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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 🙏🙏🙏
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
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.
So this will apply to games that have already been distributed on stores as well? How the fuck is such a change in the terms even legal?
I guess this will mostly impact F2P mobile devs since they will lose most money from installs. The good news is that Godot is more than capable for those types of games.
So... If the Unity's secret spyware and algorithm suddenly decides to count an update as a new installation, you suddenly get slapped with a huge bill. Especially if you release multiple small patches and your whole player base is counted multiple times.
Starting January 1, a Unity Runtime Fee will be charged to any game that has passed a revenue threshold in the past year and a lifetime install count.
Still shitty, but at least the fee only applies if you’ve already hit the revenue threshold. Maybe this is an ill-conceived effort to raise the floor on game prices (or price out low-cost ones)? A $60 game can afford a 20-cent extra fee a few dozen times. A 99-cent game is a non-starter though.
It is chargeable if you have made a certain amount of income on the game in the last 12 months, which should hopefully prevent too much impact on existing games.
Not content with their subscriptions, they now want a revenue share.
This makes sense to me, it looks like it's $0.20 for each install, only if
you have passed a threshold of installs
you yourself are charging for your game
Which, I know Lemmy has issues with proprietary software, but if you are charging for your software and it's built off this, I don't think $0.20 is too much to pay them. Unreal takes a percentage I believe, sounds like this is a "keep the lights on" charge.