Christian Simmers

I truly do not know what they’re cooking here.

I can't help but notice they're stapling AI into all of their plans, and I wonder whether that's central to all of it.

Wasn't Unity's main draw supposed to be the fact that it's free to use?

Rats! Rats! Rats!

I'm wondering how this will affect VR Chat. They use Unity for dev and homebrew content.

Unity did a good job of entrenching people in its ecosystem. Godot Engine is FOSS, but switching from one thing to any other thing is going to be a slow process, assuming desired features are at parity.

And if it's an in-dev game, you're probably looking at a year or more of lost time switching. Because learning the new thing and moving stuff that was (hopefully) already working to new thing is gonna break things.

I once heard someone say they thought Unity's interest now was courting government money because they had tapped all the game dev they could, but I guess billing departments can always innovate.

This reminds me of that time Oracle wanted to charge all the developers who brought along a copy of the Java Runtime. In that case, Microsoft just lol'd and spent a couple years building up its own Java Runtime from OpenJDK. And that's why Minecraft used Java 8 for so long before suddenly using the latest stable version of Java. Alas that the solution here is not so easy.

im getting the rats

Remembering that time Suda 51 wrote John Riccitiello into No More Heroes as an abusive scumbag who doesn't understand video games and nodding my head

how are they even going to track the installations?

This almost feels like it was done on purpose. To make sure Unity tanks... and the pieces can be sold off. Feels like a very private equity thing to do.

• 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?

hypotheses, from the perspective of a software developer:

• this billing will be done off a telemetry tag that executes as close to first launch as possible;
• the telemetry tag will contain a unique device identifier and a title ID tied to the publisher's Unity ID account;
• the publisher account associated with the title ID will be billed an install the first time the server sees a new (device identifier, title ID) pair (i.e., Gamers can't "install-bomb" a publisher);
• the documentation will contain a note that you should use the same title ID for the demo of a game (if any) and the retail release, to avoid being double-billed. someone will miss this and get extremely freaked out by it, and depending on how good their account manager is/whether or not they become a cause celebre they might manage to get the charge reversed.