I've noticed there's a few frequently asked questions by non-gamedev folks about how Unity's recent direction might affect them as consumers, and a lot of folks still (understandably confused) about all the Unity happenings.
Given Unity's half-elaborated approach to this decision it's difficult to come up with concrete answers in some cases as we don't know how this is all going to roll out, but I figured it would be worthwhile to try to provide some clarity on common topics where I can.
If anyone has additional questions please leave them as a reblog or an ask and I can try to help. I'm not a definitive source and I'd encourage folks to look around at what other developers are saying on this subject.
Q: I don't get it! It's only a few cents off the top and it doesn't effect most developers. Why are so many devs mad about this if it doesn't affect them?
A: Here's a good overview on the whole situation up to this point. It's a long read but excellent background and likely to answer a lot of questions.
While the pricing decision doesn't affect all developers (due to thresholds), the way Unity is implementing it does and there's a lot of that side of it which is a massive sweeping change. They're planning to track users on a per-install basis, which is an incredibly unreliable approach to business and largely lacks precedent for a game engine. Installs can be spoofed, and tracking universal installs from things like piracy, countries with stricter data laws, etc. is virtually impossible for every type of application. This is why most companies like Epic simply charge based on game revenue, because revenue is tracked and it also doesn't rely on charging developers for money they potentially don't have.
Additionally, some devs operate on incredibly thin margins and 0.15 cents an install is easily enough cost to tank a company, especially in the realm of Free-To-Play where installs don't make money. This also means that low-priced games are at risk, as 0.15 cents off a game that is, say $5, really adds up. Unity also seems poised to chase after distributors like Microsoft and Valve in some of these cases, which is...a daunting legal battle that could easily cost the company a fortune, and this is probably the biggest hurdle they will cross in putting this into action.
Moreover Unity has been incredibly cagey about the actual technical implementation of how this will happen, and it's going to be implemented on any game made in Unity by every developer, regardless of sales or platform. It's a massive core change to their product and how users are tracked, and they're rolling it out in a very unplanned, untelegraphed way across everyone in their ecosystem. Many developers find it difficult to trust a company that makes decisions like this (*cough*Twitter*cough*) and don't want to be associated with shipping games that track users like this.
If I had to draw a comparison it's a bit like if an electric company gave you electricity and charged you for it, but being unwilling (and also unable) to show you how much they came up with the numbers on how much you owe them - all because one guy in your whole town was using more electricity than the rest of you.
Q: Will I lose access to my favourite dev's Unity-made games when this happens?
A: Assuming devs choose to remove their games, it depends on how the platform handles it. Steam, for example, keeps games in users libraries even if they're delisted from the store. You'll need to investigate how your platform of choice handles game removals to determine the risk there, but I imagine keeping access of the game to users is fairly standard practice across various platforms.
This is also assuming a company or platform chooses to remove a game because of this. As of right now it's hard for most people - devs included - to tell if this plan is going to stick as is, which means it's hard to know if devs will de-list their games because of it. It's a huge risk dev-side and I'm sure most would prefer to avoid that however possible.
Q: Should I avoid installing a developer's game if it's made in Unity? I don't want to charge them money!
A: These policies (if they go through) don't kick in until January 1st, 2024, so anything you download now is fine to download risk-free. After that, assuming these decisions go through as-is, it largely depends on the game's sales figures and how the developer wants you to handle it, as I imagine every one will have a different approach. Some devs will signal their intent.
Remember too that this largely depends on the game's user numbers and sales figures, which aren't often made public to consumers and are even hard to track for developers. It's very muddy water, but I'd honestly say you're going to be generally safe to install games. Also keep in mind Unity alleges it's only "for a first install" - assuming this is true, if you've already installed a game you're theoretically safe to reinstall it on your device as many times as you need without charging a dev.
Q: Is every game made in Unity going to be taken down?
A: I suspect it's likely you'll still have access to all your titles you have access to in some way or another. Some games could potentially be lost but I imagine popular titles that everyone is asking about (Cult of the Lamb, Hollow Knight) will continue existing in some form whether that be preservation or re-publishing by developers - after all they're the ones most in the public eye and most likely to be hopped on by presevationists. Unfortunately though, it's hard to know right now and depends on the decision the developer makes with delisting their product.
Q: Should I download all my games for preservation purposes?
A: If you're planning to actually archive them for others! I imagine a lot of preservationists are eyeing this and taking action as we speak.
Q: I'm a consumer, how can I support developers?
