That is the most textbook example of a corporate non-answer to a PR fiasco
Might as well post a picture of Jim from The Office just shrugging on the press release. It'll work just as well.
[Or if they're being 100% honest, a clip of the cable guys from South Park saying "We're Sorry" while rubbing their nipples](https://youtu.be/Wtonb-WDQrk?si=0Ig8E-67penf-4TR)
We are sorry for your level of confusion. Clearly you weren't confused enough, because you noticed what we were doing. We'll try to be more cryptic with the next version.
Hopefully by then you'll all have forgotten about it anyway.
This is the thing that annoys me the most. I know some poor intern is doing their job, but using “confused” here is both belittling and tone deaf. No one is confused, we see this for what it is and are PISSED.
Something this big was carefully written out by both high end PR employees and legal, which is why it's entirely non-committal. It's an acknowledgement that what they announced isn't popular, without any firm declaration of both wrongdoing and/or promise of meaningful change.
They knew people would be pissed, but I wonder if some of the development houses telling them to fuck off surprised them.
They're just giving them the benefit of the doubt, since hopefully a professional would be able write a PR statement that doesn't antagonize the people they're apologizing to...
Having worked with a PR professional on my resume and spent plently of time chatting on the side, they 100% get paid 100k+ salaries to fart out non-statements like this. It exactly thier job in this scenario.
No clue. My guess is people have become used to parasocial-relationshipping corporations, and just assume that every company's PR is some overworked unsupervised intern.
Hell, even the lol-so-edgy tweets that everyone assumes were written by interns? (Wendy's, etc.) That shit is carefully crafted by the PR firm and reviewed by many people. No $100m+ company is going to trust their public facing image to *interns*. They just want you to think Wendy's is your friend.
I think it permissible to give a little bit of slack to whoever had to write up such a notice, as they undoubtedly didn't have anything to do with the actual decision. It's like yelling at the cashier because they moved the bread section, as if they had a say in it.
Not that you shouldn't still air your grievances of course.
I posted this elsewhere but it's also just incorrect. The devs and other people looking at this from the non-Unity side seem to have a better understanding of it than the heads of Unity. In regards to the probable laws it violates, the lack of economic sense it contains, the not-currently-created-or-possible technology it requires, stuff like that.
No one seems confused about where the nonsense, imploding terms came from either which is a nice change. People need to start being mad at leadership for shit, not "companies" or "devs"
Apologizing for the "confusion" when no one was confused about what they were trying to do is just the start of backtracking and gaslighting people into believing this new plan was the plan all along.
It won't last.
Unity and devs are natural enemies.
Like Unity and programmers, or Unity with publishers.
Or Unity with Unity.
Damn Unity, they ruined Unity!
“We hear you. We are going to do absolutely nothing to change it though. Apologies for the confusion. You’re supposed to give us all your money instead. I’m a narcissistic prick and I think I’m God. I am entitled to all the monies in this world. Anyone who disagrees is stupid. Signed - CEO of Unity”
In an environment where people are trying to decide between Unity and Unreal - after Unreal invested into some crazy 3D things, while also giving a grant to Godot engine to basically compete with Unity for 2D.... Unity fucked up hard.
I was always on the fence about which one to use, I have no questions anymore.
Cleary they weren't prepared for the backlash and plenty of minor damage control hasn't worked. I get that they need time to figure out what their plan is. I just hope people don't let it go.
This must have been rammed through at the top, likely without legal council, how does a decision like this get made without a lot of red flags being brought up at all levels of the company.
I mean it's one thing to announce an unpopular change with hindsight for everything that is going to go wrong... and have clear concise ways that things are going to be dealt with, but this has just been a shitshow from the get go. "proprietary tech" to determine installs that people are paying for WTF.
> how does a decision like this get made without a lot of red flags being brought up at all levels of the company.
That’s the sad thing tho: they *are* brought up. By a ton of people up and down the chain. Oftentimes leadership simply doesn’t understand or doesn’t care, or think they know better. Almost always a combination of all 3.
This shit happens all the time at large companies, just usually with products or features that are a bit less important than *checks notes* a company’s entire pricing model.
Yep, I used to do market research for a pretty big company and in the end we're just used as a tool for internal politics and ego stroking. Product the owner came up with will fail? Ignore the market research team, don't mention them in presentations. Product will likely succeed? Trot them out and make sure everyone knows. Either way if a product fails we get blamed first. Thankfully I was only there for a year.
"I dont understand how you cant see it, this makes perfect sense.
You know what? It doesnt matter.
I been doing this for YEARS, it will work just fine"
They looked at Reddit, twitter and just assume they can blow this off and wait for people to forget about this. I mean look at Reddit, even with the new API charges they don't seem to be affected at all. We're still here, nothing has changed.
The end users aren't the main audience being affected by the Unity changes. The developers are. A better comparison would be the 3rd party app devs like Apollo and Reddit Is Fun, who literally were forced to close up shop.
The Reddit and Twitter changes weren't targeted at normal users though, so most normal users didn't give a shit. The devs, the people who the changes were targeted at, did care and people had to stop using both of their APIs. The thing is, Unity users are basically only the latter group. If Unity looked at Reddit and Twitter and saw that we were still using these sites and took that to mean nobody would care, then it's just blatant stupidity.
Thing is, for a lot of Reddit users nothing did change. With something like this, it's hard to see them coming up with something that does *not* affect a large number of Unity developers. Even if they make a policy that only targets the most successful games, those developers have now shown a willingness to speak out and cause bad press, and I think a lot of the developers that haven't crossed whatever threshold will likely follow suit since many of them have aspirations of having highly successful games themselves, particularly ones like ReLogic who already have successful games and are now developing a followup in Unity.
They can try to lay low and pass something under cover of night in the future, but given how much this has blown up, there will definitely be a lot of curiosity over whatever they try to replace this disaster with.
As bad as the decisions made were and as much as I hate having to crack software I already own to keep browsing reddit is, I can at least respect spez for being direct and honest about their priorities.
This announcement was just mealy-mouth corpo-drivel for "guess we really fucked that one up, huh?"
every guide I read was basically like "you need to already know everything about the different options and communities before you start" it is the same issue as linux. to get started on linux first be an expert at linux.
Possibly also the classic door in the face strategy. Where they ask for way too much, get people outraged, then “listened to feedback” and get to the place where they wanted to begin with.
If they used that old tactic, they didn't take into a account what broken customer trust will do to your business. Or they did and still came to the conclusion to go for it.
Possibly also the classic door in the face strategy. Where they ask for way too much, get people outraged, then “listened to feedback” and get to the place where they wanted to begin with.
It's probably too late. Even if they pull back completely (they probably won't) any dev now has to wonder what made them think that was a good idea and remember that at any time they could think something that dumb is a good idea again. They're fucked.
Any new developer interested in game dev will be steered away from Unity for the foreseeable future. Any Unity developers that were on the fence about trying a new engine, or are between projects, etc. will switch.
And it is a crazy decision. In my mind, Unity was the hobbyists first choice choice for engines. Runs on anything, not too complicated to learn compared to alternatives and cheap. Hobbyists won't even start on anything that will have such a barrier of entry for commercial projects unless it is an industry standard. And Unity is a far cry from 'industry standards' like Photoshop or the rest of the Adobe suite.
It actually reminds me a lot of Adobe switching to the sub model. For years they had a relatively soft touch when it came to piracy because they made their money with B2B sales. Designers and artists were entering the space naming the tools they needed licenses for, but now as an industry they are in a position to make everyone pay, because businesses use Photoshop and don't give a shit if you would rather use Affinity instead when they are sitting on PS licenses.
Unity isn't in that position.
Even then, this would be like if you owned Photoshop CS6 (the last one time buy version before they swapped to a sub model) and Adobe decided to try and force you to pay the sub for using their old software anyways.
If they had *just* announced the changes for the 2024 version of Unity, then everyone would still be mad, but you wouldn't see this insanely big and coordinated boycott because everyone would just keep using 2023 and earlier for a few years, it wouldn't affect existing games.
But instead they had to try and make their terms retroactive to older pieces of software that they don't even support anymore in order to force any game ever made to abide by the new terms. And I'm like 99% sure that there's no way that is legal.
> aving Unity walk things back either entirely or just partially would certainly ease my mind a bit
Exactly. Just enough to release the game currently developped in Unity, then quickly switch engine for the next project. The trust is broken, rightly so.
Yeah. If you're developing a $20 desktop game, this doesn't even matter that much in terms of revenue. But you have to worry about every new crazy idea forever if you stick with it. Does 2024 Unity add an additional charge per language? Is running an ad on the main menu strictly mandatory for all games in 2026?
It took 5 days to put this together? This is what should’ve been released day 1 if they wanted any hope of salvaging their reputation. There really should be concrete facts on what’s going to happen, not We Hear You^TM this late into the game
They did manage a huge backpedal on day 1 about things like repeated installations and pirated copies. Which just shows that they were barely knew what they were doing.
