It's only over when c-level heads are rolling which would be a first step to restore trust. So far they haven't even done that, so nothing really changed.
they didn't walk this back fully like everyone wanted, all they did was make a policy that wasn't as shit as the first draft, their just sorry they got caught and now they're giving us this weak ass apology to try and save face, Developers out there please don't stop fighting this just because of this apology. make Unity walk this back ENTIRELY and remove the runtime fee, we need a W against corporations who think they can do whatever they want and get away with it.
sry but ... most likely not over i mean it just calm things right now but it leave a huge black screen for later if they dont at least add perpetuel contract for later, this will calm things now but i doubt it wont cost them later down the line who would start a new project later on with current situation and more then anything without any way to know when and how they'll f*** you around and change terms in the midle of things
TOS guarantees are the only way that they would even begin to have a chance to have profitable development studios trust them again. Unity may be great software for indy developers that don't make much money. But its actually not, they will be better off switching engines now rather then wasting more time using Unity. Because when no profitable developers are using unity, unity makes no money and goes out of business, then the engine goes away and they could have just started learning a new engine immediately but they didn't and now they have to and however long that was that they delayed is just wasted time.
People say that, and it would certainly not be bad, but I don't think it would have the effect you would be hoping for. No massive change would happen.
This whole incident has left me feeling: - Unity can't be trusted - They will try to inch their way back towards this position again - Their games are probably loaded with tracking malware and now you don't know whose using it
And as a gamer, it's made me more hesitant to buy Unity games going forward. I don't want to support their business model and I don't want to be subject to their whims.
I already some Unity apologizers in comments, saying things like "most devs won't be affected anyways" As if gaslighting them with "You won't make that much money to qualify anyway, stop complaining". I'm not sure if they were hired by Unity acting as PR or just devs coping hard.
if there was any phone home malware, someone will find it because you know there are people who look for things like that by using network scanners and seeing what traffic a game is sending
Unity have made it abundantly clear that they are not to be trusted. Nobody should ever again consider using Unity for their projects until Unity has in a legally binding manner permanently closed the door on these kinds of shenanigans.
@@talonstride Guarantees in the TOS are the only thing that is legally binding. Even then I think if you use Unity going forward you are crazy. All the time you invest in a partnership is wasted if they go under. Even if they managed to survive it would be because of leeching money off of soulless mictrotransaction companies and what kind of company will they be when that is how they operate. Do you think they will be providing an excellent engine and services at that point? A companies actions are indicative of their quality and trajectory going forward. I feel sorry for the devs that cannot read the writing on the wall and hold onto hope that they don't have to switch engines, and end up getting burned waaaaay worse a couple years from now. I reject entirely the ethos of this company and barring some unlikely complete transformation of the company I will not be spending money on any game made with Unity going forward. I'm not alone.
@@talonstride John Diccitiello being deported to the surface of the sun would be nice, but it would ultimately be pointless unless they forbid themselves from doing stuff like this again in a legally binding manner. If they manage to trick developers to stay with them there is nothing stopping them from doing it again, after having made it much more difficult to escape to other engines. There is a greater than zero probability that this whole debacle has set wheels in motion on legislation regarding non-negotiable contracts and retroactive changes to such contracts. Let us all hope and pray that the politicians writing that legislation do a decent job because if they don't it is quite possible that Unity will go down in history as the company that killed a whole industry with their greed.
I won't do business with Unity as long as they are continuing to push the idea of a runtime fee. I simply do not think it is a funding model that we as developers or gamers should let become normalised. Which is clearly what they're hoping with this change. They made it optional, made it self reporting, made it the cheaper option, in a year or 2 once everyone has gotten used to it they will push it further. The trust is gone and the fact they're still trying to smuggle in the runtime fee is the nail in the coffin.
This ain't directed at you. People have learned about this from the horse armor and how that has lead to games as a live service model. There isn't much of a fundamental difference between the 2. I wonder if the reason the customers lost out in the end is because the games were primarily funded with investor money as part of the reason. No reason to really care about customers if you got investment money.
This is by no means a nail in the coffin, the coffin was sealed and lowered when the first news went out, we're just waiting to see how slow people are with the shovels.
It's not ideal, but self reporting nerfs it into the ground. Really, I don't think there's any funding structure other than carte blanke revenue splits (and not even ones that feel mildly in any dev's favor) that actually can sustain game engines the size and scope that Unity wants to go after. Hell, even maintenance for something like Steam could probobly only stand to go down to a 20-25% rev split, with the amounts of traffic it gets. I don't even thing Godot is safe. Like donations are great if your customer base is small, but not when you're courting as many devs as they are.
Unity has spat in the faces of its users (developers). I don't think this change to there pricing is going to clean-up the mess they made with the community.
@@cashtachethe issue isn't gamers. Its devs, and devs ain't stupid. A lot of devs might just cut unity out entirely. Idk why you thought this was a gamer thing, it affected gamers only because it affected people who make games... Why did you say this so sure?
It would be foolish to trust any company. I still love Sega even though they screwed me with the Sega CD, 32x, and the amaizingly sad Dreamcast. I still love Sega and Unity! I couldn't do anything as a consumer about Sega but we did leverage some power over Unity and got a win I think.
@@Nev182mang How is it a win? If you think this is a win, then they succeeded in fooling you. They took 10 steps forward, 8 steps back and you think you won? They're still 2 steps forward. This is manipulation & gaslighting 101.
@@Nev182mang it would be foolish to trust any company but it would be even more foolish to keep supporting a company that secretly deletes their ToS and imposes sudden license changes with hidden fees. Notice how the community is complaining less about how Unity normalized the run time fee, cause they get to remove splash screen of Unity.
Too little too late. The leadership exposed themselves and its too late. What is stopping then from doing the old slow implementation of everything they "walked back." Im telling you they are just waiting for the backlash to quell down and for everyone to come back before trying again! Not to mention that they still haven't walked back the Bull shit!
If Unity really wants to try to regain trust they should fire the entire board of directors. Unless they can show the minutes of the meetings where someone objected to those predatory proposals the ones that went along should find other jobs.
The CEO is the Chair of the board and majority share holder. So he has absolute power and they cant get rid of him even if they wanted to unfortunately. He will try this again.
@@georgehall7749 So there was no external shareholder pressure to pull off this garbage? Yeah, he will definitely do it again since it was all him. A majority shareholder can openly wipe its ass with the stakeholder suggestions until the orders start getting canceled, effectively shrinking the company by cutting its revenue. This stuff was deliberate af based on what I know. Unless the company is losing money, in which case fees need to be raised and the costs cut. Even then, this is not how to do it.
They have literally shown their cards and are now hiding them again hoping you forget what you saw. CEO's like this never get sacked because in their world they are seen as a success.
bottom line is, it doesn't matter if 60% of Unity developers leaves if the remaining 40% who uses Unity makes enough money and Unity's numbers goes up at the end of the year.
@@kusog3 CEOs like this show people numbers on paper and fudge the numbers. If you gut a company by selling off its assets and firing its entire workforce you can theoretically show a profit at the end of the quarter, despite the fact that the company is effectively now nonprofitable. It's like burning your house down because you got cold and calling it a win.
@@kusog3 Short term no, longer term... When was the last time you visited your MySpace page? It was the Facebook of its day. Now I had to Google to even remember its name.
The splash screen section is actually incorrect as they said you need to upgrade to remove the splash screen so effectively they didn’t change that at all.
The CEO is only one ingredient that brewed that. Shareholders and board mainly. There are even board members without equity, so I prefer to follow the money (proper shareholders).
It's still a tragedy, in terms of what's happening to... basically everyone in the Unity community who isn't an executive. None of them wanted this, but none of them could prevent it. That said, you're right. Unity has to be destroyed at this point, to set an example. No more "Three steps forward, one step back, then repeat until you get everyone to accept the shenanigans." It needs to be "One step too far, and your company evaporates and you're blackballed from the industry." Real consequences, not just a stock dip and a golden parachute, then a new job in a year.
@@Cryptic0013unfortunately, consumers have long since lost that kind of power; or rather, your average, politically-unengaged 'I just want to grill for pete's sake' Joe has allowed the owning class to grow in power, to such a degree that workers/consumers can no longer meaningfully affect change via their decisions like this. At the end of the day, the only reason things got this bad in the first place is because at every step towards this, the workers/consumers have been powerless to stop the owning class. And it's going to continue to happen, across the board, until we stop holding onto the delusion of "we'll just vote with our wallets, that'll show them!!" For every informed person who actively fights against these changes, there will be hundreds more uninformed, unengaged people that simply accept what's given to them. This is bound to happen to every firm in this aggressively unregulated Capitalist economic model. The ones that stay principled will ultimately be either bought out by the larger, scummier companies, go out of business (not being able to compete with economies of scale), or become the very thing they sought to destroy. These large companies will *never* act in the interests of the consumers -- not unless they're literally forced to. They've shown us this time and time again, and will continue to, until people realise that maybe, *just maybe*, the giant corporations funding the propaganda campaigns that have convinced people to be deathly afraid of any sort of government regulation *have done so because it's the only surefire way to keep them from screwing us over for their own benefit.* They work so hard to ingrain that into the psyche of the average citizen, *specifically because* that's the only way the citizen could meaningfully resist them.
No. These companies need to know that you can’t f around and push your customers. You can’t just say, “oh sorry, my bad,” and get away unscathed. No, corporate greed needs to be handled swiftly and definitively. You push the customers, you lose your azz. It’s the only way these scummy corporations will stop pushing the limits. Between corporate greed and political corruption we have to start demanding that bad behavior in both realms be addressed and resolved.
They always look for easy money , they never want to improve , if they did improve ppl would naturally come to them and increase their revenue , they are just dumb corpo thinking ,if they could they'd tax us for breathing air .
You know what should happen when a prominent corporation F's up? Superior competition that doesn't. There are plenty of people capable of creating their own game engines. They might not be as ready-to-go, though the singular dudes developing them can get by with a relatively minor donations. Also, there are plenty of open source engines. For example, Torchlight was made with OGRE the open source 3D engine.
This is making me think of one of my favorite sayings that i learned awhile back. "Trust is like glass. It takes a long time to make, and it can shatter in an instant."
