Choosing installs to collect revenue on is stupid because it isn't tightly correlated to revenue for a game:
Demos, bundles, free week-end tryouts on Steam, free-to-play games and other specific cases all lead to high install counts without necessarily generating the matching sales.
It's especially stupid because Unity has good market share on mobile, which is a juicy market but with a fixed price per install, free-to-play and low-priced (0.99$, etc...) games will never choose Unity for new projects, because the percentage of revenue you will lose on those is going to be prohibitive.
A less worse metric to collect on would be actual game sales count, but that's still horrible for promotional sale events and low-priced games (assuming fixed cost per sale).
The sensible and simpler option would simply be a percentage of revenue past a threshold like Unreal Engine and CryEngine for example.
I see two possible outcomes:
* They stick with this pricing policy, and cash in on the fact that a lot of game studios are heavily invested in Unity at the moment and will take time to move away to extract a shit-ton of money short term in the meantime. Long-term it will probably crash and burn, but they're fine with it as long as they can milk enough before that.
* They wait for the outcry, say they've listened to the community, roll it back and introduce a more sensible royalty system with percentage of revenue, which the community grudgingly accepts since it's less worse than the initial option.
It does look like there is a lot of potential for abuse, depending on how installs are tracked. If it's some DRM system, pirated copies might or might not be counted, and of course "install bombs" would potentially be possible in theory. Which means a need to find ways to potentially exclude those installs from counting towards the count. This introduces crazy complexity when really you could have simple revenue share which is much more easily auditable.
I mean, there's going to be a web endpoint that gets hit to count one installation. That is definitely going to remain a secret, so no one could possibly run wget in a loop to say their steam account installed it a million times.
Back in the days in parts of the Internet I've seen, though I've never joined those groups, it used to be a webapp stress testing tool called Apache JMeter. Participants(legit criminals, in hindsight!) were encouraged to download scenario files, referred to as "ammunition", through equivalents to Mega/mediafire at the time and join coordinated attacks. Nowadays I'm sure it will be scripts on GitHub, botnets of IoT appliances, and volunteered GPU farms for PoW algorithms.
> Nowadays I'm sure it will be scripts on GitHub, botnets of IoT appliances, and volunteered GPU farms for PoW algorithms.
I'd be surprised if it's anywhere near that exotic. It'll just be a webpage with a list of games you can pick, input a number of "installs" to fake, and it'll fire the requests off with Javascript. Or maybe a browser extension if they feel the need to distribute the requests. Half the gamers will install it at some point when their favorite absurdly over-hyped game flops.
There's not much need to run an optimized and complicated tool like JMeter when each request costs the other side $0.20. I wouldn't be surprised if a browser extension could get out something in the ballpark of 100 requests/second.
Unity is so wholly siloed away from the rest of the .NET ecosystem that I doubt Microsoft really cares about Unity regarding its impact on C#.
Like, a lot of Unity developers think they know C#. They really don't. Most of the Unity developers I have met know a very, very small subset of C#, and almost nothing of .NET in general. That's not meant to be any shade-throwing at Unity developers. It's just that they are, for most purposes, completely different things. I can't take someone who has been working in Unity for the last 5 years and easily put them on any other kind of .NET project. The same for going the other way. The underlying language commonality is the least of the concerns.
A small part of this is how most of the .NET framework isn't exactly great to execute in the middle of a hot update loop, but a much larger part is because of how Unity is built, having reinvented their own wheels for many things that could have been contributions to the larger .NET/Mono/CLR/etc ecosystem.
Also I suppose most people will auto-reinstall everything when they get a new phone via Play, no matter if they will actually continue playing that game.
That seems pretty far-fetched for PC users. Either they copy their Steam library (or the standalone install) or not reinstall everything they own.