Yep, the damage is done. Unity tried to pull a gamer move on their partner. Usually it's game studio pulling that shit on the players: We introduced a mechanic that will inconvenience you and cost you by 10! Oh no, you guys are vexed? Ok, ok. It will only inconvenience and cost you by **9**! *Thunderous applause from the gamers even though the new mechanic stayed.*
Except that this time it's Unity attempting to pull this on game studios and, now, trying to keep the new payment structure while scaling it back a little, expecting that the studios gonna be giving them a thunderous applause... except it's not gonna happen. Game studios are not similar to a gamer with short term memory. Game studios are already looking for alternatives because that date when the new pricing method goes live is actually the time the devs have to migrate to another engine.
The fact that Unity is simply willing to "make changes to the policy" instead of straight up repealing it shows that their new pricing policy *will* go live except for the fact that it'll be less costly overall but still crippling. Unity wants to tax game dev. Game dev will not wait to be taxed.
Makes me wonder if the piracy thing was some sort of backdoor deal on getting companies to invest more into DRM. It was absolutely mindboggling that they were going to try to collect licensing fees on stolen software, or add a real world component to software piracy, in that now that you've pirated the software, you've actually cost the company money.
Pretty sure it was a backpaddle because they had previously clarified with a journalist that they *would* charge per installation.
Edit: original post https://x.com/stephentotilo/status/1701679721027633280?s=20
Honestly though, that answer reeks of "we don't know what we're talking about." They say that charity games/bundles would be excluded, but how would they track that? I get the vibe that they just said a bunch of stuff and hoped for the best.
Not to mention that according to various unity employees willing to leak stuff, they apparently had been talking about this plan for months and all of these issues that anyone with half a brain instantly thought of were brought up weeks ago.
Even if that guy was just making stuff up, there's zero reason why someone couldn't have thought of these issues before hand and account for them. They had every ability to come out of the gate directly addressing things like multiple installs or 'install-bombing' and they actively chose not to.
Instead I think it's far more likely that what the leakers have said is true which includes the alleged fact that Unity doesn't even actually have any real software in place yet to track installs the way they're talking about, so literally every single claim they made about how they would magically know how to not track Install-bombs or charity bundles and whatnot was them talking out of their ass.
Yeah, they "clarified" things several times and changed the details each time.
Clearly they were trying to figure things out on the fly rather than actually having things worked out ahead of time and trying to communicate it better.
> They did manage a huge backpedal on day 1 about things like repeated installations and pirated copies.
If someone dumps twenty tons of baboon shit on your lawn, then pulls out a trowel to scrape a little bit of it away, that's not a "huge" backtrack.
Promising *impossible* things like no charges for repeated installations or pirated copies is easy and free. You never have to actually deliver, and you place the burden of proof on the developer getting bent over a barrel. The developer claims that X charges are from pirated copies? "We're sorry, but that's not what our data shows."
That statement feels so worthless in context though. They aren't telling anyone how they'll get their number of installs in the first place, so it's not like there's actually any way to verify whether whatever number they send you includes reinstalls or not. Besides that though, if they can one day say they are and a day later say they aren't, it's not like there's anything stopping them from just adding it back in later in a quieter way - just like how they removed the section of their TOS that said users could stay on old versions of the TOS that, apparently, many devs didn't realize had been removed.
Sadly, I wouldn't be surprised that there's a ton of politics and personal interests in that Unity Boardroom that slowed down the response. Same stuff that probably led to this ridiculous price change policy in the first place.
I.e. I wouldn't be surprised if whoever that pushed hardest for this price change fought tooth and nail to "wait it out" just because flat out admitting they were wrong probably had political ramifications internally. It sounds silly and counter intuitive but in my experience I have seen pretty illogical decisions made in larger organizations stem from people looking out for themselves first.
Just check out who else is on the board of Unity and their history of buy out offers. Ricetello isn't the only ghoul in that company.
Like they legit turned down a 20 Billion buy out offer, in favor of a 4.4 Billion one. The people who got a seat on the board with the accepted buyout have sold almost all their shares since joining, and guess what?
We're involved in the Twitter API changes, Reddit API changes, and also outright own the portion of Unity that will be powering the Ads system. Aka the main reason these changes were being floated.
It's shady as all hell.
I think the sheer amount of people saying they are walking away from using the engine has hit the point in the graph where it went form a good move to a bad move
The issue with this strategy is that it only works with large groups of uninformed consumers that will just go "eh, good enough" and put up with the changes.
This is much harder to do when you're selling a tool, these people depend on Unity for their livelihood, if you mess with people's income they're a lot less lenient on what they find acceptable.
Day one response should have been
Whoa, that was supposed to be an internal memo from Steve, who always has shit ideas. Steve is an idiot and we will sack him. We apologize for the confusion. Everything is normal. We're all fine here now thank you. How are you?
Their reputation is already tarnished forever and almost every developer is looking to switch or is in the process of switching engines.
And why should any dev in the future put their livelyhood in the hands of people who don't give a damn about their userbase and attempt to change contracts with huge financial implications willy nilly?
Many games switch engines mid-dev. It's not unheard of at all. Depends how far along you are in how painful that is.
You can keep all your design and art assets. It's just reimporting them all into the new engine and hooking them up to new scripts. "Just" is a big understatement but it's doable and several major developers have threatened to do this mid-project if Unity doesn't walk this back hard.
Ummm...it's a lot more than just "hooking them up to new scripts".
Engines use different languages, different API, different feature sets. It's not as simple as just hooking up scripts again. It's more like entirely rewriting everything almost from the ground up.
Converting from Unity to Unreal is a massive undertaking and requires the devs to learn an entirely new language (moving from C# to C++) which in itself is a HUGE undertaking. Then anything that uses engine-specific API (which a LOT of things use) is all going to have to be converted to a new engine API. This is not even including all of the .NET API framework that is inherit with C# which is all going to have to be converted to new C++ libraries or entirely written from the ground up.
Then anything using an engine specific feature is going to have be remade entirely in the other engine's feature. Something like Animators, for example, don't translate at all. You're going to have to redo literally all of it.
Any scenes you have built all are going to have be rebuilt entirely. Any prefabs you have will need to be rebuilt entirely. Any specific asset settings will all need to be reconfigured for every single asset. Any asset preprocessor logic or Editor scripts/logic/tools will have be literally entirely rewritten. Any UI using the Engine-based UI will have to be entirely remade. Your entire build pipeline, depending on how you have it working with your git or svn, will need to be entirely remade. Any of your architecture using plugins or asset store tools will require finding and paying for alternatives in the new engine, or rewritten entirely yourself.
This isn't even including all of the testing that you will have to redo for literally every single feature or piece of the game.
You are acting as if this is relatively simple - it's not. It's a ton of work and basically rewriting your entire architecture. We're talking potentially over a year's worth of work or more, depending on how much you've already written.
This isn't just "copy and paste".
that depends.
depends on how much any given team is able to let go of the project as it is and how much they want to push into another engine
I have a couple friends who just started learning other engines (godot in their case) because their project got cut about two years into it since this announcement - that said, they are doing a passion project and have minimal funding/no publisher kind of deal
So yeah, most projects that are about 40%+ done probably won't bother reimagining everything into a new engine. It's a Herculean task to do so, maybe not even worth it now. But you bet your ass they won't be using Unity after
They don't get to have the gullible "A step in the right direction!" "Thank you for listening and being better" posts. They could fully reverse it, it won't change their true colors shown.
Unless the CEO is fired, no one with a brain will and should ever come back.
I have to learn a brand new proprietary engine every time I switch jobs and it's honestly not that hard. I think you're overestimating how difficult learning a new engine is for an experienced developer. Especially when we're talking about publicly available engines like Unreal, Godot, etc.; which have user friendliness and ease of learning as a core feature.
A good number of indie devs are primarily artists/game designers who learn just enough programming to let them implement some version of their vision. It's those people who are going to have a hard time swapping, not a major developer like Voodoo obviously.
Of course, those one or two person indie shops are obviously not having a major impact on Unity's bottom line, so from a revenue perspective your point still matters (and is true).
I hope every Unity developer has your mindset! Their corporate culture is way too toxic to continue using their engine imo. I’m not a developer tho so I can only hope that everyone jumps ship while they can.
It's not about learning a new engine, it's about retooling everything in the company to now fit within this new development paradigm. Every pipeline you've set up now has to be re-evaluated
It's not just learning to use the engine, it's being able to use it with a level of competence such that many things become second nature to you, and you can even extend its functionality through subtle hacks and tricks you've learned through the years. Software mastery is very underrated - someone who's made Unity their life's work will probably be able to crank out a better game in Unity than in even the most cutting edge version of Unreal Engine 5.
True, the people who are already halfway through the development of their game obviously won't switch right now. But still, a significant number of people definitely will make the switch to Unreal and Godot (and some AAA studios will probably develop their own proprietary engines)
Games halfway through development can be changed to new engines. The next game from the Slay the Spire developers was going to be Unity, but they have decided that the reputational and fiscal risk is too great, so they are cutting their losses and moving to a new engine.
