It’s not the fact that Unity wants to make more money from its engine that has gotten people so up in arms about it, it’s the way it was structured.
If they simply took a percent of revenue, everyone would have shrugged, you might have had some indies complaining, and the world would have kept on turning. Instead, they made a couple of compounding missteps. An install based fee creates a massive amount of uncertainty about how much you will owe at the end of the month, creating potential cash flow issues. You are at the whims of Unity in terms of how they calculate it, and praying that they properly handle all the edge cases and potential abuses, despite all their incentives giving them plenty reasons not to care that much. And then on top of all of that they made it retroactive to all existing games on the market using their engine. Companies had a very reasonable expectation that they could rely on the terms their games were released under. All that trust has now been upended. Unity has shown they are willing to change terms retroactively with little notice. Now when evaluating Unity as an engine you will have to take into account not only the current fee structure, but also the risk that they will add additional fees retroactively that have the potential to completely disrupt your business model.
The Unity CEO and management team seem actively hostile to game developers. They view them more as adversaries than allies. Their first principle may be something like "How can we extract more revenue from our developers?" rather than "How can we make developers more successful on our platform [such that we all enjoy more success]?". I think that cultural value is the root of a lot of these tactical problems and missteps.
A couple of years ago the CEO called game developers "big fucking idiots" effectively for not extracting the most possible revenue out of the industry. There was the classic "well I actually meant [more innocuous but still dirtbag thing]" walkbacks, but we all knew what he meant.
It now makes a lot more sense when you view it from the perspective of Unity wanting to rip much more revenue out of devs and games using their engine.
He was saying not thinking about monetization during the creative process is idiotic in context of developers wanting to to do monetization.
As in don't tack on monetization at the end of spending years building out your big creative dream. Which is bluntly true, you're going to be in a world for pain.
I can see the reversal of previous terms of service getting challenged in court. But that's a lot of effort, of course. Maybe IGDA can take on the challenge.
Seems obvious, that if you did not agree to the ToS, you cannot be held accountable.
I certainly hope that at least, legally speaking, they would be forced to back down on games built using older version of the unity engine so that previous and upcoming projects aren't affected.
And, if I'm reading the details correctly, it seems like it's going to push developers toward charging recurring subscription fees for their games. If I install a game 20 times in the span of a decade, the devs are being charged over the long term while I only paid once.
>If they simply took a percent of revenue, everyone would have shrugged, you might have had some indies complaining, and the world would have kept on turning.
I think that's the issue. I did some math and it turns out that this is actually really cheap for f2p games, at least the heavily monetized ones that have a high attach rate. At Enterprise level, the install rate is only $0.01, which means as long as more than 1 out of every 500 people buy some monthly pack, the fee is paid for. And those monthly packs are the cheapest of very expensive packs modern mobile games charge. a whale dropping $100 on some big pack covers for 10k downloads. the install rate is nothing for the successful games.
In comparison, consider how Unreal after their threshold will take $5 out of that whale pack. Is it fair? debatable, but it's a more scalable option. However, for those large games with crazy expensive packs, UE is a much worse deal.
The big problem is that Unity is clearly targeting F2P games, but these deals are awful for console. Gamers with multiple devices (or upgrading devices. or simply changing whatever arbituuary metric they track) will cost you more money with zero return, which may be nothing for a f2p title but it adds up quickly for single purchase content. Then they just think they can walk over and ask Microsoft for their Gamepass money, which is laughable. MS could simply drop every Unity game from Gamepass (which wouldn't hurt as bad as you'd expect) and then take Unity to court over retroactive fees.
This could have easily been solved with two different payment plans based on platform and monetization, but this plan clearly wasn't properly thought through.
If they simply took a percent of revenue, everyone would have shrugged, you might have had some indies complaining, and the world would have kept on turning. Instead, they made a couple of compounding missteps. An install based fee creates a massive amount of uncertainty about how much you will owe at the end of the month, creating potential cash flow issues. You are at the whims of Unity in terms of how they calculate it, and praying that they properly handle all the edge cases and potential abuses, despite all their incentives giving them plenty reasons not to care that much. And then on top of all of that they made it retroactive to all existing games on the market using their engine. Companies had a very reasonable expectation that they could rely on the terms their games were released under. All that trust has now been upended. Unity has shown they are willing to change terms retroactively with little notice. Now when evaluating Unity as an engine you will have to take into account not only the current fee structure, but also the risk that they will add additional fees retroactively that have the potential to completely disrupt your business model.