this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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Unity adding a fee for devs for each time a game is installed, after certain thresholds (www.gamesindustry.biz)
submitted 1 year ago by lazycouchpotato@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world
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[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

For Unity Personal and Unity Plus users, the thresholds are $200,000 in revenue a year and 200,000 lifetime installs.

The fees also vary, with Unity Personal developers having to pay the most for every install above the threshold ($0.20)

So, if you get 200k lifetime installs but don't get the 200k revenue a year, you don't have to pay it?

Existing games built on Unity will also be hit with Runtime Fees if they meet the thresholds starting January 1.

OOOHOOOOO BOY, now, that's going to hurt a fair amount of people!

Also, what about web play? I guess that'll only count towards revenue, but not towards downloads?

[–] wax@lemmy.wtf 25 points 1 year ago (3 children)

If their licencing agreement permits retroactive changes like this, that is reason enough to gtfo

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 16 points 1 year ago

I sure feel glad to never have gotten into developing with it. When I saw that a blank project generated a ~231MB executable back in 4.1 or so, I simply ditched it.

Licenses that allow retroactive changes are terrible for the end user, fuck up the company's image and might give a significant boost to competition. Hasbro trying to pull that shit with DnD earlier this year comes to mind.

[–] FaeDrifter@midwest.social 2 points 1 year ago

Our terms of service provide that Unity may add or change fees at any time. We are providing more than three months advance notice of the Unity Runtime Fee before it goes into effect. Consent is not required for additional fees to take effect, and the only version of our terms is the most current version; you simply cannot choose to comply with a prior version. Further, our terms are governed by California law, notwithstanding the country of the customer.

Yup lol.

What's funny and sad is that about 3 years ago on r/godot, I had an argument with a Unity fanboy over this exact thing. He was demanding someone give him a reason that Godot should exist, when, in his humble opinion, Unity did everything and did it better.

My take was that you don't actually own your Unity-made game. You might own the assets and trademark, but as long as you're licensing the engine, you are subject to the whims of Unity.

Of course that was theoretical, until today.

[–] Syndic@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago

I'm pretty sure that even if the license agreement does have such language that it won't uphold in court. And there are enough big companies using Unity for this to go to court if they try to come to collect.

I mean seriously, if that would be legally possible, nothing would prevent them from uping the charge to $10, $20 or even $100 per installation, applied retroactively.

[–] trustnoone@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think they have the web play question in their FAQ somewhere and it does include as a download. There's no real way to know how their telemetry is calculating this though.

[–] trustnoone@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Q: Does this affect WebGL and streamed games?

A: Games on all platforms are eligible for the fee but will only incur costs if both the install and revenue thresholds are crossed. Installs - which involves initialization of the runtime on a client device - are counted on all platforms the same way (WebGL and streaming included

https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago

Wow... I expect that WebGL telemetry to be less reliable than from an installed app. "No cookies found, guess this is a brand new download, chaps!"