The charge per install fiasco seemed like a last ditch effort. I have no doubt that Unity has been having financial issues for a while, and they were looking for a way to bump the needle.
1 - Unity has an unprofitable Business model
2 - Unity chose their business model
3 - Changing the business model will, as we have now seen, require time.
This is the startup trouble I see in that all the promises of the previous decade are void in the fave of financial hardship.
Of course it's rare, upper management will never decide to make less money personally in the short term. The only time I've heard of this happening is in some Japanese companies.
Part of choosing your engine is selecting the appropriate licensing costs for your games business model. After spending 2+ years working on your product, the business model completely changes, without the ability to opt out. It also affected already released games, and wasn't even a rev share, it would cost money just for downloads.
This also occured 4 years after Unity publically stated that developers should be able to stay on the version of terms of service they already agreed to.
If a company wants to have that business model, go for it - but don't bait and switch, don't go against your word, or else you've torched all trust between you and your customers
1. The fees were to be retroactively applied even to games that were already released and may have ended development. That alone would have been a dealbreaker for trust, but...
2. Unity was incorporating a price-per-sale fee model when its original sales pitch was all about how it was never going to go to such a model.
3. The changes were interpreted in the greediest way possible. It's not price-per-sale, it's price-per-install (so if I buy it once and install it on all three of my computers, it's 3 times the price to the developer), etc. And when the inevitable backlash of "are you really this colossally stupid?" came back, the company doubled and tripled down on it.
After the immense backlash, Unity did eventually backtrack to a more reasonable and typical price-per-sale model, but not without colossal and perhaps fatal damage to their reputation.
And even more than that: that their management structure saw this as anything besides shooting developer trust in it's head and watching it hit the ground paints a picture of leadership that is astonishingly out of touch with their customers, to a degree rarely seen even lately. How do you know so little about the people you're selling to where this looks like anything but the worst idea in their company's history?
1. It retroactively applied to existing licenses. So was a bait and switch to many
2. Installs are a terrible metric for revenue. A lot of Unity based games are F2P, where installs would then turn into negative revenue.
3. They didn’t outline any of the edge cases of users getting refunds. That would allow a user to be a negative revenue suddenly.
Their change as it was first announced was really out of touch with their own community of developers, and failed to even encompass the most basic of real world details that a developer may face.
At the end of the day, the model itself isn’t really bad, but all the implementation details, or lack of, were.
Internal Unity staff had raised all these issues with leadership and been ignored.
Significant parts of many businesses have no way to make a contract agreement beyond the terms and services agreement they agree to
And even with a contract, you may not think of every loophole. That doesn’t mean that you can’t then argue that the loophole is a violation of the previous agreements spirit.
The idea that “well you didn’t think of all of these things ahead of time so it’s okay that you get tossed around” is just so incredibly broken and flawed. No legal system is that binary, and very few businesses are either.
> 7. The Agreement Between You and Epic
> a. Amendments
> If we make changes to this Agreement, you are not required to accept the amended Agreement, and this Agreement will continue to govern your use of any Licensed Technology you already have access to.
ie unlike Unity, once you agree to this, you may continue using the engine you licensed permanently under the current fee structure. Companies should prioritize stability like this.
So you're a small time indie who agreed to the terms to "pay your fair share", Unity says you owe them $100k, and you know that doesn't make sense, but can you prove that in court? Can you pay for that court case in the first place?
Virtualbox all over again?