i’m sure this will never be abused
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if the Unity servers assume all first-time executions of the runtime are legitimate instead of correlating to backend from store platforms/sales numbers and/or ignoring device identifiers: yes, of course
this isn’t going to bury any ol’ game because the fee doesn’t kick in until revenue and install thresholds are met, so if piracy or mass automated installation could pump one number but the other number stays stagnant, they still won’t owe anything/as much
with that said, if devs are going “hey this seems bad”, I would listen to them
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also I’m an idiot and Unity doesn’t (didn’t) have revenue share but make money on dev seat licensing so yeah, this is gonna piss people off because it’s a de facto revenue share
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But developers get a discount if they put Unity’s ad service in their game! : PPP
one potential impact of this on bundles/charity bundles in particular https://twitter.com/DevRelCallum/status/1701604403332182349
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i’m guessing this means the unity runtime installer or whatnot will be required to phone home (so unity can tally the installs), so you probably won’t be able to install unity games without being on the internet, eh?
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the idea of a reality where gamers can literally organize a mass-install campaign of studios or developers they don’t like who use Unity (which we all know they’d absolutely do) in order to put them in financial debt is where we’re at. no review-bombing or metacritic bombing, literally just taking money directly out of the pockets of a developer. and it applies retroactively too? this is just insane to me
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this tweet does a good job of underlying a lot of potential issues:
https://twitter.com/ScottTRichmond/status/1701632624882782301
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as a longtime unity developer: this fuckin sucks ass
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Looks like Football Manager 24 is going to have the J-League!
It’s big news to me, okay.
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yeah so, the big issue is having to relearn how to Do Stuff In a Game Engine. Like making a little character walk around with player input and not fall through the ground. Every time a game engine does some head ass shit like this you’re like “well, do I spend a while relearning stuff?” or do you keep going at it? In my case the first time this happened was when Flash started to go, I had made a bunch of games in Flixel which are now sorta lost to time. That’s when I finally picked up Unity after years of going “I should learn this engine” and now I’m like “well, it’s time I actually learn Godot”.
but there’s other stuff too, like Unity had multiple vehicle simulation plugins. Am I going to have to implement my own vehicle sim because nobody else has? There’s a lot of 3D stuff that Unity took care of that is not in any other engine, and so leaving Unity behind represents a huge step back in what kind of games an individual can realize.
Unity corp is in full rentseeking mode with this, knowing that large scale developers can’t just move huge install bases to a whole new engine. They don’t care about small scale developers at all. They cancelled an internal game they were working on, something a lot of developers requested, so they could make development and release tools that developers would actually use.
anyway, like i said, this sucks ass.
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yeah - i’ve had another friend who uses Unity tell me this too. so much of the current proliferation of smaller scale developers being able to realize more ambitious things in their games (especially basically any 3D game) is because how many random plugins and tutorials there are for Unity that people made over the years to make things easier for developers, esp people who don’t really know much about coding. that’s really how so many people use Unity at this point. and bc of that, that’s become the expectation on the player/audience side too.
so when that’s gone when people stop using Unity, and Godot obviously isn’t there yet… it def feels like the whole space is taking a step back. which could also mean a lot of people who are so entrenched in Unity just giving up on game development. certainly if you’re someone who is a small developer who has used Unity for your game, you’re incentivized for not ever wanting greater success on it lest you hit that 200,000 mark somewhere down the line and go in debt. being successful at a mid level suddenly becomes a massive liability you want to avoid, which will keep people in line from seeking more avenues to promote their thing. and those who do have the resources and are still able to meet player/audience expectations will continue to do well while more people are pushed out of the space. another sort of rich get richer while more people get pushed to the margins moment.
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andi mcclure’s read on this situation:
This is what I believe in my heart:
What I am 100% convinced, reading this announcement (and the wordy-but-explains-surprisingly-little “FAQ”) is that Unity specifically believes their “audience” is creators of cookie-cutter, app-store-flooding “free to play”/live-service games, and this announcement is them admitting out loud that they believe this and they’re no longer even thinking about any other user. The “free to play” crowd is the only group of developers for whom this change makes sense. And by “makes sense” I don’t mean “is a good deal”. I mean that’s the only lens through which the announcement is coherently understandable at all. These are the only customers who are going to be able to look at the deal and be able to evaluate “is this a good deal, or not” rather than it just being extremely confusing.For indie/itch devs, the structure’s bafflingly punitive. The seeming failure to even consider demo installs, demo web embeds, things like Epic Store giveaways makes the rules impossible to follow. For AAA devs, the price is so bafflingly lowball it’s unclear why Unity would even bother. But for “FTP” developers, this is a column in a spreadsheet. FTP is already, to my understanding, based around a calculus of “you have a cost for user acquisition, you have an average expected income per user, when the second number dips under the first you discontinue the game”. These are also the devs for whom the flippable-asset/“AI” pack-ins on the new pricing plan become a deal-sweetener (rather than just confusing, or a moral reason to boycott). What Unity’s plan does is add a small amount to the user acquisition cell in the spreadsheet, probably just high enough that Unity carefully planned it would not quite be enough to make the FTP devs switch away. The effect on anyone else is just not something Unity even thought about.
I’m really worried what this means for game preservation because it potentially creates an incentive of a type which has never existed before for pure-digital games, to simply stop distributing a game at the end of its “lifetime” instead of giving it away free or massively reducing the cost.
I wonder how well that Godot plugin that claims to be able to import Unity scenes and assets works.
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Man remember when Suda hated the current Unity CEO so much he made a parody of him the antagonist of all No More Heroes games from then on
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I know people don’t necessarily care about the sector wide factors here but it can’t be said enough how much every company that went public between the start of the pandemic and the rise in interest rates has been panicking and eating shit and fucking over entire ecosystems, because they all assumed a much more lucrative runway.
I still don’t really know if I’m opposed to the fed raising rates but it has made a lot of midsize tech companies that built whole chunks of industries during the 2010s like catastrophically cowardly. this is unfortunately par for the course and as a worker the only sensible thing to do is find a new startup (but hopefully not too new because you’re probably too tired – I made that mistake once this year and thankfully round 2 has been better) or join a corporation that’s too large to panic; as a hobbyist or a consumer it just blows
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yeah this and the rush to cram AI everywhere are two sides of the same coin of VC money drying up for everything but AI
every other web dev ops / infrastructure company is doing the same thing with restricting licensing and adding fees to their quasi-open source projects
they sewed by either co-opting open source or undermining it with “free” community licensing and now they’re reaping 
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I managed to join a non AI startup this time! right around the 200 employee mark where stuff is $$$ but chill. fingers crossed but I like them a lot and they’re growing, if anyone is interested a few months down the line
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Honestly coming from unity godot was extremely easy to pick up, there were some gotchas with entity compostion and lifecycle but over the course of a week long game jam I felt like I had gotten over the new engine curve completely
And it is just strictly better than unity imo, except for its plugin ecosystem as youd expect
But Im not a “watch a video tutoiral” guy, and I understand godot is much weaker on that front
I dont know what the experience looks like for a first time developer but I imagine its not great…
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