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Unity will start charging developers each time their game is installed
(www.engadget.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This only makes sense. Unity is a very big part of what makes a game work and building and maintaining the Unity engine costs a lot of work. They deserve some share of the money made on a game. That share should ideally be proportional to how much money is made by the developer, which should be proportional to the amount of times the game is downloaded. And this is only one of their plans. There are other plans as well. So maybe someone can explain to me why this is not just a sound business decision apart from: I don't want to pay any money?
Unity already charges money once you hit a certain revenue from your game, it's only free if you don't get a lot of sales.
More importantly, according to the article, when questioned it seems Unity hasn't given any proper thought into this model.
If a user installs the game and then uninstalls and reinstalls, it counts as 2 installs that must be paid for. Not only is that unfair, it can lead to abuse. Angry with a change the developer made? Uninstall and reinstall 30 times (automate it) and you will actually cost the Dev money.
What about pirated copies? Unity will still "phone home" and the result will be a developer paying for 1mil installs that he earned nothing from.
What if your game is free to play?
There were some other issues like that mentioned too (in the twitter post in the article).