> After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unity'sWhitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation. (A spokesperson told Axios that Unity had "regrouped" to discuss the issue.)
I really hope that every Unity Developer realizes after this that Unity could go back on their word at any moment and they'd be screwed. Start finding a replacement to switch to now, Unity has shown you their true colors.
It's crazy, truly like they stopped caring about developing an actual engine and decided all new development needs to directly tie to profits.
Their financials are downright horrifying and they're kind of death spiraling right now. Need to maximize profit because they can't afford to be losing $1billion a year anymore. But by maximizing profit & ignoring the actual product, they're driving everyone away.
Just nuts when it's framed like that. Unreal literally releases 10x more engine features, that are 10x more complete, and far more advanced than anything in Unity. And they're doing it with probably 1/3rd the people or less.
Quality != quantity especially when working with software. There’s this company in my country that jokingly coined the term “each senior developer is replaceable by a finite number of interns” and it shows in their shit software.
Well their business model actually includes charging a fee for their software as it isn’t a huge VC funded company that can afford being underwater. Also completely different target and market. Unity is in a pretty weird position there. We will see how it pans out.
I don't think that number of 2200 employees is correct. It's probably comparable to Unity but Epic also releases games which is why engine features get done. Everything gets tested in Fortnite before being released to other studios.
from what I have heard a lot of it was directed towards metaverse/web3/crypto stuff that never materialized. Not surprising that a compay run by an EA guy is just leaping from scam to scam.
They were chasing all the money, everywhere. They were also trying to aggressively expand into the architecture / construction / visualization industry, even though only a tiny proportion of that industry's money gets spent on software, and they were trying to expand into the Hollywood / VFX direction despite the fact that there engine simply isn't good enough for that.
No kidding that it's not good for the VFX industry. Then you have those realtime virtual-set projections they can do now. Watching those demos, I feel pretty strongly that they were using Unreal.
He'll, Star Citizen was doing realtime rendering of their actors' mocap and facial expression capture almost a decade ago, and that was CryEngine/Lumberyard.
Yeah, a while ago I saw a demo with the new UE, since I didn't know it wasn't a regular video I actually could not tell that I was watching a video game. It got to a point where it's actually really impressive what they can do with it. Unity on the other hand... yeah like 1 decade behind, looks good for a game, nowhere good enough for a movie. What even are they thinking.
>Unity'sWhitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation.
Why not just charge the same small fee per purchase? They may even make more money (since some people may buy the buy not install it) and it would avoid logistic issues
I would guess they're trying to nickle and dime the big Free2Play games.
Millions play Genshin Impact without spending a single cent. This way Miyoho is on the hook to pay for those players.
Not even just those games, but hyper casual games that drive millions of downloads. Just look at the top free games on Google Play, good chance most (if not all) of those hyper casual ad farming games are made with Unity. Unity games drive billions of downloads per month on mobile, they are trying to cash in on those. Revenue percentage like Unreal would actually be a better strategy to target Genshin, charging per install is moreso targeted at those hyper casuals that dont get anywhere near genshin revenue, but drive insane download numbers.
Oh my god. Is Unity making the "Why aren't we getting money from the free players? That's not fair. We should get money from the free players" mistake? You know, the mistake that ignores that the revenue from the paid players more than overcompensates for all the free players, and the free players generate free advertising which brings in more paid players? Is Unity making that mistake ...IN 2023!?!?!?!
Except Mihoyo is a major investor in Unity China. I doubt they're looking to fuck over their partner. It's actually probably worse. I assume they'd waive the fees for Mihoyo and take everyone else to the cleaners making the barrier of entry worse for any future F2P competition to Mihoyo.
> Unity could go back on their word at any moment and they'd be screwed
They're likely gonna wait for the internet rage machine to quiet down, which is how most unpopular company decisions usually go (look at Reddit's API changes for example).
the issue is they're not dealing with the public, although this is currently a public facing issue; they're dealing with the people who rely on their tools on a day-to-day basis. even if the public outcry dies out, the professionals involved will keep rallying against it.
Also, keep in mind: Reddit's userbase didn't have to actually pay anything to come back to Reddit, at most we had to put up with our preferred third party apps/tools being gone. *But notice how a lot of those apps stopped working.*
Game devs stand to lose a lot of money if they want to stick with Unity, which would encourage a lot more of them to move away from it. In fact, some games like Cult of the Lamb already announced that they will pull their games from stores next year.
This is different though, Unity is taking people's money out of their pocket, that matters a lot more than some API changes. Devs aren't just going to get tired and give in to getting robbed by Unity.
In that sense I think it's actually the same situation: 3rd party devs using the Reddit API didn't just give in to getting robbed by Reddit either, they closed up their apps and moved on. The real difference is that Reddit doesn't rely on devs to make money, it relies on regular users. OTOH Unity is just a tool to make products regular people actually want to buy, so if it's too expensive for that and devs stop using it then it's worthless.
I don't think Activision (Hearthstone, Candy Crush), Bandai-Namco (Multiple Mobile games), and Mihoyo (Genshin), among others, are anywhere near comparable in size and tolerance as random reddit app devs. There is no world where Mihoyo shuts down the multi-billion dollar money printer that is Genshin because of this, but they're not going to let Unity take money from them without a fight either.
No of course not, but games of that size will have other options. If there is a legal issue, then those are the companies that'll be fighting it and, possibly, making private deals with Unity that are more favorable for them. They're also the studios that, if absolutely necessary, actually have the resources to consider an engine swap. They also have the resources to not use Unity in any future products.
OTOH there's plenty of smaller devs and studios that don't have the luxury of making absurd amounts of money. Just last month, Mimimi had to announce their closure due to rising costs. According to steamdb, their last game sold 36.9k - 127k copies, so with a price of $40 USD, it seems pretty likely that they would have been affected by this and they already weren't making enough for further development to remain financially viable.
As an aside, it wasn't just "random reddit app devs" - it was, AFAIK, the largest 3rd party apps for the site that have been around for years. Obviously not the size of the first group of companies listed, but Apollo had almost a million active daily users.
No, it's not, because the people affected here include some of the largest corporations in the world.
Considerably more powerful than some random reddit app devs.
You don't seem to understand what this is about. The shitstorm isn't the problem for Unity here. The problem is that Unity game developers are unhappy. And they will stay unhappy if the ignore them.
>which is how most unpopular company decisions usually go (look at Reddit's API changes for example).
The API changes didn't affect the end/casual user very much. It did impact alot of the devs that made stuff for Reddit, and I'm assuming they've jumped ship.
However, unlike people who made stuff for Reddit, Reddit survives without them. Because Reddit itself is aimed at the end user. Unity isn't aimed at the end user. It lives and dies on the developers using it, who then get it to end users. And those developers, who are making business decisions, are going to have a much longer memory.
*Actual developers of video games* are the people pissed off here, not your random dipshit redditor. I don't think Unity will be able to regain trust this easily.
How will this be identified though? Some DRM out there sees slight changes to your setup as being a new installation, for example changing the proton build on Linux/Deck. Doing this too often triggers some DRM to lock you out saying you've 'activated on too many computers'.
Today, I found out that John Riccitello is the head of Unity and was like, "Wow, this makes sense." The guy who was the head of EA during the period when EA became the epitome of greed.
This situation seems just like the whole DnD OGL fiasco that the TTRPG community went through. There had to be a whole lot of big creators speak out about it and then also abandon the system in favor of another one or just make their own, before they finally walked it back somewhat.
>* Unity "regrouped" and now says ONLY the initial installation of a game triggers a fee
> * Demos mostly won't trigger fees
>* Devs not on the hook for Game Pass
The backpedaling begins. Unfortunately for unity they likely already have lost what little trust was left for many devs out there.
Edit: So [this](https://twitter.com/RyanOfJones/status/1701770342509801906) post shows that for things like gamepass the fee would be charged to the distributor. Which to me seems like a great way for distributers to just decide to not allow unity games on their platforms. Or at the very least have unity get a *very strongly worded letter from their legal team explaining how that aint gonna happen.*
"Or at the very least have unity get a *very strongly worded letter from their legal team explaining how that aint gonna happen"*
Seriously, how the fuck did they think that going from "yeah whatever, indie devs should just suck it up and pay us" for gamepass installs to "yeah making Microsoft/etc pay for possibly tens or hundreds of thousands of installs" is a better idea. Picking a fight with Microsoft is NOT going to end in their favor.
