Unity License Changes

CCatMan@lemmy.one to Out of the loop@lemmy.world – 53 points –

Whats the final outcome of Unity's changes to their license. Also, do the changes apply to previously released games?

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Unity (led by an ex-EA CEO to give you an idea where this is headed) decided to change their pricing model to charging $0.20 per install (if you’re over $200K revenue and 200K installs) – they haven’t clarified how they’re planning on tracking install numbers (ie. can someone use a VM to tank a competitor?) – then someone pointed out they quietly changed their TOS back in April to “allow” this to go through – and apparently they’ve sent out letters saying they’ll wave the install fee if you use their own IronSource ad system instead of the AppLovin ad system – needless to say, devs are panicking, Godot is seeing a huge influx, and Unity has maintained radio silence all weekend … Monday should be “interesting” …

To put some perspective on that. If you make $200,000 in sales, $60,000 is paid to the digital store.

Out of your remaining $140,000 if half of your 200k users reinstall your game then that's another 100k x $0.20 = $20,000 out of your pocket.

And you can still get billed for future reinstalls.

Say an indie game with decent polish can easily get to 3 development years worth of effort, that leaves the developers with the equivalent of $40,000 each.

You missed their latest response a few hours ago
https://twitter.com/unity/status/1703547752205218265

We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days. Thank you for your honest and critical feedback.

Hey, no worries, Unity, we weren't confused at all.

Does this apply to software that was made before the terms change?

  • if you’re using Unity, you definitely want someone knowledgeable looking over all the terms and details (ie. I am not a lawyer)
  • from Sunday’s tweet, it seems they’re considering changes to their new pricing model in reaction to the blow back (“what? people got upset?”)
  • new pricing model doesn’t take effect until 1 Jan 2024
  • looks like they were planning on charging for any installs (for new and old games) from that point on
  • the changes to the TOS they sneaked through a few months back makes it look like they are trying to apply the new terms retroactively and replace whatever terms were in place when the game was developed – which sounds all sorts of shady (but then again, it’s an ex-EA CEO … )