Hello guys and gals, it's me Mutahar again! This time we take a look at some new practices from one of the largest game engines on the planet, Unity. How they've decided that they can charge per download is beyond me and what should be the take away is moving to more open technologies and leaving this behind. Thanks for watching!
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Hello guys and gals, me Mudahar and Unity is a prime example of how to ruin your company in like a couple hours.

and gentlemen, Unity is a game engine that we all know too well.

And if it's 1 thing about Unity, you've probably played a game in it.

OK, 1 of my early games that I played on my channel was Slender the 8 Pages, a game made by 1, maybe another person, underneath Unity.

But Unity isn't just designed for shovelware trash on Steam.

There's a lot of big games that use Unity.

So to understand, Unity is a game engine that people come in.

They develop games on, they release it, and it's not just used for game development.

It's used for a whole bunch of other 3D varieties, other 3D reasons.

But today they've introduced something that's a little wild.

What if I told you that they are now charging people for each install?

So if you're a game developer and you release a game on the internet and a hundred thousand people, you know, download your game, launch it, and after you make a certain amount of money, you may end up owing a serious amount of cash.

Now, I'm wondering how this is even ethical, okay?

Why is it that a game engine company can suddenly decide to charge you money for a project you made on their tools just because other people downloaded.

To give you a comparison, imagine if tomorrow Adobe came out and said, hey, all you YouTubers making videos, you're going to have to give us a certain amount per hundred views.

Okay, just because I used your software to produce the video?

Why would I pay you extra if other people consume my media?

Ladies and gentlemen, let's actually look down into Unity, okay?

So to understand, this whole hoopla kind of came out from this 1 post.

1 poster from a small independent company, AgroKrabs.

This is where I actually found about it first.

Today, Unity, the engine we use to make our games, announced it'll soon be taking a fee from developers for every copy of the game installed over a certain threshold, regardless of how that copy was obtained.

Yeah, that also includes people that find a pirated version of it, okay?

Guess who has a somewhat highly anticipated game coming to Xbox Game Pass in

So basically, that means Another Crap's Treasure will be free to install for 25 million game pass subscribers.

If a fraction of those users download our game, Unity could take a fee that puts an enormous debt into our income and threatens the sustainability of our business.

And that's before we even think about sales on other platforms or pirated installs or even multiple installs by the same user.

Okay, so this sounds really, really wild.

And of course, if you look at September 12, 2023, should have released this 1 a day ago, to be honest, given how destructive it is for their company, Unity plan pricing and packaging updates.

So this is actually a blog with further updated clarification.

As many of you know, the Unity engine is in fact, 2 substantial software components, Unity editor, Unity runtime.

The Unity runtime is code that executes on players' devices and makes made with Unity games work at scale with billions of monthly downloads.

So we are introducing a Unity runtime fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded to an end user.

So again, let's look at their thresholds for revenue.

If 2 criterias have been met, the game has passed a minimum revenue threshold in the last 12 months and the game has passed a minimum lifetime install count.

So from the day you launch a game to the end of time, they're calculating that number.

We set high revenue and game install thresholds to avoid impacting those who have yet to find scale.

So here they've actually detailed Unity Personal and Unity Plus, Those who have made

or more in the last 12 months and have had at least

And then of course, if you're a pro and enterprise user, then you have a threshold of a million USD in the last 12 months and a million lifetime game installs.

So this is probably run by big companies and like, you know, small businesses that are going to be big companies.

Personal is obviously the independent game developer.

You might think those thresholds are crazy.

So here's actually the founder, Gary Neumann of FacePunch Studios.

You might recognize them as the developers behind Gary's Mod and Rust.

Okay, so right here, best known for Gary's Mod and Rust, 2 popular games.

This is how fees are calculated because initially he said Unity wants to pay them 200 grand a month.

Last month based on all of these, you know installs and whatnot.

and while this isn't much here's stuff that they don't like Unity can just start charging us a tax per install.

They can install tracking to our game, interesting point.

And of course, can you trust their tracking?

For me to trust them, even professionally, takes a level of disbelief that I could probably chalk towards believing in the flat fucking earth, believing in aliens, but never believing the greedy game company run by a greedy CEO known as John Risatello, okay, who currently is CEO at Unity Technologies.

