🚀 Don't forget to check out the PSS2 Kickstarter Campaign through this link www.kickstarter.com/projects/savysoda/pixel-starships-2?ref=dzgh76 and to download Pixel Starships for free 🌟: go.onelink.me/8GqS/slope
Nice video. One mistake on the Unreal costs. If you sell 40,000 units x $25 = $1million, you would pay unreal $0, because you only pay the additional beyond the first $1 million.
What drew me to Pixel Starships was the bright colors and 2D art. Now that they're going 3D, it's no different than any other game. I've already played Fallout Shelter so this is no longer 'Pixel' starships; it's just 'Starships'
You gotta love when companies say "we apologize for the confusion" when they make a decision like that and it gets backlash. We're not confused about what you said, you just dont want to admit you were wrong.
As soon as you said a dude from EA is somehow involved, I understood that Unity was akin to the Titanic that hit an iceberg and is now slowly sinking into oblivion because of one guy's greed and the poor choice to hire him to lead the company. 🤦♀️
The thing is, that CEO had been running the company for several years at this point without tanking it - the most recent change in top level personnel was the board of directors, who are still in charge. Rickitello deserves no defending for his past actions, but I believe this particular turd idea is most likely from the board who are letting him take the fall
I was making a fan game on unity, but shortly after just writing the outline for it, this all happened. Now I bought that humble bundle for Godot learning and using it to make that game in Godot now.
I never considered it, but I'm assuming the game won't be monetized because it's a fan game right? But the system would say someone downloaded your game with unity so you would have to pay for it? I'm guessing even you don't know but that really would be scummy.
I have moved to Unreal because I can't stand Godot's node system, and don't get me started on the GDScript. Not to mention that I want the graphical fidelity only Unreal can provide (nanite, lumen, etc.)
I can't even imagine what kind of person this guy is in his normal life, when all his creative energy and passion is directed solely in the pursuit of more money. I cannot imagine he's a warm, loving family man, to start with.
@@Carnyzzle .... and he would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for those meddling kids! What a scummy villain! His "apology" is hilarious "we should have consulted you better before screwing you over, and changing the terms of your contract retroactively ..."
Fun fact: For the longest time one of the requirements to get the free and cheapest licenses for Unity was a mandatory "Unity" splash screen when the game launches. They probably thought that this would be good free advertisement for their engine. In contrast, Unreal Engine went to the exact opposite extreme: Not only are you not required, but moreover you can _not_ use the Unreal Engine splash screen without their explicit permission. Turns out that Epic had the better foresight of the two. They understood that their logo being associated with particular games affects their image. Unity has always been associated with cheap money-grabbing asset flips, because their splash screen would appear when launching almost any of them. In contrast, Unreal Engine is usually associated with high-end triple-A games, because only those are allowed to show their logo. In other words, Unity has got this fame of being the "cheap money-grabbing indie" engine, while Unreal Engine has got the fame of being the "big boys' big-budget triple-A" engine.
With a per-install fee you can even hurt developers long after they stopped even selling the game. I boggles the mind how they somehow thought this would not get backlash. Of course, once you notice that the CEO and some other sold some stocks before the announcement...makes more sense.
There's no way in a billion years that the European Union would have allowed this criminal act of theft Even the UK - I sat a Contract Law module at university where I learned that ... A contract can only legally be a "fair exchange" ... and CERTAINLY not changed retroactively on the hoof! A case was brought up where some young wannabe pop-stars got into a terrible contract with a record label - they signed the contract, which basically screwed them over. The Judge ruled that the contract was not binding, because it was not a "fair exchange" - the kids were released from the contract and paid damages I mean .... I went to Tescos yesterday ... I selected some groceries, and paid for them at the checkout ... it was a fair (if expensive) exchange ... Imagine if I opened my e-mail today and got a message from Tesco ... "We've decided to implement a 'per visit' charge of £1 per customer per visit to our stores ... this applies retroactively to all customers who visited our stores since November 5th 2004. Your Clubcard record shows that you visited a Tesco store: 6041 times in that period. The outstanding amount is £6041 There are several great ways to pay, AND you will be given 1 Clubcard point for every £4! Sweet deal! Thanks for being a great Tesco customer!" I should stress that Tesco has NOT sent me such an e-mail .... but just imagine how you would feel if your favourite grocery store tried to pull this on you! In the UK at least, and certainly in the whole of the European Union - this is highly illegal to the point of criminality. The USA is the only place where you can get away with this. Even the Chinese regime would make an example of you, and shoot you live on TV!
Imagine that you'd have to pay FOREVER for a product that you made and sold just once, just because people kept *installing* it, not buying it years and decades laters, just *installing* it. People really have overlooked the part where it says *LIFETIME*, and it's not just that they have no way of telling pirated/malicious install apart, you'll be in trouble just for the legitimate installs alone, because its a literal forever concurring fees.
Love how the entire background music throughout actually has all the right beats. Prelude at the beginning, the SoR credits music at the end, all the other little bits that fit and the Sonic clown music for Ricky boy was perfect
It's called the Investor Syndrome. Investors tend to put profit first, and lots of profit now is better than even more profit tomorrow. So it doesn't matter if it destroys the company if the short term benefit is good enough.
If I understood the story correctly, Riccitiello was plotting this move for almost 10 years. All that time he pretended to grow Unity. And then, crush it in a single move. And evil prince Epic is not really evil, but a savior on Unreal engine. Can't wait to watch Disney make it into a movie.
He also sold a bunch of Stock before the Announcement, with the internal channels being choked with messages begging for more information and less inflammatory wording.
Well the C levels get paid partially in stock, that doesn't change that for the last year they have only sold stock, not once bought any, that somewhat indicates their faith in the company future. P.S. the 5 C levels make a total of $100 million USD every year, while the company loses money every year. @@SkylerLinux
@@SkylerLinuxThat's kinda a non story, he sold 80 grand in stock. Many people in his position do that kinda trade a LOT since a lot of their wealth is in investments; you DID have suspicious trading of 600k+ from other execs however.
_Can't wait to watch Disney make it into a movie._ Nope. Don't want them to make this movie. They would inject it with their identity politics and have Riccitiello played by an overweight black woman who actually saves the company. Then when you complained that it wasn't what really happened, they would call you a racist, sexist fatphobe and how very dare you?
