Unity Technologies have announced an overhaul to their fees for game developers, which now includes tracking game installs and revenue.

Presumably Unity decided they had too many customers and needed to get rid of most of them. Not only is this an insane thing to charge developers for, there are all kinds of concerns like:

  • do pirated copies cost devs money?
  • couldn’t customers organize mass install retaliations to bleed a company dry over any fickle thing?
  • how are they tracking installs, and what does that mean for privacy?

This just seems stupid from where I sit.

  • ekky43@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    5·
    1 year ago

    That does sound like someone at Unity had a fatal brain hemorrhage.

    Haven’t read the article yet, but I wonder if this counts for existing games (read: existing games which update to the new Unity version) too?

    • ampersandrew@kbin.socialOP
      5·
      1 year ago

      It does.

      Note: Unity said it won’t be applied retroactively when you hit the cap, the install fee is charged after the threshholds have been met for additional installs. However, it will apply to games already on the market. However, games that do not hit the thresholds or aren’t monetised at all will not be required to pay the fees.

      • ekky43@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        2·
        1 year ago

        Yea, just got to that part. It also seems that they plan on keeping the previous subscriptions running while additionally leeching off successfully games.

        At least the free games don’t have to pay the penalty.