John Risatello once famously said, What if battlefield players could pay 1 dollar per reload?

OK, so during a transcript from a 2011 stockholder meeting, Xbox 360 Achievements discovered the following comments.

When you are 6 hours into playing Battlefield and you run out of ammo in your magazine, he says, clip, we ask you for a dollar to reload.

Were you really not that price sensitive at that point in time?

This dude is the fucking Scumbag that the moment you walk into a public urinal and piss he's out there in front of the stall with a nice Roll of Charmin super ultra unit soft and he's like you you want to you want to pay

I mean You're gonna need to clean the piss

parole He's the dude that takes advantage of you.

And this is where I kind of wish that if you're the CEO of the company, especially if you're in game development, I really wish it was ran by gamers.

This guy seems like an actual proper to God, full on, no jokes, scumbag.

And that's the best way to describe this guy as a person.

If Bobby Kodik and this guy had a faceoff between who could be the most evil gaming CEO, that would be a battle of the ages, okay?

That would be like a serious heavyweight title championship to witness.

So looking back into Unity, this is how much they charge.

This is how they calculate the fee, okay?

So if you cross the eligibility, The fee calculation is like this.

Unity Personal goes like, so new installs per month, right?

This is standard rate if thresholds are met.

If you're on the Personal package, they charge you 20 cents per install, okay?

Now in the Enterprise side, they charge you 0.125 cents per install, okay?

So it's cheaper if you buy the higher tier straight up.

Now for 1 to even a million new installs per month, it's a flat rate of 20 cents if you're a brand new personal Unity-like developer.

And of course, if you buy the pro package or the enterprise package, then it starts to get cheaper.

So after a million users, enterprise accounts only have to pay a penny per install.

It's literally cheaper for just the enterprise guy.

The largest pain point comes from the personal amount.

Could you imagine people indie games like indie developers that make like the 1 head off game that a streamer enjoys and millions of people download it, but they were using a personal account just because their game was successful.

They have now bankrupted themselves because of these new fees that are going to these scumbags.

And of course, new installs per month, emerging market rate.

Okay, so I guess the emerging market rate, which let me see the...

So for instance, if your game is downloaded from India, then the standard rate is 2 cents per install, and then of course, 1 cent for Unity Pro and not even a goddamn penny for Unity Enterprise.

Again, it really feels like the actual pain point is for that person who is in the personal package.

Now free to play games like Genshin Impact, which I think are run on unity, but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

If you make a free to play game on the mobile store, that might be the biggest pain point.

So unless, you know, if millions of people download your mobile game, but now your ad system in the game or microtransactions aren't making up for it, it creates an unsustainable model.

So again, I have to imagine No 1 is happy about any of this.

So then I started to read into their FAQ, okay?

And so they said, what about pirated copies?

We are happy to work with any developer who has been the victim of piracy, so they are not unfairly hunted by, hurt by unwanted installs.

How is Unity collecting the number of installs?

We leverage our own proprietary data model.

Oh yeah, It's not open and transparent, huh?

And we'll provide estimates of the number of times the run time is distributed for a given project.

Will installs of a demo or a game in open access.

If a user can access a full game, then installs count towards the fee.

If a user can access the full game, then the demo would be considered a separate package and not count towards the fee.

So when that's, that's actually interesting wording, separate package just means that you're going to bill me for that demo on its own Or the open beta or whatever.

They're also killing demos from the way that it sounds We don't intend to capture or count installs for QA testing.

I would hope not I would hope in during development.

You don't at least bill the actual person for developing their game.

You're already charging them in certain cases to use higher tier versions of your software.

Why the fuck would you then charge them money for debug?

So looking into the unity forums, this is Leonard P from unity technologies.

So highlighting some of the question and answer pairs, so right here, 1 of them asks, if a user reinstalls, redownloads a game, changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs?

Yes, the creator will need to pay for all future installs.

The reason is that Unity doesn't receive end player information.

That might be 1 of the most disgusting answers that I've ever read.

Ladies and gentlemen, you have heard it here today.

There used to be a meme back during Nintendo like emulation days, where it was like, how do you bankrupt Nintendo?

Oh, you just download a Nintendo game over and over again.

