The fact that these decisions are coming down from the ex-CEO of EA Games, who was the CEO when EA was voted “Worst Company in the World”, just makes all this even more entertaining to watch.
GamePass and probably most cheap sales are all going up in flames because Unity has hired a demon to lead them into oblivion.
The fact that these decisions are coming down from the ex-CEO of EA Games . . . .
This guy speedrunning the enshittification game. Oceangate needs to build another sub, stat.
Microsoft learned never to leave an EA exec at the wheel ten years earlier, with the disastrous launch of the Xbox One. You know, the all seeing, all knowing, all credit card charging privacy invader with its hooks permanently sunk into the internet, and a camera you couldn’t cover, like it was some motherfucking episode of Max Headroom. Allow me to say, “Fuck you, Don Mattrick, and the DRM and surveillance-laden horse you rode in on.”
Right. Here’s how it works: Your game is on Gamepass, and a user installs it. Now instead of Microsoft paying you $0.15, then you paying Unity $0.10, Microsoft will just pay us directly the $0.10, and you still get your $0.05! See, it’s a great deal! Everybody gets their money and you don’t even have to deal with the Unity costs! Please, don’t go!!
Good business model. I hope Gamepass wil also limit number of game user can install, like, pick only 4 in 100 or so
Nintendo is gonna lawyer up at the speed of God before they’d pay unity a fucking cent.
And Mexico was going to pay for that southern boarder wall…
Will they tho?
It’s unclear if Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are aware of this particular change in policy, and whether they’d be willing to comply with Unity Technologies.
If they aren’t already paying royalties to Unity on behalf of the devs, then I can almost guarantee they won’t be paying royalties in the future. If they are doing that, then the devs might want to double check their revenue, because that may mean that Unity’s been double-dipping on royalties (taking royalties from distribution through Sony, MS and Nintendo, and then taking them again directly from the devs).
It’s like when CDPR said everyone could get refunds for CP2077 without talking to the stores first, then were shocked when Sony removed it from the PlayStation Store.
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Yep, although at least that was a pro-consumer move on CDPR’s part. It’s very understandable why Sony wasn’t happy about it, but it wasn’t a shady move on CDPR’s part. Whereas the same definitely can’t be said for Unity right now.
It’s more, you gotta let your partners know before you announce something major. The reason Sony had to pull it was because they only allow refunds after a certain point on defective games, and they can’t sell a game they know is defective. So the only way they could do blanket refunds is if the game is labeled defective, which means they can’t sell it. Giving Sony a bit of a heads up might’ve meant they could have changed their policy, which would have been better long run for consumers.
Oh absolutely, I agree! I just wanted to point out that CDPR’s move was at least well-intentioned so it’s harder to judge them poorly for it. But you’re right that communication is important in these situations.
He could be the kind of person who writes things down on his vision board, then sends his thoughts out into the universe to make them come true. Like Elon.
Nintendo? Like fuck they will
Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft Lawyers united… that’s an enemy you don’t want to fight. Each department alone is scary enough. All three of them? Now, that’s something you want to be on very solid ground for.
We’ll call them The Objectors
Yeah, because Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are companies who would never pass those costs back to the devs or down onto consumers. They’d totally bite the bullet on Unity’s new royalty…
Unity are out of their minds if they think this is at all a good move. All they’re going to do by pushing devs away and pissing off the major distributors is inspire the creation/adoption of a competitor.
That’s what happens when your CEO is an ex EA exec who thought that charging battlefield players a dollar to reload their gun was a good idea
Oh I don’t think they imply they will cover the costs. More like the only ones to know exactly the installs will be them, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo , and that’s why is done this way. Also to simplify the billing as well they already pay them for putting the game in their respective stores in one way or another.
Of course they could put a remote call that notified back to them in the game engine… and probably will work this way for PC, but probably the console companies might not be too happy about it.
Afaik the engine already phones home for telemetry, that’s why they’re able to count installs retroactively.
Only loosely, definitely not in the precise way they say they will do it. If they even could do that, it would be a massive privacy violation the likes EU would not be too keen on.
You can just see the panic coming out of Unity.
