Garry Newman: The new Unity pricing would have cost him $410,000 of lifetime revenue

The enshittification continues.

Watch for more products that enable normal people to do great things to become paywalled. Only your gatekeeper masters may direct the market, and the creativity. In their infinite wisdom, they demand the control of gods.

Billionaires are a mistake.

EDIT: and I love the bait-and-switch of charging anyone who ever used Unity, even under different terms. Electric chair for the CEO.

Surprised nobody mentioned here, but Godot Engine people. It's FOSS and will never charge you for anything. Don't stay in an abusive relationship

They're going to back off on this and replace it with something bad but not as horrible. This is testing the water, and opens the door to charging everyone money every time you install a game, not just devs.

Have an install saved on your external and want to install it next week? You'll get charged for it as of you didn't already pay for it.

Games you have in your steam/gog backlog? Get charged again for it when you decide to play it.

I guarantee there are investors/publishers/whoever hitting themselves right now screaming "why didn't I think of that?".

Smells like a lawsuit to me. Retroactively devaluing software that they were already paid for.

It's probably a scream test that they'll walk back with something more reasonable in the next few days.

This is exactly how you make FOSS more popular.

Unity Engine taking a leaf out of reddits book. Lol

Nevermind PC games, think about how this would impact mobile games. Where you get TONS of transient installs, and very few consistent players.

You could actually go into debt by using unity, and accidentally being successful if you aren't abusively monitizing your game.

founding your business on proprietary software is just a crazy gamble.

I think the reason beginners want to use Unity is because that is what they will need as professional game developers. But if professional game developers stop using Unity, then there is no reason to use Unity, no matter how beginner-friendly pricing it is.

Everyone I know has been reaching about Unreal for the past few years anyway. I'm surprised Unity is pulling this controversial move in this situation, driving more customers to the competition. It's like if it was 2013 and AMD suddenly started charging double for their graphics cards even though Nvidia was way better

Common proprietary L

So whats the next step, everytime a start my car i have to pay?! F*ckin ridiculous

I gotta ask, considering the "per install" pricing, what exactly is an installation in the eyes of Unity?

A game download? In which case would a cancelled and restarted download result in two installations being logged?

Is it an API call during first start-up? What would keep malicious actors from simply modding their game to repeat this call a thousand times?

What about pirated copies? Do they count as being "installed"?

I think the real problem is how shady it seems. Like has everyone forgotten the concept of "grandfather in"? People will make new games in unity if they factor in the cost. I think people are understanding if they have the priory knowledge that unity needs to maybe start charging something. But sounds like they are asking for after these businesses already have created budgets. It sounds like it could be a bit of extortion depending on what the original agreement was. " Extortion might involve ... damage to a companies financial well being."

So do game developers have lobbyists to ban this shit?

What’s the tl:dr?

The creators of the unity engine are charging people extra for games they have already created?

It's a truly horrible chain of events. Unity has been continually scaling back it's development objectives, canning their developer game samples and overall it feels like they're struggling.

While overall I'm fairly happy with Unity as a game engine, I'm not happy with Unity as a company, which seems to prioritize the strangest things while features and optimisations seem to languish

Will Garry Newman decide to reskill his devs to use Godot? Will anybody with enough power decide to do so? Imagine if game studios big and small decided "we don't want to have to deal with this ever again, we're making a new or investing in an existing opensource game engine".

I wish people would see the light, but will they?

This is the java business model, there's two ways it could go: total flop, everyone hates it and because video games aren't as deeply entrenched as legacy codethe java business model won't work. OR the Java business model works great and there's now a 10% unity tax passed on to the consumers

Edit lmao the most pedantic Mfs alive in the replies

Sad times, I remember first learning from Tornado Twin tutorials way back in version 3. At this stage of my life, I basically develop exclusively for game jams, and give away my weekend warrior projects for free. The new pricing model, as currently described, would not affect me. However, trust has been eroding for a while. Trust is gone now. I do not trust Unity not to alter the deal further. I fear that I may become liable for fees that I did not agree to when I published, for lack of a better term, my games to the internet. I've been looking at features offered up in Unreal for a while. I guess it is time to start watching tutorials.

Shareholder greed is astounding

If I had a dollar for every time proprietary software users act surprised when it abuses them...

Anyone used O3DE?

Wait. All libraries will go this model.

This has always been the risk.

Now, I'm a Linux user and really don't like Unity the game engine. Unity the desktop was cool, on a side note, even though I've never used it for long periods of time.

Use godot then, or write your own engine. If the licensing permits retroactive changes to old games, I'd migrate away from unity asap. Sooner or later they want a bigger piece of the pie

how much did they make with it?

Here in my car I feel safest of all. I can lock all my doors, it’s the only way to live in cars

I’m not a fan of the new licensing scheme, but at 20 cents or less per install, I have a difficult time feeling sorry for a dev losing $400k. That means he’s already made a shit ton of money (like over $20 million if the game is sold for $10).

https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates