It takes a lot to unite every corner of the gaming industry, but that’s exactly what Unity has done with a strangely bad update to the price of its game engine, Epic Games’ biggest rival to Unreal Engine.
Unity has announced that it will now rate the development of the engine according to the installation of its game. This amazing update has scared off countless indie developers, and many have already announced plans to port platforms for future or future releases.
Unity temporarily moved to try to explain some of the most common questions raised through this decision, which, as Axios reports, include:
Despite some clarifications, no one is satisfied with this decision. This is deeply overdue, and there will most likely continue to be a flood of developers fleeing the platform to Unreal or other engines to avoid this kind of paid installation style that came out of nowhere. Some wonder if Unity, which has lost some of its price in the last five years, will be able to make it in the long term if that’s what they turn to for revenue.
There is also the controversy that some of Unity’s more sensible officials sold inventory days before this announcement was published, even though internally they knew the move was bound to be incredibly controversial. In fact, Unity inventory is down 5% after today’s news.
The problem is that even if Unity walked the entire policy back, and there’s no indication they will, the fact that it was concocted and released in the first place is a serious breach of trust, and is alone probably enough to get loads of developers not to continue using its engine, lest more future harmful decisions be made. We will have to wait and see what a company like Microsoft has to say about suddenly having to shoulder a bunch of Unity install fees, or much larger games like Genshin Impact which run on Unity, a megahit that Unity probably believes can rake in tons of cash for them under this model.
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