> but the fact they are applying this retroactively to every game every made in Unity
that also seems like it should not be legal no matter what you put in your TOS, at least in some jurisdictions it probably isn't (in the same way that e.g. conditional auto-termination contracts are no actually auto-terminating in many jurisdictions even if it's written in the contract)
In Germany it is not. SaaS apps can be particularly challenging because you cannot just change the terms for existing users and contracts.
Ironically most customers don't know and don't react accordingly. Generally the customer behaviour is that customers get spooked and pay anyway.
... but if they were to sue it would be a problem, which is why typically small companies try to follow legislation and big company with big legal department, don't necessarily care.
I'm not so sure about that. You are totally right that e.g. here in the EU contracts and terms of service with ordinary consumers ("B2C") are restricted as you say, limiting what can possibly be agreed on in that contract. Generally this consumer protection only applies to individuals for their private use. E.g. later changes to the terms of a contract are a big no-no.
Contracts between businesses ("B2B") are far less restricted, there is no such thing as consumer protection for businesses. Whereas for consumers, terms of service are heavily restricted by a special law ("AGBG", basically translates as "terms-of-service-law") It is generally thought that business people are savvy enough to know what they can and cannot agree on. Therefore legislation and courts lean strongly towards providing greater freedom of business and contract in anything B2B.
And I think in most circumstances, a game developer who distributes its game to a wider audience is a business in the scope of the aforementioned discussion. It would only maybe not be a business if there were no monetary benefit of any kind, so no selling games, no advertisements, no publicity that could lead to monetary benefit in the future...
Games which are already in development will be affected. That feels retroactive, since the purchase decision to use Unity was made potentially years ago, even if it technically isn't.
It also apparently applies to already shipping games?
EDIT: It seems that while some article say they retroactively apply this other state they expliticly do not do so. Through they seem to have removed previous clauses which would allow developers to stay on the version they started developing with which hadn't had that terms jet. Which is scummy (because it relies on "tricking" companies into those terms) but might be legal.
put new installs are not newly published products, i.e. they don't involve the publisher bundling in a new version of unity they got from the vendor
so while the installs are new the contract between the producer <-> publisher <-> distributor <-> unity is not
which means it's uniliteraly retroactively changing a contract
which sounds like very much not very legal
if you consider that the other contract partner is somewhat dependent on unity (switching is expensive) it might also involve other laws not necessary racketeering but something in that direction
and while unity might be able to terminate the contract with the publisher (by their lawyers sending them a letter, not automatic) this is between the publisher and them i.e. it shouldn't affect already sold products
but they explicitly want additional fees from distributor or publishers for _already sold products they have no control over_ which is just tbh. ridiculous
and even if it only affects newly sold products it's still affecting already produced product retroactively which still is highly questionable
Well if that is the case it is either
a) illegal.
b) the developper/studios already agreed on a license that would allow unity to change term and licensing fee on stuff made long ago and screw them whenever they want.
If the answer is b, then I guess those involved should just slap themselves and swallow it instead of complaining.
The old story... Be friends to the community, get everybody to believe you then increase prices when everybody is locked in. This time we have an answer: Godot.
An alternative engine (no matter how good) doesn't solve vendor lock-in. Gamedev is a cutthroat business. You can't afford a rewrite. Even for new productions, you can't throw away engine experience and start retooling. I expect backlash.
This is FUD. If you get to the point of having a contract to deploy your game on a console, I expect you could afford to hire one of the several consulting companies that will help you port your Godot game to the console. And yes, they actually do exist.
Not to mention that, by the time your game is ready, you should be able to leverage the new work the Godot team is doing for commercial console exporters.
I am into Rust, and I did check out Bevy. I made a little demo WASM game called StarRust which you can play at the bottom of the page:
https://dublog.net/blog/rust-2/
TLDR: Bevy is in no ways ready for prime time. It's at least 3 years away from getting anywhere near where Godot 4.1 currently is and light years away from Unity in usability.
Compared to Unity DOTS and Bevy, Godot's architecture is not scalable to multicore architectures.
