I spent most of the time I've been trying to run a game company regretting the early decision to not use Unity for my project. But reading this, I'm really, really, *really* glad I don't have Unity anywhere in my stack

https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates

Things that stand out here:

- The pricing plan is baffling. It's like they designed it to make it impossible for you to make rational decisions about what you're getting into
- If they bait-switch you like this now, what will they do in ANOTHER 2 years?

Unity plan pricing and packaging updates | Unity Blog

In January 2024, Unity will introduce a new Unity Runtime Fee based on game installs. Prior to this, Unity subscription plans will add cloud-based asset storage, Unity DevOps tools, and AI at runtime at no additional cost.

Unity Blog

Additional thoughts:

- The "AI" parts of this announcement would by itself be a reason to stop using Unity
- Having a per-seat license AND a per-install fee is just so insulting. Like, pick one, sister
- Godot has improved SO MUCH lately. I know people shipping commercial games with it now.
- Godot can to some degree import Unity projects. I'm not sure how well it works but there's a Godot plugin that claims it can import scenes/assets. I wonder if we''ll see increased activity around that now.

Last thought:

- The decision to make the fee based on lifetime sales of *a game* sounds very easy to game unless the TOS has some clever language around what constitutes a single game. Will this have visible knock-on effects to game *players*? In other words, doesn't this rule create an incentive to shut down and "relaunch" FTP live-service games repeatedly? People already complain a lot about their phone games shutting down after they accumulated loot and whatnot. Will this make it worse?

@mcc I absolutely guarantee that some solo/microstudio indie devs will get absolutely shafted by this when they suddenly realise they were supposed to been hanging on to 20 cents per sale after their $1 game unexpectedly sold 500,000 copies after becoming a streamer meme one week.

Not using any reference point of game price and studio revenue in all this is wild.

@HauntedOwlbear I frankly don't even know how I'm supposed to *know* how many copies of any games I've ever made got installed, except for the one that was on the iPhone. What if I had, say, put some sort of DLC in my game, such this accidentally got to $200,000.01 of revenue? Does Unity expect me to put phone-home code in my game? Am I supposed to be keeping fucking *cookies* on my users?
@mcc @HauntedOwlbear is there any way to know they don't do that for you?
@hllizi @HauntedOwlbear I don't know. This is why my games are based on fricking open source to start with! So I can actually know what I'm fricking shipping
@mcc @HauntedOwlbear I am fully on board with that.
@mcc @HauntedOwlbear where can I find your games, btw? Might be interesting.
@mcc @HauntedOwlbear ha ok, it's in your profile after all.

@hllizi @HauntedOwlbear https://runhello.com - Games made before 2015, run on Windows (or very old Mac OS). Recommend "Jumpman" and "Icosa".

https://dryad.technology/ — Abstract web games, unfortunately sound may not work in some of them because Chrome changed things after they were published. Recommend "Become a Great Artist"

https://mermaid.industries — Current project, unreleased, unfortunately you can't play it RN but there's a video

Run Hello » Games

@hllizi @HauntedOwlbear I'm just leaving a slug trail of content as I move from site to site and watch parts of my past stop working as OSes and web browsers change. "LOL"
@mcc @HauntedOwlbear perfect use case for nix, archiving your games.
@mcc @HauntedOwlbear regarding Mermaid I'm probably not enough of a gamer anyway to get myself a VR set as long as it doesn't provide the only habitable environment. Might check in five years. 😬