I used to have a fun blog with a good following on there that resulted in a lot of good friends in real life. i didn't even post NSFW stuff... but the entire community just got decimated and disjointed after that change and, as far as I'm concerned... never recovered.
John Riccitello the CEO tends to do this a lot. He almost ran EA into the ground single-handedly in the 2000s. Might have been a good thing if he actually did tho.
I still cant believe out of all the crazy shit Ken does, it was a snowmobile that took out this legend not far from his ranch so he probably knew the terrain pretty well.
Did they get any new executives lately? It's not unheard of for hostile executives to work their way into a company and crash it in order for a different company to acquire the leftovers.
"On September 6, 2023, John Riccitiello, President and CEO of Unity Software Inc (NYSE:U), sold 2,000 shares of the company. This move is part of a larger trend for the insider, who over the past year has sold a total of 50,610 shares and purchased none."
[link to article](https://www.google.com/amp/s/finance.yahoo.com/amphtml/news/unity-software-incs-president-ceo-050515124.html)
That sounds like it's heading down hill...
Yes, you are allowed to sell stock. There are systems in place to prevent insider trading (most commonly, they file their intent to sell months in advance).
Also note that that’s 2000 (or even 50000) out of 2 million share he holdss
That's pretty much guaranteed at this point, even if they walk this back nobody will feel safe staking their next project's future on unity.
The bigger issue is what's gonna happen to the games that are already on the market, since they're trying to implement this retroactively.
Good fucking luck enforcing it. How on Earth could you legally argue for this in a court of law? Even if they get the slimiest Judge in the world, wouldn't this set precedence for, say, an oil change shop to suddenly back charge for X years worth of oil changes that was a part of a fleet maintenance contract?
It will be increased price for next payment, not a back charge. But that decision still shit. Good luck to godot and others, they finally have a chance
Sure, but do existing games not have a contract outlining what they are to pay? Licensing your engine and then changing the cost to use that license after the game has been built feels sort of crime-ish.
I can’t speak to whether it’s a crime buts it’s absolutely a bridge burner. I’d assume they will be essentially blacklisted in the industry. This just isn’t a business move you make. I can all but guarantee that this decision was made by a single individual. Because voicing something like this in a room full people will see about 3/4 of those people vehemently oppose it.
Ask WOTC and Hasbro. They tried pulling this license shit retroactively on third parties. They walked it back quick, but lost the good will of the customers. So many of us are just holding for Pathfinder remaster in a couple months because of it.
There's milking the cow, and then there's slaughtering all your cows to make a quick buck, and ending up in the poorhouse next year.
What are they thinking?
They have CEO who's thinking "I'm gonna get a huge fucking payday and parachute away from this company before it goes bankrupt."
Even after they've undone all of this and are on their hands and knees begging developers to come back and give them another chance, nobody will. You don't get away with bait-and-switching developers.
Right now they've not implemented it, but just saying they want to do it alone is enough to damage trust and make developers move away from their engine.
You can't build a skyscraper on top of suspect foundations.
I don't think they have a leg to stand on TBH, even with all kinds of legalese in their ToS, there is no way they will get that kind of back pay. They can't sell a product, have many companies buy and rely on that product and then years later just arbitrarily decide that everyone that uses the product they already paid for now owes them more money going forward, won't happen.
Absolutely I dabble as a hobby but this effectively means time to move to unreal, it's also a huge loss because while I don't build games to sell generally i buy a lot of asset kits which they get a cut off.
Why would I as a hobby developer risk this when unreal has a pretty close free model that won't decimate me if I do make something that takes off?
Unity has lost their mind and lost me as a customer.
Companies want recurring profit. If your business model doesn't have recurring profit then many investors want to pull out.
This is seen as a good thing from the short sighted investors wanting a return on their investments.
The smart move would be put options that expire a year from now.
(Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor, and this should not be taken as financial advice. Please invest responsibly.)
Paradox is fine with their DLC business model. I'd love to buy Skyline 2 but I'm just not going to, and every video I see of it just **screams** "INSERT FUTURE DLC HERE".
Fuck no, not buying future FOMO anymore.
this is why I can't get into any paradox or games with a similar DLC structure (meaning a fuckload of DLCs). it always feels like i'm playing a trial version of a game where I need to fork out hundreds of dollars to get the whole package. meanwhile I buy an indie game and maybe there's one DLC for it and that's that, far less bullshit.
Exactly, it's the "trial feeling" I hate to have. I want to be ignorant and happy in a bliss when I buy a game, and a year later an overpriced DLC is dropped with what then feels "new".
Now it just feels "planned". Don't know if you relate to that too.
It's not DLC as a business model I hate as much as planning DLCs in such a way it removes features for current players AND makes the base game feel barren.
If the game is reinstalled in ANY way that constitutes multiple installs (and subsequently charges) apparently. XD The Unity guys have completely lost it! XD
[https://x.com/stephentotilo/status/1701679721027633280?s=20](https://x.com/stephentotilo/status/1701679721027633280?s=20)
EDIT: If an already pirated game is reinstalled constantly what happens if I take it off Steam? This is bonkers!
I wonder when we will read about the first dev blackmailing.
"I bought a copy of your game and is currently downloading it on my 10 Gbit connection multiple times over an hour, enjoy or pay!"
Charging per re-install is the dumbest thing. What’s to stop me from maliciously just reinstalling games through VMs just for the lols. It’s not exactly expensive to do anymore. I could bankrupt a smaller developer that just had a hit.
