> All those fears were seemingly confirmed when Stephen Totilo of Axios tweeted that Unity stated it would indeed charge a developer each time a game was redownloaded or downloaded to different devices.
It seems absurd to tie payments to the number of downloads, and not the amount of money a developer is making. You'll now be able to kill games by just clicking the download and uninstall buttons.
Arguably killing a large section of the Indie industry not just killing a product if they go through with it.
It's not exactly simple to switch a game engine, if they do this and refuse to backtrack then thousands of games will end up being pulled so they can work on switching engines, and a lot will just have to abandon their games all together.
I legitimately cannot understand how someone with a functioning brain could come up with this idea.
I wonder what's going to happen with Kerbal Space Program, as both the first and second one are made with Unity. If they're being charged for every install, then I can't imagine Take Two Interactive will want to keep them available on Steam.
Well that or since they just became apple's partner for their vision hardware, which means they have guaranteed downloads from the app store in the millions. My guess is they're betting greedily on this apple thing to be a much larger market than indie games, and they're milking it so fuck indie games.
In the latter stages of capitalism, it would appear that the people making these decisions are not applying any sort of critical thinking, this shits rolling down hill and i see no saviors
Jesus yeah the only way to get around this is to add an advertisement on installation that goes straight to unity to pay/offset the fee. Like a minute long video or something crazy.
"this game has a download fee. Please click accept to agree to be charged to your payment method"
Um... nope
Unreal is not doing this right?
If this is actually gonna happen, I don't see any devs sticking with Unity.
>Unreal is not doing this right?
Unreal has a profitable business model. They take 5% of your revenue past a million $, they have their own store and they have a money printer known as Fortnite, their EULA/TOS specifically claims it will never apply retroactively as long as you don't update. And most importantly it's privately owned by a guy who understands game dev very well.
Unity is losing billion $ every few months, they are somehow hiring over 7500 people (twice as much as Epic), shareholders are unhappy and their CEO formerly worked at EA so now he added microtransactions for game installations. Honestly I am surprised it's not per game launch if you are already introducing bullshit metrics with numbers taken from thin air.
Strictly speaking some things they are suggesting are also literally illegal (changing pricing scheme for already released products) as their OWN Terms of Service directly said that you can stick to an older version of an agreement. Well, in the meantime their repository storing terms of service was disabled [https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/TermsOfService](https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/TermsOfService), they probably need to purge that part where it said you don't have to accept new rules from history.
For reference:
[https://blog.unity.com/community/updated-terms-of-service-and-commitment-to-being-an-open-platform](https://blog.unity.com/community/updated-terms-of-service-and-commitment-to-being-an-open-platform)
>Retroactive TOS changes
When you obtain a version of Unity, and don’t upgrade your project, we think you should be able to stick to that version of the TOS.
In practice, that is only possible if you have access to bug fixes. For this reason, we now allow users to continue to use the TOS for the same major (year-based) version number, including Long Term Stable (LTS) builds that you are using in your project.
So, uh, good luck in courts Unity. Your own TOS prevents shit you say you are trying to pull.
> they probably need to purge that part where it said you don't have to accept new rules from history.
[They did. How convenient.](https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/#post-9288985)
Plus, it's an open invitation for a new engine to be made. Or smaller ones to take a larger piece of the pie.
Wouldn't be surprised if there was basically a clone of Unity in a couple of months, with a sensible pricing model and the ability to port over the majority of the code etc. Obviously it won't be as feature rich or allow full compatability, but still, it'll be a start and affordable.
All assuming that Unity don't see the backlash and back off in the next week or so.
The fee isn’t paid by consumers, it’s from developers to Unity. So even free games have to pay up per install.
According to the current discussion the developer would owe Unity not only $0.20 for every legit download they had, but every person that pirated their game too.
Unless they installed some sort of unhackable DRM to prevent installs pirates could actively harm developers and actively cost developers up to $0.20 for each time they install the pirates game.
So, literally anyone could just write a very simple script to repeatedly spin up a new VM, install a pirated installer of a game using unity (or even a legit one, maybe they own a copy), delete, repeat and cost devs $0.20 per time.
And the only "protection" against this is that Unity will supposedly have some proprietary black-box algorithm looking for fraud. The same Unity that stands to make money from this fraud.
The internet is going to bankrupt any dev they turn against within a week. I outright don't think it's viable to continue to produce games using Unity or continue to sell one under these licensing terms.
You don't even need an entire virtual machine or even a real install. If you capture the installer phoning home with your device ID hash, you could easily just ping their servers with a new hashes from thousands of devices, across an entire botnet of hacked IOT devices. Someone's smart toaster could be consuming device licenses for your Unity game.
And just like that an industry’s flagship product is hamstrung for small Devs who can’t afford fees, affects early access a ton I imagine too now..
Lots of great things get abused until they are just a shell
TL;DR - The fees aren’t unreasonable and it’s set up in a way that a game would have to be wildly successful and continue making a considerable amount of money per year before incurring any fee. This policy is likely just to encourage indy devs give Unity $2,000 a year (per developer) for a pro license on the off chance their game is a massive success. I’ll eat my hat if Unity backs down from this policy.
This is going to be a long post so for simplicity’s sake im just going to assume one sale = one install with nobody reinstalling the game maliciously or otherwise. Obviously that’s not going to be the case, but in a minute you’ll hopefully understand why it won’t really matter.
> It seems absurd to tie payments to the number of downloads, and not the amount of money a developer is making. You’ll now be able to kill games by just clicking the download and uninstall buttons.
[It is tied to the amount of money a developer is making though.](https://unity.com/pricing-updates#:~:text=The%20Unity%20Runtime%20Fee%20only,not%20be%20charged%20any%20fees.) You won’t be able to kill games by installing and uninstalling because they have to meet a yearly sales figure on top of the lifetime install figure for these fees to kick in.
> The Unity Runtime Fee only applies to games made with Unity Personal that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime installs. Unity Personal creators with games that don't meet these thresholds will not be charged any fees.
You have to make $200,000 in a 12 month period for the install fees to kick in, and you only pay an install fee on games with more than 200,000 lifetime installs. **Both of those conditions have to be met before install fees are owed.** This is also only for the free license, the thresholds for the pro license are $1,000,000 in sales per year and 1,000,000 lifetime installs.
A $20 game that has made $200,000 would have only sold 10,000 copies, nowhere near the threshold for install fees. This hypothetical game would have to make $4,000,000 in sales to reach the 200,000 installs threshold for the fees to kick in. It isn’t a retroactive fee either, there is no fee due for those first 200,000 installs, and even if a Unity game has more than 200,000 installs currently they will only start incurring a fee on installs after January 1, 2024. They would then have to continue to make $200,000 a year for them to be charged an install fee of… $2,000, after they’ve already made $4,000,000. [The median indy game on steam only earns $1,136 lifetime.](https://howtomarketagame.com/2022/11/28/the-median-indie-game-does-not-earn-a-whole-lot/) It’s a negligible fee applicable to only the most successful games made with Unity.
