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.
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.)
Short term profits making quarterly reports look better to stakeholders. Isn’t that how 80% of these bigwigs get their job in the first place? We should be calling it the Zaslav Model at this point 😂.
Just because it looks better to shareholders now doesn’t make it a good business decision. I swear the majority of CEO types don’t give a damn if the company goes under in a few years because they either:
Have a golden parachute in place by sucking up to the Board.
Will move on to another CEO position at another company before it folds. Bonus points if they golden parachute on the way out.
That’s what the golden parachute is supposed to be for: a payout long term so the CEO doesn’t make a short term decision that fucks the company up but pays out big. Ex: offering a stock package that you can’t sell for 5-10years.
A decision like this will pay out HUGE in the short term, but if they don’t change it I doubt many will be using unity in a few years.
I said it in another thread, but Unity has truly fucked the vendor-client relationship.
While it is a nightmare, you can work with a company that changes its prices and terms, but you absolutely can’t work with a company that pulls this level of BS.
It’s just not safe to have your company so dependent on a vendor that could tank it on a whim.
Pretty much the biggest mistake made due to greed is the decision to retroactively apply thr deals to already existing titles. Its one thing to neuter titles in the future, but another to fuck over everyone whose already committed to using it on a different TOS
Not a lawyer, but I feel like basing the fee on their internal guess on how many installs seems questionable. Surely some major jurisdictions would take issue with that and counting installs from before the new TOS towards the new threshold. Also their contradictory TOS terms at the very least would probably get them an expensive trial, even if they win it.
Yep. The insanity of thinking you could apply it retroactively to already licensed games was absurd.
If you tied it to a future main version release with features people wanted, you could absolutely get away with some light pushback that's the usual grumbling on price changes, and a lot of developers would suck it up and move to the up to date engine anyways.
But when you try to pull the rug on people for stuff they've already been developing under previous terms, they're going to seriously reconsider, and on stuff they already published makes it extremely hard to justify working with you again.
Yeah, that’s what burns the business relationship. Because now it’s not just “oh, Unity might screw me, and I’m investing in learning what could become a dead platform”, it’s “even if Unity doesn’t screw me now, they could randomly decide to screw me 10 years from now and retroactively charge me a king’s ransom”. That’s the stuff that has a permanent chilling effect on the whole platform.
The reason why Unity refuses to not make it retro-active is because they want money from Genshin Impact etc which already launched. If they don’t make it retroactive then the whole point of the change on their end is gone.
Evil genius marketing, working as it always does. The kids don’t know any better, so they are being exploited and conditioned to think the horrible new normal is just the way things have to be. And most parents are too tired and busy to find better alternatives.
It’s simple, the games that appeal the most to kids require some form of subscription. If those games didn’t, then they wouldn’t want ones with subscriptions.
Putting it like that makes it sound that this is incidental, but the conditioning techniques baked into the design of these games are included for the sake of selling battle passes and virtual items. If they didn’t have subscriptions and virtual currency, they would have been built entirely differently.
That’s because I am not speaking on the corporate point of view here, I am discussing the kids’. Every time I see this subject come up there seems to always be people who think that the move to subscriptions are due to a preference of access model upon the consumer, naively ruining their own capacity to own things, namely kids/young people, thinking it’s just the modern, and thus better, more convenient, way to go.
Even the article’s headline is written in a manner that suggests that kids prefer the subscription model it’s self, not that they are choosing based on the game without thought to the access model.
I see what you mean. Far from me to want to blame the kids for it, but I don’t think we can just overlook how corporations are deliberately funneling them towards these models through marketing and manipulative design. The kids’ perspective is one of just being excited for things they want in these games, but this happens due to habitual conditioning of a neverending threadmill of virtual rewards and Fear of Missing Out. Not to mention semi-organic peer pressure among kids, over who has the fanciest or default cosmetics. Which wasn’t deliberately created by the corporations, but they are definitely benefitting over it, and nobody is dissuading that from happening.
The kids are not at fault, but I don’t think this is a “just let kids be kids” situation. They are being exploited.
It did. I think you are misunderstanding what I am saying, or adding more to it than there is.
Children do not desire subscriptions as a superior model to owning games. The model of access is not something they are comparing and contrasting. They are simply going for the games they prefer, which get locked behind subscriptions. I never implied that games popular with kids aren’t intentionally put behind subscriptions, I was arguing that the subscription model isn’t actually preferred by kids.
How you worded this makes it seem like “if those games didn’t” refers to requiring subscriptions.
I would suggest editing it to “If those games didn’t appeal to kids” or similar; if what you meant was that kids just plays what appeals to them, and those games “just happens” to be subscription games.
I was talking just today with some coworkers about how having subscriptions instead of owning is what is normal to kids now - not just games, but things like Netflix and Spotify. So this doesn’t surprise me, but does depress me. Technofeudalism is the new normal.
In my teen years I spent a large fraction of my disposable income on music. A Spotify subscription is a vastly better value than buying whatever I could scrounge from a used CD store. Back then it was common for me to read about some semi-obscure recording and just have to wonder what it sounded like, because I had no hope of finding it in a store, and a special order was way out of my budget, especially for something I had no idea if I’d even like. Now I can listen to damn near anything that’s ever been published for less than I spent as a teenager. I find new music by listening to personalized recommendations instead of local radio stations. It’s just better in every way (except probably for the artists, but music has always been a cutthroat business so who knows).