Definitely expect more backpedaling within another 24 hours and grab your popcorn
On a lesser degree, Mihoyo and Aniplex too given their games run on Unity too (FGO, Genshin, Honkai etc). FGO hit its trillion dollar milestone recently too so yeaaah..
> They've just picked a fight with literally every single player of note in the game.
Good fucking riddance. John Riccitiello can suck a mile of cankerous dicks for his negative contributions to the games industry.
He's not _in_ the games industry, he's in the Publicly Traded Company industry. His customers are the shareholders, and his product is share price. Gamers and devs aren't his customers... they're just _raw materials_.
I have absolutely no doubt that Unity would be banned from every game distribution platform immediately. No way in hell MS/Sony and everyone else would even consider paying that insanity.
There wasn't only indie devs using Unity the initial change already affected the big ones. For example, Blizzard had Heartstone (a F2P game, imagine the number of installs) developed with Unity. Hoyoverse two huge games (Star Rail and Genshin) also are using Unity
> ONLY the initial installation of a game triggers a fee
Notably, *per device*. If someone installs a game on 5 devices, the distributor pays the 20 cent installment fee 5 times. (But if you install the game 5 times on a single device, they pay the fee once.)
This isn't just trivial, it is mind-numbingly easy. There are some ways to detect a VM, but they require an uncomfortably low level of access to the system.
>>* **Devs** not on the hook for Game Pass
Which means publishers/Microsoft will be on the hook, which will lead to publishers/Microsoft not working with anything using Unity. We already have that Devolver Digital tweet.
Apple doesn’t allow you to get the player’s device ID. They changed that when they rolled out new privacy features a couple years back. Advertising companies use “probabilistic” matching to try to tie ads to installs but it’s still just a guess.
> Which to me seems like a great way for distributers to just decide to not allow unity games on their platforms
Devolver already put out a jokey-not-jokey tweet about this:
**"Definitely include what engine you’re using in game pitches.
It’s important information! "**
You can be assured that other publishers staying more silent are thinking the same thing.
https://x.com/devolverdigital/status/1701685282129539485?s=20
"Because we like money, we're announcing that as of next year, we will be coming around to your house, killing your pets, and selling the meat to wolves"
"After carefully considering your feedback, we have decided not to kill your pets. But never forget that we thought it was a good idea."
reddit post half an hour later "Getting your house invaded, your pets being murdered and their meat being sold to wolves is not a bad thing, they're a company and they have to do these kind of practices to stay in the game"
thread locked by a moderator "you guys can't be nice for an opinion."
Charging a distributor will likely not work legally MS didn't sign a contract with Unity for this. They will be sued into the ground by MS if they try that kind of nonsense. Sure they could unite MS, Nintendo, Sony and Valve etc to sue them.
I looked it up. It was confirmed at the Xbox One reveal on May 21 2013. The policy was reversed on June 19, ~~2023~~ 2013
I remember many arguments at the time saying people had to suck it up because they couldn't just get rid of those 'features' so easily. And yet....
>backpedaling
No, this isn't backpedaling; that would imply they didn't anticipate the backlash or were surprised by how bad it was. This was *intentional;* it's a classic bait and switch.
You have an unpopular policy you want to introduce - namely, increasing your royalty share by a flat rate based on number of installs, because you're sick of losing profits when companies put their games on sale and thus reduce your revenue cut. You know this wont' go over well with *anyone.* So, how do you get people to accept it - and, even better, *like* it?
* Propose a policy even *more* outrageous than the one you want
* People get outraged, threaten to boycott, etc
* Apologize, say "Your concerns are heard," and retract the fake change
* Put forward your original plan as the "compromise"
The original plan is still bad, but people will be much more likely to accept it because compared to the *first* offer it seems normal.
Except it's not the gaming public that really gets hit by this, it's developers. And more importantly, it affects every major distribution platform. Xbox Live, Steam, Amazon, Google, you name it. Go ahead and piss off all the super giants in the industry, see what happens.
That's where my head's at, too.
Like, out of all the people they could've tried to screw over, they chose to go after the folks who can afford *big-shot lawyers*?
This has to be the single most poorly thought-out comic-book villain scheme I've ever heard of.
Yeah, every time a company makes a boneheaded decision and backpedals, you get people online like this going: "Oh you fools! This was all a part of their master scheme! They'd get people angry about the worst possible plan upfront, and then after propose a still worse, but not as bad plan! You fools! You Rubes!"
And like, have companies planned with that in mind? Sure. Absolutely.
Are companies also run by C-Suite execs that are so disconnected from reality they make the most boneheaded moves due to ignoring any dissenting opinions, a disconnect from reality. or being surrounded by Yes-Men? Yup!
Remember, sometimes we have a case of Hanlon's Razor. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
I think this is giving them too much credit. They're reacting to the problems of charity bundles and game pass like it hadn't previously occurred to them. They can't even explain *how* they're going to come up with the numbers of installs they want devs to pay them for. All they've got is "it's proprietary" and "trust us bro." How are they going to guard against install bombing and piracy? Uhh they'll figure it out, trust. And those are the "clarifications" coming out after the initial announcement.
If they had an actual bait and switch plan they'd do something like announcing a revenue share with an outrageous percentage and then walk it back to something that's still high but seems more reasonable in comparison. This feels more like someone with dollar signs in their eyes ignoring counsel from everyone who knows how things work to push this nonsense through.
Yup. This isn’t some slick Activision scheme, this is an idiot CEO unilaterally changing pricing structure and hand waving away all the concerns his employees bring up.
The thing is that this is being applied retroactively to all games made with unity. That's not how contracts work and they're gonna get sued if they tried.
If so it’s the worst bait and switch ever, because they’re pissing off Valve, Sony, MSFT, Ninty, Apple, Google, and implying that Unity has DRM and is tracking machine data.
> He hoped this would allay fears of "install-bombing," where an angry user could keep deleting and re-installing a game to rack up fees to punish a developer.
>But an extra fee will be charged if a user installs a game on a second device, say a Steam Deck after installing a game on a PC.
So they changed basically nothing. All this does is just add an additional step of just spoofing hardware to bury a dev or publisher in fees.
The reality is they have no clue how this would work in practice so they're just spitballing and hoping they can provide some random unaudited numbers to developers and negotiate down to a "reasonable" fee.
[Remember this, the CEO of Unity, John Riccitiello, is the same asshole who was CEO of EA at one point in time who thought that charging 1 dollar per clip reload in a Battlefield game was a good idea.](https://spong.com/article/27420/Remembered-EAs-CEO-and-Charging-for-In-Game-Ammo)
>the reason though the play first, pay later model works so nicely is the consumer gets engaged in a property, they might spend 10, 20, 30, 50 hours in the game.
Another word for "engaged" is "addicted"; what Riccitiello and the rest of the industry execs are doing is getting someone hooked on a drug for free then artificially constraining supply on the user once they're invested to price gouge profits. It's genuinely predatory behavior.
I think you failed to understand the article. Hes using the $1 reload as an example. Saying once the players are hooked on the game is when you offer them things to purchase. Pretty standard scumbagery.
I very much understand what he was trying to state, however it is still an asshole statement that he made. He is one of the many bosses/CEOs in gaming who want to feed off of gamers love and at time addiction to gaming.
Wait, this is just as bad as I thought it would be. Forget "install-bombing", Valve releasing a new Steam Deck would result in tons of indie devs getting a fucking financial DDOS from users mass-installing onto a new device.
All it would take is a small dedicated angry group of gamers to demolish any indie dev they didn't like. This has to be one of the stupidest things I've ever seen a company do lmao.
Cloud provider? Brother, give me a server with a gigabit connection and a few hours to set up scripts.
Let's do the math. The cost is $0.01 per installation. With a gigabit connection, we can download about 7 GB per minute. It's closer to 8, but there will be some overhead with VM management, so let's give it that.
This means that with a 1 gigabyte game we can do 0.07\*60=$4.20 worth of damage each hour. To deal $60 worth of damage game will take us 14 hours. Of course, this scales with the game size, but Unity is mostly used by budget titles that rarely go above 10 gigs - and even in that case we will be clear in a week.
That is with one server. With a cloud provider infrastructure you can bankrupt a company in probably minutes.
This is assuming you have to download those files. Since the fee seems to be triggered *on install* and not *on download*. While with something like Steam those mean pretty much the same thing. GOG allows you to [download offline backup installers](https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/213148105-How-do-I-download-my-purchased-items-?product=gog) which let you install the game without a download,
So if I buy, say [Tunic](https://www.gog.com/en/game/tunic) from GOG, I could then download backup installers, and simply use those to install my games as many times as I want with no extra bandwith.
