Unity and The Hidden Costs of "Free" 3rd Party Software

The recent pricing structure change by Unity has captured the attention both within and without the video game industry. They are proposing a per-install fee for games both existing and published in the future - adding a retroactive tax to games that have long since been published. While many are rightfully concentrating on the specifics of Unity’s modifications - especially those with games in development or already released using the engine - I am seeing a critical risk often discussed in entrepreneurial circles: an over-reliance on a third party.

The Passion Trap

Indie game developers are largely driven by passion - this is a double-edged sword. Due to this passion, we fail to consider that what we are doing by creating and (hopefully) releasing a game which people will pay money for is starting a business.

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It seems as though Unity has relied on this passion and their arguably intuitive game engine to gain a very strong position in the market. They are now abusing this position to extort their user-base.

This is not the first time something like this has happened, and it won’t be the last. To understand the potential consequences of Unity’s decision, let’s look back at another dominant platform: Adobe’s Flash.

The Rise and Fall of Flash

In 1998, Adobe’s Flash was the go-to choice for website builders wanting to add some flair - standard web capabilities were pretty limited back then. Entire interactive websites were made in Flash and pretty soon the Newgrounds website would give birth to the Flash games scene.

Newgrounds boasted 18 million unique visitors a month at its peak and was a major hub for Flash games and animations. By 2005, top Flash game developers could earn up to six figures in sponsorship deals for a single game.

In 2010, Steve Jobs wrote an open letter criticising Flash for multiple reasons, one of which being that it didn’t port well to mobile devices.

In 2011, Adobe pivoted to HTML5, though it would still take almost a decade before browsers started dropping support for Flash entirely.

Though it took a long time for the sun to set on Flash, there were web designers with careers built on this proprietary tool that could no longer find work. Businesses stopped using Flash, afraid that anything made in it would be unusable within a few years.

The Real Cost of Free

I don’t think anybody expected that this kind of pricing change would happen - but people did expect something to change with Unity’s pricing model. The argument that Unity may one day be unavailable and all the Unity-based game developers would be in a position of having skills in something that isn’t easily transferred seemed hyperbolic just a couple of weeks ago. That is, unless you looked at previous examples of things like this happening - such as The Machinery game engine - a game engine that revoked their license to all developers using it and gave them 14 days to delete all source code (including their in-progress games).

The situations are different, and the mechanism is the same: updating the EULA to the detriment of the user-base. Whether this is legal is a matter for the courts - the message is clear: “we don’t give a damn about our users”.

Some developers have spent a decade learning the ins and outs of Unity and are now looking at migrating to another tool. Some developers with games in development are considering full rewrites in other engines like Godot.

Unfortunately, most people don’t think about these scenarios until they are forced to - the result is, unfortunately, some pretty dire circumstances.

Everything is a Trade-off

There is always a trade-off with every decision - by doing X, you cannot do anything that isn’t X. By learning Unity, you cannot spend that time learning how to create your own tools, or how to use other tools.

In the vast expanse of software development, the allure of pre-made solutions often blinds us to the pitfalls of becoming too comfortable. Unity’s recent shock move only underscores a fundamental principle: Relying heavily on a single tool, no matter its reputation, can backfire spectacularly. The pitfalls of proprietary platforms remind us to spread our dependencies and stay adaptable in our craft.

Doing a bit of research into the plethora of free (as in liberty) software libraries and tools out there may save you and your business from ruinous circumstances.

I have a video that touches on how one may go about doing this available here: Unity Game Ends Themselves - A different take.

The Take-Away

Remember, if your business (game dev is a business) is reliant on a 3rd party and you have no contingency plan then your business is at that 3rd party’s mercy. If something happens to them, or they decide not to work with you anymore, your business could be ruined overnight.