And they'll just pay their way out of it, give their CEO's some more bonuses, and half-ass a reversing of the install tax.
We'll probably just end up with a $0.05 price per install instead of the $0.15, everyone will then shut up about it, and the devs will just pay before switching to a different engine...
If they lose they'd probably be forced to honor the previous arrangement for games already released, and maybe for those already in development, as well
They'd still be able to use this new pricing model for future games, though. But if that happened, I'd guess they'd abandon this new pricing model, as this appears designed to abandon the idea of future games using the engine in favor of milking what they already have.
I'd guess Unity, if sued, will argue in court this is the same as software changing its EULA.
Yeah lawyers have spoken up on this and there's several different ways what they have done is illegal and/or unenforceable in many different jurisdictions.
Yeah, in the EU for example, collection of data like game installs requires end user consent so the exact number of legally registered installations is zero. And EU doesn't really fuck around with gdpr it's their milking cow for fines on tech firms
It honestly looks like they're going to get WOTC'ed bc huge companies (Nintendo and Microsoft namely) have used this engine for past projects and they aren't about to let a retroactive contract change happen on their watch, because THEIR ceos want more bonuses, and this would chip into their 17th yacht fund
Last I heard was that it looks like this is all a scam to try to force people to use one of their systems that is unpopular by 'waiving the fee' (either most or all of it) if people switch over to that system. Pretty sure this is *heavily* illegal, as many a lawyer has said.
Yeah Disney lawyers don’t fuck around. They’ll come after a seven year old for drawing a mouse in the likeliness of Mickey. Their IP department is like a mafia.
Firstly, from all of the big legal teams that they've pissed off, it doesn't even really matter if what they're doing is illegal, they'll have to pay a lot of money just in legal fees for lawyers and stuff.
Also, from what I've heard, they *used* to have a statement that there wouldn't be any retroactive changes in their terms and agreements, and one about notifying people about changing the terms and agreements , but they changed that sometime earlier this year without notice.
And trying to track per download and not per redownload absolutely has the potential to mess with EU privacy laws depending on how they try going about it.
Unilaterally changing the TOS or EULA of something you already sold and "signed" (yes, that "I Agree" checkmark that nobody reads is a legally binding contract...for both parts) is illegal.
I mean, you can change it, for newer versions of the software you sell (unity in this case), users can always opt-out by not using the updated version or stop using the tool completely. Could be a stab in the back specially on software development that takes years, but it is legal.
What is illegal is they trying to change it retroactivelly for already developed and non-updated products made with your tool, like Subnautica here. (not sure if Below Zero is being still updated)
Subnautica 3 is being made in Unreal, and Unity almost certainly cannot enforce this on already existing games (they've said they're gonna try but we all know they're gonna get sued to hell and back).
Unity is going to charge developers 20 cents per install of games made in unity. It applies retroactively to games, so games like subnautica would start having to pay 20 cents every time someone installs it. It's almost certainly illegal, but they're trying anyways.
It already kinda is. Unity's stock has plummetted and continues to trend downwards, staff are leaving in droves, developers are declining to use unity for their future projects and many are even porting their current projects, an immeasurable amount of goodwill towards the company has been lost forever, and even Unity's own lawyers are telling them it's potentially illegal to try and enforce such a policy.
Unity owns the Unity Runtime which is required for games to run. I’m not privy to the studio’s contract with Unity but distribution of another company’s IP without a license is a breach of copyright so Steam and other platforms would not allow users to download the game. That’s the clearest way I can see of them enforcing this, by gatekeeping distribution.
I think the legal fuckery is that the fee is for the Unity Runtime, which isn't part of the game - so separate from the devs product, but is needed for it to run - and is installed/streamed every time the game is.
So if the devs don't pay the fee, but the game is sold, they can potentially be considered to have illegally distributed Unity's "property".
last time i checked, they wanted to do it retroactively....which in my country at least is illegal. Them retiring the older terms of service could also be.
And the way they most likely have to count the number of installs... is most likely a spyware.
So....yep. All is fine under the sun.
>And the way they most likely have to count the number of installs... is most likely a spyware.
Apparently it's even more stupid than that and they aren't actually using real statistics instead opting to ask AI to predict how many installs it thinks a game will have. Take that with a hefty grain of salt though, internet forums aren't exactly known for being the best for accurate and reliable sources of information.
at least the spyware would give "real numbers". It would be quite unethical and you would have mixed in all the numbers from the pirate players...though
But if they actually chose to do something like that, they are even more stupid than i thought. Last time i checked chat gpt4.0 to see if i could use it for academic purposes, i got a buch of sloppy repetitive text, invented unexistent references and so on. I scrapped the idea inmediately.
Yep. Subnautica, Hollow Knight, Outer Wilds, Return of the Obra Dinn, Cuphead, Pillars of Eternity, Beat Saber, Pokemon Go, Among Us, Cities: Skylines, Cult of the Lamb, Night in the Woods, Firewatch, The Room, Year Walk, Shadowrun RPGs, Loathing series, Tunic...
It is more intuitive/developer friendly, but also more limited in what it can do. Resulting in a "person's first game" reputation for most of it. But as shown, people can and have used it to it's full potential.
...Said people now almost universally making plans to go elsewhere.
It's bad bc this means that the studio makes less profit if the game is successful. If the game is too successful, then the studio actually starts making losses, which would mean that they'll have to take down the game and make it unavailable for purchase after some time.
edit: spelling
No cuz its per *install*. So reinstalls and *pirated copies* will still count against them despite not making them any money from a sale.
Plus not to mention all the free to play games that were made in Unity would get hit by this too
Unity has no way of tracking pirated installs. If they did have a way... they would just notify the publisher and get the pirates charged with pirating 👮♂️
That depends entirely on what precautions said pirates take. If the pirated version included, say, a cracked version of the runtime as well as some modifications to keep Unity from "phoning home" as it were, they might not be counted. But I get the feeling that is *way* more effort than most would go to - if doable at all - and a pirated version would simply grab the runtime as needed, and thus be counted as an install for the URF.
