Developer makes a game for the iPhone, charges $1 for it.
I buy the game for $1.
Apple takes 30 cents.
My family of 5 all install the game and play it via family sharing.
Unity takes $0.20 X 5 = $1
Developer loses 30 cents on the sale.
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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You make an excellent point and it’s easy as a PC gamer like myself to forget, that Apple actually sells a lot more games than Value.
I think the worst part of it all is the trust that is irrevocably broken now.
This is obviously a moronic scummy decision driven by greed, but it also goes directly against past decisions. As per this reddit post, Unity actually had a TOS in action that protected Developers against retroactive changes like this. Specifically, it stated that you could choose to continue using old versions of the engine and comply to the old TOS if an update to the TOS that you disagree with ever happened. This specific part of the TOS was deleted last year.
If they actually try to enforce this new crap on already released games (that accepted an older version of the TOS) then it would seem blatantly illegal (I'm not a lawyer though).
Even if they revert everything by tomorrow, the whole fiasco still shows where Unity's current interests are, and make the company a liability to deal with for any game developer.
Yeah, this isn't a "I'm never using Twitter again!" kind of fiasco. This has upset Capitalist™®© company heads, who now see Unity as a financial risk. Money tends to have more of a sway than morality.
Apparently Genshin Impact and some Nintendo Games are made in Unity, and there are even some plans to charge Microsoft for Game Pass installs.
I hope Unity's legal team is prepared.
I hope Unity's legal team is prepared.
I really hope they're not, because this practice needs to crash and burn brightly as a warning beacon to other corpos' grubby fingers.
I hope their anuses are prepared.
Nintendo sure as fuck aren't bringing any lube.
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Unity actually had a TOS in action that protected Developers
No it didn't. It just had words that pretended tk protect developers. TOS are meaningless for anyone other than the service when they can change at will.
Yea, they are useless when being changed at will, but what if the TOS specifically said "You can disregard future TOS versions and still abide by this old one under certain circumstances" ?
You would still be complying with the Terms of Service, by not honoring the new Terms of Service.
Obviously, this is still a terrible situation regardless, but I am thinking about if the old TOS won't give already released games a way out of this BS, or even better, may keep a usable Unity version alive for the future. Long term obviously, as many people as possible should ditch unity entirely, but for right now, it looks like a lot of developers will have big trouble starting in just 3 months.
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Unity saw how Reddit killed off free users by raising prices to absurd rates, and how Reddit was largely unaffected by it as a whole. Not going to be surprised to see other types of platforms also follow suit.
The reddit issue screwed over end consumers and a couple of tiny app developers.
There's some big developers that use Unity. Pokemon Go is in Unity. Pokemon BDSP was in Unity: say what you want about the quality, but that's as still over 14 million games sold and I would not be at all surprised if ILCA was halfway through another Unity re-make.
These changes aren't just screwing over random individuals who like to play games. Not just indie developers either. Unity is looking to battle with billion-dollar corporations over this. I can't believe for once I'll actually be rooting for Nintendo's legal team.
Guaranteed anyone who can actually fight back gets their own contract that exempts them from this.
Genshin Impact is also on Unity, so you know they were hoping for some of all that MiHoYo cash, since this scheme of theirs was going to apply retroactively.
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Unity is playing a game of fuck around and find out
Reddit largely unaffected
So they might say. However the post 3 up from this is an article about how their posts and comments have dropped 50 to 90% across major subreddits.
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I've read that this started with easy loan money drying up after the First Republic collapse.
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Good reason to just use godot
Had been looking at it for awhile. Installed it this morning.
Even supports C#.
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I was always curious about Unity, but now I'm good.
It's crazy how these companies could manage to lose their goodwill overnight one by one these 2~3 years. It's almost like they have some secret any% fiasco RTA competition or something.
I’m not a huge conspiracy theorist, but considering the c-level execs pulled their investments before all these announcements, it’s not out of the question that they could tip people off to short the company as well.
Hell the realist in me sees the fines these guys get and they see it as a cost of doing business.
