When Unity Disappointed Us
It's been a while since I last wrote on this blog, so thought I'd come by with a short post, talking about how I feel about the Unity fiasco. I'll also briefly talk about my understanding of it and what my future plans are.
Unity Install Fees
Let's begin with the simple one - Unity attempted to introduce install fees. If I just left it at that, you may think it doesn't sound so bad. Unity already requires developers that earn over $100,000 in a year to pay for Unity Pro, which is about $2,500 per head in the studio. This isn't an insignificant amount of money, but the install fees were in addition to starting at the same time. The install fees were $0.20 per install.
But how was an install determined? Through software the Runtime would have in place; their own solution... Which they then admitted couldn't determine if it was a re-install or not. So this would have meant, once a game has earned over $200,000 in a year and 200,000 installs - Including re-installs. This would have meant that particularly bad actor/s could have done an 'install bomb' to really hurt developers.
There was a lot more behind this too - These decisions were done to then sell people to use Unity's services, especially for ads. If a developer used Unity's services, they would then discount the amount of the install fees.
What Terms?
All in all, this is pretty bad stuff, but the worst of it wasn't really the install fees. They were bad, sure, plus poorly thought out... But the Terms of Service GitHub repo got silently removed, due to "low views". Further to this, these fees would have been retrospective - So older released games would suddenly find themselves liable to pay up as well.
What happened next?
Unity changed course and addressed some of the problems, but in doing so, they have tarnished their reputation. I, for one, really enjoy developing in Unity. I think it's a great bit of software which I have experimented with for ages. I'm also one of the people who may not be affected by this so soon - Skell's Quest is a labour of love and any money earned on it would only be welcomed, but not expected.
As such, I intend to keep using Unity for now... But I also am investigating other game engines, in case we get a repeat of this. After all, Unity are a public company, profits are what they want to push for, so this often comes at the expense of its users. I'm going to make an incredibly short game in Godot. Once it's done, I'll publish it somewhere - and of course, it'll be available in the projects page. Skell's Quest is not at risk, though. I want to keep working on it, because it's a project that truly excites me.
In the past few weeks during this, I ended up making myself a CRM for this blog. So now I can publish, edit and delete posts. Before I was having to manually submit them to the blog's database, so that wasn't fun.
Until next time, thanks for reading and keep on tinkering on. Much love to all - Timlah