Unity wants to collect a fee for games using their engine. Unity devs are upset because they can't afford it or it's cutting into their business sustainability.
Didn`t they get a cut from the sales or something? As far as i know it`s never been a 100% free. They would get their money as long as the games did well commercially.
Unity wants a Steam-tier cut for your game's sales
It's a per-install fee, not per-purchase. So you get charged for being on gamepass, or having your game pirated, or fake installs to review-bomb. You make no money but still get charged. They are not telling anyone how they collect the install data, their reply is "it's proprietary, trust me bro, also pay me lmao". They're also applying this retroactively to all existing unity projects, not just new ones. Total dumpster fire.
>They're also applying this retroactively to all existing unity projects, not just new ones
everything u said except this is true, it only goes in effect 2024 its not retroactive
This. > Unity tries to sue Tencent > Case goes before Chinese court because Tencent is essentially a part of the Chinese govt. > Chinese court finds case in Tencents favour > Unity appeals > Chinese court finds case in Tencent's favour and Chinese court punishes Unity for wasting Chinese courts times through frivolous litigation.
no one had a problem when it was a revenue share deal. since they're moving in a more mobile game direction after that merger or whatever, they're changing it to a per install flat fee to to target all those f2p mobile games. but it also just happens to target everything that uses unity like gamepass installs. this is primarily a scheme to get unity developers to put ads in their games using unity's own ad services which they also take another cut from
If your game reaches a certain lifetime install threshold (as in a fresh install, not just one sale) and your company made a certain threshold of revenue in the last 12 months, you now owe unity for every new install until your game no longer hits that revenue threshold, charged monthly.
From Unity's own example: >Game has 5 million installs >Game made $2 million in the last 12 months
>Last month's installs were 300K from "standard" and "emerging markets" (different fees for each) >You owe Unity $23,000 for that month
there are layers upon layers of additional retardation that you omitted
>telemetry doesn't track whether it's the same user installing the game, or any kind of other relevant data that might be relevant for determining which installs are legitimate, so unity is going to employ a lot of guesswork to come up with their "fee" >opening the game in a web browser counts as a new install (unity games can be exported into html5) >no clue how unity will enforce the fee transaction. since they are not providing any service for this fee and thus have no leverage aside from trying to pull the game down on various platforms and go to court about it
It needs to be emphasized that this is NOT per purchase, it's per INSTALL. If somebody buys a game for 2 dollars and simply installs and reinstalls it ten times, the dev lost all the money from the transaction. And if the guy continues to install and reinstall, the dev goes negative. They explicitly say that yes, this is how it works.
there are layers upon layers of additional retardation that you omitted
>telemetry doesn't track whether it's the same user installing the game, or any kind of other relevant data that might be relevant for determining which installs are legitimate, so unity is going to employ a lot of guesswork to come up with their "fee" >opening the game in a web browser counts as a new install (unity games can be exported into html5) >no clue how unity will enforce the fee transaction. since they are not providing any service for this fee and thus have no leverage aside from trying to pull the game down on various platforms and go to court about it
[...]
It's a per-install fee, not per-purchase. So you get charged for being on gamepass, or having your game pirated, or fake installs to review-bomb. You make no money but still get charged. They are not telling anyone how they collect the install data, their reply is "it's proprietary, trust me bro, also pay me lmao". They're also applying this retroactively to all existing unity projects, not just new ones. Total dumpster fire.
pls help
can someone (who knows what they are talking about) explain to me in plain english why they even are trying to monetize on a per-install basis? why not just take a cut of revenue from sales? is it because they want a cut off of microtransaction-heavy f2p games? if so why can't they just say they get 5% of all microtransactions revenue as well? are they worried devs will try to get around that so unity doesn't get their cut?
Yeah I didn't consider Gamespass or similar, either. Basically they are (shittily / incompetently) trying to figure out a way to get paid for like non-'% of steam sale' use of the engine?
it's per device, retard. every low IQ reads "install" and thinks they found a massive loophole. like how dumb are you to think anyone else would be that dumb?