A: This one is tricky because options are limited consumer-side. At this point, short of denouncing Unity's decision, even developers are limited in their options. We can't "strike" or "boycott" against Unity because...well none of us work for Unity and refusing to interact with the ecosystem would cost many people's livelihoods. Many devs have already cancelled their payment plans to them or threatened to abandon the platform should this go through.
Consumers have even less options, but being vocal towards Unity especially in ways they will notice - such as their official forum thread or tagging their official social media channels on the subject - is incredibly valuable and lets them know that you as a consumer are against this. Moreover, listen to developers and what they're saying about all this, and what their plans are for their games when/if this decision goes through. Be vocal in your support for devs who are denouncing Unity's practices - I promise if this is scary as a consumer it's even scarier as a developer as this is very much putting dev's jobs at stake. You should also stay up to date with Unity's messaging and what developers say about it - the first step is staying reliably informed and not jumping head-first into wild speculation.
I suspect in most cases boycotting Unity games on the whole is not helpful for paid titles, as you'd likely just be punishing the developers.
No matter what be respectful to the workers at Unity and do not threaten them. I've worked at companies that made shit decisions, and they are never made by choice of the workers at a company. It's a frustrating situation and given how fundamentally flawed these changes are I fully believe that they pointed out the flaws here ahead of time and were likely ignored. The folks working there are not to blame and do not deserve your ire or threats, and I guarantee they've spent this week internally denouncing this decision from management as well.
Q: I'm learning/started learning Unity, is all my knowledge gone to waste? Should I stop learning it?
A: No! Game engines are all similar to one another and many skills are transferable across them. Any game developer who works in an IDE eventually learns how to swap to another and at no point are you ever locked in to one. Practices and processes you learn in Unity are very much applicable in Godot or Unreal.
There's no moral imperative that forces you to let the decision of executives compromise your learning - you're not paying Unity anything to use their engine for learning, and it will teach you skills you can carry on to a new engine when you're done.
Unity Offices Evacuated Over Death Threats After New Install Charge Policy
Original article on TheGamer
TL;DR: earlier today, Thursday, September 14th, Bloomberg reported that several Unity offices will be closed today and tomorrow due to “credible death threats.” Several Unity developers have commented on this on Twitter.
On Thursday, September 24th, Bloomberg reported that Unity had cancelled a town hall and would be closing two of its offices in the wake of “credible death threats”
Several employees have responded to the report, seemingly confirming it’s legitimacy, including Senior XR product designer Javier Busto and senior software engineer Eli C Davis.
(9/14, 11:46 PM EST) UPDATE: Polygon reached out to SFPD who said “officers responded to Unity’s San Francisco office “regarding a threats incident.” A “reporting party” told police that “an employee made a threat towards his employer using social media.” The employee that made the threat works in an office outside of California, according to the police statement.”
Unity just pulled a WotC and acted like they were the only game in town - changing their payment/service structure in a way that suggests they think they've got a monopoly - and much like WotC they've been politely informed by the game development community and Reality At Large that no, actually, they are a business with competitors who are only too happy to snap up the free market share and show off their own development engines to anyone who is suddenly looking for a new one For Reasons.
Like, the announcement about Unity's pricing change hit the news blogs a day or two ago and as of today every blog I follow that does game development is like, "Let's do a quick comparison of Godot and Unreal Engine to see which would be the better dev environment for switching your game to!"
"Ur an idiot if you want to do anything that isn't for money!!! Nevermind making games for exposure or just art!!! If ur not doing anything beyound trying to participate in fucking capitalism ur a fucking idiot!!!"
I hope UE along with every other video game engines oppa homeless styles you on your fucking grave you nasty sick crass motherfucker
so I did some reading on the Unity debacle and decided to make a short summary/review.
In case you haven't heard, Unity has announced a new way of charging devs for the use of their platform, in which devs could be charged a small fee for every time a user installs the game. This applies to games that have more than $200k yearly revenue and 200k lifetime downloads, and it would start counting at the beginning of next year. It's being received by devs as a major breach of trust and a reason to abandon unity altogether. The most egregious aspects of the change are:
1 - The fee will add an extra cost to games and projects that already had their costs planned for and paid for. For some games, this could mean that the whole project becomes untenable, but if the game is already in development or even already published, the devs can't do anything about it. It's like "oh shit, this game was planned to pay for itself but now it will not only not do that as it might also cost us money for years to come"
2- the change is sudden enough that devs that subscribe to Unity Pro and above can't even change their contracts with unity before it starts applying.
