Existing games built on Unity will also be hit with Runtime Fees if they meet the thresholds starting January 1.
How can you have a deal in place and just say “you’re giving me more money” and think that that’s ok?
I am altering the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further. - Vader
I don’t believe that is legal. That’s just absolutely ridiculous.
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It used to be illegal. Part of anti-trust was forcing IP owners to license their technology to everyone at a reasonable price. That means that reddit’s API price gouging would also have been illegal and tesla and apple would have had to license their FSD and OS to other hardware manufacturers. This ability to control other companies through abusive pricing and licensing lock-in is classic monopoly violation that the govt has stopped policing.
Jokes on them, I never finished a unity project.
Godot.
Context: https://godotengine.org/
Their tagline is on point.
I only code in Guffman
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This is a good way to incentivize game developers to just not use Unity and just some other engine that does this.
Great for short term profits which makes the quarterly statements look good, but bad for long term sustainability.
Short term profits making quarterly reports look better to stakeholders. Isn’t that how 80% of these bigwigs get their job in the first place? We should be calling it the Zaslav Model at this point 😂.
Just because it looks better to shareholders now doesn’t make it a good business decision. I swear the majority of CEO types don’t give a damn if the company goes under in a few years because they either:
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Have a golden parachute in place by sucking up to the Board.
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Will move on to another CEO position at another company before it folds. Bonus points if they golden parachute on the way out.
It’s a good decision for the CEO though. That’s part of the problem, they’re not beholden to the business. They’ll just bugger off and go elsewhere.
That’s what the golden parachute is supposed to be for: a payout long term so the CEO doesn’t make a short term decision that fucks the company up but pays out big. Ex: offering a stock package that you can’t sell for 5-10years.
A decision like this will pay out HUGE in the short term, but if they don’t change it I doubt many will be using unity in a few years.
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More enshitification. This is the kind of stuff I’ve grown to expect from tech companies. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are bleeding money due to interest rates and they need any way possible to stay afloat.
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That’s the definition of capitalism
line go up or die
They haven’t been profitable for, like, past half a decade or so. Each year brings bigger and bigger losses.
Seeing how the CEO sold 50k shares over the last year, and another 2k not long ago, I can see it being the last hail mary to extract as much money as possible and sell the company to Microsoft/Apple/Facebook/Whoever is willing to buy
The person who runs Unity is a shithead.
Oh, he was a former CEO of EA. That explains a few things.
A Big fucking idiot
This is why they shut down Parsec Arcade. Cause they’re an asshole
We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed," the company explained in adding the fee.
Ok and??
Every copy costs them money. Don’t you know how digital copies work?!
Guys they’re artists. They deserve to be paid every time you play any game. You wouldn’t steal a car
Like… wow, that’s what the engine is! Fucken doinks.
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So if Microsoft published a Unity developed game on Windows, Microsoft could easily charge a $0.20 free to the unity team for installing the Unity Runtime on their OS.
Not being completely serious there. Honestly thought, did the CEO not realize if they start doing this, what’s to stop another company from doing that to them. Things like mp3, where developers need to pay a license for, could then be charged in a similar fashion for each install.
I work for a small (15 people) Unity gaming company. Will let you know what the CEO says, just shared the actual Unity blogpost
Edit: Update - CEO added a gravestone emoji and said “yikes”
For the sake of your sanity, I hope there’s a resolution to this that doesn’t involve a rewrite.
This is the problem with being a whole company on the ecosystem of another, they can pull the rug at any time.
Yeah this is why many bigger studios just use their own Engines even if they’re shit.
The problem is that its so expensive to build from scratch. All Unity does is build just the engine, and that’s enough to make it a 7000 person company. Trying to build a game engine and then an actual game on top is a herculean effort.
This is why open source software is so important. It enables these small companies to pool their resources and share an engine as long as they each contribute fixes back.
7000 people is misleading. Being a general purpose game engine it has to be everything for everybody. An engine developed for a single game can be simpler, and once it is done, making the game will be simpler than it will be in Unity. Also those 7000 people are doing way more things than develop an engine.
That said, an engine like Unity can save a massive amount of time, especially for games that are medium scope. It’s these games where developing engine code and tooling would both take a lot of time and the advantages would likely go unnoticed.
This is 100% targeted at bleeding indie game developers dry in hopes of taking some of that sweet viral cash from devs like the one who made Vampire Survivors. They see that indie devs are charging $3-5 for their games, and so they aren’t hitting the $200k threshold unless they go viral, so Unity is charging by install, not just by total revenue. I hope that the ESA or other interested groups take legal action against this retroactive greed.
Has to be a smarter way than this. This is just going to make devs go back to activation limits.
After seeing the way WotC handled DnD and MtG, and the way Musk has been dragging Twitter through the shit, I really believe that shareholders are trying to take what they can while they can and peace out. No one is looking at the long term anymore. Everyone just wants theirs, fuck everything else.
RIP Unity. First they partnered with Ironsource. Who are the people behind InstallCore it’s a wrapper for bundling software installations. It tricks people into installing enough browser toolbars and other bloat to hurt their PCs. Windows Defender and MalwareBytes blocks it. Now Unity does this shit.
Unity’s CEO was EA’s CEO too. He is the guy who shaped EA into the greedy company that it is today. I’m literally not surprised
No wonder the article smelled like wet rats reading it
“Runtime fee” is the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard im the programming world, I think we hit a new record of low
Beyond what this means for Unity and the indie gaming scene, I’m concerned about copycats.
With how big Unity is for hobbyists, I’m worried this might have an “Apple” effect, where other runtimes (even non-gaming related) begin to try this.
Just a reminder that if Unity developers with pro licenses coming to Godot contribute even a small fraction of what they might have paid for those licenses on Unity, Godot can develop even faster.
You guys should check out Stride if you are looking for another C# based engine. It’s open source, but pretty rough around the edges right now.
Or, go for Godot for something more mature.
What about Open 3D Engine? Basically an updated version of Lumberyard. https://o3de.org/
I’d imagine Unity user would most likely be looking for a C# based engine instead of a C++ or Python based one, and O3DE doesn’t support C#.
Don’t know that I’d call Godot mature exactly. It’s still missing a lot of major features that both Unity and Unreal have.
thank God for their inconvenient way of installing and using of the engine itself, if I didn’t have a hard time back then I wouldn’t have switched to Godot 🙏🙏🙏
This is absolutely mad vendor lock in. I’m doing the maths and if you create the next flappy bird and it goes viral and gets 50 million downloads in a month, you’d owe unity $10 million dollars before you’d even received your first monetization cheque (you did launch with a full monetization plan, right? right? oh.)
edit: i forgot they had moneitzation limits too, so no - this situation wouldn’t quite happen until they earned $200,000 in revenue. Though the potential to go viral and find yourself underwater because of the massive unity bill in comparison to your income is still a possibility