If it started as a per device thing they wouldn't have specified later on that they made "revisions" and it "only tracks the first install now" which is also fucked in the head because there's no guarantee that the install has to come from a purchase in order for it to count, unless you're gonna trust their amazing fraud checking software while you're at it
i don't care how it started you moron. their "revisions" are to address the stupid things people were saying on twitter, to make it obvious to people like you, who are not even capable of making games with unity, what they are saying to actual devs, who already understood that it was not going to be such an easily exploitable system.
meanwhile, you still think that unity is going to do the counting themselves based on telemetry. absolute shit for brains.
>Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs? >A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data.
Review-bomb install abuse bankruptcy tech confirmed.
>Q: What's going to stop us being charged for pirated copies of our games? >A: We do already have fraud detection practices in our Ads technology which is solving a similar problem, so we will leverage that know-how as a starting point. We recognize that users will have concerns about this and we will make available a process for them to submit their concerns to our fraud compliance team.
Submit a complaint and we won't ignore it lol trust me bro
>Q: Are these fees going to apply to games which have been out for years already? If you met the threshold 2 years ago, you'll start owing for any installs monthly from January, no? (in theory). It says they'll use previous installs to determine threshold eligibility & then you'll start owing them for the new ones. >A: Yes, assuming the game is eligible and distributing the Unity Runtime then runtime fees will apply. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.
Made a popular game 10 years ago? You're on the hook for life bitch.
can someone (who knows what they are talking about) explain to me in plain english why they even are trying to monetize on a per-install basis? why not just take a cut of revenue from sales? is it because they want a cut off of microtransaction-heavy f2p games? if so why can't they just say they get 5% of all microtransactions revenue as well? are they worried devs will try to get around that so unity doesn't get their cut?
They saw the revenue figures for Genshin and want their hand in that pie, consequences be damned. Gachashit and its consequences have been a disaster for the gamer race.
They want to get a piece of that mobile cash without having to resort to saying the words "royalties" so as to not scare off potential future devs. The new fees are functionally a non-issue for pc/console games since the margins are not as tight. You should easily be able to recoup the 2 to 15 cents fee per install with a proper 10+ dollar game.
(the 20 cent fee is a meme and you should definately have enough to pay for the pro license by that point).
I was actually thrilled about this because Unity is almost exclusively used by gay games and runs like shit but then I remembered Rogue Trader is Unity. So they should just make that exempt and double the fee and I'll be happy.
Yeah, people can just Google "games made in unity" and see there's a lot of well known, well regarded games in the Google summary box without having to click any links. I understand the shovelware stereotype but it's massively reductive.
I wouldn't know, their existing license was already garden gnome enough so I shifted to Godot a long time ago. But I guess it hurts the small studios the most? Big studios would adjust their monetization to the fee changes but small studios hoping to break out with their first few games are actually gonna eat shit.
Then you're insane, evil and retarded.
Charging devs by install is insane because devs do not get paid by install count. Devs get paid per purchase, which is unconnected to number of installs. Note that these are not fucking _unique_ installs, they admit right away that they have no means of tracking that. Note that reinstalling a game many times is normal use of a game.
twitter just found out proprietary software restrict your freedom, but they won't learn from it and continue using it after said software back peddles to screwing them over a bit more gently after the backlash is over
some small scale commercial devs (think devolver, or pre-genshin mihoyo) will probably stop using it for future titles because of a new royalty schedule. other than that it's fucking nothing
It can fuck over people who already made titles. Imagine finishing your game and signing a deal with gamepass a week before this unilateral contract change. You'd be absolutely fucked.
if your new game doesn't sell then you don't owe unity anything new. if you qualify for the royalties you aren't really fucked at all. it kinda sucks that you now have another bill to pay but you're still making decent money. if you make a deal with gamepass either make sure you get more than 20 cents/copy or have the terms assign the unity costs to microsoft. or don't sign with them. like any other business decision.
