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.
They’re going to back off on this and replace it with something bad but not as horrible. This is testing the water, and opens the door to charging everyone money every time you install a game, not just devs.
Have an install saved on your external and want to install it next week? You’ll get charged for it as of you didn’t already pay for it.
Games you have in your steam/gog backlog? Get charged again for it when you decide to play it.
I guarantee there are investors/publishers/whoever hitting themselves right now screaming “why didn’t I think of that?”.
I’d pirate the fuck out of everything if that happens.
The second Steam charges me for an install… Back to the high seas.
Not even about the money.
That’s part of the problem; they aren’t charging you for the install, they are remotely tracking that you’ve done so and then billing the dev for it.
If you grab a cracked version, did the person cracking that game also remove the install telemetry, or did they just make it functional? Can you be sure?
In many cases, the dev would still be billed for you installing the game you didn’t even pay for. Unity has no incentive to ensure each install is legitimate, as they profit from failing to catch that.
Sounds like pirating a copy and then trying some network fuckery… Fun!
But also if they make it bad enough I’ll just do something else. I love games but if they wanna fuck that up bad enough then there are always other ways to kill time.
Maybe the gaming industry needs another collapse.
AAA needs a shake up, that’s for sure, if it’s just going to continue on it’s current trajectory of “nothing new but costs more”.Most of the AAA’s can’t even be bothered to include as much content and as many systems as games from decades ago. You can play PlayStation 1 & 2 games that are just as complex or more complex than games releases recently. It’s all the same stuff but with more pixels and larger localization folders.
Why is Skyfield 130 GBs when at it’s core it has all the same functions as Oblivion or Fallout? Why does Octopath Traveller have a sliver of the in-game content that games like Star Ocean and Final Fantasy 9 had? Sports games and Shooters were lost causes years ago.
Indie devs have been making games that are far more fun and original than most AAA teams of multiple hundreds have been able to do in awhile.
The big guys need to return to focusing on fun. Some AAA’s can still do it. BG3 and Zelda are the current obvious examples. Those games are Fun. That’s what games are supposed to be.
Also, battle passes and season passes and everything that horse armor spawned can all go in the trash when there is another video game collapse.
Surprised nobody mentioned here, but Godot Engine people. It’s FOSS and will never charge you for anything. Don’t stay in an abusive relationship
The enshittification continues.
Watch for more products that enable normal people to do great things to become paywalled. Only your gatekeeper masters may direct the market, and the creativity. In their infinite wisdom, they demand the control of gods.
Billionaires are a mistake.
EDIT: and I love the bait-and-switch of charging anyone who ever used Unity, even under different terms. Electric chair for the CEO.
Unity Engine taking a leaf out of reddits book. Lol
This has always been the risk.
Now, I’m a Linux user and really don’t like Unity the game engine. Unity the desktop was cool, on a side note, even though I’ve never used it for long periods of time.
Everyone I know has been reaching about Unreal for the past few years anyway. I’m surprised Unity is pulling this controversial move in this situation, driving more customers to the competition. It’s like if it was 2013 and AMD suddenly started charging double for their graphics cards even though Nvidia was way better
