Submitted 1 year ago by cypher_greyhat@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
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.
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
Yeah ok. It doesn’t affect me, I won’t be using them 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?
They are implementing the “Anchor High” plan.
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.
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.
‘confusion’. Yeah, right. Not a single person was confused. You went for the cash grab and it blew up in your face.
Now you’re going to go for slightly less cash grab and because it’s ‘better’ and ‘we listened’ everyone is supposed to just accept it. Been here before…
It’s like if I mugged you at gun point and said “give me all your money”, and you said “this is bullshit, I don’t want to give you my money.”
Then I said, “I’m sorry for your confusion, but I’m going to shoot you in the fucking face if you don’t give me all your 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.
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?
Personally, 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
They went for a retroactive pricing change.
Which in some countries could alse be illegal.
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…
“Well I’m sorry that you feel that way.”
That’s how this comes off. The ultimate non-apology. Fuck off, Unity.
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.
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!
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
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.
I don’t think Xtr and Reddit understood anything
I think they did, it’s just that they are way too egoistic and dick to admit that.
How to be a company in 2023
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?
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.
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.
It wasn’t that they increased prices, they added new fees to things without notice, breaking some business models entirely.
They’ve only backed down on fees for reinstalling games after it was pointed out you could trivially cost a developer millions of dollars by running an install/uninstall script on a loop.
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.
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”.
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.
Let’s see what they’ll announce. So far it’s nothing.
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.
CEO needs to step down after this
That wasn’t an apology at all.
This after the ceo dumped shares
I'm sorry. We're sorry. Sorry. Sorry.... Sorry~ Sorry. We're sorry. We're soary. Sorry.
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.
“we are sorry you feel that way. Cope”.
That’s what it reads like, honestly
“Sorry not sorry. Here are the amended prices that we intended to change all along, but knew you’d revolt unless we did something thoroughly obnoxious first.”
Sorry our awesome plan was so clever it got you confused. We’ll try and make it simple for you morons next time.
Ah yes, the Macron Apology.
The CEO of Unity was also, CEO, COO, and president of EA.
Too late, shit waffle.
Between this and the WotC/D&D licensing scandal, companies ought to think twice about changing terms for things that rely heavily on the more mathematically/scientifically inclined portion of the population.
They tend to be a bit more vocal about this kind of bullshit.
tabular@lemmy.world 1 year ago
“We apologize for the confusion (…)”
darq@kbin.social 1 year ago
Oh it did make everything crystal clear. If one isn't stupid.
li10@feddit.uk 1 year ago
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.
anteaters@feddit.de 1 year ago
HerbalGamer@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Whose dumb? Theirs or mine?