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Unity adding a fee for devs for each time a game is installed, after certain thresholds
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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Well this is bullshit but is there anything I as a non-developer can do about it?
Choose to play games written in Godot instead.
And how do I know which ones those are?
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.
Go to Godot's website and take a look at the showcase of... pixelart platformers and PS1-graphics boomer shooters. Hope you like those two genres!
I checked out their site and found that Cassette Beasts was made in Godot!
https://godotengine.org/showcase/cassette-beasts/
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.
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.
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.
Sail the high seas ๐
That's even worse for the devs, because they might still need to pay Unity for your install.
As a player, no. And I don't recommend doing anything, this is developer tool among them.
You can donate to Godot I guess? But of course you are not the one using it.