RIP Unity. First they partnered with Ironsource. Who are the people behind InstallCore it’s a wrapper for bundling software installations. It tricks people into installing enough browser toolbars and other bloat to hurt their PCs. Windows Defender and MalwareBytes blocks it. Now Unity does this shit.
This will probably use some well-defined api endpoint to do their telemetry check-in, so this could probably be effectively circumvented if users were willing and able to do host level overrides to specifically prevent the unity engine from phoning home
You could also imagine a malicious actor phoning home to that API to drive up “installs” for a game and make a small studio or individual deal with massive fees. If a company is making these kinds of changes against the better judgement of their user base AND their internal analysis (lots of stock was sold two weeks ago), I’m doubtful they even care to properly deal with those kinds of problems.
Barely any commercially successful games are written in Godot right now. But Godot keeps getting better and Unity keeps getting worse, things could look very different in a couple of years.
This is a game I’ve had my eye on, since after playing Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, and then Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, it was a further slap in the face just how crappy the Pokemon games continue to get with each new release (it’s basically downhill after X and Y). Sure the story was good, but Scarlet/Violet was tough to enjoy with stutter, frame drops, hitching, and making me motion sick (and that’s just visuals, gameplay itself in a boring open world with no incentive to explore is also a factor). I’ve never played a video game that made me motion sick. I needed an alternative and heard about Cassette Beasts being a better game than Pokemon. I played the demo, loved it, and I was waiting for a sale. Now I’m gonna pay full price for this game to support the devs and their work with Godot.
This actively hurts the developers and helps Unity.
The devs will be charged for every install. Even if that install wasn’t legitimate.
So if you pirate a Unity game, it’s no longer a victimless crime. You’re actively making the developer pay for your piracy.
Like normally, I am totally cool with piracy. But giving piracy as a solution here is actually detrimental to the developers and doesn’t hurt Unity the company at all.
Like others said, I am sure it will be one of the patches applied to the Unity games. Crackers are not really bad people, and turning off some telemetry should be a piece of cake.
Don’t buy Unity games, encourage developers you like to not buy them. Not much you can do really, but hopefully the financial disincentive will put them off. Users don’t want install limits to be placed on their games, and they certainly won’t pay developers for every install.
Starting January 1, a Unity Runtime Fee will be charged to any game that has passed a revenue threshold in the past year and a lifetime install count.
Still shitty, but at least the fee only applies if you’ve already hit the revenue threshold. Maybe this is an ill-conceived effort to raise the floor on game prices (or price out low-cost ones)? A $60 game can afford a 20-cent extra fee a few dozen times. A 99-cent game is a non-starter though.
That’s exactly what this is. They want to price out the $3-$5 games that unity is primarily used for. They make no revenue from those since the revenue threshold never gets hit.
They’ll almost certainly lower the revenue threshold next too
Oh yeah… I can’t see this being weaponed by the bad side of the consumers.
Game comes out, it does something stupid or just “woke” and pisses people off. They attack the dev by installing more copies. Company goes bankrupt. Dickhead gamers win.
That clarification makes it even worse, this is obviously an attempt to push free to play or indie games out the window while making major bank.
The fraud detection will not help at all to prevent abuse especially in cases like steam family sharing where other “users” won’t have to pay to install the game!
There’s literally no reason to charge per game install here, the only possible reason is greed
So basically they’re explicitly condoning it. That’s not just bad, but even worse that they’re doubling down that a delete+reinstall will charge the dev twice.
This will end a lot of indie projects and they’ve basically destroyed their good standing in indie dev circles.
Hard to chuck unity in the bin when you don’t use unity.
We’re lucky there are enough other engines on the market at the moment, but eventually someone will need to spearhead a FOSS engine with blackjack and hookers.
So once a game stops selling it had better hope its player base dries up and stops reinstalling it? The way that is phrased makes it sound like you could net lose money over the long term if sales decline and people keep reinstalling it
Also, what counts as an install? Ive seen many unity based games that don’t have an installer and just run standalone? Would a standalone game count as already installed? Is it a first run thing in that case? Honestly this, and the additional clarification raises more questions than it answers?
