Unity announced a new fee structure today, and developers are none too happy. “We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the change.
Yeah, you can call that stupid, but I am not stupid. But regardless of your insult, let me talk to you.
I am not sure which Microsoft product you are talking about, but certain Microsoft products are indeed charged this way. It is called an OEM license and while typically every OEM license is negotiated on different terms (per license, per revenue, per download, per install, per duration of usage, etc.), the basic idea is usually that some amount of money will be made by Microsoft proportional to how much use your product is getting. In the Enterprise world it is also common to charge by how much value the user is getting out of the product, which whole sales departments are trying to figure out on a case by case basis with complicated excel sheets. I mean, it is not like Unity invented this model. In fact, Microsoft got as big as it got by selling a pay per copy version of MS-DOS to IBM.
Unity is an ingredient that makes games work. The game is made with Unity and is shipped with the Unity engine packaged inside, just like any other ingredient. So explain to my why Unity can not define some metric which will highly correlate with the amount of usage and charge based on that metric?
So what I get from Unity’s site is that they will charge per download. So yeah, potentially you can download a game three times to three different devices or even to the same devices you’ve wiped. But I would claim that generally speaking the number of downloads is a good indicator of how often a game is used. If you don’t like a game you are generally going to download it only once. If you really like the game you are likely to download it again and again to new devices and after wipes. It isn’t perfect for sure, but every other metric you can come up with also has a fair share of problems. Maybe you tell me which one is the one that does not have any problems and is still simple enough to bill upon?
Windows. If Unity is a large part of what makes games work then Windows is arguably an even larger part of what makes most consumer software work. If it’s acceptable to charge for Unity usage then it should also be acceptable to charge for Windows usage. After all if you want to install Unity development tools on Windows you need to use Windows. Then following your logic that means Microsoft should be able to charge, in this example charge Unity Technologies, every time someone installs the Unity development tools because the tools literally won’t work without Windows.
And if this became the norm then that cost will be offloaded to the customers. That would mean if you’ve built a new computer and want to play Skyrim you’re going to pay x amount to install Chrome (or Firefox), then pay another x amount to install Steam and finally pay another x amount to install Skyrim. That’s stupid.
It’s called licensing and Unity developers already pay a licensing fee per year and, in theory, also per user. Some companies reuse keys (not unique to Unity or game dev) between developers because they can get away with it as just the “per user” part is already too hard for licensing companies to properly track and bill.
And to be clear I never said you’re stupid. I said your idea is stupid. Smart people can have stupid ideas as well.
Yeah, so Windows is indeed a large part of why software works, but it is infrastructure which is packaged separately. Your reasoning can be extended into even further absurdity, like we should pay Intel each time we run software, etc. But this is just not how Microsoft and Intel operate. They’re not part of the product, but just make the product work. It’s not like we get another Windows version and Intel chip with each game.
Think of Unity like a frozen pizza bottom. What the developers needs to do is put some ingredients on top and it can be sold. The frozen pizza is clearly sold with the pizza bottom. Should the developer not have to pay per pizza bottom? You can bake the pizza in your oven, but the pizza developer doesn’t need to pay for the oven. They can assume people have that in place; it is simply a requirement in order for the pizza to be consumed.
However, if you are going to ship a Microsoft product as part of your product, you can sure as hell expect Microsoft sales people on your doorstep. They’ll negotiate an OEM deal and it’ll surely depend on things like: number of installs, number of downloads, number of users, time used, value extracted by the users, revenue made by you, etc. I’ve ran a big company for many years and did a number of OEM deals during that time (both being OEMed and OEMing). This is only reasonable.