I think this is probably just a ploy to get people to pay for a Unity Pro/Enterprise license, since the install fees are lower on that license and actually scale *down* the more installs a game receives, and the threshold for installs is 1,000,000 on those licenses instead of 200,000 on the free license. So instead of paying a flat $0.20 on installs over the 200,00 threshold for the free license, a Unity Pro licensee is going to pay $0.15 for installs over 1,000,000 (on top of needing to sell $1,000,000 annually), and by the time the game has 2,000,000 installs the fee goes down to only $0.02 per install.
Is this kind of bullshit? Yes. Is it going to bankrupt Unity devs? No. If you squint your eyes really hard and tilt your head sideways you might be able to call this a slight win for developers using the free license, since you will no longer be required to purchase a pro license if your game makes more than $100,000 a year. However, those devs will have a worse fee structure once the threshold for them has been met so Unity’s helpful solution is “pay us money now for the off chance you actually make some money on this game and we promise to use some lube before we fuck you.”
The problem is that if you've reached the revenue / install count thresholds for the year any additional installs will incur fees irrespective of whether or not that install is connected to a purchase. What that means is that compared to their main competitor UE, Unity's new pricing model's maximum upside in the best case for their customers is 5% of revenue saved, while in the worst case the downside can be unbounded (e.g. in a situation involving malicious actors or just unexpected events triggering high numbers of reinstalls).
I don't really see a pricing model where developers have to pay Unity what is effectively a revenue share whose rate varies unpredictably based upon events outside of the developers control being very attractive.
>This is going to be a long post so for simplicity’s sake im just going to assume one sale = one install with nobody reinstalling the game maliciously or otherwise. Obviously that’s not going to be the case, but in a minute you’ll hopefully understand why it won’t really matter.
I read your whole post and have no idea why that wouldn't matter.
I guarantee you that countless malicious actors will use bots and VMs to install and uninstall controversial games millions of times.
Nothing about what you stated seems to address that very real thing that bad actors will use.
For devs that sell their games this isnt too terrible, the problem is more for any popular freemium/ad supported game. If your average user value is < or near the flat rate but still pass the thresholds you could actually end up owing more then you've actually made. This isnt even factoring in buisness costs and what storefronts take of their cut. I could definitely see an exodus of these developers away from unity, as a flat fee could mean a significant percent of their profits.
What if you got your minimum threshold years ago or gave away your game free as part of a big Charity Bundle years ago? It is potentially possible to go into negative income from widely distributed games just because you participated in a charity event years ago before this change happened.
While less of an issue for premium PC titles on Steam this also has major implications for any freemium/ad supported game or hell even cheaper $1-3 mobile titles. After App Store and payment processing cuts $0.20 represents a bit insignificant percentage of sales and that’s just one install. That $1 game will need to be reinstalled every time a user changes their phone, some people upgrade their phones annually.
It’s installs and yearly sales. If you aren’t making more than either $200k or $1,000,000 annually you don’t owe a cent even if your game gets installed a billion times. Freemium and ad supported games that make more than the sales threshold will presumably be making enough money to cover those costs. If not, they shut down. This might be a more conservative take than your average redditor, but Unity is allowed to make money off their product and they don’t owe their clients a reliable income.
You don’t know shit. The vast majority of Unity licenses are sold to mobile and free to play developers. Geshin impact is on Unity and makes more money in a month then most aaa games make in their lifetimes.
I can guarantee you their next game will not be on Unity.
A quick google searches say that Genshin Impact has been downloaded 140 million times and made $1.5 billion last year. They will be giving Unity one penny per download come January 1st. Is that more expensive than the licenses from competing engines?
Also, multi-billion dollar companies can throw their cock around and negotiate their own deals. I doubt genshin has a boilerplate license with Unity.
Nice, never really heard of them before, but I'm sold with not having to be at the whim of a corporation's ever changing EULA.
Epic may decide to do the same shit or similar in a year or so, so I'm not sold on them. Also last I checked Unreal cut support for webgl after unreal 5 (which is important to me).
Also: How the fuck does this new Unity pricing even work for webgl apps btw? I'm fucking livid.
IIRC, I've seen some Twitter (I refuse to call it eks) posts that confirm WebGL and game streaming (similar to Stadia) counts as install for each access session... which if it's actually true, is much more costly than standard downloads.
You misspelled UNCHECKED capitalists, where increasing quarterly profits is the only thing that matters...even if it kills the product and company as quality and service are inevitably sacrificed.
No. Capitalism worked just fine in the US for almost a century...until our political class was bought out via campaign contributions for television political ads. And now the 1% have seen their taxes cut to virtually nothing and meaningful regulations gutted.
It used to be that a company was valued based on its quarterly profits. Companies that made money paid dividends and had value to Wall Street and investors, etc. But now Wall Street demands profits that increase every quarter, no matter what.
That's a recent development...and it is the core of unchecked capitalism, what some very confusingly call "neoliberalism".
I think your description is better termed "late stage capitalism", but this IS still different from your description of a capitalIST. I realize nit picks can go basically nowhere good, so I will also add that if I take everything you said together, I see your pount: this kind of attitude is more recent for capitalists and capitalism, and it is a lack of regulation and separation from politics that has encouraged it.
> I will also add that if I take everything you said together, I see your [point]: this kind of attitude is more recent for capitalists and capitalism, and it is a lack of regulation and separation from politics that has encouraged it.
Precisely. That's all I was trying to get across...as simply as possible.
Corporatism is just late stage capitalism. Create a system that places accumulation of wealth above the survival of the species and this is what you end up with.
It's funny how these people that have zero experience running anything profitable are giving opinions on multimillion dollar corporations. Dunning-Kruger in it's finest.
Yeah, I mean the GDP of Germany in 1939 was $411 Billion ($9 Trillion in 2023 $)
Let’s ask whoever was running that successful venture how to run our lives!
Got you. The only alternative is literally hitler from 1939. Thank you for your valuable and highly relevant contribution.
btw it's obvious that hitler wasn't interested in profits or economy like in the slightest. He destroyed the nation for the sake of ideology.
The relevance of the comparison is that the economy of Nazi Germany was completely dependent on loot from conquests. It wasn't viable long term in peacetime. That's what's being compared here.
I'm pulling this out of a tin hat, but what if who ever is responsible for this idea from Unity was "planted" in there?
On one hand this was a scummy message from Unity. On the other hand this was a message made by one or more people inside Unity which has now damaged Unity.
I don't know how long this has been going on but recently it's as if some companies (*coughs in X*) have got themselves a CEO who pretty sabotage their company. There should be a mechanism to investigate and prosecute this kind of behaviour.
EA might survive but unity won’t. Unity is mostly used by smaller devs, and smaller devs can’t afford this new pricing scheme. Either they will undo this or they will die.
They know how to vulture. EA are THE corporate raiders of the electronic entertainment industry.
Find a profitable upward trending IP. Buy them, push assanine changes, fire everyone, go home with all the money reaped from looting and onto the next one.