This applies retroactively to new installs for games already made. Contracts with gamepass are already signed.
Also, edge cases with piracy installs and review-bomb multi-installs; you have to trust unity to not fuck you on those, and why would you trust them when they've already fucked you with this once?
Genshin's too big (as in the game world and the assets they've built) to switch engines at this point. But I bet they'll switch out their future games.
>every unity game is now confirmed to track you
Welp, guess I'm not installing any games that use unity unless I feel like bankrupting a dev by constantly reinstalling with a script
other than the fee charged like said by others, an incredible amount of high earning gacha games, (including the top earning ones like FGO, Genshin, Honkai starrail, Uma musume) use Unity
Not sure how their publishers will react
Mihoyo makes billions from their Unity based free-to-play games with millions of users. Unity sees this and thinks, hey, we should get a slice of that revenue instead of just the flat fees. Goes for it without thinking about the impact it'll have on other developers and their own brand.
I'm low IQ sometimes, but if that was the case, couldn't they just simply write a clause in their engine licensing that they get X% of every microtransaction made in the game? And either tie it to a software token or just audit it?
I imagine there could be trust / verification issues but it seems to me like it shouldn't be THAT hard a problem to solve, in a more intuitive way than a per-installs fee?
Total guess here, but I figure they're able to track install data themselves (and charge for it) but they can't track microtransactions. Also it might be legally easier to charge for installs.
Except theyre actually letting gacha games slides, as well as educational games and one other I don't remember.
There was no thought behind this change, its just the CEO cashing out since he sold 2k shares a week ago.
If you're referring to their "no gambling" clause, gacha games are not legally gambling. Didn't they fight to make themselves NOT considered that and a pure game, that's how you have teens downloading it
QRD > any game that was compiled through the Unity IDE has a runtime tracker that notifies them if an installation app has been ran. > if the number of installations exceed a certain amount of runtime, the devs have to pay money per installation > Ganker will totally NOT use this poorly thought-out scheme as an exploit, to aggressively "ping" the Unity server through VMs over-and-over-and-over again with installation confirmations to basically charge indie devs enormous amounts of distribution charges.
Unity wants to collect a fee for games using their engine. Unity devs are upset because they can't afford it or it's cutting into their business sustainability.
Didn`t they get a cut from the sales or something? As far as i know it`s never been a 100% free. They would get their money as long as the games did well commercially.
It's a per-install fee, not per-purchase. So you get charged for being on gamepass, or having your game pirated, or fake installs to review-bomb. You make no money but still get charged. They are not telling anyone how they collect the install data, their reply is "it's proprietary, trust me bro, also pay me lmao". They're also applying this retroactively to all existing unity projects, not just new ones. Total dumpster fire.
>They're also applying this retroactively to all existing unity projects, not just new ones
everything u said except this is true, it only goes in effect 2024 its not retroactive
Weasal words. It does not charge for installs pre-2024, but it does charge for new installs on old projects made and released before 2024.
so what are the chances all these terrible unity games just get delisted and disappear forever in jan?
High. Good ones will also go. New features will be delayed as dev time is spent on rebuilding games in another engine.
Also, expect a sharp rise in DRM for Unity games, as piracy now cuts directly into a dev's pocket.
Grim.
>They're also applying this retroactively to all existing unity projects
How is this legal?
because they are rich
makes sense (in america)
This is the fun one, changing contracts with a 3 month heads up is gonna be a fun time in court.
They will make it legal.
Tencent and other big one swill fuck the Unity ass on tribunal.
This.
> Unity tries to sue Tencent
> Case goes before Chinese court because Tencent is essentially a part of the Chinese govt.
> Chinese court finds case in Tencents favour
> Unity appeals
> Chinese court finds case in Tencent's favour and Chinese court punishes Unity for wasting Chinese courts times through frivolous litigation.
