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It will never be repaired as long as John Riccitiello controls the gaming Unity as the Senate. He's too dangerous to keep Unity under his control... *Star Wars*
Thr trust can be repaired once that demonspawn CEO booted out. But again he becoming CEO reflect the shareholders, people that mostly profit oriented or not even play videogames at all having ghe power to hire that demonspawn scumbags as CEO. So its not likely to hapoen soon until Unity finally fall out from indies or mobile game market as game engines which we will witness in early 2024 I think.
Let's just keep this in mind. If they had stuck to their guns 100% and ignored the devs, they would eventually have gotten the attention of Nintendo since some of their games are made with Unity. You can only imagine the bloodbath that would ensure if they attempted to fight Nintendo. At the end of the day, Unity has universally tainted their trust and reputation and no one will look at them the same again.
Not only that, the creators of Genshin Impact would've gotten involved as well, because that's also made in Unity. I can only imagine how bad it would've gone for them attempting to force a Chinese company to pay up for simply using Unity as their software
@@michaelbk0076Hoyoverse actually uses a custom version of Unity that they licensed and bought rights to 5-6 years ago. Meaning it’s managed by Hoyoverse themselves and they aren’t beholden to Unity.
I really don't think so. Not because I think they are above that, but because I don't think they would have let the dumpster fire go on for 10 whole days if they had this ready. It's just too long to let people complain and explore other options. I think it's more likely they weren't expecting such a massive backlash and they have been panicking trying to figure out new conditions to fix it.
I'd like to note something EXTREMELY important : Nowhere do they say that what they did, retroactively changing the contract, was illegal or should not have been done. They're saying that they should have talked to the community, listened, the usual corporate stuff...but they're not saying that their actions were illegal or wrong in that regard. Given how deliberate the wording of the announcement had to have been, it means they're keeping that line of maneuvering open. Just like some companies did with microtransactions, they'll make something outrageous, backtrack after the backlash, and then slowly gnaw away until it becomes the accepted norm. Believe me, with that EA leech at the helm, Unity will be revisiting that someday, once they've dug deep enough to erode the resistance.
The thing about that, though, is that they can't revisit shit if nobody uses their game engine anymore. There is straight up an *exodus* among all devs that used Unity, and no half assed apology will change the fact they tried to retroactively make people owe them thousands.
Devs and studios look a lot harder at their bottom line than consumers. This isn't about "should I buy that pink cat onesie skin," this is about their existence.
Because this isn't a complete revert, it feels like this is one of those "We present you an absurd option that nobody will accept, and then we show you a second option that you also wouldn't normally accept, but because we showed you the stupid option first, the bad option suddenly feels like a compromise" tactics
Exactly! That shit has been happening for years. They're not slick enough for you, me and the others that agree. I'm still going with another engine if I ever start. I wish every other dev the best.
On a completely unrelated note, when creating Batman: The Animated Series, the writing team would often propose things they knew would never make it past the censors in order to make the things they actually wanted to do look much less bad in comparison. By going far beyond what they knew was acceptable they could ensure their ability to do things that would have gotten the ax if proposed on their own. Anyway, I'm sure this whole thing with Unity has nothing to do with that kind of thing, though.
I know Animanics did that... that's how the "finger Prince" gag got in. it was supposed to be a throwaway gag for the censors to catch, only they didn't catch it! Yakko: Number one sister, dust for prints. (sometime later) Dot: I found Prince! (She is seen carrying the eponymous pop star in her arms) Yakko: No no no, finger prints. (She looks at the pop star, who smiles.) Dot: I don't think so. (She then tosses him out through the porthole.)
@@ahettinger525 That was one tactic, another was the fact that they had Spielberg (at the time was a giant in the industry) backing their efforts and pretty much subdued the censors. Also the majority of their jokes were subtle enough to have kids just not getting it. Made you almost feel bad for the censors at the time. Almost.
This is a very common business tactic. 1. Test the waters with a unreasonable offer/demand. 2. Pay attention to the response. 3. Adjust accordingly and get what you actually wanted. I've never seen it used with such little tact, but it's the same strategy used by pawn shops when you try to sell something. They'll say they can only give you $100 when they'd actually be ok giving you $150. That way you'll feel like you got a good deal when you successfully haggle them up to $120, but that's just because they said they can only go up to $100. The pawn shop still came out $30 ahead. It's an unreasonable offer followed by the mitigation of it's impact.
If you have ANY form of business management training that's one of the first things you will learn: A lot (if not most) companies set their initial price way too high so when they introduce the discounts people will think "I have to buy it, I will save money". BUT: The actual targeted price from the start is the price after the discount. AND people don't understand that they NEVER save money if they spend it on non-essential stuff. Even if you just pay a Cent. You still spent a Cent. You only actually save money when you don't buy.
That's a common tactic in trade relations too: ask for a lot more pay per hour, settle for far less, demand crunch time, settle for overtime. The point is while you're arguing over numbers, you don't question the narrative underneath; in Unity's case, the new ToS. Once you've bought consent for the new ToS with a minimal price, and habits have settled in, you're free to jack up the price by increments. Boiled frogs and all that...
Don't be fooled, I would not be surprised if this is all a tactic to wait till all things cool down before they quietly do it in anyways or make new loopholes or upgrades to it.
I was kinda thinking the same thing. Typical negotiation strat. Give outrageous demand, then scale back to make the otherside feel like they got a good deal.
And to pretend like what they decided on wasn't their original intention hidden behind a fake exaggeration to make us accept the "better" original intended result
This literally looks and feels like what Wizards of the Coast did to the Open Game License change they wanted to implement to profit off from its usage. It crashed and burned and so many have chosen to leave it behind and have continued to do so. Honestly this speaks of greed and attempting to grasp onto someone else's success with out doing anything different from the day before.
Except it's somehow even dumber. At least WotC only tried picking a fight with us poor people (and still lost), Unity tried picking a fight with a *MULTI-TRILLION DOLLAR* industry.
Yeah, between this and wotc, I'm surprised people haven't learned their lesson. Wotc tried it and everyone jumped ship and told them to go suck on ice while creating their own versions of stuff half out of spite, half because they enjoy it.
If Unity really wants to regain some of that lost trust, two more things they can do that will show some integrity: -Fire the genius that came up with the idea; -Have the CEO step down from his position. If he was the one that had the idea in the first place, then disregard this step and focus on the previous one.
There's no way to regain the trust that you lose from "We've decided to retroactively change every contract everyone's ever signed with us to the tune of charging them millions of dollars." If they're willing to try this once, they'll be willing to try it again. Unity is dead, switch to something else, preferably Godot.
this was premeditated backlash. meaning they did the worst option then apologize then give a less horrible version. they get what they want to begin with. i am tired of this scam. that's like charging me $90 for a band aide then i yell at them they apologize and say well the band aide cost me $5. but in reality, the band aide cost the $0.15. once someone or company takes advantage of you like this, they will keep doing it over and over again.
@@victorhahs3798 "There was a breakdown in communication and expectations were not as clear as we would have liked. Going forward, only 50 coked out rats per concert and they will all be carrying sprinkles so as to make the experience more family friendly"
Make no mistake. They did the "Big Ask". Then they back off and make it sound like they are doing everyone a favor. Then later they will slow role out bigger and bigger fees. Let's hope these developers do not fall for it and just completely abandon the engine.
All they did was make it sound nicer but they got the new system already in place bet you before long it will be worse and screw the developers over in the end.
And then when devs get so far in with development they will end up in the "sunk cost" fallacy. Bait people in with a seemingly more palatable proposal just to employ the tactic later on.
I’m happy for the small indie devs using unity who no longer have to worry about this, and for the fact that previous games will no longer have to retroactively deal with extra fees. But it’s too late for Unity, they’ve burned up all their trust.
Yep that's for sure I would suggest that new users use a another engine because after all that crap I wouldn't trust them again? These company's were really going to screw the small developers like real hard personally I would leave. I don't really care what they said 🤷 I would move on anyway.
@@hyperfusiongear9050agreed, they’ll probably do so after finishing any games that are already far along with the engine, but I won’t blame any indie devs that don’t want to risk even that
Even if devs started to trust again, I can't see most devs genuinely staying anyways. They are either handcuffed to using outdated Unity or move onto the new version of Unity in 2024 and have to deal with the new fees. Seems like a lose-lose if you stick with Unity. Best to move on now.
@@jenniferhamels1176 yea there's no one left that would ever trust unity after they did this they've done it once and without any notice, what's to stop them from doing it again? Can you trust someone like that with a loaded gun to your back?
Indie devs legitimately better still switch and be ready to tell them to piss off if they ask for money, as retroactively changing agreements and charging you for it is very illegal, know your rights and don't trust companies like this, one fuck up is enough to be considered a liability.
17:05 - 17:09 I read comments about this on Muta's video referring to this as the Door in the Face technique. It's a negotiating technique, and it's basically what Unity has done with this new policy, you intentionally pitch something that you know nobody will ever accept, (which they did, since upper management moved ~37.5k shares of stock out of Unity,) then you make the pitch that you were going to make anyway, and people will look at it and think "oh, yeah that's much more reasonable," without realizing that you still took that one step forward, because in their mind, it's so much better than the last pitch you made. If I were a developer, I would never trust Unity again until that CEO is out the door.
The thing that Unity doesnt understand is you can trample on the trust of consumers all you like; they don't have long term financial interests in your product or service. You can win them back easily and they have short memories. Businesses are the exact opposite. Trust is a giant concern because they do have long term interests and often large amounts of time/money wrapped up in their venture. Once their 'partner' is shown to be untrustworthy it triggers an alarm that they need to find a replacement ASAP because it imperils their future. At least they are pushing the fee forward to the next LTS to give devs some time to ditch Unity...
This might be the incentive a lot of devs needed to start learning how to use Godot, I know that after I learn the basics of programming Godot will be my first pick now while before it would have been Unity. I just don't trust them to not try something like this in the future again, cause like you said people have short memories. Maybe Godot will try to screw me too one day but until then I will stick with them.
