Unity’s new “per-install” pricing enrages the game development community

stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to Technology@lemmy.world – 678 points –
arstechnica.com

Fees of up to $0.20 per install threaten to upend large chunks of the industry.

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Developer makes a game for the iPhone, charges $1 for it.

I buy the game for $1.

Apple takes 30 cents.

My family of 5 all install the game and play it via family sharing.

Unity takes $0.20 X 5 = $1

Developer loses 30 cents on the sale.

You make an excellent point and it’s easy as a PC gamer like myself to forget, that Apple actually sells a lot more games than Value.

I think the worst part of it all is the trust that is irrevocably broken now.
This is obviously a moronic scummy decision driven by greed, but it also goes directly against past decisions. As per this reddit post, Unity actually had a TOS in action that protected Developers against retroactive changes like this. Specifically, it stated that you could choose to continue using old versions of the engine and comply to the old TOS if an update to the TOS that you disagree with ever happened. This specific part of the TOS was deleted last year.

If they actually try to enforce this new crap on already released games (that accepted an older version of the TOS) then it would seem blatantly illegal (I'm not a lawyer though).

Even if they revert everything by tomorrow, the whole fiasco still shows where Unity's current interests are, and make the company a liability to deal with for any game developer.

Yeah, this isn't a "I'm never using Twitter again!" kind of fiasco. This has upset Capitalist™®© company heads, who now see Unity as a financial risk. Money tends to have more of a sway than morality.

Apparently Genshin Impact and some Nintendo Games are made in Unity, and there are even some plans to charge Microsoft for Game Pass installs.

I hope Unity's legal team is prepared.

I hope Unity's legal team is prepared.

I really hope they're not, because this practice needs to crash and burn brightly as a warning beacon to other corpos' grubby fingers.

Well I mean I wouldn't mind seeing Genshin Impact suffer. They're advertising and fanbase are insufferable. But I've never been a fan of Unity and it's nice to see everybody else getting on board now too.

Unity actually had a TOS in action that protected Developers

No it didn't. It just had words that pretended tk protect developers. TOS are meaningless for anyone other than the service when they can change at will.

Yea, they are useless when being changed at will, but what if the TOS specifically said "You can disregard future TOS versions and still abide by this old one under certain circumstances" ?
You would still be complying with the Terms of Service, by not honoring the new Terms of Service.

Obviously, this is still a terrible situation regardless, but I am thinking about if the old TOS won't give already released games a way out of this BS, or even better, may keep a usable Unity version alive for the future. Long term obviously, as many people as possible should ditch unity entirely, but for right now, it looks like a lot of developers will have big trouble starting in just 3 months.

This specific part of the TOS was deleted last year.

Yeah that's fine, what could possibly go wrong?

the trust that is irrevocably broken now

Irrevocably for the next week or so, maybe. People not only put up with but eat up heaps and heaps of BS and never change, so the BS never changes. Oh, Unity's corporate shite. "Shut up, it's fine!" Oh, Unity's being evil. "Shut up, it's fine!" Oh, Unity hired the fucking EA guy. "Shut up, it's fine!" Unity removed protections for devs. "Shut up, it's fine!" Unity wants to charge the fuck out of everycritter per-install. "Oh woe!" ... but any day now it'll be back to "Shut up, it's fine! They just want money, that's what companies are for! It's just capitalism broooo gotta make money, they can't just give stuff away!" like that justifies literally anything.

Blah blah blah. I guess I'll never understand how people can think for-profit companies that repeatedly abuse them are their friends. Maybe that's just me being a clueless lefty free software hippie or whatever, unaware of the benefits of being exploited and shat on then going and white-knighting for the damn companies against real people anyway.

wanders off yappyranting into the void

Unity saw how Reddit killed off free users by raising prices to absurd rates, and how Reddit was largely unaffected by it as a whole. Not going to be surprised to see other types of platforms also follow suit.

The reddit issue screwed over end consumers and a couple of tiny app developers.

There's some big developers that use Unity. Pokemon Go is in Unity. Pokemon BDSP was in Unity: say what you want about the quality, but that's as still over 14 million games sold and I would not be at all surprised if ILCA was halfway through another Unity re-make.

