Unity planning on charging developers *by individual installation* in the near future.

[FramFramson]

Unity introduces new fees for game devs based on revenue and game installs

 

This part's unconfirmed but the GamingOnLinux account reposted it on Mastodon

 

 

 

 

[Yukkuri]

Seems to be real, making it into sources like RPS and The Guardian.

 

How is TFP going to deal with this?

 

 

[theFlu]

Streaming one installation from a cloud to all the players..?

[FramFramson]

Personally I can't see how they implement this and survive when Godot is Right There for new games to switch to as an alternative. Older games like 7D are stuck with Unity, but at the same time they're sort of in the long tail of sales.

 

Far from guaranteed, but I suspect we may see some furious backpedaling on this shortly. That or Unity just dies.

[Yukkuri]

8 minutes ago, FramFramson said:

Older games like 7D are stuck with Unity, but at the same time they're sort of in the long tail of sales.

 

 

 

Or go bankrupt from a few disgruntled users setting up continuous re-installs.

Edited September 12, 2023 by Yukkuri (see edit history)

[Toops144]

Just read this on Eurogamer.

 

Truth be told I've never liked Unity (and I've expressed this on a previous post), but this is totally insane.

Okay so let's just pretend that this is implemented by Unity, what would be the feasibility of 7 Days being moved over to Unreal Engine 5? Looking at the Unreal 5's nanite geometry in their latest 5.3 build and the ability to use it on landscapes now, is a game changer.

[drgnkght]

Not to alarm the 7D devs, but I've got eight installs of 7D on *one* computer. I have more on my laptop.

 

The Unity management are off their rockers if they think this will fly with existing games. And apparently this does apply to existing games. How the blazes does that work? Are they updating the Unity runtime of older games? Admittedly, I haven't read all 28 pages of that forum post but this sounds like a massive class action lawsuit brewing up.

[doughphunghus]

So....did  Oracle or a VC firm buy Unity?

(kidding, but also sorta not kidding maybe they did have a change in mgmt or something?)

the "delete and reinstall is 2 licenses, if true, is complete BS and aside from 7D2D, i would "boycott" buying a Unity game ever again, much like I boycott anything associated with EA today (but for different reasons: basically they always have overpriced beautiful unfun games)

 

[OneManStanding]

I've tried to follow this -- this seems deranged on Unity's part. Far as I can see, they'll see people dumping their engine rapidly or have to backtrack fast.

[FramFramson]

1 hour ago, doughphunghus said:

So....did  Oracle or a VC firm buy Unity?

(kidding, but also sorta not kidding maybe they did have a change in mgmt or something?)

the "delete and reinstall is 2 licenses, if true, is complete BS and aside from 7D2D, i would "boycott" buying a Unity game ever again, much like I boycott anything associated with EA today (but for different reasons: basically they always have overpriced beautiful unfun games)

 

 

Unity has been like this for quite a while. The owners openly admitted they make very little from actual licenses - mainly because it's an excuse for them to whine and increase fees - but what they don't mention as often that they make most of their money off of sketchy crap like adware, selling user data, etc.

[Maharin]

That's been updated several times already and I suspect there will need to be a whole lot more clarification before all is said and done.

 

And, honestly, I hope Unity loses big on this one.

[Yukkuri]

2 hours ago, Maharin said:

That's been updated several times already and I suspect there will need to be a whole lot more clarification before all is said and done.

 

And, honestly, I hope Unity loses big on this one.

 

I think they figure that as long as they manage to get the really big customers (like certain gacha games I won't name) to go along with it they'll make so much money it won't matter if every small dev drops them and/or goes bankrupt.

[doughphunghus]

Found this: https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-marc-whitten
 

Quote

After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unity'sWhitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation. (A spokesperson told Axios that Unity had "regrouped" to discuss the issue.) 

• He hoped this would allay fears of "install-bombing," where an angry user could keep deleting and re-installing a game to rack up fees to punish a developer.
• But an extra fee will be charged if a user installs a game on a second device, say a Steam Deck after installing a game on a PC.

