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this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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So basically unity wants money even for games made on their engine before this shitty update. All older versions of games with older versions of unity are eligible to be monetized. Forget ethical, how is that even legal?
Unity, I hope you die. Sorry to all the Devs who put their soul into developing it.
Jesus dude chill it. Somehow hating Unity is popular here, and don't get me wrong I am also here because I hated the corporate asshole named spez, but this move Unity wants to make isn't super unreasonable. They want to charge proportionally to the amount of usage. If they'd done this right out of the gate, nobody would have thought that is unreasonable. Unity is a great engine, they should be able to charge for it.
Taking a fixed percentage of the profits/revenue is reasonable. Taking a fixed amount of money for every install is insane.
Taking profits means that:
Doing it based installs is none of that.
It's insane. It's a stupid idea from an idiot who probably arrogantly ignored everyone who told him it was a stupid idea.
If I was a shareholder of Unity I would want this moron investigated for selling shares and then tanking the company.
No doubt they are going to buy shares at the lower price before they announce a total reversal or this plan.
Or one of their friends. Or their kid's friends.
Tracking revenue of thousands of developers over the whole world is impossible. Maybe put yourself in Unity's position?
And tracking the installation of games across millions of machines is more reasonable?
It's based on downloads. It is easy to track those.
"We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user. We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share." https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates
So revenue still need to be tracked like it was before so they know when to start charging. This just adds another metric to track, not replacing anything and does not make anything easier.
This from the CEO of unity John Riccitiello who introduced loot boxes at EA and famously called developers that don't have ongoing monetisation of games fucking idiots. Yeah, fuck that shit. This will just penalise developers that sell their game and don't constantly try to grab as much money from their user base as they can. Exactly what he wants to see. Fuck that guy he seems to destroy everything he touches.
It's what Unreal does:
Also, right now Unity forces you to take a subscription to their paid version when you make more than $100k a year.
I was wondering how they would do it with tiny companies using excel spreadsheets to track... but if it's only 1M+ companies they have to have decent books, so that makes it easy.
Once you hit a $1m target, they'll be wanting to see your books yeah. That is a much smaller number and doable. Believe me, tracking revenue of other companies is a pain in the ass though. I've done a number of OEM deals and revenue based OEM deals are much more complicated than usage based OEM deals.