After this bullshit or even before Tencecnt msut spend money to make a in house engine or other shit
>or having your game pirated
How would anyone know if a game was pirated and installed?
Data collection
All legal, look at our paperwork
no one had a problem when it was a revenue share deal. since they're moving in a more mobile game direction after that merger or whatever, they're changing it to a per install flat fee to to target all those f2p mobile games. but it also just happens to target everything that uses unity like gamepass installs. this is primarily a scheme to get unity developers to put ads in their games using unity's own ad services which they also take another cut from
Unity wants a Steam-tier cut for your game's sales
Steam tier? LMAO Its literally pennies per sale. Unless you're making dog shit 2 dollar "games" or a mobile moron, you're getting at most a 2% fee.
taking money from installs is the most retarded idea i've ever heard
so retarded i uninstalled unity
no you weren't, prison is for long-term sentences, you'd have been in jail
>no you weren't, prison is for long-term sentences, you'd have been in jail
What's the difference?
you go to jail when arrested and awaiting a trial and then to prison to serve your sentence unless it's really short
Go unity, go broke
It's the video game equivalent of the Tea Act.
how did the tea act lead into the creation of a golem country full of mutts that will die for israel?
If your game reaches a certain lifetime install threshold (as in a fresh install, not just one sale) and your company made a certain threshold of revenue in the last 12 months, you now owe unity for every new install until your game no longer hits that revenue threshold, charged monthly.
From Unity's own example:
>Game has 5 million installs
>Game made $2 million in the last 12 months
>Last month's installs were 300K from "standard" and "emerging markets" (different fees for each)
>You owe Unity $23,000 for that month
Mobile morons don't deserve sympathy anyways. If you're not making at least 10 cents per 'user', you deserve to bankrupt.
there are layers upon layers of additional retardation that you omitted
>telemetry doesn't track whether it's the same user installing the game, or any kind of other relevant data that might be relevant for determining which installs are legitimate, so unity is going to employ a lot of guesswork to come up with their "fee"
>opening the game in a web browser counts as a new install (unity games can be exported into html5)
>no clue how unity will enforce the fee transaction. since they are not providing any service for this fee and thus have no leverage aside from trying to pull the game down on various platforms and go to court about it
>you can now literally bankrupt a company by pirating their games
Unity is pro-piracy and that's based. Literally "vote with your wallet" is now a real threat.
It needs to be emphasized that this is NOT per purchase, it's per INSTALL. If somebody buys a game for 2 dollars and simply installs and reinstalls it ten times, the dev lost all the money from the transaction. And if the guy continues to install and reinstall, the dev goes negative. They explicitly say that yes, this is how it works.
pls help
Yeah I didn't consider Gamespass or similar, either. Basically they are (shittily / incompetently) trying to figure out a way to get paid for like non-'% of steam sale' use of the engine?
They're currently on the walkback for gamepass and bundles and saying they'll charge the publisher/distributor for that (LOL)
Here's a screenshot of acopypasta that sums things up.
Also keep in mind they're refusing to disclose the data model they're using. It's literally "trust me bro" tier of bullshit.
it's per device, retard. every low IQ reads "install" and thinks they found a massive loophole. like how dumb are you to think anyone else would be that dumb?
>create a new VM for every install
problem?
If it started as a per device thing they wouldn't have specified later on that they made "revisions" and it "only tracks the first install now" which is also fucked in the head because there's no guarantee that the install has to come from a purchase in order for it to count, unless you're gonna trust their amazing fraud checking software while you're at it
i don't care how it started you moron. their "revisions" are to address the stupid things people were saying on twitter, to make it obvious to people like you, who are not even capable of making games with unity, what they are saying to actual devs, who already understood that it was not going to be such an easily exploitable system.
meanwhile, you still think that unity is going to do the counting themselves based on telemetry. absolute shit for brains.
it doesn't matter, you african american
the idea itself of taxing INSTALLS is absolutely retarded
you are fucking retarded and have no clue how it works lmao
>it's per device, retard.