Thank you very much for making this video slope I really needed someone with enough common sense to explain to me what was actually going on in plain English
You're spot on about developer preferences. Sometimes you just like what you like. When I was in college (around 2010), the Unreal Development Kit became available and almost everybody in our school wanted to use the new hotness, so that's what we learned. I ended up going on to work at Epic on the engine itself and since leaving, I still work in Unreal. I've never truly given Unity a chance though...and we'll see if I ever do at this rate. I'm not under the illusion that Epic is a paragon of morality when it comes to monetization, but man, Unity, what were you thinking? Edit: I think companies should hire John as a consultant, just to do the opposite of his ideas.
You accidentally said 2023 instead of 2024 when talking about the new unity model. The new model will absolutely kill small devs that get pewdiepied- as in a game gets featured by a big youtuber and goes viral.
It bothers me that you don't explain how John Riccitiello came to be the Unity CEO. CEOs don't just wander into town and take over. Who was part of the decision to hire him at Unity and why? Was it those three nice guys from the beginning? Seem to have plenty of quotes from them before the change...
If you are subscribed to Unity on UA-cam or other social media and only want to hurt their numbers, unsubscribe/un-follow them to show them the repercussions for what they did.
Here's a *_crazy_* concept that's so _amazingly unreal_ that it's _probably not even true:_ Engagement is more important that followers or subscribers. Seriously though, there's a reason the subscription tr*de (this might get auto-filtered, not taking my chances) trend died: People realized subscribers who don't engage is more harmful than helpful.
I love how you people think you're actually going to accomplish anything at all. Unity still runs the show and that's not changing any time soon. Godon't 😂
EA has been a villain for so long, I remember over 15 years ago OverClocked Remix made an April Fools joke saying they were bought by EA and renamed themselves EA Remix.
Sounds like Riccitiello is a parasitic psychopath who's never played a game without thinking of addictions and additions. Riccitiello's eyes say a lot of how damn many demons are in that guy's childhood.
It's truly sad that Unity started as a labor of love, and allowed so many to get into game development, only to hire and absolute scumbag who destroyed all that good will in one night.
Wow, you produced this video very quickly. You missed a few additional points of contention: the fee waiver if the game used ironSource (owned by Unity Technologies by the way) for ads and the retroactive changes to the Unity EULA for those that agreed to older versions of the EULA (they also tried to do this in 2019 but backtracked and promised not to do it again).
Just finished video. Wow! I'm speechless other than "How?", like the level of couldn't you have prevented this so easily or within reason? Doesn't look like it at all. Love me some older Unity stuff and it was fun while it lasted! Might want to hang on to those games a little more carefully to save the goodness. 🍻🌎♥️🎶🕺
On the plus side of the all crap Unity tried to do, it did lead people to seak out & support several up & coming engines. I believe several companies donated a large sum of money to Godot. I also wouldn't be surprised if there's going to be renewed interest in the Blender game engine from either the Blender Foundation or by devs looking for more open source alternatives.
There's actually been an unofficial effort to resurrect BGE ever since it was removed from Blender back when 2.8 came out. It's called UPBGE but I don't know much else about it.
You forgot the part where the CEO and board members sold their stock before the announcement and that this was an attempt to put App-lovin out of business.
Thank you! There was a need for a video not only clearing up what contract changes were actually made instead of listening to people not knowing what they are talking about. It was also great to chronical the rise of unity so we can contrast how they've fallen from grace. Thanks again /Bo
The whole Unity debacle (and a course sale over at Udemy) caused me to pivot a bit on my next game. Godot is what I'm assessing now...if I mesh well with GDScript it'll probably wind up being what I use. It's not just the drama...it's BLOAT. Unity is larded down with a ton of backend that just gets in the way of making a clean build of a smaller game that doesn't need ad or microtransactions tools. Still a great dev environment, but I'm gonna use this as an excuse to try the other guy(s). Wish me luck.
Godot supports C# as well! GDScript is definitely favoured atm, but apparently the C# integration is making big strides. I came from python so GDScript is perfect for me, but I’m glad to see that they’re trying to support C#, given how popular it is with games.
22:20 wow what an absolute parasite. the way that he even describes the scenario is completely detached from any actual game play model. he has no fkn clue what he is talking about. he simply imposed himself into an industry and is trying to squeeze it for all its worth
One person devs will end up begging jacksepticeye or markiplier to NOT feature their games because they wouldn't be able to afford the cost of going viral
I’m hoping that whatever the US has as a Securities Commission takes a look into the share dumping that occurred before the announcement. Maybe we’ll get lucky and that cancer of a CEO does some time for it (before being released to become a CEO of an American Health Insurance company I’m sure).
Great video Dan! Love your documentaries! It's incredibly unfortunate that Unity's case (of handing over ownership to a corporate scumbag) is just another one of many involving developer or community-centric studios, companies, applications or platforms. I don't know about everyone but after twitter, unity, reddit, youtube and others I can't help but wonder, looking at the alternatives that come out and everyone hypes: "How long until the founders or co-founders sell it to a greedy CEO that will go against every idea this started with?" I guess even the most apparently well intended teams of founders and creators eventually sell their communities out if they're offered enough $.
They still need to fall harder and deeper. I wish for them to crash to the ground and for the CEO to become a pariah in the industry, someone no board of investors will ever hire for fear he'll drag the company to the ground and beyond.
Very interesting. Although I have followed the debacle over the past few days, I was not aware of the particular individual responsible. It is good to see greed getting some pushback and this needs to happen throughout the world before corporations really do bring an actual 1984 global society. There will be very few gams to play then.
This new pricing model is exactly why Unity bought the spyware company. I can bet you top dollar that the same spyware is being hooked into unity game engines so that they can keep track of installation counts. At this point everyone should just consider Unity as spyware itself and stay far away from it.
Situations like the recent Unity kerfuffle make me feel glad I make games for a system thats been dead for decades haha. No extra fee's or charges with ol' handhelds.
I'm surprised you skipped the various controversies, but it's really cool to learn more about their early history. Particularly the 2019 harassment scandal.
