they are going the way of unreal. overpriced as shit. or demand to much cash from beginner devs or experienced devs. all the money probably went to their damn head.
Well yeah and technically then saying they don't have to share their revenue well that's contradicting as youre forced now ticeahee your success basically it's the higher ups piggybacking off the hard work and creativity these devs bring
@@tailez606if unity charges the revenue they can only charge once per copy sold, the system that they want to implement charges per download. While a 30% charge on revenue is far more than 20 cents to 8 dollars per download you can't exploit the revenue to fuck over the studio, you can literally just proggram a machine to reinstall the unity tracker from a game to bankrupt the studio in a day
It doesn't scale equally. A revenue share is a flat % of all revenue, if you make more you pay more. This business model punishes devs for charging less for their games because they are charged per install and not per dollar actually made. It also doesn't make sense to charge for repeated installs of the same user. They're also asking devs to trust that they can detect when a game is installed fraudulently with 100% accuracy which is ridiculous. Imagine getting charged for people pirating your game lmao.@@tailez606
@@tailez606 Sharing revenue would be a % of the money from the sale of copies of the game or from microtransactions or ads. It is a portion of money coming to you. This new bit they added means you will owe them money even in instances when you don't make any. If you release a free app with microtransactions, and you meet the revenue and installs thresholds, you will owe money for every install of the game, not the purchase of the game, the installation of it. So if someone buys your game and it doesn't work for some reason and they delete it and reinstall it, you get charged for 2 installations. If someone buys your game and plays it for a while, then deletes it, then later reinstalls to play for a while, then deletes it, etc., you get charged for each of those installs. For F2P games, they can make good money from microtransactions, even though many, or most, of their players never pay a penny. All of those free players will cost you money now. And that's not to mention the possibility of abusing this system by installing games repeatedly to bankrupt someone.
As a unity developer for 7 years now... I'm out going to godot, unless they change the management completely and do proper licencing that would actually cater and protect devs...
For real. Even if they backpedaled entirely, I wouldn't have any faith in them unless they got rid of the execs that made the decision to move in that horrible direction with the business model. Seems like more and more companies are getting inspiration from crypto scammers as of late.
@@jeffmccloud905 The bigger picture is not about the fees being imposed right now. But the fact that they thought changing the rules for everyone, including those with already developed and published games, was A-OK. For any future devs, this is going to be a big NO. They could change anything again in the future at any time.
Except the hardware mfr does not come to your house with a new modification and improved version every other month, some exponential. This has to be the dumbest comparison I've read today, and the Internet is a large place. You folks have no touch with reality eh lol
@@DaveRicher705um yeah I've gotten firmware updates on blu-ray players that bricked it, forcing me to send it in for a costly repair or wait on a class action lawsuit to get like 40 cents back on my purchase. So yeah the comparison works, Richard.
The Unreal Engine is only getting bigger as it expands beyond gaming to other industries. You'd think that Unity would try and compete stronger instead of alienating the very developers they need.
I just need Unreal to make insane updates to their VR features and have some talented developers to jump in and make some games like Lone Echo, Boneworks or Half-Life Alyx.
UE isn't the one and only engine, it has issues as well and a monoply isn't what users and developers should want, especially with a guy like Tim Sweeney at the top. Disgusting guy.
I'm almost 4 months into building a game on Unity (mostly just coding at this time) and I'm dropping Unity and switching to UE5. I'm having to restart all the work I've done so far and completely restart all of my coding. Unity uses C# code and UE5 uses C++. I'm not risking my financial well-being to try and see if Unity fixes this. I know a lot of Devs making the switch. Dumb move Unity...
I'm working on a horror game project as well, having scene level design and game system, logic for prototyping. And now planning to move all the work to UE and rebuild it again. I have been using unity for 6 years and I have make a hard decision to move in unreal and learn how to use it.
