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Unity on X (formerly Twitter): "We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of... / X"
The only real confusion I saw was in the first few days when many were asking "surely they mean unique installs, right?" That got cleared up pretty quickly with their price change faq.
The only real confusion I saw was in the first few days when many were asking "surely they mean unique installs, right?"
That got cleared up pretty quickly with their price change faq.
I don't see how there was confusion. Unity told Axios that uninstalling and reinstalling the game would count as separate installs. They then backtracked on it....
I don't see how there was confusion.
Unity told Axios that uninstalling and reinstalling the game would count as separate installs. They then backtracked on it.
After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unity's Whitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation.
I actually hadn't even heard about that backtrack. What I was talking about was on the day of the initial announcement, many people were confused and thought they must've made a mistake in their...
I actually hadn't even heard about that backtrack.
What I was talking about was on the day of the initial announcement, many people were confused and thought they must've made a mistake in their wording and that it was meant to be for the first install only.
This was clarified later in the day in their price change faq and response to users on social media that they definitely did mean every install.
After that there were still a few days of people confused about that point because a lot of the "reporting" they saw about it was from reaction channels on youtube/twitch or headlines on twitter.
The confusion generally centered around how the heck they plan to implement this, and the general logistics. The announcement was beyond vague, and raised far more questions than it answered. For...
The confusion generally centered around how the heck they plan to implement this, and the general logistics. The announcement was beyond vague, and raised far more questions than it answered. For example, "Is some of this stuff even legal?"
Then there's also the confusion on how the heck it made it to this stage without someone shutting it down or at least trying to cut down the damage. I think it's genuinely the worst policy change I've seen in any industry, there's literally no part that can be defended or explained by even the most rabid defenders of Unity. It's the most out of touch policy change I've ever seen seen.
The damage is already done, doesn't matter what the new policy is. Unity will be sunset by the game developer community in favor of their competitors. Their customer base is developers and those...
Exemplary
The damage is already done, doesn't matter what the new policy is. Unity will be sunset by the game developer community in favor of their competitors. Their customer base is developers and those people tend to be savvy. They are not going to risk their time or their future game sales on a dicey company. I'm rather amused. Twitter, Wizards of the Coast, Reddit, and now Unity have all made the same core mistake here. Corporate suicide must be the new fad in Silicon Valley. It's a fad I can definitely get behind.
I look forward to the court cases. Their idea about retroactively back-charging developers for downloads that already happened is blatantly and obviously illegal everywhere - contracts cannot be changed after the sale is completed without both parties' consent unless in violation of the law, period. You can sign any contracts you want, but you cannot sign your rights away. All of those EULAs are wishlist thinking at best because no agreement can ever abrogate basic foundational rights derived from english common law with precedent that traces all the way back to the damn Roman empire.
Any court in the USA or the EU will rule the developers of existing games get to keep the original terms that were in place when they paid for their Unity license and whatever version of the Unity engine they paid for, even if the games aren't released yet. They can still release those games under that contract, and Unity can't do a damn thing about it. Only future sales can be under the new license. The people who have the 'lifetime' Unity deal may even be able to keep that exact same deal in perpetuity applying to all future versions, depending on the language in the contract.
The really interesting thing is the stock sales. Several C-level execs who sold shares over the last couple of weeks are absolutely going to be investigated for insider trading. As for the batshit insane licensing, in the US it might amount to a slap on the wrist, but in the EU they are an awful lot more enthusiastic when it comes to punishing tech companies for bad behavior. If the EU levies a fine, it'll be based on a nice fat percentage of their total lifetime product revenue, not a small 'cost of doing business' expense like we get in the USA. Just ask Microsoft and Facebook if they recommend locking horns with EU regulators.
I feel bad for the rank and file who created the Unity engine, which is a phenomenal piece of software. They were just sold down the river, all that work's gone. Plugin developers will be porting all of their value-added goodies to the competition now, I imagine Godot and Unreal are seeing a rather stunning bump in sales even though neither one is a true replacement for Unity. If I were Godot, I'd take that money and hire Unity's best people out from under the dumpster fire right now while the getting is good.
Perhaps next time go for a worker co-op, so that C-people with IQs five deviations below the mean can't ruin the company in an afternoon just by opening their mouths. One thing I'm quite sure of is that no group of workers would ever vote to do something this idiotic to their livelihoods.
I've found Bellular News has a pair of goodvideos covering this, if you're out of the loop. Hear it all with sourced quotes and citations, from a game developer who is impacted by this mess.
Perhaps next time go for a worker co-op, so that C-people with IQs five deviations below the mean can't ruin the company in an afternoon just by opening their mouths.
Controversial take, but I don’t think developers will be the strongest force in moving the market away from Unity. If you want a 3D game engine that’s tightly integrated, easy to use, easy to...
Their customer base is developers and those people tend to be savvy. They are not going to risk their time or their future game sales on a dicey company.
Controversial take, but I don’t think developers will be the strongest force in moving the market away from Unity. If you want a 3D game engine that’s tightly integrated, easy to use, easy to develop in, and performant, Unity is a great option. Tons of learning resources, C# as a development language, and the community behind it will keep Unity going for a while. Of course as you mentioned, "neither [Unreal or Godot] is a true replacement for Unity."
Publishers, on the other hand, are likely immediately going to be looking to offset the risk Unity games pose, given that a profitable deal for a game today may potentially bankrupt the publisher tomorrow. Indie devs will eventually learn one way or another that publishers aren’t interested in their Unity projects moving forward. It’s important to note that publishers are overwhelmingly going to be the ones paying these new fees, and they are far more shrewd than even developers are.
There will be a lag in the apparent effects as in-work Unity games mature, but expect publishers to show far less interest in publishing a game that uses the Unity engine.
Maybe I’m too cynical, but I think this is just another part of the plan. Release it with over the top bad news, walk some of it back and implement what they always wanted to once the furore dies down
Maybe I’m too cynical, but I think this is just another part of the plan. Release it with over the top bad news, walk some of it back and implement what they always wanted to once the furore dies down
That seems like a very short sighted strategy. As the saying goes, trust takes years to build, a moment to ruin, and forever to repair. They have completely ruined their reputation and any half...
That seems like a very short sighted strategy. As the saying goes, trust takes years to build, a moment to ruin, and forever to repair. They have completely ruined their reputation and any half steps backwards would leave them in a position worse than if they had just taken the half step in the first place. Unity must bend over backwards and tie themselves into legally binding straight jackets before anyone reasonable would consider using their engine at this point. The value of their engine is bolstered by community support, recommendations, supplies of experts etc. The vast majority of all those resources they got essentially for free are going to go away and he engine will not be nearly as enticing for new adopters ever again.
I can see why they tried it though, we just watched Netflix do the same thing and get away with it. They threaten to limit account sharing, the fan base gets mad, they walk it back a little. Then...
I can see why they tried it though, we just watched Netflix do the same thing and get away with it.
They threaten to limit account sharing, the fan base gets mad, they walk it back a little.
