Unity licensing changes discussion

https://www.ign.com/articles/why-un...urring-massive-backlash-among-game-developers

I saw this article today and it made me very worried about the state of the game going forward.

I really hope this does not effect Eleon, but I have to wonder how much of a pain in the code it would be to get Empyrion away from Unity and onto something else, like the Unreal engine (for example).

Thoughts?

 

Just looking at the numbers they're stating, my own guess is that Eleon is probably in the clear. Good to hear that directly from Taelyn.

Apparently one of the big guys from EA is over at Unity and almost certainly responsible for pushing such a greedy policy. Not surprising. The point of mentioning that is I'm sure we'll see plenty of people pumping fists saying things like "switch to Unreal Engine"

All I can say is: don't.

While Unreal Engine might be great, Epic is not, and is wrapped up in plenty of malicious and scummy practices. They may make a juicy offer now, but they'll twist the knife once they've got their hooks in. That's what Unity is trying to do, they're banking on devs not having the time or money to switch game engines. I'd bet folding money Epic will do worse when given the chance.

It's okay to be cynical in business.

 

Be surprised if it affected them currently. Be more concerned if someone decided to do something malicious against them and Unity refused to acknowledge the malicious act and were asked to pay up.

I am not sure of the published articles on this fully capture the details either. If as presented, then I think in some regions this may be against precedents set in civil law (ie not illegal, but likely to fail to be upheld if challenged) - not sure about the US whihc seem to be the wild west for **** like this - EU and UK however it could probably be challenged succesfully. However I expect the devs will be looking very closely at the Apr 2023 or later ToS if using that version or later which is where I think it comes into affect in practice. Idiots at unity did not seem very clear on its scope.

Unreal may be EA and also have sales related costs, but at least as I understand it, once you agree to the terms of the engine version you use, they apply in perpetuity which I suspect is why he didn't try to pull this **** (AFAIK) while he was at EA.

I for one would support any dev who chose to boycott unity and do everything in their limited power to sink unity over this. Of course if all possibly affected unity devs and publishers were to band together the world over, then may be more effective. If this is allowed to happen unchallenged, I fear for the long term impact in may have on gamer's who ultimately always end up footing the bill for **** like this. As the saying goes - **** travels downhill... For eg, if steam remain neutral, and end up adapting to its implications, it could have unpleasant and unreasonable impact down the line for all games and thus gamers.

I await with interest with the likes of MS, Apple, Google, Steam etc will make of this and how they will react. For anyone with actual regionally appropriate legal expertise (contract law I expect - maybe 'prejudicial contracts'?) that small indy developers may not have (being techies probably rather than lawyers), might be worth writing your thoughts in places where they may be seen by the relevant people to at open their eyes if needed and appropriate.


A thought - you may not have 200k sales but...
Do re-installs count when it is seen as the first install after Jan 1st 2024 despite having been installed originally several years previously? I for one will be getting a new PC soon - that is a new device.
As I understand it that counts as a new install and counts towards your 200k. Over the lifetime of many games, I can see people changing PCs at least once, maybe a couple of times. 200k may sound like a big number for a small outfit, but what if that 200k is because some of your existing users install on new devices and you start getting hammered despite actual sale being way way below the threshold?

What if releasing a major update that encourages a bunch of people to install the game again and that triggers a sudden unexpected huge bill without concurrent sales to go with it because these are the first installs the new system sees done by people who bought the game years ago and havn't played for ages?

This whole plans seem very very wrong to me. The person behind this is all about hooking people in and landing them with a bill when they are far too invested and committed (in this case years of hard won engine experience vs a long risky learning ramp on a new engine) to back out and say no. He wanted to charge people for digital ammo in the middle of a fight FFS!
People like that need to be sunk into oblivion.

 

What Unity is doing also goes against pretty much every precedent I've ever seen for software.
I'm not a big name developer, but I've never used software that had a "per install" fee associated with it. It's always been "per user".

Imagine if Microsoft charged you a fee to reinstall Office or Windows?
Or if Adobe charged you a fee for installing a new version of Photoshop even though you have a yearly subscription?
Or an AV software charging you to install it again even though you already paid for the year?

It's an absurd change, and no matter how much they walk it back now the damage to their reputation has been done.

