This only makes sense. Unity is a very big part of what makes a game work and building and maintaining the Unity engine costs a lot of work. They deserve some share of the money made on a game. That share should ideally be proportional to how much money is made by the developer, which should be proportional to the amount of times the game is downloaded. And this is only one of their plans. There are other plans as well. So maybe someone can explain to me why this is not just a sound business decision apart from: I don’t want to pay any money?
I agree with the essence of your post, but the part about Unity already charging devs proportionally based on sales is not true. The editor is currently licensed per-seats and there is currently no cap to how much money you can make if you run the enterprise license, which is 5k/year per employee.
They deserve some share of the money made on a game. That share should ideally be proportional to how much money is made by the developer
Yes, and that is what they already do, as does Unreal.
which should be proportional to the amount of times the game is downloaded
Eh, no. How many unique times a game is uninstalled, perhaps, but not how many over all. That’s clearly stupid.
“This only makes sense. Ovens are a very big part of what makes food and designing and building the ovens costs a lot of work. They deserve some share of the food made in the oven. That food should ideally be proportional to how many edibles items are made by the chef, which should be proportional to the amount of times the food is baked. And this is only one of their plans. There are other plans as well. So maybe someone can explain to me why this is not just a sound business decision apart from: I don’t want to give away my baked food?”
Unity already charges money once you hit a certain revenue from your game, it’s only free if you don’t get a lot of sales.
More importantly, according to the article, when questioned it seems Unity hasn’t given any proper thought into this model.
If a user installs the game and then uninstalls and reinstalls, it counts as 2 installs that must be paid for. Not only is that unfair, it can lead to abuse. Angry with a change the developer made? Uninstall and reinstall 30 times (automate it) and you will actually cost the Dev money.
What about pirated copies? Unity will still “phone home” and the result will be a developer paying for 1mil installs that he earned nothing from.
What if your game is free to play?
There were some other issues like that mentioned too (in the twitter post in the article).
By that logic Microsoft should also be able to charge for any software installation that happens on windows. That also means any and all installations for the customer should be single use, because now all installations cost money.
Would you be willing to pay a certain amount of money any time you want to install some software, doesn’t even matter if you’ve already paid for it? Because that’s the business plan you call “sound”.
I call that stupid.
Yeah, you can call that stupid, but I am not stupid. But regardless of your insult, let me talk to you.
I am not sure which Microsoft product you are talking about, but certain Microsoft products are indeed charged this way. It is called an OEM license and while typically every OEM license is negotiated on different terms (per license, per revenue, per download, per install, per duration of usage, etc.), the basic idea is usually that some amount of money will be made by Microsoft proportional to how much use your product is getting. In the Enterprise world it is also common to charge by how much value the user is getting out of the product, which whole sales departments are trying to figure out on a case by case basis with complicated excel sheets. I mean, it is not like Unity invented this model. In fact, Microsoft got as big as it got by selling a pay per copy version of MS-DOS to IBM.
Unity is an ingredient that makes games work. The game is made with Unity and is shipped with the Unity engine packaged inside, just like any other ingredient. So explain to my why Unity can not define some metric which will highly correlate with the amount of usage and charge based on that metric?
So what I get from Unity’s site is that they will charge per download. So yeah, potentially you can download a game three times to three different devices or even to the same devices you’ve wiped. But I would claim that generally speaking the number of downloads is a good indicator of how often a game is used. If you don’t like a game you are generally going to download it only once. If you really like the game you are likely to download it again and again to new devices and after wipes. It isn’t perfect for sure, but every other metric you can come up with also has a fair share of problems. Maybe you tell me which one is the one that does not have any problems and is still simple enough to bill upon?
I am not sure which Microsoft product you are talking about, but certain Microsoft products are indeed charged this way.
Windows. If Unity is a large part of what makes games work then Windows is arguably an even larger part of what makes most consumer software work. If it’s acceptable to charge for Unity usage then it should also be acceptable to charge for Windows usage. After all if you want to install Unity development tools on Windows you need to use Windows. Then following your logic that means Microsoft should be able to charge, in this example charge Unity Technologies, every time someone installs the Unity development tools because the tools literally won’t work without Windows.
And if this became the norm then that cost will be offloaded to the customers. That would mean if you’ve built a new computer and want to play Skyrim you’re going to pay x amount to install Chrome (or Firefox), then pay another x amount to install Steam and finally pay another x amount to install Skyrim. That’s stupid.
Maybe you tell me which one is the one that does not have any problems and is still simple enough to bill upon?
It’s called licensing and Unity developers already pay a licensing fee per year and, in theory, also per user. Some companies reuse keys (not unique to Unity or game dev) between developers because they can get away with it as just the “per user” part is already too hard for licensing companies to properly track and bill.
And to be clear I never said you’re stupid. I said your idea is stupid. Smart people can have stupid ideas as well.
