Unity is coming out with a new pricing model for 2024, where game developers will have to fork over money every time someone installs their game. this includes redownloads of already bought games, and downloads of games from places like game pass. it also applies to game demos and free games. it even applies if someone transfers a game from one device to another.
the policy applies if your company makes over $200,000 in yearly revenue and the game has been downloaded over a certain number of times in its entire lifetime.
there are rumors that gambling games and gotcha games are exempt.
https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates
A long last, the copypasta becomes possible.
> Pirate game
> Install and then uninstall
> Repeat a million times
> Game company loses $60M
Seeing as how I mostly shitpost here this was literally my first line of thought and it will also cross the minds of places like 4chan which will weaponise it simply "for the lolz".
Imagine, if you will, hundreds of VMs running on dozens of Raspberry Pi's, installing and uninstalling various games in perpetuity. At last, our revenge against the AAA gaming industry is at hand!
Prequel Darth Sidious (in evil voice):
Child, expand your mind. I have a rack of Dell Big Iron, each box with dual Xenons and 48 gigs of RAM. I will break their accounts with the scale of my installations!
yup... perhaps that was the plan to justify annother piracy crackdown. unity just gave people a damn nuke they can use,,, theres now way they didnt miss this its got to be on purpose.
That's the first thing that came to mind. It has John Riccitiello written all over it. Lest people forget that he wanted to adopt a similar kind of cash gouging for Battlefield when he was CEO at EA: https://youtu.be/ZR6-u8OIJTE
in this case they'd lose ~$200,000, but the meme still stands
What? Why would gambling and gatcha games, the ones best positioned to pay these fees, be exempt? So, basically, Unity just told indie developers to get fuck themselves.
The CCP called them and told them don't touch Genshit Simpact and HONK HONKai
the story is still developing, and every indie Dev and their mother is crying out in pain. there will likely be changes before the model gets implemented.
As for gambling and gacha games, it's likely because those games have ridiculous fuck you money behind them and they don't want to get sued into the ground.
Also because gacha games specifically have stupid grind incentives that have hardcore players reinstalling the game 100+ times to get their favorite 0.2% pull from the free initial chests.
Oh god, "rerolling" is the stupidest thing anyone could have imagined. The level of sadism/masochism involved to create a game with the concept of "rerolling" and then having the players think it's fine is next level. Just let people select their starting 3 heroes instead of rolling for them. There, done. That was easy.
Deterministic choices? In my gacha game? ahahahaha... oh wait you're serious?
F2P games make their money on volume. 1,000 download a game, 1 person pays. Different types of games have different relationships with volume.
A hypercasual game with very low monetization might take $.02 for each person marketing gets to install it in India. Meanwhile a high barrier to entry game might cost $5 for each person it gets to install in the USA. And for AAA games, the cost/value of marketing is pretty close to expected return ( >$10 per).
In theory, a $0.20 Unity install price would increase the cost of a AAA game by .003%, but it would increase the cost to roll out a gatcha game in India by 1,000%. This would completely kill Unity for mobile instantly, so they're going with something else for these cases.
Charging per user doesn't really make sense. The customer arent the customers, the developers are.
I didn't realize that Unity was seeking Canadian Healthcare.
kek
Canadian doctor talking to Unity:
Oh wow, I had no idea the CEO was the Ravioli guy. He used to be the CEO of EA back during the times when they won the "worst company in America" award, as well as earlier during the "EA Spouse" thing from like 20 years ago.
Someone posted on half-KiA that CEO stock sales are apparently pre-planned or something? Gotta go back, but it could be, it could not be.
This is just going to push devs to other platforms. Godot is totally free. Unreal is only 5% of revenue over $1M. There's things like Unigine for 3D and loads and loads of 2D engine.
Godot is aptly named.
Unfortunately, that would imply that people could actually program in C/C++ and not just barf out some lines of Python or Javascript or some other troon-friendly middleware with insane computational burden.
Yeah I'd be interested to see what "computer science" actually learns and what a modern developer job is even like. All of the web-based custom business software I use is just terrible. It's layers and layers and layers of middleware for something that should be snappy and responsive. I'd require computer science students to do an assembler class myself. Doesn't have to be something complicated, like 68k or Z80 or something. Maybe a simple Gameboy game as the final.
Most of the professional devs I've talked to have no idea what the computer is actually doing. They talk of fancy sounding stuff "node", "jQuery", "Ruby on Rails" but the output is a slow buggy mess. Or they will talk about what languages they know. My answer is I don't really know any to be honest. I've done a lot of them sure, but if you dropped a project in something easy like Python I'd end up looking it up to make sure I was doing a branch or a loop right. It would take a whopping 5 minutes to figure out. That's how I learned though. Hell, I think I started with the QBasic help files when I was like 5 or 6. Let's see what this command does. Oh, it didn't work, how about this, etc.
