If Silksong is delayed because of this I’m going to riot!
Cult of the Lamb did come out and say they weren’t serious about delisting.
Telling people to purchase their game because they’re delisting it, then coming out later and saying, “haha jk” is kind of shitty.
Cult of the Lamb has always been shitposty with their marketing. It would be a little silly to take them seriously immediately and buy on the spot.
That does seem to be their excuse. It crosses a line when they make a call for action that benefits them monetarily and “it’s just a prank, bro” is just deflection for not great behavior, imo.
Nah dude, don’t be so eager to jump on people’s throats like this. They were being sarcastic about a difficult situation that they and many other indie developers might have to deal with, that in January 1st they might be sent a massive bill over a deal that they never agreed with.
If your conclusion here is Cult of the Lamb/Massive Monster/Devolver is being greedy rather than Unity, you are missing the point. Unity is the one actually making it so that the most sensible decision for many smaller developers barely making ends meet will be to delist before January 1st.
Sometimes people become so cynical that they go back around at losing perspective by always assuming the worst out of everything and everyone, that’s not great.
This, jumping on massive monster is definitely victim blaming. The real massive monster is unity
I think you are misunderstanding what I’m saying. I do believe they were just joking around and being sarcastic, I don’t think they were intentionally trying to fleece people for money. But when you’re running a studio and you make a call for action saying “we’re going to pull the game so buy it now!” and just expect people to somehow know you’re kidding, well, that isn’t very responsible or professional. That’s my point. I’m not sure why you’re defending them, here. It’s not the end of the World or anything, but it’s not great behavior, either.
Here we go back around to where I started with. They always been silly with their marketing. They also said they would sacrifice their players and they both have beef and flirted with Angry Birds. Nobody would take that seriously.
A quirky indie studio going “welp, better pack up and leave next year” at the Unity situation just seems par for the course. No reason to jump the gun unless they confirm that later.
I’m defending them because I think you are making too much of an issue out of it.
Can Steam buy Unity and end this nightmare?
The only way I see Unity being saved is by developers buying it out, only to render it Open-Source. And for the purpose of an open-source 3D game engine, you’ve got Godot.
I know Valve has a good reputation but I really don’t want another company owning both a major storefront and a major game engine. It’s not great to have Epic in that situation, but at least they provide competition to Steam.
If Unity fails hopefully that means another game engine company can grow and take their place and keep market competition strong.
Valve already owns Source 2 which I assume is better than unity
Source 2 is ancient and doesn’t even come close to modern Unity. Unity added a lot of modern stuff in the last few years (obviously) like physically-based rendering, which make a world of a difference in games.
How do you know, source 2 isn’t publicly available yet if I’m not mistaken.
You’re never going to see Source 2, you will see S&box though which is based on Source 2
I’m pretty sure valve has stated source 2 will be publicly available in the future just like source 1 is. They haven’t ever really betrayed or misled me in the 10+ years I’ve been on steam so I’m going to believe Valve.
Valve’s really slow to announce anything and given that there’s only I dunno, three games right now using Source 2, they’ve probably forgotten about it. Furthermore, looking at how S&box is shaping up, they could always just buy Facepunch and make it the ‘licensable’ option because it looks more feature complete. I wouldn’t be surprised if S&box shakes out to be the Source 2 you can use at home. Source 2’s featureset is more or less dictated by what Valve wants to build, which makes it a poor choice unless you wanna make a VR FPS game or a Moba.
Well, to be fair the Epic Games Store is not a major storefront.
From their FAQ, looks like Unity doesn’t have any real way of dealing with pirated or fake installs. Their FAQ says you have to work with them when that happens so they can correct your bill. It doesn’t say Unity will automatically filter those installs out.
pirated? they want developers to pay Unity for people pirating their game???
Officially no, but the wording on the FAQ says it’s the developer’s job to take it up with them to resolve it. So it’s clear they don’t have any safeguard and only after you’re affected you can talk to them lmfao.
Does the Unity Runtime Fee apply to pirated copies of games? We are happy to work with any developer who has been the victim of piracy so that they are not unfairly hurt by unwanted installs.
Same thing goes for “install-bombing”:
We are not going to charge a fee for fraudulent installs or “install bombing.” We will work directly with you on cases where fraud or botnets are suspected of malicious intent.
