- 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?
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in reply to @bruno's post:
Based on how the CEO sold 2,000 shares before the announcement was made, I'd say they're cooking planned bankruptcy.
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?
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! 🙂
The internet already ruined me, it's honestly impressive I'm still alive.
I'm wondering how this will affect VR Chat. They use Unity for dev and homebrew content.
I also love the ending of it: we got rid of Unity Plus so now you have to use the expensive $1000$2000+tier if you want quality of life features! BYEEEEEEE~~~!"
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.
I really wish GDScript wasn't the main approach for Godot. It has really put me off of the desire to do anything with the engine, and I really want to try
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
Hold up, where was this, I got the entire series and need to verify this now. I knew I loved Suda's stuff for a reason.
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.
Ah, I remember that part. Thanks for giving me a reason to replay them.
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.
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