Feeling a lot like the time you watched a friend destroy his life and you could only watch it unfold painfully before you rule
RIP Unity
I truly feel bad for unity developers here. While unity as a company was always a bit shitty from what I've heard, the engine itself still was a very low barrier to entry into game development, however now it feels like you are being punished for releasing something which is marginally successful.
If you are looking for Unity alternatives, I'd like to suggest Godot. While some things are rough around the edges the engine has made huge improvements in the last year or so. It's developed by a small independent team as well as it's own community and completly open source, effectively eliminating the chance for corporated fuckery like in Unity's case.
Godot is great. It has 2d, 3d, VR, can do cool stuff like compute shaders, and has pretty decent graphics if you configure it well. It also has a built in IDE, and is only around 100mb of disk space (unity takes about 5gb, and unreal takes about 50gb)
Wow, so if I understood correctly, basically anything that's free (not counting demos or subscription services) is fucked. 200k installs is a lot of installs, but from what I've heard it's not hard to rack up a bunch of installs if a YouTuber or Twitch streamer picks up your game (if it's free). Additionally, it sounds like it's not taking into account things like piracy, which means anyone who pirates the game is fucking over the developer by potentially running up the number of installs the game has had. What a shitshow. I wonder how many larger devs like VRC will try to pivot away from unity. I know full well how hard it is to get away from an engine you've been developing on, but there's a number of games like VRC that could get taken offline if the devs can't pay the new royalty scheme. That's not even including all the games that could get delisted because the devs aren't making money on them anymore. Hell, it sounds like under this scheme, even a game that's no longer offically available could run up a dev's bill.
Rip unity indeed.
Edit: I was curious about what kinda nutjob would make a move like this. Good ol' John Riccitiello. Good ol' John "game devs are idiots for not having microtransactions" Riccitiello. I had hoped he'd died and gone to hell after he got booted from EA, but nope! Apparently he's still alive and kicking. Good ol' John Riceroni. What an amazing man, that John Tortellini.
That John dude sounds like the scum of the earth.
Update: yep! On top of the microtransactions thing, he's apparently also a big proponent of replacing humans with AI, calls the Metaverse "the next version of the internet" and dumped 2000 of his shares in Unity ahead of the announcement, which smells of insider trading to me..
Only if the developer made more than $200k/yr:
Unity Personal and Unity Plus: The Unity Runtime Fee will apply to games made with Unity Personal and Unity Plus that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime installs.
A free game will never make 200k$ in a year, so I don't really see any issue here (?). Unless you are talking about free game with in-game purchase. Then yeah, someone who would download the game without doing any purchase after the threshold is met would be a net loss for the devs.
ELI5 how does it work with pirated games? I figured that steam/epic/Xbox store servers are connecting with Unity servers to provide the user with all the necessary files, but if I’m pirating then I’m just getting files from other users and it’s not connecting to the unity servers in any way.
They're likely using the analytics features that're baked into unity. So the game is probably phoning home to unity and saying, "hi, I've been installed!"
From https://unity.com/pricing-updates
Unity Personal and Unity Plus: The Unity Runtime Fee will apply to games made with Unity Personal and Unity Plus that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime installs.
Yeah, I don't understand what the controversy is about. Free games still won't have to pay anything. Asking 20 cents per install if the players pay at least $1 per install seems fair to me.
This assumes that each player only installs it once but games can be installed multiple times. I could even write a script that automatically reinstalls a game over and over again and thereby cause high cost for the developers.
Edit: Apparently Unity plans to detect and prevent fraudulent behavior. However, a user can still install a game multiple times for valid reasons. Something like Gamepass would also be very problematic for devs.
Ew, brand. Stop wasting money and your time with long loading screens and try Godot! It's free, it's open source and it runs on anything. Making a pixel art game on my ThinkPad from 2011 using Gidir, and it's amazing.
Damn what the fuck
I wonder if we'll see a solemn jpeg apologising and walking it all back in the next day or two