@@eazilyunreal2701 But blueprints are not programming, I hate this type of stuff and in my case I prefer to program by myself, but C++ is also really painful, I have some years of experience with C++ but I way more prefer C#, way easier especially in game dev with complex projects, just for this reason I will not move on Unreal Engine. And Unity is the only powerful 3D engine that use C# currently.
The fact that the big wigs at Unity drafted this shit up and said "yep...everyone will want to use our platform now!" is mind boggling John Ricotello has to have dementia or some form of severe mental disconnect to that think people are happy with this.
@@ChaosBahamut But he wants to kill the company with this move. New developers will avoid Unity and studios with money like Facepunch will try to sue them for retroactively changing the agreement. Even if they back off from this they already lost devs trust.
I suspect even if Unity walks this back in some fashion, they'll quitely implement the policy later down the line without letting anyone know publicly. It'll be far down the TOS and written in fine print. Because thats how a lot of this kind of crap goes; a business will come out with an announcement, the public gets pissed, the business walks it back, waits until the public forgets about it in due time, then implements the policy under everyone's noses.
even if they do that, it won't last long... coz ppl will notice thousands and more missing from revenue and investigate... and once they find out they aint going to be quiet abt it and guarantee a Budlight situation will occur...
@@ReDkOaLa64 One can only hope that's the case, but corporations do this type of shit all the time, especially when it comes to boycotts, that's they most boycotts fail. Budlight was probably the only exception to that rule.
Unity is being run by the former EA CEO. Remember the guy that introduced a payment to play used online multiplayer games and he was the guy that said he was happy with gamers paying $1 per bullet in battlefield
At this point, no matter the backtracking they do, it is mostly over for Unity. The trust has basically been smashed to pieces, and pulling this over devs without warning just doubles the damage to that trust, because this tells us and devs that Unity trusts no one, yet wants more money from nothing... I really hope Godot manages to get that funding, because the very last thing I ever want to see in the games industry, is Epic having a total stranglehold in the engine market.
As an indie dev I worked multiples years in the past with Unity, went a bit for away for the game dev in between, but recently I just restarted a project on Unity (like 2 weeks ago) so now I'm seriously thinking about moving on UE5. But I can't imagine indie teams that work on a project for multiples years now, they're simply locked and can't restart from scratch on Unreal Engine.
@@jeffmccloud905 This is not the question here, the issue here is that if they start by something like that, they would probably continue in this direction of adding more and more constraints to indie devs.
@@Degenevesting Unity is a powerful engine when you know how to use it and it also use C# as the main language, it's way easier to use than C++ (and this is an ex C++ dev saying that !). Saying "Unity is shit" reveal you don't know anything about this engine + the thing is I don't want to move on UE5, I need to learn everything about the engine, having years of experience of C++ is not enough, I have years of experience with Unity, moving to UE5 would be a HUGE contraints. For now I'm waiting to see if Unity will go back on their decision and we will see...
@@GameBoyyearsago I hear godot is on the rise and has the potential to replace unity i'm not a game dev so idk how similar the engines are but it's something to check out
This is wild. I buy my games on Steam. One purchase, but i can install the game on many computers, meaning many fees. I imagine there are many developers, who are stuck on the Unity engine for what ever game they are making now, but on the next game that would change.
I did read its not technically per install for one person (say you uninstall and then install at a later date) but rather for first time installs per user. Not sure how they would track that, but its the initial install.
@@Ryan-xu9zbDid you watch the video? Someone directly asked them for clarification. If someone installs, deletes, then installs again, that's 2 installs so 2 fees. You have no idea how this could be vindictively used to target indie devs. Scripts could easily be made to install then uninstall over and over. A fee each time.
@@VenomGamingCenteror even not vindictively. I have a small hard drive compared to my steam library. I'm always uninstalling and re-installing games depending on what I feel like playing.