For 99% of games and hobby gamedev's though it's good enough (just like Unity). Given enough time and funding Bevy will get there, but such performance is becoming more and more irrelevant every year tbh.
A good architecture for fully parallel, deterministic, thread-safe, serializable and extensible games is the Entity-Component-System pattern. I'm sure that Godot has one or a way to integrate a library that implements it.
I think Unity doesn't come with ECS anyways.
This is why I feel an engine like Bevy will one day beat them all. ECS, rust, memory safety, thread safety.
It just needs an editor (or even a gameplan for what an editor would look like), animation, halfway decent rendering pipeline... it's a very long way from production ready.
I went into it thinking I needed a bunch of ECS multithreading to make it run on an Oculus Quest 2, but honestly, it's completely unnecessary. Vanilla essentially single threaded Unity C# with careful asset optimization, and I get get ~60+ rigidbody running on a mobile chip at 72 fps. I haven't been able to survive a dogfight against more than 12 enemy ai fighters
Tim Sweeney was right, ECS for optimization purposes is overkill for most games and is best relegated to fancy particle systems (which is the route Unreal went)
I would say Bevy isn't really similar to Unity. Something like Fyrox - https://fyrox.rs/ - would be more similar. Bevy is more low level and lacks an editor (as of now, it's planned)
Someone who needs to start developing right now should use Fyrox right now. I tested the same project in both, and can echo the sentiment that Fyrox is further along and much more similar to classical engines like Godot, Unity or a number of further-along C++ engines.
Bevy breaks things every minor release and is missing key features. If more people supported the Fyrox effort, then the rust gamedev ecosystem would be less vulnerable to a change in bevy's pricing structure just as this Unity change has impacted the wider game dev ecosystem.
I think it's absurd that Unity can push a new pricing scheme on existing customers regardless of circumstance and essentially little to no warning. Games are in development for years and they're basically telling people 3 months beforehand. How is this okay? This is something I'd expect when switching to a newer version of a service/product. Not a randomly changing contract for what I've already been using at no fault of my own.
It’s mostly likely an application of the Door in the Face technique where one makes a huge ask followed by a smaller, more well-received ask after the first is rejected.
Here, they put forward an unreasonable demand. Later, once the trolling emerges, they roll it back to be only on new devs with old devs keeping the old system. They get to seem like they “listened to the community” and the community ignores their still predatory pricing.
I don't think they'll even wait for the trolling. Small/mid tier studios are not going to accept it because they literally cannot afford to. New developers aren't going to accept it, because it now creates a poor value proposition for an ecosystems who's primary selling point is 'lower capability, but easier than Unreal.' The only people that might be able to accept are those big high revenue studies, but those are also the exact group capable of 'negotiating' for better terms.
Even if this is a just an effort to roll out some less oppressive changes with less backlash than doing so immediately would entail (because they can now frame this initially planned roll out as indeed 'listening to the community'), this really just has clueless MBA stamped all over it, because the brand/trust damage here is serious, and that for a ship that's already sinking.
We all learn the value of free software one way or another. For many of us, including myself, it was through similar pain and suffering due to a proprietary platform.
We do that all the time. Modern day smart tech with microwaves, tv, phones etc. And I'd consider it equally bullshit if the brand behind my microwave decided to start charging me for each meal I heated. Or like what's going on with printers.
Companies going back and trying to alter the deal is a complete no go.
Play stupid games, win stupid prices; companies are not your friend and you need to invest at least the minimal amount of time in protecting yourself. The only things that are guaranteed to work in the future are:
- Software that is open source that you can keep around, tweak and modify forever
- If the above isn't possible, then software that does not require internet connectivity or updating and can be run in perpetuity in an offline sandbox
- Hardware that is not internet connected and will run so long as the hardware is still able
- Bonus points for the above if there are openly available schematics
"Enshittification [to describe what Unity is doing] refers to companies that create a good product, then ramp up fees and deteriorate the service to take advantage of users who are locked into it."
Let's see, how many App Stores follow suit. Pay per play/install might sound like a wonderful option for some.
