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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even a full 180 isn’t enough unless they commit to not changing fees for years or something. The trust has already been broken, and they show that changing fees however they see fit isn’t beyond them. That’s terrible for anyone considering Unity as their game engine of choice because it could completely fuck up your business plan half way through.
Unity: YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND! YOU DON’T KNOW THE FULL STORY
Devs: You’re charging us based on how many times a game gets installed and reinstalled, or opened in streaming services?
Unity: Oh so you do have the full story. What’s wrong with that?
Plainly, whoever’s at the head of this doesn’t understand developers or the industry, and is likely refusing to listen to their subordinates.
It'd be a shame for these companies to build some kind of cosmetic DLC priced at 10k or higher that "unlocks the full game" to avoid the charges. I'm sure Unity would just build some legal lingo to get around that loophole however.
Them hiring that EA exec as the chief financial officer, and another as their CEO, around the same time they stopped offering lifetime subscriptions near the end of Unity 4, while at the same time reworking their sub plans to pull back support for devs with recently-expired subs, should’ve been a massive red flag at the slippery slope they were aiming to go down
sigh… isn’t this more or less the same thing that Reddit did with their API fees? look how well that turned out for them.
Unity is an extremely flawed game engine with unsolvable memory management issues. Most game devs choose to go with Unity because it’s cheap, and then end up getting a lot of complaints because of the previously mentioned unsolvable memory issues.
IMO Unreal is the better game engine, in pretty much every aspect. i haven’t checked out Godot yet, but based on all the hype i’m seeing and their prioritizing accessibility, it seems to be a great choice.
Yeah, these "clarifications" plainly contradict what they had told journalists before. They already had clarified that they would charge for all installations, not just the initial ones.
I also wonder what Microsoft thinks of this talk that they will be on the hook for Game Pass rather than the developer studio.
axios.com
Najstarsze