You know for an engine called Unity, it sure does keep alienating and distancing developers left and right. In their latest misguided attempt to nickel and dime their customers, Unity has decided that they will start charging developers everytime someone installs a game.
Understandably, this has left developers seriously perplexed. Basically, with what Unity is proposing, it means that bad actors can now just mass install and reinstall games in order to financially cripple a company. It’s like Unity looked at review bombing and asked itself “How can I make something like that even worse?”
What’s worse is that everytime they try to explain why they are doing it, and say how it’s not as bad as people think, it turns out to be even worse. They are trying to justify this only being a requirement for big sellers (after 1m+ sales), but that doesn’t really make it any better.
Imagine if they can introduce something like this out of nowhere today, what will they do tomorrow? It’s a shame since I started developing on Unity myself before graduating over to Unreal, so I can understand how valuable this program can be in the right hands.
It is also one of the lighter engines, allowing a wide range of users with different setups to use it. Something like Unreal is powerful, but it has a much higher cost to run optimally. Because of this, Unity is especially approachable to non first-world developers and indies, who might not have the specs to support something like Unreal.
Not to mention, Unity still has some of the best documentation available, both official and community-led and you can pretty much find a tutorial on literally how to create anything from the likes of Game Maker’s Toolkit, Brackeys and more. Even with Unreal and Godot you will often run into blindspots with certain topics, often making Unity the best place to learn making games.
What’s even more depressing is that a lot of developers are now at an impasse, as a lot of them have spent years working on their Unity games, and they will either have to throw away years of work, or agree to Unity’s new rules.
It doesn’t only affect games either, as a lot of people using Unity aren’t even creating games with it, instead using it for other applications such as digital art exhibitions or product visualisation for example. There are companies that are super reliant on the workflow for it.
Unfortunately, if possible, my advice to unity developers is to see if they can move onto alternative engines like Godot which also supports C# and is open-source or if their PC can handle it, turn their attention to Unreal with its powerful blueprint capabilities and wide range of free starter assets. It’s risky to think Unity’s decision won’t affect you, as something else they might do in the future will.
Even some prolific developers have now voiced their decision to leave, as they have no faith in Unity. Can’t believe that just to squeeze more money from games like Genshin and more, they are ready to lose some of the most prolific creators.
