I think it might be too little too late. I do wonder if this was always the plan with classic door-in-the-face technique, but I can't imagine they would have anticipated the absolute magnitude of backlash. Their product certainly isn't as special as they clearly think it is, and the fact that they attempted to unilaterally change the contract in as egregious as way as they did is unacceptable and not behaviour I would want from a vendor I'm reliant on. Anecdotally, I'm seeing a lot of game devs being surprised at relative ease of migration in some instances, though I imagine there are megaprojects which will have a much worse time.
Crow had to be eaten but it looks like they're only tasting the feathers.
This is it, in a nutshell. People don't want the apology. They want to know that a decision like this doesn't have a chance of happening because the people in charge know it's a bad idea before it leaves the door. No one wants to be stuck in a cycle of getting fucked and then boycotting to get what they want, especially for something that their livelihood depends on. They want a product made by people they trust who are making decisions in the best interest of the users/creators and not only decisions that are in the best interest of the company.
It's amazing to me how very smart people in corporations can convince themselves (and I mean, like really believe it) that the shit sandwich they are serving up is actually filet mignon. It's the whole "it's very hard for someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on not understanding it" issue. I've seen it a few times in person, where I'm like "How the f are we convincing ourselves of this?"
2 recommendations:
1. This is where a "neuro-diverse" person or two can really be an asset. The social dynamic in corporations often leads to people eventually shaking their heads in agreement, even if they have big underlying concerns. Those of us somewhere on the spectrum are less likely to understand those social dynamics in the first place and be more willing to call out BS.
2. Good corporate leaders have trusted outside council that they can run ideas by to get brutally honest feedback.
I haven't seen any evidence that anyone smart was involved in this decision. There's been some hints that the actual smart people (devs, customer support folks) were screaming bloody murder that it was a terrible idea, but the execs pushed it through anyway. This is yet another entry in the enormous list of evidence that becoming the head of a company does not require any intelligence. Quite the opposite, apparently.
Don't mean to defend the execs that made this decision too much, but I think saying "they're all just idiots" is probably not what really happened.
Basically, execs (especially public company execs) have the responsibility for growing revenue and earnings. Ideally they do that by just making better products, but some times you do need to "thread the needle" by charging more for your products while not pissing off customers too much.
I'm sure the devs and customer support folks were screaming bloody murder, but they are also not responsible for satisfying public markets, so it's easier to say those things without having to worry about revenue growth.
So point being, I'm sure execs thought there would be some blowback, but they probably felt it would be "manageable", and like others have said, they overestimated the irreplaceability of Unity. So its important at the exec level to have someone who can whisper in your ear, someone who does understand the requirement for growing revenue, that can honestly say "you've managed to convince yourself of this bullshit."
I think it does, to an extent. Reddit is still alive, for example. It's just nowhere near the community and content it used to be and, in my mind, it won't ever be that way again. Reddit's biggest benefit was that most of the moderators were people who were really, really into very niche topics. The big subs were all moderated by the same 10 people so they devolved into meme depositories and made up stories that stoked emotions. Now that the principled mods have left and those niche subreddits are being taken over by people who care more about the memes than the topic at hand, it's falling apart.
Reddit, like Twitter, isn't going anywhere. It's just a worse value for the end user, and in Reddit's case the business is potentially better off for it, users be damned.
I disagree. Twitter is already dying, albeit slowly. Reddit will suffer the same fate. The entire reason Reddit grew the way it did was because it had content that other sites didn't have and the reason it had that content was because of the niche subreddits modded by people who were extremely passionate about niche stuff. Reddit won't grow anymore because the content being fed to it now is just content stolen from other sites and it's not any easier to access or better for being on Reddit. It's a worse value for the end user because the value was in the people that have now all left.
+ steam now opens steam + shows you ads, each time when you start a game, using a game shortcut from the desktop. You still could disable ads in settings, but not starting steam.
Another "genius" improvement. Yes, I recommend buy factorio directly from the dev now.
Exactly. If your project or organization is dependent on some external product or platform, that thing had better be boring and predictable. Busy people don't have the time or the patience to be jerked around by external surprises.
Walk-back or not, Unity is demonstrably not boring and predictable anymore. That's done.
Oh they didn't walk it back. It's now one of two ways for them to get a percent of your revenue - that did change.
(It also was only going to kick in once your revenue hit a certain point.)
The CEO John R. didn't chime in here, and that would have meant him being accountable for this decision and its effect on Unity. His mask slipped here.
Them charging for whatever they can make up and claim to be true, is neither walked back or not walked back. It's waiting to happen again, in whatever way they dream up. You're assuming they wouldn't simply make stuff up and that there would be a chain of accountability, so the process would make sense.
Such things are for making money, not sense. You have not seen the last of them.
> After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unity'sWhitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation. (A spokesperson told Axios that Unity had "regrouped" to discuss the issue.)
If you're working on strategy at Unity in good faith right now, I think you announce like they did rather than having the CEO take accountability. Because I think the CEO apology strategy depends on the CEO's ability to convince people he's sincere and contrite. That's a tall order under these circumstances.
Even for a decision by middle management, the trustworthiness of senior management is a cap on how much you can trust middle management - how can you trust a decision more than you trust the people with the ability to overrule it?
>No one wants to be stuck in a cycle of getting fucked and then boycotting to get what they want, especially for something that their livelihood depends on.
A lot of devs and studios are, they know they are, Unity knows they are, and there's little anyone can afford to do about it. I suspect most of the crowd that ostensibly abandoned Unity will return because they've already sunk too much time and energy into the platform, and that's the path of least resistance. They will tolerate whatever deal Unity gives them because they can't afford to do otherwise. Even if they liked the alternatives, the only reasonable business decision is to return to Unity and pretend this never happened.
Unfortunately this probably means much of the interest in Godot and other open source alternatives this debacle created is about to evaporate. Inertia is a harsh mistress.
Is Unity's CEO a product guy? It appears that the CEO does not give a shit to the product, or details of pricing policy in this particular case. If so, I could never understand how a tech company would get someone who wouldn't pay attention to such details.
I don't have a horse in the Unity issue, though I've been following it loosely. I can speak to my own response to another organisation.
I'd written off Reddit personally around five-six years ago. This despite having a fairly long-lived bloggy subreddit (and a small smattering of others) on the site, which I still use as a reference (despite having taken it private).
It wasn't specifically on account of the specific technical decisions they'd made, or the site changes (or lack of site changes) resulting, but the fact that those decisions were being made. That is, as with other business organisations I've encountered over the years, Reddit had repeatedly proven themselves antithetical to my own interests and values.
I suspect that's the issue Unity's going through here, and that though the final endgame may take some time in coming, it could well doom the company.
