Developers Rally Together as Unity Attempts to Clarify Controversial Install Fee Policy

As someone who is looking at starting a career in game design, direction, and production, I am thrilled to be moving forward using literally any tool other than Unity. Have fun rotting in the shallow grave you dug yourself, Unity.

I believe it was the morning the day this stuff was announced, I was thinking that maybe I should be learning how to use Unity instead of Godot to develop games, because of the larger amount of resources available for Unity. The reason I chose Godot was because there were no licensing fees involved at any point (even though I have no delusions of incurring the Unity fees, because you’d have to make $200,000 in sales for the fees to be incurred).

Now I’m feeling like I really made the right choice now. Even if I do decide to use another game engine, it definitely won’t be Unity.

Genuinely curious. How is this worse than the 30% publishers take from selling games on their platform? Having to give Unity a one time payment of 20 cents per unit installed seems like a small drop in the bucket to me.

They need to do a complete about face, but it’ll still be too late. They should’ve as soon as they saw how bad it was backfiring. Guessing they’re eventually headed to bankruptcy.

Reminder that conglomerates use Unity for some of their products and games, including but not limited to Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Apple, MiHoYo, and Google. Coupled with the fact that indie devs never agreed to any of this and the fact that this could break Australia law (possibly protecting the Hallow Knight Siksong devs), this could boil into multiple massive lawsuits against Unity, lawsuits that they likely won't win.

That's without mentioning the bad publicity and the fact that it could lead to teams switching over to other engines like Unreal and Godot.

I'd say good luck to Unity, but they did this to themselves.

This is a greedy move, and it will backfire big time. every game devoper will be affected I'll bet even Genshin will be affected if they shut down their game in protest. Even if it affects sales. There are a lot of games made in Unity and it will not be worth it in the long run.

@BamBamBaklava89 It is a flat fee vs. a percentage. Take a free to play model where you are counting on a massive number of downloads with the hope that a few will be willing to pay. Our sample case will be 2 million downloads and $200,000 earned. You will owe the platform holder $60,000. You can pay $60,000 out of the $200,000 earned. However, you will owe Unity based upon the 2 million downloads (rather than based upon earnings) resulting in a cost of $360,000. You cannot pay $360,000 out of the $200,000 earned so you have to come up with an additional $160,000. Paying out more than you make is clearly unsustainable. If it were Unreal Engine, on the other hand, you would owe something like $10,000 (5% I believe). So on a $200,000 revenue you would pay out $70,000 in fees and reap a profit of $130,000.

Additionally, Unity will determine, using sorcery we presume, how many installs have occurred. How? You just have to trust them. How will they get Microsoft or Sony to pay if it is on their subscription services? Again, trust them. It is not like they've ever done anything to betray a dev's trust, right?

I published a few games using Unity approximately 15 years ago. Sad to see them turn into this.

Haven't caught up with all the latest policy changes by socials,but seemingly another "coincidence",prior to the Unity train wreck was several execs quietly selling off their company shares prior to all this!🙄

Not sure how serious or not they are but Massive Monsters/Cult of Lamb seemingly tweeted potentially needing to buy it before things changeover with a possible digital deletion if things continue on their current course.

Going to take more than a roll back to regain trust in the Unity brand after this.

@BamBamBaklava89 It's not a cut of revenue - its a fee per install, regardless of whether it was sold or not. If a user installs a purchase onto multiple device - a PS5 and a PS4 for example, Unity will charge them twice. Demos are now meant not to be charged (a clarification/backtrack) but not if they containt the whole game and can be unlocked. Free-to-play games become uneconomic for small developers who could end up owing fortunes. Malicious downloads could be used to bankrupt someone.
The list of issues goes on and on, but the main issue is that Unity has taken this step in such a way to pull the rug out from under lots of smaller developers who relied on a completely different charging model. It could argue it has the legal right to do it, but to them it feels like a breach of trust.

Unity deserve the slow death they creating. Having won the trust of small devs, they have now thrown away any trust by killing their tos unilatrally. How could any project trust these people again? They cant and unity will experience a well deserved death.

The Cult of the Lamb devs are saying they'll delete the game on 1st January 2024 if these changes aren't reversed.

Something else I learned from this whole debacle is that apparently no one knows the difference between a verb and a noun.

