Developers Respond To Unity's New Pricing Scheme (theverge.com) 107
Unity announced a new pricing model this week, charging developers per game install beyond certain thresholds. This move has faced severe backlash from developers, criticizing Unity's communication, clarity, trust issues, and perceived exploitation of indie teams. The Verge adds: Many developers and even publishers took to social media to register their anger and to call on Unity to reverse its decision. [...] "This decision puts studios in a position where we might not be able to justify using Unity for our future titles," read a post on X (formerly Twitter) from developer Aggro Crab. "If these changes aren't rolled back, we'll be heavily considering abandoning our Unity expertise." Many developers shared a similar sentiment, explaining they were considering abandoning Unity as a game engine.
Other game developers, like Massive Monster, were more drastic, which, via the official account for its game Cult of the Lamb, threatened to delist the game entirely. Though the post was a tongue-in-cheek joke, it's one being repeated by other developers. "[Please] buy our game," posted the official Viewfinder account. "But don't install it after January 1, 2024." Other game makers wondered how Unity could put forth such a statement without considering all the ways it could negatively impact its users. According to a post on the Unity forums from someone who claimed to be an employee, objections were raised internally. "Know also that all of the concerns that are understandably blowing up at the moment have been raised internally by many weeks before this announcement," the alleged employee wrote. "Why it was decided to rush this out anyway in this way I can only speculate about."
Other game developers, like Massive Monster, were more drastic, which, via the official account for its game Cult of the Lamb, threatened to delist the game entirely. Though the post was a tongue-in-cheek joke, it's one being repeated by other developers. "[Please] buy our game," posted the official Viewfinder account. "But don't install it after January 1, 2024." Other game makers wondered how Unity could put forth such a statement without considering all the ways it could negatively impact its users. According to a post on the Unity forums from someone who claimed to be an employee, objections were raised internally. "Know also that all of the concerns that are understandably blowing up at the moment have been raised internally by many weeks before this announcement," the alleged employee wrote. "Why it was decided to rush this out anyway in this way I can only speculate about."
Greed is Good! (Score:2)
Gordon was right.
Classic Strategy (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: Classic Strategy (Score:2)
It's not going to work this time. The developers have learned that they cannot be trusted.
It's a shame most people are too dumb to realize that no for profit company can be.
Re: Classic Strategy (Score:2)
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I really don't think it will. I think this is going to be remembered as the beginning of the end. Nobody is going to adopt their engine going forwards. There will be a few follow-on projects that still use it just because it's still worth it given time investments, but for genuinely new projects? nopenopenope. These terms are onerous even for big players, who don't want to have to think about such things. They want an agreement up front that they can calculate ahead and which won't change.
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I agree. And I work for a company that invested heavily in it, and (because reasons) will likely not find itself badly impacted by the change. It's really more a realization that if they altered the agreement, and retroactively at that, there isn't any reason to assume they will not alter it further. And next time we very well could end up well and truly banjaxxed.
But I'm thinking the same with regard to other things, like RHEL, in which developers (and even end users) have lost their trust.
Wouldn't it b
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People trust companies? Who the heck does that? That's crazy. This includes the not-for-profit corporations. Do not trust any of them. Always verify. United Way pulled some crap a few years back too.
People. Now people can earn your trust. But as you have probably said, corporations are not people. Not by a long shot. By corollary, you can trust sole proprietorships by trusting the person, and also small business, again by trusting a few people.
Re: Classic Strategy (Score:2)
If you trust people more than corporations, you might need to get off the Internet more.
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You can trust a person, but you can't trust people.
Also corporations are literally made of people. If you can't trust corporations, you clearly can't trust people. And you definitely can't trust corporations.
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I can't help but see this as a beautiful opportunity start migrating to something Free/Open like Godot.
And to learn the lesson that if you depend on anyone else's software - even if it is allegedly open-source (e.g,. RedHat) - there is some risk. Far less IMO if it's Free/Open, but still more than none. And dramatically more if proprietary, and still more if it gets bought up by a company with lots of lawyers and no ethics (e.g., Oracle).
