this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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No, Unity is still saying they want a cut of old games if they're ever newly installed.
And this clause will give unity some fun lawsuits for those old versions
I'm really hoping some of the bigger Unity devs, like the people that made Rust or Among Us sue, as most of us don't have enough money to even stand a chance in court against Unity's lawyers...especially once they have all that nice runtime money to spend. 😒
Thinking small there, there are several Unity games published by big dick AAA corps.
Like Hearthstone, most of Kings catalog, the Doom ports were wrapped in Unity. Plus there's a lot of Unity games on Gamepass and that's Xbox 's bread and butter right now so Microsoft could just slap the shit out of em or just buy em out entirely (might be smart just for the King purchase itself).
My guess is that AAA developers will just negotiate individual contracts that are more favorable for the developers. They're not going to sue when they can just work out a special deal.
I really don't want you to be right, but I'm super convinced that you are.
god I hate how right you are here
I've seen the "Microsoft should just buy Unity" argument a lot lately. And while I think it's probably a better management than current, I imagine Microsoft is hesitant having only just come out of a, what, 6 month long legal battle in US and EU courts regarding acquisition of ActiBliz? So a good idea, but one I can imagine might not happen...
I honestly don't think MS really wants to own Unity. Like, sure, there's a small amount of synergy because some of their games use it, but owning Unity also means committing resources to support and improve it and competing with Unreal to an extent.
If anyone would be interested in buying Unity I'd think it'd be a Chinese corp like Tencent or NetEase or else a publisher that works with a lot of indies like Devolver or maybe Embracer.
Yeah, it kind of sucks that Microsoft being an even bigger unstoppable monopoly would have actually helped in these instances... at least in the short term... hopefully something less future terrible comes along to solve the short term problems instead at least.
Microsoft gaming is not even an industry leader, much less a monopoly.
Gaming isn't the only thing they do though, cornering multiple markets as one company is the definition of a monopoly. The merger was thoroughly investigated as to whether it would be unfair competitively, that is a different way of saying they were worried it was gonna be a monopoly, and in that case they were even only concerned about the gaming market.
I'm not just throwing around random terms, it is indeed approaching a monopoly. And could indeed be bad long term, even if it gets rid of kotick and helps clean up blizzard in the short term. And that's a pretty big if.
This is what I think. It kinda comes off as extortion.
Well yesterday, Unity decided they were gonna get Sony and Nintendo and Microsoft to pay the fees for smaller studios (lmao wat).
I don’t think Unity understands exactly how many top-tier lawyers those companies are going to bring to the table in the interest of legally curbstomping then.
Maybe that's the point. Unity caves immediately to the big lawyers and says "Sorry guys, we tried. Looks like all you little studios will have to pay up after all. Blame Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft"
And then their customers sue the ever loving fuck out of Unity and win, because they’re not only looking at breach of contract, but also monopolistic and predatory business practices (they were basically forcing smaller studios to switch from a competitor mobile analytics platform to their in house platform). Either Unity’s exec suite didn’t consult the lawyers, like, at all… or their legal team should be disbarred. Unity is fucked unless they do a complete 180 and clean out the C-suite.
It doesn't seem like they are thinking that far ahead. Or if that was the plan it's really not working out.
Does this mean that the "Report on install" feature is already in the old release? It's a reasonable feature to already have, I assume Unity gives you a handful of statistics "for free" as part of using the engine.
However there is a difference between "installs" the number and "installs" the billing number. A website might have 1,000 page views. So 1,000 users? Well we need unique page views. What makes a page view unique? What if someone visits your website but leaves after 2 seconds, do we count those?
In addition to being a terrible decision I don't think the company is prepared at all for this decision.
No, they have some magical "proprietary method" for determining those, with additional hand-waving for not counting "illegitimate" installs. Translation: they pull these numbers out of their ass, fuck you.
A pre-sale cut could be considered "reasonable" since there's a paper trail with real numbers that basically everyone can agree on. Unity is just trying to muddy the waters.
My understanding is that one of the services Unity provides Devs is analytics telemetry, and they just have to hook into that to read some telemetry of their own.