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.
In other words: everything turns to shit.
Yeah, at least these dominant corporations are now being forced to compete and become profitable without the advantages of free financing. This process is revealing the ghoulishness that their exaggerated ability to outspend their competition via borrowed capital had been hiding from the consumers.
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
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 games and monetize 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?
Yes
Haha for real ? What a pedigree. What’s his name ?
John Riccitiello, dude looks, and behaves, like a bond villain
Or gacha/live service games, where you’ll get enough installs and overall revenue to push you over the 200k threshold, but never enough installs for the 1 mil discount, in a genre where it’s not uncommon for one person to have the same game on multiple devices (especially if you have a PC or console port), and for games to have a cycle of low revenue dead months that doesn’t always coincide with new player counts due to the whale rule.
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.
Maybe the gaming industry needs another collapse.
AAA needs a shake up, that’s for sure, if it’s just going to continue on it’s current trajectory of “nothing new but costs more”.Most of the AAA’s can’t even be bothered to include as much content and as many systems as games from decades ago. You can play PlayStation 1 & 2 games that are just as complex or more complex than games releases recently. It’s all the same stuff but with more pixels and larger localization folders.
Why is Skyfield 130 GBs when at it’s core it has all the same functions as Oblivion or Fallout? Why does Octopath Traveller have a sliver of the in-game content that games like Star Ocean and Final Fantasy 9 had? Sports games and Shooters were lost causes years ago.
Indie devs have been making games that are far more fun and original than most AAA teams of multiple hundreds have been able to do in awhile.
The big guys need to return to focusing on fun. Some AAA’s can still do it. BG3 and Zelda are the current obvious examples. Those games are Fun. That’s what games are supposed to be.
Also, battle passes and season passes and everything that horse armor spawned can all go in the trash when there is another video game collapse.
Comparing Octopath Traveller to FF9 isn’t really fair. One was an entry on Squares premiere series with tons of money behind it, the other is a side project made by a side team with far less resources. Starfield is a big install as it’s using far higher quality textures than previous Bethesda games, probably higher quality audio too.
I knew someone was going to Actually those examples.
This is already how it works with poorly cracked games/software. The games’ crack.nfo (readme) will say something like: - Copy the .exe to the /bin/ folder, add the .exe to your windows firewall or otherwise prevent it from accessing the internet.
Which is why I like tinywall or simplewall – it uses the windows firewall to block all apps by default.
Hm. I guess if one can reverse the code and sniff the network then one can probably figure out all but the most sophisticated phone home evasion. Just like with cracking games, eventually someone figures it all out. Game crackers will have to add network monitoring to their toolkit if they haven’t yet I guess.
I guess the only way to be sure is to not buy those games.
My only issue there is you, as an end user installing these cracks, don’t really have a way to be sure it was removed (unless you yourself know the details of and block the phone home). It’ll have no effect on you either way, but it’ll certainly effect the dev if you miss it; it’s only gotta get through once (per install), maybe it tries until it succeeds.
I very much agree with various developers decisions to change engines. I feel for the ones that don’t really have that option.
wouldn’t a simple firewall block solve that?
Possibly, but can you expect an entire userbase, potentially millions of people, to:
A) know about the problem
B) care enough to do something
And C) know how+be able to apply that block
Especially when there’s no effect for end users whether it does or doesn’t go through.
A significant portion of players won’t bother. Enough that the ones that do don’t really matter.
To be clear, I’m specifically taking about pirated versions, which I figure the people using have enough interest in doing to know how or figure out how to do something like that, or even have it disabled at the start by the game crackers.
Launch the game offline. Which if you’ve ever done with a game made in the last 5 or so years and launching legitamitly, it is increasingly harder to do so.
I take my gaming laptop into work. I can launch older games without an internet connection, but stuff like red dead redemption 2 doesn’t like to start offline – presumably due to telemetry.
Copy-Paste from a reply about blocking the telemetry:
Possibly, but can you expect an entire userbase, potentially millions of people, to:
A) know about the problem
B) care enough to do something
And C) know how+be able to apply that block
Especially when there’s no effect for end users whether it does or doesn’t go through.
A significant portion of players won’t bother. Enough that the ones that do don’t really matter.
Apparently, pirating the game can trigger the install tracking and would cost the dev even more
I bet crackers would also null that shit
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.
I’m talking about the publishers doing it down the road.