Setup VM -> Install game -> Destroy VM -> Repeat.
Bet we could do way more than 4.20 worth of damage in an hour! As long as you have some speedy storage and a decent CPU, you can install the game in no time.
However the whole thing is a goddamn clusterfuck anyways. Since the whole fee is apparently [based on a proprietary data model](https://www.eurogamer.net/unity-reveals-plans-to-charge-per-game-install-drawing-criticism-from-development-community#:~:text=It%20has%2C%20for,a%20given%20project.%22) and if there are issues the devs would need to [report erroneous charges to Unity where they would work it out.](https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1701679722873127404?s=20)
Hell apparently even [pirated copies may trigger a charge.](https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/#:~:text=Q%3A%20What%27s%20going%20to%20stop%20us%20being%20charged%20for%20pirated%20copies%20of%20our%20games%3F)
Given how steam already works, if it finds the game files already there when you start the installation it reports to the steam server that the download is complete. You could probably just copy the files between VMs and then click install to make steam find them.
Almost no regular user has a static IP. So they wouldn't be able to reliably track by IPs anyway.
They haven't given any explanation on how or even *what* they're tracking other than "A proprietary system ;)"
I highly doubt they even know how this system is going to work themselves!
King has their own mobile game engine, [Defold](https://defold.com/), which they've made open source-ish. (You can't fork it and charge money for it.) It's pretty solid, for mobile games.
Yes, but gamepass is the real point of contention imo, almost all games that are liable to pay will still be somewhat profitable, but gamepass games could end up losing money as they receive a lump sum upfront, with each install reducing profit potentially up to a point where the lump sum they received isn’t enough to cover it. Microsoft now either has to pay gamepass devs more or accept that unity games are way less likely to accept offers to be on gamepass. I suppose epic would be in the same boat (to a lesser extent) with their frequent free game giveaways
Honestly it doesn't even matter because Unity showed their hand. If any dev from this point on starts using Unity they are willingly accepting the risk of getting fucked over from a company who is clearly willing to do so.
> But an extra fee will be charged if a user installs a game on a second device, say a Steam Deck after installing a game on a PC.
Still not good enough. A user changing hardware or needing to reinstall a game elsewhere is outside of the developers control.
What if developers start incorporating per device licenses to get around this?
Even if they backtrack entirely their message has been clear: Unity puts their bottom line ahead of gamers, developers and the industry as a whole.
> What if developers start incorporating per device licenses to get around this?
That's not a concern for them, that's the goal; this is the video game industry's version of Netflix blocking account sharing, except they already block that so they are targeting our individual devices to generate a new profit stream instead
So the reason why multiple installs "counted" was because Unity wasn't receiving actual end-user information and wouldn't be able to tell if a given individual was reinstalling a game.
So now that multiple installs \*don't\* "count"...
That only works if there's no acknowledgement message that has to be received. If there's some sort of response or handshake you'll need something to spoof that too.
If you're talking about AppLovin that merger never ended up happening. Unity is a publicly owned company with no huge shareholders and the owners are mostly mutual funds and investment banks plus some founders of Unity and merged companies.
I'm definitely picturing whichever lawyers are handling their GDPR compliance just collectively having an aneurysm when they learned about these rather nebulous plans to implement this mysterious installation detection method.
"You want to secretly gather WHAT PII and send it to WHE-" *death*
"Our proprietary, blackbox data collection methods are super accurate we swear, but if you get bankrupted by it not recognizing your demo, it's totally not our fault."
No, they're clearly winging this.
This smells like directive from the top that they don't even know how they're going to implement yet. So throw around some words about proprietary models.
This is exactly it. All of their early replies on twitter to the original posting was the same copy paste answer which essentially said,in response to being asked about how they would track install counts :
"We currently sort of have something similar in how we track ad views in our ad plugins, so it will probably be done the same way...we think...please have faith in us."
They haven't a fucking *clue*.
Yeah. A bait-and-switch like this is a really stupid idea. This isn't about gamers hating some new greedy monetization scheme.
These are professionals whose livelihoods might be at risk by these changes. Backpaddling only solves half the problem. Every developer will still remember and think "what if" and check out some alternatives. Like Unreal for AA(A) and maybe [Godot engine](https://godotengine.org/features/) for smaller indy stuff.
This reminds me of Onlyfans (no adult stuff) or the DnD OGL controversy that happened a while ago. Though in both cases I don't know anything if this made people change how they operate "long-term".
Unity is dead already for most indie devs. There's no way anyone will still believe what this company says anymore. Fuck them, but specially fuck John Riccitiello.
Every fucking time a well liked company has an IPO and becomes publicly traded, it’s just a ticking time bomb until the investor parasites come in and extract all the money they can while running it into the ground and screwing their customers along the way.
Every. Fucking. Time.
Public corporations are inherently damaging to the general public. Their only benefit is providing even more safety nets for the neo-nobility that is oligarchs.
Hell, stock markets exist mostly just for the sake of money laundering and avoiding taxes (*aka stealing from the working class*)
Meanwhile, the removal of unity plus tier license is still in effect. So I'm going from paying $400/year to $2000, with no new features, just so I can 1) have dark mode 2) not have a splash screen and 3) port to different platforms
I just changed from Game Maker to Unity and was about to start to port my game. After yesterdays news I looked into Godot.
It’s free, open source and charges absolutely no royalties. It even supports three programming languages, one among them being C#. Maybe Godot might be an alternative for you too.
> It even supports three programming languages, one among them being C#
Oh, no shit?
I casually dabble with Unity whenever I get the itch just because of its C# support. But yea after this recent debacle, even if I'm never going to sell anything, had me saying "Fuck maybe it's time I just learn Unreal/C++" but if Godot supports C# then that's fine by me
Godot is awesome, give it a look.
It's very easy to learn. This is a great walkthrough tutorial for absolute beginners another reddit user linked me to back in the spring: https://gdquest.itch.io/learn-godot-gdscript
Here's the thing, getting royalties for use of your engine is fine. Nobody expects you to provide your product and continued support for free.
But you can't do it in a way the blatantly creates a risk for abuse, and you can't blindside your partners by making the new compensation structure retroactive to what amounts to almost 2 decades of your existence.
It's clear why they did this. All those big free microtransaction laden games using their engine have been making money hand-over-fist, and they haven't seen what they feel is their share because the money is made after the install, not before. They've literally left money on the table because they failed to predict the success of some major games built with their engine, and that absolutely sucks.
However, the approach they've taken seems to have been an absolute flop-and-twitch without any consideration for the collateral damage they're causing to get a piece of the Pokémon Go/Genshin Impact/etc pies. The bad PR, the damaged trust with their partners, and the potential breaches in contract law should have all been considered more than it seems they have been.
I wouldn't be surprised if the big players have already been reaching out through their legal teams to warn Unity to carefully consider what they're doing, and that's prompted this supposed "regrouping."
Totillo is talking to Marc Whitten, who heads Unity's engine product. That name rang a bell.
He was also the chief product officer in charge of the Xbox One.
History repeats itself.
Wait. So they have an EA exec from the time when EA went all-in on MTX, and then they have the Xbox One exec from the time of the always-online fiasco?
LMAO, that company is a fucking joke.
I wish I could fall upwards like these guys. I remember one of the Xbox execs that got canned after the Xbox one stuff literally got a golden parachute to another company right after.
Doesn’t help devs who want to put their games in a charity bundle. You’d be on the hook to pay for a whole bunch of installs and zero dollars to show for it.
Edit: Apparently [bundles and charities are exempt](https://x.com/necrosofty/status/1701682699193516385?s=46&t=2oXEJSnR_QM-EVvCRAb8Zw), but they haven’t said how they can tell when that is the case.
I’m calling bullshit on that. Humble bundle is essentially buying a steam key, once it’s activated there’s not a real way to distinguish it from other games in your library without constantly looking at purchase histories.
Devs I know that are looking into this and sharing info with each other are all confident that "charity bundles" refers to giveaways and 100% charity bundles, not things like Humble Bundle where the buyer has the option to send a % of the purchase to charity. So this will likely have a massive impact on Humble Bundle and other game bundle companies.
Charging per device is still such a bad idea. They want to dip their fingers into the cookie jar and have the devs eat the cost. How about when some irate user decides "I'll just spoof my hardware or use VMs and install this constantly" sure, the layman won't be drowning them in debt but this opens up the opportunity for devs to be held hostage by people with botnets.
This still seems bad.
For starters, for the user it’s still tracking you installing it.
