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I truly feel bad for unity developers here. While unity as a company was always a bit shitty from what I've heard, the engine itself still was a very low barrier to entry into game development, however now it feels like you are being punished for releasing something which is marginally successful.

If you are looking for Unity alternatives, I'd like to suggest Godot. While some things are rough around the edges the engine has made huge improvements in the last year or so. It's developed by a small independent team as well as it's own community and completly open source, effectively eliminating the chance for corporated fuckery like in Unity's case.

Wow, so if I understood correctly, basically anything that's free (not counting demos or subscription services) is fucked. 200k installs is a lot of installs, but from what I've heard it's not hard to rack up a bunch of installs if a YouTuber or Twitch streamer picks up your game (if it's free). Additionally, it sounds like it's not taking into account things like piracy, which means anyone who pirates the game is fucking over the developer by potentially running up the number of installs the game has had. What a shitshow. I wonder how many larger devs like VRC will try to pivot away from unity. I know full well how hard it is to get away from an engine you've been developing on, but there's a number of games like VRC that could get taken offline if the devs can't pay the new royalty scheme. That's not even including all the games that could get delisted because the devs aren't making money on them anymore. Hell, it sounds like under this scheme, even a game that's no longer offically available could run up a dev's bill.

Rip unity indeed.

Edit: I was curious about what kinda nutjob would make a move like this. Good ol' John Riccitiello. Good ol' John "game devs are idiots for not having microtransactions" Riccitiello. I had hoped he'd died and gone to hell after he got booted from EA, but nope! Apparently he's still alive and kicking. Good ol' John Riceroni. What an amazing man, that John Tortellini.

From https://unity.com/pricing-updates

Unity Personal and Unity Plus: The Unity Runtime Fee will apply to games made with Unity Personal and Unity Plus that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime installs.

Ew, brand. Stop wasting money and your time with long loading screens and try Godot! It's free, it's open source and it runs on anything. Making a pixel art game on my ThinkPad from 2011 using Gidir, and it's amazing.

Damn what the fuck

I wonder if we'll see a solemn jpeg apologising and walking it all back in the next day or two