@@dragongrandmasterfun fact did you know Red (the head dev at relogic) said terraria has been selling the exact same amount every year since release to such a degree it has given their company the same type of yearly income as a games as a service income? Pretty wild but they do update it every year I know I have bought it about 3 times like Skyrim u get it on every console
The really disgusting part is that Unity will probably be destroyed as a company, and the executive responsible for all of this will simply move on to the next company and pay no price for his failures.
I hope not. He now has a reputation for destroying the reputation of EA and potentially destroying Unity entirely. If I was on a board of directors, I would NEVER hire a dude who had that resume.
This is why corporations are legally considered people. United Fruit Company rebranded to United Brands Company, then Chiquita Brands International. Blackwater became Xe Services, Academi, and now Constellis Holdings. A brand takes the fall, and all the people actually responsible get off scot-free.
@@lasarousi Yet another reason why 'Legal Personhood' for Corporations need to die. It won't fix everything but it would be a major step towards eliminating accountability insulation/protection for executives.
The frightening thing is that this idea isn't just about the game industry. This business model could explode into anything electronic that requires software to run.
@@GamerBoy870 Cars have electronics. Anything with an electronic is like ET phone home software they can manipulate and charge for however they see fit.
Really? Are you just noticing this now? Open Source Software noticed this in 1982 or thereabouts... Microsoft could disable Windows tomorrow, if they so feel like it. Heck Windows Server and Oracle are so expensive they basically have!
The weird part is in most places retroactive charges are unenforceable if not illegal, so their original plan would literally never work anyway. All they did was destroy all trust in the company and started the ball rolling on their on demise. They literally spawned competition because of this inane stunt. Whoever made this decision should be fired.
@@masterbasher9542I can't recall which video on this subject cited this because I've watched so many now, but the death threats were confirmed to be from one of Unity's own frustrated employees who worked in a different location from the 3 buildings that were locked down as a result. The threat was either made or overheard in an internal phonecall.
@@conspiracypanda1200 the funny thing is: there was not even a police report to be found, I read. some people searched for it, but there was nothing. Maybe they didn't search hard enough, maybe the police didn't get involved, maybe it was a diversion, but I'm taking it with a grain of salt.
That's what I don't get either. I know companies put a clause "we can change this at any time" and "clauses that are not legal in your country do not invalidate the rest" just to make people believe it is so, but they should be aware that any company with even the slightest bit of capital behind them would at least let a lawyer look at the thing and ask "can they actually retroactivly change the contract?" I can't believe someone looked at this and said "trying to change the contract with people one sided is perfectly fine and no one will bat an eye".
Right, literally refuse to pay the fees, which i believe is what sony or microsoft would do.. if they try to take you to court, i’m pretty sure they’d never win can this retroactive bullshit does not make legal sense
Unity: "Help, we're not making enough money, our budget needs balancing if we want to stay solvent!" The Budget: $200 Million Employee Pay: $20 Million R&D: $30 Million Company Acquisitions: $120 Million Executive Stock Options: $500 Million Unity: "Stock options budget is non-negotiable, please help."
The Terraria team has always been my favorite group of devs. It's always amazing to see them fighting for the best for the industry. Yet another reason to love them
The worst part about this for me is all the ground floor employees and developers, who work for them, are very likely going to be out of work soon because the top end of the company dipped their hand in someone elses cookie jar.
Not really capitalism. In capitalism they could easily get another job or start their own company because the owner takes on the risk. This is cronyism.
@@SupHapCak yea, really a little tired of that shallow argument. If cronyism can sneak in, then capitalism allows for that. It's awful funny that you guys call it Capitalism until you're caught red handed, then you call it cronyism to try and avoid any association with greed, but capitalism rewards greed. Whatever you can get away with is allowed. It's a buyer beware market and it always has been. Starting a new business in an environment that is only set up for the wealthy people to do that kind of thing is a gross over asking. If you wanna stick your head in the sand and pretend that the average person can start a business, then you go right ahead. I will not join you. The average person is $600 away from being homeless. If you aren't, then yay for you. You are not the average person.
I feel so bad for the Unity engineers. They've spent so much time and effort creating this (imo) great engine, which is such a monumental task. And now, because of some greedy people at the top of the company, their work is being thrown in to the trash.
Fortunately, there's a high chance the company the greedy people are in will either eventually fire all of them or no longer exist, so that the engineers' work won't get those greedy people _anything_.
@@SmileOlderBro_GodsBrotherthat’s hopeful thinking. People at the top rarely loose in games like these because everyone who has power is connected in someway. They only want each other to win
@@RimFaxxe I've used Unity professionally and haven't had too many issues. Besides, is there a game engine out there that's flawless? I don't think so. Just because you had a bad experience with it, that doesn't mean it's the same for everyone else.
@@ZoofyZoofthey flooded the market with games made to fast and to cheap with ET being a notable example made by one person in 6 weeks. It was heavily marketed as well but sold only a fraction of Ataris expectation
This seems more like the CEO deciding some absolute nonsense despite all the warnings and the executives don't want to be effected by their boss's bullshit.
"Wow, this company, based on the sith homeworld, ran by siths and their cowed peons, wants to offer me a sweet deal! I'll base my livelyhood around trusting them! I'm sure nothing whatsoever can possibly go wrong!"
When I saw the Re-Logic pledge those donations it solidified my stance that they are the only company I'll ever consider fighting for. We stan Re-Logic in this house. One of my favorite games, and dev teams ever.
Wow the control scheme on Switch is weird. I think I prefer the PS3/4 controls. I have struggled most with the lack of quick stacking my items into chests, and crafting is bad if you hold down the button making other things you don't want. Otherwise it's a decent port and runs alright for a handheld system. Better than the Vita version, but the lack of quick select tools and weapons with the D-pad, and if you press "R" a split second too long you can't change items on the bar hold it back the most.
@@jasperpluklmao yeaah. dude literally got fired from EA of all places for being ‘too greedy’ and they saw this and thought “hmm, yes, what a fine addition to our team!”
Re-Logic also mentioned they don't use Unity in that snapshot but they mentioned they still had to take a stance. I am so glad they're supporting other engines now. I'm personally learning Godot now.
One thing I really love about Godot: you download the zip, see an executable, think "Yeah, that's probably just the installer"--NOPE! You click it, and you're in. No splash screen, DRM, account login... the way software used to be. I made the jump about a year ago, when the writing was on the wall. No regrets.
Bro I am not going to download a fucking launcher, open an account and tie it to my steam account just to play a damn game. I don't care what collectible you give me, it aint happening.
Fun fact: The name Unity is actually a reference to how gamers, game devs and game publishers all acted in response to their scummy attempts at making more money
Yup. I remember a lot of grumbling and doomsaying around when John Riccitiello was announced as the CEO. It was going to be for sure just a matter of time before something like this would happen and it's not the first time Riccitiello has done this to Unity either. Why make a better product that more people are willing to continue to use when you can just rug pull now? That's been Riccitiello's M.O. for decades so I can see why Unity users were rightfully upset back in 2014.
Imagine Home Depot demanding regular fees from artisans for using their tools for business. "Well, you made 200 repair jobs with our hammer, so from now on, we will charge you 20 dollars for each job you take"
True, but they also don't give you the hammer for free if you're just a hobbyist or don't make much money. If Unity charged a one-time fee based on what it cost to make, no one would be able to afford it. The biggest problem with Unity's business model change is that it was retroactive. Imagine Home Depot telling the same artisans that they've changed their pricing model and now the artisan will have to pay them 20 bucks for each job that they had ever taken addition to the 20 bucks per job in the future. THAT'S more what Unity's change was like.
Someone needs to make a website that keeps track of CEOs and board members that are involved in shady stuff like this. So we can keep track of what they are going to screw up next in advance.
It's becoming outrageously common to make entirely outlandishly insane announcements specifically to gently step them back to say "look, now it's not _so_ bad."
I've heard it's become a business strategy that's even got a specific name and is outright taught to business students as 'a good way to do business'. (I forget what that name is though.) The classic example that is usually taught is the 'New Coke' debacle, in which there was outrage against coke completely changing it's formula to something most people hated and discontinuing the original. That was later rolled back with the re-release of 'Classic Coke', which hid the formula switch of the re-released '''''Classic''''' Coke from cane sugar to high-fructose corn syrup, which was much cheaper and only slightly worse tasting. If they had just started with the switch to corn syrup they likely would've received the same level of backlash, but because the change happened directly after the New Coke debacle people barely noticed. This was (probably) an accident, but people learned from it in the worst ways possible, like that doing it on purpose could be a strategy to push out bad changes without the majority of folks noticing. Basically it goes like this: 1) Plan to make moderately bad changes that will definitely incur backlash from the more savvy customers. 2) Announce that you're going to make majorly bad changes instead, that you probably don't intend to follow through with (unless you think you can actually get away with them). 3) Cue backlash, not just from savvy customers, but from **everybody**. 4) Announce rollback to quell backlash. 5) Push out originally planned moderately bad changes instead, under the guise of 'not as bad as it **could've** been'. 6) The relief from the majority over the rollback will drown out the justified complaints about the actual bad changes from the savvy. 7) Profit. Of course, this strategy banks on not making the fake announcement so extreme that it permanently chases off too much of their customer-base. Many companies have tripped over that part of it lately, Unity is just the most recent. And as long as it keeps being taught in business schools, we should keep expecting to see it across all industries going forward.
ikr! this is reminding me of clip studio paint, i feel like corporations are NOT hesitating when it comes to trying to profit off of apps/software specifically made for creating things- probably because they have this stupid idea that we depend on their applications to make our games or art in the first place… well guess what! they’re wrong! they depend on us, because once they do shit like this it’s as easy as just not using their app anymore, and then what are they going to do? hundreds of alternatives exist out there, and doing “business practices” like these just makes it more desirable to switch to something that ISN’T run by greedy idiots
Mmm ... as an American, the legal issues are one of the reasons this initially struck me as insane. Especially with comments on its "retroactive" nature and getting Microsoft to pay the fees for its game passes. Because Unity has to have a contract in place with the people who use it. That contract outlines the terms of its use. You can't just suddenly CHANGE the contract without getting everyone to sign the new deal. No developers agreed to the changes, and their "use" of Unity was in the past when they were making the game, it's not current. So it doesn't seem to me to be anyway for Unity to get at that past money. And the Microsoft, Sony, and others with game passes, Unity doesn't have a contract with them at all. Unity can't make them pay. They're just not obligated to do anything for Unity in any way, shape, or form.
The premise would be that to continue selling a game using a unity engine you would have to agree to the new contract. That might hold up in court who knows.
@@Person01234 That depends on what the original contract said. And I don't know what that contract said. But the thing that makes the most sense to me is that the contract was to use their tools and engine for game development. And maybe the way unreal does, you have something to cover selling the engine with your game, since the engine powers your game. I think that's where their percentage comes in. But that was all done in the past. Unless there was language in the contract that limited the time period that they could sell the engine for, they can just keep selling their game with your engine. They already have a contract. They don't need to change their contract. You're only going to have a renegotiation if both sides have something they want to renegotiate. Unity is as bound by its contract as the developers are. That's how contracts work. In the US we have a concept that once a thing is sold, it is the property of the person it was sold to. And that person can do whatever they want with it (unless specifically limited by some sort of contract.) So odds are that the things that are already made and sold are gone. It's very unlikely Unity is going to win a case the requires continuous licensing unless their initial contract was set up that way. And I very much doubt it was because what dev would want to continue paying a license fee for something they'd stopped using.
For one, unity tried to quietly change their license agreement to strip mention of being locked to the license version in effect at time of shipping the product (this failed, as they were seen doing it). For two, trying to impose that cost on Microsoft is likely going to be considered tortious interference, which is grounds for a massive lawsuit.
@@jenniferhanses they didnt have a percentage in the past. It was a flat rate. But I 100% agree, I don't think they knew how to implement this change at all let alone any legal trouble they might get in, they wanted to push it out the door to get money asap. I still say fuck unity, they refuse to take responsibility and call this a "communications debacle" 🤦 and even if they walk back it being retroactive and the prices, it's still just a big trust me bro. I don't think anyone is gonna buy into this, and if those automatic systems to change engines get released I think almost everyone will move away from unity. The big games might stay, but no one is gonna want to release anything new. Even if unitys 4% is less than unreals 5% unreal has trust still, not to mention unity is an outdated engine with no new developments like unreal
I wonder in what universe Unity thought they were: -They do not have popular opinion with them -They are far from being in a situation of monopoly -The law most likely isn't on their side
There really should be like a netflix documentary on companies making these insane decision, where they find out what their logic is, and show first hand accounts from people inside and stuff. It would be really interesting to see the mindset of these people.
I would LOVE a series like that but Netflix wouldnt be able to host it when half the rug pulls tend to be done by them as well as pumping out 'Originals' as fast as possible@@Lilitha11
I've said this elsewhere, but I think Unity is dead. Even if they completely retract this decision, forced or not, they've destroyed any trust in them. I would be supprised if enough developers continued to use Unity to keep it afloat in the future.