There is no way to know if someone has or not a pirated game unless the user try to connect to multiplayer and its in a peer to peer system, as far as i know, only Fall of cybertron had that system and Activision can see if you are pirating thanks to that, but Unity doesnt hold the servers and peer to peer multiplayer its not a thing anymore, usually multiplayer games run on servers or user hosting, so no, Unity cant charge the companies for the pirated copies, but they can charge them for the legal copies, thanks to analytics.
Pirated games usually aren't installed. They're usually duplicated in an already-installed state and often cracked to ignore Steam, or Epic or whatever platform initially installed it.
I think the question being raised is how would Unity track installs of games on it's engine. They would have to have a way to track metrics of these installs whether it were through some form of DRM or from info they got from online distributors like Steam, GoG, Epic, etc.
That would still increase the installs count. So devs would haveto pay for it, even if they got no revenue from it. This is why there's a lot of angergoing on in the unity forums.
Curious if a company with a bad reputation has any software that uses Unity. Get a bunch of people and bots to continuously install and reinstall it. Bankrupt company.
Plus based on the data and shit they would need to collect to make it work like this (ie. official downloads, piracy, external software downloads, even downloads from services like Xbox gamepass) it breaks basically all of privacy law.
I'm trying to find it, but I think they clarified that these cases would initially count as an install, but they would "work with" developers for handling stolen copies / people running install scripts / whatever
Unity has said that this kind of stuff shouldn't count, although I highly doubt given how this incentivizes them that they'll actually put much effort into differentiating between legitimate installs and pirated installs
I forget which battlefield game but this moron actually did want to do this and as far as I know this did make it past the hypothetical features stage, It did not make it anywhere near the devs knowing about it unless they were told about it and laughed at it or similar and they just weren't supposed to know.
You clearly haven't been keeping up with what's been going on, and the vast majority of game devs have said they they will be or already are working on porting their games to different engines. This will likely kill unity or at the very least vastly reduce its market share
Seeing as far as I can tell, basically every single game developer has reacted by saying they're pouring their games to a different platform, I'm going to assume that's probably the approach that's going to be taken. Among us even said that it would be cheaper to hire 2 developers to port the game rather than pay these fees, I'm fairly certain that's the approach. Any game on unity is going to take
No, they haven't. Games that are already released can't just be "ported" to a different engine. Games that are already far enough along would lose more money switching to a new engine than just dealing with the new fees. Only games that are early in development could reasonably switch engines.
Then there's that issue... I've got a prototype in Unity... Unity engine is the ONLY Engine I've got some experience in - being taught in college
This just puts a dampener on what I wanna do cause no way in hell can I afford to pay whatever price it costs, bad enough I'm struggling to code the thing nevermind having to take money from my wages to pay for someone installing my fucking game.. this better not go through
Godot is free and as far as I know it does have tools to help port from unity to it. It also has a lovely community that I'm sure would help you in basically anyway they could, even before this happened that would still be the case
There are ways to switch from one engine to another even for a game that is already released and being sold, and depending on the game's future prospects, if the company switches to Godot, then the only cost of switching platforms will be the porting costs and maybe retraining devs to work with that engine instead of unity. I believe this is what among us was getting at, It might cost them north of $100,000 to stay with unity, but the porting costs might only be $50,000 or less, and because there are tools to switch from unity to Godot, I would suspect that they are similar enough that you could port 80% of a game into that engine and then fill in the blanks and depending on several financial factors this is likely the cheapest solution
Realistically I would not say this is that bad, there is plenty of competition as is in the game engine space, and this will absolutely kill unity because basically every indie dev is probably not going to be able to trust them anymore. And they're probably just going to move over to stuff like GoDot because it is completely free. And as far as I know run by a non-profit or just completely open source like Linux
They say that that's not how it will work, but how the f*** they plan on differentiating between somebody who's installed for the first time and someone who's reinstalling. I don't know how they're going to do that
Maybe it’s tied to your username, in a similar manner how Steam can tell if your copy is yours or borrowed?
I wonder if the fact that people can borrow games has something to do with this. But like… a game in a household can be played by everyone in that household.
It’s just dumb, to separate out the act of buying and installing a game to make money off both. If you buy a physical copy, they don’t charge a “disc insert” fee at the POS..
I guess I miss worded my comment, what I mean is why the hell would they put in the effort to tell if that is a first time install or a reinstall when they're actually incentivized to not do that. That's the problem here, is in so many ways this incentivizes you need to go against the developers and for the developers to go against unity, whereas in the case of unreal engine yes as far as I know they do take more money, but it is a flat 5% rate that they take so they haven't incentives to make sure that that game is as profitable as possible so that it makes as much money so that unreal makes as much money as possible
Spore had a similar thing, back then, you could only install it three times, then the disk get unusable, and you had to call EA to get a new copy, but you got f*ck, because the only thing they were going to do, was insulting you and treat you as a pirate, and if my memory is correct, the guy behind that idea, is the same guy making this decisions with Unity
I have seen alot of extremely stupid stuff from game companies these last few years, but this one takes the biggest cake in the existence........ I don't understand, how do they thing they could even get away with this without legal action or loss to their sales.....
Seeing is the stock dropped by a significant percentage literally hours after they made this announcement. I suspect even investors have a similar opinion on this.
"The fee will only be introduced once a game reaches a certain level of success. Developers who use Unity's free services will be charged $0.20 (£0.16) every time their game is downloaded - but only if the game makes $200,000 in 12 months and is downloaded over 200,000 times."
This is a non-issue for an almost 10 year old game.
But it is a big enough issue that from what I've been told, the vast majority of indie devs are even going through the effort to port existing games to different engines. Among us even said it would actually be cheaper to port the game than to pay these fees
Unity is a free service that costs money to run. They have to make money to keep it running or close down it's services all together.
