They’ve proven they can’t be trusted. The people who devised and attempted to enact this plan - the exec team - have not gone anywhere, and they aren’t going to. They have shown the industry who they are, and they clearly don’t give a shit about business ethics or even legality (the AppLovin shit smells an awful fucking lot like anticompetitive market interference). They will definitely try something similar in the future.
Don’t worry, 90% of our users won’t have to pay anything at all! Just ignore that like 50% are people who downloaded Unity to mess around for a bit and never made anything other than a “hello world” or similar.
So if you've published a game, just keep on keeping on. You can sell that game, maintain an older copy of Unity to update it for bugs, even develop new content for that game with the older version of Unity.
I figured this must have been in here. No professional organization would allow a TOS to pass into publishing that allowed a company to unilaterally change fees.
Yes, the fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.
So if you've published a game, just keep on keeping on. You can sell that game, maintain an older copy of Unity to update it for bugs, even develop new content for that game with the older version of Unity.
According to the article, probably no.
Many devs may have updated unity and used it for minor updates, but also the clause in question probably doesn't protect anyone anyway. There's a broader ToS that supercedes it with much more restrictive language.
According to the article, it's not that simple. This is from the ToS for the Unity Editor, which is subservient to a broader Unity ToS that has much stricter legal language about changing anything without warning and the customer being able to go fuck themselves.
So, yes, technically this bullshit may be completely legal. Devs who were sold Unity on "no royalties" may be forced to pay royalties. Which is definitely healthy for our society and not obviously a problem.
I agree. I am not a game dev, but I have considered making a game before. I do have programming experience. I just started a Godot tutorial today.
The tutorial focused on how to use the interface for the most part. I will not continue the tutorial I was using as it was video, and I really prefer to read. I’ll see if No Starch Press has a book. I typically like the books they publish.
Update It does not look like they have a Godot book. I will keep looking for one.
Honestly at this point just the peace of mind of working in a FOSS engine and not under a corporation that can do this whenever is enough to motivate me to learn godot. I’ve got some prototypes I can port into that engine to learn on, it might even be some good motivation to start integrating them into a single project.
This price change would be not for gaming industry gains, but for the capitalist's private appetite. Unity engine would be added unneccesary features for it.
Dude every company does this shit. The whole “announce something twice as bad as what you wanna do so you look good when you roll it back” schtick is as old as sliced bread. I do it to my wife all the time.
Sometimes the find out nobody really cares and they get to do the even worse thing. It’s a win win.
I think we could have done a lot of things a lot better.
No shit, Sherlock. Not fucking over your client-base, for one. One would think he’s not fit to be CEO of cow shit after this douche was previously in charge of EA during some of the worst years of that company.
There are alternatives to Unity. Time to move on if possible.
For something like cheating and streaming your exploits on Twitch, it makes sense for a suit like this. Bungie’s reputation would suffer even more due to his audience being much more likely to seek out cheating tools, to associate the game with cheating, and to spread both those pieces of information themselves.
In a case where the damages are real and not contrived, copyright feels a bit more legit.
$500k feels extreme, though, even in this case. Is this based off real sales, stock prices, or back of the napkin math? Maybe mark it down to his scale of income. So they have $100 million in annual ebitda (and excluding any funny business like stock buybacks) and he makes $50k before taxes but after living expenses. That $500k is worth 1/600th of their annual income and so should be 1/600th of his: $250. Multiply that by as much as 10 due to the severity of his actions (or divide by as much as 10) and you’ve got $2500 in damages. Much more reasonable.
Bit rough going the opposite way, but fair’s fair.
[Very sarcasm] It's nice that copyright just means a copyright holder gets to do literally anything they want as long as a relevant work is involved. Wouldn't want anyone to get away with any kind of local modification, tinkering, tweaking an old piece of software to work in a modern environment, some forms of modding... All obviously reprehensible violations of a wank gesture, eyeroll Copyright Holder's right to control distribution of their work!
IP law is so fucking vile, and yet proves it can continually get even worse :|
Edit to preempt, just in case: Also, no I don't need another bullshit lecture on how "IP law isn't a real thing, it refers to separate segments of law blah-blah-blah" but somehow can't be used as a term because some wankstain feels like being condescending.
Like… I don’t disagree with the sentiment here when it comes to most things that have to do with copyright and modifications; but if you’re using the modifications to get an unfair advantage in a multiplayer game, you’re a piece of shit and deserve punishment.
I’m curious what uses you have in mind–anything that’s an online competitive (i.e., you compete against other players–doesn’t need to be esports sweaty) game I don’t think there’s a strong case for allowing injected code, since that’s an avenue for gaining an unfair advantage and thereby worsening other players’ enjoyment, and anything offline I can’t see it being worth a company’s time and money to prosecute.
I think the problem is that the ruling now establishes that overlays and injected code are a copyright violation. Therefor any overlay or injected code is now illegal unless you have permission from the authors if the game.
This. Nintendo is one of the least ethical videogame companies out there. Even when they come up with something new and innovative, it’s so locked down you’re better off waiting to play someone else’s copycat of it.
arstechnica.com
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