Trust is like glass. Once broken, it can be mended, but it will forever be flawed, and everyone will be able to see that crack. Unity has rang the alarm bell, devs subsequently stopped being complacent under it, and to be honest, the company will be extremely lucky if it navigates this affair unscathed. (spoilers: it won't) Remember, this is Unity's CEO second strike... Who in their right mind would trust him again, and what guarantees that he won't try another trick down the road?Expect devs starting to flee this potential minefield.
They already are leaving. Hence why Unity extended an olive branch with the "we will only be illegally greedy with the NEW version, not all the older ones mwehehe please don't leave 🥺" Multiple companies will finish their projects and then try to move to other engines
I think you're underestimating how much abuse devs are willing to take, as long as Unity introduces license changes slowly, but surely, I don't think the majority of devs will care.
@@kbrnsrexactly. not to mention how prevalent unity is with independent devs and education. its being taught in schools ffs and we all know damn well universities wont expand their repertoire because of this
@@_holy__ghostSchools and universities are pretty cost sensitive when it comes to paying for software, educational institutions are constantly using tricky workaround in order to fit that shit into the budget in my experience. They'll either be teaching students how to do the same effectively or there just gonna switch because they have as little or less give in there budget than most bussiness's.
Even if Unity completely canceled this monetization route and offered to pay developers for using Unity, it wouldn’t be enough to undo the damage they've done to their reputation.
Ironically for Unity that Mihoyo start hiring engine programmers to create their own in-house engine, with their huge budget and resource it's no doubt that they can do it in a few years and say goodbye to Unity forever
I think we will see huge opportunities for businesses that focus primarily on porting Unity games into other engines like Godot/Unreal/etc. For many devs it will literally be cheaper to hire these types of services than to pay increased fees, especially for engines with zero royalties or in-house engines.
If this leads to things working out for Unity in the end, it will have been a master class in conditioning your customers. It's wild that people have any kind of leniency or goodwill left towards corpos that fuck you over at every turn.
Well the difference between corpos that screw regular consumers and the Unity situation is that Unity's customers aren't consumers, but business owners. So they're not gonna take it up the butt as eagerly as the average consoomer, but may be too optimistic.
3:50 - The OTHER unfortunate thing about the splash screen policy is it only applies to people who agree to the new terms... with the new 2.5% revenue cut. If you want to continue on the older terms (which lets be honest 99.9% of devs will) then tough luck, gotta keep that splash screen
99.9% of devs will be forced to upgrade to new version anyway. How else are you going to get that critical bug fix or that critical new feature that you want your game to take advantage of?
Was that mentioned somewhere outside of the open letter because that is not what it says in the letter. The splash screen only applies to the personal version and according to the letter that version will not have a runtime fee.
@@MorbidEela few other creators delved into the fine print, and yes, the condition is to take advantage of those changes, you HAVE to accept the new TOS and upgrade to the next version
Yeah this exactly the way I was thinking it was going as well. It's like taxes we want 5% higher taxes so will ask for 8% and settle on 5%. 🧐 getting what we originally wanted 🤡
In negotiations it is called "The Big Ask" go long then walk it back to what you really want. Come back in 2-3 years for another Big Ask, go long walk it back to where you wanted in the first round of negotiations. Rinse and repeat.
@@johannw7933 exactly how the games industry went from complete game at launch to game + dlc to game + day 1 dlc + season pass to half finished games + day 1 dlc + season pass + microtransactions + battle pass.
though that is probably whats happened if that what their plan was they are idiots. Besides their per seat fee this doesn't make their cost for a dev doesn't seem that different then unreals the 30 login thing is really stupid. Honestly i think if they had just come out with something similar to this there would have been some grumbling but it wouldn't have become a massive news story that motivated people to try and build tools to move a game out of unity and even have studios donate money to support godot. Honestly if i was a dev or even a smaller publisher i would still be wary of using unity for any new games and be looking to retrain in other engines for the simple view of 'yeah this is what we got in the end this time but that first deal is more what they wanted what to stop them trying to push that again'. Just feels like they have place sword of Damocles above every unity dev head with them simply waiting for the next time unity tries to screw them.
Anyone who trusts them after this is crazy. There are already people posting in various Reddit subreddits about how great Unity is for doing this making it seem like what they tried to pull never happened and I'm sure they are out there on other social media doing the same thing.
Stuff like this, cynical or not, I automatically assume the culprit hired bots or bad actors to spin the narrative. Case in point - all the fake reviews for, well, everything on Amazon. I was looking at a review for a TV today - a verified purchase - and it talking about a fridge-freezer unit. Padded the numbers, spin the dice in the "right" way...
@@Ackadia Actually, that sounds pretty optimistic on humanity. My cynical take is that it's a mix of actual people and bots. I've worked enough customer service to not be so optimistic for humanity.
I want a statement from everyone on UNITYs board in their own words. ESP EA ricatello. I dont accept their sacrificial lamb. And the apology letter still is hinting that they are going to roll out the fees anyway over time in the new versions.
EGDF is already starting the process to make such retroactive charges illegal under EU law by default. The eula change is already illegal, but the new amendments would make it much easier to sue. Also, it wouldn't be the developers, but EGDF suing, which is a quasi government agency with a speed dial to courts in Brussels.
yeah, they are SO GOING TO slow boil their users, now that roasting didnt work for them. I was going to branch into gamedev and learn Unity. Unity ensured that I will literally never touch any of their products, no matter how long my stick is.
@@michajastrzebski4383 Well, with the reputational loss, the projected loss of developers using unity, and I'm talking about the big guys here like Tencent, and their annual amount of financial losses, they are going to go bankrupt anyways. So yes, it's not a smart decision to learn their engine. Oh, and have you seen the number of universities announcing that they are going to drop unity from their programs? That... hm.... will have an effect.
This is basically exactly what happened to Wizards of the Coast with their D&D OGL changes, it's almost hilarious how exactly the same shit is happening. Down to the retroactive requirement stuff and questionable enforcability. Multiple groups spurned WotC altogether and either threw their lot in with more open groups like Paizo or went to make their own systems, people trashed the shit out of their decision online til they admitted defeat. It says a lot about how not sorry they are that they're still going to have the runtime fee, just more specifically targeted, and later.
Literally the only point of the runtime fee could be to put more pressure on people with low per-install revenue. So either they are simply stubborn or, more likely, they want leverage specifically on mobile devs for some reason.
Wasn't the final rollback of WotC basically everything, though? Sounds to me like the Unity rollback isn't quite as complete, they're still keeping the runtime fee in there.
@@logicalfundy Yeah, that's where the story splits, Unity's making concessions but I don't think anyone will conside it enough. WotC essentially had to make their core system entirely free use just to win back _some_ people and I don't think Unity's ever gonna do that...
I'm not a game dev ("I wrote a few small games" doesn't make me a game dev) but what little desire I had to learn Unity went out the window when all this started.
Absolutely. Even as an intellectual exercise, if I make some stupid little graphic game, it's not going to be in a financial dead-ender like Unity is now. It's the game engine equivalent of writing and publishing a game module in AD&D now.
I think the backlash was calculated. They put out a bunch of terms that nobody would accept to then scale it back to what was intended in order to get devs more receptive to it. At least this is the feeling I get from the fact they knew internally it was going to happen.
Could be, the suckers that accept the terms will now also accept yearly increases in the pricing giving up more of their revenue without really gaining anything. This certainly has weeded out the studios that run their businesses sensibly and those that don't. If this is true it's even more obviously a scam and shrugging off the leechy freeloaders (as they apparently see them).
The anchoring effect, a favored tactic among used car salesmen. Start with an absurdly high initial offer, then "compromise" down to something that likely would have been negotiated down even further had been the initial offer, but now seems like a good deal compared to the anchor. I think that was their plan initially too, but their anchor was just so ludicrously high that everyone just immediately jumped ship, leaving Unity scrambling to stop the hemorrhaging of customers.
@@Okusar Agree, I also think it was a case of selling overpriced just to give a "discount". But they overdid and fell on their faces. But I also wanna see which developers (if any) will stop using Unity, because if the image get hurt but not the wallet then it really doesn't matter for them.
The only thing to establish trust again would be a poison pill clause in the entire board's contract, that fires them all anytime something like this happens. If they're going cavalierly threaten dev's livelihood like this ever again, it needs to be tied to theirs.
@@littlebear274 I'm not entitely sure that wasn't seen favorably internally tho. I mean if you're losing money, that just releases the pressure of "having to do" layoffs. I've certainly worked jobs where the tactic was to make certain the experience so bad that the more aware employees quit, rather than having to fire them.
I'm willing to bet they went into it of the usual mindset of "We'll push something ridiculous way too far then walk it back a little so people still think we're the good guys" and are now actually panicking because they pushed too far anyway.
Sounds like they, Unity, want Adobe's rep, a necessary "evil", due to "industry standards", but they screw with their own customers. Occasionally to the point that they drive the rich customers crazy at times.
Adobe could get away with murder because they were an exception of maybe half a dozen rather than a rule. And some of their software is industry standard. Unity doesn't have that power.
There was a very good reason, back in the day, that each studio made its own engines or bought the rights to an engine per project at a single flat fee. Open source is quite simply the only option now.
The only way they would have been 'trusted' would have been to revert the entire ordeal. It's too late and really hope people show this with their future developments.
Unity played their hand and revealed what they were willing…nay…what they WANTED to do. The best course of action for developers right now is to do whatever they can to move away from unity. Whether that is through porting their games, or just diversifying their skill set. As long as Unity has the leadership that they do and they are a publicly traded company, the shareholders will always be prioritized above developers and gamers alike.
Gamers need to stop being spineless and fully commit to not forgiving studios, devs, and companies when they pull disgusting anti consumer moves like this. The gaming community seems so quick to forgive or not even put up a resistance at all. If Unity doesn't cease to exist entirely, then the lesson wasn't learned and we will eventually lead back up to this point again thru gradual change. Gaming is already destroyed with the inclusion of Call Of Dutys' Black Cell premium battle pass scheme. I 100% blame corporate attitude for ruining gaming, but I equally blame gamers for not having the conviction to fight back and stop supporting these companies entirely.
My brother in Christ, you are talking about video game developers as if those people killed your entire family. It's people making fucking video games. This isn't deciding whether you are to live or die. Chill. Go outside. Hug a tree. Sit on a stone. Walk on the forest floor.
