1182
This is of course not including the yearly Unity subscription, where Unity Pro costs $2,040 per seat (although they may have Enterprise pricing)
Absolutely ridiculous. Many Unity devs are saying they're switching engines on social media.
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
1182 points (99.0% liked)
Game Development
2814 readers
23 users here now
Welcome to the game development community! This is a place to talk about and post anything related to the field of game development.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I’m not a fan of the new licensing scheme, but at 20 cents or less per install, I have a difficult time feeling sorry for a dev losing $400k. That means he’s already made a shit ton of money (like over $20 million if the game is sold for $10).
https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates
Taking a cut from my initial purchase, sure, but to charge the developer everytime I decide to re-install the game?
That's absolutely absurd.
Then you get into developers being billed for potentially millions of installs of a free to play game while only profiting off a small percentage of users willing to make in-game purchases. That ratio can be so massive that the total revenue from those paying players pales in comparison to the free-to-play bill.
Finally; retro-actively applying this to developers that have been building their projects through Unity for years and never agreed to these terms to begin with is such a ridiculously scummy move... Want new terms for new projects going forward? Fine. Leave the existing devs alone with the terms they actually agreed to.
Forcing someone to accept your new harmful terms because they're already too invested in your service to reasonably change course should be criminal.
It's the "per install" that's a lot of the problem. It's like an ISP data cap or charging per text message.
I think the main issue here is the precedent it sets. Every time we see a new awful thing rear it's ugly head, people don't scream loud enough or for long enough. Because of that, these things become ingrained and part of the norm.
We certainly don't want "installations" (whatever that actually means to them, which isn't even explained well) to get a foothold.
That’s over 10 years and ~50 staff. So about $50,000 a year.
30% of which already go to Steam in the case of Garry. Plus wages, taxes, rent, equipment. You add another 10-20%+ on top which you can't predict now because of Unity. Plus all the paid libraries and licenses already charging per seats or game revenue.
That being said, devs like Garry absolutely make banks and 400k is not that huge of a chunk for him. He, and a lot of devs, would probably be paying more on a royalty system like UE, which is the real irony here. But yeah, what most people lament is the slimeyness of the move and the terms.