That's 60 bucks out of Nintendo's pockets.

So if you wanted to bankrupt your your your Unity developer, your Unity indie guy, just keep downloading their game.

You know, on itch.io where I used to play and occasionally still want to download some amazing VHS horror games, a lot of those games are made underneath Unity.

Just downloading, just uploading your Unity game on there and people download it and all of a sudden you're bankrupt to Unity because your game got popular and people are just running the final launch build, the end user build on their system.

Again, it goes back to the beginning of this.

Unity is a tool that you have purchased, you have licensed to create your game.

Once your game is out there, the final project, why is it all of a sudden Unity feels that they can collect actual royalties on a game that they don't have any involvement with, you know, after all of it?

Could you imagine if Unreal started doing this?

They would absolutely be chastised, they might even go straight up bankrupt if they tried it.

And of course, you know, this has opened the door for people to look at things like GDOT Engine, which is an open source project which you should absolutely switch to if you're a game developer.

Because let me tell you something right now, the beauty of open source is it's not run by 1 scumbag company that can absolutely decide to bring this any time, day, and shape.

You can just download this engine and start working on your project.

And that's pretty much where I want to end this video off of, ladies and gentlemen.

Unity, even if they roll this back and say, guys, we messed up, you still did it.

Unity as a game engine should just die out.

And honestly, that's the best case scenario because what they've shown is you cannot trust them if you're a developer.

And if you do want to continue developing with unity in the future after all of this then that's on you dog that's all on you because then you can't complain the genie is already out of the bottle we've already seen it stay far away from unity Anyways, ladies and gentlemen, this is me, Mudahar, and yeah.


Speaker 0: Hello guys and gals, me Mudahar and Unity is a prime example of how to ruin your company in like a couple hours. Ladies

Speaker 1: and gentlemen, Unity is a game engine that we all know too well. And if it's 1 thing about Unity, you've probably played a game in it. OK, 1 of my early games that I played on my channel was Slender the 8 Pages, a game made by 1, maybe another person, underneath Unity. But Unity isn't just designed for shovelware trash on Steam. There's a lot of big games that use Unity.

So to understand, Unity is a game engine that people come in. They develop games on, they release it, and it's not just used for game development. It's used for a whole bunch of other 3D varieties, other 3D reasons. But today they've introduced something that's a little wild. What if I told you that they are now charging people for each install?

So if you're a game developer and you release a game on the internet and a hundred thousand people, you know, download your game, launch it, and after you make a certain amount of money, you may end up owing a serious amount of cash. Now, I'm wondering how this is even ethical, okay? Why is it that a game engine company can suddenly decide to charge you money for a project you made on their tools just because other people downloaded. To give you a comparison, imagine if tomorrow Adobe came out and said, hey, all you YouTubers making videos, you're going to have to give us a certain amount per hundred views. Why?

Okay, just because I used your software to produce the video? I already pay you. Why would I pay you extra if other people consume my media? What? Ladies and gentlemen, let's actually look down into Unity, okay?

So to understand, this whole hoopla kind of came out from this 1 post. 1 poster from a small independent company, AgroKrabs. This is where I actually found about it first. Hey gamers. Hi.

Today, Unity, the engine we use to make our games, announced it'll soon be taking a fee from developers for every copy of the game installed over a certain threshold, regardless of how that copy was obtained. Yeah, that also includes people that find a pirated version of it, okay? A certain repack? Guess who has a somewhat highly anticipated game coming to Xbox Game Pass in

Speaker 0: 2024?

Speaker 1: So basically, that means Another Crap's Treasure will be free to install for 25 million game pass subscribers. If a fraction of those users download our game, Unity could take a fee that puts an enormous debt into our income and threatens the sustainability of our business. They could actually be bankrupted, OK? And that's before we even think about sales on other platforms or pirated installs or even multiple installs by the same user. Okay, so this sounds really, really wild.

And of course, if you look at September 12, 2023, should have released this 1 a day ago, to be honest, given how destructive it is for their company, Unity plan pricing and packaging updates. Okay. So this is actually a blog with further updated clarification. As many of you know, the Unity engine is in fact, 2 substantial software components, Unity editor, Unity runtime. The Unity runtime is code that executes on players' devices and makes made with Unity games work at scale with billions of monthly downloads.

