[Coda]

Aaaaaaaargh >_< I hate human psychology. And I include myself in this because I really ought to be able to disconnect myself from emotional reactions when I intellectually know that people are reacting based on their own incomplete information and biases.

This whole Unity debacle is just driving me crazy. People having emotional reactions based on misreadings -- it's even growing into conspiracy theory territory! -- are going to cause more damage to indie game development than Unity themselves ever would have.

Even after the community got what they wanted, they continue to believe that Unity is the BBEG that got exactly what THEY wanted. And instead of praising them for correcting a misstep, a noisy group continues to say that Unity is terrible for this whole thing and that they were manipulating everyone the whole time to get an outcome that they couldn't have gotten away with if they had just come out with it up front.

Even smart people that I trust keep spreading the misinformation that Unity was trying to introduce a retroactive fee. That was never true, even in the very first poorly-communicated incompletely-thought-out pay-per-installation announcement that started the whole mess. They were never going to charge for past installations; even in the worst case, the past installations only counted toward reaching the threshold, not toward how much in total fees you would owe. It was only ever going to be based on new installations that occurred after all of $200,000/12 months in gross revenue, 200,000 total installations, and January 1, 2024 were met.

And I know I've ranted about this before, but the final result is actually WORSE for indie developers. With the refinement that Unity had previously announced, where it was only counting unique devices instead of counting every single installation, it was a progressive fee: you would only have to pay for the number of sales you made after hitting all of the thresholds.

But now, it's a trap -- now as soon as you hit $200,000/12 months in gross revenue, no matter how many unique users you have, no matter how many installations you have, you have to get a Unity Pro subscription, which costs $2040 per developer on your team per year, or else you're in breach of contract and you aren't allowed to use Unity anymore. There's no grace period where you just pay a small fee per new user that starts playing your game once you've reached the cutoff... just immediately bam, you have to have a recurring subscription for the rest of time.

And we're in this situation because that's what we asked for. Unity could have stayed with the progressive fee and offered the same deal that they did for Pro to Personal users -- a choice between a per-unique-user fee or a revenue share arrangement. (And the revenue share arrangement that they're offering for Pro is very competitive -- it's half of what Unreal Engine charges.) But because of Internet backlash, we've got this hard cutoff, and they can rightly say that they took this route because it's what the community demanded.

I'll say it again: I really fear that FUD is going to cause more damage to indie game development than Unity themselves ever would have.

</rantrantrant>