| Machiavellian said:
I am not even sure that Unity can actually charge MS or Sony a fee for every download of a game. Unless MS signed some type of agreement with Unity to accept such terms, its does not seem even remotely plausible that MS or Sony would be on the hook for license change. If by any chance Sony and MS are on the hook there probably be 2 scenarios that will happen. One, they will remove those games from the service and second they will tell Unity to go fish and meet us in court. I doubt they will take the third option and just pay whatever Unity feels they are going to charge for a distributor of a game just because they decided to change their license. A move like this seems very suspect on the level where the company must be asking to be sold or looking for a cash out before going under. Either way, I do not see this going very well for Unity in the future. |
Yeah don't think it's possible either. But, The fact that some successful games devs will be charged per install as soon as January 1st is so f*-up, not only have they never agreed to such a clause but the only way for them to free themselves from such is to remove their successful IPs from distribution. This points out the possibility that Unity may retain some rights over the distribution of products as per the current user agreement, which could enable them to use these rights to force actual royalty from distributors.
If that's the case however it's even worse as it assesses that, by using Unity, you are not only a victim of the currently anticipated change but Unity has a hand over your own products that enable them to come up with ever so crazy short-term money grab policy.
At this point, even without considering this change's impacts, the sole context that enabled Unity to enact such half-assed money grad and the fact they are looking and willing to enact such tells me one thing Unity is dead this move simply killed it on the spot.
There's no way devs will continue to use this engine with their new projects only to become dependent on the whims of a failed CEO's shortsightedness.
This really pains me because I love geeking out with Unity and over the past few years it has become stable enough to be a favorite among indies. Since some indies of today will certainly grow to be AAA devs, the outlook for Unity to finally have a foothold in the AAA engine market share in the not-so-distant future never was as good as it was.
But now, in one blunder, this is all gone, even reversing course won't do it as there is no way the dev will have the confidence Unity won't try again with something slightly different.
The only path forward for unity is either A:
- kick out the current Ceo's
- Reverse courses
- Change policy in a way that does not enable them to do so ever again
- Do all above in the next few days
or B:
- Be acquired
- Let the new acquirer do A) and give back confidence in Unity to its users