This is dev on dev violence and business is way less forgiving than players. If a player gets screwed they can move on, if a dev gets screwed the studio can fold and they take that very seriously.
In a way the whole backlash feels like an empty victory.... On the one hand its great that the gaming community has finally started standing up and saying no to predatory bullshit. But on the other hand the community has allowed them to be pushed back so far to the point where the big companies and industry as a whole are willing to risk the chance of everything burning to the ground just to see how far they can push people.
What I've learned during all of this is that they already put in writing that, if you want to not upgrade you can use the TOS that were in effect when you last upgraded. They removed that language silently because it wasn't legally binding. Learned that from a lawyer's videos on it. Them giving the same deal they gave in 2019 - and then renegged on - should lend no faith that they will keep their word. Do not trust Unity and do not trust anything John Rotticiello is involved in. I still think this was intended originally to tank Paralives and Life By You, just claiming they had several times the downloads they had, because one would assume Rotticiello still has shares of Electronic Arts and one of their big money makers is threatened. Both use Unity.
Not a fan of the CEO by any stretch if the imagination but this comment is completely misinformed. It was a percentage of stock that the CEO is payed in and then incrementally sold over a number of years. To think anything else is ridiculous.
@@lambbooner3379 b-b-but but but but i heard it was like super illegal insider trading!!1!!111!!!!! breacherment of trust!!11!! we are literally at war!!!!1!!
This definitely feels about as big of a win as was possible under the circumstances. I say that because just about everything that clouds that win, is just simply inherent to this situation that nothing could possibly have solved. As someone who's done a BA in game design, I feel *really* sorry for this years batch of students who have almost certainly spent the last 2-3 years learning how to make games in Unity. Because there isn't any real getting around that it's the best engine for learning how to make games from the ground up, it has the tool and samples to get things going as you're learning the very basics, while still having the scope to let you make things as customized as you need for whatever kind of project you want to tackle... and honestly for that purpose I just don't know if any other engine can really take it's place as teaching platform because from what I have seen most other engines definitely have higher entry barriers. Far from insurmountable, but ones that Unity has really strived to remove.
Unity can still, relatively easily, regain most trust. If they fire their entire directors board they can at least honestly say that they got rid of the evil people who pushed this and start again cleanly; they can obviously hire equally greedy people or wose, but at least people will give them the benefit of the doubt
The board is voted in by shareholders. The CEO only has to brush aside the negative publicity and say they've monetised more successfully, and show projected increased revenue over the coming years. Revenue will very likely increase, despite losing a portion of customers. The move away from Unity likely won't be as strong as many think as 1) it does a portion of the market better than other engines, and 2) the larger devs can always seek unique ironclad terms, and to them it's all just business. Further, a significant enough dev stating their intention to leave Unity is also intentionally or even unintentionally a negotiation strategy. We're not all playing at the same level, so how we react to this as mostly minor devs is pretty insignificant. All IMHO obviously.
The problem is they still got what they wanted, going forward there is an 'install tax'. Not for every single case, but it exists now. They got the monetization feature they wanted in place, and in the future they can tweak these new limits and rules to slowly sweep more devs into that monetization model. Anyone thinking they won't try to salami slice their way back to where they wanted to be, which is basically everyone paying this install tax (which you can bet will get passed on to customers), is being willingly ignorant of what is going on here.
EX: the US government. Towards the beginning, the US almost put a limit on income tax to 10%, but policy makers at the time thought that there's no way they'd hit that limit and it'd just encourage later policy makers to jump taxes up to that "impossibly high number." It all started there, and got much, much worse. 2.5% isn't bad now, but the existence of that runtime fee *will* mean higher, more onerous fees later.
this whole situation is like when the hero spots an obvious trap at the bad guy's feet and the bad guy's holding the trigger to activate it just begging the hero to step forward and during the negotiations the bad guy randomly decides to just gently place the device on the table next to him and says "see, I put it down, I can't activate that trap now because I don't have the trigger, please step forward." while occasionally still glancing at the trigger wondering if he can get away with setting it off later.
the damage is done and all trust has eroded. Friend of mine works in a Studio and they basically just finish their current project with Unity and after that they will probably never touch the engine again. We will see in the coming years how much damage this insane action has done to Unity in the long run.
The interesting thing about all this to me is how other company will respond in turn. As in, when you look at Reddit, they are charging for API access. When you look at X and whatever is going on there. Unity seemed like they thought they needed to do something drastic. And WotC did something similar which backfired in a similar way. I'm watching this wondering what these companies that feed the nerdom are doing.
unity opened a very dangerous door with this one. im worried to see how corporations are gonna take this event and make things even worse than they already have somehow.
Yeah, if they let them get away with THIS level of the change, we lost. Companies will just realize that they can just do what they want. Just more slowly.
As a friend said to me about the Unity scandal: "Trust arrives on foot, but leaves on horseback". Once people currently working on Unity projects finish those projects, I expect most of them will switch to something else. Why would they take another chance on a company who already let the mask slip?
This is what I'm expecting as well. I don't expect any AAA or even AA development in Unity 5 years from now. It feels almost like a MTX/mobile freemium deal now, where you can be a mega casual for free, or be prepared to drop a ton of $$ to play full-time.
They can just change these percentages, caps or eligibility requirements whenever they want down the road. That is a very real possibility for anyone that continues with Unity. They’ve lost all trust and who knows what they’ll do next time. That’s the real problem, not the specifics of this policy or that one. How can you work with a company that has proven it doesn’t value its trust with its clients/consumers.
They only did this because of the consistency and scale of the backlash. Otherwise, they'd be following through with the original idea with a smile on their face. If I was a developer, I would stay away from anything Unity, because you never know what their next scheme might be, and how it might impact your business and product. They have proven who they really are with this little charade.
They've destroyed way too much trust. I guarantee you're not going to see very many unity games in the next 10 years after the first waves games that were already built. And if unity survives as a company, I'll be surprised.
"They hadn't spoken to enough users..." I doubt they spoke with any at all. I'd wonder how many would've actually supported their idea. They've got some work to do and that's if anything moving forward can restore trust.
Said it before on other videos but I think Matt being on the news channel is incredible. Love the pair of you together, but I reckon Matt's cooler disposition makes him better suited to the long length flow. Could be ADHD brain talking, but he's a source of chill? I dunno. More Matt on the news basically!
The best thing this type of backtracking did is that now I will end up finishing my main project I was making in Unity instead of discarding 5 years of work and switching to Unreal... But I'm STILL switching to both Unreal and Godot. So at best, Unity's apology just got me to continue working on my game one last time.
I think the trust is gone for good. And the only way to keep other engine providers to get the clear message to not even think of it is to punish Unity. Severely.
Based on how unprepared they were for the questions and backlash, I'm guessing they announced the change to test the limit of what devs would pay and the backtrack is the result.
19:07 The common phrase for the anvil is the sword of Damocles. And it's something that will figure into a businessman's risk calculation. Would I, as someone who leads a team or produces games, want to shoulder the risk that Unity would unilaterally do something that will affect earnings? Those who can afford to transition now are likely doing so, those who cannot are likely getting their devs familiar with other engines. This is quite possibly the dumbest way possible to lose trust in a business partner.
I have to say that it really is impressive how this escalated. Unity made a decision *so* bad that the entire industry didn't even bother with a boycott. It went straight to the next step. Just a full stop of any support or trust.
I've moved permanently over to Godot Engine. I really don't see myself going back after the trust has been breached like that. If a Scooby Doo villain takes off his mask and goes "it was me all along!" and then awkwardly puts the mask back on and goes "oh wait, no it wasn't" it's too late. We all know who you are now. Goodbye Unity.
Ironically, the move that was designed to earn them more money, might just have backfired enough to be the one leading them to bankruptcy. It seems like economical suicide to start new projects using Unity now, so when all current projects are finished the company (or at least this arm of it) may be just as done. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but a couple of years from now it seems highly likely. All their business partners now know that this is a company who have no problems retroactively changing their pricing, contracts, and overall wants to be as greedy as possible but found themselves to be in a far less indispensable position than they thought. They may have backtracked heavily, but the desire has not changed; they will try the same or similar again in the future if they can. Problem is, they showed their dirty greedy hands a bit too soon, so their business partners will flee in droves anyway now, to avoid being caught unware next time they try.
It’s so depressing that the CEO suffered no consequences for this -he even got Whitten to do the apology! -and will probably get a massive bonus for increasing revenue in the most incompetent and goodwill-killing way possible. There are just no consequences for bad people anymore.
When the company goes public, the product suffers. Shareholders are not stakeholders. Go private or go down. Or something, hell I dunno at this point :P Good luck to all.
I mean, this basically answers all of the questions and concerns. However, the way they announce this, and the way they handled the community, leads me to believe that this was not the intended policy. I believe that this is a walk back, when they realized that the small developers were willing to walk away, and not risk bankruptcy.
In a way, I do think this has ended about as well as it could have. It would be nice if they fully rolled back the changes, but I don't even think in that case devs should or would trust them again. Or even worse, they may have thought it was fine for them to stay and found themselves in the same position in a couple of years. These changes let people who are currently using the engine get their games published, and then allows them to leave if they don't want to pay for royalties (which I think are more likely to increase in the future than not). On the other hand, if people want to stay in Unity, they have now had their warning of what the company might do, so they are doing it at their own risk.
The issue is they only rolled the changes back due to the backlash. As their true values as a company have now been shown, are game developers going to lock themselves into an engine that could do a repeat of this in the near future?
They could save a tonne of money right now firing some over paid executives who aren't investing in the company and only selling their shares in the company. Imagine how much better this would have gone over if they just announced they would be changing to a simple 2.5% model from the very start.
"The door-in-the-face technique is a persuasive strategy that involves making a large, unreasonable request first, followed by a smaller, more acceptable one. The idea is that the contrast between the two requests makes the second one seem more reasonable and appealing, increasing the likelihood of compliance." guys come on, this is happening like, monthly at this point
The lawyers have said the TOS includes that they can add in or edit the fees whenever they want without consent of other parties. Edit: also they included it is whenever you agree to the next TOS so if you download Unity again even if it isn't the newest Unity since it does ask you to agree to the TOS that does include you into the new agreement. This example was listed even going from Unity 2019 to Unity 2020 which 2020 isn't even the newest yearly version.
