Unity Engine new pricing system pisses off everyone

1. 2023-09-13 at 3:35 PM UTC

   #1
   

   totse2118 Space Nigga [my ci light-haired pongee]
   
   
   
   
   https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-marc-whitten
   https://www.ign.com/articles/cult-of-the-lamb-developer-threatens-to-delete-game-on-jan-1-amid-unity-backlash
   
   

   Why it matters: The fees, which Unity said are essential for funding development of its tech, left many game makers wondering if having a hit game through Unity would cost them more money than they could make.
   
   Developers spoke throughout the day of delaying their games to switch to rival Epic Games' Unreal Engine or other services on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
   But by the evening, Unity exec Marc Whitten was updating Axios on the policies, potentially defusing some concerns raised by game creators.
   
   Details: The new "Runtime Fee" announced Tuesday morning is tied to a player's installations of a game, an action that previously didn't cost developers anything.
   
   With Unity's new plan, developers who use Unity's free tier of development services would owe Unity $0.20 per installation once their game hit thresholds of 200,000 downloads and earn $200,000 in revenue.
   Developers paying over $2,000 a year for a Unity Pro plan would have to hit higher thresholds and would be charged with lower fees.
   The newfee system will begin at the start of 2024.
   
   Yes, but: Game developers, rallying on X, began fuming immediately that any game enjoying a spike in installations due to a big sale, inclusion in a charity bundle or even just by being included in a popular subscription service like Microsoft's Game Pass, would trigger back-breaking Unity fees.

2. 2023-09-13 at 3:52 PM UTC

   #2
   

   aldra JIDF Controlled Opposition
   lol
   
   game engine as a service? unity isn't a great engine anyway, it's just relatively easy to learn. new devs will probably avoid it now.
   
   legally I doubt they can change the entire pricing model for people who've already purchased it but they'll probably just apply the model to new versions and break backwards compatibility to force devs to upgrade.
3. 2023-09-13 at 4:57 PM UTC

   #3
   

   aldra JIDF Controlled Opposition
   oh, they were already offering it as a service, they're just changing TOS. lol.
   
   I saw the 7days devs post about it earlier, those guys are total spastics
4. 2023-09-13 at 7:14 PM UTC

   #4
   

   totse2118 Space Nigga [my ci light-haired pongee]
   fuck time to make a free game engine, thats wild
   
   
5. 2023-09-20 at 8:31 PM UTC

   #5
   

   totse2118 Space Nigga [my ci light-haired pongee]
6. 2023-09-21 at 3:42 AM UTC

   #6
   

   Lanny Bird of Courage
   Ehh, $0.20 on an install after 200k in rev isn’t cheap but it’s not the end of the world either. I mean yeah, use unreal or whatever instead, but I’m not convinced this is really any more evil than their existing per-dev-seat model which is the industry standard. Honestly it’s probably less prohibitive to new studios if the fee offsets the seat costs. And licensing runtimes isn’t really anything new for proprietary software. There was an era there (and this still might be common in midsize studios, idk) where you’d get a license on a physics engine and build a graphics pipeline around it, or smaller subsystems for shit like facial animations, trees, weather, whatever and I’m pretty sure royalty was a pretty standard part of that licensing structure.
7. 2023-09-21 at 4:06 AM UTC

   #7
   

   aldra JIDF Controlled Opposition

   Originally posted by Lanny Ehh, $0.20 on an install after 200k in rev isn’t cheap but it’s not the end of the world either. I mean yeah, use unreal or whatever instead, but I’m not convinced this is really any more evil than their existing per-dev-seat model which is the industry standard. Honestly it’s probably less prohibitive to new studios if the fee offsets the seat costs. And licensing runtimes isn’t really anything new for proprietary software. There was an era there (and this still might be common in midsize studios, idk) where you’d get a license on a physics engine and build a graphics pipeline around it, or smaller subsystems for shit like facial animations, trees, weather, whatever and I’m pretty sure royalty was a pretty standard part of that licensing structure.

   
   I think it's funny that it opens up the possibility of totally fistfucking a dev you don't like by spamming hundreds of thousands of installs with random hwids
8. 2023-09-21 at 4:33 AM UTC

   #8
   

   totse2118 Space Nigga [my ci light-haired pongee]
   i thought the offer to get 100% reduced fees if you switch over to their proprietary thing wasn't too bad. Some call it "bundling" and "illegal" but it just seems like a play to me THEY ARE MAKING A PLAY
   
   charging per INSTALL seems fucktarded though like I have personally installed a bunch of random pirated porn games from unity because i'm not paying $30 for that shit. Sucks to be them