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.
I don't believe that is legal. That's just absolutely ridiculous.
I can't imagine that it is.
If that's the case then they could simply up the charge next year to $10 to get even more money for doing absolutely nothing. And then to $20 the next year and so forth. There's no sane court anywhere in the world who would say "Yeah, that sounds reasonable!" and even the less sane ones would think that's bonkers.
I mean, that can't be legal, right?
It used to be illegal. Part of anti-trust was forcing IP owners to license their technology to everyone at a reasonable price. That means that reddit’s API price gouging would also have been illegal and tesla and apple would have had to license their FSD and OS to other hardware manufacturers. This ability to control other companies through abusive pricing and licensing lock-in is classic monopoly violation that the govt has stopped policing.
Jokes on them, I never finished a unity project.
Oh hey, look.
The former CEO of EA made a greedy, short-sighted decision to fuck over his entire customer base.
I get the reference, I love that show, even though Bender may not approve, because I'm just a meat bag.
It's not that guy that looked like a supervillain every time he got up on stage at E3, is it?
Not sure about that, but he is a boss character in not one but two Suda51 games. (Suda51 was apparently screwed over by the guy who was, at the time EA's CEO.)
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.
The CEO of Unity used to the the CEO of EA.
It explains a lot.
A CEO who can't manage. Shocker.
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:
Have a golden parachute in place by sucking up to the Board.
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.
Modern corporate management model is just broken.
That's what the golden parachute is supposed to be for: a payout long term so the CEO doesn't make a short term decision that fucks the company up but pays out big. Ex: offering a stock package that you can't sell for 5-10years.
A decision like this will pay out HUGE in the short term, but if they don't change it I doubt many will be using unity in a few years.
Oh, he was a former CEO of EA. That explains a few things.
A Big fucking idiot
This is why they shut down Parsec Arcade. Cause they’re an asshole
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.
They haven't been profitable for, like, past half a decade or so. Each year brings bigger and bigger losses.
Seeing how the CEO sold 50k shares over the last year, and another 2k not long ago, I can see it being the last hail mary to extract as much money as possible and sell the company to Microsoft/Apple/Facebook/Whoever is willing to buy
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
starts copies of GTA on a thousand computers
Every copy has to be hand made by routing bits around the copper highway ar ludicrous speeds, and rearrange them manually to form what is called "a game".
Like.. wow, that’s what the engine is! Fucken doinks.
So if Microsoft published a Unity developed game on Windows, Microsoft could easily charge a $0.20 free to the unity team for installing the Unity Runtime on their OS.
Not being completely serious there. Honestly thought, did the CEO not realize if they start doing this, what's to stop another company from doing that to them. Things like mp3, where developers need to pay a license for, could then be charged in a similar fashion for each install.
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.
There's going to be a lot of money on the table for another engine that can build a unity migration or abstraction tool
I don't see that being left on the table for long
I’m sure someone will try, but it seems nearly impossible to do this in a way that’s actually useful. Most game engines are going to have fundamental differences that won’t easily map to the unity way of doing things
Art assets, sound effects, storylines, that sort of thing transfers pretty easily.
Rigging, animations, scripting, physics...these pretty much don't and would have to be rewritten from scratch.
... not really, and for what a few years? Indie devs don't have a lot of money, and there is a huge discrepancy between unity and other engines. They work in fundamentally different ways.
There are some pretty big games built in unity, the money on the table is coming from them, (assuming reasonable licensing terms) not the small indie games.
I may be entirely off the mark, as I don't work in that part of the industry. But I've messed around with unity and it's not particularly unique compared to any other engine it competes with in my experience, particularly when it comes to actual runtime. Assets will need conversion and sure, the API shim will probably give a performance hit, but there's no reason I can see that unity is fundamentally different.
I'm in the middle of a project right now that's going to be released on an out-of-date engine because the newest versions broke backward compatibility and I'm too far along to port everything. If I had to change engines entirely at this point I'd have to cancel the entire project.
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.
Honest question though, what other small engines have the support and features of unity while also having the permissive licensing they used to have?
At least when I was looking into engines unreal and unity really stood out as the only useable free engines.
There's unreal, Godot, and a couple others I can't think of off the top of my head. They're not as widely used because they lack the feature set of unreal and unity, but they're out there.
That’s pretty much what I thought. Unity is so big because it offers a ton of features with a pretty permissive license. There’s not something comparable except unreal, which has an even worse licensing situation
The thing about Unreal is that you can always negotiate with Epic Games. And if they like your project, they can even invest or provide tech support.
True, but you also have to deal with Epic, which is a downside for many. It’s a great engine without a doubt, but it does come with its downsides too
I dunno if Epic's licensing is worse. At least it's a cut of revenue and not charging per install.
Not to mention that Epic gives sweetheart deals to indies periodically. They make their money from Fortnite, not the engine.
Unity got popular because it was simpler than unreal, and way more feature complete than Godot.
Was.. these days unreal is easier to work with, and Godot is much more capable. So it's mostly inertia at this point. And now everyone is going to take a real hard look at the alternatives.
I'm not a game engineer, so someone else who's actually in that segment of the industry can probably give more answers, but Godot and Bevy seem to be making some waves.
And if they're not enough for what a dev needs, given these license changes, I don't really understand why someone wouldn't pick unreal or something much more comprehensive over unity now.
Correct me if I'm off the mark, but unity always seemed like what you'd go for if you wanted something like unreal, but (completely understandably) didn't want to pay the fees associated with it
I only prefer unity for 2 reasons, 1. I have assets that I've purchased. 2 I like c#.
You can actually import assets from unity into godot using a 3rd party add-on (If the assets license allows is)
Godot has C# scripting
It depends on the game you're making.
Godot has a dedicated workflow for 2D games, so I'd rather make one of those color sorting puzzle games that's all people play on mobile these days in Godot than Unity or Unreal.
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.
I can’t even blame him. I would too. This is essentially a situation where the only option is going to be a rewrite from the ground up in a new language and new engine.
If I was an indie game dev I’d be questioning my future right now too.
This will kill new development on the engine and older games without who have a limited number of users.
The ones halfway or more through development to recently launched will have to move to subscriber model or a shit-ton of ads.
In the next 3-5 years however their profits will likely be up. So some larger company will likely buy them out.
I think we need to kill everything so this is a good start. Snake blisken LA
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
The fraud detection is especially bad because they have a financial incentive to ignore, or under-report installation fraud.
Exactly! I'd put money on a group abusing it, admitting to abusing it, and the game devs still being charged in the near future.
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.
