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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?
I'm wondering, is there some sort of economic or logistical justification for this fee? Like, does it cost Unity something each time this happens? I had thought that once you develop a game using the engine, then the code is the code, you can deploy it as you wish. Which could be reliant on having constant access to online services or something, but this seems universal for all games. So if you have a chunk of code lying on your SSD that someone pays you to download a copy of, then they install it on their own computers, what's Unity's justification for taking a cut of that particular interaction, given that their input ended once the chunk of code got finished and went gold? Is it just pure rent seeking? It almost feels like Unity wants to insert itself in like an actor earning royalties off syndication, which isn't the most unreasonable thing to try for, but then it seems like these royalties should be taken off the earnings like a tax, rather than off installs, which often don't generate any revenue at all.
The business justification is that he current CEO of Unity formerly occupied a high position in Electronic Arts, and suggested that the publishers should experiment with e.g. charging players for reloading their guns past some point in a gameplay session, when they highly price-insensitive.
Single-player, paid (as in, you pay for them once) games are a rounding error to this kind of a business-brained person. The pricing was made with Genshin Impact in mind, in an attempt to extract more money from Mihoyo (sp?). In a mobile world of freemium games, using "installation" as a measure makes more sense because accounts are revenues are usually tied to that.
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I’m not aware of any logistical justification.
It is as you observe: any additional downloads, distributions, surreptitious thumb-drives involve no additional cost to developer or publisher. But this is true of almost all software. Vendors have been trying to capture that value since for ages.
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