22 September Update
This last two week were quite tiring and demoralising for me, especially this last week with Unity Silence
but the silence has been broken.
https://blog.unity.com/news/open-letter-on-runtime-fee
The new fee is much more reasonable and don't apply to already existing version of the engine, which should have been the case since the begining.
However, the trust has been broken for me, and while Rogue: Genesia will stay on Unity 2022, future games I'll make will use another engine.
This is a hot take, and the announcement is recent, so I really hope things will change in the near future.
Hello,
I believe this is an important post as it may greatly affect the future of Rogue: Genesia.
So, what's the deal with Unity's new pricing plan?
Earlier today, Unity made this announcement:
https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates
This blog post announces Unity's new pricing model, set to take effect next year.
The new pricing model of Unity, in addition to maintaining the subscription, will now include a fee per installation of the game on the user's device.
At first, I thought it was simply a $0.20 fee per sale of the game, which, while a bit annoying, I could easily understand the pricing and I'm fine with it.
However, after some research, I found that this $0.20 fee is per installation of the game.
YES, PER INSTALLATION.
This means that anytime you uninstall the game and then reinstall it, that's a $0.20 fee sent to the developer. As you can imagine, this can lead to dangerous situations for many game developers using Unity.
First off, installation counts for demos also add to the game installation count. So, any player installing the demo is basically costing the developer $0.20.
Pirated versions of the game would be "prevented by their fraud detection practices," which, to be honest, is basically "trust me, bro," or spending a ton of time trying to recoup fees from pirated versions of the game. I would be very surprised if they suddenly resolved the issues of piracy when so much effort has already been made by multiple other big companies.
Similarly, they replied that benevolent copies of the game (Humble Bundles, etc.) wouldn't be counted, but I don't see how they can ensure this without invasive data collection. Of course, what is considered an install is entirely up to Unity's decision and they could make up the numbers themselves if they wanted.
There is also concern about Unity collecting data that I wasn't aware of from my players.
This change applies to every Unity game, even those already released. Installation fees only apply to new installations starting on January 1, 2024.
This also means they could change the fee charged out of nowhere. What's preventing them from increasing it to $150 per installation out of nowhere?
This could also lead to a lot of abuse from the players as a way to harass developers. Nothing prevents a player from buying a game, installing and uninstalling it as much as possible, and then asking for a refund.
And that's without going further with installations of the game in Virtual Machines or directly grabbing the packets sent to Unity and replicating them.
I sincerely hope this change will be reverted. There is a possibility this could be dangerous for the development of Rogue: Genesia.
I could even end up having to remove the game from Steam if it ends up costing more money than it can earn.
I'll continue to work on Rogue: Genesia in the meantime, waiting for changes on Unity's behalf, and exploring possible legal action along with other developers if nothing changes.
I just wanted players to know, what are at stake, and I wouldn't be surprised if other developer of Unity game to act similarly.
As I expect this question:
No, porting Rogue: Genesia to another engine is not a realistic approach due to the amount of work required,
especially at the moment, as there are a lot of uncertainties.
(source of official unity replies can be found here: https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/