It's time to chuck unity in the bin. If not Godot, go for unreal.. though I would check their requirements beforehand first.
Hard to chuck unity in the bin when you don't use unity.
We're lucky there are enough other engines on the market at the moment, but eventually someone will need to spearhead a FOSS engine with blackjack and hookers.
Godot is a FOSS engine.
But does it have the blackjack and hookers? 🤔
I'd make my own branch with BJ and hookers, but both GCC and Clang failed to compile :(
I'm sure somebody somewhere has made both of those games in Godot. Lol
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
Also, what counts as an install? Ive seen many unity based games that don't have an installer and just run standalone? Would a standalone game count as already installed? Is it a first run thing in that case? Honestly this, and the additional clarification raises more questions than it answers?
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"
For the sake of your sanity, I hope there's a resolution to this that doesn't involve a rewrite.
This is the problem with being a whole company on the ecosystem of another, they can pull the rug at any time.
The problem is that its so expensive to build from scratch. All Unity does is build just the engine, and that's enough to make it a 7000 person company. Trying to build a game engine and then an actual game on top is a herculean effort.
This is why open source software is so important. It enables these small companies to pool their resources and share an engine as long as they each contribute fixes back.
7000 people is misleading. Being a general purpose game engine it has to be everything for everybody. An engine developed for a single game can be simpler, and once it is done, making the game will be simpler than it will be in Unity. Also those 7000 people are doing way more things than develop an engine.
That said, an engine like Unity can save a massive amount of time, especially for games that are medium scope. It's these games where developing engine code and tooling would both take a lot of time and the advantages would likely go unnoticed.
Yeah this is why many bigger studios just use their own Engines even if they're shit.
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.
Has to be a smarter way than this. This is just going to make devs go back to activation limits.
After seeing the way WotC handled DnD and MtG, and the way Musk has been dragging Twitter through the shit, I really believe that shareholders are trying to take what they can while they can and peace out. No one is looking at the long term anymore. Everyone just wants theirs, fuck everything else.
No one is looking at the long term anymore.
It feels like no one has been looking at the long term for ages now, and this is just the natural conclusion
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
Beyond what this means for Unity and the indie gaming scene, I'm concerned about copycats.
With how big Unity is for hobbyists, I'm worried this might have an "Apple" effect, where other runtimes (even non-gaming related) begin to try this.
I've heard of proprietary code libraries before with expensive licensing, but still nothing this dumb
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
No wonder the article smelled like wet rats reading it
This is great news!! For Godot.
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)
Rule 6: Unreal does the same thing, everyone switches to Godot 😂
It is management
CEO or whatever used to be head of EA
Unreal engine will probably do the same shit than Unity, Unreal engine might be opensource (not FOSS), I think there's the same clauses about production royalties.
Even if Godot wins, there's a cost to move.
I think Godot will not win simply because Unreal is so much better for 3D games what most comercial games use. I think Godot will become the indie favourite for 2D. Where it goes from there I'm not sure. Is the revenue sharing not enough to carry the game engine? Unreal/Epic is a special case. But is Unity mismanaged so hard? It still has huge market share.
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.
What about Open 3D Engine? Basically an updated version of Lumberyard.
https://o3de.org/
I'd imagine Unity user would most likely be looking for a C# based engine instead of a C++ or Python based one, and O3DE doesn't support C#.
Don't know that I'd call Godot mature exactly. It's still missing a lot of major features that both Unity and Unreal have.
Can you name some? Honest question, I don't know either Unity or Unreal in depth, I'm just aware that Godot still struggles with performance in the 3D department
This is a bit old now, but has a good break down of stuff that's missing for large games. Godot 4 works well for smaller 3D games just fine, it just doesn't do stuff like level streaming. Also it's missing a landscape tool. (Though there is a third party one, not sure if it was ported to Godot 4 yet or not)
I'm sure this will give a boost to Godot development.
Ha, yeah my immediate thought was imagining a situation like:
Godot Developers who have not yet read the news: "Huh. Why do we have 1000 new pull requests today?"
as someone who was reasonably deep with unity, the alternatives really are quite thin - Godot is a big contender or otherwise it's time to pick up some Rust game development
Godot has Rust support with GDextensions
Is Rust a game engine?
I’m familiar with the coding language but I wasn’t aware of any game engine stuff outside of developing your own
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 🙏🙏🙏
firing up godot felt nice, no logins or other bullshit
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
So I only owe them 10 million if I've made $200,000?
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.
Once [a company] can make more money by screwing its customers, that screw-job becomes a fait accompli.
Capitalism, yay!
Sounds like another problem we have thanks to DRM and telemetry.
Get. Fucked.
Well, guess it's time to learn Godot.
As someone who's using Godot and giting gud at it, I hope you enjoy it. For programming, you can go with either its GDScript (python) or C#, so Unity veterans shouldn't have much trouble.
That's great to hear. C# has grown on me so much lately! It's like TypeScript but not sucky.
GDScript (python)
I think GFScript is it's own language, but looks definitely inspired by Python
Me, a hobbyist that never planned to sell anything I made: chortle my balls, Unity Tech!
Common proprietary L
Wow that is such a bad idea... I... I'm honestly speechless. Who thought if that? I mean...
Man I was just getting into game development and learning Unity.
I guess it's time to pivot into Unreal or Godot or something.
Anybody have recommendations?
Godot, definitely. Or GDevelop, if you want an experience akin to Construct3 and an end product that's entirely javascript+html, but with a FOSS alternative
depends on your platform and your level of experience. Both unreal and godot have steep learning curves depending on where you come from. GDevelop is very accessible but also caps out quite fast. Great for making prototypes and getting simple games out there but depending on your level of ambition you will probably outgrow it sooner or later.
That's pretty awesome of them to do such a great Godot advertisement
So this will apply to games that have already been distributed on stores as well? How the fuck is such a change in the terms even legal?
I guess this will mostly impact F2P mobile devs since they will lose most money from installs. The good news is that Godot is more than capable for those types of games.
I not only expect lawsuits out the ass, but tech lobbyists are likely going to fight against it since basically every game uses Unity now.
Well this is bullshit but is there anything I as a non-developer can do about it?
is there anything I as a non-developer can do about it?
Choose to play games written in Godot instead.
And how do I know which ones those are?
Barely any commercially successful games are written in Godot right now. But Godot keeps getting better and Unity keeps getting worse, things could look very different in a couple of years.
Go to Godot's website and take a look at the showcase of... pixelart platformers and PS1-graphics boomer shooters. Hope you like those two genres!
