They’re still scumbags though
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Nothing they do at this point will bring any of the goodwill back. They already messed up and no amount of walking it back is going to change the perception that they might just do it again at any moment
1,000%
I’m a year into developing my first game though and this means I don’t have to abandon all the progress I’ve made. After I publish this game, all bets are off as to where I go…or should I say where I godot.
Aye. I’m not waiting for godot.
Have you explored what level of effort it would take for you to convert it to use another engine? There are a TON of tools people are making to assist with porting projects from Unity to any number of other engines. Sure, the tools won’t do 100% of the work, but by what I’ve been hearing, they take a HUGE amount of the tedium out of the process.
They don’t need good will, unfortunately. They just need devs to not abandon it for Unreal or some other engine, and the cost/benefits calculation on that is going to be made by short sighted people on a project-by-project basis.
Which is exactly why anyone in a position to do so should still drop Unity like a hot potato, sunk cost or not. We can’t condone this kind of behavior.
Ah, the ol [trust thermocline] (https://web.archive.org/web/20230403081519/https://twitter.com/garius/status/1588115310124539904)
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the engine costs several hundred million dollars to maintain
I just don’t understand this. Godot is fairly comparable in scope and while it is behind Unity somewhat it also has a tiny fraction of the budget. Sometimes just throwing more money at a product does not make it any better any faster.
You’re not counting the several millions of dollars required for executive salaries yearly. Those executives are important because how else are you going to drain the life out of the developers who are actually maintaining the thing with useless meetings, bureaucracy, “cultural transitions”, and other forms of daily torment?
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I won’t trust Unity with any of my future projects until I see the heads of their entire upper level management team on pikes.
Even that wouldn’t bring me back. There are simply other options. Godot’s good so long as you aren’t planning of a console release. If your are then Epic are no angels but they haven’t pulled this crap with Unreal.
If they open source their engine then at least you wouldn’t need to trust them.
Give it two weeks, no one will care anymore
And pointedly, there was no mention of acknowledgement whatsoever of their sneaky license modifications from months ago that a bunch of people discovered after the fact.
Unity’s execs and board do not fucking care. Their opinions have not been changed. They will certainly try something just as scummy at some point in the future. It’s only a matter of time.
Sub 1 million is not going back, they are just reducing the scope. Unity is dead
Exactly. Somebody needs to explain to them what “backtrack” means…
Don’t trust it. Even if it was a dry run, the only way to prevent this happening in the future is to abandon the platform completely. Fuck these people.
There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.
A few things:
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Unity is still bleeding money. They have a product that could be the basis for a reasonably profitable company, but spending billions on a microtransaction company means it is not sufficient for their current leadership. It doesn’t seem wise to build your bussniess on the product of a company whose bussniess plan you fundamentally disagree with.
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It would be the best for the long term health of bussniess-to-bussnies services if we as a community manages to send the message that it doesn’t matter what any contract says - just trying to introduce retroactive fees is unforgivable and a death sentence to the company that tries it.
the W reference was so early 2000s.
It’s a classic
On a related note, I heard somewhere that the reason Bush “messes up” that quote is that he realized mid sentence that he didn’t want a sound bite of him saying “shame on me”.
May just be a rumor though.
You had me going until the first blunder of the old saying. Oh GWB², your antics paled in comparison to today’s Trainwreckublicans.
George W. Bush is still the torture president, the surveillance state president, the police state president, the war on terror president and the war profiteering president.
Oh and the signing statements president.
Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize in his first year just for the act of Not Being Bush.
Not to bash Obama, but how many of those things did Obama stop doing? GIMO is still open, five eyes was started under him, and Biden was the one that pulled troops from Afghanistan.
Bash away. Obama promised us hope and change and upheld most of George W. Bush’s policies, even adding village-burning drone-strikes to the war on terror and disposition matrix. After Bush we believed for a moment that maybe Obama might turn around the ultra-conservative nightmare we’d been watching unfold. Not at all. We learned about NSA’s PRISM and XKeyscore programs, Obama the president debated with Obama the candidate on television
And we had to face that the Democratic party isn’t going to save the United States, not from the transnational white power movement, or Christian nationalism, not from the climate crisis. Not from runaway unregulated capitalism.
