My thoughts on the Unity bullshit, if you're interested

September 23rd, 2023

I think that it is needless to say that I stand for anybody that is acting against Unity.

Now, that's not to say that I hate Unity. I mean, as an organisation, they fucking suck ass for sure right now. John Riccitiello should eat shit and suffer whatever that implies.

I think that Unity has been a great engine for a very long time now, and while the community has collectively seemed to have predicted this inevitable crash-and-burn, I have been extremely entertained to witness the miracles that have come with it. For example, Re-Logic, the developers of Terraria, just donated 100 grand to Godot and FNA each, all in the aftermath of the Unity drama (Once again, FOSS rules above all).

Funnily enough, after years of not having approached any game dev adjacent work, I had picked up Unity for fun just an evening before they published such controversial statements. For me and my best friend, whom I regularly work with/develop with, well, we were lucky. Unfortunately, that's not the reality that so many devs have been hit with over the past week.

Today, Unity issued their (seemingly) ultimate statement on the matter, claiming that while they are not going to be applying such install fees ("runtime fees"?) to developers that had used Unity up to historic versions, they WILL be implementing and enforcing such fees for any Unity Pro and higher privileged development parties beginning as soon as their previously decided January 2024 date.

That in itself is personally ridiculous to me. Unity had such a nice image going for themselves. I have (had.) faith that they could budget and find a revenue share model that would benefit both Unity as an organisation and Unity developers together as a whole.

On top of all of this, there seems to be some deeply complicated shit involving various companies that sounds a whole lot like insider trading to me, but I was stoned and falling asleep listening to a Youtuber talk about it at the time, so this is just some secondary rhetoric that comes into play for me here. From what it sounds like, someone wants to turn Unity into an advertisement network, which does make a lot of sense considering such a model of forcing everyone that doesn't want to submit to the stupid install fee bullshit to having ads in their game.

I think that's all I have to say about it now, which is certainly no different of an opinion from what the general (technically inclined) population has had to say, but hopefully I've brought a little more insight with the weird advertisement network bullshit. It made a lot of sense when I heard about it; it had to do with Ironsource, which even I imagine most other game developers are more in the know about than I am.

temporal, signing off! thanks for reading!