Engine concerns (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

I'm progressing well and I think I will be able to release the update, as expected, tomorrow.

In usual circumstances, this wouldn't warrant a post and I'll wait for the release tomorrow, but I want to write a bit about the Unity community current concerns. Forgive me for the rant, but I think the whole user base need to be aware of what's going on.

So, the whole unity dev community is currently ongoing a total breakdown over a sudden and unilateral change of unity terms of service. This change will retroactively affect all games already in the market, and devs will have to pay a fixed fee for each install of the game. Granted, for this to be effective, it would need a large amount of download and a large amount of revenue. 

This is the very short summary, so if you're interested, don't hesitate to look this up on dedicated websites that will talk about it in far better details than me. The whole point is : Is this gonna impact this project (and the next one)?

Long story short, from what I've gathered, there wouldn't be any financial impact on the project, as the threshold for download and revenue, is, as I said, quite high. Nonetheless, I'm very angry about sudden,unilateral changes like this, not talking about the fact that charging a fixed fee per install sound really stupid. So, while we're safe on that side, it's still infuriating and questionnable.

Now, I could just jump of engine and switch to another one. But as you may guess, engines are tremendously complicated piece of softwares, and you don't jump from one to another one without a significant time investment.  So, while I totally disapprove the way Unity is doing things, I'll stuck with it at least for the current project and the next one, crossing fingers that they won't make some drastics changes again in the next few years. 

I have one red line though : the fact that they want to charge a fee per "install" of the game, might mean that they will embeed a tracker inside their games to get data on install numbers. User privacy is one of my top concern, and if it appear that there's a tracker, and that it could potentially track your personnal data, I'll have no choice but to jump ships. But for now, based on current research, it look like this isn't the case, and that they're simply "estimating" the number of install based on reported download numbers. So, for now, this is simply something I'll be paying close attention to. 

In the end, nothing change for now. Again, forgive me about the totally off-topic ranting, but I wanted to be totally transparent about this matter because, while it might sound trivial, this kind of changes can blow away small teams and solo devs and reflect a very poor mentality from Unity. 

With that all said, don't hesitate to PM me if you have any questions about the subject, and see you tomorrow for the update release.