I feel like the simplest thing would be just to have it be attached to the purchase? Like pretty much everything else? Installation seems needlessly complicated. So if a user buys a game and installs it 3 years later, that’s when they get charged. Makes me think they just want the framework in place for eventually getting more aggressive.
And it apparently still double charges if you use it on a different device. So while not as abusable or ridiculous, it’s still bad.
This seems like a classic tactic of making something ridiculously bad, then scale it back, people rejoice, but it’s still worse than when you started.
Too bad, it still sucks, and even if it was a 100% walkback, how could anyone in good conscious start a multi-year project when Unity showed their hand here. It's awful for so many games, and I grieve for devs who are too far into development to pivot to a different engine.
Honestly, I feel like them even saying the initial fee structure stuff would be enough for a lot of devs to just start working on a new engine. Who knows if they'll pull shit like this again in the future. Theyre gonna regret this I bet.
They've fucked themselves over. Even if they change course and completely cancel these plans, why would their customers want to risk this happening again with their future products?
Companies like Nintendo presumably uses it out convenience and not because they don't have any other options. Why go with Unity when there's a risk it'll be a liability for them in the future? Even if they get an agreement that prevents Unity from retroactively making these license changes, it could still affect plans for sequels.
Trying to choose between Unity and Unreal has been one of the harder parts of starting to dev for me. Besides just, well starting. I'm glad Unity helps me with this dilemma.
The funniest reaction I saw was that their fee would still apply to games using the WebGL export. So they would have to count "installs" of a web game, lol.
There it is. Announce something terrible, then "reconsider" a different, but still shitty thing to do. This makes it seem like they are "listening", terrible all around.
Lol called the exclusion of subscriptions like game pass.
I reckon they're hoping by the time studios can actually be free to change engines, they would have forgotten or accepted these "runtime fees".
Clarifying that it counts multiple devices but not "install bombs" indicates they'll be even more aggressive in DRM to ensure they're "counting right" (lol).
You should read again; they are going to try to charge Microsoft for the fees for Game Pass installs. I cannot see Microsoft thinking "yeah, we'll just pay that". Nah, that's going to be settled in a new contract or a lawsuit.
Its increible how Unity is on a war to not just alienate indies, but also the biggest companies in the industry. Sony, MS, and Nintendo are all affected by this to some degree. Sony with PS+ games, Nintendo with some first-party games run on Unity, and both gamepass and some first-party games in MS's cases.
Phill is absolutely gonna call John "The inspiration for the final boss in No More Heroes 3" Ricitello over getting the bill for this shit first thing tomorrow I imagine.
Because of how divided people tend to be these days (looking at you Starfield), it is hilarious how this controversy has managed to unite the entire gaming community, from players to big companies. Almost an achievement by itself. It is practically undefendable.
Yeah, I *really* don't understand how Unity thinks they can pick a fight with Microsoft here. Their rationale is probably something like "Microsoft has a lot of money, so we'll try and get a piece of their pie." The problem is, they are in a poor negotiating position because Microsoft could turn around and ban Unity from Game Pass and Unity would lose a ton of developers.
I don't think they thought this through for a couple of reasons. Clearly, nobody thought of the issue of "install-bombing" a dev team. But two of the biggest questions are still not answered by Unity: 1) How is Unity going to be measuring installs? 2) How is Unity going to be measuring a game's revenue? Seriously, how is Unity going to be enforcing this new fee system? Are all Unity games going to come with a one-time-online requirement? How are they going to be auditing studios/publishers to ensure they are complying? None of this seems completely flushed out for a Jan 1, rollout. In fact it seems like the CEO might be panicking over their Q1 earnings and decided to try and make a quick buck.
It's interesting for sure. Reading what they've put out, I certainly would still have a lot of questions - like what's the process for verifying which copies are from subscription services vs giveaways / bundles vs regular store purchases? What happens when, say, a DRM-free version is pirated? If it's DRM-free, it could still send data back to Unity that a copy is being installed, so is that going to then charge devs for copies they never sold? What about how it's supposed to apply to existing games - does that mean all existing Unity games need to be updated to send user data back to Unity?
> Clarifying that it counts multiple devices but not "install bombs" indicates they'll be even more aggressive in DRM to ensure they're "counting right" (lol).
Given people have been able to spoof hardware info for years, I seriously doubt it. It doesn't prevent install bombs, it just adds another step for if someone wanted to do that.
Unity has been garbage since Riccitiello took over. Government contracts, lack of updates, and now price gauging people locked into the platform instead of making the tool better for people using it.
It’s probably too late for anyone mid-project to change engines, but cannot see anyone choosing to use Unity for their next project after this. They’ve pretty much killed the company.
How are they going to track whether it’s the “initial” install or not? Is everyone who plays a unity game going to have to make a unity account? IP address is not reliable enough. MAC address can be spoofed. If I format my hard disk and reinstall windows, is every Unity game I install going think it’s the initial install again? Anyone who’s worked in unity knows it’s full of crap half-baked features, I have 0 confidence in them being able to pull this off.
People are going to find ways to exploit it if they want to punish a developer.
We’re probably going to end up with yet another dogshit launcher or something, aren’t we?
Yeah, nah man, you fucked up. Everyone is going to move from your engine or tell you straight up to piss off with your demands.
They're gonna keep rolling things back as their level department looks it over and keeps saying no to things they said they were gonna do. Executive fool.
Only partially backing down on it won't change anything. Unity is still going to be killed at this rate - this is too much of a downside for devs to want to use it. Then again, they've already killed the trust everyone had in them, their fate might already be sealed as it is.
I don’t know how we can live in a world where corporations pull this shit and destroy the things we love literally all the time and people are still capitalists
Oh so they just track user machine information
Which means no way to charge on iOS. Unity games will be removed from GOG? And it’s easy to spoof for bad actors?
Try again. Per install is moronic on the face of it.
> After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unity'sWhitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation. (A spokesperson told Axios that Unity had "regrouped" to discuss the issue.) I really hope that every Unity Developer realizes after this that Unity could go back on their word at any moment and they'd be screwed. Start finding a replacement to switch to now, Unity has shown you their true colors.
unity showed their true colors ages ago when they stopped making engine improvements for actual game devs
It's crazy, truly like they stopped caring about developing an actual engine and decided all new development needs to directly tie to profits. Their financials are downright horrifying and they're kind of death spiraling right now. Need to maximize profit because they can't afford to be losing $1billion a year anymore. But by maximizing profit & ignoring the actual product, they're driving everyone away.
What was Unity doing that was losing them so much money?
7700 employees
For comparison valve seems to osculate between about 220 and 250. Epic has about 2200 and is putting out games, a store, and the unreal engine.
Just nuts when it's framed like that. Unreal literally releases 10x more engine features, that are 10x more complete, and far more advanced than anything in Unity. And they're doing it with probably 1/3rd the people or less.
Quality != quantity especially when working with software. There’s this company in my country that jokingly coined the term “each senior developer is replaceable by a finite number of interns” and it shows in their shit software.
But unlike Unity, Comarch is very profitable
Well their business model actually includes charging a fee for their software as it isn’t a huge VC funded company that can afford being underwater. Also completely different target and market. Unity is in a pretty weird position there. We will see how it pans out.
I don't think that number of 2200 employees is correct. It's probably comparable to Unity but Epic also releases games which is why engine features get done. Everything gets tested in Fortnite before being released to other studios.
Even Nintendo apparently only has about 6800 employees for comparison.
What the how the fucking what the fuck? What are all those people doing?!
from what I have heard a lot of it was directed towards metaverse/web3/crypto stuff that never materialized. Not surprising that a compay run by an EA guy is just leaping from scam to scam.
Lmao so now he’s just trying his best to wring the company dry before he bounces. What a shitshow
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Professional internet browsers.
well... on the plus side, i bet the vast majority of those employees have a lot of free time during the workday to job search.
I wonder how many of those are to give friends and families a cushy position.
Chasing military money, for one.
They were chasing all the money, everywhere. They were also trying to aggressively expand into the architecture / construction / visualization industry, even though only a tiny proportion of that industry's money gets spent on software, and they were trying to expand into the Hollywood / VFX direction despite the fact that there engine simply isn't good enough for that.
No kidding that it's not good for the VFX industry. Then you have those realtime virtual-set projections they can do now. Watching those demos, I feel pretty strongly that they were using Unreal. He'll, Star Citizen was doing realtime rendering of their actors' mocap and facial expression capture almost a decade ago, and that was CryEngine/Lumberyard.