So not only are the fees outrageous, but now devs are responsible for making sure this whole system isn’t being abused. It’s not gonna be long until people figure out how the install count is updated, and will proceed to weaponize it lmfao.
and don’t forget that this is “we’ll work with you” - i.e. you’d better build your own analytics into your game to prove your case otherwise unity can go “well assume 10% are bad installs - now pay for 90%”
This needs to turn into a class action suit that results in John Tortellini having his oxygen rights revoked. I can’t imagine shareholders will be happy finding out that John Riceroni has been selling off Unity’s stock, and I’m pretty sure what Unity’s trying to do here is straight-up illegal in the US. Fuck John Rigatoni. God, I was so happy thinking he’d died and gone to hell after EA, but nope, still alive and well.
Hahaaa nah, ToS:
The Parties agree that any arbitration will be conducted in their individual capacities only and not as a class action or other representative action, and the Parties expressly waive their right to file a class action or seek relief on a class basis.
Forced arbitration is one of the most villainous legal practices still somehow allowed in the US.
Arbitration is often a good thing, by avoiding clogging up courts and arbitrators can sometimes be better than whatever judge you’d get (since both parties have to agree to the arbitrator). It’s still legally binding and arbitrators have made lots of great rulings.
But not as a replacement for class action. The whole point of class actions is to make it much more viable for many people to be represented because only one affected person has to deal with managing an expensive lawsuit and there’s just one case instead of hundreds of thousands of arbitration cases (which still cost a ton of money for lawyers). So IMO arbitration is great, but shouldn’t be allowed to replace class actions specifically.
With all your puns, I still don’t what John Cappelletti’s real name is.
I think it’s, never working in this industry again.
Game Dev Story… And every Kairosoft game.
Did they just forget they sell mobile games?
This is going to get so bad…Go godot.
Looking forward to pihole lists that block every single domain from ubity.
god, I didn’t even consider that yet
Im looking forward to what happens next, do they hardcode it so the runtime doesnt work if it doesnt receive a response from home, effectively making it “must be connected to internet” or will they allow us pihole users to bypass the telemetry.
If they do that always-on-drm crap I will be very disappointed.
If they kill Cult of the Lamb over this. There will no longer be any reason to live.
The devs followed up indicating that the tweet about delisting the game on Jan 1st was a joke, but it’s still a shitty situation for developers
Oh fuck no. Silksong is never coming out.
Is there a way to convert it to use Godot or Unreal? I understand nothing about programming a game but… oh damn
It’s doable, but a tedious pain in the ass.
Not really. Assets are more or less portable with some effort, but not the logic. There are tools to help you port your code but it more or less requires a complete re-write.
though to be fair, a big part of writing the logic is figuring out the logic, designing the system and interactions etc. so while it is a big task, its much smaller than starting over from scratch
Fair enough, but it’s still a massive time and resource sink. You also can’t really implement new features during the re-write lest project creep gets out of control, and even after the rewrite the product will be less stable than the original for quite a while until it’s had sufficient time to mature.
It might be worth the investment to ditch proprietary software from a predatory company and jump to open source though, which can’t really pull shit like this in its future.
Something else to think about is that it will potentially make it so there are more patches required, and those patches may take more time to cycle to production. Companies that had deadlines and a work schedule planned are now thrown into disarray.
Not necessarily since different toolsets have different logic operators and transformers and the logic isn’t always 1-1. I’ve moved enough code from even the same language but different implementations, nothing to say of entirely different system and languages.
Speedruns show how much of a bodge jobs a lot of games are and how much they could be broken.
Jist like in writing, you run the tool, you proof-read, repeat
Not instantly. This could take months or even years of additional work.
No, they’d have to start from scratch. They’re entirely different engines and everything is very specific to the engine, down to the tooling and languages used.
Oh my…what a waste of time, money, old games will be removed I imagine, knowledge. All to gain what? Developers are already moving away from Unity. It’s one company after another going to hell and causing damage.
It depends.
I’m working on a game with Unity and the software design has been done in a way that keeps most the game itself as data, and uses the Unity stuff mainly as something to display multiple views on the state of the data (a 3D view of the game space, multiple UI elements diving into slices of the data an so on) - basically a Model-View-Controller Architecture, so moving from Unity to something else doesn’t require a rewrite (in fact such structure makes it possible, for example, to with some ease change the game’s visuals from 3D to 2D), though it would still be quite a lot of work.