They thought they’d be able to slip this change through and people would just pay it. They were expecting a big payday, not a storm of bad press and angry people.
Also now Deva are gonna be skeptical of proprietary game engines. It’s too big of a risk to develop on anything proprietary now that this is on the table as a thing that could happen. Change won’t ahppen overnight but expect FOSS game engines to start getting big
Or back to it was in ye olden days where every studio has its own proprietary game engine.
I still find it amazing that Starfield is not on the same foundations as Morrowind, a full two decades earlier.
PlayStation, Nintendo and Xbox claim “no the fuck we won’t…”
They’ll just increase all prices by $1, and call it a day.
I wonder if it’s purposeful sabotage at this point. You can’t be that stupid and still be paid millions of dollars to do your job can you?
Capitalism is truly amazing if it can happen.
See: a certain owner of a (much less than) $44 billion social media company.
Well he was trying to sabotage Twitter, he just fucked up and ended up holding the reins of the company he undermined.
The CEO of Unity did sell off most of his own stock in the company shortly before the original announcement. It’s an open-and-shut case for insider trading charges if ever I had heard one.
By the definition of “distributor” this would include Steam, GOG, Epic, etc. as well.
In before one of them starts stripping or firewalling the phone-home code. What’s Unity gonna do? Valve hasn’t signed any contracts with them!
This sounds like it would mean charging Valve money for the privilege of using Valve’s own infrastructure every time a player installed a Unity game after a major PC upgrade/reinstall or after uninstalling that MMO they dumped every other game in their library try out.
Steam could probably bake a ban on software that uses installation trackers into their developer/publisher ToS, or ban the collection or transmission of Steam user data related to installations, or something similar.
I don’t want another attack vector for some hacker on my computer. That phone home code will be the second coming of the Sony rootkit.
Apple has Unity games in Apple Arcade I’m sure; which is like “iCloud GamePass”. So add another behemoth with almost more lawyers than money.
Lmao, Unity is not going to get away with this.
Apple also brought Unity onboard for Vision Pro development. They are absolutely going to roll over Unity.
No they won’t! There’s no way any of the big console manufacturers will ever agree to those terms, ESPECIALLY Nintendo. Microsoft would just buy Unity out before paying that ransom. You be smokin’ some bigtime crack, Riccitello.
Microsoft would just buy Unity out before paying that ransom
Maybe that’s the plan lol
TBH that would explain the decision. Pump up the projected revenue numbers right before an acquisition and exit.
I think they even played that plan wrong. All MS has to do is announce that unity games won’t be allowed on game pass anymore and the value of unity will drop. It’s probably already in freefall with few new games from this point onwards targeting it.
Fastest way to have all traces of your engine scrubbed from realty.
Because picking a fight with some of the world’s biggest companies is the best form of damage control…
I’d like to watch them try to send an invoice to these companies.
Most likely they won’t ever try, it’s just a blatant lie because they have no grounds to even attempt it. They have a deal with the gamedev studio, not the platform owner.
They have a deal with the gamedev studio, not the platform owner.
They don’t even have that because they’re trying to back date this shit, and you’re very much not allowed to do that. Otherwise what’s the point in even having contracts?
They are definitely taking the whole “can change terms anytime” too far.
Oh, so is this the result of some negotiation with them, or are they just saying random shit again?
They are trying to make a power play against these companies to strike out a deal due to their market share
A problem I see with it is that games that push console sales are made on Unreal (or internal engine) not Unity
However the amount of negative press is overblown as they are starting far in order to give things up during negotiations. And despite saying it’s only charged on first install; I’ve seen people claim it will bankrupt devs
I support devs switching from Unity to Godot but I feel like in a year’s time it won’t really matter as people are more likely to get hired for Unity
However the amount of negative press is overblown as they are starting far in order to give things up during negotiations. And despite saying it’s only charged on first install; I’ve seen people claim it will bankrupt devs
It’s charged on ever reinstall, not only on the first.
https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-marc-whitten
Whitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation.
Unity’s free tier of development services would owe Unity $0.20 per installation once their game hit thresholds of 200,000 downloads and earn $200,000 in revenue.
With pro plans having lower fees and a higher threshold, the majority of devs aren’t going to feel this