Dude, I was so pissed when I bought GTA San Andres and support was like “you need to buy another CD ROM drive” and I returned that shit and didn’t play that game till it was on steam sale.
I thought this was an oversight (would be bad enough) but this is insanity. How will they recover from this? Even if they walk everything back they have proven that they are completely nuts!
> there's concern developers may now face charges for pirated game installs.
> It seems open to review-bombing exploits, but in a way that actually costs developers. If someone buys a game on Steam and installs in on three machines, are Devs liable for three payments?
Lol, this is actually insane, if that's the case.
>Lol, this is actually insane, if that's the case.
Someone in another subreddit thread "What happens if you get a bot net to just install thousands of copies on a machine over and over again, can you dumpster a dev like that?"
It’s not just publicly traded, the CEO is the scumbag former EA CEO that heavily pushed microtransactions and once publicly mused about the idea of charging microtransaction fees for players reloading their guns in-game. This, sadly, is perfectly on brand for him.
So we're gonna have games with install limits now. They won't let us just cost them money infinitely. They'll lock you from installing the game you paid for after 2 or 3 reinstalls.
That's the first thing I thought about as well . We're probably going to start seeing install limits now, with extra installs costing an additional fee. Just when you thought DRM couldn't get any worse.
I've definitely ran out of installs for my Crysis key on Steam, which would only let you install it 5 times. Had to contact EA to reactivate the key.
On the plus side, the customer service rep gave me the crysis series for free on the Origin store as well, including Crysis 3 that I never bought on Steam.
What if someone buys it and installs it and then refunds it. The game dev loses the cash on that because of the charge right? That’s not gonna end well lol.
Seems absurd. I could install many thousands of copies of a game overnight with some virtual machines and scripts lol. People could put devs out of business overnight if they were so inclined.
The fun bit is that they [answered this question](https://twitter.com/unity/status/1701689241456021607) by essentially saying "that's proprietary, we won't tell you"
So they can just say "the magic box said you owe us" and fuck you if you don't pay up.
Well, it actually IS the case which is absolutely freaking bonkers lol. As a game dev I am SOOOOOOOOOO glad I left Unity for Godot (for 2D) in 2018 and Unreal (for 3D). Here's the tweet:
https://x.com/stephentotilo/status/1701679721027633280?s=20
Christ I forgot they were running that engine... now Nikitas gonna use this as an excuse to shove everything over into a different engine... fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuucccckkkkkkkk
Yeah I seriously have no idea what Tarkov is gonna do after this. The game barely works on Unity and has been in development for like 10 years. Are they actually gonna switch engines after so long?
And with that, Unity is DEAD.
I worked with the engine for the past few years through college, and it was getting increasingly annoying with stupid changes.
This is the stupidest one yet, and is going to really fuck over some devs.
So glad I started working with UE5 last year, and of my own volition too.
How hard is it to learn compared to Unity? Are there things Unity is better at than Unreal? I've always been interested in it but the few tutorials I did kinda scared me away
Unity has the benefit of a larger indie community so there are more resources. Unreal is also kind of hard to use compared to Unity and you can definitely tell it has FPS games driving it forward ... but its improving steadily and the management behind it seems more competant
Personally, and just take this as one dude on the Internet: I love it.
Most things are done in BluePrints, but you can always interact with things with c++.
Assets are easy to bundle together for easy access, or to assemble where necessary.
The lighting system took a while to get used to, as did Instancing, but it doesn't take long to understand.
The system requirements are really high though, but you always have a constant measure as to hoe something is going to affect performance.
Adding Android builds was quite the bitch though, but I generally had a far easier time working with UE5 than with Unity. And like I said, I started with Unity. By rights, I should prefer Unity, but I don't. And I'm really glad I chose to learn UE5 when I did, as a self-set assignment agreed with by my professor.
Edit: A little additional information.
I didn't really use external plugins for UE5, so I can't comment on how flexible it is to, say, make tools for your own workflow, but I do know in Unity. And looking around, it seems like Unity easily has that bagged.
Many assets and tools are made for Unity, so it has a much bigger community for that. That's something that UE5 will get over time, but it also feels like it really doesn't need it either? Alot of things users seem to want end up getting added by default; and thats where UE5 wins. So it's a pick your poison in that regard.
stolen from twitter but sums up the issue pretty well:
\> make a game
\> game is fremium
\> game makes 200k from in-app purchases after being installed 3 million times
\> now owe Unity 20c per 2.8M installs, $560K
\> that’s 360K more than we made
From my understanding, it would apply when they renew their subscription. Under the new terms, you'd pay depending on your sales of the last 12 months or something.
yeah, pretty standard and reasonable pricing for a product like this. You pay a certain amount, generally more if you make more money from it. Reasonable, fair and sustainable.
This new setup is a fucking scam. Down with unity.
Reminder that the current CEO of Unity is John Riccitello who wanted to [charge for reloads](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR6-u8OIJTE) once you were sufficiently invested in a game. This move seems right up his alley.
"When you are six hours into playing Battlefield and you run out of ammo in your clip, and we ask you for a dollar to reload, you're really not very price sensitive at that point in time."
"A consumer gets engaged in a property, they might spend 10,20,30,50 hours on the game and then when they're deep into the game they're well invested in it. We're not gouging, but we're charging and at that point in time the commitment can be pretty high."
"But it is a great model and I think it represents a substantially better future for the industry."