Then after the heat died down they pushed it back forward. Now it's a thing.
Wizards of the Coast did it with the Open Gaming License. We're still waiting to see if they try again when they push the new books next year. We're also waiting to see if Paizo and others make good on their promises to have their own game with blackjack and strippers.
My comment shows why this is different in this case. Both developers and game companies are interested in investing their time and money into reliable technology. Anyone can cancel Netflix in five...
My comment shows why this is different in this case. Both developers and game companies are interested in investing their time and money into reliable technology. Anyone can cancel Netflix in five minutes. If they want to rap up all the episodes for a season or not it’s up to them. If unity becomes unviable, developers and gaming companies will have wasted huge amounts of resources that they cannot recover. This risk, regardless of unitys pricing, is untenable for adopters.
I think the retroactive-ness is a big factor here as well. It would be one thing if Unity had said it applied to new games going forward, but they claimed it would apply to games already released....
I think the retroactive-ness is a big factor here as well. It would be one thing if Unity had said it applied to new games going forward, but they claimed it would apply to games already released. Even if they walk it back, this indicates that they think they can do something like that and developers may absolutely decide to use a different engine moving forward based on the idea that Unity might retroactively change something like this after their game has already been released.
I hear this take a lot but for me it doesn't hold a lot of water. Big corporations don't want tons of negative press and to build a reputation as evil. I think Occam's razor dictates that this was...
I hear this take a lot but for me it doesn't hold a lot of water. Big corporations don't want tons of negative press and to build a reputation as evil. I think Occam's razor dictates that this was simply something they thought they could get away with, the idea was pushed by a greedy, out of touch executive and it got pushed back on hard.
True, definitly can’t rule out classic greed, shortsightedness or stupidity. Hard to imagine they couldn’t have predicted this though given their own internal protests.
True, definitly can’t rule out classic greed, shortsightedness or stupidity. Hard to imagine they couldn’t have predicted this though given their own internal protests.
Going back from “we’re retroactively and unilaterally changing the TOS” is going to be an interesting study in PR management . We'll see how that plays out. Getting the trust back is going to be...
Going back from “we’re retroactively and unilaterally changing the TOS” is going to be an interesting study in PR management .
We'll see how that plays out. Getting the trust back is going to be an uphill battle.
I believe that if Unity's numbers ever go up, it won't be because of regained trust, but ignorance, pressure, or just "we ran the numbers, we'll profit short-term, and we don't plan for this...
I believe that if Unity's numbers ever go up, it won't be because of regained trust, but ignorance, pressure, or just "we ran the numbers, we'll profit short-term, and we don't plan for this project to exist long enough for the risk of being taken hostage to matter, so whatever".
So probably mass-produced mobile crap, which seems to align with Unity's direction...
The mass-produced mobile crap brings in metric shit-tons of money though... From the outside it's hard to even fathom how bonkers amounts of money a mid-tier mobile game with some longevity can...
The mass-produced mobile crap brings in metric shit-tons of money though...
From the outside it's hard to even fathom how bonkers amounts of money a mid-tier mobile game with some longevity can bring in. Like "let's send the whole team to Tokyo for a week, but we'll actually make money because marketing isn't at the office spending money" -amounts.
The people on Tildes, Hacker News and to a point Reddit aren't in the target audience, but there are tens of millions of people for whom the mobile phone is the only device they own, maybe in addition to a TV.
The money we spend on PC hardware, gaming consoles, Baldur's Gate 3, Starfield etc, they spend on mobile games.
Exactly what I mean. For instance, when the Game of Thrones came out, dozens of games themed around some sort of unlicensed GoT ripoff came out. Hyper-profitable low-effort reskins of a successful...
Exactly what I mean. For instance, when the Game of Thrones came out, dozens of games themed around some sort of unlicensed GoT ripoff came out. Hyper-profitable low-effort reskins of a successful formula. I doubt people still play them, though—even if, they don't get many installs, and so can't be taken hostage by Unity.
Zynga's Game of Thrones Slots Casino is still steadily in the top most grossing list in it's category: https://app.sensortower.com/overview/1369317521?country=US&tab=category_rankings - it is a...
That's basically what Chapek did for Disney for Iger to walk back. It's gross and it's obvious when companies do it. We're not idiots. These companies deserve to be smacked down for what they're...
That's basically what Chapek did for Disney for Iger to walk back. It's gross and it's obvious when companies do it. We're not idiots.
These companies deserve to be smacked down for what they're doing.
Looking at the reporting, leaks and lack of technical specifics; entire debacle feels like a C-suite push that had no external or operational support. Feels like someone with an MBA pulled up a...
Looking at the reporting, leaks and lack of technical specifics; entire debacle feels like a C-suite push that had no external or operational support. Feels like someone with an MBA pulled up a list of KPIs, sorted by size and asked "Why is big number not money number?"
My guess is that they will try to walk back these decisions from the PC/Console space but they need something to further capitalize on mobile. The platform makes for the bulk of install numbers and is the space most likely to engage with the excessive monetization and intrusive analytics systems Unity has been focusing on. But even then the math is suspect because for every whale attracted to a game, there are probably millions of other people trying it for a time and dropping it later. Success is a risk that can only be mitigated by baiting the most dedicated players into paying more money, more often.
But I do think it's really going to bite them with platforms and publishers. They retroactively changed contracts with 3 months notice and sent an entire industry into a panic. Attaching Unity to any project is a risk I don't think anyone has an appetite for and I do think indie studios are serious about dropping them all together.
They might be putting out the fire before it does too much damage. At the end of the day new adopters are still going to look at UE and balk, and wind up at unity because there's not a ton of...
But I do think it's really going to bite them with platforms and publishers. They retroactively changed contracts with 3 months notice and sent an entire industry into a panic. Attaching Unity to any project is a risk I don't think anyone has an appetite for and I do think indie studios are serious about dropping them all together.
They might be putting out the fire before it does too much damage. At the end of the day new adopters are still going to look at UE and balk, and wind up at unity because there's not a ton of competition (cross platform and 3d being the big things).
Still...the fact this got this far is super concerning. If an idiot C Suite gets this bad of an idea and it gets all the way there with no understanding of how to even answer the questions that it causes, you have fucked up. Either too much power or too many yes men, but that's a corporate cancer.
I have 0 skill developing and have considered multiple times trying to get into Unity/Godot/Monogame again, and this sure as hell narrowed the choices in my eyes.
I don't think they can put out the fire. Some people will still use it for the reasons you mentioned, but this totally shattered trust because we can't predict what other BS they might try to...
I don't think they can put out the fire. Some people will still use it for the reasons you mentioned, but this totally shattered trust because we can't predict what other BS they might try to pull. Any game made on Unity at any point is a liability thanks to them trying to retroactively apply the fee to games made well before the fee was even conceived. There's no telling what other decisions they'll try to enforce on games which the developers never agreed to.
It's not just developers who are wary. From what I know some publishers are already implying they won't work with Unity games from now on, and I doubt the consoles will want the games on their streaming services since Unity claimed they'd charge them instead of the developers. Unity is trying to charge people unrelated to the production of the games themselves, which means anyone who touches the game is fair game in Unity's eyes.