@@Prototype-357 even if Godot Scrrew us, we can fork them since it was Fully open source with no strings attached not to mention "Currently" Godot Foundation is Non-Profit
It never fails to baffle me that companies are taken aback and surprised that their anti-customer and malicious policy changes create a dumpster fire. Are all of them run by egoistic megalomaniacs, or just most of them?
it could very well be a person taking the helm and selling stock before driving the company into the ground by trying to squeeze blood from the stone and dipping before bankruptcy
They aren’t surprised they are angry the targets aren’t submitting and their apologies is just trying to soothe the angry horde they created. They fully know what they are doing they just want us to be dumb idiots and give them all the money because they cant chill without all the money
I mean... statistically, it can't be all of them, but it sure seems like it. Like, I haven't seen a company that's not ran by an egotistical megalomaniac. Maybe we can say that it's most to the point where it's virtually indistinguishable from all? Like how the limit of 1 over infinity isn't 0 but for all intents and purposes, it acts like 0?
I'm no legal expert, but the whole idea that they can RETROACTIVELY decide to charge developers regardless of not having any prior legal agreements sounds illegal to me. Something tells me their legal team may have had something to say about their plans, and probably told executives to prepare for class action suits that would inevitably come from attempting to extort developers for past business.
They definitely had to backtrack for legal reasons. It is grounds for lawsuit to cause undo financial stress by unforeseen changes to any agreement verbal, contract, TOS, or otherwise via promissory estoppel. Also they wouldn't legally be able to enforce the payments for studios that couldn't afford it via impossibility/impracticality because any agreement where one party isn't reasonably believed to be able to hold up their end at the time of creation is not legally enforceable.
@@thanatosdriver1938 not to mention in some countries, changes made by one party years down the line, regardless if the secondary accepts the "accept updated terms and condition", cannot and will not be enforced by law and depending on how predatory the changes are. The party responsible for the new changes can be charged heavy fines for even trying this.
Remember, the Unity CEO is the former EA CEO, who once "proposed" the idea of charging people real money whenever they ran out of ammo in Battlefield games. Old habits die hard it seems...
If I'm a developer unity just taught me that they are fully willing to retroactively charge money for using their product, who in their right mind would ever do that? Every time I would consider unity for use in a project in the back of my mind I would say "yeah but they could also decide to charge me later on like they tried to do before and was only stopped because of the absolutely massive backlash."
Between the initial policy announcement and this open letter, I can all but guarantee that many conversations and many meetings have already taken place within Unity regarding how to eventually implement those changes after the backlash has died down.
Not even sure firing John Riccitiello would actually help, he probably had a lot of free rein to putting like minded individuals in key leadership positions. Many of which himself included prior to announcement sold a decent portion of their stocks. Even if he were gone you can't really trust them to not attempt to pull something shady like this in the future.
Unity has already shown its colors. It's willing to make significant decisions without even getting feedback from its customers. Time to move on to another platform. It's only a matter of time until they pull this stunt again to test the waters.
exactly, if I was a developer I wouldn't trust my whole company and life work on something they can just switch up their policy one day and starting charging me way more For smaller Devs that will completely ruin their finance as one day they have X Salary and X amount of budget than next minute they have tens of thousands more in outgoings
@@Lollburger88 "As gamers we need to avoid new games made in Unity" I usually try to avoid Unity games anyway. Most of them have crappy UI, bad performance and graphics. Some exceptions exist of course.
After this fiasco you'd have to be insane as an indie dev to build your game in Unity going forward. Even with the reversal after the backlash, it would be a risk to the future of your studio. I think Unity cooked itself with this one.
I have a feeling they got exactly what they wanted. I have this nagging feeling they made it initially as aggregious as possible so that when they pulled back people would be happy we 'won' while they still get to take money from developers. One of the reasons I have for this theory is that they didn't announce how they were going to track it installs. why? Because they never actually made it, I doubt they would really care about a proprietary data tracking software that much. I'm fairly certain It didn't exist, so that wheb they go all the backlash they can bequeath that role on the developer themselves. So less work from them, less manpower needed and more money made for little to no effort.
Let's be honest here, it doesn't matter even if they walk back on the entire thing and ask everyone to forget it and they apologize. The damage has already been done and all that goodwill Unity has built up for years among the community is gone, and it's not coming back. Now whenever indie devs want to make a new game they are gonna steer clear of Unity and go to another engine that won't pull shit like this
@@purpzz6285 Update on that... he sold over 50,000 stocks through out the past 12 months, without any buy backs. So it likely IS intentional insider trading while trying to make money off of destroying the company he's running.
Announce a new fee so outrageous that it sparks outrage, then roll it back to something less awful so they look like they are listening and arent greedy
I love the unity response. "We're sorry you got mad." I really hope a new developer takes advantage of this and comes up with something that can ruin their whole market share.
@@ninjareaper4828 So, I looked up a lot of stuff and I found that yes for most problems there is an answer easily to be found on godot's stackoverflow'ish ask page, but don't expect the replies to have more than 2 upvotes, lol Maybe it makes sense to engage with the community to make it better for everyone
Finding out they were going to have to explain how their spyware is keeping track of installs must have scared them good! No way they were ever getting that data legit.
I happen to agree with Muta on this in his video on the matter: This is a clear walkback strategy. These kinds of number don't just come from nowhere. This change is something that they'd have to base future projections on, base their budgets on, and consider when considering potential investors and business arrangements moving forward. A successful business isn't going to do something like that in a reactionary manner. These things need to be considered and planned for. This "reversal" was planned. They most likely had an entire suite of contigency policy adjustments they were prepared to make until their customer base felt satisfied. This wasn't considered "in response to feedback" from anyone or anything. This is obviously a case of pushing the limits. No one should believe for a single instant that they had any kind of meaningful internal dialogue over this other than what contigency to present next due to public reception.
Don't accept their apology at all, this was after all, their intended goal, put something crazy up front, and walk it back to their original plan quoting "we've listened to your feedback..." for goodwill.
I disagree that this was their intended goal. Why would they put something crazy up front that would do far worse reputational damage to them, if they were planning to "walk it back to their original plan"? Nobody with even a bit of sense would think that game developers of all people would fall for that. You can argue that this entire situation lacks "sense" of course, but I suspect that the original plan was in fact their real plan, and that they simply didn't have the wisdom or good sense to avoid doing something so foolish out of greed. This decision by them wouldn't have bought them any good will even in a hypothetical scenario before the backlash. They likely banked on developers simply not being willing to give up their Unity Skills to switch and accepting the changes out of necessity, or perhaps were hoping this would fly under the radar, but that wasn't the case.
@@echomjp if you watch Yong's previous video it was mentioned that Unity conducted internal discussions regarding the policy and received internal feedback warning exactly what would happen, yet zero of those feedback was reflected in the publicly announced original runtime fee policy. That and the fact board members sold their stock 1 week before all this shit made it extremely likely that it was intentional to show something outrageous first then pretend to walk back to make the true goal more "acceptable" in public opinion
@@AkasagiPhan I did watch his previous video. I am sure that they did have internal discussions, but I just find it hard to believe that they were planning to walk things back like this. It would have been much more acceptable to developers and the public at large if they had announced this new policy in the first place. Though I also am willing to just assume they just were too incompetent to account for public opinion.
@@echomjp Look at it as gambling. You have stock in the company but want to turn larger profit; you run the company but want to turn a larger profit on products you already offer (no extra work). If you go in small you might get backlash that lowers stock, plus if backlash is strong you have nothing to show for the effort; you cant sell your stock off high and buy back low if you don't have a guarantee it'll be low. At the same time, you won't get your foot in the door making easy profit on unpopular practices unless you push for something big and dangerous. You sell off your stock at a high point then announce a MASSIVE change that will be met with universal condemnation; stock plummets, you can now use a fraction of what you earned selling high to buy back at the lower price (you pocket the extra money and or buy more stock than you had before). Faced with backlash from the idea you knew would never fly, you see how much you can safely dial it back while still keeping the core of this idea: If you start at 0, propose 100, and dial back to 15: You're still up 15 from your original 0. The shift from insane idea to reasonably unwanted idea still got an unsavory practice into effect: people accept the apology or at least don't fight it like they did the insane idea. You just got free money, more stock, passive income, _and_ a lot of PR (no such thing as bad publicity when it comes to business). People will move on and forget as they always do, and the CEO just proved he can become universally vilified then turn it around to "unlikeable at worst" at the snap of his fingers. He's a business man, and he knows how to play the game - he won and he knows it. People rarely unify long enough to topple giants, so all he has to do is kick back and watch his stocks slowly return to normal highs
Never forget that they were going to do something EXTREMELY illegal, retroactively changing the terms of a contract without the consent of the other parties. They had no qualms trying to openly break the law to make an extra buck, and as an organization, they can no longer be trusted. After all, indie devs wouldn’t have had the money to fight that legal battle, so who knows how long it would’ve taken to reverse it if they hadn’t backed down now?
While they have come out and said that you'd only have to abide by the terms of your current version of unity, there's nothing in their new terms that solidifies that. Also worth noting that their terms are written in such a vague way that they could claim the source code for any products you develop with their engine. I worked with a company that planned to use Unity for a project roughly six years ago. The lawyers spent three days reading over every word of Unity's ToS and EULA before coming back and issuing a hard "Fuck no." And suggesting we port it into Unreal before moving forward with development.
Not only is it illegal to retroactively change the Eula in how they did, but potentially company destroying in regards to a class action suit. Then again, the law means nothing anymore with corporations and people of money.
@@scrittle You forget that while Twitter/Reddit deal with consumers, Unity deals with businesses. A developer's skill in Unity doesn't mean squat if his boss does not want to do business with Unity.
@@Samu2010lolcats indie and solo devs do not have b2b relationships with unity. Stop pretending that every hobbyist that can afford to just bail is in a "business relationship" with unity. Youre not. Hobbyists leaving en masse doesnt really effect unity because they didnt make them any money anyway. I get that we all want to teach unity a lesson but this very much on the same level as a twitter protest. With the new terms, its seriously unlikely that many devs or studios with serious investment are going to leave. From what ive seen its mostly youtubers and hobbyists with no published titles that make up the majority of the "exodus". There is nothing foolish about sticking with unity if thats where you are comfortable, and if its what is most suitable for your project. I think people have had enough of the catastrophizing around how "anyone who stays with unity cannot be saved". Using unity is still a perfectly reasonable and safe course of action. Im not defending the handling of this mess from them, but its far from a death blow and far from having any effect on the majority of their users.
the majority of the folks that currently stayed are only doing so because they have active projects currently being worked on and already made statements that future projects will NOT be in Unity you also cannot dismiss that unlike with the reddit/twitter shtshow Unity is not dealing with its end users, they are Dealing with businesses that in some cases are bigger than themselves and they will NOT tolerate this sort of shannanigans. take for instance the vast majority of f2p games on places like Steam that happen ot use unity, main reason these games can be F2p is because the dev relinquised publishing rights making said publishers the ones liable ot lose money on this policy.they will not take that sitting down, between Vintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Vale and Apple these are a lot of enemies you'd rather not make. lastly many of the skills you acquire with unity3d translate well enough inot other 3d engines and it doesnt matter if you want to or no in a studio if the ppl in charge do not want ot have business with Unity, then you are looking at future training into a new engine(or a layoff) .@@scrittle
So long as their contract includes a "we can change the terms any time we f***ing feel like" line, they can't be trusted. For that matter, this applies to all companies that have that kind of language in their license.
