So Unity can just change their pricing any time they want?

This is an interesting read:

What’s stopping them from raising the price to $0.50 per install next year?

Is there a limit to how far they can take this? It sounds to me like they are holding a lot of power over game companies and their ability to finance their gaming servers…

This is old news, they already backed down from it. I gave my suspicions about this in the other thread about this.

They didn’t “back down” from it completely. They went from the original change which was $0.20 per install, to only $0.20 per install PER DEVICE.

What this does is it sets a precedence. Unity has become Darth Vader, with his famous quote:
“I am altering the deal. Pray that I don’t alter it any further.”

This is actually a very common tactic used by corporations. They do one thing which seems ridiculous, and then when confronted with negative press, they back down a little bit to something that isn’t quite as ridiculous so that people accept it.

If they didn’t do something more ridiculous at first, it would make people less likely to accept the thing they intended all along. It’s also a negotiation tactic.

If I offer to sell something at $99,999, and people don’t buy it because it’s absurd, but then I lower the price to what I had intended to sell it for all along, let’s say $8,000, then people are more likely to buy in the second time around, because relative to the first offer, it seems more reasonable.

As a seller, you want to start negotiations high, and as a buyer, you want to start negotiations low.

No, they did back down. They made those changes only for future versions, if the devs want to update the engine. If they don’t update the engine they will still have the same deal they had before.

So the developers are just supposed to never update the engine? I doubt they will never update the engine. If they decide to do it (for the many benefits, including continued support), they will be “under the gun” so to speak.

I’m sure Unity will say they no longer “support” the older versions of the engine, as most companies do (looking at you, Microsoft), which will incentivize developers, such as Eleventh Hour Games, to update to the newer version. Especially if it includes many bug fixes.

I’m not going to continue to repeat the answers for both threads, so I’ll just keep answering on the other one :wink:

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Lots of misconceptions and misinformation surrounding this issue in general.

It’s nowhere near as bad as anyone thinks. The key piece of missing information is that it’s self reported. If we were to update to a version that required this (which we aren’t) then we would tell Unity how many new users we get each period and pay that much. There are also alternative payment options that you can do if you want. You can even report each category and Unity will just do the math and charge you the lowest version.

Was it scary and disappointing? Yes. Is it really that bad? No.

I’m going to close this thread here.

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