If your revenue is above $100.000 the last 12 months, you need a professional license. Which you pay for. The “free for smaller games” is what allowed Unity to gain it’s current foothold in the market. This install fee will be in addition to that. And for all games, including older games or games made on older versions of unity.
It takes years to develop a game, and Unity announced this pretty recently (September 12). If you had a plan that would be profitable with ads or microtransactions and you and your team spent years making it, you’d suddenly might not have a business model any more. And for games already released, it might not be profitable keeping it up any more. Unless you have a way to predict the future, that point is completely moot. If you started developing a new game the last … 5 days, sure. But then you’d probably pick a different engine that doesn’t have such a requirement.
I can fully imagine that some people who counted on the old business model are really fucking bummed out by this change, need to rethink their business strategy and feel forced with their back against the wall. That has got to be a major pain in the ass and disappointment.
I am unsure why Unity is making this change. Perhaps they are just greedy bastards, perhaps they need it to survive or perhaps something in between. Regardless, if you would be in Unity’s position and would want to do this change then I don’t see a way an easy way around it. Even if they’d decide that older versions are licensed in the old way, then that would potentially mean you’d get a whole bunch of people sticking to an old version, which of course opens up a whole new can of worms that they might have good reasons for not wanting to open up.
While everyone is up in arms and hating on Unity my entire point was only to say that the business model that they are proposing isn’t unreasonable. Paying per installation. People are acting like it is totally unreasonable to charge for the number of installs, as if Unity isn’t a core ingredient of all those shipped products. It seems like people lose critical thinking skills when they get emotional.
This is not to say that it doesn’t suck monkeyballs for those affected. I use a free ferry service quite often where I live. It’s great and it would suck ass if the municipality would start charging for it, but I wouldn’t pretend that it is totally unfair that they decided to ask money for it.
PS some person accused me of using ChatGPT while directing their Unity hate onto me, but I truly don’t, so I am keeping my wall of text because I think it gets my point across more effectively.
A few points:
Finally, someone who actually makes arguments! :)
I can fully imagine that some people who counted on the old business model are really fucking bummed out by this change, need to rethink their business strategy and feel forced with their back against the wall. That has got to be a major pain in the ass and disappointment.
I am unsure why Unity is making this change. Perhaps they are just greedy bastards, perhaps they need it to survive or perhaps something in between. Regardless, if you would be in Unity’s position and would want to do this change then I don’t see a way an easy way around it. Even if they’d decide that older versions are licensed in the old way, then that would potentially mean you’d get a whole bunch of people sticking to an old version, which of course opens up a whole new can of worms that they might have good reasons for not wanting to open up.
While everyone is up in arms and hating on Unity my entire point was only to say that the business model that they are proposing isn’t unreasonable. Paying per installation. People are acting like it is totally unreasonable to charge for the number of installs, as if Unity isn’t a core ingredient of all those shipped products. It seems like people lose critical thinking skills when they get emotional.
This is not to say that it doesn’t suck monkeyballs for those affected. I use a free ferry service quite often where I live. It’s great and it would suck ass if the municipality would start charging for it, but I wouldn’t pretend that it is totally unfair that they decided to ask money for it.
PS some person accused me of using ChatGPT while directing their Unity hate onto me, but I truly don’t, so I am keeping my wall of text because I think it gets my point across more effectively.