I started on Unreal and migrated to Unity.... Womp womp for me. Too far into my current game to quit, but next game will be back with Unreal. At some point, with this current CEO, they are going to force microtransactions into your game or you will be nickel and dimed to death.
This actually gives me some comfort. I wanted to be able to keep using Unity because I love the actual tool. I do NOT consider this a full Walk-Back but it was naïve to think that they would actually do that. They are a business and a business needs to make money. However, I definitely don't trust them. I shouldn't have in the first place so this is just a reminder to me to not do that. Because of that reminder, I will make sure that I keep up with learning other engines (which is honestly good for my own marketability as a developer) and I hope by doing that I will find one that I like better than Unity and/or that has more of the features I want in a game engine. I feel relatively safe continuing to develop my own side projects in Unity until i find a better one that has similar balance between ease of use and breadth of features. I was not likely to ever hit those thresholds of revenue before or after this update but at least for now, the terms are enough so that I won't kill my own company before it can succeed. I can put off the re-evaluation of continuing with Unity down the road for when they try this again (I think we should have a few years at least). I also like that you don't need the splash screen now as for many small devs, that was the only reason they had to pay anything (to get Pro so they could remove it) to release their game under the license. My ideas and use of Unity aren't likely to make $100's of thousands but I would like it if they did and knowing that any additional costs would cap at a rev share half of Unreal's is good enough. Also, I don't need to worry about that for a while as I am still on 2022 LTS version and these older version are perfectly fine for what I am doing. Long story short: I can keep doing what I am doing while still looking for something as good or better over the next few years.
@@CainXVIINGL, despite all the hell this company just put devs through, it is still the best dev tool out there for indie devs making something small, manageable, in 2D AND/OR 3D and has easy cross platform builds. It needs to be fully customizable but also allow you to get things done quickly and easily. Unity has this ease but ramps up to high end quality as well. Unreal is the only fully featured option that can compare but it is complex (to me at least) and not easy to learn quickly. Other engines that do what Unity does tend to be less fully featured and/or not cross platform and/or 2D or 3D only. I like the Open Source options but who do you call when it can't do something you need or one of their systems has a blocker or critical bug. I don't have time for that on top of a full time job with indie dev on the side.
@@dancoburn1108 Yeah if Godot is a valid alternative for your game, you never *needed* Unity in the first place. I don't think a lot of the "developers" in these comments really understand the technological differences between engines and why switching from Unity to some other engine, for actual developers, is a hugely expensive option in either time, money, or both. Godot is simply just not commercially viable for anything more than tiny little experiences yet. I hope it gets there, but its not there. Unreal is for making flashy showpieces with low cpu load. Its for making corridor shooters. You COULD make Cities: Skylines on Unreal, technically, but you wouldn't ever choose to actually do that. I think its important to reassure aspiring developers, or indie/solo devs that are using Unity that they are not just automatically in danger. Its not foolish or dangerous to continue using it. If someone personally doesn't find Unity's terms agreeable, then thats fine, but trying to whip up a mania to convince people to abandon Unity is childish and asinine. Its a business tool that people need and want to use for various reasons. Having allegiance to one or another is weird as hell. Use the one that best fits your requirements and leave the hysterics to gamers and anime girl game developers.
The story should be this: The executive staff, upper management, and the board of directors are, and should always regarded as, toxic for business. They are incapable of sound decision-making, and everything they touch turns to shit. Let's not forget that they took what was a well-loved and rapidly-growing company with a popular and growing product, and turned it into the most hated, fastest-shrinking platform, with zero growth prospects, clouded in uncertainty and doubt. Everything they did cost _everyone._ It cost employees their jobs, it cost the company its goodwill and revenue, it cost their entire customer base, it cost their public perception, and it cost investors' money. All that was good has been turned to shit. None of these people - the directors, executives, and management - should ever be allowed to make decisions affecting a business, ever or anywhere at any time.
16:37 The quote is actually „Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, **** the peace signs, load the chopper, let it rain on you.“
The fact they even opened pandora's box was enough to obliterate the trust of most. I think they need to take a massive hit for this, to be made an example of so no others try something so mindlessly greedy again.
Don't forgive the snake, let them burn. It always remind me of the story of the frog and the scorpion,. There are some people out there that no matter what they will continue to try and do horrible things, it's in their nature and they will never change. I hope from this that all the wonderfully hard working and talented people leave unity and if we are lucky get multiple different engines from it. Ohhhh wouldn't that be the day when we had options and let the best product win.
The funniest thing for me on all of this is that wizards of the coast tried to do exactly the same with with D&D licencing a few months ago and the result of that was EXACTLY the same as this one. It's literally nothing new
If people continue to believe that these people are actually sorry, these kinds of things will continue to happen...but slow and steady...the boiling frog. How many times do we need to see people make greedy decisions, role them back, say sorry and then continue to do the same thing.
Just wanted to say this: ❤you FOSS Community & also huge thanks for relogic for donating $300000 to game engines. This has brought the community together in such an amazing way!
Unity has build a community of indie game, of gamer even. For a decade, they expanded the game landscape. That's until Ricotello shit on it while it was on golden age. We couldn't have a feat like this anymore, cooperation, ruins everything, including a cultural impact hobby. Now, everything is shattered. This install fee drama has mark a deep scar on Unity reputation and will go down to history, even forgotten forever. That's from someone who don't have Unity or play an Unity game. Just someone who watch the destruction.
9:35 My issue with Adobe Firefly in Photoshop is not just an issue that can be resolved by a reduced cost, it's an ethical issue. 1) AI Art is and has been built on the works of other artists without their permission, consent, or compensation by feeding their work into an AI algorithm. 2) I can't be certain at this point that Adobe isn't uploading any of my work for use in Firefly. At this point I can't even trust a downgraded version won't unload my work anyway to feed Firefly. AI Art has literally made me uncomfortable even sharing my artwork online in a more scummy way than some shopkeeper in a Farmer Market or ebay printing your work on a t-shirt and selling it....and that's truly terrifying.
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It's only over when c-level heads are rolling which would be a first step to restore trust. So far they haven't even done that, so nothing really changed.
they didn't walk this back fully like everyone wanted, all they did was make a policy that wasn't as shit as the first draft, their just sorry they got caught and now they're giving us this weak ass apology to try and save face, Developers out there please don't stop fighting this just because of this apology. make Unity walk this back ENTIRELY and remove the runtime fee, we need a W against corporations who think they can do whatever they want and get away with it.
21:32 The same happened at the beginning of the year with the WotC OGL drama.
NO ONE NEEDS VPN UNLESS YOU PURPOSELY NEED TO HIDE SHIT BECAUSE YOU`RE IN A ROGUE HUMAN RIGHTS DENYING COUNTRY
sry but ... most likely not over
i mean it just calm things right now but it leave a huge black screen for later
if they dont at least add perpetuel contract for later, this will calm things now but i doubt it wont cost them later down the line
who would start a new project later on with current situation and more then anything without any way to know when and how they'll f*** you around and change terms in the midle of things
If Unity wants to earn trust, it's gotta start by getting a new CEO.
And board especially the ones that came from the other company they merged with
And kiss up to what users are left
TOS guarantees are the only way that they would even begin to have a chance to have profitable development studios trust them again. Unity may be great software for indy developers that don't make much money. But its actually not, they will be better off switching engines now rather then wasting more time using Unity. Because when no profitable developers are using unity, unity makes no money and goes out of business, then the engine goes away and they could have just started learning a new engine immediately but they didn't and now they have to and however long that was that they delayed is just wasted time.
People say that, and it would certainly not be bad, but I don't think it would have the effect you would be hoping for. No massive change would happen.
@@morgierwin6641 Basically, it would take a whole lot of effort on Unity's part that we all know will not happen.
This whole incident has left me feeling:
- Unity can't be trusted
- They will try to inch their way back towards this position again
- Their games are probably loaded with tracking malware and now you don't know whose using it
You bet.
And as a gamer, it's made me more hesitant to buy Unity games going forward. I don't want to support their business model and I don't want to be subject to their whims.
I already some Unity apologizers in comments, saying things like "most devs won't be affected anyways" As if gaslighting them with "You won't make that much money to qualify anyway, stop complaining". I'm not sure if they were hired by Unity acting as PR or just devs coping hard.
if there was any phone home malware, someone will find it because you know there are people who look for things like that by using network scanners and seeing what traffic a game is sending
@@kusog3 Proof reading is your friend.
Unity have made it abundantly clear that they are not to be trusted. Nobody should ever again consider using Unity for their projects until Unity has in a legally binding manner permanently closed the door on these kinds of shenanigans.
That is John Riccitiello stepping down as CEO and letting a new competent CEO take over.
@@talonstride Guarantees in the TOS are the only thing that is legally binding. Even then I think if you use Unity going forward you are crazy. All the time you invest in a partnership is wasted if they go under. Even if they managed to survive it would be because of leeching money off of soulless mictrotransaction companies and what kind of company will they be when that is how they operate. Do you think they will be providing an excellent engine and services at that point? A companies actions are indicative of their quality and trajectory going forward. I feel sorry for the devs that cannot read the writing on the wall and hold onto hope that they don't have to switch engines, and end up getting burned waaaaay worse a couple years from now. I reject entirely the ethos of this company and barring some unlikely complete transformation of the company I will not be spending money on any game made with Unity going forward. I'm not alone.
And they said they removed old EULA repository due to "low view count" but replaced it with latest EULA version so it be retroactive ...
@@talonstride John Diccitiello being deported to the surface of the sun would be nice, but it would ultimately be pointless unless they forbid themselves from doing stuff like this again in a legally binding manner.
If they manage to trick developers to stay with them there is nothing stopping them from doing it again, after having made it much more difficult to escape to other engines.
There is a greater than zero probability that this whole debacle has set wheels in motion on legislation regarding non-negotiable contracts and retroactive changes to such contracts. Let us all hope and pray that the politicians writing that legislation do a decent job because if they don't it is quite possible that Unity will go down in history as the company that killed a whole industry with their greed.
