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.
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.
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
Finally an article that goes beyond the drama and misinformation. It is not just about the new fee, which realistically is nothing compared to what you would owe epic for the same level of success.
What sucks is the shadiness and the deceptive nature of it all. I am sure the executives felt really clever and thought it would almost fly under the radar After all, they managed to spin this as not-a-royalty after years of boasting that Unity wouldn’t have any.
The new changes are essentially this :
You’re forced into going with the pro or enterprise license past a certain revenue (which was sort of a thing already).
You’re forced into serving Unity ads, or else you get charged a some royalties, which realistically should still be less than what UE charges.
You’re forced retroactively into it, as they deleted the old TOS behind the scenes.
They’re definitely not being upfront about their intentions, and due to their complete aversion to mentionning the word royalties, they managed to deceptively make up a lie that sounds worst than the actual truth. Even though this is a move targetted at multi-mullion dollars productions, actual students and hobbyist are now worried about being charged per user downloads, which is not happening.
It is sad to see, Unity went from being owned and operated by people who truely cared. I worked there for a number of years and most leaders and employees truely believed they were a force of good in this otherwise shitty world. It is crazy how much the company changed in just a number of years/months. It sucks, and whoever ended up in charge robbed both the employees and the users of something great.
John was a smooth talker, and even as the company was turning corporate and seemingly stepping on old values, he was very good at making sensible arguments and justifying the company transformation. I can’t help but feel deceived now. Ultimately I left the company because I disagreed with so many decisions. Virtually my entire backlog was stuff I disagreed with and I just couldn’t justify waking up in the morning. We’re long past the “Users first” slogan which made Unity so popular with indies.
You’re leaving out what’s really the key problem with the new pricing, which is that it is per install. It’s an unlikely but very possible scenario that a developer could lose money (inexpensive game with an abnormally high number of reinstalls).
The pricing incentivizes “live service” or ad-supported games that constantly extract revenue from users rather than “buy once” games.
Their pricing is based on "trust me bro" currently, since they don't have details on how it will work. They say it was installed i number of times, therefore you owe them j. No need for a bot farm when they can just lie, since we have no way to verify their numbers.
Fair enough, this is an atrocious billing system, but I I firmly believe that this is simply a gimmick to get around charging royalties without calling it so. Maybe I am biased, but the people working at Unity are not monsters, and I believe the employee who posted publicly and stated that the people implementing this system made sure that it would be under-reporting installs is speaking the truth. I think there is this misconception that Unity is simply gonna fire an event for every install and charge you directly for each report, but there is no way that this will be this simple. In all likelihood they will use this to keep a list of the popular games, and the actual fee will be based on heuristics like estimated sales and whatever other analytics and ads generated by the game clients. Sure it is a “trust me bro” system, yes it’s bad, yes it could be abused, I think it is fair to call it out and ask for a more transparent system, but deep down I just don’t believe that Unity is evil and did this to abuse the developers.
In all likelihood THEY will be the one forced to under charge, and really they’re doing this to force you into their ecosystem so it is likely that they will reach out the studios individually before incurring the fees. The whole thing is worded in a way that past a certain level of success, they will charge you royalties unless you play ball with them and serve ads and buy in other services. I would not blame anyone for calling it scummy, but I think it is important to understand their motives, they want to force your hand to use whatever they’re selling. The installation fee is just a smoke screen, they have nothing to gain bankrupting studios by making up numbers. Of course, this is just my own take. I think I have a fairly good understanding of how they operate, but I could be wrong.
Unity is mad that mobile game companies acquire millions of users in a few months as they transition from soft launch to global, and then sell their companies for millions - if not billions - of dollars.
They want a cut of that pie, and in true unity fashion, they chose the most inept way of doing that.
If you have developers of games like Cult of the Lamb feeling scared, you did it wrong.
You protect your indies, you protect the people making art with your product. The people who invested 3 million and are making billions in the mobile ads game? That’s your target.
How they could be this inept is astounding…
Also, I’ll echo the other commenter’s statement in saying the article is very well written. They just weren’t able to really answer the “why” portion very well. John Riccitiello wasn’t wrong when he said this plan wasn’t designed to affect 90% of their customers - but it also doesn’t mention how that remaining 10% makes more than that 90% combined.
They’re wet go, John Riccitiello! That’s why I recognized that assholes smirk in the thumbnail. He used to be president of EA. No surprise he’s brought those scummy tactics over to unity.
Magic, thanks for posting this. I’ve been trying to find a good and clear explanation of that been going on since I started reading about people getting upset with unity during the week.
PR Guy: I dunno, boys, the headline 'Our boss is okay, you'd probably be fine sticking indie and not being owned at all' doesn't look... good. I'm thinking maybe we just... completely reverse that, yeah that's more like it."
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.
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.)
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)
Unreal engine will probably do the same shit than Unity, Unreal engine might be opensource (not FOSS), I think there’s the same clauses about production royalties.
I think Godot will not win simply because Unreal is so much better for 3D games what most comercial games use. I think Godot will become the indie favourite for 2D. Where it goes from there I’m not sure. Is the revenue sharing not enough to carry the game engine? Unreal/Epic is a special case. But is Unity mismanaged so hard? It still has huge market share.
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.
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.
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.
Every copy has to be hand made by routing bits around the copper highway ar ludicrous speeds, and rearrange them manually to form what is called “a game”.
Firstly, how dare you! Secondly, unity is made from a limited resource, which is whale balls. For every download of unity, a whale loses one of its balls. Think of the whales!
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.
Doesn’t really make any sense at all to investigate it again since nothing at all changed for the EU, and the streaming changes offered for the UK make it more competition friendly.
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