Traditionally computer science wasn't programming but theory. Students wouldn't be expected to use a computer during the course. I don't know how it is nowadays, but I think there are usually different tracks after the initial course based on what kind of developer someone wants to be. I like your idea though. I learned on really old computer books that were out of print and obsolete by that time, but they gave me a good understanding of fundamental architecture.
Haha that too. Spent many late hours staring at those blue and gray screens.
I had those monkeys throwing atomic bombs by the end.
Nanner chunker.
most developers do not know what a map-reduce function is, or what cache-coherency is. if you put a gun to their head and told them to write a memory pool that avoided any sorting and any searching for next free element they couldn't do it.
When people ask me how to get into C I say go look at the Brogue source code. a functional game written entirely in C in a mostly sane way.
When I get asked about C++ I say go look at the Qt coding guidelines - how they write the Qt libraries. It isn't fancy but it is a HUGE project and it is maintainable. It's also performant.
I'm not really sure using C++ is a mark of wisdom. I understand games people find some use in it's flexibility. It is terribly implemented though and very dated.
C# or whatever being slow is dwarfed by the inefficiency of games programmers. Using C# doesnt make stuff efficient, in fact due to the difficulty of it probably the game just ends up being less well written. Starting with c++ is kind of optimizing first. Because you do extra work and your game is more efficient ( hopefully). But it's harder to refactor the code and change your actual algorithms, not to mention that bugs in C++ can be insidious since there is very little runtime safety.
What I see is people saving a few cycles writing CPP only to waste billions in order to lag out while nothing literally is happening in the game. It's just an endless loop that uses all your CPU cycles to get to 30 fps.
This is even worse given the precise nature of what they're trying to enforce.
This isn't like changing their price model for how much they charge for developers to use their engine, or adjusting how they handle royalty fees, they're explicitly trying to charge any developer for every fucking time their game is installed.
If they're trying to make this shit apply to games already released on Unity they're going to completely tank their company within less than a year.
This is far beyond any realm of madness in the software world.
nah, its madne$$ i think its a scheme to justify annother piracy crackdown but cant rule out plain greed... they really did not think this thru though they made the old pirates killed our gamestuido bit real... hell you might not even need the whole game just whatever verifcation code/program they use and some simple automation and some proxys/vpns boom dev now has an extra expense and where they made this retroactive they made any company basicly install a bomb if they used unity for anything...
Is piracy still alive even? At this point I've not downloaded a cracked game since the noughts.
eh, kinda in a zombie form. but its still around kinda surprised its not had a resurgence tbh.
To be fair, there isn't much to pirate.
Most good games worth playing can be emulated, and only a few scant titles in modern times -- not available on emulators -- are actually worth pirating.
I've never used Unity but I have made a few demos with Godot mostly to learn Godot and interop with Blender. Godot is quite good.
I'm in the industry and this is retarded.
I can see the logic behind it though. It seems like they don't trust the developers to actually pay them, because they don't have any way to see real financial numbers numbers from all the platforms the games might be on. So instead, they're going to tax what they can see, because they can make their engine phone home.
IMO they're going to destroy their own market share with this move, but clearly they think otherwise. Or they think the loss of market share will be made up for by getting paid more.
If the engine has to phone home, does that mean they're going to inject an "always online" requirement into every game?
Optimistically, they just need to get the install data eventually so they might just have it phone home periodically and then charge based on total unique fingerprints they get back, because 99.9% of players are bound to connect to the internet at some time.
Pessimistically, yeah probably. Or an online requirement the 1st time you play.
I was thinking this might have something to do with the subscription services, since they've also ballooned in price recently. I'm not sure how their model actually works, and how devs get paid, but I always figured it was pretty shit. Unity, being even farther removed from that deal, would then be getting a fraction of shit.
I don't think Unity would be large enough to successfully negotiate with Microsoft and Sony. Pricing based on installs would allow them to bypass those deals entirely.
Of course, it still looks like stupid business. Another thought I've had is that it might just be corporate sabotage. You almost never actually hear of it, but it definitely exists. This is suicidal enough to make me suspicious.
Unity never had the best royalty deal, but it was at least passable for a long time for smaller games and developers, but I think they raised the stakes a bit in the last 3-4 years or so.
So everyone else is probably just bewildered that Unity effectively handed over their market share if they follow through with this.
2023 does seem to be the year of corporate seppiku, just no honor only spilling of guts.
Unless it's the first of many and it becomes an industry standard.
I really doubt it, this is looking less how dlc and micotransactions were made normal and more the kind of fuck up caused when Bethesda tried to introduce paid mods.
Shitty troonware game "engine," I would be glad if it dies.
