Unity has temporarily closed its offices in San Francisco and Austin, Texas and canceled a town hall meeting after receiving death threats. The company made the call as a precaution against possible retribution after it announced a contentious change to its business model this week.
AFAIK, the retroactive nature of it doesn’t apply to already released games, but to games released with the new license terms. So if you released that mobile game last year, you wouldn’t need to pay $200k or whatever next year. However, if you release that same game next year, you would have to retroactively pay that $200k once the downloads exceeded the stated max.
So the solution is: don’t use Unity next year, especially if you’ll be selling a game for $1. It sucks since in-progress games would have to be reworked, and Unity should suffer for that, but it shouldn’t ever come to threats of violence.
That’s actually fair. But the point is that the popularity of a game could tank a developer with this business model. It could also affect past profits and purchases specifically because of the bit about downloads. It doesn’t differentiate between a user who’s downloaded a paid app on 6 different phones, 1 phone, 1000 phones. So if I for instance paid for I dunno Plants vs Zombies one time, the developer releases it with an update patch, I and then downloaded it onto every phone I have had since then or will have in the future that could be 10,.15, 20 downloads over my lifetime. What if I have a work phone? They’re not saying they can’t implement this even with old games. I don’t think they meant retroactively. I think they mean new installs of old games that have updates.
I guess I’d have to read through the contract, but generally these things only apply to games released after the new terms take effect, but updates to games released prior. So the dev would be fully aware of the policy at the point of releasing the game.
Unity seems to be catering to games with a recurring revenue model (ads, microtransactions, etc), and discouraging other revenue models, and I think most developers will recognize that with this pricing model.
So I don’t think Unity is trying to screw already released games, they’re just trying to limit their appeal to a certain type of game revenue model.
AFAIK, the retroactive nature of it doesn’t apply to already released games, but to games released with the new license terms. So if you released that mobile game last year, you wouldn’t need to pay $200k or whatever next year. However, if you release that same game next year, you would have to retroactively pay that $200k once the downloads exceeded the stated max.
So the solution is: don’t use Unity next year, especially if you’ll be selling a game for $1. It sucks since in-progress games would have to be reworked, and Unity should suffer for that, but it shouldn’t ever come to threats of violence.
That’s actually fair. But the point is that the popularity of a game could tank a developer with this business model. It could also affect past profits and purchases specifically because of the bit about downloads. It doesn’t differentiate between a user who’s downloaded a paid app on 6 different phones, 1 phone, 1000 phones. So if I for instance paid for I dunno Plants vs Zombies one time, the developer releases it with an update patch, I and then downloaded it onto every phone I have had since then or will have in the future that could be 10,.15, 20 downloads over my lifetime. What if I have a work phone? They’re not saying they can’t implement this even with old games. I don’t think they meant retroactively. I think they mean new installs of old games that have updates.
I guess I’d have to read through the contract, but generally these things only apply to games released after the new terms take effect, but updates to games released prior. So the dev would be fully aware of the policy at the point of releasing the game.
Unity seems to be catering to games with a recurring revenue model (ads, microtransactions, etc), and discouraging other revenue models, and I think most developers will recognize that with this pricing model.
So I don’t think Unity is trying to screw already released games, they’re just trying to limit their appeal to a certain type of game revenue model.