I use unity only for free content and I'm glad they still except this from the policy (using the revenue threshold, obviously I don't have any revenue whatsoever). Obviously I can't pay for installs because I don't make any money from it.
I don't think asking professional developers to pay fees is bad in principle. After all they get a lot of value from it. And they use it to make money.
One thing I do find really bad is that they retroactively impose a monthly model on content developed with a once-off business model in mind. I don't think that's fair. If you're going to do this, do it only going forward so developers can incorporate the cost in their business model.
Why did/can game companies not protect themselves against this possible change of contract?
I mean, if you spend millions on developing a game, taking two-three years to develop, surely you try to tackle any risks that might endanger the project. For example, by fixing the price on the foundation of your game, i.e. the game engine.
This is a huge change in the way this game engine will be considered for new games. If now during the development and full lifetime of the game the contract rules can change, gamedev companies will start to avoid these kind of contracts.
With this one change Unity made it so that they can now no longer be trusted to keep the agreed upon contract terms intact for the lifetime of the game.
If only they said this would go in effect for new, not-already-in-development-and-paid-for-game-engine, projects from January 1st, it would have saved them this breach-in-trust issue.
Cities: Skyline, Rust, Hearthstone, Cuphead, Disco Elysium, Kerbal Space Program. Those might not be the ginormous games you're thinking of but Unity is far from exclusively used by very small studios.
Utlimately, I guess it's a question of definition: can you point me to a commonly agreed industry definition of AAA and indie?
How does this work retroactively on released products?
Say five years ago, I paid a company to build a house, who hired a contractor to build it and it was completed in a year. Nowadays, I open the door daily. Now the contractor goes to the company, saying that from January 1st, every time I open the door, the company has to pay a small fee to the contractor, because they built the house with the door five years ago.
How is that even legal, even in a B2B context?
As a company, you have no control over the number of installations. How can they even measure the number of installations for games released 5-10 years ago?
It works legally since you didn't buy Unity. You don't own anything. You're licensing the right to use it on an ongoing basis.
It's like how I can't buy a Rolling Stones CD and then play it on the radio for millions of people without paying them. I never bought the music, just the right to listen to it privately.
In your example, it feels more like the distributor of the CD now has to pay the copyright holder 1ct everytime you play the CD, from January 1st next year.
But it is license based? Wow, that is quite a risk to take as a gamedev, to tightly-couple your game with a third-party company's tooling, who can change their terms at will, so you can no longer use their tooling.
I understand that you buy a license, but surely you can buy a permanent or fixed license for a lot more money, to take away the risks of having to pull your game from distribution due to licensing restrictions.
It sounds like a dumb move from unity, to create so much uncertainty.
Unity has lost $455 million dollars in the first 6 months of the fiscal year 2023. They lost $919 million in 2022. I don't think they have ever made a profit. Companies are not charities; they exist to make money, and Unity doesn't by a mile.
It's not CEO's doing something wrong. It's workers.
Try "year of the submissive worker" maybe "year of the dominated worker" and see how that tastes in your mouth.
It's workers lack of unionization and enforced professional ethics that means there are no consequences for being "greedy" and that being "greedy" is in fact a winning strategy in the game of prisoners dilemma.
It's convenient when someone else is doing something wrong and they need to change, but if you want change, you need to look in the mirror and ask what you are doing wrong and for most of us, that is failing to unionize in order to get a seat at the negotiating table and therefore being able to check otherwise unchecked CEO/Board power.
Wage is a measurement of power, not value. Wage is capped by value provided, but scales with power.
I never was a fan of Unity. To me it felt like its selling-point was that it could run on multiple platforms, but not at optimal performance compared to other engines (basically like Android and Java). My introduction to Unity was with Hearthstone (the card game), and even then it didn't natively support Linux.
