“This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

Best part is you can bet people who don't like the developer of a game (for whatever reason) will "install bomb" the game.

Third outcome - Microsoft acquires them ( given the impact to Gamepass and C#)

Also I suppose most people will auto-reinstall everything when they get a new phone via Play, no matter if they will actually continue playing that game.

That seems pretty far-fetched for PC users. Either they copy their Steam library (or the standalone install) or not reinstall everything they own.

In Germany it is not. SaaS apps can be particularly challenging because you cannot just change the terms for existing users and contracts.

Ironically most customers don't know and don't react accordingly. Generally the customer behaviour is that customers get spooked and pay anyway.

... but if they were to sue it would be a problem, which is why typically small companies try to follow legislation and big company with big legal department, don't necessarily care.

I'm not so sure about that. You are totally right that e.g. here in the EU contracts and terms of service with ordinary consumers ("B2C") are restricted as you say, limiting what can possibly be agreed on in that contract. Generally this consumer protection only applies to individuals for their private use. E.g. later changes to the terms of a contract are a big no-no.

Contracts between businesses ("B2B") are far less restricted, there is no such thing as consumer protection for businesses. Whereas for consumers, terms of service are heavily restricted by a special law ("AGBG", basically translates as "terms-of-service-law") It is generally thought that business people are savvy enough to know what they can and cannot agree on. Therefore legislation and courts lean strongly towards providing greater freedom of business and contract in anything B2B.

And I think in most circumstances, a game developer who distributes its game to a wider audience is a business in the scope of the aforementioned discussion. It would only maybe not be a business if there were no monetary benefit of any kind, so no selling games, no advertisements, no publicity that could lead to monetary benefit in the future...

> at least in some jurisdictions it probably isn't

I also don't think "you'll agree to future unpublished terms" will work anywhere in the EU

Not sure you read the article. Unity explicitly states they are NOT applying this retroactively.

An alternative engine (no matter how good) doesn't solve vendor lock-in. Gamedev is a cutthroat business. You can't afford a rewrite. Even for new productions, you can't throw away engine experience and start retooling. I expect backlash.

If I had to guess, Gogot is also the reason why they are scrambling to cash-out before it's too late.

Missing ton of console exporting, Xbox Series, One, WinGDK, PS4, PS5, etc. And sure there might be some beta out there but we need proper support :)

Bevy is getting better every quarter. If you're into Rust, you should check it out.

Let us know how you deal with the threading model in Godot.

Or Bevy, if you're into Rust: https://bevyengine.org/

It’s mostly likely an application of the Door in the Face technique where one makes a huge ask followed by a smaller, more well-received ask after the first is rejected.

Here, they put forward an unreasonable demand. Later, once the trolling emerges, they roll it back to be only on new devs with old devs keeping the old system. They get to seem like they “listened to the community” and the community ignores their still predatory pricing.

> no fault of my own

You locked yourself into proprietary-licensed solution and invited this upon yourself.

This is the warning. They only start to bill from Jan 1 2024.

A lot of games don't cost millions to develop. In particular, I associate Unity more with indy games rather than AAA.

Those sorts of devs don't have a lot of leverage.

It works legally since you didn't buy Unity. You don't own anything. You're licensing the right to use it on an ongoing basis.

It's like how I can't buy a Rolling Stones CD and then play it on the radio for millions of people without paying them. I never bought the music, just the right to listen to it privately.

Unity has lost $455 million dollars in the first 6 months of the fiscal year 2023. They lost $919 million in 2022. I don't think they have ever made a profit. Companies are not charities; they exist to make money, and Unity doesn't by a mile.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1810806/000181080623...

It's not CEO's doing something wrong. It's workers.

Try "year of the submissive worker" maybe "year of the dominated worker" and see how that tastes in your mouth.

It's workers lack of unionization and enforced professional ethics that means there are no consequences for being "greedy" and that being "greedy" is in fact a winning strategy in the game of prisoners dilemma.

