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Oh it did make everything crystal clear. If one isn’t gullible.
You’d have to be crazy to want to work with this company anymore.
Forget about this being a “video game scene” specific drama. As a vendor, they’ve just fundamentally destroyed any credibility they had with their clients.
Do you want to work for a company that will intentionally sabotage themselves? Probably not.
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.
Great quote there and totally right.
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 are implementing the “Anchor High” plan.
- Come out with a ridiculously high number
- Take the back lash
- Issue an apology, claim you are “listing to the team, partners, etc” <---- We are here
- Release a “revised” plan, which is really what you wanted all along
- Profit (quite literally)
I’m willing to bet they are angling for an acquisition, and trying to bump up their value to get a higher number.
Precisely what I’m talking about. They can afford to do so, since they lost the trust of the user about 2 statements from the CEO ago.
And not to go too deep into it, but how the hell are you going to create a brand new pricing scheme in only “a couple of days”, without already having a draft of it ready? Don’t you wanna check in with your lawyer? Your CFO? This shit must take more than 2 days to do.
I don’t think they checked with their lawyer before releasing the first one (that had some pretty obviously legally dubious provisions). Why would they start asking the legal team now?
They want apple to buy them. Apple can’t really lean on unreal at this point since the epic lawsuit. So unity is the next viable option. They want apple to buy them and/or they wanted a piece of every download on apples phones/vr.
Apples last announcement is telegraphing a shift towards gaming on some level. Unity is being opportunistic albeit tone-deaf AF.
This is the part they’re missing: apple actually care about the appearance of quality.
I’m not saying apple makes quality products, there’s some good debate there that they really don’t. But they certainly foster the belief that apple products are superior in quality to their competitors.
Unity is a great engine when it’s used well, but it doesn’t have a reputation for quality. It has a Reputation that says “anyone can publish a bolted together asset flip and make a quick buck off of twitter hype”
I doubt apple would acquire unity based purely on the fact that unity does not adhere to apple’s ideals on branding. Apple tends to buy rights from young companies that don’t have large established brands yet, because it’s easier to fold them into the cult of apple. An established brand with a known reputation would be a tough sell, especially when Apple has the resources to simply make their own product that’s tailored to their hardware.
That’s a good point. I know apple usually doesn’t do acquisitions because cultures just clash too much (especially when it’s a large company). It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
Unity just shot themselves in the foot. If I was a game dev, I’d think twice or thrice about starting a new project with unity.
There will certainly be a chilling effect on their revenue moving forward. I don’t understand how companies this large make gaffs this bad. Do they not have someone assigned to ‘red team’ major decisions.
I always assign someone or a team of people to red team key decisions. Especially if everyone in the room thinks its a great idea.
So maybe now would be a good time to buy stocks?
No, because the entire industry and most of their customers are still pissed off enough at them that it’s still going to have very serious long term effects.
If you look at 10 year investment it might be a good idea to buy stocks now, unless this charade kills the company
That’s my point - I am fairly certain they’ve destroyed any trust and goodwill the industry had towards them, to the extent that I would bet money on Unity folding in a year or two.
The only thing that would restore that trust is for Unity to dump their entire exec team, and they’re not going to do that, because the board and the exec team are all buddies.
I don’t think this is recoverable. They tried a naked cash grab (plus some other sketchy stuff lumped in), it blew up in their faces, and now everyone who does business with them knows that Unity’s leadership sees no issue with unilaterally changing all of their business agreements in a sweeping fashion. That’s not a behavior pattern that will entice other companies and developers to do business with them.
Oh shit, I realised I responded to the wrong message lol. I don’t disagree, but what if their idea would be to sell to another company?
They’re an industry pariah at this point. They’d have to hand out crazy sweetheart deals to get people onboard (which, with the AppLovin context, was basically happening already)… but anyone who takes that deal should ask themselves: “What if Unity decides to change this deal, too?”
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.
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.
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.
They went for a retroactive pricing change.
Imagine that you start a game project (which will cost you years and a lot of $$$ to develop) and at any point Unity just arbitrarilly changes the conditions (which can be of any kind, not just extra charges) that apply to your game, after you’re too far into development to feasibly replace Unity, and do it retroactivelly, so after your game is already out it can still get impacted by it.
Suddenly a totally viable project might become unviable or, worse, an active drain on your company’s finances or even your own (i.e. your company and, depending on how you structured it, even you yourself can go bankrupt), and all of that based on the fickle wishes of a higher up in Unity.