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Greed turns everything to crap. And sooner or later the greedy assholes creep in everywhere.
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So living something other than subsistence level of living is "crap"?
Because it's the greed that allowed people to be motivated to uplift themselves out of it. This is why cultures that suppress greed remain at subsistence levels to this day where they by some miracle of geography survive.
Re:Classic Strategy (Score:5, Insightful)
It wasn't greed that got us up from subsistence. It was invention and it was capitalism. People invented things that gave them more free time and better production levels. People learned to save capital which improved their resilience. Currency was invented to smooth over trade, making the accrual of capital easier.
But capitalism is not greed. American, capital C, Capitalism is. The ideology put forth to oppose Communism that mutated into a monster. You don't have to maximize and hoard and fuck people over to play it smart and have some capital socked away. Maximizing short-term gains to please a bunch of scumsuckers. Hoarding absurd amounts of wealth for, well... I don't know why that matters other than to insulate someone from the apocalypse. Failing to share the fruits of labor with those who made it for you for the aforementioned, to hoard more than a person could possibly allot. That is all crap and it is all American Capitalism.
We have ruined a good thing, and now the kids are all using the Marxist term "end stage capitalism." Great going folks! Greed is turning the future generations into Marxists, not pulling us all up.
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+1 comment
> I don't know why that matters other than to insulate someone from the apocalypse
and that can also put a huge target on you.
Maybe the relevantly high emotional disconnect from a huge part of society can't help but break one's reasoning. Like a brain disease of network connectivity, some kinds of fear and bunker thinking might be a sign of cognitive dysfunction.
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? !!
s/relevantly/relatively/
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Indeed. Capitalism does not mean you must exploit everybody to the limit and it does not mean "fuck the future". That is a degenerated form of capitalism that has no long-term viability or stability. This is what many in the US misunderstand a "proper" capitalism though.
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You've got it the wrong way round. Marx put forth communism to oppose greedy capitalism that had turned into a monster.
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How'd that work out for East Germany? Or Cuba? Or the Soviet Union? Or North Korea? Or Venezuela?
Oh, and if your answer doesn't include "huge numbers of their own people murdered by their so-called 'leaders," then your answer is wrong.
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OK. Fair enough.
I'd still respectfully disagree. I think you will find that both systems are attested almost as far back as history goes, albeit not by those precise names.
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Just looking at it from a historical perspective. Capitalism is not merely free trade or mercantilism, it's distinguished by the use of money to make money. That goes back to ancient times. But something clearly changed with the Industrial Revolution and the shift to city living, mass production, automation, railroads etc. It became possible to capitalize on a grand scale, and that was what sparked Marx and others to push back against the excesses.
Re: Classic Strategy (Score:2)
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On some level it is. It also enables a lot of projects that wouldn't otherwise exist.
Most of the analysis I've seen is overly simplistic and one-sided.
Still, charging a dev for installs regardless of how those installs occurred seems pretty over the top to me.
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Seems excessive (Score:2, Insightful)
Seems like excessive outrage for a $0.20 per-first-install charge, and only after 200K installs.
If you sell your game for $5, surely this is not eating into your profits much?
Am I missing something?
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If you sell your game for less than that, the percentage hit is bigger. Of course, it's also harder to reach the 200k/year revenue trigger, so... *shrug*?
Re:Seems excessive (Score:5, Funny)
"I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further."
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Exactly the problem, but it also exists, to a perhaps lesser degree, anytime anyone decides to depend on proprietary prisonware.
As the RHEL fiasco demonstrates, even going Free/Open Source doesn't completely eliminate the problem, but it helps, especially if the source you depend on is developed and supported by the community, rather than a megacorporation.
