Unity adding a fee for devs for each time a game is installed, after certain thresholds

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

Godot.

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.

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.

The person who runs Unity is a shithead.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/18/23269218/unity-ceo-john-riccitiello-apology-game-developers-fucking-idiots-ironsource-merger

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.

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??

This might kill entire indie projects.

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.

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"

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.

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

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

This is great news!! For Godot.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Get. Fucked.

Unity going the way of Reddit

Well, guess it's time to learn Godot.

Me, a hobbyist that never planned to sell anything I made: chortle my balls, Unity Tech!

Common proprietary L

Man I was just getting into game development and learning Unity.

I guess it's time to pivot into Unreal or Godot or something.

Anybody have recommendations?

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.

Wow that is such a bad idea... I... I'm honestly speechless. Who thought if that? I mean...

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.

Permanently Deleted

That's pretty awesome of them to do such a great Godot advertisement

Well this is bullshit but is there anything I as a non-developer can do about it?

Switch to Godot or FTEQW, screw Unity.

I can't decide if they'll get away with this or if they're committing corporate suicide.

Wanna bet he secretly has a bunch of Epic Games stock?

Welp, guess it's time to uninstall Unity

Yeah, this will insure I never use Unity. But at least they can collect from their existing games.

For Unity Personal and Unity Plus users, the thresholds are $200,000 in revenue a year and 200,000 lifetime installs.

The fees also vary, with Unity Personal developers having to pay the most for every install above the threshold ($0.20)

So, if you get 200k lifetime installs but don't get the 200k revenue a year, you don't have to pay it?

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

OOOHOOOOO BOY, now, that's going to hurt a fair amount of people!

Also, what about web play? I guess that'll only count towards revenue, but not towards downloads?

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.

And that's why we need more than one standard

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.