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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Just a reminder that if Unity developers with pro licenses coming to Godot contribute even a small fraction of what they might have paid for those licenses on Unity, Godot can develop even faster.
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.
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
Thanks for sharing, I’ll check it out. Games in rust could help that whole endeavor in finding insecurities and whatnot even faster with game hackers and whatnot too
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
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.
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
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