One business strategy that seems to have been increasingly widely adopted over the past decade or two, or perhaps I'm only simply far more cognisant of it and recognise it where it occurs, is the "walk right up to the creepy line" approach (as Eric Schmidt put it: <https://thehill.com/policy/technology/71739-schmidt-google-g...>), or moving products or services right to the pain or tolerance threshold.
In the short term this can work. It can even be successful over a longer term, in cases. But there are two inherent problems with the concept:
1. The threshold, whether it's pain, tolerance, creepiness, or whatever, can change, and often startlingly suddenly. At which point the organisation is caught high and dry.
I've seen IBM, Microsoft, and Google subject to similar shifts, some more pronounced than others, over the years.
Leaving a considerable goodwill moat around offerings is an alternative. I'm too far outside the consumer mainstream to know what business, products, services, and/or brands exemplify this, though I suspect Costco and Trader Joe's might be among these.
This is a great take because I suspect that the airline industry is exactly the reason why all these companies are now in the "death by a thousand cuts" stage of their strategies. Literally no one prefers the airlines today and the experience of flying to the same degree (and especially not more) than they did a decade ago or more. Everything about the experience, from the boarding to the seating to the food, is objectively worse than it was before and yet people still need to fly.
Unity lost a lot of goodwill among developers, and it took over a week for them to admit fault. I seriously doubt they planned all along to present a temporary horrible plan, to make their “real” plan easier to swallow.
If this were a 48- or 72-hour turnaround, maybe. But Unity lost a lot of goodwill amongst developers and there are some they may never get back as a result.
If you're working in a development environment where management is drawing hard lines at choosing your tooling you should find a place that's going to succeed.
That's right and you have a choice to accept that job. If the tooling takes you by surprise you either didn't do your due diligence with a new employer or you were lied to.
For a lot of studios, even very large ones, that's not the case anymore, and even those that have their own engines don't use them for everything. Nintendo has several engines, but Pokémon Go is made in Unity, as was Mario Kart Tour and Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Pokémon Shining Pearl. miHoYo has over 5000 employees but they still use Unity for Genshin Impact and some of their other games. Blizzard surely had the money to make their own engine for Hearthstone, but they chose Unity.
This is even more pronounced for Unreal, where Final Fantasy VII Remake, Valorant, Apex Legends Mobile, Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order and Survivor, Octopath Traveler, and tons of other wildly profitable games are made in it. CD Projekt Red is making the next Witcher game in Unreal as well. Square Enix has a ton of money and thousands of employees, as does Riot Games, EA, and plenty of other huge companies. Nearly all of these companies have developed their own engines in the past, but Unity and Unreal are just really hard to beat: not only can they offer great performance and stability, as well as easy multiplatform support (can publish on Windows, PlayStation, Switch, Xbox, iOS, Android, etc.), but it also can make development easier since new employees likely already are familiar with the engine, versus if you build your own it can take months for new employees to be productive and contribute much of anything to the project.
Often times they'll still make changes to the engine's source code (miHoyo didn't just download the latest Unity LTS from the website or Unity Hub), but that's still considerably less work than building your own engine from scratch, and in many cases even that's not necessary.
On the topic of Square Enix, what's bizarre to me is that FF7R is the odd one out among recent games. FF15 and FF16 were on two different internally developed engines! I wonder if the reason FF7R used UE is because it was originally being developed outside, before Square was unhappy with how development was going and brought it back in house.
What amazed me the most of UE, is that ILM uses it for real time rendering of backgrounds in the immersive LED environment where they shoot The Mandalorian.
But they were at one point. I'm not in gamedev but I do recall people being enthused about it some years ago.
When you lose that audience and enthusiasm among the people who influence next year's technical decisions, eventually you enter the dustbin of history.
I simply don't trust publicly traded companies these days. I genuinely can't think of an example where a private company in the tech space has become better since going public. I don't like to MBA bash, but it large tech companies genuinely seem filled with people who don't even like tech (let alone love it) and are just happy to squeeze everything and everyone at any opportunity. I'm genuinely concerned and waiting for the enshittification of the next round of companies - people like cloudflare - then I guess I'll just give up on anything mainstream and remain an indy Dev doing indy things for fun
I got a new pair of lululemon pants this week and they're terrible quality compared to year's past. I remember their CEO saying they were trying to double their stock price this year. Know I know how.
I definitely agree with this sentiment. And it's not just publicly traded companies - I like the saying "private equity kills everything it touches" because whenever PE buys a a company I have never seen it turn to anything but a shit pile eventually.
At some point with all companies the finance people take over. But well-loved products and companies are never created by finance people - they're created by people with a passion for something.
Cat’s out of the bag. I gave godot a try and it’s absolutely amazing! It felt great working with open source tools - i could finally read the source when i needed to understand something. Indeed it lacks some features but it is an amazing engine. Unity and their ceo has proven to be untrustworthy. I am getting the sense that open source engines will eat their market share.
I'm curious to see how quickly it gains a performant 3D layer now that people capable of getting performance out of Unity are looking at it.
It was interesting seeing some people bounce off it on the grounds of woeful inefficiency. I don't remember the person, but one Unity refugee traced the path of a raycast and Godot more or less needed to treat it as a dynamically typed generic thing, going through a huge rigamarole to get a result.
It's possible to hack in more direct access for those who can make sense of it. I don't think there's a thing going on in Godot's 3d engine that some of these Unity refugees can't understand. They're running into arbitrary obstacles based on Godot's attitude towards what's clean and elegant code. These obstacles could go away really quickly under the right conditions…
>I don't remember the person, but one Unity refugee traced the path of a raycast and Godot more or less needed to treat it as a dynamically typed generic thing, going through a huge rigamarole to get a result.
There was a whole HN thread about it[0], and the response[1].
It already is pretty darn performant - but without the many convenience features unity and unreal have. Also it does lack means to modify vertex buffers directly on the GPU - a feature I liked in Unity (https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Mesh.GetVertexBuffe...). However, I think godot shouldn't try and implement everything - the project should focus on getting core functionality performant and flexible enough.
Everything else - managing massive world, etc, should be done by 3rd parties and monetised. I hope the game dev world wont take the web dev world path where code is in oversupply and there are little options to monetise.
Unity's asset store allowed many people to gain freedom by selling assets. I think godot should follow the same path. But indeed for that the engine needs even more low level access exposed in a nice manner.
> I hope the game dev world wont take the web dev world path where code is in oversupply and there are little options to monetise.
Very beneficial for the consumer however. Right now the bar to create a good videogame is rather high, and this leads to the current hellscape where so many videogames are plagued with lootboxes, season passes and other microtransactions to make up for the multiple years in dev time required with many employees.
