Unity adding a fee for devs for each time a game is installed, after certain thresholds
Unity is adding a new charge for every time a game using the Unity Engine is installed, the company announced today. St…
Godot.
Context: https://godotengine.org/
Some more context: Godot established the "Godot Development Fund" to accept donations directly (https://lemmy.ml/post/4815592).
Their tagline is on point.
I only code in Guffman
Existing games built on Unity will also be hit with Runtime Fees if they meet the thresholds starting January 1.
How can you have a deal in place and just say “you’re giving me more money” and think that that’s ok?
I am altering the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further. - Vader
Tech companies badly need to get their shit kicked in to stop with this "I have the right to change the terms unilaterally anytime"
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.
I don't believe that is legal. That's just absolutely ridiculous.
I can't imagine that it is.
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.
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.
Jokes on them, I never finished a unity project.
Oh hey, look.
The former CEO of EA made a greedy, short-sighted decision to fuck over his entire customer base.
I am shocked, friends.
SHOCKED.
It's not that guy that looked like a supervillain every time he got up on stage at E3, is it?
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.)
This is a good way to incentivize game developers to just not use Unity and just some other engine that does this.
Great for short term profits which makes the quarterly statements look good, but bad for long term sustainability.
The CEO of Unity used to the the CEO of EA.
It explains a lot.
A CEO who can't manage. Shocker.
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:
The person who runs Unity is a shithead.
Oh, he was a former CEO of EA. That explains a few things.
A Big fucking idiot
This is why they shut down Parsec Arcade. Cause they’re an asshole
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
We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed," the company explained in adding the fee.
Ok and??
Every copy costs them money. Don't you know how digital copies work?!
Like.. wow, that’s what the engine is! Fucken doinks.
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 might kill entire indie projects.
There's other engines, this will kill unity
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 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.
This will kill new development on the engine and older games without who have a limited number of users.
The ones halfway or more through development to recently launched will have to move to subscriber model or a shit-ton of ads.
In the next 3-5 years however their profits will likely be up. So some larger company will likely buy them out.
I think we need to kill everything so this is a good start. Snake blisken LA
Indies are the ones who deserve to die the least.
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.
I got some clarifications from Unity regarding their plan to charge developers per game install (after clearing thresholds)
- If a player deletes a game and re-installs it, that's 2 installs, 2 charges
- Same if they install on 2 devices
- Charity games/bundles exempted from fees
Regarding this being abused by bad actors:
Unity says it will use fraud detection tools and allow developers to report possible instances of fraud to a compliance team
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
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
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?
I work for a small (15 people) Unity gaming company. Will let you know what the CEO says, just shared the actual Unity blogpost
Edit: Update - CEO added a gravestone emoji and said "yikes"
For the sake of your sanity, I hope there's a resolution to this that doesn't involve a rewrite.
This is the problem with being a whole company on the ecosystem of another, they can pull the rug at any time.
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.
Yeah this is why many bigger studios just use their own Engines even if they're shit.
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.
Has to be a smarter way than this. This is just going to make devs go back to activation limits.
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.
"Runtime fee" is the most idiotic thing I've ever heard im the programming world, I think we hit a new record of low
Beyond what this means for Unity and the indie gaming scene, I'm concerned about copycats.
With how big Unity is for hobbyists, I'm worried this might have an "Apple" effect, where other runtimes (even non-gaming related) begin to try this.
I've heard of proprietary code libraries before with expensive licensing, but still nothing this dumb
Unity's CEO was EA's CEO too. He is the guy who shaped EA into the greedy company that it is today. I'm literally not surprised
No wonder the article smelled like wet rats reading it
This is great news!! For Godot.
rule 1: get user by giving free candy rule 2: let's them build their product, workflow on your tools rule 3: harvest.
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)
Rule 6: Unreal does the same thing, everyone switches to Godot 😂
It is management
CEO or whatever used to be head of EA
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 guys should check out Stride if you are looking for another C# based engine. It's open source, but pretty rough around the edges right now.
Or, go for Godot for something more mature.
What about Open 3D Engine? Basically an updated version of Lumberyard. https://o3de.org/
I'd imagine Unity user would most likely be looking for a C# based engine instead of a C++ or Python based one, and O3DE doesn't support C#.
I'm sure this will give a boost to Godot development.
It already has. The Godot Developer Fund went up by $4,000 yesterday alone.
Ha, yeah my immediate thought was imagining a situation like:
Godot Developers who have not yet read the news: "Huh. Why do we have 1000 new pull requests today?"
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
Godot has Rust support with GDextensions
Stride might be worth looking into if you're going for 3D stuff, it uses C#
Ngl, I did visit their site right after reading the news. My next project will be using it. I hope it catches wind with this!
GODOT SQUUUUUUAAAAAD
thank God for their inconvenient way of installing and using of the engine itself, if I didn't have a hard time back then I wouldn't have switched to Godot 🙏🙏🙏
firing up godot felt nice, no logins or other bullshit
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
So I only owe them 10 million if I've made $200,000?
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.
Unity going the way of Reddit
Once [a company] can make more money by screwing its customers, that screw-job becomes a fait accompli.
Capitalism, yay!
Sounds like another problem we have thanks to DRM and telemetry.
Get. Fucked.
Well, guess it's time to learn Godot.
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.
That's great to hear. C# has grown on me so much lately! It's like TypeScript but not sucky.
GDScript (python)
I think GFScript is it's own language, but looks definitely inspired by Python
Me, a hobbyist that never planned to sell anything I made: chortle my balls, Unity Tech!
Man I was just getting into game development and learning Unity.
I guess it's time to pivot into Unreal or Godot or something.
Anybody have recommendations?
Unreal has similar business model, so Godot.