These changes aren't just screwing over random individuals who like to play games. Not just indie developers either. Unity is looking to battle with billion-dollar corporations over this. I can't believe for once I'll actually be rooting for Nintendo's legal team.

Guaranteed anyone who can actually fight back gets their own contract that exempts them from this.

Genshin Impact is also on Unity, so you know they were hoping for some of all that MiHoYo cash, since this scheme of theirs was going to apply retroactively.

Reddit largely unaffected

So they might say. However the post 3 up from this is an article about how their posts and comments have dropped 50 to 90% across major subreddits.

That's what happens if you piss off the 10 percent of your users that provides 90% of the meaningful engagement.

I've read that this started with easy loan money drying up after the First Republic collapse.

Easy money ending too quickly caused the First Republic collapse. Not the other way around. The Fed did a half a decade of rate hikes in a year.

Feb '22 rates were 0.08% by Feb '23 they were 4.57%. A 5700% increase in 12 months. First Republic collapsed on May '23.

An aggressive but responsible rate increase of 0.25% per quarter would have taken only 4 years to implement but would likely have led to zero bank failures.

Good reason to just use godot

Had been looking at it for awhile. Installed it this morning.

Even supports C#.

I just had the same thought and looked into it. It seems like Godot has the same object composition style as Unity? That was the main thing that's kept me using Unity.

Having documentation that’s always in flux, I don’t know that I would recommend Godot to new users, but I’ve been doing this for fifteen years, and after awhile, you develop a sense of what general direction to look in when things aren’t working as expected.

Right well I'm not new to game dev, just looking for a new engine. My experience with the UDK years ago turned me off that entire engine and confirmed to me that composition >>> inheritance which is why I stuck with Unity.

I guess since I'm pretty much committed to finding an alternative it can't hurt to download it and give it a try. It'll be nice to know I'm working in an actually open engine for once.

I think the only reason not to use Godot now is console support.

Godot mentions on the website that they partner with publishers for console support, so it's theoretically possible. It's not like indie devs working with Unity are getting their hands on Dev kits anyway.

I was always curious about Unity, but now I'm good.

It's crazy how these companies could manage to lose their goodwill overnight one by one these 2~3 years. It's almost like they have some secret any% fiasco RTA competition or something.

I’m not a huge conspiracy theorist, but considering the c-level execs pulled their investments before all these announcements, it’s not out of the question that they could tip people off to short the company as well.

Hell the realist in me sees the fines these guys get and they see it as a cost of doing business.

There are Pokemon games made in unity

Nintendo coming for that ass

Wizards Of The Coast: Ha, it will never affect us if we change our licensing and hurt the little guy. End consumers don't care and no one reads these things anyway. "We have an announcement about changes to our EULA!"

Internet and DND community revolt, Pathfinder 2 sees a massive boost, and content providers are scared now.

Unity: Surely nothing similar could happen to us if we change our licensing? "We have an announcement about changes to our EULA..."

Unity casually destroying the trust between them and their devs

Installed Godot yesterday and it's starting to grow on me, I like it. Looking forward to a huge movement of studios over to Godot, which will hopefully speed up the development of Godot through further support. Is there any reliable source of data about which game engines are popular at the moment? I want to see that sweet sweet decline in Unity user base over to Godot.

Unreal Engine almost has a monopoly at this point. It‘s also very friendly to use for small indie devs, not charging you anything for the first million dollars you make. Their license fees also seem rather fair as of now. But it doesn‘t help competition is flat lining left and right. Epic Games could feel their engine is worth a little more when Unity is gone too so I‘m happy to see many hobby devs give Godot a try first. I hope a company like Valve with their sheer infinite resources will see the shrinking market of Unreal alternatives and give their engine development a serious push. We really need more diversity when it comes to Engines.

Yeah, and Unreal is just one group of psychopathic executives away from pulling similar shit.

Source 2 is so good. Would love to see more games in it.

