Great news in some ways. Unity has been on a poor path for some time, boiling the frog in the pot. But with a move so egregious, it's much harder to sweep it under the rug and keep going.
Also good news for game engines that treating their communities with due respect. Unity has been called dead a number of times, but now they have fucked with people's wallets in a way that totally eroded trust. Unity the company is a busines liability now. No one with any sense would accept that risk over the other great engine options available.
Sure the other engines coule pull a similar move, but only Unity has proven that they will actually do it.
A more important issue that's not being considered here is that when they had their debacle with Improbable, they committed to a GitHub repo[1] with all the ToS changes and outright said that people could keep using the ToS of whatever major version of Unity they used[2].
They have now deleted the repo, so I wonder if they're just gonna pretend they never committed to that.
They are primarily known for high-quality free game-dev-assets (2d, 3d, sprites, sounds) and Asset-Creation-Tools like AssetForge. I would guess that most (hobby-)game-devs have used their content for tutorials, prototypes and the like.
They're also a gamedev. In the beginning, their assets were leftover/reutilized from their games to help other gamedevs with placeholder assets. Now, that's kinda more of their thing, with them developing entire asset packs for aspiring gamedevs.
They have been struggling financially under a CEO that is known to make a mess of everything he touches. Now he has decided that to turn his sinking ship around every game that uses their engine has to pay some amount per install. This will kill them in the free-to-play and indie market where unity is currently the leader.
The issue is that they are trying to retroactively change a license agreement, and doing so in a way that will bankrupt many of their current users.
Charging per install is absolutely insane, and will absolutely be the end of many publishers. Even successful games like Cult of the Lamb are being culled because of this.
Am i crazy?
https://twitter.com/unity/status/1701650081403842851
In the original tweet they write:
"We want to be clear that the counter for Unity Runtime fee installs starts on January 1, 2024 - it is not retroactive or perpetual. We will charge once for a new install; not an ongoing perpetual license royalty, like revenue share."
The main controversy is that they seem to intend to apply this to any new installs of any Unity game still available on the market as of 1/1/2024, including any that were already developed and released under different Terms of Service—and possibly even ones already sold that way.
As far as I can tell, their model even seems to include, for example, any installs on a different system that I might do of the Unity-based game Cult of the Lamb I already bought—months ago when it launched and when Unity had a different TOS. And that’s bad news for the devs because Steam’s terms of sale allow me unlimited multiple installs anywhere I have Steam installed, as long as they only run one at a time.
But even if Unity doesn’t try to go that far, it would absolutely apply if I did a second install of a new license I bought after 1/1/2024 on EGS, or if I got put on Game Pass and I did a new install from that somewhere I didn’t want to install Steam.
And since Unity apparently uses click wrap agreements upon opening their dev tools to set licensing terms, using the tools to make a patch afterwards would likely include new terms that subsequent installs of the patched version will now be counted for existing licenses, even if the original deployment wasn’t under those terms.
That led to Massive Monster’s response that they’re going to be delisting Cult of the Lamb entirely.
As far as what you quoted, all this says is that they won’t use their historical telemetry data to retroactively bill you for installs performed before 1/1/2024, and that any given install will only be charged for once. But multiple installs by the same purchaser are still charged multiple times unless Unity agrees they’re all on the same system.
Also good news for game engines that treating their communities with due respect. Unity has been called dead a number of times, but now they have fucked with people's wallets in a way that totally eroded trust. Unity the company is a busines liability now. No one with any sense would accept that risk over the other great engine options available.
Sure the other engines coule pull a similar move, but only Unity has proven that they will actually do it.