Unity is one of the most popular game engines in the world in spite of its leadership, as it has shown once more with its truly disastrous latest announcement. Unity’s new policy involves an install fee, and it isn’t just a minor slice of money grubbing. It’s not like when Ticketmaster added a service charge to its booking fee or when the burrito place made guac cost extra. This is not a greedy little cash grab here to introduce a new trickle of profit. This is a disaster 🧸that could destroy Unity and several hundred indie games in the process.
I don’t like to talk in hyperbole. But if this policy is not walked back in full (as I suspect it will be), I cannot see how Unity can remain a viable option for developers. Even if the ridiculous policy is cancelled, it’s the latest in a long line of t♛rust-eroding announcements from the company. CEO John Riccitiello keeps asking indie devs to trust-fall into its arms, dropping them, then apologisin🎃g while they get back to their feet.
Here’s the policy in numbers, and keep in mind that right now, all of what I’m about to list can be done for free. First off, it’s dependent on what Unity license꧅ you have. With Unity Personal or Unity Plus, once your game h꧃as been installed 200,000 times, you owe Unity $0.20 for every future install. With Unity Pro and Enterprise, it takes 1,000,000 installs before the pricing kicks in, at which point both have different charges that change at different thresholds, as the table below shows.
This all comes into effect in January 2024, but even that’s a mess. Unity says the policy won’t be retroactive (meaning developers won’t be charged for games installed prior to 2024), but games yet to reach 200,000 or 1,000,000 installs won’t have their clock reset. If a game releases in late November and gets 950,000 installs in its fiไrst two months, it just needs another 500,000 post-Jan to clear the threshold.
And while games bought pre-Jan won’t be charged, games released pre-Jan but installed post-Jan will be charged. That means if you released a game on Unity, even if𝄹 you didn’t agree to this awful idea, you still owe the company money. The only way to avoid this is to stop people playing your game at all, which isn’t exactly an ideal solution.
Another Crab’s Treasure developer Aggro Crab has been one of the first to respond publicly, highlighting that Game Pass and other subscription services are incompatible with this idea. Beca🐈use users can download games for free on Game Pass, the developer themselves gets no fee per download. But they’re still charged by Unity, meaning the engine (that, as Aggro Crab points out, thousands of developers have years of experience and expertise with) may no longer be a viable option for most developers - especially indie devs, who make up a large percentage of Unity’s user base.
As this was the most asked question in the wake of this monumentally reckless decision, Unity has offered some clarity and a solution in the first of what will likely be many walkbacks. Unfortunately, this proposed solution might be worse. The idea is tha🍬t Microsoft, rather than the developers themselves, will be charged for Game Pass installs, and the ൩same goes for whoever is running the subscription service. What this means for Epic’s free games is currently unclear.
But what is clear is that Microsoft will stand for this no more than your favourite indie devs would, and that means we may see fewer Unity games on the platform at all, and ‘we won’t charge you, but now no one will💃 host your game’ is not a fix devs wa🤪nted.
It would be one thing if this policy were a revenu🗹e share. It would still be greedy and underhanded, but at least then it might have res𓆏embled a real policy. Instead, it’s a charge. And it can quickly become an expensive one.
What’s impressive is that it could have been a lot worse. the policies that demos would be charged and that multiple installs (if you delete to make room and then reinstall) would be charged multiple times. At the same time, it was revealed that Microsoft would be charged for Game Pass, which isn’t ꦬthe great news Unity thinks it is. Pirated copies will still carry a charge as well.
It can still be abused by bad actors, too. Whenever a game gets an unpopular update or is adjudged to be woke, we see review bombing, often planned by communities online. Though it will be harder without the ability to deleteꦅ and reinstall to incur the f♊ee, an organised campaign of pirating and installing could still hurt the developers’ pockets. It’s more directly punishing than giving it a zero on Metacritic.
It’s a little like Kodak coming to your house and saying you owe i𝄹t $573.27 for all those times you looked at your grandma’s photo album. The deal (with Unity and presumably with grandma’s Kodak) is that you buy the product to use and then create something with it - something you then own. The painting does not belong to the canvas manufacturer. Unity is way overstepping here, seemingly with a lack of knowledge of how the modern games industry operates, and that means it may no longer be sustainable.
This is the latest example that those steering the ship in gaming are completely detached from the people who make games and that the industry cannot continue in this way. Riccitiello saw an easy way to make money and didn&rsℱquo;t even realise it would backfire. Gaming is becoming increasingly hostile to developers, and it keeps getting harder to make any games at all.