Some developers are seriously considering de-listing their games from online shops when the Unity Runtime Fee kicks off at the start of next year, meaning some titles built on Unity could end up being temporarily — or permanently — unavailable. Here's what developers are saying about the Unity Runtime Fee on social media, and what games could be impacted.
deleted by creator
The difference here is that it’s pissing off businesses, not users.
Yeah businesses can sue you for pulling out the rug like this.
Users cannot.
Pokemon is made on the unity engine, so one of the scariest legal teams in the world. Nintendo doesn’t like it when people take a little whipped cream off of the mcflurry, and this threatens to take the whole McFlurry.
Oh that’s gonna be a treat to watch, assholes punching each other
What exact grounds would a business sue for?
Retroactive change of terms for already released unchanged products? I don’t know the legal details but it seems pretty strange that they can just say they will charge over something for products that were finished and released under different terms before all this. The devs may not even be opening those projects on Unity anymore.
There’s nothing implicit about “opening the project in unity” that needs to be a trigger for terms to change.
If you make and distribute a game made in unity, then you are distributing some unity IP. You would need the license holder to grant you permission to do that. The terms you agree to with unity are what grant you the right to distribute this.
So this has very little to do with “have you opened the editor lately”, and is more similar to when e.g. Dead By Daylight has to stop selling a dlc character because they don’t renew an agreement with the rights holders.
That’s because digital media licensing is a whole circus. We aren’t talking of using someone else’s likeness or characters. What if Microsoft Office decides that they will charge retroactively about every file previously created with those tools regardless of what compensation they may already have agreed to and received? Does that seem even remotely reasonable in the least?
Do publishing houses need to pay leases to printer manufacturers per page printed on top of their own material costs? Do they need to pay every time a new reader opens the book the first time?
It’s not reasonable to just go “the company said so, therefore this is how it has to work”, that’s just being a chump.
No it is not - those businesses ARE the users. Unless by user you mean consumers
My real point is that one of these userbases has lawyers and are highly risk-averse.
Pedantically though, yes.
Unity games include Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, Pokémon GO, Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail and Marvel Snap.
I doubt The Pokémon Company, MiHoYo and Marvel/Disney will just let Unity shove this decision at them, especially when some of these are have tens of millions of players and many more downloads per player.
Add Hearthstone and Legends of Runeterra to that list as well
MiHoYo’s games are free-to-play on mobile platfroms, right? If they’ll going to get charged 20c per install, they’ll going to get royally fucked because most of free-to-play users aren’t buying anything. IMO that’s a huge incentive to switch ASAP, unless they have special deal with unity and not affected by this new pricing scheme.
I wouldn’t say MiHoYo would be fucked because they are making bank. But they will definitely get a massive bill on top of however much they already paid Depending on whether Unity counts updates as additional downloads, that’s even more money. It might be enough to make them fight it. This whole change in monetization is probably aimed at mobile games in general
We barely had a mass exodus from Reddit. It was quite modest lol
That being said, I popped my head in on reddit last week to find something, and it definitely seems noticeably worse at a glance. Or maybe I’ve just had enough distance from it now that I see the warts more plainly.
No we did have a mass Exodus from reddit, it’s just people stopped using the platform altogether instead of coming here.
Do you have any numbers? The only stats I saw were in the early throes of the black out. I haven’t seen anything lately showing a significant drop in DAU’s.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, I just haven’t seen anything indicating that
deleted by creator
I imagine it will get a bump. I’d love to see more developers using Godot, more tutorials, more in the asset library. The engine itself is quite good, but it doesn’t have a huge ecosystem built around it the way Unity does.
Plus unlike unity, being closed source, devs can actually contribute to the engine for others to benefit, as well as go in a fix problems they used to have to wait for unity to fix.
FOSS makes so much more sense when the people using the software, are devs themselves.
Not to mention that they eat their own dog food. The Godot application is itself running on Godot engine (which is also super useful for people wanting to add to it or make changes. eg. if you can make a UI for a game in Godot, then you can mod the actual Godot interface quite easily.)
Unity did something like this before with built in advert data or such, and some left. Now is drawing a new line, perhaps too far for many more.
My hope is that this backlash extends to all proprietary software eventually. Discord banned 3rd party apps before Reddit thought it was cool to overcharge for the privilage.
The thing is that something like this and further similar actions were clearly in the future back when companies decided they didn’t care about the last scandal enough to leave. There will be a few companies this pisses off enough to leave but fewer than people might be hoping for.
I don’t know the figures but it appears the trend is slow. Who is to say all the people trying out Godot will continue on it and not go back to using Unity (assuming they don’t go through with this).
If W4 doesn’t enshitiffy it to push people to their proprietary fork (which is unfortunately required because Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft don’t allow making their APIs public).
Do W4 have a publically available fork they want people to switch to? I was under the impression they were just offering third party porting to consoles. I don’t really understand how they would be able to even offer a proprietary version with support to directly build console versions.
Ive been making my game in Godot for a few months now. Its a really good engine after the 4.0 update.
I’m looking forward to try it out next time I get the energy to do game development for fun.
I’d heard Godot 4.0 made massive improvments to multiplayer systems.