 

Edited September 13, 2023 by Crater Creator
formatting for readability (see edit history)

[meganoth]

* Essentially this is an issue between Unity and game companies using Unity, not endusers. If anyone doesn't buy a unity game anymore because of this he will hurt the game companies more than Unity. For future games lots of developers might switch to other engines if unity's price policy is too risky or too expensive for them. If they don't change then Unity may be right with their opinion that they didn't charge enough until now.

 

* Still, the announced policy sounds like their brains were clouded by illegal substances when Unity came up with that plan 😉. Or they knew they would get flak anyway and wanted something to backpedal from so the developers would think they achieved something in the end. Sort of like negotiations are always started with extreme positions so the middle ground everyone agrees to eventually is nearer to the wanted result. 

 

* If anyone thinks TFP would switch to whatever engine for 7D2D, forget it. No matter how much it costs in licence fees, switching engines would almost surely cost more, and a lot more time. 7D2D will be released with Unity.

Also they surely have a Unity Pro subscription and will pay less than the .20 cent per installed game.  Statistically most players will have the game installed only once, and even if someone installs the game on virtual machines to harm TFP it would be a drop in an ocean. And Unity can simply add a limit to the maximum installations per user that would have to be payed to make it impossible for an internet mob to perceptibly harm TFP through creating lots of parallel installations.

 

Edited September 13, 2023 by meganoth (see edit history)

[Mumpfy]

or... maybe they switch engines and delay gold +10 years. i mean at this point.... would it change something?

 

im just kidding. am I? yes i was, i think. Im lost already.

[Pille]

57 minutes ago, meganoth said:

* Essentially this is an issue between Unity and game companies using Unity, not endusers. If anyone doesn't buy a unity game anymore because of this he will hurt the game companies more than Unity. For future games lots of developers might switch to other engines if unity's price policy is too risky or too expensive for them. If they don't change then Unity may be right with their opinion that they didn't charge enough until now.

 

* Still, the announced policy sounds like their brains were clouded by illegal substances when Unity came up with that plan 😉. Or they knew they would get flak anyway and wanted something to backpedal from so the developers would think they achieved something in the end. Sort of like negotiations are always started with extreme positions so the middle ground everyone agrees to eventually is nearer to the wanted result. 

 

* If anyone thinks TFP would switch to whatever engine for 7D2D, forget it. No matter how much it costs in licence fees, switching engines would almost surely cost more, and a lot more time. 7D2D will be released with Unity.

Also they surely have a Unity Pro subscription and will pay less than the .20 cent per installed game.  Statistically most players will have the game installed only once, and even if someone installs the game on virtual machines to harm TFP it would be a drop in an ocean. And Unity can simply add a limit to the maximum installations per user that would have to be payed to make it impossible for an internet mob to perceptibly harm TFP through creating lots of parallel installations.

 

 

I think this view is rather naive (this is not meant to be offensive!). Neither do we know whether individual users can be reliably distinguished, nor do we know what counts as an installation. So we can't foresee how elaborate it is to generate fake installations and/or users. It all depends on the effectiveness of Unity's countermeasures. The consequences are unforeseeable. 

 

Users may suffer from this in the form of delayed releases and canceled/disappearing projects. Of course, I'm not talking about 7 Days here.

Edited September 13, 2023 by Pille (see edit history)

[Obsessive Compulsive]

18 hours ago, Toops144 said:

Just read this on Eurogamer.

 

Truth be told I've never liked Unity (and I've expressed this on a previous post), but this is totally insane.

Okay so let's just pretend that this is implemented by Unity, what would be the feasibility of 7 Days being moved over to Unreal Engine 5? Looking at the Unreal 5's nanite geometry in their latest 5.3 build and the ability to use it on landscapes now, is a game changer.