Yeah, It was amazing seeing this all unfold. I want to know why nobody in the room told him this was a terrible idea lol. I know some programmers told the higher ups it was going to cause a problem, but where was everyone else lol? I feel like he didn't make that decision alone and I would be weary of anyone that was on the board, or worked as a higher up at Unity during all of this lol.
There was a death threat that was investigated, and it turns out it came from inside the company. If a company gets a death threat from inside the company it says something
Being a Mac user from early 2000’s I’ve been following Unity from its inception and this whole thing is just sad Unity has always had a tumultuous history of constantly changing focus: from Mac development, to games that run in your browser, to an easy path to release games on both computers and platforms, to 3d animation and now to just, well, profit it seems. The engine has always held a place close to my heart, I’ve always defended the engine when it was maglined an incorrectly blamed for the poor performance often found in games using it I still believe it’s a good product, it’s not surprise UE4 basically ripped off its fundamental design, but it’s beyond question that they fucked everything up Good thing Godot is a thing, but for people who need to deploy on console it looks it’s either UE or pay someone to port your game
Yeah, I coulda gone down the route of explaining that this mind set has been on the cards for a while. Constantly upgrading the software to better fit the mobile market more than the console market .. because... money! It's all very sad
@@slopesgameroom they never had a solid vision unfortunately and it ended up costing them dearly, getting in bed with corrupt leadership that only followed the money I think the breaking point for me was when all focus went to the asset store and trying to create a marketplace with some good content but ultimately a lot of filler they could get a cut of the profits of It's not a bad thing per say, but a lot of the focus really went on integrating the asset store instead of making the Editor or the engine better Actually no, what really sealed the deal for me was the fact I had a pretty big bug reported that lingered for years and was ultimately closed as "wontfix" because quote "This doesn't impact many people anyway" The bug in question impacted the macOS platform, the very OS the engine was born for.
Unrealted to the video, I just wanted to say I got my copy of the Slope's Game Room Complete SEGA History Vol. 1 in the mail today, and WOW this Bluray is packed to the gills! The menu is awesome, I have found a couple easter eggs (I was cheap and did not get the slipcase version, so gotta catch em all on my own). Really looking forward to digging into the whole disc, what a treat! I hope there is a volume 2 in the future.
Reminds me of the recent mess with OneD&D and the new OGL. Somebody saw their customer base as under-monetised and in attempting to monetise their customers broke trust and had the previously stable customer base rapidly looking for alternatives. Paizo (who make Pathfinder, D&D's nearest competition) likely made bank on that particular disaster. Personally I welcome our new Unreal and Godot overlords. And hope Riccitiello gets all the love from the company owners that he deserves, having broken the value of the company with a single decision. (Which I gather was firmly opposed by most of the internal developers even before it went public.)
33:10 "it's hard to imagine a future where Unity remains one of the big players" Let's just see about that. He posted this End of September, 2023. Company was valued at 11-12 billion dollars. If you are reading this in 2025 or later, check and see how Unity is doing!
In regards to the Per-Install fee, they wanted to charge per install and reinstall. So my Steam Account on my PC and Steam Deck would be two installs, 40c. Oh and when I get a new GFX card that's a Third install so 60c. One purchase and three installs and it just keeps increasing.
I only have one thing to say those fleeing avoid Epic aim for godot so we can have a decent open-source engine it is alright but could be so much better. Epic doesn't deserve kindness in all honesty they are pure ivory tower elitist brats. The stories I could tell of shit I dealt with from them.
If I was playing an fps and the game asked for ANY amount of real money to reload my gun... I uninstall the game immediately, refuse to support the companies behind it ever again.
Imagine if the game devs just passed it to gamers and started charging the users $0.20 each time players installed their game, especially if it was a "free-to-play" game. It would make more sense to just charge 20 cents per sale, but imagine you selling your game for 1 dollar or as some games even go on sale for 5-10 cents, which would mean, it would cost those developers to sell their game! A percentage is the only logical way and maybe cap the total amount, such as, if you were to make software you sell for 10k, you wouldn't have to pay more than 1 dollar per sale.
We need to charge him 10 bucks for even breathing a single air, that'll teach him. No one is going to be able to live knowing they'll get charge unknowingly from games they made.
Sweet! A Slope's video! I think you are fantastic and love your style, attitude, humor etc .... good depth and honesty in my opinion! Much love and good wishes for you and your loved ones. Appreciate what ya do! 🍻🌎♥️🎶🕺
@@slopesgameroom sir, you are welcome and deserve it. Thank you for being you and just keep it up as best as ya can. 😁 Hearing the "Burnout" music gave me the chills and "feels", I have always loved that game so much. I think my fav ever is Burnout Paradise with a custom soundtrack and the need to release some frustration or just fun and kids loved playing party mode except I wasn't allowed to participate or I had to have something to impair my gameplay because I played it more than anyone and the hours played reflected lol Have a wonderful day! 🌎♥️🏎️🚒🚑🎮 P.S. - you just made me realize how the pay to play things games have is just like an endless "Arcade" (for the creator or others involved):in your pocket similar to spending $10 or $20 in quarter at the local arcade, just always available and more expensive. At least arcades were/are fun! 👾🕹️
As much as I dislike how these executives think of games, this isn’t something new in recent years. Literally EVERY commercial arcade game was made with one thing in mind: How can a game be made, changed or added to, to make as much money as possible? Yet we look at these arcade games very fondly today. Will this happen too with micro-transaction filled games 20+ years from now...
I've been wanting to start getting into game development for a while now and have been thinking about learning Unity. While I'm probably never going to make any game that's going to sell, I don't really want to support a company like Unity. It's hard to trust them after they tried pulling something like this. Who knows what scheme they'll come up with next.
Given that the recent mess included a death threat from within Unity itself, I think its safe to say that John Riccitiello is cruising for a past tense Wikipedia entry. On a totally unrelated note, when y'all have time, everyone should go and watch "The Take", a 2005 documentary about the Worker-Recovered Enterprises Movement in Argentina.
Individuals like that should be barred from the game industry and shunned… Hollywood has this thing called blackballing, which essentially makes you blacklisted per se If a controversial individual like this word become CEO of another company, I would encourage anyone that has stockholdings for the company to sell them to make a statement The way that this apparently went down I was not sure of but because this video I now have that context and I’m absolutely appalled Edit: they most likely conceited there changes, because there was no way that is going to hold up in a court of law. If they actually went through with these changes, then it would only be a very short maritime before any large companies are being affected by this file a class action lawsuit, because this is underhanded, and would be even more, so if it retroactively applied to already installed numbers
This is why something like this needs to be set as a GPL for the engines like this. Therefore it would be challenging for this to happen, and if they tried it, it'd immediately fork off into its own separate project. We don't need another Java situation.
Wow, thanks!. Really appreciate that mate. The way I see it is it's very easy to just read the news and agree with what's being said. But actually showing off the history shows in greater detail just how terrible this actually was
@@slopesgameroom Yes you really connected the dots well IMO, but one thing I don't understand, is how Unity is the most popular (or maybe second) game engine, and still they run at a massive deficit of USD $921 million out of $1.39 billion revenue? I seriously doubt Unreal is in a similar position, but I can't find the numbers anywhere. Also shows how impressive the achievements of Godot are, with a tiny tiny budget of $25000/month compared to Unity $100+ million per month!! Now Godot has doubled in contributions, but it's still peanuts.
Godot's about to get a lot more popular, especially now that it has options for console publishing. It always was better for 2D projects than Unity it was just the console angle that was holding it back.
@@slopesgameroomAnything! You have a wonderful voice and might just need some experimentation, but I reckon you'd rock and find something you clicked with. Maybe have a couple of AI engines create some examples for ya and see what you find. ❤ Something like what would be a good game character for "Slope's Game room" or based on the host, but in sci-fi flavor or midieval knight, any genre you can think of or prefer... Might be fun or at least interesting trying different options you probably know of better than myself by far. 🍻🌎♥️🎶🕺👾🕹️
I'm working on my own engine, which is built for retro pixelart style games. Soon, I'll move the sprite rendering to the GPU, which is pretty complicated if you want to avoid pixel-misalignment (turning off texture filtering is just half the battle).
Poor Riccitiello. Guy probably grew up unloved by his parents and having not loved anyone and anything meaningful in his life, for only a loveless person could come up with such vile monetization plans in video gaming, of all things.
it is a bit sad to see this complete history only after the drama. I've used unity for a long time now and always loved it and was always disappointed most people only thought it was "that thing people use to make crappy games" because of requiring a splash screen on the free version. I was VERY outspoken and against unity's recent fee change, but now I'm personally pretty happy with the most recent changes to the fees after the outrage as apparently unity was never actually making money since they did not benefit when a game does well, unlike unreal which has already had a 5% rev share. with as unprofitable I have always heard unity was I have always been worried about the day they just pulled the plug on it, a lot of their troubles come from them getting involved with way too many industries stretching themselves VERY thin, while the game engine really ended up being a back burner project for them at this point the developers of unity engine itself are great people and were fully against these changes as many were outspoken about it on their twitter accounts the CEO is a moron and I really hope unity dumps him soon but yeah, I love unity, I don't see myself not using them, but I really hate their executive team
🚀 Don't forget to check out the PSS2 Kickstarter Campaign through this link www.kickstarter.com/projects/savysoda/pixel-starships-2?ref=dzgh76 and to download Pixel Starships for free 🌟: go.onelink.me/8GqS/slope
Nice video. One mistake on the Unreal costs. If you sell 40,000 units x $25 = $1million, you would pay unreal $0, because you only pay the additional beyond the first $1 million.
Appreciate the correction here mate
What drew me to Pixel Starships was the bright colors and 2D art. Now that they're going 3D, it's no different than any other game. I've already played Fallout Shelter so this is no longer 'Pixel' starships; it's just 'Starships'
you should fire your video editor, he/she sucks
You gotta love when companies say "we apologize for the confusion" when they make a decision like that and it gets backlash. We're not confused about what you said, you just dont want to admit you were wrong.
I hate it when companies do that, like is it hard to apologize and admit you were in the wrong? its not
Hahaha yep!
As soon as you said a dude from EA is somehow involved, I understood that Unity was akin to the Titanic that hit an iceberg and is now slowly sinking into oblivion because of one guy's greed and the poor choice to hire him to lead the company. 🤦♀️
who made the decision of hiring John? my dude is going to be the most hated boss in a few games since the unity incident.
The thing is, that CEO had been running the company for several years at this point without tanking it - the most recent change in top level personnel was the board of directors, who are still in charge. Rickitello deserves no defending for his past actions, but I believe this particular turd idea is most likely from the board who are letting him take the fall
EA also sunk another, older game engine, RenderWare.
Their biggest mistake was inviting a guy from EA over.
I was making a fan game on unity, but shortly after just writing the outline for it, this all happened. Now I bought that humble bundle for Godot learning and using it to make that game in Godot now.
Good. I appreciate you making the effort and doing the right thing, really.
Good on you ... many wishes on your success...
I never considered it, but I'm assuming the game won't be monetized because it's a fan game right? But the system would say someone downloaded your game with unity so you would have to pay for it? I'm guessing even you don't know but that really would be scummy.
@@ericmollison2760if it's free, you don't pay any installation fees. This was explicitly stated in the first ToS change as well.
I have moved to Unreal because I can't stand Godot's node system, and don't get me started on the GDScript. Not to mention that I want the graphical fidelity only Unreal can provide (nanite, lumen, etc.)
I can't even imagine what kind of person this guy is in his normal life, when all his creative energy and passion is directed solely in the pursuit of more money. I cannot imagine he's a warm, loving family man, to start with.
I don't know about his personal life but I'd imagine if he has any kids, he groomed and molded them in his image. Hopefully not.
Even Scrooge McDuck had some passions outside of making money and finding treasure.
know a lot of people like this. they seem to fill the void in their life by worshipping profit or some shit.
Keep in mind that Unity's CEO worked for EA and he had the idea to charge players a dollar for ammo refills
@@Carnyzzle .... and he would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for those meddling kids!
What a scummy villain!
His "apology" is hilarious "we should have consulted you better before screwing you over, and changing the terms of your contract retroactively ..."
Fun fact:
For the longest time one of the requirements to get the free and cheapest licenses for Unity was a mandatory "Unity" splash screen when the game launches. They probably thought that this would be good free advertisement for their engine.