On that presumption, I found it incredibly surprising people latching onto it for VR dev, and considering most Unity VR games all share the same look (cartoon-y; basically look at A Township Tale and compare it to Orbus and Zenith), that further cements my view of Unity not being a serious high-quality capable engine to be using, unless I want to throw quick non-sustainable projects together.
This news about Unity being even more expensive definitely doesn't help my view :p
You have to understand where it came from. Unity was the simple easy to use indie darling for years when it first came about. The corporatization and financialization of the company ruined it, but once upon a time it occupied the same space Godot does today.
I think they were just pretty early in the VR space with good libraries/support/tutorials etc. I cannot say for sure because I have only done one Unity-VR tutorial "back in the day" but in the AR space there was a time window where they were pretty clearly #1 (imo). I shipped a couple of small projects based on their Vuforia integration (quite costly) and then later without Vuforia. Nothing big, mostly trivial product vizualizations for customers that had upcoming trade shows/excibitions with somewhat creative markers.
100% of my lifetime AR profits are based on Unity such a strange wild west time but I got out of that market very quickly when it became a lot easier to build these simple demo apps. I still remember the "wow factor" and people running around the office showing all their colleagues how you could see their products through a tables/phone.
The video game market is a feast or famine kind of deal. Few games break even, even fewer make a profit.
What Unity probably wants or needs is to take a cut off the large successes. That’s where all the money is.
The problem is that they aren’t involved in distribution.
This per/install model is trying to solve this by turning Unity into some kind of malware. A completely tone deaf move.
Why not build business relationships with the companies that have been successful with Unity? It’s in the interest of both sides that Unity and its ecosystem are stable, improving and growing.
> What Unity probably wants or needs is to take a cut off the large successes. That’s where all the money is. The problem is that they aren’t involved in distribution.
Isn't the simple solution to just tax the companies a percentage of the revenue? Isn't that what Unreal do?
yep. Unreal has a much better deal. 5% of royalties once your sales cross 1 Million.
So if you are an indie dev, you can pretty much use Unreal for free. But if you are a decently sized dev shop, you pay a % of your revenue.
i doubt that's correct. i can install windows as often as i like, i just have to pay for the key and afaik i can only use the key in one active install at a time (as a private user).
Does this mean the engine will phone home every time a software which contains it is installed?
How is that compatible with the GDPR which has been interpreted by courts in a way that it forbids sending any network packets to the USA, no matter if the user consented to it or not?
For reference, see the rulings which deemed Google analytics illegal independent of consent.
"Q: Is software made in unity going to be calling home to unity whenever it's ran, even for enterprice licenses?
A: We use a composite model for counting runtime installs that collects data from numerous sources. The Unity Runtime Fee will use data in compliance with GDPR and CCPA. The data being requested is aggregated and is being used for billing purposes."
But the curts have ruled such claims from US companies are worth nothing because the US government has access to that data and has not made such claims.
The cases you are referring to are Schrems I (which cancelled the Safe Harbor transfer agreement) and II (which cancelled the Privacy Shield). But, the commission ratified a new agreement between the EU and the USA in July, the DPF. So such transfers are now possible again, without any further protections. Until Schrems III, that is.
They claim to have their own processes to count installs which would counter spoofing attacks. As well as being opaque to developers on how their installs are counted, this may be scooping up PII of users.
In some contexts the IP address already counts as personal data. Wasn't there recently an issue with web sites using Google fonts and therefore transmitting the user's IP address to Google?
How do you download and install a game without internet?
Even the last few games sold outside Steam still need some launcher whether it's from Epic, Ubisoft or whatever. Sure, you can install a game from 2004 completely offline but that's not a Unity game.
We are talking about paid games using Unity engine. If you can name a market for those that even remotely comes close to the sales on Steam, PlayStation, XBox, Epic, etc I'd be curious to hear about it.
Either way it doesn't matter because Unity will just require an internet connection during installation and 99% of players won't notice or complain.
On 4chan it immediately sparked a crowdsourced effort to make scripts that repeatedly install/uninstall games in creative ways (VMs, MAC spoofing) with the specific intention to hurt developers.