I guess everytime i reinstall my games steam will charge me .50 cents per reinstall. Or game companies will recommend us to purchase more storage to prevent us from reinstalling our games.
The "self-reporting" is primed to turn into an issue, because they still said they're tracking what does and doesn't count as an additional install, which means they can arbitrarily refute whatever you report to them by showing you their own numbers based on whatever method they use to track all that.
You know, as bad as it would've been, I would've liked to see the outcome of the original deal, only because if they'd gone through with that, they would've inevitably come face to face with Nintendo and Hoyoverse, companies that have made games in Unity, and inevitably get sued into the ground for trying to force money from them. Because yeah, they're doing this to target small time indie devs, but regardless of that, it's still going to effect the big players of the gaming industry in SOME compacity, something which would've undoubtedly caused them to act
The funnier thing is that the big players have the money to pay those stupid fees, but would also fight the hardest to not pay them via lawsuits and stuff. Never get between a giant multibillion corporation and their two cents, they'll want to ruin your life and throw you in jail for that. And you know what, always happy to see big corpos duking it out, especially if one is clearly in the wrong. Love to see them destroy their reputation, trust, and lose absurd amouts of money in the process. What's not funny is the employees that don't want anything to do with the higher ups bs, they're the ones ACTUALLY taking the brunt of it, losing their jobs so the company can stay afloat and stuff. Because don't you dare suggest the CEO take a paycut like some certain other CEO that actually had a shed of integrity.
Hoyo uses a custom version of Unity according to another comment. Meaning they'd be unaffected by this issue, but I'm only repeating what the other person said. Nintendo, though... Unity would be ripped a new one.
@@scrittle Oh I'm not missing that at all. I'm well aware. Although, they def bit off more than they could chew with the initial proposals because it did a lot of damage, not just outcry that's quickly forgiven.
It is as they say "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it". Unity have lost the trust and goodwill it had accumulated over the many years with the community. With such a greedy move, they literally brought themselves back to square one and they have to work twice as hard to earn back the trust, no matter how much apologies they make now. It is truly saddening because its developers are some of the most talented in the field, but their management just so happen to be some of the most corrupt. I truly hope they take it as a harsh but vital lesson, and prove they are worth ever returning back to - but then again, that's a slim hope to ever look up to.
I think before people go back to this company they need to seriously consider the consequences. I don't usually believe in the nuclear option but at this point this company needs to be made as the example, they need to reap the consequences of greed. Everyone should go elsewhere, the only reason why people ever should go back to Unity, is if they SEVERELY reduce the cost of their product, and a complete staffing change and a corrective action plan. And even then people should be sleeping with one eye open.
They will continue their current running projects, but for new ones you certainly will have a “terms and conditions can change anytime” in the risk assessment.
I find it interesting that the web page for the "emergency walk back" looks more finished than the first website even though it was rushed out. I think people might be getting taken for a run here. What if they knew there would be backlash on a revenue increase and decided to intentionally be unreasonable and then walk it back. Just something interesting to think about.
Two steps forward, one step back. Slowly pushing the envelope. I say give them no forgiveness, and all unity devs should be considering a change soon. The part that sucks the most is the unity devs who will lose their job over this :(
In that world we’ll have no cellphones, laptops, affordable clothing, machinery & countless other things. It’s a shame we rely on predatory business to make products
@@stratifacations8377 I understood what you said. We ‘have’ ‘do’ & will ‘continue’ to rely on predatory business to make a ton of products. Nature of the beast. Like I said it’s a shame
Sorry that makes NO sense. Predatory behavior does not inherently cause innovation. Predatory behavior is in fact when things begin to become mediocre in multiple ways. Having plenty of technical Know-how, expert collaboration and an appropriate level of funding to facilitate research and development is what drives innovation. You can look at Free and Open Source Software that rely on no predatory behavior, such as incredible software like Godot, Blender, Libre-Office, the entirety of Linux Operating System Distributions, and so on, which directly contradicts the false rhetoric that "you wouldn't have anything without predatory behavior". It turns out that simply having a decent level of technical know-how around the world can by itself allow passionate people to collaborate and develop incredible things for free, WITHOUT an expectation of a return, relying on public funding. @@joshuatealeaves
Unity really found a way to recreate the whole "pay for bullets in the heat of the game" thing the CEO talked about while at EA. They're hoping people will buy in on the less scummy monetization practice. They tried to pull the whole foot in the door tactic and accidentally brought down the wall.
@@ayayron8221 think about how absurd paying to reload sounds. Now, imagine how bonkers it would be to see a game really attempt it. The fact that the same guy managed to find something even more greedy should not shock you, but it should disgust you.
I honestly don’t feel like this is enough… only a full back down… really hope developers show them how they feel by abandoning the engine while they still can
They still cut out the middle option (which I believe is $400 a seat?) and added royalties. They did the "make an extreme announcement then 'dial it back' to what they intended to make it look good" tactic but didn't expect people to actually ditch the brand. I understand if they needed to add royalties to be financially viable to a degree, but they also screwed devs over by nixing that middle-of-the-road option I mentioned. It's still a losing situation for customers.
Good. This is why we NEED competition. In anything. Otherwise we'll get a monopoly on the most popular or sometimes ONLY company/tech so they try and pull crap like this. We have the individual power to say no. If everyone did that, these guys wouldn't keep getting away with this. Good job devs! 💪
@@redlord4321it IS exactly about competition. Coz if Unity is a monopoly where no other game engine exists then they CAN get away with this coz devs wont have any alternatives to choose from. Thank god for competition. We got alternatives to go to if one company tries to fck around and find out.
Unfortunately, the universal law of capitalism is the formation of monopolies after some time. It's the basic state of this peculiar economic formation
Competition is not a fix. These companies are run by clinical psychopaths that understand exactly how to manipulate their tech illiterate boomer shareholders in order to continue to get away with their predatory and manipulative behavior. Even regulations and litigation have no chance of fixing it at this point. Nothing short of tall trees and strong rope will solve this corporate greed across all industries.
Standard modern tactic of demanding what you know people will complain about, and then back track to what you wanted in the first place so that it appears to be reasonable and acceptable regardless of the real increase.
This is why I only use open source engines for my projects and I'm very careful of the fine print on assets I purchase. My 3d Tower Defense / Arena fighter I'm working on atm is in O3DE and was initially prototyped in OGRE. I'm really interested in where Godot goes from here after all this. When I release any of my projects if any of them do good, I'm building my company around Open Source and Open Modding. If my future company builds a tool it will be available to every DEV and everyone I work with will be respected with no bullshit contracts. Revenue; 25% keep in house, 50% goes to new games and investors (if any) and 25% would be entirely allocated for community funded implimentations or paying modders. I wanna build a solid respectable studio that gives back.
Make sure to have backups done often, and on multiple hard drives, or usb drives. I was in game development classes back in the day. One of the other teams started talking about one game they'd started working on, outside of class. I'd heard great stories about what they were up to, then one day they came back broken hearted. They'd set up the jazz drive disk to delete the data after 3 attempts to access it with the wrong password, and someone had tried to access it 3 times. All that work over the course of several quarters? Gone. No extra backups at all.
IMO, it’s too little too late. Everyone’s already moved on to other, better engines. Unity brought this upon itself, and I can’t see it recovering from this utter breach of trust.
My friends and I theorize that they were trying to pull that whole thing the games industry loves to do now of announcing something worse, getting backlash, and walking back to something more acceptable, but they WAY overshot the mark on step 1. Seriously, anyone who can move away from Unity should, because there is no reason to believe they will actually not change shit again.
I know some of the groups that hack games could extract the tracker code that tells unity that a game has been installed and share it so you can fool the engine into sending the signal that the game was installed but you don't dowload the full game just a portion of the unity engine. Then you use virtual machines, and cha ching, you can have the thing make automatic installations then you just have to figure out what takes to be noticed and caught, they are definetly going for an automate solution to track any malicious behavior, no human until it is a real issue. Incredible how greed can blind anyone from the obvious.
Even EA thought this CEO was too greedy, let that sink in. It was so bad that EA had no choice but to kick him out due to being so greedy. He was ok with making people pay for reloading their gun and thinks any game without microtransactions is an idiot.
Not really!!! They did his idea if they could get away with it like they do screwing FIFA AND MADDEN PLAYERS.... Yash right in the Ass of madden and fifa players!!
I hope everyone transitioning from Unity to a new system is able to do so without much fuss or hardship ♡ I cant imagine the mental toll this must be taking on some of these developers 😢 Be well indi devs
Never give them another chance. Never forgive them. Tear them down. Never support them. They are never to be trusted again. They do not deserve anything.
If you're a Unity developer, you need to be asking for more right now. This is not a GOOD deal for you, and if you yield to this decision now without asking for anything in return, then you can expect this to keep happening in the future. From Unity, and other companies.
Straight up. This is the kind of screw up where the only bit of real resolution would be for Unity to pay devs to use their engine rather than the other way around. Anything less is essentially just an open door for another ploy to try to choke money out of devs. Unity didn’t just burn their trust. They obliterated it
My understanding (from encountering this apology etc. from other sources) is that the changes are good enough for 'finish the current project Then bail' rather than 'bail immediately', which is where it was before.
Improvement: Fire the CEO Results: Unity is going to have a fun next 3-5 years. /s Lesson: The community can get together, now if we can only go after microtransactions like this.
Honestly, if they started adding "Installation Trackers", that would just open a window for a hacker to break into that, and steal all sorts of information from PC's, consoles, phones, ect...