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.
Can you name some? Honest question, I don’t know either Unity or Unreal in depth, I’m just aware that Godot still struggles with performance in the 3D department
This is a bit old now, but has a good break down of stuff that’s missing for large games. Godot 4 works well for smaller 3D games just fine, it just doesn’t do stuff like level streaming. Also it’s missing a landscape tool. (Though there is a third party one, not sure if it was ported to Godot 4 yet or not)
More enshitification. This is the kind of stuff I’ve grown to expect from tech companies. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are bleeding money due to interest rates and they need any way possible to stay afloat.
They haven’t been profitable for, like, past half a decade or so. Each year brings bigger and bigger losses.
Seeing how the CEO sold 50k shares over the last year, and another 2k not long ago, I can see it being the last hail mary to extract as much money as possible and sell the company to Microsoft/Apple/Facebook/Whoever is willing to buy
thank God for their inconvenient way of installing and using of the engine itself, if I didn’t have a hard time back then I wouldn’t have switched to Godot 🙏🙏🙏
Quake world engine. Huh, wasn’t aware of that one! Speaking of which, you can do all sorts of silly stuff with Doom sourceports, so that’s also a valid alternative.
I know and thank goodness for that... but there will be projects that simply won't be able to afford to move to entirely different engines. It's a lot of work that might have to be redone.
… not really, and for what a few years? Indie devs don’t have a lot of money, and there is a huge discrepancy between unity and other engines. They work in fundamentally different ways.
There are some pretty big games built in unity, the money on the table is coming from them, (assuming reasonable licensing terms) not the small indie games.
I may be entirely off the mark, as I don’t work in that part of the industry. But I’ve messed around with unity and it’s not particularly unique compared to any other engine it competes with in my experience, particularly when it comes to actual runtime. Assets will need conversion and sure, the API shim will probably give a performance hit, but there’s no reason I can see that unity is fundamentally different.
I’m sure someone will try, but it seems nearly impossible to do this in a way that’s actually useful. Most game engines are going to have fundamental differences that won’t easily map to the unity way of doing things
I’m in the middle of a project right now that’s going to be released on an out-of-date engine because the newest versions broke backward compatibility and I’m too far along to port everything. If I had to change engines entirely at this point I’d have to cancel the entire project.
There’s unreal, Godot, and a couple others I can’t think of off the top of my head. They’re not as widely used because they lack the feature set of unreal and unity, but they’re out there.
That’s pretty much what I thought. Unity is so big because it offers a ton of features with a pretty permissive license. There’s not something comparable except unreal, which has an even worse licensing situation
Unity got popular because it was simpler than unreal, and way more feature complete than Godot.
Was… these days unreal is easier to work with, and Godot is much more capable. So it’s mostly inertia at this point. And now everyone is going to take a real hard look at the alternatives.
I’m not a game engineer, so someone else who’s actually in that segment of the industry can probably give more answers, but Godot and Bevy seem to be making some waves.
And if they’re not enough for what a dev needs, given these license changes, I don’t really understand why someone wouldn’t pick unreal or something much more comprehensive over unity now.
Correct me if I’m off the mark, but unity always seemed like what you’d go for if you wanted something like unreal, but (completely understandably) didn’t want to pay the fees associated with it
Godot has a dedicated workflow for 2D games, so I’d rather make one of those color sorting puzzle games that’s all people play on mobile these days in Godot than Unity or Unreal.
It's probably still going to take some projects with it. If you've sunk hundreds or even thousands of manhours into a project you can't just... do it again, or at least not always. Especially not if you've invested money as well as time, which is probably the case for most indie projects that aren't literal one-person shows.
There’s not really anything other than unreal that has the same capabilities. This isn’t just going to kill unity, it’ll kill a ton of indie developers
I have a friend who has been moderately successful in the game creation space and he is saying he wants to just give up at this point because of this change.
I can’t even blame him. I would too. This is essentially a situation where the only option is going to be a rewrite from the ground up in a new language and new engine.
If I was an indie game dev I’d be questioning my future right now too.
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