The whole teaching a person to use a software package so that they go on to use it in their professional life is Microsoft’s bread and butter, they literally give free licenses for windows and office to schools so that students learn on the package, and they go out and use the packages in their professional life (adobe does that too, it’s why you should try to learn the basics on GIMP instead of photoshop)
@@giulioceresini1435 I’ve worked extensively in both and they really aren’t that different from each other, sure photoshop has a few more tools but GIMP is just as capable. The big difference is that you probably learned on photoshop, gained your skills there and are familiar with it, you’d be so comfortable in it that you don’t realize that it has its own just as frustrating set of problems that make it terrible for some jobs, but because you are used to it you work around it without even thinking about it. That’s why I hate that they put those tools in schools for free, it’s basically direct indoctrination into their ecosystem and tricks generations of users into being customers.
It's amazing to watch several companies do stuff like this *this* year. I am a fan of Tabletop RPGs, and Wizards of the Coast tried something like this earlier in the year trying to pull more money from their 3rd party creators. Annnnd tons of people left, creators and players alike. It seems like they are all just trying to get to whatever money they can. In fact, it reminds me a little bit of the Newsies story when the producers of the newspapers decide to charge the distribution more to sell their product without doing anything to improve their product. Funny how people never seem to learn...
Very proud of the devs standing up to this. I wish normal consumers could learn from their example.....but we all know we can't stick together on anything lol
Yea with how people treat most of media....Yea not gonna happen people will literally fund all these awful practices and not care. This is especially bad in the gaming area where one is supposed to always somehow play these awful games with bad buggy releases....And the masses defend these buggy releases.
I think a big reason is that game developers are a smaller ground and due to how they have to work with their programs they have to stay on top of things to keep track of stuff.
You are the first commentator that mentioned the talent pipeline. It starts from tinkerer, to hobbyist to solo dev to indie dev team to making big or getting hired by someone who needs your skills. No matter how good your product is, if no one knows how to use it it will wither on the wine.
@@kevinbissingeradobe is still industry standard. People still use and learn it. They just pirate it. Unity is heading towards noone downloading it in the first place
@@RusticRonnie Well no I was saying that's why Adobe is the industry standard. Because tinkerers and hobbyists use it so it tends to carry up to their professional life
This is what happens if they hire someone that used to be prez of EA to run your company. This bullshit will happen. I mean he wanted to charge people for faster reloads in FPS games. What did they expect?
they expected the devs and the gaming industry to be soo extremely reliant to unity that they would rather pay extra just to stay on it its the same mindset they had with the paid reloads nonsense in call of duty the big names like tencent will just adapt and knowing china, theyll just throw money into something else and make their own Unity engine clone
Friendly reminder it's the shareholders appointing these people to these leadership jobs in companies. Shareholders love it when you blame Bobby Kotick and CEOs for their insanity.
It's wild to see so many companies this year decide to start wringing blood from stones and get absolutely destroyed by consumers... like they're looking around and going "well THAT guy was destroyed for trying this but OUR greed will pay off and we'll be billionaire god kings forever!!!!"
re-logic cares about one thing: making the best possible game for the genre. When unity opposes other devs, they oppose making the Best Game™ of that genre - against what Re-Logic believes in. (the Best Game™is a game that is fun to play and well coded so it's easily editable
What's so baffling about the whole thing, is how utterly _obvious_ this whole mess is. My only connection to the industry is as a consumer, and after reading all those first articles, I, _just like everyone else,_ saw that this was the end of Unity as a serious player in the future. It shows how completely unhinged and uncoupled from reality Unity's management is, and if Unity is to have any hope in the future, the entire C-suite (and everyone else who OK'd this blunder) has to be sacked. But that's about as likely as me sprouting wings.
It won't be the first time Riccitiello has been sacked from CEO. His previous position in a gaming company was as CEO of E-fucking-A and they sacked him, because of his ideas were so fucking bad. "Let's charge players $1 per reload in Battlefield, because in that moment of intensity, players will be less price-sensitive about their purchase." The man is a caricature of corporate greed, it's unbelievable.
Well, I don't mind Unity gone. Don't really care about the company either way, since its just your typical corporation with your typical corpo BS. But the engine, though, that's entirely different matter. As a gamer, I never liked Unity engine. Never liked how it behaves and works, and if less games are made in it from here on out, I'd say it's a win.
That is what happens when you hire John Riccitiello, someone known for unfettered greed, they fired him from a freaking EA because his greed caused a massive drop in financial performance of EA.
This should be an absolute death blow .. even if they walk it back now, the audacity of them to ever even attempt something like this should not be forgotten -- although far too many people seem too willing to just shrug off bad behavior like this and go right back to the people who knifed them in the back which is truly sad.
I'm personally boycotting Unity for all eternity. No matter what they do now, they have shown themselves to be capable of stooping to such lows. My trust and faith is forever broken and can never be mended by this action.
@@wwatermelon15 it wasn't just one person, we all know this. They will try again if you let them go the first time and next time they do it they'll be prepared and then, then there's nothing you can do. I prefer it die to teach others as well as save Devs now rather than in 5 years time when they are finally ready to do it, at which point there will be no reprieve.
@@tarektechmarine8209bro the CEO was fired from EA because he was "to greedy"💀. He literally proposed the idea of charging money for every reload (for battlefield I think) because "the average gamer wouldn't think twice in such a high stress situation". (I don't remember a lot of it but that was basically the jist of it)
I understand the difficulty of changing engines mid-development, but I really hope no one goes back to using Unity, regardless of what they say now. The lack of respect shown towards all developers is something we should never forget.
I guarantee people won't, there will be very little new games made using unity. You don't just push out a change like this (that's against the law for one) and then walk it back and nothing happen. People might not delete their games now, but they're certainly not going to make new ones. The entire reason they changed it is probably because big devs were gonna leave or sue them, if it was just smaller devs complaining they wouldn'tve walked it back 100%. The trust is broken, and everyone sees them for who they are. An outdated company with a CEO and board of directors in their 60s who are so out of touch and greedy they'd drive their entire company off a cliff to get more money. CEO also sold a bunch of stock before the announcement, just another twig on the bonfire.
@@Kratos-eg7ez Either the ceo is scummy. Or CEO was pushed to do that by the board and decided 'meh, you idiots wanna do this, fiiiine~ i'll cover my ass just in case'.
There are already a lot of people making porting to Godot much easier. also one of the studios said the install fee per month would basically amount to the salary of 2 devs, which could easily port the game in a month. Especially mobile games will not be hard at all.
They actually CAN do what they said they'd do. Basically they mean retroactive poorly. They used the word wrong. What they mean is games already made will have to sign the new license so even released games will be under the license. The license needs to be resigned I think yearly though some people may have custom contracts. So anyone can just choose to never update the game. But any updates wouls be under the new license which is legal. Their isn't any precident yet set for can you change a contract in a way that effects long term development which ofncourse could be chosen illegal. But no past dales or install or games would actually be changed which means no contract was broken. Unity was playing a dangerous game though because reoccurring contracts could be considered assumed a certain way and that assumption can be considered legal
@@Zalied This. What Unity is doing is very likely completely legal but we've had a lot of recent precedent of the EU cracking down on big tech anti-consumer practices in spite of their legality (i.e. forcing Apple to allow you to repair your phone, or charge it using the same cables as everyone else).
"We're sorry that you misunderstood our message" - words of people who are not sorry about a single thing they ever did in their lives. If a company _ever_ says anything of the sorts, I just assume they're practically scammers now.
@@mojojojo1529 I'd disagree with this. The company going down would come with a lot of issues out from that which would affect many devs/games. I think the best course is for the top people to be outed in hopes that someone else can salvage the situation. But moving forward something big would need to be done to reassure people that something like that won't happen again. It may be the best course for the company to burn (as an example for others to not take a similar course) but I'd rather see something else come of it.
@@uhrguhrguhrg wrong, it still would be, using the number of installs is just hilarious. an install doesnt mean shit and is unreliably as hell. why not using licensing and take a percantage as win as everyone else period. i bet, when they made that decision, there wasnt a single developer or even an high level IT person in the room. straight up only business people who dont even know what a program actually is.
What's more amazing is that their CEO is still has a job. Even believing their own story, that they were actually proposing a sustainable price increase to survive, and it was all a miscommunication (you'd have to completely ignore the fact that execs sold lots of stock before the announcement, but let's do that), the effect of this whole debacle is that they got law firms and regulatory bodies involved, caused long term clients to instantly migrate to competitors and damaged trust in the company. So, even by their own excuses it's possibly one of the biggest business blunders ever. I wonder what a CEO has to do to get fired!
First, "firing" him would probably mean handing him $20+ million or something, because the business world is so stupid and top-heavy. Second, this company has much bigger concerns than the CEO that they themselves hired, knowing his reputation and disdain as EA's CEO. Firing him wouldn't cure the rot that controls the company.
I wonder: if they stopped acting like they can do no wrong, would that be taken as a sign of weakness and result in them getting fired? Because that kind of hubris seems like it'd enable this kind of idiocy.
You hit the nail on the head at the end with how companies are focused on short-term profits and this has been becoming a norm across the board. The long term for a lot of people is essentially a dead concept and people want to make all the money in the shortest time. Unity’s actions feel like extreme short term income gaining in an industry that does not support it.
Exactly. I’ve seen it across all creative mediums. Disney, UA-cam, now Unity… big companies will take something that was made with heart and passion, and do anything it can to get a quick buck out of it. Whether that’s by wringing it dry with cheap cash grabs or demolishing it’s foundational rules. Either way, it’s ruining the reputation of once beloved companies all to make a few rich people richer. Disgusting. And really disheartening.
This guy has great commentary. Able to break things down, doesn't wag his tail when the company steps back or releases a PR statement (like a lot of DnD members did with DnD Beyond, or other people with WarThunder) , covers general relevant information, and is able to recognize the larger effects of the destroyed trust.
Both Tycho from Penny-Arcade and Tom Francis made the point that Unity will have to roll back BEYOND where they started to meaningfully recover any goodwill. Francis goes so far as to say that if they dont put it in legally binding writing, he doesn't think anything they do for goodwill will stick, since the trust is so thoroughly broken.
Which is how things should be handled. The problem with this attempt is that they are clearly still intent on carrying it out to some capacity. And even in the event that they walked everything back there is nothing stopping them from boiling the frog or doing something like this again. Having things in legal writing is about the only way that they can be trusted again, given that at any point they could just do the exact same otherwise.
@@rasmachris94 Can and probably WILL try to do. The way they keep pretending this is all just some miscommunication is like PR gaslighting or something. Its basically the social media equivalent of Shaggy's "Wasn't Me"
It may have not been fully his choice. Supposedly on the board of directors there are ex IronSource executives and they wanted Apploving out of Unity....
they at least need to wipe their board of directors on top of whatever they plan to do as a fix/apology. whatever the fix they will offer as long as the scummy board directors are still there, no one will trust that unity will not pull the same stunt again.
@@monad_tcp The silver lining is that they can't avoid suffering the consequences of their choices. They can try to ignore or downplay them, but there is no way back for them after this. That they were ever willing to try it even once is proof that they can never be trusted again.
I hope this is the start of a collective redefining of how consumers deal with products. This has a very high chance of breaking out into the mainstream and from there it could convince a lot of people to change how compliant they are with the stuff large companies try to pull.
Even if it becomes mainstream, it won't transfer over to the side of consumers in the broad sense. This is limited to the side of industry, meaning it'll only ever become a thing for the side that does this professionally. For the actual consumers, the circumstances are very different.
Sadly i doubt or at least until the change itself comes into reality I doubt most would notice. In my uni almost everyone talks and memes about it but this was our study literally. But my roommate whose into games took a bit of time to understand what was going when I was ranting to him about it.
Unity might let a lot of small devs use their engine but ultimately they sell to companies not consumers, and as you have seen 99% of consumers say fuck unity even after walking it back. And developers are leaving unity. Even huge developers mustve been talking to unity about leaving or suing them or unity wouldn'tve walked it back 100%, they don't care about the little guy that's not their target in the first place. This will never become mainstream, people call out Bs when they see it n that's a fact. Some shit might slip through unnoticed or uncared about but that's the minority. I think unity are still fucked and this walk back matters very little, the trust is broken and this system is still just a big "trust me bro I won't lie about downloads I swear! Oh the old policy could make you go bankrupt? But we changed it! It was a communications debacle!" This system is still made to be abused by unity, competition, and individuals. Unitys fucked, no one is gonna make new games on their engine even if they don't delete the games they have now. This change will forever be remembered for potentially bankrupting people, for being able to be abused by everyone including unity, and for being retroactive which is against the law. It doesn't matter if they act like it never happened, because it did.
What boggles the mind is that WOTC did something very similar and it went _very badly_ for them. Did nobody at Unity see this coming? Seriously, man. They should know by now that gamers are _tired_ of getting screwed over, and that indie developers _are_ gamers with a passion, and many gamers get jobs working at larger studios, too. The people at Unity shoulda known not to mess with gamers. They tend to react _violently_ to BS like this, because they've been dealing with greedy corporate BS for years.
