This is of course not including the yearly Unity subscription, where Unity Pro costs $2,040 per seat (although they may have Enterprise pricing)
Absolutely ridiculous. Many Unity devs are saying they're switching engines on social media.
The enshittification continues.
Watch for more products that enable normal people to do great things to become paywalled. Only your gatekeeper masters may direct the market, and the creativity. In their infinite wisdom, they demand the control of gods.
Billionaires are a mistake.
EDIT: and I love the bait-and-switch of charging anyone who ever used Unity, even under different terms. Electric chair for the CEO.
I'm starting to see enshittification as part of the cycle of renewal in capitalism. Don't get me wrong...it's a completely foolish and disasterous way of doing things, and billionaires are a black mark on society as a whole, but innovation happens when you take away the established tools.
Twitter is a good example. Elon seriously accelerated the enshittification, and now it's tanking. Meanwhile, alternatives are springing up at breakneck speeds to replace it. Which one will win the war is anyone's guess, but Twitter will be the loser regardless. Reddit is another one. And Digg before it. As one commits corporate seppuku, others step in to take its place.
While it sucks for anyone caught in the crossfire, and the ones responsible for nuking a corporate landscape often skip away with a golden parachute, it usually leads to a shakeup that can bring amazing innovations. The key is to get in on the next wave, hope you picked the winner, and make sure you get out before shit hits the fans this time.
But that cycle is bad for the advancement of society as a whole. Instead of having something others can build on, everyone has to start from scratch and redo a lot of the work that was already done.
Establishing new social networks for example take a whole lot of time. And then you tank them so others can do the same thing all over again? That's not progress. That's standstill being sold as progress.
Lol your mistake is thinking that these people care at all about "the advancement of society as a whole".
Surprised nobody mentioned here, but Godot Engine people. It's FOSS and will never charge you for anything. Don't stay in an abusive relationship
They're going to back off on this and replace it with something bad but not as horrible. This is testing the water, and opens the door to charging everyone money every time you install a game, not just devs.
Have an install saved on your external and want to install it next week? You'll get charged for it as of you didn't already pay for it.
Games you have in your steam/gog backlog? Get charged again for it when you decide to play it.
I guarantee there are investors/publishers/whoever hitting themselves right now screaming "why didn't I think of that?".
I'd pirate the fuck out of everything if that happens.
The second Steam charges me for an install... Back to the high seas.
Not even about the money.
That's part of the problem; they aren't charging you for the install, they are remotely tracking that you've done so and then billing the dev for it.
If you grab a cracked version, did the person cracking that game also remove the install telemetry, or did they just make it functional? Can you be sure?
In many cases, the dev would still be billed for you installing the game you didn't even pay for. Unity has no incentive to ensure each install is legitimate, as they profit from failing to catch that.
Sounds like pirating a copy and then trying some network fuckery... Fun!
But also if they make it bad enough I'll just do something else. I love games but if they wanna fuck that up bad enough then there are always other ways to kill time.
I think they might actually get told to fuck off by publishers, strictly because they wouldn't be making any money out of it on top of the bad publicity being passed down to them by consumers.
Every major publisher including Trillion dollar Microsoft has Unity engine games in their catalog.
I don't think any of them really want to pay for that. MS would just scoop up Unity before paying that.
Unity Engine taking a leaf out of reddits book. Lol
Their Twitter is even leaning into the "answering questions" angle. Just frame the backlash as a result of ignorance, rather than people being reasonably upset by a situation they understand perfectly well. Then they dodge inconvenient questions about things like malicious automated downloads. Of course, they're happy to "listen to feedback." Not act on it, of course, but the social media person is happy to scroll past whatever you have to say!
Smells like a lawsuit to me. Retroactively devaluing software that they were already paid for.
It's probably a scream test that they'll walk back with something more reasonable in the next few days.
This happened to a crafting/cutting machine and its software a while back.
The company wanted to start charging once you hit a miniscule upload threshold, forcing you to pay if you wanted to upload more than, say, 20 images per day.
Folks who already owned the machine were furious that they'd essentially be limited out of their own machine, when there was previously no extra charges for use.
The company rolled back their statement and stated that they'd only start charging people who purchased & registered their machines after a certain date. Older users would not be charged.
Even so, after the shit they pulled, people no longer recommend that specific machine/brand/company anymore because of their nonsense.
This is exactly how you make FOSS more popular.
Yep, had an idea for a game and when I read all this stuff I decided to check out Godot again since the last time I did it wasn't in a great state yet. So far it's looking pretty good now!
Nevermind PC games, think about how this would impact mobile games. Where you get TONS of transient installs, and very few consistent players.