Re: Seems excessive (Score:5, Insightful)
it's not after 200k installs. it's after $200k of gross revenue. there are a lot of problems with this, which you can learn about by either thinking critically for two minutes or watching a youtube video. i won't waste my time going into detail, but consider 1) malicious installs by trolls, 2) that free demos of unity games would be impossible (they sort of rolled back/clarified this part at least, but it isnâ(TM)t very reassuring), 3) you have to basically trust unityâ(TM)s sampling methodology and anti-fraud claims about number of valid installs, 4) if you have a deal with a publisher, you may only be getting paid a relatively small fraction of revenue share after a period of time, but are now immediately responsible for the "unity tax" yourself.
don't bother with apologetics for unity; they are already doing that out of desperate necessity to salvage value, which makes one wonder if the new owners care at all. (they don't lol. also this is efficient and how all businesses work nowadays.)
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Re:Seems excessive (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. This means your competitor can run a script to install/uninstall your game in a loop and bankrupt you in a few hours.
or just remote play in an VM where each session is (Score:2)
or just remote play in an VM where each session is an install
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Re: Seems excessive (Score:2)
tl;dr: in principle i agree that it is not that unreasonable to charge a developer a small per-seat fee. unity is just doing it in a basically suicidal way (it doesn't help that the ceo has been selling his shares at an increasing rate over the past year hahaha).
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the count also includes free demos... so forget about have a demo version of the game.
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$0.20 per-first-install charge
The original wording and FAQ stated it was $0.20 per install and reinstall, arguing that was the so because game stores only provide bulk install numbers, so it wasn't possible to distinguish a first install from a reinstall. Now they say it's possible after all. But how so? Likely, if at all, by embedding some kind of DRM or rootkit in the library. And in either case it's a black box. They tell you they know your game was installed 10,000 times. You say them it was 1,000. They charge you $2,000 anyway and
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Don't forget Apple/Google's cut. As always, the money is in selling the shovels, apparently.
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A lot of platforms let you buy once and install on multiple devices. Imagine paying once and using a game for 20 years across multiple devices and several wipes. Oh and that old iPad that doesn't have enough storage so you're constantly uninstalling and reinstalling when you want to play. I don't know how they could miss all the stupidity here.
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Seems like the complaint is about the use of DRM, instead of sticking to the old honor/I'll sue your ass system.
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Unity seems to trigger something that wants to send shit to the cloud at every game start and every game closing. Former is usually linked to game executable, and latter to the unity crash monitor utility.
That's likely the mechanism Unity could use to determine installs. Very few people both run a properly discriminating firewall and decide to block the game they got from going online.
Re:Seems excessive (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems like excessive outrage for a $0.20 per-first-install charge, and only after 200K installs.
If you sell your game for $5, surely this is not eating into your profits much?
Am I missing something?
Here [appbrain.com] is a list of top grossing games on android.
Can you spot what they have in common? All of them are free to play. Nobody sells games for $5 if they want to make money.
In the free-to-play model, a good game will have many installs, but only about 5% of users will buy something. Under the new Unity scheme, that means for every person that buys something, there would be 20 installs or $4.00. This could easily put several free-to-play games out of business.
We can debate all day whether free-to-play is good or bad, but as you can see, this charge hits hard for some of us.
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Seems like excessive outrage for a $0.20 per-first-install charge, and only after 200K installs.
If you sell your game for $5, surely this is not eating into your profits much?
If I purchase the game and install it, the developer gets charged $0.20. If I uninstall it, then decide to reinstall it to play again, the developer gets charged another $0.20 for that. If I do that just five times with that $5.00 game, that's one fifth of the game's cost eating quite a bit of their profits, and is an undue burden on the developer. There is no way charging a developer for me reinstalling a game I've previously purchased from them can be legal or justified. This is overreach by Unity, a
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> Am I missing something?
Yes, F2P games where the goal is carpet bombing installs to squeeze out good enough revenue.
Not to mention it's impossible to track installs, it's all based on "modeling" Unity has internally. Basically, they'll tell you how many installs you owe them for, with no proof.
