The state(ment) of Unity

A lot of other developers have already put out a statement about what’s going on with Unity right now, from big studios to small micro indies like us.
We first thought not to write a statement, because everything is already said, but with a statement it’s not about that everything is already said, it’s about the stance against this, so here we go.

We started making games with Unity on a game jam back in 19.12.2014 and since we are all doing this just “as a hobby” outside of our jobs in our free time, it took us pretty long to get good at it.
Now that we are pretty good at it, Unity decided to play Darth Vader by “altering the deal” of their engine and we should just hope they won’t alter it any further.
Don’t get me wrong, we are so small that this change does not affect us YET, but Unity has positioned itself as an unreliable “partner”, who changes things to the absolute worst without warning and hesitation.
Who stops them from altering the deal in 2 years to a fee that is due every time someone starts a game?

The new pricing model can actually bankrupt a studio and we are already looking forward to people ransoming game devs for money or they will re-install our games until we go bankrupt. Unity saying they can prevent this fraudulent detection on a “trust me bro” level is just absurd.
So even if a game of ours would actually make enough money to fall into this new install-fee category, we would stop sales/unlist it until it doesn’t anymore, to prevent us from potentially getting ransomed and bankrupt.
All of this is absolutely unacceptable and we can only hope they roll this back completely.

But with all of this in mind, we will just finish our current projects in Unity and look for another engine to make our games with in the future, like Godot.

It is really sad to give up nearly 10 years of experience with an engine, a tool that was quirky but very good for the type of games we make. But we can and will not work with a “partner” that only wants to artificially increase its own revenue for a short time to give an executive a bonus payout for “doing so well” on his job.

WE KNOW GAMES AND WE WILL NOT PLAY THIS GAME