In contrast, Unreal Engine went to the exact opposite extreme: Not only are you not required, but moreover you can _not_ use the Unreal Engine splash screen without their explicit permission.
Turns out that Epic had the better foresight of the two. They understood that their logo being associated with particular games affects their image. Unity has always been associated with cheap money-grabbing asset flips, because their splash screen would appear when launching almost any of them. In contrast, Unreal Engine is usually associated with high-end triple-A games, because only those are allowed to show their logo. In other words, Unity has got this fame of being the "cheap money-grabbing indie" engine, while Unreal Engine has got the fame of being the "big boys' big-budget triple-A" engine.
Lol. Ok
If you put Riccitiello in a hood, he'd be a perfect Palpatine cosplay
With a per-install fee you can even hurt developers long after they stopped even selling the game. I boggles the mind how they somehow thought this would not get backlash.
Of course, once you notice that the CEO and some other sold some stocks before the announcement...makes more sense.
There's no way in a billion years that the European Union would have allowed this criminal act of theft
Even the UK - I sat a Contract Law module at university where I learned that ...
A contract can only legally be a "fair exchange" ... and CERTAINLY not changed retroactively on the hoof!
A case was brought up where some young wannabe pop-stars got into a terrible contract with a record label - they signed the contract, which basically screwed them over.
The Judge ruled that the contract was not binding, because it was not a "fair exchange" - the kids were released from the contract and paid damages
I mean .... I went to Tescos yesterday ... I selected some groceries, and paid for them at the checkout ... it was a fair (if expensive) exchange ...
Imagine if I opened my e-mail today and got a message from Tesco ...
"We've decided to implement a 'per visit' charge of £1 per customer per visit to our stores ... this applies retroactively to all customers who visited our stores since November 5th 2004. Your Clubcard record shows that you visited a Tesco store: 6041 times in that period.
The outstanding amount is £6041
There are several great ways to pay, AND you will be given 1 Clubcard point for every £4! Sweet deal!
Thanks for being a great Tesco customer!"
I should stress that Tesco has NOT sent me such an e-mail .... but just imagine how you would feel if your favourite grocery store tried to pull this on you!
In the UK at least, and certainly in the whole of the European Union - this is highly illegal to the point of criminality.
The USA is the only place where you can get away with this. Even the Chinese regime would make an example of you, and shoot you live on TV!
Imagine that you'd have to pay FOREVER for a product that you made and sold just once, just because people kept *installing* it, not buying it years and decades laters, just *installing* it.
People really have overlooked the part where it says *LIFETIME*, and it's not just that they have no way of telling pirated/malicious install apart, you'll be in trouble just for the legitimate installs alone, because its a literal forever concurring fees.
Love how the entire background music throughout actually has all the right beats. Prelude at the beginning, the SoR credits music at the end, all the other little bits that fit and the Sonic clown music for Ricky boy was perfect
Really appreciate this comment. I take a looooong time on my music so this is very much appreciated
@slopesgameroom I'm curious to learn about/from your process. Do you have / have you considered Behind the Scenes type content?
@@CatFish107I think he has done one before when for a sponsor spot where his sponsor was an editing software.
Clown music? That's Carnival night zone, I'll have you know!
@@troywright359 You're right, It is but Ricky boy is a sonic clown, maybe even a supersonic clown :)
When profits far outweigh passion you see an infection spread that can easily be fatal.
It's called the Investor Syndrome. Investors tend to put profit first, and lots of profit now is better than even more profit tomorrow. So it doesn't matter if it destroys the company if the short term benefit is good enough.
If I understood the story correctly, Riccitiello was plotting this move for almost 10 years. All that time he pretended to grow Unity. And then, crush it in a single move. And evil prince Epic is not really evil, but a savior on Unreal engine. Can't wait to watch Disney make it into a movie.
He also sold a bunch of Stock before the Announcement, with the internal channels being choked with messages begging for more information and less inflammatory wording.
oh boy insider trading
Well the C levels get paid partially in stock, that doesn't change that for the last year they have only sold stock, not once bought any, that somewhat indicates their faith in the company future.
P.S. the 5 C levels make a total of $100 million USD every year, while the company loses money every year.
@@SkylerLinux
@@SkylerLinuxThat's kinda a non story, he sold 80 grand in stock.
Many people in his position do that kinda trade a LOT since a lot of their wealth is in investments; you DID have suspicious trading of 600k+ from other execs however.
_Can't wait to watch Disney make it into a movie._
Nope. Don't want them to make this movie. They would inject it with their identity politics and have Riccitiello played by an overweight black woman who actually saves the company. Then when you complained that it wasn't what really happened, they would call you a racist, sexist fatphobe and how very dare you?
Thank you very much for making this video slope I really needed someone with enough common sense to explain to me what was actually going on in plain English
More than welcome bud. I was in the same boat at 1st it was a "fun" topic to explore
Unity does this to themselves and now with the ex-EA CEO still there I doubt any dev are going to trust Unity ever again.
You're spot on about developer preferences. Sometimes you just like what you like. When I was in college (around 2010), the Unreal Development Kit became available and almost everybody in our school wanted to use the new hotness, so that's what we learned. I ended up going on to work at Epic on the engine itself and since leaving, I still work in Unreal.
I've never truly given Unity a chance though...and we'll see if I ever do at this rate. I'm not under the illusion that Epic is a paragon of morality when it comes to monetization, but man, Unity, what were you thinking?
Edit: I think companies should hire John as a consultant, just to do the opposite of his ideas.
You accidentally said 2023 instead of 2024 when talking about the new unity model.
The new model will absolutely kill small devs that get pewdiepied- as in a game gets featured by a big youtuber and goes viral.
It bothers me that you don't explain how John Riccitiello came to be the Unity CEO. CEOs don't just wander into town and take over. Who was part of the decision to hire him at Unity and why? Was it those three nice guys from the beginning? Seem to have plenty of quotes from them before the change...
Of course an EA executive had something to do with this mess
If you are subscribed to Unity on UA-cam or other social media and only want to hurt their numbers, unsubscribe/un-follow them to show them the repercussions for what they did.
Too bad that ain't going to mean jack to a big company like that.
