cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/5186904
Unity, the tech company behind one of the most popular engines for creating video games, is scrambling to clarify how a price increase for its services will work, after its announcement Tuesday morning broadly infuriated the game development community.
Why it matters: The fees, which Unity said are essential for funding development of its tech, left many game makers wondering if having a hit game through Unity would cost them more money than they could make.
- Developers spoke throughout the day of delaying their games to switch to rival Epic Games’ Unreal Engine or other services on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
- But by the evening, Unity exec Marc Whitten was updating Axios on the policies, potentially defusing some concerns raised by game creators.
Details: The new “Runtime Fee” announced Tuesday morning is tied to a player’s installations of a game, an action that previously didn’t cost developers anything.
- With Unity’s new plan, developers who use Unity’s free tier of development services would owe Unity $0.20 per installation once their game hit thresholds of 200,000 downloads and earn $200,000 in revenue.
- Developers paying over $2,000 a year for a Unity Pro plan would have to hit higher thresholds and would be charged with lower fees.
- The newfee system will begin at the start of 2024.
Yes, but: Game developers, rallying on X, began fuming immediately that any game enjoying a spike in installations due to a big sale, inclusion in a charity bundle or even just by being included in a popular subscription service like Microsoft’s Game Pass, would trigger back-breaking Unity fees.
- “Stop it,” development studio Innersloth, makers of the hit Among Us, tweeted Tuesday evening. “This would harm not only us, but fellow game studios of all budgets and sizes…”
- Another studio, Aggro Crab, called on Unity to reverse its plans, saying that it feared that its next game, set for release to the 25 million subscribers on Game Pass, could incur fees that “threaten the stability of our business.”
The intrigue: Unity has scrambled to clarify and in one key case alter what it has said about its policies around the fees.
Zoom in: After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unity’sWhitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation. (A spokesperson told Axios that Unity had “regrouped” to discuss the issue.)
- He hoped this would allay fears of “install-bombing,” where an angry user could keep deleting and re-installing a game to rack up fees to punish a developer.
- But an extra fee will be charged if a user installs a game on a second device, say a Steam Deck after installing a game on a PC.
Between the lines: Runtime fees will also not be charged for installations of game demos, Whitten said, unless the demo is part of a download that includes the full game (early access games would be charged for an installation, he noted).
- Games offered for charity or included in charities will be exempt from the fees. Unity will provide a way for developers to inform Unity that their games are being offered that way, Whitten said.
- As for Game Pass and other subscription services, Whitten said that developers like Aggro Crab would not be on the hook, as the fees are charged to distributors, which in the Game Pass example would be Microsoft.
- Runtime fees will also not be charged for installations of game demos, Whitten said, unless the demo is part of a download that includes the full game (early access games would be charged for an installation, he noted).
Of note: Whitten estimates that only about 10% of Unity’s developers will wind up having to pay any fees, given the thresholds games need to hit.
What they’re saying: “Our core point with this is simply to make sure that we have the right value exchange so that we can continue to invest in our fundamental mission to make sure that we can deliver the best tools for people to make great games.”
- "It’s not fun to get a bunch of angry feedback on any particular day. And I think that that is us needing to clarify some of these points.
- “But we’re we’re listening and we will continue to make sure that we deliver the best that we can.”
Go deeper… Unity CEO: Generative AI will make better games, but won’t steal jobs
Unity saying that Microsoft is on the hook for game pass installs is the quickest way to get your ass destroyed in court by Microsoft lawyers. Microsoft has dumped so much money into game pass to beat Sony off the block that any threat to that business model will be seen as an act of fucking war.
Tomorrow’s headline: Microsoft Corp has just bought Unity.
Honestly, thats probably a better alternative to the current CEO, formerly from EA, who sold 2000 shares just prior to this announcement and has never purchased any additional shares in Unity.
After all of the drama over the Activision acquisition, I doubt MS is trying to make any more bold gaming moves for a second. Buying an entire non-proprietary engine would be an easy target for anti-trust lawsuits.
Not to mention there is no way Microsoft is going to pay it. They’ll find a way to pass it on to developers or to end users who don’t get a choice.
This is a truly pathetic attempt to save face. Fuck Unity, its now proven definitively that they cannot be trusted for current and future projects. The only thing they’ll learn from this is to not be so loud about these sorts of changes.
If they even survive (hopefully they don’t, because this beyond scumbaggery)
Unity “Vadering the deal” is enough reason that no business should choose Unity for anything whatsoever going forward. They are now a huge legal and financial risk to any business endeavor at all.
No matter how much they relent, developers should not get complacent and trust that things will stay this way. Unity will go back on the offense once the outrage quiets down a little. Don’t do it. Transition now before you end up in a worse situation.
Takes a while to make a game. If I had to start right now, I would not pick the product where I wouldn’t be sure where it stands in 2-3 years.
