It’s kinda amazing how Unity shot themselves in the chest with this one. No, I don’t mean foot, they are now actively bleeding from the torso.
No Dev or Publisher is going to be okay with this, none. This basically leaves Devs on the hook for unlimited liability. Even with their walk back of “only initial installs” doesn’t help. I myself have both a Desktop and a SteamDeck. That’s possibly two installs out of the gate from one customer. Then any time I make an upgrade in the future, or heck maybe even switch Proton versions on my Deck, the Dev could be on the hook for more cash. There’s zero transparency with how these “installs” are detected or counted, so there is no way to budget or plan for the expenses.
Businesses hate unpredictable fees.
They’ll deal with utilities upping rates, because who are you gonna switch to in a monopoly? But if you’re just a tool for them, they’ll ditch you as soon as they’re able and never use you again.
And again, publishers will care about this too, since their whole job is distribution. Any Dev looking to sign with a publisher, even a subscription service like GamePass, will now be asked which engine they’re using, and I bet you 9/10 times the Dev will get rejected if they’re using Unity now. That puts even more pressure on Devs not to use Unity.
Unity will price gouge their existing customers(Devs), but will ensure that nobody ever buys their product ever again. At this point I doubt their reputation will ever recover even if they can walk this back. The fact that they believe they can unilaterally add enormous fees at the drop of a hat means they’ve ruined any trust their customers had in them.
Unity: I can charge you any fees I want, any time I want.
The real hit is free mobile games. Paying per install can be crippling when you naturally have low retention rates.
You can accidentally success yourself into debt if you don’t have preditary monetization.
I’m building a game ATM that’s meant to be fun and fair, monetization is really low. If it shot up as a front page item for some reason that now went from a huge success to a massive stress point as the number of installs would easily put me into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to unity overnight.
Who TF wants to take on that kind of risk? Does this not push mobile games into being even MORE preditary?? Since it’s now impossible to build a mobile game with Unity, and just release it as something free.
How would they even track that it was “only the initial install”, and what’s the metric for that? If i need to reinstall my OS due to a crash, is that a second install for the game? How about if I replace a piece of hardware that fails, is it considered a new system with a new install?
The whole idea that they can claim additional fees for an “install” is ridiculous.
As someone who’s been following Unity’s development since 2.0, this doesn’t surprise me. They’ve always struck me as a company that doesn’t care about developers. And while all companies are trying to make money, there’s a difference between “pay for our product because we need money to operate” and “we love Adobe’s subscription model and want to outdo them - and we will squeeze you as much as possible.” Have a little heart, Unity.
It’s interesting to think about the position that Caesar’s is in, with regard to trust. How do you determine that you can trust the hackers enough to pay them, that they won’t release the data anyway? Like… do the hackers have prior exploits they can point to saying “Hey, we took company X’s data, they paid up, and we didn’t release their info, so you can trust us?”
I mean, there’s also the thought that if they don’t pay up, it will definitely be released, so it comes down to something of a risk analysis.
Alternative title: Unity about to get sued into settlement or bankruptcy due to legal fees by Nintendo, Sony, and a bunch of others over unilaterally announced installation fee.
engadget.com
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