this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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From what I understand this change will retroactively apply to games released in the past as well. I think that's a rather scummy move on Unity's part. "I've altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it further."
And it's not like game devs have been using a free product. They already pay for it through expensive licenses per developer.
If the justification on Unity's part is true, that for each install of a Unity game the runtime environment needs to be downloaded from their servers, then maybe they should look into fixing that rather than nickle and diming their customers for each individual install (customers in this case being the game developers)
According to the article, it's not retroactively charged, but still bad if your game is about to come out and you haven't accounted for this.
https://www.eurogamer.net/unity-reveals-plans-to-charge-per-game-install-drawing-criticism-from-development-community
Other articles I have been reading on the topic do mention it:
When I say that it applies retroactively, I mean that it applies to games released in the past.
It's true that they are not retroactively charging devs for past downloads. That would have been even worse.
So if i want to ruin a developer, I only need to install and deinstall all day?
Unity walked back from charging per installation earlier today. Now they will be charging per device it is installed on.
It doesn't solve the core problem, but it at least prevents install-bombing like you are suggesting
https://www.eurogamer.net/unity-backtracks-slightly-on-plans-to-charge-developers-for-game-installs
I'd be interested to know how they're going to track this? They'd need to create some sort of fingerprint for each device, and store it together will all already installed games / software in some sort of database in perpetuity.
Nahh, they are absolutely fine charging the dev 100 times for the 100 times a GPU reviewer installed the game on a fresh system. That's 100 billings! All they see is money.
Saw this screenshot on Mastodon. They won't tell how they're going to track it exactly but it sounds like some weird estimation work.
My 100 VMs are just ripe with anticipation
Well, it makes it a bit harder to inflate the rates but not impossible.