It’s amazing how it’s done before Unity.
The Rogue-like card game, built by Mega Crit, was launched on 6 March in Steam, which, although only an EA version, is expected to take another year or two to perfect the official version of Mega Crit, but with great quality, the game has been a great success. Over 3 million copies were sold in the first week, while the number of online players peaked at 57,4638, with no change.
However, the fire in the Extremation Tower 2 does not prevent people from reminiscent of the previous “run fee” wave of the Unity engine, especially when the Godot engine Logo was seen in the game. In response to the announcement of a new fee policy by Unity, Mega Critt renounced the Unity engine and replaced the two-year kill minarets 2 on Unity with the Godot engine. Before that, most players had never heard of Godot.
On 12 September 2023, Unity announced the implementation of the “operation fee” as of January 2024, i.e., the developer would have to pay the United States maximum of US$ 0.2 per additional installation once the revenue from the game and the cumulative amount of installation reached a certain threshold. Most outraged to the community, the policy also applies to old games that have been sold for many years.
In the face of a variety of problems, developers have shown remarkable solidarity, including the famous games studios, such as The Slash of Killing, What Apocalypse, which have protested and publicly condemned Unity as “honoring”, and many of them have threatened to change their engines or lower up. Unity initially tried to hold its position, but quickly made concessions under great industrial pressure. Only a few weeks later, the former Chief Executive Officer of Unity, John Riccitiello, who introduced the policy, announced his retirement and resigned from a number of high-level positions, including the President, the Chief Executive Officer, the Chairman and the members of the company’s board. After a whole year of brand damage and development, the new CEO Matt Bromberg announced on 12 September 2024 that it would abolish “operation fees” completely, never implement, and Unity reverted to the traditional subscription model. As a compromise, subscription fees for professional and enterprise versions were increased and the individual income ceiling for the free version was raised to $200,000.
At present, Unity is still one of the main engines of the game, especially in hand-drives, which appears to have stabilized under Matthew Brownberg. But the success of the Skull 2 shows precisely how much this wave actually damages Unity. At that time, Mega Critt issued a statement, “The Mega Crit team has been working on a new game for more than two years. Unlike the Killing Point Tower, we’ve been using Unity engines. Although the team has invested a great deal of time and effort in this new undertaking, we will have to relocate to the new engine if Unity does not completely reverse these changes and establish protective provisions. We have never made a public statement before, which is enough to show how bad Unity is making things worse.”
Although Unity eventually withdrew its new policy, its piecemeal approach was not satisfactory to developers and many eventually permanently abandoned Unity. In the case of Mega Crit, they chose the Godot engine, which was licensed with MIT and was free of charge “for any purpose”. Mega Crit decided on Godot after three weeks of internal game-making marathons and also produced a small card-to-card game called Dancing Dullists. Dancing Dullists can play free on Windows, Mac and Linux, and Mega Critt says that any player who wishes to donate is requested to donate money directly to the Godot engine development fund. The Mega Crit studio and the developer Re-Logic of Telaria are the main sponsors of the fund.
This is a small but very enlightening event in the recent history of the industry: it took only one month between the beginning and the end of the wave in the autumn of 2023. The end result was that the CEO of Unity came down and that the company, despite its best efforts to recover, had lost all the good that it had accumulated over the years in the independent game industry and that many developers had left the company shortly thereafter. Mega Crit, through the Slate II of the Killings, proved that the annual explosive funds could be created by Godot, and it is foreseeable that Mega Crit will not consider Unity for a short period of time. Of the many controversial changes that Unity is trying to introduce, the worst of them is that they think they can “get money” in a rational manner by squeezing the lifeline of their users. Unity, who pulled the trigger three years ago, might not have thought that the spree of killing 2 would be like a bullet, and that today, years later, it was right in its eyes.
