Unity: We Have Heard You
twitter.com
twitter.com
* One of Unity's spokespersons actually said that Unity could add fees at any time, and customers could not do anything about it. Aside probably being illegal in most jurisdictions, this mentality shows a complete lack of integrity and an abundance of power-drunkenness. What is being done to ensure that you can actually do a contract with Unity and trust them to live up to their obligations? (spirit of the agreement, not letter of the agreement)
* What is going to be done to make sure that Unity's executive team does not make a future mistake like this?
Finally, we'll all have to wait. The tweet said "we heard you and we're going to do something different". Not exactly a decisive move.
Part of me really wanted this to happen just to put it to the legal test. So many modern sales, especially digital, are actually an indefinite license rather than ownership. Imagine the fun possibilities of:
* iTunes/Amazon/Google/etc charging an additional "viewing fee" any time you listened or watched music, movies, or TV you previously paid for.
* Tesla charging a network access fee any time you start your car.
* Your smart TV getting a firmware upgrade that starts invoicing you for minutes watched. These charges can be offset by advertisement credits that you earn by shouting "McDonald's!" at your television.
I suspect with the death of ZIRP, Unity won't be the last company who tries to pull something like this.
However Unity also said the terms came into effect as part of license renewal. Requiring a new fee structure as part of a renewal is bog standard.
The main thing people were pushing back on was it was promised that old titles could preserve the existing terms.
If anyone cut ties with Unity and Unity went after them anyway would have been what you mention.
Feel free to send me a message and I can send you a list of alternatives. I don't consider myself much of an expert but for what it's worth I've been making games for almost 25 years.
Here's a quick one as I'm on a movie break. I'll make a note to update this in the morning.
Haxe + Haxeflixel : pixel art games
Haxe + Heaps : More general 2d/3d framework with webgl target
Godot : I havent used it personally but I've had a myriad of co-workers tell me how good it is
Monogame/FNA : Open source multi-target C# framework that more or less fits the XNA api. I love this one. Might be really good for C# programmers.
This completely wrecked faith in Unity. They also took too long for this response. If it was their plan, it was an absolutely terrible one.
Getting people to use their ads was imo the main plan for them.
But they completely botched it by using a stupid fee structure and disregarding all the non-ad supported game developers who obviously won't get the waiver.
But it seems like since Unity probably can't open source their product and stay in business, Unity has put their customers in a position where they can't trust the company but need to trust the company to use the product.
I'm totally outside the gaming industry but jeesh, how could anyone use that product if they had any choice about it?
Haxe + heaps.io are open source/free/MIT and can publish to webGL which was generally my unity use case so I'm looking forward to moving over to that environment.
It's the new board that got 3 new heads from IronSource and Sequoia VC (who pushed for the IronSource merger).
Many of those other investments date from the 90s and 2000s.
The firm has since lost its mojo. The transcript of the discussions behind the SBF investment are embarrassing.
No one is pointing fingers for the latter.
SBF would have never done anything with a simple BoD requirement: independent auditor. That was not done by BoD. This is a very standard requirement for most companies beyond A. SBF got special treatment. Why is the question
Also, a good CEO knows how to manage the board and provide sensible strategic alternatives; even if the board liked this dumb move, it's the CEO's fault for not having leveraged the company's resources (business directors, other C-level executives, etc) to produce a better strategy. The board was certainly pushing for more profits, but the CEO is the one to say how the company will get these increased profits.
So in comes the fees. But then those pesky LTS means nothing I charge to 2024 Unity will stick next quarter, nor all of 2024. The only question at this point is why I chose to do install based fees instead of the Rev share model standard in every other industry. It might have worked if they undercut Unreal and said "we'll only charge 2% of revenue after $1m". I wonder what the CTO was thinking because everywhere I've read suggests that there is simply no effective and ethical way to track installs as a Middleware.
I agree the board is responsible, it's too dramatic an f-up for just one.
I’m sure some executive did even worse. But a scorched Earth cash grab is very bad business. No need to spin it positively.
PS: for those without a sense of humor, this is a joke.
From an outsider it seems horribly mismanaged.
Once a company gets this big it’s simply a horde of independent maggots writhing in the pile. No true sense of direction, just a deep-rooted desire for growth at all costs. No one is sure what’s happening with other parts of the company, because that’s outside of their scope. All they know is that for their own sake they must continue growing the company.
Trust takes a lifetime to earn and a moment to destroy. I think this could actually kill Unity.
It's easy to opine from the armchair, but what I think they should have done is gone down Unreal Engine's path - buy up valuable properties like Quixel and give yourselves a unique selling point. Then they could have at least said they're adding new functionality to justify the price hike.
This is almost always the case. But executives tend to listen to the yes-men more.
I see no way how it wouldn't. Which developer wouldn't be looking for alternatives now? Perhaps they have luck and their former good reputation especially with smaller studios will hold for a while.