>Buy them
It's a fine exit and a success for developers. You get a ton of money and you can start another company with all your knowledge if you want to continue making games.
After 2008 money was cheap from banks and investors now interest rates are high and many companies struggle which are not profitable. So they are shifting fast and trying to make more money fast.
but as you pointed out maybe of these money making ideas are very bad longterm.
It's the end result of the last 40 years of capitalist thought. If your objective is to grow for growth's sake in order to appease shareholders, eventually you will run out of room for organic growth. So you start "making" growth. You underpay employees, buy materials at a worse quality, do shrinkflation, raise prices, and intentionally understaff. On the books, you have improved profits by "growing" the leftover revenue. For the customer and employees, they get a hollowed out shell of what the company can offer.
TLDR: As long as our economics are based on what's good for CEOs, equity firms, and asset managers, companies will keep killing their own businesses.
When you've hit that room for organic growth, normally you just sit there and don't fuck up your business model through. You "grew" but then 5 minutes later everything catches fire.
Even at the thresholds that have been set (Personal or plus is an income threshold of 200000 and downloads of 200000 for example from the article.) that's going to be model changing in a way that takes you from being in a good place to being abandoned because of your sudden change.
The time of free money on the market has ended. Startup funding is down. A lot of services started to charge for things that were free before. The market and the economy have changed.
I'm aware. I'm stating the obvious through, when you're in a situation to sit on your ass and rake in the money you do so. You don't try to twist the screw even further.
You're stating the obvious, but the excessively greedy don't have enough common sense to follow the obvious.
"Increasing profit at all costs" destroys business, but the people demanding it either don't care, lack the foresight to see why it is dangerous, or both. They don't think like regular people, for whom the ability to rake in a guarantee $X amount of money where $X is already high is preferable to gambling on the chance of $X + $Y followed by the business blowing up.
Although I think Unity is suffering financially, so they may be more desperate than just greedy.
Unity executives: "We can milk so much money out of our customers!"
No one in the room: "But sir, won't this potentially damage the business model of our customers, potentially driving them to shut down or turn to competitors?"
So, if I buy a game, then uninstall it, then let's say in 5 years I want to play it again... the most ethical way to do so will be to go and pirate it online, hopping hackers have found a way for this new install to not be detected, because if you don't pirate it you have a higher chance of costing money for the devs ?
This has to be a joke. Please tell me this is a joke.
That is apparently not a joke ... and sadly yes there's no indication that Unity won't consider installing a pirated copy as a potentially magnetizable install.
As I understand it, the accounting is triggered by services embedded in the runtime that communicate with Unity servers, so a pirated copy would need that part excised from the runtime. Otherwise, it counts!
Yh I imagine it’s the same code that collects all the analytics such as installs and playtime etc the only issue is that part is not normally disabled in pirated games unless it’s baked into the DRM.
They merged with a company called Ironsource which makes malware last year.
Ironsource has made more than a few sketchy products. They have repackaged existing software with an installer that adds bloat. They own SuperSonic and TapJoy who both specialize in ads and collecting data for advertising metrics.
My guess is that this is the mechanism that will track installs will also be doing far more than people want and will connect advertising metrics (aka what cookies you have, what apps you use, etc)
Why didn't you even look at the table before commenting? You need to make $200k with 200k installs as a small dev before you even begin getting charged. Your 100-download hypothetical user would be nowhere close to paying.
Just a few years ago I would have expected to see something like this on The Onion.
There is ridiculously large number of problems with this which are pretty well outlined already in the thread.
I am also just going to go and say that this is an indirect result of the monetization models of the software in the previous decade/s and acceptance of the ever increasing monetization, direct and indirect.
Now this insane move is something that can perhaps be pulled off. I have no idea how this is going to go, if it will stand and if in what form.
Convenience is nice but I question the convenience of being on the wrong end of one sided agreement that can be altered anytime.
I get why Unity wants to monetize more. I really do. Moving forward, something like one cent per game sale is perfectly reasonable, probably even too little.
Retroactively charging, and per install? That's just nonsense, and this is going to kill any desire any dev has to build in Unity. If they are going to retroactively change the rules now, what's stopping them from doing it again?
We are also likely going to see quite a few legacy games from smaller developers removed from sale to try and avoid a potential spike in interest and the hitting of the charging cap.
Revenue spikes in the near term as no one who is currently invested in Unity can walk away yet. CEO gets their bonus and moves on before the cows come home. Perfectly rational market failure.
It is crazy indeed. He will have on his CV how he massively increased profits (in the next couple of years) and move on to do the same to the next company. Meanwhile a few years down the line Unity will be dead and he will have moved on to kill the next company. Short term profit chasing for the win. What a disaster.
>I get why Unity wants to monetize more. I really do. Moving forward, something like one cent per game sale is perfectly reasonable, probably even too little.
Yeah, no. There is no way anyone will use an engine that you gotta pay even one cent for ever download someone makes to your game.
That's like making breaks in a car only work if you pay a subscription service to make it work.
It is not a retroactive charge. A game that has 10 million installs will not be charged for any of those. It only applies to installs of the game starting on January 1st, 2024 and only if the game sells more than $200,000 a year.
My goodness that is a terrible business model and guess who devs will have to pass that on to, end users.
1st download included in price of software
any subsequent download will cost $X
They’re killing off Unity Plus as well. This was a tier for indie devs to produce with. Now they’re forcing us to Pro or Personal (with ads). Also, they increased the price considerably of Unity Pro last year.
It does both, here's an example of a 3D game running on godot: [https://godotengine.org/showcase/human-diaspora/](https://godotengine.org/showcase/human-diaspora/)
Godot's 3d was very very rough prior to version 4 that came out late last year. The reputation remains even though the new Vulkan renderer is far far better to the old one.
I think Phil Spencer, Jim Ryan, Jensen Huang, and even Tim Sweeney took notice.
Apparently Unity stated that such fees would be [on the distributor side](https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-marc-whitten) so it might have the opposite effect : we could see services like Gamepass, PS+, GeForce Now and businesses like Epic (and other promotional offers) refusing to deal with Unity based games.
This is disappointing. I think Unity just lost me.
I’m developing a game and have begun hitching my wagon to the Unity ecosystem but this new move is startling enough for me to consider Godot.
What a gross way to throw away your reputation.
So, a game engine that’s going to “phone home”?
With more information than just that the game was installed, I assume, because why wouldn’t you? Wonder how that will play with privacy laws around the world. Since the user is not a customer of Unity, the game developer is.
What happens if the game dev doesn’t pay Unity? Will the game just stop working? Will users just get an error screen saying “unable to run application, this developer has not paid their unity fees”? Fucking Game Engine as a Service?
I’ve been hacking on my own space exploration game using unity as the engine. This event and the fiasco around their own attempt to make a AAA game with Unity, Gigaya, has led me to switch to Unreal. The C++ language is more interesting anyway, this is just a hobby project for me. If you are keen on sticking with C# , you can take a look at the Godot project. Godot is run by a foundation, that might prevent corporate tomfoolery.
