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Good God, what an arsehole.
We apologize for the confusion…
Confusion? No, there was no confusion. You announced a policy that was terrible, but there was nothing confusing about it, it was just stupid. I wasn’t at all confused you condescending twat, I fully understood what was being announced, as did everyone else, hence the backlash.
The article says it best:
Developers remain critical of this latest statement from Unity. “There wasn’t any ‘confusion’,” said Trent Kusters of Jumplight Odyssey studio League of Geeks. “In fact, the exact opposite is the concerning issue here; That we all, very clearly, understood the devastating impact and anti-developer sentiment of your new pricing model far better than you ever did (or cared to) before rolling it out.”
We were confused about how much backlash there would be. We didn’t think it would hurt our bottom line this much. Sorry for the confusion.
We thought you would love to throw money at us!
We apologise for you all being hysterical, and any Angst that may have caused.
Twats.
I don’t think Unity has any chance of healing while that moron is still there. He poisonous.
Sorry you confused greed with annoyance.
You know a significant number of devs will be OK with Unity’s statement and stick with them. Unity won’t learn their lesson. They’ll just be sneakier
Yeah ok. It doesn’t affect me, I won’t be using them, but what other people choose to do is their problem.
They were confused why we didn’t love their amazing decision. Don’t we care about the shareholders?
Do not believe their lies. Do not accept their token gestures. Abandon them. Let them burn. If you tolerate this your children will be next. Trust no one.
Developers remain critical of this latest statement from Unity. “There wasn’t any ‘confusion’,” said Trent Kusters of Jumplight Odyssey studio League of Geeks. “In fact, the exact opposite is the concerning issue here; That we all, very clearly, understood the devastating impact and anti-developer sentiment of your new pricing model far better than you ever did (or cared to) before rolling it out.”
That’s the exact point. The apology is a joke.
Indeed. They had the whole chart showing exactly what would be paid by who. Their original post was designed not to be confusing and it wasn’t.
The confusion is that they want more money and are confused why developers don’t want to give them more money.
That’s not an apology.
And if we’re talking about apologies and corrective action: the only real way forward is a completely fresh executive team at Unity. Anything short of that means they’re simply going to try this all again in a slightly different fashion once focus on their clusterfuck dies down.
Shareholders need to demand board change, I doubt it’s entirely on C.
A trifecta of VC and PE firms own a majority share or Unity’s shares. Those guys love a monetization scheme, which is all this is. The board’s not going anywhere.
The real question is whether or not people will continue to use Unity. Apologies mean less than nothing in a case like this regardless of whether or not they’re sincere. This is a company that’s shown their cards. Why give them business when you can go elsewhere?
Personally, this has made me start looking more into Godot. I’ve got a project I’m going to be working on that I was going to do in Unreal, but this Unity stuff has made me skeptical of tying my creative output to any one company that can’t be easily replaced. Getting that wrapped up with a proprietary platform that comes with licensing that might change just seems like a bad idea now. Maybe Unreal is okay today, but what about down the road? Why start building into a system that there’s no guarantee won’t enshittify a few years down the road?
I’d like to get my major mechanical stuff squared away and develop a visual style and then tell more stories without reinventing the wheel every time. Once I’ve got my assets built on top of an engine, I’d rather add to it over time than arbitrarily scrap it every few years. Updating and refactoring is all well and good, but I’m not in it to code the same system over and over.
That makes Godot look pretty appealing, and any closed source corporate offering look pretty shady.
This seems to be a case of start with a horrible plan that they know will make everyone angry only to roll it back to a plan that still sucks but isn’t quite as bad to try to reduce the sting. The thing is, I don’t think their customers are that stupid.
They underestimate their customers. They keep forgetting they’re business to business, not business to customer.
Developers are other businesses, even if they’re a business with an employee of one, although often they are small but not tiny teams. The relationship that they have with unity is a business relationship and it can end at any time should that relationship cease to be productive, for we don’t have random undying loyalty to one platform, that wouldn’t be financially sensible.
Good luck porting over a 10 year old game you released on Unity to some other engine in such a way that your overall costs are lower than just sticking with it and eating the fees.
For a 10-year-old game I probably wouldn’t (unless it was Minecraft level popular) but for a 1-year-old game I might, and for a game I haven’t developed yet I definitely will.
If the game is old not being played that much anymore then the fees probably are not going to hit me that much but if it’s old and popular it’ll be a big financial hit.
I hear this accusation a lot, but how many times does it work out for the company? Maybe the second plan doesn’t get any press and that’s proving your point?
Worked with reddit when they hired Ellen Pao as a scape goat to implement harse changes then they rolled it back after to what they wanted
I don’t remember what they were trying to change, what they ended up concluding with and what it was like originally.
Exactly.
