I hope all the devs with weight followsuit. My little project moving won't really disturb anyone but me. Sweeping and sudden policy changes like this are bullshit.
What I'm hoping is that gamers take some of the big pocket publishers that use Unity and abuse the absolute fuck out of them so they send their lawyers after Unity for the obviously unenforceable terms.
Unfortunately Unity will probably just settle with them for nothing to avoid them setting precedents.
It's like crawling back to an abusive partner thinking things wont get worse.
What happened?
TL;DR of the situation is that Unity released a statement 2 days ago saying they want successful developers to pay up to 20 cents every time a user installs a Unity game starting from Jan 1 2024, even if your game was already released. This caused a huge ruckus in the game dev community and many developers want to switch away from Unity.
Note that it's "per install" (they clarified that reinstalling on the same device only counts as one install), not per unit sold. And Unity will also track pirated copies, so the devs would still have to pay the fee even if they didn't sell it to you.
the tracking of pirated copies is even more fucked up. is that their way of imposing that "piracy = stealing"?
It’s because they literally don’t know how to differentiate a download from legit and illegitimate. They’re going to track every time their bundler is downloaded and bill the developer for it, that would include pirated copies and legit copies alike.
The swashbuckler's solution is then to make your own bundler installer!
That's assuming pirates would go through the trouble of removing said functionality. Pirates hate trackers, so they might do it, but not necessarily, as often the priority is just to get the game working.
Because a cracker could remove the DRM but not whatever is tracking installs
That's a recent change. According to the faq on the official forum, initially the idea was to charge every reinstallation. Then they realized it was crazy. Now it's every first installations:
If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs?
A: We are not going to charge a fee for reinstalls. The spirit of this program is and has always been to charge for the first install and we have no desire to charge for the same person doing ongoing installs.
(Updated, Sep 13)
Note the "updated" yesterday. Initially every install in "different devices" counted. Even on the same device after reinstallation of the os
I fail to see how they can guarantee it's the first install.
I game inside a VM with GPU passthrough and I'm pretty sure it would be trivial to install-bomb any game to rack up install numbers and costs.
Moreover, would anyone even trust any number of times Unity tells you your game was installed?
They could a magical 10% that would be hard to prove/disprove.
Anyone with a half-competent legal team would stay the fuck away from any of this nonsense going forward.
It's a "proprietary system" (quote). It must be clearly always correct. It's not one of those open source stuff... /s
Where did they add the same device reinstall clarification? Last I saw, same device reinstall is still a new install and thus chargeable
Basically changed their pricing model to fleece Indy devs. Some devs would have owed more money than they ever even made on their games.
Fleece every Unity dev pretty much, even if big studios can afford it.
They copy from Spez book LOL. Dev definitely gonna pass the price to us users. We're fcukd
The thing is they can't even do this reliably. If you charge the customer once on purchase, but don't know if they are going to install it once or ten times or if they are going to fuck with you and install it a hundred times, then how much do you want to charge?
I've seen this somewhere before
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
I've seen this somewhere before
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Bot woke up and said "I'll show you how deep the thread goes"
I opened up this thread thinking there was a lot of engagement here.
Yo wtf is happening lol
Edit: There's a github issue opened for this
Oh no.
YouTube's black ops team hit the bot
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
I've seen this somewhere before
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
I've seen this somewhere before
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
I've seen this somewhere before
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
I've seen this somewhere before
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
I've seen this somewhere before
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
I've seen this somewhere before
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
I've seen this somewhere before
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
I've seen this somewhere before
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I think the bot broke
But do you have an alternative link?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
I've seen this somewhere before
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
I've seen this somewhere before
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I hope all the devs with weight followsuit. My little project moving won't really disturb anyone but me. Sweeping and sudden policy changes like this are bullshit.
What I'm hoping is that gamers take some of the big pocket publishers that use Unity and abuse the absolute fuck out of them so they send their lawyers after Unity for the obviously unenforceable terms.
Unfortunately Unity will probably just settle with them for nothing to avoid them setting precedents.
It's like crawling back to an abusive partner thinking things wont get worse.
What happened?
TL;DR of the situation is that Unity released a statement 2 days ago saying they want successful developers to pay up to 20 cents every time a user installs a Unity game starting from Jan 1 2024, even if your game was already released. This caused a huge ruckus in the game dev community and many developers want to switch away from Unity.
Note that it's "per install" (they clarified that reinstalling on the same device only counts as one install), not per unit sold. And Unity will also track pirated copies, so the devs would still have to pay the fee even if they didn't sell it to you.
the tracking of pirated copies is even more fucked up. is that their way of imposing that "piracy = stealing"?
It’s because they literally don’t know how to differentiate a download from legit and illegitimate. They’re going to track every time their bundler is downloaded and bill the developer for it, that would include pirated copies and legit copies alike.
The swashbuckler's solution is then to make your own bundler installer!
That's assuming pirates would go through the trouble of removing said functionality. Pirates hate trackers, so they might do it, but not necessarily, as often the priority is just to get the game working.
Because a cracker could remove the DRM but not whatever is tracking installs
That's a recent change. According to the faq on the official forum, initially the idea was to charge every reinstallation. Then they realized it was crazy. Now it's every first installations:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/
Note the "updated" yesterday. Initially every install in "different devices" counted. Even on the same device after reinstallation of the os
I fail to see how they can guarantee it's the first install.
I game inside a VM with GPU passthrough and I'm pretty sure it would be trivial to install-bomb any game to rack up install numbers and costs.
Moreover, would anyone even trust any number of times Unity tells you your game was installed?
They could a magical 10% that would be hard to prove/disprove.
Anyone with a half-competent legal team would stay the fuck away from any of this nonsense going forward.
It's a "proprietary system" (quote). It must be clearly always correct. It's not one of those open source stuff... /s
Where did they add the same device reinstall clarification? Last I saw, same device reinstall is still a new install and thus chargeable
This.
Basically changed their pricing model to fleece Indy devs. Some devs would have owed more money than they ever even made on their games.
Fleece every Unity dev pretty much, even if big studios can afford it.
They copy from Spez book LOL. Dev definitely gonna pass the price to us users. We're fcukd
The thing is they can't even do this reliably. If you charge the customer once on purchase, but don't know if they are going to install it once or ten times or if they are going to fuck with you and install it a hundred times, then how much do you want to charge?