Backstory
So as many of you know, all of my games are made in Unity. This is because when I first started learning to make games at the age of 13, this engine was really easy to understand (also a lot of people were doing tutorials about it).
My opinion about Unity was a really positive one. It’s really easy to get started so basically allowed me to make a prototype of a game in a week using a combination of my own code and some easy-to-integrate plugins, and lastly the amazing asset store that has most of the things you need to start working on a game especially if you’re not artistically inclined. This was literally what I needed at that time for that prototype game which later became Planet Clicker.
The community around using Unity was also great. This meant that if I was facing any issues with my game, I could just search it online and most probably someone else had a similar issue. To be fair, it was not the most stable piece of software either as it kept crashing (and it sometimes still freezes on macOS now) when you try to make the build.
The changes
But now, all has changed with the new change announced by them.
From January of 2024, they will (want, at the time of writing,) charge a flat fee of 0.20$ (US dollars) for each install after the developer meets these two criteria: has made more than 200,000$ in the last 12 months and also has 200,000 lifetime installs.
The issue is not that they would take this runtime fee on purchase (which would be outrageous enough considering they also make you pay for a licence after a certain threshold) but they would take it if the person, let’s say, installed it on 3 phones or tablets. The developer, in this situation, owes Unity 0.60$ for having their game installed on 3 devices. That game may never produced any money on those 3 installs but the developer gets charged.
Also, this is a “problem” on PCs as well as nowadays things such as Steam Decks are getting popular and AAA games take a lot of space so people are more inclined to uninstall games more frequently to solve the space issue and reinstall them at a later time when they want to play the game.
Real-World Example
An example I can think of is how I constantly install and uninstall games such as Phasmophobia. That game as far as I know is made in Unity. This game as far as I know can be played on standalone VR headsets such as Meta Quest where the fee also applies. I can also see how people will attempt to play this game on Steam Decks as well. Now let’s link this with also the fact that storage nowadays is limited especially on mobile devices (Steam Deck starting at 64GB and also Meta Quest starting at 128GB).
Now you can clearly see how that adds up for a developer, especially the indie ones that make up a very big chunk if not the majority of Unity users. There are also a lot of issues with their explanation on FAQ that I just find really unprofessional especially on the one relating to piracy which is a really massive issue. They said “We will work with developers having this issue”.
Can this be used with bad intent?
I do think it can be used with bad intentions to impact the developer of a game that does not meet public expectations using things such as Virtual Machines.
My Opinion
For me personally, Unity lost my trust. Unity might’ve known how this would impact the gaming industry really hard yet they still announced this. Games such as Among Us, Genshin Impact (apparently also made in Unity), Cuphead, Beat Saber and so on from indie developers to even some of the bigger players such as Niantic (in collaboration with Nintendo) with Pokemon Go would be impacted by this measure.
What will I do? I don’t personally know what I would do with the existing projects but I know for sure I would try to not use Unity for future games. I have been looking at Godot (which is free and open-source) since the news broke out and played around with it for a bit. I don’t feel like I miss any important features so far so I may be looking into getting all of my games redone in Godot (once I get more comfortable with it) regardless if they backtrack on this or not.
