Hello, Ducklings!
Madame Evil here. For those who don't know me, I am the current owner and operator of Evil Quacks. Since we are a small studio, I wear many hats so I also am the team's project manager and software developer. For those that also didn't know, Evil Quacks has been trained in and only utilized the Unity Game Engine.
Today our blog post is going to be a little bit more serious than previously as we talk about how the newly proposed Runtime Fees from Unity Game Engine impact our very small studio.
If you are not caught up on these changes that Unity plans to make to it's Terms of Service and pricing models then consider reading this blog post from Unity
I think it's also important to consider why they are making these changes outside of the default assumption of Human Greed. While I am aware that greed is a common driving force behind many decisions like this one, I believe it's important to not assume it is that way with no further research. With this in mind, please also consider reading this post from AskAGameDev on Tumblr.
Now let's get started...
Team Meeting
Evil Quacks is a small team consisting of primarily 4 members with 2 additional ones who partner with us on occasion. Everyone on the team works full-time jobs on top of projects under the Evil Quacks name. Because we are such a small team, I thought it important to gather everyone together and go over these changes. We read through the blog post as well as concerns other indie developers had about these changes. We ensured everyone on the team understood the consequences changes like this could bring to us. We then talk about responses we would take given this change.
Main Concerns
Evil Quacks currently does not hit any of the thresholds required to incur the Runtime Fees that Unity is proposing. (For the exact thresholds, read the previously linked Unity Blog post). While it is easy to say "This change won't impact us." that's a fairly shallow view of the situation.
Malicious Attacks with Fake Installs A Malicious Attack with Fake Installs means that an individual with malicious intentions installs the game in rapid succession utilizing means to mask their identity and trick the key used to track installs into believing these are all unique. An attack like this is often done programmatically and can rack up hundreds of thousands of installs within minutes. This would easily trigger a small studio to hit the threshold of installs or if they already hit the threshold previously to incur massive amounts of fees. Unity has provided no clarity on how they intend to combat this issue.
Retroactive Changes to Terms of Service Unity is referencing lifetime install counts as a threshold with this. This means that studios will suddenly (3-month notice ) be paying tens of thousands of dollars in fees that initially were not present when they chose the monetization of their game and from installs that occurred years prior. This fosters a severe lack of trust between Unity and studios choosing the Unity Engine. This change shows that Unity can change the terms of service to have impacts on previous years that were under older terms of service.
Unity's Financial Record The Tumblr blog post by AskAGameDev (linked above), shows the financial trouble that Unity Technologies is currently in. This doesn't bode well for the future of the engine as a whole. If Unity Technologies is unable to recover financially even with these Run-Time Fees then more changes along a similar vein will be enacted or the engine will cease production and be unavailable. This shows that even if the team were to remain with Unity we run the risk of further fee changes or utilizing an engine that becomes obsolete within a number of years.
Responses
Currently, the studio has one project in the pipeline, one project archived for future use, and another in pre-development phases. The team planned to utilize Unity Game Engine for all of these projects. However, now the team must consider utilizing another engine to avoid the concerns mentioned above. However, the team has to consider moving over a code base of years in the making as well. It's simply not feasible to rewrite the entire code base in a new language. This limits us to engines that support C# as a primary language.
The team has opted to shift to learning the Godot Engine to see if it is capable of handling the projects we have with as minimal rewriting as possible. Godot is fully open sourced which brings its own set of pros and cons. It also supports C# fully alongside its native scripting language. It can support 2D and 3D, Mobile and PC as well as some console support.
The team will spend the next couple of weeks or months learning this new engine before making the final decision on whether or not to transfer over to utilizing this engine full-time. However, this means that our current projects are put on hold indefinitely until a decision has been reached.
Conclusion & Other Updates
Special thanks to those who continue to support us through these troubles and to GDQuest for having free tutorials the team is utilizing to familiarize themselves with Godot.
You may have also noticed that the Evil Quacks Twitter account has been deactivated. This was done purposefully in response to the changes to the terms of service Twitter is making that permit them to utilize any shared image in AI work. Evil Quacks does not support the use of AI to replace artists and will not permit any work of ours to be used in the training or generation of AI content.
Hope to see you all in the next one!
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