New Unity Tax
New Unity Tax
What is Unity?
If you are not familiar with game development Unity is a very popular game development software. It is by far the most used game development engine for small scale programmers and companies. Unity is a cross platform engine that was originally made in June 2005. It has slowly expanded from computer to phone, and now even VR support. It’s behind many popular games you have probably heard of such as among us and Pokémon go. It allows you to code in C# which is one of the easier programing languages. Not only that but it gives you a huge amount of freedom to design 3D objects without needing to code at all.
What’s changed?
For nearly a decade, the CEO of Unity has been John Riccitiello. For most of his career John Riccitiello has been in high positions of management. Early on he served as managers for Clorox, PepsiCo, and Grand Metropolitan. He also served as CEO for Wilton Sporting Goods and Sara Lee’s Corporation (which is a bakery chain). He even worked as president for EA for a time. Suffice to say he has led a lot of companies and moved up quite a bit in the world. However, he did make one mistake that got him kicked out of his position and out of the Unity company as a whole. He established a new fine on every person who used the engine. From then on whenever someone installed a program that has been made in Unity, the person who created the program would have to pay Unity $0.20.
Why does anyone care?
$0.20 doesn’t seem like a very big amount until you realize how much some of these games get installed. Some high-profile games have tens of thousands, hundreds-of-thousands, or maybe even millions of downloads. There is also the fact that one person who buys the game can install it on as many computers as they want to. At this point we are talking about tens of thousands of dollars that unity is now demanding from creators. This is in addition to all the money that these creators must pay Unity to use the software itself. The full software charges two thousand dollars per year to those who want to use all the tools of the software.
From these people’s perspective they are already paying very good money to Unity just for it to ask for potentially thousands of dollars in addition to their membership. There is also a lot of concern with how this came out of nowhere. No one knew that this was happening until they had already implemented it. This caused a lot of concerns on whether Unity was planning on making more changes like this again in the near future.
What’s happening now?
Due to the backlash John Riccitiello was let go from Unity. James Whitehurst was promoted to fill John’s position as CEO. While Unity isn’t going to stop taxing the creators, it is very unlikely they will do anything like this again for quite some time due to the unanimous negative response.
Hi Henrey,
ReplyDeleteI really like your podcast, but would like to see more information on this topic! I was really interested in your, "What's Changed" section. It shocked me to see that one individual could hold so many positions in so many companies! It also was interesting to read about ow one fatal flaw made such an uproar within his position and the gaming community. I really think you should consider adding more to your sections, because your already on such a great track!