Maybe? I don’t recall ever doing anything about it back then. I stopped using it now because I can’t use Apollo and interacting with Reddit on mobile now sucks.
People keep comparing this to how WotC had to give up more gorund than they started with after announcing their DnD bullshit. As someone who plays Magic I can tell you they do and get away with stuff like that multiple times a year and the DnD thing was a rare exception of people holding them to account. They’ve shown no signs of having changed things either.
Businesses who act like this know that in the long run they get very slightly more profit out of it than they lose from the times people stand up to them.
Oh, I don’t think it often works out. But a business person can make the data show what they want to do while ignoring what is likely to happen.
If you believe it and keep using Unity for new projects, you’re kind of a sucker.
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Not even the first time they’ve done it. Changing engines isn’t the easiest thing in the world, and corporations don’t have that big of an incentive to do so. Having said that, do migrate to Godot - 4.0 and beyond are much better than previous versions, having effectively 1:1 feature parity with Unity, plus some other cool additions.
“Well I’m sorry that you feel that way.”
That’s how this comes off. The ultimate non-apology. Fuck off, Unity.
Edit: something to consider is that Unity intentionally made this change as terrible as it is so that they could put out this apology, and roll things back to where their main goal was the entire time. It’s kind of like when you list your house for a high price so that it gets negotiated down to the price range you wanted from the outset. Don’t be shocked if Unity changes this a bit but keeps it essentially the same. It means they can then reflect on history and go “hey, remember that time we listened to the developers?” while still fucking them over.
They seem to think we’re all stupid.
That’s not always true. People were claiming the same tactic is what reddit was doing, but they’ve actually stuck with their original pricing.
Well yeah but reddit really just wanted all third party apps gone so that they could force everyone to use their shit app.
hindsight is 20-20. My point is not to jump to conclusions, nobody knows what is going on through their head. They may be really that fucking stupid, as most executive staff tend to be.
Reading this suggests they’re just greedy assholes and nothing more.
Ding ding ding, that is almost always the answer
I’d say greed is right up there with greed and “don’t give a shit”
This is called the “Door in the face method” of bargaining. Start with a request so high and absurd that you “slam the door in their face” because it’s so absurd.
The next time they try, they’ll come back with an offer that sounds far more reasonable than the original request. Since you’re still primed with the previous context, your brain makes it sound less bad than it probably is ("At least it’s not the first offer!). You’re more likely to accept after this.
The opposite technique is called “foot in the door”, start with a small request (get your foot in the door) and then increase the ask after the small request goes over.
Seems like they assumed their original foot-in-the-door would hold the slam, here.
TIL. Now I know how to refer to those methods. Thanks!
Nothing short of a full reversal and Unity’s entire board standing down would restore the goodwill they burned.
They don’t really need the goodwill; at least, the current board doesn’t need it. The amount of lock-in a game engine has on a game being developed with it is staggering. Game devs already using Unity, or at least making assets for Unity, are going to finish the projects in Unity.
The next gen won’t be using Unity though, but the current board will have picked all the pockets they need to pick by then, and be retired on an island with their grift-money.
They really need to make it easier for retail investors to vote, there is no reason it couldn’t all be done online. But I get like 20 different packets I need to mail back in? Most people won’t ever take the time for that.
Why would they do that? They don’t want you to vote.
And even then people will be keeping a wary eye on them. Same thing happened with Wizards of the Coast a while ago. It’s good to see that these companies can still be forced to back off, though.
How to be a company in 2023
- Make a controversial move to please your shareholders without caring about your loyal customers.
- Don’t use a proper PR team, just use the same apology template on Twitter that everyone is using.
- People are angry… Could anyone seen that coming? 🙈
- Undo some changes without addressing the root problem.
- ???
- Profit (if by profit, you mean loose every inch of respect people had about you)
Rinse & repeat, because we’re all humans and we can’t learn from our mistakes. Surely, this won’t happen again… right?
Why do you think it was a mistake? They put themselves in the spot where taking back just the most egregious fees will be considered a victory by the users while in reality the company basically got what they were hoping for.
It’s like on a Turkish bazaar when you buy a fake jersey. He will ask for 800 lira and then you talk him down to 400 and feel like a winner, but the jersey is maybe worth 100.
It won’t be considered a victory. The developers have already lost Unity, and Unity has already lost its developers. Even if they undo everything, the trust is permanently damaged. What developer will dare to make a multi year, million dollar bet on Unity after this?
Just so you know, this isn’t the first time Unity does this - last time they potentially enabled literal malware and forced privacy violating software on users and developers alike. Games using Unity still came out after that debacle.
Sorry, I thought it was obvious I was sarcastic about their “mistake”. They want to be seen as the victims like they didn’t know in advance the outcome of their decisions. Backing down on the changes only to show something “less worst” is only a way to make the pill easier to swallow. Unity cannot be trusted anymore.