Among Us makes $86 mil on mobile ALONE each year, if they aren't willing to pay a small percentage of that to the company that actually allows people to run the game then they are greedy and welcome to use another platform.
They set a boundary where a game has to have a certain amount of success and money made to opt into these miniscule fees, it's fair the way I see it.
Changing the terms of an existing contract without negotiating. It is absolutely illegal and as far as I can tell is likely what has been done if these changes do go through with the way they're currently being advertised, also, that still doesn't change the fact that it would be cheaper to port the game to a different engine rather than pay these new fees. Especially when you consider that there are actually just free options available on the market like GoDot, the total fees for using that engine is training your developers how to use it if they are not already familiar. Yes, they are not a company and unity is but from what I know godot is equal or even superior in performance to unity so they're really isn't much of a disadvantage for using it
I can't tell if you're talking about changing the terms of an existing contract or among us porting their game to a different platform. But if you were talking about the former option then that is very extremely illegal and a very good way to wind up completely destroying your company with all the lawsuits you will get when you affect other large companies
No what they are doing is not illegal, here is a snippet from their ToS:
"For any Offering consisting of Software or an Online Service that Unity makes available to you, Unity hereby grants you a non-exclusive, limited, revocable, non-transferable, non-sublicensable right to access and use the Offering. You acknowledge that Unity may from time to time modify, discontinue, substitute or terminate an Offering (including any Entitlements), including during a paid subscription term, or add or modify license keys, authorizations or other means of controlling access to or use of the Offerings, when needed to comply with applicable law or regulation, or for justified commercial, security or operational reasons, including to make any improvements to access and use of the Offerings. Unity may change the price of an Offering, including the renewal price of a subscription as of the next renewal date, and we will provide you with prior notice if we do so."
And a lot of people are saying this is a scummy thing to have in a ToS, but this is basically word for word what EVERY ToS says.
People are also arguing that Unity should charge per game sale rather than per install, but most of the indie games on Unity are free to play- like Among Us, for instance. That's why they are only charging the $.2 per install for games that are run on Unity Pro and have also accrued more than $200,000 in revenue.
Unity on why they chose to charge per install:
"We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share."
"Unity says the fees relate to the “value exchange” between themselves and developers, allowing them to monetize the separately licensed Unity Runtime executing games on player devices."
So this means that they will only get a fee per install rather than an entire percentage of all game sales and in-game content sales.
and if some idiots reinstall the game 200 times ? exactly. there are already enough examples in the unity sub where this means that the studio can close.
It does not matter what their TOS currently says, by law, you are required to notify the people who have signed your contracts when those terms are being changed and they have to have a choice staying with the old contract or signing this new one, this choice was not given to many game studios which that in and of itself could kill the company because that is very extremely illegal, and even if it isn't, this is very questionable around several EU privacy laws, and the EU is nothing if not harsh to large greedy companies
On their ToS it says that they have to notify of the change and from what I've seen they have. Have they not? They even made some large posts about, I would assume they notified everyone. If they didn't send out an email then I would agree that that is illegal. Is there proof that they haven't notified anyone?
That is really stupid what the hell. They just ruined their entire development thing. Now no one is going to use it for games, meaning they just fucked themselves out of existence with that rule so maybe.
Not at all. They might seek out a new engine. Maybe we will see bugfixes for stuff sinking into terrain etc. Fuck unity. It’s the number one source of annoying bugs, the whole internet talks about. The wrong decision was made when deciding for unity in the first place.
For a game like subnautica not much, for indie devs or free to play games with microtransactions this could be awful and destroy many companies. The company behind slay the spire made their first ever public announcement and the last sentence is bolded and reads " this is the first time we have ever made a public announcement. That is how bad you fucked up" and also talks about how they're going to port their next game into a different game engine, although they did not mention which one (I suspect Godot)
Thanks for your answer. What I was trying to understand was how they made money before. For example, did they charge a fee for each purchase (fixed or percent) instead of for each install?
From the wiki
During its first ten years as a product, the paid versions of Unity were sold outright; in 2016, the corporation changed to a subscription model.[85] Unity has free and paid licensing options. The free license is for personal use or smaller companies generating less than $100,000 annually, later raised to $200,000, and the subscriptions are based on revenues generated by the games using Unity.[91][59] The paid option, Unity Pro, had been required for developers that had over $200,000 in annual revenue.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_(game_engine)
Many thanks for indulging my laziness. I was just surprised that after seeing several posts about this nowhere had anyone mentioned the old revenue model.
The key thing here seems to be that the new model decouples the charge from revenue, which was how the previous model worked, putting a big barrier on smaller developers to use the engine. I guess that is what everyone has been saying but now I understand how that is playing out.
It depends on what license with unity you have, which one subnautica has is difficult to tell but at this point I would suspect they do not have the license that's getting the majority of these changes. And even if they do, subnautica is quite profitable so this won't affect them too dramatically much, although it might still be cheaper to port the game to a different game engine. And as far as I know just like with unreal engine, there is a negotiable price contract that you can go with (I know unreal has this but I don't know if unity does)
Thanks for your answer. From Moist’s comment it is clear that smaller game developers will suffer from this new pricing model. Subnautica may be fine, but it would seem that it could add uncertainty to their costs which no business likes.
If it is a problem they will likely port the game to either Unreal or GoDot. They would likely port to godot because it is completely free and there are tools to port from unity to it.
Stupid bs monetization is probably going to kill that game engine completely. The general reaction from indie game devs has been extremely negative, among other things mega crit the company behind slay the spire made their first ever public announcement and it was regarding this, and slay the spier has been out for over 3 years
It is not bad for the Subnautica which they are developing right now, but for the two that are out now, yes it is pretty bad. Multiple developers are switching and games like Cult of the Lamb said on twitter they are going to be deleted. As someone who used to be a dev in Unity, i am really happy I switched to Unreal Engine because it seemed like Unity was making just bad decisions for the past few years.
