Unity’s new “per-install” pricing enrages the game development community | Fees of up to $0.20 per install threaten to upend large chunks of the industry.::Fees of up to $0.20 per install threaten to upend large chunks of the industry.
When capitalism runs out of places to grow/metastasize, it will consume itself.
And it has been for years, in every sector. People try to blame everything but the cause.
This is why we as consumers must demand open source software
$0.00 dollars per inStallman of godot engine.
While I’m a huge open source advocate this has little to do with open vs closed source software.
The issue of having to put up with software changes you dislike is solved when you (or 3rd parties) have the freedom to change the software in ways you like.
It is my hope that people see this as very much a proprietary vs free software issue. I hope this leads to further introspection; it’s bad when an engine mistreats them (game devs) so maybe they should give software freedom to their users too.
This has everything to do with FOSS.
If a company can get away with pulling the rug on you, they will.
Once you’ve heavily invested in using a a piece of software, the company behind it has leverage over you, but if you could pay for updates to that software from another company, the original company has no leverage over you.
The only reason these companies refuse to release the source code is because they are planning on fucking you over in the future. As consumers we need to demand open source products to prevent this sort of abuse.
So out of every 1M downloads, that’s $200,000 to Unity’s pocket and out of the pockets of developers. Am I doing this math right?
Not downloads. Installs. They also count re installs. So if you. Install a game, play it, remove it, then install again later that is an additional charge to the dev.
Plus on top of all the other subscription fees.
it’s not even really about the money, even if it will fuck the devs and ruin projects and lives, but the breach of trust and a mark that more shit is probably on it’s way if this goes through. Unity owns a ecosystem that many people depend on and now they really start squeezing. It’s not right.
This is why things that act as commons should be either nationalised or replaced with free software.
I agree. This dipping of fingers into the pockets of devs errodes trust.
Plus on top of all the other subscription fees
False. This 200k number assumes you would stay on Unity Personal, which breaks EULA anyway since you’re required to buy Unity Pro once you have more than 200k in revenue and funding.
The real cost for 1M installs, under Unity Pro, would be 62k$, to which you’re adding 2k annually for every seat of Pro you need, that’s it. Again, this assumes you’re making upwards of 2M$ annually. As soon as your game falls back under that, there’s no runtime fees anymore.
Compare with Unreal, where as soon as your game made 1M$ revenue over its lifetime, you’re on the hook for the 5% revshare perpetually. Over time, there’s loads of situations where that will stay more expensive.
Not necessarily. It depends on the Unity license being used and it scales based on installs. So higher tier license and more installs makes each additional install cheaper. But if they are using the free license, it stays at 20c per install no ‘discount’ at any install counts. It is a bit convoluted: https://unity.com/runtime-fee