If the tooling gets better to the point that it takes less time and less devs to create good games that don't require the insane levels of monetisation, then this trend is more likely to be reversed.
Unity also has a C# wrapper layer around C++ objects. Most of the performant stuff is written in C++, and the C# source code they provide as reference is just a wrapper around it.
For example, the Cloth bindings with annotations like [NativeHeader("Modules/Cloth/Cloth.h")] and [NativeClass("Unity::Cloth")]:
>It's possible to hack in more direct access for those who can make sense of it.
>These obstacles could go away really quickly under the right conditions…
I'm not sure why you feel the need to paraphrase this so much but the GDextension API is a thing and it is more efficient but it hasn't been
implemented for C#. The blog poster extrapolated from the C# bindings that there are unfixable flaws in the engine when in reality the C# bindings aren't up to date yet.
I think the bottom line damage is that no one is going to develop new games on Unity if they have any other choice. Even if Unity walks this back 100%, why would a dev trust them not to pull this again in the future? Maybe some large projects will stop looking at migration in the short-term, but any new work is going to start happening elsewhere for sure.
> Even if Unity walks this back 100%, why would a dev trust them not to pull this again in the future?
This is why I stopped paying JetBrains, despite them 100% walking back their idiotic licensing change proposal many years ago. I love(d) the products, but could no longer trust the decision-makers.
They went back to the monthly billing with no option for buying a version permenantly. I think you can still fix your version for a while without upgrades but they will force an upgrade at some point now. The original issue I complained about has returned.
I don't know of them for ing an upgrade. If you subscribe for 12 months you get perpetual access to the version that was available when you subscribed, so you can buy a version for 12 monthly subscriptions. There's nothing wrong with that IMO
> Seems the same model it was when they moved to subscriptions
Indeed, but there was a period of brain-dead decision making in 2015 where they announced a very different direction and back-tracked 2 weeks later.
They announced plans for an evergreen subscription model, but the flip side was that they'd brick your IDE (with no fallback) the moment your subscription lapsed[1]. The only reason the subscription model seems unchanged from their initial one was because of the outrage their controversial change generated.
I found this unconscionable - they backtracked (faster than Unity to their credit, but still)
Yes, that was years ago, the "move to subscriptions" that the since in my post referred to. The parent poster was claiming they'd backtracked since on getting the perpetual fallback license, which doesn't seem true.
You don't build buildings on sinking sand regardless of whether for now it appears not to be sinking. Once the footing has proved unstable its best to build elsewhere.
My anecdoate is that many people in this industry don't even know the existance of Godot. Yeah, I mean Godot, not Love2D or LibGDX. People can work in video games but are completly unaware of Godot.
I think their product is technically special -- as with all of the commercial game engines -- but they were not in the market position they thought they were, which is what led to them to thinking this was a good idea.
"When you make a game with Unity, you own the content and you should have the right to put it wherever you want. Our TOS didn't reflect this principle - something that is not in line with who we are.
We charge a flat fee per-seat -- not a royalty on all of your revenue. Building Unity takes a lot of resources, and we believe that partnerships make better services for developers and augment our business model -- as opposed to charging developers to pay for Unity’s development through revenue share.
When you obtain a version of Unity, and don’t upgrade your project, we think you should be able to stick to that version of the TOS."
Well, that all sounds pretty good to me! Perhaps its time for Joe to pull a Steve Jobs style comeback.
Basically had no input on the AI side which I found odd given that (at least at the time) JR etc were suggesting that AI was going to be leading the future of U
This is basically everything policy wise they needed to do to quell the storm. This is honestly what should have just been announced originally. So much reputational damage just to arrive at a reasonable model weeks later.
I'm happy for all the Unity developers out there that are breathing a sigh of relief. Hopefully they can ship their ongoing projects but I'd be hesitant about a continued long term relationship with Unity after this.
This isn't the first Unity backlash and I'd be surprised if it's the last.
How does this help anything when they have already demonstrated their willingness to alter terms and retrospectively add fees or alter licensing conditions. They already walked back changes once before saying “Okay you can keep the terms you agreed on your version” and went back on that promise for this clusterfuck.
They burned the trust bridge and nothing they _ever_ do or can say will bring that trust back.
Compared to how other companies behave, Reddit for example, it's a good signal to their customers that they've come to their senses and reached a reasonable compromise. Also, a second mistake like this would be devastating, so hopefully Unity will handle changes better from now on.
I'm not so sure. Although the opportunity hasn't really even come up, one thing that Reddit has never done is make an agreement along the lines of, "You can use X version of this software under this license forever," in their own ToS, and then suddenly go back on it and declare that, actually, everyone they had that agreement with is now subject to arbitrary new rules. While Reddit has done some sketchy and user-hostile things in the past, it's an entirely different category.
It's a can of worms that cannot be closed. Even the apology-promises they're making right now are subject to random change, because they've made clear that they don't see their own ToS as binding for them. The article says, "We will make sure that you can stay on the terms applicable for the version of Unity editor you are using – as long as you keep using that version," and we're supposed to be reassured by that, but they've already said that exact thing before and shown that it was meaningless. What's to stop them from deciding next week that they changed their minds on their commitments again? They may have learned that they can't make such grand changes all at once without a boycott, but they could think that they can still roll out the same types of changes piecemeal over the next few years (and they might be right). What's to stop them from finding new ways to skirt around these commitments in the future (for example: adding some sort of planned obsolescence to future LTS versions to ensure that, even though you are technically allowed to use them under an old ToS, actually doing so would be completely untenable)?
Personally, I wouldn't trust anything this company says unless I have a legally binding contract with them, with clear damages defined if they break it (this may be the case for some larger studios, and that's fine for them). They can say anything they want in a PR release.
According to the GP, this already was their second mistake like this. I'm not in game development and I'm not aware of the first, but maybe someone else can explain what/when their first "mistake" was.
Ever since the mobile ad-first approach that's been a result of their buyout/merger/whatever it was, I think most Unity developers are bouncing. No one in their right might would leave their potential income in the hands of these sycophants.
Unity has cultivated this reputation as a provider for artsy indies and small studios, and now some larger AAs, but I think they want to be a provider for mobile casinos. That's where all the money is, and they are less likely to balk at more fees.
No, most Unity developers. Unity the company definitely wants into that market but, unfortunately for them, that's not the majority of their customers.
If you have a game that has been X months/years in development, porting to a different platform was not a realistic option. Those people are mega relieved they can get the current project out the door. Greenfield development should do a significant amount of consideration before starting a Unity project.
If they are willing to retroactively change the TOS once, why wouldn't they do it again once the smoke has settled?
