Can they tell the differences between installs or can’t they? Either way, they’re definitely lying to their users.
Even worse, https://unity.com/pricing-updates is posted on their site:
“We leverage our own proprietary data model and will provide estimates of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project – this estimate will cover an invoice for all platforms.”
Estimating how many copies you sold based on your own ‘data models’ which is impossible to track? Isn’t that like a giant red flag for laundering money?
In my opinion, it’s bad either way for different reasons
If they do tell the difference, then there is some tracking built into the machine that runs the engine, which is bad for the application user
If they don’t tell the difference, then there will be exploits for intentionally reinstall multiple times, which is bad for the application developers
It’s still bad for their profit margins when their stocks fall by 8% in one day, when major indie developers announce they’ll be moving their current projects off of Unity and future developers are deterred from using their software in the first place.
Whether they care about money or care about public relations, their shooting themselves in the foot on both counts.
Wow, 8 whole percent. And started going back up shortly after.
This should have been a 50% event. Sounds like the backlash hasn’t been severe enough yet and wall street thinks it’s probably mostly fine.
Don’t try to find a meaning in this, just switch to something FOSS. Look at how the 3D modeling world is since Blender became a real competitor.
Do the different ones have separate use cases? Or are they all pretty similar in terms of intended functionality and user knowledge requirements?
This whole thing is absurd and overcomplicated - they could have just copied Unreal and slightly undercut them.
It isn’t too complicated, but for example, a game which made $2 million in gross revenue would owe Epic Games $50,000, because it would pay 5 percent of $1 million, keeping the first million entirely—minus whatever other fees are owed, such as Steam’s cut.
There should also absolutely have been a grandfather clause for games already released.
I get Unity needs to make money. They’ve never been profitable. But they’ve seriously overcomplicated the whole thing and gotten people angry at them.
I’m not even sure this is a price increase. It probably is, but I think a lot of people will pay less.
They are just reserving the right to bankrupt you, at random, without any previous warning, because they want. There’s no good reasoning anywhere.
Do installs of the same game by the same user across multiple devices count as different installs?
We treat different devices as different installs. We don’t want to track identity across different devices.
Jesus Christ. A single user can freely install the game repeatedly and bankrupt a creator.
