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Comment by awesomeMilou | Hacker News Reader

> Simply, they could have not made this retroactive

How can they make this apply retroactively though? For already shipped titles, if I'm no longer providing updates anymore, how can they force me to pay money?

I'm aware that games no longer have a final shipping date, with early access and all, and as a dev I'd likely would want to offer continued support in such a scenario.

But the way I understand it from the overall public reaction, is that they're trying to charge customers for existing titles, retroactively, in perpetuity going onward. This would be a one sided ToS change which only benefits them, which they push the customer into agreeing. Such a practice is mostly unenforceable in a lot of jurisdictions around the world.

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Well yeah, that’s what is so mind boggling about the whole thing. They are trying to do something that’s likely illegal in terms of contract law. It’s also just abundantly stupid given the social cost. There was a super clean way to do the whole transition where you announce the changes going forward starting 1 Jan 2024. You show examples of what costs will be and stress that that the pricing is an order of magnitude cheaper than Unreal, and everyone feels like it’s fair (though nobody loves price increases). Someone needs to fire their CEO.

Are there perpetual unity licenses? If not, then surely the retroactivity comes as soon as you renew your license.

The problem is they now want to license the engine as a separate product which they didn’t do in the past. Previously, you paid your license fee for editor and any game you build off that is deployed and you could stop paying them.

I guess they didn’t like the thought of not being able to perpetually milk their customers and wanted to increase their cut outside of the editor fee.

From what I understand though, Unreal is just licensed based on revenue and all the editing tools are free. Unity had the opposite approach previously. They’ve decided they want a cut of both pies.

This has nothing to do with whether there are perpetual licenses or not.

The way the go about this makes it seem that you enter a contract that you can never reasonably exit out of, as in order for you to stop having to pay, you'd have to convincingly prove that you forced every customer to uninstall your app, i.e. that there isn't at least one install left.

This sounds absolutely bonkers to me.

They can't force you to pay. The only leverage or legal claim they have is if you want to update your title after Jan 2024, then they can ask you to get up to date on your account.

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