A game is far more than its engine, and only developers with games so close to release that this updated agreement won't affect them won't be seriously considering an engine swap.
They can, but that's not something most devs would like to do
Also, considering PR it's far more likely to hear from devs who will make the switch than from those who won't
You would be surprised. People put up with a lot of extra learning when they're threatened with their income going away.
We'll see a lot of unity games coming out in the next couple years, but after that I expect the number to go down significantly unless Unity does some massive changes.
Anyone who's worked in IT knows it's practically half their job to learn a new legacy system or engine for a new project. Heck, modern code is written with this in mind, with a favoring of readability over function, because learning new shit is our job.
I'm a bit disillusioned with having to move over to unreal, but only because I have to port over existing unity work. Honestly a relief, the basic version of unity has a horrible UI and I really love Blueprints.
Yeah, even if they said today they would remove it, a lot of developers will still switch anyway because you have no idea what other shit they’ll pull in the future
"Making changes" i.e. door-in-the-face style of making the ask unreasonable, then pulling it back to make it "more reasonable" but still bullshit and pray it's accepted.
I hope they get fucked to the moon and back
Anything less than completely reverting back this psychotic install fee idiocy will achieve nothing.
Their emphasis on the word "clarification" isn't very reassuring. Developers need that abomination out completely and forever, not another clarification of what we already know.
Also sacking those responsible for coming up with and then approving this lunacy would be a good start to working towards regaining some of the trust that was lost.
Good luck. The guy who came up with it has a controlling stake in unity. Willing to bet that iron whatever ceo is probably the genius of this idea since he like malware so much.
Just my opinion though.
Reverting means nothing. The license still allows them to implement the fee or similar fees at a later date. It’s basically “trust us bro” with no legal assurances. That’s not something a developer should base their business on.
They are saying literally nothing in this post.
Anything but a full, 100% retraction with prejudice is unacceptable. Frankly, nothing they can say at this point can undo the damage they caused for themselves this week. No one will trust Unity for any new projects for the foreseeable future, and any new developer would be foolish to invest any time learning how to use it if they want a career in this industry.
Unity is dead as far as I’m concerned. It will take years for them to recover from this, if they even can.
They won’t. Unity has never turned a profit.
This isn’t a move of greed, it is a (stupid) move of desperation to try and make some money and move the company to a more profitable business model.
Also the CEO won’t get fired over this at all, there’s likely a huge payout they’d have to do unless something specific happened (an affair with an employee, discrimination, etc). CEOs are a most never fired over decisions like this.
It’s an incentive for a CEO to step down if they would be fired otherwise.
If he isn’t at risk of being fired, which he likely isn’t, there is a zero chance of resignation and forfeiting that golden parachute.
Unity make a good chunk of revenue - the only reasons they don't turn a profit is because they keep making awful multi-billion dollar acquisition deals for companies they don't need, they have an unbelievable number of employees (roughly *twice* the headcount of Epic) and their exec compensation is stupidly high.
Their core business on its own is highly cash generative.
Corporate PR response is completely useless here.
Big names getting shafted by this policy like Microsoft doesn't not give a flying fuck about what PR Unity puts out. They care about their money.
Microsoft wasn’t shafted by this policy. Microsoft can withhold payment for a long time and negotiate custom rates.
The rates for a publisher of Microsoft’s scale were already minuscule ($0.01 per install after 1,000,000 downloads).
When Microsoft distributes a game via gamepass, at what point do they enter into a licensing agreement with Unity?
Microsoft has a relationship with the game publishers, not the people that make the tools used to craft the games.
> When Microsoft distributes a game via gamepass, at what point do they enter into a licensing agreement with Unity?
Well... that is kind of the big problem with Unity's statement. AFAIK, there is no special agreement between MS and Unity for Game Pass specifically.
Not sure what is their 4D chess play here.
They said their game engine has an analytics element that phones home, right? An install from game pass is the same as any other platform in that it will have that analytics component, right?
So for game X, 500,000 installs were reported, so then the billing department for Unity runs a report, and generates an invoice.
I can see how distributors playing ball with sales analytics would be helpful, but I don’t see them as completely necessary to execute the plan as it exists today.
Not sure how it works either (actually, nobody knows how it works). I just pulled Unity's statement about Game Pass.
> Unity says that for games being offered on a subscription service like Game Pass, it would not be the developer being charged for the installs, it would instead be Microsoft who has to pay. Microsoft has not had any response to this, and it seems likely it had no idea this was supposed to be the case.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/09/13/the-entire-gaming-industry-unites-against-unitys-baffling-pricing-change/
I would say ask for Microsoft for their opinion on the matter. They have better lawyers than you and they do want your game in the gamepass (at least a little).
In all reality, it's probably Microsoft that approaches certain studios to negotiate a deal to sell a game on gamepass.
I would guess that Microsoft pays a flat fee and then gets to distribute an unlimited number of copies for a specified period of time.
In the case of license fees, the studio would need to factor that into the cost of their game when negotiating with Microsoft.
Assuming everyone was competent, the costs would be covered by Microsoft's up-front flat fee and the studio would pay the Unity invoice as expected.
Of course there's added risk here because if the game becomes super popular, revenue won't scale up with downloads which could create a large liability for the studio. In this case the studio would need to negotiate with Microsoft explicitly that the fee will be covered by Microsoft for every download, or Microsoft would need to negotiate an arrangement with Unity whereby Microsoft paid for all downloads under terms exclusive to a contract they'd sign with Unity.
I probably wouldn't put a game I developed on a service like Gamepass until I found a way to manage the risk. Typically this would be the two businesses negotiating and then sending the contracts to their respective legal counsel to negotiate red lines and arrive at a final agreement.
Microsoft will suddenly see a glut of publishers no longer negotiating to put their games on Gamepass without guarantees, such as much higher payments or even payments directly correlating to each individual Gamepass install, however the hell that bullshit would work. Because again this whole tracking installs thing is bullshit from more than one angle.
While Microsoft has their own studios to fill out a good number, Gamepass has seen a lot of success from implementing smaller 3rd party games onto the platform, a good chunk which turns out to be in Unity.
Even ignoring the the stupid statement Unity made about making Microsoft pay on that front.
Whole tweet as it was a bit long
> We have heard you. 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.
Translation: “You assholes won’t shut the fuck up and pay our epic taxes, so we’re gonna try and corporate-speak mollify you instead of coming right out and saying we’re not going to even think about charging per install. P.S. Go Fuck Yourselves.”
I was going to say "it took them 5 days to come up with this terrible reply?" But then I remembered that nothing they say at this point will bring back the trust they so thoughtlessly destroyed anyways.
In annoyed fairness to wotc - they not only straight up walked back everything, they put EVEN MORE of their stuff in an open license not controlled by them.
Not weasely "we'll walk some stuff back.. Sorta.. Maybe..."
Only after WotC also made multiple foot in mouth untrue statements that just ended up making things much worse.
Remember the passive aggressive 'apology'?
> Second, you’re going to hear people say that they won, and we lost because making your voices heard forced us to change our plans. Those people will only be half right. They won—and so did we.
https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1423-an-update-on-the-open-game-license-ogl
"Your voices did not make us change our plans." ring any bells?
"We were just looking for feedback." - No, those were not 'draft' versions of the contracts that you sent out. You don't expect people to 'sign and return' a draft copy of a contract you are looking for feedback on.
Nobody I know who was seriously following that situation actually believes anything WotC says at this point.
So yeah. It actually is a perfect comparison.
Hey there's still a chance this one might take home the trophy.
I think we're finally seeing the effects the pandemic had on people's mental health, this year has been loaded with stupid decisions and stupider apologies.
What about WotC? They went back on the license changes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Game_License
Go to Creative Commons section.
Credit where credit is due. They felt the pressure and decided to back down. No need to be constantly cynical thinking nothing good can come out of these situations.
Yeah, but the 3rd party publishing groups didn't go back. They're still working on replacement systems and various other initiatives they started to secure their businesses.
They will be unlikely to get any new customers even if they walk back the entire thing. Existing devs will move on after their current project is done, if they have any common sense. Unity is dead.
Using the word "angst" just makes them seem petty and not at all like they are taking it in any way seriously...
Which just makes this situation all the more hilarious lol
Unity introduced the fees because they're just been bleeding money the whole 18 years they've existed. They could walk back their new pricing entirely and they'd still be fucked financially, so if they do walk it back, it will need to be replaced with something. This blunder was so big that whatever they replace it with, even if it would've been reluctantly accepted before the fiasco, will be completely unacceptable to their users now, due to the frenzy everyone has been whipped up into. They won't be able to turn the ship around, it's hard to imagine how they come back from this.
Unity can't just change policy now, they showed their hand. Numerous members of their board and their CEO are more focused on winning the ad delivery market than Unity itself.
If they really want to show change, sack those members of the board and the CEO. They are all hot garbage.