The best way to deal with it is to pull out of unity entirely. Don't look back. None of that "ohh we're threatening to delete our game herpa derpa derp". Just do it and tell you're friends and colleagues to avoid the engine like the plague.
Dont forget, Source 2 is also on the corner since when CS2 releases, Source 2 SDK will most likely be a thing too. With also people using SnBox(Garry's mod 2) to create games too.
source isnt really comparable to unity or unreal though@@gorilla1397 it doesnt have the features and no devs are experienced in it so its not rly a thing. there many other engine more likely to be used
I really am appreciative of everyone covering this, creators, players and commentators alike. I honestly don’t know if people can put their trust in Unity even if this doesn’t go through. Just the fact they considered this is shocking itself.
I was learning Unity since last 6 months because of all the praise I had heard from devs about how it was supportng indie / beginner devs. Now, I am going to start learning Unreal.
Unreal has made huge improvements in the past 4 or so years to be more new creator friendly. The UE5 upgrade was on that made huge improvements and makes so much more sense than most other affordable game engines.
@@zachiga True but Unreal is only C++ and blueprints based, so what if we are more experienced with C# for multiples years ? • C++ it could be okay I made a lot of projects with this language in the past, but from my experience C++ is painful when it comes to huge projects (like a game) and really don't want to comeback to C++ after working with C#. • And blueprints... okay that's cool for beginner, but that's not programming at all, I'm way more used to real programming than visual type of stuffs like that ! So it's not that easy to say: "How let's just switch the game engine !".
well, the CEO/Executives and adjacents sold their unity stock a couple days before they announced this move, so I don't think this was really ever going to go through, and was more so used so they could buy back stocks when the prices go low due to the announcement of their policy change. They then assume that their stocks will go up again and that'll turn them a profit or smth, altho I strongly doubt it will ever even get remotely close back to what it was. I don't think this'll really be implemented, the projects that are in the later stages of still being worked on probably should still get released (unless they can find a way to convert to a different engine without too much effort, which idk how possible that is), tho after that I doubt most people are gonna stick with Unity any longer, even if the changes don't happen. Chances are they don't realize just how badly they fucked up.
This happens everyday in everyone's life. People make money, other people want to take the money you earn... People, Governments, Agencies and Companies will always try and get something for nothing while "we" or "you" fight to keep whats yours well as much of it as possible
That's what they tell you, that's what they want you to think. Do you live in the US? Our taxes definitely end up in the pocket of politicians both legally and illegally
i grew up with unity, as an indie dev, i started using it when i was 12, after "graduating" from the old gamemaker... when UE4 went free i switched to that and started learning, but went back to unity for the one mobile game I've released, and a prototype project i started that's much smaller than my unreal game i have a soft spot for unity, but this is some asinine shit and the reason why i'll be sticking with UE5
I've been a Unity programmer for over 10 years, and sometimes the thought of Unreal Engine crosses my mind, but I tell myself, 'Nah, I've been using Unity for 10 years, it doesn't make sense to switch.' After this, DEFINITELY Hello Unreal, goodbye Unity.
I downloaded the Godot engine in response, and I really like what I see; C++? Supported. Bring in your Unreal code with minimal edits. C#? Supported. Bring in your Unity code with minimal edits. Workflow? Not terribly different from Unity on a surface level, albeit it seems to have more differences the deeper you dig. Graphics pipeline? Seems like a solid Vulkan implementation. Hardware/OS Compatibility? VERY close to Unity's variety. And editors are fully available on Linux, as well as macOS I think, so you can work in whatever environment makes you comfortable without the need for a VM or WINE. The real kicker? Godot is MIT licensed FOSS. No fees, don't even have to say you used it, doesn't matter what the scale is. All funding and development for it is community driven; the community has a lot more say for what gets implemented than something like Unreal or Unity. Really, the only thing it actually lacks is Unity levels of prefab asset stores, and Unity levels of community tutorials, which given Unity's downfall being upon us may very well change since it's one of the two big engines to move to and all that C# knowledge can translate.
