Picture taken from their Twitter
They should honestly just move their engine anyway. Unity has played their hand, and showed they are willing to make changes to their pricing retroactively.
Yep, they might roll back the changes this time but they’ve shown where they want to be and now we know. They’ll work their way slowly towards it instead of a sudden change now and it will be less noticeable and harder to fight legally when they do that
They’re cranking the bad PR to 11 so they can dial it back to 9 and point to it as a compromise.
I think most developers can see the writing in the wall there, but switching mid-way through a project will be costly and time consuming. If the changes were fully rolled back, I would still bet many would finish what they working on and then switch for their next game.
Problem is that if your current unity game is successful this year, and then they reimplement the retroactive charge next year, you’re still screwed. If you can afford it then it’s best to change now in order to avoid that mess that might mean you have to delist your game
I’m not sure it’s legal to implement it retroactively. I’d be very curious to get an attorney’s perspective - seems a lot like trying to unilaterally change a contract after both parties have signed. But I have a hard time imagining anyone being willing to develop using Unity going forward.
There’s no way this is legal unless it’s already in a contract – and even then, it might still be illegal. The notion of charging people more money because you’ve raised your prices after they’ve already bought something just breaks economics completely. You’d be able to sell a bunch of a product for cheap, and then later say sike and charge everyone a lot more.
I’m sure companies would love to do that, but no company exists in isolation. Every single company is buying something from another company to sell their product. If they could do this to their buyers, then their suppliers could do it to them. It would probably end up cancelling any gains you’d get.
I’m guessing this was a move their executives made without any consultation with legal, because it’s the kind of idiotic move only they could think of.
I feel like any company with a legal department would surely check with them before announcing something like this. But maybe unity is so poorly ran they don’t have a legal team or didn’t check idk
I think you overestimate how much they care about doing illegal things. They will try it, and if someone can prove it’s illegal, they’ll pay a minor fine and stop, maybe. Otherwise they’ll get away with it. That’s how corps look at laws.
I mean you’d think so, but look at how often companies get into lawsuits for clearly illegal shit. Plenty of places will still try to enforce arbitration/NDA clauses that have no actual legal basis or consequence.
I would think so too but this entire decision has felt like the company is shooting itself in the foot, so who even knows anymore.
just
How can it even be applied?
This. It’s not easy or trivial but as a long term strategy, they should already plan investing efforts into consolidating something like Godot or another FOSS engine. They should play like you calm down an abuser you can’t just escape yet while planning their demise when the time has come.
I love that last line.
“We have never made a public statement before. This is how badly you fucked up.”
A public statement ever? Or about this? If the former, damn.
ever
It must have felt good to say but I suspect they’d have better chance of seeing positive results if they avoided confronting the Unity team’s egos.
If Unity dies, it dies.
The only way Unity can realistically fix it at this point is to pull a WotC and not just backtrack all these changes, but implement a legal mechanism that guarantees changes like this cannot ever be retroactively applied to past versions of the engine.
I don’t think Unity will do that.
We have never made a public statement before now. That is how badly you fucked up.
Lmao shots fired. Unity’s C-suite made their own bed… and the bed is made out of anti-personnel mines. I genuinely hope this picks up steam.
Unity showed their hand when they made the announcement. I had never thought to look up who owned them before. Now that I am aware that they’re majority-owned by VC and PE firms, it’s pretty clear to me that this category of monetization-oriented behavior is here to stay, because that’s how VC and PE operate. Unless and until they somehow get a new owner, it’s my sincere opinion that Unity should absolutely not be seriously considered as a game engine for any new game project.
If there’s a penny in your hand, it’s a penny they need. Leave not one cent to be saved, not a morsel for tomorrow, because the people who control the money, want to own it all too.
There’s a subscription for every need, for every hobby, for ever facet of reality. No matter what you do you can give one of these firms between 30 and 300 dollars a month to send you a box of crap you don’t need.
There is no aspect of your life that is not fully monetized, and if there is, they’re coming for it. A stroll through the park? Buy water from a fountain that used to be free. An old game with friends you love? Why not buy the expansion, play online only a small fee to have the latest updates and play with anyone! They’ll find any avenue to sell to you and completely miss the point of what it is you’re looking for, in the quest to fill that need at the highest price you’ll pay.
LOL this is how capitalism operates.
This. We’re only just now feeling the sting more keenly in a number of ways because companies are desperate to stay the course with increased profits year over year despite there being a massive global economic slump.
The 2010’s were full of venture capital pumping money into companies, and when we asked, “How is this business profitable,” they’d respond “Just trust us, bro.” Well, now the well has dried up, the venture capitalists are here to collect, and we all get to be surprisedpikachuface.jpg watching this trainwreck unfold in slow motion.
Even if they do revert it, the trust has been lost. They’ve made mistakes before, but none as stupid as this one
It’s a matter of self-preservation to get away from Unity as soon as possible at this point.
