Terraria dev donated $200k to Unity competitors
Unity's decision to change its terms of service and add a fee per game download has caused a lot of upset in the gaming world.
Their new changes impact everyone in the community, from indie game developers to AAA publishers and even gamers themselves. As a reaction to Unity's TOS change, game developers are speaking out, using their game's large platform to raise awareness of the problems that this could cause down the line.
Terraria developer Re-Logic has taken this one step further, donating money to its competition in order to help them grow and become as much of a powerhouse as Unity once was.
Terraria is donating money to Unity's open source competitors
In response to Unity's terms of service change, which will require developers to pay a certain amount per download once they hit a sales threshold, Terraria developer Re-Logic has donated $200,000 to smaller open source games engines.
In a statement on Twitter, Re-Logic said: “The team at Re-Logic has been watching the recent events surrounding Unity with both interest and sadness. The loss of a formerly-leading and user-friendly game engine to the darker forces that negatively impact so much of the gaming industry has left us dismayed to put it mildly.
“We unequivocally condemn and reject the recent TOS/fee changes proposed by Unity and the underhanded way they were rolled out. The flippant manner with which years of trust cultivated by Unity were cast aside for yet another way to squeeze publishers, studios, and gamers is the saddest part. That this move was wholly unnecessary pushes things into the tragedy category - a cautionary tale the industry will not soon forget.
“We do not feel that a simple public statement is sufficient... We strongly feel that it is now equally important to get behind some of the other up-and-coming open source game engines. Lighting some candles in an otherwise dark moment.
“Re-Logic has always been supportive of game developers and indie studios that do things the right way. We feel that our actions in this moment are the best way to carry that mission forward - by accelerating and strengthening competing open source engines, we hope to empower and assist studios that are struggling with how best to proceed given these recent events.”
Within the statement, Re-Logic shared that it has donated $100,000 each to Godot Engine (a free, all-in-one, cross-platform game engine) and FNA (open source reimplementation of the Microsoft XNA Framework). Re-Logic will also be donating $1,000 per month to both engines.
The gaming community is united against Unity
Re-Logic is not alone in feeling betrayed by Unity's decision. Several other game developers have spoken out against the move, telling Unity to "stop being stinky" and fix it.
Massive Monster, the creators of Cult of the Lamb, put out a statement on Twitter stating that it used Unity to make their popular cosy roguelike and that the change would result in significant delays to their future projects.
Other devs, including Among Us developer Innersloth, have shared their own irritation at how their games would be impacted and how they feel they have lost faith in the platform.
In a post shared to Twitter, Innersloth said: "This would harm not only us, but fellow game studios of all budgets and sizes... Stop it! WTF?"
Aggro Crab, the developer of Another Crab's Treasure, similarly shared a post that elegantly ended with "I fucking hate it here."
Unity has stated that they have heard the complaints and will be making changes to the policy, however, it is yet to be seen whether or not any policy change, including completely reversing this decision, will win back the audience they have lost.