Yeah that’s the thing, you don’t have to install anything. You just have to figure out how unity “phones home” and spoof the traffic 100 times a second.
First of all, punishing devs you don’t like is a slippery slope that opens a lot of people to abuse they don’t deserve. Second of all, I would be very surprised if any of those asset flip games are going to be making $200k. Third, they specifically state in the article you won’t be able to install bomb a dev just because you don’t like them.
Unity "Vadering the deal" is enough reason that no business should choose Unity for anything whatsoever going forward. They are now a huge legal and financial risk to any business endeavor at all.
No matter how much they relent, developers should not get complacent and trust that things will stay this way. Unity will go back on the offense once the outrage quiets down a little. Don't do it. Transition now before you end up in a worse situation.
I think companies tend to overvalue support and undervalue software freedom. You get developer lock-in once people are trained on closed software, then they start squeezing you for every dime because they know it’s too expensive to migrate.
They’ll either do a complete reversal of the policy once they see the amount of games pulled from store fronts, or implode burying their head in the sand.
They’re going to get sued by all the developers who already put out games with the existing license that Unity is trying to unilaterally change the terms of. They’re trying to charge money for installs on games that are already published and already sold.
There is nothing to "clarify" - Unity is a toxic, predatory company with toxic, predatory leadership and developers and investors need to get out as quickly as possible.
I'm a little out of the loop. How so? Have they always been said way? Edit: I'm an aspiring dev and want to know as much as I can, and if they're shitty, I wanna know.
They are popular because they were permissive and dead easy to use in… 2008 or so. Indie studios adopted Unity, many went on to great success, and it is now a product with a huge userbase, tons of tutorials, and an industry full of experienced Unity developers.
Unity is successful, entrenched, known, and makes money.
And this is the worst possible situation for a product to be in. The term is “enshittification” and basically means the owners are incentivized to sell out, while new owners are more incentivized to add new ways to extract value than to improve the product meaningfully. This is a death spiral that no products recover from.
It’ll just get worse until in several years all that is left are some patents bought by a patent troll who sues the everliving shit out of anyone still using Unity.
Anyway: Look up Godot. It’s a modern version of what Unity was when it was young and pretty.
Unity has been rent seeking for awhile. In my mind, a big issue is the unity asset store, which apparently is where they actually make most of their money. Unity collects a 30% cut of all sales and imposes pretty restrictive licensing terms. This is annoying, but not a huge deal for things like art assets, but it creates a huge perverse incentive when you look at plugins and tools.
The best way for unity to make money in the business model they’ve created is to add a bunch of seemingly simple but not very comprehensive systems to the engine. Then, rather than refine these features they can wait for 3rd party developers to fill in the gaps with plugins that must be sold on the unity asset store. This allows unity to scoop up a bigger revenue stream on top of the licensing income without having to do any additional work.
If they wanted to just give the monopoly to Unreal Engine and be directed on a path to irrelevance, they could just placed a banner on their website “please use Epic Unreal Engine”. Much easier than enraging devs and tracking all the installs via internet (Tracking gamers without consent can be legal in Europe?)
20 cents per install is insane especially for old games bundled with other stuff when they got pennies
With as many Unity games as there are, saying only 10% of developers will end up having to pay is still quite a large number of developers.
Also, I wonder how against the TOS it would be for game devs of existing titles to sandbox Unity behind a firewall and prevent it from accessing the internet. And they say the change applies to old games, do older builds of Unity have the telemetry already? How long has it been in place?
The people in charge over there at Unity are some pretty stupid people if they think we won’t see right through their bullshit.
There is no solid way for them to track this. Not everything is distributed on an app/game store. And what constitutes an initial install anyway? What if I have ten gaming rigs and I buy direct from a developer and install the game to all ten rigs…is that ten initial installs?
I’m thinking they might addsome engine-side telemetry we don’t know about, but they’re refusing to actually say anything about how they’re tracking this.
Right, and I know this isn’t anything any of us can answer, but what constitutes an initial install? What specific keys are sent in the telemetry to know that I, ulkesh, have already installed this game once? It is literally impossible in so many ways to know this without forcing the user to provide some static key (such as a license code). Technically steam has such license codes, as do most, if not all app/game stores like it. But if the developer decides to publish without using such an app store, does this mean Unity will force them to put in some kind of license code mechanism? What if it’s a simple game that happens to get downloaded and installed over 200,000 times and the game costs the consumer only $0.99? What if the game is distributed for free? What if a user refunds post-installation? How can a developer even trust the data Unity gathers for this?
Perhaps some of this has been addressed, but Unity doesn’t control distribution – this is the WHOLE reason they should stick to their tiers of licensing their platform and not try to get a piece of the distribution pie. If they want to control distribution, then set up their own damn app store and force people who develop on Unity to use it (which will be met with exactly the same resistance). And, we all know it would fail miserably. They’re not the only game engine in town, they’re just one with a low barrier for entry. Why is it so many companies that were once doing good become such greedy pieces of crap? Reddit (fuck Spez), Twitter (well we know whose fault that was), and now Unity. I suspect there are betting pools at casinos on which company will be next to be so stupid as to cause their own demise.
The fucked up part is charging devs who used their products under the idea that they would be charged certain fees, and now the company they built their business model around is turning around and saying “now you owe us more of a cut if you continue to offer the thing you built”.
Imagine buying a fleet of delivery vans and suddenly Ford wants 5% of your revenue forever. It’s fucking racketeering.
This honestly sounds like a lot of overhead in development. How does Unity track my installs? Do I have to do anything to my games? Do I have to warn users about privacy related to Unity’s tracking? Does it have to be in my TOS? These are just privacy questions.
Of course your feelings are going to be biased. Anyone being told they’re about to get royally screwed is going to be biased because it’s personal to them
I meant specifically how I feel about making 2D in UE since I am used to Unity. But yeah sudden ass-fucking policy changes are bound to piss people off
Yup, no information on how they actually get that information. The only assumption I can make is that it’s some sort of telemetry in the installer or the engine
There's just no way this was ever going to go well, no matter how they clarify. Oh, you can inform Unity of upcoming charity bundles to be exempt from fees? You know what's better than that? Not having a fee for something that stupid. No need to inform anyone of anything.
I give about a year until Unreal does the same, except that they’ll at least have the good graces to waive the fee if games are sold on Epic Contractually Timed Exclusive Games Store.
Looking forward to Godot finally getting the love and recognition it deserves after this, at least.
Yeah, I think it’s pretty likely that the only reason Unreals terms are sustainable at all at this point is that they are funded by vertical integration using Epics infinite Fortnite coffers. Unity has no such safety harness, and has to squeeze everyone for as much money as possible to be profitable. The moment all of Epics deranged fake consumer rights activist PR starts working and devs and customers actually get locked into their ecosystem at scale they will start tightening the screws on everyone.
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