If you haven’t heard, Unity has gone off the deep end. They are going to start charging $0.20 per install (or reinstall) starting next year. This is an incredibly bad move for Unity…but also for the gamersphere. I don’t know about you, but I install and uninstall games all the time. There are very few that I keep on my hard drive because I play them often enough that it just makes sense.

So what might this mean? The implications are pretty big and far reaching if we take them to the logical conclusion. I mean, most of us don’t even own hard copies of the games we play thanks to the Steam “model.” It’s all so terribly convenient and right there and we can play, update, and install right through it. But they can also pull the games and brick updates and do all kinds of other general skullduggery…what happens when they start charging you for installing the game even after you’ve bought it? What happens when you reinstall it? Worse, what if you have to pay to uninstall it in the first place? This sort of “ensh*ttification” is only going to get worse the less we care and the more we let them do it.

And think of the devs? Small indie game devs were promised one thing and now have another and they are going to be the ones to suffer. The sphere of games is going to grow smaller and smaller and the prices to develop even the simplest of games grows more and more expensive. Whether you want to admit it or not indie devs lead the way. They are the backbone of the videogame industry and all this is going to do is severely hurt them in a way that we may not see right now…but we will see it eventually and it’s going to come like a thief in the night.

For more on this, check out this Ars Technica article.