@@DFX4509B It's a fairly harmless thing that just has them see some numbers drop for popularity.
Here's a *_crazy_* concept that's so _amazingly unreal_ that it's _probably not even true:_ Engagement is more important that followers or subscribers.
Seriously though, there's a reason the subscription tr*de (this might get auto-filtered, not taking my chances) trend died: People realized subscribers who don't engage is more harmful than helpful.
I love how you people think you're actually going to accomplish anything at all. Unity still runs the show and that's not changing any time soon. Godon't 😂
It's actually better to stay subbed, but never click on the videos. That will tank the channel.
EA just continues to find new and excruciating ways to be a blight to the game industry!
It's a shame because underneath you got some good games underneath all the crap... sometimes
@@slopesgameroom Yep! And that makes it even worse!😢
EA has been a villain for so long, I remember over 15 years ago OverClocked Remix made an April Fools joke saying they were bought by EA and renamed themselves EA Remix.
@@ccricers God, has it been that long? I feel like I'm gonna turn to dust soon...
Sounds like Riccitiello is a parasitic psychopath who's never played a game without thinking of addictions and additions. Riccitiello's eyes say a lot of how damn many demons are in that guy's childhood.
It's truly sad that Unity started as a labor of love, and allowed so many to get into game development, only to hire and absolute scumbag who destroyed all that good will in one night.
Wow, you produced this video very quickly. You missed a few additional points of contention: the fee waiver if the game used ironSource (owned by Unity Technologies by the way) for ads and the retroactive changes to the Unity EULA for those that agreed to older versions of the EULA (they also tried to do this in 2019 but backtracked and promised not to do it again).
Just finished video. Wow! I'm speechless other than "How?", like the level of couldn't you have prevented this so easily or within reason? Doesn't look like it at all. Love me some older Unity stuff and it was fun while it lasted! Might want to hang on to those games a little more carefully to save the goodness. 🍻🌎♥️🎶🕺
Cause Riccitiello is just another Nero Nimrod dipsh**.
Welp, yeah... time for Godot to shine, I suppose.
On the plus side of the all crap Unity tried to do, it did lead people to seak out & support several up & coming engines. I believe several companies donated a large sum of money to Godot. I also wouldn't be surprised if there's going to be renewed interest in the Blender game engine from either the Blender Foundation or by devs looking for more open source alternatives.
There's actually been an unofficial effort to resurrect BGE ever since it was removed from Blender back when 2.8 came out. It's called UPBGE but I don't know much else about it.
Another 3rd party open-source project replacing Blender Game Engine is Armory3D.
You forgot the part where the CEO and board members sold their stock before the announcement and that this was an attempt to put App-lovin out of business.
Thank you!
There was a need for a video not only clearing up what contract changes were actually made instead of listening to people not knowing what they are talking about. It was also great to chronical the rise of unity so we can contrast how they've fallen from grace.
Thanks again
/Bo
You're welcome! Thanks for the comment mate
The whole Unity debacle (and a course sale over at Udemy) caused me to pivot a bit on my next game. Godot is what I'm assessing now...if I mesh well with GDScript it'll probably wind up being what I use. It's not just the drama...it's BLOAT. Unity is larded down with a ton of backend that just gets in the way of making a clean build of a smaller game that doesn't need ad or microtransactions tools. Still a great dev environment, but I'm gonna use this as an excuse to try the other guy(s). Wish me luck.
Godot supports C# as well! GDScript is definitely favoured atm, but apparently the C# integration is making big strides.
I came from python so GDScript is perfect for me, but I’m glad to see that they’re trying to support C#, given how popular it is with games.
good luck
22:20 wow what an absolute parasite.
the way that he even describes the scenario is completely detached from any actual game play model.
he has no fkn clue what he is talking about. he simply imposed himself into an industry and is trying to squeeze it for all its worth
Unity should become open source quickly, then maybe I'll go back.
One person devs will end up begging jacksepticeye or markiplier to NOT feature their games because they wouldn't be able to afford the cost of going viral
They hired a EA CEO. Oooooooh, oh no.
I’m hoping that whatever the US has as a Securities Commission takes a look into the share dumping that occurred before the announcement. Maybe we’ll get lucky and that cancer of a CEO does some time for it (before being released to become a CEO of an American Health Insurance company I’m sure).
it's certainly insider trading
I didn't even know unity was dead. that's how much i keep up with gaming these days :(
Trust will slowly be regained, but not as long as John, not deserving of a last name, Guy is CEO. Force him to apologize and fire that bastard
Great video Dan! Love your documentaries! It's incredibly unfortunate that Unity's case (of handing over ownership to a corporate scumbag) is just another one of many involving developer or community-centric studios, companies, applications or platforms. I don't know about everyone but after twitter, unity, reddit, youtube and others I can't help but wonder, looking at the alternatives that come out and everyone hypes: "How long until the founders or co-founders sell it to a greedy CEO that will go against every idea this started with?"
I guess even the most apparently well intended teams of founders and creators eventually sell their communities out if they're offered enough $.
They still need to fall harder and deeper. I wish for them to crash to the ground and for the CEO to become a pariah in the industry, someone no board of investors will ever hire for fear he'll drag the company to the ground and beyond.
It's too late! They wacked the beehive and they are now suffering from the stings!
It's unreal how much unity had divided us.
I keep saying, 1983 is coming back.
Very interesting. Although I have followed the debacle over the past few days, I was not aware of the particular individual responsible. It is good to see greed getting some pushback and this needs to happen throughout the world before corporations really do bring an actual 1984 global society. There will be very few gams to play then.
When greed overwhelms common sense and realism.
This new pricing model is exactly why Unity bought the spyware company. I can bet you top dollar that the same spyware is being hooked into unity game engines so that they can keep track of installation counts. At this point everyone should just consider Unity as spyware itself and stay far away from it.
Situations like the recent Unity kerfuffle make me feel glad I make games for a system thats been dead for decades haha. No extra fee's or charges with ol' handhelds.
I'm surprised you skipped the various controversies, but it's really cool to learn more about their early history. Particularly the 2019 harassment scandal.