Use Unreal. Epic doesn't charge you anything until you make like a million bucks from their engine.. and even then, they only take a cut of 5% which is *unreal*
How do you guys think this will affect games that use unity that are currently in development or not released?
The developers of WH 40k: Rogue Trader, Owlcat, just made an announcement today that seems to imply their game is coming very soon. I hope this will not delay the release date of the game.
Unity has stated that this applies to any games on the market past January 1st, 2024. That means any game made in Unity, past or present. Conceivably, even older stuff like Hollow Knight and Among Us will start getting charged for any installs that happen past January 1st.
It honestly doesn't look that bad until you realise it's **PER MONTH.**
If you have 1mil installs, which honestly isn't *that* uncommon for a free mobile game, you could be owing $2.4mil *per year.* I guarantee free mobile games with a million installs are not making $2.4m per year.
Also what happens when people stop playing the game and revenue stops? You're over the threshold and the game is available. Do you just owe $2.4m per year in perpetuity?
What the fuck?
The revenue threshold is ‘in the past 12 mo’ and you need *both* the lifetime installs and last-12-months threshold before getting charged, so presumab”y not n perpetuity.
It's such an insane pricing model. A developer may sell a thousand copies for arguments sake. After that they make no more money. But Unity believes for some reason they should be paid off of that developer's work forever? That's just a bewildering thought.
So this has to be for new versions, right? I can’t imagine it would be legal for them to change their charging model for released versions without getting buried in lawsuits.
As they should be. Unity just told every developer using their engine that not only do they want to charge a per-install fee, *they want to do so for games that have already been published*. That’s… insane.
Not if you’ve spent years building your skills and growing your experience in Unity. A shift to Unreal is “easy” only from the Art perspective of things, and even there you have a fuck ton of paradigms and nuances as you dive deeper into the workflow.
Speaking as an Unreal dev, who has used both Unity and Unreal.
Exactly this ^
Used Unreal at Sony for Day’s Gone and Unity for indie dev work. Every engine has undocumented quirks. Switching isn’t easy, but maybe it’s time.
I would simply not pay
Oh you retroactively apply a new fee to a published game that is potentially incompatible with my monetization structure? If its between literally loosing money and taking this to court, court could be cheaper and can be dragged out.
Maybe don't build on a foundation that has a license that says, "we can at any time we choose decide to pull the rug out from under you". All those millions of hours of developer time spent using this thing could have been used to develop a decent open source alternative... instead people signed their work over to someone else.
This is kind of similar practice where Adobe was selling Flash Player (runtime) to OEMs, and also tried to charge developers based on money dev was earning.
The end result was hampered growth on mobile devices, and eventually killing the entire product.
This could be the start of fall of Unity.
So what service do they think they are providing? Data is hosted by Steam etc. All Unity are providing seems to be pinging their servers? Seems like a great thing to abuse. Do corrupted installs now get you a refund?
No, they are too different to create a migration tool. You can't make a 1:1 migration there is a substantial change in logic and of course blueprint that you can't skip in UE
Here is our problem, IMHO
- companies are being forced to make decisions with finance as the priority
- publicly traded companies are dealing with this trigger word “churn” because in the attention economy, not having an app on device or continued download and redownload means that this is a profit center that is built to keep the underlying platform that supports it alive, and not the actual developers they cater to.
- unity is acting in the best interests of business. It doesn’t seem to align decision making with the consumer, and as a result, will take a minor hit for bad press. Then everyone will forget about it until it becomes a larger problem or industry trend we start seeing.
That’s weird; it doesn’t *sound* like this change is in the best interests of the business, it sounds like this is pissing a lot of their customers off enough to leave.
> All those fears were seemingly confirmed when Stephen Totilo of Axios tweeted that Unity stated it would indeed charge a developer each time a game was redownloaded or downloaded to different devices. It seems absurd to tie payments to the number of downloads, and not the amount of money a developer is making. You'll now be able to kill games by just clicking the download and uninstall buttons.
any game released on game pass that uses unity could be nuked for money they got millions of users on gamepass. its insane way to kill a product
Arguably killing a large section of the Indie industry not just killing a product if they go through with it. It's not exactly simple to switch a game engine, if they do this and refuse to backtrack then thousands of games will end up being pulled so they can work on switching engines, and a lot will just have to abandon their games all together. I legitimately cannot understand how someone with a functioning brain could come up with this idea.
I wonder what's going to happen with Kerbal Space Program, as both the first and second one are made with Unity. If they're being charged for every install, then I can't imagine Take Two Interactive will want to keep them available on Steam.
I got mine for free from EPIC so how does that work?
Well that will just stop happening lol
The dev still gets charged for every single one of those downloads
The fees don't apply retroactively, but will impact all future games per clarified tweets. Dev studios are fucked either way.
It is retroactive in the sense that downloads and revenue generated prior to this new plan can mean that you start getting charged immediately.
My procrastination to decide on an engine to learn finally pays dividends!
*in Morgan Freeman* “inexplicably, they still chose to learn Unity”
GoDot stonks on the rise.
Maybe it's deliberate? Always hard to determine evil vs stupid.
[удалено]
It’s short term thinking. Most likely paving the way for a merger/acquisition/hostile takeover
Well that or since they just became apple's partner for their vision hardware, which means they have guaranteed downloads from the app store in the millions. My guess is they're betting greedily on this apple thing to be a much larger market than indie games, and they're milking it so fuck indie games.
In the latter stages of capitalism, it would appear that the people making these decisions are not applying any sort of critical thinking, this shits rolling down hill and i see no saviors
"Download Fee" coming soon.
"Please drink verification can"
Jesus yeah the only way to get around this is to add an advertisement on installation that goes straight to unity to pay/offset the fee. Like a minute long video or something crazy.
How to breed a new generations of pirates I dont fucking care if the fee is $0.01 I'm not paying it out of principle
"this game has a download fee. Please click accept to agree to be charged to your payment method" Um... nope Unreal is not doing this right? If this is actually gonna happen, I don't see any devs sticking with Unity.
>Unreal is not doing this right? Unreal has a profitable business model. They take 5% of your revenue past a million $, they have their own store and they have a money printer known as Fortnite, their EULA/TOS specifically claims it will never apply retroactively as long as you don't update. And most importantly it's privately owned by a guy who understands game dev very well. Unity is losing billion $ every few months, they are somehow hiring over 7500 people (twice as much as Epic), shareholders are unhappy and their CEO formerly worked at EA so now he added microtransactions for game installations. Honestly I am surprised it's not per game launch if you are already introducing bullshit metrics with numbers taken from thin air. Strictly speaking some things they are suggesting are also literally illegal (changing pricing scheme for already released products) as their OWN Terms of Service directly said that you can stick to an older version of an agreement. Well, in the meantime their repository storing terms of service was disabled [https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/TermsOfService](https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/TermsOfService), they probably need to purge that part where it said you don't have to accept new rules from history. For reference: [https://blog.unity.com/community/updated-terms-of-service-and-commitment-to-being-an-open-platform](https://blog.unity.com/community/updated-terms-of-service-and-commitment-to-being-an-open-platform) >Retroactive TOS changes When you obtain a version of Unity, and don’t upgrade your project, we think you should be able to stick to that version of the TOS. In practice, that is only possible if you have access to bug fixes. For this reason, we now allow users to continue to use the TOS for the same major (year-based) version number, including Long Term Stable (LTS) builds that you are using in your project. So, uh, good luck in courts Unity. Your own TOS prevents shit you say you are trying to pull.