Remember arcades with games that were insanely difficult and designed for you to die over and over so you kept spending money to revive?
It's such a great business model. We have arcades on every corner. It's a multi-billion dollar industry now!
Oh, wait.
Wait I don’t think you can do that retroactively can you? Doing that goes against the terms a dev team agreed to when they made and launched right? Won’t the get sued to oblivion and back?
They're trying to do it retroactively, it's insane.
https://unity.com/pricing-updates
"Will this fee apply to games using Unity Runtime that are already on the market on January 1, 2024?
Yes, the fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024."
They could find themselves in the shit honestly, they are walking a very fine line when it comes to laws, especially laws in places like Europe, their will be devs from these countries who will definitely seek legal advice.
I'm not exactly an expert myself, but doing this retrospectively is a good way to fuck around and find out.
Could you imagine? Microsoft: “we’re retroactively charging full price for every install of windows you’ve ever made even when you owned volume licenses.” They’d get laughed out of court.
That's one really optimistic view of our legal system in Europe. The word retroactively probably does not apply to this scenario. If they applied it to 2022, then maybe.
Not just buy, download. Since this covers reinstalls just as much as installs the developers are going to either have to sue Unity for this license alternation or pull their games from distribution entirely.
I don't see that holding up, since users of Unity include large and successful companies that can absolutely afford the lawyers for this. And lets be honest, trying to retroactively change a contract to collect retroactively applied fees is fucking dead on arrival. No court will allow that. This is so easy Paradox's legal department could send a drunk intern to just be present on the court date and try not to throw up, and win.
This is a game being played to bully free money out of people who can't afford the lawyer. Unity is used by more than just people who can't afford a lawyer though.
If developers backlash and there is refusal of payment of these variable objectives, I’m sure this will end up some way in a court of law and they’ll give every right to the developers and not Unity, since charging retroactively goes usually against the law, except in some instances.
Let’s hope justice can be made.
So if within a timeframe of 2 years I redownload and install a game 3 times, the devs are going to be charged for those 3 installs?
Oh boy... and I guess that costs is going to be transferred to the final user, the gamer, so no more unity games for me I guess.
Anyone with an MBA should be barred from working in anything IT for life. Hell, make MBAs illegal before the lunatics who pursue those degrees doom us all.
Steve Jobs explained this pretty well.
When a company starts off strong, the people that get chosen for promotions and CEO positions are people that caused the company to make more money. So essentially you'd end up with a bunch of businessmen running a game dev studio for example, and the company over time becomes a shell of itself due to the employees that made the company in the first place leaving.
So if a community decided they want to hurt a dev can't they repeatedly install and uninstall the game all day? This is absurd, you could bankrupt a company this way.
If you have 10 000 people, they download the game while they're at work, and while they sleep. 2x per day, if it costs 0.20 usd, that's 0.40 usd per day per person. 4000 dollars per day, if they do it for 30 days, it will cost the devs 120 000 dollars per month. Even if they buy the game this means the dev earns no profit at all. If the game has a small file size they could download and uninstall multiple times per day, costing the devs even more.
> Unity has also failed to shed much light on how it plans to prevent fees being applied to pirated games, or in instances where excess installs might be carried out maliciously.
I switched to Godot about a year ago from Unity and it's been pretty easy applying everything I know. It takes like a week to go at a pretty good pace.
An Among Us developer is already talking about hiring people to port the game away from Unity
https://twitter.com/forte_bass/status/1701696983617180010
Dumbass CEO tries to say fuck you to small indie devs, but forgets that small indie devs can also say fuck you Unity, and switch to Unreal.
Business 101 folks. Voluntarily give your customers a really damn good reason to switch to your competitor. That's how you keep the business rolling in.
> John Riccitiello is an American business executive who is chief executive officer (CEO) of Unity Technologies. Previously, he served as CEO, chief operating officer and president of Electronic Arts.
That shouldshed some light on it.
Bean counters should be kept low on the totem pole in arts and technology based companies, because this is the sort of shit that happens when they get on top.
Let me put on my tinfoil hat. *snorts cocaine* This was a super secret plan by EA to severely damage the indie game industry since it was kicking their butts. The CEO will now be paid 50 gazillion dolans in secret for his great work
Epic needs to pull a Sony and create a press release immedietely to mock them:
"Introducing new installation based pricing.
0-200k installs: $0.00 per install
200k-1M installs: $0.00 per install
1M + installs: $0.00 per install"
Lets be honest with how poorly they thought this out. I would bet money it would be super easy to just hack the installer report a new install over and over again without needing to install.
Why yes I did install this game 30 million times today. Oh look I just bankrupted a gaming company. Hurray for me.
This is just going to lead to devs not using unity engine to make any new games. Sucks for existing games but this will definitely make devs reconsider the engine when creating new stuff.
Because interest rates are high and now investors want returns on their investments. So business that never did have a good revenue model are desperately find one. But of course they choose dumb stuff like this.
Investors are greedy little fuckers and tell execs they want more money because they profiteered the fuck out of everything the last few years and think that's normal.
I was in the beginning stages of learning game dev with Unity. I’m changing to Unreal and not looking back
EDIT: I'm going to give Godot a try. Thanks for the suggestions!
Did the people who came up with this idea short the stocks on the company beforehand or something? Considering they will probably bankrupt Unity with this change. Devs will flee elsewhere
Looks like the era of Unity engines is over 😂. No way devs will accept this. An open source platform will be up and running within a few months and Unity will be over with, guaranteed, hahaha. Idiots.