However my game is survival-management in space (within one or more generated star-systems, so it was simplified down to a 2D plane) which doesn’t relly on Unity things like terrain, navigation meshes or even colliders to constrain the movement of objects in the game, so calculating “what happens next” (say, the movement of planets or the guidance of ships going from planet to planet) gets decided using Maths at the data level without going through the Unity layer, and Unity is mainly the means to get user input comes and the layer that gets updated with the state of the data at the end of each cycle (i.e. game objects get moved around) which it the uses for rendering.
Other games which are not reliant on Unity to do the heavy lifting for objects interactiong with other objects on a 3D space, such as 2D platformers, can probably use a similar architecture, but for example something like Valheim or Planet Crafter (were the player controls a humanoid avatar on a 3D world which is mainly terrain) is probably much harder to move out from Unity,
Not to mention I’m sure they use third party tools to help with things. Bigger games like Genshin Impact for example, are on an older version of Unity where they heavily modified the engine to suit their needs. That would take a tremendous amount of work to move, and they’d have to redesign their entire graphics pipeline. Which also Godot has gotten better, but is still far behind the others in terms of high end graphics. That’s why it’s usually seen as the go to for indies, and not so much high end games. Also they don’t plan on making anything like DOTS, but I’m not sure how relevant that actually is.
Third-party tools might or not be a problem depending on whether those tools also support other frameworks or there being equivalent tools for other frameworks.
Again, it depends how tightly coupled the game is to the framework (directly or via 3rd party tools), but yeah, the more work you’ve sunk into the Unity-specific side of things and the more tightly coupled your game is to it (i.e. doing everything via Unity rather than, as I did, make the game run as a data model which then dictates how the visual layer - which is where Unity mainly is - is updated) the harder it will be to move.
Mind you, the Unity guys really pushed for devs to go via it for everything (it’s software design and architecture aren’t exactly great) in a sort of spaghetti design, so I expect a lot of indie devs using Unity who don’t have quiet as much experience and/or it’s not really broad, will get burned due to falling into that specific trap.
The Godot tools are significantly behind Unity. Unity has a much bigger community and a built in store for their addons. Godot has neither, and has been around for less time. Godot doesn’t even have a built in terrain tool for example, and the most advanced plug-in for it is still pretty basic.
I don’t think one can say “it will be a problem” because there are so many different ways to do a game (do you really think “terrain tools” matter in something like Terraria???!), all one can say is that “it might be a problem”, which is what I’m saying, and judging from my experience with it it will be more of a problem for people doing 3D worlds with terrain, pathing and so on than for people doing 2D or, like me using 3D as a sort of moving gallery to show in a nice way what would otherwise be pretty bland.
Whilst I’m currently on vacations, next week I’ll have to start evaluating both Godot and Unreal for my project - which, as I said, whilst it does show things in a 3D view, is architectured so that the game essentially runs in data space with user-input coming from the framework (and it’s pretty easy to change that because it’s centralized) and on the other side the framework rendering visual views of the data.
My plans to upgrate to the latest Unity are now shelved and I’ve already planned how I’ll remove the last pieces of Unity influence (basically Vector2) from my data layer and make sure it’s totally separate.
You can port over a lot of C# code into Godot, but there are things that are engine specific. However, they are similar enough that you can just work on refactoring without sgarting from scratch.
I’ve ported a few of my projects from Unity and it’s not impossible, it’s just a lot of copy and pasting and making a few changes
That’s good to hear! I’m thinking of learning Godot, so that means all the knowhow is transferable, yay
While it would potentially be easier to learn all the not-programming stuff that’s different whilst sticking with a programming language you’re familiar with, I would recommend also having a play with GDScript too. It’s well documented and pretty easy to get started with (syntactically it’s basically Python.)
Someone has pulled off porting an Unreal map over to Unity before, but a lot of the maps lighting and other effects were completely lost. Look up Stanley parable rocket league. It’s definitely possible to port Unity maps to other engines and vice versa, but it would take a lot of work and a lot of rebuilding everything from scratch
So Davey Wreden, writer and creator of the stanley parable, has a brother who is a youtuber, DougDoug. When ultra deluxe dropped Davey joined his brother playing through the game again. Anyway, at one point in the video he mentioned that in order to port over the rocket league map they needed to hire an outside consultant to port it.
Migrating really large software is incredibly time consuming and difficult. My background is with backend servers, not games, but some large framework migrations we’ve done were a multi year effort and IMO they weren’t nearly as big or fundamental as game engines can be (though we did have to maintain near perfect uptime, which isn’t a concern for an unreleased game).
