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Unity game engine just screwed the pooch, developers are up in arms
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/
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/
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Well ...
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ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hugs, Jon