It’s less a case of not knowing and more a case of how far can they push the envelope? Companies are always trying to find ways to squeeze out as much money as they can. They don’t care if others failed, so long as they can succeed.
@@synonym1196 They knew exactly what they were doing, they just thought now is the time to strike because so many games are depending on Unity that Developers "have no choice but to accept the installation fee" and i even bet there was a huge financial expert team behind all this shenanigens. Well, they were wrong and now the bucket with the match is a full grown forest fire they cant put out while everyone can see it from miles away.
I think this situation provides a great object lesson to developers, particularly newer ones: Keep options open and don't let anyone rise to dominate the field. Because when, not if, they turn to bite you, you won't have anywhere else to go.
It doesn't seem that Unity's employees or the spokespeople that sent those messages understand the gravity of what they did. It's not a communication error when you delete part of your TOS beforehand and later on it just so happens that you release a plan that not only charges per install, but also applies retroactively. They're not sorry for what they did, they're sorry that they caught so much flack.
Employees have literally 0 fault on this. They either follow management orders, or they lose their jobs. I just hope they've already been looking for new jobs.
@@DarkOmegaMK2 Yeah, but even the people who wrote those statements word by word are just following orders. You can only blame the decision-makers, e.g. the executives, who got on a meeting and decided this is how things will be done.
Lawyers are like piranhas. If one senses something is up and it seems like a big payout, the rest of the lawyers will eventually swarm. I love seeing lawyers at work and it'll be interesting to see how law by mike will respond to this situation if he does.
@@ArbitraryNicknameyou're right, but the whole point of competition is to get rid of dumbass decisions like this. That's the main part of capitalism we are all sold. There is more such is an employee being able to price their time or not work at a place.
Yeah, I've reinstalled my entire library several times for different reasons. The developers, publishers, and the gamestore done see any revenue from me doing that. The idea that the maker of the game engine deserves some kind of fee for it is completely ridiculous. I'm glad the industry is punishing them for this. I honestly hope no one wavers. The right outcome is for this to cause Unity to actually collapse AND for new regulations to be past. THIS is the time to make the consequences for these practices so egregious that the executives and investors behind them finally have to take a step back and change course.
I absolutely adore how the entire gaming community came together declared war and aimed straight for the jugular on the first fucking move. This is brutal and i love it! I'm proud of the "unity" (heh) that everyone showcased against the genuinely evil policies that this awful company is trying to push forward. Now we just need to see how the big studio reacts to this sudden cut into their bottom lines.
@@ahumanb3ingthatexists67Just like Hasbro/WOTC trying to erroneously charge people who design fantasy maths games for a living. Indies design their tabletob games around DnD's ruleset because it was well known and they liked DnD, but they're still born from the same community that invented the term "rules lawyering" so it's a pretty bad idea to try nickel and diming them.
@@conspiracypanda1200basically Any community with a sufficient amount of people who's entire shtick is being mini-lawyers and mathematicians is bad idea because they will likely run the numbers and find a way to get what they want
@@ahumanb3ingthatexists67 kevlar is useless against blades btw, would be a better allegory with someone trying to take over the HEMA community using a bread knife...
In an alternate universe, Unity said hey in 6 months we're introducing a 4 percent revenue share for games that pass 1 million in yearly sales moving forward. There wasn't an insane backlash and they made more money. But we live in this timeline.
Yeah, I can't understand why they didn't just do that. Sure, there would be some muttering, but pretty much everyone would understand and be okay with it.
I think what most people might be missing in saying that Unity is making a mistake is that the CEO and higher ups likely totally fine with it collapsing. I remember reading that the CEO sold 2000 stocks before the announcement, so it seems like this is all a plan to pump and dump the company.
Only option is to resort to more physical means at this point. When it comes to bastards like Unity's current CEO, though, I really have no qualms with that.
Remember the Stampy episode from The Simpsons? You know, Bart Gets an Elephant? Homer realizes he can't afford to support the Elephant even when charging people money to ride the Elephant. He then raises the price and goes to the Vanhauten residence to charge them hundreds of dollars that they "owe" him because they rode the Elephant under the old pricing. There was an awkward silence and he was told to get off their property. That's what happened with Unity.
@@vedritmathias9193 HAH! I am a law firm and even my name doesn't make any sense! Like, why tf am I firm? Does law make me firm? Is that why I'm named law firm? WHY TF AM I NAMED A LAW FIRM?!
I'm a hobbyist who is just starting on what I hope will be my first complete game project. I learned Unity to do this, but have completely jumped to Unreal now. No one should care about me and my project specifically, but I would bet that there are thousands of people like me out there. Nice job Unity!
Exactly. Trust is broken. Even if they fully retract and pretend this never happened, who will want to stay a new game in unity now? And yes learning a new engine sucks. But like spoken languages, it gets easier each new one.
I'm currently in the same boat, currently in the process of making a game with a team at Uni and planned to finish soon. Made it in Unity and now we don't know what to do as we're almost done and can't exactly redo all our hard work. A sad time to try and publish a first game with Unity, and I'm sure there are plenty more people and teams in the same boat.
You'd have to be nuts to choose this engine for any future project. Sure you'll have to learn a new engine, but that's the sort of thing developers are good at. Don't put all your eggs into one corporate basket.
This is the kind of trust you'll never win back. If this industry has taught us anything then it's that you can never ever give giant companies a second chance or the benefit of the doubt. They're not a few dudes with coffee stains in some building, they're corporate suits with shareholders and profit margins who will do absolutely anything to squeeze every single penny out of the people below them. They're sharks, you don't reason with them, you get the hell out of the water.
10:06 to 10:50 Absolutely correct. Prior to Sept 12, I was on the road to becoming a Unity professional as an aspiring technical artist. I'm already an animator, I chose Unity to work with. Now, even though I don't make money using Unity, I don't see it as a time investment anymore. I'm trying to build a career around my unique strengths and what could be utilized in the future as I age. Sept 12, 2023 ENDED that plan. Unity is no longer in the cards. What kind of budding companies, who can start a project anew as of Sept 12, 2023, will risk years of development to have their wallets left open to manipulation by the global public via Unity? Only the ones with the infrastructure and revenue will even consider it, instantly turning Unity into a zombie software. No one will pay to go to school to learn a software that would make their startup a nightmare. The only way any new startup wouldn't be a nightmare is if it's an absolute blowout success with a decent price point for a first release. All Unity can do with this policy intact (and with its senior management walking around like the building isn't on fire) is maintain its position for as long as the successful companies don't throw them out. Elsewise, all Unity will do is rot on the vine until it's gone.
They really should be getting struck with some antitrust / insider trading lawsuits. After all the stock that the big heads offloaded before the announcement, it was clear they knew this was going to be big, and their protected their own bottom line just in case.
There is exactly one thing they can do to repair this. Include in the license that you can opt to use the version of the license at the time you published the game, and keep a public repo of all versions of the license and when it changes. Oh wait. They already did that and then took it away to make this move. On what grounds should anyone ever trust them again? There is literally nothing they can do to give users a sense of security that they will be ok staying with unity that they haven't already done previously and then taken away unilaterally to screw their users.
This reminds me of a lesson my high school professor taught me, a college professor who downgraded himself because he hated teaching college kids. His lesson was that if every major group be it political, economic, or judicial had a history major in their ranks, the world's problems would not repeat themselves if they listened to them. But as always, history keeps repeating itself just like this incident.
That's because people in power surround themselves with Yesmen. And when a Yesman happens to have a few more braincells to rub together and gives actual good advice, yet said advice contradicts the Boss' views, the Yesman gets booted out.
@@NovaGirl8 It's all under the excuse that "they don't understand the vision we're trying to achieve" that leads to the "Yesmen" becoming prevalent, because anyone who doesn't agree supposedly "doesn't understand" what the leader(s) wants to achieve. 😆
The same thing happened with the circuit board development software called 'Eagle CAD'. Autodesk bought it and decided to 'change the deal' on multiple axes like requiring connectivity to a license server, locking designs in their cloud, and eliminating reasonable license prices to force a subscription model that was way more expensive over any normal time-frame. This led to KiCad implementing extensive support for importing Eagle CAD projects so people could switch over to KiCAD rather than having to upgrade in to the jail that was the Autodesk version.
I'm still curious about the fact that the executives sold their shares before making this announcement. Which indicates they knew the response they'd get. Perhaps they expected short-term backlash, and thought they could recover long-term? It's also borderline insider trading, but they'll probably get away with it as long as they don't re-buy shares.
The Unifree project is an absolute chad move from Applovin. Hopefully gonna make porting games to Godot possible soon. I'm sure the near _doubling_ of Godot's dev fund over the last week thanks to all this will also help with that 😂
@@captainufo4587 They were, Applovin proposed 20 billions. Unity refused and tried with that new policy to force an Ironsource monopoly behind the scenes. Long story short, they wanted the 20 billions but didn't want to give their positions away.
@@captainufo4587yes. Though I don't think they were interested in Unity, so much as stopping Unity from buying IronSource (given what has happened, for good reason). I still don't think they really want to buy Unity (I think the antitrust concerns would be pretty big), so much as loosen Unity's grip on the mobile market. For one, a Unity that is feeling pressure is going to work with whatever ad networks developers want, rather than trying to impose their own solution. And two, half of Applovin's business is their own mobile games. They had 3.7B installs over the last year. With volume discounts, the install fee would likely be a $100-200M/year expense, on a part of their business that brings in about $1,200M/year of revenue. So, even just tactically, they have a lot of incentive to make tools that make porting to royalty-free engines easier (even porting to Unreal would be about a half or a third of the royalty that this install fee would take). This is actually a bit different from the PC game studios, where, despite the ambiguity and confusion, the cost will most likely be less than Unreal's royalty would have been.
Also, it's very characteristic of sociopaths this illusion of control remark of "oh, we were not caught, it was just bad communication!", like changing communication would make all these worries go away. What they the very least need to change is to fire the executives that supported the decision.
"I hope that's a lesson to the industry at large" - but no, it'll never be. Shit like this still keeps happening in the industry (Activision, anybody?), the only difference this time around is that it comes from an engine, not from a game dev/publisher. As long as these assholes lead companies, it'll keep happening too.
There has been a lot of "lessons" for the gaming industry this year. Blizzard's disasterous Diablo 4 patch and crappy season 1 that basically killed the game. Game devs attacking Baldur's Gate 3 for being a quality game and it backfiring on them completely. Bethesda releasing another game on their janky 20 year old engine and getting 7/10 reviews. And now we have Unity fucking up royally. Will the gaming industry actually learn anything from these "lessons"? Of course not.
I taught myself unity in highschool. But now that I'm in college studying computer science i moved over to monogame to get a better understanding of how games are made on a deeper level. I see no reason to move back to unity and with the knowledge i gained in monogame i have the feeling I'll have an easier time moving to an engine other than unity if i decide to go into game development.
At this point even a complete reversal and apology would not be enough. Unity has demonstrated that using their engine is simply too big a liability to be used by small developers, and larger ones have the resources to switch to safer alternatives. It's only a matter of time until unity implodes completely.
I love Relogic. Hands down, LOVE them all. From their running joke of * this is the last update* to this? So many people didnt take terrarria seriously when it first came into being, but now ? God damn they have balls
Okay, so I rarely actively watch this channel. Not seeing Bellular is a shock, and no offense to Bellular, but this guy is a breath of fresh air. Keep this man around!
Re-Logic continues to prove itself to be one of the greatest indie companies we've got. Red himself is a treasure of a person and should the day come that they've done some truly shady shit will be the day my heart is broken into pieces.
I am planning to make a game and was evaluating engines godot & unity prior to this whole fiasco. Thank you unity for coming out with this NOW, I was leaning towards using your engine. Now it will be godot.
The lesson for the devs is to go for open source. There's no telling that unreal too won't pull shit like this in the future. Godot is the right way. It can be the blender of game engines. I think it already kind of is, just needs a bit more push from community with advanced tech. Blender also got a big push from their geometry nodes, it's a high quality swiss army tool now.
Unreal's business model is very different and Tim Sweeny is a game dev to begin with. They make games first and use the money to better their engine. Also Unreal has been giving grants to Godot for a while. Hopefully they will never mess up like this...
@@rubyy.7374 Yeah, Tencent is a little bit worrying. As long as things stay like they are, things will be OK, I hope. Plus if things start to change in Unreal, it's highly likely developers will will be much more ready to jump ship if necessary...
Just as a reference to the install thing: I've had some weird ass bugs with Destiny 2 while streaming, which has led me to re-install the game 4 times this week alone (it's tuesday...). Some games require a few more depending on how serious the bugs are (i'm looking at you Dx11 fatal crash FFXIV). or even some of the smaller games that i have around but will constantly cycle in and our of the HDD for space. it's a quick install so what does it matter if I delete and re-install Golf with my Friends every week, even twice a week if i'm extra spicy ? I personally would be causing these devs within a month their revenue from my single purchase of the game.
