Unity has changed its pricing model, and game developers are pissed off::Unity has announced that starting on January 1st, 2024, it will implement a new pricing model that will charge developers based on how many times a game was installed.
From what I understand this change will retroactively apply to games released in the past as well. I think that’s a rather scummy move on Unity’s part. “I’ve altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it further.”
And it’s not like game devs have been using a free product. They already pay for it through expensive licenses per developer.
If the justification on Unity’s part is true, that for each install of a Unity game the runtime environment needs to be downloaded from their servers, then maybe they should look into fixing that rather than nickle and diming their customers for each individual install (customers in this case being the game developers)
If by “scummy” you mean “questionably legal” (obligatory IANAL), then yeah.
I’m no legal expert, and I have no familiarity with Unity’s licensing terms. So I didn’t want to outright call what they are doing illegal.
For all I know they did technically have a clause in their licensing agreement that allows them to do this. But that wouldn’t make it any less of a scum move imo.
It’ll be interesting to see what the lawyers will make of this.
I read in a other thread, that they’re not doing it retro actively on paper. Its part of the new terms for new licenses.
But since their licenses are perpetual and need to be renewed constantly, it will affect everyone when they hit the next cycle. Everything released afterwards is then affected. This even includes current projects in the works and even finished ones when you want to do a bug fix. That way, they seem to be “safe” to do that legally.
Nothing is downloaded from Unity servers. This is an attempt at recouping money from developers making over 1M per year.
It’s not recouping if they were never owed it… This is a shakedown, pure and simple.
This is not the point I was trying to make. Replace “recoup” by whatever term you see fit I don’t think they are owed this money either. They are trying to cut on their quaterly losses tho, which are massives.
According to the article, it’s not retroactively charged, but still bad if your game is about to come out and you haven’t accounted for this.
Other articles I have been reading on the topic do mention it:
Unity has also clarified the changes are “not retroactive or perpetual”, noting it will only “charge once for a new install” made after 1st January 2024. However, while it won’t be charging for previously made installs, fees do indeed apply to all games currently on the market, meaning should any existing player of an older game that exceeds Unity’s various thresholds decide to re-install it after 1st January, a charge will still be made.
When I say that it applies retroactively, I mean that it applies to games released in the past.
It’s true that they are not retroactively charging devs for past downloads. That would have been even worse.
So if i want to ruin a developer, I only need to install and deinstall all day?
Time to learn Godot.
But with the new interest it will improve much faster. I hope it will be on the same level as Blender.
They expect Game Pass titles to have their bill footed by Microsoft.
There’s kicking the nest, and then there’s kicking the fucking queen bee.
Honestly the most credible theory I can come up with for why Unity is doing this is that it’s an attempt to force MS to acquire them to stop the effect this BS will have on gamepass and C#
Thats still a really stupid plan. If they want to be bought off you’d assume they’d want to sell out at the best possible price. This measure is going to make their valuation sink so hard that they could be bought out for peanuts.
Microsoft isn’t in a position to acquire any other significant gaming companies in the near term, imo.
Either microsoft buys them, or they simply stop putting unity games on gamepass.
Can’t see them paying it (or on what basis, since MS don’t have a contract with unity in the first place).
Can’t wait an indie developer to go bankrupt because the super secret algorithm counted updates as new installations and the developer gets billed multiple times for their whole player base.
Or a rival developer, troll, corporation, etc just runs a script to uninstall/reinstall someone else’s game over and over and over again costing them an insane amount of money.
I don’t get it…Unity just forced the entire development community to use Unreal. The pricing structure isn’t even close between the two.
At 200k downloads at 1$ a pop, unreal is still free…Unity is $40k.
