Unity is a game engine used by a lot of developers, many of them indies. Some popular games that use Unity are Among Us, Cuphead, Cult of the Lamb, and Tunic. They recently made several changes to their TOS that has upset the gaming community.
Unity used to have a clause in the TOS stating:
“if the Updated Terms adversely impact your rights, you may elect to continue to use any current-year versions of the Unity Software (e.g., 2018.x and 2018.y and any Long Term Supported (LTS) versions for that current-year release) according to the terms that applied just prior to the Updated Terms (the “Prior Terms”)”
This meant that if you didn’t agree with the new terms, you could continue using a different version of Unity and the new terms wouldn’t apply to you. In April 2023, they removed that clause completely. A week ago, they announced new terms: every game install will be charged a fee of up to $0.20 starting next year, depending on what Unity subscription the developers have and how much revenue/installs the game receives.
This change was set to cover all existing Unity games, even ones made on older versions. Any time anyone installed the game, even if they had installed it previously, the developer would be charged a fee. Many of the games made with Unity are under $20, with some of the popular ones being $5 or less. Immediately people thought of ways this could be trouble: Scripts to install the same game over and over, people sharing their game libraries with family/friends, those with multiple computers/laptops/tablets.
Unity announced on Sep 17, 2023 that they would not be going forward with this new policy:
We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days. Thank you for your honest and critical feedback.
It’s unclear what Unity will do now. Many developers have started looking at an alternative called Godot, and some even plan on canceling their Unity subscription because they have lost faith in the company.
Unity is a game engine and a bunch of ancillary services, analytics and tracking and what not. It’s been free to use and publish games with as long as your company revenue was under a certain amount. Over that amount and you’d have to buy a license for I think about $1600 a year.
The brouhaha was because they changed their income model to charge people/companies who create their game using the unity engine to make games on a per install basis. Up to 20cents per install of your game ( but only if your revenue was over $200k AND installs was over 200k, raising to $1m AND 1m installs with the unity pro license) .
The changes would take place next January leaving developers with very little time to make any changes to their revenue model. Unity (the company) also changed the terms of use of Unity (the game engine software) so that it was retroactive across all previous versions of unity, ie. If you didn’t like the new terms you couldn’t just carry on using an older version of it.
If you were being charitable you’d call it a clumsy launch or even ill considered. But it went down like a bucket of cold sick with the game dev’ community who viewed it like a greedy shakedown.
The really big bruhaha came from them doing it retrospectivelly (the legality of which is yet to be clarified and likely depends on jurisdiction) which means games made on top of Unity and shipped would also have to start paying this install fee (even though the version of Unity with which the game was devloped and shipped had no such conditions in their Terms Of Service so the game makers never agreed to these new conditions).
Theoretically if found legal this could not just kill certain business models in the game development community but even bankrupt companies (especially for games distributed free and funded by ads, which are quite common in the mobile space).
Now, maybe, hopefully, such retroactive changes to the pricing will be found illegal in the applicable jurisdictions, but in some it might require a quite expensive legal fight to clarify it and meanwhile many gamedev companies working with Unity run a huge business risk if they ship their products with it.
Unity is a tool that game developers use to build games. You don’t have to use Unity, but lots of really popular games use it and it makes development easier. Recently, the company behind Unity (also called Unity) decided to add an extra fee for using Unity. That would have been bad enough, but Unity went with adding a fee in which the game developers need to pay every single time a customer installs their game.
This was a startlingly bad idea, because you end up punishing games that sell well. But it also opens up entire cans of worms, because trolls could easily mess with developers by simply buying a game, then installing, uninstalling, then reinstalling again and again. And because the fee is applied per install, a single troll could easily build up massive fees for the developers. On top of that, this new fee is applied retroactively to all games that were built with Unity. So it doesn’t matter if you built your game 10 years ago - you’ll still get charged if a user installs your game.
In response, many developers are pushing to boycott Unity, with many saying that they would go bankrupt with the new fees. It also came to light that many of the top executives at Unity sold a large number of their shares in the company shortly before making the announcement of the new fee, showing that the top executives knew that the fee would be unpopular but went with it anyways. It also brought up the concern that they were engaging in insider trading, which is illegal.
game program bad want more stupid money
All I know is Unity is a Apple IOS developer and I don’t own anything Apple so I didn’t care.
False
A game engine.
Because gamers need to have a knee jerk reaction about freaking everything.
Yup, the something-cents-on-the-dollar fee only applies to individuals if they sold 200k copies and make 200k/yr off it.
