- Like, who exactly is this targeted at? Is this about F2P games? Is this about Game Pass?
- If you have a legacy game with a lot of installs and also a current game that makes money, are you now going to be on the hook infinitely every time someone chooses to reinstall your old game?
- Are demos counted as 'installs' for purposes of this?
- If The Gamers get mad at a studio, can they cause them to incur Unity runtime fees by repeatedly reinstalling the game?
- Is John Riccietello on crack?
- Should John Riccietello and every last Unity exec be fed to rats?
What I am 100% convinced, reading this announcement (and the wordy-but-explains-surprisingly-little "FAQ") is that Unity specifically believes their "audience" is creators of cookie-cutter, app-store-flooding "free to play"/live-service games, and this announcement is them admitting out loud that they believe this and they're no longer even thinking about any other user. The "free to play" crowd is the only group of developers for whom this change makes sense. And by "makes sense" I don't mean "is a good deal". I mean that's the only lens through which the announcement is coherently understandable at all. These are the only customers who are going to be able to look at the deal and be able to evaluate "is this a good deal, or not" rather than it just being extremely confusing.
For indie/itch devs, the structure's bafflingly punitive. The seeming failure to even consider demo installs, demo web embeds, things like Epic Store giveaways makes the rules impossible to follow. For AAA devs, the price is so bafflingly lowball it's unclear why Unity would even bother. But for "FTP" developers, this is a column in a spreadsheet. FTP is already, to my understanding, based around a calculus of "you have a cost for user acquisition, you have an average expected income per user, when the second number dips under the first you discontinue the game". These are also the devs for whom the flippable-asset/"AI" pack-ins on the new pricing plan become a deal-sweetener (rather than just confusing, or a moral reason to boycott). What Unity's plan does is add a small amount to the user acquisition cell in the spreadsheet, probably just high enough that Unity carefully planned it would not quite be enough to make the FTP devs switch away. The effect on anyone else is just not something Unity even thought about.
I'm really worried what this means for game preservation because it potentially creates an incentive of a type which has never existed before for pure-digital games, to simply stop distributing a game at the end of its "lifetime" instead of giving it away free or massively reducing the cost.
I wonder how well that Godot plugin that claims to be able to import Unity scenes and assets works.
Andi's post makes some extremely good observations, and it actually matches really well with statements made by Riccitiello around the time of their merger with ironSource:
I’ve been in the gaming industry longer than most anybody – getting to the grey hair and all that,” he continued. “It used to be the case that developers would throw their game over the wall to the publicist and sales force with literally no interaction beforehand. That model is baked into the philosophy of a lot of artforms and medium, and it’s one I am deeply respectful of; I know their dedication and care.”
“But this industry divides people between those who still hold to that philosophy and those who massively embrace how to figure out what makes a successful product. And I don’t know a successful artist anywhere that doesn’t care about what their player thinks. This is where this cycle of feedback comes back, and they can choose to ignore it. But to choose to not know it at all is not a great call.”
“I’ve seen great games fail because they tuned their compulsion loop to two minutes when it should have been an hour. Sometimes, you wouldn’t even notice the product difference between a massive success and tremendous fail, but for this tuning and what it does to the attrition rate. There isn’t a developer on the planet that wouldn’t want that knowledge.
At the time everyone dragged him for calling developers "fucking idiots" and using really gross language like "compulsion loops." In retrospect, though, it's pretty easy to see he's simply not considering Unity's relationship to itch.io indie darlings or mid-budget Annapurna arthouse award winners, but F2P/GaaS titles that are all about mass adoption in pursuit of whales.