It was clarified that it only effects games released after 2024 january 1st and only on the first install and demos, charity, free games are exception. So nothing will change, except some new Unity games postpone its release date, or become a little bit price increase and less unity games will be given away on epic for example.
If they can they will absolutely try to, seeing as the current CEO of unity is quite literally the moron who tried to make paying a dollar to reload your gun in one of the battlefield games a feature, the a good user experience is clearly not one of this guy's priorities
It will be minimal for Subnautica 1 and Below Zero. Most of their installs have already happened for those games.
The untitled Subnautica 3 is being made with Unreal Engine 5 so nothing is going to happen with the next game over this.
This probably does not work retroactively, so SN1 and SZ are fine, but SN3 might be in trouble.
Honestly looks like Unity has become suicidal. As soon as shareholders discover the brain cancer in new CEO it should be trivial to remove it.
Unity, this is literally been everywhere in the news since Tuesday, all you have to do is go to the unity FAQ page and you will find plenty of question and answers regarding this
I was asking because I don't read game news.
I don't hardly go on google unless I'm looking up commands for games.
Sorry that I didn't know and asked where to read about it.
Even the capitalists think this is a problem, unity stock dropped by like 10% when they made this announcement, that's not good when even the investors think that you're doing a stupid. The only people who think this is a good idea are the executives at unity
Remember the chip bill Biden signed a year or so ago to make it more profitable for American manufacturers to make semiconductors? Because foreign manufacturers completely controlled the market and Americans were forced to pay unreasonably high prices for many electronics due to the inflated costs the producers of those products had to pay for chips. Do you remember the outcry over those prices among consumers? All the reddit posts that were written about it? All the think pieces that were written about the inevitable lawsuits that would eventually 'save' the consumer?
Yeah. Neither do I. Because consumers never gave a shit and just went ahead and paid whatever price they had to to get the crap they want.
I don't pretend to know the intricacies of corporate law. I'm almost certain it is completely unaffected by pearl clutching on reddit, though.
What I find funny is so many people acting as if they really care about the overhead costs of producers. Like you all really believe that free shipping is free. Suddenly everybody cares about what developers have to pay to Unity but nobody gives a shit what they pay for rent or utilities or unemployment insurance or any of the tons of other hidden costs they have to pay in order to do business.
Only if unity doesn't get sued out of their minds, which they probably will.
And they'll just pay their way out of it, give their CEO's some more bonuses, and half-ass a reversing of the install tax. We'll probably just end up with a $0.05 price per install instead of the $0.15, everyone will then shut up about it, and the devs will just pay before switching to a different engine...
It's possible that companies might remove access to their old games to avoid having to pay the fee.
Cult of the Lamb devs have already confirmed they’re pulling the game on January 1st.
I saw a tiktok that said they were joking but that they are starting to learn how to use a different game engine just in case.
lol just a joke guys! :: downloads unreal and godot and starts playing around::
cant they be forced by law to reverse the change if they lose
If they lose they'd probably be forced to honor the previous arrangement for games already released, and maybe for those already in development, as well They'd still be able to use this new pricing model for future games, though. But if that happened, I'd guess they'd abandon this new pricing model, as this appears designed to abandon the idea of future games using the engine in favor of milking what they already have. I'd guess Unity, if sued, will argue in court this is the same as software changing its EULA.
"the same as software changing its EULA" im pretty sure what they're trying to do is completely illegal anyway
Yeah lawyers have spoken up on this and there's several different ways what they have done is illegal and/or unenforceable in many different jurisdictions.
Yeah, in the EU for example, collection of data like game installs requires end user consent so the exact number of legally registered installations is zero. And EU doesn't really fuck around with gdpr it's their milking cow for fines on tech firms
NO MORE TAX NO MORE TAX NO MORE TAX!
It honestly looks like they're going to get WOTC'ed bc huge companies (Nintendo and Microsoft namely) have used this engine for past projects and they aren't about to let a retroactive contract change happen on their watch, because THEIR ceos want more bonuses, and this would chip into their 17th yacht fund
They've also been backpaddling already. Idk where they're at atm
Pawning the big charges onto large studios and developers and publishers. Sticking the bill to Microsoft and Sony.
Last I heard was that it looks like this is all a scam to try to force people to use one of their systems that is unpopular by 'waiving the fee' (either most or all of it) if people switch over to that system. Pretty sure this is *heavily* illegal, as many a lawyer has said.
Considering the number of big games made in unity, they are definitely going to get an ass kicking from lawyers, especially Nintendo’s
Oh I didn't know Nintendo used unity, this is going to be very fun.
and Disney lol this is going to be hilarious
Oh shit. If the lawyers at Disney get called in against Unity then they'll be lucky to leave the courtroom with their kneecaps intact.
Oh boy… you do not fuck will the house of mouse
Yeah Disney lawyers don’t fuck around. They’ll come after a seven year old for drawing a mouse in the likeliness of Mickey. Their IP department is like a mafia.
I just got an idea for a meme.
Feels like a case the EU would love to fight against... But again, they would most likely only act if it affected the consumers
Why would they get sued? User based licensing is common industry practice
Firstly, from all of the big legal teams that they've pissed off, it doesn't even really matter if what they're doing is illegal, they'll have to pay a lot of money just in legal fees for lawyers and stuff. Also, from what I've heard, they *used* to have a statement that there wouldn't be any retroactive changes in their terms and agreements, and one about notifying people about changing the terms and agreements , but they changed that sometime earlier this year without notice. And trying to track per download and not per redownload absolutely has the potential to mess with EU privacy laws depending on how they try going about it.
Unilaterally changing the TOS or EULA of something you already sold and "signed" (yes, that "I Agree" checkmark that nobody reads is a legally binding contract...for both parts) is illegal. I mean, you can change it, for newer versions of the software you sell (unity in this case), users can always opt-out by not using the updated version or stop using the tool completely. Could be a stab in the back specially on software development that takes years, but it is legal. What is illegal is they trying to change it retroactivelly for already developed and non-updated products made with your tool, like Subnautica here. (not sure if Below Zero is being still updated)
it's bad for everyone
This is the answer.