The walkback is good for people who already had games out on Unity or are so far into a project that switching engines is not feasible, however, they've already shown that they cannot be trusted and that they are willing to change the rules. Also, ultimately, they still feel entitled to more money for zero work; many developers using Unity will still be forced to fork over a lot of money whereas before they didn't.
2 thing both devs and players should keep in mind. 1. Unity DID buy and now owns a company that made malware, which means when you don't need to be only suspicious as a dev on how they would keep track of installs, but also the buyer who might not know what that game is putting on your computer and what all it's tracking. And 2. This is still a change made and being forced on people who used Unity that didn't agree to any of it. They are still changing their contracts and they can still do it again.
1. That is blatantly false. They bought and own a company that distributed ads, and because they didn't test the ads they ended up distributing some ads that contained malicious code. They did NOT make malware themselves. I get that you want to stay on the hate train but if you have to lie for that that just discredits your point immediately. 2. No. They backtracked on that. Thi snew thing only goes into effect with the next Unity version. Everyone who stays on the current or past versions of Unity keep the old contract. You only fall under the new contract if you decide to migrate your project onto the next LTS release of Unity. I understand that the trust is gone now and I would not go with Unity anymore because of this, but the new rule changes are completely fine. The way it's supposed to work now is completely reasonable and fine. 2,5% revenue share is far below the 12% that Unreal demands. And doing this with the next LTS version going forward is pretty standard too. The new version of this is 100% fine and reasonable. The issue is the broken trust because we simply can't know if they won't try this again next year.
Whether they choose to backtrack, wont change a thing, they've shown who they really are and how they can change things as they see fit. No company in their right mind would agree to it.
it is the same trick other companies have pulled, make very crazy changes that causes outrage, then wait a few days then apparently back peddle to a more "reasonable" option which is what the company wanted all along but managed to make it not sound as bad since they put a worse option out first.
Lets teach Unity CEOs a lesson by burying it financially to the point it becomes the next Gamestop. Make Unity the business disaster where other companies learn to NEVER bite the hand of their damn consumers EVER AGAIN!
that would be nice but we all know that a lot of developers decide to stay with the engine because they are either too far into development of their project or they have too much experience with this engine to simply move to another. so i don't think that's gonna happen
This apology feels so cheap cause it's so insanely obvious that their users would NOT be okay with just giving them more money in exchange for absolutely nothing. This is just stupid greed at it's peak.
actually, they could have got away with just raising their prices. It would have made the calculations for future projects less favourable to them, but it wouldn't have been all that big a deal. Problem was... they didn't just raise fees. They basically turned their product into a bomb that was highly likely to kill their customers. Metaphorically speaking.
@@Johngreggor99 You're proving my point. There's no pleasing people like you. It's in their best interest to ignore people like you who won't except that people make mistakes.
The Ceo sold his shares while the price was up, create the drama, the price drops. No surprise if he starts buying shares again with the lower price. This could easy by a stunt to make more money.
I'm barely a gamer and I've been all over this situation like stink on shit. The audacity of it shocked me, and I agree that the trust will be hard to rebuild.
This isn't an appology to the developers. Its an appology to themselves for getting caught Whats to say they won't try something like this again in the future?
They shouldn’t charge for installs at all. That’s like charging us for how many steps we’ve walked a day. You have to walk to get where you need to go, you have to install a game to play it..
I would not trust them on “self-reporting” they are not just going to trust people to report their earnings…they are going to have something in the runtime still tracking this stuff. They said they had some software to do it when this whole thing started. Unfortunately it just seems like a lot of devs will just forgive them because the splash screen is optional now.
I cannot believe they were so greedy that they thought they could pull this off with companies like Microsoft and Nintendo watching. What a bunch of idiots
We might want to check how much Unity stock these higher ups bought back before this "apology" lol. Not to mention these apologies are never a surprise. The backlash may have been more than expected but a partial reversal was probably always the plan as with most of these "woops we went too far, praise us for listening to our users" AAA stories.
Let's hope it won't go crazy again since i study more with Unity. I have already bought books for Unreal and Godot to take just a peek on the engine. (hint: humble bundle has it)
The way this is weirded suggests they'll eventually end the self reporting for installs. They go to great lengths to define what is a first installation...but why? After all, if they're really trusting devs to self report, why would they need to specify what should be counted as a first installation? I think they defined that so specifically because it gives them room later on to change what types of installations count for the fee. Also, what they tried to do with their original fee is basically exactly what Ricietello wanted to do with Battlefield: wait until their customers are too invested in the product and then start extracting more money from them, because they're already too deeply invested. That seems to be his one move in business and he's going to keep making it. He needs to go for this company to regain trust.
I'm glad to see somebody mentioning this lapse and logic about how unity is going to somehow track what games were purchased with bundles or not. I've been buying humble bundles since the start of the damn site, you just put in the key and boom you got the game. What are they going to do Make it so any Unity games made with a manually added key Don't count? Are they going to do the research and correlate what keys I've added and cross-reference them with historical bundle data?
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The damage to trust is already done, that will take a very long time to rebuild, if it can be repaired at all.
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Hey yong we’res the video?
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It's too late to apologize and no sorry business with them anymore.
It will never be repaired as long as John Riccitiello controls the gaming Unity as the Senate. He's too dangerous to keep Unity under his control... *Star Wars*
Thr trust can be repaired once that demonspawn CEO booted out. But again he becoming CEO reflect the shareholders, people that mostly profit oriented or not even play videogames at all having ghe power to hire that demonspawn scumbags as CEO. So its not likely to hapoen soon until Unity finally fall out from indies or mobile game market as game engines which we will witness in early 2024 I think.
Let's just keep this in mind. If they had stuck to their guns 100% and ignored the devs, they would eventually have gotten the attention of Nintendo since some of their games are made with Unity. You can only imagine the bloodbath that would ensure if they attempted to fight Nintendo. At the end of the day, Unity has universally tainted their trust and reputation and no one will look at them the same again.
Not only that, the creators of Genshin Impact would've gotten involved as well, because that's also made in Unity. I can only imagine how bad it would've gone for them attempting to force a Chinese company to pay up for simply using Unity as their software
@@michaelbk0076Hoyoverse already started hiring engine engineers.
It’s kinda silly to have one incident ruin your trust in something
@@chaserseven2886no its not, especially when millions of dollars and illegal actions are concerned
@@michaelbk0076Hoyoverse actually uses a custom version of Unity that they licensed and bought rights to 5-6 years ago. Meaning it’s managed by Hoyoverse themselves and they aren’t beholden to Unity.
This apology was 100% written before the runtime fee was ever announced. Unity really thinks we're this dumb
Agreed. And then they modified it along the way to deal with exactly the level of backlash they actually received.
*Salesman punches you*
"Hey I'm not going to punch you that hard next time, ok?"
You: *accept next punch happily, arms wide open*
I really don't think so. Not because I think they are above that, but because I don't think they would have let the dumpster fire go on for 10 whole days if they had this ready. It's just too long to let people complain and explore other options. I think it's more likely they weren't expecting such a massive backlash and they have been panicking trying to figure out new conditions to fix it.
@@m0-m0597I won't rob you as much as last time trust me lol
@@whynot5568I don’t think bungee is bad dispute what other people say I honest am happy to play there game destiny 2
I'd like to note something EXTREMELY important : Nowhere do they say that what they did, retroactively changing the contract, was illegal or should not have been done. They're saying that they should have talked to the community, listened, the usual corporate stuff...but they're not saying that their actions were illegal or wrong in that regard. Given how deliberate the wording of the announcement had to have been, it means they're keeping that line of maneuvering open. Just like some companies did with microtransactions, they'll make something outrageous, backtrack after the backlash, and then slowly gnaw away until it becomes the accepted norm. Believe me, with that EA leech at the helm, Unity will be revisiting that someday, once they've dug deep enough to erode the resistance.
The thing about that, though, is that they can't revisit shit if nobody uses their game engine anymore. There is straight up an *exodus* among all devs that used Unity, and no half assed apology will change the fact they tried to retroactively make people owe them thousands.
This is the classic they aren't sorry for what they did, they're sorry they got caught
Devs and studios look a lot harder at their bottom line than consumers. This isn't about "should I buy that pink cat onesie skin," this is about their existence.
I stopped resisting. Using godot now loool
he was TOO GREEDY FOR EA
Because this isn't a complete revert, it feels like this is one of those "We present you an absurd option that nobody will accept, and then we show you a second option that you also wouldn't normally accept, but because we showed you the stupid option first, the bad option suddenly feels like a compromise" tactics
I bet Unity's "compromise" is just a distraction from the actual problem.
Exactly! That shit has been happening for years. They're not slick enough for you, me and the others that agree. I'm still going with another engine if I ever start. I wish every other dev the best.
On a completely unrelated note, when creating Batman: The Animated Series, the writing team would often propose things they knew would never make it past the censors in order to make the things they actually wanted to do look much less bad in comparison. By going far beyond what they knew was acceptable they could ensure their ability to do things that would have gotten the ax if proposed on their own. Anyway, I'm sure this whole thing with Unity has nothing to do with that kind of thing, though.
I know Animanics did that... that's how the "finger Prince" gag got in. it was supposed to be a throwaway gag for the censors to catch, only they didn't catch it!
Yakko: Number one sister, dust for prints.
(sometime later)
Dot: I found Prince! (She is seen carrying the eponymous pop star in her arms)
Yakko: No no no, finger prints.
(She looks at the pop star, who smiles.)
Dot: I don't think so.
(She then tosses him out through the porthole.)
Ah, the good old South Park strategy, excellent!
Knowing how EA fucks up their games...i'm sure it's genuine
@@ahettinger525 That was one tactic, another was the fact that they had Spielberg (at the time was a giant in the industry) backing their efforts and pretty much subdued the censors. Also the majority of their jokes were subtle enough to have kids just not getting it. Made you almost feel bad for the censors at the time. Almost.
This is precisely my take on this. Unity knew exactly what they were doing.
This is a very common business tactic.
1. Test the waters with a unreasonable offer/demand.
2. Pay attention to the response.
3. Adjust accordingly and get what you actually wanted.
I've never seen it used with such little tact, but it's the same strategy used by pawn shops when you try to sell something. They'll say they can only give you $100 when they'd actually be ok giving you $150. That way you'll feel like you got a good deal when you successfully haggle them up to $120, but that's just because they said they can only go up to $100. The pawn shop still came out $30 ahead. It's an unreasonable offer followed by the mitigation of it's impact.
