Unity announces its revamped pricing model | After outcry from the gaming community, Unity revealed a new plan that’s a drastic departure from what was initially announced.::Unity has introduced a revamped version of its new pricing model. The updated pricing scheme arrives a little more than a week after the disastrous original announcement that infuriated developers.
Lol it’s not a “drastic departure”. All they did was to remove some of the passages that were dubiously legal, effectively unenforceable, or both. They also didn’t address the sketchy anticompetitive (and probably illegal) fee vouchers that were clearly an attempt to sink AppLovin, nor did they say anything about the sneaky license change they made a while ago to enable this whole snafu. The exec team, who are the ones who pushed this whole clusterfuck, are not going anywhere, and will probably try something stupid like this in the future.
Unity’s fucked. They’ve established that they’re unconcerned with business ethics, and are clearly willing to operate in bad faith towards business partners. They have destroyed any real trust the industry had in them. You can’t buy that back.
Abandon it. Fuck em. This was stupid. Scrap the whole thing.
Scrap the whole Unity.
I think the damage may already be done to Unity. Devs have been moving to alternatives like Unreal and I doubt this walk back would make them change their minds.
Nor should they change their minds. How do developers know they won’t try this BS again? Trust has been eroded all for the sake of a quick profit. If I was a developer I wouldn’t touch their products again.
This could even have cascading effects with others using similar business models. Relying on a product that a for profit company provides for free is risky, especially if the company is publically traded.
Though the real point I’m seeing in all of this is that there needs to be more regulation about “terms of service” and “end user agreements”, rather than just letting companies say whatever and then letting the courts determine what flies when push comes to shove.
And there we have it, the inevitable outcome. Ask for something insane -> apologize and backtrack -> ask for something slightly more reasonable (which was the original desire all along they just thought they wouldn’t get away with it in a vacuum). It’s classic bs and i hope people don’t buy it. Fuck Unity.
I don’t buy this at all. The door-in-the-face strategy doesn’t really work if it leaves the customer feeling like they’d rather get rid of the door and start over with a new door technology.
You can squeeze your customers in a way that doesn’t make you look insane and Unity chose to not do that.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A little more than a week after announcing a disastrous new pricing model that infuriated developers, Unity has introduced its revamped version.
So long as the developer did not update their version of Unity, newer terms of service wouldn’t apply.
Instead of charging per installation, Unity will now let developers choose: “For games that are subject to the runtime fee, we are giving you a choice of either a 2.5 percent revenue share or the calculated amount based on the number of new people engaging with your game each month.” The blog does not make clear what metric by which developers are supposed to calculate what to pay.
Throughout this rollout, users have asked how Unity will determine when a game has met download and revenue thresholds.
Developers were concerned that “proprietary software” was either unreliable, involved inserting unwanted DRM or would run afoul of privacy laws.
The company will be hosting a live “fireside chat” on YouTube to discuss the new policy on Friday at 4PM ET / 1PM PT.
The original article contains 616 words, the summary contains 169 words. Saved 73%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I seriously hope this does not save them.