It's convenient when someone else is doing something wrong and they need to change, but if you want change, you need to look in the mirror and ask what you are doing wrong and for most of us, that is failing to unionize in order to get a seat at the negotiating table and therefore being able to check otherwise unchecked CEO/Board power.

Wage is a measurement of power, not value. Wage is capped by value provided, but scales with power.

Every year is the year of the greedy CEO.

You're saying they weren't greedy in 2022? What changed?

It has been interesting and fun to watch what one simple knob turn of interest rates to more reasonable numbers does.

You have to understand where it came from. Unity was the simple easy to use indie darling for years when it first came about. The corporatization and financialization of the company ruined it, but once upon a time it occupied the same space Godot does today.

I think they were just pretty early in the VR space with good libraries/support/tutorials etc. I cannot say for sure because I have only done one Unity-VR tutorial "back in the day" but in the AR space there was a time window where they were pretty clearly #1 (imo). I shipped a couple of small projects based on their Vuforia integration (quite costly) and then later without Vuforia. Nothing big, mostly trivial product vizualizations for customers that had upcoming trade shows/excibitions with somewhat creative markers.

100% of my lifetime AR profits are based on Unity such a strange wild west time but I got out of that market very quickly when it became a lot easier to build these simple demo apps. I still remember the "wow factor" and people running around the office showing all their colleagues how you could see their products through a tables/phone.

I can bet my money on this being yet another case of things going well until MBA imbeciles took over.

Are you implying this move is intended to force Microsoft's hand? Because... that would be the most reasonable explanation I can think of!

> What Unity probably wants or needs is to take a cut off the large successes. That’s where all the money is. The problem is that they aren’t involved in distribution.

Isn't the simple solution to just tax the companies a percentage of the revenue? Isn't that what Unreal do?

Windows

Does it also mean that an internet connection is a requirement to play any Unity game? Including, for example, physical Switch cartridges?

Doesn't GDPR basically count as the perfect excuse as why they would count the same user installing as multiple installs?

Something along the lines of "we can't identify the device so we have to count it as a unique install"

"Q: Is software made in unity going to be calling home to unity whenever it's ran, even for enterprice licenses? A: We use a composite model for counting runtime installs that collects data from numerous sources. The Unity Runtime Fee will use data in compliance with GDPR and CCPA. The data being requested is aggregated and is being used for billing purposes."

Source: https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packa...

Unity already has UnityEngine.Analytics.dll since 2018, and it claims to be GDPR-compliant.

Are "corporate information", as PI for commercial entities, covered by GDPR?

GDPR relates to personal data and it doesn’t forbid sending any network packets to the USA.

How do you download and install a game without internet?

Even the last few games sold outside Steam still need some launcher whether it's from Epic, Ubisoft or whatever. Sure, you can install a game from 2004 completely offline but that's not a Unity game.

By calling home. The implication here is that unity is malware.

You don't need to actually install/reinstall games if you can figure out how the Unity runtime is notifying its servers about this install.

You could theoretically write an 'install bombing' tool that sends fake install notifications straight to their server (or modify the game executable to do it repeatedly). You can't trust the client, especially when dealing with PC games.

Hopefully Unity will anticipate this potential abuse, and filter out repeated 'installs' from the same IP address. But they don't seem to have anticipated free demos, pirated copies, Game Pass, or charity bundles before announcing this...

A least now the argument that piracy hurts the developers has some weight

The best part is that we can use this against people whose politics we don’t agree with. Developer says something Trumpy? Let’s make him pay! Solo developer is a trans woman? Why not shoot for bankruptcy?

I wonder if this could be used as a way to target civilians as part of a larger cyber war, like in the Ukraine conflict?

Always this comment on these threads. Unity existed for 18 years in a particular capacity now it's being changed. It is not unreasonable to not be prepared for a change like this or to be upset by it.

> Did you think they didn't need to buy food and pay rent?

Poor multi-billion dollar company Unity Technologies has managed to corner the entire segment of the market in 18 years and now they have to pay for food and rent.

Unity was not free for all before this, only to a small section of the market. Plenty of the people complaining were already paying.