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
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.
Common proprietary L
Wow that is such a bad idea... I... I'm honestly speechless. Who thought if that? I mean...
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.
"F2P game developers are the biggest fucking idiots" - Unity CEO, c. 2022: https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/18/23269218/unity-ceo-john-riccitiello-apology-game-developers-fucking-idiots-ironsource-merger
I not only expect lawsuits out the ass, but tech lobbyists are likely going to fight against it since basically every game uses Unity now.
So... If the Unity's secret spyware and algorithm suddenly decides to count an update as a new installation, you suddenly get slapped with a huge bill. Especially if you release multiple small patches and your whole player base is counted multiple times.
Also piracy lmao
According to the article only installs on new devices are counted.
Furthermore this only takes efrect after a certain threshold of revenue and installs.
Ah yes, because it's that difficult to spoof a new PC. You can run a tool similar to a kernel level anti cheat "ban bypass", run the game, and cost the developer up to 20 cents. With a relatively simple script, this can be done many times per hour on a single PC, easily racking up cost for the developers.
This is a bad idea, no matter how you implement it. If it goes through, it will be abused.
The clarification on Xitter states deleting and reinstalling is 2 charges, the same as installing to 2 different devices. https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1701679721027633280?s=20
Except that that is a back pedal on their part and their FAQ plainly says they actually have no way of tracking what is a new install versus a re-install; which is why they decided to count all installs to begin with.
That's pretty awesome of them to do such a great Godot advertisement
Well this is bullshit but is there anything I as a non-developer can do about it?
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 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.
Sail the high seas 🌊
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.
That's even worse for the devs, because they might still need to pay Unity for your install.
As a player, no. And I don't recommend doing anything, this is developer tool among them.
You can donate to Godot I guess? But of course you are not the one using it.
Switch to Godot or FTEQW, screw Unity.
FTEQW
Quake world engine. Huh, wasn't aware of that one! Speaking of which, you can do all sorts of silly stuff with Doom sourceports, so that's also a valid alternative.
Wanna bet he secretly has a bunch of Epic Games stock?
They did sell their thousands of shares before this shit so I wouldn't be surprised
Looks like they know very well what they are doing. This seems illegal, but we all know they get away with it.
I can't decide if they'll get away with this or if they're committing corporate suicide.
Yeah, this will insure I never use Unity. But at least they can collect from their existing games.
For Unity Personal and Unity Plus users, the thresholds are $200,000 in revenue a year and 200,000 lifetime installs.
The fees also vary, with Unity Personal developers having to pay the most for every install above the threshold ($0.20)
So, if you get 200k lifetime installs but don't get the 200k revenue a year, you don't have to pay it?
Existing games built on Unity will also be hit with Runtime Fees if they meet the thresholds starting January 1.
OOOHOOOOO BOY, now, that's going to hurt a fair amount of people!
Also, what about web play? I guess that'll only count towards revenue, but not towards downloads?
If their licencing agreement permits retroactive changes like this, that is reason enough to gtfo
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.
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.
Of course that was theoretical, until today.
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.
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.
Q: Does this affect WebGL and streamed games?
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
https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/
Starting January 1, a Unity Runtime Fee will be charged to any game that has passed a revenue threshold in the past year and a lifetime install count.
Still shitty, but at least the fee only applies if you’ve already hit the revenue threshold. Maybe this is an ill-conceived effort to raise the floor on game prices (or price out low-cost ones)? A $60 game can afford a 20-cent extra fee a few dozen times. A 99-cent game is a non-starter though.
That’s exactly what this is. They want to price out the $3-$5 games that unity is primarily used for. They make no revenue from those since the revenue threshold never gets hit.
They’ll almost certainly lower the revenue threshold next too
It is chargeable if you have made a certain amount of income on the game in the last 12 months, which should hopefully prevent too much impact on existing games.
Not content with their subscriptions, they now want a revenue share.
This makes sense to me, it looks like it's $0.20 for each install, only if
Which, I know Lemmy has issues with proprietary software, but if you are charging for your software and it's built off this, I don't think $0.20 is too much to pay them. Unreal takes a percentage I believe, sounds like this is a "keep the lights on" charge.
There are a lot of cases where this might suck if you're a full time Unity dev. Getting on Gamepass was already a bit dicey as it cannibalizes sales, but now you got an extra Unity tax on that. (And you may get a LOT of installs on Gamepass)
Give a bunch of keys to a charity auction? Guess you're paying extra. Got a demo that's doing wonders on Steam NextFest? Those are installs. Is your game being pirated? Those look like installs, gotta pay up.
I don't think this will bankrupt any dev, but all those above decisions will hurt.
But they already changed it from $0 to 0.2, how do you know it won't be 10 dollars next year after you've already spent 5 years making your game?
What if you only were charging a dollar for your game and people like it so much they install it 5 times over the year? Easy to do with multiple devices or reinstalling OS's
The problem is unity is forcing this on people who may have spent years and lots of money entering into a different kind of business agreement.
Except steam will let you un/re-install something infinite times.
as already confirmed by others, it is per install, not per sale. Meaning that if you uninstall your game and mhen reinstall it, the dev has to pay twice. You buy the game and install it on your pc, and your steam deck so you can play it whenever you want? developer pays twice.
that sort of thing
The model makes no sense.
Consider how it affects $60 AAA games vs close to free $1 games, it's wildly disproportional and somehow the $1 game dev starts paying significantly earlier. Now consider how it affects games that make far less than a dollar per user, this is true of many free-with-in-game-purchase mobile games.
Then consider demos, refunds, piracy, and advisarial attacks.
It would have been simpler, more balanced approach, and have none of the pitfalls if they had just gone with a profit share scheme.