It has done massive damage to the gaming industry since DA/Twitter-tier "artists" and "writers" thought they could start developing games with this easy-to-use engine.
What bewilders me is that actual game companies started using it too so now we have an absurd number of poorly optimized games that all look the same - like shit.
how do they know when someone installs? are they admitting that their engine has spyware in it?
Well this gives a good avenue for attack on woke devs, just install and uninstall a game ad Infinium to run them out of business.
wtf? I hope you go out of business overnight, Unity. It's no business of yours which computers I install the games I purchased on, it's no business of your how many times I install and uninstall them, and why should you keep making money over and over and over again when the devs don't?
Fuck the gaming industry. Fuck it with an AIDS infested tranny dick.
Actually, it would probably enjoy that at this rate.
In that case the engine is dead and only good for flipping free/ heavily discounted store assets into other games.
OOF
That isn't a shot in the foot, that is straight up blowing your legs off.
What the hell were they thinking? This completely fucks over every indie dev and probably will open up the door to financial sabotage.
I find this a bit unreal. I'm sure they'll add some caveats for indies, but that's like waiting for Godot.
Pretty SCUMMy thing to do.
It's hard to Construct a proper thought, it's just a gamebryo, yet it leaves me Jaded. I need to find the Source to their greed. Maybe Torque their minds to reality. It's a bit Vicious, but I think they need it.
Alright, no topping that! Groovie..
I'm out of the loop on game engines, are there really that many options nowadays?
I only knew a few of them! Unreal is obvious, Godot is another big one, and Unity is too.
I had a to google a bunch of them. The ones I knew--Source is half life. SCUMM is the game engine from LucasArts ... Monkey Island. (Similar to old school Sierra adventure games that ran on the AGI and then SCI engines.)
Groovie was the engine for The 7th Guest.
David Szymanskis (DUSK, Gloomwood) repsonse
No company is going to agree to a contract that opens them up to unlimited liability based on an interaction between third parties (Unity and customers installing their game) that they can't even audit. So, obviously the way this will be implemented is the game will phone home to both Unity and the developer during install. The developer will be able to allow or disallow the install, and will gain an audit record of all "installs" being performed, prior to being charged by Unity.
TLDR: This will result in customers having to deal with games having a limited number of installs, and pirates having to overcome the phone home systems rather than developers being exposed to unlimited liability.
Unity speedrunning the desintigration of their engine.
It's good to have software like Unity that's simple and easy to use but it's really, really bad to let the kinds of people who top out at being able to operate simple software actually have access to it.
I was actually building out stuff in Unity before this as a side gig.
I'm genuinely not sure what system to use now instead for games, or even apps.
Any recommendations?
What are the alternatives? I want to make free games. Not interested in making money just want to share my games with friends.
Text-based, 2D, or 3D? If you're artistically inclined, use something quick and easy like rpg-maker, ren'py, or game-maker studio to get your feet wet. If you're more interested in programming, make a CLI or TUI game to get your bearings on the fundamentals of a game engine and your desired programming langauge. 3D: mess around with Godot or Unreal Engine 3, or Blender for the models and animation.
A recommendation you're not going to find in a generic web search is Open Croquet, although it's early 00's educational tech.
RPG-makers with story images require a lot of 'artistic' work.
Quick and easy should be quick and dirty. A complete project that 1000+ people will enjoy takes devs with some prior experience at least 10 months to make. I started programming with Al Sweigart's Invent With Python, but I'm loathe to recommend a dedicated SJW. That series of dead simple games like hangman is my idea of a dead simple game you share with 2 friends before deciding if you want to dedicate to the hobby.
Warning for those who do decide to use UE3/UDK: if you do decide to upgrade your project to UE4/UE5, the old codebase from UE3/UDK is not compatible with UE4/UE5.
I haven't used Godot, but UE4/UE5 is very poorly optimised for small projects with small footprints. If you're making a big, visually grandiose game for multiple platforms then UE5 would be a good option, but for something compact and simple with great performance, nearly anything else is better.
Thanks, slip of the tongue. Don't mess with older engines unless you're modding older games. Godot aims for beginner-intermediate friendliness, while UE5 is to get familiar with modern tech rather than make your own small game.
Wasn't Unity the game engine that had spyware shit built into it by default that would phone home?
i seem to remember red shell does that ring any bells or am i misremembering again... edit looks like i misrememberd it was iron source they merged with...
I'm assuming that would be against whatever license/contract Unity uses and open the dev up to getting sued.
First sale would seem to prohibit them from charging for reinstalls. At least as far as you at home. They can play with the developers however they want since those are agreements that need to be ongoing and some will start in the future after the license change. I don't think they're going to alter existing deals unless a dev upgrades versions.