Comment on Unity adding a fee for devs for each time a game is installed, after certain thresholds
lazycouchpotato@lemmy.world 9 months agoI got some clarifications from Unity regarding their plan to charge developers per game install (after clearing thresholds)
- If a player deletes a game and re-installs it, that’s 2 installs, 2 charges
- Same if they install on 2 devices
- Charity games/bundles exempted from fees
Regarding this being abused by bad actors:
Unity says it will use fraud detection tools and allow developers to report possible instances of fraud to a compliance team
So basically they’re explicitly condoning it. That’s not just bad, but even worse that they’re doubling down that a delete+reinstall will charge the dev twice.
This will end a lot of indie projects and they’ve basically destroyed their good standing in indie dev circles.
It’s time to chuck unity in the bin. If not Godot, go for unreal… though I would check their requirements beforehand first.
Hard to chuck unity in the bin when you don’t use unity.
We’re lucky there are enough other engines on the market at the moment, but eventually someone will need to spearhead a FOSS engine with blackjack and hookers.
So once a game stops selling it had better hope its player base dries up and stops reinstalling it? The way that is phrased makes it sound like you could net lose money over the long term if sales decline and people keep reinstalling it
nature_man@lemmy.world 9 months ago
That clarification makes it even worse, this is obviously an attempt to push free to play or indie games out the window while making major bank.
The fraud detection will not help at all to prevent abuse especially in cases like steam family sharing where other “users” won’t have to pay to install the game!
There’s literally no reason to charge per game install here, the only possible reason is greed
Hildegarde@lemmy.world 9 months ago
The fraud detection is especially bad because they have a financial incentive to ignore, or under-report installation fraud.
nature_man@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Exactly! I’d put money on a group abusing it, admitting to abusing it, and the game devs still being charged in the near future.