Yeah, It was amazing seeing this all unfold. I want to know why nobody in the room told him this was a terrible idea lol. I know some programmers told the higher ups it was going to cause a problem, but where was everyone else lol? I feel like he didn't make that decision alone and I would be weary of anyone that was on the board, or worked as a higher up at Unity during all of this lol.
There was a death threat that was investigated, and it turns out it came from inside the company. If a company gets a death threat from inside the company it says something
You can't just tell a CEO "no." You'd get fired or have your life threatened.
as far as we know it was CONSTANTLY people telling the executives this was a dumb idea for months and they did it anyway.
Being a Mac user from early 2000’s I’ve been following Unity from its inception and this whole thing is just sad
Unity has always had a tumultuous history of constantly changing focus: from Mac development, to games that run in your browser, to an easy path to release games on both computers and platforms, to 3d animation and now to just, well, profit it seems.
The engine has always held a place close to my heart, I’ve always defended the engine when it was maglined an incorrectly blamed for the poor performance often found in games using it
I still believe it’s a good product, it’s not surprise UE4 basically ripped off its fundamental design, but it’s beyond question that they fucked everything up
Good thing Godot is a thing, but for people who need to deploy on console it looks it’s either UE or pay someone to port your game
Yeah, I coulda gone down the route of explaining that this mind set has been on the cards for a while. Constantly upgrading the software to better fit the mobile market more than the console market .. because... money!
It's all very sad
@@slopesgameroom they never had a solid vision unfortunately and it ended up costing them dearly, getting in bed with corrupt leadership that only followed the money
I think the breaking point for me was when all focus went to the asset store and trying to create a marketplace with some good content but ultimately a lot of filler they could get a cut of the profits of
It's not a bad thing per say, but a lot of the focus really went on integrating the asset store instead of making the Editor or the engine better
Actually no, what really sealed the deal for me was the fact I had a pretty big bug reported that lingered for years and was ultimately closed as "wontfix" because quote "This doesn't impact many people anyway"
The bug in question impacted the macOS platform, the very OS the engine was born for.
Unrealted to the video, I just wanted to say I got my copy of the Slope's Game Room Complete SEGA History Vol. 1 in the mail today, and WOW this Bluray is packed to the gills! The menu is awesome, I have found a couple easter eggs (I was cheap and did not get the slipcase version, so gotta catch em all on my own). Really looking forward to digging into the whole disc, what a treat! I hope there is a volume 2 in the future.
Wow dude. Thanks ever so much :D
Whatever you do, defo don't go to the bonus features and wait 60 seconds
BARREL
GREEN CAR
FLAGS
@@slopesgameroom Haha, thanks! I will be sure to not do that. 😉 Seriously, this Bluray is awesome!
@@slopesgameroom Hahaha, that was awesome and spooky!
Reminds me of the recent mess with OneD&D and the new OGL. Somebody saw their customer base as under-monetised and in attempting to monetise their customers broke trust and had the previously stable customer base rapidly looking for alternatives. Paizo (who make Pathfinder, D&D's nearest competition) likely made bank on that particular disaster.
Personally I welcome our new Unreal and Godot overlords. And hope Riccitiello gets all the love from the company owners that he deserves, having broken the value of the company with a single decision. (Which I gather was firmly opposed by most of the internal developers even before it went public.)
You can thank Hasbro and their shareholders for it.
33:10 "it's hard to imagine a future where Unity remains one of the big players"
Let's just see about that. He posted this End of September, 2023.
Company was valued at 11-12 billion dollars.
If you are reading this in 2025 or later, check and see how Unity is doing!
UPDATE: This fee is no more, but the damage has already been done
In regards to the Per-Install fee, they wanted to charge per install and reinstall. So my Steam Account on my PC and Steam Deck would be two installs, 40c. Oh and when I get a new GFX card that's a Third install so 60c. One purchase and three installs and it just keeps increasing.
Exactly this... it's insanity
I only have one thing to say those fleeing avoid Epic aim for godot so we can have a decent open-source engine it is alright but could be so much better. Epic doesn't deserve kindness in all honesty they are pure ivory tower elitist brats. The stories I could tell of shit I dealt with from them.
If I was playing an fps and the game asked for ANY amount of real money to reload my gun... I uninstall the game immediately, refuse to support the companies behind it ever again.
Imagine if the game devs just passed it to gamers and started charging the users $0.20 each time players installed their game, especially if it was a "free-to-play" game.
It would make more sense to just charge 20 cents per sale, but imagine you selling your game for 1 dollar or as some games even go on sale for 5-10 cents, which would mean, it would cost those developers to sell their game!
A percentage is the only logical way and maybe cap the total amount, such as, if you were to make software you sell for 10k, you wouldn't have to pay more than 1 dollar per sale.
Loyalty to a corporation is the most misplaced loyalty there is
Hahaha agreed
We need to start charging Riccitiello 10 dollars for each word that came out of his stinking mouth.
We need to charge him 10 bucks for even breathing a single air, that'll teach him. No one is going to be able to live knowing they'll get charge unknowingly from games they made.
Sweet! A Slope's video! I think you are fantastic and love your style, attitude, humor etc .... good depth and honesty in my opinion! Much love and good wishes for you and your loved ones. Appreciate what ya do! 🍻🌎♥️🎶🕺
Ahhhhhhhhhh dude. thanks so much
@@slopesgameroom sir, you are welcome and deserve it. Thank you for being you and just keep it up as best as ya can. 😁 Hearing the "Burnout" music gave me the chills and "feels", I have always loved that game so much. I think my fav ever is Burnout Paradise with a custom soundtrack and the need to release some frustration or just fun and kids loved playing party mode except I wasn't allowed to participate or I had to have something to impair my gameplay because I played it more than anyone and the hours played reflected lol Have a wonderful day! 🌎♥️🏎️🚒🚑🎮
P.S. - you just made me realize how the pay to play things games have is just like an endless "Arcade" (for the creator or others involved):in your pocket similar to spending $10 or $20 in quarter at the local arcade, just always available and more expensive. At least arcades were/are fun! 👾🕹️
You and I feel the same about John.
Great video, Slope!
Thanks buddy
Thanks you very much for another great video explaining the current situation
My pleasure!
C'mon, the body isn't even cold yet!
As much as I dislike how these executives think of games, this isn’t something new in recent years.