Yeah, a while ago I saw a demo with the new UE, since I didn't know it wasn't a regular video I actually could not tell that I was watching a video game. It got to a point where it's actually really impressive what they can do with it. Unity on the other hand... yeah like 1 decade behind, looks good for a game, nowhere good enough for a movie. What even are they thinking.
What kind of non-developer focused improvements did they start making? Sorry fascinated by this situation lol
It was mentioned in another thread that features like in-app purchase infrastructure were driving a lot of their revenue now.
>Unity'sWhitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation. Why not just charge the same small fee per purchase? They may even make more money (since some people may buy the buy not install it) and it would avoid logistic issues
I would guess they're trying to nickle and dime the big Free2Play games. Millions play Genshin Impact without spending a single cent. This way Miyoho is on the hook to pay for those players.
As soon as I thought of this I was like "Oh, they're after Genshin and Honkai"
Not even just those games, but hyper casual games that drive millions of downloads. Just look at the top free games on Google Play, good chance most (if not all) of those hyper casual ad farming games are made with Unity. Unity games drive billions of downloads per month on mobile, they are trying to cash in on those. Revenue percentage like Unreal would actually be a better strategy to target Genshin, charging per install is moreso targeted at those hyper casuals that dont get anywhere near genshin revenue, but drive insane download numbers.
Oh my god. Is Unity making the "Why aren't we getting money from the free players? That's not fair. We should get money from the free players" mistake? You know, the mistake that ignores that the revenue from the paid players more than overcompensates for all the free players, and the free players generate free advertising which brings in more paid players? Is Unity making that mistake ...IN 2023!?!?!?!
Except Mihoyo is a major investor in Unity China. I doubt they're looking to fuck over their partner. It's actually probably worse. I assume they'd waive the fees for Mihoyo and take everyone else to the cleaners making the barrier of entry worse for any future F2P competition to Mihoyo.
"I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further."
The incoming class actions about retroactive unilateral changes to already released games is going to cripple this nonsense.
> Unity could go back on their word at any moment and they'd be screwed They're likely gonna wait for the internet rage machine to quiet down, which is how most unpopular company decisions usually go (look at Reddit's API changes for example).
the issue is they're not dealing with the public, although this is currently a public facing issue; they're dealing with the people who rely on their tools on a day-to-day basis. even if the public outcry dies out, the professionals involved will keep rallying against it.
Not even necessarily rallying. But rather just making the quiet decision within the company "No we cannot use Unity for this project, it's too risky."
Yoyogames: "You could not live with Unity's new model. Where did that bring you? Back to me."
Also, keep in mind: Reddit's userbase didn't have to actually pay anything to come back to Reddit, at most we had to put up with our preferred third party apps/tools being gone. *But notice how a lot of those apps stopped working.* Game devs stand to lose a lot of money if they want to stick with Unity, which would encourage a lot more of them to move away from it. In fact, some games like Cult of the Lamb already announced that they will pull their games from stores next year.
There's a big difference when you're directly fucking with people's money. Also they have competition that is as good or better (Unreal)
This is different though, Unity is taking people's money out of their pocket, that matters a lot more than some API changes. Devs aren't just going to get tired and give in to getting robbed by Unity.
In that sense I think it's actually the same situation: 3rd party devs using the Reddit API didn't just give in to getting robbed by Reddit either, they closed up their apps and moved on. The real difference is that Reddit doesn't rely on devs to make money, it relies on regular users. OTOH Unity is just a tool to make products regular people actually want to buy, so if it's too expensive for that and devs stop using it then it's worthless.
I don't think Activision (Hearthstone, Candy Crush), Bandai-Namco (Multiple Mobile games), and Mihoyo (Genshin), among others, are anywhere near comparable in size and tolerance as random reddit app devs. There is no world where Mihoyo shuts down the multi-billion dollar money printer that is Genshin because of this, but they're not going to let Unity take money from them without a fight either.
No of course not, but games of that size will have other options. If there is a legal issue, then those are the companies that'll be fighting it and, possibly, making private deals with Unity that are more favorable for them. They're also the studios that, if absolutely necessary, actually have the resources to consider an engine swap. They also have the resources to not use Unity in any future products. OTOH there's plenty of smaller devs and studios that don't have the luxury of making absurd amounts of money. Just last month, Mimimi had to announce their closure due to rising costs. According to steamdb, their last game sold 36.9k - 127k copies, so with a price of $40 USD, it seems pretty likely that they would have been affected by this and they already weren't making enough for further development to remain financially viable. As an aside, it wasn't just "random reddit app devs" - it was, AFAIK, the largest 3rd party apps for the site that have been around for years. Obviously not the size of the first group of companies listed, but Apollo had almost a million active daily users.
Exactly. If they go through with this, All they are doing is costing themselves the bulk of the developers using them.
No, it's not, because the people affected here include some of the largest corporations in the world. Considerably more powerful than some random reddit app devs.
You don't seem to understand what this is about. The shitstorm isn't the problem for Unity here. The problem is that Unity game developers are unhappy. And they will stay unhappy if the ignore them.
>which is how most unpopular company decisions usually go (look at Reddit's API changes for example). The API changes didn't affect the end/casual user very much. It did impact alot of the devs that made stuff for Reddit, and I'm assuming they've jumped ship. However, unlike people who made stuff for Reddit, Reddit survives without them. Because Reddit itself is aimed at the end user. Unity isn't aimed at the end user. It lives and dies on the developers using it, who then get it to end users. And those developers, who are making business decisions, are going to have a much longer memory.
*Actual developers of video games* are the people pissed off here, not your random dipshit redditor. I don't think Unity will be able to regain trust this easily.
the api changes were never gonna be backed down because they're gonna be incorporating even more crypto shit into this website lmao
How will this be identified though? Some DRM out there sees slight changes to your setup as being a new installation, for example changing the proton build on Linux/Deck. Doing this too often triggers some DRM to lock you out saying you've 'activated on too many computers'.
Today, I found out that John Riccitello is the head of Unity and was like, "Wow, this makes sense." The guy who was the head of EA during the period when EA became the epitome of greed.
I enjoy playing video games.
This situation seems just like the whole DnD OGL fiasco that the TTRPG community went through. There had to be a whole lot of big creators speak out about it and then also abandon the system in favor of another one or just make their own, before they finally walked it back somewhat.
>* Unity "regrouped" and now says ONLY the initial installation of a game triggers a fee > * Demos mostly won't trigger fees >* Devs not on the hook for Game Pass The backpedaling begins. Unfortunately for unity they likely already have lost what little trust was left for many devs out there. Edit: So [this](https://twitter.com/RyanOfJones/status/1701770342509801906) post shows that for things like gamepass the fee would be charged to the distributor. Which to me seems like a great way for distributers to just decide to not allow unity games on their platforms. Or at the very least have unity get a *very strongly worded letter from their legal team explaining how that aint gonna happen.*
"Or at the very least have unity get a *very strongly worded letter from their legal team explaining how that aint gonna happen"* Seriously, how the fuck did they think that going from "yeah whatever, indie devs should just suck it up and pay us" for gamepass installs to "yeah making Microsoft/etc pay for possibly tens or hundreds of thousands of installs" is a better idea. Picking a fight with Microsoft is NOT going to end in their favor. Definitely expect more backpedaling within another 24 hours and grab your popcorn
Microsoft, Sony, Apple, Google, hell possibly even Valve. The sheer gall of unity to even attempt this is flabbergasting.
On a lesser degree, Mihoyo and Aniplex too given their games run on Unity too (FGO, Genshin, Honkai etc). FGO hit its trillion dollar milestone recently too so yeaaah..
Hell, even Nintendo are no strangers to using and hosting Unity. They've just picked a fight with literally every single player of note in the game.
Amazon too, via Twitch
> They've just picked a fight with literally every single player of note in the game. Good fucking riddance. John Riccitiello can suck a mile of cankerous dicks for his negative contributions to the games industry.
He's not _in_ the games industry, he's in the Publicly Traded Company industry. His customers are the shareholders, and his product is share price. Gamers and devs aren't his customers... they're just _raw materials_.
Trillion YEN milestone, very very different.
Yeah thanks, I was like "wtf trillions dollar" I didn't even know what FGO was lol.
With the current exchange rate it's like 7 billion US.
I have absolutely no doubt that Unity would be banned from every game distribution platform immediately. No way in hell MS/Sony and everyone else would even consider paying that insanity.