This goes beyond the usual broken trust. This is a case where the cons far outweigh the pros of using Unity, with the con being you're potentially gambling your entire livelihood. Even if they walk it back, the fact they might try to do something again and force it on you, even if it's 10 years down the line, is just too big of a gamble.
Eh, i think this is optimistic. For every dev frothing at the mouth right now (as they should be) there's going to be thousands more who won't even know this happened (assuming Unity is smart...
Eh, i think this is optimistic.
For every dev frothing at the mouth right now (as they should be) there's going to be thousands more who won't even know this happened (assuming Unity is smart enough to shut the fuck up and let it fade). In 2 years I wouldn't expect it to have much of an impact if they don't fuck it up more.
They will take a short term hit, and it's possible Unity is already on the ropes or they'll double down on stupid so we'll never know, but I've long since given up on how much people care about corporate actions. The only reason I see this one as maybe sticking is because the way they went about it obviously burned bridges with serious developers and publishers, and even still they all speak money.
Usually I'd agree that it's optimistic to think people would care about corporate actions enough to change it, but this time feels genuinely different. It's a policy that doesn't just make things...
Usually I'd agree that it's optimistic to think people would care about corporate actions enough to change it, but this time feels genuinely different. It's a policy that doesn't just make things inconvenient, but has the potential to genuinely ruin people's lives. And as I said, it's the sort of policy that doesn't just impact developers, who are the primary customers, but other players in the industry.
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo refuse to have Unity games on their subscription services like GamePass and PS Plus because Unity declared they'd be charging them the fee. They might even balk at allowing Unity games on their consoles altogether, because there's no guarantee Unity won't try to make them pay some other way in the future.
That's part of why this policy by Unity is so mind-boggling to me. They're sullied their name with not just developers, but they also challenged other, much BIGGER corporations. Heck, Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl were made with Unity, and Nintendo is notoriously protective of their games. They've shown that they're not only greedy, but they're incredibly careless towards other corporations. This short-term hit has done colossal damage with everyone.
I know very little about the industry, but I get the impression from following gamedev Twitter that the average tenure is short and relies on fresh entrants. The school year has already started...
I know very little about the industry, but I get the impression from following gamedev Twitter that the average tenure is short and relies on fresh entrants.
The school year has already started (or is about to start) in many parts of the world and syllabuses have been set. If Unity can walk this back quickly, then course creators will need a long memory to justify shifting all their materials away from Unity to Unreal or Godot in time for next year's courses.
I know there are game dev degrees out there in a few places, but they're not common. I'd wager if you surveyed game devs, even only young ones, a vanishingly small number of them would have a...
I know there are game dev degrees out there in a few places, but they're not common. I'd wager if you surveyed game devs, even only young ones, a vanishingly small number of them would have a degree in game dev or even have taken courses in game dev at uni. The vast majority of people who use Unity learned on the job or independently on their own time. Gamedev is a career that burns people out fast and relies on lots of fresh blood (it's a fucking toxic industry), but that fresh blood still isn't made up primarily of people who have taken formal courses in game dev, much less in a specific engine.
Ah, there you go. Cunningham's Law in action. Thank you for your response. In my field (data), there seems to be a deluge of bootcamps over the past few years and I just assumed it'd be similar in...
Ah, there you go. Cunningham's Law in action. Thank you for your response.
In my field (data), there seems to be a deluge of bootcamps over the past few years and I just assumed it'd be similar in gamedev.
I'm actually someone who got a degree in game dev at a university! I can't speak for every university, but mine didn't have classes for specific engines. The intro course did focus on Unreal, but...
I'm actually someone who got a degree in game dev at a university! I can't speak for every university, but mine didn't have classes for specific engines. The intro course did focus on Unreal, but later courses let students be a bit more choosey about which engines they used. The instructors tended to know a bit about both Unreal and Unity since they're the biggest engines and they like students to have options.
I think there's a decent chance my university will focus even more on Unreal over Unity going forward, and also explore Godot. My professors were pretty upfront about burnout and the likelihood none of us would successfully break into the industry, we even had assignments to research where we'd potentially move because there's no job opportunities locally outside being fully independent developers. With that in mind, I think they'd absolutely warn new students about this current debacle with Unity since it can potentially impact people's livelihoods. Their priority is to make sure students understand the risks, and Unity has made itself a direct risk.
How was your degree viewed post uni? I remember back in ~2008 speaking to a mate who was working for Bizarre in Liverpool, now lead engine dev for Ubisoft. He graduated with a double first in...
How was your degree viewed post uni? I remember back in ~2008 speaking to a mate who was working for Bizarre in Liverpool, now lead engine dev for Ubisoft. He graduated with a double first in mathematics from Cambridge but what got him his first job was a platformer he wrote with my mate many years before.
He said that every year they received a stack of job applications from game dev graduates but they threw them all in the bin with barely a glance. I couldn't understand why, but he explained that the graduates submitted exactly the same game as their portfolio, it having been an exact set of requirements to fulfil the course.
He proved it to me and loaded up a dozen of their submissions. Every single one was exactly the same FPS with minor differences, it was obviously pointless to review any of them. He said that creativity and creating your own utterly crappy game was far more valuable than building a preconceived concept dictated by their game dev course.
Back then I felt really sad about it, these people who had gone to uni for game dev only to fall at the first hurdle, even though it was fully justified. That was the really early days of any unis offering game dev degrees and I figured that in years to come things would change.
I wasn't trying to be disparaging with that comment, I'm really hoping those degrees have earned their place, the students deserve it. How has your own experience with a game dev degree gone. Considering the ever increasing complexity of engines it make sense that it would require years, i.e. a degree, to become competent and a highly valued future employee.
Fair question, not disparaging at all! Though unfortunately I can't answer very well, since I haven't used it to apply to game studios. I live in the midwest, where there are very few game...
Fair question, not disparaging at all! Though unfortunately I can't answer very well, since I haven't used it to apply to game studios. I live in the midwest, where there are very few game development opportunities outside of the indie scene (hence the assignment to research places to move). I also happened to graduate in 2019. I went to a job fair at my university literally a month before lockdown, so... yeah. Also worth noting my major is actually listed as Media Arts and Sciences rather than straight-up game development, which covers basically any blend of tech and creative pursuits: game development, web design, audio and video, etc. So while I focused on game development, I have options outside of it.
However, that said, I don't think they'd automatically dismiss people majoring anymore like in your anecdote. You're right that things have changed in how the programs are run. Mine only really followed "blueprints" for the intro course when teaching specific skills and parts of the engines, and even then we had a lot of flexibility in what we could do. I made a platformer with a candy theme for the final assignment in the intro course just because I could easily combine spheres and cones to make candy. The intermediate class had students pitch concepts, and then vote on which ones were best and get divided into teams to actually make them. Heck, even an assignment to make a simple game in a class about QA testing (not even coding or making games, just QA testing, there was a guy on my team from the engineering school) didn't give us a specific concept to follow. Pretty much every time we had to make a game in any class, it was up to us to come up with the concept.
