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My Reddit feed glitched and gave me this masterpiece.
Consumer FAQ About Unity's Recent Decision
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.
So who wants to bet on who’s gonna sue Unity first my money’s on Nintendo
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.”
Link here
Unity
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
can't wait for the unity vs AAA game corpo showdown
In 2012, Adobe tried what Unity's trying
Predictably, they did not succeed.
Link in to the article in the first reblog because tumblr suppresses posts with links in them.
Remember Flash? It was huge and now it's gone.
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.
i wonder why!
(if you werent aware, unity is doing some incredibly shitty things and trying to charge game developers per installation)
Unity And Supporting Game Devs
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.