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It also counts pirated installs, re-installs, installs in VMs, and a host of other potential ways to get charged. It's insane. Even if it was a penny per install it would still be insane. You could literally wake up and find yourself in deep debt to Unity.
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Ok, I understand, everybody. Great insights! No more replies needed. Really.
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Perhaps, but consider that developers buy a license to use the Unity engine for a specific project at a negotiated cost. Now, despite the existing contracts, Unity has unilaterally changed their license agreement and is now saying "Hey, if you make more than $200k annally and your customer installs or reinstalls your software you gotta give us an extra $0.20 on top of what you already paid us!"
The idea is completely ludicrous if you take even a handful of seconds to think about it. What Unity is trying to
my contrary take (Score:3)
So... I understand how many indie shops would suffer greatly here so I think Unity does need to solve some challenges, like base it on installs per account (aka a 'purchase') for instance. Nothing is free after all.
The problem I have with many indie games is that they are just adware. They can drop it into the app/play stores for free and then burry you in ads. An otherwise fun game is nothing but a ad delivery mechanism or a pay to win model. The ads have found some balance of one slight step below too annoying to plan the game for many. By saying that every game install ('purchase lets say') has a cost, those games have to produce enough revenue to justify that cost so the ads will either need to increase or the game needs to cost $.99 or something. If the ads are any worse, that model is dead. it should die.
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I'll give you that, i didn't catch that part of the fine print and that seems to be the primary driver here. Kill off other ads so that unity's ad engine is the only viable option.
Re: my contrary take (Score:2)
Re: my contrary take (Score:2)
>>Nothing is free after all.
Except for free to play games.
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They're not free, you spend your time watching their ads and they collect your personal information. Falls sqaurely in the too good to be true camp.
Is the charge really that high? (Score:5, Interesting)
From what I can tell, if you were to sell a $5 game made with Unity and made $200,000 per year, the total charge would be $8,000. But that charge would be $40k if your game was only $1 and $800 if your game sold for $50. For Unity Pro if you made $10 million selling 1 million copies you would be charged $60,000. That same studio making $10 million on a game written with Unreal Engine would be charged $500,000 in royalties. That is far more than $60k for Unity. It still appears that Unity is the budget option, it just isn't quite as cheap as it used to be.
Considering Unity has a negative operating margin of around 50%, it seems clear they need to start making more money. Customer acquisition and R&D costs have been growing much faster than revenue so they need to start making more money somewhere. R&D costs have risen by 275% over the past 3 years, and sales/marketing costs have increased 175%. Revenue has only increased 150% over the same period.
It's likely their PR department needs improvement, but the justification for raising prices appears to be there.
Re:Is the charge really that high? (Score:4, Insightful)
They could just raise the yearly fee.
They could even expand their tiered model so only the more profitable games have to pay the higher price.
This new fee is a flat rate, so it hits the cheapest games the hardest, thus creating an incentive to drive prices up. It also creates a stronger incentive to use much-reviled DRM. Oh and it is also directly hostile to the free to play game model.
If they needed more money, they certainly could have done a better job than this.
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Before discussing Unity's operating margins, one should recognize that they also purchased Parsec (streaming software, could have been implemented themselves for way less than the $320 million they paid... I say as someone who has *implemented* real time streaming software for a business), Weta Digital for over $1 billion, and their $4.4 *billion* stock purchase of IronSource, the ad company... which oh wait, is exactly why this crap is happening, because now that they put all that money into an ad vendor,
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EA put popup ads in their game UFC 4. But they didn't make them start popping up until two weeks after release, to give people time to write positive reviews first.
Once the ads started popping up, the player backlash was intense enough to convince EA to turn them off.
I would expect a similar backlash when ads get served up in any other game. The market won't accept this.