I checked out their site and found that Cassette Beasts was made in Godot!
This is a game I've had my eye on, since after playing Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, and then Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, it was a further slap in the face just how crappy the Pokemon games continue to get with each new release (it's basically downhill after X and Y). Sure the story was good, but Scarlet/Violet was tough to enjoy with stutter, frame drops, hitching, and making me motion sick (and that's just visuals, gameplay itself in a boring open world with no incentive to explore is also a factor). I've never played a video game that made me motion sick. I needed an alternative and heard about Cassette Beasts being a better game than Pokemon. I played the demo, loved it, and I was waiting for a sale. Now I'm gonna pay full price for this game to support the devs and their work with Godot.
Don't buy Unity games, encourage developers you like to not buy them. Not much you can do really, but hopefully the financial disincentive will put them off. Users don't want install limits to be placed on their games, and they certainly won't pay developers for every install.
This will probably use some well-defined api endpoint to do their telemetry check-in, so this could probably be effectively circumvented if users were willing and able to do host level overrides to specifically prevent the unity engine from phoning home
You could also imagine a malicious actor phoning home to that API to drive up "installs" for a game and make a small studio or individual deal with massive fees. If a company is making these kinds of changes against the better judgement of their user base AND their internal analysis (lots of stock was sold two weeks ago), I'm doubtful they even care to properly deal with those kinds of problems.
Sail the high seas 🌊
This actively hurts the developers and helps Unity.
The devs will be charged for every install. Even if that install wasn't legitimate.
So if you pirate a Unity game, it's no longer a victimless crime. You're actively making the developer pay for your piracy.
Like normally, I am totally cool with piracy. But giving piracy as a solution here is actually detrimental to the developers and doesn't hurt Unity the company at all.
I don't think a pirated copy of the game would call home, that's something that hackers should patch really quickly IMO
Crackers often only patch out the DRM to redistribute a pirated copy of a game. If it is a game from a small studio, something like Goldberg is enough to "crack" the game, and it wouldn't remove any of the Unity telemetry.
huh, that's true. I've "forgot" about emulators like Goldberg.
Tho, I can imagine some kind of methods will appear sooner or later for that too.
Like others said, I am sure it will be one of the patches applied to the Unity games. Crackers are not really bad people, and turning off some telemetry should be a piece of cake.
What about all the games that have already been cracked?
Bear in mind this affects every game, including games that have already been released. So if that stuff wasn't patched out before, then devs would be charged for piracy.
I dunno. It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I agree that crackers aren't bad people, but it leaves some unknowns because you're counting on them to go above and beyond, essentially.
Agreed, games would have to be fixed retroactively. That is a problem, but maybe it creates enough uproar people will actively try to block it.
That's even worse for the devs, because they might still need to pay Unity for your install.
So... If the Unity's secret spyware and algorithm suddenly decides to count an update as a new installation, you suddenly get slapped with a huge bill. Especially if you release multiple small patches and your whole player base is counted multiple times.
Also piracy lmao
According to the article only installs on new devices are counted.
Furthermore this only takes efrect after a certain threshold of revenue and installs.
Ah yes, because it's that difficult to spoof a new PC. You can run a tool similar to a kernel level anti cheat "ban bypass", run the game, and cost the developer up to 20 cents. With a relatively simple script, this can be done many times per hour on a single PC, easily racking up cost for the developers.
This is a bad idea, no matter how you implement it. If it goes through, it will be abused.
Not arguing with that. I totally agree with you. Just wanted to correct the comment.
Imagine the player outcry being too just uninstall and reinstall games over she over to punish the devs.
Yeah as petty as some people are over games I can see a developer pissing them off and a bunch of players banding together to uninstall and reinstall games over and over. They could even script it. Bad idea all around.
This, so much of this.
WoW players doxxed the devs (lots of pizza was ordered) once, as they were pissed over real IDs being introduced to the account for the game.
Except that that is a back pedal on their part and their FAQ plainly says they actually have no way of tracking what is a new install versus a re-install; which is why they decided to count all installs to begin with.
Switch to Godot or FTEQW, screw Unity.
FTEQW
Quake world engine. Huh, wasn't aware of that one! Speaking of which, you can do all sorts of silly stuff with Doom sourceports, so that's also a valid alternative.
Welp, guess it's time to uninstall Unity
That'll be $10.
You know, at some point Microsoft and Apple are going to enable developers to charge people to uninstall software, and that'll be the driving force that finally forces the public to adopt Linux en masse.
Nothing is ever going to not happen as much as this.
Oh, I hope you're right.
I can't decide if they'll get away with this or if they're committing corporate suicide.
Wanna bet he secretly has a bunch of Epic Games stock?
Looks like they know very well what they are doing. This seems illegal, but we all know they get away with it.
Yeah, this will insure I never use Unity. But at least they can collect from their existing games.
For Unity Personal and Unity Plus users, the thresholds are $200,000 in revenue a year and 200,000 lifetime installs.
The fees also vary, with Unity Personal developers having to pay the most for every install above the threshold ($0.20)
So, if you get 200k lifetime installs but don't get the 200k revenue a year, you don't have to pay it?
Existing games built on Unity will also be hit with Runtime Fees if they meet the thresholds starting January 1.
OOOHOOOOO BOY, now, that's going to hurt a fair amount of people!
Also, what about web play? I guess that'll only count towards revenue, but not towards downloads?
If their licencing agreement permits retroactive changes like this, that is reason enough to gtfo
I sure feel glad to never have gotten into developing with it. When I saw that a blank project generated a ~231MB executable back in 4.1 or so, I simply ditched it.
Licenses that allow retroactive changes are terrible for the end user, fuck up the company's image and might give a significant boost to competition. Hasbro trying to pull that shit with DnD earlier this year comes to mind.
Our terms of service provide that Unity may add or change fees at any time. We are providing more than three months advance notice of the Unity Runtime Fee before it goes into effect. Consent is not required for additional fees to take effect, and the only version of our terms is the most current version; you simply cannot choose to comply with a prior version. Further, our terms are governed by California law, notwithstanding the country of the customer.
Yup lol.
What's funny and sad is that about 3 years ago on r/godot, I had an argument with a Unity fanboy over this exact thing. He was demanding someone give him a reason that Godot should exist, when, in his humble opinion, Unity did everything and did it better.
My take was that you don't actually own your Unity-made game. You might own the assets and trademark, but as long as you're licensing the engine, you are subject to the whims of Unity.
Of course that was theoretical, until today.