I guarantee there are investors/publishers/whoever hitting themselves right now screaming “why didn’t I think of that?”.
Until the owner of the engine is the publisher, like if Microsoft buys Unity and only sells on MS Store…
I’m not sure what you mean. How is that any different than what I said?
EA has been doing this for years. Except they were nearly infinitesimally nicer about it and gave you X installs per key, with the caveat that you had to burn hours on their support line to get it reset.
Probably where that guy got the idea since the Unity CEO was the EA CEO during that online pass era.
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.
Until a few years ago there was barely any alternative afaik
People wrote their own game engines since the earliest of games, they just want the easy route today and a marketplace to monetize on. These are poisoned gifts, and always have been.
And if everyone invented their own wheel every time they wanted to build a new cart all we’d ever have is various different wheels and very few carts.
Great analogy, but this is a wheel you’re being charged for, after you’ve installed it on your product. Maybe you would have been better suited with your own wheel.
You’re not picking an existing good wheel solution that you can use forever, you basically took a promise for a free wheel that you’re now being charged for, and you’re sad because the free wheel isn’t free anymore. Well, maybe you should have picked an actually free wheel to begin with.
Unity is not the only solution to your cart problem. You’re just using it, because it is convenient.
Are you being obtuse on purpose?
This isn’t a case of “I use unity because it is free,” because outside of recreational game developer use-cases, it isn’t free. There are very real costs associated with monetization that any developer, team, and studio should be aware of.
Developers who have been using unity with knowledge of their pricing mechanisms are being blindsided with new pricing, that you can’t opt-out of, with a little less than 3 months notice. Going back to the wheel analogy, these teams have designed entire vehicles around these wheels, with application-specific knowledge and workarounds to be told that “Hey, regarding that product which underpins your entire project, one with which we’ve already entered into a sales agreement… we decided we want to change the agreement and track its usage and charge you more money. You have 11 weeks to get over it. Your continued use of our product implies consent to the new terms of this agreement.”
You can’t just move to a different platform without significant amounts of rework.
Developers who have been using unity with knowledge of their pricing mechanisms are being blindsided with new pricing
I get that, and it sucks. But too many offerings on the market are nowadays accepted as normal operating procedure, when they seem like such obvious traps to me. There is no financially-driven company out there that you can rely on with your project. Go with an open-source project or write what you need yourself. I fully understand the challenge of writing a product from scratch and bringing it to market. Your dependencies can break your neck one way or the other.
You can’t just move to a different platform without significant amounts of rework.
I know and feel that. I am no longer in entertainment, but I also see these exact same patterns in my current line of work (IT infrastructure). People use “free” tools that they take for granted, and then they’re surprised by rug-pulls. This has been happening for so long in so many areas that it’s almost tiring.
Unity isn’t free, what are you on about, you pay money for it.
There really isn’t much point having this conversation if you’re going to operate on flights of fantasy.
Yeah, and people nowadays don’t even rewrite basic libraries! Everyone should have their version of glibc or they are just lazy!!!1!!1!
C implementations are available as open-source. The glibc especially is a great example of this. This comparison is not good. I’m all for using open source
People wrote their own game engines since the earliest of games
Lazy gets, using someone else’s programming language. They should have developed their own language and written the compiler before starting to write a games engine for the game they wanted to make.
To be honest even a home written language and compiler would be based on someone else’s hardware.
Come to think of it, imagine if American Megatrends would start with a subscription model.
10 USD tier: 10 free boots a month, each subsequent boot shows an ad. You can skip the ad for 25 crystals.
Crystals are bought in packs of 10 or 35.
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.
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!
Remember that all these dudes spend most of their week reading each other’s linked in posts and jerking each other off.
These things are happening now because it is in vogue among their peers
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.
It was the status quo in animation until a few years ago : every school would teach Maya or Max and the industry as well as aspiring professionals were kinda locked with those. Others players evened out the playing field (Houdini, Blender, etc) and today it’s not the monopolistic situation it used to be.
How are they teaching nowaday?
From what I gathered it’s more varied, it kinda mirrors how studios rely less on a single package. Houdini, Substance, Blender… back in my day it was Maya and Photoshop all the way
I’m now interested in UPBGE, a fork from Blender with game engine. It seems useful for learning modeling and gamedev.
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.”
If I had to do something like that, I would make it every time the installer runs, every time it’s installed by a launcher like Steam, and as a fallback every time the game executable runs for the first time unless an installer or launcher hands it a key to say “you’ve been paid for already.” But I’m by no means a game dev so idk.
