[gmjosack]

This video[1] talks a bit about this from a lawyer's point of view and is a really good overview.

For people who are not paying as much attention to this I'd like to summarize the main points of frustration.

1. Unity has just shown they believe they are able, and they are willing, to change the terms on what you have to pay them. What are the bounds to terms like this? What if Unity is tight on money and decide to squeeze developers further? The risk to continuing business with Unity is very high as you have unknown future exposure.

2. The monetization model they've chosen is tied to installs, not revenue. On the initial day of announcement they even claimed re-installs would count but they've since walked that back (or "clarified a miscommunication"). Unity has been extremely wishy-washy on how they even plan to track this mentioning proprietary systems they can't elaborate on and your only recourse is to appeal if you think they got the numbers wrong. This is not a metric tied to your revenue and is difficult to plan around.

There are a lot of people arguing against a strawman of people who don't want to pay unity but that is not at all what this is about. Unity chose a terrible model they can't even explain for how they want to bill people and apply it to all past games that use the engine for all future sales.

This would be similar to if Microsoft said everyone who ever built anything on C# has to start paying a fee for every future install because it includes the .net runtime.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGMrebXypJo

[brundolf]

IANAL but isn't this what we have an FTC for? It feels like pretty blatantly unfair business dealings, particularly the fact that it's retroactive

Literally "I am altering the deal, pray I do not alter it any further"

[harles]

I hope so, but if it’s likely to get smacked down by the FTC, it’s unlikely Unity would try this path. I’m sure this has been in the works for a long time and all the backlash was anticipated - they just expect huge profits on the other side.

[turquoisevar]

The FTC and other such agencies won’t do shit because corporations are the highest authority in the US.

Every once in a while they’ll pick a “sacrificial lamb” for a slap on the wrist and call it a day.

[hiddencost]

Naw bruh. They killed the regulatory state. It's too late.

[readyplayernull]

They might have well devised the first of its kind "ransom by installations" in the history of software, by making it possible for attackers to fake mass installations and get gamedevs into fatal debts. And they are taking the executioner role.

[gmjosack]

We've been calling it "Install Bombing" after the common abusive practice of review bombing. Unity claims they have anti-fraud systems in place and you can always appeal with their fraud team but I don't have an reason to blindly trust a black box that when fails makes Unity more money and puts the burden on me to prove otherwise.

[lucb1e]

This applies to any paid API and is something we check for when we do security audits, definitely not a "first of its kind". It's just not common that APIs that cost 20 cents per invocation are exposed directly to the general public.

[brazzledazzle]

>Unity has been extremely wishy-washy on how they even plan to track this mentioning proprietary systems they can't elaborate on and your only recourse is to appeal if you think they got the numbers wrong.

They must know that their methods will ultimately be revealed during discovery during the inevitable lawsuits. So I’m wondering if they haven’t actually figured out how they’re doing it yet.

[ahi]

All I can think of is some poor dev trying and failing to explain to the mbas why this can't be done with any precision. Two parallel lines that cross...

[d3w4s9]

I am curious -- if you are a business and buy Google Ads, and they tell you how many impressions and clicks you got, are those numbers verifiable? How effective is it at filtering out "bad" clicks, like the ones from a competitor who wants to exhaust your ad money? Is the situation similar?

[idbehold]

Ah, the difference here is that game developers have alternatives to Unity. You can't verify Google's numbers, but fortunately for them there's no (meaningful) alternative. The advantages of being a monopoly!

[lucb1e]

Not sure why I watched the whole hour's worth of content as I'm not involved tbh, but what I gather is that the whole speech amounts to, in essence, "yes it's legal (unless you want to appeal to empathy from a court); however, Unity is saying that they'll tell you how much you owe them and you have no way of verifying it, so with these one-sided changes blemishing trust while simultaneously asking for your trust in their estimations on how much you owe them... tread carefully"