3- The charge is a fixed value per install, regardless of how big the game is or how much it costs. A game that costs $20 to buy has the same fee as a $1 game or a free game. This obviously unfairly punishes small games and free games and also discourages devs from trying to reach a wider audience.
4- Devs don't actually control installs, so this added cost would be not only unpredictable but completely out of control of the paying party, unless everyone starts adding DRM-like limitations to their games.
5- When asked how the installs will be counted, Unity answered basically "through secret proprietary means". So Unity wants basically tell devs what they owe with no oversight, and devs are supposed to accept it.
I'm baffled that any of this could possibly be considered legal.
the thing that gets me about the whole unity thing is like. even if they walk this back, they can't actually... take it back. they can't unspeak what they said, and they are NEVER going to get back the trust they just ruined. i honestly don't think they can come back from this one.
If you haven't heard, Unity announced that on January 1st, they will begin charging developers for every installation of their game, meaning every time someone downloads the game, the developers will be charged a fee.
This has drawn outrage and concern from both developers and players, raising questions about what the reasoning behind this decision was and if this will be sustainable for developers. Developers have brought up that it may mean many games, both major indie titles and smaller ones, may have to be temporarily or permanently removed from online stores. Additionally, many developers currently working on games in Unity's engine have stated they are unsure if they can continue to develop their games in Unity or if they will have to be moved or restarted in another gaming engine.
The future is unclear; whether Unity backs down or not, it is a good idea to look into games you may be interested in and check on whether developers are going to be pulling them or not, as they may not be available for purchase soon.
Message from the developers Aggro Crab, summarizing some of the concerns of game devs.
Articles:
The Unity Games That Could be Impacted Most by Controversial Fees, From Silksong to Cult of the Lamb
The Entire Gaming Industry Unites Against Unity’s Baffling Pricing Change
the fact that people are talking about expanding the strikes to the video game industry at the same time as the fact that unity decided to pull a fuck around means something cosmic to me
I am by no means smart, but I don't have to be because it's even worse than it not being clear how they will track pirated installs, it's not even clear how they will be tracking ANY installs.
they will be using a "proprietary data model, that collects data from numerous sources", and ... they BELIEVE it accurately reflects the number of installs.
it somehow gets even worse than that though; in their initial response to the confusion, they stated this:
but, after further backlash they decided to change this policy so that it will "only be charged once per first install on each individual device," i.e. installing it twice on the same computer will only be charged once, while installing it on two separate computers from the same account/license, e.g. the same steam account, will be charged twice.
the very massive glaring major problem with this change though is that they stated the reason for the initial policy was that they were incapable of differentiating individual downloads due to aggregation. in other words, they only receive a batch update that states there have been 3572 new installs with NO data regarding where individual installations came from
the fact that they completely backpedaled on this either means they either were lying about not being able to, or they're lying about being able to. OR they're lying when they say unity software won't be communicating directly from peoples devices when they are installed, which is likely illegal, as well as being a MASSIVE security risk; someone will have reverse engineered the process within days and will simply be able to generate fake installations to send for any game they want, as much as they want.
there are also many, very easy ways that you can simply alter the device to give a different id/signature/whatever, it literally happens by accident all the time ! a very common example is that just changing a piece of hardware in a computer can cause windows to see it as a different computer, and for digital licenses, you have no other option than to BUY A NEW LICENSE !!!!!!!!
sorry this is getting stupidly long, solely due to the fact that everything about this is completely insane !!!
oh, and if all of that wasn't absolutely atrocious on it's own, you may have noticed they will be using proprietary data model, but in case you didn't or you don't understand what that means; the system they will be using to collect all their data will exclusively belong to them, you will not know anything about what it is, what it is doing, how it works, or if it is even working at all. you won't even have access to the data it's collecting. in essence, you will be billed significant amounts of money based on numbers you cannot see, collected by a system you have no access to, and all of comes from actions that you have no control over !! and they're saying all of this openly, as if that's normal in any way whatsoever !!
the only saving grace here is I am almost certain that last point makes it all completely and utterly illegal. it's like the financial sector of the company came up with all of this without consulting a single lawyer, developer, or their public resources team, or hell even the janitors could see how stupid every single aspect of it is
yeah see this number here, see how it's going up ? that's our data. what does it mean ? don't worry about it, anyway we'll be billing you monthly according to what the number says. what ? no we can't tell you how it works. of course it's accurate. accurate to what ? to the data, i just told you...
And in the god forsaken amount of time this took to get all the sources for this and explain just how many things are wrong with this, and keep in mind this is JUST regarding how they will track installations, they have edited it again !!!
