2y ago

Creators of Slay the Spire will migrate their next game to a new engine if Unity doesn't completely revert their changes

Picture taken from their Twitter

2y ago

Creators of Slay the Spire will migrate their next game to a new engine if Unity doesn't completely revert their changes

105 comments

I've seen this somewhere before
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  I've seen this somewhere before
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
  
  Bot woke up and said "I'll show you how deep the thread goes"
  
  Yo wtf is happening lol
  Edit: There's a github issue opened for this
  
  Oh no.
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  I've seen this somewhere before
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I hope all the devs with weight followsuit. My little project moving won't really disturb anyone but me. Sweeping and sudden policy changes like this are bullshit.
- What I'm hoping is that gamers take some of the big pocket publishers that use Unity and abuse the absolute fuck out of them so they send their lawyers after Unity for the obviously unenforceable terms.
  Unfortunately Unity will probably just settle with them for nothing to avoid them setting precedents.
It's like crawling back to an abusive partner thinking things wont get worse.
What happened?
- TL;DR of the situation is that Unity released a statement 2 days ago saying they want successful developers to pay up to 20 cents every time a user installs a Unity game starting from Jan 1 2024, even if your game was already released. This caused a huge ruckus in the game dev community and many developers want to switch away from Unity.
  
  Note that it's "per install" (they clarified that reinstalling on the same device only counts as one install), not per unit sold. And Unity will also track pirated copies, so the devs would still have to pay the fee even if they didn't sell it to you.
  
  Retroactively charging developers, that's stupid.
  However, I'm not knowledgeable on any Game Industry economics, but isn't $0.20 on a $20-$60 game negligible? I understand some people will have multiple devices so the developer could be out $1. On a $20 game that someone sells 1000 copies, that's only $200 of $20,000 sales (maybe $800 in fees at the high end). I've used Unity before and it's still a pretty solid game engine with easy to use tooling; using it would definitely save you time to build your game (time=money). Additionally, if I were to be building a game studio, everyone knows unity, so it would be easy to hire or find contractors who can help with pieces of the game. It makes sense from a business standpoint for me unless I'm missing something.
  Is there a max fee? On the opposite side of the spectrum I could see DDOS-like attacks on game developers where an attacker can spin up a bunch of virtual machines and then keep installing the game to charge the developer $1mil dollars.
- This.
  Basically changed their pricing model to fleece Indy devs. Some devs would have owed more money than they ever even made on their games.
  
  Fleece every Unity dev pretty much, even if big studios can afford it.
They copy from Spez book LOL. Dev definitely gonna pass the price to us users. We're fcukd
- The thing is they can't even do this reliably. If you charge the customer once on purchase, but don't know if they are going to install it once or ten times or if they are going to fuck with you and install it a hundred times, then how much do you want to charge?

105 comments