Supposedly, according to Unity, re-installs of games on the same device don't count. Though they haven't given any details on how they can tell the difference between first installs, re-installs, pirated games, etc. So basically, they expect us to take their word for it.
Before i said screw it and bought and external i was constantly deleting and redownloading games as well. Not to mention the fact that i have had a few different pcs in the last numerous years for various reasons. Can't imagine how much money i would have boned poor devs out of if this had been in place then. Absolutely absurd
I don't know if it was already mentioned in the comments, but the developer writing the conversion tool from unity to Godot is Brian Bucklew (unormal), lead dev of Caves of Qud.
It's a "New Coke" Fiasco: Change the formula to something horrible, let the outrage build, and then Pull Back so they appear to listen. All of this was by design to switch from sugar to corn syrup unnoticed. We would have tasted the difference in a straight line. It's a crap move, gas-lighting.
Unreal's only drawback is the lack of marketplace assets that Unity has. But a few asset creation teams consider porting their solutions to Unreal, and propably Godot, when it has a marketplace too. These few packages are why we went for Unity in the first place, because Unreal didn't have anything like Dialogue Systems, Makinom2, UMA2, etc.
I would argue that Unreal's main drawback is more community-based. That's where Unity excelled and what made it work so well. With Unity, if you wanted to do something, you could find a million knowledgeable people to help you do it. It was easy to find any missing knowledge. The ecosystem was incredibly open and helpful. Finding useful info about doing stuff in Unreal(especially C++ code-related) is so much more like having to reverse-engineer the engine. I mean you can find a ton of gimpy little tutorials about blueprints, but once you actually want to use real code, you are kind of winging it. That makes Unreal much less beginner-friendly, and is the main reason Unity competed as long as it has despite being an inferior engine to UE.
Would be nice if the consumers could muster this type of energy to defend themselves against the gaming industry when it uses predatory practices itself to monetize every level of gaming, rather than protect the industry when one of their own decides to use their own tactics against them, for the same reason.
You mean the consumers that still pre-order broken games? Or the ones that make gatcha games the most profitable games in the industry's history? Those consumers?
It's almost like this has much less impact on consumers than it does on businesses, which are much more strict with their money. I don't understand why everything has to come down to shaming people for enjoying something just because you don't like it.
@5h4d0w5l1f3 because those people ruined this hobby and industry for people who can still remember a time when /most/ games came out finished and didn't try to take every coin you own through actual proven manipulation. (Outside of the arcade, given in retrospect arcades were kind of fucked too) that's why they get mad.
So they've walked it back to a pricing structure that is still 3 to 4 times worse than Unreal's (Unreal is 5% revenue but you get $1M per quarter, not per year, and no subscription for the editor).
The senior team at unity are actually very good at maths, which is why a huge chunk of their shares were sold before this change was made. In some circles that is considered “insider trading”
I think Tycho of Penny Arcade said it best when he compared it to the WotC debacle earlier this year. "What Wizards had to do in order to get out from under that particular Sword of Damocles - one they installed themselves, directly o'erhead - was to make concessions even *greater* than the original status quo they'd been attempting to amend. And that's what it will take here." If they don't rewrite their TOS to preclude further attempts at retroactive changes of this sort and include language that guarantees a license will apply to games released under it in perpetuity the way Unreal does, I don't see how anyone will trust them again.
First game i made solo was in Godot, and i was flamed in the reviews for it. I didnt use unity out of principal years ago, and its nice to see i wasnt wrong for doing so. That change would destroy any past and future revenue for me.
Ah! Thanks for the reminder about the Godot Humble Bundle - I'd heard about it a couple times as the storm's been brewing and finally remembered at the same time as I had a minute to make the purchase. I'm sad to see Unity's engine being tied in to something so bad. I have so many good memories of youtubers getting their start with Unity tutorials, and there are many games that might never have gotten made if there weren't something so beginner-friendly (one could say the same of the RPG Maker series).
I think you should also mentioned that if a third party decide to install tracking software without explicit stated in the EULA that could be count as very illegal in EU.....since this would break several laws
even with it stated in the eula it would be illegal in some countries like norway and it would invallidate all the other terms in the contract and since money has changed hands before you can read the terms of service its already total bunk there and norway is not part of eu they just have trade agreements with them so for ppl from there most of these contracts are already invallid rofl
@@charlessanne5689 I know.....its just one of the reason why some tech giants are forced to pay hundreds of millions of Euro every year because of it. As third party Unity has no way the option to make a contract with the end user, to enforce tracking or datamining, which is illegal in EU and highly illegal in germany. I doubt unity can afford the fines that facebook/google/apple or microsoft pay every year to the EU. Lawyers would have it easy to rip Unity apart. Also Users would need give explicity their consent, not some form of popup or such sort and you cant blackmail afterwards when they already bought the program. Unity is opening a giant can of worms and i doubt the stocks looking good if they get fined. But hey the CEO already sold his share before the announcement, which is another can of worms
I noticed something changed a couple of years back when thier marketing staff (in Singapore) tried to hard sell thier pro product just to get more $$$. Thier marketing staff cannot even have a technical background when I asked about some pro features. They just here to sell and even threat us to buy a license even we are a non-profit organization. Because of this, we moved to Unreal and this new pricing news just confirm our right decision.
Im just so proud of the gaming industry for once. Classic Red W with relogic of course. Lol hes always tossing W's in all directions like that but to see all the other companies come out as they have has really made me feel such oride for the indie dev scene
@@Troonielicious thing is, i'm seeing all these articles about how the head guy at unity's just a blatant piece of "crap". it's almost like all these people that get rug pulled on crypto scams headed by people that are known scammers! it's like why would you deal with these people in the first place? what did you expect? a hand jpb and a pat on the back? i know it sounds harsh and brutally honest but people need to wake up and stop trusting these types of people. and it's not just this one example, these types of psychopaths pretty much make up everyone in charge of our govenments, health care and news media. you think they're any better?
Terraria devs making that donation have honestly turned me over to their game. Always been on edge about picking it up but here we go, wish me luck boys!
I do not understand how can companies become this untouched from reality. It would be really interesting to hear what went down in the meeting where they decided to go down this route.
The company was going to apply a policy retroactively. That's all you need to know about this company. They can never be trusted again.
"Unity needs to get good will on the table" Unity needs to go fucking bankrupt
Yep, no one in their right mind should trust unity at this point, regardless of what they do or say now. It should be over.
And from what little I know about stuff like this, that's pretty dang illegal
Again? They're run by EA, they should've never been trusted to begin with
This
a lot of companies have decided they wanted to go bankrupt in the past year, but Unity's speedrun of it has been particularly spectacular
Like for real! I bet it's gonna go into historical records as one of the greatest failures ever
@@JesusPlsSaveMeIs that what it is? Many on the board of directors and the ceo sold all their stock in the week before the announcement.
They did it so well you have to wonder if they were going for an achievement.
@@RarebitFiends Which really people should be pushing for insider trading charges.
@TrackMediaOnly right? I mean if you think the policy is so good why sell?
terraria devs are always the ones you'd expect to do the right thing. they've gone above and beyond with the donation.
You know it’s serious when even the Terraria Devs are serious about it.
also terraria didn t change its price in a long time compared to other ones
Red Literally trying to stuff one more W into his packed coset of past wins😂
@@dragongrandmasterfun fact did you know Red (the head dev at relogic) said terraria has been selling the exact same amount every year since release to such a degree it has given their company the same type of yearly income as a games as a service income? Pretty wild but they do update it every year I know I have bought it about 3 times like Skyrim u get it on every console
When the scamers say you go to far...wow.
The really disgusting part is that Unity will probably be destroyed as a company, and the executive responsible for all of this will simply move on to the next company and pay no price for his failures.
I hope not. He now has a reputation for destroying the reputation of EA and potentially destroying Unity entirely. If I was on a board of directors, I would NEVER hire a dude who had that resume.
Well, if the FTC steps in the CEO will have it worse than the company for insider trading. We'll just have to wait and see.
Welcome to LLC, literally the only reason to exist is to waive responsibility from it's members.
Also bankruptcy also achieves this.
This is why corporations are legally considered people. United Fruit Company rebranded to United Brands Company, then Chiquita Brands International. Blackwater became Xe Services, Academi, and now Constellis Holdings.
A brand takes the fall, and all the people actually responsible get off scot-free.
@@lasarousi Yet another reason why 'Legal Personhood' for Corporations need to die. It won't fix everything but it would be a major step towards eliminating accountability insulation/protection for executives.
The frightening thing is that this idea isn't just about the game industry. This business model could explode into anything electronic that requires software to run.
What like a car
@@GamerBoy870 Cars have electronics. Anything with an electronic is like ET phone home software they can manipulate and charge for however they see fit.
This is why the idea of free and open software is so important.
Really? Are you just noticing this now? Open Source Software noticed this in 1982 or thereabouts... Microsoft could disable Windows tomorrow, if they so feel like it. Heck Windows Server and Oracle are so expensive they basically have!
@@GamerBoy870 guess what they already have done that
The weird part is in most places retroactive charges are unenforceable if not illegal, so their original plan would literally never work anyway. All they did was destroy all trust in the company and started the ball rolling on their on demise. They literally spawned competition because of this inane stunt. Whoever made this decision should be fired.
@@masterbasher9542I can't recall which video on this subject cited this because I've watched so many now, but the death threats were confirmed to be from one of Unity's own frustrated employees who worked in a different location from the 3 buildings that were locked down as a result. The threat was either made or overheard in an internal phonecall.
@@conspiracypanda1200 the funny thing is: there was not even a police report to be found, I read. some people searched for it, but there was nothing. Maybe they didn't search hard enough, maybe the police didn't get involved, maybe it was a diversion, but I'm taking it with a grain of salt.
That's what I don't get either. I know companies put a clause "we can change this at any time" and "clauses that are not legal in your country do not invalidate the rest" just to make people believe it is so, but they should be aware that any company with even the slightest bit of capital behind them would at least let a lawyer look at the thing and ask "can they actually retroactivly change the contract?"
I can't believe someone looked at this and said "trying to change the contract with people one sided is perfectly fine and no one will bat an eye".
Right, literally refuse to pay the fees, which i believe is what sony or microsoft would do.. if they try to take you to court, i’m pretty sure they’d never win can this retroactive bullshit does not make legal sense
@@masterbasher9542 Oh no, the Unity Execs got threatened by other Unity Execs. What a disaster! Someone protect Unity from them..
Unity: "Help, we're not making enough money, our budget needs balancing if we want to stay solvent!"
The Budget: $200 Million
Employee Pay: $20 Million
R&D: $30 Million
Company Acquisitions: $120 Million
Executive Stock Options: $500 Million
Unity: "Stock options budget is non-negotiable, please help."
Clearly you should fire 20% of staff and increase the user price, whilst increasing the stock options budget.
Sell the mallware to Disney.
@@TempoLOOKING"mallware" or "malware" :) Is this software for shopping malls, or is it problematic?
it takes a LOT of expertise to make business-ruining decisions. The stock option budget is justified.
I love when the most overpayed people in the world tell us that price increases are "necessary".
The Terraria team has always been my favorite group of devs. It's always amazing to see them fighting for the best for the industry.
Yet another reason to love them
Thank god I don't play games anymore! 😂
@@theunicornbay4286 i mean a lot of industries have the same issues its not a thing exclusive to gaming
@@GMan-xv8ek
Well that's one less issue for me to worry about 🤷♂️
@@theunicornbay4286the world has problems, thank god I don’t breath anymore *flatlines*
@@Jetstreamsamsbiggestglazer
Because playing video games is necessary for me to live...
The worst part about this for me is all the ground floor employees and developers, who work for them, are very likely going to be out of work soon
because the top end of the company dipped their hand in someone elses cookie jar.
Yeah, the domino effect will no doubt destroy the actual good workers and talent the company had and leave nothing but the rotten core.
It's an ugly side of capitalism. Hopefully and probably, quality employees will be snatched up with better pay.
Not really capitalism.
In capitalism they could easily get another job or start their own company because the owner takes on the risk.
This is cronyism.
Ive walked by the Unity building in SF… there have been so many moving companies taking furniture and other items out of their office.
@@SupHapCak yea, really a little tired of that shallow argument. If cronyism can sneak in, then capitalism allows for that. It's awful funny that you guys call it Capitalism until you're caught red handed, then you call it cronyism to try and avoid any association with greed, but capitalism rewards greed. Whatever you can get away with is allowed. It's a buyer beware market and it always has been.
Starting a new business in an environment that is only set up for the wealthy people to do that kind of thing is a gross over asking.
If you wanna stick your head in the sand and pretend that the average person can start a business, then you go right ahead. I will not join you.
The average person is $600 away from being homeless. If you aren't, then yay for you. You are not the average person.