Definitely waiting for Godot (heh) to step up to the plate, it's missing some stuff at the moment but give it a year and I'm sure it'll get there. We're stuck with Unity for now but things like this mean plans are in place to migrate off it should it become necessary (by and large aren't hit by this yet because we charge a bunch for the app so 20p isn't a big deal.. although we don't and likely can't track installs so no idea how that works..).

That was a wonderful reference.

A friend works for a large-ish company that makes a product on Unity (not a game tho) and he just told me they were moving to Godot ASAP

This is why non-libre software sucks. They have 0 incentive to not screw you over.

With how many companies started trying to move libre software to non libre licenses, it's also not a given that that helps.

I guess at least you can just fork libre software if that happens.

That's exactly the point and it's happened many times now. OpenOffice got converted to a non-libre license so it was forked to LibreOffice and OpenOffice was left to rot. Audacity fucked around and now there's like 3 or 4 forks all competing there. That's the great thing about open source software, if companies or even individual maintainers do something that pisses off the user base enough, someone will come along and fork it. It's truly democratic as people vote with their feet, or downloads as the case may be.

In addition, the work is never fully lost.

If unity goes to shit, welp, cannot use any of unity's code at all. Years and years of engine development wasted.

If some FOSS software goes to shit? That code is still there. Just take it and unshittify it. Little to no work wasted.

How are the Audacity forks doing?

I don't know honestly, I was never really an Audacity user in the first place. My limited googling though suggests there still isn't a strong consensus behind any of them yet though. It just sort of seems like you pick whichever one you like the name of the most.

I am a light user so I just stayed on version 3.0.2

It works for my use case as it is and the day it doesn't, I'll look for whatever fork is most popular

Being licensed as free software (libre) just means users have the freedom to fork and continue without the copyright owner (to the degree permitted by the license).

The same bad incentives still exist but they are mitigated when devs know competition can sprout out of their bad actions.

2023 has been quite an year of revelation, showing the true nature of these scummy corporates. Lets learn our lesson and not jeopardize ourselves by trusting them.

Thanks Twitter and Reddit api increases! You started a trend in fucking over your user base and developers!

I was going to start game programming using unity. Just uninstalled it. Will pick up something else like godot.

I'm so happy I never wasted the time to learn this platform. I could've but chose not to (mostly too busy). Again, another company that I have no problem watching them fail, along with the Twitters/Teslas and reddits of the world.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

That goodwill has now been largely thrown out the window due to Unity's Tuesday announcement of a new fee structure that will start charging developers on a "per-install" basis after certain minimum thresholds are met.

The newly introduced Unity Runtime Fee—which will go into effect on January 1, 2024—will impose different per-install costs based on the company's different subscription tiers.

Outside of those countries, an "emerging markets rate" ranging from $0.005 (for Enterprise subscriptions) to $0.02 (for Unity Personal users) will apply after the minimum thresholds are met.

This is a major change from Unity's previous structure, which allowed developers making less than $100,000 per month to avoid fees altogether on the Personal tier.

Larger developers making $200,000 or more per month, meanwhile, paid only per-seat subscription fees for access to the latest, full-featured version of the Unity Editor under the Pro or Enterprise tiers.

"Gloomwood will definitely be my last Unity game, likely even if they roll back the changes," developer Dillon Rogers wrote on social media.

The original article contains 506 words, the summary contains 168 words. Saved 67%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

How is unity to determine a company’s revenue on a game if not self reported by a company?

They guess.

We leverage our own proprietary data model and will provide estimates of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project – this estimate will cover an invoice for all platforms.

From their FAQ.

The world is dying and my only regret is that it won't be put out of its misery.

Ffs, add twenty cents to the price, fuck it add 50 cents so valve gets it's cut and you do too. If it's a good game from an indie developer I'll buy it.

They aren't demanding a cost per purchase, they are demanding a cost per install. The abuses this could lead to are widespread and could easily lead to many bankruptcies.

Per install. You got 2 computers and steamdeck? Make that $1.50 extra.

Since youre a fan, how about steam and unity work to make it "fair" and just have the download fee on the store page. That way, you can pay for the game, then pay Unity each time you actually play the thing you own!

What a great deal for everyone, especially you!