This is definitely one of the dumbest choices I've seen a company do.
You don't need to actually install/reinstall games if you can figure out how the Unity runtime is notifying its servers about this install.
You could theoretically write an 'install bombing' tool that sends fake install notifications straight to their server (or modify the game executable to do it repeatedly). You can't trust the client, especially when dealing with PC games.
Hopefully Unity will anticipate this potential abuse, and filter out repeated 'installs' from the same IP address. But they don't seem to have anticipated free demos, pirated copies, Game Pass, or charity bundles before announcing this...
It's not currently tracking anything, at least according to some unity devs on their support forums. So in the absence of some network request to capture, scripting the reinstall loop is the current option to be have a "day 1" script ready in advance.
> the same ip address
Unity confirmed that this is part of how they intend to do it. That's why the meme scripts so far make a point to cycle up addresses or use rotating proxies per install.
The other part of the methodology that unity confirmed is "proprietary internal models that can't be shared but are GDPR compliant". Somehow.
You wouldn't even need "piracy" in this case, just buy one copy of the game and figure out how it phones home, and then pick your favorite method of tricking it into reporting ludicrous amounts of installs, which would significantly outnumber pirate copies.
No it doesn't, fraudulent install tracking by Unity could hurt the developers. If pirated copies count as valid installations, that means that the system is completely unauthenticated and will be abused.
The best part is that we can use this against people whose politics we don’t agree with. Developer says something Trumpy? Let’s make him pay! Solo developer is a trans woman? Why not shoot for bankruptcy?
I wonder if this could be used as a way to target civilians as part of a larger cyber war, like in the Ukraine conflict?
It is an actual liability to use Unity, and there is no way to avoid it. Anyone can directly hurt them by simply installing a game multiple times on multiple devices. Bonus, developers can hurt other competing developers!
It is such an idiotic move it is criminal, and I am hoping that they get slapped with a class action lawsuit if they don't recede on it.
The worst part is that, even though I'd love for everyone to just switch over to Godot, game studios cannot simply "change engine" and they absolutely know it. So for them to just come up with completely unreasonable terms, with no possibility to not agree to it? You are forced to accept to give them an arbitrary amount of money that is spat out at the end of the month by a proprietary, closed source system that is basically BUILT IN MALWARE IN EVERY SINGLE UNITY GAME.
That's actual fucking robbery.
They can't simply force users to accept to give them 110% of your revenue, or else, AND expose them to direct damage while doing so. This cannot be legal.
Absolutely shameful. I seriously hope that no one will ever consider Unity again after this stunt.
I don't think you can fairly accuse independent game developers (who are overwhelmingly building atop Unity) of nickel and diming customers. Most of them never even break even.
If someone gives you something that is vital for your product for free, and the license does not guarantee your free usage in perpetuity, and you can't take the source code and maintain things yourself if the vendor changes their mind, ... surely that's on you then?
Did you think they didn't need to buy food and pay rent?
To me as a complete outsider this move reeks of desperation on their part, not malice. Maybe you should have taken steps to prevent this instead of complaining about it after the fact?
Turns out you can't pay people in exposure forever.
Always this comment on these threads. Unity existed for 18 years in a particular capacity now it's being changed. It is not unreasonable to not be prepared for a change like this or to be upset by it.
> Did you think they didn't need to buy food and pay rent?
Poor multi-billion dollar company Unity Technologies has managed to corner the entire segment of the market in 18 years and now they have to pay for food and rent.
Unity was not free for all before this, only to a small section of the market. Plenty of the people complaining were already paying.
We cannot have an advanced society where everyone lives and works in tiny self-reliant bubbles that are hugely duplicative of effort because they cannot trust others not to rip them off.
(Think about it, HN: do you really want a world in which nobody ever dares buy any SaaS or ongoing-license product, making those unsaleable and unstartupable?)