I don't make games, I have nothing at stake in this fight, but this just feels like PR damage control and to be completely honest, I don't think most software engineers are so absolutely dependent on (proper noun) Unity to risk this company doing shady stuff again, and I suspect this entire ordeal will work as great marketing for engines like Unreal.
A part of me thinks that the CEO (and all the other executive morons who decided to make the installation fee) was sitting there thinking "what are they going to do? Move to Godot?", but if that was their line of thinking, and if they seriously did not think they were competing with Unreal, then I really do not see what business they have being multimillionaires in charge of any kind of decision-making process.
> A part of me thinks that the CEO (and all the other executive morons who decided to make the installation fee) was sitting there thinking "what are they going to do? Move to Godot?"
Their CEO gives me the impression of a rich but unsophisticated mba type who can only deliver revenue growth by raising prices. I doubt he even thought about captive customers and lack of what he might have thought alternative engines, let along open source and free.
He’s the type that thinks open source is maybe a toy.
I knew he was a stink when i read that he ordered unity employees back to offices. He thought he can order customers a new fee. He confirmed my suspicion. A shame that we as a society and industry allow these zeroes to end up leading tech companies.
I know John Riccitiello from when I worked at Maxis/EA on The Sims last century, and when he was involved with investing in Will Wright's Stupid Fun Club, and later when he was involved as CEO of EA in open sourcing SimCity for the One Laptop Per Child. We (including Eben Moglen, Free Software Foundation general counsel) explained to him why EA should open source the original SimCity source code under GPL-3, and what open source software and GPL-3 mean, and he approved the deal, and I gave him credit and positive feedback and sincerely thanked him. And we earned EA a lot of good publicity during a time when they were considered one of the worst companies in the world.
EA Donates Original City-Building Game, SimCity, to ''One Laptop per Child'' Initiative:
When Unity joined the Blender development fund as a Patron member while Riccitiello was CEO of Unity, I also gave him positive feedback and sincerely thanked him again, telling him how important Blender is to Unity game developers, and how important it is for them to work well together.
Unity Joins the Blender Development Fund as a Patron Member:
I recommended he watch Ton Roosendaal's excellent "Money doesn't interest me" interview, in which he does not hold back on his feelings about Autodesk:
Then when Joe Biden endorsed Unity three times in his inaugural address, I asked Riccitiello how much Unity paid for that product placement, but he wouldn't tell me:
>"With Unity we can do great things, important things!"
>"For without Unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury."
>"And Unity is the path forward."
>-Joe Biden's inaugural address.
Then after Unity recently announced they're pulling the rug out from under their developers, I posted to Riccitiello's Facebook page a screen snapshot of the github star ranking table showing that Godot suddenly had a 535.6% increase in stars, and sincerely thanked him again, writing "Thank you for your substantial contribution to open source gaming engines, at the expense of your own company!"
So I'm pretty sure he's aware of open source software, but I don't think he actually meant to benefit the Godot project so much at the expense of Unity.
The Godot folks, who have greatly benefited from this fiasco through no fault of their own, immediately condemned the death threat that somebody (who turned out to be a Unity employee) posted, which caused Unity to cancel an event and close their office.
>We extend our sincere solidarity and support to the Unity workers. The recent reactions have left us profoundly disappointed. Threats of violence should have no place in the gamedev community.
>Update: San Francisco police told Polygon that officers responded to Unity’s San Francisco office “regarding a threats incident.” A “reporting party” told police that “an employee made a threat towards his employer using social media.” The employee that made the threat works in an office outside of California, according to the police statement.
Reddit thread from 8 years ago, with recent posts:
TIL Unity CEO John Riccitiello was former CEO of EA. He saved EA from declining profits by sellings games EA made online (Origin) rather than physical packages and raising game quality. Also, he's barely known for being CEO at Unity Technologies.
>drakfyre 8 yr. ago
>I am honestly really pleased the hate has died down. Riccitiello is a pretty damn good CEO and Unity's former CEO (though a SUPER COOL dude) really didn't have the practice nor want to be a CEO of such a rapidly expanding company.
Interesting. What i fail to understand though is how on earth he could have approved or thought that this may be a good move. I find it hilariously childish. But glad it ignited the idea of open source in game development - hope the industry figures out how to also monetise it.
Because Biden endorsed Unity so many times in his inaugural address. It was a such refreshing departure and contrast from Trump's obsession with Unreal lies and propoganda.
i just feel like there needed to be a good transition from the serious beginning about the riticiello to the meme at the end. Like it was too jarring to suddenly do the 180 to the presidential speech.
It was in chronological order, from my Facebook Messenger chats with him. Not everything we discussed was serious, sorry to confuse you! How is literally quoting the President of the United State's Inaugural Address a "meme"?
Did you watch the video of Autodesk attacking Ton Roosendaal with falling ceiling plaster? (I didn't make that part up: It happened just after Ton mentioned Autodesk, so he immediately joked: "That was Autodesk!")
Ton Roosendaal gets hit by ceiling at Blender Conference:
>During his Blender Foundation/Institute panel, Ton Roosendaal gets almost hit in the head by a piece of plaster falling from the ceiling of the conference center.
> If they are willing to retroactively change the TOS once, why wouldn't they do it again once the smoke has settled?
I haven't seen any evidence they did that, it's mostly been FUD from Godot supporters. The initial communication was messy, but where are actual TOS changes that are being touted so loudly?
You updated your post with the TOS, but from what I read the concern was that the new TOS said it applied to any new distribution of the Unity Runtime, without specifying versions and the like.
I have never seen a Unity TOS that specified versions as seen in the screenshot of the link you shared. Where did they get that screenshot from? They need to share their source. For all we know this is a change from 2020 (latest version referred to in their screenshot).
In which case I think you will agree that is plenty of notice and most likely unrelated to be maliciously related to what's being announced now. They've even walked back the applicability to old versions as seen in GP.
Well Unity is being accused of some dishonesty with updating things and not disclosing it [1]. If that's true, then it's possible that it's been somewhat purged to make themselves look better.
That said, that's a big "if", I'm just regurgitating what I read in news articles.
At this point I'm pretty sure this is a dishonest attempt to dig up a 2020 change (if this clause even ever existed, which I've seen zero proof of) and correlate it to a 2023 announcement as if these things were done in tandem.
Downvote me all you want. I don't think Godot et al will survive with these scummy tactics.
I seriously doubt this is some conspiracy from the Godot team, even if it's dishonest. I think people are probably drawing some correlations as a response to an announcement that they don't like, and then saying "Godot doesn't have this bullshit because it's open source". I don't think the Godot team is engaging in "scummy tactics" explicitly.
