Technology

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)

Time to learn Godot.

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.

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.

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.

Well, glad that I switched away from Unity in 2016. The competition by the Unreal Engine caused some really weird business decisions back then.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Popular video game engine Unity is making big changes to its pricing structure that’s causing confusion and anger among developers.

“We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user,” the company shared on its blog.

Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share.”

Additionally, there’s the concern that malicious actors could use this information to run up charges by continuously downloading and redownloading games as a form of protest or griefing.

All those fears were seemingly confirmed when Stephen Totilo of Axios tweeted that Unity stated it would indeed charge a developer each time a game was redownloaded or downloaded to different devices.

An additional tweet from Totilo stated that Unity would implement fraud detection tools and allow developers to report potential cases of abuse.

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