Fuck Unity

Development • 16 September 2023

A few days ago Unity announced that starting next year, all games that use their engine will pay per user install. Every game that is built using Unity utilizes the Unity Runtime, whether you are using Unity Free, Pro, Plus or Enterprise. Games like Fall Guys, Cuphead, Rust will now have to pay every single time someone installs the game.

I don’t fall into the requirement. Although The Lonely Helmet did have pretty good results (> 25k) it’s no where near the $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs required for me to pay per install, however.

This sets a horrible path that Unity is going down. They no longer care about Developers or Gamers, they care about lining their pockets and nothing else.

The last few days there has been many opinions on this and why it’s a terrible idea. Installation tracking is messy, tricky and in a lot of cases inaccurate. Unity won’t even explain how they’re tracking it, they’re claiming propriety software - which is even worse. Why? Because Unity acquired ironSource in 2022, the owners of installCore - an SDK that allows charging for installations and allowed making installations invisible to users and anti-virus.

An unbelievable amount of games have been made in the Unity Engine. Some absolute massive games, such as Cuphead, Beat Saber, Fall Guys, Rust and Pokémon GO. I was working on a new game using it called Der Toten Alptraum, which I’ve now decided to scrap. I can’t support Unity, nor can I knowningly let people install Unity games that I made knowing that ironSource is involved.

There are some really good engines out there that you might want to try instead, such as; Godot, Unreal Engine, GameMaker, CryEngine 3, etc. But the overall conclusion?

Fuck Unity.