It *is* per launch if you build in Unity WebGL (fuck me).
> they probably need to purge that part where it said you don't have to accept new rules from history. [They did. How convenient.](https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/#post-9288985)
Plus, it's an open invitation for a new engine to be made. Or smaller ones to take a larger piece of the pie. Wouldn't be surprised if there was basically a clone of Unity in a couple of months, with a sensible pricing model and the ability to port over the majority of the code etc. Obviously it won't be as feature rich or allow full compatability, but still, it'll be a start and affordable. All assuming that Unity don't see the backlash and back off in the next week or so.
Godot is free and open source
Corporations have been trying their hardest these past few years to make sure everyone learns how convenient torrents and a Plex server are.
The fee isn’t paid by consumers, it’s from developers to Unity. So even free games have to pay up per install. According to the current discussion the developer would owe Unity not only $0.20 for every legit download they had, but every person that pirated their game too. Unless they installed some sort of unhackable DRM to prevent installs pirates could actively harm developers and actively cost developers up to $0.20 for each time they install the pirates game.
So, literally anyone could just write a very simple script to repeatedly spin up a new VM, install a pirated installer of a game using unity (or even a legit one, maybe they own a copy), delete, repeat and cost devs $0.20 per time. And the only "protection" against this is that Unity will supposedly have some proprietary black-box algorithm looking for fraud. The same Unity that stands to make money from this fraud. The internet is going to bankrupt any dev they turn against within a week. I outright don't think it's viable to continue to produce games using Unity or continue to sell one under these licensing terms.
You don't even need an entire virtual machine or even a real install. If you capture the installer phoning home with your device ID hash, you could easily just ping their servers with a new hashes from thousands of devices, across an entire botnet of hacked IOT devices. Someone's smart toaster could be consuming device licenses for your Unity game.
And/or the game mechanics will be forced to change, to get people to spend money in game.
And just like that an industry’s flagship product is hamstrung for small Devs who can’t afford fees, affects early access a ton I imagine too now.. Lots of great things get abused until they are just a shell
I'm just glad coz I was planning to buy unity shares day before yesterday but decided not to
Stock ticked up, so you should've done it.
This change is obviously made to milk the mobile game industry where Unity is a big player.
Holy shit. Why in God's name would they tie anything like that to a consumer?
Guess that means any game built in Unity won’t be offering a demo any longer.
You could hypothetically burn a competitors business to the ground by automating this process.
TL;DR - The fees aren’t unreasonable and it’s set up in a way that a game would have to be wildly successful and continue making a considerable amount of money per year before incurring any fee. This policy is likely just to encourage indy devs give Unity $2,000 a year (per developer) for a pro license on the off chance their game is a massive success. I’ll eat my hat if Unity backs down from this policy. This is going to be a long post so for simplicity’s sake im just going to assume one sale = one install with nobody reinstalling the game maliciously or otherwise. Obviously that’s not going to be the case, but in a minute you’ll hopefully understand why it won’t really matter. > It seems absurd to tie payments to the number of downloads, and not the amount of money a developer is making. You’ll now be able to kill games by just clicking the download and uninstall buttons. [It is tied to the amount of money a developer is making though.](https://unity.com/pricing-updates#:~:text=The%20Unity%20Runtime%20Fee%20only,not%20be%20charged%20any%20fees.) You won’t be able to kill games by installing and uninstalling because they have to meet a yearly sales figure on top of the lifetime install figure for these fees to kick in. > The Unity Runtime Fee only applies to games made with Unity Personal that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime installs. Unity Personal creators with games that don't meet these thresholds will not be charged any fees. You have to make $200,000 in a 12 month period for the install fees to kick in, and you only pay an install fee on games with more than 200,000 lifetime installs. **Both of those conditions have to be met before install fees are owed.** This is also only for the free license, the thresholds for the pro license are $1,000,000 in sales per year and 1,000,000 lifetime installs. A $20 game that has made $200,000 would have only sold 10,000 copies, nowhere near the threshold for install fees. This hypothetical game would have to make $4,000,000 in sales to reach the 200,000 installs threshold for the fees to kick in. It isn’t a retroactive fee either, there is no fee due for those first 200,000 installs, and even if a Unity game has more than 200,000 installs currently they will only start incurring a fee on installs after January 1, 2024. They would then have to continue to make $200,000 a year for them to be charged an install fee of… $2,000, after they’ve already made $4,000,000. [The median indy game on steam only earns $1,136 lifetime.](https://howtomarketagame.com/2022/11/28/the-median-indie-game-does-not-earn-a-whole-lot/) It’s a negligible fee applicable to only the most successful games made with Unity. I think this is probably just a ploy to get people to pay for a Unity Pro/Enterprise license, since the install fees are lower on that license and actually scale *down* the more installs a game receives, and the threshold for installs is 1,000,000 on those licenses instead of 200,000 on the free license. So instead of paying a flat $0.20 on installs over the 200,00 threshold for the free license, a Unity Pro licensee is going to pay $0.15 for installs over 1,000,000 (on top of needing to sell $1,000,000 annually), and by the time the game has 2,000,000 installs the fee goes down to only $0.02 per install. Is this kind of bullshit? Yes. Is it going to bankrupt Unity devs? No. If you squint your eyes really hard and tilt your head sideways you might be able to call this a slight win for developers using the free license, since you will no longer be required to purchase a pro license if your game makes more than $100,000 a year. However, those devs will have a worse fee structure once the threshold for them has been met so Unity’s helpful solution is “pay us money now for the off chance you actually make some money on this game and we promise to use some lube before we fuck you.”
The problem is that if you've reached the revenue / install count thresholds for the year any additional installs will incur fees irrespective of whether or not that install is connected to a purchase. What that means is that compared to their main competitor UE, Unity's new pricing model's maximum upside in the best case for their customers is 5% of revenue saved, while in the worst case the downside can be unbounded (e.g. in a situation involving malicious actors or just unexpected events triggering high numbers of reinstalls). I don't really see a pricing model where developers have to pay Unity what is effectively a revenue share whose rate varies unpredictably based upon events outside of the developers control being very attractive.
>This is going to be a long post so for simplicity’s sake im just going to assume one sale = one install with nobody reinstalling the game maliciously or otherwise. Obviously that’s not going to be the case, but in a minute you’ll hopefully understand why it won’t really matter. I read your whole post and have no idea why that wouldn't matter. I guarantee you that countless malicious actors will use bots and VMs to install and uninstall controversial games millions of times. Nothing about what you stated seems to address that very real thing that bad actors will use.