Cool, find a game dev you hate and set up a script to install their game and run it once as many times as possible. Let that run on a machine you don’t use for a while, then drink their tears
I’m not saying it’s a good idea, that’s just how I’d implement it - no matter how you do it it’s evil, unsafe and evasive.
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
Oh damn the whole day I was thinking it was about Unreal Engine, not unity. Was pretty sad that some of the projects I follow could be abandoned. Now I’m so glad, holy shit. Reading the articles caffeine starved at 5 am in a tram probably was the culprit for misreading
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
What the hell is the Java business model? Do you mean Oracle, when you say Java?
I’ve literally developed Java applications and never heard of the “Java business model”, Java costs nothing for its developers or users, other than dignity.
I presume you mean the open-source versions of the JVM published by other companies like IBM, or maybe there’s some other distinction that I don’t understand? As far as I know, Oracle Java has required a paid license for the last few years: https://redresscompliance.com/decoding-oracle-java-licensing-java-licensing-changes-2023/
Right. I’ve been working with Java ever since 1.1.6 back in the late 1990s (so, yeah, 25 years now). I get having opinions about Java and the JVM, but there is no business model associated with it unless they’re referring to what Oracle has tried to do with Java in the past (the licensing and whatnot) which is immaterial these days due to OpenJDK and various other Java/JVM providers.
This is probably simple confusion is all. Because the poster isn’t wrong about everything being taxed and the consumer always having to pay for it. Greed is running rampant and unchecked now and while it has been this way for some time, it seems to have accelerated during and since the pandemic.
Dignity AND sanity.
Oh you don’t know which company sells the most licenses for a jdk?
What?
I’m just shocked you didn’t know Oracle™️ Java™️ runs on 3 billion devices!
- Of course I know about Oracle, I’m the one who asked you because you clearly do not understand how Java is actually used and distributed.
- Oracle JDK and OpenJDK are actually not the dominant Java distribution and most developers don’t even bother with Oracle JDK anymore.
- OpenJDK doesn’t require any huge licensing like Oracle JDK does, hence why there are numerous vendors supplying OpenJDK distributions.
- Aside from very large corporations, anecdotally I’ve not encountered anyone in the last decade who has had any issues with licensing solely because they’re using an OpenJDK distribution.
- I have 25 years experience in the Java ecosystem. You’re not going to be successful trying to zing me.
.
If you’re going to say things, it might be helpful to have a clue about what you’re saying.
t. God’s most pedantic redditor
If you knew I was talking about oracle and just wanted to make a point that oracle wasn’t the only one that licensed the JDK first of all, why not just say that, and what the hell does it have to do with my comment?
No one cares about your Java dev experience, this post wasn’t about Java, or OpenJDK, you just wanted to be a dick, and that makes you a dork
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
This you?
this post wasn’t about Java
This also you?
You are clearly insane. Good bye.
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.
Agreed. Terrible ideas here
The obvious rebuttal to that is that it is in the financial interest not to detect false installs because the developer will owe them money for those. Why would ANYONE trust their word on this?
Thanks, a few Lemmy posts later and I saw this article that explain
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
They want to charge game devs $0.20 per install. Yes, that’s right, they want to charge devs 20 cents every time somebody installs their game.
Thanks for responding to my post.
That will be uhh… 0.20.
Ah fuck, ya got me. pays up
… wait a minute… pays up again
Now, everyone who has ever responded to one of my comments also has to pay me.
Why a terrible company. I don’t even want to redeem their free games any more.
So 1000 installs per day (small numbers for a global title) = $200/day x 30 = $6000/mo, and then at like 10% after the hype wears off, $600/mo for the entire product lifetime (even installing on a new computer charges, so this cost doesn’t go away when new users stop coming)…
Edit: this is actually similar to the numbers given in the original post, of an average settling at $40k / yr (so like 200k installs per year or only 550 per day across the entire world). Which like they said, yeah, is about half a million dollars over product lifetime.
Common proprietary L
Sad times, I remember first learning from Tornado Twin tutorials way back in version 3. At this stage of my life, I basically develop exclusively for game jams, and give away my weekend warrior projects for free. The new pricing model, as currently described, would not affect me. However, trust has been eroding for a while. Trust is gone now. I do not trust Unity not to alter the deal further. I fear that I may become liable for fees that I did not agree to when I published, for lack of a better term, my games to the internet. I’ve been looking at features offered up in Unreal for a while. I guess it is time to start watching tutorials.
