Unity: Gaming CEO to Retire after blundering big time!

John Riccitiello is saying good-bye after failing game developers and gamers.

Photo by Pakata Goh on Unsplash

Unity Runtime fee’s based on Game Installs sounds pretty neato if you’re new to the gaming scene and don’t know what that means for developers and gamers in general. This is something many people don’t understand so the overall breakdown of it is, every time you install a game built with the Unity Game Engine, the developers will be responsible to pay a fee. Moreover; Unity has added to their Terms of Service that the fee would also be retroactive to when the game was original published. Something lawyers have weighed in on and said is unenforceable, and borderlines on illegal.

That is a pretty scary thought considering there are hundreds of games made using Unity, many of them are free to play games that do not earn any money. This brain child change to the Unity Terms of Service is thanks to none other than John Riccitiello. You may remember this man from 2011 when he told the shareholders of Electronic Arts (EA) that charging a dollar a reload in Battlefield 3 was something they were considering. Clearly this man is beyond focused on monetization of the gaming sphere.

The way this new Runtime fee would work is every time you install a game, a fee must be paid. For gamers, this could become expensive as you install, uninstall, reinstall games to when you play in the modern gaming environment. As video games get larger and larger the hard drive space becomes more and more limited. So uninstalling games becomes a requirement unless you hemorrhage lots of money into new hardware. Game developers paying every time you install means they will pass that fee on to the player. Keeping in mind that someone who steals the game and installs it, would cause this fee to be triggered too. And while Unity said that it wouldn’t trigger it, how would they know it is a cracked game and not a legitimate purchase?