Game development engine Unity has U-turned on some parts of its hugely controversial plan to enforce fees on game creat…
I don’t think people realize how horrifying these addendums are.
Not only do they not really fix the issue, but they prove that no, yeah, they hadn’t thought about the possibility of “install bombing” at all until just now and it would totally have triggered massive fees.
I mean, the announcement was terribly worded, and some of the stuff (like wha’t a “monthly fee” or a “retroactive fee”) were very unclear, so you could hold out hope that they knew what they wanted to do and were just bad at explaining it.
But nope, that ship has sailed. They clearly didn’t give this any amount of thought.
So yeah, I’m more worried about it now than I was yesterday, believe it or not. Like, a LOT more.
Still an enormous nope. Both for the developers and the users. How do you check if a game has already been installed once? What data are you gonna steal to check if it has been installed already?
Unity is an application to spy on users and show them ads. Often there is some sort of game involved, but I think that is just coincidence.
Kerbal Space Program, an awesome game that simulates the construction of space vehicles and the physics of an entire solar system hyper-realistically, was developed in Unity. I am waiting on their dev team’s word on this.
Not every Unity game is a generic free mobile game
What an interesting year. This has to be the 4th or 5th large tech-centric company that’s
- introduced some really shitty policy
- pissed off it’s consumers
- then backtracks to some degree after backlash
Just like every other company that’s done this, the backtrack is likely meant to appease the consumers before the policy gets re-introduced later. Perhaps with slightly different wording.
The back tracking isn’t even a reversal. They just said they were going to keep the charges but try to reduce the impact of “install bombing”.
My first thought was:
This can only apply to games that begin development after this announcement…right? Otherwise it fells like a massive bait and switch.
Some companies are already announcing the elimination of their games starting in January. Cult of the lamb, for example.
Anyone that uses unity is as foolish as any that use java. Just begging for meritless lawsuits to extract rent.
You know how OpenJDK works right? Not every runtime requires payment to Oracle.
You know how Oracle works right? Not every license is adhered to by Oracle.
They sued over copyright of the function names my dude. The fact that that was insane did not stop them and did not stop google from paying massive amounts of money to Lawyers to get the License terms enforced.
https://www.eff.org/cases/oracle-v-googleNever have anything to do with Oracle. Not even tangentially.
Proprietary software always leads to this. Open source is the future
The only problem with open source is you can’t really make a profit from it. If someone wants it, they can just spin up their own local copy of the original, and you can’t do shit about it.
Yup, as a software dev, I would love to be able to devote all my time to writing open source, but I gotta make money to live as well. Switching to working on OSS would be a huge leap of faith that there is someone out there willing pay/donate for my work. As it is, I think it will be my way of giving back once I have saved up enough money from my proprietary work, and hopefully I will be able to switch over sooner rather than later.
Maybe I’ll go take a look at what the process is for getting grants from the government or non-profit orgs like Apache foundation…
Many organizations writing open source stuff are hiring people to work full-time. You might not earn as much as other places, but just because they are non-profits doesn’t mean they don’t have money or an income.
Why not work for Godot? Or KDE, or LibreOffice,… They need full-time workers too
