The indie developer is afraid that it will soon become bankrupt — and Chinese gamers will be to blame. One day, the number of active players may become critical and then they will have to pay Unity for cloud services.
The guy shared his guesses on Reddit.
He released his first mobile game on the Google Play Store and received 70 downloads. But suddenly, many people from China started playing his game without downloading or connecting to Google Play.
It was about 200 people every day and the number was growing. So the author is worried that when the number reaches a critical point, he will have to pay Unity for cloud services.
And this is at a time when he hasn’t received any money from those players because they can’t watch ads or make in-game purchases.
In China, Google Play is blocked, so users from there are literally pirating the game from an indie developer.
Accordingly, he asked on Reddit what he should do. The advice was as follows:
- change the API keys used, roll out an update requiring proper Google Play authentication, which will disable the old access to the game.
- geo-block the entire region of China from its server, so the only way to connect to the game is through a VPN, which can also be detected and blocked. Also, use Google APIs to determine whether the client has been properly authenticated and, based on this, time out clients who have not. If this doesn’t help — ask Unity directly for advice.
Changes in Unity
As a reminder, the real life-changing changes began after Unity made significant changes to the terms of use: On January 1, 2024, instead of the standard changes
a fee for each game installation was introduced.
The Unity Runtime Fee, a new payment model for developers, required them to pay for the use of Unity every time their game was installed by a player.
After the announcement of its new pricing plan, the company said that employees began receiving death threats. As a result, Unity temporarily closed its offices in San Francisco and Austin, Texas, and canceled public meetings.
But after that, Unity announced that it was cutting 25% of its workforce, which is about 1800 jobs.