You could actually go into debt by using unity, and accidentally being successful if you aren't abusively monitizing your game.
That's what this is about. The CEO said that devs who don't put ads in their are "fucking idiots"
Unity isn't a game engine company anymore, they're an advertisement company that owns the rights to a game engine.
This is the same CEO who was at EA during their "worst company in America" awards era right?
founding your business on proprietary software is just a crazy gamble.
I turned down a job offer at a company that relied solely on twitter’s api in order to accomplish their goals. It was a sales lead generation tool that used a scripted approach to warming leads before handing them off to AE’s to bring home.
Within a year Twitter shut down their access and the company went under. That’s the day I learned not to trust another company to allow you to make money with their product permanently.
Developing a good and feature rich game engine which also runs performant is a huge effort. That alone can cost a good team 2 years at least. Even more if we consider todays graphic standards. That's nothing which smaller studios can easily deliver. So yeah, it's an obvious decision to buy a license for a proprietary engine, where a lot of work has already went into. That's just business and nothing crazy about it. Companies using services or products of other companies is pretty ordinary.
I think the reason beginners want to use Unity is because that is what they will need as professional game developers. But if professional game developers stop using Unity, then there is no reason to use Unity, no matter how beginner-friendly pricing it is.
Pretty much every gamedev course will teach either Unity, Unreal or both, so those students end up getting fucked either way.
Common proprietary L
Everyone I know has been reaching about Unreal for the past few years anyway. I'm surprised Unity is pulling this controversial move in this situation, driving more customers to the competition. It's like if it was 2013 and AMD suddenly started charging double for their graphics cards even though Nvidia was way better
So whats the next step, everytime a start my car i have to pay?! F*ckin ridiculous
I gotta ask, considering the "per install" pricing, what exactly is an installation in the eyes of Unity?
A game download? In which case would a cancelled and restarted download result in two installations being logged?
Is it an API call during first start-up? What would keep malicious actors from simply modding their game to repeat this call a thousand times?
What about pirated copies? Do they count as being "installed"?
Unity's official response to those questions as of a few hours ago is akin to "we have ways... trust us."
I think the real problem is how shady it seems. Like has everyone forgotten the concept of "grandfather in"? People will make new games in unity if they factor in the cost. I think people are understanding if they have the priory knowledge that unity needs to maybe start charging something. But sounds like they are asking for after these businesses already have created budgets. It sounds like it could be a bit of extortion depending on what the original agreement was. " Extortion might involve ... damage to a companies financial well being."
What’s the tl:dr?
The creators of the unity engine are charging people extra for games they have already created?
Creators of the Unity engine want to charge developers per game install, the more people that install the game the more you have to pay. This includes games that already exist and never agreed to this. It also causes a lot of safety concerns, how will they confirm how many installs a game has? Are they bundling spyware with Unity games?
What will they do when 50 angry incels run a script that downloads/installs/deletes your game hundreds of times a day?
They said they have a fraud detection system for their ads business and will use that as a starting point.
I don’t see how they are going to be able to move forward with this change.
From what I've heard, from January 2024, any for-profit game made in Unity that meet a certain profit and download threshold will have to pay a fee to Unity per install of said game, including those released before these changes are being introduced.
Unity also said it will track installs with its own proprietary data. Speaking to Axios, Unity also confirmed that if a player deletes a game and re-installs it, that counts as two installs, and two separate fees.
From the article linked in comments here. That's unbelievable. I'm at a lose for words.
I guess they don't want anyone to use Unity at all
That's fucked because I delete and download games from my steam library all the time. If I need just a little more space I'll delete a few games but then probably pick them back up a little later.
I wonder how that works.
Like if I released a Unity game in 2016... if I tell Unity to fuck off, would they then try to get my game off of Steam?
It's a truly horrible chain of events. Unity has been continually scaling back it's development objectives, canning their developer game samples and overall it feels like they're struggling.
While overall I'm fairly happy with Unity as a game engine, I'm not happy with Unity as a company, which seems to prioritize the strangest things while features and optimisations seem to languish
Will Garry Newman decide to reskill his devs to use Godot? Will anybody with enough power decide to do so? Imagine if game studios big and small decided "we don't want to have to deal with this ever again, we're making a new or investing in an existing opensource game engine".
I wish people would see the light, but will they?
This is the java business model, there's two ways it could go: total flop, everyone hates it and because video games aren't as deeply entrenched as legacy codethe java business model won't work. OR the Java business model works great and there's now a 10% unity tax passed on to the consumers
Edit lmao the most pedantic Mfs alive in the replies
Welcome to the game development community! This is a place to talk about and post anything related to the field of game development.