Unity Update

The last couple weeks have been pretty stressful, watching this Unity discourse and trying to decide the future of Duelists because of course it's being made in Unity.

The big issues for me were the retroactive changes in terms and the "per-install" fee.

The fact they could change the terms retroactively meant none of the games made in Unity were "safe" for developers. At any time Unity could take money from developers whenever they wanted, even 20 years down the road! I can't believe it even got publicly announced.

The per-install fee was insane because there is no way anyone can track that metric. Especially with storefronts like Steam. I'm pretty sure I've installed my steam games on at least 5 different devices! Paying money every time a customer upgrades their pc, gets a steam deck, laptop, etc. is just wild.

These two issues made me decide to quit Unity which I've used exclusively for the past 8 years. (I did dabble in GameMaker 5.0 when I was a kid).

Now Unity has put out an update with much fairer and non-retroactive terms that only apply to games made in version 2023+. Duelists is being made in Unity v2021 and I don't plan to upgrade to 2023. I tried it, and Unity just keeps getting more and more bloated so it was quite clunky.

This means I can finish Duelists according to plan right? Well clearly Unity can still change the rules whenever they want. So I will still be focusing on getting Duelists finished, and not adding as many features as I originally planned. This might've happened regardless because well multiplayer and online-profile development is not a good time. I want to make some smaller offline games again.

I will say it was really cool to see the community band together against this change. I think it was a good wakeup call that the community needed.