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Garry Newman: The new Unity pricing would have cost him $410,000 of lifetime revenue (i.vgy.me)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/gamedev@programming.dev
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This is of course not including the yearly Unity subscription, where Unity Pro costs $2,040 per seat (although they may have Enterprise pricing)

Absolutely ridiculous. Many Unity devs are saying they're switching engines on social media.

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[–] 29 points 3 years ago (23 children)

What’s the tl:dr?

The creators of the unity engine are charging people extra for games they have already created?

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  • [–] [S] 93 points 3 years ago (8 children)

    Creators of the Unity engine want to charge developers per game install, the more people that install the game the more you have to pay. This includes games that already exist and never agreed to this. It also causes a lot of safety concerns, how will they confirm how many installs a game has? Are they bundling spyware with Unity games?

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  • [–] 43 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    What will they do when 50 angry incels run a script that downloads/installs/deletes your game hundreds of times a day?

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  • [–] 28 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    https://www.ign.com/articles/why-unitys-new-install-fees-are-spurring-massive-backlash-among-game-developers

    They said they have a fraud detection system for their ads business and will use that as a starting point.

    I don’t see how they are going to be able to move forward with this change.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    The obvious rebuttal to that is that it is in the financial interest not to detect false installs because the developer will owe them money for those. Why would ANYONE trust their word on this?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    That is a great point. I bet they are going to walk this back on games that have been released already. Hopefully, devs will just move to an opensource game engine or make their own.

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  • [–] 29 points 3 years ago* (8 children)

    From what I've heard, from January 2024, any for-profit game made in Unity that meet a certain profit and download threshold will have to pay a fee to Unity per install of said game, including those released before these changes are being introduced.

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  • [–] 41 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Unity also said it will track installs with its own proprietary data. Speaking to Axios, Unity also confirmed that if a player deletes a game and re-installs it, that counts as two installs, and two separate fees.

    From the article linked in comments here. That's unbelievable. I'm at a lose for words.

    I guess they don't want anyone to use Unity at all

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  • [–] 23 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    That's fucked because I delete and download games from my steam library all the time. If I need just a little more space I'll delete a few games but then probably pick them back up a little later.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago

    In this age of gaming, it's a necessity. I don't have endless storage space for 120+GB game files that I'm not playing to sit indefinitely. What a completely fucked plan.

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  • [–] 17 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    How are post facto agreement changes working retroactively legal?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    Up until now companies have been getting away with this because of "user agreements." Nobody has had the money and interest to get them in court.

    I don't see any possible way this survives a lawsuit, for exactly the reason you said. This is almost certainly not legal but nobody has had a reason to get precedent to say it until now.

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  • [–] 17 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    They want to charge game devs $0.20 per install. Yes, that's right, they want to charge devs 20 cents every time somebody installs their game.

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  • [–] 16 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Thanks for responding to my post.

    That will be uhh… 0.20.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

    So 1000 installs per day (small numbers for a global title) = $200/day x 30 = $6000/mo, and then at like 10% after the hype wears off, $600/mo for the entire product lifetime (even installing on a new computer charges, so this cost doesn't go away when new users stop coming)...

    Edit: this is actually similar to the numbers given in the original post, of an average settling at $40k / yr (so like 200k installs per year or only 550 per day across the entire world). Which like they said, yeah, is about half a million dollars over product lifetime.

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