💯
I won't do business with Unity as long as they are continuing to push the idea of a runtime fee. I simply do not think it is a funding model that we as developers or gamers should let become normalised. Which is clearly what they're hoping with this change. They made it optional, made it self reporting, made it the cheaper option, in a year or 2 once everyone has gotten used to it they will push it further. The trust is gone and the fact they're still trying to smuggle in the runtime fee is the nail in the coffin.
Unity CEO is John Riccitiello. A man who was fired from freakin' EA because thanks to his insane greed, EA's profit performance massively dropped.
This ain't directed at you.
People have learned about this from the horse armor and how that has lead to games as a live service model. There isn't much of a fundamental difference between the 2. I wonder if the reason the customers lost out in the end is because the games were primarily funded with investor money as part of the reason. No reason to really care about customers if you got investment money.
This is by no means a nail in the coffin, the coffin was sealed and lowered when the first news went out, we're just waiting to see how slow people are with the shovels.
@kosmosXcannon No need to wonder. That is the reason.
It's not ideal, but self reporting nerfs it into the ground. Really, I don't think there's any funding structure other than carte blanke revenue splits (and not even ones that feel mildly in any dev's favor) that actually can sustain game engines the size and scope that Unity wants to go after. Hell, even maintenance for something like Steam could probobly only stand to go down to a 20-25% rev split, with the amounts of traffic it gets.
I don't even thing Godot is safe. Like donations are great if your customer base is small, but not when you're courting as many devs as they are.
Unity has spat in the faces of its users (developers). I don't think this change to there pricing is going to clean-up the mess they made with the community.
unity or their CEO
Unity. The CEO does things on behalf of shareholders and board.
@@fraserodonnell7618 Would both be an acceptable answer. The CEO has burned bridges ages ago.
Gamers are pretty forgiving, I think it’ll be fine
@@cashtachethe issue isn't gamers. Its devs, and devs ain't stupid. A lot of devs might just cut unity out entirely. Idk why you thought this was a gamer thing, it affected gamers only because it affected people who make games... Why did you say this so sure?
Ah yes. Another "trust me, bro" from Unity. I absolutely trust them now. I am not at all skeptical of their intentions.
It would be foolish to trust any company. I still love Sega even though they screwed me with the Sega CD, 32x, and the amaizingly sad Dreamcast. I still love Sega and Unity! I couldn't do anything as a consumer about Sega but we did leverage some power over Unity and got a win I think.
@@Nev182mang How is it a win? If you think this is a win, then they succeeded in fooling you. They took 10 steps forward, 8 steps back and you think you won? They're still 2 steps forward. This is manipulation & gaslighting 101.
@@Nev182mang it would be foolish to trust any company but it would be even more foolish to keep supporting a company that secretly deletes their ToS and imposes sudden license changes with hidden fees. Notice how the community is complaining less about how Unity normalized the run time fee, cause they get to remove splash screen of Unity.
"Just a prank, bro!!"
Too little too late. The leadership exposed themselves and its too late. What is stopping then from doing the old slow implementation of everything they "walked back." Im telling you they are just waiting for the backlash to quell down and for everyone to come back before trying again! Not to mention that they still haven't walked back the Bull shit!
If Unity really wants to try to regain trust they should fire the entire board of directors. Unless they can show the minutes of the meetings where someone objected to those predatory proposals the ones that went along should find other jobs.
The CEO is the Chair of the board and majority share holder. So he has absolute power and they cant get rid of him even if they wanted to unfortunately. He will try this again.
@@georgehall7749 Then I don't see trust being given to Unity anytime soon.
@@georgehall7749 So there was no external shareholder pressure to pull off this garbage? Yeah, he will definitely do it again since it was all him. A majority shareholder can openly wipe its ass with the stakeholder suggestions until the orders start getting canceled, effectively shrinking the company by cutting its revenue. This stuff was deliberate af based on what I know. Unless the company is losing money, in which case fees need to be raised and the costs cut. Even then, this is not how to do it.
@@georgehall7749the whole board is responsible
They have literally shown their cards and are now hiding them again hoping you forget what you saw. CEO's like this never get sacked because in their world they are seen as a success.
bottom line is, it doesn't matter if 60% of Unity developers leaves if the remaining 40% who uses Unity makes enough money and Unity's numbers goes up at the end of the year.
@@kusog3 CEOs like this show people numbers on paper and fudge the numbers. If you gut a company by selling off its assets and firing its entire workforce you can theoretically show a profit at the end of the quarter, despite the fact that the company is effectively now nonprofitable. It's like burning your house down because you got cold and calling it a win.
@@kusog3 Short term no, longer term... When was the last time you visited your MySpace page? It was the Facebook of its day. Now I had to Google to even remember its name.
The splash screen section is actually incorrect as they said you need to upgrade to remove the splash screen so effectively they didn’t change that at all.
Don't point that out! - Unity PR team, probably
Just want to point out that Unity is framing that the removal of Github ToS was due to lack of views rather than them covering their tracks...
The CEO is predatory garbage and should resign or quit. This is becoming a parody of the South Park BP spill episode.
The BOARD as well. The CEO alone didn't do this. We talking about a board that is infected by Ironsource leadership.
The CEO is only one ingredient that brewed that. Shareholders and board mainly. There are even board members without equity, so I prefer to follow the money (proper shareholders).
this is probably 99 % the board and 1 % the CEO. He knew it was a dumb move (reportedly sold 2000 of his shares).
Nope, the board and the CEO are in bed, ever heard that of Vanguard and BlackRock Inc?
@@bumpsyThe CEO is the majority share holder and Chair of the board. This was 100% him and he cant be sacked.
This is less of a tragedy that Unity must now be destroyed to send a message, but more of an opportunity for Godot.
And all of the other open source engines out there such as O3DE
@@Ulrick32
... or libGDX, or jMonkeyEngine. O3DE looks fun though. They use Lua, which is a plus!
Yeah Unity is to Gadot what Diablo Immortal/4 was to Path of Exile - free advertising.
It's still a tragedy, in terms of what's happening to... basically everyone in the Unity community who isn't an executive. None of them wanted this, but none of them could prevent it.
That said, you're right. Unity has to be destroyed at this point, to set an example. No more "Three steps forward, one step back, then repeat until you get everyone to accept the shenanigans." It needs to be "One step too far, and your company evaporates and you're blackballed from the industry." Real consequences, not just a stock dip and a golden parachute, then a new job in a year.
@@Cryptic0013unfortunately, consumers have long since lost that kind of power; or rather, your average, politically-unengaged 'I just want to grill for pete's sake' Joe has allowed the owning class to grow in power, to such a degree that workers/consumers can no longer meaningfully affect change via their decisions like this.
At the end of the day, the only reason things got this bad in the first place is because at every step towards this, the workers/consumers have been powerless to stop the owning class. And it's going to continue to happen, across the board, until we stop holding onto the delusion of "we'll just vote with our wallets, that'll show them!!"
For every informed person who actively fights against these changes, there will be hundreds more uninformed, unengaged people that simply accept what's given to them.
This is bound to happen to every firm in this aggressively unregulated Capitalist economic model. The ones that stay principled will ultimately be either bought out by the larger, scummier companies, go out of business (not being able to compete with economies of scale), or become the very thing they sought to destroy.
These large companies will *never* act in the interests of the consumers -- not unless they're literally forced to.
They've shown us this time and time again, and will continue to, until people realise that maybe, *just maybe*, the giant corporations funding the propaganda campaigns that have convinced people to be deathly afraid of any sort of government regulation *have done so because it's the only surefire way to keep them from screwing us over for their own benefit.*
They work so hard to ingrain that into the psyche of the average citizen, *specifically because* that's the only way the citizen could meaningfully resist them.
No. These companies need to know that you can’t f around and push your customers. You can’t just say, “oh sorry, my bad,” and get away unscathed. No, corporate greed needs to be handled swiftly and definitively. You push the customers, you lose your azz. It’s the only way these scummy corporations will stop pushing the limits. Between corporate greed and political corruption we have to start demanding that bad behavior in both realms be addressed and resolved.
They always look for easy money , they never want to improve , if they did improve ppl would naturally come to them and increase their revenue , they are just dumb corpo thinking ,if they could they'd tax us for breathing air .
You know what should happen when a prominent corporation F's up? Superior competition that doesn't. There are plenty of people capable of creating their own game engines. They might not be as ready-to-go, though the singular dudes developing them can get by with a relatively minor donations. Also, there are plenty of open source engines. For example, Torchlight was made with OGRE the open source 3D engine.
This is making me think of one of my favorite sayings that i learned awhile back. "Trust is like glass. It takes a long time to make, and it can shatter in an instant."
Trust is like glass. Once broken, it can be mended, but it will forever be flawed, and everyone will be able to see that crack.
Unity has rang the alarm bell, devs subsequently stopped being complacent under it, and to be honest, the company will be extremely lucky if it navigates this affair unscathed. (spoilers: it won't)
Remember, this is Unity's CEO second strike... Who in their right mind would trust him again, and what guarantees that he won't try another trick down the road?Expect devs starting to flee this potential minefield.
They already are leaving. Hence why Unity extended an olive branch with the "we will only be illegally greedy with the NEW version, not all the older ones mwehehe please don't leave 🥺"
Multiple companies will finish their projects and then try to move to other engines
I think you're underestimating how much abuse devs are willing to take, as long as Unity introduces license changes slowly, but surely, I don't think the majority of devs will care.
@@kbrnsrexactly. not to mention how prevalent unity is with independent devs and education. its being taught in schools ffs and we all know damn well universities wont expand their repertoire because of this
If you have a broken glass, you either throw it away or make a stained glass art from it.
@@_holy__ghostSchools and universities are pretty cost sensitive when it comes to paying for software, educational institutions are constantly using tricky workaround in order to fit that shit into the budget in my experience. They'll either be teaching students how to do the same effectively or there just gonna switch because they have as little or less give in there budget than most bussiness's.
10 steps forward 9 steps back. They still have the pricing plan in place.
Even if Unity completely canceled this monetization route and offered to pay developers for using Unity, it wouldn’t be enough to undo the damage they've done to their reputation.
Ironically for Unity that Mihoyo start hiring engine programmers to create their own in-house engine, with their huge budget and resource it's no doubt that they can do it in a few years and say goodbye to Unity forever
I think we will see huge opportunities for businesses that focus primarily on porting Unity games into other engines like Godot/Unreal/etc. For many devs it will literally be cheaper to hire these types of services than to pay increased fees, especially for engines with zero royalties or in-house engines.