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It's likely their PR department needs improvement, but the justification for raising prices appears to be there.
explanation maybe, but justification is too big a word here. conceptually unity is a pack including a library, a compiler and an editor. meaning it's not a service that costs money by the hour to run. the platform does have a few services, and the tool does need support, but largely their business is in selling software licenses and they have no mandatory operating costs other than maintaining/improving their software and, yeah, pr, management, marketing and all that shit like any other company.
considering
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It's not the charge but rather how it is applied. If the charge were based on sales it's likely no one would be batting an eye. It's not. It's based on installs. It's a bareheaded move which means you are unable to actually calculate how much Unity will charge.
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This assumes a perfect 1:1 ratio of installs to sales, which is never going to happen. Piracy, reinstalls, malicious use of VM's to inflate install numbers by disgruntled players, demos and so on will alter these numbers in unpredictable ways.
If you sell a $1 game and the installs per sale over five, you owe Unity more than your sales price. And this is not an uncommon situation.
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An increase to the per-developer license, though probably unpopular, would not have drawn the same outrage as what they tried to do instead, which was to try to fundamentally alter the agreement they made with their customers, and as close to retroactively as they felt possible given the Universal Commerce Code (UCC) and other national, state and local laws.
You don't get to change the rules of the game just because you've made poor business decisions, and, if you try, the result is that you will end up losi
Fundamental to our economic model (Score:4, Insightful)
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They migrated _to_ Oracle? They must either be the dumbest fucks on the planed or have gotten massive bribes. Yes, I am aware SAP sucks too, but not on that level.
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Despite their horrible reputation on the end user front, Oracle is still a major player in the data infrastructure industry.
They don't stop being good at what they've always been good at just because they're bad at certain other things.
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I'd guess that is because of lock-in and threats of lawsuits.
I'll take your word that there are things Oracle does well, aside from suing its own customers, its non-customers, and anyone else they think they can.
Contrary to my own experience.
But even if they had the world's best database, best memory-safe high level language, best ERP system, best CRM system, best semi-relational database, etc., etc., etc. . . . .all things some might argue on a purely technical level . . . .
I still wouldn't touch them with
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I applaud your decision. Unfortunately people with your level of personal integrity are rare and some cannot do it economically even if they very much would like to.
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Indeed. Also notice that capitalism must avoid or strictly control monopolies or it stops working.
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Capitalism is like a car: with a competent driver behind the wheel it can take you almost anywhere quickly and efficiently. However if appropriate care isn't taken to keep the car on the road it will happily run itself into a tree, or another car, or a pedestrian, etc. I don't know of a better economic system than well regulated capitalism. Unregulated capitalism, however, is a danger to itself and everyone around it.
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Are you speaking metaphorically? Or are you talking about Tesla?
Hope this Inspires Blender to Work on Game Engine (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hope this Inspires Blender to Work on Game Engi (Score:4, Informative)
There are already some good FOSS game engines available, such as Godot and Open 3D.
Of course, if the guys behind Blender want to make another one, I certainly have no objection.
Re: Hope this Inspires Blender to Work on Game Eng (Score:2)
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Unity was given honorary open-source status
This is news to me. Unity has never been open at all, in contrast to most of the larger alternatives which at least give code to their paying customers. What are you referring to?
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It's news to me too but Google told me this:
https://forum.unity.com/thread... [unity.com]
So that's probably what he's referring to.
We're witnessing the death of freemium... (Score:3, Insightful)
Reddit raising their API prices, AWS charging for public IP addresses, Twitter offering subscription services that raise your engagement level. Web 2.0 platforms using freemium business models led to the user-base monetizing the platform on their own and there being no reason to pay the platform for advertising. Platforms legally have to disclose what is and isn't advertising so users just learned to ignore or actively had the advertisers paying the platform. If you actually wanted to market something on Reddit you'd do it via astroturfing.
These changes will reduce transnational money laundering in gaming and reduce the amount of uninspired shovelware on the market.
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and it's about damn time
You are entirely within your right to not use shovelware. Why should actual developers bear the cost of your inability to control yourself?
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It will have no such effect at all. Producers of such software will simply switch to another toolkit.
In fact, it will probably lead to automated tools to generate such software becoming more widespread, so it will have the opposite effect.
