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
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.