In January 2024, Unity will introduce a new Unity Runtime Fee based on game installs. Prior to this, Unity subscription plans will add cloud-based asset storage, Unity DevOps tools, and AI at runtime at no additional cost.
So today Unity announced changes in how they are going to monetize their game engine, and it is, rightfully might I add, poorlyrecieved
Here is how much youtuber Dani would have to pay unity if they consider his games to gain over $200k in revenue
Now I don’t know how much tracking crackers and re-packers remove from the games getting cracked, but if unity were to count cracked games as a valid install (and they will count every install of a game they are aware of), thn piracy could seriously bankrupt indie devs. Like, not just losing them revenue, but actively losing them money. While piracy is already in an ethical grey area, I think that is just a bit too much.
So, I want to raise awareness of this, and with it I have 2 questions to ask:
Do the people that crack games make sure to remove the ability of unity tracking cracked installs?
If the answer to the previous question is “no”, how do we make them aware of the fact that it is probably for the better if they do this?
makes me sad because for VR and AR, Unity got devkits working faster than anything. And new hardware is still supported overwhelmingly in unity sooner. but fuck everything about this shitshow
Everyr VR game I’ve played that uses Unreal feels sooo much more optimized then other games using Unity. It would be a significant win for everybody if more devs switched over.
they’re more optimized because they must be in order to hit performan frame rates. Unreal makes a fantastic FPS engie; for anything else, it must be beaten into a shape that conforms with the limitations - in VR’s case, sub 10ms frame timing so the GPU has enough time to get the scene drawn into the buffer for each eye.
I hope game developers can shift to different game engines! Can’t imagine how difficult that could be since I don’t even know more than some basic python.
Probably difficult difficult limes difficult. Like rebuilding a wood frame house into a concrete block house.
You can reuse parts (doors, windows, etc) but not everything comes apart easily, and it’s still a lot of work reassembling things. Even the parts you should be able to reuse, you may end up replacing since they don’t “disassemble” easily.
It’s pretty much a “develop from zero” situation. You can import assets, but will probably have to at least fix them up. If you are lucky, the two engines use the same language, but probably not. For example Unity uses C# while UE5 uses C++. And then you didn’t even get to the parts where you actually use use the engine. Everything that touches the capabilities of the specific game engine need to be rewritten. That is off the top of my head: interaction, physics engine usage, collision engine usage, AI stuff etc.
It’s usually quite difficult, since most other engines use C++, which is pretty different from C# in many aspects. My engine (PixelPerfectEngine - 2D game engine primarily aimed at retro pixelart games, link: https://github.com/ZILtoid1991/pixelperfectengine ) is written in D, which is much closer to C# in a lot of aspects, however my engine is far less capable than Unity, still needs a lot of development, and also has it’s own quirks that make some features inconveinent to implement or add.
Mine is quite minimalistic, and relies for the D runtime and standard library (or other D libraries) for many things. Also my engine is primarily geared towards retro pixelart games, and works as such. Currently, the CPU renders to a low-res texture (as seen in emulators), which is then stretched to a higher resolution, later on it’ll replaced by custom shaders that do color lookup and render directly to a texture (which is quite complicated, simpler methods would cause easily misalignable pixels, thus defeating the engine’s purpose, even if some likes the “smooth” scaling from other engines).
That’s my understanding as well. You could have a game on Steam that you haven’t even updated in years, and then you suddenly have to start paying for new installs from existing owners.
Actually, it’s potentially even worse. You could have a game that you released and then later removed from every storefront, but if people keep installing it, Unity will demand payment.
Unreal is first place already so that wouldn’t matter too much for Godots place but you are partly right, people probably won’t switch to Godot. What I think you get very wrong is the chance for open source offerings in that area, the reason why so many big developers still have in house engines is control but those engines get more expensive as the scope of games increases, I think that wiuld be the perfect spot for open source to occupy but it’s questionable if that will ever happen.
No, I mean that they legally can’t support say PS5 and still be 100% open source. There would need to be a closed source wrapper, and that’s what they don’t want.
Which is fine, they can do what they want, but it means they can never be the choice of a developer that wants to put their game on as many platforms as possible.
Oh, sorry I missunderstood that! That’s certainly a issue and probably should be outlawed but it doesn’t make it impossible perse, if the interest would be big enough someone could probably write some sort of modular component to add, you can modify it after all and there is no requirement for the wnd product to be open source but again, if anything like that actually happens is highly questiknable, I wish the DMA identified consoles as Gatekeepers! :(
It would sure be nice to run whatever I wanted on my consoles. Top of my list would be SteamLink for Switch.