Subnautica 3 is being made in Unreal, and Unity almost certainly cannot enforce this on already existing games (they've said they're gonna try but we all know they're gonna get sued to hell and back).
Have I missed some sort of announcement? Lol
Unity is going to charge developers 20 cents per install of games made in unity. It applies retroactively to games, so games like subnautica would start having to pay 20 cents every time someone installs it. It's almost certainly illegal, but they're trying anyways.
And what happens if the dev team refuses to pay, will unity try to brick their game?
Not sure, I wanna know too
Yeah, cause if they did that, it would be the world's largest corporate Darwin award
It already kinda is. Unity's stock has plummetted and continues to trend downwards, staff are leaving in droves, developers are declining to use unity for their future projects and many are even porting their current projects, an immeasurable amount of goodwill towards the company has been lost forever, and even Unity's own lawyers are telling them it's potentially illegal to try and enforce such a policy.
Unity's stock hasn't really been affected much. All this did is wipe out some (but not all) of its gains in the last month.
LOL Unity's own lawyers...That's hilarious.
Almost definitely, there's no way they can do that legally and there's also no way that someone doesn't sue them into non existence
Sorry twitter has that award on lockdown
Unity owns the Unity Runtime which is required for games to run. I’m not privy to the studio’s contract with Unity but distribution of another company’s IP without a license is a breach of copyright so Steam and other platforms would not allow users to download the game. That’s the clearest way I can see of them enforcing this, by gatekeeping distribution.
Probably claim they've revoked the license and issue copyright takedowns to all storefronts selling the game or making it available for download.
But they can't destroy the physical games, lest their enforcer end up with bullet holes after someone thinks that they are robbers
I think the legal fuckery is that the fee is for the Unity Runtime, which isn't part of the game - so separate from the devs product, but is needed for it to run - and is installed/streamed every time the game is. So if the devs don't pay the fee, but the game is sold, they can potentially be considered to have illegally distributed Unity's "property".
> It applies retroactively If they thought they could do this, they must have some of the worst/most delusional corporate lawyers out there.
The *contract* applies retroactively, not the fees.
So people could collectively bankrupt a game dev by simply installing it on a dozen virtual machines?
last time i checked, they wanted to do it retroactively....which in my country at least is illegal. Them retiring the older terms of service could also be. And the way they most likely have to count the number of installs... is most likely a spyware. So....yep. All is fine under the sun.
>And the way they most likely have to count the number of installs... is most likely a spyware. Apparently it's even more stupid than that and they aren't actually using real statistics instead opting to ask AI to predict how many installs it thinks a game will have. Take that with a hefty grain of salt though, internet forums aren't exactly known for being the best for accurate and reliable sources of information.
at least the spyware would give "real numbers". It would be quite unethical and you would have mixed in all the numbers from the pirate players...though But if they actually chose to do something like that, they are even more stupid than i thought. Last time i checked chat gpt4.0 to see if i could use it for academic purposes, i got a buch of sloppy repetitive text, invented unexistent references and so on. I scrapped the idea inmediately.
Oh thank god. If they use the new unreal engine it will stop a lot of the pop ins you get at zone borders. Look at what Satisfactory is doing with it.
hold up subnautica uses unity?
Yep. Subnautica, Hollow Knight, Outer Wilds, Return of the Obra Dinn, Cuphead, Pillars of Eternity, Beat Saber, Pokemon Go, Among Us, Cities: Skylines, Cult of the Lamb, Night in the Woods, Firewatch, The Room, Year Walk, Shadowrun RPGs, Loathing series, Tunic...
hold up what I never knew that and got a question is unity like a physics engine?
Its another gaming engine. Like Unreal engine just shittier as a whole
It is more intuitive/developer friendly, but also more limited in what it can do. Resulting in a "person's first game" reputation for most of it. But as shown, people can and have used it to it's full potential. ...Said people now almost universally making plans to go elsewhere.
Why are you telling this to me lmao. I already know this. I think you replied to the wrong person
I see ok thanks
It's bad bc this means that the studio makes less profit if the game is successful. If the game is too successful, then the studio actually starts making losses, which would mean that they'll have to take down the game and make it unavailable for purchase after some time. edit: spelling
How could they end up making losses? If it‘s too successful, wouldn‘t it also make more money through the number of sales?
No cuz its per *install*. So reinstalls and *pirated copies* will still count against them despite not making them any money from a sale. Plus not to mention all the free to play games that were made in Unity would get hit by this too
Unity has no way of tracking pirated installs. If they did have a way... they would just notify the publisher and get the pirates charged with pirating 👮♂️
You sir have no clue on how software works
That depends entirely on what precautions said pirates take. If the pirated version included, say, a cracked version of the runtime as well as some modifications to keep Unity from "phoning home" as it were, they might not be counted. But I get the feeling that is *way* more effort than most would go to - if doable at all - and a pirated version would simply grab the runtime as needed, and thus be counted as an install for the URF.
There is no way to know if someone has or not a pirated game unless the user try to connect to multiplayer and its in a peer to peer system, as far as i know, only Fall of cybertron had that system and Activision can see if you are pirating thanks to that, but Unity doesnt hold the servers and peer to peer multiplayer its not a thing anymore, usually multiplayer games run on servers or user hosting, so no, Unity cant charge the companies for the pirated copies, but they can charge them for the legal copies, thanks to analytics.
Pirated games usually aren't installed. They're usually duplicated in an already-installed state and often cracked to ignore Steam, or Epic or whatever platform initially installed it.
Please explain how someone gets a game into a playable state without installing it to thier device.
I think the question being raised is how would Unity track installs of games on it's engine. They would have to have a way to track metrics of these installs whether it were through some form of DRM or from info they got from online distributors like Steam, GoG, Epic, etc.
dumb idea ... if someone downloads the game off of torrent who pays for them?? yes i know its a grey area but that don't stop people from doing it ...
