So according the the news I wanted to start a topic about Unity game engine, that is going to charge a developer 0,20€ for each installation of a video game made in Unity, that occurs each time when you install it again even on the same machine.
I consider it an indie game publishers killer and expecting some games to be delisted from Steam platform or IndieGala freebies.
The changes will take effect starting January 1, 2024
As I know, here on Chrono.gg there are not only PC gamers but also some programmers, who code some games for fun, so I wanted to create a topic about the upcomming changes to unity and maybe a list of delisted games.
There is a glitch in the system, someone can installl a bot that will constantly uninstall and install the game, so a bot may generate money for the engine. This really needs to be fixed ( changed), but however they edit it, it will still be a con to keep to unity. And even worse for the programmers who spend 5-10 years getting better at Unity.
Well they’ve said they’re going to walk some of this back today, or at least that they’re rethinking. Of course even if they decided to fully abolish the idea the trust is still destroyed and Unity is just about a dead engine now. No one in their right mind ought to start a new project in unity at this point.
But we’ll see what they decide to do over the next week or so. Only thing I could see that might stand half a chance at saving the company as a whole is that they walk back everything completely, issue a TOS warranty that states that they will never and can never change terms retroactively and that the entire leadership is replaced. Then they’ll have to spend a few years being VERY easy to work with and maybe if they haven’t gone bankrupt in the process they might earn back a modicum of trust.
I was learning C# for Unity (well, and modding for Vintage Story! lol). I’m glad I didn’t start anything on the engine. I’d rather use Godot or something, than put trust in Unity after this.
There’s some clarification below I found on Reddit:
So this is not the full story. If you read the actual article from unity the reality is quite different.
Let’s run thru stuff:
Unity will charge IF you have over 200k installs AND 200k revenue WITHIN THE LAST 12 MONTHS.
This means if you as a developer are not making 200k over 12 months you don’t need to pay.
You would also only cross the threshold if you were selling your games for $1
If you’re an indie dev selling your game for 20 bucks on steam. You would need to sell 10,000 units over 12 months to meet the financial threshold, and over 4million USD
By this point you have the option to upgrade to unity pro which is a 2000 usd/yr license/company.
Under unity pro the dev is paying 15 cents per install for the first 100k installs. .075c for installs from 100k-500k and 3 cents from 500k - 1m and 2c per install for 1m+ installs.
Also the threshold for install fees only kicks in after 1million lifetime installs AND 1 million usd in the last 12 months.
Enterprise gets even cheaper.
Honestly if you look at the full plan and crunch some numbers I don’t think it’s anything to worry about. And older games that don’t break the 200k / year threshold don’t have to worry, and any devs that are ok unity pro, have to worry even less
Just to give some context. A developer that sold 200k usd of a 20 usd game. The number of customers would be 10k users. Each user would need to install the game 20 times before the developer gets charged.
At which point, I don’t see how as a developer yoy wouldn’t just pay the 2k unity pro license fee, rather than get stuck paying 40k for the 200k installs.
If anything this seems like a ploy to get devs to sign up to unity pro, rather than getting them to pay per downloads at the unity personal rate.
Kind of like those situations where a seller gives you crap at the basic level to get you to pay a bit more for the real product in the mid tier.
Wow, it’s one thing to put out a strongly worded letter. But actually putting a hefty bit of money where your mouth is is a whole other thing. I’m pretty sure Godot and FNA can do a lot of good things with 100k.
Very interested to see what grows out of the ashes of this forest fire.
Obviously some big brain at Unity asked an office full of people, “How do we make more money?” They couldn’t think of anything new, so they talked through the process of selling games.
“So after they buy the game, they install the game.”
Developers didn’t feel too bad at first because the TOS only applies if you update the game. So if you don’t update the game, the previous TOS is still in effect. Except that Unity changed their terms of service a long while back in preparation for the install fee.
THEN the developers got mad because they got blindsided by the obvious crooked methods.
And the push for the Unity pro license to cover the install fees is not good either. Unity created a problem and sells the solution. All those fees will be pushed onto consumers. If that’s the case, I want to charge the game a rental fee for taking up space on my hard drive so I can be as ridiculous as them.
I glad that there are competitors to Unity so that developers can quit and go to the competition.
Godot is getting big now because of the MIT license. So I hope that keeps up.
The MIT licence is a well-known FOSS licence that asserts copyright but imposes basically no restrictions on what you do with the code. It’s named after the place of its creation, the software using it usually has no association with MIT.
The most important part here I believe is the one where they wont force the fee on old versions of unity. So everyone’s current games are safe. Still doubt there’s going to be a lot of future games though.
