Developers of indie puzzle game Orgynizer have claimed that Unity said organisations like Planned Parenthood are “not valid charities” and are instead “political groups.”
In a blog post, the EU-based developer LizardFactory said the plans to charge developers up to $0.20 per install if they reach certain thresholds would cost them “around 30% of the funds we have gathered and already sent to charity.”
As Unity clarified the runtime fee will not apply to charity games, LizardFactory reached out to the company to clarify their game would be exempt from the plan.
However, Unity reportedly said their partners were not “valid charities” and were viewed as “political groups.”
Profits made from the game go directly to non-profit organisation Planned Parenthood and C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, Michigan.
“We did this to raise money for a good cause, not to line the coffers of greedy scumbags,” the developers wrote in a blog post. “We have been solid Unity fanboys for over ten years, but the trust is scattered all over the floor.”
The developers are considering a move to open-source game engine Godot, “but we will have to recode our entire game because we refuse to give you a dime,” they wrote. “This is a mafia-style shakedown, nothing more, nothing less.”
Today, Unity responded to the ongoing backlash and apologised, acknowledging the “confusion and angst” surrounding the runtime fee policy.
The company has promised that changes to the policy will be shared in “a couple of days.”
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You can go to the SteamDB page for a game, click App Info on the left, then look for the “Detected Technologies”. This will usually tell you what they’re using if it’s not a custom engine. You can use the Augmented Steam or SteamDB browser extensions to get a direct link to the SteamDB page from a game’s store page.
Also, SteamDB has a page here with aggregate data of how much each detected engine is used across Steam. Unity currently accounts for over half of the games using known engines (snapshot).
Edit: For non-Steam games you could check out IGDB.com. It has crowd-sourced data on all video games, including which game engine was used.
I am not a developer but don’t they have to state the engine at the beginning of the game? Really no idea, just guessing, as I’ve seen a lot of games with it.
That would involved buying/downloading the game first to find out though (which would defeat the purpose of avoiding Unity in the first place). Out of curiosity I checked some of the games on my Steam wishlist to see if Steam had the engine listed anywhere, and unfortunately they don’t. A few had it under the fine print copyright section under System Requirements, but not all. Because of this whole thing, it would be nice if Steam would include that as well, like in the sidebar where they list the developer and publisher. I can’t speak for other pc storefronts though.
I took some game dev classes so take this with a grain of salt. In my experience with unreal, that is not added and bundled with the game by default, so I imagine it as a deal they strike with the engine to get better rates or such, basically gives the engine an ad slot. I think one common reason would be for new GPUs / new engine updates like ray tracing support they pay the game dev $ to use their engine and put in the new features to show case them. On the flip side if you think the engines good as a customer and see that on splash screen maybe you then associate good engine with good game.