I'm pretty sure that even if the license agreement does have such language that it won't uphold in court. And there are enough big companies using Unity for this to go to court if they try to come to collect.
I mean seriously, if that would be legally possible, nothing would prevent them from uping the charge to $10, $20 or even $100 per installation, applied retroactively.
I think they have the web play question in their FAQ somewhere and it does include as a download. There's no real way to know how their telemetry is calculating this though.
Q: Does this affect WebGL and streamed games?
A: Games on all platforms are eligible for the fee but will only incur costs if both the install and revenue thresholds are crossed. Installs - which involves initialization of the runtime on a client device - are counted on all platforms the same way (WebGL and streaming included
Wow... I expect that WebGL telemetry to be less reliable than from an installed app. "No cookies found, guess this is a brand new download, chaps!"
Starting January 1, a Unity Runtime Fee will be charged to any game that has passed a revenue threshold in the past year and a lifetime install count.
Still shitty, but at least the fee only applies if you’ve already hit the revenue threshold. Maybe this is an ill-conceived effort to raise the floor on game prices (or price out low-cost ones)? A $60 game can afford a 20-cent extra fee a few dozen times. A 99-cent game is a non-starter though.
That’s exactly what this is. They want to price out the $3-$5 games that unity is primarily used for. They make no revenue from those since the revenue threshold never gets hit.
They’ll almost certainly lower the revenue threshold next too
It is chargeable if you have made a certain amount of income on the game in the last 12 months, which should hopefully prevent too much impact on existing games.
Not content with their subscriptions, they now want a revenue share.
This makes sense to me, it looks like it's $0.20 for each install, only if
you have passed a threshold of installs
you yourself are charging for your game
Which, I know Lemmy has issues with proprietary software, but if you are charging for your software and it's built off this, I don't think $0.20 is too much to pay them. Unreal takes a percentage I believe, sounds like this is a "keep the lights on" charge.
Charging "per install" as opposed to "per sale" will be goddamn awful. At best it might lead to DRM where you'll have a limited number of installs before you lose the game you bought.
Or more cases of devs saying "Just pirate the game, it's cheaper for us that way"
Unless pirate installs trigger the fee
We don't know how they are measuring it. If it's baked into the engine and not removed by cracking groups, it just might cost more for the devs.
But they already changed it from $0 to 0.2, how do you know it won't be 10 dollars next year after you've already spent 5 years making your game?
What if you only were charging a dollar for your game and people like it so much they install it 5 times over the year? Easy to do with multiple devices or reinstalling OS's
The problem is unity is forcing this on people who may have spent years and lots of money entering into a different kind of business agreement.
Except steam will let you un/re-install something infinite times.
Is that really how it works? That seems like a pretty egregious oversight if so, couldn’t groups of people bankrupt devs, especially small ones with small file size games that are easy to reinstall over and over?
Hearthstone runs on Unity. I'm ok setting up a little something to let people constantly install and uninstall Hearthstone to bleed Blizzard dry... hell, once it's discovered how your installs are tracked, I could see that leading to insane exploitation.
especially small ones with small file size games that are easy to reinstall over and over?
Wouldn't even need a small game technically. I'm pretty sure the only way to properly calculate would be running a postinstall script and someone could presumably just keep running that script
Nah, it's per device install. So unless you modify your PC enough to generate a different hardware fingerprint or go install a game on a fleet of laptops or something, most people won't be running up that counter too much.
They’ve clarified this is not the case. Reinstalling counts as a new installation
I saw that a short while ago and actually laughed out loud. The only thing left is to get the popcorn ready I guess because this is going to be hilarious.
Depending on how they generate a hardware fingerprint, fabricating random ones every check is a single LD_PRELOAD (or equivalent) away.
After Unity's clarifications, I'm honestly kind of expecting the old "null-route the web address in the HOSTS file" to be a valid method to prevent their installer from phoning home to increment the counter. It's gonna be incredible if people start trying that just to frick with Unity.
The fact that we can even have this discussion should be proof enough to Unity that it's a complete non-starter of an idea to let user behavior influence the developer bottom-line.
I wonder if distributors could get away with doing that automatically. My gut instinct tells me that Unity isn't stupid enough for that to be feasible long term, but... like you say, the C-suite bozos clearly aren't listening to the engineers.
How many reinstalls? Because I have games I have bought 4 PCs/laptops ago, not counting some few more when I installed them in family members' computers to play with them. What about OS updates? Windows keeps insisting to move to 11.
Frankly, this doesn't sound reasonable at all. It's not even like Unity is doing any of the hosting to justify squeezing devs like this.
edit: Now it has been confirmed it's not measured on an unique hardware basis, any reinstall counts. It's just madness.
Virtual Machines.
That's without a doubt not what Unity means here though
It is exactly what Unity means; they have doubled down on the clarifications. The precise point is to charge the developer for any install a user makes once they earn a (paltry) $200K.
It's not rocket science to see that this is a very bad, very abusive idea and its targeted to hurt indie developers the most (as larger studios like EA would be on the enterprise plan and therefore on the hook for only 1/20th of the same usage).
Some simple math says that you would have to uninstall and reinstall a $5 game 20 times to completely nullify the earnings from your purchase.
It's surprisingly easy to rack up installs; between multiple devices, uninstalls for bug fixing / addressing, the OS breaking it, modded installs having to be reset, making space for other games, refreshing a device... and so on. And that's not even accounting for bad actors actively trying to damage a company.
Honestly I just can't believe it. It's so unbelievably stupid and prone to fraud. How did they come to this decision??
Clearly without consulting anyone with a modicum of common sense.
It's also possible its a move to deliberately piss of the customer base, so they can "back off" and implement a solution that still satisfies them, but looks like they let the "customer" (mostly) win.
For example:
"We will charge $.20 for over 200K installs!"
Backpedal:
"We will charge $.05 for only the initial install after 500K installs!"
Pretty sure there are many documented instances of exactly this occurring, especially in the game dev industry unfortunately. (The goal was never the first offer, but rather to overshadow the real goal.)
as already confirmed by others, it is per install, not per sale. Meaning that if you uninstall your game and mhen reinstall it, the dev has to pay twice. You buy the game and install it on your pc, and your steam deck so you can play it whenever you want? developer pays twice.
that sort of thing
The model makes no sense.
Consider how it affects $60 AAA games vs close to free $1 games, it's wildly disproportional and somehow the $1 game dev starts paying significantly earlier. Now consider how it affects games that make far less than a dollar per user, this is true of many free-with-in-game-purchase mobile games.
Then consider demos, refunds, piracy, and advisarial attacks.
