Technology

Developer makes a game for the iPhone, charges $1 for it.

I buy the game for $1.

Apple takes 30 cents.

My family of 5 all install the game and play it via family sharing.

Unity takes $0.20 X 5 = $1

Developer loses 30 cents on the sale.

I think the worst part of it all is the trust that is irrevocably broken now.
This is obviously a moronic scummy decision driven by greed, but it also goes directly against past decisions. As per this reddit post, Unity actually had a TOS in action that protected Developers against retroactive changes like this. Specifically, it stated that you could choose to continue using old versions of the engine and comply to the old TOS if an update to the TOS that you disagree with ever happened. This specific part of the TOS was deleted last year.

If they actually try to enforce this new crap on already released games (that accepted an older version of the TOS) then it would seem blatantly illegal (I'm not a lawyer though).

Even if they revert everything by tomorrow, the whole fiasco still shows where Unity's current interests are, and make the company a liability to deal with for any game developer.

Unity saw how Reddit killed off free users by raising prices to absurd rates, and how Reddit was largely unaffected by it as a whole. Not going to be surprised to see other types of platforms also follow suit.

Good reason to just use godot

I was always curious about Unity, but now I'm good.

It's crazy how these companies could manage to lose their goodwill overnight one by one these 2~3 years. It's almost like they have some secret any% fiasco RTA competition or something.

Unity casually destroying the trust between them and their devs

This is why non-libre software sucks. They have 0 incentive to not screw you over.

2023 has been quite an year of revelation, showing the true nature of these scummy corporates. Lets learn our lesson and not jeopardize ourselves by trusting them.

Thanks Twitter and Reddit api increases! You started a trend in fucking over your user base and developers!

I was going to start game programming using unity. Just uninstalled it. Will pick up something else like godot.

I'm so happy I never wasted the time to learn this platform. I could've but chose not to (mostly too busy). Again, another company that I have no problem watching them fail, along with the Twitters/Teslas and reddits of the world.

I really don't understand why they care the runtime is getting installed.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

That goodwill has now been largely thrown out the window due to Unity's Tuesday announcement of a new fee structure that will start charging developers on a "per-install" basis after certain minimum thresholds are met.

The newly introduced Unity Runtime Fee—which will go into effect on January 1, 2024—will impose different per-install costs based on the company's different subscription tiers.

Outside of those countries, an "emerging markets rate" ranging from $0.005 (for Enterprise subscriptions) to $0.02 (for Unity Personal users) will apply after the minimum thresholds are met.

This is a major change from Unity's previous structure, which allowed developers making less than $100,000 per month to avoid fees altogether on the Personal tier.

Larger developers making $200,000 or more per month, meanwhile, paid only per-seat subscription fees for access to the latest, full-featured version of the Unity Editor under the Pro or Enterprise tiers.

"Gloomwood will definitely be my last Unity game, likely even if they roll back the changes," developer Dillon Rogers wrote on social media.

The original article contains 506 words, the summary contains 168 words. Saved 67%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

How is unity to determine a company’s revenue on a game if not self reported by a company?

The inevitable outcome of propietary software.