this might be the dumbest monetization change I've ever seen, hopefully this means more people will move to open-source game engines
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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How they're going to track the installs is probably going to be some horrific spyware. The charge also still applies if the game was pirated. Someone is def going to make a script that can just spin up a vm with enough randomized hardware information to appear as a new device, install the game, and then scrap and start again. This is going to be a bloodbath.
I don't want to be one of those 'this is good for bitcoin' fuckers, but I def think godot will get a boost out of all this. Personally, I have a feeling that this is mostly going to squeeze money out of most of the larger developers who use unity and can afford to pay. I'll bet a lot of indie devs will simply refuse the charges, and we'll see a lot of games get scrubbed, and unity accounts closed.
they're saying that it's per initial install, but that doesn't change how dumb the idea is. everyone will run to godot and ue5 if unity doesn't roll back
I saw Cult of Lamb is going to pull their game from stores soon because of this
I'm really worried about which games in my wishlist will be removed because of this; I've got 650+ games in the list, seeing that number mysteriously go down will not be fun 💀
Yep, and it seems like piracy would actually hurt the devs since Unity wants to go after all installs. How fucked
There's a lot of misunderstanding about the pricing structure. If I'm understanding this right, you get charged every month (which is bad) for a year long window of time. You only get charged for installations that are above the threshold, and after a year those installations no longer count towards the threshold. I'm super unsure about this next part: if you upgrade to Pro/Enterprise after release it will then reduce your monthly fees.
It will be a big revenue hit for mihoyo and mobile devs that don't make much per install. But for the typical itch.io dev who gets maybe 4 installs it won't be a problem. If you can charge like $5 or more for your game you will probably be ok. But that's a minority of devs. And unless they figure out a way to reliably detect pirates it means that the solvency of your business is at the mercy of random people who can just install your game and make Unity charge you more.
Basically, there are a lot of issues that need to be worked out. But if you're developing visual novels for example, this is not an issue for you. Although I would personally advocate for you to switch to Godot.