Avoiding piracy is a thorny one for them. They’ve really locked that shit down in recent years. The last time I saw any was for the Xbox 360, where everyone at work had their drives altered and laughed at me for being a mug that still bought games, and then I laughed as they all got banned at once during the Great Purge of 2009. I think piracy was one of the reasons that the PS3 Linux thing was discontinued as well.
Cracking often includes blocking all networking features of a game to kill any phone-home license checking, so it’s likely that Unity will not know cracked games are getting installed. But it is not guaranteed.
More likely every game dev save for a few big developers (who we don’t give a shit about) is going to drop this radioactive business model like a hot plutonium potato and it will become a non-issue.
unity is so bad at DRM, genshin impact got cracked a while ago and people made a private server with no paimon barrier. So not really worry about cracked games.
Yes and no, IIRC the last time I installed a cracked game (disclaimer: it has been a decade) I was required to install the game first with internet OFF, then replace the .exe with a cracked version. But it’s entirely possible that there are a lot of newbies doing this without blocking traffic, and launching the game with their internet on and without the crack. So Unity might not see EVERY pirate, but they will definitely see SOME. How many, I’m not sure.
Usually, cracking doesn’t typically result in the blocking of network features. This is why most groups suggest blocking the executable in the firewall.
The most hilarious thing about this is that, assuming crackers prevent Unity games from phoning home, the best way to support game developers would be to buy their game and then only play the cracked version, never installing the version you purchased.
I haven’t pirated a game for a very long time. Indie games are very very cheap; and AAA games don’t interest me anyway.
So I’m not really looking at this change from a piracy point of view. For me, the big message here is (once again) don’t trust big corps. People who put their trust in Unity are now getting stabbed in the back. They’re now have to either pay up big, or do a huge amount of additional work to write their stuff using a different engine. And this could easily happen again, and again, and with other engines… … So its best not to rely on big corps.
I’m not involved in piracy/DRM/gamedev but I really doubt they’ll track cracked installs and if they do, actually get indie devs to pay.
Because what’s stopping one person from “cracking” a game, then “installing” it 1,000,000 times? Whatever metric they use to track installs has to prevent abuse like this, or you’re giving random devs (of games that aren’t even popular) stupidly high bills.
When devs see more installs than purchases, they’ll dispute and claim Unity’s numbers are artificially inflated. Which is a big challenge for Unity’s massive legal team, because in the above scenario they really are. Even if Unity successfully defends the extra installs in court, it would be terrible publicity to say “well, if someone manages to install your game 1,000 times without buying it 1,000 times you’re still responsible”. Whatever negative publicity Unity already has for merely charging for installs pales in comparison, and this would actually get most devs to stop using Unity, because nobody will risk going into debt or unexpectedly losing a huge chunk of revenue for a game engine.
So, the only reasonable metric Unity has to track installs is whatever metric is used to track purchases, because if someone purchases the game 1,000,000 times and installs it, no issue, good for the dev. I just don’t see any other way which prevents easy abuse; even if it’s tied to the DRM, if there’s a way to crack the DRM but not remove the install counter, some troll is going to do it and fake absurd amounts of extra installs.
Whatever metric they use to track installs has to prevent abuse like this
I would be eagerly awaiting a follow-up response from unity from this, because as it stands right now, consensus among gamedev circles is that unity won’t prevent abuse at all, which is just awful for multiple groups of people.
someone paying for your game and then re-downloading it every hour would cost you $144 a month
someone paying for your game and then re-downloading it every 5 minutes would cost you $1728 a month
web games exist, and if the Unity Runtime Download metric is used there, well, that is going to be an expensive bill for anyone putting any sense of monetization in their web game
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Godot is looking much better to me today than it did yesterday.
Does this mean you can’t make free games with Unity anymore?
not without the fear that a sudden breakout hit results in installs you can’t pay for.
Nope, just means that you can’t make over 200,000 US yearly if it has over 200,000 downloads
Installs, not downloads.