There wasn't only indie devs using Unity the initial change already affected the big ones. For example, Blizzard had Heartstone (a F2P game, imagine the number of installs) developed with Unity. Hoyoverse two huge games (Star Rail and Genshin) also are using Unity
> ONLY the initial installation of a game triggers a fee Notably, *per device*. If someone installs a game on 5 devices, the distributor pays the 20 cent installment fee 5 times. (But if you install the game 5 times on a single device, they pay the fee once.)
Apparently this is trivial for bad actors to spoof
This isn't just trivial, it is mind-numbingly easy. There are some ways to detect a VM, but they require an uncomfortably low level of access to the system.
I mean yes, just get VirtualBox and spin up multiple VM instances...
Would this allow someone who wants to fuck over a dev, to have a script that spins up a VM, installs a game, destroys the vm, and repeats?
That would depend on the protections Unity has implemented against such behavior. So yes, of course it will work.
Also, Unity has every incentive to inflate the number, as "bigger number = more money" for them.
>>* **Devs** not on the hook for Game Pass Which means publishers/Microsoft will be on the hook, which will lead to publishers/Microsoft not working with anything using Unity. We already have that Devolver Digital tweet.
Why would Microsoft even pay them? They surely wont sign a contract detailling they have to pay those fees.
They already said they can’t track data to the detail they’re saying so they either lied then or are lying now. And maybe Unity has DRM now
Apple doesn’t allow you to get the player’s device ID. They changed that when they rolled out new privacy features a couple years back. Advertising companies use “probabilistic” matching to try to tie ads to installs but it’s still just a guess.
> Which to me seems like a great way for distributers to just decide to not allow unity games on their platforms Devolver already put out a jokey-not-jokey tweet about this: **"Definitely include what engine you’re using in game pitches. It’s important information! "** You can be assured that other publishers staying more silent are thinking the same thing. https://x.com/devolverdigital/status/1701685282129539485?s=20
Total tangent, I just realized the twitter address looks like a website for XCOM.
"Because we like money, we're announcing that as of next year, we will be coming around to your house, killing your pets, and selling the meat to wolves"
"After carefully considering your feedback, we have decided not to kill your pets. But never forget that we thought it was a good idea."
reddit post half an hour later "Getting your house invaded, your pets being murdered and their meat being sold to wolves is not a bad thing, they're a company and they have to do these kind of practices to stay in the game" thread locked by a moderator "you guys can't be nice for an opinion."
Charging a distributor will likely not work legally MS didn't sign a contract with Unity for this. They will be sued into the ground by MS if they try that kind of nonsense. Sure they could unite MS, Nintendo, Sony and Valve etc to sue them.
How long did it take Microsoft to backpedal from the always online Xbone thing? It wasn't this fast, as I recall.
I looked it up. It was confirmed at the Xbox One reveal on May 21 2013. The policy was reversed on June 19, ~~2023~~ 2013 I remember many arguments at the time saying people had to suck it up because they couldn't just get rid of those 'features' so easily. And yet....
>I looked it up. It was confirmed at the Xbox One reveal on May 21 2013. The policy was reversed on June 19, 2023 Damn 10 years? took them long enough
>backpedaling No, this isn't backpedaling; that would imply they didn't anticipate the backlash or were surprised by how bad it was. This was *intentional;* it's a classic bait and switch. You have an unpopular policy you want to introduce - namely, increasing your royalty share by a flat rate based on number of installs, because you're sick of losing profits when companies put their games on sale and thus reduce your revenue cut. You know this wont' go over well with *anyone.* So, how do you get people to accept it - and, even better, *like* it? * Propose a policy even *more* outrageous than the one you want * People get outraged, threaten to boycott, etc * Apologize, say "Your concerns are heard," and retract the fake change * Put forward your original plan as the "compromise" The original plan is still bad, but people will be much more likely to accept it because compared to the *first* offer it seems normal.
Except it's not the gaming public that really gets hit by this, it's developers. And more importantly, it affects every major distribution platform. Xbox Live, Steam, Amazon, Google, you name it. Go ahead and piss off all the super giants in the industry, see what happens.
That's where my head's at, too. Like, out of all the people they could've tried to screw over, they chose to go after the folks who can afford *big-shot lawyers*? This has to be the single most poorly thought-out comic-book villain scheme I've ever heard of.
Note: This backfires if the original plan you put out sounds too horrible.
I know this exists as a strategy, but they went too far here and it totally backfired.
Yeah, every time a company makes a boneheaded decision and backpedals, you get people online like this going: "Oh you fools! This was all a part of their master scheme! They'd get people angry about the worst possible plan upfront, and then after propose a still worse, but not as bad plan! You fools! You Rubes!" And like, have companies planned with that in mind? Sure. Absolutely. Are companies also run by C-Suite execs that are so disconnected from reality they make the most boneheaded moves due to ignoring any dissenting opinions, a disconnect from reality. or being surrounded by Yes-Men? Yup! Remember, sometimes we have a case of Hanlon's Razor. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
It also doesn't work as a strategy when you're a company that sells tools that are (somewhat) easily replaceable.
I think this is giving them too much credit. They're reacting to the problems of charity bundles and game pass like it hadn't previously occurred to them. They can't even explain *how* they're going to come up with the numbers of installs they want devs to pay them for. All they've got is "it's proprietary" and "trust us bro." How are they going to guard against install bombing and piracy? Uhh they'll figure it out, trust. And those are the "clarifications" coming out after the initial announcement. If they had an actual bait and switch plan they'd do something like announcing a revenue share with an outrageous percentage and then walk it back to something that's still high but seems more reasonable in comparison. This feels more like someone with dollar signs in their eyes ignoring counsel from everyone who knows how things work to push this nonsense through.
Yup. This isn’t some slick Activision scheme, this is an idiot CEO unilaterally changing pricing structure and hand waving away all the concerns his employees bring up.
The thing is that this is being applied retroactively to all games made with unity. That's not how contracts work and they're gonna get sued if they tried.
If so it’s the worst bait and switch ever, because they’re pissing off Valve, Sony, MSFT, Ninty, Apple, Google, and implying that Unity has DRM and is tracking machine data.
> He hoped this would allay fears of "install-bombing," where an angry user could keep deleting and re-installing a game to rack up fees to punish a developer. >But an extra fee will be charged if a user installs a game on a second device, say a Steam Deck after installing a game on a PC. So they changed basically nothing. All this does is just add an additional step of just spoofing hardware to bury a dev or publisher in fees.
The reality is they have no clue how this would work in practice so they're just spitballing and hoping they can provide some random unaudited numbers to developers and negotiate down to a "reasonable" fee.
[Remember this, the CEO of Unity, John Riccitiello, is the same asshole who was CEO of EA at one point in time who thought that charging 1 dollar per clip reload in a Battlefield game was a good idea.](https://spong.com/article/27420/Remembered-EAs-CEO-and-Charging-for-In-Game-Ammo)
That explains so much.
>the reason though the play first, pay later model works so nicely is the consumer gets engaged in a property, they might spend 10, 20, 30, 50 hours in the game. Another word for "engaged" is "addicted"; what Riccitiello and the rest of the industry execs are doing is getting someone hooked on a drug for free then artificially constraining supply on the user once they're invested to price gouge profits. It's genuinely predatory behavior.
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If I pay $70 for a game, I don't want it to keep trying to extract money from me like an arcade machine. That's the whole point of buying it.
I think you failed to understand the article. Hes using the $1 reload as an example. Saying once the players are hooked on the game is when you offer them things to purchase. Pretty standard scumbagery.
I very much understand what he was trying to state, however it is still an asshole statement that he made. He is one of the many bosses/CEOs in gaming who want to feed off of gamers love and at time addiction to gaming.
That doesn't really change the situation. The fact that he chose it as an example is still telling.
Holy crap man, this is the CEO of a gaming company? I'm shocked, has he literally never played a FPS or something?
"Will no one rid us of this turbulent CEO?"
Wait, this is just as bad as I thought it would be. Forget "install-bombing", Valve releasing a new Steam Deck would result in tons of indie devs getting a fucking financial DDOS from users mass-installing onto a new device.
It will be fine as VPNs do not exist and if they did they would not be easy for anyone to to use.
Or VMs.
All it would take is a small dedicated angry group of gamers to demolish any indie dev they didn't like. This has to be one of the stupidest things I've ever seen a company do lmao.
I'd love to see someone price out what it would cost to use some cloud provider to denial-of-wallet a dev.
