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
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.
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.