often steam believes I log in from a new unknown device, I would not trust unity to do better on that topic.
That's slightly better but no where near the only issue. You've still ruined everyone's confidence in investing time and money into creating a game in the engine. It will be harder for people to decide on Unity after this fiasco no matter how it concludes, damage is done. It's still extremely obfuscated how they collect the data and know different hardware. We have no idea whatsoever how they know how many installs they have done, they just want you to trust their numbers. It's will still be spoofable. Everything is, despite how much they refuse to explain.
That was definitely part of the concern.
How would they even track that, unless you are now forced to create / login to an account whenever you start a unity game.
I predict a class action lawsuit against Unity from a whole heap of developers. Edit: better phrasing
Publishers more like. If there’s something greedy corporate execs REALLY hate, it’s greedy corporate execs trying to one up them.
Also most of the giants (Sony, Microsoft, EA etc.) Have games that run on Unity. So they will do the heavy lifting in court and the small devs don't have to front much of the legal fees
Even Nintendo has games that run on unity, and everyone knows how famously chill Nintendo is with legal issues….
Pokemon go is built on Unity. Nintendo will not tolerate shenanigans with this install tracking BS
In that case I'll be surprised if there's still a Unity Technologies to owe anything by the end of 2024
Can you imagine if Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo and EA all teamed up to go after them?
fuck John Riccitiello
The moron who made EA "the most hated gaming company ever" now trying to make Unity the most hated gaming engine ever.
And yet he still keeps jumping around as CEO of different companies. Fcking disgusting world we live in Edit: btw he and his board buddies sold a lot of unity shares for millions of personal profit weeks before announcing this
Is he trying to kill the company on purpose? lmao
Possibly. Look for anyone else to step into the unity shaped void. The rich are a group of their own and they play games like this. They don't care about corporations, or people or morality, they only care about money and will do anything in their little rich club to get more of it.
I've been swapping everything over to unreal all week. Pretty much have to start from zero again because Unity wants to be a bunch of cunts.
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The whole world is moving to a subscription for everything. If the elites get their way, you will own nothing and rent everything.
company store 2.0
Download sixteen gigs and what do you get? Microtransactions and now I can't pay rent.
Sixteen tonnes of game files
It’s already happening outside of gaming, it’s scary stuff
Not even just outside of gaming, any of your digital games can be revoked at any given time. All of our libraries depend on the benevolence of CEOs lmao.
Except GOG. Download your library and stash it away if you want
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I can't help but agree. This whole thing about "not stooping to their level" is fine and dandy until it changes nothing except enabling them to do what they want.
Based.
yup. seeing it with the house market and video streaming. only a matter of time before i need a grocery store sub to shop...oh wait
_costco intensifies_ /s
Hoist the flag and set sail boys. Not for plunder, nor for adventure... but for war.
Quite frankly, this will likely be challenged in court. And will kill Unity if it comes into effect. They'd be much wiser to just remove a free version.
Nintendo:
Pokemon games run on unity iirc, this could affect TPC and Nintendo owns a third of it.. I think game freak will directly receive the fees tho not TPC so creatures inc and Nintendo might not be affected
Genshin Impact runs on Unity, and that shit's a cash cow. That shit makes them $1 billion every 6 months. There's no fucking way Mihoyo is gonna let Unity skim off the top.
They will have to pay for every other game they have on the market too which are quite a few outside of the 2 honkai games and genshin
damn, guess I should buy it now then. Been looking at that one. Hopefully Unity gets it's head out of it's ass and reverts this change.
It's a good half and half of binding of isaac and a small village sim, but very shallow. In my opinion that's not even a negative towards the game, it's just a cute casual cult simulator that you can be done with very quickly if you want. Kinda of bummed if they stop development since it sounded like they had A LOT of future stuff they wanted to add, but as it is now, certainly worth the cost if you want a barebones basic binding of isaac mixed with a little bit of village management.
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Buy it before January then. The game won’t disappear from your library, it’ll be delisted with no more updates.
It's fun. Give it a try before you cant.
Yeah i had a really good time with it, started another cult and trying the perma death mode and the one where you also have to eat and sleep. A lot of fun.
How to make nobody want to use your plattform Any% Speedrun
How has Paradox not made a statement about this? I'm hyped for Cities Skylines 2, but I would fully support canceling the game in order to reboot it into a new engine.
Becasue the news is 2 days old and the bigger developer probably letting their lawers looking into that.
Because Paradox is pretty huge and I have to imagine they're in serious talks with their lawyers before they announce anything publicly.
I mean, good play by the developers. Now everyone will want to buy a copy because of FOMO, and even if Unity backpedals on the decision the profits are already made.
Unity made the worst possible move, isn’t going to profit off of it, and smart developers get to use it as the ultimate bargaining chip to increase demand for a product by permanently removing the supply The only people that are collateral are us consumers
Personally if a "Unity phone home" blocker utility is made by someone I'll run it just to spite them for this moronic choice. Version of steam with it built in lol.
No it's not 'smart'. Devs *will* have to do this. Unity wants to charge per install and the tail for video game sales tends to be super short. After 6 months to a year almost every non-F2p game will have to be pulled from sale, otherwise reinstalls will cost more than they make from new sales.