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Unity casually destroying the trust between them and their devs
Installed Godot yesterday and it's starting to grow on me, I like it. Looking forward to a huge movement of studios over to Godot, which will hopefully speed up the development of Godot through further support. Is there any reliable source of data about which game engines are popular at the moment? I want to see that sweet sweet decline in Unity user base over to Godot.
Unreal Engine almost has a monopoly at this point. It‘s also very friendly to use for small indie devs, not charging you anything for the first million dollars you make. Their license fees also seem rather fair as of now. But it doesn‘t help competition is flat lining left and right. Epic Games could feel their engine is worth a little more when Unity is gone too so I‘m happy to see many hobby devs give Godot a try first. I hope a company like Valve with their sheer infinite resources will see the shrinking market of Unreal alternatives and give their engine development a serious push. We really need more diversity when it comes to Engines.
Yeah, and Unreal is just one group of psychopathic executives away from pulling similar shit.
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Definitely waiting for Godot (heh) to step up to the plate, it's missing some stuff at the moment but give it a year and I'm sure it'll get there. We're stuck with Unity for now but things like this mean plans are in place to migrate off it should it become necessary (by and large aren't hit by this yet because we charge a bunch for the app so 20p isn't a big deal.. although we don't and likely can't track installs so no idea how that works..).
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This is why non-libre software sucks. They have 0 incentive to not screw you over.
With how many companies started trying to move libre software to non libre licenses, it's also not a given that that helps.
I guess at least you can just fork libre software if that happens.
That's exactly the point and it's happened many times now. OpenOffice got converted to a non-libre license so it was forked to LibreOffice and OpenOffice was left to rot. Audacity fucked around and now there's like 3 or 4 forks all competing there. That's the great thing about open source software, if companies or even individual maintainers do something that pisses off the user base enough, someone will come along and fork it. It's truly democratic as people vote with their feet, or downloads as the case may be.
In addition, the work is never fully lost.
If unity goes to shit, welp, cannot use any of unity's code at all. Years and years of engine development wasted.
If some FOSS software goes to shit? That code is still there. Just take it and unshittify it. Little to no work wasted.
Being licensed as free software (libre) just means users have the freedom to fork and continue without the copyright owner (to the degree permitted by the license).
The same bad incentives still exist but they are mitigated when devs know competition can sprout out of their bad actions.
2023 has been quite an year of revelation, showing the true nature of these scummy corporates. Lets learn our lesson and not jeopardize ourselves by trusting them.
Thanks Twitter and Reddit api increases! You started a trend in fucking over your user base and developers!
I was going to start game programming using unity. Just uninstalled it. Will pick up something else like godot.
I'm so happy I never wasted the time to learn this platform. I could've but chose not to (mostly too busy). Again, another company that I have no problem watching them fail, along with the Twitters/Teslas and reddits of the world.
I really don't understand why they care the runtime is getting installed.
They just want money
I doubt they actually do care; I reckon it is just an excuse.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
That goodwill has now been largely thrown out the window due to Unity's Tuesday announcement of a new fee structure that will start charging developers on a "per-install" basis after certain minimum thresholds are met.
The newly introduced Unity Runtime Fee—which will go into effect on January 1, 2024—will impose different per-install costs based on the company's different subscription tiers.
Outside of those countries, an "emerging markets rate" ranging from $0.005 (for Enterprise subscriptions) to $0.02 (for Unity Personal users) will apply after the minimum thresholds are met.
This is a major change from Unity's previous structure, which allowed developers making less than $100,000 per month to avoid fees altogether on the Personal tier.
Larger developers making $200,000 or more per month, meanwhile, paid only per-seat subscription fees for access to the latest, full-featured version of the Unity Editor under the Pro or Enterprise tiers.
"Gloomwood will definitely be my last Unity game, likely even if they roll back the changes," developer Dillon Rogers wrote on social media.
The original article contains 506 words, the summary contains 168 words. Saved 67%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
How is unity to determine a company’s revenue on a game if not self reported by a company?
They guess.
We leverage our own proprietary data model and will provide estimates of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project – this estimate will cover an invoice for all platforms.
From their FAQ.
So... They bill you based on a guess?
Not just any guess...a proprietary guess. So extra smokescreen and mirrors
Very legal, very cool.
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The inevitable outcome of propietary software.
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