ETA:
Also, if you're going to edit your responses after you post them, I recommend using the `delay` feature in your HN settings, or adding an addendum section like I'm doing here, as it's a little unfair to people responding to you to make undisclosed changes so it looks like people responding to you aren't responding to all your points. I'm not saying you're being dishonest, I'm just saying that it feels a little unfair to responders.
> Notwithstanding this Section 1.4, any modification of the Unity Software Additional Terms is subject to Section 8 of the Unity Software Additional Terms.
> Unity may update these Unity Software Additional Terms at any time for any reason and without notice (the “Updated Terms”) and those Updated Terms will apply to the most recent current-year version of the Unity Software, provided that, if the Updated Terms adversely impact your rights, you may elect to continue to use any current-year versions of the Unity Software (e.g., 2018.x and 2018.y and any Long Term Supported (LTS) versions for that current-year release) according to the terms that applied just prior to the Updated Terms (the “Prior Terms”). [etc...]
Not only is there no conspiracy from Godot, the reporting is correct. The TOS was modified between March/May of 2023 to remove the reported clause and the Internet Archive proves it.
> What’s changed: We have posted an update to our Unity Editor Software Terms to, among other things, provide for our Industry Offering. We’ve also updated other sections, including those relating to data collection and modification of terms.
Interestingly, their linked FAQ (https://web.archive.org/web/20230605071610/https://unity.com...) provides no mention of the fact that they've removed the clause. I can't know what was going through Unity executives' heads when that FAQ was written, but they apparently didn't think it important to draw attention or specifically notify users about that revocation of their rights.
Why would "Godot supporters" care about what Unity is doing? It's not like they are on payroll and more users means more bug reports and feature requests for the maintainers without necessarily gaining more capacity to implement them. An open source project doesn't need an exodus of users from another project, it needs to get parity with its competitors and then quietly take over the market with little resistance.
"We should have spoken with more of you and we should have incorporated more of your feedback before announcing our new Runtime Fee policy. Our goal with this policy is to ensure we can continue to support you today and tomorrow, and keep deeply investing in our game engine."
It is hard to think of a diplomatic response to this specific framing. Of course the first substantive paragraph was this. It's inevitable, and I'm convinced it's encoded into some fundamental physical constant.
If a company actually, once, for-real avoided this specific sort of mealy-mouthed, boilerplate-indirect-corporatese semi-apology, I would seriously consider using their product solely on that merit alone. I'm fairly certain I'm not the only one who feels that way, and it's sort of amazing that nobody appears to have figured that out.
Surely someone in some sort of corporate PR position at some company is reading this. Think about it. Seriously think about it.
---
Edit: this isn't a personal criticism of the author either, I'm pretty darn sure that this the post was vetted and revised by at least one layer of PR and legal. The issue is an intractably systemic one that is not rectifiable by any individual. Outside of maybe the C-suite, I'm skeptical the that it makes any sort of sense to attribute blame to any individual for this type of corporate apology.
Not GP, but for a while I have thought that PR shitstorms should be treated like security breaches and outages.
So you do a blameless post-mortem where you outline what went wrong, your five whys, and what steps you are taking to make sure it doesn't happen again.
The Rust leadership did it right during the RustConf scandal. Key figures resigned (from leadership, not from their respective teams), changes in procedure were announced, process transitions were accelerated, etc.
Here Unity is just saying "here's somsome decisions we're lightly amending, sorry you got upset".
A definite improvement but the CEO needs to go. It's the only way to begin restoring long term trust. Developers & publishers are extremely wary of unstable business partners.
Yeah. An apology isn't enough in this case-- words clearly mean nothing to them.
We were always told C-level compensation is as absurd as it is because they're expected to fall on their sword for fucking up. Keeping your position after defrauding customers is not a sign of good faith, it's just another [social] contract broken.
>We were always told C-level compensation is as absurd as it is because they're expected to fall on their sword for fucking up.
We were? I thought it was as simple as "big leader + big company = big money". Made sense in the days where those leaders rose the company off the ground. Not so much when it's just some MBA that comes in or a friend of some other rich guy that simply wants to increase stock numbers.
Yeah, I really do not understand why these executives get such huge salaries. They get all the credit when something goes well (see: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, probably a dozen other CEOs in big tech), but when their decisions lead to a drop in revenue they get to fire 12,000 people, get to keep their exorbitant salaries and/or stock options, and just blame everyone else for the problem, or blame a "bad market".
I really do not understand what it is that they actually do, outside of being an extremely overpriced and lazy spokesperson.
At that level it's often just a big club that you don't get to be a part of because you don't have the right connections.
Many CEO's (and execs in general) are not extraordinary people in any sense of the word.
I think people underestimate just how often a business leader gets to where they are because of nepotism. Many of the biggest companies in the world operate like a royal dynasty, with children inheriting the leading roles from parents.
When you consider that decision making is often inherited, rather than earned, these displays of incompetence make much more sense.
It wouldn't bother me so much if not for the fact that they get lauded as geniuses for every innovation coming out of their companies.
I've seen dozens of people on LinkedIn claiming that Elon Musk invented self-landing rockets, and they get mad at me when respond with "no he fucking didn't! He hired people to figure that stuff out".
So I think "Fine, I guess you could make some kind of transitive argument that he hired the right people so he's responsible for the self-landing rocket", but in the same breath they will claim he's not responsible for any of the failures involved with his handling Twitter.
Well which is it? Is this executive some genius pulling all the strings of the company and should be given credit for all the innovations? Or are they just idiots like the rest of us and like to take credit for when things go well?
Elon Musk is kind of a special case, and shouldn't used as a representative example of the class "CEOs".
Most CEOs don't micromanage to the level Musk does, most CEOs wouldn't have ran SpaceX the way Musk did, competent engineers or not. If all it took was hiring the right people, Blue Origin would have left them in the dust.
(That said, yes, he should definitely be considered responsible for the failures with Twitter)
At least on LinkedIn, people tend to hide their antisemitism and just wishwash it away as some nebulous, never-properly-defined thing like "bots" or "legacy cruft".
I never used Twitter much, and I haven't used it at all in more than a year, so I'm somewhat out of the loop on what people do on that site, admittedly.
Boards are often presented pre-packaged answers via CEOs with slide decks. They are rarely given the flat truth about reality. Good boardmembers know this and how know to smell and cut through bullshit. Sales gonna sell.
If you as a gamer or developer are unhappy with this outcome or are unhappy that this happened at all.
Have a reminder that Godot (an open source MIT License) game engine could use your support, Godot offers a way to address this long term instead of relying on a contract with an untrustworthy company:
Use:
Homepage with download links for Latest and LTS versions for Android, Linux, macOS, Windows, and Web (you can build for iOS but cannot write on it).
IMO there is nothing Unity can realistically do to regain trust, when a corporation shows you what their goals are and how they plan to reach them; believe it.