 

The problem is they have not released how they will deal with any of those situations.
They already said specifically that they have no way of knowing whether an install is a new install or a reinstall.
Their response on pirated installs is also very vague and makes it seem like the developer will have to fight the charges after the fact.
How will they track if a game is played on a browser versus an install?

This shows that they don't have any of those things figured out and they only have 3 months to do it.
They should have at least waited until they had the answers to those questions before posting something they knew they'd get pushback on.

 

100% this.
"We will work directly with you on cases where fraud or botnets are suspected of malicious intent."
This statement tells me that malicious install campaigns likely are possible, but if a dev reports it after getting a bill (yeah, they are counting it and billing) then don't worry because they will "work directly with you".....
Yeah, 0% trust in that.

Regardless of what kind of backpeddling and assurances they make now, does any of it really matter?
A company that will suddenly force a giant change in fee structure, without any real warning, and essentially amount to altering past deals, can they be trusted going forward?
What's to stop them from lowering the download and revenue thresholds significantly a year or so down the line?
After all they just showed they will massively change their terms at any point.


I don't have a stake in this as I'm not a developer nor am I selling projects built on Unity.
I do know this is shaking the gaming world pretty hard and harming trust pretty bad though.

 

In the long run they are trying to change the model from the end user to pay once the time software is bought to the lase model, where the customer pays every time the software is used. And they hope all other game engine companies follow them.

Just my two cents of what I see happening now with a pinch of glimpse in the near future.

 

Epic Games has published a detailed guide on migrating from Unity to Unreal Engine 5

https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.3/en-US/unreal-engine-for-unity-developers/

 

While I understand that Eleon has a lot invested in Unity, and they believe that the changes will not effect them, I have also been gratified at how the developer community has been banding together after what Unity has tried to do.

The backlash is also highlighting compeating platforms I was not aware of, like Godot and FNA.



Considering the amount of backlash Unity is getting, lets hope their montization changes never see the light of day.

 

Unity issued an update today.

This individual breaks the new changes down.

 

I got an email from Unity about some of the new changes.

If they had just gone with that in the first place it wouldn't have been nearly the PR disaster it turned out to be.

 

The thing that got me is how they talk about installs of the Unity Runtime not the game its self. Does the Runtime install a separate copy each time a new Unity game is installed, or is there ONE Runtime that all use? It's such a very weird way to try to milk money from someone, and there are huge holes (aka, no details what so ever) how they are going to accurately count genuine installs.

If they work like the Taxman, it's going to be a case of Pay Up, even if they're wrong, and they'll work out any refunds (minus a "handling" fee? lol) at a later date. If I were a Unity devs, well, I'd not be a Unity dev much longer methinks. Surely, the carp they're trying to pull now might not effect Eleon so much, but what about their next move if this current one starts raking in the cash? I'd suggest all trust is lost at this point.

If they want extra cash, why not simply go by SALES, which is a metric than can generally be very easily captured. Well, cos their suggested method mean they'd potentially get more than one fee per game purchase, it's really that simple. Greed.

Best of luck to Eleon, and other Unity devs, I hope you're not shafted too hard by this.

 

UnityPlayer.dll is the runtime component. While it can be shared across multiple programs (static code & data) normally devs sandbox their use of the player with the client program that uses it to enable upgrading applications without backward compatibility testing / forced lockstep upgrades. Empyrion installs three copies of the player for the client, dedicated server, and the solar system generator executables. Since gaming platforms are generally running only one copy of any given game at any given time this isn't a waste of memory resources. Sharing a single copy of a dll requires setup (GAC, path, etc.) which implies coordination between the different software publishers- an org like steam could devise a strategy for sharable image libraries to support multiple versioning but there isn't a lot of benefit for the additional plumbing.

 

Thanks, that makes sense. Still, I can imagine situations where the player has a Client installed on their PC, perhaps another copy on a laptop. A server install on a PC on their home network (for testing) as well as yet another copy installed on a rented server.

I wonder if Unity would flag something if say the Dev said "We've only sold 100k copies", yet the .dll has been installed many more times than that. Which stat "Wins" when it come to what Unity expect a dev to pay. It's really shady stuff.

That said, I wish I got paid for every install of Apps I've created, rather than just being paid to develop it lol.

 

Looks like John Riccitiello (the former CEO of Unity) is out because of this fisaco.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/09/technology/unity-chief-resigns-after-pricing-backlash.html