It would have been simpler, more balanced approach, and have none of the pitfalls if they had just gone with a profit share scheme.
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.
I don't believe that is legal. That's just absolutely ridiculous.
I can't imagine that it is.
If that's the case then they could simply up the charge next year to $10 to get even more money for doing absolutely nothing. And then to $20 the next year and so forth. There's no sane court anywhere in the world who would say "Yeah, that sounds reasonable!" and even the less sane ones would think that's bonkers.
I mean, that can't be legal, right?
It used to be illegal. Part of anti-trust was forcing IP owners to license their technology to everyone at a reasonable price. That means that reddit’s API price gouging would also have been illegal and tesla and apple would have had to license their FSD and OS to other hardware manufacturers. This ability to control other companies through abusive pricing and licensing lock-in is classic monopoly violation that the govt has stopped policing.
Jokes on them, I never finished a unity project.
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.
Well... not that shocked.
Way to ruin a comedic moment.
https://youtu.be/N4vIBijzg4w?si=EBXFGyCZJV-waJX_
I get the reference, I love that show, even though Bender may not approve, because I'm just a meat bag.
It's not that guy that looked like a supervillain every time he got up on stage at E3, is it?
Not sure about that, but he is a boss character in not one but two Suda51 games. (Suda51 was apparently screwed over by the guy who was, at the time EA's CEO.)
John Riccitiello
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.
The CEO of Unity used to the the CEO of EA.
It explains a lot.
A CEO who can't manage. Shocker.
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:
Have a golden parachute in place by sucking up to the Board.
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.
Modern corporate management model is just broken.
That's what the golden parachute is supposed to be for: a payout long term so the CEO doesn't make a short term decision that fucks the company up but pays out big. Ex: offering a stock package that you can't sell for 5-10years.
A decision like this will pay out HUGE in the short term, but if they don't change it I doubt many will be using unity in a few years.
The person who runs Unity is a shithead.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/18/23269218/unity-ceo-john-riccitiello-apology-game-developers-fucking-idiots-ironsource-merger
Oh, he was a former CEO of EA. That explains a few things.
A Big fucking idiot
This is why they shut down Parsec Arcade. Cause they’re an asshole
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.
They haven't been profitable for, like, past half a decade or so. Each year brings bigger and bigger losses.
Seeing how the CEO sold 50k shares over the last year, and another 2k not long ago, I can see it being the last hail mary to extract as much money as possible and sell the company to Microsoft/Apple/Facebook/Whoever is willing to buy
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
starts copies of GTA on a thousand computers
Every copy has to be hand made by routing bits around the copper highway ar ludicrous speeds, and rearrange them manually to form what is called "a game".
Like.. wow, that’s what the engine is! Fucken doinks.
So if Microsoft published a Unity developed game on Windows, Microsoft could easily charge a $0.20 free to the unity team for installing the Unity Runtime on their OS.
Not being completely serious there. Honestly thought, did the CEO not realize if they start doing this, what's to stop another company from doing that to them. Things like mp3, where developers need to pay a license for, could then be charged in a similar fashion for each install.
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.
There's going to be a lot of money on the table for another engine that can build a unity migration or abstraction tool
I don't see that being left on the table for long
I’m sure someone will try, but it seems nearly impossible to do this in a way that’s actually useful. Most game engines are going to have fundamental differences that won’t easily map to the unity way of doing things
Art assets, sound effects, storylines, that sort of thing transfers pretty easily.
Rigging, animations, scripting, physics...these pretty much don't and would have to be rewritten from scratch.
... not really, and for what a few years? Indie devs don't have a lot of money, and there is a huge discrepancy between unity and other engines. They work in fundamentally different ways.
There are some pretty big games built in unity, the money on the table is coming from them, (assuming reasonable licensing terms) not the small indie games.
I may be entirely off the mark, as I don't work in that part of the industry. But I've messed around with unity and it's not particularly unique compared to any other engine it competes with in my experience, particularly when it comes to actual runtime. Assets will need conversion and sure, the API shim will probably give a performance hit, but there's no reason I can see that unity is fundamentally different.
I'm in the middle of a project right now that's going to be released on an out-of-date engine because the newest versions broke backward compatibility and I'm too far along to port everything. If I had to change engines entirely at this point I'd have to cancel the entire project.
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.
Honest question though, what other small engines have the support and features of unity while also having the permissive licensing they used to have?
At least when I was looking into engines unreal and unity really stood out as the only useable free engines.
There's unreal, Godot, and a couple others I can't think of off the top of my head. They're not as widely used because they lack the feature set of unreal and unity, but they're out there.
That’s pretty much what I thought. Unity is so big because it offers a ton of features with a pretty permissive license. There’s not something comparable except unreal, which has an even worse licensing situation
The thing about Unreal is that you can always negotiate with Epic Games. And if they like your project, they can even invest or provide tech support.
True, but you also have to deal with Epic, which is a downside for many. It’s a great engine without a doubt, but it does come with its downsides too
I dunno if Epic's licensing is worse. At least it's a cut of revenue and not charging per install.
Not to mention that Epic gives sweetheart deals to indies periodically. They make their money from Fortnite, not the engine.
Unity got popular because it was simpler than unreal, and way more feature complete than Godot.
Was.. these days unreal is easier to work with, and Godot is much more capable. So it's mostly inertia at this point. And now everyone is going to take a real hard look at the alternatives.
I'm not a game engineer, so someone else who's actually in that segment of the industry can probably give more answers, but Godot and Bevy seem to be making some waves.
And if they're not enough for what a dev needs, given these license changes, I don't really understand why someone wouldn't pick unreal or something much more comprehensive over unity now.
Correct me if I'm off the mark, but unity always seemed like what you'd go for if you wanted something like unreal, but (completely understandably) didn't want to pay the fees associated with it
I only prefer unity for 2 reasons, 1. I have assets that I've purchased. 2 I like c#.
It depends on the game you're making.
Godot has a dedicated workflow for 2D games, so I'd rather make one of those color sorting puzzle games that's all people play on mobile these days in Godot than Unity or Unreal.
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.
I can’t even blame him. I would too. This is essentially a situation where the only option is going to be a rewrite from the ground up in a new language and new engine.
If I was an indie game dev I’d be questioning my future right now too.
This will kill new development on the engine and older games without who have a limited number of users.
The ones halfway or more through development to recently launched will have to move to subscriber model or a shit-ton of ads.
In the next 3-5 years however their profits will likely be up. So some larger company will likely buy them out.