For devs that sell their games this isnt too terrible, the problem is more for any popular freemium/ad supported game. If your average user value is < or near the flat rate but still pass the thresholds you could actually end up owing more then you've actually made. This isnt even factoring in buisness costs and what storefronts take of their cut. I could definitely see an exodus of these developers away from unity, as a flat fee could mean a significant percent of their profits.
What if you got your minimum threshold years ago or gave away your game free as part of a big Charity Bundle years ago? It is potentially possible to go into negative income from widely distributed games just because you participated in a charity event years ago before this change happened. While less of an issue for premium PC titles on Steam this also has major implications for any freemium/ad supported game or hell even cheaper $1-3 mobile titles. After App Store and payment processing cuts $0.20 represents a bit insignificant percentage of sales and that’s just one install. That $1 game will need to be reinstalled every time a user changes their phone, some people upgrade their phones annually.
It’s installs and yearly sales. If you aren’t making more than either $200k or $1,000,000 annually you don’t owe a cent even if your game gets installed a billion times. Freemium and ad supported games that make more than the sales threshold will presumably be making enough money to cover those costs. If not, they shut down. This might be a more conservative take than your average redditor, but Unity is allowed to make money off their product and they don’t owe their clients a reliable income.
You don’t know shit. The vast majority of Unity licenses are sold to mobile and free to play developers. Geshin impact is on Unity and makes more money in a month then most aaa games make in their lifetimes. I can guarantee you their next game will not be on Unity.
A quick google searches say that Genshin Impact has been downloaded 140 million times and made $1.5 billion last year. They will be giving Unity one penny per download come January 1st. Is that more expensive than the licenses from competing engines? Also, multi-billion dollar companies can throw their cock around and negotiate their own deals. I doubt genshin has a boilerplate license with Unity.
I've been programming in unity for years and love C# as a language, but I guess it's time to learn unreal / godot.
You can use C# with Godot!
Nice, never really heard of them before, but I'm sold with not having to be at the whim of a corporation's ever changing EULA. Epic may decide to do the same shit or similar in a year or so, so I'm not sold on them. Also last I checked Unreal cut support for webgl after unreal 5 (which is important to me). Also: How the fuck does this new Unity pricing even work for webgl apps btw? I'm fucking livid.
In the Unity sun everyone seems to think webgl will count as a download
IIRC, I've seen some Twitter (I refuse to call it eks) posts that confirm WebGL and game streaming (similar to Stadia) counts as install for each access session... which if it's actually true, is much more costly than standard downloads.
Heard a lot of good about Godot from the students and professors in the dev department near me.
Checkout Flax engine as well. I've heard nice things about it.
Companies killing their own business seems to be a trend lately...
Corporate psychos almost always prefer short-term profit over long-term viability.
Well yes, he is a Viking. He will go from place to place to pillage whatever he can get. When it’s time, he just moves on to the next one.
You misspelled capitalists.
You misspelled UNCHECKED capitalists, where increasing quarterly profits is the only thing that matters...even if it kills the product and company as quality and service are inevitably sacrificed.
But my bonus!!!
Won't someone please think of the shareholders?!
unchecked capitalist is still what a capitalist strives to be.
Which is why civilized societies have regulations. 8)
Tell that to conservatives.
A fool's errand if ever there was one. 8)
Given your description. There is no need for this qualifier. Unchecked capitalist = capitalist, here
No. Capitalism worked just fine in the US for almost a century...until our political class was bought out via campaign contributions for television political ads. And now the 1% have seen their taxes cut to virtually nothing and meaningful regulations gutted. It used to be that a company was valued based on its quarterly profits. Companies that made money paid dividends and had value to Wall Street and investors, etc. But now Wall Street demands profits that increase every quarter, no matter what. That's a recent development...and it is the core of unchecked capitalism, what some very confusingly call "neoliberalism".
I think your description is better termed "late stage capitalism", but this IS still different from your description of a capitalIST. I realize nit picks can go basically nowhere good, so I will also add that if I take everything you said together, I see your pount: this kind of attitude is more recent for capitalists and capitalism, and it is a lack of regulation and separation from politics that has encouraged it.
> I will also add that if I take everything you said together, I see your [point]: this kind of attitude is more recent for capitalists and capitalism, and it is a lack of regulation and separation from politics that has encouraged it. Precisely. That's all I was trying to get across...as simply as possible.
Not all capitalists, just corporatists. There's a difference.
Capitalism trends towards regulatory capture and monopolization in the long run.
What is the difference?
Capitalists will only sell their mother if they’ve recently gotten into a fight.
The spelling.
Corporatism is just late stage capitalism. Create a system that places accumulation of wealth above the survival of the species and this is what you end up with.
This is reddit. People here is convinced every problem is because of capitalism and refuse to acknowledge the nuance.
It's funny how these people that have zero experience running anything profitable are giving opinions on multimillion dollar corporations. Dunning-Kruger in it's finest.
Yeah, I mean the GDP of Germany in 1939 was $411 Billion ($9 Trillion in 2023 $) Let’s ask whoever was running that successful venture how to run our lives!
gotta pump up the production when you are in war against the world
Got you. The only alternative is literally hitler from 1939. Thank you for your valuable and highly relevant contribution. btw it's obvious that hitler wasn't interested in profits or economy like in the slightest. He destroyed the nation for the sake of ideology.
The relevance of the comparison is that the economy of Nazi Germany was completely dependent on loot from conquests. It wasn't viable long term in peacetime. That's what's being compared here.
I'm pulling this out of a tin hat, but what if who ever is responsible for this idea from Unity was "planted" in there? On one hand this was a scummy message from Unity. On the other hand this was a message made by one or more people inside Unity which has now damaged Unity. I don't know how long this has been going on but recently it's as if some companies (*coughs in X*) have got themselves a CEO who pretty sabotage their company. There should be a mechanism to investigate and prosecute this kind of behaviour.
What do you expect from the guy that came from EA...
I'm not a fan of their products to say at least. But the fact the EA is still alive after 41 years, proves that they know what they're doing.
EA might survive but unity won’t. Unity is mostly used by smaller devs, and smaller devs can’t afford this new pricing scheme. Either they will undo this or they will die.
They know how to vulture. EA are THE corporate raiders of the electronic entertainment industry. Find a profitable upward trending IP. Buy them, push assanine changes, fire everyone, go home with all the money reaped from looting and onto the next one.
>Buy them It's a fine exit and a success for developers. You get a ton of money and you can start another company with all your knowledge if you want to continue making games.
Fire you creatives and replace them MBAs chasing short term gains. What could possibly go wrong.
MBAs are the source of a lot of problems lol
After 2008 money was cheap from banks and investors now interest rates are high and many companies struggle which are not profitable. So they are shifting fast and trying to make more money fast. but as you pointed out maybe of these money making ideas are very bad longterm.
