Unity adding a fee for each time a game is installed
www.gamesindustry.biz
external-link
Unity is adding a new charge for every time a game using the Unity Engine is installed, the company announced today. St…
LCP
creator
link
fedilink
English
781Y

I got some clarifications from Unity regarding their plan to charge developers per game install (after clearing thresholds)

  • If a player deletes a game and re-installs it, that’s 2 installs, 2 charges
  • Same if they install on 2 devices
  • Charity games/bundles exempted from fees

Regarding this being abused by bad actors:

Unity says it will use fraud detection tools and allow developers to report possible instances of fraud to a compliance team

- @stephentotilo

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
English
341Y

So once a game stops selling it had better hope its player base dries up and stops reinstalling it? The way that is phrased makes it sound like you could net lose money over the long term if sales decline and people keep reinstalling it

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
English
501Y

So basically they’re explicitly condoning it. That’s not just bad, but even worse that they’re doubling down that a delete+reinstall will charge the dev twice.

This will end a lot of indie projects and they’ve basically destroyed their good standing in indie dev circles.

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
English
261Y

It’s time to chuck unity in the bin. If not Godot, go for unreal… though I would check their requirements beforehand first.

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
English
71Y

Hard to chuck unity in the bin when you don’t use unity.

We’re lucky there are enough other engines on the market at the moment, but eventually someone will need to spearhead a FOSS engine with blackjack and hookers.

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
English
231Y

Godot is a FOSS engine.

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
English
11Y

Oh, fantastic. Good to know, thanks!

But does it have the blackjack and hookers? 🤔

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
English
11Y

deleted by creator

I Cast Fist
link
fedilink
English
21Y

I’d make my own branch with BJ and hookers, but both GCC and Clang failed to compile :(

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
English
11Y

I’m sure somebody somewhere has made both of those games in Godot. Lol

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
English
721Y

That clarification makes it even worse, this is obviously an attempt to push free to play or indie games out the window while making major bank.

The fraud detection will not help at all to prevent abuse especially in cases like steam family sharing where other “users” won’t have to pay to install the game!

There’s literally no reason to charge per game install here, the only possible reason is greed

Hildegarde
link
fedilink
English
271Y

The fraud detection is especially bad because they have a financial incentive to ignore, or under-report installation fraud.

@[email protected]
link
fedilink
English
21Y

Exactly! I’d put money on a group abusing it, admitting to abusing it, and the game devs still being charged in the near future.

Create a post

Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.

Weekly Threads:

What Are You Playing?

The Weekly Discussion Topic

Rules:

  1. Submissions have to be related to games

  2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil

  3. No excessive self-promotion

  4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts

  5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW

  6. No linking to piracy

More information about the community rules can be found here.

  • 1 user online
  • 198 users / day
  • 801 users / week
  • 2.3K users / month
  • 6.32K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 4.89K Posts
  • 101K Comments
  • Modlog