Unity game engine just screwed the pooch, developers are up in arms

[thewayne]

Unity used to be THE game engine that developers went to. It was multiplatform, and it was pretty much free for small developers to get in to for early projects. Big developers paid more for it, which makes sense.

Well, that all changed this week.

There's an old joke that when you take your car to your mechanic and you need a whole bunch of stuff done, like your brake fluid filter replaced, that the mechanic needs to make a boat payment. Well, in this case, it's like Unity's entire board needs new boats.

They are going to start charging users of Unity's engine $0.20 every time someone INSTALLS a game using the Unity engine! The developers/game company eats that fee. It slides slightly, like if you're a huge company like Bethesda or EA, it goes down once you're above a certain threshold.

But let's look at a couple of very real events. A game company developed a game with the Unity engine, I believe it was called Vampire. They sold it on the Steam platform for $0.99. Steam automatically takes a 30% cut. Had Unity been taking $0.20 at that time, the developer would have been taking a loss on every single unit.

Second scenario. For whatever reason, you hate Bob at Bob's Game Studio. Maybe he left a snarky comment on a social media post that you didn't like. So you write a script that will create a virtual machine that will then download Bob's game, install it, then delete the VM and repeat endlessly. Costing Bob $0.20 until you decide to stop the process. And hey, why not rent some Amazon cloud servers and spin up a few dozen VM servers to do the same thing?

Among the worst parts of this is that Unity promised to never do such a thing, now they're doing it. And to top it off, they're saying that this fee will be RETROACTIVE. The game that you made on a previous version of the Unity engine? Start coughing up those 80% of a quarter.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/09/game-developers-unite-against-unitys-new-per-install-pricing-structure/


Developers are furious. So much so that Unity has had to close two offices because of threats against the company and its people. Closed at least through the end of the week. They have 15 offices in North America, 39 world-wide.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/09/potential-threat-shuts-two-unity-offices-after-per-install-fee-announcement/


But there is a bright spot on the horizon: Godot. Yes, you don't have to wait for Godot. (sorry/not sorry: couldn't resist)

There's a new game engine in town that goes by Godot. It's fairly mature, up to the V4 stage with the v3 engine in long-term support. It is multi-platform including iOS and Android, supports C#, C++, Rust and a number of other languages. AND it's free and open source. You can use Blender with it and several other languages to create assets for it.

Absolutely guaranteed that computer game developers will be switching to it by the legion.

Humble Bundle frequently sells programming bundles for game developers for Unity. I wonder how long until they sell them for Godot and whether the frequency of offering them for Unity goes down.

https://godotengine.org/

Comments

[rain_gryphon]

That seems a horrible blunder. I'm reminded of Toast, and their PoS hack to add a ten cent charge to every sale for their benefit.

[thewayne]

SMH  So many ways to torpedo a good product.

[dewline]

Tim Peel and his team have been using Unity for their motion graphics work on the Star Trek series filmed in Toronto, Discovery and Strange New Worlds. I wonder how much longer that's going to continue. I expect that the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes are leaving them with lots of time to learn new software...

[thewayne]

Now that's an interesting application, reminds me of J Mike doing all the rendering for Babylon 5 on Amigas.  Now in this case, I expect Peel et al have a paid developer's license and people aren't downloading their "game".  But considering that this move has put Unity on such risky ground, yeah, I'd change platforms if I were them!

[dewline]

I was considering trying to learn how Unity works. Now, as a consequence of the fuss, I'm looking in Godot's general direction. I'm mildly curious as an animation student, as the computer-aided design tools were just starting to get useful - per your example re: Babylon 5 - in my second year classes at Algonquin College. Gerry Paquette or Don Perro had hooked up a VideoToaster board to one of the Amiga 2000 machines in the Animation programme's computer lab, and some of the more forward-thinking students were experimenting with it, per the encouragement of the faculty.

[thewayne]

Now that is very cool!  That is an amazingly forward-thinking faculty to go to that point.  Were they able to produce anything striking?

Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

Sucks for developers, but awesome for Unity's rivals. It's always grand when your enemy decides to shoot himself in both feet.

Re: Well ...

[thewayne]

Shoot, take a sledge hammer to, then chop off with a machete.

Re: Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

Yeah, it's like modern businesses sometimes come down with market dysphoria and cut off parts of themselves to escape. 0_o

[silveradept]

This is what happens when you've given your product away for free enough to make it ubiquitous enough that you can start squeezing the people who have spent all that time learning, using, and developing with it. I suppose it says something about the availability of engines that it took Unity a decade to arrive at this point, rather than having turned around and done it in a year or two.

[thewayne]

Apparently they did an IPO a year or two ago, so I'm guessing some major shareholder fund is screaming for returns.

[silveradept]

Ah, so they're right on time, then, we just weren't in the right conditions before.

[disneydream06]

Gotta love "big business".
ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hugs, Jon