So do game developers have lobbyists to ban this shit?
It’s already illegal, so it’s not like it needs any banning.
🤔 So what’s stopping people from simply making games under the free license and selling them anyway without paying Unity ridiculous taxes and fees?
Also now would be a great time to just use Godot and be done with it.
Last time I checked out Godot it wasn’t exactly what you called fully featured. So really it isn’t an unequivalent replacement.
Then it’s time for us to put our heads together and make it so. Godot’s open source.
Sure but then we just get back around to the whole “why don’t people just build their own engine” arguement.
If I am making a game then I don’t want to spend time building out an engine first. I am very grateful to the people who do spend their time updating the engine but I don’t actually have the time.
And then we just go back around to the “too bad, we don’t have a choice” argument. We don’t have a choice. The fact that it’s hard or inconvenient to make one doesn’t change the fact that we have to. Stop being lazy and focus on making or improving a free open-source engine so you can make games. Priorities first. You can’t make a game without a suitable engine so you don’t have a choice regardless of any other consideration or circumstance.
Life is not always easy or convenient. Often, it’s the opposite. And you have to deal with that.
The fact that it’s hard or inconvenient to make one doesn’t change the fact that we have to. Stop being lazy and focus on making or improving a free open-source engine so you can make games.
You seem to underestimate the immense amount of work a good quality engine requires. It’s not about being lazy or having some neglectable inconveniences. For a lot of, especially smaller, developers this is a matter of financial survival.
Open source is cool, but requires dedicated regular contributors. The more work there is to do, the more important this and the number of contributors is. And there are not enough good engineers who like to dedicate their free time for such unpaid work. This just doesn’t work very well with such a capitalistic economy system that we have now.
Licenses and copyright laws. When you make a game with Unity, you’re using proprietary code from Unity which has a license stating that the free version can only be used under certain circumstances. You’d be braking this license agreement if you distribute a game outside those conditions
How could they enforce such a thing? Just incorporate in another country and put the money there. Accept payment for micro transactions in Bitcoin. It’s not like they could take a foreign company to court; you just have to pick the right country that doesn’t honor such things.
The thing about unity is that it’s not just a software you use to program the game. When you distribute the game, you also distribute the engine. Since the engine is licensed to you under a special license, distributing it in a way that’s not permitted is copyright infringement. You agree to the license when you use unity, it’s like signing a contract. And if you breach this contract, Unity has all the rights to take legal action against you for profiting off their proprietary engine without paying them.
It also just doesn’t make sense to even try that. If you’re at the point where you’d have to share your profits with unity, your game will be making enough sales that it’s probably big enough for unity to notice it. And if you manage to keep your copyright infringement hidden from them, then your game is probably so small that you wouldn’t be paying anyways.
So yeah, it’s simply illegal, and unity will take legal action if they’re losing out on enough money
Licensing and copyright infringement doesn’t mean jack shit if you do business with an entity from a country that doesn’t respect such things. Even lawsuits wouldn’t do anything in that case.
Enforcement is the only thing that truly matters.
Good luck selling your game if unity asks every distributor to remove your game for copyright infringement.
I’m not saying it’s impossible, you can go ahead and try. But you asked what stops people and the answer is laws. If it was so easy to do what you’re suggesting, then everyone would do it
I’m surprised someone hasn’t launched a game platform in some other country to help developers skirt such laws, point in fact.
If you’re at the point where you’d have to share your profits with unity, your game will be making enough sales that it’s probably big enough for unity to notice it. And if you manage to keep your copyright infringement hidden from them, then your game is probably so small that you wouldn’t be paying anyways.
From my experience that is not true. Unity has a very dedicated team of lawyers who are constantly looking out for possible licence infringiments. And they would rather inquire twice than to ignore someone for being “too small to notice”.
How I made this experience: In univeristy I worked on a research project regarding immersion in gaming. We used Unity for creating virtual environments to conduct our experiments. For that we acquired a couple of education licenses which were strictly bound to non-profit usage. In return we got them for free. Some months later we received mail from Unitiy lawyers who suspected that we broke the terms of our license. The matter was cleared up after a while. But still, I was astonished by the dedication and energy they invested. It makes sense though. Their business depends on it.