And just like that, in the span of a day, Unity has found a way to completely kill the appeal of small studios and indies using their engines for low priced games.

Honestly, it feels like they did this specifically to try to grab extra cash out of things like Vampire Survivors and any freemium game, because the excuse of “this covers the cost of us distributing the runtime” falls flat when people can download the runtimes from literally any of *several* other hosts. And if Unity tries to block people from getting the runtime elsewhere, then the sleezy cashgrab nature of this would be even more obvious.

Anyway, I kinda hate to see this. I’ve been learning Unity Engine since around 2010, and started putting significantly more time into learning it to mod games like Starbuster and Freedom Planet 2 in the past fourish years. I’ve been hearing plenty of other devs moving to Godot, and GalaxyTrail in particular has been pretty vocal about shifting to Godot. And I had been dabbling in Godot myself a bit and in some ways it’s a lot easier to deal with than Unity.

But yeah like. AAA gaming has been missing the mark for years, and if the game engines are about to go hike up the prices, then fine. Godot, MonoGame, Enigma, Three.js, and Phaser are all literally like _right there_ and work just fine.

Aaaaand on top of that, thanks to the recent explosion of LLMs, translating my WIP game projects from Unity to Godot or MonoGame is a lot easier than it would have been without those tools.

“Finally, Whitten suggested only about about 10% of developers who use Unity will have to pay fees because of the thresholds the company has established.”

yeaaaah. And I bet they got that 10% figure using the same method they were planning on using to track install counts, right? In which case, why would anyone who was building on Unity’s tech trust that number?

I don’t know why all at the same time Unity, Twitter, Reddit, Audacity, and Nintendo have all completely forgotten that the people using their tools are often normal humans and _not_ the megawealthy and _not_ “just AI bots” but my suggestion for anyone who happens to find this article is to stay far faaaaar away from these big companies when they offer tools to build with. They are not your friends. No matter what promise they’re making, as long as the conceptual motivation of “infinite profit” exists, they will always be a threat. Open Source and other freeware might be kinda rough and flawed, but at least they have a better grasp that they’re making things for people.