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Comment by Willish42 | Hacker News Reader

I wish I had a large enough Twitter following to make a public claim about this before Unity "went back" on the first version of the recently-announced pricing changes, but I was nearly certain this was an intentional move to make the "Update on our update" second version more palatable.

There's probably a wiki link somewhere to the Proper Noun PR phenomenon in business school for this strategy, but the "terrible plan then less terrible plan but still worse than before the initial terrible plan" strategy seems like essentially a confirmation Unity is not to be trusted for small developers. It's sad to lose a great dev community but it sounds like BUG is making the right call here.

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I remember a game developer on a podcast saying that business relations in the field where not just about the money, and commitment and proof of perseverance was the strongest currency.

Basically each game developer is gambling their time and livelyhood, and no one would start a game studio just to make money (that would be crazy given the odds). In this respect, a platform has to also show they're commited and will fight in the trenches with everyone else when winter comes (basically the exact opposite of Stadia...).

Unity playing with developers' trust feels like showing your pregnant wife divorce papers. You can retract it and apologize, but it will never be the same from there after.

Man, your last paragraph cracked me up! Great comparison

"Pregnant wife divorce papers" is such an apt analogy.

Businesses should consider the pregnant wife divorce papers test of any change they're making BEFORE they make it.

What podcast was this? Sounds interesting.

I might have heard it a few times, but the only instance I clearly remember is from a Japanese podcast [0] with a former Sega engineer, who then went to Microsoft and stayed in the gaming sphere, sith Stadia being one of the latest project he worked on.

He mentions an FAQ used to discuss between devs and an newcommer in the console market (I assume xbox) going like:

Q: Won't you quit the market as soon as you see how hard it is ?

A: We'll do this to the bitter end. As long as I'm on this team this project will keep going.

[0] https://rebuild.fm/344/#chapters on the chapter on Stadia around 2h12

Brilliant metaphor there in the last 'graph.

There is no way this was intentional. First you’d have to argue that only the top execs were aware of this, because a bunch of Unity employees quit due to this. Secondly, if it was a form of anchoring, they did it in the worst possible way. The problem wasn’t really the numbers, it was the base idea of using installs and having it apply retroactively. If they had just wanted to anchor they could have come out with a plan at 5% revshare or something.

They can't ever introduce any revenue sharing because they promised not to do that and would be immensely vulnerable to lawsuits if they ever went back on that promise. This was their attempt to do something that doesn't technically count as revenue sharing.

Yeah I agree with you on this. This might have been the CEO too proud to not go back on his strong words against revenue share. That said the alternative they presented is a really stupid alternative. I don't think anyone has argued that Unity shouldn't be able to make money or increase their fees if necessary, but they should have followed their word on "stay on the terms you signed up to" and not do such a crazy version of fee increase as they did (install fee is a really stupid metric and that the install fee didn't have a roof was really bad).

They had already promised to abide by the terms of the license in force at the moment it was agreed to, so the fact that they promised not to do something does not stop them, apparently.

Someone who agreed to a prior version of the license will always be able to abide by that version of the license. The fact that they removed the provision going forward is just them trying to lock-in future customers.

No, it was a plan to lock in current customers that didn't look into license every time they updated engine.

That's why they removed the repo too, too easy to see the changes.

Whatever, a plan to lock in anyone who accidentally "agrees" to the new terms. You know what I meant.

I just wanted to highlight it wasn't for just new customers like you wrote but potentially every game in development using Unity. That's a massive difference.

Now they kind of did though. Since you can pick between 2.5% and paying the install fee.

Also I’m not sure how are “promises” legally binding unless they are part of a contract?

> Also I’m not sure how are “promises” legally binding unless they are part of a contract?

You'd be surprised. Claims that are made as part of any marketing material or promotion can absolutely result in lawsuits if someone built their business on that claim and then Unity screwed them over. In that way at least, Unity is liable for the things that they say in a public capacity.

Most contracts I've seen have clauses that specifically say that you are agreeing that the contract is limited to the terms in the contract itself and waiving everything else so you are probably out of luck there.

It’s known as promissory estoppel. The main reason promises are often not binding is that you can’t prove the other party said it. If you can prove the other party said it, and you “reasonably” relied on their statements, and suffered damages because their statements were false, you can recover those damages from them.

(IANAL)

>First you’d have to argue that only the top execs were aware of this, because a bunch of Unity employees quit due to this.

This doesn't follow - it's entirely possible that the execs planned to do this, a bunch of dev's said "that's insane and we'll quit if you do this", the execs followed through, and the devs followed through on their threats to quit.

Or someone may have postulated that people would quit over this change, and that wasn't considered a deal breaker at the time. Depending on how cynical we feel, they may have viewed people quitting as a positive; people who won't play ball with the new vision leave the company.

> First you’d have to argue that only the top execs were aware of this.

They would have to be, because deniability is important for a gambit like this. I'm not sure how you would announce "we're going to psychologically manipulate our customers" to the team anyway.

If they are stupid, it is even worse. Search for stupidity theories, kind of fun.

Agreed; Hanlon’s Razor applies here.

Stop using Hanlon's Razor. The only thing it cuts is the people using it over and over again. Say it with me: stupidity is weaponized so as to be indistinguishable from malice.

I am willing to extend the Razor to clueless individuals at most. It does NOT apply to corporations.

This is a corporation. They know exactly what they are doing.

Have you ever worked in a corporation?

Yes. I actually have my own company. Always assume they have an army of lawyers backing their every move. I know I do.

Ah. And you think lawyers know what they’re doing.

They know just enough to enable the corporation's strategic incompetence whenever the situation calls for it.

I think the noun phrase and wiki link you're looking for is "door-in-the-face technique", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door-in-the-face_technique.

It's all just based on the idea of anchoring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_effect

These are both exactly what I had in mind. DITF was specifically something I'd definitely read about but couldn't remember the name for. Also think this reply correctly identifies that anchoring bias is the underlying more generic version of this effect / tactic.

Thanks!

Edit: Specifically, reading through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negotiation#Tactics, I believe both the "Highball/Low-ball or Ambit claim" and "Anchoring" sections describe the phenomena I was thinking of.

Thanks to you, I learned and named some interesting concepts today.

I also found that vaguely explaining to GPT-4 the description you start with, also produced the proper names for me. Unstructured querying that I could not Google-Fu

I don't think this was planned.

This is purely down to C-suite's arrogance and moving into extraction mode. And not understanding their core audience. As Cory Doctorow said - enshittification.

Otherwise they would have released the 2nd update faster, since they would have prepped it beforehand to reduce the pressure and bad PR building up over multiple days.

Most if not all governments also play this card. Fictional example: "we'll raise the tax to 10%" sh-t hits the fan as expected "after careful considerations we'll "only" raise it to 8%" everyone is cheerful thinking they made decision-makers change their mind. A similar version: when they promise to do something knowing it's impossible to achieve, then sell it as "they don't let us do it but trust us we'd have done it otherwise". All in all, the shocking thing is how effective this is despite having been in practice for (probably) centuries and centuries.

I was also considering this, but while this strategy works wonders on the consumer, I don’t know how well it works in more B2B offerings.

Video games specifically get away with this because, as we saw with Diablo 4, people are going to give game companies money regardless how bad and unpalatable the game is.

Man. My Reddit account became limited in the Diablo subreddit for saying that I cancelled my preorder after the beta.

Historically, subreddits were run by community volunteers because people were tired of being censored on official forums. Now subreddits are the official channel more often than not, and we're back to square one.

I think this really succinctly describes why reddit sucks now.

Some of us saw what was going to happen with D4. It was pretty obvious.

After DI, and D3, to expect D4 to launch in any decent state would have been naive at best.

I've said as much in the Diablo subreddit. D3 is now a good game, if it is what you are looking for. It's a fun romp, but... It isn't a truly heavy ARPG. If you want that POE is calling you.

Diablo 4 was great. I put probably 50+ hours into it and enjoyed it a lot.

I also completely ignored the opionion of whatever communities existed for it, because they ALWAYS complain and turn toxic, especially for Blizzard games. It’s inevitable and says very little about the actual game. Same thing happened with Overwatch 2 as well. It’s a great game yet somehow has only 10% positive reviews on Steam.

It is okay to like and enjoy a game that the majority of the playerbase does not, I've had similar experience in multiple games, mostly MMORPGs and ARPGs with expansions but that does not take away from the experience of other players.

It comes down to personal preference. If you find yourself liking a game/expansion when most of the playerbase does not, it is best to avoid online forums/subreddits where the game is put on full blast (sometimes unfairly) becuase people are extrememly emotional, when the best thing for the to do is to walk away and play games they enjoy, it is just a game the stakes couldn't be any lower.

50 hours is not the expectation from an ARPG mainline title. If their goal was to just push the story forward, fine. But that clearly isn’t what they were going for. From that perspective, it’s not great.

Overwatch got review bombed because they just remonetized overwatch 1 and did things they said they wouldn’t do. It’s actually a pretty good parallel to the unity story.

> It’s a great game yet somehow has only 10% positive reviews on Steam.

Or it's an objectively very bad game that you just happen to enjoy.

It has 79% on Metacritic, which is the closest thing we have to an objective review score.

You think critics are objective?

You think they want to pan the people handing them early review codes TOO hard given that it is how they make a living?

Often critics have little time to review a game, a few hours, etc... they have a ton of games to review, they'll use cheats in single player games, or play through on easy mode etc.

For a game like D4 that is played at the end game, and really the big problems will only show up later in the game... There's no way a review was going to be right.

Understanding what a critic can, and can not see is critical to understanding what they can tell us about a game. Personally, I give them some weight, but I've taken to waiting a bit and listening to people who love the genre speak about it.

When Raxx is panning D4... it's bad. Bad enough that 79 is a WAY overrate.

