https://www.theguardian.com/games/2023/sep/12/unity-engine-fees-backlash-response

Upsetting. How on earth are they gonna keep track of this?

Well, we know Unity recently partnered with IronSource, a company best known for making spyware, so suddenly that makes a whole lot of sense if they're going to try to track individual installs.

This is especially scary news for Newgrounds, since I'm not sure what counts as an install and what doesn't. Is it every time WebGL loads a game in a new tab? If so, there are a lot of games that are over that 200k threshold already. No bueno.

The current CEO of Unity John Riccitello was once the CEO of EA games (2007-2014) and left his position due to "financial performance". That says a lot about this whole situation. This guy is a businessman with no tech literacy and he's made an uninformed decision fueled by greed. "Line must go up! Quarterly earnings!"

Just look what the president of Unity did a few days prior to this announcement.

What are you doing here in the forums!? You only have 3 and half months left to port Robot Daze to another engine before you're charged a fee and then some!!

The name "runtime fee" is misleading, since is refers to game installs, not how long you're playing it.

I'll give them a week at most before they go back on this. But even if they do, it's going to leave a lot of people pissed off that it was even up for consideration in the first place. I've produced games indie and professionally with the engine for over a decade (and still am), and this will leave a very bad taste in my mouth for a long time.

It opens a lot of questions like people installing the game via piracy, or someone installing your game over and over again for whatever reason. They say they have "fraud detection practices" and their own "proprietary data model", but went on record that they won't go into a lot of detail about it, and that you should appreciate that they won't.

I'm pissed.

This probably marks the end of my time with Unity. Even if they roll back this decision, any trust they had left with their users is now gone forever. They have shown that they are willing to retroactively change their terms of service and that any unity game, regardless of how many years in the past it was developed, is now at risk to their bullshit. Once you put something like that on the table, it can never come off.

I believe the threshold is for both 200k 'Installations" and 200k USD in revenue. Since most projects here are entirely free to experience with no methods of monetization at all, I don't think there are a lot of games at risk, if any at all.

The way Unity describes it does make it seem like both criteria need to be met, so I'm not sure why reporters that sought clarification are saying it's one or the other. If they got it wrong, so did I.

That said, the risk remains for anyone that has a free version here and a paid full version on Steam or anywhere else. It's up to Unity to arbitrate whether the differences between versions counts as a demo or a different game entirely, and something tells me they're going to default to assuming they're the same until they decide to get around to reading whatever appeal you have proving the contrary. A $5 indie, assuming everyone installed their game twice, would generate half a million in revenue before fees kick in, but if they have a demo here, it's likely their install threshold gets hit much, much sooner. Since Unity doesn't differentiate streamed "installs" from paid installs, having a demo up is pure liability past that point.

In the short term, that means we're going to see less games that have any kind of aims at a full paid release. Unless they port their ongoing project to a new engine, it's in unity devs' best interest not to risk it.

Well, if our current view rate keeps up (it won't), we'll hit 200k in about a year. We're already talking about porting what we have to Godot. This already threw a wrench into Part 2; We're not currently at any real risk, but I think we need to make the switch sooner rather than later, otherwise a beefed up Steam version is completely off the table.

Port it to gzDoom instead. It will be funny.

Unity has just clarified in a new tweet that they will not be counting web and streaming plays to a title's count

https://twitter.com/unity/status/1702077049425596900

I don't think any of these clarifications make the situation any better, they have still decided to modify their TOS on a whim, and are still refusing to address the more serious issues like data collection and no revenue caps. But at least the leniency to web games will give you and other teams in similar situations more time and room to decide what comes next.

I wish you and your people the best, this shit really sucks :(

Such a strange decision by Unity. Even if they did really need to raise revenue, I feel like a revenue split would be far less confusing. Even with their clarifications that they posted to Twitter today (screenshotted below), I still see no reason to choose Unity over Godot/Unreal, especially Godot since it's open source.

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.1/getting_started/editor/unity_to_godot.html

Just in case there are some people about to pick up Godot engine, I'd recommend getting the latest Godot 3 version instead of Godot 4 because Godot 4's web exports still aren't compatible with Mac / iOS browsers. That said, if you mainly want to export to target systems' native architecture and might also release web exports as a side thing, Godot 4 would be fine because most people here seem to don't use Apple anyway and Godot 4 games have been frontpaged here.