Companies don’t desire to be treated as people under the law, the 1886 Supreme Court decision that interpreted the 14th Amendment as corporate personhood was the most racist decision we still live with today. The amendment was written to grant freed slaves citizenship, but the same greedy capitalists that benefited from slavery used it to begin the neofeudaism that still enriches the few while causing suffering for the masses today and it’s only getting worse. Don’t “love” any corporation, they’re literally born out of the greatest evil in US history.
Eh, he said the word apologize, but that’s not a full apology. All they essentially did was acknowledge that they noticed the public was mad at them. A full apology includes that acknowledgment and then what they did wrong and how they’re going to try to prevent it again. I doubt that last point will happen.
Someone should make a bot that replies to all corporate “apologies” with a LMGTFY link to “how to apologize”.
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Too late. Everyone I know is deep into their Godot or Stride projects.
This is a weird way of saying “I don’t know anyone developing games in unity over the last few years”.
Switching engines of this scale isn’t something you do in a week for any project past inception.
Most of my network is hobbyists who have no loyalty and are not bound by existing commitments
Those who are, are probably going to ship their last Unity game and bounce. At least that’s what i’m hearing.
Depends on the scale of the game. Bigger games with multiple teams? Timescale of months. Small indie team with one dev and one artist working out of their college dorms? Much quicker.
Anything short of a perpetual, binding agreement to never do this type of shit again is nothing more than “we’re sorry if being awesome made you idiots mad”. Get fucked.
Wasn’t it just six months ago or so that Dungeons & Dragons was going through a similar debacle? That they can change the terms of the license post release is insane.
2023 has been a bang up year for attempted enshittification. DnD, Twitter, Reddit, now Unity. It’s a clown bus of failure.
You say that, but it’s common practice.
Ahemm as I understand the previously license did have a “we don’t change this license on you” clause, which they removed shortly before this change. As I understand there is atleast possibility, that some existing customer developers might upon being pressed take unity to court over “you said you wouldn’t change the license fundamentally without our consent, we had a deal”.
What the exact language of that clause and would it hold in court challenge, I don’t know. Just heard one interviewed developer say something to affect of “hey they did have we don’t change the deal clause, which they sneak removed on pretty recent license update”.
I atleast as business would not agree to deal of “yeah we have a deal, except this deal allows us to change the deal however we want”.
It might mean having to do time limited or project limited deals, since on otherhand no provider would agree to “we have no room to change deal ever”. I would atleast in case of say game development expect clause for example “any fundamental license change must have 2 year announcement time for existing customer.” Such clauses are very common in “on-going basis contracts and deals”. Heck international treaties use such clauses “If you want to leave this treaty, you must give other treaty parties 1/2/3/5 year notice and for the duration of that notice period you are still bound by the treaty”.
So I would guess: If this ends ugly, there will be lawsuits over was the license change contractually legal, were the possibble change notices clear enough upon the main change being in itself legal and for example was some jurisdictions fair and good behavior clauses of national contract law itself violated. Was enough notice time given etc. Since one cant make any contrac or contract change whatever one likes, business contracts are always subservient to local contract law regulating what can be agreed, how and what amounts to stuff like informed consent, how contract terms can be changed and regulation on prohibition of underhanded or deceptive business practices.
CEO needs to step down after this
They’ve burned so much trust in leadership after this, and Unity is now going to be known as a sketchy platform to develop for since they’ve done really scummy monetization policies over night. This is extremely important if you’re going to be pouring millions in budget for game development in that engine.
This is not a CEO thing. The board asked for this. Look it up. There are some of the worse out of touch executives, which includes owners of scam software. Unity is done for, changing the CEO will not change a thing since the new CEO will be asked to do the same or worse things by the board, all in the name of profit.
The only possible way forward for Unity is for him to go.
He has a pattern of maverick pricing ideas that are totally at odds with what the community will tolerate.
As long as he’s around, there’s no knowing what else he’ll come out with.
A percentage of the profits; it’s a classic for a reason.
If the value of Unity tanks after this, wouldn’t surprise me if MiHoYo or someone bought them just to not risk their huge projects that are currently using Unity.
For context, MiHoYo runs all their games on Unity (Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, etc), and their net worth ($16 billion) is more than Unity’s itself ($13 billion).
Tencent also has a huge chunk of games that run in Unity, and their market value is too massive to even utter.
I don’t think they can buy Unity, but I do know those games use a custom version of Unity that’s heavily modified. That version should still fall under the old license. Also you know they have the money to sue the hell out of Unity. It’d be cool if they moved their games to Godot, but I really doubt that’d happen lol.
That wasn’t an apology at all.
The ONLY acceptable apology at this point is a complete roll back and a full announcement of the direction they plan to take the company in for the next 5+ years.
They’ve absolutely lost the trust of devs, designers and hobbyists.