That said - both Epic and Valve are private and that is probably the better razor. Be extremely vary VC/Public companies because they will come under pressure to slaughter golden geese when the time comes.
Even if you agree with the overall move, surely you recognise that some of the details — charging developers for users installing the same product multiple times, or even pirating it — are flat-out wrong? Not even just wrong from a moral point of view, but from a "this can't possibly work" one too.
Oh don't get me wrong! I don't agree with the overall move.
I just think their customers should have seen it coming from a mile away.
Capitalists are going to capitalist.
Just like I thought the cloud customers should have anticipated that the cheap introductory lure offers would eventually run out and then they'll have to pay real money for the services. I'm a bit daft like that.
Some will simply never have considered it — these risks are well-known in tech communities, but less-so in the general public, even including some game developers.
Others will have considered it and weighed it up like any other risk. It's possible that a terrorist will destroy your warehouse, but the chances are so low that it's not worth shutting down your business over. You're still entitled to be angry at the terrorist for doing it, though.
This isn't even a normal 'capitalists being capitalists' move, this is a 'capitalists going insane and dousing everyone in petrol' one.
I quit on Unity several years ago for this sort and many other reasons. But honestly, that isn't a decision a lot of people can make.
For me, I just went back to doing web development. For someone in the indie game market, you either develop in Unity or cut yourself out of the employee pool.
Unity isn't doing what Unreal did and asking for a cut of every sales. That would be surprising, that would be impactful, but that would be a manageable amount of money.
Unity is asking for a fee on every _install_ of the game, even if it amounts to one single sale of the game. Quoting their FAQ[0]:
> Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs?
> A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data.
That means that if you sell a game for $1, and if a user reinstalls it 6 times over the course of their ownership of the game (changing computers, just uninstalling/reinstalling to free up space every now and then, adding or removing mods, etc...), and you made more than 200.000 sales... You now owe Unity $1.20 for that user. And you only earned $1 from that user. Sure, you can pay Unity 1500/year/developer to rise the threshold to $1 million and lower the fee to $0.15 per install, but that's not a "deal". That's a racket.
This is absolutely, completely unsustainable. And not like "this will cost some money to companies" unsustainable, more like "it will be cheaper to hire people to port our game to another engine" unsustainable, as the person handling the business side of Among Us stated yesterday[1]:
> This is legit the kind of math I'm doing too. I've learned that Unity's fee won't be retroactive which is delightful, but also Among Us gets enough dls per month that I could just hire two whole people to port AU away from Unity instead of them taxing us for 0 added value.
And that's not accounting for business models like bundles or game passes. AGGRO CRAB, the developers behind the upcoming "Another Crab's Treasure" game announced earlier this year and coming out early next year, has stated that they are unsure whether their GamePass release will be sustainable for them[2]:
> This means Another Crab's Treasure will be free to install for the 25 million Game Pass subscribers. If only 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.
To be more exact and add some context, as reported by journalist Stephen Tottlio[3], Unity executive Mark Whitten stated that the fee would be sent to Microsoft:
> As for Game Pass and other subscription services, Whitten said that developers like Aggro Crab would not be on the hook, as the fees are charged to distributors, which in the Game Pass example would be Microsoft.
This will, however, deincentivize Microsoft to publish games made by studios who use Unity because Microsoft would be potentially publishing at a loss, which of course they don't want to do. So, not the exact same impact to developers, but the same difference for them.
And of course, that's not accounting for all of the "freemium" models here and there. And I don't mean microtransactions, I mean games that lock part of the content behind a paywall but propose access to most of the game for free. That business model, sustainable so far, is now literally going to end up with Unity asking for more money than you earn a year. (and yeah, this is a real risk for some companies. Anduo Games, the company behind the NSFW game Third Crisis, is still wondering if they're in that exact situation and what they can do about it[5]).
This move is just bonkers. Like, it's a business model where just using a game engine means that you can end up owing more money to a company than you earned over the lifetime your game.
And this is why people are not happy about this move.