I feel so bad for the Unity engineers. They've spent so much time and effort creating this (imo) great engine, which is such a monumental task. And now, because of some greedy people at the top of the company, their work is being thrown in to the trash.
Fortunately, there's a high chance the company the greedy people are in will either eventually fire all of them or no longer exist, so that the engineers' work won't get those greedy people _anything_.
@@SmileOlderBro_GodsBrotherthat’s hopeful thinking. People at the top rarely loose in games like these because everyone who has power is connected in someway. They only want each other to win
capitalism. people who don’t work have the control, and people who do work don’t have the control
Are you high? Unity is garbage, runs poorly etc
@@RimFaxxe I've used Unity professionally and haven't had too many issues. Besides, is there a game engine out there that's flawless? I don't think so. Just because you had a bad experience with it, that doesn't mean it's the same for everyone else.
Extreme greed was the exact reason why the whole gaming industry crashed and almost died thanks to ATARI
what did atari do
@@ZoofyZoofthey flooded the market with games made to fast and to cheap with ET being a notable example made by one person in 6 weeks. It was heavily marketed as well but sold only a fraction of Ataris expectation
Well not only did they have a monopoly but they also pumped out tons and tons of what people call shovelware.
@@ZoofyZoof IIRC They flooded the market with shitty games with famous faces (this is also related to the E.T game burial).
we've been overdue for an industry crash for atleast a decade, It would truly help gamers if we could get another one ASAP
Executives aggressively selling Unity stock; "Everything is proceeding as I have forseen" *Palpatine cackle*
Execute order 66
This seems more like the CEO deciding some absolute nonsense despite all the warnings and the executives don't want to be effected by their boss's bullshit.
"Wow, this company, based on the sith homeworld, ran by siths and their cowed peons, wants to offer me a sweet deal! I'll base my livelyhood around trusting them! I'm sure nothing whatsoever can possibly go wrong!"
@@0pposite221yeah but wasn't the CEO of Unity also selling a lot of his stocks before the announcement? Kinda weird isn't it?
@@leandrogoslean889 Didn't he sell 5k out of his 300k+ stocks? Basically nothing.
When I saw the Re-Logic pledge those donations it solidified my stance that they are the only company I'll ever consider fighting for. We stan Re-Logic in this house. One of my favorite games, and dev teams ever.
I bought another copy of Terraria, this time on switch, because of this.
@@Mac_Omegaly I have it on both steam and gog, if I had a switch I'd probably get it on there too.
Terrarians stand United
Yeah they have always been great people
Wow the control scheme on Switch is weird. I think I prefer the PS3/4 controls. I have struggled most with the lack of quick stacking my items into chests, and crafting is bad if you hold down the button making other things you don't want.
Otherwise it's a decent port and runs alright for a handheld system. Better than the Vita version, but the lack of quick select tools and weapons with the D-pad, and if you press "R" a split second too long you can't change items on the bar hold it back the most.
Never underestimate a CEO's willingness to tank the reputation and future of their company in search of quick and easy profit.
i mean their current CEO came from EA so it was coming right for them tbf...
@@jasperpluklmao yeaah. dude literally got fired from EA of all places for being ‘too greedy’ and they saw this and thought “hmm, yes, what a fine addition to our team!”
@@twotruckslyrics exactly! xD idk what kind of crack they where smoking when they hired him but it must be some good stuff haha
Their job is to make the shareholders money.
@@bryanb3352 in this case the reputation and legitimacy of unity is royally fucked cuz of that
Re-Logic also mentioned they don't use Unity in that snapshot but they mentioned they still had to take a stance. I am so glad they're supporting other engines now. I'm personally learning Godot now.
I think they use a diff engine for pc terraria but use some unity stuff for mobile and console
One thing I really love about Godot: you download the zip, see an executable, think "Yeah, that's probably just the installer"--NOPE! You click it, and you're in. No splash screen, DRM, account login... the way software used to be.
I made the jump about a year ago, when the writing was on the wall. No regrets.
Having foresight pays off
“The way software used to be”
The good old days
Bro I am not going to download a fucking launcher, open an account and tie it to my steam account just to play a damn game. I don't care what collectible you give me, it aint happening.
Long live FOSS
No one remembers product keys?
Fun fact: The name Unity is actually a reference to how gamers, game devs and game publishers all acted in response to their scummy attempts at making more money
Perfect
thats funny because i had the same thought. so funny how things are.
United againt Unity, for sure 😂
Yup. I remember a lot of grumbling and doomsaying around when John Riccitiello was announced as the CEO. It was going to be for sure just a matter of time before something like this would happen and it's not the first time Riccitiello has done this to Unity either. Why make a better product that more people are willing to continue to use when you can just rug pull now? That's been Riccitiello's M.O. for decades so I can see why Unity users were rightfully upset back in 2014.
Oh don't worry, the people im charge made a ton of money. They knew what was coming and sold their shares.
Imagine Home Depot demanding regular fees from artisans for using their tools for business. "Well, you made 200 repair jobs with our hammer, so from now on, we will charge you 20 dollars for each job you take"
That's not something you tell to a person holding a hammer.....
@@astranger448 no worries, they can charge WAY more for murder
@@astranger448exactly
or a pneumatic roofing nailer.@@astranger448
True, but they also don't give you the hammer for free if you're just a hobbyist or don't make much money. If Unity charged a one-time fee based on what it cost to make, no one would be able to afford it. The biggest problem with Unity's business model change is that it was retroactive. Imagine Home Depot telling the same artisans that they've changed their pricing model and now the artisan will have to pay them 20 bucks for each job that they had ever taken addition to the 20 bucks per job in the future. THAT'S more what Unity's change was like.
Someone needs to make a website that keeps track of CEOs and board members that are involved in shady stuff like this. So we can keep track of what they are going to screw up next in advance.
Stock market gonna go crazy with that
@@boxfullofdust9029good
You trying to get yourself in some hot water?
Cease and desists slander lawsuits threats. And if you find something to big your life could be at risk.
@@alexhutchins6161 well damn that sucks
@@alexhutchins6161it’s not slander if it’s true
It's becoming outrageously common to make entirely outlandishly insane announcements specifically to gently step them back to say "look, now it's not _so_ bad."
classic, tho
I've heard it's become a business strategy that's even got a specific name and is outright taught to business students as 'a good way to do business'. (I forget what that name is though.)
The classic example that is usually taught is the 'New Coke' debacle, in which there was outrage against coke completely changing it's formula to something most people hated and discontinuing the original. That was later rolled back with the re-release of 'Classic Coke', which hid the formula switch of the re-released '''''Classic''''' Coke from cane sugar to high-fructose corn syrup, which was much cheaper and only slightly worse tasting. If they had just started with the switch to corn syrup they likely would've received the same level of backlash, but because the change happened directly after the New Coke debacle people barely noticed. This was (probably) an accident, but people learned from it in the worst ways possible, like that doing it on purpose could be a strategy to push out bad changes without the majority of folks noticing.
Basically it goes like this:
1) Plan to make moderately bad changes that will definitely incur backlash from the more savvy customers.
2) Announce that you're going to make majorly bad changes instead, that you probably don't intend to follow through with (unless you think you can actually get away with them).
3) Cue backlash, not just from savvy customers, but from **everybody**.
4) Announce rollback to quell backlash.
5) Push out originally planned moderately bad changes instead, under the guise of 'not as bad as it **could've** been'.
6) The relief from the majority over the rollback will drown out the justified complaints about the actual bad changes from the savvy.
7) Profit.
Of course, this strategy banks on not making the fake announcement so extreme that it permanently chases off too much of their customer-base. Many companies have tripped over that part of it lately, Unity is just the most recent. And as long as it keeps being taught in business schools, we should keep expecting to see it across all industries going forward.
the overton window
@@aaronfrl no, it has some name in sales technology.
something like "false middle" or "false choice'... i didn't found
ikr! this is reminding me of clip studio paint, i feel like corporations are NOT hesitating when it comes to trying to profit off of apps/software specifically made for creating things- probably because they have this stupid idea that we depend on their applications to make our games or art in the first place… well guess what! they’re wrong! they depend on us, because once they do shit like this it’s as easy as just not using their app anymore, and then what are they going to do? hundreds of alternatives exist out there, and doing “business practices” like these just makes it more desirable to switch to something that ISN’T run by greedy idiots
Mmm ... as an American, the legal issues are one of the reasons this initially struck me as insane. Especially with comments on its "retroactive" nature and getting Microsoft to pay the fees for its game passes.
Because Unity has to have a contract in place with the people who use it. That contract outlines the terms of its use. You can't just suddenly CHANGE the contract without getting everyone to sign the new deal. No developers agreed to the changes, and their "use" of Unity was in the past when they were making the game, it's not current. So it doesn't seem to me to be anyway for Unity to get at that past money.
And the Microsoft, Sony, and others with game passes, Unity doesn't have a contract with them at all. Unity can't make them pay. They're just not obligated to do anything for Unity in any way, shape, or form.
The premise would be that to continue selling a game using a unity engine you would have to agree to the new contract. That might hold up in court who knows.
@@Person01234 That depends on what the original contract said. And I don't know what that contract said.
But the thing that makes the most sense to me is that the contract was to use their tools and engine for game development. And maybe the way unreal does, you have something to cover selling the engine with your game, since the engine powers your game. I think that's where their percentage comes in.
But that was all done in the past. Unless there was language in the contract that limited the time period that they could sell the engine for, they can just keep selling their game with your engine. They already have a contract. They don't need to change their contract. You're only going to have a renegotiation if both sides have something they want to renegotiate. Unity is as bound by its contract as the developers are. That's how contracts work.
In the US we have a concept that once a thing is sold, it is the property of the person it was sold to. And that person can do whatever they want with it (unless specifically limited by some sort of contract.) So odds are that the things that are already made and sold are gone. It's very unlikely Unity is going to win a case the requires continuous licensing unless their initial contract was set up that way. And I very much doubt it was because what dev would want to continue paying a license fee for something they'd stopped using.
they saw how canada tried to fleece facebook and google and decided to try it themselves in a much dumber manner
For one, unity tried to quietly change their license agreement to strip mention of being locked to the license version in effect at time of shipping the product (this failed, as they were seen doing it). For two, trying to impose that cost on Microsoft is likely going to be considered tortious interference, which is grounds for a massive lawsuit.
@@jenniferhanses they didnt have a percentage in the past. It was a flat rate. But I 100% agree, I don't think they knew how to implement this change at all let alone any legal trouble they might get in, they wanted to push it out the door to get money asap. I still say fuck unity, they refuse to take responsibility and call this a "communications debacle" 🤦 and even if they walk back it being retroactive and the prices, it's still just a big trust me bro. I don't think anyone is gonna buy into this, and if those automatic systems to change engines get released I think almost everyone will move away from unity. The big games might stay, but no one is gonna want to release anything new. Even if unitys 4% is less than unreals 5% unreal has trust still, not to mention unity is an outdated engine with no new developments like unreal
I wonder in what universe Unity thought they were:
-They do not have popular opinion with them
-They are far from being in a situation of monopoly
-The law most likely isn't on their side
There really should be like a netflix documentary on companies making these insane decision, where they find out what their logic is, and show first hand accounts from people inside and stuff. It would be really interesting to see the mindset of these people.
I would LOVE a series like that but Netflix wouldnt be able to host it when half the rug pulls tend to be done by them as well as pumping out 'Originals' as fast as possible@@Lilitha11
These suit guys are blinded and corrupted by greed. There was never any logic to begin with.@@Lilitha11
EA is company acid
I've said this elsewhere, but I think Unity is dead. Even if they completely retract this decision, forced or not, they've destroyed any trust in them. I would be supprised if enough developers continued to use Unity to keep it afloat in the future.
The whole teaching a person to use a software package so that they go on to use it in their professional life is Microsoft’s bread and butter, they literally give free licenses for windows and office to schools so that students learn on the package, and they go out and use the packages in their professional life (adobe does that too, it’s why you should try to learn the basics on GIMP instead of photoshop)
GIMP my beloved. Also it's morally correct to pirate adobe products. Needing a fucking subscription to edit a PDF is stupid.
@averythegamer4949 still got a cracked photoshop 2017
Never failed 😂👌
I mean photoshop just runs better than GIMP. Don't get me wrong, I never paid and never will pay to use it, but it's objectively better.
@@giulioceresini1435 I’ve worked extensively in both and they really aren’t that different from each other, sure photoshop has a few more tools but GIMP is just as capable.
The big difference is that you probably learned on photoshop, gained your skills there and are familiar with it, you’d be so comfortable in it that you don’t realize that it has its own just as frustrating set of problems that make it terrible for some jobs, but because you are used to it you work around it without even thinking about it.
That’s why I hate that they put those tools in schools for free, it’s basically direct indoctrination into their ecosystem and tricks generations of users into being customers.
