Their language was salty and the message was clear: game developers believed their livelihoods were under threat and they were not going to accept it.
Unity, a US company whose software is used to create and run thousands of games including smash hits like “Pokemon GO” and “Genshin Impact,” announced on Sept. 12 new fees for developers.
The firm was going to charge 20 cents every time a Unity-backed game was installed on any device, a move that analysts warned could collapse studios and nix new releases.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Ten days later, after a spirited and often vulgarity-laden fightback from studios and developers, Unity rowed back some of the changes.
But for many developers, the damage may be irreparable.
“If I’m forced to accept the current conditions, I will leave,” said Alain Puget, director of the French studio Alkemi.
Photo: AFP
Unity claims that its technology underpins 70 percent of the top 1,000 mobile games, and that people download apps made with its software four billion times a month.
Levying even a tiny fee would reap it big rewards.
But there are plenty of alternative “engines,” as the software is known.
Photo: AFP
“Game makers have already begun to consider switching engines,” said Rhys Elliott, market analyst at the Newzoo consultancy.
‘DISCONNECTED FROM REALITY’
It was all very different back in 2005, when Unity launched with promises of democratizing game development. Its software platform was cheap and easy to use, and quickly became a favorite for independent and smaller developers.
The main innovation was that designers could build on elements from other games, such as the lighting of a background or the movements of characters.
Before Unity and its competitors emerged, each game was custom made, with graphics and everything else built from the ground up.
After a stellar rise, the firm went public in 2020.
For many industry watchers, the stock market flotation was the start of the fall.
The firm, which projects revenues of US$2 billion this year, has instituted several waves of layoffs and alienated users by tweaking the software and pricing.
Then came the Sept. 12 bombshell.
“The first proposal they made was completely disconnected from reality,” said Puget of Alkemi.
Hundreds of developers took to social media to slam a proposal they said would kill studios relying on free-to-download games and any smaller outfits that happened to develop a hit game.
“There is no way Unity talked to a single developer before launching this,” developer and consultant Rami Ismail posted on X, formerly Twitter.
The firm returned with an apology — “we heard your concerns,” “you are what makes Unity great” — and a new offer to limit the levy to the most successful games.
Puget believes the firm made a “totally unreasonable” initial proposal so that their later offer, which will still give them a huge windfall, seems more palatable.
‘STOP IT’
The vitriol from developers suggests Unity has a long way to go before it is accepted back into the fold.
Shortly after the initial announcement, an account sprang up on X to collate the responses under the handle “fucked by Unity,” gaining more than 15,000 followers in a few days.
While some developers issued heartfelt letters, others resorted to images of raised middle fingers in front of the Unity logo, or short messages with obscenities of discontent.
“Stop it. WTF?” was the stark response from Innersloth, whose game “Among Us,” made with Unity software, has an estimated 500 million players.
Puget said he was unsure if there was a way back for Unity, saying that “like everyone else” he would look at alternatives.
“It makes me sad to think that I’ve invested 13 years of learning, of research and development, in a solution that I’ll have to throw away,” he said.
The primaries for this year’s nine-in-one local elections in November began early in this election cycle, starting last autumn. The local press has been full of tales of intrigue, betrayal, infighting and drama going back to the summer of 2024. This is not widely covered in the English-language press, and the nine-in-one elections are not well understood. The nine-in-one elections refer to the nine levels of local governments that go to the ballot, from the neighborhood and village borough chief level on up to the city mayor and county commissioner level. The main focus is on the 22 special municipality
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) invaded Vietnam in 1979, following a year of increasingly tense relations between the two states. Beijing viewed Vietnam’s close relations with Soviet Russia as a threat. One of the pretexts it used was the alleged mistreatment of the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam. Tension between the ethnic Chinese and governments in Vietnam had been ongoing for decades. The French used to play off the Vietnamese against the Chinese as a divide-and-rule strategy. The Saigon government in 1956 compelled all Vietnam-born Chinese to adopt Vietnamese citizenship. It also banned them from 11 trades they had previously
In the 2010s, the Communist Party of China (CCP) began cracking down on Christian churches. Media reports said at the time that various versions of Protestant Christianity were likely the fastest growing religions in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The crackdown was part of a campaign that in turn was part of a larger movement to bring religion under party control. For the Protestant churches, “the government’s aim has been to force all churches into the state-controlled organization,” according to a 2023 article in Christianity Today. That piece was centered on Wang Yi (王怡), the fiery, charismatic pastor of the
Hsu Pu-liao (許不了) never lived to see the premiere of his most successful film, The Clown and the Swan (小丑與天鵝, 1985). The movie, which starred Hsu, the “Taiwanese Charlie Chaplin,” outgrossed Jackie Chan’s Heart of Dragon (龍的心), earning NT$9.2 million at the local box office. Forty years after its premiere, the film has become the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute’s (TFAI) 100th restoration. “It is the only one of Hsu’s films whose original negative survived,” says director Kevin Chu (朱延平), one of Taiwan’s most commercially successful
RSS