Yeah, I think a lot of us are in the same boat in terms of how we may not be immediately threatened (today) and I don't think they can legally enact their scheme regardless, but the intention to fuck over broad swaths of the userbase is there and it's not going away. If we don't get hit this time, it's only a matter of time before they pull something else that succeeds. Maybe they phase out personal licenses, maybe they try leeching off revenue directly, maybe they paywall making a non-debug build of your game, it could be anything, and none of it would cross a line that wasn't already crossed or make the company more malicious than it already is.

Nobody liked Unity as a company to begin with, it's just that nobody hated it enough to finally swear it off. I definitely hated it, but I still reluctantly used it for work, and that made it the easiest to use for personal projects. Hopefully that's going to see an industry-wide change now that any medium-sized dev is more genuinely threatened, and they have more say about what is and isn't an industry standard.

This is that moment where Autodesk monopolized one too many programs and now every new modeller just uses Blender, or Adobe's CC causing most new artists (and some pros) to permanently switch to CSP, Krita or something else. Markets do have a breaking point when it comes to greed, and this one got violently shattered.

from what i understand about copyright law, viewing a webpage isnt downloading anything, because the information is in a temporary place on ur computer. this is partially the reason ur ISP can ban u for downloading movies illegally, but not streaming them, technically you are never coming into possession of the software, the webpage is just showing u whats on someone elses computer.

i am not a lawyer, there is prolly more to it than that

They're not going off of a legal definition, they made up their own. It's stupid, but a corpo can do that when it's in an EULA as long as they stipulate what it means when they say it.

I've been told they're walking this back, but here was their original definition, taken straight from Unity's announcement:

If you're initial reaction is "but that's illegal," you could be right. There's a lot about this that reeks of fraudulent bait and switch tactics, it's reliant on metrics that you can only collect by breaching the privacy of end users, and covers such a vage and broad swaths of possible ways to affect an "install count" that it's impossible to disprove or prove otherwise. Doesn't matter though. The police usually don't show up to your office and arrest you for white collar crime just because you're openly committing it; someone needs to take you to court for it, and most companies that will be affected can't afford to. They're going to get away with it unless the companies with the power to sue do so in a way that bars Unity from pulling this scam on everyone, when they're more likely to sue just to exempt themselves from it. Having to rely on corpos to take on other corpos is a pretty bad position to be in.

every unity game comes with a little guy who hops out of the computer to take the money when the game installs

funny that this is meant to make more money, but all they did was lose money.

Such an absolutley bizare and new scummy way of being an evil greedy bastard.

With this kinda BS, one could make a game and put it out there for free. Then you could go bankrupt if there's too many people who played that game!

And how the fuck is it Unity's bussiness, (or do they even have the ability, what the hell!?!?) to go and keep track of who is installing games, and where when they're doing that!?

That's fucking creepy and criminall as can be!!

I wouldn't want to make a game independantly, and then have the game phone home to some corporate scumbag whenever it gets installed. Its beyond creepy.

All I will say for sure. Is that this will be the death of Unity games on Newgrounds.

Or in layman's terms...

"Unity - #DeaderThanFlash"

https://twitter.com/WritNelson/status/1701720278189937099

https://twitter.com/MassiveMonster/status/1701808567140102633

Shit's on fire lol.

Oh wow...that is unbelievably scummy.

I will definitely be staying far away from Unity when I start learning how to code, jeez.

Sauce

I'm gonna need more popcorn.

welp ill take godot engine as a alternative even tho it aint the same but itll get better

I lost the thread, but someone was saying that a recent Unity acquisition was basically just spyware which might explain how they would track installs. They then said that it was a lot of investment banking decisions leading to the announcement, and Unity now looks better to investors despite the severe backlash.

Yep :(

I think a commenter on ArsTechnica did mention that. Another Article on this debacle: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/09/wait-is-unity-allowed-to-just-change-its-fee-structure-like-that/

I think I know what you're referencing. Is it this reddit thread?

https://www.reddit.com/r/unity/comments/16j23ci/i_know_people_dont_want_to_hear_this_you_shouldnt/

There's also these articles too:

https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20230915700/

https://mobilegamer.biz/unity-is-offering-a-runtime-fee-waiver-if-you-switch-to-levelplay-as-it-tries-to-kill-applovin/

Other engine reactions:

Dear God, please let this happen. It'll be so fucking funny.