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this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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What happened?
TL;DR of the situation is that Unity released a statement 2 days ago saying they want successful developers to pay up to 20 cents every time a user installs a Unity game starting from Jan 1 2024, even if your game was already released. This caused a huge ruckus in the game dev community and many developers want to switch away from Unity.
Note that it's "per install" (they clarified that reinstalling on the same device only counts as one install), not per unit sold. And Unity will also track pirated copies, so the devs would still have to pay the fee even if they didn't sell it to you.
the tracking of pirated copies is even more fucked up. is that their way of imposing that "piracy = stealing"?
It’s because they literally don’t know how to differentiate a download from legit and illegitimate. They’re going to track every time their bundler is downloaded and bill the developer for it, that would include pirated copies and legit copies alike.
The swashbuckler's solution is then to make your own bundler installer!
That's assuming pirates would go through the trouble of removing said functionality. Pirates hate trackers, so they might do it, but not necessarily, as often the priority is just to get the game working.
Because a cracker could remove the DRM but not whatever is tracking installs
That's a recent change. According to the faq on the official forum, initially the idea was to charge every reinstallation. Then they realized it was crazy. Now it's every first installations:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/
Note the "updated" yesterday. Initially every install in "different devices" counted. Even on the same device after reinstallation of the os
I fail to see how they can guarantee it's the first install.
I game inside a VM with GPU passthrough and I'm pretty sure it would be trivial to install-bomb any game to rack up install numbers and costs.
Moreover, would anyone even trust any number of times Unity tells you your game was installed?
They could a magical 10% that would be hard to prove/disprove.
Anyone with a half-competent legal team would stay the fuck away from any of this nonsense going forward.
It's a "proprietary system" (quote). It must be clearly always correct. It's not one of those open source stuff... /s
Where did they add the same device reinstall clarification? Last I saw, same device reinstall is still a new install and thus chargeable
Retroactively charging developers, that's stupid.
However, I'm not knowledgeable on any Game Industry economics, but isn't $0.20 on a $20-$60 game negligible? I understand some people will have multiple devices so the developer could be out $1. On a $20 game that someone sells 1000 copies, that's only $200 of $20,000 sales (maybe $800 in fees at the high end). I've used Unity before and it's still a pretty solid game engine with easy to use tooling; using it would definitely save you time to build your game (time=money). Additionally, if I were to be building a game studio, everyone knows unity, so it would be easy to hire or find contractors who can help with pieces of the game. It makes sense from a business standpoint for me unless I'm missing something.
Is there a max fee? On the opposite side of the spectrum I could see DDOS-like attacks on game developers where an attacker can spin up a bunch of virtual machines and then keep installing the game to charge the developer $1mil dollars.
It's the complete unpredictability that devs and businesses hate. 2% of every purchase they can plan for, but with install fees they could get randomly billed for copies that were already sold, and that is unacceptable. This isn't a one time fee, whenever somebody installs the game on a new device, the dev gets charged. Not to mention the fact that some people might have multiple devices, but randomly in 3 years they could get a new PC and suddenly the dev gets charged again, all the while the dev didn't make anymore money from that copy. Who the heck would agree to a system like that?
Not to mention that if a game gets added to a service like GamePass, then the service gets the bill. No way Microsoft would say yes to that, which means the Dev misses out on deals that could've made them a bunch of money.
A competitor could literally buy one copy, make a script that spins up 1000 vms a minute and downloads your game over and over on "new devices" and put you out of business
This.
Basically changed their pricing model to fleece Indy devs. Some devs would have owed more money than they ever even made on their games.
Fleece every Unity dev pretty much, even if big studios can afford it.