Last week, I wrote about Enshittification, which is a great lead into for what just happened with Unity. Unity is a game development engine. It’s a very popular platform and a number of universities use it as part of their game development degrees. Popular YouTuber Mark Brown, of GameMakersToolKit uses Unity in his series exploring novice game development.

Which is rather unfortunate, because Unity has gone and decided to retroactively add a way to claw back value from game developers. They announced it on 9/12, it is a Run Time Fee for every new install of a game. It might not sound like a lot, $0.20 (at the lowest end) for an install, however, if you are a low priced game, because it’s a small game, that could be 1/5 of your revenue. Add in Steam’s 30% fee, you’re already at 50% of your revenue chewed up in fees. The other challenging part of this fee, is that it would apply to every computer an end user installs the game on.

I have a Steam Deck, a laptop, and a Gaming PC. If I installed a $0.99 game on all three systems, the company that developed by game would have lost 10 cents on my purchase. That’s untenable for game developers. It’s not a survivable product strategy. Game devs and publishers would need to charge at least $2.00 for every game to ensure they made money. Which might kill the viability for that game.

In a related cash grab eX-Twitter is contemplating charging a fee for every user on the platform. No matter how much you use the site, it’s now a subscription price. The benefit of that product was always the free association and random interactions on the platform. Another way it’s been enshittified has been the significant growth of Nazi users.

Companies that dramatically change the terms of use, will drive customers away. They will push companies from the platform or potential companies away. The Developers of Terraria, didn’t even use the engine, have elected to fund two Open Source development engines as a result.

I think it’s important for technology companies to take a long look at what the users are saying in response to Twitter, Unity, Google (and it’s Google Graveyard), and Telecom companies. End Users, the life blood of any platform, avoid these companies and their products as much as they. They do not want to be exploited. It’s toxic.

The executive class do like these schemes as they push up the “value” of their products to the stock market. However, this is ultimately at the expense of their long term revenue and value to customers. Working with your customers, both immediate and end customers, will drive value for your business in the long run. Trust lost is lost value. Don’t enshittify your products.