Thanks for speaking up on this one! I was RAGING when I heard about it and didn't think this was going to be a real thing. But here we are. This is the DUMBEST act of "Fk you" to any dev out there now. A lot of companies are starting to act this way and it just makes no sense.
Well to be fair, he stole that idea from Luke Stephens - who always has a life-size cardboard cutout of Todd standing behind him when talking about Bethesda news. This guy just stole Luke's idea.
They aren't squeezing every little dollar out of customers here like you said near the end. Unity had never once been profitable from 2005 to Jan 2023, where it finally had its first profitable quarter. They are trying to solidify a profitable model, and they are run by idiots so they don't know how to do that properly. But it's not greed in the same way as when a company is deciding between "A lot of the money" VS "ALL THE MONEY" with microtransactions.
40k is pre revenue this isnt a development deductable meaning it will cut into companu profits. since this is retroactive its after tax too so u lose more. there are no analustics to guesstimate familu share or steamdeck or reinstalls so it could be more than 0.2 per user
I no longer accept back peddling from any company. I'm sick of multimillion-dollar corporations trying to screw everyone over only to retract if enough people get mad, only to do the same thing again later on.
Many people we know are switching to Unreal or Godot, we are thinking about the same move. At this moment we aren't making any revenue from our games but this is seriously stopping us from starting something bigger. It's a pity, Unity was always very good engine for small indie devs...
From what I have seen the demos being "mostly" exempt is because for some reason if the demo allows users to carry over data for the full game then it counts for the fee, even if the user tries the demo and then doesn't want the full game. Not sure how they can track that the demo version allows you to carry your progress to the full game or not just like a lot of their fee conditions seems like they would be tracking user information to a degree that is highly illegal in many countries these days.
They stated that it's all agregate data which is why they can't track if a game was first time installed or reinstalled. There is hardly any data collection there compared to literally any other service people use. They also can't track if data can be carried over because that's not really how data is stored unless it's through some sort of cloud operated by Unity. Developers have full control over how their save data is created and stored.
Louis Rossman in his youtube adblocker video said(paraphrased) that one of the signs that a company is circling the drain, is that they start searching the couch cushions for change instead of spending money to grow and attract new customers. Unity attacking their developers in this way is them searching for change.
Yeah, I think Unity committed business suicide with this. Even if they reverse the decision, NOBODY is going to trust them anymore. "Wait! Don't go! We're sorry! We changed our minds! We're NOT going to fuck you over now! Come back!" Nope. Too late. You WERE going to fuck us over. We see what your intentions are and what you think of your customers. The damage is done. Good bye, Unity.
USE AND CONTRIBUTE TO GODOT ENGINE. Godot is essentially the Linux of game engines. the more people that are contributing to the project and even just using it, the better it's going to get. It's completely free and open source under MIT license, and NO ROYALTY FEES. There are already some banger titles on Godot such as Cruelty Squad, Lumencraft, Ex Zodiac, Wrought Flesh, and Cassette Beasts. it's rough around the edges but it's perfectly capable.
Absolutely unforgivable and there is no way in hell ANY developer should put their trust in them after this stunt. Barring a complete regime change, they need to be shut down. My heart goes out to all the teams that have built their games on unity and are mildly successful. Makes me want to vomit. Such an absolutely unforgivable move from Unity.
I've been working with unity for over a decade, It helped me get my first game job out of college , helped me build a stable career, and is a skillset I've ridden with much success . For a while I considered myself a Unity fanboy but THIS ?! It's inexcusable , greedy , short-sighted , and to me decisions like this say that the future of this engine is dead in the water because the people at the top are beyond out of touch on how to make a valuable tool that enhances the creative ability of its users. I have never seriously considered looking into Unreal game development until now and this latest decision tells me my future with Unity is nearing its end , thanks John riccitiello you've killed the tool I built my career on .