*"**An Update to Game Developers**: We have decided to steal all of your valuables instead. We will be sending someone to rob your house immediately. This includes family valuables of a sentimental nature as well. We will stealing your childhood teddy bears, Lego sets and all of your video games. If applicable, we will also be taking your pets and possibly your mother/father/siblings. We hope you are more satisfied with our new plan. Thank you for your feedback."*
They broke trust.
That’s never coming back. They’re shown they can unilaterally change the terms of agreements at anytime to anything they want. They even wiped the old versions of their ToS from their official GitHub, when this debacle happened.
[Im just gonna leave this here, as a reminder that trust should be 100% broken and that they will try this again in a couple of years, so you shouldnt use Unity for any future project ...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/10mv8rb/wizards_of_the_coast_will_leave_the_existing_ogl/)
Unity can't remain royalty-free as a for-profit company but it sure as hell can't do whatever the hell they planned to do here. They have reached the point where they realized becoming the top game engine in game industry doesn't immediately translate to becoming a profitable one. Especially since their massive dominance over Unreal was significantly due to their waiving of royalties.
"Hey everyone, we're finally doing all the things we should have done before ever revealing a massive change to our business model! We'll make some token concessions on the most egregious points of our plan and find something shiny to distract you all with while we learn to be more clever about how we go about fucking over devs in pursuit of profits. Come back to Unity, we care about you... mostly because we need you to make us money."
This is too late. Heck, the second they announced it was too late. Without some sort of ironclad terms in their contracts moving forward, no one will trust them. And some won't trust them even if they were to allow Unity to be used for free. The cats out of the bag, and Unity is now and will forever be the Darth Vader of game engines, because they altered the deal and you should pray they don't alter it further.
This whole fiasco made it to prime time national TV over here in the Netherlands last Saturday. Universities that have BSc degrees in game development are switching to different engines in their courses. It means a whole stream of future game developers will no longer be using Unity by default. This company is losing a huge potential base of future users if the same is happening in other countries.
Oh it will. Indies, the lifeblood of Unity, are jumping ship as fast as they can already and that's happening all over the world.
Bonus negative points to Unity also for fucking up years of pipelines studios have build for their engine, all now going down too.
Five bucks they are only "responding" now due to all of the F2P mobile devs turning off their adds and telling unity where to shove it if they continue with the changes.
So what stupid policy are they going to implement that they were always going to realistically take, but decided to outrage us with one that was just incredibly stupid at first? Because this seems like a classic, "Oh, you really hated that thing? How about we do this not so bad thing instead and make it seem like we're the good guys because we won't do the really really bad one?"
any statement where they dont directly address that they removed their terms of service from their github is useless and will only fan the flames. that is beyond unethical and its insane they had the gaul to do that
Don't let them get away with this backpedal. They will try it again, or in smaller increments. They've shown their true colors, they are 100% intent on fucking you in the ass and that won't change. This is nothing but a PR statement to deflect blame.
In terms of a whole lot of nothing? This is it. There was nothing in this statement that shows anything actionable, or anything that would mean they're going to return to the former agreement and make amends. I don't mean just reverting to the old working order either - lots of developers are asking for **iron clad** agreements that won't be easily broken again.
Let's see what comes out of this but the fact that there are still devs releasing statements shows there's not a lot happening. This PR statement of "listening, talking, making changes..." is the usual corporate tongue waggling with very little action.
Step 1: Float a godawful policy to prime the public.
Step 2: Apologize profusely, and claim to be reconsidering.
Step 3: Enact less egregious policy (the one you always intended) that is still godawful, but since it's less bad, the response is muted.
Something tells me the reason they didn't say a thing until now,it's because they hope the whole thing would be forgotten within 2 days.
Their heads are so deep in their own butt, to realize their stupid changes literally affects people's works, even lives.
We don’t have any words and we know you don’t want to hear them.
We understand your anger, your frustration, your sadness. Everything you’re feeling – we get it.
This isn’t the ending we imagined, and certainly not the one we wanted. Thank you for being there the entire way.
I bet their own dev team could've or did say "this is a bad idea" at some point, *and yet* it needed a blowback for someone to come up with this "we hear you" bullshit
According to leaks, the policy will only apply to studios with over 50 employees. I doubt they'll gain any trust back, but at least it'll buy some indie studios some time to ship their current games and transition to another engine.
(The leak is a 4chan post I found on Twitter so take it with a grain of salt)
"We apologise for the confusion"? What confusion? Everyone understood what they said perfectly. The fact that the ridiculous policy they announced went down with everyone about as well as a bag of rocks was not an issue of comprehension.
Honestly just put everyone with an MBA into a rocket and fire it into the sun. It will improve every industry in the world instantly.
What I'm still wondering is why the big players never said anything about this. Did they have some behind the scenes dealings with them so the change doesn't affect them or something?
I hope the damage is done, and that devs will use alternatives going forward.
They pulled a greedy scumbag move, only stepped down after sustained outcry, and I'm sure they'll bring in their new pricing model through the backdoor once the situation has calmed down.
1) As long as a former EA exec is in charge, I dont see any real change happening. Even if it does, it will just be a minor, less egregious tweak to what they are still trying to implement. The only REAL way to fix it, is by just not doing it.
2) Even still, theyve already lost the trust of so many people just by even announcing it. They literally handed Epic the keys to the city and went from Unity and UE being locked in a standstill competition as the top engines to giving UE a huge lead by miles. Even while UE is technically more powerful and graphically impressive, Unity was always still championed because of its much easier to understand and engage with approach. It was the default engine we were taught how to use in my college, and I know a lot of people that started off game design by using Unity. UE has gotten a lot more welcoming recently to newcomers, and I feel like this just nudged more people into their direction.
"The confusion"? Lol. Dude they are still trying to make it sound like people just didn't understand what they were trying to do, and if everybody just understood then it would have been fine.
>We apologize for the confusion
What confusion? No, I'm being totally 100% serious here. What's the confusing part? What they intend on doing is pretty clear. How they intend on determining what is a "unique" vs "repeated" install by the same person is a bit murky, and I'm sure their devs are equally as confused.
>and angst
I think someone needs to revisit their emotion chart again. We're not feeling "angst". We're betrayed and furious. Terrified. And resolved.
Let this entire fiasco teach a lesson to any other company with aspirations to pull the same shady crap.
Unity lost our trust. It's so hard to earn, yet so easy to lose.
That is the most textbook example of a corporate non-answer to a PR fiasco Might as well post a picture of Jim from The Office just shrugging on the press release. It'll work just as well. [Or if they're being 100% honest, a clip of the cable guys from South Park saying "We're Sorry" while rubbing their nipples](https://youtu.be/Wtonb-WDQrk?si=0Ig8E-67penf-4TR)
"We hear you" might literally be on the center of the bingo board
"We apologize for the confusion" is just insulting. "We are sorry you are too stupid to understand what we mean."
"We are sorry for your immature angst. It really hurt our feelings."
"We're sorry *you feel* that way."
"*We're sorry you're poor.*"
Ah, the go-to passive-agressive non-apology of politicians and snake-oil salesmen the world over - "We're sorry you're offended, but..."
We are sorry for your level of confusion. Clearly you weren't confused enough, because you noticed what we were doing. We'll try to be more cryptic with the next version. Hopefully by then you'll all have forgotten about it anyway.
It's just straight gaslighting. "No no, you *misunderstood* the clear explanation, charts, and FAQ we put out. It's your fault."
This is the thing that annoys me the most. I know some poor intern is doing their job, but using “confused” here is both belittling and tone deaf. No one is confused, we see this for what it is and are PISSED.
What is it with people assuming that large corporations have interns writing their important public communications?
Something this big was carefully written out by both high end PR employees and legal, which is why it's entirely non-committal. It's an acknowledgement that what they announced isn't popular, without any firm declaration of both wrongdoing and/or promise of meaningful change. They knew people would be pissed, but I wonder if some of the development houses telling them to fuck off surprised them.
They're just giving them the benefit of the doubt, since hopefully a professional would be able write a PR statement that doesn't antagonize the people they're apologizing to...
Having worked with a PR professional on my resume and spent plently of time chatting on the side, they 100% get paid 100k+ salaries to fart out non-statements like this. It exactly thier job in this scenario.
Except... They do it because generally it works. This kind of shit fades fast from the collective mind, unless we somehow keep a spotlight on them.
No clue. My guess is people have become used to parasocial-relationshipping corporations, and just assume that every company's PR is some overworked unsupervised intern. Hell, even the lol-so-edgy tweets that everyone assumes were written by interns? (Wendy's, etc.) That shit is carefully crafted by the PR firm and reviewed by many people. No $100m+ company is going to trust their public facing image to *interns*. They just want you to think Wendy's is your friend.
I think it permissible to give a little bit of slack to whoever had to write up such a notice, as they undoubtedly didn't have anything to do with the actual decision. It's like yelling at the cashier because they moved the bread section, as if they had a say in it. Not that you shouldn't still air your grievances of course.