No it explicitly is not, unless they've done a major walkback in the past hour.
https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=company_global_blog_2023-09-13_updated-forums-faq
>Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs?
>A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data.
Review-bomb install abuse bankruptcy tech confirmed.
>Q: What's going to stop us being charged for pirated copies of our games?
>A: We do already have fraud detection practices in our Ads technology which is solving a similar problem, so we will leverage that know-how as a starting point. We recognize that users will have concerns about this and we will make available a process for them to submit their concerns to our fraud compliance team.
Submit a complaint and we won't ignore it lol trust me bro
>Q: Are these fees going to apply to games which have been out for years already? If you met the threshold 2 years ago, you'll start owing for any installs monthly from January, no? (in theory). It says they'll use previous installs to determine threshold eligibility & then you'll start owing them for the new ones.
>A: Yes, assuming the game is eligible and distributing the Unity Runtime then runtime fees will apply. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.
Made a popular game 10 years ago? You're on the hook for life bitch.
This shit is going straight to court if it somehow isn't walked back
can someone (who knows what they are talking about) explain to me in plain english why they even are trying to monetize on a per-install basis? why not just take a cut of revenue from sales? is it because they want a cut off of microtransaction-heavy f2p games? if so why can't they just say they get 5% of all microtransactions revenue as well? are they worried devs will try to get around that so unity doesn't get their cut?
They saw the revenue figures for Genshin and want their hand in that pie, consequences be damned. Gachashit and its consequences have been a disaster for the gamer race.
They just want a consistent flow of money from all the devs using unity
They want to get a piece of that mobile cash without having to resort to saying the words "royalties" so as to not scare off potential future devs. The new fees are functionally a non-issue for pc/console games since the margins are not as tight. You should easily be able to recoup the 2 to 15 cents fee per install with a proper 10+ dollar game.
(the 20 cent fee is a meme and you should definately have enough to pay for the pro license by that point).
>Quick QRD?
Another videogame crash incoming.
I'm so fucking happy.
I was actually thrilled about this because Unity is almost exclusively used by gay games and runs like shit but then I remembered Rogue Trader is Unity. So they should just make that exempt and double the fee and I'll be happy.
a lot of people are going to discover how many games were actually made in unity unbeknownst to themselves
most asset flippers have moved onto unreal since it's new and shiny and comes with a lot of free shit you can stitch together
Yeah, people can just Google "games made in unity" and see there's a lot of well known, well regarded games in the Google summary box without having to click any links. I understand the shovelware stereotype but it's massively reductive.
>Implying rogue trader isn't a gay game
I wouldn't know, their existing license was already garden gnome enough so I shifted to Godot a long time ago. But I guess it hurts the small studios the most? Big studios would adjust their monetization to the fee changes but small studios hoping to break out with their first few games are actually gonna eat shit.
Unity is making "pirating a game bankrupts the developers" a real thing. Power to the players.
Even if it says I have to sacrifice my virgin sister to their CEO if my game uses Unity,
HOW THE FUCK CAN THEY CHANGE THE CONTRACT REOTROACTIVELY FOR MY ALREADY MADE GAME?!
They can’t, you’re going to see tons of lawsuits that’ll combine into a class action in the coming year.
>genuinely don't see the problem with this
Then you're insane, evil and retarded.
Charging devs by install is insane because devs do not get paid by install count. Devs get paid per purchase, which is unconnected to number of installs. Note that these are not fucking _unique_ installs, they admit right away that they have no means of tracking that. Note that reinstalling a game many times is normal use of a game.
They all deserve to be murdered for this.
all unity games are trash. 99% of them are gacha games sellings jpegs or 3d models.
So all Unity games are inherently spyware now because they HAVE to track you?