I love OSs and I contribute to a few projects, but using godot for a project of silksong calibre is asking for a disaster
Have you worked with Godot? The developers of Cassette Beasts seem pretty happy with it.
I’m desperate. I loved Hollow Knight so much.
Probably not but the good news is a lot of the pains of developing a game is that unlike most projects you need 10 artists for every one programmer
So, while core logic will likely change, all the other assets and planning is done. It shouldn’t be as bad as remaking it from scratch
I’m not an artist but some of that work may be done in the engine, and so is not simple imported into it. I assume much is though.
I am not an artist either, so take this with a grain of salt, but a quick Google search suggests the two should be convertible
1.5 years of learning unity gone down the shitter. here I come, godot
even if they backtrack, trust is ruined at this point. this only makes sense if you’re trying to destroy the company intentionally and short your stock on the way out. what the fuck
1.5 years of learning unity gone down the shitter.
And this is the real damage to their business here. They clearly lost sight of their business model: Create an army of developers who know their product very well, so that it’s on a short list of products studios are all but forced to consider.
A wave of developers who know soemthing other than Unity or Unreal has the potential to turn the games development ecosystem totally on its head. They didn’t shoot themselves on the foot, they possibly shot themselves in the femoral artery.
They didn’t shoot themselves on the foot, they possibly shot themselves in the femoral artery.
I myself have been describing it as them shooting themselves in the chest, and are now bleeding out on the floor asking how it happened.
The CEO did sell a bunch of shares before this was announced, I hear.
That’s clickbait journalism.
He sold 2000 shares for $40/share, which he then immediately bought back for $1.42/share.
https://finance.yahoo.com/screener/insider/RICCITIELLO JOHN S
Which means he sold at the top, then bought more at the bottom so he can ride the train back up to do the same thing again.
This isn’t a good thing.
Pretty much the dream insider trading plan. But $80k doesn’t deem like much for a CEO
It’s definitely not. It’s probably just a free $80k his contract allowed him to get.
It was probably part of his contract. It wasn’t $40 when he sold it. As probably allowed by his contract, he sold it back to the company and bought it back for pennies. It’s just compensation not some conspiracy on his individual part.
What you said doesn’t make any sense. Either it wasn’t $40 a share when he sold it like you said in this comment or it was $40 a share like you said in the previous comment.
I guarantee you his contract looks like something like this, “If you meet X performance metric, the company will buy N amount of shares (maximum 2000) back at the maximum/average stock price within Y days and sell you back the amount of shares sold (maximum 2000) for Z dollars.”
You’re describing something worse.
6 years of professional experience for me, only engine I’ve used.
Yes, but no. My company is working in a proprietary engine, so there is almost no one we can hire with that engine experience, but we still want people who became familiar and strong with other engines because they can do it again with ours.
Don’t be too discouraged by this, but start learning your next engine.
Don’t forget those skills are transferable!
Streams of events, object manipulation and shit is used everywhere. Just a few minor concept changes, just like from one company to another.
Concept, yes. The actual infrastructure, tool chains, and processes are usually not. The IDE is different, the language is different, the keyboard shortcuts are different.
The only non-pain point are probably assets. But the code is not really transferable.
Most of the stuff needs to be completely rewritten.
Yes, I understand! I’m talking from the perspective of someone that learned those skills.
That learned about tool chains, about the required infrastructure, the processes, IDE configuration, etc.
I’m not saying the change is painless. I’m saying for each of those, there’s an equivalent in any other game making tool. The foundations help to learn the new ones faster. And the new ones takes you generalised knowledge further. Which only contributes to your professionals growth.
At the end of the day, every technology will be replaced. Being able to transfer skills between different scenarios is a valuable skill itself. :)
I understand the controversy, especially in light of the recent Reddit bullshit. But I don’t think I understand the tech.
For the sake of it, let’s focus only on games that are paid for, installed on a system (or downloaded using Game Pass), and do not involve a multiplayer element. (Hollow Knight, Cuphead, etc)
Is there some ongoing resource use (on Unity’s end) when people download or play these games? Like, when I play Hollow Knight, my system isn’t connecting to Unity to use their servers to run the game on my home system, is it? When I download a game to my system, an I downloading the engine separately from the software, thereby using Unity’s servers?
As abhorrent as the Reddit API change was, at least they were charging for the ongoing consumption of some digital resource (Reddit data). Unless I’m misunderstanding something, this just seems more like trying to collect a residual after the fact.
