Presumably Unity decided they had too many customers and needed to get rid of most of them. Not only is this an insane thing to charge developers for, there are all kinds of concerns like:
- do pirated copies cost devs money?
- couldn’t customers organize mass install retaliations to bleed a company dry over any fickle thing?
- how are they tracking installs, and what does that mean for privacy?
This just seems stupid from where I sit.
Another reason to use Godot.
great time to jump to either unreal or godot
Progressing along the enshitification line nicely.
I feel so bad for indie game devs using Unity right now…
That does sound like someone at Unity had a fatal brain hemorrhage.
Haven’t read the article yet, but I wonder if this counts for existing games (read: existing games which update to the new Unity version) too?
It does.
Note: Unity said it won’t be applied retroactively when you hit the cap, the install fee is charged after the threshholds have been met for additional installs. However, it will apply to games already on the market. However, games that do not hit the thresholds or aren’t monetised at all will not be required to pay the fees.
Yea, just got to that part. It also seems that they plan on keeping the previous subscriptions running while additionally leeching off successfully games.
At least the free games don’t have to pay the penalty.
Goodbye Unity, nice shot in the foot. Unreal is the next one.
It’s not user specific with the counting either. One user downloads on PS5 and Steam? That’s two installs of your game. Uninstalls then reinstalls? Yep that’s another.
