They announced a new business model effective next year. It’s plastered all over the net, just look up “Unity news” and you’ll get a ton of hits on it. Lots of coverage on YouTube as well.
Godot is a good example of a free and well-developed open source game engine. It’ll probably see a sharp rise in adoption following this controversy from Unity.
We are not going to charge a fee for reinstalls. The spirit of this program is and has always been to charge for the first install and we have no desire to charge for the same person doing ongoing installs.
Someone tell them they can achieve the latter much more effectively if they simply charge once FOR EACH COPY SOLD.
Hmmm… but then what about humble bundle sales or freemium games? Maybe the charge should change depending on the price of the game…
OH WAIT THAT’S REVENUE SHARE. Seriusly this whole thing is just an attempt at taking more money than devs would be willing to pay, by using a model without an up front percentage.
It’s also possible that they can’t track new installs either.
FAQ:
How is Unity collecting the number of installs?
We leverage our own proprietary data model and will provide estimates of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project – this estimate will cover an invoice for all platforms.
Which is some kind of weird nebulous BS.
They’re not saying their engine phones home and/or collects data from end-user devices. With the associated data protection nightmares.
Oof. This is corporate lingo for “we’ll pull a number out of our ass and charge the dev accordingly”. “Proprietary data model” makes it clear they intend to remain conveniently (for them) opaque about it.
Ok so if they are now only charging for the first install, why aren’t they just charging an extra fee per sale? Wouldn’t that accomplish effectively the same thing? (And actually work out in unity favour since not everyone who buys a game downloads it)
That’s probably pretty negligible numbers. In fact I’d suspect that the number of people who buy a single copy that they then install on multiple devices is lower than the number of people who buy a game and never play it.
It’s also much simpler to implement and the numbers are verifiable. Unless… that’s exactly what Unity wants; just “trust me bro this is the correct number” kind of deal.
Also Steam Deck - every install and uninstall is considered a new computer. That’s true for Linux gaming using Proton in general, but the rest of Linux gaming is not as relevant.
The only major reason I can think of is people playing on PC and Steam Deck, using the cloud save to play on both. Sometimes I want to play the same game on the big screen and sometimes in bed.
Because they realize that a huge number of their customers are small indies, and they want to be able to squeeze them - the majority of their customer base - not just the minority of big companies (who are also the most likely to fight back legally).
Just look at how their scheme squeezes smaller, poorer developers way more than big ones. If Unity went by points like, say Epic does with Unreal, they could shake down the big developers… but wouldn’t get much out of the indies.
Which is the opposite of what smart companies like Adobe do. You facilitate the small players in hope that they grow big and keep using your products at a larger scale.
The fact that they went forward with this decision means they’re not so wise at lying. It sounds more like last-minute damage control, but I doubt this will stop their greed. What I’m wondering now is how will the Chinese game companies react? Everybody get your popcorns ready.
So does this mean every single unity game will have unity online drm now? Or how else will they be able to tell? Seem so much more convenient to take a cut from sales instead
$10 may seem like nothing and all you can spare, but it definitely adds up and is very important. That $10 is still very important and making a difference.
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