Ultimately, what studios will look at isn't your degree but your portfolio. My teachers hammered that in pretty well, along with the fact that most of us wouldn't actually get a career in game dev without putting in massive effort outside of classes. The main benefits of studying it in college are the opportunity to learn with access to guidance and resources we couldn't easily attain on our own, get some experience working on games and in actual teams, and do some networking.
Unity is C# -based. Unreal is C++. Even though both have C in the name, they are completely different beasts with very different skillsets required. Source: worked professionally in Unity-based...
Unity is C# -based.
Unreal is C++.
Even though both have C in the name, they are completely different beasts with very different skillsets required.
Source: worked professionally in Unity-based mobile games for the last half decade or so.
True, but I think this is a big enough deal to push the small devs (yknow, the ones who actually made Unity what it is) toward monogame and godot, and the massive added risk for large companies of...
True, but I think this is a big enough deal to push the small devs (yknow, the ones who actually made Unity what it is) toward monogame and godot, and the massive added risk for large companies of using an engine owned by idiots is going to push them towards Unreal because they can handle the added annoyance of working in C++ by just throwing manpower at it.
Maybe I'm being overly optimistic but Unity seems to have signed their own death warrant here.
This statement doesn't actually say anything. It leads as if it's an apology, but blames the community for being confused rather than legitimately reacting to the changes announced. It takes no...
This statement doesn't actually say anything. It leads as if it's an apology, but blames the community for being confused rather than legitimately reacting to the changes announced. It takes no responsibility, doesn't give any concrete changes being made, no offer of restitution, no ask for forgiveness, or any other part of a real apology.
Think of how easy it would be to revert to the old terms if they really heard the community at minimum. This shows that management has no plans to change course and is instead attempting to delay hoping the news cycle passes.
Aww fuck off. Nobody was “confused” Unity, people were just angry at your greed. I hope they backtrack the entire thing and beg for forgiveness. Many developers are going to switch to another...
Aww fuck off. Nobody was “confused” Unity, people were just angry at your greed. I hope they backtrack the entire thing and beg for forgiveness. Many developers are going to switch to another engine, so maybe Unity is too late already.
Meanwhile, it seems Unity has rejected the notion that Planned Parenthood or C.S. Mott's Children's Hospital are charities because they are "political groups". Organyzer is a game specifically...
Meanwhile, it seems Unity has rejected the notion that Planned Parenthood or C.S. Mott's Children's Hospital are charities because they are "political groups".
Organyzer is a game specifically made to drive charitable donations to these groups, and should have qualified under the Unity terms for charitable organizations being exempt from the licensing fee. But it seems the unspoken terms of that clause is that Unity defines what is and isn't a charity.
We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and...
We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of…
— Unity (@unity) September 17, 2023
‘We have heard you’: Unity says it will make changes to controversial fee policy
by Grant St. Clair Link to the article
While it’s vague, the allusion to “changes to the policy” does sound promising. It’s likely we’ll have to wait until that update in a couple of days to find out what exactly that entails, but a cancellation of the policy entirely sounds like a bit too much to hope for.
It’s possible there will be a reduction in the fee, or perhaps a higher threshold to meet before the fee is implemented, but neither of these is likely to satisfy many of the policy’s detractors or regain Unity’s goodwill any time soon.
Cool. Fire your entire C-suite and promote people from within the company and maybe you can claw back some trust. Beyond that, it's over. Unity is clearly a dead man walking, same as Twitter,...
Cool. Fire your entire C-suite and promote people from within the company and maybe you can claw back some trust.
Beyond that, it's over. Unity is clearly a dead man walking, same as Twitter, Reddit, and a host of other big companies that just decided they couldn't leave a good thing alone.
I think trust has already been lost. Even if they do backtrack now, people will find ways to slowly move out of the ecosystem. You don't know when they'll try it again. But it's strange that they...
I think trust has already been lost. Even if they do backtrack now, people will find ways to slowly move out of the ecosystem. You don't know when they'll try it again.
But it's strange that they took this long to release such a non statement.
Is this really the official account? I thought anybody on Twitter could pretend to be anybody else (and pay for a verified checkmark), making it a very unreliable place to get news. Maybe I'm...
Is this really the official account? I thought anybody on Twitter could pretend to be anybody else (and pay for a verified checkmark), making it a very unreliable place to get news. Maybe I'm misinformed or things have changed.
To that point, a lot of the updates from Unity have not been published to their blog. Until they are prepared to set it in stone there, I refuse to trust their "updates".
To that point, a lot of the updates from Unity have not been published to their blog.
Until they are prepared to set it in stone there, I refuse to trust their "updates".
I can't help but wonder if Unity is banking on the "whale" strategy. There are a lot of mobile games flooded with microtransactions that can give you a big advantage in the game in some way, often...
I can't help but wonder if Unity is banking on the "whale" strategy.
There are a lot of mobile games flooded with microtransactions that can give you a big advantage in the game in some way, often unfairly so. The developers of these games know this is a turnoff for most players, but implement them anyway, banking on a handful of players who will spend ungodly amounts of money on them. To emphasize how important this is, whales will often get a dedicated customer service employee of sorts to make them feel like a VIP and keep spending.
If Unity can keep hold of 20% of the most installed games, this might end up making a big profit, even if they lose 50% of their community overall.
This is just a theory as I don't have those numbers, but some games that pop up as using unity include Fall Guys, Beat Saber, Cuphead, and Cities: Skylines. It's unrealistic to think all of these dev teams will rewrite their games from scratch.
I think the companies following this strategy recently are betting on inertia to carry them through any user dissatisfaction. I can imagine a board room conversation where a group of middlemen can...
I think the companies following this strategy recently are betting on inertia to carry them through any user dissatisfaction. I can imagine a board room conversation where a group of middlemen can talk themselves into thinking that their customers are stupid, or locked-in, or uninformed, and that it's really only a 'small' group of people who will be outraged by their increasingly anti-consumer practices. Those people don't matter because they are just loud, not representative of the total consumer base. We don't need tastemakers, champions, and early adopters - we hate them, they hold us accountable! How dare they criticize our obvious brilliance... after all, we went to business school, we know everything and competition is for suckers. Our 300x larger salaries are proof of this!
On some level they are actually right about this. Inertia is a hard thing to overcome, and the switch does not happen right away. Hit them up front with a nasty business change as a cash grab, rake in the money, and it doesn't matter if the company tanks because they'll move on to another business and it's not going to be their problem for very long. Do a little insider trading like most of the US congress, sell before the bad announcements obliterate the stock price. Nothing wrong with a little market manipulation, everyone's doing it right? These plebs can't even read a stock chart, and we own the regulators - they'll never catch us!
The real pain from these short-sighted decisions is only felt longer term. Wizards of the Coast for example did not consider that within days of their own bad decisions most of the tastemakers on streaming sites who got the newer generations into tabletop would immediately start streaming other games (of which there are thousands, many superior to D&D). All of the free content and good will that was making them a powerhouse instantly goes somewhere else where it is treated with more respect.
