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.
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
Maybe they shouldn’t be doing everything possible to drive off consumers. Exclusivity deals everywhere, prices that don’t like to dip, multiple versions of the same game so you need to pay more for the complete thing later. I tried to get into FF with 15, and I actually really liked it. Then all this nonsense happened with FF7R and I just gave up because it seemed like a pain to try and follow the series.
Glad they’re finally catching up to Xbox from a platform features standpoint. Things like this were why I used to be so pro-Xbox, but that gap is narrowing rapidly.
I could see this encouraging a whole new form of brigading. Imagine if a developer pissed off the community, thousands of people could go about uninstalling and reinstalling the game over and over, driving up the engine monthly bill for the company.
Did they put anything in place with their new rules to prevent this from being abused?
I trust they did their best.
I also trust that any sufficiently tech savvy individual will be able to bypass that system. It only takes one person to pull it off and then it’s public knowledge. Sure, they’ll fix it, and then someone will do it again.
Small companies can’t afford to take that risk and larger companies won’t want the hassle.
It’s a shame too. I liked Unity more than Unreal. Oh well.
The point was, do you trust their software to accurately detect and ignore repeat installs and pirated copies, when it’s in their obvious interest to half ass that detection and charge devs more?
I want to see how the M1 version fairs on my tiny laptop. Obviously it won’t be as good as my gaming machine, but finally: a Metal title I’m interested in that can push the hardware!
I quite literally just started the SNES original, for the first time, 3 days ago… Guess I’ll stop and wait for the Switch release. The 2D graphics are surprisingly charming, but I bet the new version will have some QoL improvements.
There really got me with this one… I was soooo excited for some F-Zero news… the music… the pixel look… then a shift to HD graphics and the a announcement of a new game… oh wait this was in my head!
Instead we got a battle royale.
Don’t get me wrong, I still take it and play it… but this was really brutal. :(
I mean, the whole backstory to F-Zero X sounds an awful lot like this game; no rules, death race, massive field. It feels like this game fills a gap between X and the original
games
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