Unity Tech’s Fee Rollback, Beta Bugs, and Steam

Due to recent releases, this is the first public Peace Island update in a while - so I wanted to discuss what recently happened with Unity Technologies.  If you are not aware - two weeks ago, the company that makes the Unity Game Engine (which is pretty much THE preeminent dev engine for indie games) announced that it was imposing a 20-cent-per install fee for all games made on its platform.

Now - laying aside the concerns about multiple installs and piracy, we did the math: If Peace Island sold ¼ the number of units that “Stray” (another recent Cat game) did, Unity’s fee would have topped out at nearly half a million dollars - which would have been equal to almost 50% of total dev costs for Peace Island.  If we sold half as many copies as Stray, Unity’s fee would have literally eclipsed the ENTIRE development budget for Peace Island.

This meant that pretty much overnight, every game publisher in the world was treating any potential Unity game project as if it were covered with radioactive diarrhea.

As you might expect, this threw the entire indie game development community into chaos. However, this was one of those situations where the decision handed down from on high was so absolutely ODIOUS, that it united EVERYONE against it.  Game publishers, Game Developers, and even the huge corporations such as Sony & their stockholders made their opinion known:

This would not stand.

Naturally, we here at Peace Island were among those who added their small voices to this overwhelming chorus.  After ten days of the closest thing we’ve ever seen to a populist capitalist rebellion since the introduction of “New Coke” - Unity relented.

They didn’t take it all back - nor did they make the management firings that the entire game dev community was screaming for - but they scaled it back to the point that indie developers like us - and thousands of others - are exempt from their new fees.

However, every game developer who is currently using the Unity Game Engine has had to insert a page similar to this into their “Pitch Decks”:

In the wake of the release of the MVP/Closed Beta - we’ve started to tackle the bug reports that have been flooding in, and putting in content that was lacking from the initial release.

Our list of “Must Haves” for the public Beta demo stands at 88 items - with 33 completed, and 55 remaining (This includes all bugs reported to-date.)

Some are complex - for example: We have to record & mix a five-minute Podcast that the players can find on a laptop.  However, as the script has mostly been written, production should not be more than 24 hours.

Some are more simple - for example: who knew the cat's eyes became so transparent, when close to the camera?

That should take about 10 minutes to fix - I’ll deal with it, with tomorrow’s cornflakes.

And we really need another week before we can get the game up on Steam, and distribute keys to contributors.  This is partly due to the need to fix crucial bugs - and partly because the process is rather convoluted.  Hopefully, I can send out a mass mailing to all contributors past and present, next week.

We’ll be back, in a week’s time - 7 weeks to public Beta!

Thanks again for your patience and support, through all of these years - we’re so close to our goal!