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https://blog.unity.com/news/plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates

Unity, in their infinite wisdom, is planning on charging developers $0.20 per install once they hit a certain point. This counter counts installs directly, so demos, FTP downloads, and possibly even pirating a game will cost devs 20 cents when they hit the point.
Also, on the chopping block is the unity plus subscription, meaning the only way for a game to not have an ugly splash screen is to shell out 100+ dollars a month for the pro subscription.

This will probably have a decently big effect on the indie game sphere, sucks that a perfectly good engine with good games had to be enshittified like this

The CEO of Unity Technologies is also the former CEO of EA who was a part of the company when EA began to become REALLY scummy, so sadly not surprised. And yeah it sucks too because Unity is an engine that can be put to super great use, especially by indies, but the CEO is just fucking everyone over.

I feel like this will just push devs to move over to unreal engine. There's not a whole lot of competition on the market when it comes to creation platforms. The only other platform besides unreal that I'd consider would be Godot and maybe some interest in gamemaker (which isn't good for 3d development).

Huh. You know, that actually makes a lot of sense.

"Literally charge them for every download" is definitely the type of idea EA would have, especially at its scummiest.

Yay, another company to wish damnation upon \o/

Since the thread hasn't closed to new posts yet I figured this is the best spot to announce that John Riccitiello is officially retiring from Unity as of October 9, 2023.

Source

I feel it's maybe more accurate to say he was "softly fired" by the board of directors, no doubt the dude's leaving with a golden parachute, but if his reputation as one of EA's most infamous CEO's wasn't enough to tank his ability to be hired in the game industry, his time as Unity CEO sure feels like it did.

It does remain to be seen if both 1) Unity walking back their fee plans and instead doing a revenue share system like Epic and Unreal and 2) Riccitiello no longer being CEO can save Unity's crippled reputation, though. Only way to really know for sure is if indies and big name companies like Nintendo decide to keep using the engine in projects made in 2024 and beyond.

TBH, it kind of feels like he basically ran with the money after ultimatly ruining Unity’s reputation.

It’s a real damn shame that so may game developers have spend years on creating their own game(s) have to suffer from this cretin of executive. I see from many devs that their trying to finish up the games they have made for several years since they don’t want all that time go to waste. and after publishing them, they’ll cut ties with Unity and just go to a different game engine since they already lost their trust.

Another option is to try to export their game onto UE, Godot, or GameMaker. But the process of doing so can vastly differ depending on how complex the game is made and how much coding the developer included. One thing for certain, the future for game developing is unclear.

But on a brighter side, Godot is getting a lot of support (both donations and userbase). Hopefully this new resurgence will lead to more advance features to play around with for anyone to use.