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Unity adding a fee for devs for each time a game is installed, after certain thresholds
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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I work for a small (15 people) Unity gaming company. Will let you know what the CEO says, just shared the actual Unity blogpost
Edit: Update - CEO added a gravestone emoji and said "yikes"
For the sake of your sanity, I hope there's a resolution to this that doesn't involve a rewrite.
This is the problem with being a whole company on the ecosystem of another, they can pull the rug at any time.
The problem is that its so expensive to build from scratch. All Unity does is build just the engine, and that's enough to make it a 7000 person company. Trying to build a game engine and then an actual game on top is a herculean effort.
This is why open source software is so important. It enables these small companies to pool their resources and share an engine as long as they each contribute fixes back.
7000 people is misleading. Being a general purpose game engine it has to be everything for everybody. An engine developed for a single game can be simpler, and once it is done, making the game will be simpler than it will be in Unity. Also those 7000 people are doing way more things than develop an engine.
That said, an engine like Unity can save a massive amount of time, especially for games that are medium scope. It's these games where developing engine code and tooling would both take a lot of time and the advantages would likely go unnoticed.
Yeah this is why many bigger studios just use their own Engines even if they're shit.