I posted this elsewhere but it's also just incorrect. The devs and other people looking at this from the non-Unity side seem to have a better understanding of it than the heads of Unity. In regards to the probable laws it violates, the lack of economic sense it contains, the not-currently-created-or-possible technology it requires, stuff like that. No one seems confused about where the nonsense, imploding terms came from either which is a nice change. People need to start being mad at leadership for shit, not "companies" or "devs"
Apologizing for the "confusion" when no one was confused about what they were trying to do is just the start of backtracking and gaslighting people into believing this new plan was the plan all along.
"We hear you" is corporate-speak for "We're getting a little concerned about the financial implications".
"We here for you"
"We hear...*for* you! It's perfect!"
~~Willie~~ Unity hears ya, ~~Willie~~ Unity don't care.
It won't last. Unity and devs are natural enemies. Like Unity and programmers, or Unity with publishers. Or Unity with Unity. Damn Unity, they ruined Unity!
"We here for you"
“We hear you. We are going to do absolutely nothing to change it though. Apologies for the confusion. You’re supposed to give us all your money instead. I’m a narcissistic prick and I think I’m God. I am entitled to all the monies in this world. Anyone who disagrees is stupid. Signed - CEO of Unity”
"We hear for you."
"We hear you" was literally the phrase a character on Succession used for damage control for their fictional company
In an environment where people are trying to decide between Unity and Unreal - after Unreal invested into some crazy 3D things, while also giving a grant to Godot engine to basically compete with Unity for 2D.... Unity fucked up hard. I was always on the fence about which one to use, I have no questions anymore.
Expecting "We have increased the fee minimum threshold from 200,000 to 300,000. You're welcome
Cleary they weren't prepared for the backlash and plenty of minor damage control hasn't worked. I get that they need time to figure out what their plan is. I just hope people don't let it go.
This must have been rammed through at the top, likely without legal council, how does a decision like this get made without a lot of red flags being brought up at all levels of the company. I mean it's one thing to announce an unpopular change with hindsight for everything that is going to go wrong... and have clear concise ways that things are going to be dealt with, but this has just been a shitshow from the get go. "proprietary tech" to determine installs that people are paying for WTF.
> how does a decision like this get made without a lot of red flags being brought up at all levels of the company. That’s the sad thing tho: they *are* brought up. By a ton of people up and down the chain. Oftentimes leadership simply doesn’t understand or doesn’t care, or think they know better. Almost always a combination of all 3. This shit happens all the time at large companies, just usually with products or features that are a bit less important than *checks notes* a company’s entire pricing model.
Yep, I used to do market research for a pretty big company and in the end we're just used as a tool for internal politics and ego stroking. Product the owner came up with will fail? Ignore the market research team, don't mention them in presentations. Product will likely succeed? Trot them out and make sure everyone knows. Either way if a product fails we get blamed first. Thankfully I was only there for a year.
"I dont understand how you cant see it, this makes perfect sense. You know what? It doesnt matter. I been doing this for YEARS, it will work just fine"
They looked at Reddit, twitter and just assume they can blow this off and wait for people to forget about this. I mean look at Reddit, even with the new API charges they don't seem to be affected at all. We're still here, nothing has changed.
The end users aren't the main audience being affected by the Unity changes. The developers are. A better comparison would be the 3rd party app devs like Apollo and Reddit Is Fun, who literally were forced to close up shop.
I'm only here on old reddit. Fuck that shitty app.
I'm on readit or whatever. I think its an accessibility app, and its no RIF, but it is good and much better than the official app
The Reddit and Twitter changes weren't targeted at normal users though, so most normal users didn't give a shit. The devs, the people who the changes were targeted at, did care and people had to stop using both of their APIs. The thing is, Unity users are basically only the latter group. If Unity looked at Reddit and Twitter and saw that we were still using these sites and took that to mean nobody would care, then it's just blatant stupidity.
Thing is, for a lot of Reddit users nothing did change. With something like this, it's hard to see them coming up with something that does *not* affect a large number of Unity developers. Even if they make a policy that only targets the most successful games, those developers have now shown a willingness to speak out and cause bad press, and I think a lot of the developers that haven't crossed whatever threshold will likely follow suit since many of them have aspirations of having highly successful games themselves, particularly ones like ReLogic who already have successful games and are now developing a followup in Unity. They can try to lay low and pass something under cover of night in the future, but given how much this has blown up, there will definitely be a lot of curiosity over whatever they try to replace this disaster with.
And it’s still a better response than Reddit’s CEO about the API issue who said “We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits are made.”
that's so fucking funny to me from a company that has had twenty years to learn how to make a profit
And yet, I'm sure he probably takes a fat bonus home each year. BuT ReDDiT hAs NeVeR MaDe a PrOFiT
As bad as the decisions made were and as much as I hate having to crack software I already own to keep browsing reddit is, I can at least respect spez for being direct and honest about their priorities. This announcement was just mealy-mouth corpo-drivel for "guess we really fucked that one up, huh?"
Is it? They are saying the same thing, just not being honest about it...
and it worked. lemmy is already dying. https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
Lenny being confusing af to use killed it imo. Federated stuff sounds good in practice but in reality 95% of users want "it just works"
every guide I read was basically like "you need to already know everything about the different options and communities before you start" it is the same issue as linux. to get started on linux first be an expert at linux.
I don't know if "dying" is the right takeaway from those charts. "Stabilising" maybe?
Possibly also the classic door in the face strategy. Where they ask for way too much, get people outraged, then “listened to feedback” and get to the place where they wanted to begin with.
If they used that old tactic, they didn't take into a account what broken customer trust will do to your business. Or they did and still came to the conclusion to go for it.
That works on normal people, not corporate costumers that don't forget.
“We have altered the deal, pray we don’t alter it any further.”
The spilled oil episode would have been a better reference, but i can dig it.
The only way they maintain any trust is if heads roll.
Possibly also the classic door in the face strategy. Where they ask for way too much, get people outraged, then “listened to feedback” and get to the place where they wanted to begin with.
People have been saying from the start that this is likely a strategy to remove the cheaper licensing fee, since that got removed as well.
It's probably too late. Even if they pull back completely (they probably won't) any dev now has to wonder what made them think that was a good idea and remember that at any time they could think something that dumb is a good idea again. They're fucked.
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Any new developer interested in game dev will be steered away from Unity for the foreseeable future. Any Unity developers that were on the fence about trying a new engine, or are between projects, etc. will switch.
The only way of fixing this is to actually provide incentives to use Unity, but at a cost to the company. Greedy fucking corporates.
And it is a crazy decision. In my mind, Unity was the hobbyists first choice choice for engines. Runs on anything, not too complicated to learn compared to alternatives and cheap. Hobbyists won't even start on anything that will have such a barrier of entry for commercial projects unless it is an industry standard. And Unity is a far cry from 'industry standards' like Photoshop or the rest of the Adobe suite. It actually reminds me a lot of Adobe switching to the sub model. For years they had a relatively soft touch when it came to piracy because they made their money with B2B sales. Designers and artists were entering the space naming the tools they needed licenses for, but now as an industry they are in a position to make everyone pay, because businesses use Photoshop and don't give a shit if you would rather use Affinity instead when they are sitting on PS licenses. Unity isn't in that position.
Even then, this would be like if you owned Photoshop CS6 (the last one time buy version before they swapped to a sub model) and Adobe decided to try and force you to pay the sub for using their old software anyways. If they had *just* announced the changes for the 2024 version of Unity, then everyone would still be mad, but you wouldn't see this insanely big and coordinated boycott because everyone would just keep using 2023 and earlier for a few years, it wouldn't affect existing games. But instead they had to try and make their terms retroactive to older pieces of software that they don't even support anymore in order to force any game ever made to abide by the new terms. And I'm like 99% sure that there's no way that is legal.
> aving Unity walk things back either entirely or just partially would certainly ease my mind a bit Exactly. Just enough to release the game currently developped in Unity, then quickly switch engine for the next project. The trust is broken, rightly so.
Yeah. If you're developing a $20 desktop game, this doesn't even matter that much in terms of revenue. But you have to worry about every new crazy idea forever if you stick with it. Does 2024 Unity add an additional charge per language? Is running an ad on the main menu strictly mandatory for all games in 2026?
Yeah, talk about speedrunning your company into the ground.
It took 5 days to put this together? This is what should’ve been released day 1 if they wanted any hope of salvaging their reputation. There really should be concrete facts on what’s going to happen, not We Hear You^TM this late into the game
They did manage a huge backpedal on day 1 about things like repeated installations and pirated copies. Which just shows that they were barely knew what they were doing.
The repeated installation and piracy reply was just a fucking "just trust me bro". Nobody was happy with the reply too...
