RIP Unity. First they partnered with Ironsource. Who are the people behind InstallCore it’s a wrapper for bundling software installations. It tricks people into installing enough browser toolbars and other bloat to hurt their PCs. Windows Defender and MalwareBytes blocks it. Now Unity does this shit.
Just a reminder that if Unity developers with pro licenses coming to Godot contribute even a small fraction of what they might have paid for those licenses on Unity, Godot can develop even faster.
This is a good way to incentivize game developers to just not use Unity and just some other engine that does this.
Great for short term profits which makes the quarterly statements look good, but bad for long term sustainability.
The CEO of Unity used to the the CEO of EA.
It explains a lot.
A CEO who can’t manage. Shocker.
Short term profits making quarterly reports look better to stakeholders. Isn’t that how 80% of these bigwigs get their job in the first place? We should be calling it the Zaslav Model at this point 😂.
Just because it looks better to shareholders now doesn’t make it a good business decision. I swear the majority of CEO types don’t give a damn if the company goes under in a few years because they either:
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Have a golden parachute in place by sucking up to the Board.
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Will move on to another CEO position at another company before it folds. Bonus points if they golden parachute on the way out.
Modern corporate management model is just broken.
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This is absolutely mad vendor lock in. I’m doing the maths and if you create the next flappy bird and it goes viral and gets 50 million downloads in a month, you’d owe unity $10 million dollars before you’d even received your first monetization cheque (you did launch with a full monetization plan, right? right? oh.)
edit: i forgot they had moneitzation limits too, so no - this situation wouldn’t quite happen until they earned $200,000 in revenue. Though the potential to go viral and find yourself underwater because of the massive unity bill in comparison to your income is still a possibility
Unity going the way of Reddit
This is incredibly scummy. Not just for the obvious reason, but also because this is a business to business deal that developers have little room to avoid. It essentially encourages per-install charges for users, or at least limits on how many times you can install the software - which is completely unreasonable, they should only ever limit concurrent installations. If I want to upgrade to a new computer I should be able to move all my software over to it.
This might kill entire indie projects.
Me, a hobbyist that never planned to sell anything I made: chortle my balls, Unity Tech!
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Man I was just getting into game development and learning Unity.
I guess it’s time to pivot into Unreal or Godot or something.
Anybody have recommendations?
Unreal has similar business model, so Godot.
depends on your platform and your level of experience. Both unreal and godot have steep learning curves depending on where you come from. GDevelop is very accessible but also caps out quite fast. Great for making prototypes and getting simple games out there but depending on your level of ambition you will probably outgrow it sooner or later.
I work for a small (15 people) Unity gaming company. Will let you know what the CEO says, just shared the actual Unity blogpost
Edit: Update - CEO added a gravestone emoji and said “yikes”
So… If the Unity’s secret spyware and algorithm suddenly decides to count an update as a new installation, you suddenly get slapped with a huge bill. Especially if you release multiple small patches and your whole player base is counted multiple times.
Also piracy lmao
According to the article only installs on new devices are counted.
Furthermore this only takes efrect after a certain threshold of revenue and installs.
The clarification on Xitter states deleting and reinstalling is 2 charges, the same as installing to 2 different devices. https://twitter.com/stephentotilo/status/1701679721027633280?s=20
That’s madness.
Imagine the player outcry being too just uninstall and reinstall games over she over to punish the devs.
Yeah as petty as some people are over games I can see a developer pissing them off and a bunch of players banding together to uninstall and reinstall games over and over. They could even script it. Bad idea all around.
This, so much of this.
WoW players doxxed the devs (lots of pizza was ordered) once, as they were pissed over real IDs being introduced to the account for the game.
Except that that is a back pedal on their part and their FAQ plainly says they actually have no way of tracking what is a new install versus a re-install; which is why they decided to count all installs to begin with.
Welp, guess it’s time to uninstall Unity
That’ll be $10.
You know, at some point Microsoft and Apple are going to enable developers to charge people to uninstall software, and that’ll be the driving force that finally forces the public to adopt Linux en masse.
Nothing is ever going to not happen as much as this.
Oh, I hope you’re right.
Wanna bet he secretly has a bunch of Epic Games stock?
They did sell their thousands of shares before this shit so I wouldn’t be surprised
Looks like they know very well what they are doing. This seems illegal, but we all know they get away with it.
Common proprietary L
