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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?
Epic Megagames must be rubbing their hands with glee right now. They are the developer of the Unreal Engine; probably Unity's only competitor. Either the industry tolerates this change of charge per install and they get to copy it and increase their profits, or they see their competitor take a big hit to reputation and income.
My current speculative work around involves devs using game streaming experiences to limit installs ('a G-force NOW exclusive!'), but this could be 'patched out' of Unity's next TOS/Contract.
You might think devs would just jump ship from Unity to Unreal. But, IMHO, any self respecting dev that is using Unity is retarded in the first place, and is likely to struggle significantly using any other tool.
I mean, I'm no elite game developer. I've aspired. I've dabbled. I written shitty prototypes for games I've never finished in XNA, Unity, C with SDL2, C with GLUT, x86 assembly and 6502 assembly. Unity was by far the easiest, and the worst. If you are doing what it wants you to do, it's literally drag and drop. If you aren't doing what it wants you to do, the work explodes 1000 times, to not just write you own systems, but to stop the built in systems from fucking up your shit. At least that was my amateur experience with it. Unity is a skillset I'm not sure transfers to anywhere else.
But I donno, maybe someone with more experience can chime in. Like I said, unpublished amateur here.
ZorbaTHut has a bunch of great rants about Unity, but this one is usually what I link to, because I think the Tide has gotten a lot closer very quickly. GameMaker's a lot more attractive now for simple games doing exactly what the engine wants, and Godot's gotten much better just since he wrote that rant.
Good read! Speaking of Godot, they capitalized by announcing their new gofundme today. Good bit of PR.
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