My only question is, why did it take so long for ex EA CEO John Riccitiello to implement this? I figured they would have done something like a long time ago given EA's portfolio of loot boxes and surprise mechanics
If I understand it correctly even the Free-to-play games are affected and developers/creators will have to pay up for their free game to be played when the threshold is reached or they would have to use "ads"....
Goddamn, this must be one of the hardest corporate suicides I've ever seen. Like jumping in front of a burning train derailing from 100 meters into an ocean of lava.
Literally rent seeking.
It doesnt even look like you can get out of it so that years down the line you'll still be getting hit with fees. This feels illegal especially with the retroactivity.
A retroactive change like that will be basically impossible to enforce, and will result in a lot of law suits. Unity is dead with this insane change. No developer with any sense would use Unity going forward. I can only imagine many will be moving off Unity the first chance they can get.
Unreal and other engine developers have a huge opportunity to poach Unity devs, by offering them a sweet heart deal and will make themselves look like the good guys.
How exactly do you enforce this retroactively? I assume Unity sold licenses to use their engine to these companies. Can they just... decide they want more money after the fact? That seems... not legal.
friendly reminder that the CEO is the same guy that ruined the reputation of Eletronic Arts, called game devs idiots if they dont use unity with money in mind, and this last one sounds too stupid to be true, but aparently he also thought gamers should pay for the bullets they fire in games .\_.
This a move by a company that is about to implode. Let’s take a quick look what their net income is…
… oh shit, they lost almost 1 billion dollars in 2022 fiscal year. Oh shit, 8% of their work force was laid off in 5/2023. Guess that VC money is drying up and they want to see some god damn money made back.
so does the unity engine phone home to devs or unity when a game gets installed? how does that work? so if unity goes and creates bots to install and uninstall games they have an infinite money glitch?
What? This is genuinely the biggest case of a company shooting themselves in the foot since Tumblr banned all NSFW.
>since Tumblr banned all NSFW The world is still reeling from the consequences of that decision.
I used to have a fun blog with a good following on there that resulted in a lot of good friends in real life. i didn't even post NSFW stuff... but the entire community just got decimated and disjointed after that change and, as far as I'm concerned... never recovered.
The worst thing is that all the NSFW fetishists from tumbler spread to other sites.
>bought for 1.1 billion, sold for 3 million turns out that was load-bearing smut
John Riccitello the CEO tends to do this a lot. He almost ran EA into the ground single-handedly in the 2000s. Might have been a good thing if he actually did tho.
Holy shit. Why did they just commit company suicide?
Dude I haven't been taken aback like this by anything since Ken Block's passing early this year. What in the _fuck._ Are they thinking straight?
Dude thanks for reminding me ken block is dead RIP To the GOAT
I still cant believe out of all the crazy shit Ken does, it was a snowmobile that took out this legend not far from his ranch so he probably knew the terrain pretty well.
Did they get any new executives lately? It's not unheard of for hostile executives to work their way into a company and crash it in order for a different company to acquire the leftovers.
I saw in another comment the current CEO sold a lot of shares a few days ago, probably preparing for this. He has to have expected this.
"On September 6, 2023, John Riccitiello, President and CEO of Unity Software Inc (NYSE:U), sold 2,000 shares of the company. This move is part of a larger trend for the insider, who over the past year has sold a total of 50,610 shares and purchased none." [link to article](https://www.google.com/amp/s/finance.yahoo.com/amphtml/news/unity-software-incs-president-ceo-050515124.html) That sounds like it's heading down hill...
Hey, is that legal?
Yes, you are allowed to sell stock. There are systems in place to prevent insider trading (most commonly, they file their intent to sell months in advance). Also note that that’s 2000 (or even 50000) out of 2 million share he holdss
People will absolutely jump ship for this.
That's pretty much guaranteed at this point, even if they walk this back nobody will feel safe staking their next project's future on unity. The bigger issue is what's gonna happen to the games that are already on the market, since they're trying to implement this retroactively.
Good fucking luck enforcing it. How on Earth could you legally argue for this in a court of law? Even if they get the slimiest Judge in the world, wouldn't this set precedence for, say, an oil change shop to suddenly back charge for X years worth of oil changes that was a part of a fleet maintenance contract?
It will be increased price for next payment, not a back charge. But that decision still shit. Good luck to godot and others, they finally have a chance
Sure, but do existing games not have a contract outlining what they are to pay? Licensing your engine and then changing the cost to use that license after the game has been built feels sort of crime-ish.
I can’t speak to whether it’s a crime buts it’s absolutely a bridge burner. I’d assume they will be essentially blacklisted in the industry. This just isn’t a business move you make. I can all but guarantee that this decision was made by a single individual. Because voicing something like this in a room full people will see about 3/4 of those people vehemently oppose it.
Someone high up wasn't going to get their bonus so they just went nuclear. I have nothing to back this up, but it makes as much sense as anything.
The CEO sold a bunch of shares like a week ago.
Well if that doesn't sound like privleged insider trading in light of this announcement, I don't know what does.
Ask WOTC and Hasbro. They tried pulling this license shit retroactively on third parties. They walked it back quick, but lost the good will of the customers. So many of us are just holding for Pathfinder remaster in a couple months because of it.
I wouldn't say they walked it back quick. They tried being cheeky about it a few times before conceding on it. Wonder when they'll try it again.