Always have been
You’re only now noticing
twitter just found out proprietary software restrict your freedom, but they won't learn from it and continue using it after said software back peddles to screwing them over a bit more gently after the backlash is over
Thank you, RMS
some small scale commercial devs (think devolver, or pre-genshin mihoyo) will probably stop using it for future titles because of a new royalty schedule. other than that it's fucking nothing
It can fuck over people who already made titles. Imagine finishing your game and signing a deal with gamepass a week before this unilateral contract change. You'd be absolutely fucked.
if your new game doesn't sell then you don't owe unity anything new. if you qualify for the royalties you aren't really fucked at all. it kinda sucks that you now have another bill to pay but you're still making decent money. if you make a deal with gamepass either make sure you get more than 20 cents/copy or have the terms assign the unity costs to microsoft. or don't sign with them. like any other business decision.
This applies retroactively to new installs for games already made. Contracts with gamepass are already signed.
Also, edge cases with piracy installs and review-bomb multi-installs; you have to trust unity to not fuck you on those, and why would you trust them when they've already fucked you with this once?
unity is kill
What's bad about that?
They want a cut of the big Genshin money.
how long until they switch engines?
Genshin's too big (as in the game world and the assets they've built) to switch engines at this point. But I bet they'll switch out their future games.
>every unity game is now confirmed to track you
Welp, guess I'm not installing any games that use unity unless I feel like bankrupting a dev by constantly reinstalling with a script
I only play games on emulators now because of all this predatory bullshit
other than the fee charged like said by others, an incredible amount of high earning gacha games, (including the top earning ones like FGO, Genshin, Honkai starrail, Uma musume) use Unity
Not sure how their publishers will react
name a good unity game so I might start giving a fuck
grim dawn is ok at least
Mihoyo makes billions from their Unity based free-to-play games with millions of users. Unity sees this and thinks, hey, we should get a slice of that revenue instead of just the flat fees. Goes for it without thinking about the impact it'll have on other developers and their own brand.
I'm low IQ sometimes, but if that was the case, couldn't they just simply write a clause in their engine licensing that they get X% of every microtransaction made in the game? And either tie it to a software token or just audit it?
I imagine there could be trust / verification issues but it seems to me like it shouldn't be THAT hard a problem to solve, in a more intuitive way than a per-installs fee?
Total guess here, but I figure they're able to track install data themselves (and charge for it) but they can't track microtransactions. Also it might be legally easier to charge for installs.
Also Nintendo has Pokémon games running on it and will 10000% get ducked by their lawyers
Except theyre actually letting gacha games slides, as well as educational games and one other I don't remember.
There was no thought behind this change, its just the CEO cashing out since he sold 2k shares a week ago.
If you're referring to their "no gambling" clause, gacha games are not legally gambling. Didn't they fight to make themselves NOT considered that and a pure game, that's how you have teens downloading it
>Retroactive billing
>Counting pirated copies
It's so fucking gnomish I can only laugh.
RPG Maker bros, I'm thinking we're back
QRD
> any game that was compiled through the Unity IDE has a runtime tracker that notifies them if an installation app has been ran.
> if the number of installations exceed a certain amount of runtime, the devs have to pay money per installation
> Ganker will totally NOT use this poorly thought-out scheme as an exploit, to aggressively "ping" the Unity server through VMs over-and-over-and-over again with installation confirmations to basically charge indie devs enormous amounts of distribution charges.
>quick quick rundown
Ubisoft goes Steamworks bye bye, always on DRM
Can't wait to install a million times any game made by wokies kek
>could protest predatory games
>choose culture war bullshit instead
Fuck off moron, bullshit is bullshit. Nothing stopping you from expanding the list.
> install
You don't even have to install, anon. Just get a script to execute the runtime tracker.
The unity server will not know the difference. All that happens is that they track that an install has occurred.
is it really hard to understand how charging per install is insane?
qrd me on the average human iq in these threads defending it
we talking moron garden gnome tier or bugman commie tier?
Worse, unthinking reflexive contrarian tier.
Optimistically, they're being paid to do it.
It's hating SJW cucks like you tier.