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.
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.)
Short term profits making quarterly reports look better to stakeholders. Isn’t that how 80% of these bigwigs get their job in the first place? We should be calling it the Zaslav Model at this point 😂.
Just because it looks better to shareholders now doesn’t make it a good business decision. I swear the majority of CEO types don’t give a damn if the company goes under in a few years because they either:
Have a golden parachute in place by sucking up to the Board.
Will move on to another CEO position at another company before it folds. Bonus points if they golden parachute on the way out.
That’s what the golden parachute is supposed to be for: a payout long term so the CEO doesn’t make a short term decision that fucks the company up but pays out big. Ex: offering a stock package that you can’t sell for 5-10years.
A decision like this will pay out HUGE in the short term, but if they don’t change it I doubt many will be using unity in a few years.
More enshitification. This is the kind of stuff I’ve grown to expect from tech companies. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are bleeding money due to interest rates and they need any way possible to stay afloat.
They haven’t been profitable for, like, past half a decade or so. Each year brings bigger and bigger losses.
Seeing how the CEO sold 50k shares over the last year, and another 2k not long ago, I can see it being the last hail mary to extract as much money as possible and sell the company to Microsoft/Apple/Facebook/Whoever is willing to buy
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.
I know and thank goodness for that... but there will be projects that simply won't be able to afford to move to entirely different engines. It's a lot of work that might have to be redone.
… not really, and for what a few years? Indie devs don’t have a lot of money, and there is a huge discrepancy between unity and other engines. They work in fundamentally different ways.
There are some pretty big games built in unity, the money on the table is coming from them, (assuming reasonable licensing terms) not the small indie games.
I may be entirely off the mark, as I don’t work in that part of the industry. But I’ve messed around with unity and it’s not particularly unique compared to any other engine it competes with in my experience, particularly when it comes to actual runtime. Assets will need conversion and sure, the API shim will probably give a performance hit, but there’s no reason I can see that unity is fundamentally different.
I’m sure someone will try, but it seems nearly impossible to do this in a way that’s actually useful. Most game engines are going to have fundamental differences that won’t easily map to the unity way of doing things
I’m in the middle of a project right now that’s going to be released on an out-of-date engine because the newest versions broke backward compatibility and I’m too far along to port everything. If I had to change engines entirely at this point I’d have to cancel the entire project.
It's probably still going to take some projects with it. If you've sunk hundreds or even thousands of manhours into a project you can't just... do it again, or at least not always. Especially not if you've invested money as well as time, which is probably the case for most indie projects that aren't literal one-person shows.
I’m not a game engineer, so someone else who’s actually in that segment of the industry can probably give more answers, but Godot and Bevy seem to be making some waves.
And if they’re not enough for what a dev needs, given these license changes, I don’t really understand why someone wouldn’t pick unreal or something much more comprehensive over unity now.
Correct me if I’m off the mark, but unity always seemed like what you’d go for if you wanted something like unreal, but (completely understandably) didn’t want to pay the fees associated with it
Godot has a dedicated workflow for 2D games, so I’d rather make one of those color sorting puzzle games that’s all people play on mobile these days in Godot than Unity or Unreal.
There’s unreal, Godot, and a couple others I can’t think of off the top of my head. They’re not as widely used because they lack the feature set of unreal and unity, but they’re out there.
That’s pretty much what I thought. Unity is so big because it offers a ton of features with a pretty permissive license. There’s not something comparable except unreal, which has an even worse licensing situation
Unity got popular because it was simpler than unreal, and way more feature complete than Godot.
Was… these days unreal is easier to work with, and Godot is much more capable. So it’s mostly inertia at this point. And now everyone is going to take a real hard look at the alternatives.
I have a friend who has been moderately successful in the game creation space and he is saying he wants to just give up at this point because of this change.
I can’t even blame him. I would too. This is essentially a situation where the only option is going to be a rewrite from the ground up in a new language and new engine.
If I was an indie game dev I’d be questioning my future right now too.
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
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.
This is 100% targeted at bleeding indie game developers dry in hopes of taking some of that sweet viral cash from devs like the one who made Vampire Survivors. They see that indie devs are charging $3-5 for their games, and so they aren’t hitting the $200k threshold unless they go viral, so Unity is charging by install, not just by total revenue. I hope that the ESA or other interested groups take legal action against this retroactive greed.
After seeing the way WotC handled DnD and MtG, and the way Musk has been dragging Twitter through the shit, I really believe that shareholders are trying to take what they can while they can and peace out. No one is looking at the long term anymore. Everyone just wants theirs, fuck everything else.
RIP Unity. First they partnered with Ironsource. Who are the people behind InstallCore it’s a wrapper for bundling software installations. It tricks people into installing enough browser toolbars and other bloat to hurt their PCs. Windows Defender and MalwareBytes blocks it. Now Unity does this shit.
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