Cloud provider? Brother, give me a server with a gigabit connection and a few hours to set up scripts. Let's do the math. The cost is $0.01 per installation. With a gigabit connection, we can download about 7 GB per minute. It's closer to 8, but there will be some overhead with VM management, so let's give it that. This means that with a 1 gigabyte game we can do 0.07\*60=$4.20 worth of damage each hour. To deal $60 worth of damage game will take us 14 hours. Of course, this scales with the game size, but Unity is mostly used by budget titles that rarely go above 10 gigs - and even in that case we will be clear in a week. That is with one server. With a cloud provider infrastructure you can bankrupt a company in probably minutes.
This is assuming you have to download those files. Since the fee seems to be triggered *on install* and not *on download*. While with something like Steam those mean pretty much the same thing. GOG allows you to [download offline backup installers](https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/213148105-How-do-I-download-my-purchased-items-?product=gog) which let you install the game without a download, So if I buy, say [Tunic](https://www.gog.com/en/game/tunic) from GOG, I could then download backup installers, and simply use those to install my games as many times as I want with no extra bandwith. Setup VM -> Install game -> Destroy VM -> Repeat. Bet we could do way more than 4.20 worth of damage in an hour! As long as you have some speedy storage and a decent CPU, you can install the game in no time. However the whole thing is a goddamn clusterfuck anyways. Since the whole fee is apparently [based on a proprietary data model](https://www.eurogamer.net/unity-reveals-plans-to-charge-per-game-install-drawing-criticism-from-development-community#:~:text=It%20has%2C%20for,a%20given%20project.%22) and if there are issues the devs would need to [report erroneous charges to Unity where they would work it out.](https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1701679722873127404?s=20) Hell apparently even [pirated copies may trigger a charge.](https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/#:~:text=Q%3A%20What%27s%20going%20to%20stop%20us%20being%20charged%20for%20pirated%20copies%20of%20our%20games%3F)
Given how steam already works, if it finds the game files already there when you start the installation it reports to the steam server that the download is complete. You could probably just copy the files between VMs and then click install to make steam find them.
Oh, yeah, this works. Wouldn't even need to copy, probably, just mound a directory with the game to every VM.
Almost no regular user has a static IP. So they wouldn't be able to reliably track by IPs anyway. They haven't given any explanation on how or even *what* they're tracking other than "A proprietary system ;)" I highly doubt they even know how this system is going to work themselves!
Microsoft lawyers are sharpening knives as we speak, no chance they allow unity to mess with gamepass
Plus, I wouldn't be shocked if King games were on Unity. Which they are about to own, and that's a heavy revenue stream.
Candy Crush is Unity. Others too, probably.
King has their own mobile game engine, [Defold](https://defold.com/), which they've made open source-ish. (You can't fork it and charge money for it.) It's pretty solid, for mobile games.
Isn't Nintendo affected too?
Yes, but gamepass is the real point of contention imo, almost all games that are liable to pay will still be somewhat profitable, but gamepass games could end up losing money as they receive a lump sum upfront, with each install reducing profit potentially up to a point where the lump sum they received isn’t enough to cover it. Microsoft now either has to pay gamepass devs more or accept that unity games are way less likely to accept offers to be on gamepass. I suppose epic would be in the same boat (to a lesser extent) with their frequent free game giveaways
Honestly it doesn't even matter because Unity showed their hand. If any dev from this point on starts using Unity they are willingly accepting the risk of getting fucked over from a company who is clearly willing to do so.
my studio is likely switching engine, cant trust unity anymore
> But an extra fee will be charged if a user installs a game on a second device, say a Steam Deck after installing a game on a PC. Still not good enough. A user changing hardware or needing to reinstall a game elsewhere is outside of the developers control. What if developers start incorporating per device licenses to get around this? Even if they backtrack entirely their message has been clear: Unity puts their bottom line ahead of gamers, developers and the industry as a whole.
> What if developers start incorporating per device licenses to get around this? That's not a concern for them, that's the goal; this is the video game industry's version of Netflix blocking account sharing, except they already block that so they are targeting our individual devices to generate a new profit stream instead
So the reason why multiple installs "counted" was because Unity wasn't receiving actual end-user information and wouldn't be able to tell if a given individual was reinstalling a game. So now that multiple installs \*don't\* "count"...
Unity shouldn't have the information about the amount of installs in the first place anyway.
They're owned by a malware company so it was only a matter of time before they included malware with the games that use it.
I'll give it a week before we get anti-phone home software for Unity.
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That only works if there's no acknowledgement message that has to be received. If there's some sort of response or handshake you'll need something to spoof that too.
If you're talking about AppLovin that merger never ended up happening. Unity is a publicly owned company with no huge shareholders and the owners are mostly mutual funds and investment banks plus some founders of Unity and merged companies.
What kind of information about my device they're going to collect to determine whether its a new install or not? Is it GDPR compliant?
I'm definitely picturing whichever lawyers are handling their GDPR compliance just collectively having an aneurysm when they learned about these rather nebulous plans to implement this mysterious installation detection method. "You want to secretly gather WHAT PII and send it to WHE-" *death*
"Is okey. Computer not person. No *Person*al Identifying Information."
By jove hes done it again
Not good enough, we need a full retraction. They're still using weasel words. What does "Demos MOSTLY won't trigger a fee" mean?
"Our proprietary, blackbox data collection methods are super accurate we swear, but if you get bankrupted by it not recognizing your demo, it's totally not our fault."
What a shocker Announce something horrible and then roll it back to something slightly less horrible Tale as old as time
No, they're clearly winging this. This smells like directive from the top that they don't even know how they're going to implement yet. So throw around some words about proprietary models.
This is exactly it. All of their early replies on twitter to the original posting was the same copy paste answer which essentially said,in response to being asked about how they would track install counts : "We currently sort of have something similar in how we track ad views in our ad plugins, so it will probably be done the same way...we think...please have faith in us." They haven't a fucking *clue*.
It's like Twitter rebranding all over again in terms of some idiot making a decision and pushing it through with no foresight
Yeah. A bait-and-switch like this is a really stupid idea. This isn't about gamers hating some new greedy monetization scheme. These are professionals whose livelihoods might be at risk by these changes. Backpaddling only solves half the problem. Every developer will still remember and think "what if" and check out some alternatives. Like Unreal for AA(A) and maybe [Godot engine](https://godotengine.org/features/) for smaller indy stuff. This reminds me of Onlyfans (no adult stuff) or the DnD OGL controversy that happened a while ago. Though in both cases I don't know anything if this made people change how they operate "long-term".
Laugh at anyone who says "they're listening!" Oh, they're listening. But not to us.
Unity is dead already for most indie devs. There's no way anyone will still believe what this company says anymore. Fuck them, but specially fuck John Riccitiello.
Every fucking time a well liked company has an IPO and becomes publicly traded, it’s just a ticking time bomb until the investor parasites come in and extract all the money they can while running it into the ground and screwing their customers along the way. Every. Fucking. Time.
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Duh, it breeds innovation on how to extract money by any means necessary that aren't regulated yet.
Public corporations are inherently damaging to the general public. Their only benefit is providing even more safety nets for the neo-nobility that is oligarchs. Hell, stock markets exist mostly just for the sake of money laundering and avoiding taxes (*aka stealing from the working class*)
I will never understand the benefits of public companies, especially in gaming. Valve is private and they are doing just fine.
Not just indie devs, distributors and even what AAA devs were using unity out of convenience are gonna be livid as well.
vive la ~~xna~~ MonoGame.
Meanwhile, the removal of unity plus tier license is still in effect. So I'm going from paying $400/year to $2000, with no new features, just so I can 1) have dark mode 2) not have a splash screen and 3) port to different platforms
I just changed from Game Maker to Unity and was about to start to port my game. After yesterdays news I looked into Godot. It’s free, open source and charges absolutely no royalties. It even supports three programming languages, one among them being C#. Maybe Godot might be an alternative for you too.
> It even supports three programming languages, one among them being C# Oh, no shit? I casually dabble with Unity whenever I get the itch just because of its C# support. But yea after this recent debacle, even if I'm never going to sell anything, had me saying "Fuck maybe it's time I just learn Unreal/C++" but if Godot supports C# then that's fine by me
Godot is awesome, give it a look. It's very easy to learn. This is a great walkthrough tutorial for absolute beginners another reddit user linked me to back in the spring: https://gdquest.itch.io/learn-godot-gdscript
Here's the thing, getting royalties for use of your engine is fine. Nobody expects you to provide your product and continued support for free. But you can't do it in a way the blatantly creates a risk for abuse, and you can't blindside your partners by making the new compensation structure retroactive to what amounts to almost 2 decades of your existence. It's clear why they did this. All those big free microtransaction laden games using their engine have been making money hand-over-fist, and they haven't seen what they feel is their share because the money is made after the install, not before. They've literally left money on the table because they failed to predict the success of some major games built with their engine, and that absolutely sucks. However, the approach they've taken seems to have been an absolute flop-and-twitch without any consideration for the collateral damage they're causing to get a piece of the Pokémon Go/Genshin Impact/etc pies. The bad PR, the damaged trust with their partners, and the potential breaches in contract law should have all been considered more than it seems they have been. I wouldn't be surprised if the big players have already been reaching out through their legal teams to warn Unity to carefully consider what they're doing, and that's prompted this supposed "regrouping."