At this point it makes no business sense whatsoever to choose Unity: there is way, WAY, WAY too much risk involved by choosing it (new charges that apply retroactivelly as this one can literally kill your company) and at the same times there are viable alternatives out there without such risks.
For any project not yet deeply tied to Unity, from the day they came up with a retroactive change to their pricing, the obvious, clear as day, choice from a business point of view became to not use anything from Unity, even for shitty shit asset-flipping “near zero investment” projects.
We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days. Thank you for your honest and critical feedback.
Allow me to translate:
We’re now publishing the terms that we were actually going for from the very beginning. We’ve always known that the flaming bag of shit that we laid on your doorstep was unreasonable. If it worked, it worked, but if it didn’t, it can stand in contrast to the new less shit terms that you’re either supposed to agree to or rewrite your whole game. Not like our PR was great before this gambit. What have we to lose?
I mean, they have a lot to lose. There are strong alternatives. Unreal and Godot are at the doorstep. Godot doesn’t take anything at all, Unreal takes, but in a reasonable manner and it’s of course on 3D a lot more powerful and also offers an asset store.
The games already developed and deep into development are unlikely to jump, but future games will have a huge argument against Unity now. Unreal could completely snap their necks now by putting into writing that they never do such move.
Correct. The right course of action would be to backtrack this per download idea completely, fire the person who thought of this, and add a clause on their ToS that such bullshit will never happen again, and that of they broke that agreement, they will refund everyone affected by it.
fire the
person who thought of thisCEO
If you believe it and keep using Unity for new projects, you’re kind of a sucker.
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.
Reputation is a perishable commodity. It is very hard to replenish it once gone.
Xwitter and Reddit understood it the hard way. Even if Unity goes back to exactly where they were before this ruckus - people will think twice before trusting them again.
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.
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.
Anyone who still uses Unity for their new projects after this would have to be completely stupid. Of course they’ll jack up the pricing again as soon as they can.
Some groups have invested a lot of time and money into a product based on Unity.
Let me introduce you to the concept of sunk cost.
In economics and business decision-making, a sunk cost (also known as retrospective cost) is a cost that has already been incurred and cannot be recovered.
The money already spent cannot be gotten back. Spending more continuing to develop using Unity instead of cutting your losses and moving on is a fools game.
Many of these groups are small indie companies or single individuals, with limited money. This is more an all in scenario then sunk cost.
I am not saying it is an easy or pleasant decision.
Many of these groups are small indie companies or single individuals
And they are the people who will be least able to afford this price increase or the next or the next.
It sucks but that is the reality.
Cut your losses and move on.
If I were a single indie dev with a game that was 90% complete in Unity, I think it would be fair to myself to say “well, this will be the LAST game I build in Unity”.
It would be important to see if the changes would bankrupt you and also consider the possibility that the pricing gets even worse on a moment’s notice as they have already proven they will screw you over. Finishing the game could be worse than starting from scratch if they pull this shit again.
A lot of developers have really tight profit margins and/or their current projects heavily rely on what Unity provides. “Cutting their losses and move on” would mean bankruptcy. They might be able to switch to other engines in the future but right now leaving Unity behind is not a valid decision for them.
I am not saying it is an easy or pleasant decision.
I spent 15 years working in the bankruptcy and insolvency industry. I have seen this sort of situation literally 100s of times.
Staying with Unity will just mean going broke over a longer time frame and after wasting more money.
And I work as a software developer. You can’t just suddenly leave the software behind your business is based on. For a lot of VR or WebGL related Companies there is no alternative to Unity. Also they are not broke right now and most likely won’t be next year because of Unitys policy changes. Most devs won’t be affected at all. Why just give up your hole business now because there might be problems in the future? Staying with Unity now gives us time to change the business model or find another technology.
I read it, it’s clearly not an apology. Companies don’t ever apologise. Ever.
Nobody in charge there is sorry whatsoever, they’re just looking out for their wallets.
They’re busy trying to figure out the best way to spin this to get what they want. That’s it.
Dominos apologized for having shitty pizza and using misleading product photos, then improved their quality and nearly doubled their market share.
I’m sure it was motivated by profit and PR, but that doesn’t change the fact that it had all the hallmarks of a genuine apology.
That really upset me. Domino’s was my favorite pizza, but then after they changed it. I don’t like it anymore. ☺️
Customer taste preferences are definitely odd. I liked their pizza before the change, and really liked it afterwards.
If you haven’t tried their “Brooklyn Style” crust, I’d give it a try. I don’t like their new regular crust at all. Brooklyn Style only comes in large and extra-large, though.
