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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Firstly, how dare you! Secondly, unity is made from a limited resource, which is whale balls. For every download of unity, a whale loses one of its balls. Think of the whales!
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”.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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