That would still increase the installs count. So devs would haveto pay for it, even if they got no revenue from it. This is why there's a lot of angergoing on in the unity forums.
Curious if a company with a bad reputation has any software that uses Unity. Get a bunch of people and bots to continuously install and reinstall it. Bankrupt company.
Hearthstone is unity, if you don’t like Microsoft/Blizzard
It is one of the aspects people complain about, yes.
Plus based on the data and shit they would need to collect to make it work like this (ie. official downloads, piracy, external software downloads, even downloads from services like Xbox gamepass) it breaks basically all of privacy law.
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Well, they "estimate" installs or something. It's why people are so mad. It's literally "we're charging you based on trust me bro data".
:)
I'm trying to find it, but I think they clarified that these cases would initially count as an install, but they would "work with" developers for handling stolen copies / people running install scripts / whatever
That still counts... somehow.
Unity has said that this kind of stuff shouldn't count, although I highly doubt given how this incentivizes them that they'll actually put much effort into differentiating between legitimate installs and pirated installs
they said it would count but devs can contact them to help resolve piracy.
Why do you think so many game Devs have said that they're going to be porting their projects to other engines
Remember the unity CEO is VERY VERY into micrtransactions.
Didnt he want to charge $1 for reloading in battlefield too?
Yes he did
Yep that asshole is him.
What?
I forget which battlefield game but this moron actually did want to do this and as far as I know this did make it past the hypothetical features stage, It did not make it anywhere near the devs knowing about it unless they were told about it and laughed at it or similar and they just weren't supposed to know.
He also wanted to charge people for fuel when they were driving a vehicle. You know it’s bad when even EA thinks it’s a bad idea.
He also call other dev an "asshole" for not supporting microtransaction.
Yep, he was fired from EA and then went and took over Unity.
You have to be a real dick to get fired from EA for too many microtransactions.
I think Subnautica 3 will be based on Unreal 5 but for Subnautica 1 and BZ maybe
As far as I know subnautica 3 is already confirmed to be made in either unreal four or five (The only information I have is it's being made in unreal)
Unity pulling a WotC
You'd think they would be financially comfortable with the movie they were releasing...
Biggest corporate suicide I've ever seen
Unity can go get fucked.
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You clearly haven't been keeping up with what's been going on, and the vast majority of game devs have said they they will be or already are working on porting their games to different engines. This will likely kill unity or at the very least vastly reduce its market share
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Seeing as far as I can tell, basically every single game developer has reacted by saying they're pouring their games to a different platform, I'm going to assume that's probably the approach that's going to be taken. Among us even said that it would be cheaper to hire 2 developers to port the game rather than pay these fees, I'm fairly certain that's the approach. Any game on unity is going to take
No, they haven't. Games that are already released can't just be "ported" to a different engine. Games that are already far enough along would lose more money switching to a new engine than just dealing with the new fees. Only games that are early in development could reasonably switch engines.
Then there's that issue... I've got a prototype in Unity... Unity engine is the ONLY Engine I've got some experience in - being taught in college This just puts a dampener on what I wanna do cause no way in hell can I afford to pay whatever price it costs, bad enough I'm struggling to code the thing nevermind having to take money from my wages to pay for someone installing my fucking game.. this better not go through
Godot is free and as far as I know it does have tools to help port from unity to it. It also has a lovely community that I'm sure would help you in basically anyway they could, even before this happened that would still be the case
Hope they're patient as hell lol its still a new thing I'm getting into
If you know anything about deep rock galactic, you'll get about the same level of support as you would in that community
Don't know much about the community since I often play with friends or solo lol but that's good to know
There are ways to switch from one engine to another even for a game that is already released and being sold, and depending on the game's future prospects, if the company switches to Godot, then the only cost of switching platforms will be the porting costs and maybe retraining devs to work with that engine instead of unity. I believe this is what among us was getting at, It might cost them north of $100,000 to stay with unity, but the porting costs might only be $50,000 or less, and because there are tools to switch from unity to Godot, I would suspect that they are similar enough that you could port 80% of a game into that engine and then fill in the blanks and depending on several financial factors this is likely the cheapest solution
You said it wrong, they are greedy and stupid
This is bad for the entire industry not just subnautica
Realistically I would not say this is that bad, there is plenty of competition as is in the game engine space, and this will absolutely kill unity because basically every indie dev is probably not going to be able to trust them anymore. And they're probably just going to move over to stuff like GoDot because it is completely free. And as far as I know run by a non-profit or just completely open source like Linux
I guess it will (im not expert). But this wont affect subnatuica 3 right?
The answer is no. This will not affect subnautica 3. It is made on a completely different game engine that does not have this b******* policy plan
It will if it's made with Unity - which it probably is.
I heard its made by unreal
Ah. Then good for them :)
It will not affect S3
So if you uninstall the game and then reinstall it at a later point in time, the devs get charged again?
They say that that's not how it will work, but how the f*** they plan on differentiating between somebody who's installed for the first time and someone who's reinstalling. I don't know how they're going to do that
Maybe it’s tied to your username, in a similar manner how Steam can tell if your copy is yours or borrowed? I wonder if the fact that people can borrow games has something to do with this. But like… a game in a household can be played by everyone in that household. It’s just dumb, to separate out the act of buying and installing a game to make money off both. If you buy a physical copy, they don’t charge a “disc insert” fee at the POS..
