In other parts of my life I’ve been reading a fair bit about the kerfuffle Unity has caused amongst devs with their recent retroactive changes to their contracts, and I was wondering if Boundless uses Unity, and if so will these changes affect Boundless if Unity doesn’t walk them back?
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The game run on their own graphic engine, so no Unity…
Boundless was from the beginning a game to showcase their graphic engine, witch was build by Turbulence.
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They had to ditch basically that whole thing. Someone has listed incorrect or, at least incomplete info on the turbulenz wikipedia page. Oort online was developed in the Turbulenz engine but it was changed prior to 1.0 due to not being able to meet all the needs of the new (including PS) ecosystem.
This is the reason that we don’t have the same character models, colors, light engine, etc… as what people see in the pre-release trailers.
With so much info having aged off the open web I’m not wanting to rabbit-hole about this tonight to try and be super accurate about how deep the changes went. You can still play Miss Take, Polycraft, and perhaps some other games in the turbulenz engine.
Wikipedia also says Larian bought and integrated the engine and that’s not correct at all.
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I’d edit to change the tone of that a bit if we could do such advanced things here. I have no idea, of course, how any IP contracts were structured.
They did hire the devs 
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Seems weird what is happening with Unity, if they don’t it’s a Indie Devs killer.
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Is it really that bad? You have to meet both requirements for the fee to apply. Which means having a revenue of 1 million USD AND 1 million installs. Sure it’s more than paying nothing, but as an engine that has trouble earning enough money to survive it’s not the worst option right? The free tier still exists and when you start making serious profit give something back to the engine that made that possible.
Back to the question of OP, no Boundless is not using Unity but something they made themself. I think it is a more optimized variant of the opensource Turbulenz engine.
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It really does have a feel of the D&D debacle.
I think what makes it bad is the retroactively applying these fees to games already long done. Especially free games. But there seems to be a lot of concerns and miscommunication. I spent a bit of time on the Unity forum today and there is a lot of confusion.
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This makes sense. I’d wondered why the change of character models etc.
Lets go with the $0.20 per install. That’s how much unity will charge the developer EACH time the game is installed. So lets say a college instructor buys a game and installs it on all the campus computers. At my local college, that would be nearly 1,000. That’s $200 that the developer has to pay to Unity.
Now imagine it’s a game like WoW, with over 8 million players. That’s $1.6 mil that the Devs have to pay. That’s just for one install. But what if they installed it on multiple computers in each household?
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I have some experience with Unity development and it is really unfortunate to see them doing something like this. However, based on the fairly high thresholds before charging a developer I would say that it isn’t quite the nail in the coffin for indie devs that its made out to be. 200k installs and revenue is quite a bit for an indie dev and at that point they should be paying for the engine anyways. Not sure I like how its based on installs though.
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I was just saying (in game) how well optimised this game (and therefore engine) is … 
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I’d like to see how well the game servers do with 250k players.
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I’m sure it’ll be fine.
Most likely… granted… Circa would be full all the time.
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My boys are learning on Unity at school, also on the spectrum so they took the Unity will charge for your completed projects message quite literally. I had to look up what they were actually doing, to explain it to them. No, Unity aren’t going to charge you for the projects you made at school
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Well for college instructors there are different options, which are free.
Pricing does not seem to be fully retro-active, it’s based on new installs per month.
So, if you look at the WoW example you gave and add some numbers and guesses:
- 8.5 million active users per month
- 4.6 million subscribers per month (2022)
- 228 million accounts in total (2023)
- Revenue 470+ million per year (2022)
- We don’t know the actual player growth and installs per month
- Price is Unity Pro vs. Unity Enterprise
100k installs a month / 2.4m a year
First 100.000 installs: 15.000 / 12.500
TOTAL: 15.000 / 12.500
200k installs a month / 2.4m a year
First 100.000 installs: 15.000 / 12.500
Next 100.000 installs: 7.500 / 6.000
TOTAL: 22.500 / 18.500
500k installs a month / 6m a year
First 100.000 installs: 15.000 / 12.500
Next 400.000 installs: 30.000 / 24.000
TOTAL: 45.000 / 36.500
1m installs a month / 12m a year
First 100.000 installs: 15.000 / 12.500
Next 400.000 installs: 30.000 / 24.000
Next 500.000 installs: 15.000 / 10.000
TOTAL: 60.000 / 46.500
2m installs a month / 24m a year
First 100.000 installs: 15.000 / 12.500
Next 400.000 installs: 30.000 / 24.000
Next 500.000 installs: 15.000 / 10.000
Next 1.000.000 installs: 20.000 / 10.000
TOTAL: 80.000 / 56.500
5m installs a month / 60m a year
First 100.000 installs: 15.000 / 12.500
Next 400.000 installs: 30.000 / 24.000
Next 500.000 installs: 15.000 / 10.000
Next 4.000.000 installs: 80.000 / 40.000
TOTAL: 140.000 / 86.500
I don’t think WoW is reaching 5 million NEW installs per month, think closer to the 1 million but that is just guessing. Someone has some good numbers? In all cases, if you compare the totals to the revenue 470m/year, which is about 39m/month… I think this 0.15%/0.12% would be peanuts.
The problem isn’t whether the deal is or is not fair; it’s that they unilaterally changed it after many people had made plans and business decisions based on the existing deal and pricing. A lot of revenue models for games, like “Vampire Survivors” is the famous example, wouldn’t be feasible going forward with these changes.
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