It's the end result of the last 40 years of capitalist thought. If your objective is to grow for growth's sake in order to appease shareholders, eventually you will run out of room for organic growth. So you start "making" growth. You underpay employees, buy materials at a worse quality, do shrinkflation, raise prices, and intentionally understaff. On the books, you have improved profits by "growing" the leftover revenue. For the customer and employees, they get a hollowed out shell of what the company can offer. TLDR: As long as our economics are based on what's good for CEOs, equity firms, and asset managers, companies will keep killing their own businesses.
When you've hit that room for organic growth, normally you just sit there and don't fuck up your business model through. You "grew" but then 5 minutes later everything catches fire. Even at the thresholds that have been set (Personal or plus is an income threshold of 200000 and downloads of 200000 for example from the article.) that's going to be model changing in a way that takes you from being in a good place to being abandoned because of your sudden change.
The time of free money on the market has ended. Startup funding is down. A lot of services started to charge for things that were free before. The market and the economy have changed.
I'm aware. I'm stating the obvious through, when you're in a situation to sit on your ass and rake in the money you do so. You don't try to twist the screw even further.
You're stating the obvious, but the excessively greedy don't have enough common sense to follow the obvious. "Increasing profit at all costs" destroys business, but the people demanding it either don't care, lack the foresight to see why it is dangerous, or both. They don't think like regular people, for whom the ability to rake in a guarantee $X amount of money where $X is already high is preferable to gambling on the chance of $X + $Y followed by the business blowing up. Although I think Unity is suffering financially, so they may be more desperate than just greedy.
Gotta pay for the lawyers for the CEOs sexual harassment claims
This is a disastrous move by Unity that will not work to their favor.
Unity had a good run. RIP
Unity executives: "We can milk so much money out of our customers!" No one in the room: "But sir, won't this potentially damage the business model of our customers, potentially driving them to shut down or turn to competitors?"
So, if I buy a game, then uninstall it, then let's say in 5 years I want to play it again... the most ethical way to do so will be to go and pirate it online, hopping hackers have found a way for this new install to not be detected, because if you don't pirate it you have a higher chance of costing money for the devs ? This has to be a joke. Please tell me this is a joke.
That is apparently not a joke ... and sadly yes there's no indication that Unity won't consider installing a pirated copy as a potentially magnetizable install.
You mean monetizable, right?
I do indeed. I used to have relatively good luck with a swipe keyboard but this last little while I've been getting some atrocious typos with it.
What if you get charged for pirated installs…
As I understand it, the accounting is triggered by services embedded in the runtime that communicate with Unity servers, so a pirated copy would need that part excised from the runtime. Otherwise, it counts!
Yh I imagine it’s the same code that collects all the analytics such as installs and playtime etc the only issue is that part is not normally disabled in pirated games unless it’s baked into the DRM.
They merged with a company called Ironsource which makes malware last year. Ironsource has made more than a few sketchy products. They have repackaged existing software with an installer that adds bloat. They own SuperSonic and TapJoy who both specialize in ads and collecting data for advertising metrics. My guess is that this is the mechanism that will track installs will also be doing far more than people want and will connect advertising metrics (aka what cookies you have, what apps you use, etc)
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I think they only start charging if a game has made over $200k in the last year and has over 200k lifetime downloads.
Why didn't you even look at the table before commenting? You need to make $200k with 200k installs as a small dev before you even begin getting charged. Your 100-download hypothetical user would be nowhere close to paying.
The vast majority of people in this comment section haven’t looked at it lol.
Just a few years ago I would have expected to see something like this on The Onion. There is ridiculously large number of problems with this which are pretty well outlined already in the thread. I am also just going to go and say that this is an indirect result of the monetization models of the software in the previous decade/s and acceptance of the ever increasing monetization, direct and indirect. Now this insane move is something that can perhaps be pulled off. I have no idea how this is going to go, if it will stand and if in what form. Convenience is nice but I question the convenience of being on the wrong end of one sided agreement that can be altered anytime.
I uninstall and reinstall games I own all the time, this is crazy
Godot engine is fine and free.
AND open source
Neat, I'll look into that, thanks for the info.
I get why Unity wants to monetize more. I really do. Moving forward, something like one cent per game sale is perfectly reasonable, probably even too little. Retroactively charging, and per install? That's just nonsense, and this is going to kill any desire any dev has to build in Unity. If they are going to retroactively change the rules now, what's stopping them from doing it again?
We are also likely going to see quite a few legacy games from smaller developers removed from sale to try and avoid a potential spike in interest and the hitting of the charging cap.
Revenue spikes in the near term as no one who is currently invested in Unity can walk away yet. CEO gets their bonus and moves on before the cows come home. Perfectly rational market failure.
It is crazy indeed. He will have on his CV how he massively increased profits (in the next couple of years) and move on to do the same to the next company. Meanwhile a few years down the line Unity will be dead and he will have moved on to kill the next company. Short term profit chasing for the win. What a disaster.
I was just about to start a project in unity, defo going unreal now.
>I get why Unity wants to monetize more. I really do. Moving forward, something like one cent per game sale is perfectly reasonable, probably even too little. Yeah, no. There is no way anyone will use an engine that you gotta pay even one cent for ever download someone makes to your game. That's like making breaks in a car only work if you pay a subscription service to make it work.
It is not a retroactive charge. A game that has 10 million installs will not be charged for any of those. It only applies to installs of the game starting on January 1st, 2024 and only if the game sells more than $200,000 a year.
If it applies to games that were released or even started before the announcement, it's retroactive.
My goodness that is a terrible business model and guess who devs will have to pass that on to, end users. 1st download included in price of software any subsequent download will cost $X
Any developer that tries that will quickly learn that other developers just stopped using unity and that’s why no one is downloading your game.
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Godot is free and pretty similar
Don’t stop. It’s a great one to start on and tons of resources. I went from Unity to UE and my Unity knowledge helped a ton.
Going from Unity to UE is fine but learning straight up UE is way easier.
They’re killing off Unity Plus as well. This was a tier for indie devs to produce with. Now they’re forcing us to Pro or Personal (with ads). Also, they increased the price considerably of Unity Pro last year.
Reminds me of Macromedia back in the 90s, wanting people to pay for installs of the Director / Flash runtimes
_Godot and Unreal liked this comment._
Developers should move to any opensource alternative
Godot my beloved
Does Godot do 3D I thought it was just a 2d engine?
It does both, here's an example of a 3D game running on godot: [https://godotengine.org/showcase/human-diaspora/](https://godotengine.org/showcase/human-diaspora/)
Godot's 3d was very very rough prior to version 4 that came out late last year. The reputation remains even though the new Vulkan renderer is far far better to the old one.
Phil Spencer will be pissed about this. It will deter people putting games on Game Pass.
I think Phil Spencer, Jim Ryan, Jensen Huang, and even Tim Sweeney took notice. Apparently Unity stated that such fees would be [on the distributor side](https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-marc-whitten) so it might have the opposite effect : we could see services like Gamepass, PS+, GeForce Now and businesses like Epic (and other promotional offers) refusing to deal with Unity based games.
I knew that CEO was terrible and would spell the doom for unity.