Is there some ongoing resource use (on Unity’s end)
Nope. The engine is part of the game once compiled. So all hosting and bandwidth cost goes to steam/gog/whoever is selling the game.
They are just trying to get more of that sweet viral game money.
How do they track installs then?
I’d assume they’d amend the contract to require that a tracker be added to the binaries of the game. Or something.
They can’t really… unity itself doesn’t have an installer so not sure how they could track ‘installs’ reliably, the installer is added by the developer. If they add tracking to the library that (a) creates issues for people using app stores as now you have to declare you’re tracking people, and that can be grounds for rejection (you need a watertight privacy policy at the very least, and ‘we send it to a company in the US’ isn’t going to fly), and (b) not all apps are installed over the internet, or given internet access. 3d visualisation is more than games.
Unity hasn’t been very profitable, for most of its users it’s completely free. I don’t blame them for needing money to improve the engine, but not like this
Unity Revenue reporting has always been “self-reported” by users. If they think you’re lying and aren’t on the right license they send the complkance team to make sure you’re giving enough. Unity has no way of knowing installs because as you said it doesn’t connect to Unity.
You don’t download anything separately, the runtime is included with the game.
The runtime could be updated with a phone home feature to track the install
No because this goes against GDPR. They aren’t allowed to have anything identifying users “phoning home” without explicit consent/logging into a launcher.
If it included identifiable information then yeah it would be a breach. This is just using a mac address most likely that will also if they do it right will be hashed client side so even if a bad actor could do something with that info they won’t actually get it anything from it anyway.
Then we just fall back to the issue of them not being able to identify installs, reinstalls, bad actors spoofing the source etc…
If they could track installs properly they would have solved piracy already
Well they’ve mainly said (recently) that they’ll count new device installs, but not reinstallations on the same device. Which i believe. It’s the whole, exemptions of charity sales and pirate copies is where they’re spouting bullshit, or is PR/ higher ups making quick premises to placate without the engineers saying that that’s possible, but now they’ve got to find a way. Which I don’t think they will without heavily bloating the runtime into super shitty DRM realms
without explicit consent
Couldn’t they just add another ToS checkbox to click when installing the game?
TOS is given through the publisher who would be bound by GDPR by all sorts of regulations about storing that stuff.
This is basically like if John Deere started following everyone around so they could charge a farmer 1 cent every time you bite into a vegetable you bought at Walmart.
No, there are no costs for Unity in this situation. The way they’ll need to track installs is with the unity runtime, which gets packaged with games made using Unity.
This is what economists call “rent-seeking”, where companies seek to extract more profit by charging subscriptions, rather than introducing desirable products. Adobe, AutoCAD, Microsoft Office, and the Reddit API are all high profile examples of rent-seeking.
For anyone interested to sign I found this petition against the new fee. https://chng.it/kYpqWBBHbB
Hoping with all the backlash Unity is forced to role it back. Thank you to everyone posting alternatives, I will be checking these out :)
Honestly I don’t see most of the indie companies keep working with Unity unless they have no choice. Even if they roll it back, who’s to say that they won’t do that again next year?
The fact that they count you retroactively for eligibility means they want to try and rake as much money as possible.
There was some sort of similar issue a year or two ago and it wasn’t enough to drive people away. I suspect the long-term picture is that any given business either slowly grows to the scale that Unreal Engine is a better fit anyway and abandon Unity or very very very slowly we see Indies move to Godot. Though it’ll be more that new indies will form studios around breakthrough hits made in Godot and be Godot studios from the start (and replace older Unity studios as part of the natural turnover of small to medium sized studios) until there is a tipping point where there’s enough Godot developers floating around that it becomes easier for existing Unity studios to switch than to keep putting up with Unity’s shit. That’s a slow process though. 5-10 years imho (if ever.)
This is a far more nuanced situation, but even in what you’re describing the service is then ceased, you don’t get to continue using the service on the previous terms.
I’ve seen a claim that the old terms of service explicitly stated that you could do so so long as you didn’t update to the newer version. Which is probably fine for most developers who are already deep into a Unity project. (Though as Unity has now taken down their GitHub page with those terms on it, I haven’t yet seen anyone link to an easy to verify and read copy for people to see if that’s true or not.
I don’t think an online petition has ever changed anything in the history of the internet.
