Existing games built on Unity will also be hit with Runtime Fees if they meet the thresholds starting January 1.

How can you have a deal in place and just say “you’re giving me more money” and think that that’s ok?

I am altering the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further. - Vader

Godot.

Oh hey, look.

The former CEO of EA made a greedy, short-sighted decision to fuck over his entire customer base.

I am shocked, friends.

SHOCKED.

This is a good way to incentivize game developers to just not use Unity and just some other engine that does this.

Great for short term profits which makes the quarterly statements look good, but bad for long term sustainability.

The person who runs Unity is a shithead.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/18/23269218/unity-ceo-john-riccitiello-apology-game-developers-fucking-idiots-ironsource-merger

More enshitification. This is the kind of stuff I’ve grown to expect from tech companies. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are bleeding money due to interest rates and they need any way possible to stay afloat.

We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed," the company explained in adding the fee.

Ok and??

This might kill entire indie projects.

Oh yeah... I can't see this being weaponed by the bad side of the consumers.

Game comes out, it does something stupid or just "woke" and pisses people off. They attack the dev by installing more copies. Company goes bankrupt. Dickhead gamers win.

I work for a small (15 people) Unity gaming company. Will let you know what the CEO says, just shared the actual Unity blogpost

Edit: Update - CEO added a gravestone emoji and said "yikes"

This is 100% targeted at bleeding indie game developers dry in hopes of taking some of that sweet viral cash from devs like the one who made Vampire Survivors. They see that indie devs are charging $3-5 for their games, and so they aren't hitting the $200k threshold unless they go viral, so Unity is charging by install, not just by total revenue. I hope that the ESA or other interested groups take legal action against this retroactive greed.

RIP Unity. First they partnered with Ironsource. Who are the people behind InstallCore it's a wrapper for bundling software installations. It tricks people into installing enough browser toolbars and other bloat to hurt their PCs. Windows Defender and MalwareBytes blocks it. Now Unity does this shit.

"Runtime fee" is the most idiotic thing I've ever heard im the programming world, I think we hit a new record of low

Unity's CEO was EA's CEO too. He is the guy who shaped EA into the greedy company that it is today. I'm literally not surprised

This is great news!! For Godot.

rule 1: get user by giving free candy rule 2: let's them build their product, workflow on your tools rule 3: harvest.

Just a reminder that if Unity developers with pro licenses coming to Godot contribute even a small fraction of what they might have paid for those licenses on Unity, Godot can develop even faster.

You guys should check out Stride if you are looking for another C# based engine. It's open source, but pretty rough around the edges right now.

Or, go for Godot for something more mature.

I'm sure this will give a boost to Godot development.

thank God for their inconvenient way of installing and using of the engine itself, if I didn't have a hard time back then I wouldn't have switched to Godot 🙏🙏🙏

This is absolutely mad vendor lock in. I'm doing the maths and if you create the next flappy bird and it goes viral and gets 50 million downloads in a month, you'd owe unity $10 million dollars before you'd even received your first monetization cheque (you did launch with a full monetization plan, right? right? oh.)

edit: i forgot they had moneitzation limits too, so no - this situation wouldn't quite happen until they earned $200,000 in revenue. Though the potential to go viral and find yourself underwater because of the massive unity bill in comparison to your income is still a possibility

This is incredibly scummy. Not just for the obvious reason, but also because this is a business to business deal that developers have little room to avoid. It essentially encourages per-install charges for users, or at least limits on how many times you can install the software - which is completely unreasonable, they should only ever limit concurrent installations. If I want to upgrade to a new computer I should be able to move all my software over to it.

Unity going the way of Reddit

Sounds like another problem we have thanks to DRM and telemetry.

Get. Fucked.

Well, guess it's time to learn Godot.