The actual business tactic:
1. CEO sells shares
2. Announce unreasonable demand
3. CEO hacks money by buying stock back cheaper
If you have ANY form of business management training that's one of the first things you will learn: A lot (if not most) companies set their initial price way too high so when they introduce the discounts people will think "I have to buy it, I will save money". BUT: The actual targeted price from the start is the price after the discount. AND people don't understand that they NEVER save money if they spend it on non-essential stuff. Even if you just pay a Cent. You still spent a Cent. You only actually save money when you don't buy.
"Here's a terrible price."
Community: REVOLT
"We heard you - here's a compromise."
Community: ok?
"Profit!"
That's a common tactic in trade relations too: ask for a lot more pay per hour, settle for far less, demand crunch time, settle for overtime.
The point is while you're arguing over numbers, you don't question the narrative underneath; in Unity's case, the new ToS.
Once you've bought consent for the new ToS with a minimal price, and habits have settled in, you're free to jack up the price by increments.
Boiled frogs and all that...
Yes, it's called a Big Ask.
Ask something absurd.
Then ask something less to make the offer look good.
Don't be fooled, I would not be surprised if this is all a tactic to wait till all things cool down before they quietly do it in anyways or make new loopholes or upgrades to it.
Agree; they're either sincere or just as you said, they're just waiting for this to blow over and quietly put their plan in place.
I was kinda thinking the same thing. Typical negotiation strat. Give outrageous demand, then scale back to make the otherside feel like they got a good deal.
You're forgetting one thing, they would get sued into bankruptcy if they even tried to do that
And to pretend like what they decided on wasn't their original intention hidden behind a fake exaggeration to make us accept the "better" original intended result
*cough* xbox one *cough*
This literally looks and feels like what Wizards of the Coast did to the Open Game License change they wanted to implement to profit off from its usage. It crashed and burned and so many have chosen to leave it behind and have continued to do so. Honestly this speaks of greed and attempting to grasp onto someone else's success with out doing anything different from the day before.
Corporate laziness and greed at its absolute shitty worst.
Exactly what I was thinking, yeah
Except it's somehow even dumber. At least WotC only tried picking a fight with us poor people (and still lost), Unity tried picking a fight with a *MULTI-TRILLION DOLLAR* industry.
Yeah, between this and wotc, I'm surprised people haven't learned their lesson.
Wotc tried it and everyone jumped ship and told them to go suck on ice while creating their own versions of stuff half out of spite, half because they enjoy it.
I remind you that was corporate mandate from Hasbro, but yeah, basically you're right.
If Unity really wants to regain some of that lost trust, two more things they can do that will show some integrity:
-Fire the genius that came up with the idea;
-Have the CEO step down from his position. If he was the one that had the idea in the first place, then disregard this step and focus on the previous one.
So u said the same thing twice.
It was the ex ea ceo... 😅
Unity went public ages ago, CEO doesn't make calls, its the Board.
There's no way to regain the trust that you lose from "We've decided to retroactively change every contract everyone's ever signed with us to the tune of charging them millions of dollars." If they're willing to try this once, they'll be willing to try it again. Unity is dead, switch to something else, preferably Godot.
@@slavchansidorov32the board can agree with an idea. Remove the idiot with the idea, remove the board members that agreed with the idea
@@LudwigVaanArthans you cant remove the board, they are shareholders.
this was premeditated backlash. meaning they did the worst option then apologize then give a less horrible version. they get what they want to begin with. i am tired of this scam. that's like charging me $90 for a band aide then i yell at them they apologize and say well the band aide cost me $5. but in reality, the band aide cost the $0.15. once someone or company takes advantage of you like this, they will keep doing it over and over again.
I love when companies make a batshit crazy policy and when called out it becomes a “confusion”
PR 101; never admit to doing something wrong, spin it as a mistake.
That would be like a concert venue releasing ten thousand coked-out rats into the crowd and then apologizing for the chaos at the event.
@@CharlesGriswoldand then saying “oh sorry we should have listened to community feedback about this decision beforehand”
@@victorhahs3798 "There was a breakdown in communication and expectations were not as clear as we would have liked. Going forward, only 50 coked out rats per concert and they will all be carrying sprinkles so as to make the experience more family friendly"
@@Your-Least-Favorite-Stranger “as compensation for this mix up we will be giving away one coked out rat to anyone affected (rat=$5.00 ESRP)”
Make no mistake. They did the "Big Ask". Then they back off and make it sound like they are doing everyone a favor. Then later they will slow role out bigger and bigger fees. Let's hope these developers do not fall for it and just completely abandon the engine.
All they did was make it sound nicer but they got the new system already in place bet you before long it will be worse and screw the developers over in the end.
And then when devs get so far in with development they will end up in the "sunk cost" fallacy. Bait people in with a seemingly more palatable proposal just to employ the tactic later on.
Yeah it's "door in the face" technique.
Roll*
I’m happy for the small indie devs using unity who no longer have to worry about this, and for the fact that previous games will no longer have to retroactively deal with extra fees. But it’s too late for Unity, they’ve burned up all their trust.
Yep that's for sure I would suggest that new users use a another engine because after all that crap I wouldn't trust them again? These company's were really going to screw the small developers like real hard personally I would leave. I don't really care what they said 🤷 I would move on anyway.
@@hyperfusiongear9050agreed, they’ll probably do so after finishing any games that are already far along with the engine, but I won’t blame any indie devs that don’t want to risk even that
Even if devs started to trust again, I can't see most devs genuinely staying anyways. They are either handcuffed to using outdated Unity or move onto the new version of Unity in 2024 and have to deal with the new fees. Seems like a lose-lose if you stick with Unity. Best to move on now.
@@jenniferhamels1176 yea there's no one left that would ever trust unity after they did this
they've done it once and without any notice, what's to stop them from doing it again? Can you trust someone like that with a loaded gun to your back?
Indie devs legitimately better still switch and be ready to tell them to piss off if they ask for money, as retroactively changing agreements and charging you for it is very illegal, know your rights and don't trust companies like this, one fuck up is enough to be considered a liability.
17:05 - 17:09 I read comments about this on Muta's video referring to this as the Door in the Face technique. It's a negotiating technique, and it's basically what Unity has done with this new policy, you intentionally pitch something that you know nobody will ever accept, (which they did, since upper management moved ~37.5k shares of stock out of Unity,) then you make the pitch that you were going to make anyway, and people will look at it and think "oh, yeah that's much more reasonable," without realizing that you still took that one step forward, because in their mind, it's so much better than the last pitch you made. If I were a developer, I would never trust Unity again until that CEO is out the door.
Two steps forward, one step back
The thing that Unity doesnt understand is you can trample on the trust of consumers all you like; they don't have long term financial interests in your product or service. You can win them back easily and they have short memories. Businesses are the exact opposite. Trust is a giant concern because they do have long term interests and often large amounts of time/money wrapped up in their venture. Once their 'partner' is shown to be untrustworthy it triggers an alarm that they need to find a replacement ASAP because it imperils their future. At least they are pushing the fee forward to the next LTS to give devs some time to ditch Unity...
This might be the incentive a lot of devs needed to start learning how to use Godot, I know that after I learn the basics of programming Godot will be my first pick now while before it would have been Unity.
I just don't trust them to not try something like this in the future again, cause like you said people have short memories.
Maybe Godot will try to screw me too one day but until then I will stick with them.
@@Prototype-357Godot is an open source software, isn't it ?
@@Prototype-357 even if Godot Scrrew us, we can fork them since it was Fully open source with no strings attached
not to mention "Currently" Godot Foundation is Non-Profit
It never fails to baffle me that companies are taken aback and surprised that their anti-customer and malicious policy changes create a dumpster fire. Are all of them run by egoistic megalomaniacs, or just most of them?
You can know a company is going tits up when they hire anyone associated with bcg. Expensive consultants to legally tank the business.
it could very well be a person taking the helm and selling stock before driving the company into the ground by trying to squeeze blood from the stone and dipping before bankruptcy
Close. They're run by egotistic, megalomaniacal sociopaths.
They aren’t surprised they are angry the targets aren’t submitting and their apologies is just trying to soothe the angry horde they created. They fully know what they are doing they just want us to be dumb idiots and give them all the money because they cant chill without all the money
I mean... statistically, it can't be all of them, but it sure seems like it. Like, I haven't seen a company that's not ran by an egotistical megalomaniac. Maybe we can say that it's most to the point where it's virtually indistinguishable from all? Like how the limit of 1 over infinity isn't 0 but for all intents and purposes, it acts like 0?
I'm no legal expert, but the whole idea that they can RETROACTIVELY decide to charge developers regardless of not having any prior legal agreements sounds illegal to me.
Something tells me their legal team may have had something to say about their plans, and probably told executives to prepare for class action suits that would inevitably come from attempting to extort developers for past business.
Pretty sure the execs ignored them and didn’t care if that were the case, considering this shit storm. Unity execs should be investigated pronto.
"I'm altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further."
You can't get away with that shit unless you are Darth Vader or someone equally powerful.
“We’ve updated terms and conditions please agree” will get rid of that
They definitely had to backtrack for legal reasons. It is grounds for lawsuit to cause undo financial stress by unforeseen changes to any agreement verbal, contract, TOS, or otherwise via promissory estoppel. Also they wouldn't legally be able to enforce the payments for studios that couldn't afford it via impossibility/impracticality because any agreement where one party isn't reasonably believed to be able to hold up their end at the time of creation is not legally enforceable.
@@thanatosdriver1938 not to mention in some countries, changes made by one party years down the line, regardless if the secondary accepts the "accept updated terms and condition", cannot and will not be enforced by law and depending on how predatory the changes are. The party responsible for the new changes can be charged heavy fines for even trying this.
Remember, the Unity CEO is the former EA CEO, who once "proposed" the idea of charging people real money whenever they ran out of ammo in Battlefield games. Old habits die hard it seems...
he should be charged money whenever he comes up with a scummy idea..
@@unitrader403 he'd be broke if that were the case...
@@isabellegray2338 hes already morally broke, so not much difference.
@@isabellegray2338 I think that wealth would be going to a better place, aka out of that CEO's bank account.