Unity is janky as fuck so I hope this turns more developers away so that they’ll use Unreal or anything else for that matter.
makes me sad because for VR and AR, Unity got devkits working faster than anything. And new hardware is still supported overwhelmingly in unity sooner. but fuck everything about this shitshow
Everyr VR game I’ve played that uses Unreal feels sooo much more optimized then other games using Unity. It would be a significant win for everybody if more devs switched over.
they’re more optimized because they must be in order to hit performan frame rates. Unreal makes a fantastic FPS engie; for anything else, it must be beaten into a shape that conforms with the limitations - in VR’s case, sub 10ms frame timing so the GPU has enough time to get the scene drawn into the buffer for each eye.
The thing is Unreal could do something similar later.
Yes, the only safe (sophisticated) engine is Godot. It’s free and open source.
They could, but I doubt they’ll ever be that desperate.
I hope game developers can shift to different game engines! Can’t imagine how difficult that could be since I don’t even know more than some basic python.
Probably difficult difficult limes difficult. Like rebuilding a wood frame house into a concrete block house.
You can reuse parts (doors, windows, etc) but not everything comes apart easily, and it’s still a lot of work reassembling things. Even the parts you should be able to reuse, you may end up replacing since they don’t “disassemble” easily.
Maybe not for their current games, but for their future games.
Still sucks if you’ve got a team that’s really good at Unity, but yeah
It’s pretty much a “develop from zero” situation. You can import assets, but will probably have to at least fix them up. If you are lucky, the two engines use the same language, but probably not. For example Unity uses C# while UE5 uses C++. And then you didn’t even get to the parts where you actually use use the engine. Everything that touches the capabilities of the specific game engine need to be rewritten. That is off the top of my head: interaction, physics engine usage, collision engine usage, AI stuff etc.
Godot also supports c# but 90% of the functions would be editor calls (maybe someone could make a translator)
It’s usually quite difficult, since most other engines use C++, which is pretty different from C# in many aspects. My engine (PixelPerfectEngine - 2D game engine primarily aimed at retro pixelart games, link: https://github.com/ZILtoid1991/pixelperfectengine ) is written in D, which is much closer to C# in a lot of aspects, however my engine is far less capable than Unity, still needs a lot of development, and also has it’s own quirks that make some features inconveinent to implement or add.
How does your engine compare to MonoGame?
Mine is quite minimalistic, and relies for the D runtime and standard library (or other D libraries) for many things. Also my engine is primarily geared towards retro pixelart games, and works as such. Currently, the CPU renders to a low-res texture (as seen in emulators), which is then stretched to a higher resolution, later on it’ll replaced by custom shaders that do color lookup and render directly to a texture (which is quite complicated, simpler methods would cause easily misalignable pixels, thus defeating the engine’s purpose, even if some likes the “smooth” scaling from other engines).
Unity is the worst.
Hey boss Unreal is eating some of our market shares, what should we do?
Boss: Isn’t obvious, we drive the company off the cliff. Duh
God executives are the dumbest mother fuckers
It’s actually remarkable.
Not dumb, just selfish, contemptuous of their users, and willing to destroy anything they have legal rights to for a cash grab.
Same guy: https://kotaku.com/unity-john-riccitiello-monetization-mobile-ironsource-1849179898
Hindsight is 20/20, but maybe devs should have seen this coming 😑
The problem, from what I understand, is that the fees apply retroactive. So your 2018 Unity game will now have to start paying
That’s my understanding as well. You could have a game on Steam that you haven’t even updated in years, and then you suddenly have to start paying for new installs from existing owners.
Actually, it’s potentially even worse. You could have a game that you released and then later removed from every storefront, but if people keep installing it, Unity will demand payment.
Unity is going pay to win.
Maybe that will give Godot a serious chance for second place I guess, Unity ocupied that for far too long anyway!
Doubt it. They’ll go to Unreal.
Godot needs console support if it wants to displace Unity. Open source is a noble goal, but it’s going to lock you out of certain markets.
Unreal is first place already so that wouldn’t matter too much for Godots place but you are partly right, people probably won’t switch to Godot. What I think you get very wrong is the chance for open source offerings in that area, the reason why so many big developers still have in house engines is control but those engines get more expensive as the scope of games increases, I think that wiuld be the perfect spot for open source to occupy but it’s questionable if that will ever happen.
No, I mean that they legally can’t support say PS5 and still be 100% open source. There would need to be a closed source wrapper, and that’s what they don’t want.
https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-know/
Which is fine, they can do what they want, but it means they can never be the choice of a developer that wants to put their game on as many platforms as possible.