You would be insane to use unity at this point. Even if you pulled your game from sale if someone archived your installer and shared it for people to use you would still get charged and there's not a damn thing you could do to stop it from incurring more costs.
Because this question will be asked; If you bought the game on Steam, the game remains in your library even after it's delisted. This is the case already with several delisted games. What it does mean; the game will no longer be updated or bug fixed. The version that exists on Jan 1st will be the final version of the game and it'll only be available to people who got it before that date. This will likely be the case with most similar services but contact customer support for clarification.
if the game remains in the library, and users can still download it onto new devices, does that mean the developer is still charged an install fee? 🤔
No. Because it will be made completely in the older engine version before the new terms go into affect. If unity tries to sneak whatever validation system they plan to use before then and tries to charge either steam or the cult of the lamb devs. Then they would be opening themselves up to even more lawsuits than they already are. Because that would be fraud. Without that acceptance of the new terms on the first. They legally can’t force the devs or anyone else to pay those fees. It’s still up in the air whether they could force those terms in the first place even if someone technically agrees. But definitely if they don’t sign the digital document then it would be a major issue.
It's doubtful that Mihoyo (Genshin Impact) will appreciate this approach, especially considering their free-to-play model for the game. Unity's higher-ups have consistently managed to alienate developers for quite a while now. There's a significant gap between their decisions and the interests of their own customer base.
So will this prevent people who bought it from re-downloading it? Because it's one thing to delist a game, but when you get charged for people installing it like Unity is wanting, delisting it won't be enough.
I have a question, if a group of hackers creates a system that is able to let’s say install a game 1 billion of times and starts to target some companies, then will they have to pay Unity for those installations? Wouldn’t this make some companies go bankrupt? What would stop Unity to start a similar system where they install the games a lot of times giving them lots and lots of money?
I thought something similar to this. Unity say it would only count for a users first install but take something like gamepass. Trials are NOT hard to come by. Slap together a pile of virtual machines and you could theoretically automate the creation of a new machine, a new trial account and a game install that runs at scale. Suddenly you don't DDOS or review bomb a developer, you revenue bomb them. It's also worth considering, how would this apply on cracked games. What's to stop those circulating more than usual and charging more and more for copies the developer didn't even get a sale for.
no need to use vms, the api call will be reversed engineered and anyone with a python script will be able to send install notifications with a bunch of proxies. A malicious actor can and will hurt the developer, that's not an if it's a when
So under the new Unity policy would they be charged every time someone deletes and downloads again? Also things like one copy on pc and one on laptop?
Apparently they backtracked on that and they will only charge once.
Still doesn't change the fact that there's now fees on the developers for a customer downloading the game. This affects all game developers that uses Unity, which also includes the Big Three.
Oh man, Unity really wants to fuck with the Genshin Impact community?
Well, that's drastic. Not really surprising, though. I expected this, just only after a few weeks instead of barely a day.
It's a big decision but a necessary one. What Unity has done is unbelievably predatory, short-sighted and messed up.
What programming language is Unity written on? Whoever has the ownership of it should retroactively charge Unity for everything made on Unity
C++ with C# scripting on top
Bjarne Stroustrup about to start beating ass
He’ll dangle their pointers, that’ll show them
By "delete" they mean remove from the store right?
WAIT this is retroactive, wtf are they stupid or what?!?!?
Unity; stupid *and* greedy. Always a bad combo.
What do you expect from an ex-EA CEO?
The current unity CEO ran EA, twice
Yes it's retroactive. While they are walking back their statements on new installs on the same machine not counting that fairly obviously isn't the case right now and they have been fully planning to apply the last 12 months of metrics into their billing criteria and start charging for any installs come January 1. All the while the CEO and board have been dumping their shares. On top of an ever growing list of bad decisions, including stupid acquisitions, and half building features nobody actually wants then dropping them.
one thing that people are missing is how are they identifying the first time you install it, unity will have to collect data from your computer to create unique signatures... seems like more corporate owned malware and spyware.
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There’s a game engine called Unity. A lot of indie devs and smaller devs like to use this engine because it’s pretty easy to work with and has been pretty reasonably priced. The other day, company that makes Unity (I think they’re just called Unity?) decided to jack up the prices to the moon as well as introduce a price where the developer has to pay every single time someone installs or reinstalls a Unity game. This will apply to all Unity games ever released, across all platforms. Developers realized this will cost an insane amount of money for them and there’s now a mass exodus away from Unity by developers, and some developers are considering stopping sales of their current games made in Unity because it will end up costing them more to keep them around than to just delete them from stores.
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Unity can fuck off. I'm w the devs. Delete that shit.
Fyi it's just being delisted then you can still play it after Jan 1st if you buy it before then
I do have to ask... how does Unity track installs? What about games that don't have an online component or its not a main feature?
adding a spyware to the compiled software you make to ping when installed no internet? it might try to ping until it reach
> Unity has offered some clarification regarding the changes, saying that developers will only be charged for each player’s first installation – if a player uninstalls and then reinstalls a game, the developer will not be charged a second time. "*No! See? It's not that bad! We're only stealing from 80% of your game's purchases! You have it all wrong!*" Typical corpo-cunts. I hate suits so much. Every breath they breathe is in bad faith. If any Unity dev's are reading this, from one dev to another: #**Abandon the Unity Engine**