[jsharpe]

Charging a monthly fee on game installs is absolutely wild, considering that most games on Steam are one-time purchases. The personal fee (for first world countries) is $0.20 / month. If you charged $10 for the game, you'd be losing money after only 50 months (around 4 years).

[NoahKAndrews]

It looks to be per-install, not per-month-installed.

[monsieurbanana]

I still refuse to believe that's the right interpretation. That can't be real. Are you really going to owe more to Unity every time a user uninstall/reinstalls your game? If they want to play in their main PC and their Steamdeck?

Completely abolishes the incentive of pushing free updates too. You don't want to make new great features that would push people to re-download your game.

[NoahKAndrews]

I wonder if it actually applies to updates. I doubt that.

[Auracle]

No, but people might reinstall en masse when you have a nice free update.

[NoahKAndrews]

Their FAQ page makes it crystal-clear

[Nullabillity]

From the FAQ:

> We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that applies to certain Unity subscription plans based on per-game installs across any Unity-supported game platform. Creators only pay once per download.

> An install is defined as the installation and initialization of a project on an end user’s device.

The FAQ clarifies absolutely nothing.

[delfinom]

Yea there seems to be some moronic wording on Unity's part, either they actually intended to originally charge per month or some other nonsense.

It seems they will just bill monthly on the net gain in installs.

They still avoid the topic of defining how a install is tracked (do reinstalls count?) and so far on their forum have not replied to it.

[tapland]

It seems pretty clear in the "Detailed FAQ"

> We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that applies to certain Unity subscription plans based on per-game installs across any Unity-supported game platform.

> An install is defined as the installation and initialization of a project on an end user’s device.

> Each time a game is downloaded, Unity’s runtime code is also installed. The Unity Runtime Fee goes towards the continued investment in that code to support the billions of devices served every month.

[kwanbix]

So if BuyerX installs the game, I get charged, he then re-formats his hard drive, and re-install, I get charged again, if he goes to another of his machines and install, I get charged again? Crazy.

[subsistence234]

And a weirdo who hates a developer could keep auto-reinstalling (or just re-triggering the "new install" signal to unity servers) 1000 times per day, every day.

[gambiting]

They will most likely use hardware ID to track installs. So if you reinstall the game on the same machine it won't count, if you install it on a different one it will. Unless they let you bind it to some internal ID and track it that way.

[duped]

Unless you get crafty, machine identifiers aren't stable on Windows and will change with updates. So if you update windows and reinstall an app, a lot of naive software will detect that as a fresh install on a fresh machine.

That would really suck for a small Unity dev to get screwed by a Windows update that forces reinstall of their users' game libraries - which isn't that uncommon.

[nullifidian]

>if you install it on a different one it will.

Making the developer pay for user's hardware upgrades is still insane.

[gambiting]

On PC the only upgrade that would generate a new hardware ID would be a complete mobo replacement and that's somewhat rare. Upgrading your CPU/GPU/RAM does not regenerate the hardware ID.

[nullifidian]

>Upgrading your CPU

On the recent Intel platforms upgrading your CPU required upgrading your mobo too, and there are many people who upgrade almost every generation, i.e. 1-2 years. Burdening game developers with this is unjust. The engine fee should be tied to the game's purchase, or game related purchases(DLC, other paid content).

AMD also promised (iirc) that the AM5 will only be good for 2 generations.

[anonymousab]

> They will most likely use hardware ID to track installs. So if you reinstall the game on the same machine it won't count

Pretty trivial for a malicious user to spoof, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's something that calculates a new hardware id for trivial changes as we see so often with "don't install this on more than 1 computer" DRM implementations.

[optionalsquid]

That makes me wonder: How would they count legitimate vs pirate installs? Would the developer be on the hook for both?

[hightrix]

There was some clarification on twitter, I couldn't find the direct link to the tweet without a login.

https://forum.unity.com/attachments/upload_2023-9-13_1-49-36...

[yalok]

Accessing those identifiers violates App Store and Play Store rules for some categories of apps (kids app eg)

[gambiting]

I was talking about PC specifically. Android and IOS don't have that problem because you'd use the app store/play store token to verify installation.

[dmoy]

It's not monthly, but it is worded terribly in the table.

Still bonkers for a cheap mobile game.