airakose

@airakose

Games Programmer, Anime fan, General nerd.

 

Super awkward but trying to improve~ n_n

 

(Have been advised to add: All views my own)

log in
airakose
@airakose
MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE
bruno
@bruno

honestly this raises so many questions

  • 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?
airakose
@airakose

tbf John Riccietello should've been fed to the rats long before he joined Unity. Man was leading EA during their Worst Company of All Time years (not just game companies. they beat Wells Fargo - the bank that was opening accounts in peoples names without their knowledge or consent)

So the news is defs super concerning. But not surprising. The man can't business - and the Unity board proved they can't either by bringing him on.

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @bruno's post:

Sandwich247
@Sandwich247

It's still free to use, but now if you've made 200k in the past 12 months and you've had at least 200k installs in total, ever, then every time your game is installed you owe them some money

so if you've got a successful game and the internet decides they want you ruin you, they can collectively uninstall and re-install the game thousands of times and you'll go bankrupt! 🙂

login to reply
KylieNeko
@KylieNeko

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.

login to reply
Modren
@Modren

He's the inspiration for the bad guy in NMH3, who also shows up in Travis Strikes Again by physically assaulting the creator of one of the in-universe games and butchering it to make it more marketable. Said game is also literally a sequel to Shadows of the Damned, which John Riccitiello messed with while he was head of EA.

login to reply
vogon
@vogon
  • 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.
login to reply