So we are introducing a Unity runtime fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded to an end user. So again, let's look at their thresholds for revenue. Games qualify for the fee. If 2 criterias have been met, the game has passed a minimum revenue threshold in the last 12 months and the game has passed a minimum lifetime install count. So from the day you launch a game to the end of time, they're calculating that number.

We set high revenue and game install thresholds to avoid impacting those who have yet to find scale. So here they've actually detailed Unity Personal and Unity Plus, Those who have made

Speaker 0: $200, 000

Speaker 1: or more in the last 12 months and have had at least

Speaker 0: 200, 000

Speaker 1: lifetime game installs. And then of course, if you're a pro and enterprise user, then you have a threshold of a million USD in the last 12 months and a million lifetime game installs. So this is probably run by big companies and like, you know, small businesses that are going to be big companies. Personal is obviously the independent game developer. OK, just posting their project on Steam.

So this actually is kind of wild. You might think those thresholds are crazy. So here's actually the founder, Gary Neumann of FacePunch Studios. You might recognize them as the developers behind Gary's Mod and Rust. Okay, so right here, best known for Gary's Mod and Rust, 2 popular games.

So here he writes, I was wrong. This is how fees are calculated because initially he said Unity wants to pay them 200 grand a month. Lifetime we would have paid them

Speaker 0: $410, 000

Speaker 1: or more, around 40k a year. Last month based on all of these, you know installs and whatnot. They would have cost

Speaker 0: 2517

Speaker 1: and while this isn't much here's stuff that they don't like Unity can just start charging us a tax per install. They can do this unilaterally. They can charge whatever they want. They can install tracking to our game, interesting point. And of course, can you trust their tracking?

Unity is a bunch of scumbags. For me to trust them, even professionally, takes a level of disbelief that I could probably chalk towards believing in the flat fucking earth, believing in aliens, but never believing the greedy game company run by a greedy CEO known as John Risatello, okay, who currently is CEO at Unity Technologies. John Risatello once famously said, What if battlefield players could pay 1 dollar per reload? OK, so during a transcript from a 2011 stockholder meeting, Xbox 360 Achievements discovered the following comments. When you are 6 hours into playing Battlefield and you run out of ammo in your magazine, he says, clip, we ask you for a dollar to reload.

Were you really not that price sensitive at that point in time? This dude is the fucking Scumbag that the moment you walk into a public urinal and piss he's out there in front of the stall with a nice Roll of Charmin super ultra unit soft and he's like you you want to you want to pay

Speaker 0: $10.

Speaker 1: I mean You're gonna need to clean the piss

Speaker 0: $10

Speaker 1: parole He's the dude that takes advantage of you. This is an actual scumbag CEO. And this is where I kind of wish that if you're the CEO of the company, especially if you're in game development, I really wish it was ran by gamers. This guy doesn't seem like gamers. This guy seems like an actual proper to God, full on, no jokes, scumbag.

And that's the best way to describe this guy as a person. If Bobby Kodik and this guy had a faceoff between who could be the most evil gaming CEO, that would be a battle of the ages, okay? That would be like a serious heavyweight title championship to witness. So looking back into Unity, this is how much they charge. This is how they calculate the fee, okay?

So if you cross the eligibility, The fee calculation is like this. Unity Personal goes like, so new installs per month, right? This is standard rate if thresholds are met. If you're on the Personal package, they charge you 20 cents per install, okay? Now in the Enterprise side, they charge you 0.125 cents per install, okay?

So it's cheaper if you buy the higher tier straight up. Now for 1 to even a million new installs per month, it's a flat rate of 20 cents if you're a brand new personal Unity-like developer. And of course, if you buy the pro package or the enterprise package, then it starts to get cheaper. So after a million users, enterprise accounts only have to pay a penny per install. It's literally cheaper for just the enterprise guy.

The largest pain point comes from the personal amount. Could you imagine people indie games like indie developers that make like the 1 head off game that a streamer enjoys and millions of people download it, but they were using a personal account just because their game was successful. They have now bankrupted themselves because of these new fees that are going to these scumbags. And of course, new installs per month, emerging market rate. Okay, so I guess the emerging market rate, which let me see the...

