I think for 99.999% of the developers on itch this changes nothing:
- you have to earn more than 200000 $ per year with your game
- WebGL games do not count. It will still be free, even if you make millions with it
Is there really anyone here who is affected by this??? Please speak up if you are affected!
It won't affect us that much financially, It will affects us more with the following things:
1. For November, there will be an offline blocking system, in which if you are without an Internet connection for 3 days, unity can't be used for offline.
2. It will also not be possible to experiment between previous and new versions, because they have eliminated everything before at once on the website (Before they deleted the 3 and 4 versions, now all except the new one).
For me this sound still rather theoretical. You can download all versions from the past 8 years. Who is developing with an engine that is older than 8 years? And who has no internet for more than 3 days? (And the offline block is not mentioned in the blog post - where is this information coming from?)
Well, I have already seen it again, and it seems that the versions up to 5 at least have returned.
But with second question, it's as if you don't care about the people who have used the engine, but who have suffered catastrophes that can leave them without internet for months or ever years (like earthquakes or hurricanes).
"Who has no internet for more than three days?"
...People on vacation. (People who have gone somewhere remote for vacation and have brought their laptop so they can work on their novel or their game dev without distractions.) People who live in a place where internet is unavailable or unreliable, and they go to the library once in a while to download things. People whose only internet is their phone, and sure, it has a hotspot, but they can't afford to use it regularly. Kids whose parents strictly regulate their internet access. Kids in boarding schools that strictly regulate internet access. People whose internet service was lost after a natural disaster, and it'll probably be fixed in a week or two but in the meantime, they have computers, just no online ability - and they're desperately interested in playing the games they have.
Why should professional Studios quit Unity?
Really? They are the ones that are affected the most!
Maybe ask Massive Monster why they plan on ditching Unity and threaten to delete their games from stores. They have a discord, I bet that one is buzzing right now.
My guess is, that is has to do with principle and not wanting to have unreliable business partners and financial risky calculations. The business is hard. And Unity is not applying the fee on financial success and sales, but on installs. That is not the same.
If you lack the imagination, think about scenarious involving pay what you want, free with adds/premium, bundles, discounts...
In other words, if no one were affected by this pricing model change, why would they try to implement it in such a way in the first place? This is costing developers more money while not giving them more benefits. This alone is reason to be angry.
In yet other words, why should a gaming company put up with a engine maker that changes pricing so, that your licensed engine now ramps up from costing you 10k $ a year to double or triple or more? The pricing for Unity pro currently is ~2k per seat a year. So having 5 developers developing in that one would cost 10k for the engine alone. Developers want money too, so your company must make enough money to employ 5 devs. Plus assets and whatnot. So you can assume that your games have to have a sales volume putting you over the thresholds. 1 million times 2 cent gives you an additional cost of 20k. And even with only 100000 that makes 15k.
Also Unity has demonstrated that they might radically change pricing. So they could change it radically again. Lowering thresholds, increasing fees, removing exceptions, counting differently, and so on. And on a short notice. This is hard to calculate. And if you try to have a company providing your livelyhood, you want stability as much as you can. Players are fickle enough.
OK, I agree. Setting up a licence model where you cannot predict what you have to pay is dangerous. Even if it is no practical problem. (And I am not a lawyer: But changing the terms of use after I installed Unity sounds illegal to me?! Could Microsoft change the terms of use for Word, so that we have to pay 1$ for every Document we create from tomorrow on?)
My not-a-lawyer guess is that the old TOS applies to old versions of Unity - but if you update to the new version, you're stuck with the new TOS. (And Unity is not going to bother telling people that existing, non-updated games are exempt from this whole fiasco.)
I suspect Unity is actually planning to totally ignore everything not distributed through a trackable service, but they don't want to announce that to the public, because then dev companies would be actively looking for ways to dodge their install tracking.
It's 2 cents/install right now.
What stops them from making it 25 cents/install next year? ("That would be stupid?" Considering how many game companies have announced they're changing engines in the last couple of days, I don't believe "stupid" would stop them.)
If dev companies and distributors accept the "per installation" fee, Unity will eventually jack up the price to whatever they think the market will bear.
I understand that this is kind of a "shitstorm" and that things might go into this direction. But as a matter of fact: Unity was never a charity-company. Also in the past they forced you into paying, if you earned money with your projects. And they take a substantial share if you buy stuff in the asset store. And the asset store is full of crappy assets - when you buy one, and it turns out that you cannot use it, good luck with getting your money back.
So, from my point of view: It does not change much...
That is the aspect of all this that worries me most. I have not dug deep, but how do they plan to track all this stuff? Do projects that meet the threshold get a mandatory addon for installation tracking? Will there be an eula we have to agree to even play those games?
Because there are things that would be quite illegal under current privacy and data protection laws. And tracking is only possible via phoning home. Tracking sales is trivial. Tracking installations for drm free games is inherently impossible. Because it would constitute drm. Granted, this would hurt the developer in theory, but once there is infrastructure for all this, there are all kinds of things, those nice Unity CEOs might come up with to upsell to naive developers.
"- you have to earn more than 200000 $ per year with your game"
Pardon my french, but this argument is fucking stupid. It's basically saying "I'm not going to gross $200,000 in any of my games, so this isn't a problem for anyone else." Which is stupid even when taken at face value.
"- WebGL games do not count. It will still be free, even if you make millions with it"
I'm reading and watching a bunch of sources stating that WebGL games will be counted per page runtime as a separate install. (ex. [Youtube]). If you have something from Unity saying they're not going to charge anything for WebGL, please post it.
https://unity.com/pricing-updates
Does the Unity Runtime Fee apply to web and streaming games?
We are not going to count web and streaming games toward your install count.
For now ;-)
People did not sign up for that kind of pricing model, when they opted to use Unity. Now they are commited, have invested ressources, time and have half finished products, they change pricing. So they might decide to change it again and charge for web games at a later point, for all we know.
