This is of course not including the yearly Unity subscription, where Unity Pro costs $2,040 per seat (although they may have Enterprise pricing)

Absolutely ridiculous. Many Unity devs are saying they’re switching engines on social media.

  • M500@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    What’s the tl:dr?

    The creators of the unity engine are charging people extra for games they have already created?

    • popcar2@programming.devOP
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      1 year ago

      Creators of the Unity engine want to charge developers per game install, the more people that install the game the more you have to pay. This includes games that already exist and never agreed to this. It also causes a lot of safety concerns, how will they confirm how many installs a game has? Are they bundling spyware with Unity games?

    • Peekystar@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      From what I’ve heard, from January 2024, any for-profit game made in Unity that meet a certain profit and download threshold will have to pay a fee to Unity per install of said game, including those released before these changes are being introduced.

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        1 year ago

        Unity also said it will track installs with its own proprietary data. Speaking to Axios, Unity also confirmed that if a player deletes a game and re-installs it, that counts as two installs, and two separate fees.

        From the article linked in comments here. That’s unbelievable. I’m at a lose for words.

        I guess they don’t want anyone to use Unity at all

        • The Pantser@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          That’s fucked because I delete and download games from my steam library all the time. If I need just a little more space I’ll delete a few games but then probably pick them back up a little later.

          • Ech@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            In this age of gaming, it’s a necessity. I don’t have endless storage space for 120+GB game files that I’m not playing to sit indefinitely. What a completely fucked plan.

        • Bizarroland@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          They’re only legal until someone challenges it. Shouldn’t take long before Microsoft has a nice little letter for them in the mail.

        • Landrin201@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Up until now companies have been getting away with this because of “user agreements.” Nobody has had the money and interest to get them in court.

          I don’t see any possible way this survives a lawsuit, for exactly the reason you said. This is almost certainly not legal but nobody has had a reason to get precedent to say it until now.

    • donuts@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      They want to charge game devs $0.20 per install. Yes, that’s right, they want to charge devs 20 cents every time somebody installs their game.

      • M500@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Thanks for responding to my post.

        That will be uhh… 0.20.

          • M500@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Now, everyone who has ever responded to one of my comments also has to pay me.

            Why a terrible company. I don’t even want to redeem their free games any more.

        • ℛ𝒶𝓋ℯ𝓃
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          1 year ago

          So 1000 installs per day (small numbers for a global title) = $200/day x 30 = $6000/mo, and then at like 10% after the hype wears off, $600/mo for the entire product lifetime (even installing on a new computer charges, so this cost doesn’t go away when new users stop coming)…

          Edit: this is actually similar to the numbers given in the original post, of an average settling at $40k / yr (so like 200k installs per year or only 550 per day across the entire world). Which like they said, yeah, is about half a million dollars over product lifetime.