People aren't going to just burn up their existing books or stop playing their existing campaigns, though. They'll stilll be on D&D for a while - but once that campaign ends, or a new version of the game comes out, people will remember the bullshit and look at other options, all of which are helpfully provided to them now by those same early tastemakers who got them into D&D in the first place. All that money going to their competition seals their fates, because it's unbelievably easy to out-compete anyone who forgets that the customer is always right. The pain has a long tail, while the windfall for the corporation is right up front.
Unity is in the same slow boat to oblivion now. Whenever Skylines v2 comes out, it won't be built in the Unity engine. For now that's not a problem, but it will become one in the future. Companies that do this will essentially bleed to death over the coming years. Disney itself is one of them and they are bleeding out right now, thanks to their terrible taste in writers over the last decade. "Just make whatever crap and shovel it at them, they'll all buy it because they are stupid" is how that board room conversation probably went... and now their stock is at a ten year low and going down down down while they scramble to deal with their debts. The market does in fact deliver its own form of justice.
A successful business caters to and woos that noisy one percent of tastemakers as if their livelihood depends on it, because it does. A derelict business picks a fight with them. I sincerely hope this exploitative fad takes off and we see more and more of this happening. It's going to be satisfying when they are all out of business or reduced to playing sixth fiddle to the competition within a decade. It's natural selection against dumb businesses. I'd like it to take down as many of the corrupted agencies as possible before they all learn their lessons the slow, hard way and stop doing it. That's why I say this is a trend I can definitely get behind.
The nth marvel tie in for increasingly niche superheroes with even more of a backlog they expect you to have watched to get? The nth star wars tie in series which are saturating the market?...
The nth marvel tie in for increasingly niche superheroes with even more of a backlog they expect you to have watched to get? The nth star wars tie in series which are saturating the market? Formulaic 3DCG remakes that are generally underperforming?
I realise it's become fashionable in some circles to defend Disney because the right hates them now over culture war BS. But that doesn't mean they're immune from just making tired products.
While it's hypothetically satisfying to watch bad business decisions lead to a crash and burn, it's going to be devastating to their employees. I'm sure the majority of all unity employees are...
While it's hypothetically satisfying to watch bad business decisions lead to a crash and burn, it's going to be devastating to their employees. I'm sure the majority of all unity employees are blindsided by this.
As you suggest, the C-levels will be fine and likely immediately move on to the next business they can exploit. But I feel empathetic for the employees who are just trying to do their job, in an industry that often underpays to begin with, because game developers and associated positions are supposed to be partially paid in passion/job satisfaction, right?
Looks like they are walking back on a lot of the changes they proposed. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/unity-reportedly-tells-staff-details-of-runtime-fee-backtracking
Looks like they are walking back on a lot of the changes they proposed.
Was anyone “confused” by the policy, or did we all just recognize it perfectly well as a blatant cash grab?
The only real confusion I saw was in the first few days when many were asking "surely they mean unique installs, right?"
That got cleared up pretty quickly with their price change faq.
I don't see how there was confusion.
Unity told Axios that uninstalling and reinstalling the game would count as separate installs. They then backtracked on it.
https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-marc-whitten
I actually hadn't even heard about that backtrack.
What I was talking about was on the day of the initial announcement, many people were confused and thought they must've made a mistake in their wording and that it was meant to be for the first install only.
This was clarified later in the day in their price change faq and response to users on social media that they definitely did mean every install.
After that there were still a few days of people confused about that point because a lot of the "reporting" they saw about it was from reaction channels on youtube/twitch or headlines on twitter.
The confusion generally centered around how the heck they plan to implement this, and the general logistics. The announcement was beyond vague, and raised far more questions than it answered. For example, "Is some of this stuff even legal?"
Then there's also the confusion on how the heck it made it to this stage without someone shutting it down or at least trying to cut down the damage. I think it's genuinely the worst policy change I've seen in any industry, there's literally no part that can be defended or explained by even the most rabid defenders of Unity. It's the most out of touch policy change I've ever seen seen.
Confused by the audacity and sheer lack of foresight, sure.
We all were. It's not a cash grab. They just did not explain that well. Hence why they will clear up the confusion in a later press release.
/s
The damage is already done, doesn't matter what the new policy is. Unity will be sunset by the game developer community in favor of their competitors. Their customer base is developers and those people tend to be savvy. They are not going to risk their time or their future game sales on a dicey company. I'm rather amused. Twitter, Wizards of the Coast, Reddit, and now Unity have all made the same core mistake here. Corporate suicide must be the new fad in Silicon Valley. It's a fad I can definitely get behind.
I look forward to the court cases. Their idea about retroactively back-charging developers for downloads that already happened is blatantly and obviously illegal everywhere - contracts cannot be changed after the sale is completed without both parties' consent unless in violation of the law, period. You can sign any contracts you want, but you cannot sign your rights away. All of those EULAs are wishlist thinking at best because no agreement can ever abrogate basic foundational rights derived from english common law with precedent that traces all the way back to the damn Roman empire.
Any court in the USA or the EU will rule the developers of existing games get to keep the original terms that were in place when they paid for their Unity license and whatever version of the Unity engine they paid for, even if the games aren't released yet. They can still release those games under that contract, and Unity can't do a damn thing about it. Only future sales can be under the new license. The people who have the 'lifetime' Unity deal may even be able to keep that exact same deal in perpetuity applying to all future versions, depending on the language in the contract.
The really interesting thing is the stock sales. Several C-level execs who sold shares over the last couple of weeks are absolutely going to be investigated for insider trading. As for the batshit insane licensing, in the US it might amount to a slap on the wrist, but in the EU they are an awful lot more enthusiastic when it comes to punishing tech companies for bad behavior. If the EU levies a fine, it'll be based on a nice fat percentage of their total lifetime product revenue, not a small 'cost of doing business' expense like we get in the USA. Just ask Microsoft and Facebook if they recommend locking horns with EU regulators.
I feel bad for the rank and file who created the Unity engine, which is a phenomenal piece of software. They were just sold down the river, all that work's gone. Plugin developers will be porting all of their value-added goodies to the competition now, I imagine Godot and Unreal are seeing a rather stunning bump in sales even though neither one is a true replacement for Unity. If I were Godot, I'd take that money and hire Unity's best people out from under the dumpster fire right now while the getting is good.
Perhaps next time go for a worker co-op, so that C-people with IQs five deviations below the mean can't ruin the company in an afternoon just by opening their mouths. One thing I'm quite sure of is that no group of workers would ever vote to do something this idiotic to their livelihoods.
I've found Bellular News has a pair of good videos covering this, if you're out of the loop. Hear it all with sourced quotes and citations, from a game developer who is impacted by this mess.
Jesus. That is a terribly beautiful burn.
