Unity announced a new fee structure today, and developers are none too happy. “We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the change.
“This only makes sense. Ovens are a very big part of what makes food and designing and building the ovens costs a lot of work. They deserve some share of the food made in the oven. That food should ideally be proportional to how many edibles items are made by the chef, which should be proportional to the amount of times the food is baked. And this is only one of their plans. There are other plans as well. So maybe someone can explain to me why this is not just a sound business decision apart from: I don’t want to give away my baked food?”
It’s clearly not an oven, but an ingredient.
Holy fucking shit… The game concepts and mechanics are the ingredients!
Does a pizza contain an oven? No. Does a pizza contain tomatoes? Yes. Therefore tomatoes are an ingredient and an oven is not.
Does a game contain Unity? Yes. Therefore Unity is an ingredient.
The game ships with Unity which handles the rendering, physics, sound and a whole bunch more. Basically Unity is a pizza base, but it gives you a bunch of toppings too. The developer combines the base with the toppings and voila you’ve got a game. Not saying that last part isn’t hard, but a business model where Unity, or any game engine for that matter, is charged proportionally to the amount of installs isn’t a totally unreasonable business model.