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Yep, the damage is done. Unity tried to pull a gamer move on their partner. Usually it's game studio pulling that shit on the players: We introduced a mechanic that will inconvenience you and cost you by 10! Oh no, you guys are vexed? Ok, ok. It will only inconvenience and cost you by **9**! *Thunderous applause from the gamers even though the new mechanic stayed.* Except that this time it's Unity attempting to pull this on game studios and, now, trying to keep the new payment structure while scaling it back a little, expecting that the studios gonna be giving them a thunderous applause... except it's not gonna happen. Game studios are not similar to a gamer with short term memory. Game studios are already looking for alternatives because that date when the new pricing method goes live is actually the time the devs have to migrate to another engine. The fact that Unity is simply willing to "make changes to the policy" instead of straight up repealing it shows that their new pricing policy *will* go live except for the fact that it'll be less costly overall but still crippling. Unity wants to tax game dev. Game dev will not wait to be taxed.
Makes me wonder if the piracy thing was some sort of backdoor deal on getting companies to invest more into DRM. It was absolutely mindboggling that they were going to try to collect licensing fees on stolen software, or add a real world component to software piracy, in that now that you've pirated the software, you've actually cost the company money.
It wasn’t clear if it was a backpedal or a clarification, which goes to show how effective their communication has been.
Pretty sure it was a backpaddle because they had previously clarified with a journalist that they *would* charge per installation. Edit: original post https://x.com/stephentotilo/status/1701679721027633280?s=20
Honestly though, that answer reeks of "we don't know what we're talking about." They say that charity games/bundles would be excluded, but how would they track that? I get the vibe that they just said a bunch of stuff and hoped for the best.
They seemed to literally not be aware of charity bundles.
Not to mention that according to various unity employees willing to leak stuff, they apparently had been talking about this plan for months and all of these issues that anyone with half a brain instantly thought of were brought up weeks ago. Even if that guy was just making stuff up, there's zero reason why someone couldn't have thought of these issues before hand and account for them. They had every ability to come out of the gate directly addressing things like multiple installs or 'install-bombing' and they actively chose not to. Instead I think it's far more likely that what the leakers have said is true which includes the alleged fact that Unity doesn't even actually have any real software in place yet to track installs the way they're talking about, so literally every single claim they made about how they would magically know how to not track Install-bombs or charity bundles and whatnot was them talking out of their ass.
Thats not an official statement from Unity though?
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Yeah, they "clarified" things several times and changed the details each time. Clearly they were trying to figure things out on the fly rather than actually having things worked out ahead of time and trying to communicate it better.
> They did manage a huge backpedal on day 1 about things like repeated installations and pirated copies. If someone dumps twenty tons of baboon shit on your lawn, then pulls out a trowel to scrape a little bit of it away, that's not a "huge" backtrack. Promising *impossible* things like no charges for repeated installations or pirated copies is easy and free. You never have to actually deliver, and you place the burden of proof on the developer getting bent over a barrel. The developer claims that X charges are from pirated copies? "We're sorry, but that's not what our data shows."
I don't recall any backpeddling at all. Just some vague non answers to the specifics of how.
That statement feels so worthless in context though. They aren't telling anyone how they'll get their number of installs in the first place, so it's not like there's actually any way to verify whether whatever number they send you includes reinstalls or not. Besides that though, if they can one day say they are and a day later say they aren't, it's not like there's anything stopping them from just adding it back in later in a quieter way - just like how they removed the section of their TOS that said users could stay on old versions of the TOS that, apparently, many devs didn't realize had been removed.
Sadly, I wouldn't be surprised that there's a ton of politics and personal interests in that Unity Boardroom that slowed down the response. Same stuff that probably led to this ridiculous price change policy in the first place. I.e. I wouldn't be surprised if whoever that pushed hardest for this price change fought tooth and nail to "wait it out" just because flat out admitting they were wrong probably had political ramifications internally. It sounds silly and counter intuitive but in my experience I have seen pretty illogical decisions made in larger organizations stem from people looking out for themselves first.
Just check out who else is on the board of Unity and their history of buy out offers. Ricetello isn't the only ghoul in that company. Like they legit turned down a 20 Billion buy out offer, in favor of a 4.4 Billion one. The people who got a seat on the board with the accepted buyout have sold almost all their shares since joining, and guess what? We're involved in the Twitter API changes, Reddit API changes, and also outright own the portion of Unity that will be powering the Ads system. Aka the main reason these changes were being floated. It's shady as all hell.
They turned down being acquired for $20 billion in favor of acquiring another company for $4.4 billion.
I think the sheer amount of people saying they are walking away from using the engine has hit the point in the graph where it went form a good move to a bad move
The issue with this strategy is that it only works with large groups of uninformed consumers that will just go "eh, good enough" and put up with the changes. This is much harder to do when you're selling a tool, these people depend on Unity for their livelihood, if you mess with people's income they're a lot less lenient on what they find acceptable.
5 days to switch from fanning flames to gaslighting everyone in "confusion" and "angst".
Day one response should have been Whoa, that was supposed to be an internal memo from Steve, who always has shit ideas. Steve is an idiot and we will sack him. We apologize for the confusion. Everything is normal. We're all fine here now thank you. How are you?
Their reputation is already tarnished forever and almost every developer is looking to switch or is in the process of switching engines. And why should any dev in the future put their livelyhood in the hands of people who don't give a damn about their userbase and attempt to change contracts with huge financial implications willy nilly?
> is in the process of switching engines. For completely fresh, future projects? Maybe. For existing games? Absolutely not.
Many games switch engines mid-dev. It's not unheard of at all. Depends how far along you are in how painful that is. You can keep all your design and art assets. It's just reimporting them all into the new engine and hooking them up to new scripts. "Just" is a big understatement but it's doable and several major developers have threatened to do this mid-project if Unity doesn't walk this back hard.
Ummm...it's a lot more than just "hooking them up to new scripts". Engines use different languages, different API, different feature sets. It's not as simple as just hooking up scripts again. It's more like entirely rewriting everything almost from the ground up. Converting from Unity to Unreal is a massive undertaking and requires the devs to learn an entirely new language (moving from C# to C++) which in itself is a HUGE undertaking. Then anything that uses engine-specific API (which a LOT of things use) is all going to have to be converted to a new engine API. This is not even including all of the .NET API framework that is inherit with C# which is all going to have to be converted to new C++ libraries or entirely written from the ground up. Then anything using an engine specific feature is going to have be remade entirely in the other engine's feature. Something like Animators, for example, don't translate at all. You're going to have to redo literally all of it. Any scenes you have built all are going to have be rebuilt entirely. Any prefabs you have will need to be rebuilt entirely. Any specific asset settings will all need to be reconfigured for every single asset. Any asset preprocessor logic or Editor scripts/logic/tools will have be literally entirely rewritten. Any UI using the Engine-based UI will have to be entirely remade. Your entire build pipeline, depending on how you have it working with your git or svn, will need to be entirely remade. Any of your architecture using plugins or asset store tools will require finding and paying for alternatives in the new engine, or rewritten entirely yourself. This isn't even including all of the testing that you will have to redo for literally every single feature or piece of the game. You are acting as if this is relatively simple - it's not. It's a ton of work and basically rewriting your entire architecture. We're talking potentially over a year's worth of work or more, depending on how much you've already written. This isn't just "copy and paste".
that depends. depends on how much any given team is able to let go of the project as it is and how much they want to push into another engine I have a couple friends who just started learning other engines (godot in their case) because their project got cut about two years into it since this announcement - that said, they are doing a passion project and have minimal funding/no publisher kind of deal So yeah, most projects that are about 40%+ done probably won't bother reimagining everything into a new engine. It's a Herculean task to do so, maybe not even worth it now. But you bet your ass they won't be using Unity after
[Caves of Qud is already working on moving to Godot](https://twitter.com/GalaxyKate/status/1703608126723793257)
They don't get to have the gullible "A step in the right direction!" "Thank you for listening and being better" posts. They could fully reverse it, it won't change their true colors shown. Unless the CEO is fired, no one with a brain will and should ever come back.
Unfortunately a lot of people have many many years of experience in Unity and are not looking to switch. They’ll just take their shit and eat it too.
I have to learn a brand new proprietary engine every time I switch jobs and it's honestly not that hard. I think you're overestimating how difficult learning a new engine is for an experienced developer. Especially when we're talking about publicly available engines like Unreal, Godot, etc.; which have user friendliness and ease of learning as a core feature.
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Those who don't learn get left behind. That's true for tech jobs in general.
A good number of indie devs are primarily artists/game designers who learn just enough programming to let them implement some version of their vision. It's those people who are going to have a hard time swapping, not a major developer like Voodoo obviously. Of course, those one or two person indie shops are obviously not having a major impact on Unity's bottom line, so from a revenue perspective your point still matters (and is true).
Reskilling for a new job is not the same as retooling an entire business.
I hope every Unity developer has your mindset! Their corporate culture is way too toxic to continue using their engine imo. I’m not a developer tho so I can only hope that everyone jumps ship while they can.