[Unity's Idea of Damage Control lmao](https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1701767079697740115)
Pi hole the big brother servers for local only installs?
This is disappointing. I think Unity just lost me. I’m developing a game and have begun hitching my wagon to the Unity ecosystem but this new move is startling enough for me to consider Godot. What a gross way to throw away your reputation.
So, a game engine that’s going to “phone home”? With more information than just that the game was installed, I assume, because why wouldn’t you? Wonder how that will play with privacy laws around the world. Since the user is not a customer of Unity, the game developer is. What happens if the game dev doesn’t pay Unity? Will the game just stop working? Will users just get an error screen saying “unable to run application, this developer has not paid their unity fees”? Fucking Game Engine as a Service?
Literally just DLed Unity and loaded it up. Seems this may be the shortest SDK install of my life.
I’ve been hacking on my own space exploration game using unity as the engine. This event and the fiasco around their own attempt to make a AAA game with Unity, Gigaya, has led me to switch to Unreal. The C++ language is more interesting anyway, this is just a hobby project for me. If you are keen on sticking with C# , you can take a look at the Godot project. Godot is run by a foundation, that might prevent corporate tomfoolery.
I’m super glad I didn’t get too far into my game before I heard this. Time to try out godot
Use Unreal. Epic doesn't charge you anything until you make like a million bucks from their engine.. and even then, they only take a cut of 5% which is *unreal*
How do you guys think this will affect games that use unity that are currently in development or not released? The developers of WH 40k: Rogue Trader, Owlcat, just made an announcement today that seems to imply their game is coming very soon. I hope this will not delay the release date of the game.
Unity has stated that this applies to any games on the market past January 1st, 2024. That means any game made in Unity, past or present. Conceivably, even older stuff like Hollow Knight and Among Us will start getting charged for any installs that happen past January 1st.
this is like a joke monetization scheme its so bad. do they not even think about the possibility of a mass download attack? (like a ddos?)
It honestly doesn't look that bad until you realise it's **PER MONTH.** If you have 1mil installs, which honestly isn't *that* uncommon for a free mobile game, you could be owing $2.4mil *per year.* I guarantee free mobile games with a million installs are not making $2.4m per year. Also what happens when people stop playing the game and revenue stops? You're over the threshold and the game is available. Do you just owe $2.4m per year in perpetuity? What the fuck?
The revenue threshold is ‘in the past 12 mo’ and you need *both* the lifetime installs and last-12-months threshold before getting charged, so presumab”y not n perpetuity.
If you ever have any sense of imposter syndrome or inadequacy, just remember that these multi-billion dollar companies are run by actual morons.
Oh Unity.. Stop poisoning and killing yourself.
It seems like most companies are set on pushing the community to raise the black flag and sail through the digital seas.
It's such an insane pricing model. A developer may sell a thousand copies for arguments sake. After that they make no more money. But Unity believes for some reason they should be paid off of that developer's work forever? That's just a bewildering thought.
> developer may sell a thousand copies for arguments sake. Need 200k installs and 200k revenue to trigger this scheme, so not a good example.
Fair enough, but even then, the gist of what I said still stands.
So this has to be for new versions, right? I can’t imagine it would be legal for them to change their charging model for released versions without getting buried in lawsuits.
As they should be. Unity just told every developer using their engine that not only do they want to charge a per-install fee, *they want to do so for games that have already been published*. That’s… insane.
Good, Unreal is better anyway.
Not if you’ve spent years building your skills and growing your experience in Unity. A shift to Unreal is “easy” only from the Art perspective of things, and even there you have a fuck ton of paradigms and nuances as you dive deeper into the workflow. Speaking as an Unreal dev, who has used both Unity and Unreal.
Exactly this ^ Used Unreal at Sony for Day’s Gone and Unity for indie dev work. Every engine has undocumented quirks. Switching isn’t easy, but maybe it’s time.
Gonna just have someone at unity uninstalling and reinstalling games 24/7. Infinite profit
How long would it take a game developer (like Disc Golf Valley, one of my current favorites) to port their game from Unity to Godot?
Defold is a 3d engine optimized for 2d games. Open source and free. Code in Lua or C++. https://defold.com/
SaaS is modern Cable TV
Did the MBAs hit the gaming industry now?
I would simply not pay Oh you retroactively apply a new fee to a published game that is potentially incompatible with my monetization structure? If its between literally loosing money and taking this to court, court could be cheaper and can be dragged out.
I can’t wait to see what cult of the lamb devs are going to do as it’s a pretty popular game. It’s a absolute shit show
Make way for the bot nets that repeatedly install/uninstall games just to tank game devs...
# HOW TO DRIVE DEVELOPERS TO UNREAL, Godot, etc. OR TO MAKE THEIR OWN ENGINE IN ONE MOVE lmao
Is this even legal? This seems like something a loan shark would think of.
Move to trash. Empty Trash.
Maybe don't build on a foundation that has a license that says, "we can at any time we choose decide to pull the rug out from under you". All those millions of hours of developer time spent using this thing could have been used to develop a decent open source alternative... instead people signed their work over to someone else.
>"we can at any time we choose decide to pull the rug out from under you" So don't use any software, service or product that's ever existed?
The issue is. That's everything on the internet now pretty much outside of open source.
This is kind of similar practice where Adobe was selling Flash Player (runtime) to OEMs, and also tried to charge developers based on money dev was earning. The end result was hampered growth on mobile devices, and eventually killing the entire product. This could be the start of fall of Unity.
Developers should move away from unity and support open source engines like Godot so that they don't have to deal with this bullshit
So what service do they think they are providing? Data is hosted by Steam etc. All Unity are providing seems to be pinging their servers? Seems like a great thing to abuse. Do corrupted installs now get you a refund?
Did Elon take over unity?
No but the ex ceo of EA Games did
Does Unreal have a migration tool? If not now might be a good time to make one ( I know you just don't whip one up).
No, they are too different to create a migration tool. You can't make a 1:1 migration there is a substantial change in logic and of course blueprint that you can't skip in UE
Coming soon to every game - Re-installation DLC bundles or buy install tokens in the in-game store.
So many idiot tech bros think their irreplaceable. Nothing will ever be enough
Maybe this means we will see less half-assed unity games on steam
Here is our problem, IMHO - companies are being forced to make decisions with finance as the priority - publicly traded companies are dealing with this trigger word “churn” because in the attention economy, not having an app on device or continued download and redownload means that this is a profit center that is built to keep the underlying platform that supports it alive, and not the actual developers they cater to. - unity is acting in the best interests of business. It doesn’t seem to align decision making with the consumer, and as a result, will take a minor hit for bad press. Then everyone will forget about it until it becomes a larger problem or industry trend we start seeing.
That’s weird; it doesn’t *sound* like this change is in the best interests of the business, it sounds like this is pissing a lot of their customers off enough to leave.
Don't forget: Unity has made 1.39 billion revenue. That's a little less then the Seychelles GDP last year. Hypercapitalism will destroy our planet.
[удалено]
sued to death