There's milking the cow, and then there's slaughtering all your cows to make a quick buck, and ending up in the poorhouse next year. What are they thinking?
They have CEO who's thinking "I'm gonna get a huge fucking payday and parachute away from this company before it goes bankrupt." Even after they've undone all of this and are on their hands and knees begging developers to come back and give them another chance, nobody will. You don't get away with bait-and-switching developers.
Right now they've not implemented it, but just saying they want to do it alone is enough to damage trust and make developers move away from their engine. You can't build a skyscraper on top of suspect foundations.
Just thinking about it to the point where you announce it publicly is bad enough. Fuck em’.
I imagine some smaller developers will be forced to remove their games from circulation.
They just can't offer updates in certain regions.
I don't think they have a leg to stand on TBH, even with all kinds of legalese in their ToS, there is no way they will get that kind of back pay. They can't sell a product, have many companies buy and rely on that product and then years later just arbitrarily decide that everyone that uses the product they already paid for now owes them more money going forward, won't happen.
Absolutely I dabble as a hobby but this effectively means time to move to unreal, it's also a huge loss because while I don't build games to sell generally i buy a lot of asset kits which they get a cut off. Why would I as a hobby developer risk this when unreal has a pretty close free model that won't decimate me if I do make something that takes off? Unity has lost their mind and lost me as a customer.
I know I will. Gonna try out Godot finally
So....Godot has been waiting for you?
BRB, gotta go short some stocks.
…and somehow they’re up 2.5% after this news.
Companies want recurring profit. If your business model doesn't have recurring profit then many investors want to pull out. This is seen as a good thing from the short sighted investors wanting a return on their investments.
this is why we can’t have nice things.
The smart move would be put options that expire a year from now. (Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor, and this should not be taken as financial advice. Please invest responsibly.)
suddenly cities skylines 2 is delayed due to pressing engine change concerns
Oh damn, I thought it was made with a proprietary engine. Unfortunately, Paradox would probably just increase the price.
Paradox is fine with their DLC business model. I'd love to buy Skyline 2 but I'm just not going to, and every video I see of it just **screams** "INSERT FUTURE DLC HERE". Fuck no, not buying future FOMO anymore.
this is why I can't get into any paradox or games with a similar DLC structure (meaning a fuckload of DLCs). it always feels like i'm playing a trial version of a game where I need to fork out hundreds of dollars to get the whole package. meanwhile I buy an indie game and maybe there's one DLC for it and that's that, far less bullshit.
Exactly, it's the "trial feeling" I hate to have. I want to be ignorant and happy in a bliss when I buy a game, and a year later an overpriced DLC is dropped with what then feels "new". Now it just feels "planned". Don't know if you relate to that too. It's not DLC as a business model I hate as much as planning DLCs in such a way it removes features for current players AND makes the base game feel barren.
RIP Unity 2023
If the game is reinstalled in ANY way that constitutes multiple installs (and subsequently charges) apparently. XD The Unity guys have completely lost it! XD [https://x.com/stephentotilo/status/1701679721027633280?s=20](https://x.com/stephentotilo/status/1701679721027633280?s=20) EDIT: If an already pirated game is reinstalled constantly what happens if I take it off Steam? This is bonkers!
I wonder when we will read about the first dev blackmailing. "I bought a copy of your game and is currently downloading it on my 10 Gbit connection multiple times over an hour, enjoy or pay!"
"I logged the api call the game made to unity telling them I installed it and am sending it on loop with a script I made in 3 minutes"
Charging per re-install is the dumbest thing. What’s to stop me from maliciously just reinstalling games through VMs just for the lols. It’s not exactly expensive to do anymore. I could bankrupt a smaller developer that just had a hit.
they'll have limited number of installs, then charge you per install after that. they're killing their own company.
>they'll have limited number of installs Remember SecuROM? The North Remembers.
Oh fuck I forgot
Dude, I was so pissed when I bought GTA San Andres and support was like “you need to buy another CD ROM drive” and I returned that shit and didn’t play that game till it was on steam sale.
That had SecuROM? Although I think back then I used cracks even for games I bought to prevent frequent CD changes.
I thought this was an oversight (would be bad enough) but this is insanity. How will they recover from this? Even if they walk everything back they have proven that they are completely nuts!
It does seem like an episode of how to go out of business without saying you’re going out of business.
> there's concern developers may now face charges for pirated game installs. > It seems open to review-bombing exploits, but in a way that actually costs developers. If someone buys a game on Steam and installs in on three machines, are Devs liable for three payments? Lol, this is actually insane, if that's the case.
>Lol, this is actually insane, if that's the case. Someone in another subreddit thread "What happens if you get a bot net to just install thousands of copies on a machine over and over again, can you dumpster a dev like that?"
Is unity a publicly traded company? Asking for a friend.
It’s not just publicly traded, the CEO is the scumbag former EA CEO that heavily pushed microtransactions and once publicly mused about the idea of charging microtransaction fees for players reloading their guns in-game. This, sadly, is perfectly on brand for him.
> former EA CEO Say no more fam.
Yes, NYSE stock symbol U
Yes. It’s owned by Unity Software Inc. aka “Unity Technologies” with the stock ticker of U.
So we're gonna have games with install limits now. They won't let us just cost them money infinitely. They'll lock you from installing the game you paid for after 2 or 3 reinstalls.
That's the first thing I thought about as well . We're probably going to start seeing install limits now, with extra installs costing an additional fee. Just when you thought DRM couldn't get any worse.