Wtf are unity thinking, but considering unity is lead by ex ea boss that worse than the current one, suddenly that explain everything 😕

That's Hollow Knight Silksong delayed for another five years then...

Developers formed a unity to bring down Unity. Appropriate

@BamBamBaklava89 first, it’s on top of any other fees you pay.

The fees also kick in after the game makes 200k, not you. Let’s say you publish your fame on PS, and they take 30%, you actually made 140k.

Let’s say you hired an additional developer (artist, whatever) and you managed to pay them only minimum wage, that’s still likely at least 30k less a year. It all quickly adds up and you might not even make a profit yourself ar the end of all other expenses.

Now, it’s not a “one time fee”, it’s not a per-sale fee, but a per “initialization” fee. They have stared so far this is about initializing the game it actually the install. So, if someone buys a game, installs if, uninstalls it, deletes all save data and re-installs, you need to pay again.

In consoles, every user that launches the game gets its own “initialization”, so a single sold copy might get multiple initializations.

Then there is piracy, they claim they can detect this, but can they? If they can actually detect piracy so reliably, then why the heck does the runtime simply not refuse to run when it knows it’s pirated?

If the game is FTP, in the hope of charging an upgrade fee or earn money via DLC, and you get unlucky, you might have millions of installs but barely any revenue. You can easily find yourself in a position where you barely earn 10 cents per install in average, but now you owe Unity 20c per install.

Honestly, at the end, it’s just best if they take the percentage royalty the way Unreal does on their free license tier, because the royalty will always be just a percentage of your revenue and not ever be higher than your revenue. Even then, Unreal still offers a tier where you can pay per-developer yearly license that results in no royalty payments.

Another horrible thing is Unity wants to apply this to every game made with unity already published. Even if it was published 10 years ago and no longer getting patches. This might make many developers decide to entirely delist games, if possible in ways that prevent even re-downloading, because all re-downloads will result in even more money owed to Unity.

It’s some of the greediest garbage I’ve seen in a while. Bear in mind that their CEO has been selling shares recently and now announces this. Lol, they even lost Geoff so clearly the cheques aren’t clearing.

@Tharsman Sony, MS, and Steam plus others would be furious if delisting meant already purchases games could not be redownlaoded.
Unity will probably have to adjust this to be only for future games at worst case

that's bad news for us.
been on a project made in unity for 3 years of dev now.
that's some good kick in the nuts for our team.

@Jaz007 I don't think they can do that, as removing a product people purchased from being eligable for downloading is not only a violation of service and customer agreements, it's a sales violation as well. If you sold someone something and you take it away, then you technically never actually sold them anything and they have legal grounds to entitlement to a full refund at the very least.

Obviously things are different when it comes to services, but generally speaking that would create a huge problem among consumers and distributers.

That and I am pretty sure a company trying to charge companies like Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo/Apple for each individual download on their platforms would be a violation of their terms of service for publishers on their platforms that would probably result in a massive lawsuit with those companies suing Unity.

To top it off, that would also be a direct violation of laws and legislation regarding digital sales in numerous countries, which would result in those countries taking Unity to court or massive penalties and possibly banishment from any market entitlements.

At the end of the day, the buck has to stop somewhere. Development costs have been rising steadily over the last few decades, while companies with deep pockets in different spheres of the gaming industry have been subsidizing prices in all manner of ways to gain market share.

I can't speak on the matter at hand specifically, but the writing has been on the wall. It's not realistic to expect tools, games, and so on to remain free or subsidized forever. Yes, I'm looking right at you now, Microsoft. You too, Epic.

What becomes increasingly clear though, is that the gaming industry is not in a healthy state right now.

@number1024 Exactly right, but not only that.

Remember when every other day we would see a developer praising the glory of Game Pass? And Xbox shills would go "see? It's great for everyone!". Sure, everyone is happy when all bellies are full.

Then, growth flattened way earlier than Microsoft expected, and praises became whispers of checks getting smaller. And prices were raised while deals were removed.

Microsoft adopted a model that makes games cheaper to consumers at the same time when development costs were skyrocketing. There's no free lunch.

And now, they see the whole thing not working, and what do they do? They double down and make the biggest acquisition in games history.

And suddenly, Unity wants their piece of the pie. Sure, they handled it catastrophically bad, but people need to look at it from a wider perspective: it's the canary in the coal mine.