Unity is not trustworthy. This was not the first time they've changed terms unilaterally, and will not be the last.
This letter should be seen as a rickety runway extension: finalize any Unity projects you already have in development, but make sure you move to another engine in the immediate future.
well, this at least saves Silksong. That's all I can ask for at this point.
But if they are considering a 3rd Hollow Knight it'd be the biggest W if they chose an open-source engine (and hopefully not take 7 years, but TBH I'd take my time too if I made hollow knight money).
Also, there are still hints of them trying to play this off as a misunderstanding rather than what it really was: a predatory pricing scheme and an attempt to retroactively change ToS.
"When we first introduced the Runtime Fee policy, we used the term “installs” which the community found to be unclear so we’re using the term "initial engagement" as the unit of measure."
The community did not find this unclear. The original pricing scheme was very straightforward about developers being charged multiple times for a user that reinstalls a game, or install it across multiple devices.
This is Unity trying to rewrite history so they don't seem like the bad guys.
> This is Unity trying to rewrite history so they don't seem like the bad guys.
Yup, even going so far as to rewrite the FAQ and pretend they never said the initial answer, it only being noted as "(Updated, Sept 14)"[0]
For full context, the original Q/A was
> Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs?
> A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data.
and has since been edited to
> Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game, will that count as multiple installs?
> A: We are not going to charge a fee for reinstalls. The spirit of this program is and has always been to charge for the first install and we have no desire to charge for the same person doing ongoing installs.
> (Updated, Sep 14)
> Q: Do installs of the same game by the same user across multiple devices count as different installs?
> A: Yes - we treat different devices as different installs.
It's sort of surprising that they would try to act as if the plan was never to charge for multiple installs.
By lying about the situation so transparently, it's clear to me that this is nothing more than damage control, and that the loss of trust does not deserve to be earned back.
Honestly. They want to earn back people's trust, so they figure the best way to do that is with good ol' gaslighting. Thing is, it'll probably work. At least to some extent. The irony is actually kind of funny.
Here's where a professional NFT shilling tech influencer tried to carry the water for Unity by parroting their gaslighting that developers were bitchy little children who "misunderstood" the announcement, and the NFT shill's followers chimed in with how stupid and childish and demanding game developers are.
Including un-ironic replies like this one commenting "some insight into what the gamer peasants are talking about" and quoting one game developer's factual reaction, to which the NFT shill replied by calling it "unhinged conspiratorial speculating that poisons the whole atmosphere".
I took the NFT shill to task on that, with quotes and links and receipts. I pointed out that he and Unity were the ones "poisoning the whole atmosphere" by gaslighting, calling developers "confused" when they actually understood all too well, and if anyone was "poisoning the whole atmosphere" first and foremost, it was John Riccitiello literally and publically calling game developers "some of the biggest fucking idiots".
Twice the NFT shill snarkily blamed game developers for the death threat. First he baselessly accused game developers of "often" making death threats, then he gleefully berated game developers for not condemning it (which they actually did, but he didn't bother to notice), demanding they condemn it without actually condemning it himself, when it was actually a Unity employee who made the death threat, not a game developer:
"Game developers often find colorful ways of making their disappointment known."
"I notice that none of game developers who shared their righteous indignation last week had the courage to speak up and condemn the cowards who phoned in death threats to Unity offices. Keep it classy, game developers."
>Here are the Godot folks, who have greatly benefited from this fiasco through no fault of their own, condemning the bomb threat, and proving you wrong. No, Robert Tercek, you are wrong when you blame game developers for the bomb threat with no evidence, when the police say it was a Unity employee, and when you falsely claim that game developers "OFTEN find colorful ways of making their disappointment known" like making bomb threats.
>Godot Engine @godotengine
>We extend our sincere solidarity and support to the Unity workers. The recent reactions have left us profoundly disappointed. Threats of violence should have no place in the gamedev community.
>Update: San Francisco police told Polygon that officers responded to Unity’s San Francisco office “regarding a threats incident.” A “reporting party” told police that “an employee made a threat towards his employer using social media.” The employee that made the threat works in an office outside of California, according to the police statement.
Oh, it’s community now, not “prospective bagholders” and “pigs for slaughter”.
Next they are gonna push a narrative of greedy mid level managers over hiring and building fiefdoms like everyone else. The Metagame for the C level is zero risk and zero accountability
They can fuck right off and fire the CEO
Management knew this was going to be controversial including internally so they hid it from employees who could have told them just how bad the idea was and how many edge cases they had to consider.
So, if this had been what they launched with out the window, I don't think they would have had the same uproar. I don't think this is a door-in-face technique planned retreat (compared to the "leaked" proposal earlier this week which basically just started the install count at 0 and increased a revenue threshold, but still maintained it applied to existing games developed under the current deal).
I don't think this is enough that I would consider Unity for a new project (compared to my niggling doubts on my projects using Godot and Bevy in the past that maybe I should just bite the bullet and learn the "grown up" engine, until this announcement). That would require something a bit more iron clad renouncing their claim to be able to change the deal like this.
I don't know if Unity considers it a success that they've moved from their customers being in a "port everything now" rush to "Well I wouldn't take that deal, and a lot of customers will now not be upgrading Unity or developing their next titles in Unity".
But I guess as a consumer this moves my position to "someone should sue them for a declaratory judgement that making this retroactive is not legal" to "Well, guess I'm not investing in learning Unity".
People are going to continue to complain, but I honestly think this is a pretty good walk back. It addresses all of the more legitimate things people were upset about:
- $1,000,000 income floor for a trailing 12 months
- Doesn't apply to old versions
- Billed a lesser amount of 2.5% revenue if available, so low-cost indie games don't get destroyed
Not to mention, removing the requirement to have "Made with Unity" on the free version? Surprised they would change this - it wasn't really a problem for most people, and afaik getting rid of the "Made with Unity" was one of the main reasons people would buy the non-free versions of Unity.
I think this is probably the best they could have done for indie devs. As it turns out, pushback works. They did destroy a lot of trust with developers with this move though. Going to be hard to get any of that back.
>People are going to continue to complain, but I honestly think this is a pretty good walk back.
If you come up to someone, point a gun at their head, and scream you're going to murder them it's very likely there is no walking back even if you put the gun away and then state more reasonable demands. Everyone knows you have a gun in your back pocket and you're insane enough to use it.
I agree - like I said at the end of my comment, the trust being broken is why the original pricing plan was such a disaster, and it's going to take a lot to build that back up.
I'm in a lot of gamedev communities and I'm not seeing any complaints. Everyone agrees this is fine. I believe if they announced this initially people probably would have complained but nothing close to the backlash there was. Most people just don't trust Unity after this. This is after all the second time we're getting a promise not to change the terms on an existing engine version as a result of backlash. How long until the third?