Literally EVERY commercial arcade game was made with one thing in mind: How can a game be made, changed or added to, to make as much money as possible?
Yet we look at these arcade games very fondly today. Will this happen too with micro-transaction filled games 20+ years from now...
Great video as always! Indie game developer here, I was looking at Unity for my next game but going with Godot now.
**Shaking my head and sticking with Godot.**
I've been wanting to start getting into game development for a while now and have been thinking about learning Unity. While I'm probably never going to make any game that's going to sell, I don't really want to support a company like Unity. It's hard to trust them after they tried pulling something like this. Who knows what scheme they'll come up with next.
the reverb when reading the quotes is outta control man lol
Not a fan?
Given that the recent mess included a death threat from within Unity itself, I think its safe to say that John Riccitiello is cruising for a past tense Wikipedia entry. On a totally unrelated note, when y'all have time, everyone should go and watch "The Take", a 2005 documentary about the Worker-Recovered Enterprises Movement in Argentina.
Unity should be renamed Divide-N-Profit
Individuals like that should be barred from the game industry and shunned… Hollywood has this thing called blackballing, which essentially makes you blacklisted per se
If a controversial individual like this word become CEO of another company, I would encourage anyone that has stockholdings for the company to sell them to make a statement
The way that this apparently went down I was not sure of but because this video I now have that context and I’m absolutely appalled
Edit: they most likely conceited there changes, because there was no way that is going to hold up in a court of law. If they actually went through with these changes, then it would only be a very short maritime before any large companies are being affected by this file a class action lawsuit, because this is underhanded, and would be even more, so if it retroactively applied to already installed numbers
Is it possible their CEO is a trojan horse so to speak?
If you listen carefully you can hear EA laughing.
I've had that ringing in my ears since the 90s
This is why something like this needs to be set as a GPL for the engines like this. Therefore it would be challenging for this to happen, and if they tried it, it'd immediately fork off into its own separate project. We don't need another Java situation.
WOooo another "The Rise and Fall" video.
It's too bad Unity didn't have royalties built in from the get go, but that seemed to be the appeal.
I feel like it still might be a bit too soon for this video. More is very likely to happen.
16:00 You are correct. FarmVille uses Flare3D engine.
Great video. You break things down in an enjoyable and interesting way. Well done.
Ahhhhh appreciate that mate. It was super interesting to research
I had my doubts before watching this, but it's the best examination of this whole debacle I've seen. Kudos Great job. 😀👍
Wow, thanks!. Really appreciate that mate. The way I see it is it's very easy to just read the news and agree with what's being said. But actually showing off the history shows in greater detail just how terrible this actually was
@@slopesgameroom
Yes you really connected the dots well IMO, but one thing I don't understand, is how Unity is the most popular (or maybe second) game engine, and still they run at a massive deficit of USD $921 million out of $1.39 billion revenue? I seriously doubt Unreal is in a similar position, but I can't find the numbers anywhere.
Also shows how impressive the achievements of Godot are, with a tiny tiny budget of $25000/month compared to Unity $100+ million per month!! Now Godot has doubled in contributions, but it's still peanuts.
Godot's about to get a lot more popular, especially now that it has options for console publishing. It always was better for 2D projects than Unity it was just the console angle that was holding it back.
I'm a big fan of Godot, and this video makes me very glad to be one.
Fantastic rundown, a nice little trip down Memory Lane.
Why am I really not shocked to learn that this downfall all started when they employed an ex-EA CEO 😂
Goo Ball had to be an interesting game :')
Yeah. It's weird to think it has mechanics that even monkey ball hasn't implemented in at least one of its many releases
that guy has done more harm to gaming than anyone else so far ever had. change my mind
Got to the part when you mentioned John / EA and it all made sense :( Great video!
Cheers mate
you have such a dope speaking voice. think about voice acting.
What sorta character should I play?
@@slopesgameroom kinda like bender from futurama but less mean.
@@slopesgameroomAnything! You have a wonderful voice and might just need some experimentation, but I reckon you'd rock and find something you clicked with. Maybe have a couple of AI engines create some examples for ya and see what you find. ❤ Something like what would be a good game character for "Slope's Game room" or based on the host, but in sci-fi flavor or midieval knight, any genre you can think of or prefer... Might be fun or at least interesting trying different options you probably know of better than myself by far. 🍻🌎♥️🎶🕺👾🕹️
Nice Sonic shirt 😊
This feels a lot like Avid with ProTools...
Wow! Unity "groundbreaking technology"?
UA-cam didn't alert me, but I'm here anyway!
16:03 Okay slopes I look up what engine that Farmville use and it's a user engine by the name of flame3D
I'm working on my own engine, which is built for retro pixelart style games. Soon, I'll move the sprite rendering to the GPU, which is pretty complicated if you want to avoid pixel-misalignment (turning off texture filtering is just half the battle).
I wish there was a ❤ button for your videos. Just outstanding.
when greed goes wrong...
Poor Riccitiello. Guy probably grew up unloved by his parents and having not loved anyone and anything meaningful in his life, for only a loveless person could come up with such vile monetization plans in video gaming, of all things.
This didn't make me laugh... promise
Unity has 4K employees, I assume they are paying a lot of bloat
John is richer and more powerful than this comment section combined. Our world allowed this.
when the Palpatine (rickitello) rule the kingdom ... everyone suffer
That floating head 😳
it is a bit sad to see this complete history only after the drama. I've used unity for a long time now and always loved it and was always disappointed most people only thought it was "that thing people use to make crappy games" because of requiring a splash screen on the free version.
I was VERY outspoken and against unity's recent fee change, but now I'm personally pretty happy with the most recent changes to the fees after the outrage as apparently unity was never actually making money since they did not benefit when a game does well, unlike unreal which has already had a 5% rev share. with as unprofitable I have always heard unity was I have always been worried about the day they just pulled the plug on it, a lot of their troubles come from them getting involved with way too many industries stretching themselves VERY thin, while the game engine really ended up being a back burner project for them at this point
the developers of unity engine itself are great people and were fully against these changes as many were outspoken about it on their twitter accounts
the CEO is a moron and I really hope unity dumps him soon
but yeah, I love unity, I don't see myself not using them, but I really hate their executive team