Garry Newman: The new Unity pricing would have cost him $410,000 of lifetime revenue
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.
The enshittification continues.
Watch for more products that enable normal people to do great things to become paywalled. Only your gatekeeper masters may direct the market, and the creativity. In their infinite wisdom, they demand the control of gods.
Billionaires are a mistake.
I starting to see enshittification as part of the cycle of renewal in capitalism. Don't get me wrong...it's a completely foolish and disasterous way of doing things, and billionaires are a black mark on society as a whole, but innovation happens when you take away the established tools.
Twitter is a good example. Elon seriously accelerated the enshittification, and now It's tanking. Meanwhile, alternatives are springing up at breakneck speeds to replace it. Which one will win the war is anyone guess, but Twitter will be the loser regardless. Reddit is another one. And Digg before it. As one commits corporate seppuku, others step in to take its place.
While it sucks for anyone caught in the crossfire, and the ones responsible for nuking a corporate landscape often skip away with a golden parachute, it usually leads to a shakeup that can bring amazing innovations. The key is to get in on the next wave, hope you picked the winner, and make sure you get out before shit hits the fans this time.
But that cycle is bad for the advancement of society as a whole. Instead of having something others can build on, everyone has to start from scratch and redo a lot of the work that was already done.
Establishing new social networks for example take a whole lot of time. And then you tank them so others can do the same thing all over again? That’s not progress. That’s standstill being sold as progress.
That point about social networks is true, but it’s more of a symptom of the internet at large.
Running things on the web isn’t free and most of the major innovation has stemmed from trying to hide that fact from people.
It started in the late 80s with donations to the guy that ran your favorite BBS. But that was not sustainable, so banner ads started showing up, but they didn’t pay out enough. Then the pop-up and was born, but it turns out that people really hate those. So then they did away with them entirely, instead harvesting data about the users to sell to advertisers.
Now, there are basically 2 paths forward. Host your own microservices that connects to a larger network, widely spreading out hosting and storage costs across the userbase. Or, pay a subscription to access a service with the understanding that they won’t advertise or sell your data.
But in that case, it would be best to do a subscription model.
This would involve an agreement not to sell data, to collect only data with a use demonstrated to be critical to the operation of the service, and a plan to dispose of that data within X amount of time. This also needs a written contract stating that the cost of subscription won’t go more than X% above the user’s pro-rata share of the demonstrated cost of providing the service, consisting of certain very specific purposes (building, servers, ISP, employee revenue, etc.) to avoid cheating for more profit. A subscription service, protected against privacy infringement and price gouging (a profit limit).
If it’s ever going to work this would need to be a government-mandated privacy act. I usually hate government intervention, but this is very much a necessary evil to prevent price gouging.
I only suggest this over donations, because realistically, after upscaling to a global audience, only 5-10% of traffic would be users that choose to donate, increasing costs to around $10-20/month, which yet again lowers the number of people who choose to donate. It stabilizes, but at such a low percentage that it’s unsustainable at a large scale without millionaire donors willing to pledge $20-30 ish per month throughout the entire product lifetime…
What’s the tl:dr?
The creators of the unity engine are charging people extra for games they have already created?
ign.com/…/why-unitys-new-install-fees-are-spurrin…
They said they have a fraud detection system for their ads business and will use that as a starting point.
I don’t see how they are going to be able to move forward with this change.
I wonder how that works.
Like if I released a Unity game in 2016… if I tell Unity to fuck off, would they then try to get my game off of Steam?
Unity also said it will track installs with its own proprietary data. Speaking to Axios, Unity also confirmed that if a player deletes a game and re-installs it, that counts as two installs, and two separate fees.
From the article linked in comments here. That’s unbelievable. I’m at a lose for words.
I guess they don’t want anyone to use Unity at all
Up until now companies have been getting away with this because of “user agreements.” Nobody has had the money and interest to get them in court.
I don’t see any possible way this survives a lawsuit, for exactly the reason you said. This is almost certainly not legal but nobody has had a reason to get precedent to say it until now.
Thanks for responding to my post.
That will be uhh… 0.20.
Ah fuck, ya got me. pays up
... wait a minute... pays up again
Now, everyone who has ever responded to one of my comments also has to pay me.
Why a terrible company. I don’t even want to redeem their free games any more.
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.
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.
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. 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.
They’re going to back off on this and replace it with something bad but not as horrible. This is testing the water, and opens the door to charging everyone money every time you install a game, not just devs.
Have an install saved on your external and want to install it next week? You’ll get charged for it as of you didn’t already pay for it.
Games you have in your steam/gog backlog? Get charged again for it when you decide to play it.
I guarantee there are investors/publishers/whoever hitting themselves right now screaming “why didn’t I think of that?”.
Every major publisher including Trillion dollar Microsoft has Unity engine games in their catalog.
I don’t think any of them really want to pay for that. MS would just scoop up Unity before paying that.
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