Last Tuesday morning, Tom, an independent game developer, was woken up by the news in the group chat as soon as he brought coffee. The link sent by peers says: Unity will charge developers according to the number of game installations. His first reaction was, “There must be something wrong” — until he opened the official website of Unity and saw the announcement that made the whole game circle angry.
“It feels like the landlord suddenly said that every guest who comes to your house will have to pay the entrance fee in the future,” Tom described the shock at that time. The casual games on the shelves of his studio last year happened to be stuck at the charging threshold. According to the new regulations, if the download volume continues to grow, it may pay tens of thousands of dollars more next year. That morning, his team canceled the original development meeting, and everyone was frantically calculating the impact of the new policy on the project.
At the same time, in San Francisco, Sarah, an executive of a mobile game company, is urgently adjusting next year’s budget. Her company has a game released five years ago, and it is still downloaded steadily every month. According to the new regulations, we have to pay for the historical downloads, just like a restaurant has to pay extra rent for the guests we entertained yesterday. Her team held meetings overnight and even began to discuss the feasibility of switching the game engine to other platforms.
The most anxious may be those small teams that have just set up projects. Michael, the founder of a start-up company that has just received seed round investment, told us that the estimated download volume of their project is just on the edge of the toll line. Every new player means that the cost is rising, and we have to re-evaluate the whole business model. His complaints on Twitter have won thousands of resonances, and the comment section has become a complaint conference for small and medium-sized developers.
The community reacted quickly and fiercely. Some developers posted screenshots of their games removed from the shelves overnight, some launched a joint boycott, and some posted tutorials on the forum to use other engines. A senior developer gave an analogy: “It’s like the hammer you’ve used for ten years suddenly starts to charge, and you have to pay extra for each nail driven in.”
However, some people have different views. Lisa, the commercial director of a medium-sized studio, believes that Unity needs a new profit model to maintain engine development. “After all, they provide a powerful free version of the engine, and it is understandable to find a commercial path.” But at the same time, she admitted that the details of this charging plan did “need more discussion”.
In the face of tidal questions, Unity officials issued supplementary notes within 48 hours in an attempt to clarify some of the misunderstandings. They said that they would communicate closely with the developers and promised to optimize the plan. But many developers don’t buy it, thinking that this is more like crisis public relations than a substantial concession.
Behind this storm is the re-examination of the cost structure of the whole game industry. As an old developer who has been in the industry for 20 years said, “We are moving from the buy-out system to the service system, but I didn’t expect that even the development tools could not escape this trend.”
Has your circle of friends also been brushed by this topic? If you were a developer, how would you deal with this change? Welcome to share your opinions in the comment section.