Controversial take, but I don’t think developers will be the strongest force in moving the market away from Unity. If you want a 3D game engine that’s tightly integrated, easy to use, easy to develop in, and performant, Unity is a great option. Tons of learning resources, C# as a development language, and the community behind it will keep Unity going for a while. Of course as you mentioned, "neither [Unreal or Godot] is a true replacement for Unity."
Publishers, on the other hand, are likely immediately going to be looking to offset the risk Unity games pose, given that a profitable deal for a game today may potentially bankrupt the publisher tomorrow. Indie devs will eventually learn one way or another that publishers aren’t interested in their Unity projects moving forward. It’s important to note that publishers are overwhelmingly going to be the ones paying these new fees, and they are far more shrewd than even developers are.
There will be a lag in the apparent effects as in-work Unity games mature, but expect publishers to show far less interest in publishing a game that uses the Unity engine.
A very good point, pissing off the other companies one has to work with can lead to a much faster death than just pissing off one's own customers.
Maybe I’m too cynical, but I think this is just another part of the plan. Release it with over the top bad news, walk some of it back and implement what they always wanted to once the furore dies down
That seems like a very short sighted strategy. As the saying goes, trust takes years to build, a moment to ruin, and forever to repair. They have completely ruined their reputation and any half steps backwards would leave them in a position worse than if they had just taken the half step in the first place. Unity must bend over backwards and tie themselves into legally binding straight jackets before anyone reasonable would consider using their engine at this point. The value of their engine is bolstered by community support, recommendations, supplies of experts etc. The vast majority of all those resources they got essentially for free are going to go away and he engine will not be nearly as enticing for new adopters ever again.
You underestimate how much companies are willing to limit test their userbase. I've seen it all
I really like this essay's take on it. It's called the Trust Thermocline.
Thing is, ironically, I don't think Medium even gave a modicum of shit about what the author of that article wrote sadly.
Sorry, but why do we care what the site host thinks about the article?
No no, I think the point of the comment is that Medium also doesn't give a shit about user's trust.
Because the author is talking about Medium when discussing Thermocline.
I can see why they tried it though, we just watched Netflix do the same thing and get away with it.
They threaten to limit account sharing, the fan base gets mad, they walk it back a little.
Then after the heat died down they pushed it back forward. Now it's a thing.
Wizards of the Coast did it with the Open Gaming License. We're still waiting to see if they try again when they push the new books next year. We're also waiting to see if Paizo and others make good on their promises to have their own game with blackjack and strippers.
My comment shows why this is different in this case. Both developers and game companies are interested in investing their time and money into reliable technology. Anyone can cancel Netflix in five minutes. If they want to rap up all the episodes for a season or not it’s up to them. If unity becomes unviable, developers and gaming companies will have wasted huge amounts of resources that they cannot recover. This risk, regardless of unitys pricing, is untenable for adopters.
I think the retroactive-ness is a big factor here as well. It would be one thing if Unity had said it applied to new games going forward, but they claimed it would apply to games already released. Even if they walk it back, this indicates that they think they can do something like that and developers may absolutely decide to use a different engine moving forward based on the idea that Unity might retroactively change something like this after their game has already been released.
I hear this take a lot but for me it doesn't hold a lot of water. Big corporations don't want tons of negative press and to build a reputation as evil. I think Occam's razor dictates that this was simply something they thought they could get away with, the idea was pushed by a greedy, out of touch executive and it got pushed back on hard.
True, definitly can’t rule out classic greed, shortsightedness or stupidity. Hard to imagine they couldn’t have predicted this though given their own internal protests.
Any reply with a nod to Occam's razor gets a 👍 from me.
Going back from “we’re retroactively and unilaterally changing the TOS” is going to be an interesting study in PR management .
We'll see how that plays out. Getting the trust back is going to be an uphill battle.
I believe that if Unity's numbers ever go up, it won't be because of regained trust, but ignorance, pressure, or just "we ran the numbers, we'll profit short-term, and we don't plan for this project to exist long enough for the risk of being taken hostage to matter, so whatever".
So probably mass-produced mobile crap, which seems to align with Unity's direction...
The mass-produced mobile crap brings in metric shit-tons of money though...
From the outside it's hard to even fathom how bonkers amounts of money a mid-tier mobile game with some longevity can bring in. Like "let's send the whole team to Tokyo for a week, but we'll actually make money because marketing isn't at the office spending money" -amounts.
The people on Tildes, Hacker News and to a point Reddit aren't in the target audience, but there are tens of millions of people for whom the mobile phone is the only device they own, maybe in addition to a TV.
The money we spend on PC hardware, gaming consoles, Baldur's Gate 3, Starfield etc, they spend on mobile games.
Exactly what I mean. For instance, when the Game of Thrones came out, dozens of games themed around some sort of unlicensed GoT ripoff came out. Hyper-profitable low-effort reskins of a successful formula. I doubt people still play them, though—even if, they don't get many installs, and so can't be taken hostage by Unity.
Zynga's Game of Thrones Slots Casino is still steadily in the top most grossing list in it's category: https://app.sensortower.com/overview/1369317521?country=US&tab=category_rankings - it is a licensed ripoff though =P
People like what they like and don't like new things =)
That's basically what Chapek did for Disney for Iger to walk back. It's gross and it's obvious when companies do it. We're not idiots.
These companies deserve to be smacked down for what they're doing.
Looking at the reporting, leaks and lack of technical specifics; entire debacle feels like a C-suite push that had no external or operational support. Feels like someone with an MBA pulled up a list of KPIs, sorted by size and asked "Why is big number not money number?"
My guess is that they will try to walk back these decisions from the PC/Console space but they need something to further capitalize on mobile. The platform makes for the bulk of install numbers and is the space most likely to engage with the excessive monetization and intrusive analytics systems Unity has been focusing on. But even then the math is suspect because for every whale attracted to a game, there are probably millions of other people trying it for a time and dropping it later. Success is a risk that can only be mitigated by baiting the most dedicated players into paying more money, more often.
But I do think it's really going to bite them with platforms and publishers. They retroactively changed contracts with 3 months notice and sent an entire industry into a panic. Attaching Unity to any project is a risk I don't think anyone has an appetite for and I do think indie studios are serious about dropping them all together.
They might be putting out the fire before it does too much damage. At the end of the day new adopters are still going to look at UE and balk, and wind up at unity because there's not a ton of competition (cross platform and 3d being the big things).
Still...the fact this got this far is super concerning. If an idiot C Suite gets this bad of an idea and it gets all the way there with no understanding of how to even answer the questions that it causes, you have fucked up. Either too much power or too many yes men, but that's a corporate cancer.
I have 0 skill developing and have considered multiple times trying to get into Unity/Godot/Monogame again, and this sure as hell narrowed the choices in my eyes.
I don't think they can put out the fire. Some people will still use it for the reasons you mentioned, but this totally shattered trust because we can't predict what other BS they might try to pull. Any game made on Unity at any point is a liability thanks to them trying to retroactively apply the fee to games made well before the fee was even conceived. There's no telling what other decisions they'll try to enforce on games which the developers never agreed to.
