Time To Ditch Unity?
The Unity game engine has changed it’s pricing model, and game developers everywhere are outraged.
I get why some kind of change was necessary. Unity is popular but it’s not profitable, so they need to charge their customers more.
But the exact details are bad enough that my current plan is to pause development for at least a couple weeks to see if they backtrack. If they don’t, I’m planning to restart in a new engine.
With development paused, I can focus on some other neglected areas, like fleshing out a business plan or working on finalized art and music. I don’t plan to pause all Flaregate Network activity, just the code-writing part.
So why this drastic measure?
They removed the Plus license tier, which effectively forces small companies to pay 5 times more for licenses.
They’ve added an install fee. This fee costs at least 10 times more per paying customer for free-to-play games, when compared to traditional games, because F2P gets at least 10 times as many installs from people who aren’t paying anything.
Their answer on how they’ll count installs is “trust us.” But I do not trust them, because they already lied about this exact topic in the first 24 hours following their announcement. First they said “we have to charge you again for every reinstall, because there’s literally no way for us to tell if it’s a new install or a reinstall.” Then, after the backlash, they said “oh actually we’ll just charge for the first install!” It’s a miracle! It was literally impossible, but they did it anyway! I’m not sure whether they were lying before, or they’re lying now, but either way they can’t be trusted.
“Trust us” is also how they’ll protect you from getting charged for pirated copies or “install-bombing.” Install bombing is a new thing that shouldn’t exist but probably will thanks to Unity, where people will repeatedly reinstall games to bankrupt developers they’re mad at. Unity managed to make their “trust us” strategy even worse here by saying “we’ll work with you if you identify you’ve been affected by these issues.” This is business speak for “we don’t actually have a solution here, but if you solve it for us by detecting it yourself, given no data or help from us, we’ll consider refunding you.”
They say the changes apply to games that have already shipped. They’re setting a precedent that they’re totally cool pulling the rug out from under companies with decades-old games, by changing not just the amount that their game engine costs but the entire structure of those costs.
So yeah, as someone working on creating a small studio that ships a game with an eventual free-to-play multiplayer mode, I’m in a tough spot.
Originally I was thinking “I’m considering starting with a singleplayer game, so this won’t affect me as much.” But this seems shortsighted since multiplayer is my ultimate goal.
Then I was thinking “I probably won’t hit the revenue threshold that triggers the new fee” but that’s basically planning for failure.
Then Unity contradicted themselves about their pricing and I lost whatever trust I still had in them. So I did some research and learned Godot supports C# scripts. There would still be a lot of rework to port the game from Unity, but the shared programming language eliminates well over half of it.
I think a Unity to Godot port would currently take me 1-2 months, but if Unity is an untrustworthy platform for my long-term plans, I’m better off porting as early as possible.
I’ll stick with Unity if they:
eliminate fees where the developer can’t even see the calculations that determine how much they have to pay
eliminate fees that favor some types of games over others
offer contractual guarantees that they won’t change platform fees for shipped titles
So far they’re just doubling down and lying about the details though.
UPDATE: Since writing the original post, Unity walked back the worst of their new policy. Given how far into development I am, I plan to continue with Unity, at least for this project.