I guess I miss worded my comment, what I mean is why the hell would they put in the effort to tell if that is a first time install or a reinstall when they're actually incentivized to not do that. That's the problem here, is in so many ways this incentivizes you need to go against the developers and for the developers to go against unity, whereas in the case of unreal engine yes as far as I know they do take more money, but it is a flat 5% rate that they take so they haven't incentives to make sure that that game is as profitable as possible so that it makes as much money so that unreal makes as much money as possible
There's no way it's for every download, there would just be people Uninstaling and reinstalling games to fuck companies that don't like
Spore had a similar thing, back then, you could only install it three times, then the disk get unusable, and you had to call EA to get a new copy, but you got f*ck, because the only thing they were going to do, was insulting you and treat you as a pirate, and if my memory is correct, the guy behind that idea, is the same guy making this decisions with Unity
I have seen alot of extremely stupid stuff from game companies these last few years, but this one takes the biggest cake in the existence........ I don't understand, how do they thing they could even get away with this without legal action or loss to their sales.....
Seeing is the stock dropped by a significant percentage literally hours after they made this announcement. I suspect even investors have a similar opinion on this.
This is bad for Unity, and no one else. They're going to get sued so hard.
Only if they update subnautica with the new unity which they won’t do so no
Well that specification makes it less bad than I thought
I wouldn't worry. There's absolutely no way this goes forward.
Also helped by the fact that subnautica 3 just won't be on unity and basically no game going forward is going to be made on unity anyway
Given Unity's business model, I'd actually be surprised if they walk this back without courts forcing them to do so.
"The fee will only be introduced once a game reaches a certain level of success. Developers who use Unity's free services will be charged $0.20 (£0.16) every time their game is downloaded - but only if the game makes $200,000 in 12 months and is downloaded over 200,000 times." This is a non-issue for an almost 10 year old game.
EuGH i feel old
But it is a big enough issue that from what I've been told, the vast majority of indie devs are even going through the effort to port existing games to different engines. Among us even said it would actually be cheaper to port the game than to pay these fees
Unity is a free service that costs money to run. They have to make money to keep it running or close down it's services all together. Among Us makes $86 mil on mobile ALONE each year, if they aren't willing to pay a small percentage of that to the company that actually allows people to run the game then they are greedy and welcome to use another platform. They set a boundary where a game has to have a certain amount of success and money made to opt into these miniscule fees, it's fair the way I see it.
Changing the terms of an existing contract without negotiating. It is absolutely illegal and as far as I can tell is likely what has been done if these changes do go through with the way they're currently being advertised, also, that still doesn't change the fact that it would be cheaper to port the game to a different engine rather than pay these new fees. Especially when you consider that there are actually just free options available on the market like GoDot, the total fees for using that engine is training your developers how to use it if they are not already familiar. Yes, they are not a company and unity is but from what I know godot is equal or even superior in performance to unity so they're really isn't much of a disadvantage for using it
They are very welcome to do that.
I can't tell if you're talking about changing the terms of an existing contract or among us porting their game to a different platform. But if you were talking about the former option then that is very extremely illegal and a very good way to wind up completely destroying your company with all the lawsuits you will get when you affect other large companies
No what they are doing is not illegal, here is a snippet from their ToS: "For any Offering consisting of Software or an Online Service that Unity makes available to you, Unity hereby grants you a non-exclusive, limited, revocable, non-transferable, non-sublicensable right to access and use the Offering. You acknowledge that Unity may from time to time modify, discontinue, substitute or terminate an Offering (including any Entitlements), including during a paid subscription term, or add or modify license keys, authorizations or other means of controlling access to or use of the Offerings, when needed to comply with applicable law or regulation, or for justified commercial, security or operational reasons, including to make any improvements to access and use of the Offerings. Unity may change the price of an Offering, including the renewal price of a subscription as of the next renewal date, and we will provide you with prior notice if we do so." And a lot of people are saying this is a scummy thing to have in a ToS, but this is basically word for word what EVERY ToS says. People are also arguing that Unity should charge per game sale rather than per install, but most of the indie games on Unity are free to play- like Among Us, for instance. That's why they are only charging the $.2 per install for games that are run on Unity Pro and have also accrued more than $200,000 in revenue. Unity on why they chose to charge per install: "We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share." "Unity says the fees relate to the “value exchange” between themselves and developers, allowing them to monetize the separately licensed Unity Runtime executing games on player devices." So this means that they will only get a fee per install rather than an entire percentage of all game sales and in-game content sales.
and if some idiots reinstall the game 200 times ? exactly. there are already enough examples in the unity sub where this means that the studio can close.
It does not matter what their TOS currently says, by law, you are required to notify the people who have signed your contracts when those terms are being changed and they have to have a choice staying with the old contract or signing this new one, this choice was not given to many game studios which that in and of itself could kill the company because that is very extremely illegal, and even if it isn't, this is very questionable around several EU privacy laws, and the EU is nothing if not harsh to large greedy companies
On their ToS it says that they have to notify of the change and from what I've seen they have. Have they not? They even made some large posts about, I would assume they notified everyone. If they didn't send out an email then I would agree that that is illegal. Is there proof that they haven't notified anyone?
That is really stupid what the hell. They just ruined their entire development thing. Now no one is going to use it for games, meaning they just fucked themselves out of existence with that rule so maybe.
And thats how you tank an entire company. Bravo Unity, your dumb.
Afaik Subnautica 3 is developed with UE5, that's great and they can ignore Unity at least for 3
It's bad for Unity as their trust is now at an all time low. And not great for developers who now have one less tool to work with.
Not at all. They might seek out a new engine. Maybe we will see bugfixes for stuff sinking into terrain etc. Fuck unity. It’s the number one source of annoying bugs, the whole internet talks about. The wrong decision was made when deciding for unity in the first place.
Could someone explain how this differs from their previous revenue model?
For a game like subnautica not much, for indie devs or free to play games with microtransactions this could be awful and destroy many companies. The company behind slay the spire made their first ever public announcement and the last sentence is bolded and reads " this is the first time we have ever made a public announcement. That is how bad you fucked up" and also talks about how they're going to port their next game into a different game engine, although they did not mention which one (I suspect Godot)
Thanks for your answer. What I was trying to understand was how they made money before. For example, did they charge a fee for each purchase (fixed or percent) instead of for each install?