Oh, sorry I missunderstood that! That’s certainly a issue and probably should be outlawed but it doesn’t make it impossible perse, if the interest would be big enough someone could probably write some sort of modular component to add, you can modify it after all and there is no requirement for the wnd product to be open source but again, if anything like that actually happens is highly questiknable, I wish the DMA identified consoles as Gatekeepers! :(
Yeah, I’m not sure how consoles avoided that.
It would sure be nice to run whatever I wanted on my consoles. Top of my list would be SteamLink for Switch.
Avoiding piracy is a thorny one for them. They’ve really locked that shit down in recent years. The last time I saw any was for the Xbox 360, where everyone at work had their drives altered and laughed at me for being a mug that still bought games, and then I laughed as they all got banned at once during the Great Purge of 2009. I think piracy was one of the reasons that the PS3 Linux thing was discontinued as well.
I’m pretty sure the people behind Godot actually started a company to solve this exact issue, so it should be fine these days.
Cracking often includes blocking all networking features of a game to kill any phone-home license checking, so it’s likely that Unity will not know cracked games are getting installed. But it is not guaranteed.
More likely every game dev save for a few big developers (who we don’t give a shit about) is going to drop this radioactive business model like a hot plutonium potato and it will become a non-issue.
unity is so bad at DRM, genshin impact got cracked a while ago and people made a private server with no paimon barrier. So not really worry about cracked games.
Yes and no, IIRC the last time I installed a cracked game (disclaimer: it has been a decade) I was required to install the game first with internet OFF, then replace the .exe with a cracked version. But it’s entirely possible that there are a lot of newbies doing this without blocking traffic, and launching the game with their internet on and without the crack. So Unity might not see EVERY pirate, but they will definitely see SOME. How many, I’m not sure.
Usually, cracking doesn’t typically result in the blocking of network features. This is why most groups suggest blocking the executable in the firewall.
Blocks the 1st party networks, but it doesn’t mean they don’t implement their own (or more so that the repackers don’t)
I just run all games behind a firewall. Hopefully that blocks unity from learning about steam installs too.
Yeah… Enshittification of game engines, they’re trying really hard to show they can do it too.
This was a good summary to read from a Unity game devs perspective, just keeps getting worse.
The most hilarious thing about this is that, assuming crackers prevent Unity games from phoning home, the best way to support game developers would be to buy their game and then only play the cracked version, never installing the version you purchased.
I haven’t pirated a game for a very long time. Indie games are very very cheap; and AAA games don’t interest me anyway.
So I’m not really looking at this change from a piracy point of view. For me, the big message here is (once again) don’t trust big corps. People who put their trust in Unity are now getting stabbed in the back. They’re now have to either pay up big, or do a huge amount of additional work to write their stuff using a different engine. And this could easily happen again, and again, and with other engines… … So its best not to rely on big corps.
Make sure to firewall every single Unity game going forward folks!
(… which is something you should already be doing for any pirated software in general)
I’m not involved in piracy/DRM/gamedev but I really doubt they’ll track cracked installs and if they do, actually get indie devs to pay.
Because what’s stopping one person from “cracking” a game, then “installing” it 1,000,000 times? Whatever metric they use to track installs has to prevent abuse like this, or you’re giving random devs (of games that aren’t even popular) stupidly high bills.
When devs see more installs than purchases, they’ll dispute and claim Unity’s numbers are artificially inflated. Which is a big challenge for Unity’s massive legal team, because in the above scenario they really are. Even if Unity successfully defends the extra installs in court, it would be terrible publicity to say “well, if someone manages to install your game 1,000 times without buying it 1,000 times you’re still responsible”. Whatever negative publicity Unity already has for merely charging for installs pales in comparison, and this would actually get most devs to stop using Unity, because nobody will risk going into debt or unexpectedly losing a huge chunk of revenue for a game engine.
So, the only reasonable metric Unity has to track installs is whatever metric is used to track purchases, because if someone purchases the game 1,000,000 times and installs it, no issue, good for the dev. I just don’t see any other way which prevents easy abuse; even if it’s tied to the DRM, if there’s a way to crack the DRM but not remove the install counter, some troll is going to do it and fake absurd amounts of extra installs.
I would be eagerly awaiting a follow-up response from unity from this, because as it stands right now, consensus among gamedev circles is that unity won’t prevent abuse at all, which is just awful for multiple groups of people.
Yeah most games are available offline, how would they track these metrics beyond steam/store sales?
And for the web games can they not be self hosted?
That’s what I was thinking.
It’s going to be a legal kerfuffle trying to prove that Unity (or a competitor) doesn’t have an installation farm operating somewhere.