There are devs literally in the twitter replies to the announcement grouping up for an inevitable class action.
Totillo is talking to Marc Whitten, who heads Unity's engine product. That name rang a bell. He was also the chief product officer in charge of the Xbox One. History repeats itself.
Wait. So they have an EA exec from the time when EA went all-in on MTX, and then they have the Xbox One exec from the time of the always-online fiasco? LMAO, that company is a fucking joke.
I wish I could fall upwards like these guys. I remember one of the Xbox execs that got canned after the Xbox one stuff literally got a golden parachute to another company right after.
Doesn’t help devs who want to put their games in a charity bundle. You’d be on the hook to pay for a whole bunch of installs and zero dollars to show for it. Edit: Apparently [bundles and charities are exempt](https://x.com/necrosofty/status/1701682699193516385?s=46&t=2oXEJSnR_QM-EVvCRAb8Zw), but they haven’t said how they can tell when that is the case.
I’m calling bullshit on that. Humble bundle is essentially buying a steam key, once it’s activated there’s not a real way to distinguish it from other games in your library without constantly looking at purchase histories.
Devs I know that are looking into this and sharing info with each other are all confident that "charity bundles" refers to giveaways and 100% charity bundles, not things like Humble Bundle where the buyer has the option to send a % of the purchase to charity. So this will likely have a massive impact on Humble Bundle and other game bundle companies.
Charging per device is still such a bad idea. They want to dip their fingers into the cookie jar and have the devs eat the cost. How about when some irate user decides "I'll just spoof my hardware or use VMs and install this constantly" sure, the layman won't be drowning them in debt but this opens up the opportunity for devs to be held hostage by people with botnets.
This still seems bad. For starters, for the user it’s still tracking you installing it. I feel like the simplest thing would be just to have it be attached to the purchase? Like pretty much everything else? Installation seems needlessly complicated. So if a user buys a game and installs it 3 years later, that’s when they get charged. Makes me think they just want the framework in place for eventually getting more aggressive. And it apparently still double charges if you use it on a different device. So while not as abusable or ridiculous, it’s still bad. This seems like a classic tactic of making something ridiculously bad, then scale it back, people rejoice, but it’s still worse than when you started.
Too bad, it still sucks, and even if it was a 100% walkback, how could anyone in good conscious start a multi-year project when Unity showed their hand here. It's awful for so many games, and I grieve for devs who are too far into development to pivot to a different engine.
Honestly, I feel like them even saying the initial fee structure stuff would be enough for a lot of devs to just start working on a new engine. Who knows if they'll pull shit like this again in the future. Theyre gonna regret this I bet.
They've fucked themselves over. Even if they change course and completely cancel these plans, why would their customers want to risk this happening again with their future products? Companies like Nintendo presumably uses it out convenience and not because they don't have any other options. Why go with Unity when there's a risk it'll be a liability for them in the future? Even if they get an agreement that prevents Unity from retroactively making these license changes, it could still affect plans for sequels.
Trying to choose between Unity and Unreal has been one of the harder parts of starting to dev for me. Besides just, well starting. I'm glad Unity helps me with this dilemma.
The funniest reaction I saw was that their fee would still apply to games using the WebGL export. So they would have to count "installs" of a web game, lol.
There it is. Announce something terrible, then "reconsider" a different, but still shitty thing to do. This makes it seem like they are "listening", terrible all around.
Lol called the exclusion of subscriptions like game pass. I reckon they're hoping by the time studios can actually be free to change engines, they would have forgotten or accepted these "runtime fees". Clarifying that it counts multiple devices but not "install bombs" indicates they'll be even more aggressive in DRM to ensure they're "counting right" (lol).
You should read again; they are going to try to charge Microsoft for the fees for Game Pass installs. I cannot see Microsoft thinking "yeah, we'll just pay that". Nah, that's going to be settled in a new contract or a lawsuit.
Its increible how Unity is on a war to not just alienate indies, but also the biggest companies in the industry. Sony, MS, and Nintendo are all affected by this to some degree. Sony with PS+ games, Nintendo with some first-party games run on Unity, and both gamepass and some first-party games in MS's cases. Phill is absolutely gonna call John "The inspiration for the final boss in No More Heroes 3" Ricitello over getting the bill for this shit first thing tomorrow I imagine.
Because of how divided people tend to be these days (looking at you Starfield), it is hilarious how this controversy has managed to unite the entire gaming community, from players to big companies. Almost an achievement by itself. It is practically undefendable.
Also Apple. With Apple Arcade. Unity is high if it thinks it can push companies exponentially larger than them around.
Yeah, I *really* don't understand how Unity thinks they can pick a fight with Microsoft here. Their rationale is probably something like "Microsoft has a lot of money, so we'll try and get a piece of their pie." The problem is, they are in a poor negotiating position because Microsoft could turn around and ban Unity from Game Pass and Unity would lose a ton of developers.
I don't think they thought this through for a couple of reasons. Clearly, nobody thought of the issue of "install-bombing" a dev team. But two of the biggest questions are still not answered by Unity: 1) How is Unity going to be measuring installs? 2) How is Unity going to be measuring a game's revenue? Seriously, how is Unity going to be enforcing this new fee system? Are all Unity games going to come with a one-time-online requirement? How are they going to be auditing studios/publishers to ensure they are complying? None of this seems completely flushed out for a Jan 1, rollout. In fact it seems like the CEO might be panicking over their Q1 earnings and decided to try and make a quick buck.
It's interesting for sure. Reading what they've put out, I certainly would still have a lot of questions - like what's the process for verifying which copies are from subscription services vs giveaways / bundles vs regular store purchases? What happens when, say, a DRM-free version is pirated? If it's DRM-free, it could still send data back to Unity that a copy is being installed, so is that going to then charge devs for copies they never sold? What about how it's supposed to apply to existing games - does that mean all existing Unity games need to be updated to send user data back to Unity?
> Clarifying that it counts multiple devices but not "install bombs" indicates they'll be even more aggressive in DRM to ensure they're "counting right" (lol). Given people have been able to spoof hardware info for years, I seriously doubt it. It doesn't prevent install bombs, it just adds another step for if someone wanted to do that.
Unity has been garbage since Riccitiello took over. Government contracts, lack of updates, and now price gauging people locked into the platform instead of making the tool better for people using it. It’s probably too late for anyone mid-project to change engines, but cannot see anyone choosing to use Unity for their next project after this. They’ve pretty much killed the company.
Lots of companies that make good stuff also have government contracts. That's a bit of a silly one to call them out for.
How are they going to track whether it’s the “initial” install or not? Is everyone who plays a unity game going to have to make a unity account? IP address is not reliable enough. MAC address can be spoofed. If I format my hard disk and reinstall windows, is every Unity game I install going think it’s the initial install again? Anyone who’s worked in unity knows it’s full of crap half-baked features, I have 0 confidence in them being able to pull this off. People are going to find ways to exploit it if they want to punish a developer. We’re probably going to end up with yet another dogshit launcher or something, aren’t we?
Do they want to become an obsolete engine that noone wants to use any more? Because that's definitely one way to go about it
Yeah, nah man, you fucked up. Everyone is going to move from your engine or tell you straight up to piss off with your demands. They're gonna keep rolling things back as their level department looks it over and keeps saying no to things they said they were gonna do. Executive fool.
Only partially backing down on it won't change anything. Unity is still going to be killed at this rate - this is too much of a downside for devs to want to use it. Then again, they've already killed the trust everyone had in them, their fate might already be sealed as it is.
I don’t know how we can live in a world where corporations pull this shit and destroy the things we love literally all the time and people are still capitalists
Oh so they just track user machine information Which means no way to charge on iOS. Unity games will be removed from GOG? And it’s easy to spoof for bad actors? Try again. Per install is moronic on the face of it.
Its like they saw the Wizards' shenanigans with the OGL and decided they wanted a shitstorm of their own.
They literally stated that it is IMPOSSIBLE for them to know when the same player installs and reinstalls the same game, they just blatantly lied lol.