Unity is going to be charging developers every time a game is installed/uninstalled. This game runs on Unity and thus will be affected.
Well this might force them to stop telling people to reinstall to fix asset problems
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Wait, so if a player uninstalls and reinstalls this game, the developer gets charged but the players donât? Is that right?
Huh.
Seems like any upset players could do that multiple times to punish the developer for bad behaviour, like when they release a new UI that ruins the game, or when they mess up pause menus and remove important information, or when they add bugs that cost players real money then take ages to compensate those players, or when⊠Well, certain developers might have to change the way they treat players I guess.
I hope nobody decides to do this. That would be awful (!)
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I assume, this game runs on a professional version of Unity. That means, to qualify for the additional costs, the game has to have a revenue of over one million US-Dollars within the last year.
I am not sure, if it clears this mark.
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I think you are under a happy illusion - this will rather make game developers INCREASE the cost burden on players to make up for their losses.
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Depending on the internet provider, players shouldnât do that for data cap reasons.
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Yeah this huge news and will really shake up the gaming world if Unity follows through.
Might be cheaper for devs to migrate to another engine.
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Itâs a change, that will hit medium multiplatform companies the hardest, I assume, as they require an engine, that can run in such different environments. The ones behind Gems of war certainly fall into that category.
It might become an interesting debate, whether these costs need to be carried by the development company (as it concerns the internal structure) or the publisher (as it is related to distribution).
Also I wonder, how the number of installations is meant to be kept track of, especially with products, that do not require a registration and maybe are completely able to run offline. While this is no option on the phone game market, consoles and computers still pretty much have their physical games section.
Like pointed out above though, the minimum treshold is, depending on the used Unity version, either 200-thousand or 1 million dollar of yearly revenue.
If we estimate, that this game has about 50-thousand active players (rather an optimistic guess), that would be either 4 or 20 Dollar per user and year, to be required to pay this fee. Might be a close call. While 20 Dollar for campaign passes every year could be an option chosen by a significant portion, otherwise I am uncertain, if those who pay above that outweigh the free players in that average.
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I look forward to Gems of War being ran on Unreal Engine 5. Matching gems in 4k.
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With twice as many microtransactions!
Photorealistic emails with 50 gems compensation!
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Either GoW is just over threshold or nowhere near it, Iâve seen bits of info that indicate both though Iâm strongly inclined to believe its well short, given it has the lowest download rate for the last month of any 505 mobile game according to Sensor Tower.
Gems of War seems to be sky high over the threshold. Their financial report for 2022 says 2.5 million revenue and they should have somewhere around 8 million life to date installations. At this point it doesnât matter how few downloads it gets, each further installation falls into the standard monthly rate.
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It has already been clarified that several downloads to the same device arenât a problem since âdownload bombingâ has been prohibited âŠ
It sounds like the backtracked after all the backlash rather than clarifying an original policy. They were pretty clear originally that a single user deleting and reinstalling a game would count as 2 installs. Now even a simple reinstall wouldnât count against the dev.
After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unityâs Whitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation. (A spokesperson told Axios that Unity had âregroupedâ to discuss the issue.)
Update: According to a statement from an alleged current Unity employee on the Unity forum, this whole thing was rushed out. A lot of the concerns that are being raised now were also raised internally, and evidently werenât addressed before they went public. So I guess I do believe they werenât dumb enough to allow for download bombing, but someone pushed them to release the announcement.
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It also raises concerns on how they will track the number of installs. Only with invasive spyware is that possible.
From their official FAQ about how they will monitor installation data is a super vague
âWeâll let you know in the invoice, just trust us broâ
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