- 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.
I think there's another side of this, which is that Unity probably looked at Game Pass and other subscription-deal type models and thought "there's probably rent we're not collecting here". Those deals are opaque and they can be structured in ways that make it hard to say what is "revenue" and what is "investment," after all. This might very well be just a c-suite tantrum against those kinds of things.
For F2P games, this fee structure is actually incredibly punitive. Depending on the market segment, these games might have revenue per user numbers of a few cents. And they all rely on the low barrier of entry to have a churn of new users who mostly install, poke around for ten minutes, then never play the game again. It's very plausible for a game that has only a couple hundred thousand active players, and only a few thousand paying customers, to have millions of "installs" by Unity's accounting. Some bigger players will probably just eat the fee, but I think a lot of them will view this as a significant change in what they think their operating costs will be. Unity as far as I understand it hadn't made huge inroads into that market and now I really question who wants to adopt it, given the company's behavior.
Overall, Unity just behaves like it's resentful of having to deal with video games. It almost seems to want to shed this part of the business so they can fire more people and focus on defense and gambling instead.
It's also worth questioning how Unity is looking at those revenue minimums. If you have a recent game still making significant money, does that count towards you being charged install fees on old back catalog titles? Either way, it's horrifying to think that Unity has demonstrated they'll change their license terms retroactively in a way that might make studios unable or unwilling to sell their back catalog titles.