It's not just developers who are wary. From what I know some publishers are already implying they won't work with Unity games from now on, and I doubt the consoles will want the games on their streaming services since Unity claimed they'd charge them instead of the developers. Unity is trying to charge people unrelated to the production of the games themselves, which means anyone who touches the game is fair game in Unity's eyes.
This goes beyond the usual broken trust. This is a case where the cons far outweigh the pros of using Unity, with the con being you're potentially gambling your entire livelihood. Even if they walk it back, the fact they might try to do something again and force it on you, even if it's 10 years down the line, is just too big of a gamble.
Eh, i think this is optimistic.
For every dev frothing at the mouth right now (as they should be) there's going to be thousands more who won't even know this happened (assuming Unity is smart enough to shut the fuck up and let it fade). In 2 years I wouldn't expect it to have much of an impact if they don't fuck it up more.
They will take a short term hit, and it's possible Unity is already on the ropes or they'll double down on stupid so we'll never know, but I've long since given up on how much people care about corporate actions. The only reason I see this one as maybe sticking is because the way they went about it obviously burned bridges with serious developers and publishers, and even still they all speak money.
Usually I'd agree that it's optimistic to think people would care about corporate actions enough to change it, but this time feels genuinely different. It's a policy that doesn't just make things inconvenient, but has the potential to genuinely ruin people's lives. And as I said, it's the sort of policy that doesn't just impact developers, who are the primary customers, but other players in the industry.
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo refuse to have Unity games on their subscription services like GamePass and PS Plus because Unity declared they'd be charging them the fee. They might even balk at allowing Unity games on their consoles altogether, because there's no guarantee Unity won't try to make them pay some other way in the future.
That's part of why this policy by Unity is so mind-boggling to me. They're sullied their name with not just developers, but they also challenged other, much BIGGER corporations. Heck, Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl were made with Unity, and Nintendo is notoriously protective of their games. They've shown that they're not only greedy, but they're incredibly careless towards other corporations. This short-term hit has done colossal damage with everyone.
I know very little about the industry, but I get the impression from following gamedev Twitter that the average tenure is short and relies on fresh entrants.
The school year has already started (or is about to start) in many parts of the world and syllabuses have been set. If Unity can walk this back quickly, then course creators will need a long memory to justify shifting all their materials away from Unity to Unreal or Godot in time for next year's courses.
I know there are game dev degrees out there in a few places, but they're not common. I'd wager if you surveyed game devs, even only young ones, a vanishingly small number of them would have a degree in game dev or even have taken courses in game dev at uni. The vast majority of people who use Unity learned on the job or independently on their own time. Gamedev is a career that burns people out fast and relies on lots of fresh blood (it's a fucking toxic industry), but that fresh blood still isn't made up primarily of people who have taken formal courses in game dev, much less in a specific engine.
Ah, there you go. Cunningham's Law in action. Thank you for your response.
In my field (data), there seems to be a deluge of bootcamps over the past few years and I just assumed it'd be similar in gamedev.
ah yeah I'm in a similar field as you, game dev is just kinda anomalous for a lot of tech stuff afaik.
I'm actually someone who got a degree in game dev at a university! I can't speak for every university, but mine didn't have classes for specific engines. The intro course did focus on Unreal, but later courses let students be a bit more choosey about which engines they used. The instructors tended to know a bit about both Unreal and Unity since they're the biggest engines and they like students to have options.
I think there's a decent chance my university will focus even more on Unreal over Unity going forward, and also explore Godot. My professors were pretty upfront about burnout and the likelihood none of us would successfully break into the industry, we even had assignments to research where we'd potentially move because there's no job opportunities locally outside being fully independent developers. With that in mind, I think they'd absolutely warn new students about this current debacle with Unity since it can potentially impact people's livelihoods. Their priority is to make sure students understand the risks, and Unity has made itself a direct risk.
How was your degree viewed post uni? I remember back in ~2008 speaking to a mate who was working for Bizarre in Liverpool, now lead engine dev for Ubisoft. He graduated with a double first in mathematics from Cambridge but what got him his first job was a platformer he wrote with my mate many years before.
He said that every year they received a stack of job applications from game dev graduates but they threw them all in the bin with barely a glance. I couldn't understand why, but he explained that the graduates submitted exactly the same game as their portfolio, it having been an exact set of requirements to fulfil the course.
He proved it to me and loaded up a dozen of their submissions. Every single one was exactly the same FPS with minor differences, it was obviously pointless to review any of them. He said that creativity and creating your own utterly crappy game was far more valuable than building a preconceived concept dictated by their game dev course.
Back then I felt really sad about it, these people who had gone to uni for game dev only to fall at the first hurdle, even though it was fully justified. That was the really early days of any unis offering game dev degrees and I figured that in years to come things would change.
I wasn't trying to be disparaging with that comment, I'm really hoping those degrees have earned their place, the students deserve it. How has your own experience with a game dev degree gone. Considering the ever increasing complexity of engines it make sense that it would require years, i.e. a degree, to become competent and a highly valued future employee.
Fair question, not disparaging at all! Though unfortunately I can't answer very well, since I haven't used it to apply to game studios. I live in the midwest, where there are very few game development opportunities outside of the indie scene (hence the assignment to research places to move). I also happened to graduate in 2019. I went to a job fair at my university literally a month before lockdown, so... yeah. Also worth noting my major is actually listed as Media Arts and Sciences rather than straight-up game development, which covers basically any blend of tech and creative pursuits: game development, web design, audio and video, etc. So while I focused on game development, I have options outside of it.
However, that said, I don't think they'd automatically dismiss people majoring anymore like in your anecdote. You're right that things have changed in how the programs are run. Mine only really followed "blueprints" for the intro course when teaching specific skills and parts of the engines, and even then we had a lot of flexibility in what we could do. I made a platformer with a candy theme for the final assignment in the intro course just because I could easily combine spheres and cones to make candy. The intermediate class had students pitch concepts, and then vote on which ones were best and get divided into teams to actually make them. Heck, even an assignment to make a simple game in a class about QA testing (not even coding or making games, just QA testing, there was a guy on my team from the engineering school) didn't give us a specific concept to follow. Pretty much every time we had to make a game in any class, it was up to us to come up with the concept.
Ultimately, what studios will look at isn't your degree but your portfolio. My teachers hammered that in pretty well, along with the fact that most of us wouldn't actually get a career in game dev without putting in massive effort outside of classes. The main benefits of studying it in college are the opportunity to learn with access to guidance and resources we couldn't easily attain on our own, get some experience working on games and in actual teams, and do some networking.
Could I ask, what is it about UE that would make people balk at it?
Unity is C# -based.
Unreal is C++.
Even though both have C in the name, they are completely different beasts with very different skillsets required.
Source: worked professionally in Unity-based mobile games for the last half decade or so.
True, but I think this is a big enough deal to push the small devs (yknow, the ones who actually made Unity what it is) toward monogame and godot, and the massive added risk for large companies of using an engine owned by idiots is going to push them towards Unreal because they can handle the added annoyance of working in C++ by just throwing manpower at it.
