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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Quoting https://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/728361889628913664/sure-ev...:

> For my money, the most interesting part of the whole Unity debacle is that by a strict reading of the new policies, ceasing to offer one's Unity-based games for sale won't even work as a means of getting around the fees: if your Unity-based game is no longer available for sale after January 1st, you'd still be on the hook for the Unity Runtime installation fee for new installs performed by previous legitimate purchasers, even in cases where such installs are performed from physical or archival media or are otherwise impossible for you to prevent.

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Certainly that can't be enforceable. There's no agreement to the terms, in fact a tacit disagreement and loss of profit by the developer/storefront.

This all feels like Unity is pushing an obviously terrible concept so they can back down to a slightly-less-terrible one and look slightly more reasonable. I'd bet they will switch to a larger per-sale fee after a little longer of people making noise.

IANAL but it doesn't pass the sniff test. You can't provide a module to a software, change terms retroactively and request to be paid $10b per install for old versions of the software and bankrupting all your customers. That's preposterous.

Yours is a common reaction. Even many indiedevs (in the gamedev discords I am in) could not believe the implications. Unity's policy is so silly it is hard to believe.

Unfortunately, the leadership at Unity does not agree with you.

Unity's core selling point was a pay-per-seat fee with no royalty. Hence a decent number of big productions went with Unity over Unreal. Now Unity wants more money, and thinks said big productions are "free loading". It is as if an all you can eat buffet decided they should charge for entry plus per plate. "But a lot of customers come in, pay one fixed fee, then eat a lot of food" said the employees of the all you can eat buffet. "Other restaurants charge 20$ a plate. We are simply asking for the same.", said the employees of the all you can eat buffet.

> the leadership at Unity does not agree with you.

I'm interested in how the courts would rule on it. I can't imagine courts siding with an agreement change, without consideration for the other party, and applying to games developed in the past retroactively.

Yeah there's no way that's enforceable.

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