Unity adding a fee for devs for each time a game is installed, after certain thresholds

Some more context: Godot established the "Godot Development Fund" to accept donations directly (https://lemmy.ml/post/4815592).

I only code in Guffman

This might actually lead to that, depending on what kind of lawsuits arise from this change. Which could mean there will be pressure from others who don't have a stake in the "unity install fee" game but do have one in the "wants to change terms at a whim" game.

Or maybe it will threaten the "by continuing to use this, you agree" clause instead and open up a path to continue using a previous license agreement if you don't like a new one.

I can't imagine that it is.

If that's the case then they could simply up the charge next year to $10 to get even more money for doing absolutely nothing. And then to $20 the next year and so forth. There's no sane court anywhere in the world who would say "Yeah, that sounds reasonable!" and even the less sane ones would think that's bonkers.

Way to ruin a comedic moment.

Not sure about that, but he is a boss character in not one but two Suda51 games. (Suda51 was apparently screwed over by the guy who was, at the time EA's CEO.)

John Riccitiello

A CEO who can't manage. Shocker.

Just because it looks better to shareholders now doesn't make it a good business decision. I swear the majority of CEO types don't give a damn if the company goes under in a few years because they either:

1. Have a golden parachute in place by sucking up to the Board.

2. Will move on to another CEO position at another company before it folds. Bonus points if they golden parachute on the way out.

Guys they're artists. They deserve to be paid every time you play any game. You wouldn't steal a car

Every copy has to be hand made by routing bits around the copper highway ar ludicrous speeds, and rearrange them manually to form what is called "a game".

I know and thank goodness for that... but there will be projects that simply won't be able to afford to move to entirely different engines. It's a lot of work that might have to be redone.

It's probably still going to take some projects with it. If you've sunk hundreds or even thousands of manhours into a project you can't just... do it again, or at least not always. Especially not if you've invested money as well as time, which is probably the case for most indie projects that aren't literal one-person shows.

Honest question though, what other small engines have the support and features of unity while also having the permissive licensing they used to have?

At least when I was looking into engines unreal and unity really stood out as the only useable free engines.

I can’t even blame him. I would too. This is essentially a situation where the only option is going to be a rewrite from the ground up in a new language and new engine.

If I was an indie game dev I’d be questioning my future right now too.

Indies are the ones who deserve to die the least.

That clarification makes it even worse, this is obviously an attempt to push free to play or indie games out the window while making major bank.

The fraud detection will not help at all to prevent abuse especially in cases like steam family sharing where other "users" won't have to pay to install the game!

There's literally no reason to charge per game install here, the only possible reason is greed

So basically they’re explicitly condoning it. That’s not just bad, but even worse that they’re doubling down that a delete+reinstall will charge the dev twice.

This will end a lot of indie projects and they’ve basically destroyed their good standing in indie dev circles.

So once a game stops selling it had better hope its player base dries up and stops reinstalling it? The way that is phrased makes it sound like you could net lose money over the long term if sales decline and people keep reinstalling it

The problem is that its so expensive to build from scratch. All Unity does is build just the engine, and that's enough to make it a 7000 person company. Trying to build a game engine and then an actual game on top is a herculean effort.

This is why open source software is so important. It enables these small companies to pool their resources and share an engine as long as they each contribute fixes back.

Yeah this is why many bigger studios just use their own Engines even if they're shit.

After seeing the way WotC handled DnD and MtG, and the way Musk has been dragging Twitter through the shit, I really believe that shareholders are trying to take what they can while they can and peace out. No one is looking at the long term anymore. Everyone just wants theirs, fuck everything else.

Rule 6: Unreal does the same thing, everyone switches to Godot 😂

It is management

CEO or whatever used to be head of EA

Unreal engine will probably do the same shit than Unity, Unreal engine might be opensource (not FOSS), I think there's the same clauses about production royalties.

Even if Godot wins, there's a cost to move.

I'd imagine Unity user would most likely be looking for a C# based engine instead of a C++ or Python based one, and O3DE doesn't support C#.

Can you name some? Honest question, I don't know either Unity or Unreal in depth, I'm just aware that Godot still struggles with performance in the 3D department

Godot has Rust support with GDextensions

Is Rust a game engine?

I’m familiar with the coding language but I wasn’t aware of any game engine stuff outside of developing your own

Stride might be worth looking into if you're going for 3D stuff, it uses C#

Capitalism, yay!

That's great to hear. C# has grown on me so much lately! It's like TypeScript but not sucky.

GDScript (python)

I think GFScript is it's own language, but looks definitely inspired by Python

And how do I know which ones those are?

You could also imagine a malicious actor phoning home to that API to drive up "installs" for a game and make a small studio or individual deal with massive fees. If a company is making these kinds of changes against the better judgement of their user base AND their internal analysis (lots of stock was sold two weeks ago), I'm doubtful they even care to properly deal with those kinds of problems.

This actively hurts the developers and helps Unity.

The devs will be charged for every install. Even if that install wasn't legitimate.

So if you pirate a Unity game, it's no longer a victimless crime. You're actively making the developer pay for your piracy.

Like normally, I am totally cool with piracy. But giving piracy as a solution here is actually detrimental to the developers and doesn't hurt Unity the company at all.

That's even worse for the devs, because they might still need to pay Unity for your install.

Ah yes, because it's that difficult to spoof a new PC. You can run a tool similar to a kernel level anti cheat "ban bypass", run the game, and cost the developer up to 20 cents. With a relatively simple script, this can be done many times per hour on a single PC, easily racking up cost for the developers.

This is a bad idea, no matter how you implement it. If it goes through, it will be abused.

The clarification on Xitter states deleting and reinstalling is 2 charges, the same as installing to 2 different devices. https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1701679721027633280?s=20

Except that that is a back pedal on their part and their FAQ plainly says they actually have no way of tracking what is a new install versus a re-install; which is why they decided to count all installs to begin with.

Looks like they know very well what they are doing. This seems illegal, but we all know they get away with it.

I sure feel glad to never have gotten into developing with it. When I saw that a blank project generated a ~231MB executable back in 4.1 or so, I simply ditched it.

Licenses that allow retroactive changes are terrible for the end user, fuck up the company's image and might give a significant boost to competition. Hasbro trying to pull that shit with DnD earlier this year comes to mind.

Our terms of service provide that Unity may add or change fees at any time. We are providing more than three months advance notice of the Unity Runtime Fee before it goes into effect. Consent is not required for additional fees to take effect, and the only version of our terms is the most current version; you simply cannot choose to comply with a prior version. Further, our terms are governed by California law, notwithstanding the country of the customer.

Yup lol.

What's funny and sad is that about 3 years ago on r/godot, I had an argument with a Unity fanboy over this exact thing. He was demanding someone give him a reason that Godot should exist, when, in his humble opinion, Unity did everything and did it better.

My take was that you don't actually own your Unity-made game. You might own the assets and trademark, but as long as you're licensing the engine, you are subject to the whims of Unity.

Of course that was theoretical, until today.

I'm pretty sure that even if the license agreement does have such language that it won't uphold in court. And there are enough big companies using Unity for this to go to court if they try to come to collect.

I mean seriously, if that would be legally possible, nothing would prevent them from uping the charge to $10, $20 or even $100 per installation, applied retroactively.

Q: Does this affect WebGL and streamed games?

A: Games on all platforms are eligible for the fee but will only incur costs if both the install and revenue thresholds are crossed. Installs - which involves initialization of the runtime on a client device - are counted on all platforms the same way (WebGL and streaming included

https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/