Indie developer explains the nitty-gritty of Unity’s trappings
Everyone and their mum already know just how badly the team behind the Unity game engine has misread the proverbial room. Following the initial bout of critique directed at Unity, as well as a round of death threats, the company has tried to mitigate the ongoing PR disaster in a variety of ways, but indie devs aren’t having any of it. Tom Francis, in particular, the person responsible for Gunpoint, Heat Signature, and the upcoming Tactical Breach Wizards, has also decided to chime in on the problem.
A former gaming industry writer himself, Francis has decided not to mince any words in his recent blog post: “I just wanna spell out exactly what my issue is,” he said. Five years into the production of Tactical Breach Wizards, his first Unity project, Francis and his team have had to invest both time and money into learning the engine. The decision to work with Unity, said Francis, was based on the understanding that it wouldn’t take any share of the game’s post-release income. An understanding that is, as it turns out, no longer valid.
The gist of Francis’ argument rests on Unity’s own (out-of-date) Terms of Service: “When you obtain a version of Unity, and don’t upgrade your project, we think you should be able to stick to that version of the TOS.”
Indeed, Francis’ team uses Unity 2019.3: “In the last 4 years, the only additional value Unity have provided us is bug fixes to that version. But that’s OK! I’m happy to pay a large fee up front to avoid having our income skimmed forever,” Francis wrote. “It wasn’t on my radar that the most reputable indie engine might be silently laying the groundwork for a moustache-twirling betrayal.”
As access to Unity is a subscription, rather than a single-purchase product, Francis himself
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