The Unity to Godot Importer is looking awfully tempting!
Why stay at all whether they revert it or not? They’re egregiously incompetent and if they’ve done this sort of thing once, they’re going to do it again. Developers should go where their support will help make something better (Godot) and not stick with the crusty old Unity hag that is constantly pawing at their pockets hoping for the jingle of coins.
Because changing the engine in an existing project is a huge pita that requires many, many hours and possibly in some cases a full rewrite.
This also applies to games that would be released in 2023 or 2024.
Nobody should be considering Unity for a new project, but it’s understandable to make either decision for many existing projects.
Ripping out the engine of your game isn’t a trivial thing.
Many many hours is a massive understatement.
Thousands and thousands of hours is more appropriate
I don’t know how you could change the engine without rewriting the entire thing basically from scratch.
It really depends on how modular their codebase is. The Doom 1/2 modern ports they did in 2019 use Unity. But it’s actually still the original Doom underneath and just using Unity for input and output to make porting easier
I agree, although a lot of the work going into a game is the game design, art, and iteration, and not just the programming and rigging. And it may actually be a catalyst to rewrite parts better
Strongly disagree. While a lot of work does go on to art assets which should be simpler to migrate, the code is absolutely what makes the game. There are tons of very successful games with low quality or stock assets, there are very few popular games with broken code.
Even then, it’s still a lot of effort to check every asset you’re using to ensure they work as expected in your new engine.
You’re completely right
I agree for a specific scenario: if you don’t use many unity specific packages or assets. Then, perhaps you are correct, still I don’t blame anyone staying even in that case, as it is still daunting to take on such a task.
In this case it sounds like they were talking about their next game rather than a current project.
Their next game would be a current project.
Yeah, you’re right. I was thinking of it in terms of current project -> next project, but I see that’s not what was meant.
- It’s a significant effort to change engines
- Even though it’s just one dev, they’re giving Unity a reason to revert. If you just say “Yo, I’m OUT!” then they’ve already lost you and they have no reason to revert on your behalf.
If Developers were in a relationship with Unity, it’d be the sort where Unity always comes home drunk and is verbally abusive, but they stick around with the belief that Unity will change.
Cause it’s probably not worth it for them to migrate and learn/train on a new engine unless Unity goes forward with their plans.
But you’re right, this completely destroyed Unity’s reputation. Even if they revert, who’s to say they won’t try something like this in the future.
OMG that last bolded line made me legit LOL. Gotta love it!
Agreed.
I was like… DAAAAAAAMN.
Just the latest in a wave of companies that seem to be looking for ever-more scummy ways to take advantage of their customers in search of the Holy Dollar.
This is hardly a comprehensive list, there’s so many recently, but this is just what I could remember off the top of my head:
- Wizards of the Coast
- Adobe
- X-Rite/Pantone/Danaher
- Monotype
- BMW
- Netflix
Add Google/YouTube to that list as well! Google is enshittifying both Chrome and YouTube to prevent ad blocking.
Evernote. Mentioning adding AI is code for incoming price hikes and limitations.
- Wizards of the Coast
The OGL stuff and the Pinkerton incident, right?
- Adobe
They’ve been pretty shitty for a while now. What have they done recently? (I don’t use any of their stuff.)
- X-Rite/Pantone/Danaher
Don’t even know who these guys are.
- Monotype
Something font-related?
- BMW
This is the heated seat subscription, right? Anything else I’m not aware of?
- Netflix
Account sharing?
No explanation needed there.
Pantone suddenly decided to assert copyright and licensing to the literal names of colors in a way the broke art files going back decades.
Yeah fuck Unity, I’d love to see devs abandon them altogether whether they revert the changes or not.
Fuck yeah devs! Get em!
Slay the Spire is currently -66% on steam… just saying
I would love to know what they would port to. UE and Godot seem like obvious candidates.
Unreal could do the exact same thing. Obviously preaching to the choir on a Lemmy instance of all places, but open source is the only way to be safe for the future. If you’re already making the switch because Unity forces your hand, you might as well go with the long runway.
Not only can UE do the exact same thing, but Epic doesn’t need small indies as much since they have a more diverse clientbase of heavy-hitters. Epic is much more able to absorb the damage if they make a pricing change that loses them the indie market.
If it’s a 3D game, UE is a safe choice. If it’s 2D I’m willing to bet they’ll go with Godot.
Haven’t Hearthstone been made in Unity? Are we to believe Blizzard will be OK with this?
Looks like you’re right! Blizzard definitely isn’t okay with it. But I would expect them to get a sweetheart deal behind the scenes
Activision and Unity high fiving in the background
This is what we get with propietary software. We can’t go to another entity or create one to develop the engine for us moving forward. We can’t take the current state of the engine and just patch it to keep existing games alive.
If you depend on some work and that work is being done by software only some other company control, this company is really in the control of that work.
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See the devs just need to pass the cost back to the consumers, retroactively /s
