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.
This will probably use some well-defined api endpoint to do their telemetry check-in, so this could probably be effectively circumvented if users were willing and able to do host level overrides to specifically prevent the unity engine from phoning home
You could also imagine a malicious actor phoning home to that API to drive up “installs” for a game and make a small studio or individual deal with massive fees. If a company is making these kinds of changes against the better judgement of their user base AND their internal analysis (lots of stock was sold two weeks ago), I’m doubtful they even care to properly deal with those kinds of problems.
Barely any commercially successful games are written in Godot right now. But Godot keeps getting better and Unity keeps getting worse, things could look very different in a couple of years.
This is a game I’ve had my eye on, since after playing Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, and then Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, it was a further slap in the face just how crappy the Pokemon games continue to get with each new release (it’s basically downhill after X and Y). Sure the story was good, but Scarlet/Violet was tough to enjoy with stutter, frame drops, hitching, and making me motion sick (and that’s just visuals, gameplay itself in a boring open world with no incentive to explore is also a factor). I’ve never played a video game that made me motion sick. I needed an alternative and heard about Cassette Beasts being a better game than Pokemon. I played the demo, loved it, and I was waiting for a sale. Now I’m gonna pay full price for this game to support the devs and their work with Godot.
This actively hurts the developers and helps Unity.
The devs will be charged for every install. Even if that install wasn’t legitimate.
So if you pirate a Unity game, it’s no longer a victimless crime. You’re actively making the developer pay for your piracy.
Like normally, I am totally cool with piracy. But giving piracy as a solution here is actually detrimental to the developers and doesn’t hurt Unity the company at all.
Like others said, I am sure it will be one of the patches applied to the Unity games. Crackers are not really bad people, and turning off some telemetry should be a piece of cake.
What about all the games that have already been cracked?
Bear in mind this affects every game, including games that have already been released. So if that stuff wasn’t patched out before, then devs would be charged for piracy.
I dunno. It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I agree that crackers aren’t bad people, but it leaves some unknowns because you’re counting on them to go above and beyond, essentially.
Don’t buy Unity games, encourage developers you like to not buy them. Not much you can do really, but hopefully the financial disincentive will put them off. Users don’t want install limits to be placed on their games, and they certainly won’t pay developers for every install.
You know, at some point Microsoft and Apple are going to enable developers to charge people to uninstall software, and that’ll be the driving force that finally forces the public to adopt Linux en masse.
Quake world engine. Huh, wasn’t aware of that one! Speaking of which, you can do all sorts of silly stuff with Doom sourceports, so that’s also a valid alternative.
I sure feel glad to never have gotten into developing with it. When I saw that a blank project generated a ~231MB executable back in 4.1 or so, I simply ditched it.
Licenses that allow retroactive changes are terrible for the end user, fuck up the company’s image and might give a significant boost to competition. Hasbro trying to pull that shit with DnD earlier this year comes to mind.
Our terms of service provide that Unity may add or change fees at any time. We are providing more than three months advance notice of the Unity Runtime Fee before it goes into effect. Consent is not required for additional fees to take effect, and the only version of our terms is the most current version; you simply cannot choose to comply with a prior version. Further, our terms are governed by California law, notwithstanding the country of the customer.
Yup lol.
What’s funny and sad is that about 3 years ago on r/godot, I had an argument with a Unity fanboy over this exact thing. He was demanding someone give him a reason that Godot should exist, when, in his humble opinion, Unity did everything and did it better.
My take was that you don’t actually own your Unity-made game. You might own the assets and trademark, but as long as you’re licensing the engine, you are subject to the whims of Unity.
I’m pretty sure that even if the license agreement does have such language that it won’t uphold in court. And there are enough big companies using Unity for this to go to court if they try to come to collect.
I mean seriously, if that would be legally possible, nothing would prevent them from uping the charge to $10, $20 or even $100 per installation, applied retroactively.
I think they have the web play question in their FAQ somewhere and it does include as a download. There’s no real way to know how their telemetry is calculating this though.
A: Games on all platforms are eligible for the fee but will only incur costs if both the install and revenue thresholds are crossed. Installs - which involves initialization of the runtime on a client device - are counted on all platforms the same way (WebGL and streaming included
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.
That’s exactly what this is. They want to price out the $3-$5 games that unity is primarily used for. They make no revenue from those since the revenue threshold never gets hit.
They’ll almost certainly lower the revenue threshold next too
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.
Is that really how it works? That seems like a pretty egregious oversight if so, couldn’t groups of people bankrupt devs, especially small ones with small file size games that are easy to reinstall over and over?
Nah, it's per device install. So unless you modify your PC enough to generate a different hardware fingerprint or go install a game on a fleet of laptops or something, most people won't be running up that counter too much.
