This would harm not only us, but fellow game studios of all budgets and sizes. If this goes through, we’d delay content and features our players actually want to port our game elsewhere (as others are also considering). But many developers won’t have the time or means to do the same.
Stop it. Wtf?
HEY GAMERS!
Today, Unity (the engine we use to make our games) announced that they’ll soon be taking a fee from developers for every copy of the game installed over a certain threshold - regardless of how that copy was obtained.
Guess who has a somewhat highly anticipated game coming to Xbox Game Pass in 2024? That’s right, it’s us and a lot of other developers.
That means Another Crab’s Treasure will be free to install for the 25 million Game Pass subscribers. If a fraction of those users download our game, Unity could take a fee that puts an enormous dent in our income and threatens the sustainability of our business.
And that’s before we even think about sales on other platforms, or pirated installs of our game, or even multiple installs by the same user!!!
This decision puts us and countless other studios in a position where we might not be able to justify using Unity for our future titles. If these changes aren’t rolled back, we’ll be heavily considering abandoning our wealth of Unity expertise we’ve accumulated over the years and starting from scratch in a new engine. Which is really something we’d rather not do.
On behalf of the dev community, we’re calling on Unity to reverse the latest in a string of shortsighted decisions that seem to prioritize shareholders over their product’s actual users.
It will ask a small fee for every install, on top of the royalties. The issue seems that for small studios this fee is not feasible, and it seems that also pirated games and demos would count
It’s only once they’ve taken in like $200k in revenue btw. Demos don’t count, neither do game pass subscriptions or games bought via humble bundle etc.
It was actually true that multiple installs per user would count multiple times, but Unity rolled back that decision not long after announcing it. However, install bombs will still be possible, I seriously doubt Unity has a fool proof way to accurately identify the same user over multiple installs if the user is reinstalling maliciously to cost the developer money.
And? It would take a trivial amount of effort to spin up VMs and install the game on each. If I immediately tear the VM down after, I’m sure my cost would be covered by free AWS credits.
But also, what entitles them to even a portion of the games proceeds? Adobe doesn’t get a cut for every digital piece you create. Dundermifflin doesn’t get a cut everytime you write a new contract. That’s absolute bullshit and they should get a fine for even thinking they’re allowed to be this big and change the rules like this. That’s a monopoly mindset.
I guess it really depends how it’s done. I don’t think an actual cut of the proceeds is fair either, but stuff like having a low entry point and scaling your tool’s cost a bit according to the project success can be a good idea.
That said after they’d try to pull a stunt like they did I definitely wouldn’t trust them anymore.
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