Maybe I'm being overly optimistic but Unity seems to have signed their own death warrant here.
I assume the difficulty of usage and heavy weight of the engine is what they mean.
This statement doesn't actually say anything. It leads as if it's an apology, but blames the community for being confused rather than legitimately reacting to the changes announced. It takes no responsibility, doesn't give any concrete changes being made, no offer of restitution, no ask for forgiveness, or any other part of a real apology.
Think of how easy it would be to revert to the old terms if they really heard the community at minimum. This shows that management has no plans to change course and is instead attempting to delay hoping the news cycle passes.
Aww fuck off. Nobody was “confused” Unity, people were just angry at your greed. I hope they backtrack the entire thing and beg for forgiveness. Many developers are going to switch to another engine, so maybe Unity is too late already.
Especially when, according to multiple inside sources who came out in public, all these concerns were raised internally ages ago.
Meanwhile, it seems Unity has rejected the notion that Planned Parenthood or C.S. Mott's Children's Hospital are charities because they are "political groups".
Organyzer is a game specifically made to drive charitable donations to these groups, and should have qualified under the Unity terms for charitable organizations being exempt from the licensing fee. But it seems the unspoken terms of that clause is that Unity defines what is and isn't a charity.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1114380/announcements/detail/7132068756342000700
We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of…
— Unity (@unity) September 17, 2023
‘We have heard you’: Unity says it will make changes to controversial fee policy
by Grant St. Clair
Link to the article
Cool. Fire your entire C-suite and promote people from within the company and maybe you can claw back some trust.
Beyond that, it's over. Unity is clearly a dead man walking, same as Twitter, Reddit, and a host of other big companies that just decided they couldn't leave a good thing alone.
I think trust has already been lost. Even if they do backtrack now, people will find ways to slowly move out of the ecosystem. You don't know when they'll try it again.
But it's strange that they took this long to release such a non statement.
Anyhow, the whole thing is quite insane. All creation software should give you ownership of the stuff you create.
Is this really the official account? I thought anybody on Twitter could pretend to be anybody else (and pay for a verified checkmark), making it a very unreliable place to get news. Maybe I'm misinformed or things have changed.
To that point, a lot of the updates from Unity have not been published to their blog.
Until they are prepared to set it in stone there, I refuse to trust their "updates".
I can't help but wonder if Unity is banking on the "whale" strategy.
There are a lot of mobile games flooded with microtransactions that can give you a big advantage in the game in some way, often unfairly so. The developers of these games know this is a turnoff for most players, but implement them anyway, banking on a handful of players who will spend ungodly amounts of money on them. To emphasize how important this is, whales will often get a dedicated customer service employee of sorts to make them feel like a VIP and keep spending.
If Unity can keep hold of 20% of the most installed games, this might end up making a big profit, even if they lose 50% of their community overall.
This is just a theory as I don't have those numbers, but some games that pop up as using unity include Fall Guys, Beat Saber, Cuphead, and Cities: Skylines. It's unrealistic to think all of these dev teams will rewrite their games from scratch.
I think the companies following this strategy recently are betting on inertia to carry them through any user dissatisfaction. I can imagine a board room conversation where a group of middlemen can talk themselves into thinking that their customers are stupid, or locked-in, or uninformed, and that it's really only a 'small' group of people who will be outraged by their increasingly anti-consumer practices. Those people don't matter because they are just loud, not representative of the total consumer base. We don't need tastemakers, champions, and early adopters - we hate them, they hold us accountable! How dare they criticize our obvious brilliance... after all, we went to business school, we know everything and competition is for suckers. Our 300x larger salaries are proof of this!
On some level they are actually right about this. Inertia is a hard thing to overcome, and the switch does not happen right away. Hit them up front with a nasty business change as a cash grab, rake in the money, and it doesn't matter if the company tanks because they'll move on to another business and it's not going to be their problem for very long. Do a little insider trading like most of the US congress, sell before the bad announcements obliterate the stock price. Nothing wrong with a little market manipulation, everyone's doing it right? These plebs can't even read a stock chart, and we own the regulators - they'll never catch us!
The real pain from these short-sighted decisions is only felt longer term. Wizards of the Coast for example did not consider that within days of their own bad decisions most of the tastemakers on streaming sites who got the newer generations into tabletop would immediately start streaming other games (of which there are thousands, many superior to D&D). All of the free content and good will that was making them a powerhouse instantly goes somewhere else where it is treated with more respect.
People aren't going to just burn up their existing books or stop playing their existing campaigns, though. They'll stilll be on D&D for a while - but once that campaign ends, or a new version of the game comes out, people will remember the bullshit and look at other options, all of which are helpfully provided to them now by those same early tastemakers who got them into D&D in the first place. All that money going to their competition seals their fates, because it's unbelievably easy to out-compete anyone who forgets that the customer is always right. The pain has a long tail, while the windfall for the corporation is right up front.
Unity is in the same slow boat to oblivion now. Whenever Skylines v2 comes out, it won't be built in the Unity engine. For now that's not a problem, but it will become one in the future. Companies that do this will essentially bleed to death over the coming years. Disney itself is one of them and they are bleeding out right now, thanks to their terrible taste in writers over the last decade. "Just make whatever crap and shovel it at them, they'll all buy it because they are stupid" is how that board room conversation probably went... and now their stock is at a ten year low and going down down down while they scramble to deal with their debts. The market does in fact deliver its own form of justice.
A successful business caters to and woos that noisy one percent of tastemakers as if their livelihood depends on it, because it does. A derelict business picks a fight with them. I sincerely hope this exploitative fad takes off and we see more and more of this happening. It's going to be satisfying when they are all out of business or reduced to playing sixth fiddle to the competition within a decade. It's natural selection against dumb businesses. I'd like it to take down as many of the corrupted agencies as possible before they all learn their lessons the slow, hard way and stop doing it. That's why I say this is a trend I can definitely get behind.
What is Disney shoveling?
The nth marvel tie in for increasingly niche superheroes with even more of a backlog they expect you to have watched to get? The nth star wars tie in series which are saturating the market? Formulaic 3DCG remakes that are generally underperforming?
I realise it's become fashionable in some circles to defend Disney because the right hates them now over culture war BS. But that doesn't mean they're immune from just making tired products.
Actually, I agree with all of that. I forget they bought marvel sometimes.
While it's hypothetically satisfying to watch bad business decisions lead to a crash and burn, it's going to be devastating to their employees. I'm sure the majority of all unity employees are blindsided by this.
As you suggest, the C-levels will be fine and likely immediately move on to the next business they can exploit. But I feel empathetic for the employees who are just trying to do their job, in an industry that often underpays to begin with, because game developers and associated positions are supposed to be partially paid in passion/job satisfaction, right?
Looks like they are walking back on a lot of the changes they proposed.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/unity-reportedly-tells-staff-details-of-runtime-fee-backtracking
Good to see a userbase not kowtowing to idiotic and borderline spiteful policy changes and making the people in charge backpedal. cough cough