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[-] MossBear@lemmy.world 218 points 1 year ago
[-] nogooduser@lemmy.world 217 points 1 year ago

Existing games built on Unity will also be hit with Runtime Fees if they meet the thresholds starting January 1.

How can you have a deal in place and just say “you’re giving me more money” and think that that’s ok?

I am altering the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further. - Vader

[-] TwilightVulpine@kbin.social 115 points 1 year ago

Tech companies badly need to get their shit kicked in to stop with this "I have the right to change the terms unilaterally anytime"

[-] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 53 points 1 year ago

This might actually lead to that, depending on what kind of lawsuits arise from this change. Which could mean there will be pressure from others who don't have a stake in the "unity install fee" game but do have one in the "wants to change terms at a whim" game.

Or maybe it will threaten the "by continuing to use this, you agree" clause instead and open up a path to continue using a previous license agreement if you don't like a new one.

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[-] Murais@lemmy.one 165 points 1 year ago

Oh hey, look.

The former CEO of EA made a greedy, short-sighted decision to fuck over his entire customer base.

I am shocked, friends.

SHOCKED.

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[-] Gork@lemm.ee 160 points 1 year ago

This is a good way to incentivize game developers to just not use Unity and just some other engine that does this.

Great for short term profits which makes the quarterly statements look good, but bad for long term sustainability.

[-] commandar@kbin.social 151 points 1 year ago

The CEO of Unity used to the the CEO of EA.

It explains a lot.

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[-] Skoobie@lemmy.film 53 points 1 year ago

Short term profits making quarterly reports look better to stakeholders. Isn't that how 80% of these bigwigs get their job in the first place? We should be calling it the Zaslav Model at this point 😂.

[-] Gork@lemm.ee 43 points 1 year ago

Just because it looks better to shareholders now doesn't make it a good business decision. I swear the majority of CEO types don't give a damn if the company goes under in a few years because they either:

  1. Have a golden parachute in place by sucking up to the Board.

  2. Will move on to another CEO position at another company before it folds. Bonus points if they golden parachute on the way out.

[-] Carighan@lemmy.world 47 points 1 year ago

It's a good decision for the CEO though. That's part of the problem, they're not beholden to the business. They'll just bugger off and go elsewhere.

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[-] reversebananimals@lemmy.world 140 points 1 year ago
[-] DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world 104 points 1 year ago

Oh, he was a former CEO of EA. That explains a few things.

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[-] Coreidan@lemmy.world 124 points 1 year ago

More enshitification. This is the kind of stuff I’ve grown to expect from tech companies. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are bleeding money due to interest rates and they need any way possible to stay afloat.

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[-] AWittyUsername@lemmy.world 121 points 1 year ago

We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed," the company explained in adding the fee.

Ok and??

[-] grayman@lemmy.world 71 points 1 year ago

Every copy costs them money. Don't you know how digital copies work?!

[-] Touching_Grass@lemmy.world 50 points 1 year ago

Guys they're artists. They deserve to be paid every time you play any game. You wouldn't steal a car

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[-] TwilightVulpine@kbin.social 117 points 1 year ago

This might kill entire indie projects.

[-] 9point6@lemmy.world 101 points 1 year ago

There's other engines, this will kill unity

[-] TwilightVulpine@kbin.social 51 points 1 year ago

I know and thank goodness for that... but there will be projects that simply won't be able to afford to move to entirely different engines. It's a lot of work that might have to be redone.

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[-] ahornsirup@artemis.camp 37 points 1 year ago

It's probably still going to take some projects with it. If you've sunk hundreds or even thousands of manhours into a project you can't just... do it again, or at least not always. Especially not if you've invested money as well as time, which is probably the case for most indie projects that aren't literal one-person shows.

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[-] TheRagingGeek@lemmy.world 34 points 1 year ago

I have a friend who has been moderately successful in the game creation space and he is saying he wants to just give up at this point because of this change.

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[-] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 102 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Oh yeah... I can't see this being weaponed by the bad side of the consumers.

Game comes out, it does something stupid or just "woke" and pisses people off. They attack the dev by installing more copies. Company goes bankrupt. Dickhead gamers win.

[-] lazycouchpotato@lemmy.world 79 points 1 year ago

I got some clarifications from Unity regarding their plan to charge developers per game install (after clearing thresholds)

  • If a player deletes a game and re-installs it, that's 2 installs, 2 charges
  • Same if they install on 2 devices
  • Charity games/bundles exempted from fees

Regarding this being abused by bad actors:

Unity says it will use fraud detection tools and allow developers to report possible instances of fraud to a compliance team

- @stephentotilo

[-] nature_man@lemmy.world 73 points 1 year ago

That clarification makes it even worse, this is obviously an attempt to push free to play or indie games out the window while making major bank.