That isn't really a thing they can do for already shipped games, unless your game has an online component with dedicated servers and you need to update unity on the server side for a security fix. Most games don't upgrade their engine post launch, unless they are a live service game intended to get constant, significant updates for a long time.
This is all pure speculation based on what I would do if I was on Unity's board. I'm confident that his contract has all sorts of gotchas and landmines, so there is probably a ton of expensive lawyering happening right now on both sides.
A lot of the game developers I know are either dropping Unity projects right in the middle of development to switch engines, or they're working on their last Unity project and abandon the engine forever.
You're only going to see major(-ly incompetent) studios from now on using it (ie, big enough to pressure Unity into complying to their licensing requirements, ie, Microsoft or Nintnedo kind of big).
It may be reasonable and this is nothing but an attempt to stop the bleeding. There is no reason to trust them or their leadership again. The fact the CEO wasn't booted immediately shows they still want that style of leadership. The fact the CEO is not the one making this statement shows the fact Unity not interested to hold him accountable. They did this last year making dumb statements about monetization and then pulled this out this year. They deserve no trust and anyone that continues business with them gets what they deserve.
If they had opened with this it would have been amazing, but this being 3-4 revisions in with nothing locking them to this going forward, it's not that good a look.
I didn’t follow this very much but did they basically tried to enforce this on people out of the blue? If so, that must sting like crazy to have to walk it back with the addition of losing trust and goodwill of your users, not to mention those that went on to different engines.
How high up does this rank in “the dumbest decisions you can make” chart?
Their executives make millions. They make millions because they are supposed to have unique insights and skills that the rest of us don't have. These insights are supposed to exactly avoid this situation where they probably killed the company with an absolutely irresponsible plan (from a business perspective). I think this is a historical blunder in the the industry and will be studied in business schools in the future.
There is no amount of walkback that will work here. The only possible way out, if any is even possible, would be a summary dismissal of their entire leadership team due to gross incompetence. These people don't deserve even minimum wage, much less the millions they make. A junior business manager out of school wouldn't have made such irresponsible, company-killing move. These are some of the worst executives in gaming history, to be honest.
Trust is a fickle thing. Why would a new game creator use Unity with the fear of suddenly having the rug pulled from under your with another ToS change? Doesn't he realize this?
Some meta-commentary about executive leadership: the skills required to gain such a position are orthogonal to the skills required to exceed at such a position.
Clarifying Questions:
1) What type of person gets hired as CEO?
2) What type of person excels as CEO?
3) What type of person seems most suited to being a CEO while actually being least suited?
Possible Answers:
1) the salesmen, the connected, the take-crediting, the attractive, the eloquent, the politically savvy, the ambitious, the tactical
2) the decisive, the persevering, the give-crediting, the communicative, the empathetic, the trustworthy, the humble, the strategic
3) When confidence is unwarranted
Both types of people have high confidence, but only one type has a good reason to be confident. Both types are effective in making plans and executing upon them, but where the first type’s plan’s focus on personal success, the second type’s plans focus on mutual success.
Is there a good way to distinguish between the two? Yes, but subtly — have their former direct reports gone on to success outside of the candidate’s current sphere of influence? The first type will drag along the people they can trust to support their personal ambitions, elevating them in the process. The second type will elevate their direct reports without grasping on to them as life preservers in choppy political seas.
Being a good CEO is a very difficult job, and should be rewarded. It is the most important job anyone can have at a company. It is also the hardest to fill with the right person, given the hordes of ill-suited confidence men seeking their own stardom.
Too little too late, at least for me. I have been slowly working on some game ideas I want to make, in this process I have been checking out different game engines to see which one meets my needs best. With these changes I have removed Unity from my list of engines I am considering using. Granted I am just one dev and definitely don't represent the community as a whole so who knows maybe I am in the minority here.
It’s interesting how some complain companies don’t listen to them, and others say that it doesn’t matter if changes are made after (rightful) complaints.
I have absolutely no stake in this and I’m sure these aren’t the same people, but it is interesting.
From reading the original proposal and this new one, they should’ve gone first with this one. I’m sure unity developers will hesitatingly continue their work.
"Unity decides to change the deal in a way that costs us money for our already developed game" was not something on anyone's threat model. Until last year, Unity's TOS even included provisions that would have unambiguously prevented such a move. Maybe some considered "Unity changes the deal in the future and we need to learn a new engine for project n+1 and get stuck on an old version of Unity on our current project" as a threat. But now that Unity has put the first one in people's minds, Unity has to put people at ease about that to get to square one, not just cancel the current attempt.
> It’s interesting how some complain companies don’t listen to them, and others say that it doesn’t matter if changes are made after (rightful) complaints
In this case I think those can (rightfully and reasonably) be the same people. If a company rolls out a pricing/licensing change that is so detrimental to the developers that it seems like no reasonable developer would have thought it was a good idea, then it looks like the company rolled it out either without talking to their developers or without taking their feedback into account, both of which are equally bad.
In cases like this where the business acted so egregiously, the damage is done and trust might not be restorable long-term without C-level heads rolling.
If they had gone with this one to begin with they would have lost some customers but no where near as many. What they did makes them clearly an unstable business partner that is willing to break the law to rip you off. Walking it back changes the deal but it doesn't change the type of business they are.
> It’s interesting how some complain companies don’t listen to them, and others say that it doesn’t matter if changes are made after (rightful) complaints.
That's because many folks recognize that the fundamental problem is not the proposal, it is the mechanism by which that proposal was crafted, refined, and finally approved that is rotten.
Walking back the proposal is fine in the near term, but without drastic change to the fundamentals of the company and its leadership, you'll just end up in the same situation in the future, it is just a matter of when.
Just because they listened once when their profits were seriously on the line, doesn't mean they listen generally.
If you file for divorce, and in reaction they buy you flowers and other gifts, it doesn't mean they're suddenly fixed and have always been a good partner.
It's also very likely they got some legal letters from Pokémon Go or other similarly large Unity based games, and they still don't care about what the online community has to say.
But Unity is DOWNLOADABLE software, not a platform/app-store/SaaS. So, why revenue share? Surely most devs just make free-standing/downloadable games that don't tie into any platform-y features?
AFAIK, even Unity Enterprise [0] is just source code, support, 3-year LTS bug fixes, and the only real thing that's platform-y is the build server, which seems to cost extra anyway.
Well, in that case, I'm glad it's not common across software, e.g. imagine authors having to pay MS Word or Scrivener a cut for every book sold, or musicians for every song made with Logic Pro or Ableton.
From a viewpoint of "will it be compatible with a DRM-free release that doesn't phone home" (i.e., playing by GOG rules), this doesn't seem to solve the problem at all. What is in it for them? Why per install and not per sale?
