Unity Editor software terms update: Runtime fee cancellation | Hacker News Reader

Unity Editor software terms update: Runtime fee cancellation

unity.com

40 pointsvyrotek38 comments

That's why I'm really skeptical about relying on large game engines. Sure, they offer a lot for a relatively low cost, but being dependent on whatever the developers include in their terms of service—and especially on the things left unsaid or that could be decided in court—makes me hesitant to use one.

This isn't a problem if you use an open source engine that costs nothing and demands nothing. Cough Godot cough.

But even that Engine has its own drama / issues surrounding it with devs being locked out of access etc..

That drama was overblown, but it isn't stopping anyone from downloading the engine and using it.

Have you personally developed a game in Godot?

I have personally tried like the vast majority of people who use it and any other engine, including Unity, and have yet to succeed. Why?

I think if you’re asking for games developed in Godot, Slay the Spire 2 will be in Godot (and it’s a pretty popular franchise).

what? nothing about the runtime fee drama was about somthing left unsaid or decided in court. it was a pre-announced change to the pricing that they abandoned after people complained.

It was a retroactive change. Suddenly people would have owed money for the runtime fee based on poorly defined per-install metrics that would have applied to demos, refunded copies, and subscription services like PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass.

They only backpedaled after people complained, but a retroactive fee was an insane breach of trust.

Oh, maybe I'm thinking of a second iteration, where it only applied to the next major version of Unity?

Yes after the intial blowback they fired the CEO and changed the terms so the runtime fee only applied to future versions. They also added an option to pay with 2.5% of self-reported revenue instead of a per-install fee, whichever is lesser.

A month or so ago they realized the damage they had done and dropped the fee entirely, and bumped the cost of per-seat licenses instead.

The change would have applied the new fee structure even to games that were released before the change, which was absolutely scummy behaviour.

Recent and related:

Unity is cancelling the runtime fee for games customers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41521630 - Sept 2024 (76 comments)

Huge fan of how Unity put the terms of service in a public GitHub repo. Do other organizations do this?

Not sure how much good that does. Git history is mutable.

It's also tamper-evident. Forks would detect the rewrite.

I have no idea how GitHub handles this. If I fork a repo through the GH GUI, the source repo rewrites history-is mine impacted? I assume GitHub does all sorts of tricks to minimize materializing data changes unless required. My “fork” could just be a pointer to the now mutated origin.

If this changes in the source repo and you try to reconcile from your unmodified base you'll be in for some bad surprises (things like "no common history" errors in the worst of cases). This is the reasons why you have to be careful with things that change branch pointers like squashing merges.

They actually did this when they had a public spat with Improbable and stealth-changed the ToS to forbid Improbable's use of Unity. When called out, Unity posted the ToS to GitHub as a promise of transparency going forward.

They deleted the repo it a few months before rolling out the runtime fee and published it again after being called out.

So it's great in concept, but we've already seen it completely ignored in practice.

Finally a legit use case for blockchain

Because they couldn't just also move off of the blockchain?

Use legaleese to fight legaleese, just write in the ToS itself only the blockchain version is applicable. If they want to move off they at least have to update the blockchain version to remove the blockchain requirement for applicability.

Why couldn't they do the same with Github, then? What problem does the blockchain actually solve that git (or just a website) wouldn't?

They could of course just do that, so there is no benefit from it being in block chain compared with anywhere else.

The only advantage block chain provides is you don't have to trust anyone. Eg you don't have to trust GitHub to not delete or modify the repo themselves, but they weren't any part of the problem here.

Blockchain history cannot be manipulated unlike in git. This was meant as a joke though. There’s other ways to achieve this besides blockchain. the internet archive way back machine can pull up the TOS on a certain date.

Here’s some more info on file deletion using git and blockchain: https://chatgpt.com/share/67096e57-d6e0-8004-9f68-ae646bb471...

Git is a blockchain

At least it worked as a ToS canary. The repo goes down, and you know shenanigans are incoming.

i would like to see this work somehow. the whole modal click thru as part of bootup; install; or update is really old.

Too little, too late. As the owner of a game company, I cannot trust Unity for my business, it's too much risk. A new CEO looking for a fat short term bonus could bankrupt me (as it there weren't enough risks as it is).

Too little too late. Game Devs I know are too aware of enshittification trends to be baited back into Unity for their next game. Unity has shown their hand and I think it's a slow death from here.

There isn't any real coming back from this other than waiting a decade for people to just forget about it. They went out of their way to do something that was highly unpopular, retroactively binding, with nebulous enforcement rules that unity decided. This was a massive unforced blunder.

It certainly gave Godot a huge boost in mindshare. If you are starting a greenfield project today and you are Godot compatible, are you really going to risk capacious Unity altering the deal again?

They fired the CEO who made that decision. That seems like a pretty solid signal?

They have made the right moves after this, but it was their second massive breach of trust after the Improbable debacle.

The people invested in the Unity ecosystem will stay, but Unity drove a lot of people to Godot and Unreal. Unity now occupies a weird space where it's more expensive and harder to use than Godot, but not as powerful as Unreal.

As someone who has taught middle schoolers game development, Godot will absolutely replace Unity for students not only due to its price and licensing, but the ease of getting it deployed on a fleet of machines without even requiring a separate IDE.

Godot is only cheaper if you plan to make purely for the PC. If you have any aspirations of a console release, Godot is significantly more expensive.

The Switch support is free and community developed. For Xbox/PlayStation W4 has a plugin module for about $800/year, that's less than half the cost of a single Unity Pro seat.

IMHO the Improbable 'debacle' was solely due to the Improbable CEO coming up with new use cases outside the scope and spirit of the Unity license. I'm no fan of Improbable (and history has proven my opinion accurate) and they were clearly abusing Unity's license which wasn't intended to be free for companies allegedly valued in the billions of dollars. Unity gave them more than a year and they refused to pay for a license.

Has Improbable completely abandoned the game market now? Their website reads like a crypto venture fund and their CTO and CCO left last year.

It's more the breach of trust and how systemically rotten the entire company must have been to make a decision like that. I don't really buy that one guy could be the cause, and it also appears to be the CEO's job to hit the eject button when the company needs a scapegoat. The board of directors decided that the president of EA should run unity, and I think they're all still around.

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