The fraud detection will not help at all to prevent abuse especially in cases like steam family sharing where other "users" won't have to pay to install the game!

There's literally no reason to charge per game install here, the only possible reason is greed

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[-] BURN@lemmy.world 51 points 1 year ago

So basically they’re explicitly condoning it. That’s not just bad, but even worse that they’re doubling down that a delete+reinstall will charge the dev twice.

This will end a lot of indie projects and they’ve basically destroyed their good standing in indie dev circles.

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So once a game stops selling it had better hope its player base dries up and stops reinstalling it? The way that is phrased makes it sound like you could net lose money over the long term if sales decline and people keep reinstalling it

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[-] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 93 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I work for a small (15 people) Unity gaming company. Will let you know what the CEO says, just shared the actual Unity blogpost

Edit: Update - CEO added a gravestone emoji and said "yikes"

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[-] chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world 88 points 1 year ago

This is 100% targeted at bleeding indie game developers dry in hopes of taking some of that sweet viral cash from devs like the one who made Vampire Survivors. They see that indie devs are charging $3-5 for their games, and so they aren't hitting the $200k threshold unless they go viral, so Unity is charging by install, not just by total revenue. I hope that the ESA or other interested groups take legal action against this retroactive greed.

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[-] hal_5700X@lemmy.world 76 points 1 year ago

RIP Unity. First they partnered with Ironsource. Who are the people behind InstallCore it's a wrapper for bundling software installations. It tricks people into installing enough browser toolbars and other bloat to hurt their PCs. Windows Defender and MalwareBytes blocks it. Now Unity does this shit.

[-] AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world 75 points 1 year ago

"Runtime fee" is the most idiotic thing I've ever heard im the programming world, I think we hit a new record of low

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[-] Alpharius@lemmy.dbzer0.com 72 points 1 year ago

Unity's CEO was EA's CEO too. He is the guy who shaped EA into the greedy company that it is today. I'm literally not surprised

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[-] Jaysyn@kbin.social 59 points 1 year ago

This is great news!! For Godot.

[-] WuTang@lemmy.ninja 58 points 1 year ago

rule 1: get user by giving free candy rule 2: let's them build their product, workflow on your tools rule 3: harvest.

[-] Beliriel@lemmy.world 48 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Rule 4: get fucked by better and cheaper products (Unreal/Godot)
Rule 5: make an obituary presentation on what went wrong (hint: it's always management)

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[-] MossBear@lemmy.world 55 points 1 year ago

Just a reminder that if Unity developers with pro licenses coming to Godot contribute even a small fraction of what they might have paid for those licenses on Unity, Godot can develop even faster.

[-] MargotRobbie@lemmy.world 53 points 1 year ago

You guys should check out Stride if you are looking for another C# based engine. It's open source, but pretty rough around the edges right now.

Or, go for Godot for something more mature.

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[-] redcalcium@lemmy.institute 52 points 1 year ago

I'm sure this will give a boost to Godot development.

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[-] Ozzy@lemmy.ml 47 points 1 year ago

thank God for their inconvenient way of installing and using of the engine itself, if I didn't have a hard time back then I wouldn't have switched to Godot 🙏🙏🙏

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[-] lycanrising@lemmy.world 43 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is absolutely mad vendor lock in. I'm doing the maths and if you create the next flappy bird and it goes viral and gets 50 million downloads in a month, you'd owe unity $10 million dollars before you'd even received your first monetization cheque (you did launch with a full monetization plan, right? right? oh.)

edit: i forgot they had moneitzation limits too, so no - this situation wouldn't quite happen until they earned $200,000 in revenue. Though the potential to go viral and find yourself underwater because of the massive unity bill in comparison to your income is still a possibility

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[-] TWeaK@lemm.ee 40 points 1 year ago

This is incredibly scummy. Not just for the obvious reason, but also because this is a business to business deal that developers have little room to avoid. It essentially encourages per-install charges for users, or at least limits on how many times you can install the software - which is completely unreasonable, they should only ever limit concurrent installations. If I want to upgrade to a new computer I should be able to move all my software over to it.

[-] clutch@lemmy.ml 39 points 1 year ago

Unity going the way of Reddit

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[-] WhoRoger@lemmy.world 39 points 1 year ago

Sounds like another problem we have thanks to DRM and telemetry.

[-] Sharpiemarker@feddit.de 37 points 1 year ago

Get. Fucked.

[-] Muffi@programming.dev 34 points 1 year ago

Well, guess it's time to learn Godot.

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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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