If I was to guess, little to none. The skill sets required and type of coding used are different. One is c#, the other is c++. I have noticed that some of the team uses c++ since unity allows both to be used from a trick they use at compile time. The designers and art team are used to working with the confines of the unity engine at this point. It would take a lot of work to get all models and assets transferred over and working properly. Months of checking for mesh and model issues along with redoing the animations to work with the unreal animation rig. While it would have some tremendous benefits, they simply dont have the team or skills for it. No offense to the pimps. They are unity devs at this point and the few with skills to work inside unreal cant carry the weight of the team. The good thing is they are working on another title that is rumored to use unreal 5 so they do have some members that could do it, but that would mean pulling them off their new IP to work on converting the game over. Easily a year or two set back. Rust took around a year to convert over if I recall. Maybe they could do it faster but to what end? Unreal charges 5% royalties and how do they know the games interest has not peaked. If they brought something totally new along with the conversion, then maybe but we are coming up to 10 years dev time on this game already. I highly doubt the programmers nor artists want to keep doing this for another three but on a new engine.
Unreal forces certain things that Unity does not, meaning entire sections of the game must be recoded to work with the other engine and in doing so, the animations and overall design of the game will likely change. Unreal uses something called blueprints. This is radically different than Unity. Unity in all respects, allows for some of the most advanced design for games IF you know how to take advantage of it by writing your own program to work along side the engine. Unity is great at none shooter things. RPG and open world designs. However it is also limited by forcing you inside of the engine for specific calls and on a main thread OOT game design at least until roughly 2019 when they finally started implementing ECS design.
Unity has only added netcode backing back in this year. They stripped it out in 2018 I think. Devs had no proper network code to work with and had to design their own. Some what of a challenging thing and skill in its own right. Things like this are not just alarming, it shows a weird disconnect in unity to what standards need to be offered before charging for installations
lol

The more I think about it maybe a switch, if at all possible, is actually worth considering. 

1 hour ago, Pille said:

 

I think this view is rather naive (this is not meant to be offensive!). Neither do we know whether individual users can be reliably distinguished, nor do we know what counts as an installation. So we can't foresee how elaborate it is to generate fake installations and/or users. It all depends on the effectiveness of Unity's countermeasures. The consequences are unforeseeable. 

 

Users may suffer from this in the form of delayed releases and canceled/disappearing projects. Of course, I'm not talking about 7 Days here.

That means they will change the engine to not only spy on you but record your hardware. Outright data harvesting and theft of private information. It would be the only way to implement a hardware based design mixed with some kind of online requirement. Everything about this is bad news. Many users down the road may stop buying unity games just as they hate the smell of Denovo

[Obsessive Compulsive]

While the wording of this announcement is directed to developers, it does not state what it will mean for third party developers that also utilize the game engine. Will this extend to those making assets in their shop? Will it affect mod developers? As a modder, I can state we do not package the engine with our work but we still utilize and work within it. We call on the engine to make our code function. This is not only a slippery slope, it feels like an entrapment scheme.

They created this out of nothing and nobody was aware they were planning to do it. Who is to say they wont extend this practice to third party developers. When we install and utilize 7 days to die, we agree to a license agreement. This applies to people like myself that develop code with the game, whether that be a mod distributed publicly or something for personal use. I do not charge for my work however the wording of this is based on installation of the game, not the engine itself. While my work is not a game, it extends from the game itself and works within it hence why the user agreement would be binding to this.

You can not strip the engine out of the game distribution and start making a new game with it. Just as you can not get unity from my mods. Both of us are backing on to the engine to use functions within in. Will this extend to third party modders and developers at some point? What a can of worms. If they say no now, will they say yes in the future? Would they charge me for each installation of my mod because it utilizes Unity to function? The base game does this too. There is a reason you do not charge for the installation but rather the sale of it. For one, this guarantees there was a monetary transfer of value to someone utilizing the engine to make profits and two, it makes sure that free software and modders are not pushed out of the industry by greedy devs and publishers. Open license agreements will not protect us from things like this, in fact it can implicate us where having no user license agreement becomes our only option and never ever collect donations since that implicates a for profit scheme that Unity wants their cut of for installing it.

Imagine every time you have a bug or some missing files and decide to delete and reinstall, I would have to pay Unity as the developer of the mod, not you the user that reinstalled or had a problem from a bad original install. Your power goes out during the install or you hit alt f4 but had the wrong window selected. did a virus corrupt some files making you reinstall? Oops I guess I have to pay Unity for you every time. Gamers can ask for refunds on their games with services like Steam too. That is the logic being done to game devs and possibly third party programmers. Even if they could afford it, I would want to get away from the engine.

