The trend in Steam and similar seems to have been that there are no separate demo versions at all, but there are "free weekends" where you get to play the full game for a limited time, to make up your mind whether you want to buy it or not. I e.g. played Age of Empires 4 that way on Steam, and then decided it isn't for me.

I wonder if those will count as installs that Unity wants to charge?

Perhaps. But getting the pro license or whatnot would likely be suicide until you have made your own thresholds.

I either read in, or spoke with TripleB games (Made Ring Runner, and now Popup Dungeon). They said they worked something like 4 years on Ring Runner, and it cost them about $400k to make. After some years of sales they managed to 'break even' i think it was.

And personally i'd have to preferably make twice as much money on a product as i put into it before i'd consider paying fees and licenses, since any fees before you manage to hit a profit point means it takes that much longer to reach it, especially if it takes years of sales to break even.

Mind you i think using someone's tools and engine should totally entitle them to some money, especially once i've pushed into profit territory, or runaway successes; But unless you're making very tiny and very fast made games (like asset flips) then the thresholds i think they put there are too low.

Maybe you can throw a game together in 2-3 months like Vampire survivor, but the install fees would crush the game as he sells it for like $5 or something. Meaning such a cheap game is not feasible and raising the price of the game would likely result in a lot of lost sales. Lose-lose situation.

https://store.steampowered.com/demos/

5 demos released so far today, 12 demos yeasterday, 14 demos tthe day before that, 9 demos the day before that again... and so on and so on

haha just had a thought. Unity sends bill to dev for 50,000 installs, and they reply 'your records are wrong, we installed your product(s) exactly 0 times this month'...

not to mention the demo festivals (one recently finished).

I think they would. DRM controlled gaming is great, isn't it.

edit: But I'd say demos are still a thing and will also be in the future. These free weekends (no matter which platform) I ignore constantly. They don't want to gift me the game for good? Fine by me. I play when I want and not when some company thinks it's a good idea. I don't need time pressure while playing.

The problem with those are that quite often a lot of demos in those are time-limited (as in removed after the event). I'll never get that BS.

I'm going a bit further with my game.

The front-end, which displays the user interface, will use Godot, or at least that's the current plan.

The back-end, where all the game mechanics will be coded, is in Python, and it communicates with the front-end via JSON-RPC (chosen because of its simplicity and the fact that Godot's standard library has support for it).

By doing this, if somehow Godot does something evil, I don't need to re-implement the game logic from scratch to use a new engine for the visual display. (And I see Python as being even less likely to disappear, as it's widely used, and my Python code doesn't need anything outside of the standard library.)

If godot do something evil just create a fork or even better just use the best that will be created at that point.
That's the best thing about open source, you don't need to worry about them.

Typically you can crack or use a steam emulator on those since the time limit is controlled by the Steam application not by the game itself if you want to play longer.

Doesn't do me any good after the fact when I find out about a game I'd like to try that it had a demo but was removed for completely asinine reasons. It's like goddamn FOMO in the trial space. Ridiculous.

Can't say I'm a fan of it.

The fact you'd have to use a cracked version or a steam emulator says the inherit default use of these are stupid.

Though i'm probably not much better regarding cracks; I've been using the cracked Skyrim Legendary edition for years, so i don't have to fight with the damn steam app having to be installed and running to start the game. An utter headache from when i first discovered how much i HATE DRM, trying to backup my games or transfer to a non-steam device only for 95% of them to barf at me. (or some instances... going into 'Demo mode'...)

A deeper look into Unity's board of Directors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOCTSp_U-KI

Unity said no to 20b from Applovin but said yes to 4.4b from Ironsource. Guess which company some of the directors have ties to? According to this, Ironsource's CEO made millions in the last year by selling Unity stocks since the merger 1 year ago.

https://www.eurogamer.net/unity-bosses-sold-stock-days-before-development-fees-announcement-raising-eyebrows
And then we have the two from sequoia and silver lake.

This was clearly planed a long time ago, but to what end, other than money of course? The word "shady" doesn't cover half of it.