It's amazing to watch several companies do stuff like this *this* year. I am a fan of Tabletop RPGs, and Wizards of the Coast tried something like this earlier in the year trying to pull more money from their 3rd party creators. Annnnd tons of people left, creators and players alike. It seems like they are all just trying to get to whatever money they can. In fact, it reminds me a little bit of the Newsies story when the producers of the newspapers decide to charge the distribution more to sell their product without doing anything to improve their product. Funny how people never seem to learn...
History repeats. Makes me wonder if they'll make a musical out of these events...
@@longWriter only if Christian Bale is the lead dancer
The more you tighten your grip, [Unity], the more [users] will slip through your fingers.
and then path finder comes in with the steel chair OH FUCK
I also saw the connection between wizards of the coast and what unity did, if this happens again with another company i will be very surprised
I remember when Unity was a passion project created by a few guys trying to make the game industry better.
Very proud of the devs standing up to this. I wish normal consumers could learn from their example.....but we all know we can't stick together on anything lol
Yea with how people treat most of media....Yea not gonna happen people will literally fund all these awful practices and not care.
This is especially bad in the gaming area where one is supposed to always somehow play these awful games with bad buggy releases....And the masses defend these buggy releases.
nah, we too busy on opening lootboxes
I don't know, we all been collectively pointing and laughing at unity! So in a way Unity brought even the consumers together xD
I think a big reason is that game developers are a smaller ground and due to how they have to work with their programs they have to stay on top of things to keep track of stuff.
@@gucciguy3408 mock them, shame needs to make a comeback and its shameful to be such a wastoid addict that you pay for shit like this!
You are the first commentator that mentioned the talent pipeline. It starts from tinkerer, to hobbyist to solo dev to indie dev team to making big or getting hired by someone who needs your skills.
No matter how good your product is, if no one knows how to use it it will wither on the wine.
Like Adobe!
@@kevinbissingeradobe is still industry standard. People still use and learn it. They just pirate it.
Unity is heading towards noone downloading it in the first place
@@RusticRonnie Well no I was saying that's why Adobe is the industry standard. Because tinkerers and hobbyists use it so it tends to carry up to their professional life
This is what happens if they hire someone that used to be prez of EA to run your company. This bullshit will happen. I mean he wanted to charge people for faster reloads in FPS games. What did they expect?
Not even faster reloads, he wanted you to pay for ammo
He was fired from EA because he was too greedy. Imagin beeing too greedy for EA
In battlefield where the ammo boxes are plenty and the need for them low
they expected the devs and the gaming industry to be soo extremely reliant to unity that they would rather pay extra just to stay on it
its the same mindset they had with the paid reloads nonsense in call of duty
the big names like tencent will just adapt and knowing china, theyll just throw money into something else and make their own Unity engine clone
Friendly reminder it's the shareholders appointing these people to these leadership jobs in companies. Shareholders love it when you blame Bobby Kotick and CEOs for their insanity.
It's wild to see so many companies this year decide to start wringing blood from stones and get absolutely destroyed by consumers... like they're looking around and going "well THAT guy was destroyed for trying this but OUR greed will pay off and we'll be billionaire god kings forever!!!!"
the fact that they got RE-LOGIC to get upset is really something. they're debatably as chill or more chill than most grandmas
re-logic cares about one thing: making the best possible game for the genre. When unity opposes other devs, they oppose making the Best Game™ of that genre - against what Re-Logic believes in.
(the Best Game™is a game that is fun to play and well coded so it's easily editable
What's so baffling about the whole thing, is how utterly _obvious_ this whole mess is. My only connection to the industry is as a consumer, and after reading all those first articles, I, _just like everyone else,_ saw that this was the end of Unity as a serious player in the future. It shows how completely unhinged and uncoupled from reality Unity's management is, and if Unity is to have any hope in the future, the entire C-suite (and everyone else who OK'd this blunder) has to be sacked. But that's about as likely as me sprouting wings.
Sacked without pay, and fined for insider trading.
Let us know if you sprout wings, just in case.
Worst part was when they doubled down on it. These people are beyond saving.
It won't be the first time Riccitiello has been sacked from CEO.
His previous position in a gaming company was as CEO of E-fucking-A and they sacked him, because of his ideas were so fucking bad.
"Let's charge players $1 per reload in Battlefield, because in that moment of intensity, players will be less price-sensitive about their purchase."
The man is a caricature of corporate greed, it's unbelievable.
Well, I don't mind Unity gone. Don't really care about the company either way, since its just your typical corporation with your typical corpo BS. But the engine, though, that's entirely different matter. As a gamer, I never liked Unity engine. Never liked how it behaves and works, and if less games are made in it from here on out, I'd say it's a win.
Poor unity, who could have seen this coming… oh wait, everyone. 😂
Nah, only everyone who knew about this before they pulled that announcement.
Unity doing the shocked pika face
Including the CEO, who sold his stocks before the announcement.
@@DoNotFitInACivic it's only insider trading if said person is conservative or publicly speaks out against the coviet union
Wait for Unreal... 😂😂😂
That is what happens when you hire John Riccitiello, someone known for unfettered greed, they fired him from a freaking EA because his greed caused a massive drop in financial performance of EA.
This should be an absolute death blow .. even if they walk it back now, the audacity of them to ever even attempt something like this should not be forgotten -- although far too many people seem too willing to just shrug off bad behavior like this and go right back to the people who knifed them in the back which is truly sad.
Yeah this is the 2nd time they've done this exactly though. They tried this in 2019
Exactly, if people weren't so afraid of change the two-steps-forth-one-step-back wouldn't be so common.
I'm personally boycotting Unity for all eternity. No matter what they do now, they have shown themselves to be capable of stooping to such lows. My trust and faith is forever broken and can never be mended by this action.
Fun fact: When this happened, a lot of the staff at Unity actually decided against this. Which is wild
Source?
Unity; "We need to do this to survive."
Everyone; "THEN PERISH."
[Note: the above statement is made about a company, not an individual.]
@@Mac_OmegalyA company made up of innocent hard workers and ruined by 1-9 greedy executives. No one wins.
Save unity
Kick the CEO
@@wwatermelon15 it wasn't just one person, we all know this. They will try again if you let them go the first time and next time they do it they'll be prepared and then, then there's nothing you can do. I prefer it die to teach others as well as save Devs now rather than in 5 years time when they are finally ready to do it, at which point there will be no reprieve.
@@tarektechmarine8209bro the CEO was fired from EA because he was "to greedy"💀.
He literally proposed the idea of charging money for every reload (for battlefield I think) because "the average gamer wouldn't think twice in such a high stress situation".
(I don't remember a lot of it but that was basically the jist of it)
I understand the difficulty of changing engines mid-development, but I really hope no one goes back to using Unity, regardless of what they say now.
The lack of respect shown towards all developers is something we should never forget.
I guarantee people won't, there will be very little new games made using unity. You don't just push out a change like this (that's against the law for one) and then walk it back and nothing happen. People might not delete their games now, but they're certainly not going to make new ones. The entire reason they changed it is probably because big devs were gonna leave or sue them, if it was just smaller devs complaining they wouldn'tve walked it back 100%. The trust is broken, and everyone sees them for who they are. An outdated company with a CEO and board of directors in their 60s who are so out of touch and greedy they'd drive their entire company off a cliff to get more money. CEO also sold a bunch of stock before the announcement, just another twig on the bonfire.
@@Kratos-eg7ez Either the ceo is scummy.
Or CEO was pushed to do that by the board and decided 'meh, you idiots wanna do this, fiiiine~ i'll cover my ass just in case'.
@@tyranidswarmlord9722 Whatever it was, its the developers and the employees who'll pay for this. This is really unfair.
There are already a lot of people making porting to Godot much easier. also one of the studios said the install fee per month would basically amount to the salary of 2 devs, which could easily port the game in a month. Especially mobile games will not be hard at all.
@@tyranidswarmlord9722 Lets not forget the current CEO is the guy that wanted to make battlefield players pay a dollar for reloads...
Yup, knew there would be a court case. You can't retroactively demand money people didn't agree to... if you are not the government that is.
What if you give the government a 'cut' though? 🤔
LAW FIRMS are salivating - easy work
@@st.altair4936Unlikely to work unless you give them a majority cut, at which point why bother?
They actually CAN do what they said they'd do. Basically they mean retroactive poorly. They used the word wrong.
What they mean is games already made will have to sign the new license so even released games will be under the license.
The license needs to be resigned I think yearly though some people may have custom contracts. So anyone can just choose to never update the game. But any updates wouls be under the new license which is legal.
Their isn't any precident yet set for can you change a contract in a way that effects long term development which ofncourse could be chosen illegal. But no past dales or install or games would actually be changed which means no contract was broken.
Unity was playing a dangerous game though because reoccurring contracts could be considered assumed a certain way and that assumption can be considered legal
@@Zalied This. What Unity is doing is very likely completely legal but we've had a lot of recent precedent of the EU cracking down on big tech anti-consumer practices in spite of their legality (i.e. forcing Apple to allow you to repair your phone, or charge it using the same cables as everyone else).
I'm so glad to hear this: We can come together against greed and abuse. We can affect and change the industry.
"We're sorry that you misunderstood our message" - words of people who are not sorry about a single thing they ever did in their lives. If a company _ever_ says anything of the sorts, I just assume they're practically scammers now.
Don’t stop until they are forced to replace their entire leadership.
Yes, PLEASE for the love of God.
@@mojojojo1529 I'd disagree with this. The company going down would come with a lot of issues out from that which would affect many devs/games. I think the best course is for the top people to be outed in hopes that someone else can salvage the situation. But moving forward something big would need to be done to reassure people that something like that won't happen again. It may be the best course for the company to burn (as an example for others to not take a similar course) but I'd rather see something else come of it.
Fire Satan and il be happy.
@@crtg4672 It something big dosen't happen as a dev I am 100% fine with it burning down. Just to be an example never to try this again
changing leadership may not change shit
Treating your business partners as just consumers was the most hilarious blunder I've seen in a while from a big company. Not that I'm surprised.
Basically American government business model
part of me thinks that if unity had the means/info to charge consumers directly for installs, they would
@@capybaraenthusiast5164yes, but if they were upfront and transparent about it, I don't think it would have been such a huge uproar
They are just customers. But treating customers that way isn´t acceptable.
@@uhrguhrguhrg wrong, it still would be, using the number of installs is just hilarious. an install doesnt mean shit and is unreliably as hell. why not using licensing and take a percantage as win as everyone else period.
i bet, when they made that decision, there wasnt a single developer or even an high level IT person in the room. straight up only business people who dont even know what a program actually is.
What's more amazing is that their CEO is still has a job. Even believing their own story, that they were actually proposing a sustainable price increase to survive, and it was all a miscommunication (you'd have to completely ignore the fact that execs sold lots of stock before the announcement, but let's do that), the effect of this whole debacle is that they got law firms and regulatory bodies involved, caused long term clients to instantly migrate to competitors and damaged trust in the company. So, even by their own excuses it's possibly one of the biggest business blunders ever. I wonder what a CEO has to do to get fired!
First, "firing" him would probably mean handing him $20+ million or something, because the business world is so stupid and top-heavy. Second, this company has much bigger concerns than the CEO that they themselves hired, knowing his reputation and disdain as EA's CEO. Firing him wouldn't cure the rot that controls the company.
Coming in executives meeting and murder half the board members?
I wonder: if they stopped acting like they can do no wrong, would that be taken as a sign of weakness and result in them getting fired? Because that kind of hubris seems like it'd enable this kind of idiocy.
You hit the nail on the head at the end with how companies are focused on short-term profits and this has been becoming a norm across the board. The long term for a lot of people is essentially a dead concept and people want to make all the money in the shortest time. Unity’s actions feel like extreme short term income gaining in an industry that does not support it.
Exactly. I’ve seen it across all creative mediums. Disney, UA-cam, now Unity… big companies will take something that was made with heart and passion, and do anything it can to get a quick buck out of it. Whether that’s by wringing it dry with cheap cash grabs or demolishing it’s foundational rules. Either way, it’s ruining the reputation of once beloved companies all to make a few rich people richer. Disgusting. And really disheartening.
Large companies know they are destroying the world, there is no long term as far as they are concerned so they only have goals for short term profits.
This guy has great commentary. Able to break things down, doesn't wag his tail when the company steps back or releases a PR statement (like a lot of DnD members did with DnD Beyond, or other people with WarThunder) , covers general relevant information, and is able to recognize the larger effects of the destroyed trust.
the good thing is: the DnD youtubers didn't back down. They kept on pushing.
Both Tycho from Penny-Arcade and Tom Francis made the point that Unity will have to roll back BEYOND where they started to meaningfully recover any goodwill. Francis goes so far as to say that if they dont put it in legally binding writing, he doesn't think anything they do for goodwill will stick, since the trust is so thoroughly broken.
Which is how things should be handled.
The problem with this attempt is that they are clearly still intent on carrying it out to some capacity.
And even in the event that they walked everything back there is nothing stopping them from boiling the frog or doing something like this again.
Having things in legal writing is about the only way that they can be trusted again, given that at any point they could just do the exact same otherwise.
