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cellhead
@cellhead
LotteMakesStuff
@LotteMakesStuff
LotteMakesStuff
@LotteMakesStuff

Are YOU a game developer that uses Unity? Congrats they just changed their business relationship with you and there’s nothing you can do!

Effective January 1, 2024, we will introduce a new Unity Runtime Fee that’s based on game installs. We will also add cloud-based asset storage, Unity DevOps tools, and AI at runtime at no extra cost to Unity subscription plans this November.

It’s gone from having INCREDIBLY simple just pay for a yearly software licence to that, plus a very complicated sliding scale payment based on installs. Installs. Not sales or revenue but installs.

Just wait till next year when some game developer accidentally annoys their community with a “bad update” or something and their haters mass install, run delete thousands of times to rack up a massive invoice. This is so stupid. I’m done

LotteMakesStuff
@LotteMakesStuff

“Unity Create senior vice president and general manager Marc Whitten told Game Developer the company is seeking to "better balance the value exchange" between Unity and developers.”

Cool I’m glad they decided they deserve more “value” from us that’s so nice for them

Turfster
@Turfster

I've never seen a company shoot themselves in the foot quite as many times as Unity has done after taking the diseased rat1 CEO Riccitiello on board and going public on the stock market.

It's incredible to watch.

I'm just sorry for every single dev that used Unity and now has to eat fucking moneyghoul greed.

LotteMakesStuff
@LotteMakesStuff

Unity's executive level and Riccitello's determination to drive unity public to get that big payout is basically the route cause for every issue i have with unity. Capitalism IS a scourge and it is the reason we cant have nice things.

ALSO Riccitiello thinks i don't understand how doors work, and i personally can never forgive him for that

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neral
@neral

i'm glad i decided to go with godot for the project i've made zero actual progress on but

holy shit reading the FAQ is making it look worse with every item i open. normally a FAQ is supposed to like. kind of defuse the bad change you're making and pretend it's not a big deal. come up with fake questions nobody had that make you look nice and stuff. that kinda thing

they couldn't even do that this time. "yeah an install is uh, an install i guess??? what you wanted to know about weird edge cases?" "maybe you can get a discount if you let us antitrust you into using our other very expensive paid services!!! maybe also not though" "here's an ad for a totally unrelated service we snuck into the faq" "yes it applies to games already released" "almost forgot to tell you about our AI grift" "oh yeah we're also getting rid of the only pricing tier indies ever use"

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internet-janitor
@internet-janitor

"According to our calculations you owe us one Gorillion dollars and a kidney. No, you can't see our calculations; they're very high-tech trade secrets. On an unrelated note, we're offering our customers a sweet deal on ad-supported kidneys that excrete calcified masses if you don't scream I LOVE MTN DEW AND DORITOS every three hours."

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neral
@neral

i just realized. they are going to make you pay for pirated copies of a video game. it's worded entirely in such a way that they can do that. i guess the piracy scene kind of hates stuff that phones home so they might patch it out, but who knows. and even if they patch it unity might just make up a number anyway. i mean, they preemptively admitted they just might right there.

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LotteMakesStuff
@LotteMakesStuff

I've described this elsewhere, but yeah I can see it being an attack vector too. Is your game too woke? Dont like a nerf to your favorite class? are you just an internet weirdo? Don't bother brigading a games steam reviews anymore, way too much like hard work! Just install the game! Then uninstall the game! Then do it again! again! Loop doing that for a few days to rack up a big bill to punish the evil game developer. nice. Hope blizzard never nerfs a card in Hearthstone ever again you know lol

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modulusshift
@modulusshift

Literally months ahead of the release of the Apple Vision Pro that Apple gave them favored third party status on. I bet Apple wasn't told about this lmao, I wouldn't be surprised if Unity integration is just left to rot after launch now. For ~$1 apps, Unity is now taking 20%, on top of Apple's 30%, leaving the devs with 50% lmao. for free apps, Unity is officially more greedy than Apple. So basically even trinket-level Unity apps are gonna end up costing at least $2.99 lmao

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modulusshift
@modulusshift

You just know that a bunch of senior Vision staff are smirking, going "I told you guys we shouldn't focus on games"

But Tim is panicking a little about the potential lack of microtransaction-driven games that suck thousands of dollars from whales directly into his coveted "services revenue" lmao

What a fucking timeline

And it's not like they can switch to Unreal after everything Epic pulled lmao

If the right person speaks up right about now we may see an Apple-developed 3D game engine in a few years rofl

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modulusshift
@modulusshift

Oh my god, speaking of Game Pass, Apple Arcade too lmao

Apple is getting shafted by this, if someone mentions "what would Steve do" at the right moment here this is gonna be a bigger grudge than Nvidia or Adobe

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Sciman101
@Sciman101

As someone who hasn't released a commercial game, is the $200k / 200k installs threshold low? Esp. for indie devs, the people I imagine are using the personal/plus license tier, how likely are they to actually hit that? This sucks in general but I'm curious exactly what the damage of that specific number is

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LotteMakesStuff
@LotteMakesStuff

the specific number dosnt really matter so much, its the fact that the business model is changing retroactively like this. its another valve they can (AND WILL) tweak when a quaters revenue numbers look bad and the shareholders get upset.

Imagine if vampire survivers was a unity game, and it blew up next year when this change takes effect.. that game was like $2 at launch. suddenly unity would be taking a massive cut. its wild, its unfair.

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modulusshift
@modulusshift

It's gonna have a chilling effect. A lot of games dev is based on "what if we win the lottery and go viral" but now you have to price your game higher and reduce that likelihood to protect against going viral and suddenly owing Unity >10% of your revenues

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corru
@corru

as a non-unity user bearing witness: this is twisted. what happens if you don't pay the fee? do they shut your game down? does their API show a splash screen to the player that's like "sorry the dev didn't pay us enough so their game is gone now. tough"?

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