John Richetellio is a former EA CEO. This is the same guy that wanted to charge people for reloading weapons in Battlefield 3. None of this is surprising, now everyone is going to switch to Unreal Engine
one way they might feel the burn is everyone who doesn't have a reliance on unity already going and deleting their account at unity. Since I hadn't bought any assets or have anything in their system that mattered to me I just went and did it. As it is obvious all they care about is metrics and growth, if they see a tangible drop in their account numbers I am certain it might make them start to think about what they have done. Luckily I have been thinking about ditching unity for awhile, so this made the choice easy! Godot here I come! It's a shame because it is genuinely good engine, and if they were not actively hostile against developers it would be awesome.
They couldn't care less about how many accounts they have signed up, it wouldn't do a single thing. Growth and metrics is measured with the big guys. 500,000 user accounts who haven't bought any assets or anything in their system is worthless to them.
I believe you got one thing wrong. If you are an indie dev studio and you pass the 200,000 installs threshold, then pass the $200,000, you aren't obligated to give Unity $40,000. It's every install AFTER you reach the thresholds that you are then charged for. Also Demos should be fine since they would have to not only get over 200k installs, but ALSO make over $200k in revenue, for that demo.
Yeah, it does say it's 0.20 for every install OVER. So if you had 200,001 installs, it seems that would then be 0.20 a month? And you also have to have made at least 200,000$ in the last 12 month period after hitting that cap. I'm guessing that's probably also gross not net. I'd really like to see that cleared up some, but that seems to be as written. I still think this is ultimately a bad thing, and could really kill some small indie game devs, especially solo ones, and especially if say they've already sunk like years of dev into unity and are suddenly face with this, it could kill games by forcing them to switch and restart dev, or just quit all together.
is it per project or per developer for those thresholds? they didnt make that clear so could be either way. they didnt say they wont charge you for the original 200k when you hit that. again not clear. and now they say reinstalls wont count but on another device or new hardware how do they know its a reinstall? they saving all ip addresses and usernames per download? i doubt it. either way they arent trustable and this is a huge mistake
The vague language is there so you can interpret it however you like, but from what it seems once you hit one of the thresholds, you start paying Unity. This is a killer for freeware games who use Unity as their engine.
They probably used this kind of lawyer speak to sell the idea to begin with: 200,001 download is only 20 cents. Yet if someone has 10 million downloads and makes $300,000 that extra $100,000 is going to cost the developer $66,666
@@thereadherring2364 It's not 20 cents a month. It's 20 cents for each new install, paid monthly. The distinction is that if you paid for install 200,001 in May, you won't have to pay for it again in June, but you will have to pay for install 200,002, if you get this install in June.
The biggest issue even after their clarifications we have is the breach in trust which alone caused us to decide to move our project from Unity to Godot, a project nearly 2 years along. Why? Because we can never trust them again and frankly this was already a hesitated choice going with Unity from the start due to their continued pattern of poor management in the past 3-5 years, so we already were regretting our choice haven chosen them last year as the platform but we had to due to them being the only engine that could load 3D models into the scene at runtime (granted via an third party asset). Now we discovered Godot 4 has built in process for doing just that so we decided this morning to make the leap which likely will take months but just the breach in trust alone is enough for us to decide this. Also now seeing in the news today major names have decided to leave including Garry Newman stating Rust 2 will certainly not be using Unity and Among Us is going to be ported from Unity, etc. That is another reason to move from Unity, because now the future health of Unity is at stake and it would be a foolish business decision at this point to stick with them due to the amount of damage. Also, their investors are starting to catch on to all of this as well. Even if they chose to completely revert from this, the damage is done not because of the monetary aspects but as Gary and many others have stated, they can no longer ever be trusted again. Unity is the reason we have decided to only use Open Source software going forward for literally every single thing we do from accounting to game development and we in turn will only release Open Source programs/games adjusting our revenue generation to service based and the sales of virtual goods like upgrades, etc. Two great choices for Unity substitute that are open source are Godot and Stride Engine. Also another thing despite their clarifications.. Let's say you made $200k or more in a year and you have 1 million installs after making that, you now owe Unity $200k and you made nothing! They have so many issues with their formula for this not to mention they claim they can detect pirated installs and installs made by BOTs which a Cyber Security friend and a lot of others have concluded is just entirely fantasy and not actually possible, so they lie to try to reassure folks. A BOT can be made to find and remove any flag/file they set to show original install has been done on a device and there are tools for spoofing hardware and this is all before you through in Virtual Machines, VPN's and rapidly growing AI tech. The simple issue is you will have to pay and then let them know of suspected pirating of your game or abusive installations, they will have to spend money and time investigating and then you must accept their findings which it is in their interest financially to lie to you and say you didn't have such happening.
