Unity Betrayed Us

I normally stay away from the hot stuff in the news and keep focusing on my work without bothering, but what Unity announced this week affects my work itself in too many ways for me to stay idle.

It not only insults the work of every single indie developer out there but it also adds a lot of uncertainty for the developers that have chosen to focus their career path on Unity like I did.

I mainly write this article to put oil on the fire they started in hope that they get burned badly enough to cancel their new ridiculous policies. And if they don't, well we won't be able to safely put a price tag on Chaos Crown at all, so consider this my attempt to shake things up with what little voice I have.

I invite you to directly read their policy announcement here, but if you're ready to take my word for it here are the main key points that will affect us and the rest of the indie games ever made with Unity, take note that there are flaws and grey areas that they'll clarify with time :

• A $0.02 to $0.20 per first install fee when a game sells for 200k or more (that threshold can change anytime). Includes already released games, so expect some games you like to be completely removed from the market before January if their owners are unable to pay them. Those fees are fixed and can change at any given time, which will drive up global game price inflation higher than ever before. Moreover, there is no telling as to how they'll manage to detect if a game has been pirated, which means that companies may get overcharged. We also have no access to the algorithm they'll use to calculate first installs so it might end up being fraudulent in nature.

  This is a change in how we do business with Unity and no one was consulted, agreed to or had a warning about this sudden change. Should this policy last, we won't publish any game made with Unity to the Steam Store.

• x4 the prices of subscriptions and removed the lower tier so that you're forced to go full price.

• Dependency to WIFI to run any Unity versions or Unity games.

• Anti competition policies with their micro transaction tools that will over time give them a monopoly over the market.

Fun fact, the Unity CEO is the one that introduced loot boxes during his time at EA. He's also famous for having suggested in a video call that players should pay real money to reload in-game ammo. He also sold 2k of his Unity company shares just before announcing this, which is what we call insider trading : a crime that will at the very least get him in the court room.

As of now Unity has received death threats and a major backlash from the development and gaming community. I can only hope things get worse for them.

You might have heard this from other games already.

I don't have a clear answer as to what can be done. I guess that if you feel as angry as I am about what they're about to do, our best bet is to give them the greatest backlash they've ever seen. Make your voice be heard. If this policy passes expect only more abuses from companies.

EDIT : Unity has updated their policy announcements 10 days later :

• A cap of 2.5% of the profits