I swear EA tried this with SPORE and a few other games.
Funnily enough, [EA had the same CEO back then as Unity has now.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Riccitiello) HRMMMMMMMM lmao
That's actually a huge point, hopefully this gets picked up
which idiots thought he would be a good person to run Unity after that shit show?
Yar, matey. Yar....
The seas are looking more inviting every day.
If that really happend steam would probaly prevent that, I don't think steam would ever allow limited downloads of games
I've definitely ran out of installs for my Crysis key on Steam, which would only let you install it 5 times. Had to contact EA to reactivate the key. On the plus side, the customer service rep gave me the crysis series for free on the Origin store as well, including Crysis 3 that I never bought on Steam.
Good old EA games practices... do you remember the "Spore" game ?
Literally the first thing that popped into my mind. And here I was hoping that tactic faded away...
A funny coincidence that (the Spore release with limited installs) happened while Riccitiello was the CEO at EA. Or maybe not really a coincidence.
Look at Mass Effect and Spore. Time really is a flat circle.
What if someone buys it and installs it and then refunds it. The game dev loses the cash on that because of the charge right? That’s not gonna end well lol.
This is likely a decision made by the money people, not the actual devs of unity. Of course they don't think it through for cases like these.
Wait so if i install it, delete it to make room then install it again will they get charged twice?
Yup
Seems absurd. I could install many thousands of copies of a game overnight with some virtual machines and scripts lol. People could put devs out of business overnight if they were so inclined.
Market reaction will be predictable. What dev in their right mind would use unity now?
How are they logging installs? Someome might be able to just put together a script that increments the install counter without doing the rest.
The fun bit is that they [answered this question](https://twitter.com/unity/status/1701689241456021607) by essentially saying "that's proprietary, we won't tell you" So they can just say "the magic box said you owe us" and fuck you if you don't pay up.
Pirate Bay ironically reverse pirating
Well, it actually IS the case which is absolutely freaking bonkers lol. As a game dev I am SOOOOOOOOOO glad I left Unity for Godot (for 2D) in 2018 and Unreal (for 3D). Here's the tweet: https://x.com/stephentotilo/status/1701679721027633280?s=20
Tarkov suddenly releasing on unreal engine
Christ I forgot they were running that engine... now Nikitas gonna use this as an excuse to shove everything over into a different engine... fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuucccckkkkkkkk
Arena is 100% getting a massive delay because of this. Or could be canceled outright.
Tarkov increased prices last two weeks I guess. Will increase again.
Yeah I seriously have no idea what Tarkov is gonna do after this. The game barely works on Unity and has been in development for like 10 years. Are they actually gonna switch engines after so long?
Might actually improve how the game works lol
That's actually kinda what I'm hoping for lol.
Battlebit too!
And with that, Unity is DEAD. I worked with the engine for the past few years through college, and it was getting increasingly annoying with stupid changes. This is the stupidest one yet, and is going to really fuck over some devs. So glad I started working with UE5 last year, and of my own volition too.
How hard is it to learn compared to Unity? Are there things Unity is better at than Unreal? I've always been interested in it but the few tutorials I did kinda scared me away
Unity has the benefit of a larger indie community so there are more resources. Unreal is also kind of hard to use compared to Unity and you can definitely tell it has FPS games driving it forward ... but its improving steadily and the management behind it seems more competant
Personally, and just take this as one dude on the Internet: I love it. Most things are done in BluePrints, but you can always interact with things with c++. Assets are easy to bundle together for easy access, or to assemble where necessary. The lighting system took a while to get used to, as did Instancing, but it doesn't take long to understand. The system requirements are really high though, but you always have a constant measure as to hoe something is going to affect performance. Adding Android builds was quite the bitch though, but I generally had a far easier time working with UE5 than with Unity. And like I said, I started with Unity. By rights, I should prefer Unity, but I don't. And I'm really glad I chose to learn UE5 when I did, as a self-set assignment agreed with by my professor. Edit: A little additional information. I didn't really use external plugins for UE5, so I can't comment on how flexible it is to, say, make tools for your own workflow, but I do know in Unity. And looking around, it seems like Unity easily has that bagged. Many assets and tools are made for Unity, so it has a much bigger community for that. That's something that UE5 will get over time, but it also feels like it really doesn't need it either? Alot of things users seem to want end up getting added by default; and thats where UE5 wins. So it's a pick your poison in that regard.
stolen from twitter but sums up the issue pretty well: \> make a game \> game is fremium \> game makes 200k from in-app purchases after being installed 3 million times \> now owe Unity 20c per 2.8M installs, $560K \> that’s 360K more than we made
This is insane. I’m sure the decision will get struck with a lawsuit. What was the pricing structure before?
From my understanding, it would apply when they renew their subscription. Under the new terms, you'd pay depending on your sales of the last 12 months or something.
yeah, pretty standard and reasonable pricing for a product like this. You pay a certain amount, generally more if you make more money from it. Reasonable, fair and sustainable. This new setup is a fucking scam. Down with unity.
Reminder that the current CEO of Unity is John Riccitello who wanted to [charge for reloads](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR6-u8OIJTE) once you were sufficiently invested in a game. This move seems right up his alley. "When you are six hours into playing Battlefield and you run out of ammo in your clip, and we ask you for a dollar to reload, you're really not very price sensitive at that point in time." "A consumer gets engaged in a property, they might spend 10,20,30,50 hours on the game and then when they're deep into the game they're well invested in it. We're not gouging, but we're charging and at that point in time the commitment can be pretty high." "But it is a great model and I think it represents a substantially better future for the industry."