I think we need to kill everything so this is a good start. Snake blisken LA
Indies are the ones who deserve to die the least.
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.
Regarding this being abused by bad actors:
- @stephentotilo
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
The fraud detection is especially bad because they have a financial incentive to ignore, or under-report installation fraud.
Exactly! I'd put money on a group abusing it, admitting to abusing it, and the game devs still being charged in the near future.
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.
It's time to chuck unity in the bin. If not Godot, go for unreal.. though I would check their requirements beforehand first.
Hard to chuck unity in the bin when you don't use unity.
We're lucky there are enough other engines on the market at the moment, but eventually someone will need to spearhead a FOSS engine with blackjack and hookers.
Godot is a FOSS engine.
But does it have the blackjack and hookers? 🤔
I'd make my own branch with BJ and hookers, but both GCC and Clang failed to compile :(
I'm sure somebody somewhere has made both of those games in Godot. Lol
Oh, fantastic. Good to know, thanks!
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
Also, what counts as an install? Ive seen many unity based games that don't have an installer and just run standalone? Would a standalone game count as already installed? Is it a first run thing in that case? Honestly this, and the additional clarification raises more questions than it answers?
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"
For the sake of your sanity, I hope there's a resolution to this that doesn't involve a rewrite.
This is the problem with being a whole company on the ecosystem of another, they can pull the rug at any time.
The problem is that its so expensive to build from scratch. All Unity does is build just the engine, and that's enough to make it a 7000 person company. Trying to build a game engine and then an actual game on top is a herculean effort.
This is why open source software is so important. It enables these small companies to pool their resources and share an engine as long as they each contribute fixes back.
7000 people is misleading. Being a general purpose game engine it has to be everything for everybody. An engine developed for a single game can be simpler, and once it is done, making the game will be simpler than it will be in Unity. Also those 7000 people are doing way more things than develop an engine.
That said, an engine like Unity can save a massive amount of time, especially for games that are medium scope. It's these games where developing engine code and tooling would both take a lot of time and the advantages would likely go unnoticed.
Yeah this is why many bigger studios just use their own Engines even if they're shit.
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.
Has to be a smarter way than this. This is just going to make devs go back to activation limits.
After seeing the way WotC handled DnD and MtG, and the way Musk has been dragging Twitter through the shit, I really believe that shareholders are trying to take what they can while they can and peace out. No one is looking at the long term anymore. Everyone just wants theirs, fuck everything else.
It feels like no one has been looking at the long term for ages now, and this is just the natural conclusion
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
Beyond what this means for Unity and the indie gaming scene, I'm concerned about copycats.
With how big Unity is for hobbyists, I'm worried this might have an "Apple" effect, where other runtimes (even non-gaming related) begin to try this.
I've heard of proprietary code libraries before with expensive licensing, but still nothing this dumb
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
No wonder the article smelled like wet rats reading it
This is great news!! For Godot.
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)
Rule 6: Unreal does the same thing, everyone switches to Godot 😂
It is management
CEO or whatever used to be head of EA
Unreal engine will probably do the same shit than Unity, Unreal engine might be opensource (not FOSS), I think there's the same clauses about production royalties.
Even if Godot wins, there's a cost to move.
I think Godot will not win simply because Unreal is so much better for 3D games what most comercial games use. I think Godot will become the indie favourite for 2D. Where it goes from there I'm not sure. Is the revenue sharing not enough to carry the game engine? Unreal/Epic is a special case. But is Unity mismanaged so hard? It still has huge market share.
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.
What about Open 3D Engine? Basically an updated version of Lumberyard. https://o3de.org/
I'd imagine Unity user would most likely be looking for a C# based engine instead of a C++ or Python based one, and O3DE doesn't support C#.
Don't know that I'd call Godot mature exactly. It's still missing a lot of major features that both Unity and Unreal have.
Can you name some? Honest question, I don't know either Unity or Unreal in depth, I'm just aware that Godot still struggles with performance in the 3D department
This is a bit old now, but has a good break down of stuff that's missing for large games. Godot 4 works well for smaller 3D games just fine, it just doesn't do stuff like level streaming. Also it's missing a landscape tool. (Though there is a third party one, not sure if it was ported to Godot 4 yet or not)
https://godotengine.org/article/whats-missing-in-godot-for-aaa/
I'm sure this will give a boost to Godot development.
Ha, yeah my immediate thought was imagining a situation like:
Godot Developers who have not yet read the news: "Huh. Why do we have 1000 new pull requests today?"
as someone who was reasonably deep with unity, the alternatives really are quite thin - Godot is a big contender or otherwise it's time to pick up some Rust game development
Godot has Rust support with GDextensions
Is Rust a game engine?
I’m familiar with the coding language but I wasn’t aware of any game engine stuff outside of developing your own
Stride might be worth looking into if you're going for 3D stuff, it uses C#
Ngl, I did visit their site right after reading the news. My next project will be using it. I hope it catches wind with this!
GODOT SQUUUUUUAAAAAD
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 🙏🙏🙏
firing up godot felt nice, no logins or other bullshit
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
So I only owe them 10 million if I've made $200,000?
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.
Unity going the way of Reddit
Enshittification
Capitalism, yay!
Sounds like another problem we have thanks to DRM and telemetry.
Get. Fucked.
Well, guess it's time to learn Godot.
As someone who's using Godot and giting gud at it, I hope you enjoy it. For programming, you can go with either its GDScript (python) or C#, so Unity veterans shouldn't have much trouble.
That's great to hear. C# has grown on me so much lately! It's like TypeScript but not sucky.
I think GFScript is it's own language, but looks definitely inspired by Python
Me, a hobbyist that never planned to sell anything I made: chortle my balls, Unity Tech!
Common proprietary L
Wow that is such a bad idea... I... I'm honestly speechless. Who thought if that? I mean...
Man I was just getting into game development and learning Unity.
I guess it's time to pivot into Unreal or Godot or something.
Anybody have recommendations?
Godot, definitely. Or GDevelop, if you want an experience akin to Construct3 and an end product that's entirely javascript+html, but with a FOSS alternative
depends on your platform and your level of experience. Both unreal and godot have steep learning curves depending on where you come from. GDevelop is very accessible but also caps out quite fast. Great for making prototypes and getting simple games out there but depending on your level of ambition you will probably outgrow it sooner or later.
That's pretty awesome of them to do such a great Godot advertisement
So this will apply to games that have already been distributed on stores as well? How the fuck is such a change in the terms even legal?
I guess this will mostly impact F2P mobile devs since they will lose most money from installs. The good news is that Godot is more than capable for those types of games.