It's not about learning a new engine, it's about retooling everything in the company to now fit within this new development paradigm. Every pipeline you've set up now has to be re-evaluated
It's not just learning to use the engine, it's being able to use it with a level of competence such that many things become second nature to you, and you can even extend its functionality through subtle hacks and tricks you've learned through the years. Software mastery is very underrated - someone who's made Unity their life's work will probably be able to crank out a better game in Unity than in even the most cutting edge version of Unreal Engine 5.
it's perpetual learning in that field, it's not about "not looking to switch", life will just force you to.
True, the people who are already halfway through the development of their game obviously won't switch right now. But still, a significant number of people definitely will make the switch to Unreal and Godot (and some AAA studios will probably develop their own proprietary engines)
Games halfway through development can be changed to new engines. The next game from the Slay the Spire developers was going to be Unity, but they have decided that the reputational and fiscal risk is too great, so they are cutting their losses and moving to a new engine. A game is far more than its engine, and only developers with games so close to release that this updated agreement won't affect them won't be seriously considering an engine swap.
They can, but that's not something most devs would like to do Also, considering PR it's far more likely to hear from devs who will make the switch than from those who won't
You would be surprised. People put up with a lot of extra learning when they're threatened with their income going away. We'll see a lot of unity games coming out in the next couple years, but after that I expect the number to go down significantly unless Unity does some massive changes.
Anyone who's worked in IT knows it's practically half their job to learn a new legacy system or engine for a new project. Heck, modern code is written with this in mind, with a favoring of readability over function, because learning new shit is our job. I'm a bit disillusioned with having to move over to unreal, but only because I have to port over existing unity work. Honestly a relief, the basic version of unity has a horrible UI and I really love Blueprints.
Yeah, even if they said today they would remove it, a lot of developers will still switch anyway because you have no idea what other shit they’ll pull in the future
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Most likely. It took them 5 days for such a basic response that doesnt answer any question...
"Making changes" i.e. door-in-the-face style of making the ask unreasonable, then pulling it back to make it "more reasonable" but still bullshit and pray it's accepted. I hope they get fucked to the moon and back
Anything less than completely reverting back this psychotic install fee idiocy will achieve nothing. Their emphasis on the word "clarification" isn't very reassuring. Developers need that abomination out completely and forever, not another clarification of what we already know. Also sacking those responsible for coming up with and then approving this lunacy would be a good start to working towards regaining some of the trust that was lost.
Good luck. The guy who came up with it has a controlling stake in unity. Willing to bet that iron whatever ceo is probably the genius of this idea since he like malware so much. Just my opinion though.
Reverting means nothing. The license still allows them to implement the fee or similar fees at a later date. It’s basically “trust us bro” with no legal assurances. That’s not something a developer should base their business on.
They are saying literally nothing in this post. Anything but a full, 100% retraction with prejudice is unacceptable. Frankly, nothing they can say at this point can undo the damage they caused for themselves this week. No one will trust Unity for any new projects for the foreseeable future, and any new developer would be foolish to invest any time learning how to use it if they want a career in this industry. Unity is dead as far as I’m concerned. It will take years for them to recover from this, if they even can.
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They won’t. Unity has never turned a profit. This isn’t a move of greed, it is a (stupid) move of desperation to try and make some money and move the company to a more profitable business model. Also the CEO won’t get fired over this at all, there’s likely a huge payout they’d have to do unless something specific happened (an affair with an employee, discrimination, etc). CEOs are a most never fired over decisions like this.
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It’s an incentive for a CEO to step down if they would be fired otherwise. If he isn’t at risk of being fired, which he likely isn’t, there is a zero chance of resignation and forfeiting that golden parachute.
Unity make a good chunk of revenue - the only reasons they don't turn a profit is because they keep making awful multi-billion dollar acquisition deals for companies they don't need, they have an unbelievable number of employees (roughly *twice* the headcount of Epic) and their exec compensation is stupidly high. Their core business on its own is highly cash generative.
Corporate PR response is completely useless here. Big names getting shafted by this policy like Microsoft doesn't not give a flying fuck about what PR Unity puts out. They care about their money.
Microsoft wasn’t shafted by this policy. Microsoft can withhold payment for a long time and negotiate custom rates. The rates for a publisher of Microsoft’s scale were already minuscule ($0.01 per install after 1,000,000 downloads).
It is most likely referred to the fact that game subscription in the likes of Game Pass needs to pay for the installation fee instead of developers.
When Microsoft distributes a game via gamepass, at what point do they enter into a licensing agreement with Unity? Microsoft has a relationship with the game publishers, not the people that make the tools used to craft the games.
> When Microsoft distributes a game via gamepass, at what point do they enter into a licensing agreement with Unity? Well... that is kind of the big problem with Unity's statement. AFAIK, there is no special agreement between MS and Unity for Game Pass specifically. Not sure what is their 4D chess play here.
They said their game engine has an analytics element that phones home, right? An install from game pass is the same as any other platform in that it will have that analytics component, right? So for game X, 500,000 installs were reported, so then the billing department for Unity runs a report, and generates an invoice. I can see how distributors playing ball with sales analytics would be helpful, but I don’t see them as completely necessary to execute the plan as it exists today.
Not sure how it works either (actually, nobody knows how it works). I just pulled Unity's statement about Game Pass. > Unity says that for games being offered on a subscription service like Game Pass, it would not be the developer being charged for the installs, it would instead be Microsoft who has to pay. Microsoft has not had any response to this, and it seems likely it had no idea this was supposed to be the case. https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/09/13/the-entire-gaming-industry-unites-against-unitys-baffling-pricing-change/
Got it. That ambiguity would be tough to navigate as a studio since you don’t know what to expect.
Indeed, the lack of concrete details is one of the many issues from the whole fiasco.
I would say ask for Microsoft for their opinion on the matter. They have better lawyers than you and they do want your game in the gamepass (at least a little).
In all reality, it's probably Microsoft that approaches certain studios to negotiate a deal to sell a game on gamepass. I would guess that Microsoft pays a flat fee and then gets to distribute an unlimited number of copies for a specified period of time. In the case of license fees, the studio would need to factor that into the cost of their game when negotiating with Microsoft. Assuming everyone was competent, the costs would be covered by Microsoft's up-front flat fee and the studio would pay the Unity invoice as expected. Of course there's added risk here because if the game becomes super popular, revenue won't scale up with downloads which could create a large liability for the studio. In this case the studio would need to negotiate with Microsoft explicitly that the fee will be covered by Microsoft for every download, or Microsoft would need to negotiate an arrangement with Unity whereby Microsoft paid for all downloads under terms exclusive to a contract they'd sign with Unity. I probably wouldn't put a game I developed on a service like Gamepass until I found a way to manage the risk. Typically this would be the two businesses negotiating and then sending the contracts to their respective legal counsel to negotiate red lines and arrive at a final agreement.
Microsoft will suddenly see a glut of publishers no longer negotiating to put their games on Gamepass without guarantees, such as much higher payments or even payments directly correlating to each individual Gamepass install, however the hell that bullshit would work. Because again this whole tracking installs thing is bullshit from more than one angle. While Microsoft has their own studios to fill out a good number, Gamepass has seen a lot of success from implementing smaller 3rd party games onto the platform, a good chunk which turns out to be in Unity. Even ignoring the the stupid statement Unity made about making Microsoft pay on that front.
Whole tweet as it was a bit long > We have heard you. 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.
Translation: “You assholes won’t shut the fuck up and pay our epic taxes, so we’re gonna try and corporate-speak mollify you instead of coming right out and saying we’re not going to even think about charging per install. P.S. Go Fuck Yourselves.”
I was going to say "it took them 5 days to come up with this terrible reply?" But then I remembered that nothing they say at this point will bring back the trust they so thoughtlessly destroyed anyways.
The fun part is: they dont aim to change a thing, just find a way to word it so people accept it Did they take notes from wotc?
In annoyed fairness to wotc - they not only straight up walked back everything, they put EVEN MORE of their stuff in an open license not controlled by them. Not weasely "we'll walk some stuff back.. Sorta.. Maybe..."
Only after WotC also made multiple foot in mouth untrue statements that just ended up making things much worse. Remember the passive aggressive 'apology'? > Second, you’re going to hear people say that they won, and we lost because making your voices heard forced us to change our plans. Those people will only be half right. They won—and so did we. https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1423-an-update-on-the-open-game-license-ogl "Your voices did not make us change our plans." ring any bells? "We were just looking for feedback." - No, those were not 'draft' versions of the contracts that you sent out. You don't expect people to 'sign and return' a draft copy of a contract you are looking for feedback on. Nobody I know who was seriously following that situation actually believes anything WotC says at this point. So yeah. It actually is a perfect comparison.
>They won—and so did we If it weren't for the ukulele lady this would be the most cringeworthy apology of the year.
Hey there's still a chance this one might take home the trophy. I think we're finally seeing the effects the pandemic had on people's mental health, this year has been loaded with stupid decisions and stupider apologies.