And he outright said that every developer who doesn't make monetization and microtransactions the main focus of their game are "f***ing idiots"
If I'm a developer unity just taught me that they are fully willing to retroactively charge money for using their product, who in their right mind would ever do that? Every time I would consider unity for use in a project in the back of my mind I would say "yeah but they could also decide to charge me later on like they tried to do before and was only stopped because of the absolutely massive backlash."
Between the initial policy announcement and this open letter, I can all but guarantee that many conversations and many meetings have already taken place within Unity regarding how to eventually implement those changes after the backlash has died down.
You've been around enough to know how they think.
Only by kicking out their CEO can they even hope to restore any once of trust.
That's step 1.
Board of directors will just hire a worse one
The directors need to go too. You get it
@@errorx_x1063then we force them to let the employees that break their backs to decide. Fuck the board.
Not even sure firing John Riccitiello would actually help, he probably had a lot of free rein to putting like minded individuals in key leadership positions. Many of which himself included prior to announcement sold a decent portion of their stocks. Even if he were gone you can't really trust them to not attempt to pull something shady like this in the future.
Throw out the whole bod, get a mutiny lvl of protest from the 1000-ish plus folks wh work there
Unity has already shown its colors. It's willing to make significant decisions without even getting feedback from its customers. Time to move on to another platform. It's only a matter of time until they pull this stunt again to test the waters.
exactly, if I was a developer I wouldn't trust my whole company and life work on something they can just switch up their policy one day and starting charging me way more
For smaller Devs that will completely ruin their finance as one day they have X Salary and X amount of budget than next minute they have tens of thousands more in outgoings
And after being warned by a TON of their employees who knew exactly how the customer base would react.
Many devs who just started out developing will definitely move, cant risk them pulling this shit again once you're years in on the development.
@@Lollburger88 "As gamers we need to avoid new games made in Unity" I usually try to avoid Unity games anyway. Most of them have crappy UI, bad performance and graphics. Some exceptions exist of course.
After this fiasco you'd have to be insane as an indie dev to build your game in Unity going forward. Even with the reversal after the backlash, it would be a risk to the future of your studio. I think Unity cooked itself with this one.
Never underestimate human stupidity. It has no limits.
I have a feeling they got exactly what they wanted. I have this nagging feeling they made it initially as aggregious as possible so that when they pulled back people would be happy we 'won' while they still get to take money from developers. One of the reasons I have for this theory is that they didn't announce how they were going to track it installs. why? Because they never actually made it, I doubt they would really care about a proprietary data tracking software that much. I'm fairly certain It didn't exist, so that wheb they go all the backlash they can bequeath that role on the developer themselves. So less work from them, less manpower needed and more money made for little to no effort.
Let's be honest here, it doesn't matter even if they walk back on the entire thing and ask everyone to forget it and they apologize. The damage has already been done and all that goodwill Unity has built up for years among the community is gone, and it's not coming back. Now whenever indie devs want to make a new game they are gonna steer clear of Unity and go to another engine that won't pull shit like this
Too little too late.
Fire the CEO AND WE WILL DEAL.
Firing is not enough. He should be placed behind bars if possible. At least dont give him any golden parachute.
@@hainsmades3911For what? Making bad policy changes is not illegal, specifically if never implemented.
@@AfutureVHe committed insider trading a week before the announcement.
@@AfutureV the ceo of unity used to be the ceo from EA he resigned because he completely destroyed EA from the inside out due to his incompetence
@@purpzz6285 Update on that... he sold over 50,000 stocks through out the past 12 months, without any buy backs. So it likely IS intentional insider trading while trying to make money off of destroying the company he's running.
Announce a new fee so outrageous that it sparks outrage, then roll it back to something less awful so they look like they are listening and arent greedy
The worst part is that they could have introduced this fee as it is from the start and people would have been fine with it.
@@AlbertScoot no they wouldn't its still greedy
Yeah I wouldn’t be surprised if this is what they planned. I’ve seen this happen already with other companies so it appears to be a trend.
I love the unity response. "We're sorry you got mad." I really hope a new developer takes advantage of this and comes up with something that can ruin their whole market share.
Godot would like to say hello.
@@ninjareaper4828 I said hello to godot, am making my first shitty fun games
@@m0-m0597 I will also be saying hello to Godot pretty soon.
@@ninjareaper4828 sure, as long as you never plan to release on consoles.
@@ninjareaper4828 So, I looked up a lot of stuff and I found that yes for most problems there is an answer easily to be found on godot's stackoverflow'ish ask page, but don't expect the replies to have more than 2 upvotes, lol
Maybe it makes sense to engage with the community to make it better for everyone
Finding out they were going to have to explain how their spyware is keeping track of installs must have scared them good! No way they were ever getting that data legit.
I happen to agree with Muta on this in his video on the matter: This is a clear walkback strategy. These kinds of number don't just come from nowhere. This change is something that they'd have to base future projections on, base their budgets on, and consider when considering potential investors and business arrangements moving forward.
A successful business isn't going to do something like that in a reactionary manner. These things need to be considered and planned for. This "reversal" was planned. They most likely had an entire suite of contigency policy adjustments they were prepared to make until their customer base felt satisfied. This wasn't considered "in response to feedback" from anyone or anything.
This is obviously a case of pushing the limits. No one should believe for a single instant that they had any kind of meaningful internal dialogue over this other than what contigency to present next due to public reception.
Don't accept their apology at all, this was after all, their intended goal, put something crazy up front, and walk it back to their original plan quoting "we've listened to your feedback..." for goodwill.
I disagree that this was their intended goal.
Why would they put something crazy up front that would do far worse reputational damage to them, if they were planning to "walk it back to their original plan"?
Nobody with even a bit of sense would think that game developers of all people would fall for that. You can argue that this entire situation lacks "sense" of course, but I suspect that the original plan was in fact their real plan, and that they simply didn't have the wisdom or good sense to avoid doing something so foolish out of greed.
This decision by them wouldn't have bought them any good will even in a hypothetical scenario before the backlash. They likely banked on developers simply not being willing to give up their Unity Skills to switch and accepting the changes out of necessity, or perhaps were hoping this would fly under the radar, but that wasn't the case.
@@echomjp if you watch Yong's previous video it was mentioned that Unity conducted internal discussions regarding the policy and received internal feedback warning exactly what would happen, yet zero of those feedback was reflected in the publicly announced original runtime fee policy. That and the fact board members sold their stock 1 week before all this shit made it extremely likely that it was intentional to show something outrageous first then pretend to walk back to make the true goal more "acceptable" in public opinion
@@AkasagiPhan I did watch his previous video. I am sure that they did have internal discussions, but I just find it hard to believe that they were planning to walk things back like this. It would have been much more acceptable to developers and the public at large if they had announced this new policy in the first place. Though I also am willing to just assume they just were too incompetent to account for public opinion.
@@echomjp Look at it as gambling.
You have stock in the company but want to turn larger profit; you run the company but want to turn a larger profit on products you already offer (no extra work).
If you go in small you might get backlash that lowers stock, plus if backlash is strong you have nothing to show for the effort; you cant sell your stock off high and buy back low if you don't have a guarantee it'll be low. At the same time, you won't get your foot in the door making easy profit on unpopular practices unless you push for something big and dangerous.
You sell off your stock at a high point then announce a MASSIVE change that will be met with universal condemnation; stock plummets, you can now use a fraction of what you earned selling high to buy back at the lower price (you pocket the extra money and or buy more stock than you had before). Faced with backlash from the idea you knew would never fly, you see how much you can safely dial it back while still keeping the core of this idea: If you start at 0, propose 100, and dial back to 15: You're still up 15 from your original 0. The shift from insane idea to reasonably unwanted idea still got an unsavory practice into effect: people accept the apology or at least don't fight it like they did the insane idea.
You just got free money, more stock, passive income, _and_ a lot of PR (no such thing as bad publicity when it comes to business). People will move on and forget as they always do, and the CEO just proved he can become universally vilified then turn it around to "unlikeable at worst" at the snap of his fingers.
He's a business man, and he knows how to play the game - he won and he knows it. People rarely unify long enough to topple giants, so all he has to do is kick back and watch his stocks slowly return to normal highs
Never forget that they were going to do something EXTREMELY illegal, retroactively changing the terms of a contract without the consent of the other parties. They had no qualms trying to openly break the law to make an extra buck, and as an organization, they can no longer be trusted. After all, indie devs wouldn’t have had the money to fight that legal battle, so who knows how long it would’ve taken to reverse it if they hadn’t backed down now?
While they have come out and said that you'd only have to abide by the terms of your current version of unity, there's nothing in their new terms that solidifies that. Also worth noting that their terms are written in such a vague way that they could claim the source code for any products you develop with their engine.
I worked with a company that planned to use Unity for a project roughly six years ago. The lawyers spent three days reading over every word of Unity's ToS and EULA before coming back and issuing a hard "Fuck no." And suggesting we port it into Unreal before moving forward with development.
Very lucky you have decent and trustworthy lawyers, otherwise you'd get fucked for going with Unity.
@@Dante999000 They got paid based on the work they did with the company, meaning it was in their monetary interest to be honest.
Good lawyer!🎉
this is just two steps forward and one step back to appease the community, don't mistake this for good will
Not only is it illegal to retroactively change the Eula in how they did, but potentially company destroying in regards to a class action suit. Then again, the law means nothing anymore with corporations and people of money.
If a lawyer told them you could retroactively charge prior to a policy, he should be fired for being brain dead. No court will allow this, ridiculous.
He should ALSO be disbarred for gross incompetence.
If they get rid of the current CEO, then MAYBE Unity can be forgiven.
But that's a huge maybe!
The CEO got fired from EA for being to scummy….just think about that
@@emma6648 the fact his not black listed from all companies is crazy
Even with the change, none of those devs are ever coming back. You cant just betray the trust of your main users like that and expect them to stay.
Unless your user base is incredibly stupid
@@scrittle You forget that while Twitter/Reddit deal with consumers, Unity deals with businesses. A developer's skill in Unity doesn't mean squat if his boss does not want to do business with Unity.
@@scrittle for short term and current project most will stick with unity, in the long run most would plan to move other is what i think would happen.