I can't imagine Microsoft would be willing to foot the bill for the plethora of Unity indie games on Game Pass. I'm expecting them to suddenly drop a lot of popular titles from GP, and absolutely refusing to add aspiring developer's new games to the service to avoid the possible tens if not hundreds of thousands in fees.
@FreeLeaks From an FAQ regarding Unity's Installation fee: "Will developers be charged the Unity Runtime Fee for subscription-based games? No, in this case the developer is not distributing it so we’re not going to invoice the developer on subscription-based games (e.g. Apple Arcade, Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Plus, Netflix Games, etc.)" Axios, a news aggregate that managed to get some answers from Unity's president Marc Whitten, clarified that the installation fee on Subscription-based games would be charged to the distributors. For Game Pass, Microsoft would foot the bill.
Kiba Snowpaw, the Ice Wolf mage from the frozen realm of HowlStrom here. With over 36 years of gaming etched into my soul, I've seen the evolution of many game engines. But Unity... it's always been a thorn in my side. As a gamer, not a developer, I've consistently found Unity to be incredibly resource-intensive. It feels like every game I've played on this engine demands so much more from my PC than it should. I remember one demo that nearly pushed my GPU to its breaking point, a chilling testament to Unity's inefficiencies. Whenever I stumble upon a game or demo built on Unity, a sense of dread washes over me. Even if the game itself is masterfully crafted, the performance issues often overshadow the experience. I've come to the point where I actively avoid Unity-based games. It's a heart-wrenching decision, especially as someone who loves gaming so deeply.
Interesting, so based on what they're gonna be doing if it goes through, the amount of shovelware that unity has both on steam and mobile stores, would decrease drastically which in my perspective is great, then again there are still games developed on other engines like UE4 but based on the amount of run ins I had with Unity in the past years they're kind of negligible. Kinda a big middle finger to the indie devs as well but, there are other engines available if unity decides to push through with this.
I make f2p game on mobile. They have ads yes, but I make pittance atm and I care completely about making something authentic and fun. Unity saying 'it wont affect 90% of users' is so out of touch and insulting. Most of that 90% put their heart and soul into trying to become successful making games and now, instead of these devs viewing success as light at the end of a tunnel, it's a barrel of a shotgun with Unity at the trigger. Thanks for your vid bro.
Picture a scenario in which a competitor initiates a well-coordinated maneuver with the intent of eliminating their competition from the market through multiple installs resulting to high fees.
They revealed their true colors. Even if they backpedal the damage is done. Nothing stops them from being this shady again or worse. I'm starting my project again from scratch in Unreal or Godot.
Guys...don't you get it...THE PEOPLE AREN'T LINKED TO THE PRODUCT. As in, these same idiots can make their way into OTHER projects, AND DESTROY THEM, unless they are ACTUALLY punished. They don't care, they come in, burn and pillage, and leave, just like raiders.
the worst part about this is developers getting hit out of the blue with some fee because a popular youtube said oh you gotta try this classic game out. i constantly delete games to play new ones and occasionally reinstall the games I removed to make room. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Thank fuck I didn't take time to learn the unity engine, this is the push I needed to learn unreal engine. I was just on the fence on choosing between unreal and unity but now I'm definitely running to unreal.