We cannot have an advanced society where everyone lives and works in tiny self-reliant bubbles that are hugely duplicative of effort because they cannot trust others not to rip them off.

(Think about it, HN: do you really want a world in which nobody ever dares buy any SaaS or ongoing-license product, making those unsaleable and unstartupable?)

You know, we’re taking about decades here.

That said - both Epic and Valve are private and that is probably the better razor. Be extremely vary VC/Public companies because they will come under pressure to slaughter golden geese when the time comes.

Even if you agree with the overall move, surely you recognise that some of the details — charging developers for users installing the same product multiple times, or even pirating it — are flat-out wrong? Not even just wrong from a moral point of view, but from a "this can't possibly work" one too.

I quit on Unity several years ago for this sort and many other reasons. But honestly, that isn't a decision a lot of people can make.

For me, I just went back to doing web development. For someone in the indie game market, you either develop in Unity or cut yourself out of the employee pool.

I don't think you understand the policy.

Unity isn't doing what Unreal did and asking for a cut of every sales. That would be surprising, that would be impactful, but that would be a manageable amount of money.

Unity is asking for a fee on every _install_ of the game, even if it amounts to one single sale of the game. Quoting their FAQ[0]:

> Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs?

> A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data.

That means that if you sell a game for $1, and if a user reinstalls it 6 times over the course of their ownership of the game (changing computers, just uninstalling/reinstalling to free up space every now and then, adding or removing mods, etc...), and you made more than 200.000 sales... You now owe Unity $1.20 for that user. And you only earned $1 from that user. Sure, you can pay Unity 1500/year/developer to rise the threshold to $1 million and lower the fee to $0.15 per install, but that's not a "deal". That's a racket.

This is absolutely, completely unsustainable. And not like "this will cost some money to companies" unsustainable, more like "it will be cheaper to hire people to port our game to another engine" unsustainable, as the person handling the business side of Among Us stated yesterday[1]:

> This is legit the kind of math I'm doing too. I've learned that Unity's fee won't be retroactive which is delightful, but also Among Us gets enough dls per month that I could just hire two whole people to port AU away from Unity instead of them taxing us for 0 added value.

And that's not accounting for business models like bundles or game passes. AGGRO CRAB, the developers behind the upcoming "Another Crab's Treasure" game announced earlier this year and coming out early next year, has stated that they are unsure whether their GamePass release will be sustainable for them[2]:

> This means Another Crab's Treasure will be free to install for the 25 million Game Pass subscribers. If only a fraction of those users download our game, Unity could take a fee that puts an enormous dent in our income and threatens the sustainability of our business.

To be more exact and add some context, as reported by journalist Stephen Tottlio[3], Unity executive Mark Whitten stated that the fee would be sent to Microsoft:

> As for Game Pass and other subscription services, Whitten said that developers like Aggro Crab would not be on the hook, as the fees are charged to distributors, which in the Game Pass example would be Microsoft.

This will, however, deincentivize Microsoft to publish games made by studios who use Unity because Microsoft would be potentially publishing at a loss, which of course they don't want to do. So, not the exact same impact to developers, but the same difference for them.

And of course, that's not accounting for all of the "freemium" models here and there. And I don't mean microtransactions, I mean games that lock part of the content behind a paywall but propose access to most of the game for free. That business model, sustainable so far, is now literally going to end up with Unity asking for more money than you earn a year. (and yeah, this is a real risk for some companies. Anduo Games, the company behind the NSFW game Third Crisis, is still wondering if they're in that exact situation and what they can do about it[5]).

This move is just bonkers. Like, it's a business model where just using a game engine means that you can end up owing more money to a company than you earned over the lifetime your game.

And this is why people are not happy about this move.

[0] https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packa...

[1] https://twitter.com/forte_bass/status/1701696983617180010

[2] https://twitter.com/AggroCrabGames/status/170169103683230926...

[3] https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-ma...

[4] https://itch.io/post/8572430 (the link is to a comment and is fully SFW, the game this comment is about isn't)