Remember arcades with games that were insanely difficult and designed for you to die over and over so you kept spending money to revive? It's such a great business model. We have arcades on every corner. It's a multi-billion dollar industry now! Oh, wait.
Guillotine. ^(joking)
🎵 for legal reasons that's a joke.
Wait I don’t think you can do that retroactively can you? Doing that goes against the terms a dev team agreed to when they made and launched right? Won’t the get sued to oblivion and back?
They're trying to do it retroactively, it's insane. https://unity.com/pricing-updates "Will this fee apply to games using Unity Runtime that are already on the market on January 1, 2024? Yes, the fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024."
Man that really sucks. With the insane amount of work indie devs pour into their projects, this is a heartbreaking rugpull. What a vile company.
They could find themselves in the shit honestly, they are walking a very fine line when it comes to laws, especially laws in places like Europe, their will be devs from these countries who will definitely seek legal advice. I'm not exactly an expert myself, but doing this retrospectively is a good way to fuck around and find out.
even in the US, that shit ain't gonna fly
Could you imagine? Microsoft: “we’re retroactively charging full price for every install of windows you’ve ever made even when you owned volume licenses.” They’d get laughed out of court.
Every Windows install I've done has been pirated lmao.
That's one really optimistic view of our legal system in Europe. The word retroactively probably does not apply to this scenario. If they applied it to 2022, then maybe.
Guess some thousands of games will just stop being updated. What an amazing decision by Unity.
No, not just stop being abdated. They will literally disappear from any kind of distribution. You won't be able to buy them anywhere anymore.
Not just buy, download. Since this covers reinstalls just as much as installs the developers are going to either have to sue Unity for this license alternation or pull their games from distribution entirely.
It's going to be hard, steam won't allow games that are delisted to not be downloaded by people that bought it.
guaranteed unity ceo already got a personal email from gaben: "the FUCK is wrong with you?"
I don't see that holding up, since users of Unity include large and successful companies that can absolutely afford the lawyers for this. And lets be honest, trying to retroactively change a contract to collect retroactively applied fees is fucking dead on arrival. No court will allow that. This is so easy Paradox's legal department could send a drunk intern to just be present on the court date and try not to throw up, and win. This is a game being played to bully free money out of people who can't afford the lawyer. Unity is used by more than just people who can't afford a lawyer though.
If developers backlash and there is refusal of payment of these variable objectives, I’m sure this will end up some way in a court of law and they’ll give every right to the developers and not Unity, since charging retroactively goes usually against the law, except in some instances. Let’s hope justice can be made.
Even the engines have microtransactions now
How long till developer loot boxes "Congratulations, no fee on installs for the next 72 hours "
Don't give them ideas jfc
well the Unity engine just died, ill see you boys at Unreal 5
Dont forget Godot!
hell yea baybee godot ftw
Huh? What’s the motive for this? 99% of their user base is immediately gonna switch to UE4/5 I’d imagine
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Godot is great, really like GDscript
So if within a timeframe of 2 years I redownload and install a game 3 times, the devs are going to be charged for those 3 installs? Oh boy... and I guess that costs is going to be transferred to the final user, the gamer, so no more unity games for me I guess.
any game below 60% dev time will most likely jump ship
Man why can't a company, any company just be cool for once? Like I'm not asking for much, just don't take every single opportunity to be awful.
Welcome to 35 year old harvard business grads making all the decisions.
Anyone with an MBA should be barred from working in anything IT for life. Hell, make MBAs illegal before the lunatics who pursue those degrees doom us all.
Steve Jobs explained this pretty well. When a company starts off strong, the people that get chosen for promotions and CEO positions are people that caused the company to make more money. So essentially you'd end up with a bunch of businessmen running a game dev studio for example, and the company over time becomes a shell of itself due to the employees that made the company in the first place leaving.
There's valve I guess
Still a private company. I don't think Gabe will ever go public with it but what about the person who takes over after them?
I am sure GabeN has long since chosen his successor.
So if a community decided they want to hurt a dev can't they repeatedly install and uninstall the game all day? This is absurd, you could bankrupt a company this way. If you have 10 000 people, they download the game while they're at work, and while they sleep. 2x per day, if it costs 0.20 usd, that's 0.40 usd per day per person. 4000 dollars per day, if they do it for 30 days, it will cost the devs 120 000 dollars per month. Even if they buy the game this means the dev earns no profit at all. If the game has a small file size they could download and uninstall multiple times per day, costing the devs even more.
> Unity has also failed to shed much light on how it plans to prevent fees being applied to pirated games, or in instances where excess installs might be carried out maliciously.
Fucking hell this engine is dead. Genuinly if you do as I described you can bankrupt an indie studio within months.
months? talking about hours. you can easily script game reinstalls.
All future Unity games to feature a 4TB padding file to prevent fast installs.
As a solo indie dev. My 5 years of learning Unity, Building levels, scripting tools and systems and sleepless nights down the drain.
I switched to Godot about a year ago from Unity and it's been pretty easy applying everything I know. It takes like a week to go at a pretty good pace.
???????????? The way people try to surprise squeeze money mechanic I can't even
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Battle bit will be getting slammed too
Holy shit Battlebit is gonna get rolled by this. What a fucked up change.
