There's just no way this change is actually gonna happen. Many prominent indie developers have already announced they'll be switching away from Unity for future projects, and you have to think that larger studios are drawing the same conclusions. The ship is sinking.
Unity will retract this. Switch to revenue share or whatever. They'll eat a huge loss of trust because of this idiocy, but they'll remain a relevant game engine. I just can't see any other scenario.
I think "loss of trust" is understating it. This is an existential threat for lots of studios, and I can't imagine them placing future bets on the platform.
This is exactly what’s happening. Studios’ strategies are moving off of Unity. None of the ones I know are going to do any further development in the engine on any future projects. One studio is rewriting their game right now to run on Godot. It’s been the biggest exodus I’ve ever seen.
They've gotten commodified. It's going to be like being Oracle in a Postgre/MySQL world. You'll have some big legacy customers who just can't switch. But the market as a whole was primed to pack up and leave anyway. Gamedev has high turnover, and what the new kids are going to gravitate towards is what works immediately for them, which Godot superseded Unity on out-of-the-box experiences a long while back, and now has the tutorial content to accompany it.
What Unity has in its favor is mostly in the Asset Store, but that's shifted towards being a commodity as well.
I wonder what they are thinking in making this move then. Someone mentioned Genshin as the big legacy customer and someone answered on why it doesn't make sense. So why do they think this is a good move? Is there really enough profit to be made off legacy customers?
The license pre-October 2022 actually explicitly allows you to continue using older versions of the software under the original licensing terms when you released back then. So there is no money in legacy customers, except Genshin-scale ones. And I doubt those guys are paying up anyway.
That's even weirder then. Is it like when Blizzard decided they wished they had owned DotA money and enforced new ownership rules for mods for their new games but ended up just getting bad press?
> but they'll remain a relevant game engine
For a little while. The problem is that Unity is a public company, merged with a malware company, and (currently) headed by somebody with no understanding of their own customers. But nobody looking to make games right now is going to start using Unity. Many indie developers are going to transition off, and the major players who still use it are likely going to find that Unity is going to start squeezing them to keep any semblance of profitability. Maybe big games like Genshin/Cities Skylines/Pokemon Go stick with it, but Unity doesn't survive that transition.
I'm not a gamedev, but I am hoping one of the actionable things from this situation is a call to action from the gaming community to put together more open-source game engine platforms, and for them to be more easily sharable.
I am sure there are reasons this is difficult, but with so many industries built on open-source compliant tools, gamedev feels like a no-brainer for it as well.
Revenue share is going to be worse for most indie developers - the .20 install fee is only bad for extremely high volume, low ARPU games. Basically mobile F2P. They deserve a different payment option, but switching everyone to revenue share is would be much worse for a typical Steam, $5+ indie game.
IMO the problem is more the arbitrariness of the change than the specific fee structure. It applies to games that are already in development, it applies to games that already shipped. Even if it's strictly legal to pull that rug (I have my doubts), no one wants to build a business at another company's whim. Everyone is wondering if Unity just turned X% of their customers into sharecroppers, who's the next Y%? For indies that will be an especially acute concern since they have very little leverage.
Better fixes in no particular order: a grandfather clause, delay the new fees, fire the CEO.
Would it be any better of it there was retroactive revenue share? I agree it is shittily rolled out, but things like the retroactivity are the issue, and the ability to actually count install. Not the install fee itself. I am responding to the "it should have been rev share" mentality, which is totally grass is greener.
$0.20 is the minimum, you pay for every device they install on every time. Anytime they offload and reinstall, you pay again. Every additional device, upgrade, or replacement, you pay again. You’ll also pay then current rates, whatever Unity decides those are.
No abuse needed to lose money with this, I’ve probably installed the same games 20+ times over the years.
They can probably track accurately enough to identify that 90% of games aren't worth billing. Then once they are working with the top 10%, they can negotiate something that makes sense, like submit your monthly sales number, and Unity will use that as a limit on install count.
I agree what they are saying isn't workable, but that idea of install based fee could work, and would be better than a royalty for many.
Not unless you are giving away your game for free. Otherwise your limit is some small multiple of sales. They have said demos don't count, webgl doesn't count, piracy doesn't count, etc..
It would be easier if Unity just said they won't charge for installs past the number of sales. But most of the nightmare scenarios people are coming up with are not real.
Unity has been very inconsistent about communicating what will and will not be counted. I've seen two different channels from Unity saying that demos will or won't be counted. And practically, Unity has no way to verify what is and isn't a fraudulent installation (or if they do, they're not telling us). Imagine the pain in the ass it's going to be too contest this bullshit. And the risk remains unlimited because installs on new machines count.
Ultimately the main issue is that people made business decisions about using Unity under the assumption that the license and payment structure they were using could not change. That is no longer true by demonstration. I'm sure there's a lot of devs who are simply unwilling to deal with a vendor who changes the terms like this.
Unity will retract this. Switch to revenue share or whatever. They'll eat a huge loss of trust because of this idiocy, but they'll remain a relevant game engine. I just can't see any other scenario.