Tencent may be reverse-engineering Unity through Mihoyo, they've done it before.
@@Dexter037S4does tencent even own Mihoyo? AFAICT they're separate
Remember when Square Enix tried to create their own engine? And how everybody hated using it?
@@MoreImbaThanYou the one from 13 onwards? Wasn't that because the pc ports were the big poop?
If this leads to things working out for Unity in the end, it will have been a master class in conditioning your customers. It's wild that people have any kind of leniency or goodwill left towards corpos that fuck you over at every turn.
Well the difference between corpos that screw regular consumers and the Unity situation is that Unity's customers aren't consumers, but business owners.
So they're not gonna take it up the butt as eagerly as the average consoomer, but may be too optimistic.
We live among sheep.
3:50 - The OTHER unfortunate thing about the splash screen policy is it only applies to people who agree to the new terms... with the new 2.5% revenue cut. If you want to continue on the older terms (which lets be honest 99.9% of devs will) then tough luck, gotta keep that splash screen
99.9% of devs will be forced to upgrade to new version anyway. How else are you going to get that critical bug fix or that critical new feature that you want your game to take advantage of?
Yeah, I don't see why the UA-camrs are giving them such a pass for these policies. "It's finally over" reeks of naivety. @@lareolanKFP
Was that mentioned somewhere outside of the open letter because that is not what it says in the letter. The splash screen only applies to the personal version and according to the letter that version will not have a runtime fee.
@@jacobjohnson3200you really don't see?
its about don't burning bridges
@@MorbidEela few other creators delved into the fine print, and yes, the condition is to take advantage of those changes, you HAVE to accept the new TOS and upgrade to the next version
Classic overton window shift. Make an outlandish proposal that would never get accepted, then negotiate down to the position you actually wanted.
Yeah this exactly the way I was thinking it was going as well. It's like taxes we want 5% higher taxes so will ask for 8% and settle on 5%. 🧐 getting what we originally wanted 🤡
Exactly. We've seen this tactic before.
In negotiations it is called "The Big Ask" go long then walk it back to what you really want. Come back in 2-3 years for another Big Ask, go long walk it back to where you wanted in the first round of negotiations. Rinse and repeat.
@@johannw7933 exactly how the games industry went from complete game at launch to game + dlc to game + day 1 dlc + season pass to half finished games + day 1 dlc + season pass + microtransactions + battle pass.
though that is probably whats happened if that what their plan was they are idiots. Besides their per seat fee this doesn't make their cost for a dev doesn't seem that different then unreals the 30 login thing is really stupid. Honestly i think if they had just come out with something similar to this there would have been some grumbling but it wouldn't have become a massive news story that motivated people to try and build tools to move a game out of unity and even have studios donate money to support godot. Honestly if i was a dev or even a smaller publisher i would still be wary of using unity for any new games and be looking to retrain in other engines for the simple view of 'yeah this is what we got in the end this time but that first deal is more what they wanted what to stop them trying to push that again'. Just feels like they have place sword of Damocles above every unity dev head with them simply waiting for the next time unity tries to screw them.
Since that man sell his actions Just before this bullshit, i hope he become target of federal investigation
If you have proof he donated 1000 dollars to some orange man, maybe.
Otherwise LOL.
Lol yeah. If Trump was involved. We'd have raids left and right.
It reads: The Runtime Fee policy STAYS for 2024 and "beyond". Yep, it is still there.
Anyone who trusts them after this is crazy. There are already people posting in various Reddit subreddits about how great Unity is for doing this making it seem like what they tried to pull never happened and I'm sure they are out there on other social media doing the same thing.
I guarantee they’re paying those people to push this narrative in social media.
This is a repeat of the Hasboro/WotC OGL debacle. It smells exactly the same, and predictably, people are reacting in a similar manner.
Stuff like this, cynical or not, I automatically assume the culprit hired bots or bad actors to spin the narrative. Case in point - all the fake reviews for, well, everything on Amazon. I was looking at a review for a TV today - a verified purchase - and it talking about a fridge-freezer unit. Padded the numbers, spin the dice in the "right" way...
@@Ackadia Actually, that sounds pretty optimistic on humanity. My cynical take is that it's a mix of actual people and bots. I've worked enough customer service to not be so optimistic for humanity.
I dont trust unity EVER again n not 1 bit until you are beyond barried and God removes all your power.
I want a statement from everyone on UNITYs board in their own words. ESP EA ricatello. I dont accept their sacrificial lamb. And the apology letter still is hinting that they are going to roll out the fees anyway over time in the new versions.
@@devilselbow Too bad, I stole the million that was going towards you.
EGDF is already starting the process to make such retroactive charges illegal under EU law by default. The eula change is already illegal, but the new amendments would make it much easier to sue. Also, it wouldn't be the developers, but EGDF suing, which is a quasi government agency with a speed dial to courts in Brussels.
@@phoenix211245 Thank gawd.
yeah, they are SO GOING TO slow boil their users, now that roasting didnt work for them. I was going to branch into gamedev and learn Unity. Unity ensured that I will literally never touch any of their products, no matter how long my stick is.
@@michajastrzebski4383 Well, with the reputational loss, the projected loss of developers using unity, and I'm talking about the big guys here like Tencent, and their annual amount of financial losses, they are going to go bankrupt anyways. So yes, it's not a smart decision to learn their engine. Oh, and have you seen the number of universities announcing that they are going to drop unity from their programs? That... hm.... will have an effect.
This is basically exactly what happened to Wizards of the Coast with their D&D OGL changes, it's almost hilarious how exactly the same shit is happening. Down to the retroactive requirement stuff and questionable enforcability. Multiple groups spurned WotC altogether and either threw their lot in with more open groups like Paizo or went to make their own systems, people trashed the shit out of their decision online til they admitted defeat.
It says a lot about how not sorry they are that they're still going to have the runtime fee, just more specifically targeted, and later.
Literally the only point of the runtime fee could be to put more pressure on people with low per-install revenue.
So either they are simply stubborn or, more likely, they want leverage specifically on mobile devs for some reason.
Ikr. Feeling like a trend is going on these days
And people still buy WoC and wll continue on Unity..
Wasn't the final rollback of WotC basically everything, though? Sounds to me like the Unity rollback isn't quite as complete, they're still keeping the runtime fee in there.
@@logicalfundy Yeah, that's where the story splits, Unity's making concessions but I don't think anyone will conside it enough. WotC essentially had to make their core system entirely free use just to win back _some_ people and I don't think Unity's ever gonna do that...
I'm not a game dev ("I wrote a few small games" doesn't make me a game dev) but what little desire I had to learn Unity went out the window when all this started.
Absolutely. Even as an intellectual exercise, if I make some stupid little graphic game, it's not going to be in a financial dead-ender like Unity is now. It's the game engine equivalent of writing and publishing a game module in AD&D now.
Good. You should be considering godot instead anyways.
@@kizylle5204 that's what I would used if I needed such things... but I don't, I'm mostly an app dev.
This. There are no guarantees they won't go after the hobby devs at some point. This is probably the best time to look for a different engine.
I think the backlash was calculated. They put out a bunch of terms that nobody would accept to then scale it back to what was intended in order to get devs more receptive to it. At least this is the feeling I get from the fact they knew internally it was going to happen.
If that was calculated, they sure are bad at math.
Could be, the suckers that accept the terms will now also accept yearly increases in the pricing giving up more of their revenue without really gaining anything. This certainly has weeded out the studios that run their businesses sensibly and those that don't. If this is true it's even more obviously a scam and shrugging off the leechy freeloaders (as they apparently see them).
The anchoring effect, a favored tactic among used car salesmen. Start with an absurdly high initial offer, then "compromise" down to something that likely would have been negotiated down even further had been the initial offer, but now seems like a good deal compared to the anchor.
I think that was their plan initially too, but their anchor was just so ludicrously high that everyone just immediately jumped ship, leaving Unity scrambling to stop the hemorrhaging of customers.
New Coke. Same theory floated. But they too just screwed up.
@@Okusar Agree, I also think it was a case of selling overpriced just to give a "discount". But they overdid and fell on their faces. But I also wanna see which developers (if any) will stop using Unity, because if the image get hurt but not the wallet then it really doesn't matter for them.
The only thing to establish trust again would be a poison pill clause in the entire board's contract, that fires them all anytime something like this happens. If they're going cavalierly threaten dev's livelihood like this ever again, it needs to be tied to theirs.
And a lot of their own employees quit in protest, too.
@@littlebear274 I'm not entitely sure that wasn't seen favorably internally tho. I mean if you're losing money, that just releases the pressure of "having to do" layoffs. I've certainly worked jobs where the tactic was to make certain the experience so bad that the more aware employees quit, rather than having to fire them.
@@RobertStollYikes. What a world we live in.
@@RobertStoll It's called constructive dismissal and illegal in some place. Some treat it as criminal act others as grounds for lawsuit.
@@ZeroXSEED Funny thing about illegal practice. It doesn't really mean shit if you can't pay a lawyer while they can spin the narrative.
if anyone trusts them after this... they NEED medical help
I mean the Bellular News is sticking with Unity because they "don't want to put up with the cost of re-training devs" as said in a video.
I mean I'm pretty sure that's just the definition of every business entity in the video game and related tech industry
@@soundrogue4472 doesn't mean they trust Unity
Maybe a straight jacket too
@@soundrogue4472 that's some BS (that they'll stick with Unity)
After something/someone does something shady to later walk it back, I no longer trust them because they've already shown us their true colors.
Yeah it's better to just commit to the shadiness. I respect that, and I think based on how most people behave they respect it more as well.
Our Devs are stressed out enough with all the BS in the industry. Unity F* around and Find out.
Devs should be looking to leave Unity and finding an alternative. Unity as a company should fail and die as a result of the bs they pulled.
I'm willing to bet they went into it of the usual mindset of "We'll push something ridiculous way too far then walk it back a little so people still think we're the good guys" and are now actually panicking because they pushed too far anyway.
they did it, and got away with so much. I don't get why the creators are giving unity such a pass
Sounds like they, Unity, want Adobe's rep, a necessary "evil", due to "industry standards", but they screw with their own customers. Occasionally to the point that they drive the rich customers crazy at times.