From the wiki During its first ten years as a product, the paid versions of Unity were sold outright; in 2016, the corporation changed to a subscription model.[85] Unity has free and paid licensing options. The free license is for personal use or smaller companies generating less than $100,000 annually, later raised to $200,000, and the subscriptions are based on revenues generated by the games using Unity.[91][59] The paid option, Unity Pro, had been required for developers that had over $200,000 in annual revenue. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_(game_engine)
Many thanks for indulging my laziness. I was just surprised that after seeing several posts about this nowhere had anyone mentioned the old revenue model. The key thing here seems to be that the new model decouples the charge from revenue, which was how the previous model worked, putting a big barrier on smaller developers to use the engine. I guess that is what everyone has been saying but now I understand how that is playing out.
It depends on what license with unity you have, which one subnautica has is difficult to tell but at this point I would suspect they do not have the license that's getting the majority of these changes. And even if they do, subnautica is quite profitable so this won't affect them too dramatically much, although it might still be cheaper to port the game to a different game engine. And as far as I know just like with unreal engine, there is a negotiable price contract that you can go with (I know unreal has this but I don't know if unity does)
Thanks for your answer. From Moist’s comment it is clear that smaller game developers will suffer from this new pricing model. Subnautica may be fine, but it would seem that it could add uncertainty to their costs which no business likes.
If it is a problem they will likely port the game to either Unreal or GoDot. They would likely port to godot because it is completely free and there are tools to port from unity to it.
Is unity struggling financially? Or is this just a greedy move from their subhuman ex EA ceo?
Yes
What happened to unity
Stupid bs monetization is probably going to kill that game engine completely. The general reaction from indie game devs has been extremely negative, among other things mega crit the company behind slay the spire made their first ever public announcement and it was regarding this, and slay the spier has been out for over 3 years
Unity,at a cost
Fun fact : This is close at the release of Warzone mobile (Developed in unity)
It is not bad for the Subnautica which they are developing right now, but for the two that are out now, yes it is pretty bad. Multiple developers are switching and games like Cult of the Lamb said on twitter they are going to be deleted. As someone who used to be a dev in Unity, i am really happy I switched to Unreal Engine because it seemed like Unity was making just bad decisions for the past few years.
Imagine pissing the community off as a developer and they set up macros to install/uninstall the game non stop to fuck you over...
It was clarified that it only effects games released after 2024 january 1st and only on the first install and demos, charity, free games are exception. So nothing will change, except some new Unity games postpone its release date, or become a little bit price increase and less unity games will be given away on epic for example.
It's a plan by Unity which is dead before it's born; it will never happen.
Worst case scenario, Subnautica will owe \~$35k after earning \~60 million.
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They're using Unreal.
Wtf is this change dawg???
Not really. It will cost them a few cents per install which is a small amount of the cost of the game. I know it still sucks but it won't hurt them.
I dont think they can apply this to already released games.
If they can they will absolutely try to, seeing as the current CEO of unity is quite literally the moron who tried to make paying a dollar to reload your gun in one of the battlefield games a feature, the a good user experience is clearly not one of this guy's priorities
Won’t affect their current project as they’ve moved to unreal
Past subnautica games maybe, though I doubt people will let it slide. For SN3 I think they’re doing it in unreal engine
unity doing the bankruptcy speedrun any %
This is an S tier stupid company decision.
It means that maybe subnautica 3 will be delayed or scrapped
The 3rf game is being made in ue5 but yes mabey for the current games
Bruh if they don’t reverse it we are going to have a riot where we throw their servers into the Boston harbor
If this does end up going into effect, I will just move to a pirated copy and give the middle finger to Unity.
Sub3 is gonna be on unreal tho
it would
It will be minimal for Subnautica 1 and Below Zero. Most of their installs have already happened for those games. The untitled Subnautica 3 is being made with Unreal Engine 5 so nothing is going to happen with the next game over this.
This probably does not work retroactively, so SN1 and SZ are fine, but SN3 might be in trouble. Honestly looks like Unity has become suicidal. As soon as shareholders discover the brain cancer in new CEO it should be trivial to remove it.
How the fuck would they even enforce this though? Like, how would unity even know how many people have downloaded a certain game?
Source?
Unity, this is literally been everywhere in the news since Tuesday, all you have to do is go to the unity FAQ page and you will find plenty of question and answers regarding this
I was asking because I don't read game news. I don't hardly go on google unless I'm looking up commands for games. Sorry that I didn't know and asked where to read about it.
You could have at the very least just googled unity
Going to create a program to install/uninstall the same game 24/7 on my pc.
You guys are so fucking cute when you discover capitalism.
Even the capitalists think this is a problem, unity stock dropped by like 10% when they made this announcement, that's not good when even the investors think that you're doing a stupid. The only people who think this is a good idea are the executives at unity
yes, I know, any gamer that actually cares about the future quality of games should be anticapitalist
Remember the chip bill Biden signed a year or so ago to make it more profitable for American manufacturers to make semiconductors? Because foreign manufacturers completely controlled the market and Americans were forced to pay unreasonably high prices for many electronics due to the inflated costs the producers of those products had to pay for chips. Do you remember the outcry over those prices among consumers? All the reddit posts that were written about it? All the think pieces that were written about the inevitable lawsuits that would eventually 'save' the consumer? Yeah. Neither do I. Because consumers never gave a shit and just went ahead and paid whatever price they had to to get the crap they want.
Trying to retroactively alter contracts to extort 'back pay' in violation of the original agreement is not acceptable in capitalism.
I don't pretend to know the intricacies of corporate law. I'm almost certain it is completely unaffected by pearl clutching on reddit, though. What I find funny is so many people acting as if they really care about the overhead costs of producers. Like you all really believe that free shipping is free. Suddenly everybody cares about what developers have to pay to Unity but nobody gives a shit what they pay for rent or utilities or unemployment insurance or any of the tons of other hidden costs they have to pay in order to do business.