I wonder why Godot and Unreal are getting so much interest today

Someone claims here that if you use Unity's internal Ad API then you will make that money back, giving people who put ads in their games a free pass.

If true, Unity is trying to force indie devs to enshittify their products.

How can be retroactive?

I mean legally. The devs agreed to a contract, it can't be changed with different economic terms later

If someone published an Unity game 4 years ago, has now abandoned the project, doesn't release any update, why needs to pay a per install fee "for supporting the runtime"? The version is now ancient. I could understand if it was "from version xx.yy"

Not to mention that it's such a sudden announcement. I mean, sure, they gave people 3 months notice in advance, but when you consider the scale of many games probably take longer than 3 months to make the decision AND actually make the switch (or make up for the switch), it's cause for quite a bit of harm.

Granted, the majority of people may not be affected by it due to needing to meet a requirement of like earning $200,000 and 200,000 installs at a minimum, but I feel like the once you reach that, it's just downhill from there.

In addition to your example of costing the devs for reinstalling the game, you now have to consider the possibility of a user (or group of users) maliciously reinstalling their games to financially damage the developer. Sure, Unity says they'll have fraud detection for stuff like that, but then it's literally up to the people you owe money to decide whether you should pay more or less money to them.

They actually explicitly stated as such:

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.

This feels so wrong to me that I feel like they must be going against some law, or they need to be sued to set precedent. I'm not a lawyer, I just think this smells completely like a giant corporation scamming people.

It was decided that game engine development was over complicating the goal of Blender. It detracted from actual 3D software development resources and trying to make all blender features seamless with it was nearly doubling potential work.

Default Cube is a playable character in Super Tux Kart, although unofficially through a user created addon which can be downloaded through the game’s addon feature.

Not Suzanne the monkey?

Also, it's not 3D, but you may like 140, where you play as a square that turns into a circle when jumping. It's actually a great game, like a decomposition of what it means to be a platformer.

Not the dreaded cone?

It would be great if a portion of them decided to dip their toes into game development too since it's free.

You just described what I did just before reading this comment.

Unreal is not open source, it's source-available. Open source generally gives freedoms like redistribution, yet that is explicitly not allowed by Unreal. To get access to the source, you need to agree to a licensing agreement with them.

That said, source-available is a lot better than most proprietary software licenses.

I was really confused because from some reason I was thinking that Unreal and Unity were the same.

I trust they did their best.
I also trust that any sufficiently tech savvy individual will be able to bypass that system. It only takes one person to pull it off and then it's public knowledge. Sure, they'll fix it, and then someone will do it again.
Small companies can't afford to take that risk and larger companies won't want the hassle.

It's a shame too. I liked Unity more than Unreal. Oh well.

Except this licencing change removes sustainability from all licencing models except the ones that run subscription models or advertising.

Now they say they aren't going to impose this crap over any not for profit or for profit that's earning revenue under 200K. But I have serious doubts that certain scenarios are going to slip through the cracks.

What it is essentially a way to bleed any viral indie game studio dry of their capital, which could force them to declare bankruptcy and sell off their assets.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was a way to build a unity game studio.

1. Game goes viral and reaches the threshold of 200K+ revenue
2. Every install and reinstall of the game gets charged, costs start to outweigh profits.
3. Money drains fast with no way to stop it.
4. Indie company declares bankruptcy due to cash flow issues
5. Unity demands payment for unpaid bills in assets - gets the ownership of game title as payment.
6. Unity opens game studio and continues to sell the game, while employing minimal Devs to maintain it.

Bam! they've a bunch of viral hits completely for free under their umbrella in a bunch of payments. And because they own the engine, they can make money hand over fist while stopping everyone else from doing the same.

That said I'm sure they have separate payment and licencing deals with big AAA companies. So really it's only the indie companies that end up with a viral hit that get screwed.

So the other option is that they do not open a game studio and they're merely just doing big techs dirty work and taking out their competition, while providing IP fire sales for big tech.

That said, once the company goes after a group for failure to pay this money, I wouldn't be surprised if a legal fight ensued in order to declare the terms of service unenforceable and/or anti consumer and have them nullified or forcibly rewritten/reverted. If that happens I'm sure the EFF or other non profit software foundation will end up providing legal funding and or services. Heck it could end up being a class action.