Wish I could hear these meetings (Score:3)
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Any bad press will blow over in 3-4 days as people move on to the next news item."
They probably are not wrong. Reddit is still going strong. And most users probably will never hear this story.
Cities: Skylines II is going to be an mega hit and (Score:1)
Cities: Skylines II is going to be an mega hit and they want there cut
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Itd be interesting to see how many of the devs complaining are knocking out ad-riddled shit in the first place; Id be glad to see them gone
While the sentiment is good I don't see why actual devs producing actual good games should bear the cost of your inability to stay away from ad-riddled shit. I mean no one is holding a gun to your head forcing you to play shovelware. You could simply not participate and an indie dev ends up paying $60k less every year and is more like to make another good game for you next year.
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Imagine siding with Unity when you can look on Twitter and see the devs of big, good games complaining about this. Nintendo is fucking impacted by this. You going to call Cuphead shovelware ? Cities Skyline ? Shovel Knight ? My god man, tell us you don't have a clue without telling us.
How are Slashdotters so ill informed about tech these days ? What happened to "News for nerds" ?
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They want Genshin Impact money (Score:1)
Genshin Impact pulled in $3.8 billion in 2022. I wonder how much of that Unity got, and how much they would get under this new scheme. The indie developers are barely spare change and Unity almost certainly does not care if they go out of business or port to other engines.
So try Qt Quick 3D (Score:3, Funny)
It's not quite a game engine, but almost (in fact, games have been developed with it). And it's being actively developed. QML is easy enough to get started that even people like me who don't have experience with game development can put together 3D worlds with it (although I have plenty of experience with QML as a language: it was only for 2D until the last few years).
If your application is open-source, Qt is open-source too. This will not change. (Qt Quick 3D is GPL-3)
https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtquick... [doc.qt.io]
(disclaimer: I work for the Qt Company, just not full-time on the 3D stuff)
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The cost of the commercial license is quite high, and the way it works is quite hard on indie developers trying to get their first game out.
Re: So try Qt Quick 3D (Score:2)
What about old games? (Score:2)
So what happens with old games that were bought years ago that I re-install and play occasionally? If I get a new PC every few years, they'd consider it a "new" install, and try to charge the developer for it. Does the dev keep getting bills from Unity forever, even after there are minimal/no sales any more? Would Unity force Steam to pull it from my library if the dev goes out of business and stops paying?
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Typically you cannot change licensing conditions retroactively. Hence this is usually done on a larger update and everybody that wants the new stuff needs to agree to the new conditions.
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In this case, however, the fees are applied retroactively.
From the FAQ [unity.com]:
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Sorry for responding to my own comment, but I hit submit too soon.
My interpretation of this is that new installs of old games will incur the fee. Old installs of old games will not.
So people aren't suddenly going to get hit with an enormous bill for previous installs of their games. It is not retroactive in that sense. But old installs will count against the threshold needed to determine whether or not new installs must incur the fee, so it is retroactive in that sense.
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Well, in this case this possibility must have been in the original contract. Apparently too many people did not see that big red flag.
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It really wasn't, and they had an apparently-non-binding statement that developers would be able to use old versions of the engine with old versions of the license perpetually. The new management abolished that good-faith statement and decided that, from this point forward, all versions of the engine use only the new license.
Where this is really going to hurt is games that have been out for a long time and are in their long tail. Even if you're selling for twenty bucks, but 100x as many people are reinsta
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There are really only two possibilities: Either there was a big red flag in the old license (maybe cleverly camouflaged) or this will not hold up in court.
Did Elon Musk buy Unity too? (Score:2, Troll)
Did Elon Musk buy Unity?
Because that would explain a lot of the ham-handed decisions.
It's to force people use their LevelPlay mediation (Score:3)
They did this try and force people use their LevelPlay mediation platform- they're leveraging the potential high fees by saying that they'll wave the Unity fees "up to 100%" if you move to their app mediation system.
Epic going for the kill (Score:1)