People expect 100's of hours of of Diablo games.

They are games we come back to again, and again, and again.

Last Epoch is really good too.

Strange, I heard from fans of 1&2 (and disliked 3) that Diablo 4 is excellent. How did you conclude that it is so bad and everyone who plays it is just a slave to blizzard?

I don’t think we can see the player numbers, but the number of people following D4 twitch streams has decreased by over 99% since launch. A lot of people played it - but almost everyone who played it has stopped playing it.

Personally I get it. I found D4 to be a fun, but bland and uninspired arpg. It has terrible class balance and skill balance. Despite a lot of promises, there’s almost no endgame to speak of. And there are basically no new ideas in D4 that weren’t already pioneered in D3 or path of exile. The art and music is beautiful, and the first few hours are definitely fun. But it’s not excellent by any means. It’s a bland, uninspired game lacking the depth, creativity and longevity that used to make blizzard games great.

Twitch numbers dropping off quickly after launch seems normal for any new game, as streamers will move on after having played through a game.

Depends how much you drop off, last time I looked D2 with PD2 had twice the audience of D3 and D4 which were around 680 views and D2R had 100 less ...

Discussions online have had this nature ever since they went mainstream I think. Especially Reddit I mean, some of those more popular subreddits are run mostly by kids is what I make out of it. Maybe not kids in terms of age but people who never grew up. Censorship seems to be the natural order of things in online communities where people don’t see or know each other, and when a lot of the context gets lost in the text only format. Here on HN too. Too many people with flagging abilities just flagging anything they disagree with, and good luck getting any mod’s attention after that. Unless you dance around the topic and never spell out certain types of takes, your posts will get fagged if the official narrative doesn’t match, and you will be accused of flaming.

Unfortunately people have convinced themselves that some opinions -those they disagree with- are dangerous for others to read. From cancelling your preorder for a game after a beta to “let’s think twice about pharmaceutical companies’ motives”, there will be someone who thinks your motives are unclean, you’re an agitator, or full on evil, and therefor deserve to be silenced.

> Unfortunately people have convinced themselves that some opinions -those they disagree with- are dangerous for others to read.

Or more likely than seeing them as "dangerous" they recognize that if you allow opinions to be expressed, others may gain a new perspective by reading it or even adopt that opinion themselves.

Or in the case of HN, certain topics of conversation are censored or discouraged because they tend to lead to boring/repetitive/annoying/aggressive comment threads.

Censorship is necessary for a civil forum. If you don't censor, you get 8chan, a place full of nothing but vileness. All the shitty people congregate there because no one will censor them or ban them, and all the decent people leave.

Of course, we usually call this "moderation" instead of "censorship", but it's mostly the same, except it isn't done by a government.

So the quality of any forum just comes down to the quality of the moderation. Good moderators keep out the off-topic crap and general nastiness, shitty moderators ban people for saying they don't like the company's new game.

One man's nastiness is another's joke, or opinion. What people don't understand is that if you are ok with the idea of a so called "moderation" that's more on the limiting side, some other group of moderators will come later and apply he same rules but from the different side, and your sides ideas won't see the light of day. It's a very simple concept that people have forgotten why freedom of expression is the first amendment. The problem imo is that it doesn't translate well to online communities that are open to anyone. I'm sure people have thought about this endlessly before, but I don't know if there's any progress.

Online communities are communities like any other: they're a product of the people in them, and the people that control them. You may find some are more to your liking than others. There's no perfect way of doing moderation. If you don't like any kind of moderation at all, you're free to hang out on 8chan with the neo-Nazis.

If that was the plan, it was pretty stupid. I prefer the simpler theory that this was just plain old greed and hubris.

It could be both: a stupid anchoring idea driven by greed and hubris.

But the fact that they tried to hide the original terms suggests to me they thought they could get away with the original plan, despite its obvious illegality.

Bankruptcy knocking, causing panic.

I don't think the potential gains from the rolled back stunt will even remotely outweigh the damage done to their reputation. Maybe if they are lucky they manage to extract some short time win out of the game developers they fucked over, but in the long term they will have a hard time finding paying customers.

For me the whole thing reeks of a decision by the classical manegerial narcissist, that thinks they (and by extension their company) are important because it is them and not because of a value they deliver to those using their product.

Never make that mistake. Unless you sell commodity goods like toilet paper your relationship with your customer is to be treated as a valuable asset. You totally are allowed to increase prices, but if the existence of your customer depends on it, maybe consider doing so in a predictable manner (e.g. "in one year the price will increase to X amount"). This way customers don't feel betrayed and can decide whether they will stay with you on a rational basis.

Given that we deal with advertisers now, I would agree that this is very likely. This theory might increase appeal and make the first proposal more palatable, but developers aren't stupid and many know, that the engine got far less dependable to a point where alternatives are more attractive.

Yes, thank you, it was bothering me I could not remember the label for this. The 'update' and responses all felt like a planned and intentional campaign with the disaster/consequences being completely miscalculated by Unity.

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