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.
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.
Smells like a lawsuit to me. Retroactively devaluing software that they were already paid for.
It’s probably a scream test that they’ll walk back with something more reasonable in the next few days.
Unity dev here. The Unity seats were always a subscription model, and this new fee system doesn’t kick in until January 1st.
So there’s no lawsuit, you don’t have to renew your subscription if you don’t want to though.
So if you don’t renew your subscription the new tax won’t effect you? From my understanding the change was retroactive and effected all previous unity games. If you don’t release a new build after the change will the tax still be applied?
They’re not gonna be able to charge you if you don’t have an active subscription
What about charging per download/install after the threshold? It sure sounds like it won’t matter if you’re subscribed or not, as their announcement mentioned Personal licenses would be charged USD 0,20 per download after the 200k lifetime
Don’t you need a subscription if you’re above the 200k threshold though?
Subscription is only for compiling
founding your business on proprietary software is just a crazy gamble.
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.
FOSS alternatives to Unity exist though. And from my personal experience it looks like Godot seems like the better engine anyways. Not to mention the fact that there is no need for a game engine to create a game. Opengl + a windowing/utility library is ideal.
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.
Common proprietary L
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”?
So whats the next step, everytime a start my car i have to pay?! F*ckin ridiculous
God dammit, don’t give the ideas!
That’s just Uber and lyft
it’s not your car tho
🤔
Oh fck me
I just gave this idea out for free…
P.S. Hopefully it wont ever come to this!
I think the real problem is how shady it seems. Like has everyone forgotten the concept of “grandfather in”? People will make new games in unity if they factor in the cost. I think people are understanding if they have the priory knowledge that unity needs to maybe start charging something. But sounds like they are asking for after these businesses already have created budgets. It sounds like it could be a bit of extortion depending on what the original agreement was. " Extortion might involve … damage to a companies financial well being."
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?
Thanks, a few Lemmy posts later and I saw this article that explain
Great link, thanks!
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It’s a truly horrible chain of events. Unity has been continually scaling back it’s development objectives, canning their developer game samples and overall it feels like they’re struggling.
While overall I’m fairly happy with Unity as a game engine, I’m not happy with Unity as a company, which seems to prioritize the strangest things while features and optimisations seem to languish
Unity was never profitable, so this makes sense
Will Garry Newman decide to reskill his devs to use Godot? Will anybody with enough power decide to do so? Imagine if game studios big and small decided “we don’t want to have to deal with this ever again, we’re making a new or investing in an existing opensource game engine”.
I wish people would see the light, but will they?
Will Garry Newman decide to reskill his devs to use Godot?
Ehhh, I doubt it. His team is currently working on Source 2 for their game S&Box. I would expect he’s pretty close with Valve so he might just use Source 2 for the foreseeable future.
Why did they use Unity instead of Source 2 for Rust?
Source 2 wasn’t really a thing when he creates rust. It’s also really easy to find Unity devs since it’s what a lot of people know.
Source was also showing its age when Rust was developed.
Rust was made about a decade ago, Source 2 wasn’t a thing yet and there weren’t many other engine options.
I see. Makes sense.
Yeah, rust released end of 2013 and valve launched source 2 for dota 2015.
Shareholder greed is astounding
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.
Nobody will ever be able to force changes on a contract retroactively on you. The only time this ever happens is if the original contract violated some law, and then the retroactive change will be ordered by a Court of law only to revert illicit gains made. So even if this current change were to affect you, you simply would not renew the subscription. You would then still be able to distribute all your previous works, because they only have to fulfill the old license agreement. Things only get more complicated if it’s a continuous development project and you want to be able to provide updates and/or new content.
If I had a dollar for every time proprietary software users act surprised when it abuses them…
Wait. All libraries will go this model.
