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Unity apologizes and updates their infamous Runtime Fee (blog.unity.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

Seems like a sensible overhaul, hitting the major issues with the fee, but still going ahead with a version of it. Big points for me:

Not retroactive. Only affecting the next version of Unity, and you can even opt out of updating to skip the fee.
Data is now reported by the customers. Still not sure how that plan to enforce this, but it's a hell of a lot better than some arbitrary data collection scheme being baked into the game.
Free version is excluded. No charging tiny side projects, or students or something, it only affects already paying customers.

Still not sure I love charging per install as a concept, and they've already overplayed their hand and burnt many bridges, but at least this implementation isn't insanely hostile. Guess we'll see how this plays out from here.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago

The trust is already gone. I would never use unity after all this

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

That’s great but they didn’t say a single word about:

the silent license update they made to enable this whole shitshow, which people discovered after they changed the license and had to find archived copies of the previous license to compare against
the scummy and anticompetitive (and, in some jurisdictions, possibly illegal) fee vouchers they were handing out to try to nuke AppLovin’s customer base

The retroactive fee stuff was pure idiocy, but the above points are also deeply concerning and problematic, and indicate a leadership culture that appears entirely unconcerned with business ethics. And the exec team is not changing. They will try something similar in the future.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Free version is excluded. No charging tiny side projects, or students or something, it only affects already paying customers.

Wasn't the free version already excluded from the changes before?

What they have done for the Free version is set the limit to 200k (it was 100k before) and they'll no longer be requiring the Unity logo to be shown, even on the free version.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

And you can even opt out of updating to skip the fee.

Yeah but how long is this solution really viable? It's not "skipping" the fee. It's just putting it off. Eventually your version won't be supported/will lack too many critical new features. No serious studio is going to work around you if they decided to just pony up.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Long enough to learn and switch to a new engine, possibly on your next game.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

No game with less than $1 million in trailing 12-month revenue will be subject to the fee.