For a good few decades the gold standard on how to tank a brand was New Coke. In 1985 Coke decided to change its flavor, and that went over so well it became the textbook example of the a company being completely disconnected from what its userbase needed. Then Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and the fallout made the Coke decision seem like corporate management at its most thoughtful, but there’s still enough life left in the platform that thisTuesday’s Unity announcementpractically caused it to explode. When a company that’s as ubiquitous in gaming as Unity decides it wants to compete with 1985 Coke and 2022 Twitter in terms of spiking its brand, people are going to talk.
Tuesday’s announcement hit the gaming scene hard for a huge number of reasons, with the new Unity pricing structure being a fractal vortex of badness that only gets more stupid and blatantly user-hostile the more you think about it. For example, it’s retroactive, so if you made a game that met the thresholds in 2019 then you’re on the hook for monthly charges on all new installs when the change takes effect in January. How is this allowed? Well,Reddit user Darkfrost discoveredUnity not only changed the terms of service in its licensing structure, but also deleted the GitHub that tracked those changes, so when the paragraph that locks in the terms of service for the version of Unity a project shipped with was removed, there was no alarm.
That’s just a diversion to the real problem, in that Unity is charging its fees per install rather than based on sales, completely independent of the developer’s revenue. Sell a game for $30, $5 or $1, once the thresholds are exceeded the per-install fee kicks in. Initially Unity presented this as every install no matter what, but have since downgraded that to per-machine. Install a Unity game on your PS5 or PC and that’s the one charge to the developer no matter how many times you do it, but install the same game on PC and Steam Deck and that’s two charges. And at this point alarms should be ringing in your head as to how Unity would know these things. It seems Unity is phoning home with each install, and many people are (reasonably) looking worriedly at itspurchase of the companyIronSource last year.
One of the many problems with using installs as a metric is that it’s going to kill everything from sales to bundles to giveaways. Each key becomes a potential liability, putting the developer on the hook for an unknown number of charges for each one distributed. Unity is saying things like charity bundles are excluded, but seeing as a game’s key is a key no matter how it’s acquired people are pretending to be politely confused about how Unity would know the difference when the it seems like it can’t. This also holds true for subscription services like GamePass and PlayStation Plus.
Pretending for a moment that we’re all OK with Unity adding a tracking file that won’t be deleted during an uninstall for each game, so that something as simple as an IP address change doesn’t trigger a new charge, this is a large burden to put on anyone. The fun part is who pays these charges is still poorly defined, despitea Unity FAQanswering the question “Who is paying these runtime fees?” with “The Unity Runtime Fee will be charged to the entity that distributes the runtime.” That implies the console marketplace is responsible, whether that be Sony, Microsoft Nintendo, Apple, or even Valve and Epic, but that’s simply not a reasonable thing to believe. A couple hours of lawyer-work and an updated terms of service later and the charges could be right back to the developer or publisher again.
And these charges could cost some developers more than a game makes. Unity claims this will effect less than 10% of all games made using its engine, without taking into account that 95% of developers want to be in that successful 10%. There are hobbyists out there happy to make their game and hope it will brighten up the day of a few people, but most would like to do this for a living, which is highly unlikely with the new terms. “Number of installs” is a truly random variable unrelated to sales, most likely predictable within a range after months on end of experience, but when a game is selling less than the number of people installing it, that doesn’t help much. And even taking all this into account, it’s still only the second biggest issue with Unity’s announcement.
Most developers won’t go over the minimums no matter how much they’d like to, and they’re painfully aware of this. The biggest problem is the breach of trust this announcement brings with it. There’s no question Unity needs to start bringing in the cash; it’s hadone profitable quarterits entire existence (buying companies and world-class effects studios like Weta doesn’t come cheap) and that can’t go on forever, but telling publishers and developers that they’re going to start owing monthly payments on games long-published is not the way to do it, especially with all the problems outlined in the last thousand words. This is of course equally as bad for the uncountable dozens of games currently in development suddenly looking at an uncertain future where the possibility of success brings with it the probability of failure.
This is only scratching the surface of the problems, and in the three days since the announcement, all hell has broken loose (Twitter links ahead!).Unity employeesrevealed the blog post was being discussed internally and all the concerns above and more were raised, and management surprised-published it anyway. Internally the backlash is reported asbeing fairly strong, with many engineers either quitting or polishing up their resumes in preparation, although actual numbers and the effects of any departures are all rumor right now. Studios that can drop Unity are figuring out how to transition to a different engine as quickly as possible, and those that are too deep into development for any kind of change are getting angrier by the minute. Rumors of aclass-action lawsuitare kicking around, which honestly seems inevitable with the events of the week even if there’s nothing officially-official yet. Things are toxic enough at Unity that today’s town hall was canceled and two offices closed due to reporteddeath threats, which despite what Unity is engaged in is in no way an acceptable response.
The fallout from all this is going to be going on for a while. At this point it seems like any developer that can change from Unity will, bringing the financial burden of delays to those lucky enough to be in the position to afford the time needed to switch engines. Classes that teach Unity could be switching out to anything else, most likely Godot or Unreal, and people with years of Unity experience would need to get very good, very quickly at something else entirely. Published gamescould be pulledin January (not Cult of the Lamb despite news reports stating otherwise, its Twitter account is not to be takenall that seriously) and any game developed in Unity searching for a publisher could have adifficult timefinding one. Gaming’s future is a mess and it’s all down to a decision that Unity was warned was a terrible idea but still pushed through.
There’s no question gaming needed Unity. It’s a monster of a system with as many broken bits as functioning ones, many of which are redundant (here’sa good threadexplaining this in more detail), but it was accessible, people were used to it, and it delivered professional results. Grumbling about Unity was as much a part of the development experience as creating a game, but that’s over now. As Garry Newman of Garry’s Mod and Rusthas said, “Unity has shown its power. We can see what they can and are willing to do. You can’t un-ring that bell.” I’m not going to speculate on what level of out-of-touch cluelessnesscaused the decisionbecause the results are the important thing right now. Maybe with Godot (hastily-launched Humble Bundlefound here), Unreal Engine, GameMaker and a number of others there’s enough to fill the gaps, but Unity is what people were using, and for some with the way things currently are, that’s simply not going to work any more.