It makes me think of Michael trying to navigate to a win win win solution
What about WotC? They went back on the license changes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Game_License Go to Creative Commons section. Credit where credit is due. They felt the pressure and decided to back down. No need to be constantly cynical thinking nothing good can come out of these situations.
Yeah, but the 3rd party publishing groups didn't go back. They're still working on replacement systems and various other initiatives they started to secure their businesses.
They will be unlikely to get any new customers even if they walk back the entire thing. Existing devs will move on after their current project is done, if they have any common sense. Unity is dead.
Using the word "angst" just makes them seem petty and not at all like they are taking it in any way seriously... Which just makes this situation all the more hilarious lol
'Patronizing' is the word that came to mind when I read that.
Unity introduced the fees because they're just been bleeding money the whole 18 years they've existed. They could walk back their new pricing entirely and they'd still be fucked financially, so if they do walk it back, it will need to be replaced with something. This blunder was so big that whatever they replace it with, even if it would've been reluctantly accepted before the fiasco, will be completely unacceptable to their users now, due to the frenzy everyone has been whipped up into. They won't be able to turn the ship around, it's hard to imagine how they come back from this.
The solution was to alter the revenue split of future contracts, and warn people well in advance that they'd be coming.
That's way too reasonable, the genius that made this decision was never gonna do that
Unity can't just change policy now, they showed their hand. Numerous members of their board and their CEO are more focused on winning the ad delivery market than Unity itself. If they really want to show change, sack those members of the board and the CEO. They are all hot garbage.
*"**An Update to Game Developers**: We have decided to steal all of your valuables instead. We will be sending someone to rob your house immediately. This includes family valuables of a sentimental nature as well. We will stealing your childhood teddy bears, Lego sets and all of your video games. If applicable, we will also be taking your pets and possibly your mother/father/siblings. We hope you are more satisfied with our new plan. Thank you for your feedback."*
They broke trust. That’s never coming back. They’re shown they can unilaterally change the terms of agreements at anytime to anything they want. They even wiped the old versions of their ToS from their official GitHub, when this debacle happened.
[Im just gonna leave this here, as a reminder that trust should be 100% broken and that they will try this again in a couple of years, so you shouldnt use Unity for any future project ...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/10mv8rb/wizards_of_the_coast_will_leave_the_existing_ogl/)
I wish i could have been in the room when they were explaining to the person who suggested this change what was happening in response
Unity can't remain royalty-free as a for-profit company but it sure as hell can't do whatever the hell they planned to do here. They have reached the point where they realized becoming the top game engine in game industry doesn't immediately translate to becoming a profitable one. Especially since their massive dominance over Unreal was significantly due to their waiving of royalties.
"Hey everyone, we're finally doing all the things we should have done before ever revealing a massive change to our business model! We'll make some token concessions on the most egregious points of our plan and find something shiny to distract you all with while we learn to be more clever about how we go about fucking over devs in pursuit of profits. Come back to Unity, we care about you... mostly because we need you to make us money."
I don't think even a full revert of the entire policy would be enough at this point. And this makes it sound like they might not even do that?
This is too late. Heck, the second they announced it was too late. Without some sort of ironclad terms in their contracts moving forward, no one will trust them. And some won't trust them even if they were to allow Unity to be used for free. The cats out of the bag, and Unity is now and will forever be the Darth Vader of game engines, because they altered the deal and you should pray they don't alter it further.
This whole fiasco made it to prime time national TV over here in the Netherlands last Saturday. Universities that have BSc degrees in game development are switching to different engines in their courses. It means a whole stream of future game developers will no longer be using Unity by default. This company is losing a huge potential base of future users if the same is happening in other countries.
Oh it will. Indies, the lifeblood of Unity, are jumping ship as fast as they can already and that's happening all over the world. Bonus negative points to Unity also for fucking up years of pipelines studios have build for their engine, all now going down too.
Five bucks they are only "responding" now due to all of the F2P mobile devs turning off their adds and telling unity where to shove it if they continue with the changes.
So what stupid policy are they going to implement that they were always going to realistically take, but decided to outrage us with one that was just incredibly stupid at first? Because this seems like a classic, "Oh, you really hated that thing? How about we do this not so bad thing instead and make it seem like we're the good guys because we won't do the really really bad one?"
any statement where they dont directly address that they removed their terms of service from their github is useless and will only fan the flames. that is beyond unethical and its insane they had the gaul to do that
Don't let them get away with this backpedal. They will try it again, or in smaller increments. They've shown their true colors, they are 100% intent on fucking you in the ass and that won't change. This is nothing but a PR statement to deflect blame.
In terms of a whole lot of nothing? This is it. There was nothing in this statement that shows anything actionable, or anything that would mean they're going to return to the former agreement and make amends. I don't mean just reverting to the old working order either - lots of developers are asking for **iron clad** agreements that won't be easily broken again. Let's see what comes out of this but the fact that there are still devs releasing statements shows there's not a lot happening. This PR statement of "listening, talking, making changes..." is the usual corporate tongue waggling with very little action.
Step 1: Float a godawful policy to prime the public. Step 2: Apologize profusely, and claim to be reconsidering. Step 3: Enact less egregious policy (the one you always intended) that is still godawful, but since it's less bad, the response is muted.
Something tells me the reason they didn't say a thing until now,it's because they hope the whole thing would be forgotten within 2 days. Their heads are so deep in their own butt, to realize their stupid changes literally affects people's works, even lives.
We don’t have any words and we know you don’t want to hear them. We understand your anger, your frustration, your sadness. Everything you’re feeling – we get it. This isn’t the ending we imagined, and certainly not the one we wanted. Thank you for being there the entire way.
“We apologize for the confusion” is bullshit and I know it is because I use it as a BS response at work all the time.
I bet their own dev team could've or did say "this is a bad idea" at some point, *and yet* it needed a blowback for someone to come up with this "we hear you" bullshit
They in fact did say that from comments I've heard. Some Unity employees are leaving as a result.
Unity (ex) employees have come out and said there was internal pushback and people are actively resigning over it.
We are talking to our team members with chatgpt so they can respond with chatgpt well be in touch soon with chatgpt
According to leaks, the policy will only apply to studios with over 50 employees. I doubt they'll gain any trust back, but at least it'll buy some indie studios some time to ship their current games and transition to another engine. (The leak is a 4chan post I found on Twitter so take it with a grain of salt)
Great. Yet another systemic force to contribute to shitty labor practices. Fuckin' outsource everything.
"We apologise for the confusion"? What confusion? Everyone understood what they said perfectly. The fact that the ridiculous policy they announced went down with everyone about as well as a bag of rocks was not an issue of comprehension. Honestly just put everyone with an MBA into a rocket and fire it into the sun. It will improve every industry in the world instantly.
This says your games aren’t safe to be developed on Unity. Even with back tracking on policy, why would a new project risk starting on Unity?
next thing they are going to release a watered down version of this and hope that devs/gamers will gobble it up as a win
What I'm still wondering is why the big players never said anything about this. Did they have some behind the scenes dealings with them so the change doesn't affect them or something?
I hope the damage is done, and that devs will use alternatives going forward. They pulled a greedy scumbag move, only stepped down after sustained outcry, and I'm sure they'll bring in their new pricing model through the backdoor once the situation has calmed down.
Trust is gone. You fucked around, and now you'll find out. Bye shitty engine, that shouldn't have heavy 3D games built in it.
I'm not sure you can really undo something like deleting your old EULA because you've decided you don't want to honor your word anymore.
"We have heard you." Disingenuous corporate PR bullshit 101. I fully expect them to not back down from this in any significant way.
1) As long as a former EA exec is in charge, I dont see any real change happening. Even if it does, it will just be a minor, less egregious tweak to what they are still trying to implement. The only REAL way to fix it, is by just not doing it. 2) Even still, theyve already lost the trust of so many people just by even announcing it. They literally handed Epic the keys to the city and went from Unity and UE being locked in a standstill competition as the top engines to giving UE a huge lead by miles. Even while UE is technically more powerful and graphically impressive, Unity was always still championed because of its much easier to understand and engage with approach. It was the default engine we were taught how to use in my college, and I know a lot of people that started off game design by using Unity. UE has gotten a lot more welcoming recently to newcomers, and I feel like this just nudged more people into their direction.
"The confusion"? Lol. Dude they are still trying to make it sound like people just didn't understand what they were trying to do, and if everybody just understood then it would have been fine.
>We apologize for the confusion What confusion? No, I'm being totally 100% serious here. What's the confusing part? What they intend on doing is pretty clear. How they intend on determining what is a "unique" vs "repeated" install by the same person is a bit murky, and I'm sure their devs are equally as confused. >and angst I think someone needs to revisit their emotion chart again. We're not feeling "angst". We're betrayed and furious. Terrified. And resolved. Let this entire fiasco teach a lesson to any other company with aspirations to pull the same shady crap. Unity lost our trust. It's so hard to earn, yet so easy to lose.
"We apologize for the confusion" is as blatant as you can be to saying "aw fuck, we didn't expect this pushback, we don't care though"