Oof. So they are doubling down rather than taking the feedback and making changes based upon it. I do not see much growth in Unity's future.
Their responsibility is to their shareholders now. Good luck with that.
Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume
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Re: Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume
#12The installs thing doesnt make any sense.
But, I've been a professional Unity dev for 10+ years and I have started learning Godot today; the reason is because I am very concerned about how would Unity possibly implement these policies? They would need to put secret analytics calling back to Unity servers in every build + secret killswitch they can trigger if you dont pay up.
That is the reason. Tbh I've been waiting for a good reason to hit the button and that was it.
Re: Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume
#13How does this pricing scheme even make sense? Why do they think "installs" is a relevant metric? I could uninstall and reinstall a game 100,000 times. Would I single handedly cost the developers a ton of money?
They are apparently attempting to prevent that... but installs on 'separate devices' still count. So I'm sure someone will find a way to do precisely that.
But if they are attempting to prevent that then why not charge per game sold? If they think a single person installing it more than once shouldn't count then what do they believe the difference is? It seems like the only purpose of this pricing scheme is because they want to be able to charge for a single person installing it multiple times.
Re: Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume
#14Oof. So they are doubling down rather than taking the feedback and making changes based upon it. I do not see much growth in Unity's future.
IMO it doesn't really matter if they do a 180, they've telegraphed the direction they want to go. If I had a dependency on Unity I'd be evaluating my options pretty seriously to migrate off of the engine.
Hopefully it spurs further investment in things like godot and bevy.
Re: Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume
#15How does this pricing scheme even make sense? Why do they think "installs" is a relevant metric? I could uninstall and reinstall a game 100,000 times. Would I single handedly cost the developers a ton of money?
They claim to have developed proprietary code to handle this situation. They don't offer up a lot of details.
Re: Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume
#16Wait, they're planning on charging the Game Pass game fees to Microsoft? The Aggro Crab example alone could incur hundreds of thousands of dollars per game for Microsoft, they're not going to be happy about that. Surely that's going to drag Microsoft legal very quickly into this mess?
Re: Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume
#17From [1], it seems they intend on counting "loading a unity game in a browser" as an install:
> Q: Does this affect WebGL and streamed games? > A: Games on all platforms are eligible for the fee but will only incur costs if both the install and revenue thresholds are crossed. Installs - which involves initialization of the runtime on a client device - are counted on all platforms the same way (WebGL and streaming included).
[1] https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packa...
Re: Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume
#18How does this pricing scheme even make sense? Why do they think "installs" is a relevant metric? I could uninstall and reinstall a game 100,000 times. Would I single handedly cost the developers a ton of money?
They claim to have developed proprietary code to handle this situation. They don't offer up a lot of details. https://x.com/unity/status/1701689241456021607
"trust me, bro"
I imagine there will be a lot of disputes around billing, as in, ever single bill from this system.
Re: Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume
#19It sounds like they initially wanted to charge developers per install (including a reinstall) but changed it after the backlash. The relevant section:
> After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unity's Whitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation. (A spokesperson told Axios that Unity had "regrouped" to discuss the issue.)
Re: Unity rushes to clarify price increase plan, as game developers fume
#20How does this pricing scheme even make sense? Why do they think "installs" is a relevant metric? I could uninstall and reinstall a game 100,000 times. Would I single handedly cost the developers a ton of money?
They are apparently attempting to prevent that... but installs on 'separate devices' still count. So I'm sure someone will find a way to do precisely that.
I bet every install will require a "sign in"...
*edit: actually yeah, given that Unity is very heavily used in the walled gardens of mobile apps. this makes a lot of sense.