@@rasmachris94 Can and probably WILL try to do. The way they keep pretending this is all just some miscommunication is like PR gaslighting or something. Its basically the social media equivalent of Shaggy's "Wasn't Me"
I swear I can't understand why something so simple as fire Riccitiello and blacklist list is so hard for executive boards. EA alredy did it once.
It may have not been fully his choice. Supposedly on the board of directors there are ex IronSource executives and they wanted Apploving out of Unity....
they at least need to wipe their board of directors on top of whatever they plan to do as a fix/apology.
whatever the fix they will offer as long as the scummy board directors are still there, no one will trust that unity will not pull the same stunt again.
@@monad_tcp The silver lining is that they can't avoid suffering the consequences of their choices. They can try to ignore or downplay them, but there is no way back for them after this. That they were ever willing to try it even once is proof that they can never be trusted again.
I hope this is the start of a collective redefining of how consumers deal with products. This has a very high chance of breaking out into the mainstream and from there it could convince a lot of people to change how compliant they are with the stuff large companies try to pull.
Even if it becomes mainstream, it won't transfer over to the side of consumers in the broad sense. This is limited to the side of industry, meaning it'll only ever become a thing for the side that does this professionally.
For the actual consumers, the circumstances are very different.
Sadly i doubt or at least until the change itself comes into reality I doubt most would notice. In my uni almost everyone talks and memes about it but this was our study literally. But my roommate whose into games took a bit of time to understand what was going when I was ranting to him about it.
Depends, there's quite a lot of really shitty consumers out there in gaming.
Adobe
Unity might let a lot of small devs use their engine but ultimately they sell to companies not consumers, and as you have seen 99% of consumers say fuck unity even after walking it back. And developers are leaving unity. Even huge developers mustve been talking to unity about leaving or suing them or unity wouldn'tve walked it back 100%, they don't care about the little guy that's not their target in the first place. This will never become mainstream, people call out Bs when they see it n that's a fact. Some shit might slip through unnoticed or uncared about but that's the minority. I think unity are still fucked and this walk back matters very little, the trust is broken and this system is still just a big "trust me bro I won't lie about downloads I swear! Oh the old policy could make you go bankrupt? But we changed it! It was a communications debacle!" This system is still made to be abused by unity, competition, and individuals. Unitys fucked, no one is gonna make new games on their engine even if they don't delete the games they have now. This change will forever be remembered for potentially bankrupting people, for being able to be abused by everyone including unity, and for being retroactive which is against the law. It doesn't matter if they act like it never happened, because it did.
Bless the Terraria devs for supporting the open source community like that.
The wholesome part of this is that other software communities are welcoming previous unity users with open arms
Honestly I'm glad that there is a competition for this, because if not for that those Devs won't have a easier transition to another software
What boggles the mind is that WOTC did something very similar and it went _very badly_ for them. Did nobody at Unity see this coming? Seriously, man. They should know by now that gamers are _tired_ of getting screwed over, and that indie developers _are_ gamers with a passion, and many gamers get jobs working at larger studios, too. The people at Unity shoulda known not to mess with gamers. They tend to react _violently_ to BS like this, because they've been dealing with greedy corporate BS for years.
It’s less a case of not knowing and more a case of how far can they push the envelope? Companies are always trying to find ways to squeeze out as much money as they can. They don’t care if others failed, so long as they can succeed.
LOTS of people at Unity saw this coming... just not anybody with the power to stop it. That's why so many employees have quit recently.
@@synonym1196 They knew exactly what they were doing, they just thought now is the time to strike because so many games are depending on Unity that Developers "have no choice but to accept the installation fee" and i even bet there was a huge financial expert team behind all this shenanigens. Well, they were wrong and now the bucket with the match is a full grown forest fire they cant put out while everyone can see it from miles away.
due to that fiasco, getting the pinkertons of all people to mug a dude, I've really enjoyed using pathfinder
Gamers lie down and let themselves get steamrolled every single time. This won't be any different.
I think this situation provides a great object lesson to developers, particularly newer ones: Keep options open and don't let anyone rise to dominate the field. Because when, not if, they turn to bite you, you won't have anywhere else to go.
It doesn't seem that Unity's employees or the spokespeople that sent those messages understand the gravity of what they did. It's not a communication error when you delete part of your TOS beforehand and later on it just so happens that you release a plan that not only charges per install, but also applies retroactively.
They're not sorry for what they did, they're sorry that they caught so much flack.
Employees have literally 0 fault on this. They either follow management orders, or they lose their jobs. I just hope they've already been looking for new jobs.
There are employees at Unity who are aware of how badly the executives have screwed up. I hope one of them ends up in the CEO's chair.
@@Homiloko2 When i said "unity employees" i was referring to the people that have given the public statements, not ALL of the employees.
@@DarkOmegaMK2 Yeah, but even the people who wrote those statements word by word are just following orders. You can only blame the decision-makers, e.g. the executives, who got on a meeting and decided this is how things will be done.
Honestly isnt that just every company catching flack? "Oh we are so sorry for xyz" no youre not you are sorry cause its hurting your wallet
Lawyers are like piranhas. If one senses something is up and it seems like a big payout, the rest of the lawyers will eventually swarm. I love seeing lawyers at work and it'll be interesting to see how law by mike will respond to this situation if he does.
I hope this becomes an absolute win for the future of gaming
Less competition is never a good thing
@@ArbitraryNicknameyou're right, but the whole point of competition is to get rid of dumbass decisions like this. That's the main part of capitalism we are all sold. There is more such is an employee being able to price their time or not work at a place.
Yeah, I've reinstalled my entire library several times for different reasons. The developers, publishers, and the gamestore done see any revenue from me doing that. The idea that the maker of the game engine deserves some kind of fee for it is completely ridiculous. I'm glad the industry is punishing them for this. I honestly hope no one wavers. The right outcome is for this to cause Unity to actually collapse AND for new regulations to be past. THIS is the time to make the consequences for these practices so egregious that the executives and investors behind them finally have to take a step back and change course.
I absolutely adore how the entire gaming community came together declared war and aimed straight for the jugular on the first fucking move. This is brutal and i love it! I'm proud of the "unity" (heh) that everyone showcased against the genuinely evil policies that this awful company is trying to push forward. Now we just need to see how the big studio reacts to this sudden cut into their bottom lines.
Programming is quite literally built from problem solving, Unity is basically trying to take over the Kevlar lovers convention with a bread knife.
@@ahumanb3ingthatexists67Just like Hasbro/WOTC trying to erroneously charge people who design fantasy maths games for a living. Indies design their tabletob games around DnD's ruleset because it was well known and they liked DnD, but they're still born from the same community that invented the term "rules lawyering" so it's a pretty bad idea to try nickel and diming them.
@@conspiracypanda1200basically
Any community with a sufficient amount of people who's entire shtick is being mini-lawyers and mathematicians is bad idea because they will likely run the numbers and find a way to get what they want
Now we need the same thing agains ActiBlizz/ EA/ RIOT games/ Ubi and its a win....but that will never come....
@@ahumanb3ingthatexists67 kevlar is useless against blades btw, would be a better allegory with someone trying to take over the HEMA community using a bread knife...
In an alternate universe, Unity said hey in 6 months we're introducing a 4 percent revenue share for games that pass 1 million in yearly sales moving forward. There wasn't an insane backlash and they made more money. But we live in this timeline.
They announced the rugpull before it happened. Can't scam that way.
That fee for UE5.3 is as better as we all know, unlike what Unity thinking about in the 1st place
Yeah, I can't understand why they didn't just do that. Sure, there would be some muttering, but pretty much everyone would understand and be okay with it.
Same scenario but Halo Infinit exists.. not Halo 6 or one where EA isn't burning studios for sales projections... I can go on but... hey.
Try "five years", not 6 months
I think what most people might be missing in saying that Unity is making a mistake is that the CEO and higher ups likely totally fine with it collapsing. I remember reading that the CEO sold 2000 stocks before the announcement, so it seems like this is all a plan to pump and dump the company.
Only option is to resort to more physical means at this point. When it comes to bastards like Unity's current CEO, though, I really have no qualms with that.
Remember the Stampy episode from The Simpsons? You know, Bart Gets an Elephant? Homer realizes he can't afford to support the Elephant even when charging people money to ride the Elephant. He then raises the price and goes to the Vanhauten residence to charge them hundreds of dollars that they "owe" him because they rode the Elephant under the old pricing. There was an awkward silence and he was told to get off their property.
That's what happened with Unity.
"You know how legal firms work". Sir, you have far more faith in me than anyone should 😂
I worked at a law firm and don't understand how they work.
@@vedritmathias9193 HAH! I am a law firm and even my name doesn't make any sense! Like, why tf am I firm? Does law make me firm? Is that why I'm named law firm? WHY TF AM I NAMED A LAW FIRM?!
@@Interneter1245 Not an expect but I believe a Law Firm is a collection of lawyers who take cases for the organization to make revenue.
So its sorta like programming then? lol @@vedritmathias9193
They're sharks and leeches, at the same time.
I'm a hobbyist who is just starting on what I hope will be my first complete game project. I learned Unity to do this, but have completely jumped to Unreal now.
No one should care about me and my project specifically, but I would bet that there are thousands of people like me out there. Nice job Unity!
Exactly. Trust is broken. Even if they fully retract and pretend this never happened, who will want to stay a new game in unity now?
And yes learning a new engine sucks. But like spoken languages, it gets easier each new one.
I'm currently in the same boat, currently in the process of making a game with a team at Uni and planned to finish soon. Made it in Unity and now we don't know what to do as we're almost done and can't exactly redo all our hard work. A sad time to try and publish a first game with Unity, and I'm sure there are plenty more people and teams in the same boat.
You'd have to be nuts to choose this engine for any future project. Sure you'll have to learn a new engine, but that's the sort of thing developers are good at. Don't put all your eggs into one corporate basket.
What prevents unreal doing the same?
How you finding the learning curve of Unreal jumping from Unity?
This is the kind of trust you'll never win back.
If this industry has taught us anything then it's that you can never ever give giant companies a second chance or the benefit of the doubt.
They're not a few dudes with coffee stains in some building, they're corporate suits with shareholders and profit margins who
will do absolutely anything to squeeze every single penny out of the people below them.
They're sharks, you don't reason with them, you get the hell out of the water.
10:06 to 10:50 Absolutely correct. Prior to Sept 12, I was on the road to becoming a Unity professional as an aspiring technical artist. I'm already an animator, I chose Unity to work with. Now, even though I don't make money using Unity, I don't see it as a time investment anymore. I'm trying to build a career around my unique strengths and what could be utilized in the future as I age. Sept 12, 2023 ENDED that plan. Unity is no longer in the cards.
What kind of budding companies, who can start a project anew as of Sept 12, 2023, will risk years of development to have their wallets left open to manipulation by the global public via Unity?
Only the ones with the infrastructure and revenue will even consider it, instantly turning Unity into a zombie software. No one will pay to go to school to learn a software that would make their startup a nightmare. The only way any new startup wouldn't be a nightmare is if it's an absolute blowout success with a decent price point for a first release. All Unity can do with this policy intact (and with its senior management walking around like the building isn't on fire) is maintain its position for as long as the successful companies don't throw them out. Elsewise, all Unity will do is rot on the vine until it's gone.
They really should be getting struck with some antitrust / insider trading lawsuits. After all the stock that the big heads offloaded before the announcement, it was clear they knew this was going to be big, and their protected their own bottom line just in case.
There is exactly one thing they can do to repair this. Include in the license that you can opt to use the version of the license at the time you published the game, and keep a public repo of all versions of the license and when it changes. Oh wait. They already did that and then took it away to make this move. On what grounds should anyone ever trust them again? There is literally nothing they can do to give users a sense of security that they will be ok staying with unity that they haven't already done previously and then taken away unilaterally to screw their users.
pissing off a few gamers is one thing, and pissing off most gamers is a nightmare, but pissing off the handa that feeds gamers is a death sentence
This reminds me of a lesson my high school professor taught me, a college professor who downgraded himself because he hated teaching college kids. His lesson was that if every major group be it political, economic, or judicial had a history major in their ranks, the world's problems would not repeat themselves if they listened to them.
But as always, history keeps repeating itself just like this incident.
That's because people in power surround themselves with Yesmen. And when a Yesman happens to have a few more braincells to rub together and gives actual good advice, yet said advice contradicts the Boss' views, the Yesman gets booted out.
@@NovaGirl8 I wish I could disagree but I've seen too many instances of this to deny it.
@@NovaGirl8 It's all under the excuse that "they don't understand the vision we're trying to achieve" that leads to the "Yesmen" becoming prevalent, because anyone who doesn't agree supposedly "doesn't understand" what the leader(s) wants to achieve. 😆
Just someone with a memory span longer than a housecat should be enough
@@AzraelAlpha You do have people with that but they either don't use it, get ignored, or get removed.
