• foggy@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yeah businesses can sue you for pulling out the rug like this.

      Users cannot.

      • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Pokemon is made on the unity engine, so one of the scariest legal teams in the world. Nintendo doesn’t like it when people take a little whipped cream off of the mcflurry, and this threatens to take the whole McFlurry.

        • TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Retroactive change of terms for already released unchanged products? I don’t know the legal details but it seems pretty strange that they can just say they will charge over something for products that were finished and released under different terms before all this. The devs may not even be opening those projects on Unity anymore.

          • tonarinokanasan@lemmy.sdf.org
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            1 year ago

            There’s nothing implicit about “opening the project in unity” that needs to be a trigger for terms to change.

            If you make and distribute a game made in unity, then you are distributing some unity IP. You would need the license holder to grant you permission to do that. The terms you agree to with unity are what grant you the right to distribute this.

            So this has very little to do with “have you opened the editor lately”, and is more similar to when e.g. Dead By Daylight has to stop selling a dlc character because they don’t renew an agreement with the rights holders.

            • TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              That’s because digital media licensing is a whole circus. We aren’t talking of using someone else’s likeness or characters. What if Microsoft Office decides that they will charge retroactively about every file previously created with those tools regardless of what compensation they may already have agreed to and received? Does that seem even remotely reasonable in the least?

              Do publishing houses need to pay leases to printer manufacturers per page printed on top of their own material costs? Do they need to pay every time a new reader opens the book the first time?

              It’s not reasonable to just go “the company said so, therefore this is how it has to work”, that’s just being a chump.

      • Dasnap@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        My real point is that one of these userbases has lawyers and are highly risk-averse.

        Pedantically though, yes.

        • TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Unity games include Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, Pokémon GO, Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail and Marvel Snap.

          I doubt The Pokémon Company, MiHoYo and Marvel/Disney will just let Unity shove this decision at them, especially when some of these are have tens of millions of players and many more downloads per player.

          • redcalcium@lemmy.institute
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            1 year ago

            MiHoYo’s games are free-to-play on mobile platfroms, right? If they’ll going to get charged 20c per install, they’ll going to get royally fucked because most of free-to-play users aren’t buying anything. IMO that’s a huge incentive to switch ASAP, unless they have special deal with unity and not affected by this new pricing scheme.

            • TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I wouldn’t say MiHoYo would be fucked because they are making bank. But they will definitely get a massive bill on top of however much they already paid Depending on whether Unity counts updates as additional downloads, that’s even more money. It might be enough to make them fight it. This whole change in monetization is probably aimed at mobile games in general