A lot of subscription services suck and are just a way to milk customers, but streaming audio and video are not in that category.
I keep hoping–perhaps naively so–for a major backlash against this. Sometimes consumers have power, and sometimes they don’t. But maybe we’ll all get fed up with this bullshit and start just dropping any and all unnecessary subscriptions from our lives. The big problem is when a brand becomes synonymous with a product (like fucking Adobe and ProTools, for two examples).
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
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.
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.
I have gamepass but I also use to be a regular Destiny player. A single time sink like Destiny can leave very little time for anything else. Since I stopped playing Destiny I have been playing a lot more indie games.
Cause a lot of indie devs are also idiots when it comes to business decisions. Many (especially solo devs) didn’t get into the industry to make boatloads of money; they are often creative types who are passionate about their work.
A lot of gaming sites asked developers whose games were on GamePass what they thought of it, and the answer was predictable. Like, nobody is going to ill talk the provider of the service their game is on.
Other developers didn’t speak ill of it because of the fear of burning bridges, I suppose.
The Game Bakers (Furi, Haven) talked about their difficult relationship with GP on Vice (LINK).
“Game Pass is such a fantastic platform for players,” said Leprince, “so there are possibly more Xbox players than ever interested in indie games. Unfortunately, without Game Pass, it is also very hard for many indie games to be visible on Xbox.”
Basically, the problem with a subscription service such as GP is that it cannibalizes other games’ sales outside the service itself. And since you are not guaranteed to land on GP, developing a game Xbox may be more of a gamble than it is on other platforms. I fear this may become the norm as more subscription services are rolled out and start encroaching the market.
There’s also the problem with founding. Furi sold 78% of its copies through PS+, yet only one third of its budget was paid by Sony for the deal. Developers have to decide whether they need less money immediately, or potentially more money down the line; but for indie developers, sometimes there is no choice: they either accept the deal, or shut down because they don’t have the founding to complete their next game.
I really like the Vice article I linked because it’s one of the very few who tried to analyze the situation impartially, with data backing it up. Most of the other industry journalists at the time were like “GP is the future! Gamers spend less and everyone gains more money!!1!”, parroting Spencer’s bullshit.
I always wondered if thats really true for smaller musicians . I mean you get bigger share of subscription money without label and you should come out on top over cd eventualy if pepole are listening to your music. The only diffrence being that you get your money over time instead of an imidieate boost. I get this feeling its just the case of more music being made than ever before.
Also how does revenue sharing works in case of games. In case of music its pretty easy but in case of games i am not sure how that works.
As for game subscriptions, I’ve not looked into it much, but I know Apple’s service at least is based on hours played, which has resulted in some games on the service attempting to stretch out their playtime using things like mandatory grinding to progress in their games. With this model, developers can literally shoot themselves in the foot financially, by allowing the player to sprint. It’s stupid.
Games can’t be reduced to that simple a value. You can get the same amount of hours out of God of War as you can Binding of Isaac, but their production and purchase costs, are not, and should not, be the same.
Hmm yeach ive heard that spotify aproach is kinda shitty and allows music boosting by bots. But at least tidal as far as i know is fair in that regard. basing the revenue based on hours played im game is fairly shitty. Actually Given the games specific i wonder what would actually be fair ( actually i know what would be fair. Microsoft buying the games that you downloaded straight up and paying the current price,but i really doubt it would be sustainable ).
Hmm with the game i agree but with the music i basicaly buy a full cd every month. And i doubt pepole were buying a cd every month. The only controversy to me here is the revenue sharing model which seems to be shitty on some of the platforms( like Spotify wich i would probably ditch for tidal if not for the amazing discver weekly )
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?
The problem is that its so expensive to build from scratch. All Unity does is build just the engine, and that’s enough to make it a 7000 person company. Trying to build a game engine and then an actual game on top is a herculean effort.
This is why open source software is so important. It enables these small companies to pool their resources and share an engine as long as they each contribute fixes back.
7000 people is misleading. Being a general purpose game engine it has to be everything for everybody. An engine developed for a single game can be simpler, and once it is done, making the game will be simpler than it will be in Unity. Also those 7000 people are doing way more things than develop an engine.
That said, an engine like Unity can save a massive amount of time, especially for games that are medium scope. It’s these games where developing engine code and tooling would both take a lot of time and the advantages would likely go unnoticed.
Nintendo does not sell hardware at a loss and, IIRC, has done so since the Wii. It was a huge deal back when they said they were going to make a profit off the hardware. Given how abysmally the Wii U did, I’m struggling to find coverage of that from 15yr ago that I only vaguely remember. However, that’s been a major point from Nintendo since the Wii, so it’s ridiculous that Epic wouldn’t know that and is clearly just an attack on Google (please don’t read that as me supporting Google or Epic).
They usually start out selling for a loss, but Sony reduces costs and scales production so they’re usually profitable (or at least even) after a couple of years. As far as I can tell the PS3 took the longest, releasing in 2006 and not breaking even until 2010, still 3 years before the PS4 launched.
Personally, I don’t think that selling hardware at a loss is a good excuse to be anticompetitive with the software. I don’t understand how it (and any other kind of loss leading sales tactics) doesn’t trigger anti-trust laws.
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