The same thing happened with the circuit board development software called 'Eagle CAD'. Autodesk bought it and decided to 'change the deal' on multiple axes like requiring connectivity to a license server, locking designs in their cloud, and eliminating reasonable license prices to force a subscription model that was way more expensive over any normal time-frame. This led to KiCad implementing extensive support for importing Eagle CAD projects so people could switch over to KiCAD rather than having to upgrade in to the jail that was the Autodesk version.
I'm still curious about the fact that the executives sold their shares before making this announcement. Which indicates they knew the response they'd get. Perhaps they expected short-term backlash, and thought they could recover long-term? It's also borderline insider trading, but they'll probably get away with it as long as they don't re-buy shares.
FTC LOVES to go after this kind of thing. it's not borderline. It's insider trading. Or outright stock manipulation.
The Unifree project is an absolute chad move from Applovin. Hopefully gonna make porting games to Godot possible soon.
I'm sure the near _doubling_ of Godot's dev fund over the last week thanks to all this will also help with that 😂
Wasn't Applovin in talks to purchase Unity a few years ago? I wonder if they are planning to tank the company to acquire it at bargain price later.
@@captainufo4587 They were, Applovin proposed 20 billions. Unity refused and tried with that new policy to force an Ironsource monopoly behind the scenes. Long story short, they wanted the 20 billions but didn't want to give their positions away.
@@captainufo4587yes. Though I don't think they were interested in Unity, so much as stopping Unity from buying IronSource (given what has happened, for good reason).
I still don't think they really want to buy Unity (I think the antitrust concerns would be pretty big), so much as loosen Unity's grip on the mobile market. For one, a Unity that is feeling pressure is going to work with whatever ad networks developers want, rather than trying to impose their own solution. And two, half of Applovin's business is their own mobile games. They had 3.7B installs over the last year. With volume discounts, the install fee would likely be a $100-200M/year expense, on a part of their business that brings in about $1,200M/year of revenue. So, even just tactically, they have a lot of incentive to make tools that make porting to royalty-free engines easier (even porting to Unreal would be about a half or a third of the royalty that this install fee would take).
This is actually a bit different from the PC game studios, where, despite the ambiguity and confusion, the cost will most likely be less than Unreal's royalty would have been.
Honestly hope so at this point @@captainufo4587
And hey, Godot has the Jolt extension that they're hoping to make standard ahyway, that will make things even more attractive
Also, it's very characteristic of sociopaths this illusion of control remark of "oh, we were not caught, it was just bad communication!", like changing communication would make all these worries go away. What they the very least need to change is to fire the executives that supported the decision.
I've heard that the board isn't the type that'd fire this guy.
...Which in turn means they're not serving their shareholders' best interests...
"I hope that's a lesson to the industry at large" - but no, it'll never be. Shit like this still keeps happening in the industry (Activision, anybody?), the only difference this time around is that it comes from an engine, not from a game dev/publisher. As long as these assholes lead companies, it'll keep happening too.
This is why games are dead: the capitalism
There has been a lot of "lessons" for the gaming industry this year. Blizzard's disasterous Diablo 4 patch and crappy season 1 that basically killed the game. Game devs attacking Baldur's Gate 3 for being a quality game and it backfiring on them completely. Bethesda releasing another game on their janky 20 year old engine and getting 7/10 reviews. And now we have Unity fucking up royally. Will the gaming industry actually learn anything from these "lessons"? Of course not.
It should keep happening. If they don't happen, how can engines like Godot come up?
I taught myself unity in highschool. But now that I'm in college studying computer science i moved over to monogame to get a better understanding of how games are made on a deeper level. I see no reason to move back to unity and with the knowledge i gained in monogame i have the feeling I'll have an easier time moving to an engine other than unity if i decide to go into game development.
At this point even a complete reversal and apology would not be enough. Unity has demonstrated that using their engine is simply too big a liability to be used by small developers, and larger ones have the resources to switch to safer alternatives. It's only a matter of time until unity implodes completely.
Unity is doing a stellar job of uniting literally everyone against them 😂
Well they are called Unity after all
I love Relogic. Hands down, LOVE them all. From their running joke of * this is the last update* to this? So many people didnt take terrarria seriously when it first came into being, but now ? God damn they have balls
Okay, so I rarely actively watch this channel. Not seeing Bellular is a shock, and no offense to Bellular, but this guy is a breath of fresh air. Keep this man around!
Dude I swear I watched for 4 minutes before I realized that wasn't him with a cold.
Re-Logic continues to prove itself to be one of the greatest indie companies we've got. Red himself is a treasure of a person and should the day come that they've done some truly shady shit will be the day my heart is broken into pieces.
Red is too good of a person to do that tbh
I am planning to make a game and was evaluating engines godot & unity prior to this whole fiasco. Thank you unity for coming out with this NOW, I was leaning towards using your engine. Now it will be godot.
The lesson for the devs is to go for open source. There's no telling that unreal too won't pull shit like this in the future. Godot is the right way. It can be the blender of game engines. I think it already kind of is, just needs a bit more push from community with advanced tech. Blender also got a big push from their geometry nodes, it's a high quality swiss army tool now.
Unreal's business model is very different and Tim Sweeny is a game dev to begin with. They make games first and use the money to better their engine. Also Unreal has been giving grants to Godot for a while. Hopefully they will never mess up like this...
@@zerohbeat The 40% ownership by Tencent tho… Granted they haven’t really done anything, but their presence is just ominous.
@@rubyy.7374 Yeah, Tencent is a little bit worrying. As long as things stay like they are, things will be OK, I hope. Plus if things start to change in Unreal, it's highly likely developers will will be much more ready to jump ship if necessary...
@@zerohbeat Sweeney's plan to combat monopolies was to create an even worse one. There's more than just a hint of Elon about him.
This guy gets it.
Just as a reference to the install thing: I've had some weird ass bugs with Destiny 2 while streaming, which has led me to re-install the game 4 times this week alone (it's tuesday...). Some games require a few more depending on how serious the bugs are (i'm looking at you Dx11 fatal crash FFXIV). or even some of the smaller games that i have around but will constantly cycle in and our of the HDD for space. it's a quick install so what does it matter if I delete and re-install Golf with my Friends every week, even twice a week if i'm extra spicy ? I personally would be causing these devs within a month their revenue from my single purchase of the game.
Supposedly, according to Unity, re-installs of games on the same device don't count. Though they haven't given any details on how they can tell the difference between first installs, re-installs, pirated games, etc. So basically, they expect us to take their word for it.
Before i said screw it and bought and external i was constantly deleting and redownloading games as well. Not to mention the fact that i have had a few different pcs in the last numerous years for various reasons. Can't imagine how much money i would have boned poor devs out of if this had been in place then. Absolutely absurd
@@spookworm2671 their word means nothing if they can retroactively alter the deal.
I don't know if it was already mentioned in the comments, but the developer writing the conversion tool from unity to Godot is Brian Bucklew (unormal), lead dev of Caves of Qud.
It's a "New Coke" Fiasco: Change the formula to something horrible, let the outrage build, and then Pull Back so they appear to listen.
All of this was by design to switch from sugar to corn syrup unnoticed.
We would have tasted the difference in a straight line.
It's a crap move, gas-lighting.
Unreal's only drawback is the lack of marketplace assets that Unity has. But a few asset creation teams consider porting their solutions to Unreal, and propably Godot, when it has a marketplace too. These few packages are why we went for Unity in the first place, because Unreal didn't have anything like Dialogue Systems, Makinom2, UMA2, etc.
I would argue that Unreal's main drawback is more community-based. That's where Unity excelled and what made it work so well. With Unity, if you wanted to do something, you could find a million knowledgeable people to help you do it. It was easy to find any missing knowledge. The ecosystem was incredibly open and helpful.
Finding useful info about doing stuff in Unreal(especially C++ code-related) is so much more like having to reverse-engineer the engine. I mean you can find a ton of gimpy little tutorials about blueprints, but once you actually want to use real code, you are kind of winging it. That makes Unreal much less beginner-friendly, and is the main reason Unity competed as long as it has despite being an inferior engine to UE.
Would be nice if the consumers could muster this type of energy to defend themselves against the gaming industry when it uses predatory practices itself to monetize every level of gaming, rather than protect the industry when one of their own decides to use their own tactics against them, for the same reason.
Not video games, but that's what happened when Wizards of the Coast tried this exact same thing.
Consumers don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars and giant platforms to advocate from
You mean the consumers that still pre-order broken games? Or the ones that make gatcha games the most profitable games in the industry's history? Those consumers?
It's almost like this has much less impact on consumers than it does on businesses, which are much more strict with their money.
I don't understand why everything has to come down to shaming people for enjoying something just because you don't like it.
@5h4d0w5l1f3 because those people ruined this hobby and industry for people who can still remember a time when /most/ games came out finished and didn't try to take every coin you own through actual proven manipulation. (Outside of the arcade, given in retrospect arcades were kind of fucked too) that's why they get mad.
So they've walked it back to a pricing structure that is still 3 to 4 times worse than Unreal's (Unreal is 5% revenue but you get $1M per quarter, not per year, and no subscription for the editor).
The senior team at unity are actually very good at maths, which is why a huge chunk of their shares were sold before this change was made. In some circles that is considered “insider trading”
I think Tycho of Penny Arcade said it best when he compared it to the WotC debacle earlier this year. "What Wizards had to do in order to get out from under that particular Sword of Damocles - one they installed themselves, directly o'erhead - was to make concessions even *greater* than the original status quo they'd been attempting to amend. And that's what it will take here." If they don't rewrite their TOS to preclude further attempts at retroactive changes of this sort and include language that guarantees a license will apply to games released under it in perpetuity the way Unreal does, I don't see how anyone will trust them again.
First game i made solo was in Godot, and i was flamed in the reviews for it. I didnt use unity out of principal years ago, and its nice to see i wasnt wrong for doing so. That change would destroy any past and future revenue for me.
Link to the game? Also, did you update the game to fix the reported issues?
Ah! Thanks for the reminder about the Godot Humble Bundle - I'd heard about it a couple times as the storm's been brewing and finally remembered at the same time as I had a minute to make the purchase.
I'm sad to see Unity's engine being tied in to something so bad. I have so many good memories of youtubers getting their start with Unity tutorials, and there are many games that might never have gotten made if there weren't something so beginner-friendly (one could say the same of the RPG Maker series).
I think you should also mentioned that if a third party decide to install tracking software without explicit stated in the EULA that could be count as very illegal in EU.....since this would break several laws
even with it stated in the eula it would be illegal in some countries like norway and it would invallidate all the other terms in the contract and since money has changed hands before you can read the terms of service its already total bunk there and norway is not part of eu they just have trade agreements with them so for ppl from there most of these contracts are already invallid rofl
@@charlessanne5689 I know.....its just one of the reason why some tech giants are forced to pay hundreds of millions of Euro every year because of it. As third party Unity has no way the option to make a contract with the end user, to enforce tracking or datamining, which is illegal in EU and highly illegal in germany. I doubt unity can afford the fines that facebook/google/apple or microsoft pay every year to the EU. Lawyers would have it easy to rip Unity apart. Also Users would need give explicity their consent, not some form of popup or such sort and you cant blackmail afterwards when they already bought the program. Unity is opening a giant can of worms and i doubt the stocks looking good if they get fined. But hey the CEO already sold his share before the announcement, which is another can of worms
It will be interesting to see how the courts handle this. It might set a very powerful precedent.
I noticed something changed a couple of years back when thier marketing staff (in Singapore) tried to hard sell thier pro product just to get more $$$. Thier marketing staff cannot even have a technical background when I asked about some pro features. They just here to sell and even threat us to buy a license even we are a non-profit organization.
Because of this, we moved to Unreal and this new pricing news just confirm our right decision.
Im just so proud of the gaming industry for once. Classic Red W with relogic of course. Lol hes always tossing W's in all directions like that but to see all the other companies come out as they have has really made me feel such oride for the indie dev scene
Thank you again for your consistent uploads and news!
Yeah, their whole business is at stake
@@Troonielicious thing is, i'm seeing all these articles about how the head guy at unity's just a blatant piece of "crap". it's almost like all these people that get rug pulled on crypto scams headed by people that are known scammers! it's like why would you deal with these people in the first place? what did you expect? a hand jpb and a pat on the back? i know it sounds harsh and brutally honest but people need to wake up and stop trusting these types of people. and it's not just this one example, these types of psychopaths pretty much make up everyone in charge of our govenments, health care and news media. you think they're any better?
If I was unreal engine, the next thing I'd create is an easy set of tools for companies to easily convert their unity projects into UE projects.
I almost guarantee that is what they are doing now. Give it a couple weeks, now is the time to capitalize on others mistakes.
Terraria devs making that donation have honestly turned me over to their game. Always been on edge about picking it up but here we go, wish me luck boys!
Good luck
Have fun killing a elder god
I do not understand how can companies become this untouched from reality.
It would be really interesting to hear what went down in the meeting where they decided to go down this route.
Unity:”I am altering the deal, pray I don’t alter it further!”
They thought they were Darth Vader. Turns out they were Kylo Ren?