Comment on Unity apologises.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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 so retroactivelly so after your game is already out it also gets 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 even you can go bankrupts), 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.
gian@lemmy.grys.it 1 year ago
Which in some countries could alse be illegal.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Can you quickly tell me what’s the applicable jurisdition for this if say, a gamedev company based in Uruguay sells a game made with Unity (HQ US) via Apple Store (HQ US) to a user in China who installs it 3 times?
At the very least it will cost you quite some legal fees to merelly figure out the jurisdiction because there are multiple legal angles to go after this (contract law, intellectual property) which might yield different jurisdictions (maybe it’s contract law and then maybe its the US, maybe Uruguay, or maybe it’s IP law and it’s all about the copy of the game to the device local storage - i.e. the installation - which defines the jurisdiction, making it be China because that’s were the user did it).
Next you’ll have to figure out if it such retroactive pricing changes were legal there or not.
For new projects I don’t think it’s worth it for a small gamedev company to spend time and money pursuing the “let’s clear the legal status of this so that I can use Unity” option rather than the “let’s use something else one”.
It’s really only worth checking companies with existing or advanced projects on top of Unity were the income/potential-income from those projects justifies it (vs the option of just pulling the project out from distribution or redo it).
I mean, sure, eventually somebody will have paid the legal costs of this and maybe its a decision broad enough and in the right jurisdiction for your company and it’s applicable … and then Unity just goes and comes up with some other shit that has to go through the legal rigmarole to figure out if they can.
Meanwhile “Don’t use Unity on any future projects” is a pretty straighforward decision…
gian@lemmy.grys.it 1 year ago
Then Urugauay, since the contract for Unity is between Unity and the game studio in Uruguay, and is the game studio that must pay Unity, not the Chinese buyer (not sure if applicable by Uruguay’s law). In every country where you sell something, you need to follow the law applicable to the buyer, not the seller.
If you change Uruguay with Italy (where I live) then it is illegal, for example no matter where the seller has the HQ and no matter where I sell the game. And I suspect in most of EU. If you sell me something then we have a contract, then both of us cannot change it retroactively unilaterally, I am not even sure if it is legal if both of us agree. Many US based company tried and failed.
If Unity pull a stunt like this on an Italian game studio, the studio can simply avoid to pay and if Unity kill the current license agreeement the studio can sue them. Sure, Unity can then refuse to sell new or renew licenses to the studio, but that is another thing, the old license is still valid.
True, but that is the cost of doing business in a foreign country. Why did you think Apple (US based) put the USB-C on the new IPhone ? To be nice ? Or because EU imposed it ? Is not this a price for Apple ?
That is another problem and, at least in Europe, Unity is on very thin ice. From the game studio perpective is a problem only if their local law allow for a retroactive change in a contract, else the new terms are void and Unity can say what they want.
In Europe, if Unity can track retroactively the installations, then they tracked the users and if they (or the game studio ) did not notified the user it is a direct violation of the GDPR and all it need to is just one user that sue them. And before you say something, it is already happened before. The fines are pretty interesting btw…
Completely agree on this.
Again, nope. If it is illegal in the studio HQ country, then is not worth checking: the term cannot be changed.
What can happen, in Italy, is that Unity can change unilaterally the contract for the future and in this case the game studio can simply modify the selling price of an already released game or put a adeguate price tag in any future game in a too advanced development stage to be redone with another game engine. And of course change the game engine for all the other projects.
But there is no way that Unity can monetize past installation of a game based on a contract with certain conditions.
Aceticon@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Are you a lawyer?
Because if there’s one thing I learned from my own contact with the Law (not being a lawyer myself) is that sometimes it is indeed exactly as it makes logical sense (in which case that’s basically as you describe) and sometimes it’s not.
My point being that we won’t be sure until somebody gets legal clarification on this, maybe even gets their day in court over this, and after than all of us to whom it apply (and me being in the EU also, it would probably apply to my country as it does to Italy) until Unity tries something else.
Meanwhile I’ll keep on slowly decoupling the code from its Unity dependencies on the project I have and trying out Godot and the Unreal Engine, just in case.
Even this does get reversed (or shown illegal in the applical juridiction) and I do end up shipping the project with Unity, I’ll always keep on “looking over my shoulder” with them and quite likely will end up using Godot or Unreal on my next projects.
In fact worst comes to worst this will have pushed me to properly give a chance to both Godot and Unreal, quite possibly convincing me to start using them if they’re better than Unity (at least in some use cases).