The game developers affected by Unity’s new pricing model are striking back. A collective of developers across 19 companies, mostly based in Europe and mostly developing mobile games, has put out an open letter urging Unity to reverse course on its recently announced pricing model changes. The letter contains some of the same sentiments expressed by other developers this week but with one big twist.
“As a course of immediate action, our collective of game development companies is forced to turn off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization across our projects until these changes are reconsidered,” the letter read.
That’s wild. Good for them.
I don’t understand how unity has any legal standing to retroactively charge new fees to developers who have already made their games. You’re only required to abide by terms agreed to in a deal as it was written at the time of agreement. Isn’t that literally how EVERYTHING works?
Unity doesn’t give out perpetual licenses any more, it’s a subscription model. If you don’t like it, you can leave at any point in time, but then you also don’t have a license to distribute their engine along with your game.
The problematic part (for Unity) is that they used to have a clause in the contract that said that you could keep using the old license terms as long as you didn’t update the engine. They removed that last year, but developers who are using an older version than that should be able to have a chance at the court. The problem is just that small indie devs don’t have the money for this multi-year legal battle.
This feels like Reddit all over again. There’s no saving it, their CEO has long touted the “gotcha bitch!” approach to extorting money from users and called people who didn’t “fucking idiots”. This is all he knows.
So far the most popular games ive seen pushback from are Slay the Spire, Cult of the Lamb and Darkest Dungeon. Those games also have the benefit of dedicated fanbases. Those people will easily follow them.
Let’s see how this pans out over the week, still heaps of opportunities for unity to fuck this up further
The thing that’s crazy is there are some Wall Street analysts who are more bullish on Unity in our current context, which is hilarious to me, because given how they’ve (perhaps illegally) pissed off so many different and critical parts of their ecosystem, the only clear trajectory I see for Unity at this point is down.
I hope this will have an impact.
