Unity3D CEO lost their mind

As some of you have probably heard, Unity just released a new pricing "system", where they want to charge devs 20 cent for every install of the game of every user. Not per sale, per INSTALL., once a game has revenue (gross, not profit) over a certain threshold.

Read more here. 

Even though they said that they are only counting one-install per user and they have fraud protection, logic and experience tells me that they are lying through their teeth, especially since their blog posts said completely different things. Acquiring the data to reliable only count unique installs would be illegal in a lot of countries. 

One unity employee already admitted that they don't even have an idea how to collect the data, and they are still planning to roll this crap out on Jan. 1st, 2024.

I have no idea why they even want a per-install fee, when they could just do a revenue share like the Unreal engine, which most devs would probably be okay with, including me.

This braindead plan comes from the former EA CEO that is now on top of Unity for some reason. The same guy that proposed charging gamers for reloading in a game.

As many concerned devs pointed out, this idiocy opens the door for all kind of malicious activity. Instead of review bombing, people can now buy the game, install, and then refund to cost the devs money.

They could even clear whatever data unity puts on your PC to determine if it was the first "install", and because of things like the European GDPR, they aren't allowed to save IP addresses or other private data like hardware-addresses without consent, it's going to be extremely easy to just write a script that installs the game over and over.

And even then, you could easily create a bot network to do the same. Someone really malicious could even blackmail devs for ransom to not generate cost for them.

And even without the malice, a lot of games, especially freemium, have install to revenue rates that are lower than 20 cent. These games will now be losing money.

Also, you will be losing money through sales and of course piracy, because I doubt they will or even can discern a normal install from a cracked version install.

Now, what does that mean for me and my games. Hail Dicktator is not affected at all, so there is no need to worry.

I however did plan to eventually release it on steam, which considering how many times it was downloaded for free could literally bankrupt me should it be successful. (and the total revenue they use does include the 30% steam takes. I also don't know how they would even obtain revenue data. This whole thing doesn't seem thought out at all).

The timing of all this is incredibly bad. I'm weeks from a first version of D-Sim, and I was planning to put that on steam as well. It's to late to switch engines now, so I will have to keep using Unity.

However, it means that I will likely treat D-Sim like HailDicktator. It will be free to play, not sold, and not make any revenue at all. But if someone wants to support the developer, they can do so freely. 

Sorry for the long rant. I'm just very frustrated right now. I worked so hard on this all to eventually be able to get a bigger game studio going, and they are trying to pull the rug from under me.

I hope you're all doing well. Thank you all for your incredible support. I'll somehow get through this,

- hachi