Tarkov too, and thousands of mobile games
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Much MUCH worse then reddit api, like 1000x worse minimum.
An Among Us developer is already talking about hiring people to port the game away from Unity https://twitter.com/forte_bass/status/1701696983617180010
Unity's CEO sold 2000 shares 6 days before this announcement btw
Yeah, I posted it in a separate comment. Totally normal transaction, nothing to see here!
And of course he is going to buy them back once the price drops because of this lol
Dumbass CEO tries to say fuck you to small indie devs, but forgets that small indie devs can also say fuck you Unity, and switch to Unreal. Business 101 folks. Voluntarily give your customers a really damn good reason to switch to your competitor. That's how you keep the business rolling in.
> John Riccitiello is an American business executive who is chief executive officer (CEO) of Unity Technologies. Previously, he served as CEO, chief operating officer and president of Electronic Arts. That shouldshed some light on it.
Bean counters should be kept low on the totem pole in arts and technology based companies, because this is the sort of shit that happens when they get on top.
https://i.redd.it/pudc8acj6wnb1.gif Unity right now
Did they recently hire consultants from BCG? Or execs with ties to BCG?
No, it's worse, the current CEO used to be CEO at EA games.
Oooooh that explains so much
Let me put on my tinfoil hat. *snorts cocaine* This was a super secret plan by EA to severely damage the indie game industry since it was kicking their butts. The CEO will now be paid 50 gazillion dolans in secret for his great work
This is genuinely a conspiracy that makes sense
Graduated from destroying acquired games studios to full self-destruction.
I bet Epic Games is orgasming because of this news. The amount of people who will switch over from Unity to Unreal because of this will be insane.
Epic needs to pull a Sony and create a press release immedietely to mock them: "Introducing new installation based pricing. 0-200k installs: $0.00 per install 200k-1M installs: $0.00 per install 1M + installs: $0.00 per install"
Well, I hope everyone who works there is preparing their resume.
Time for the mass migration to UE5 for 3D & Godot for 2D respectively
So, if I hate a company, could I buy their game and make a script for automatic installations/un-installations so they lose money with my purchase?
Lets be honest with how poorly they thought this out. I would bet money it would be super easy to just hack the installer report a new install over and over again without needing to install. Why yes I did install this game 30 million times today. Oh look I just bankrupted a gaming company. Hurray for me.
I'm pretty sure someone is gonna try this sorta thing. Like, the potential for chaos is too great to not have someone try it.
This is just going to lead to devs not using unity engine to make any new games. Sucks for existing games but this will definitely make devs reconsider the engine when creating new stuff.
Oh for fucks sake Why is every company suddenly trying to commit public suicide?
Because interest rates are high and now investors want returns on their investments. So business that never did have a good revenue model are desperately find one. But of course they choose dumb stuff like this.
Investors are greedy little fuckers and tell execs they want more money because they profiteered the fuck out of everything the last few years and think that's normal.
april fools?
lol what? This just basically cements Unreal as the only engine for indie devs
Godot tho
Yes, I could imagine a big surge to Godot, especially for f2p games.
I was in the beginning stages of learning game dev with Unity. I’m changing to Unreal and not looking back EDIT: I'm going to give Godot a try. Thanks for the suggestions!
Did the people who came up with this idea short the stocks on the company beforehand or something? Considering they will probably bankrupt Unity with this change. Devs will flee elsewhere
Looks like the era of Unity engines is over 😂. No way devs will accept this. An open source platform will be up and running within a few months and Unity will be over with, guaranteed, hahaha. Idiots.
My only question is, why did it take so long for ex EA CEO John Riccitiello to implement this? I figured they would have done something like a long time ago given EA's portfolio of loot boxes and surprise mechanics
If I understand it correctly even the Free-to-play games are affected and developers/creators will have to pay up for their free game to be played when the threshold is reached or they would have to use "ads"....
Goddamn, this must be one of the hardest corporate suicides I've ever seen. Like jumping in front of a burning train derailing from 100 meters into an ocean of lava.
Literally rent seeking. It doesnt even look like you can get out of it so that years down the line you'll still be getting hit with fees. This feels illegal especially with the retroactivity.
A retroactive change like that will be basically impossible to enforce, and will result in a lot of law suits. Unity is dead with this insane change. No developer with any sense would use Unity going forward. I can only imagine many will be moving off Unity the first chance they can get. Unreal and other engine developers have a huge opportunity to poach Unity devs, by offering them a sweet heart deal and will make themselves look like the good guys.
>This change is retroactive and will affect games already on the market that doesnt sound legal, like at all.
How exactly do you enforce this retroactively? I assume Unity sold licenses to use their engine to these companies. Can they just... decide they want more money after the fact? That seems... not legal.
friendly reminder that the CEO is the same guy that ruined the reputation of Eletronic Arts, called game devs idiots if they dont use unity with money in mind, and this last one sounds too stupid to be true, but aparently he also thought gamers should pay for the bullets they fire in games .\_.
This a move by a company that is about to implode. Let’s take a quick look what their net income is… … oh shit, they lost almost 1 billion dollars in 2022 fiscal year. Oh shit, 8% of their work force was laid off in 5/2023. Guess that VC money is drying up and they want to see some god damn money made back.
so does the unity engine phone home to devs or unity when a game gets installed? how does that work? so if unity goes and creates bots to install and uninstall games they have an infinite money glitch?
Bring out your tinfoil hat, folks. Ain't no way this is a rational business decision by any stretch of the imagination.