A major partner told John Riccitiello personally that it will not pay the Runtime Fee – and in the strongest possible terms.
So most of the indie devs will not need to pay if they are sub 1MM revenue, and the large players can just throw the weight around and negotiate the fees down? Then who is this fee meant to fleece, the “middle class” devs?
It is still unattractive for indie devs. You risk a huge hit in your revenue when you accidentally hit the the limit. You can’t stop selling games to not hit it.
It’s a cycle.
- Indie devs will find / build new platform
- The platform will gain traction
- It’ll grow exponentially
- It’ll reach a point where platform devs will be greedy or itll be taken over by big corps.
Rinse and repeat.
Some platforms reach stage 2 but never leave.
Gdot is FOSS engine. This means it will most probably never pull shit like that and even if everybody is allowed to fork it before a bad change and continue with that
The huge hit of a maximum of 2.5% of your future revenue. Unreal takes 5% in the same situation, for comparison.
The fee itself is perfectly reasonable, Unity just completely fucked up implementing it trying to force it on games already released or in development by altering the agreements solo and stirring up a well deserved shitshow for it, staining their reputation probably permanently.
Thought they were dealing a death blow to applovin, hit themselves instead.
Though with what they were trying to do, I wonder if regulators will come in for the kill now.
I figured this was gonna come out. I figured Unity would bend the knee for anyone that made real money for the platform, so the change for their licensing fee would impact the hard working indie devs that need every penny to pursue their passion. This is such brazen rentseeking.
I remember a game developer calling this change a “tax on the rich” and I went on blast because nobody rich pays a tax. It’s handed down to the actual users as punitive. This just hurts those who want to make this a passion.
And the telling thing is a lot of Unity staff are abandoning ship. Which means the things that matter like DOTS or ARP are going to rot while metrics and ads remain stable. I got fed up with the state of DOTS and ProBuilder, and while it’s not as comparable, Godex is reaching some degree of partity with FLECS and Entitas.
Do not be fooled that with JR gone Unity will be back to its old self. If you have a project almost out the door finish it. If not, change engines.
I’ve yet to understand how that was even legal. “Hey you know those colors we sold you? Now that you used them to do a painting, we’ll take a % on how much you sold it for”
I hope this makes more people use Godot.