I legit have no idea if I should produce mods for the engine anymore since this is such a nasty approach they have done. Either they did not think of the total ramifications or they have some very bad intentions for the future. It smells like something EA or activision would do

[Riamus]

5 minutes ago, Obsessive Compulsive said:

While the wording of this announcement is directed to developers, it does not state what it will mean for third party developers that also utilize the game engine. Will this extend to those making assets in their shop? Will it affect mod developers? As a modder, I can state we do not package the engine with our work but we still utilize and work within it. We call on the engine to make our code function. This is not only a slippery slope, it feels like an entrapment scheme.

They created this out of nothing and nobody was aware they were planning to do it. Who is to say they wont extend this practice to third party developers. When we install and utilize 7 days to die, we agree to a license agreement. This applies to people like myself that develop code with the game, whether that be a mod distributed publicly or something for personal use. I do not charge for my work however the wording of this is based on installation of the game, not the engine itself. While my work is not a game, it extends from the game itself and works within it hence why the user agreement would be binding to this.

You can not strip the engine out of the game distribution and start making a new game with it. Just as you can not get unity from my mods. Both of us are backing on to the engine to use functions within in. Will this extend to third party modders and developers at some point? What a can of worms. If they say no now, will they say yes in the future? Would they charge me for each installation of my mod because it utilizes Unity to function? The base game does this too. There is a reason you do not charge for the installation but rather the sale of it. For one, this guarantees there was a monetary transfer of value to someone utilizing the engine to make profits and two, it makes sure that free software and modders are not pushed out of the industry by greedy devs and publishers. Open license agreements will not protect us from things like this, in fact it can implicate us where having no user license agreement becomes our only option and never ever collect donations since that implicates a for profit scheme that Unity wants their cut of for installing it.

Imagine every time you have a bug or some missing files and decide to delete and reinstall, I would have to pay Unity as the developer of the mod, not you the user that reinstalled or had a problem from a bad original install. Your power goes out during the install or you hit alt f4 but had the wrong window selected. did a virus corrupt some files making you reinstall? Oops I guess I have to pay Unity for you every time. Gamers can ask for refunds on their games with services like Steam too. That is the logic being done to game devs and possibly third party programmers. Even if they could afford it, I would want to get away from the engine.

I legit have no idea if I should produce mods for the engine anymore since this is such a nasty approach they have done. Either they did not think of the total ramifications or they have some very bad intentions for the future. It smells like something EA or activision would do

Well, I have a feeling you're not making over $200,000 per year on mods, so you wouldn't have to worry.  It's unlikely they would lower this threshold so far that anyone developing mods for anything would ever have to pay this per-install amount.

 

That being said, this is really bad business practice.  I had been interested in doing some Unity projects and even though I'll never make anything that makes enough money to get charged by this change, I still think I will probably find something else to use instead of Unity.  I think this is just really bad practice and so wouldn't want to support them by using their product.

[Obsessive Compulsive]

7 minutes ago, Riamus said:

Well, I have a feeling you're not making over $200,000 per year on mods, so you wouldn't have to worry.  It's unlikely they would lower this threshold so far that anyone developing mods for anything would ever have to pay this per-install amount.

 

That being said, this is really bad business practice.  I had been interested in doing some Unity projects and even though I'll never make anything that makes enough money to get charged by this change, I still think I will probably find something else to use instead of Unity.  I think this is just really bad practice and so wouldn't want to support them by using their product.

haha true, I dont know if that is a good or bad thing that Im not making that much. I would never expect to make money from something I distribute for free but that comes full circle to unity. They released this as a free engine. To do this now and to devs in mid production. Plus the wording being some what vague as to whom and why this applies. Its very shady. Like they were just testing the waters to gauge the reaction seeing as they are already changing the approach after a single day

While I was just using myself as a vague example of the absurdity to it, I have friends that have produced very popular mods that have made them close to 200k a year so far. Not for 7 days, but rather in another game produced in unity. It doesnt last forever since game popularity dwindles quick. Its amazing the money in gaming if you get lucky. Between the sponsors, advertisers and direct sales, there are insane funds which is why we see these goofy schemes creep up from unity.

