A fresh report into Unity’s hugely-controversial decision to start charging developers when their games are downloaded has thrown fresh light on the situation.
MobileGamer sources say Unity has already offered some studios a 100% fee waiver - if they switch over to Unity’s own LevelPlay ad platform.
The report quotes industry consultants that say this move is an “attempt to destroy” Unity’s main competitior in this field: AppLovin.
I actually disagree with this… without support programs in place. And I really don’t think governments should be funding game engines.
The vast majority of “new” tech companies operate at a loss. It is the only way to make inroads in a market dominated by the Google and Microsoft and Apples of the world. They pull this off via crowd funding or (less so these days) venture capital.
If they actually get the market share they then need to actually monetize. Different companies have done this to different degrees and I am inclined to put Unity in the same category as Reddit in terms of “did you really think that would at all help?”
Because if the company can’t actually try to make a profit? They will go out of business, at best.
And while I think there are definitely problem spots, this… doesn’t actually bother me all that much. It fucking sucks for the developers and I do think there need to be “grandfather” clauses for those who already have products (curious how many people are trying to pull out of Fanatical or Humble bundles right now). But this is fundamentally no different than if unity went out of business today. Any developer worth their salt would need to sunset their games or start a port. Because the unity engine is a massive attack vector and vulnerabilities will be found. And it is better to be most of the way to a godot/unreal port when the CVE is published.
This is a bullshit hypothetical that has no relevance for Unity. Unity is a well established company, that has been very successful after they revised their model to be more Indie friendly. This is a money grab attempt pure and simple. And it’s a money grab that is so bad it might actually kill Unity.
Just to add to my last point a bit:
This is actually very common in software development. Nobody is dumb enough to write ALL of their own software (okay… there are a few orgs…). So you are going to be dependent on third party libraries. Some are free and open source with licenses that aren’t GPL. Others are licensed for a small fee from other companies. And many are in the middle somewhere where you pay for support, but can use the software regardless.
And… companies change licenses over time. Open source projects change licenses over time. And sometimes, that means you can’t use it anymore. Or you don’t want to use it because the team really dropped the ball and it is a piece of shit. And that is when you get an all hands on deck to replace it.
One of our major partners recently dicked us over REAL hard by changing the terms of a license we were discussing with them to a MUCH worse one. And we are being pretty public about how unprofessional that was and “accidentally” talking about it when other partners ask us what tech we are using to do X. Mostly in the context of “Well, we were previously dependent on using Y but they actively misled us before changing their license. So we are in the process of migrating everything to Z”.
But… regardless of how salty we are and how much we and others are doing to poison the reputation of that company to those who hadn’t interacted with them before: We need to finish the port to use Z.
My problem with it is not monetizing; it is the changing of your monetization to affect games that were sold under a different model. If this was just the new TOS, ok fine. It would suck, but it’s their right to make whatever shitty monetization they want. But retroactively inflicting this on games? Shocking the development world with only a few months warning when game development takes years? No, that is not ok.
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