Epic Games is probably celebrating right now.
and Godot is positively cheering
I think companies tend to overvalue support and undervalue software freedom. You get developer lock-in once people are trained on closed software, then they start squeezing you for every dime because they know it’s too expensive to migrate.
This honestly sounds like a lot of overhead in development. How does Unity track my installs? Do I have to do anything to my games? Do I have to warn users about privacy related to Unity’s tracking? Does it have to be in my TOS? These are just privacy questions.
How does Unity track my installs?
All they’ll say is what amounts to “just trust us, it’s fiiiine”
From that post:
Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs?
A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data.
Yup, no information on how they actually get that information. The only assumption I can make is that it’s some sort of telemetry in the installer or the engine
I’m miffed to say the least. I hate 2D in Unreal and I’m mid development in Unity. But now I might as well halt and move to Unreal.
Edit: my feelings are totally biased. I’ll get over it.
I hear 2D is pretty good in Godot
Godot. Defold.
Of course your feelings are going to be biased. Anyone being told they’re about to get royally screwed is going to be biased because it’s personal to them
I meant specifically how I feel about making 2D in UE since I am used to Unity. But yeah sudden ass-fucking policy changes are bound to piss people off
What kind of game engine charges per install? Not per sale or even per user. Really bad precedent.
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Haha EA exec, that was explains everything.
X/Tweet/thing from Stephen Totilo
NEW - I got a major update from Unity about their new fees
- Unity “regrouped” and now says ONLY the initial installation of a game triggers a fee
- Demos mostly won’t trigger fees
- Devs not on the hook for Game Pass
How about don’t charge for installs? Nobody back off them for this keep at it, they’re relenting.
Demos mostly won’t trigger fees
“Mostly”? That’s absolutely grotesque.
There’s just no way this was ever going to go well, no matter how they clarify. Oh, you can inform Unity of upcoming charity bundles to be exempt from fees? You know what’s better than that? Not having a fee for something that stupid. No need to inform anyone of anything.
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With as many Unity games as there are, saying only 10% of developers will end up having to pay is still quite a large number of developers.
Also, I wonder how against the TOS it would be for game devs of existing titles to sandbox Unity behind a firewall and prevent it from accessing the internet. And they say the change applies to old games, do older builds of Unity have the telemetry already? How long has it been in place?
sigh… isn’t this more or less the same thing that Reddit did with their API fees? look how well that turned out for them.
Unity is an extremely flawed game engine with unsolvable memory management issues. Most game devs choose to go with Unity because it’s cheap, and then end up getting a lot of complaints because of the previously mentioned unsolvable memory issues.
IMO Unreal is the better game engine, in pretty much every aspect. i haven’t checked out Godot yet, but based on all the hype i’m seeing and their prioritizing accessibility, it seems to be a great choice.
It is exactly the same approach
Just be rich and pay the extra yearly fee so you don’t gotta pay as much per install. Duh
Billionaires hate this one trick ?
The people in charge over there at Unity are some pretty stupid people if they think we won’t see right through their bullshit.
There is no solid way for them to track this. Not everything is distributed on an app/game store. And what constitutes an initial install anyway? What if I have ten gaming rigs and I buy direct from a developer and install the game to all ten rigs…is that ten initial installs?
Time to dump them and move on.
I’m thinking they might addsome engine-side telemetry we don’t know about, but they’re refusing to actually say anything about how they’re tracking this.
Right, and I know this isn’t anything any of us can answer, but what constitutes an initial install? What specific keys are sent in the telemetry to know that I, ulkesh, have already installed this game once? It is literally impossible in so many ways to know this without forcing the user to provide some static key (such as a license code). Technically steam has such license codes, as do most, if not all app/game stores like it. But if the developer decides to publish without using such an app store, does this mean Unity will force them to put in some kind of license code mechanism? What if it’s a simple game that happens to get downloaded and installed over 200,000 times and the game costs the consumer only $0.99? What if the game is distributed for free? What if a user refunds post-installation? How can a developer even trust the data Unity gathers for this?
Perhaps some of this has been addressed, but Unity doesn’t control distribution – this is the WHOLE reason they should stick to their tiers of licensing their platform and not try to get a piece of the distribution pie. If they want to control distribution, then set up their own damn app store and force people who develop on Unity to use it (which will be met with exactly the same resistance). And, we all know it would fail miserably. They’re not the only game engine in town, they’re just one with a low barrier for entry. Why is it so many companies that were once doing good become such greedy pieces of crap? Reddit (fuck Spez), Twitter (well we know whose fault that was), and now Unity. I suspect there are betting pools at casinos on which company will be next to be so stupid as to cause their own demise.
They claim that repeated installs will not be counted. How do they define repeated installs?
It’s worth clarifying - because it’s easy to imagine some script kiddy that hates a certain dev or just wants to mess around, who does whatever they can to make a botnet of false accounts repeatedly installing some free game or demo.
