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Unity adding a fee for devs for each time a game is installed, after certain thresholds
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
Godot.
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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Existing games built on Unity will also be hit with Runtime Fees if they meet the thresholds starting January 1.
How can you have a deal in place and just say “you’re giving me more money” and think that that’s ok?
I am altering the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further. - Vader
Tech companies badly need to get their shit kicked in to stop with this "I have the right to change the terms unilaterally anytime"
This might actually lead to that, depending on what kind of lawsuits arise from this change. Which could mean there will be pressure from others who don't have a stake in the "unity install fee" game but do have one in the "wants to change terms at a whim" game.
Or maybe it will threaten the "by continuing to use this, you agree" clause instead and open up a path to continue using a previous license agreement if you don't like a new one.
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Oh hey, look.
The former CEO of EA made a greedy, short-sighted decision to fuck over his entire customer base.
I am shocked, friends.
SHOCKED.
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This is a good way to incentivize game developers to just not use Unity and just some other engine that does this.
Great for short term profits which makes the quarterly statements look good, but bad for long term sustainability.
Short term profits making quarterly reports look better to stakeholders. Isn't that how 80% of these bigwigs get their job in the first place? We should be calling it the Zaslav Model at this point 😂.
Just because it looks better to shareholders now doesn't make it a good business decision. I swear the majority of CEO types don't give a damn if the company goes under in a few years because they either:
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Have a golden parachute in place by sucking up to the Board.
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Will move on to another CEO position at another company before it folds. Bonus points if they golden parachute on the way out.
It's a good decision for the CEO though. That's part of the problem, they're not beholden to the business. They'll just bugger off and go elsewhere.
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The person who runs Unity is a shithead.
Oh, he was a former CEO of EA. That explains a few things.
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More enshitification. This is the kind of stuff I’ve grown to expect from tech companies. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are bleeding money due to interest rates and they need any way possible to stay afloat.
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We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed," the company explained in adding the fee.
Ok and??
Every copy costs them money. Don't you know how digital copies work?!
Guys they're artists. They deserve to be paid every time you play any game. You wouldn't steal a car
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This might kill entire indie projects.
There's other engines, this will kill unity
I know and thank goodness for that... but there will be projects that simply won't be able to afford to move to entirely different engines. It's a lot of work that might have to be redone.
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It's probably still going to take some projects with it. If you've sunk hundreds or even thousands of manhours into a project you can't just... do it again, or at least not always. Especially not if you've invested money as well as time, which is probably the case for most indie projects that aren't literal one-person shows.
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I have a friend who has been moderately successful in the game creation space and he is saying he wants to just give up at this point because of this change.
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Oh yeah... I can't see this being weaponed by the bad side of the consumers.
Game comes out, it does something stupid or just "woke" and pisses people off. They attack the dev by installing more copies. Company goes bankrupt. Dickhead gamers win.
I got some clarifications from Unity regarding their plan to charge developers per game install (after clearing thresholds)
- If a player deletes a game and re-installs it, that's 2 installs, 2 charges
- Same if they install on 2 devices
- Charity games/bundles exempted from fees
Regarding this being abused by bad actors:
Unity says it will use fraud detection tools and allow developers to report possible instances of fraud to a compliance team
That clarification makes it even worse, this is obviously an attempt to push free to play or indie games out the window while making major bank.
The fraud detection will not help at all to prevent abuse especially in cases like steam family sharing where other "users" won't have to pay to install the game!
There's literally no reason to charge per game install here, the only possible reason is greed
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So basically they’re explicitly condoning it. That’s not just bad, but even worse that they’re doubling down that a delete+reinstall will charge the dev twice.
This will end a lot of indie projects and they’ve basically destroyed their good standing in indie dev circles.
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So once a game stops selling it had better hope its player base dries up and stops reinstalling it? The way that is phrased makes it sound like you could net lose money over the long term if sales decline and people keep reinstalling it
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I work for a small (15 people) Unity gaming company. Will let you know what the CEO says, just shared the actual Unity blogpost
Edit: Update - CEO added a gravestone emoji and said "yikes"
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This is 100% targeted at bleeding indie game developers dry in hopes of taking some of that sweet viral cash from devs like the one who made Vampire Survivors. They see that indie devs are charging $3-5 for their games, and so they aren't hitting the $200k threshold unless they go viral, so Unity is charging by install, not just by total revenue. I hope that the ESA or other interested groups take legal action against this retroactive greed.
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RIP Unity. First they partnered with Ironsource. Who are the people behind InstallCore it's a wrapper for bundling software installations. It tricks people into installing enough browser toolbars and other bloat to hurt their PCs. Windows Defender and MalwareBytes blocks it. Now Unity does this shit.
"Runtime fee" is the most idiotic thing I've ever heard im the programming world, I think we hit a new record of low
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Unity's CEO was EA's CEO too. He is the guy who shaped EA into the greedy company that it is today. I'm literally not surprised
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This is great news!! For Godot.
You guys should check out Stride if you are looking for another C# based engine. It's open source, but pretty rough around the edges right now.
Or, go for Godot for something more mature.
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Just a reminder that if Unity developers with pro licenses coming to Godot contribute even a small fraction of what they might have paid for those licenses on Unity, Godot can develop even faster.
rule 1: get user by giving free candy rule 2: let's them build their product, workflow on your tools rule 3: harvest.
Rule 4: get fucked by better and cheaper products (Unreal/Godot)
Rule 5: make an obituary presentation on what went wrong (hint: it's always management)
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thank God for their inconvenient way of installing and using of the engine itself, if I didn't have a hard time back then I wouldn't have switched to Godot 🙏🙏🙏
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This is absolutely mad vendor lock in. I'm doing the maths and if you create the next flappy bird and it goes viral and gets 50 million downloads in a month, you'd owe unity $10 million dollars before you'd even received your first monetization cheque (you did launch with a full monetization plan, right? right? oh.)
edit: i forgot they had moneitzation limits too, so no - this situation wouldn't quite happen until they earned $200,000 in revenue. Though the potential to go viral and find yourself underwater because of the massive unity bill in comparison to your income is still a possibility
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This is incredibly scummy. Not just for the obvious reason, but also because this is a business to business deal that developers have little room to avoid. It essentially encourages per-install charges for users, or at least limits on how many times you can install the software - which is completely unreasonable, they should only ever limit concurrent installations. If I want to upgrade to a new computer I should be able to move all my software over to it.
Sounds like another problem we have thanks to DRM and telemetry.
Get. Fucked.
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