TL;DR of the situation is that Unity released a statement 2 days ago saying they want successful developers to pay up to 20 cents every time a user installs a Unity game starting from Jan 1 2024, even if your game was already released. This caused a huge ruckus in the game dev community and many developers want to switch away from Unity.
Note that it’s “per install” (they clarified that reinstalling on the same device only counts as one install), not per unit sold. And Unity will also track pirated copies, so the devs would still have to pay the fee even if they didn’t sell it to you.
It’s because they literally don’t know how to differentiate a download from legit and illegitimate. They’re going to track every time their bundler is downloaded and bill the developer for it, that would include pirated copies and legit copies alike.
That’s assuming pirates would go through the trouble of removing said functionality. Pirates hate trackers, so they might do it, but not necessarily, as often the priority is just to get the game working.
That’s a recent change. According to the faq on the official forum, initially the idea was to charge every reinstallation. Then they realized it was crazy. Now it’s every first installations:
If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs? A: We are not going to charge a fee for reinstalls. The spirit of this program is and has always been to charge for the first install and we have no desire to charge for the same person doing ongoing installs. (Updated, Sep 13)
I fail to see how they can guarantee it’s the first install.
I game inside a VM with GPU passthrough and I’m pretty sure it would be trivial to install-bomb any game to rack up install numbers and costs.
Moreover, would anyone even trust any number of times Unity tells you your game was installed?
They could a magical 10% that would be hard to prove/disprove.
Anyone with a half-competent legal team would stay the fuck away from any of this nonsense going forward.
However, I’m not knowledgeable on any Game Industry economics, but isn’t $0.20 on a $20-$60 game negligible? I understand some people will have multiple devices so the developer could be out $1. On a $20 game that someone sells 1000 copies, that’s only $200 of $20,000 sales (maybe $800 in fees at the high end). I’ve used Unity before and it’s still a pretty solid game engine with easy to use tooling; using it would definitely save you time to build your game (time=money). Additionally, if I were to be building a game studio, everyone knows unity, so it would be easy to hire or find contractors who can help with pieces of the game. It makes sense from a business standpoint for me unless I’m missing something.
Is there a max fee? On the opposite side of the spectrum I could see DDOS-like attacks on game developers where an attacker can spin up a bunch of virtual machines and then keep installing the game to charge the developer $1mil dollars.
It’s the complete unpredictability that devs and businesses hate. 2% of every purchase they can plan for, but with install fees they could get randomly billed for copies that were already sold, and that is unacceptable. This isn’t a one time fee, whenever somebody installs the game on a new device, the dev gets charged. Not to mention the fact that some people might have multiple devices, but randomly in 3 years they could get a new PC and suddenly the dev gets charged again, all the while the dev didn’t make anymore money from that copy. Who the heck would agree to a system like that?
Not to mention that if a game gets added to a service like GamePass, then the service gets the bill. No way Microsoft would say yes to that, which means the Dev misses out on deals that could’ve made them a bunch of money.
A competitor could literally buy one copy, make a script that spins up 1000 vms a minute and downloads your game over and over on “new devices” and put you out of business
Feels like I’m living the Pathfinder 2e boom again, I love it. Could they send the Pinkertons to the Cuphead studios next to perfectly do everything wrong
The nice thing about a company being run by evil people is that you can rely on them to eventually do something overtly evil, and then everyone will be aware they are evil.
And we are sure it would stay that way thanks to libre licence. Godot is a collective project, but even if it wasn’t and charge for copy/support/assets, we still would own our copy and could just get someone else to work on it if they screw up.
What I mean is it isn’t a bad story, but in comparison to h:zd that had the slow plot reveal that made me go: what? What?! And want to eagerly know more about the story.
But gameplay is great and the skills you can unlock makes it very fun to play.
RIP Lance Reddick, him voicing Sylens is so great. I really hope they have enough recorded material for the next game.
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.
I bought and played it a bit some months ago. It’s an interesting RTS/4X blend with the “realtime with pause”. For me the game wins in originality, with some novel systems I didn’t see before.
Not super memorable, but a nice change of pace if you want a middle ground between Civ and C&C. Buy on sale (was not so pricy either iirc).
Why do we need to keep pitting these games against each other, aside from being set in space they’re not even remotely similar gameplay wise. One is a survival game framework, the other is a RPG/Lifesim. There’s plenty of room for both in the market.
Porting to PC isn’t minimal effort. It takes a lot of dev time to optimize and make it run well on the wide variety of PC hardware, not to mention the additional PC specific technologies like DLSS that often get implemented. First game had quite a few performance issues at launch that were ironed out over the span of several months.
The point isn’t that it’s quite literally free. It’s a figure of speech.
Between taking a game you’ve already completed and is already popular and reworking it to sell to a brand new audience… versus creating a new AAA title, which one is more expensive?
that were ironed out over the span of several months
It still runs like garbage on my 13700K and 3060Ti, depending on the area. Sometimes, High settings are fine, but way too often I have to drop down to “Original” to get somewhat acceptable FPS (>40) at 1440p with Balanced DLSS. Am I doing something wrong, or was it just even worse at launch?
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