Same here except I started learning unity 2 weeks ago. Not anymore I guess. The only problem is one of my dream games is 2D tile based so making 2D games will be a bit of an issue on ue5
30% cut goes to steam, around 20% to VAT. Suddenly 200k turn into 100k. Then subtract game developing costs and don't forget the government also gets a cut. 200k threshold sounds higher than it actually is.
ya... Unity basically just killed themselves. Even if they walk it back they just made to many developers panic over this. Also I believe its OR not and. So $200000 or 200000 installs which really changes what that means Edit: nope, its and currently. i don't trust them to keep it as and though
I just use Unity and Gamemaker for hobby projects I may or may not ever even actually release to the public. I will probably never use Unity for a new project again, and may even transfer my favorite existing Unity project to Godot. This is just scummy and untrustworthy
I love how the reason they initially said it charges per install per user is because they don't have specific data on user installs, just total installs. So they just haphazardly and carelessly threw this together with 0 thought for developers and just used whatever shitty meaningless data they had lmao
I was that guy in the middle of production. Thankfully not that far in. I am already starting to learn Unreal so I can move my project there. Its especially shit for me because Ive been using Unity for about 6 years now.
Godot is dogshit. I haven't seen a single decent looking game made with Godot. Not on mobile or steam, not even on Gamejams. I seriously don't understand the fuss about Godot. Show me one game which achieve commercial success made with Godot@@IslamistSocialist371
After talking with the rest of my dev team, we're just gonna bite the bullet and switch to Unreal even if they back peddle all this. Unity just kinda destroyed themselves with this one.
Everyone keeps missing the fact that Unity Plus is going away. So if you were paying $400/y/seat now your only option to pay is now 4X more at $2000/y/seat. I have a fair amount of time invested in Unity/c# but now I'm out.
This is exactly what wizards tried to do with d&d. We should make a law that prevents these companies from enacting these types of policies. If it jeopardizes the majority of the user base in a devastating way, then the government should be able to step in and stop them!
And in some business instances they can already do this; such as phone companies only being allowed to charge so much per month. No thanks, BAN THAT SHIT!
Tell me you have no clue how EU privacy laws actually work. You're effectively saying that every anticheat ever is breaking the law. You clearly have no clue what you're talking about.
I’ll just evade that fee like I evade taxes. Real talk Seems like a lot of businesses, not just in the game industry, are absolutely trashing themselves internally.
My brothers game studio literally apparently left Unity forever yesterday, Not a massive studio but the repercussions of this will be huge, also what's with John Ricotello selling stock just before this? Yikes, Never trust anyone that's had anything to do with EA
It's like a factory that produces hammers say "Yo we know you own one of our hammer tools, guess what we decided to make a little update to our monetization policy. We gonna install gps tracking and swing sensors in your hammer so we will know where and when you swing it and from now on if you use it to make money you gonna pay $0.09 per swing, not even 0.1 you see how generous we are??" LMAO
"We'll charge you a predictable fee that's under your control" "We'll charge you an unpredictable fee that you have no control over." "We're not as good, but we'll charge you nothing." Hmmm what to choose, what to choose...
Back in the day things were a lot simpler though. Like there are whole companies devoted to making game engines, so doesn't that mean they are very complicated and hard to build now?
If this did go through. Given they said that bundles are exempt. As a dev I'd be tempted to make some crappy little clicker game, and sell that with my main game and call it a bundle. See if that avoids the fees x)
Someone could just keep constantly installing/deleting a game and rack up huge charges against a game they didn't like. This is a horrible business model.
