Oh hey, look.
The former CEO of EA made a greedy, short-sighted decision to fuck over his entire customer base.
I am shocked, friends.
SHOCKED.
Existing games built on Unity will also be hit with Runtime Fees if they meet the thresholds starting January 1.
How can you have a deal in place and just say “you’re giving me more money” and think that that’s ok?
I am altering the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further. - Vader
I can’t imagine that it is.
If that’s the case then they could simply up the charge next year to $10 to get even more money for doing absolutely nothing. And then to $20 the next year and so forth. There’s no sane court anywhere in the world who would say “Yeah, that sounds reasonable!” and even the less sane ones would think that’s bonkers.
For Unity Personal and Unity Plus users, the thresholds are $200,000 in revenue a year and 200,000 lifetime installs.
The fees also vary, with Unity Personal developers having to pay the most for every install above the threshold ($0.20)
So, if you get 200k lifetime installs but don’t get the 200k revenue a year, you don’t have to pay it?
Existing games built on Unity will also be hit with Runtime Fees if they meet the thresholds starting January 1.
OOOHOOOOO BOY, now, that’s going to hurt a fair amount of people!
Also, what about web play? I guess that’ll only count towards revenue, but not towards downloads?
If their licencing agreement permits retroactive changes like this, that is reason enough to gtfo
I’m pretty sure that even if the license agreement does have such language that it won’t uphold in court. And there are enough big companies using Unity for this to go to court if they try to come to collect.
I mean seriously, if that would be legally possible, nothing would prevent them from uping the charge to $10, $20 or even $100 per installation, applied retroactively.
Get. Fucked.
So… If the Unity’s secret spyware and algorithm suddenly decides to count an update as a new installation, you suddenly get slapped with a huge bill. Especially if you release multiple small patches and your whole player base is counted multiple times.
According to the article only installs on new devices are counted.
Furthermore this only takes efrect after a certain threshold of revenue and installs.
Ah yes, because it’s that difficult to spoof a new PC. You can run a tool similar to a kernel level anti cheat “ban bypass”, run the game, and cost the developer up to 20 cents. With a relatively simple script, this can be done many times per hour on a single PC, easily racking up cost for the developers.
This is a bad idea, no matter how you implement it. If it goes through, it will be abused.
