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Fresh controversial gaming news.
If you're not familiar with Unity, it's one of the more popular game engines in use today, especially for Indy developers. It's frequently recommended for it's relative ease of use, and up until now, generous licensing. Even if you're a very casual gamer, you've probably played some games built on this platform like Pokemon Go, Beat Saber, or Monument Valley.
Today, Unity has announced some significant pricing changes. Most controversial seems to be that beyond a certain revenue and install threshold, developers will be paying Unity per install of their game. As in, if you uninstall and reinstall the game, the dev gets charged twice.
This has managed to piss off the usual suspects of game developers, games journalists, and gamers. Many an angry comment written by Dorito stained keyboards are flooding messageboards and twitter about how this is the death of gaming. (Tongue-in-cheek by the way, as a non-game developer I find the pricing model half-baked.)
But what's really interesting is the potential for misuse that I predict will occur for the next controversial game. While Unity has said they'll try to limit malicious behavior, they're providing gamers with the ability to charge developers money by essentially clicking the uninstall/reinstall button.
Any predictions for how quickly we see the first weaponization of this tool?
If the changes aren't rescinded/cancelled, we will see every single older unity game removed not just from sale but altered to prevent installation. The costs/benefits with this new system are so incredibly dumb that there's no way to justify using Unity at all - even without assuming purposeful sabotage, the disconnect between revenue and costs is too great. They've actually admitted that they don't have a way to prevent pirate installs from counting, and hitting F5 on a game that's being rendered in a browser also dings the developer for fifteen cents. If a developer makes 2 dollars profit after selling a game, all it takes is a user reinstalling the game 15 times for that sale to actually end up losing the developer money! If a game goes onto Gamepass or some other service, it just immediately destroys the developer's bank account - and don't forget that if it supports something like Xcloud that's even more expensive! They've also spoken about how one of their sources for information on installs is going to come from asking app store owners - which I highly doubt is going to actually work. This either gets cancelled or Unity gets destroyed as an engine and nobody uses it anymore. They're proposing a fee structure so great that even massive games like Genshin Impact would be better off completely retooling and switching to Unreal or some other engine framework.
Makes sense why John Riccitiello sold a bunch of shares before making this announcement!
where did they admit that?
In a thread on their developer forum they mentioned that they have some experience with tracking fraud from companies and they're going to be using that knowledgebase/talking to stakeholders - i.e. they don't have an actual way to track this yet. The response from other developers was largely "Your system has big false positive rates and doesn't work well", so I'm looking forward to seeing how they work this out.
Source, for the curious.
Wow. Thank you for the link. I thought surely this must be some kind of nonsense gone viral, but no, that's "Unity Technologies" @ unity.com, isn't it?
It actually is. That statement may have been superseded by a more recent one alluded to upthread (I haven't looked into it in depth), but they definitely did say that.
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wow, i really expected them to be more competent than given credit, but i guess they actually made a terrible system
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