Thankfully, I never wanted to use Unity in the first place. They are being utterly demolished by Unreal Engine. They even tried cashing out and buying ZIVA Dynamics, but that development is going way too slow to compete with Metahumans
Are we sure they don't mean "unique installs"/number of players? Because someone could use a script to keep installing and uninstalling the same game to hurt the developers.
@@BigfryTV 4chan alreadu have a botnet group where theu coordinate reinstall refund scripts for all woke games we now have digital political guerilla warfare on indie devs thanks to corporate greed
depends on the developer, if we're talking steam/pc/console i don't see very many indie devs coming close to the threshold minimum. and if they're afraid of hitting the minimum, they should be buying a pro or enterprise versions to minimize the cost of overhead (which they should already be doing based on feature changes that will be taking place). it also appears that these are AND statements rather than OR statements, seems like you edited a bit of your own correction in the video around the 5:30 mark on being AND or OR. if you have pro, and someone is trying to abuse the install feature you'd have to break 1 mill installs AND 1 mill in revenue in a 12 month period before you'd even start to accrue the cost of 15 cents per install. if you have standard, you'd have to have to reach both 200k installs and 200k in revenue before you'd start paying the 20 cents per install. also, invoicing with companies like this, incur a lot of back and forth that can be negotiated, i doubt much of ANYONE will be forced to pay for what can be an easily displayed notation of "we sold 3 million copies, you have 25 million downloads on our product, someone is intentionally breaking this system, please fix your billing this month." (law of averages or some shit, only my 305th rodeo around licensing, billing, and incoices.) if you have pro, AND meet the threshold, the breakdown is as follows. (ZERO DOLLARS PAID FOR ALL DOWNLOADS PRIOR TO THRESHOLD BEING MET FOR REV AND INSTALLS) first 100k installs AFTER threshold = 15k cost (total installs 1Mill-1.1Mill) next 400k installs AFTER threshold = 30k cost (total installs 1.1Mill-1.5Mill) next 500k installs AFTER theshold = 15k cost (Total installs 1.5Mill-2Mill) every 1M installs AFTER threshold = 20k per million installs (2Mill Minimum installs made) if you have 3 mill installs (and already broke the threshold of 1 mill revenue as well as have a pro license) your total cost appears to be. 1 pro license + 80k in install fees. after making 1 mill MINIMUM in revenue + whatever you made after meeting the threshold. (you are not charged for the first million downloads) using this if you take battlebit remastered ($15 on release) 1.8million copies sold in the first two weeks. = $27,000,000. (being the low end, because it was $20 for the version a lot of people bought) licensing and install costs for lets say 5 million installs (exaggerated) for 1.8 million copies sold. equals a price tag of: unity standard = $ 960,000 (less than the 5% price tag on installs while using a free product to make money. isn't unreal more than 5% as a flat fee in genral?) Unity Pro = $120,000 + license (if you're a MAJORLY SUCCESSFULL INDIE GAME, YOU MIGHT WANT TO INVEST IN PRO) (non indie dev companies have custom licensing, don't worry about them, battlestate will be fine) i guess you could get a bunch of people to bot a popular indie game that's already broken the threshold of revenue if you wanted to, but i don't see it being applicable to a solid 98% of indie games on PC. and if you think more than 2% of indie games make more than 200k a year and have more than 200k installs, you're wrong. and if they are, then they're paying for pro, which is an even smaller subset of indie devs making 1 mill a year, and their cost is negligible. if you're making a successful game like that, you want the features that pro has over standard...... this may be dead for mobile, because their numbers are VASTLY different, but they're making all their money on ad rev and micro transactions, not sure if they'll care about the cost in the end.
It's only installs AFTER the criteria has been fulfilled. But anyway, this takes the problem of review bombing and such to a whole new level, and it's instead install bombing that directly affects the developer/publisher. This is also an additional cost AFTER all the existing cuts. So your $3 per copy sold, might suddenly become -$1 per copy sold, some times.