I'm starting to think this whole proprietary method doesn't even exist, they haven't written it yet, so they went ahead and addressed the concern of not sending data from people's computers, of being GDPR and CCPA compliant, and then backpedalled the multiple installation thing and ended up shooting themselves in the foot. The other version seemed to imply they wouldn't be doing that due to their proprietary method of many sources, but now they're going to "refine how we collect install data over time" ? Sounds like they fucked up and one of the developers has finally noticed and explained that they will need to do so if they're only counting first installations. I'm sending this now so I can get out of this absolute clusterfuck.
Aw mate, thank you so much for this explanation!
So essentially, either Unity has some obviously-illegal way to track installs - which would have needed to be announced in advance and be opted-out by default according to EU laws; OR they have nothing of the sorts and were probably planning to approximate the numbers by some black-box method without ever revealing their source. Kinda leaning towards the second idea - sincerely doubt Unity had such a developed instrument for tracking pirated copies, and no one noticed before now lol.
I am by no means smart, but I don't have to be because it's even worse than it not being clear how they will track pirated installs, it's not even clear how they will be tracking ANY installs.
they will be using a "proprietary data model, that collects data from numerous sources", and ... they BELIEVE it accurately reflects the number of installs.
it somehow gets even worse than that though; in their initial response to the confusion, they stated this:
but, after further backlash they decided to change this policy so that it will "only be charged once per first install on each individual device," i.e. installing it twice on the same computer will only be charged once, while installing it on two separate computers from the same account/license, e.g. the same steam account, will be charged twice.
the very massive glaring major problem with this change though is that they stated the reason for the initial policy was that they were incapable of differentiating individual downloads due to aggregation. in other words, they only receive a batch update that states there have been 3572 new installs with NO data regarding where individual installations came from
the fact that they completely backpedaled on this either means they either were lying about not being able to, or they're lying about being able to. OR they're lying when they say unity software won't be communicating directly from peoples devices when they are installed, which is likely illegal, as well as being a MASSIVE security risk; someone will have reverse engineered the process within days and will simply be able to generate fake installations to send for any game they want, as much as they want.
there are also many, very easy ways that you can simply alter the device to give a different id/signature/whatever, it literally happens by accident all the time ! a very common example is that just changing a piece of hardware in a computer can cause windows to see it as a different computer, and for digital licenses, you have no other option than to BUY A NEW LICENSE !!!!!!!!
sorry this is getting stupidly long, solely due to the fact that everything about this is completely insane !!!
oh, and if all of that wasn't absolutely atrocious on it's own, you may have noticed they will be using proprietary data model, but in case you didn't or you don't understand what that means; the system they will be using to collect all their data will exclusively belong to them, you will not know anything about what it is, what it is doing, how it works, or if it is even working at all. you won't even have access to the data it's collecting. in essence, you will be billed significant amounts of money based on numbers you cannot see, collected by a system you have no access to, and all of comes from actions that you have no control over !! and they're saying all of this openly, as if that's normal in any way whatsoever !!
the only saving grace here is I am almost certain that last point makes it all completely and utterly illegal. it's like the financial sector of the company came up with all of this without consulting a single lawyer, developer, or their public resources team, or hell even the janitors could see how stupid every single aspect of it is
yeah see this number here, see how it's going up ? that's our data. what does it mean ? don't worry about it, anyway we'll be billing you monthly according to what the number says. what ? no we can't tell you how it works. of course it's accurate. accurate to what ? to the data, i just told you...
And in the god forsaken amount of time this took to get all the sources for this and explain just how many things are wrong with this, and keep in mind this is JUST regarding how they will track installations, they have edited it again !!!
I'm starting to think this whole proprietary method doesn't even exist, they haven't written it yet, so they went ahead and addressed the concern of not sending data from people's computers, of being GDPR and CCPA compliant, and then backpedalled the multiple installation thing and ended up shooting themselves in the foot. The other version seemed to imply they wouldn't be doing that due to their proprietary method of many sources, but now they're going to "refine how we collect install data over time" ? Sounds like they fucked up and one of the developers has finally noticed and explained that they will need to do so if they're only counting first installations. I'm sending this now so I can get out of this absolute clusterfuck.
Aw mate, thank you so much for this explanation!
So essentially, either Unity has some obviously-illegal way to track installs - which would have needed to be announced in advance and be opted-out by default according to EU laws; OR they have nothing of the sorts and were probably planning to approximate the numbers by some black-box method without ever revealing their source. Kinda leaning towards the second idea - sincerely doubt Unity had such a developed instrument for tracking pirated copies, and no one noticed before now lol.
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