Hearing is not listening. First you hear, but you do not listen. Then you want to listen. Then you can listen. Finally, with effort, you listen. In addition to intent there must be theory of mind, and inter-subjectivity, some one to listen to. Then, say back what you really think you heard - acknowledge the reality not your own lens;
"We hear that you feel we were greedy, took our users for granted and treated you with disrespect."
Is different from;
"We are frightened and reacting to your signals of disengagement" (expect more manipulative acting-out as we try to "fix you")
(English is not my primary language, but I've seen on Linguee at least one occurrence of "We heard you" translated into the equivalent French phrase, which does use the literal translation of "listen")
In carefully worded corporate PR speak, it has unfortunately been sullied by those particularly using it to appear to be listening to feedback without making the changes that the feedback wanted.
Also keep in mind that "We're listening" is another common PR response.
Listening is not hearing. You can listen to a song and not hear the words it contains. Not hear the intent behind each line.
You hear by...
Of course that's an over-rigid appeal to scientific words, and I appreciate your saying it can kinda work with the words exchanged. Bit like the tussle we once had here over "ethics" versus "morals" :)
Unity could have said 'listen', and given the insane mismatch between their past actions and the current rather predictable response, there'd be precious little comfort the sentence "We Have <Either> You" could provide compared to whatever their next actions are.
With all your research I'm sure you've come across this concept in the often quoted form: "actions speak louder than words"
(And for posterity, they even said they're listening: they just don't open with it...)
Ah, I guess it was just a big misunderstanding!
Uh, no. I understood you perfectly. I still oppose it.
I really hope game developers start demanding the following:
- Unity abandons all attempts to adopt a revenue share of any kind and funds itself solely on subscriptions to Unity[1].
- Unity poison-pills themselves such that if they attempt any additional significant change in business model, then all developers who have developed games on Unity are entitled to GPL source access to those versions of the Unity runtime. They can hold source code in escrow to be released should this poison pill trigger.
- Unity specifically fire John Riccitiello.
Choosing a game engine is a matter of trust in a particular development team. Unity has broken that trust, and as far as I can tell, that is specifically due to John's "gotcha" business tactics. Remember that quote from a decade ago about charging players a buck to reload? That's revealing of the mentality behind this business model change.
[0] Door-in-the-face refers to making a ridiculous offer intended to be rejected in order to make another offer seem less onerous in comparison.
[1] Yes I am aware this implies cancelling features. Given what people have said of Unity's development pipeline over the last half-decade, it sounds like most of those features weren't actually things Unity's customers wanted.
I presume you don't know what the board discussed to come to this plan It's a public company but those discussions are private.
Confusion? Nope pretty sure everyone was 100% clear that this was a money grab & giant f you to the devs.
I do think this buries the lede in that John has been around for a decade, but this is happening a little over a year after Unity merged/acquired Ironsource and 3 board members from IronSource became Unity's board.
I really hate these apologies that blame their customers, they are ridiculously narcissistic.
Regular people see a profit or loss as an inevitable and uncontrollable result of fate. Anyone who has run a business knows costs are things you decide on. Contracts do not sign themselves. Employees do not show up at the door by themselves demanding payment.
Unity spent more money than it earns. Leadership decided to do that. Now devs and employees are treating that decision as a fact of nature and pleading to charge more.
If ownership could accrue in employees to a non trivial degree, they would have some power to push back when some bonehead exec tries to blow the whole place up. It's their livelihood as well as just the shareholders.
Right now when one of these giants at the top falls, they take out a lot of other people with them.
If anything, Unity became a beast outside of the control of the very ones who fostered it. Sure, each founder could probably retire off the money they made, but this doesn't seem like something they would have allowed if they were still around.
Tangent aside:
>If ownership could accrue in employees to a non trivial degree, they would have some power to push back when some bonehead exec tries to blow the whole place up.
How would that happen? The thing is that employees in many places are paid in stock as is. In theory they can all collectively do the very thing you suggest by all pulling out stock. But it's hard for that many people to come together and rally under one cause.
You do realize that one company's crisis is just another company's opportunity, right?
I have no involvement and I'm not a game developer (except for small weekend projects). Please do not make any change "to the policy" you have announced! Your decision seemed to be the straw that was lacking for many people to support Godot and I'm rooting for them. Please don't let us down now.
I doubt many people will start new projects based on Unity after this..
The worst case is that Godot forks, rebrands, goes private with the rebrand, and leaves the public branch unmaintained. But in that case your current game isn't screwed. It is still yours, can't be nickle and died, and you have source code access to fix any bugs (even if you lost a lot of support). Though, it is very likely someone else decides to maintain Godot as a result of this.
WotC completely got away with it. People will queue up for their new VTT and then be shocked, SHOCKED when Wizards leverages that to achieve the lock-in that they've so desperately pursued for years.
And wizards never retracted the claim that they could revoke the OGL. So pathfinder 1e in particular is directly in their crosshairs.