What do they actually mean over here? Emerging gaming regions such as India. So for instance, if your game is downloaded from India, then the standard rate is 2 cents per install, and then of course, 1 cent for Unity Pro and not even a goddamn penny for Unity Enterprise. Again, it really feels like the actual pain point is for that person who is in the personal package. Now free to play games like Genshin Impact, which I think are run on unity, but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

If you make a free to play game on the mobile store, that might be the biggest pain point. Okay. So unless, you know, if millions of people download your mobile game, but now your ad system in the game or microtransactions aren't making up for it, it creates an unsustainable model. So again, I have to imagine No 1 is happy about any of this. So then I started to read into their FAQ, okay?

And so they said, what about pirated copies? Which is a pretty valid concern. We are happy to work with any developer who has been the victim of piracy, so they are not unfairly hunted by, hurt by unwanted installs. Wow, that's cool. That's a nice vague response, I guess.

I'm glad you're happy to work with them. You should work with them. How is Unity collecting the number of installs? We leverage our own proprietary data model. Oh yeah, It's not open and transparent, huh?

I gotta trust you guys? Okay! Alright! And we'll provide estimates of the number of times the run time is distributed for a given project. Will installs of a demo or a game in open access.

Oh Jesus. If a user can access a full game, then installs count towards the fee. If a user can access the full game, then the demo would be considered a separate package and not count towards the fee. So when that's, that's actually interesting wording, separate package just means that you're going to bill me for that demo on its own Or the open beta or whatever. They're also killing demos from the way that it sounds We don't intend to capture or count installs for QA testing.

I would hope not I would hope in during development. You don't at least bill the actual person for developing their game. That would be insane. You're already charging them in certain cases to use higher tier versions of your software. Why the fuck would you then charge them money for debug?

Just stop doing this in the first place. Now it gets even wilder. So looking into the unity forums, this is Leonard P from unity technologies. And this is where it gets even wilder. Okay.

So highlighting some of the question and answer pairs, so right here, 1 of them asks, if a user reinstalls, redownloads a game, changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs? Yes, the creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn't receive end player information. That might be 1 of the most disgusting answers that I've ever read. Ladies and gentlemen, you have heard it here today.

There used to be a meme back during Nintendo like emulation days, where it was like, how do you bankrupt Nintendo? Oh, you just download a Nintendo game over and over again. That's 60 bucks out of Nintendo's pockets. It's real, at least for Unity gamers. So if you wanted to bankrupt your your your Unity developer, your Unity indie guy, just keep downloading their game.

You know, on itch.io where I used to play and occasionally still want to download some amazing VHS horror games, a lot of those games are made underneath Unity. Could you imagine? Just for a minute, just for a minute. Just downloading, just uploading your Unity game on there and people download it and all of a sudden you're bankrupt to Unity because your game got popular and people are just running the final launch build, the end user build on their system. Again, it goes back to the beginning of this.

How is this even ethical? Unity is a tool that you have purchased, you have licensed to create your game. Once your game is out there, the final project, why is it all of a sudden Unity feels that they can collect actual royalties on a game that they don't have any involvement with, you know, after all of it? It just doesn't make any sense to me. At all.

Could you imagine if Unreal started doing this? They would absolutely be chastised, they might even go straight up bankrupt if they tried it. And of course, you know, this has opened the door for people to look at things like GDOT Engine, which is an open source project which you should absolutely switch to if you're a game developer. Because let me tell you something right now, the beauty of open source is it's not run by 1 scumbag company that can absolutely decide to bring this any time, day, and shape. You can just download this engine and start working on your project.

And that's pretty much where I want to end this video off of, ladies and gentlemen. Unity, even if they roll this back and say, guys, we messed up, you still did it. So nobody should trust you. Unity as a game engine should just die out. And honestly, that's the best case scenario because what they've shown is you cannot trust them if you're a developer.

And if you do want to continue developing with unity in the future after all of this then that's on you dog that's all on you because then you can't complain the genie is already out of the bottle we've already seen it stay far away from unity Anyways, ladies and gentlemen, this is me, Mudahar, and yeah.

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Unity Ruined Their Game Engine Forever...