"F2P game developers are the biggest fucking idiots" - Unity CEO, c. 2022: https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/18/23269218/unity-ceo-john-riccitiello-apology-game-developers-fucking-idiots-ironsource-merger
Never forget
I not only expect lawsuits out the ass, but tech lobbyists are likely going to fight against it since basically every game uses Unity now.
Well this is bullshit but is there anything I as a non-developer can do about it?
Choose to play games written in Godot instead.
And how do I know which ones those are?
Barely any commercially successful games are written in Godot right now. But Godot keeps getting better and Unity keeps getting worse, things could look very different in a couple of years.
Go to Godot's website and take a look at the showcase of... pixelart platformers and PS1-graphics boomer shooters. Hope you like those two genres!
I checked out their site and found that Cassette Beasts was made in Godot!
https://godotengine.org/showcase/cassette-beasts/
This is a game I've had my eye on, since after playing Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, and then Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, it was a further slap in the face just how crappy the Pokemon games continue to get with each new release (it's basically downhill after X and Y). Sure the story was good, but Scarlet/Violet was tough to enjoy with stutter, frame drops, hitching, and making me motion sick (and that's just visuals, gameplay itself in a boring open world with no incentive to explore is also a factor). I've never played a video game that made me motion sick. I needed an alternative and heard about Cassette Beasts being a better game than Pokemon. I played the demo, loved it, and I was waiting for a sale. Now I'm gonna pay full price for this game to support the devs and their work with Godot.
Don't buy Unity games, encourage developers you like to not buy them. Not much you can do really, but hopefully the financial disincentive will put them off. Users don't want install limits to be placed on their games, and they certainly won't pay developers for every install.
This will probably use some well-defined api endpoint to do their telemetry check-in, so this could probably be effectively circumvented if users were willing and able to do host level overrides to specifically prevent the unity engine from phoning home
You could also imagine a malicious actor phoning home to that API to drive up "installs" for a game and make a small studio or individual deal with massive fees. If a company is making these kinds of changes against the better judgement of their user base AND their internal analysis (lots of stock was sold two weeks ago), I'm doubtful they even care to properly deal with those kinds of problems.
Sail the high seas 🌊
This actively hurts the developers and helps Unity.
The devs will be charged for every install. Even if that install wasn't legitimate.
So if you pirate a Unity game, it's no longer a victimless crime. You're actively making the developer pay for your piracy.
Like normally, I am totally cool with piracy. But giving piracy as a solution here is actually detrimental to the developers and doesn't hurt Unity the company at all.
I don't think a pirated copy of the game would call home, that's something that hackers should patch really quickly IMO
Crackers often only patch out the DRM to redistribute a pirated copy of a game. If it is a game from a small studio, something like Goldberg is enough to "crack" the game, and it wouldn't remove any of the Unity telemetry.
huh, that's true. I've "forgot" about emulators like Goldberg.
Tho, I can imagine some kind of methods will appear sooner or later for that too.
Like others said, I am sure it will be one of the patches applied to the Unity games. Crackers are not really bad people, and turning off some telemetry should be a piece of cake.
What about all the games that have already been cracked?
Bear in mind this affects every game, including games that have already been released. So if that stuff wasn't patched out before, then devs would be charged for piracy.
I dunno. It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I agree that crackers aren't bad people, but it leaves some unknowns because you're counting on them to go above and beyond, essentially.
Agreed, games would have to be fixed retroactively. That is a problem, but maybe it creates enough uproar people will actively try to block it.
That's even worse for the devs, because they might still need to pay Unity for your install.
So... If the Unity's secret spyware and algorithm suddenly decides to count an update as a new installation, you suddenly get slapped with a huge bill. Especially if you release multiple small patches and your whole player base is counted multiple times.
Also piracy lmao
According to the article only installs on new devices are counted.
Furthermore this only takes efrect after a certain threshold of revenue and installs.
Ah yes, because it's that difficult to spoof a new PC. You can run a tool similar to a kernel level anti cheat "ban bypass", run the game, and cost the developer up to 20 cents. With a relatively simple script, this can be done many times per hour on a single PC, easily racking up cost for the developers.
This is a bad idea, no matter how you implement it. If it goes through, it will be abused.
Not arguing with that. I totally agree with you. Just wanted to correct the comment.
The clarification on Xitter states deleting and reinstalling is 2 charges, the same as installing to 2 different devices. https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1701679721027633280?s=20
That's madness.
Imagine the player outcry being too just uninstall and reinstall games over she over to punish the devs.
Yeah as petty as some people are over games I can see a developer pissing them off and a bunch of players banding together to uninstall and reinstall games over and over. They could even script it. Bad idea all around.
This, so much of this.
WoW players doxxed the devs (lots of pizza was ordered) once, as they were pissed over real IDs being introduced to the account for the game.
Except that that is a back pedal on their part and their FAQ plainly says they actually have no way of tracking what is a new install versus a re-install; which is why they decided to count all installs to begin with.
Switch to Godot or FTEQW, screw Unity.
Quake world engine. Huh, wasn't aware of that one! Speaking of which, you can do all sorts of silly stuff with Doom sourceports, so that's also a valid alternative.
Welp, guess it's time to uninstall Unity
That'll be $10.
You know, at some point Microsoft and Apple are going to enable developers to charge people to uninstall software, and that'll be the driving force that finally forces the public to adopt Linux en masse.
Nothing is ever going to not happen as much as this.
Oh, I hope you're right.
I can't decide if they'll get away with this or if they're committing corporate suicide.
Wanna bet he secretly has a bunch of Epic Games stock?
They did sell their thousands of shares before this shit so I wouldn't be surprised
Looks like they know very well what they are doing. This seems illegal, but we all know they get away with it.
Yeah, this will insure I never use Unity. But at least they can collect from their existing games.
So, if you get 200k lifetime installs but don't get the 200k revenue a year, you don't have to pay it?
OOOHOOOOO BOY, now, that's going to hurt a fair amount of people!
Also, what about web play? I guess that'll only count towards revenue, but not towards downloads?
If their licencing agreement permits retroactive changes like this, that is reason enough to gtfo
I sure feel glad to never have gotten into developing with it. When I saw that a blank project generated a ~231MB executable back in 4.1 or so, I simply ditched it.
Licenses that allow retroactive changes are terrible for the end user, fuck up the company's image and might give a significant boost to competition. Hasbro trying to pull that shit with DnD earlier this year comes to mind.
Yup lol.