Adobe could get away with murder because they were an exception of maybe half a dozen rather than a rule. And some of their software is industry standard. Unity doesn't have that power.
There was a very good reason, back in the day, that each studio made its own engines or bought the rights to an engine per project at a single flat fee.
Open source is quite simply the only option now.
The only way they would have been 'trusted' would have been to revert the entire ordeal. It's too late and really hope people show this with their future developments.
Unity played their hand and revealed what they were willing…nay…what they WANTED to do. The best course of action for developers right now is to do whatever they can to move away from unity. Whether that is through porting their games, or just diversifying their skill set. As long as Unity has the leadership that they do and they are a publicly traded company, the shareholders will always be prioritized above developers and gamers alike.
Gamers need to stop being spineless and fully commit to not forgiving studios, devs, and companies when they pull disgusting anti consumer moves like this. The gaming community seems so quick to forgive or not even put up a resistance at all.
If Unity doesn't cease to exist entirely, then the lesson wasn't learned and we will eventually lead back up to this point again thru gradual change.
Gaming is already destroyed with the inclusion of Call Of Dutys' Black Cell premium battle pass scheme. I 100% blame corporate attitude for ruining gaming, but I equally blame gamers for not having the conviction to fight back and stop supporting these companies entirely.
Ok, I guess, but this is about developers, not gamers.
My brother in Christ, you are talking about video game developers as if those people killed your entire family. It's people making fucking video games. This isn't deciding whether you are to live or die. Chill. Go outside. Hug a tree. Sit on a stone. Walk on the forest floor.
@scratchy996 no, it's about gamers just as equally and this exact attitude is why we are in the position we are in now
This is dev on dev violence and business is way less forgiving than players. If a player gets screwed they can move on, if a dev gets screwed the studio can fold and they take that very seriously.
If you never forgave literally any studio after they do something bad, then there’d be no studios left in circulation.
In a way the whole backlash feels like an empty victory.... On the one hand its great that the gaming community has finally started standing up and saying no to predatory bullshit. But on the other hand the community has allowed them to be pushed back so far to the point where the big companies and industry as a whole are willing to risk the chance of everything burning to the ground just to see how far they can push people.
What I've learned during all of this is that they already put in writing that, if you want to not upgrade you can use the TOS that were in effect when you last upgraded. They removed that language silently because it wasn't legally binding. Learned that from a lawyer's videos on it. Them giving the same deal they gave in 2019 - and then renegged on - should lend no faith that they will keep their word. Do not trust Unity and do not trust anything John Rotticiello is involved in. I still think this was intended originally to tank Paralives and Life By You, just claiming they had several times the downloads they had, because one would assume Rotticiello still has shares of Electronic Arts and one of their big money makers is threatened. Both use Unity.
When the CEO sells a large share of stock before making the original announcement they knew would be a shit show. SEC please investigate!
Not a fan of the CEO by any stretch if the imagination but this comment is completely misinformed. It was a percentage of stock that the CEO is payed in and then incrementally sold over a number of years. To think anything else is ridiculous.
@@lambbooner3379 b-b-but but but but i heard it was like super illegal insider trading!!1!!111!!!!! breacherment of trust!!11!! we are literally at war!!!!1!!
This definitely feels about as big of a win as was possible under the circumstances. I say that because just about everything that clouds that win, is just simply inherent to this situation that nothing could possibly have solved.
As someone who's done a BA in game design, I feel *really* sorry for this years batch of students who have almost certainly spent the last 2-3 years learning how to make games in Unity. Because there isn't any real getting around that it's the best engine for learning how to make games from the ground up, it has the tool and samples to get things going as you're learning the very basics, while still having the scope to let you make things as customized as you need for whatever kind of project you want to tackle... and honestly for that purpose I just don't know if any other engine can really take it's place as teaching platform because from what I have seen most other engines definitely have higher entry barriers. Far from insurmountable, but ones that Unity has really strived to remove.
Unity can still, relatively easily, regain most trust. If they fire their entire directors board they can at least honestly say that they got rid of the evil people who pushed this and start again cleanly; they can obviously hire equally greedy people or wose, but at least people will give them the benefit of the doubt
If who fires them? If they all vote to fire themselves you mean? Its not like the 80s movies where a shareholders vote saves the day.
The board is voted in by shareholders. The CEO only has to brush aside the negative publicity and say they've monetised more successfully, and show projected increased revenue over the coming years. Revenue will very likely increase, despite losing a portion of customers. The move away from Unity likely won't be as strong as many think as 1) it does a portion of the market better than other engines, and 2) the larger devs can always seek unique ironclad terms, and to them it's all just business. Further, a significant enough dev stating their intention to leave Unity is also intentionally or even unintentionally a negotiation strategy. We're not all playing at the same level, so how we react to this as mostly minor devs is pretty insignificant.
All IMHO obviously.
The problem is they still got what they wanted, going forward there is an 'install tax'. Not for every single case, but it exists now.
They got the monetization feature they wanted in place, and in the future they can tweak these new limits and rules to slowly sweep more devs into that monetization model. Anyone thinking they won't try to salami slice their way back to where they wanted to be, which is basically everyone paying this install tax (which you can bet will get passed on to customers), is being willingly ignorant of what is going on here.
Yep, they got it now, and was their goal. Threaten a big thing, then "concede" and do a small one instead, and as outrage ends slowly creep it up.
EX: the US government. Towards the beginning, the US almost put a limit on income tax to 10%, but policy makers at the time thought that there's no way they'd hit that limit and it'd just encourage later policy makers to jump taxes up to that "impossibly high number."
It all started there, and got much, much worse.
2.5% isn't bad now, but the existence of that runtime fee *will* mean higher, more onerous fees later.
this whole situation is like when the hero spots an obvious trap at the bad guy's feet and the bad guy's holding the trigger to activate it just begging the hero to step forward and during the negotiations the bad guy randomly decides to just gently place the device on the table next to him and says "see, I put it down, I can't activate that trap now because I don't have the trigger, please step forward." while occasionally still glancing at the trigger wondering if he can get away with setting it off later.
The CEO and the top managers should get sacked after this.
I’m betting the only lesson Unity has learned is that they can’t just toss the frog in the boiling water, they need to raise the heat slowly.
the damage is done and all trust has eroded. Friend of mine works in a Studio and they basically just finish their current project with Unity and after that they will probably never touch the engine again. We will see in the coming years how much damage this insane action has done to Unity in the long run.
The interesting thing about all this to me is how other company will respond in turn. As in, when you look at Reddit, they are charging for API access. When you look at X and whatever is going on there. Unity seemed like they thought they needed to do something drastic. And WotC did something similar which backfired in a similar way. I'm watching this wondering what these companies that feed the nerdom are doing.
unity opened a very dangerous door with this one.
im worried to see how corporations are gonna take this event and make things even worse than they already have somehow.
Yeah, if they let them get away with THIS level of the change, we lost. Companies will just realize that they can just do what they want. Just more slowly.
I’m glad that Unity gave developers enough time for them to learn Godot for their future projects
As a friend said to me about the Unity scandal: "Trust arrives on foot, but leaves on horseback". Once people currently working on Unity projects finish those projects, I expect most of them will switch to something else. Why would they take another chance on a company who already let the mask slip?
This is what I'm expecting as well. I don't expect any AAA or even AA development in Unity 5 years from now. It feels almost like a MTX/mobile freemium deal now, where you can be a mega casual for free, or be prepared to drop a ton of $$ to play full-time.
They can just change these percentages, caps or eligibility requirements whenever they want down the road. That is a very real possibility for anyone that continues with Unity. They’ve lost all trust and who knows what they’ll do next time. That’s the real problem, not the specifics of this policy or that one. How can you work with a company that has proven it doesn’t value its trust with its clients/consumers.
You mean how can you work with any company? I think what Unity did is bad, but every large company is underhanded. That's just the nature of it.
They only did this because of the consistency and scale of the backlash. Otherwise, they'd be following through with the original idea with a smile on their face. If I was a developer, I would stay away from anything Unity, because you never know what their next scheme might be, and how it might impact your business and product. They have proven who they really are with this little charade.
I think they still need to be investigated for insider trading.
They've destroyed way too much trust. I guarantee you're not going to see very many unity games in the next 10 years after the first waves games that were already built. And if unity survives as a company, I'll be surprised.
The splash screen no longer being mandatory tells you that Unity now considers its brand tainted. I like that.
"They hadn't spoken to enough users..." I doubt they spoke with any at all. I'd wonder how many would've actually supported their idea. They've got some work to do and that's if anything moving forward can restore trust.
Said it before on other videos but I think Matt being on the news channel is incredible.
Love the pair of you together, but I reckon Matt's cooler disposition makes him better suited to the long length flow. Could be ADHD brain talking, but he's a source of chill? I dunno. More Matt on the news basically!
Unity about to learn the phrase "dont bite the hand that feeds you" over the next couple years
The best thing this type of backtracking did is that now I will end up finishing my main project I was making in Unity instead of discarding 5 years of work and switching to Unreal...
But I'm STILL switching to both Unreal and Godot.
So at best, Unity's apology just got me to continue working on my game one last time.
I think the trust is gone for good. And the only way to keep other engine providers to get the clear message to not even think of it is to punish Unity. Severely.
Know you have been busy with other stuff but it's so nice to have you back on the news Matt, always such good insights!
If anyone believes that they won't try this again next year, they deserve to lose everything.
Based on how unprepared they were for the questions and backlash, I'm guessing they announced the change to test the limit of what devs would pay and the backtrack is the result.
19:07 The common phrase for the anvil is the sword of Damocles. And it's something that will figure into a businessman's risk calculation. Would I, as someone who leads a team or produces games, want to shoulder the risk that Unity would unilaterally do something that will affect earnings?
Those who can afford to transition now are likely doing so, those who cannot are likely getting their devs familiar with other engines. This is quite possibly the dumbest way possible to lose trust in a business partner.
I have to say that it really is impressive how this escalated. Unity made a decision *so* bad that the entire industry didn't even bother with a boycott. It went straight to the next step. Just a full stop of any support or trust.
I've moved permanently over to Godot Engine. I really don't see myself going back after the trust has been breached like that. If a Scooby Doo villain takes off his mask and goes "it was me all along!" and then awkwardly puts the mask back on and goes "oh wait, no it wasn't" it's too late. We all know who you are now. Goodbye Unity.
