Starting 1st January 2024, developers have to pay a monthly runtime fee for new game installs. This system will kick in for developers who earned above $200,000 in the last 12 months and have a lifetime of 200,000 game installs. Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise subscribers have to pay after they pass the $1 million revenue and 1 million lifetime install threshold.
I’m guessing that with enough backlash this will be reversed. But assuming that it doesn’t, how would this affect Farthest Frontier?
Just wondering whether Crate has any other projects for which they plan to use Unity.
Not that we know of. The horror survival game is using Unreal and the RTS will use the new generation of Crate’s game engine which they’ll probably use for future games as well.
The changes the Unity pricing seems like a desperate final cash grabbing attempt before the engine is truly dead, I’m sure everyone in the field are aware of its decline already.
I don’t know what crate could do there to far into FF development to switch gears. Could have effects on dlcs or any plans for expansions. Kind of forces devlopers to charge more to cover this cost. Which sucks I’ve all ways felt crate was far with prices.
Sorry, but this is a more serious topic than just talking about future horror games. I think the pivot of this discussion is not about any future games, but about this game. This question needs an answer: “how would this affect Farthest Frontier?”
From this question, some derivative questions are popping out, all of which need answer.
Will this mean post-release development & support will end earlier than what planned?
Any risk this game will become abandonware sooner rather than later?
Will this mean FF will have to change platform at a some point?
How would this affect later DLCs?
I’m a bit concerned about all these questions, because this game has such a great potential and I’m really afraid if this could bring to developers having to stop development aborting what this game could become once fully developed and with DLCs.
Until Unity actually release some clear and definite information I don’t think it is really possible to say what the implications will be for any particular game. My reading of the vibes is that just the fact they are retroactively changing an agreement to now charge money where they weren’t before makes them a very dubious business partner to depend upon.
While we can sit here speculating, it seems entirely unlikely crate will make any comment.
I don’t know how to multi-quote on Discourse, so replying to each comment separately.
I agree with what you said, speculation won’t do us much good.
I am curious about whether or not what Unity did here is legal. Are retroactive changes to contract agreements legal or can they get sued for this? Does anyone know of similar cases where a company got away with changing contract terms retroactively?
This is getting more serious than what I was thinking. I hope they are not forced to stop this game’s development, and cut possible DLCs. I’m not sure if at this point of development a migration to another platform is feasible.
It’s good that Crate is working on an in-house engine. This ensures that their future IPs aren’t at such risk.
It’s also good that this fiasco has brought more attention to FOSS game engines like Bevy and Godot.
I am curious about the future of Farthest Frontier though. As of typing this, Unity has tweeted saying that they’re planning to revisit the new ToS. I doubt that they’ll back pedal on these changes. At most, they’ll implement a somewhat tolerable version of this to prevent a class action lawsuit.
