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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 checked and the fee doesnt apply to games that arent making at least $200 000 a year or that dont have over 200 000 installs
since you need to be paid for an install in the first place, how is having your income taxed any more controversial than every single other company taxing you for hosting your games on them?
The developer receives money when the customer buys the game as a one-time transaction. The developer does not get any money when the user installs their game - so if someone has a PC in the office, a laptop they take with them for business and a home gaming PC, after paying the developer once they then install the game three times. If this person updates their hardware or refreshes their OS, this counts as an additional three installs. A game that was sold with unity two years ago and made a profit under the old system is now going to actively lose the developer money anytime someone plays or installs it. Furthermore, there is nothing stopping a bad actor from paying for the game once and then installing it on 500 virtual machines in order to put a competing game studio out of business. For free to play games, every single customer who is not a whale is actively costing the developer money. Releasing a demo? That also now actively costs the developer money. If a developer's game gets pirated repeatedly, the developer will be charged for the privilege!
Yeah, there's no way the swathes of smaller and independent developers who've put time into Unity will ever accept this; they simply cannot afford it, nor will they countenance something like the infamous install limits of Bioshock or Spore (assuming they could even wrangle that kind of DRM capability). Honestly, even the bigger developers would balk at this idea, and no big corporate publisher would ever allow a studio to use Unity for this reason.
I would absolutely love to be a fly on the wall in the meeting where they tell Nintendo that not only are they are going to have to pay them a 20 cent fee every time a Unity game gets installed on a Nintendo platform but that Unity is going to be using their own proprietary way to determine those numbers. There are actually even more layers of broken stupidity to this decision than it seems at first glance.
Realistically I think what happens is Unity goes up to Nintendo and says "please pay me 100 million dollars for all these installs I see using my proprietary methods" and Nintendo is like "i will counteroffer with this Twix bar" and Unity looks at the Twix bar, compares it to the prospect of a lengthy and expensive trial vs the Nintendo legal team, and accepts the counteroffer. Repeat with Microsoft et al.
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