@@Samu2010lolcats indie and solo devs do not have b2b relationships with unity. Stop pretending that every hobbyist that can afford to just bail is in a "business relationship" with unity. Youre not. Hobbyists leaving en masse doesnt really effect unity because they didnt make them any money anyway.
I get that we all want to teach unity a lesson but this very much on the same level as a twitter protest. With the new terms, its seriously unlikely that many devs or studios with serious investment are going to leave. From what ive seen its mostly youtubers and hobbyists with no published titles that make up the majority of the "exodus".
There is nothing foolish about sticking with unity if thats where you are comfortable, and if its what is most suitable for your project. I think people have had enough of the catastrophizing around how "anyone who stays with unity cannot be saved".
Using unity is still a perfectly reasonable and safe course of action.
Im not defending the handling of this mess from them, but its far from a death blow and far from having any effect on the majority of their users.
the majority of the folks that currently stayed are only doing so because they have active projects currently being worked on and already made statements that future projects will NOT be in Unity
you also cannot dismiss that unlike with the reddit/twitter shtshow Unity is not dealing with its end users, they are Dealing with businesses that in some cases are bigger than themselves and they will NOT tolerate this sort of shannanigans.
take for instance the vast majority of f2p games on places like Steam that happen ot use unity, main reason these games can be F2p is because the dev relinquised publishing rights making said publishers the ones liable ot lose money on this policy.they will not take that sitting down, between Vintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Vale and Apple these are a lot of enemies you'd rather not make.
lastly many of the skills you acquire with unity3d translate well enough inot other 3d engines and it doesnt matter if you want to or no in a studio if the ppl in charge do not want ot have business with Unity, then you are looking at future training into a new engine(or a layoff)
.@@scrittle
So long as their contract includes a "we can change the terms any time we f***ing feel like" line, they can't be trusted.
For that matter, this applies to all companies that have that kind of language in their license.
I guess everytime i reinstall my games steam will charge me .50 cents per reinstall. Or game companies will recommend us to purchase more storage to prevent us from reinstalling our games.
The "self-reporting" is primed to turn into an issue, because they still said they're tracking what does and doesn't count as an additional install, which means they can arbitrarily refute whatever you report to them by showing you their own numbers based on whatever method they use to track all that.
bro they're really taking a page out of american taxes 😂
You know, as bad as it would've been, I would've liked to see the outcome of the original deal, only because if they'd gone through with that, they would've inevitably come face to face with Nintendo and Hoyoverse, companies that have made games in Unity, and inevitably get sued into the ground for trying to force money from them. Because yeah, they're doing this to target small time indie devs, but regardless of that, it's still going to effect the big players of the gaming industry in SOME compacity, something which would've undoubtedly caused them to act
The funnier thing is that the big players have the money to pay those stupid fees, but would also fight the hardest to not pay them via lawsuits and stuff. Never get between a giant multibillion corporation and their two cents, they'll want to ruin your life and throw you in jail for that.
And you know what, always happy to see big corpos duking it out, especially if one is clearly in the wrong. Love to see them destroy their reputation, trust, and lose absurd amouts of money in the process.
What's not funny is the employees that don't want anything to do with the higher ups bs, they're the ones ACTUALLY taking the brunt of it, losing their jobs so the company can stay afloat and stuff. Because don't you dare suggest the CEO take a paycut like some certain other CEO that actually had a shed of integrity.
Hoyo uses a custom version of Unity according to another comment. Meaning they'd be unaffected by this issue, but I'm only repeating what the other person said. Nintendo, though... Unity would be ripped a new one.
@@scrittle Oh I'm not missing that at all. I'm well aware. Although, they def bit off more than they could chew with the initial proposals because it did a lot of damage, not just outcry that's quickly forgiven.
It is as they say "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it". Unity have lost the trust and goodwill it had accumulated over the many years with the community. With such a greedy move, they literally brought themselves back to square one and they have to work twice as hard to earn back the trust, no matter how much apologies they make now. It is truly saddening because its developers are some of the most talented in the field, but their management just so happen to be some of the most corrupt. I truly hope they take it as a harsh but vital lesson, and prove they are worth ever returning back to - but then again, that's a slim hope to ever look up to.
those in charge have already proven that they don't hold themselves to their own contracts. they quite literally can't be trusted.
I think before people go back to this company they need to seriously consider the consequences. I don't usually believe in the nuclear option but at this point this company needs to be made as the example, they need to reap the consequences of greed.
Everyone should go elsewhere, the only reason why people ever should go back to Unity, is if they SEVERELY reduce the cost of their product, and a complete staffing change and a corrective action plan. And even then people should be sleeping with one eye open.
at this point the sensible move is 'finish the current project, then move on and never look back'.
They will continue their current running projects, but for new ones you certainly will have a “terms and conditions can change anytime” in the risk assessment.
I find it interesting that the web page for the "emergency walk back" looks more finished than the first website even though it was rushed out.
I think people might be getting taken for a run here.
What if they knew there would be backlash on a revenue increase and decided to intentionally be unreasonable and then walk it back.
Just something interesting to think about.
Two steps forward, one step back. Slowly pushing the envelope. I say give them no forgiveness, and all unity devs should be considering a change soon. The part that sucks the most is the unity devs who will lose their job over this :(
Wow wwho would've expected this? Almost like they knew this was gonna happen.
When C-suite are selling off shares it's always a great sign for the future 😭😭
Now just imagine if people could react like this to all predatory practices instead of just this one, what a nicer world we could build for ourselves
In that world we’ll have no cellphones, laptops, affordable clothing, machinery & countless other things.
It’s a shame we rely on predatory business to make products
@@joshuatealeaves no, we really don't, and I was talking about into the future not going back in time and changing things
@@stratifacations8377 I understood what you said. We ‘have’ ‘do’ & will ‘continue’ to rely on predatory business to make a ton of products. Nature of the beast. Like I said it’s a shame
Sorry that makes NO sense. Predatory behavior does not inherently cause innovation. Predatory behavior is in fact when things begin to become mediocre in multiple ways. Having plenty of technical Know-how, expert collaboration and an appropriate level of funding to facilitate research and development is what drives innovation. You can look at Free and Open Source Software that rely on no predatory behavior, such as incredible software like Godot, Blender, Libre-Office, the entirety of Linux Operating System Distributions, and so on, which directly contradicts the false rhetoric that "you wouldn't have anything without predatory behavior". It turns out that simply having a decent level of technical know-how around the world can by itself allow passionate people to collaborate and develop incredible things for free, WITHOUT an expectation of a return, relying on public funding. @@joshuatealeaves
@@NotOnlyLiveOnceexactly
Unity really found a way to recreate the whole "pay for bullets in the heat of the game" thing the CEO talked about while at EA. They're hoping people will buy in on the less scummy monetization practice. They tried to pull the whole foot in the door tactic and accidentally brought down the wall.
He said a dollar per clip.
But yeah a "clip" is anywhere from 1 to 100
What do you mean "really found a way to recreate" it's the same fucking CEO lmao of course it wouldn't be hard.
@@ayayron8221 think about how absurd paying to reload sounds. Now, imagine how bonkers it would be to see a game really attempt it. The fact that the same guy managed to find something even more greedy should not shock you, but it should disgust you.
I honestly don’t feel like this is enough… only a full back down… really hope developers show them how they feel by abandoning the engine while they still can
They still cut out the middle option (which I believe is $400 a seat?) and added royalties. They did the "make an extreme announcement then 'dial it back' to what they intended to make it look good" tactic but didn't expect people to actually ditch the brand. I understand if they needed to add royalties to be financially viable to a degree, but they also screwed devs over by nixing that middle-of-the-road option I mentioned. It's still a losing situation for customers.
Good. This is why we NEED competition. In anything. Otherwise we'll get a monopoly on the most popular or sometimes ONLY company/tech so they try and pull crap like this.
We have the individual power to say no. If everyone did that, these guys wouldn't keep getting away with this. Good job devs! 💪
its not about competition there are other options its about companies feeling they are entitled to all the money in the world
@@redlord4321it IS exactly about competition. Coz if Unity is a monopoly where no other game engine exists then they CAN get away with this coz devs wont have any alternatives to choose from.
Thank god for competition. We got alternatives to go to if one company tries to fck around and find out.
@@redlord4321 I mean, competition is what keeps that feeling from becoming reality.
Unfortunately, the universal law of capitalism is the formation of monopolies after some time. It's the basic state of this peculiar economic formation
Competition is not a fix. These companies are run by clinical psychopaths that understand exactly how to manipulate their tech illiterate boomer shareholders in order to continue to get away with their predatory and manipulative behavior.
Even regulations and litigation have no chance of fixing it at this point.
Nothing short of tall trees and strong rope will solve this corporate greed across all industries.
When are these people gonna learn that every shitty little get-rich-quick scheme they cook up will only cost them money?
Don’t forget what they did. They’ll try to pull this crap again if you forget.
For them to be able to track installs there would have to be spyware buried in the engine that even the developers are unaware of. EVIL!
Standard modern tactic of demanding what you know people will complain about, and then back track to what you wanted in the first place so that it appears to be reasonable and acceptable regardless of the real increase.
This is why I only use open source engines for my projects and I'm very careful of the fine print on assets I purchase. My 3d Tower Defense / Arena fighter I'm working on atm is in O3DE and was initially prototyped in OGRE. I'm really interested in where Godot goes from here after all this. When I release any of my projects if any of them do good, I'm building my company around Open Source and Open Modding. If my future company builds a tool it will be available to every DEV and everyone I work with will be respected with no bullshit contracts. Revenue; 25% keep in house, 50% goes to new games and investors (if any) and 25% would be entirely allocated for community funded implimentations or paying modders. I wanna build a solid respectable studio that gives back.
Just remember if a bigger company is trying to buy you, you're doing something right. Don't sell
Make sure to have backups done often, and on multiple hard drives, or usb drives. I was in game development classes back in the day. One of the other teams started talking about one game they'd started working on, outside of class.
I'd heard great stories about what they were up to, then one day they came back broken hearted. They'd set up the jazz drive disk to delete the data after 3 attempts to access it with the wrong password, and someone had tried to access it 3 times.
All that work over the course of several quarters? Gone. No extra backups at all.
IMO, it’s too little too late. Everyone’s already moved on to other, better engines. Unity brought this upon itself, and I can’t see it recovering from this utter breach of trust.
Everyone?
