Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume

Just found that the current Unity CEO is the same guy that, as EA CEO, wanted to charge for weapon reloads in battlefield games.

That explains everything.

What you mean the guy who keeps getting sexual assault claims filed against him and is know for internally grinding EA into dust and abandoning ship is out of touch at Unity too? I don't get why you'd think poorly of their vision
- Clearly Unity had an eye for talent. I wonder what's going to be the next company that chooses him as CEO, so they can use too his incredible, privileged and always successful business vision.
Wait really? I hadn't heard of the reload thing before. Sounds just stupid enough to be real.

So, Game Pass would have to pay per installation huh?

Which is going to mean a lot fewer Unity-based games showing up, because no company is going to suddenly be okay with fees out of nowhere. Especially something that allows you, the user, by design to install something, try it, then delete it if you didn't like it. Not only that, but gamepass is from pc and console. You find a game, love it, install it on console. Then discover you can mod it, so you install it on pc. Gamepass is now on the hook twice.

Yeah, unity did not think this through. Even if that is unity working as intended, that's still a stupid policy. Either games will now have to be more expensive, just in case, or have install licences, requiring even more dial-home to monitor.

Add to that unity not saying whether or not it's going to use dial-home as a counter, and that works for games written years ago. Indy developers are now going to have to think long and hard about advertising old games, or discounting them. I would imagine a few of them will be pulled from stores, just in case.

There's a lot of lack of detail here: like, how do you as a developer know how many installs there are?

The free 200k limit, does that mean profit you made, or is that 200k sales? These two things are not the same.

Time to revisit Goddot.

200k in revenue, not profit.
- Yeah and their definition on revenue is brutal https://unity.com/runtime-fee
  
  Quote: A game or app’s “total revenue” includes all revenue generated (without limitation) from retail sales, in-app purchases, subscription fees, web payments, offline payments, ads-based revenue, etc. Total revenue is calculated without deduction, including any relevant digital store fees.
Yeah that's just... bad.

The perspective you just outlined makes this policy so mich more ridiculous than it already was.

Game demos (rare as they may be) also won't be possible anymore as it costs the devs money.

So we fucked up, let’s back track, but just enough so we still make money, and hopefully enough to curb the anger.

As someone learning unity, I’ll look at what unreal has to offer.

You might want to consider learning Godot instead. It's certainly not as much of an industry name as Unreal, but Unreal could pull similar moves at any point...
- Yeah realistically if Unity profits from this after the initial loss of devs, Unreal will know they can pull something similar.

good thing i'm learning godot instead lmao

They're trying to allay individual fears while ignoring the bigger problem that the system creates: Games are sold once, but may be installed any number of times. So on the books, each sale of a Unity game represents a single fixed income, but potentially unlimited liability. From an accounting perspective, it makes zero sense to sell Unity games.

Wouldn't it also make companies pay for installs of pirated copies?
- I believe it does, yes. Which makes it even worse. But even if they close that issue though, the problem remains that distributing a Unity game creates a limitless liability on your books, forever.

For anyone thinking they meaningfully backed out of the plans and you won't read the article to find out. They didn't. It's still complete bullshit that is gonna massively hurt the industry

That’s great and all, but I’m judging them based on what they’re doing, and not so much on what they’re saying.

They’re trying to squeeze blood from a stone. This is the classic VC/PE enshitification cycle. They’re going to ride it into the ground chasing profitability, and it’s 100% part of their business model.

Edit: did another couple searches; found this:

Unity Technologies is a publicly-traded company, and its ownership is divided among its shareholders. The company’s largest shareholders include Silver Lake Partners, Sequoia Capital, and Coatue Management. Among the three co-founders — David Helgason, Nicholas Francis, and Joachim Ante — Ante is the only one still involved as a board member and technical advisor. The current CEO of Unity Technologies is John Riccitiello, who joined the company in 2014. Under Riccitiello’s leadership, Unity has continued to grow and expand into new markets, such as augmented reality and virtual reality.

Emphasis mine.

Silverlake is private equity; Sequoia is VC; Coatue is a “privately owned hedge fund sponsor” (read: private equity). This enshitification trajectory should be expected when controlling interest of anything is held by financial organizations of this type.