It says that they're trusting developer provided numbers, and they've basically moved from literal installs to basically a user count metric provided by the developer, so it seems there is no need for it to be DRMed or phone home.
Ah, I didn't spot that they no longer require counting installs. But you're right; this is probably what "the number of new people" means. And the "2.5% revenue share" variant means no hurdles for freeware. So a real improvement indeed. Thanks for the corrections!
And freeware can get rid of the Made with Unity splash screen now, so it's honestly a big step up from where we were before. I'd still rather switch to Godot, but at least I can walk away from Unity calmly instead of running away screaming.
I may be misremembering but this is what happened with recent the Open Gaming License fiasco.
As I recall, they inevitably changed the current one with a clause saying “we explicitly can’t pull the rug out from folks anymore with this license”. Simply ensuring that while they can create new licenses for new content, that can’t mess with creators who adopted the previous one.
I have linked to his interactive exploration of their fee calculator, which should set many "what if" scenarios to rest.
Nobody can really say anything educated about the long-term impact on trust, but I suspect that if they can Riccitello things will return to something of a baseline and nobody will be talking about it in a year.
I trully cannot fathom Riccitello's tenure remaining viable on the other side of this. He is a dead man walking, corporately speaking.
I'm reminded of a favorite allegory which seems perfect for today:
New CEO walks into her office just as the old CEO is leaving. Old CEO says congrats and good luck; I left you three sealed envelopes which you should open in times of crisis.
Things go well until they don't. First letter says "blame your predecessor".
This fixes things until the next crisis. Second letter says "blame the technology".
Nothing could go wrong, until it does. Third letter says "write three letters".
Does anyone have the text of this? For me the page appears momentarily, then is replaced with a blank white screen reading "An unexpected error has occurred." The archive.org copy is also broken. (Most likely some kind of analytics or ad erroring because of a browser privacy setting.)
I’m Marc Whitten, and I lead Unity Create which includes the Unity engine and editor teams.
I want to start with simply this: I am sorry.
We should have spoken with more of you and we should have incorporated more of your feedback before announcing our new Runtime Fee policy. Our goal with this policy is to ensure we can continue to support you today and tomorrow, and keep deeply investing in our game engine.
You are what makes Unity great, and we know we need to listen, and work hard to earn your trust. We have heard your concerns, and we are making changes in the policy we announced to address them.
Our Unity Personal plan will remain free and there will be no Runtime Fee for games built on Unity Personal. We will be increasing the cap from $100,000 to $200,000 and we will remove the requirement to use the Made with Unity splash screen.
No game with less than $1 million in trailing 12-month revenue will be subject to the fee.
For those creators on Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise, we are also making changes based on your feedback.
The Runtime Fee policy will only apply beginning with the next LTS version of Unity shipping in 2024 and beyond. Your games that are currently shipped and the projects you are currently working on will not be included – unless you choose to upgrade them to this new version of Unity.
We will make sure that you can stay on the terms applicable for the version of Unity editor you are using – as long as you keep using that version.
For games that are subject to the runtime fee, we are giving you a choice of either a 2.5% revenue share or the calculated amount based on the number of new people engaging with your game each month. Both of these numbers are self-reported from data you already have available. You will always be billed the lesser amount.
We want to continue to build the best engine for creators. We truly love this industry and you are the reason why.
I’d like to invite you to join me for a live fireside chat hosted by Jason Weimann today at 4:00 pm ET/1:00 pm PT, where I will do my best to answer your questions. In the meantime, here are some more details.*
Thank you for caring as deeply as you do, and thank you for giving us hard feedback.
Heads has to roll in the c-level space for them to Ever get the trust back. This walk-back is reasonable but they will still lose a majority of their customers. I am glad that people late in their projects can still ship and see a profit and hopefully move on to another engine.
Dropping this on a Friday with a fireside chat happening in the afternoon on the same day leaves a bad impression. A blog post announcement is ok, but my reading of this is that there is no guarantee that they will not attempt a retroactive change again (ex: their TOS change and removal). This is a step in the right direction, but feels there’s still a long gap to bridge if they want to earn back trust.
Unity attempt at cash grab is nothing new but since it backfired they are using their sweetest words to walk it back. This is happening all the time in ecosystems where businesses are built completely relying on a single vendor or platform. The difference is hardly anybody hears or cares about it.
You are not doing good job if your company or business model can be killed by anyone else than you or your customers.
"I’d like to invite you to join me for a live fireside chat hosted by Jason Weimann today at 4:00 pm ET/1:00 pm PT, where I will do my best to answer your questions."
Awaiting countless variants of "who the hell thought this price change sounded like a good idea, and are they fired yet".
While a good portion of developers will still be switching engines and staying there, as an AR developer, there isn't really anywhere else for me to go aside from developing with WebXR. Because of this, I am glad to see these changes.
Apple's Vision Pro support as well as Niantic's Lightship ARDK are currently only available via Unity. In general, many of the tools for new AR platforms and devices are developed for Unity first. With all of this backlash that might change in the future, but for the time being the overwhelming majority of AR support goes into Unity.
Trust is like a nice glass vase... It takes a long time to make one. It takes seconds to break one. And you can put it back together, but you'll always see the cracks from The Last Time This Happened.
The tone of this post is exactly the same as a company would use after a very public incident of harassment or discrimination. So, they probably realized it was not the smartest thing to do.
Why can't we just come out and say that the agent / capital model is consumer antagonistic and work on fixing it? This is just a symptom, the cause needs to be addressed by the legislature.
We can't say it not because it's not-quite taboo, but the agents that benefit from the model employ a psyops where everyone who points out the problem is a weakling loser and shouldn't be listened to. If you're losing at Capitalism it's clearly your fault, and not entrenched parties with millions of times the resources as you thwarting you however they can.
Why is this not being given by the dude that made the initial pronouncement? I'm not affected by unity, but if I was I'd think long and hard about being fooled twice.
Original pricing scheme was the brainchild of John R and Tomar B. As far as I am concerned, this announcement changes nothing with those two still present.
got to love the Meta-esque “I am sorry” opener. At least they made changes to the program though.
I feel Unity violated trust of community. No going back. Today it’s a claw back. Tomorrow (future) it’s back to f’ing over the community once the heat wears off. Or a new CEO is appointed.
I'm out of the loop but used to use Unity as a hobbyist. What's been going on? The letter and comments hint at an out-of-the-blue policy change? Who was affected?
Basically policy changes that were absolutely abysmal and pretty much killed the entire Unity engine for most people. Now walk-back but trust is broken forever.
Crow had to be eaten but it looks like they're only tasting the feathers.