I hope your project goes well

Edited September 13, 2023 by Obsessive Compulsive (see edit history)

[Krougal]

Yeah, the whole thing sounds insane, but Meganoth does have a good theory about the negotiations.

 

Happens all the time. I'm negotiating right now on a job for a company known for lowballing so I asked for way more money than what I am willing to accept so they have room to negotiate but I still get what I want and everyone feels like they "won" something.

 

I still think someone over at Unity needs to put down the crackpipe, they must have been hanging out with Netflix execs and said "hey, hold my beer"

 

[Riamus]

15 minutes ago, Obsessive Compulsive said:

haha true, I dont know if that is a good or bad thing that Im not making that much. I would never expect to make money from something I distribute for free but that comes full circle to unity. They released this as a free engine. To do this now and to devs in mid production. Plus the wording being some what vague as to whom and why this applies. Its very shady. Like they were just testing the waters to gauge the reaction seeing as they are already changing the approach after a single day

While I was just using myself as a vague example of the absurdity to it, I have friends that have produced very popular mods that have made them close to 200k a year so far. Not for 7 days, but rather in another game produced in unity. It doesnt last forever since game popularity dwindles quick. Its amazing the money in gaming if you get lucky. Between the sponsors, advertisers and direct sales, there are insane funds which is why we see these goofy schemes creep up from unity.

I hope your project goes well

Makes sense.  I wonder if they could count advertising and sponsors in that cost.  I'd imagine it would have to be only direct sales figures.  They'd have a hard time knowing what other income you could make from something.

[lord_ahriman]

3 hours ago, Pille said:

 

I think this view is rather naive (this is not meant to be offensive!). Neither do we know whether individual users can be reliably distinguished, nor do we know what counts as an installation. So we can't foresee how elaborate it is to generate fake installations and/or users. It all depends on the effectiveness of Unity's countermeasures. The consequences are unforeseeable. 

 

Users may suffer from this in the form of delayed releases and canceled/disappearing projects. Of course, I'm not talking about 7 Days here.

 

Agree. Reinstalling a game is also very common to get rid of bugs. For example, I always reinstall when a new alpha drops, still, had to reinstall A21 twice because I was getting an annoying bug with electric fences.

[FramFramson]

18 hours ago, doughphunghus said:

So....did  Oracle or a VC firm buy Unity?

(kidding, but also sorta not kidding maybe they did have a change in mgmt or something?)

the "delete and reinstall is 2 licenses, if true, is complete BS and aside from 7D2D, i would "boycott" buying a Unity game ever again, much like I boycott anything associated with EA today (but for different reasons: basically they always have overpriced beautiful unfun games)

 

 

BTW the current CEO at Unity is a former EA CEO, who once said this on a stream:

 

Quote

"Now what causes higher margins with digital, a couple of things... [skip a line]... The second thing and this is a point that I think might be lost on many, is a big and substantial portion of digital revenues are microtransactions.

 

When you are 6 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 (laughter in the background). Um, and for what it’s worth the cogs on the clip, really low, and so, um, essentially what ends up happening and the reason the play first, pay later model works so nicely is 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.

 

As a personal anecdote I spent about $5000 calendar year to date on doing just this thing, this type of thing, on our products and others, um, I can readily attest to how well it works, um, but it is a, it’s a great model and I think it represents a substantially better future for the industry…"

 

[4sheetzngeegles]

So here is a question.
If say I for instance have 7 days installed in my steam install default directory.
And have an alternative hard drive with all, of the prior alphas on it. I, being a
a compulsive technology hoarder of sorts, copy the version that I am going to play
to the default directory and delete the other. No worries, I make copies once the

game is verified, so no loss.
Does that mean that i still am considered to have one installation?

 

The reason I ask and why i archive the way i do is because, If you are doing an install

and it is corrupted from steam download or a bad sector. if you have to re-download

it then is that considered two installs?