After Unity's clarifications, I'm honestly kind of expecting the old "null-route the web address in the HOSTS file" to be a valid method to prevent their installer from phoning home to increment the counter. It's gonna be incredible if people start trying that just to frick with Unity.
The fact that we can even have this discussion should be proof enough to Unity that it's a complete non-starter of an idea to let user behavior influence the developer bottom-line.
I wonder if distributors could get away with doing that automatically. My gut instinct tells me that Unity isn’t stupid enough for that to be feasible long term, but… like you say, the C-suite bozos clearly aren’t listening to the engineers.
How many reinstalls? Because I have games I have bought 4 PCs/laptops ago, not counting some few more when I installed them in family members' computers to play with them. What about OS updates? Windows keeps insisting to move to 11.
Frankly, this doesn't sound reasonable at all. It's not even like Unity is doing any of the hosting to justify squeezing devs like this.
edit: Now it has been confirmed it's not measured on an unique hardware basis, any reinstall counts. It's just madness.
I saw that a short while ago and actually laughed out loud. The only thing left is to get the popcorn ready I guess because this is going to be hilarious.
especially small ones with small file size games that are easy to reinstall over and over?
Wouldn’t even need a small game technically. I’m pretty sure the only way to properly calculate would be running a postinstall script and someone could presumably just keep running that script
Hearthstone runs on Unity. I’m ok setting up a little something to let people constantly install and uninstall Hearthstone to bleed Blizzard dry… hell, once it’s discovered how your installs are tracked, I could see that leading to insane exploitation.
It is exactly what Unity means; they have doubled down on the clarifications. The precise point is to charge the developer for any install a user makes once they earn a (paltry) $200K.
It’s not rocket science to see that this is a very bad, very abusive idea and its targeted to hurt indie developers the most (as larger studios like EA would be on the enterprise plan and therefore on the hook for only 1/20th of the same usage).
Some simple math says that you would have to uninstall and reinstall a $5 game 20 times to completely nullify the earnings from your purchase.
It’s surprisingly easy to rack up installs; between multiple devices, uninstalls for bug fixing / addressing, the OS breaking it, modded installs having to be reset, making space for other games, refreshing a device… and so on. And that’s not even accounting for bad actors actively trying to damage a company.
Clearly without consulting anyone with a modicum of common sense.
It’s also possible its a move to deliberately piss of the customer base, so they can “back off” and implement a solution that still satisfies them, but looks like they let the “customer” (mostly) win.
For example: “We will charge $.20 for over 200K installs!” Backpedal: “We will charge $.05 for only the initial install after 500K installs!”
Pretty sure there are many documented instances of exactly this occurring, especially in the game dev industry unfortunately. (The goal was never the first offer, but rather to overshadow the real goal.)
But they already changed it from $0 to 0.2, how do you know it won’t be 10 dollars next year after you’ve already spent 5 years making your game?
What if you only were charging a dollar for your game and people like it so much they install it 5 times over the year? Easy to do with multiple devices or reinstalling OS’s
The problem is unity is forcing this on people who may have spent years and lots of money entering into a different kind of business agreement.
There are a lot of cases where this might suck if you’re a full time Unity dev. Getting on Gamepass was already a bit dicey as it cannibalizes sales, but now you got an extra Unity tax on that. (And you may get a LOT of installs on Gamepass)
Give a bunch of keys to a charity auction? Guess you’re paying extra. Got a demo that’s doing wonders on Steam NextFest? Those are installs. Is your game being pirated? Those look like installs, gotta pay up.
I don’t think this will bankrupt any dev, but all those above decisions will hurt.
I’m not a lawyer who can properly interpret the legalese but I don’t think this is the case.
Selling your game to a publisher or a third party to distribute it counts as the developer making revenue off the game.
Edit: Actually I may be incorrect - The apparent wording of the license says the publisher or distributor would pay the per install fee. I’m not sure how that would work, unless they’re planning to send a bill to Steam/Microsoft/EA/etc. I will have to reread the terms.
Charging "per install" as opposed to "per sale" will be goddamn awful. At best it might lead to DRM where you'll have a limited number of installs before you lose the game you bought.
as already confirmed by others, it is per install, not per sale. Meaning that if you uninstall your game and mhen reinstall it, the dev has to pay twice. You buy the game and install it on your pc, and your steam deck so you can play it whenever you want? developer pays twice.
Consider how it affects $60 AAA games vs close to free $1 games, it’s wildly disproportional and somehow the $1 game dev starts paying significantly earlier. Now consider how it affects games that make far less than a dollar per user, this is true of many free-with-in-game-purchase mobile games.
Then consider demos, refunds, piracy, and advisarial attacks.
It would have been simpler, more balanced approach, and have none of the pitfalls if they had just gone with a profit share scheme.
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.
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