Oh boy, I do sure love the smell of a good PR disaster in the morning. I’m not going to go into details here since I’m sure most of you already know what this is about. It’s basically Unity (the game engine) suddenly going fully retarded and demanding money for each user install, and to boot, having it to be retroactive. From what I understand this would cover all games released, so imagine you published a game a couple of years ago, and now unexpectedly you are supposed to pay thousands in fees to Unity for the amount of people who installed your game. Seems pretty unethical and illegal to me.
It’s such a cluster it’s hard to even think that someone on the business end of their company thought that this was a great idea – unless you deliberately want to tank the company. Making the shares plummet for then for someone else to pick up the company for pennies. I have no idea, this is just random speculation. Another thing I find really funny is that Unity doesn’t want to say what kind of tech they will use to determine the amount of installs. Do all Unity-based games come with a hidden tracker of some sort? That sounds nasty. They don’t say how this will work at all, I guess it’s just secret Just-Trust-Me-Bro™ tech. I’m sure indie devs will just fork over money on their say so – “Your game was installed 2 million times last week. We can see it here in our magical stat report that we can’t explain how it works“.
There are probably a lot of misunderstandings involved in all this, but it isn’t looking great. Indie devs are already fleeing the engine, and some have already said they will delist their games. Well, that isn’t good for game preservation. If this goes through, you can be sure this cost will be transferred over to the end user somehow (that is you and me). Imagine swiping your credit card for 20 cents each time you get into the mood to install and play a Unity-based game. Or why not have a coin slot attached to your USB – each life will cost you a coin – it’s like going back to the days of arcade halls!
Maybe this will teach devs to make their own game engines since having every game based on either Unity or Unreal kinda sucks, and as shown now to be incredibly risky. Actually, this whole mess makes Unreal the only viable mainstream engine. Oh dear god, every game in the future will look and feel the same! This timeline keeps getting worse when it comes to gaming.
/Thomas
Tom's Gaming Vault 