Or in anything else 😂
Thoughts and prayers
There is no way they can legally enforce retroactively charging. How the fuck is that even possible or legal?
Unity is not a product, it’s an ongoing subscription. You can distribute Unity as part of your game as long as you have a subscription.They changed the terms of the subscription for next year. If you don’t have a subscription then you cannot redistribute Unity. So your choice is to either accept the new terms, or pull your game from the stores.
wait so if unity goes bankrupt everyone is fucked?
Pretty much, yes
They’d sell off the IP, and somebody else would continue licensing out the engine. Development might be dead, but that doesn’t matter for already released games anyways.
If there’d be truly no successor, people could just continue using their existing Unity engine binary, since there’d be nobody to stop them.
Another reason why everything is subscription based these days, they can change the terms at will
Per their lawyers it’s in the TOS. Everyone just hits “I agree” when they get that EULA but there’s always a “we reserve the right to fuck you over” buried in the fine print.
I don’t think I’ve ever read one where the clause “we can change any if this at any point in the future and you automatically accept it” wasn’t there. All the fucking time it’s there. Everyone is always agreeing to this shit all the time. That’s why many services can just change their prices and whatever how they want and only send an email “next month the price is X”.
Everything is rotten.
I’m waiting for a Legal Eagle breakdown or something. I’ve been thinking the exact same thing. Sneakily removing stuff from their TOS in GitHub a while back is dodgy.
I read somewhere that they removed their TOS entirely from GitHub but I would love a breakdown of this too. I’m not familiar with how the Unity agreement works.
Depends what is in the contract. If the contract says devs on are the hook for any future fees they deem necessary, then the devs are on the hook. Unless they want to pay a lawyer big bucks to take on the company behind Unity with their billions of dollars of revenue and the lawyers that buys. How many indie devs do you think can afford to do that?
Not just indie devs bro
Pokemon is made in unity
Hearthstone too
They aren’t retroactively charging. They’re charging a new fee going forward.
They are retroactively applying the new pricing model to games that have been out for years. That’s what I meant. So they’re not back-billing for previous downloads, but already-released games don’t get grandfathered in.
I’m always open to corrections though.
Games that have been out for years arent going to hit the minimum 12 month downloads/revenue figures unless they are still very popular, no?
I dont agree with this downloads based fee to be clear.
Yeah, I’m not 100% sure. There are instances too though where someone gets a new PC and installs their old games. I think it would still count in those cases, which is just silly to me. It all feels like a massive cash grab, or they’re trying to fudge the stock value.
So there’s a little nuance here. They aren’t going to charge you for the downloads that already happened, it’s on all downloads moving forward, even if the game has already been released. I still think it’s ridiculous, but it is not the same as suddenly hitting you with a bill for all the downloads the game already had. That would not hold up in any court. But the latter case…we’ll see. Depends on the specifics of the initial agreement I suppose. Totally possible they are within their rights even if it’s scummy.
Correct me if I’m wrong, that’s my understanding. I don’t think if you had a million downloads last year, for instance, you’ll be charged for those.
deleted by creator
Yes, the fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. We look at a game’s lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.
I read that as it’s billing moving forward but they’ve been very opaque thus far so I’m willing to entertain there’s a contradiction elsewhere lol
As I understand it, they’re billing moving forward but counting past installs for the purpose of figuring out if you have to pay.
yeah i deleted my post because they keep changing their minds.
its retroactive (for now) in the sense that they started counting from before, just only billing for new ones.
No, you won’t be charged retroactively for previous downloads. But the change does retroactively affect games previously released on Unity.
So last year you made decisions on your game’s price and revenue model that are no longer true. if you made your small game free to play with microtransactions and its had more than 200,000 installs you’re probably shitting yourself. Unity will be charging $0.20 per install even if it’s to the same device multiple times. A million installs of your game is you having to write a check to Unity for $160,000 for installations alone.
So your microtransactions game now must average a spend of at least $0.20 per install, plus per seat licensing of Unity, plus your overhead for it to even begin to make a profit.
And Unity has said that multiple installations on the same device will all be charged. So it’s inevitable that script kiddies with bad attitudes are going to install a game thousands of times. Unity has said you can appeal this type of behavior, but that puts the onus of detecting and reporting this stuff on the devs, further increasing their workload and risk.
I’ve been wondering about this too.
You mean that Silksong could be delayed? pikachu face
It’s going to be the new Duke Nukem Forever…
Except it might be good :p