What's funny and sad is that about 3 years ago on r/godot, I had an argument with a Unity fanboy over this exact thing. He was demanding someone give him a reason that Godot should exist, when, in his humble opinion, Unity did everything and did it better.
My take was that you don't actually own your Unity-made game. You might own the assets and trademark, but as long as you're licensing the engine, you are subject to the whims of Unity.
Of course that was theoretical, until today.
I'm pretty sure that even if the license agreement does have such language that it won't uphold in court. And there are enough big companies using Unity for this to go to court if they try to come to collect.
I mean seriously, if that would be legally possible, nothing would prevent them from uping the charge to $10, $20 or even $100 per installation, applied retroactively.
I think they have the web play question in their FAQ somewhere and it does include as a download. There's no real way to know how their telemetry is calculating this though.
https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/
Wow... I expect that WebGL telemetry to be less reliable than from an installed app. "No cookies found, guess this is a brand new download, chaps!"
Still shitty, but at least the fee only applies if you’ve already hit the revenue threshold. Maybe this is an ill-conceived effort to raise the floor on game prices (or price out low-cost ones)? A $60 game can afford a 20-cent extra fee a few dozen times. A 99-cent game is a non-starter though.
That’s exactly what this is. They want to price out the $3-$5 games that unity is primarily used for. They make no revenue from those since the revenue threshold never gets hit.
They’ll almost certainly lower the revenue threshold next too
And that's why we need more than one standard
It is chargeable if you have made a certain amount of income on the game in the last 12 months, which should hopefully prevent too much impact on existing games.
Not content with their subscriptions, they now want a revenue share.
This makes sense to me, it looks like it's $0.20 for each install, only if
Which, I know Lemmy has issues with proprietary software, but if you are charging for your software and it's built off this, I don't think $0.20 is too much to pay them. Unreal takes a percentage I believe, sounds like this is a "keep the lights on" charge.
Charging "per install" as opposed to "per sale" will be goddamn awful. At best it might lead to DRM where you'll have a limited number of installs before you lose the game you bought.
Or more cases of devs saying "Just pirate the game, it's cheaper for us that way"
Unless pirate installs trigger the fee
We don't know how they are measuring it. If it's baked into the engine and not removed by cracking groups, it just might cost more for the devs.
But they already changed it from $0 to 0.2, how do you know it won't be 10 dollars next year after you've already spent 5 years making your game?
What if you only were charging a dollar for your game and people like it so much they install it 5 times over the year? Easy to do with multiple devices or reinstalling OS's
The problem is unity is forcing this on people who may have spent years and lots of money entering into a different kind of business agreement.
Except steam will let you un/re-install something infinite times.
Is that really how it works? That seems like a pretty egregious oversight if so, couldn’t groups of people bankrupt devs, especially small ones with small file size games that are easy to reinstall over and over?
Hearthstone runs on Unity. I'm ok setting up a little something to let people constantly install and uninstall Hearthstone to bleed Blizzard dry... hell, once it's discovered how your installs are tracked, I could see that leading to insane exploitation.
Wouldn't even need a small game technically. I'm pretty sure the only way to properly calculate would be running a postinstall script and someone could presumably just keep running that script
Nah, it's per device install. So unless you modify your PC enough to generate a different hardware fingerprint or go install a game on a fleet of laptops or something, most people won't be running up that counter too much.
They’ve clarified this is not the case. Reinstalling counts as a new installation
I saw that a short while ago and actually laughed out loud. The only thing left is to get the popcorn ready I guess because this is going to be hilarious.
Depending on how they generate a hardware fingerprint, fabricating random ones every check is a single
LD_PRELOAD(or equivalent) away.After Unity's clarifications, I'm honestly kind of expecting the old "null-route the web address in the HOSTS file" to be a valid method to prevent their installer from phoning home to increment the counter. It's gonna be incredible if people start trying that just to frick with Unity.
The fact that we can even have this discussion should be proof enough to Unity that it's a complete non-starter of an idea to let user behavior influence the developer bottom-line.
I wonder if distributors could get away with doing that automatically. My gut instinct tells me that Unity isn't stupid enough for that to be feasible long term, but... like you say, the C-suite bozos clearly aren't listening to the engineers.
How many reinstalls? Because I have games I have bought 4 PCs/laptops ago, not counting some few more when I installed them in family members' computers to play with them. What about OS updates? Windows keeps insisting to move to 11.
Frankly, this doesn't sound reasonable at all. It's not even like Unity is doing any of the hosting to justify squeezing devs like this.
edit: Now it has been confirmed it's not measured on an unique hardware basis, any reinstall counts. It's just madness.
Virtual Machines.
That's without a doubt not what Unity means here though
It is exactly what Unity means; they have doubled down on the clarifications. The precise point is to charge the developer for any install a user makes once they earn a (paltry) $200K.
It's not rocket science to see that this is a very bad, very abusive idea and its targeted to hurt indie developers the most (as larger studios like EA would be on the enterprise plan and therefore on the hook for only 1/20th of the same usage).
Some simple math says that you would have to uninstall and reinstall a $5 game 20 times to completely nullify the earnings from your purchase.
It's surprisingly easy to rack up installs; between multiple devices, uninstalls for bug fixing / addressing, the OS breaking it, modded installs having to be reset, making space for other games, refreshing a device... and so on. And that's not even accounting for bad actors actively trying to damage a company.
Honestly I just can't believe it. It's so unbelievably stupid and prone to fraud. How did they come to this decision??
Clearly without consulting anyone with a modicum of common sense.
It's also possible its a move to deliberately piss of the customer base, so they can "back off" and implement a solution that still satisfies them, but looks like they let the "customer" (mostly) win.
For example: "We will charge $.20 for over 200K installs!" Backpedal: "We will charge $.05 for only the initial install after 500K installs!"
Pretty sure there are many documented instances of exactly this occurring, especially in the game dev industry unfortunately. (The goal was never the first offer, but rather to overshadow the real goal.)
as already confirmed by others, it is per install, not per sale. Meaning that if you uninstall your game and mhen reinstall it, the dev has to pay twice. You buy the game and install it on your pc, and your steam deck so you can play it whenever you want? developer pays twice.
that sort of thing
The model makes no sense.
Consider how it affects $60 AAA games vs close to free $1 games, it's wildly disproportional and somehow the $1 game dev starts paying significantly earlier. Now consider how it affects games that make far less than a dollar per user, this is true of many free-with-in-game-purchase mobile games.
Then consider demos, refunds, piracy, and advisarial attacks.
It would have been simpler, more balanced approach, and have none of the pitfalls if they had just gone with a profit share scheme.