To be honest, that sounds like a funny Scooby Doo episode...
- Unity fire John Riccitiello - PLEASE - Also nice "Anvil of Damocles" and thanks for supporting this issue across industries. -
Ironically, the move that was designed to earn them more money, might just have backfired enough to be the one leading them to bankruptcy. It seems like economical suicide to start new projects using Unity now, so when all current projects are finished the company (or at least this arm of it) may be just as done. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but a couple of years from now it seems highly likely. All their business partners now know that this is a company who have no problems retroactively changing their pricing, contracts, and overall wants to be as greedy as possible but found themselves to be in a far less indispensable position than they thought. They may have backtracked heavily, but the desire has not changed; they will try the same or similar again in the future if they can. Problem is, they showed their dirty greedy hands a bit too soon, so their business partners will flee in droves anyway now, to avoid being caught unware next time they try.
It’s so depressing that the CEO suffered no consequences for this -he even got Whitten to do the apology! -and will probably get a massive bonus for increasing revenue in the most incompetent and goodwill-killing way possible. There are just no consequences for bad people anymore.
When the company goes public, the product suffers. Shareholders are not stakeholders. Go private or go down. Or something, hell I dunno at this point :P Good luck to all.
You're completely right. Valve stayed private, and they've been incredibly successful.
I mean, this basically answers all of the questions and concerns. However, the way they announce this, and the way they handled the community, leads me to believe that this was not the intended policy. I believe that this is a walk back, when they realized that the small developers were willing to walk away, and not risk bankruptcy.
In a way, I do think this has ended about as well as it could have. It would be nice if they fully rolled back the changes, but I don't even think in that case devs should or would trust them again. Or even worse, they may have thought it was fine for them to stay and found themselves in the same position in a couple of years. These changes let people who are currently using the engine get their games published, and then allows them to leave if they don't want to pay for royalties (which I think are more likely to increase in the future than not). On the other hand, if people want to stay in Unity, they have now had their warning of what the company might do, so they are doing it at their own risk.
The issue is they only rolled the changes back due to the backlash. As their true values as a company have now been shown, are game developers going to lock themselves into an engine that could do a repeat of this in the near future?
They could save a tonne of money right now firing some over paid executives who aren't investing in the company and only selling their shares in the company. Imagine how much better this would have gone over if they just announced they would be changing to a simple 2.5% model from the very start.
"The door-in-the-face technique is a persuasive strategy that involves making a large, unreasonable request first, followed by a smaller, more acceptable one. The idea is that the contrast between the two requests makes the second one seem more reasonable and appealing, increasing the likelihood of compliance."
guys come on, this is happening like, monthly at this point
The lawyers have said the TOS includes that they can add in or edit the fees whenever they want without consent of other parties.
Edit: also they included it is whenever you agree to the next TOS so if you download Unity again even if it isn't the newest Unity since it does ask you to agree to the TOS that does include you into the new agreement. This example was listed even going from Unity 2019 to Unity 2020 which 2020 isn't even the newest yearly version.
That's completely unenforceable if true and would invalidate any changes made under that provision at the very least.
@@ericm5315 I'm aware just reading what they said.
17:18 I love the delivery. It's just *chef's kiss*.
I started on Unreal and migrated to Unity....
Womp womp for me.
Too far into my current game to quit, but next game will be back with Unreal.
At some point, with this current CEO, they are going to force microtransactions into your game or you will be nickel and dimed to death.
"or you will be nickel and dimed to death." That is the deal now.
Between the film industry, Unity, and WotC, it's been a very FAFO year
This actually gives me some comfort. I wanted to be able to keep using Unity because I love the actual tool. I do NOT consider this a full Walk-Back but it was naïve to think that they would actually do that. They are a business and a business needs to make money.
However, I definitely don't trust them. I shouldn't have in the first place so this is just a reminder to me to not do that. Because of that reminder, I will make sure that I keep up with learning other engines (which is honestly good for my own marketability as a developer) and I hope by doing that I will find one that I like better than Unity and/or that has more of the features I want in a game engine. I feel relatively safe continuing to develop my own side projects in Unity until i find a better one that has similar balance between ease of use and breadth of features.
I was not likely to ever hit those thresholds of revenue before or after this update but at least for now, the terms are enough so that I won't kill my own company before it can succeed. I can put off the re-evaluation of continuing with Unity down the road for when they try this again (I think we should have a few years at least). I also like that you don't need the splash screen now as for many small devs, that was the only reason they had to pay anything (to get Pro so they could remove it) to release their game under the license. My ideas and use of Unity aren't likely to make $100's of thousands but I would like it if they did and knowing that any additional costs would cap at a rev share half of Unreal's is good enough. Also, I don't need to worry about that for a while as I am still on 2022 LTS version and these older version are perfectly fine for what I am doing.
Long story short: I can keep doing what I am doing while still looking for something as good or better over the next few years.
Yes, I agree that this means people won't have to fear going bankrupt while looking for alternatives. As long as people do find alternatives.
@@CainXVIINGL, despite all the hell this company just put devs through, it is still the best dev tool out there for indie devs making something small, manageable, in 2D AND/OR 3D and has easy cross platform builds. It needs to be fully customizable but also allow you to get things done quickly and easily. Unity has this ease but ramps up to high end quality as well. Unreal is the only fully featured option that can compare but it is complex (to me at least) and not easy to learn quickly. Other engines that do what Unity does tend to be less fully featured and/or not cross platform and/or 2D or 3D only. I like the Open Source options but who do you call when it can't do something you need or one of their systems has a blocker or critical bug. I don't have time for that on top of a full time job with indie dev on the side.
"This doesn't effect me."
- People standing in line for the guillotine.
@@rahn45 good input, clearly a seasoned industry professional we're dealing with here.
@@dancoburn1108 Yeah if Godot is a valid alternative for your game, you never *needed* Unity in the first place. I don't think a lot of the "developers" in these comments really understand the technological differences between engines and why switching from Unity to some other engine, for actual developers, is a hugely expensive option in either time, money, or both.
Godot is simply just not commercially viable for anything more than tiny little experiences yet. I hope it gets there, but its not there. Unreal is for making flashy showpieces with low cpu load. Its for making corridor shooters. You COULD make Cities: Skylines on Unreal, technically, but you wouldn't ever choose to actually do that.
I think its important to reassure aspiring developers, or indie/solo devs that are using Unity that they are not just automatically in danger. Its not foolish or dangerous to continue using it. If someone personally doesn't find Unity's terms agreeable, then thats fine, but trying to whip up a mania to convince people to abandon Unity is childish and asinine. Its a business tool that people need and want to use for various reasons. Having allegiance to one or another is weird as hell. Use the one that best fits your requirements and leave the hysterics to gamers and anime girl game developers.
The story should be this: The executive staff, upper management, and the board of directors are, and should always regarded as, toxic for business. They are incapable of sound decision-making, and everything they touch turns to shit. Let's not forget that they took what was a well-loved and rapidly-growing company with a popular and growing product, and turned it into the most hated, fastest-shrinking platform, with zero growth prospects, clouded in uncertainty and doubt. Everything they did cost _everyone._ It cost employees their jobs, it cost the company its goodwill and revenue, it cost their entire customer base, it cost their public perception, and it cost investors' money. All that was good has been turned to shit. None of these people - the directors, executives, and management - should ever be allowed to make decisions affecting a business, ever or anywhere at any time.
Damage is already done, i'll use another engine for any projects.
16:37 The quote is actually
„Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
Fool me three times, **** the peace signs, load the chopper, let it rain on you.“
Trusting Unity is like an EA loot box. A gamble called surprised mechanics
Isn't the Unity CEO was the same Father of EA's Surprised Mechanics 🤯
The fact they even opened pandora's box was enough to obliterate the trust of most.
I think they need to take a massive hit for this, to be made an example of so no others try something so mindlessly greedy again.
Don't forgive the snake, let them burn.
It always remind me of the story of the frog and the scorpion,. There are some people out there that no matter what they will continue to try and do horrible things, it's in their nature and they will never change.
I hope from this that all the wonderfully hard working and talented people leave unity and if we are lucky get multiple different engines from it. Ohhhh wouldn't that be the day when we had options and let the best product win.
Even if they walked back
The trust is completely gone
Any inspiring dev would be absolutely insane to use unity
Never sign a contract with someone you wouldn't trust with a handshake contract.
What is this, 1935? I wouldn't trust anyone with a handshake.
The funniest thing for me on all of this is that wizards of the coast tried to do exactly the same with with D&D licencing a few months ago and the result of that was EXACTLY the same as this one. It's literally nothing new
If people continue to believe that these people are actually sorry, these kinds of things will continue to happen...but slow and steady...the boiling frog.
How many times do we need to see people make greedy decisions, role them back, say sorry and then continue to do the same thing.
Our legal department is done with Unity now. There is no going back. Local LLM AI models are helping staff transition to C++. It's going well!
Unity=noobs
Just wanted to say this:
❤you FOSS Community & also huge thanks for relogic for donating $300000 to game engines. This has brought the community together in such an amazing way!
Unity has build a community of indie game, of gamer even. For a decade, they expanded the game landscape. That's until Ricotello shit on it while it was on golden age.
We couldn't have a feat like this anymore, cooperation, ruins everything, including a cultural impact hobby. Now, everything is shattered.
This install fee drama has mark a deep scar on Unity reputation and will go down to history, even forgotten forever.
That's from someone who don't have Unity or play an Unity game. Just someone who watch the destruction.
9:35 My issue with Adobe Firefly in Photoshop is not just an issue that can be resolved by a reduced cost, it's an ethical issue. 1) AI Art is and has been built on the works of other artists without their permission, consent, or compensation by feeding their work into an AI algorithm. 2) I can't be certain at this point that Adobe isn't uploading any of my work for use in Firefly. At this point I can't even trust a downgraded version won't unload my work anyway to feed Firefly.
AI Art has literally made me uncomfortable even sharing my artwork online in a more scummy way than some shopkeeper in a Farmer Market or ebay printing your work on a t-shirt and selling it....and that's truly terrifying.
So what happens if you dont have an internet connection and Unity can't check in every 30 days?