The guy above me likes his own replies bro 💀
Yeah, everyone learned how to use a new engine in a week
wtf are you saying lol
WotC can. Why unity don't?
My friends and I theorize that they were trying to pull that whole thing the games industry loves to do now of announcing something worse, getting backlash, and walking back to something more acceptable, but they WAY overshot the mark on step 1. Seriously, anyone who can move away from Unity should, because there is no reason to believe they will actually not change shit again.
>Do something outrageous
>Pull it back a bit
>People accept the new line more easily
Like clockwork
I know some of the groups that hack games could extract the tracker code that tells unity that a game has been installed and share it so you can fool the engine into sending the signal that the game was installed but you don't dowload the full game just a portion of the unity engine.
Then you use virtual machines, and cha ching, you can have the thing make automatic installations then you just have to figure out what takes to be noticed and caught, they are definetly going for an automate solution to track any malicious behavior, no human until it is a real issue.
Incredible how greed can blind anyone from the obvious.
Even EA thought this CEO was too greedy, let that sink in. It was so bad that EA had no choice but to kick him out due to being so greedy. He was ok with making people pay for reloading their gun and thinks any game without microtransactions is an idiot.
Imagine being too greedy for even the modern day embodiment of greed that is EA
Not really!!! They did his idea if they could get away with it like they do screwing FIFA AND MADDEN PLAYERS.... Yash right in the Ass of madden and fifa players!!
@@DeathCluntchNgl, FIFA and Madden players are scamming themselves. If you buy a new game every year you are 100% wasting money
He’s literally the worst person in all of gaming and he’s the reason who implemented loot boxes he’s the final boss of gaming
Well, UBISOFT actually implemented that into Far Cry 5. For helicopters .... Just sayin'
I say to the devs, continue with moving away from Unity. There's no stopping them from trying something like this again when no one is looking.
Devs, don't let up! They'll do this yet again! Leave this engine and move on to another one!
I'm in the middle of a big project that I have been making for 3 years. I'll finish it in Unity
I hope everyone transitioning from Unity to a new system is able to do so without much fuss or hardship ♡ I cant imagine the mental toll this must be taking on some of these developers 😢 Be well indi devs
Never give them another chance. Never forgive them. Tear them down. Never support them. They are never to be trusted again. They do not deserve anything.
If you're a Unity developer, you need to be asking for more right now. This is not a GOOD deal for you, and if you yield to this decision now without asking for anything in return, then you can expect this to keep happening in the future. From Unity, and other companies.
I don't see how anybody would want to use Unity ever again after this
Straight up. This is the kind of screw up where the only bit of real resolution would be for Unity to pay devs to use their engine rather than the other way around. Anything less is essentially just an open door for another ploy to try to choke money out of devs. Unity didn’t just burn their trust. They obliterated it
My understanding (from encountering this apology etc. from other sources) is that the changes are good enough for 'finish the current project Then bail' rather than 'bail immediately', which is where it was before.
Improvement: Fire the CEO
Results: Unity is going to have a fun next 3-5 years. /s
Lesson: The community can get together, now if we can only go after microtransactions like this.
imagine how many lives micro tx and lootboxes already have ruined
addiction to gambling is a thing
Honestly, if they started adding "Installation Trackers", that would just open a window for a hacker to break into that, and steal all sorts of information from PC's, consoles, phones, ect...
The walkback is good for people who already had games out on Unity or are so far into a project that switching engines is not feasible, however, they've already shown that they cannot be trusted and that they are willing to change the rules. Also, ultimately, they still feel entitled to more money for zero work; many developers using Unity will still be forced to fork over a lot of money whereas before they didn't.
Unity: We’re Sowwy. Please pay us mo-
Devs: OMAEWA MO SHINDERU.
Unity: NANI!?
2 thing both devs and players should keep in mind. 1. Unity DID buy and now owns a company that made malware, which means when you don't need to be only suspicious as a dev on how they would keep track of installs, but also the buyer who might not know what that game is putting on your computer and what all it's tracking. And 2. This is still a change made and being forced on people who used Unity that didn't agree to any of it. They are still changing their contracts and they can still do it again.
1. That is blatantly false. They bought and own a company that distributed ads, and because they didn't test the ads they ended up distributing some ads that contained malicious code. They did NOT make malware themselves. I get that you want to stay on the hate train but if you have to lie for that that just discredits your point immediately.
2. No. They backtracked on that. Thi snew thing only goes into effect with the next Unity version. Everyone who stays on the current or past versions of Unity keep the old contract. You only fall under the new contract if you decide to migrate your project onto the next LTS release of Unity.
I understand that the trust is gone now and I would not go with Unity anymore because of this, but the new rule changes are completely fine. The way it's supposed to work now is completely reasonable and fine. 2,5% revenue share is far below the 12% that Unreal demands. And doing this with the next LTS version going forward is pretty standard too. The new version of this is 100% fine and reasonable. The issue is the broken trust because we simply can't know if they won't try this again next year.
Get rid of the CEO and I'll think about it.
1. Take two steps forward.
2. Take one back to make everyone calm down.
3. Repeat.
Whether they choose to backtrack, wont change a thing, they've shown who they really are and how they can change things as they see fit. No company in their right mind would agree to it.
it is the same trick other companies have pulled, make very crazy changes that causes outrage, then wait a few days then apparently back peddle to a more "reasonable" option which is what the company wanted all along but managed to make it not sound as bad since they put a worse option out first.
Lets teach Unity CEOs a lesson by burying it financially to the point it becomes the next Gamestop.
Make Unity the business disaster where other companies learn to NEVER bite the hand of their damn consumers EVER AGAIN!
that would be nice but we all know that a lot of developers decide to stay with the engine because they are either too far into development of their project or they have too much experience with this engine to simply move to another. so i don't think that's gonna happen
This apology feels so cheap cause it's so insanely obvious that their users would NOT be okay with just giving them more money in exchange for absolutely nothing. This is just stupid greed at it's peak.
actually, they could have got away with just raising their prices. It would have made the calculations for future projects less favourable to them, but it wouldn't have been all that big a deal.
Problem was... they didn't just raise fees. They basically turned their product into a bomb that was highly likely to kill their customers. Metaphorically speaking.
You're an example of why people don't apologize. Nothing they say could ever be good for you
@@AntonioCunningham how about actually apologizing instead of apologizing for peoples “feelings”. No real apology ever took place.
@@Johngreggor99 You're proving my point. There's no pleasing people like you.
It's in their best interest to ignore people like you who won't except that people make mistakes.
@@AntonioCunninghamStop simping for Unity. This isn't a "mistake" it was BLATANTLY trying to rip people off. How do boots taste?
If you want to talk about trust, your voice is one I trust, YongYea!. Thank you for everything you do!
The Ceo sold his shares while the price was up, create the drama, the price drops. No surprise if he starts buying shares again with the lower price. This could easy by a stunt to make more money.
I'm barely a gamer and I've been all over this situation like stink on shit. The audacity of it shocked me, and I agree that the trust will be hard to rebuild.
stink on shit 💪🏻😖
Every corporate apology letter:
"We heard you.. we apologize.. we're sorry for it.. we're listening to you ... (but we're still gonna do it)"
“Good. Then we’re finished. Goodbye.” -The customers.
This isn't an appology to the developers. Its an appology to themselves for getting caught
Whats to say they won't try something like this again in the future?
This is exactly why I will not use Unity for any future projects.
That is why its time to leave unity and say hello to godot and/or unreal
NOTHING. Absolutely NOTHING.
They shouldn’t charge for installs at all. That’s like charging us for how many steps we’ve walked a day. You have to walk to get where you need to go, you have to install a game to play it..
I would not trust them on “self-reporting” they are not just going to trust people to report their earnings…they are going to have something in the runtime still tracking this stuff. They said they had some software to do it when this whole thing started. Unfortunately it just seems like a lot of devs will just forgive them because the splash screen is optional now.
I cannot believe they were so greedy that they thought they could pull this off with companies like Microsoft and Nintendo watching. What a bunch of idiots
So basically Unity wants to charge every time you install the game. It's not strange if Unity are forcing you to add spyware just to do that.
Yeah, they can't really gather these metrics without breaking laws.
We might want to check how much Unity stock these higher ups bought back before this "apology" lol. Not to mention these apologies are never a surprise. The backlash may have been more than expected but a partial reversal was probably always the plan as with most of these "woops we went too far, praise us for listening to our users" AAA stories.
Surprised this is the only comment I've seen about this, it happens all the time
And let's not forget there was insider trading involved. He's just gonna walk away just like that with no consequences?
Let's hope it won't go crazy again since i study more with Unity. I have already bought books for Unreal and Godot to take just a peek on the engine. (hint: humble bundle has it)
I don’t trust that the install monitoring code will be removed. Question is what other “spy” code will remain in the engine moving forward.
They took 2 steps forward, and when there was inevitable and predictable backlash they took 1 step back.
I hate them.
Once again, this stupid tactic. They need to be sued to be put 10 steps further back.
Last time Unity caused this much damage Rick James punched Charlie Murphy in the forehead
“Confusion”
They must be the only ones whom are confused. They spoke their desires.. we see through it.
Enjoy your slow decay, Unity.
The way this is weirded suggests they'll eventually end the self reporting for installs. They go to great lengths to define what is a first installation...but why? After all, if they're really trusting devs to self report, why would they need to specify what should be counted as a first installation? I think they defined that so specifically because it gives them room later on to change what types of installations count for the fee.
Also, what they tried to do with their original fee is basically exactly what Ricietello wanted to do with Battlefield: wait until their customers are too invested in the product and then start extracting more money from them, because they're already too deeply invested. That seems to be his one move in business and he's going to keep making it. He needs to go for this company to regain trust.
Unity is doing a great job ensuring the success of UE5
And Godot.
If they can change their terms not to charge fees now, they can change it back to charge fees later when the uproar dies down.
Unity trying to nickle and dime Devs:
[Everyone Hated This]
I'm glad to see somebody mentioning this lapse and logic about how unity is going to somehow track what games were purchased with bundles or not.
I've been buying humble bundles since the start of the damn site, you just put in the key and boom you got the game. What are they going to do Make it so any Unity games made with a manually added key Don't count? Are they going to do the research and correlate what keys I've added and cross-reference them with historical bundle data?
Trust and Loyalty are difficult currencies to recuperate after they have been poorly spent.