Unity’s new “per-install” pricing enrages the game development community | Hacker News Reader

Unity’s new “per-install” pricing enrages the game development community

arstechnica.com

128 pointsstalfosknight36 comments

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Here's a quick refresher on how we handle a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) like this one: we downweight follow-ups until there is Significant New Information (SNI). I don't see any SNI yet; readers of "Unity Can Get Fucked", "The Death of Unity", and "This Is a Disaster" don't need a new article to tell them that devs are mad at Unity right now. Once something happens to significantly (or interestingly—i.e. something non-repetitive) advance the story, we can have another frontpage thread.

Past explanations on follow-ups and SNI:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

The outrage is warranted. Two things about this are poorly designed:

1) Charing for installs vs sales. Because installs are potentially a multiple of sales (and thus, revenue), this will make it extremely difficult to build accounting models for in advance of launch.

2) For the thousands and thousands of devs that decided to invest in learning Unity (vs Unreal or otherwise), many of them did so with the understanding that the business model would always offer a royalty free tier. This was asserted by the CEO! They've since raised (arguably) way too much private equity capital and now have to put the screws on their customer base.

While Unity has been slowly losing its focus (indie / mobile), Unreal has been executing better and better. If you're invested in Unity, it's time to strongly consider a switch.

Godot is also getting really good

Yeah, my immediate thought is "wow, that really shows the dangers of depending on a proprietary platform; maybe people will start going FOSS to escape". Because honestly, using a proprietary platform is an understandable move if it's useful and you think it won't do a rugpull, but a major vendor deciding to do exactly that feels like it shifts the analysis.

But I'm not a game dev, so take this with a whole helping of salt grains.

What's the chances of Unity blowing them out of the water with lawsuits (patents, whatever)?

I'm praying for everyone at Epic Games right now, there were probably some severe high-five related injuries happening when they heard this news. What an incredible own goal for Unity.

I wouldn't be so sure. If I were a game dev and I just had one proprietary game engine pull the rug out from under me, I might be a little reticent to switch to another proprietary engine.

After all, Epic can make whatever promises they want and then go back on them later. See for example Unity's promise to allow developers to not update and stay bounded by the old ToS (which they silently went back on before this whole fiasco).

Epic's royalty fee is structured differently. It's tied to the license in effect when you give notice to Epic that you intend to release a product using the Unreal engine. Once you give that notice, your royalty rate is locked in.

Up until these event Unity also had a different fee structure.

My point is that you are completely beholden to whoever you get your license from.

Yes, but my point was that legally Unity and Epic were nothing alike.

Epic's license and the associated fee structure are tied to the version in effect when you give your notice to Epic, which can be at any point in development up to the moment of commercial release.

Unity's license and associated fee structure can change at any time and apply somewhat retroactively, and apparently even to third parties like game subscription services.

A "per sale" fee or something at least makes sense. Per install I don't get. A single sale can be multiple installs, and a flat fee may not match your income for that install.

Heck, what about webgl builds where it's often downloaded from scratch. Is each loading of the web page an "install"?

Could I bankrupt a dev by continuously re-installing their game on Steam?

Its wild that if I buy a game and install it on my desktop, laptop, and steam deck the developer could get charged 3 times. It makes absolutely no sense.

> Could I bankrupt a dev by continuously re-installing their game on Steam?

I'm wondering this too. How long until there's a script to uninstall/reinstall a game in a big 'ole loop to game the system and rack up some charges?

The old 4chan piracy meme is finally real!

Per install is likely due to the fact that games can be monetized in different ways (subscription, dlc, loot boxes, etc).

They address the install/uninstall bits in the article. It says they're planning on counting one device as an install total. So if you remove/reinstall on the same PC, that only counts as 1.

You could still bankrupt someone then by reinstalling a vm & game, depending on how they identify a device

Yep. Or just use bootable media and install to an external drive, wipe, restart computer, repeat.

Unity is planning to add a fee to all INSTALLS of a game. That includes demos, game pass, and even reinstalls. It's not a revenue share, it's a fee. You could potentially bankrupt a dev by repeatedly reinstalling. Or if streaming, just refresh 20 times. Insane shit

This arstechnica article is so much better than the kotaku article. First thing I see is the actual fee schedule. I spent the entire kotaku article wondering what the fees were.

Also, yeah, this just seems like an even better reason to learn the, seemingly vastly superior, Unreal Engine and use that.

Is there a reason people still use Unity other than familiarity? It's fine but I installed the most recent version a few weeks ago to find it's basically the exact same as the 2019 version I used a lot. Feels really outdated versus Unreal.

Cult of the Lamb is even threatening taking their game down due to this change to their costs.

https://twitter.com/cultofthelamb/status/1701715971663425897

Enrages understates the problem. This is the only topic of conversation in the dev community over the past 24h.

Not to mention the violation of privacy. It is no one's business if or when I am installing a game.

Closed software in action!

Cue the legal action in 3... 2... 1... Unity's public statements have been that they are zero fee, that developers can count on license agreement as of when they engage Unity, etc. They've induced a reliance upon having a no-fee (no royalty fee or royalty-adjacent fee) upon thousands and thousands of developers, who published games upon that reliance, and now they want to change the terms essentially retroactively? The court case will be massive, and in all likelihood these changes are going to be on ice pending resolution of that court case (probably imposed by the court itself, maybe by Unity unilaterally). There is no good outcome for them, or their executives who had to know what a shitstorm this would create (optically and legally), and who apparently dumped their stock in anticipation of the announcement of these changes.

It's the modern business Moloch trap. You've gotta either grow revenue or margins more or less continually (well, unless you hit the magic and basically impossible # for margins).

And revenue usually doesn't grow indefinitely, so...

> gotta either grow revenue or margins more or less continually

Statements like this show how Silicon Valley, over the past decade, has stripped itself of foundational business acumen. A garden-variety MBA should be able to tell you that most businesses don’t do this. They aren’t expected to grow like that. Most businesses in America are steady-state, with low or no real growth. If you promise growth and fail to deliver, yes, you’ll get skewered. If you don’t want that, don’t promise growth.

In case you didn't catch it, my comment was a direct reference to the rule of 40. It has come to dominate a lot of thinking in finance, and I don't think it is just Silicon Valley.

It has interesting implications in practice.

Unity is probably finished the moment Godot gets it own asset store, and first class C# support.

Unity is finished. Right now.

The only question is how many people they will destroy on their way down.

Any game developer that didn't do it already should really look into creating a limited liability company of some kind and transferring the games into it. The software stores made it really easy and safe to just sell things on a person's name, but for Unity games it's not safe anymore.

what's lacking about Godot C# support?

You can't build to mobile on 4.x version, only desktop supported.

Unity's amazing in that they do not see the developer's side.

Imagine the nightmare these fees create for a company that makes a legendary hit game that is still being installed decades later. Imagine Sid Meier still paying Unity royalties in the original Civilizations! (I know the original Civilizations did not use Unity, but it is an example of a game that is still installed.)

Unity is creating a perverse incentive for game developers to kill off great games after they are a year or two old.

Why aren't game engines priced like other dev/pro tools? Like $X per month per developer. Why do they want to get in on the revenue percentage game?

Lmao $0.20 when you’re making $100,000 per month and they’re whining about it.

What you wrote seems to say you think they're charging $100k PER USER?

Seems pretty minimal. And if you're making over $100k, you should probably upgrade to the paid version.

The paid version isn't exempt from this extra fee though. :)

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