I still vote Democrat, but that’s to vote against the Republican takeover, since they’re not even pretending about going full-on authoritarian dictatorship. It’s all a mess, and I don’t know if there is a good ending to this adventure.
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All my homies hate Unity.
No for real though, I’ve met some genuinely excellent people in the Godot discord
Ongoing projects will probably not migrate engines as it’s prohibitively expensive & time consuming, but only a really clueless dev would start a new project in Unity. I guess it’s kinda the perfect scheme for a cynical short-term “investor” who’s just trying to pump company revenue then dump their stock, as the results of this may not be fully realized for a few years.
This company will be dead in three years. No one will pin their livelihood to this engine after this
Exactly. This isn’t some wack subscription fee for a game, they’re directly attacking the livelihoods of industry professionals. Many studios were already having a hard time seeing the value in unity over unreal anyway. Now it’s an easy choice.
As for the company… idk. I’d be surprised if they completely go away. I suspect either the company or the engine tech will be bought by Microsoft, or some other company, at some point.
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Why does the new board of directors look like the same people but with mustaches?
The CEO will probably sell the company and walk away with a ton of cash.
Public company. He can’t just sell it. Hell probably make millions off his own shares though.
I think the engine will survive, like you say. I don’t think the actual company will. But I am just speculating. I have no knowledge one way or the other
I wouldn’t be that optimistic. It’ll be a less attractive engine for indie devs and smaller companies, but it’s their enterprise customers that bring in the lion’s share of the revenue, and it takes a lot more to move them. To them, it’s purely a business decision. They didn’t even notice the drama, but come the q1 2024 fiscal report they’ll notice the supplier’s cost increased, have an investigation done if any competitors offer a better deal and what the retooling and retraining costs would be, observe keeping with Unity will be significantly cheaper, and life will go on. I sure hope Godot can take over the indie scene though, that would be amazing.
Any game developer that chalk this up as a big win and go back to business as usual as if nothing happened last week deserve to get rugpulled again in a year or two. Just the fact that Unity as a company is in a financially questionable state alone should be a blaring alarm to ditch the platform. Scumbags that tried to fleece game developers are still there collecting paychecks with zero consequences. Every Unity developers should have a plan in place to migrate away from the platform as soon as possible.
Worth noting - Unity still showed utter contempt for Devs and gamers. They’re still public enemy number 1.
If you’re working on a game now, switch to an alternative like Godot.
I would, but I’m still waiting for it.
“We’re sorryu it didn’t work this time, we’ll work harder to make sure that the next time we try again, we’ll do so in a more insidious way that boils the frog slower”
Oh the damage has already been done. Trust is a hell of thing. Gained in inches and lost in miles. Let this be another cautionary tale for the rest of them.
When someone shows you who they are, believe them.
Fuck Unity.
So its still there. Just only for more succesful games… lol
What a fucking joke
Trust was broken. I would have hardly batted an eye if this is what was planned in the first place, but of course the greed got the best of that company at the risk of its entire customer base. Since the backtrack, Unity might have a chance at keeping its existing customers, but I’d discourage anyone new from using Unity at this point.
These are a lot more reasonable terms, but remember that the people who designed the outrageous policy is still very much in charge at that company. They’ll keep pushing to see what they can get away with, they just fucked up by pushing too much at once instead of building up to it.
Or push too much so when they “backtrack” they still get some of what they wanted.
I had a feeling this would be the case. It’s the new scummy thing to do. Set your prices ridiculously high, sparking outrage. Then, backpedal a little to quelch the unruly and everything just goes back to normal.
Unity is now scum.
The weird part is that the 2.5% royalty fee isn’t even outrageous. it’s literally half of what Unreal takes. Sure Unity also has the licensing fee for pro and enterprise packages, but for any company making +1mil in revenue the licensing fee is a non-issue. This is all speculation but I imagine if they had originally come out with the 2.5% deal (I’m excluding the “initial engagements” part because that is still fucking stupid IMO) you’d hear developers be grumpy about it but there wouldn’t have been any widespread outrage. The reasoning is what I already alluded to, Unreal takes 5% under the same conditions. In that sense I very much doubt they were trying to do the “door-in-the-face” technique, the second offer is too reasonable and the first offer was too insane. They knew how insane the initial offer was, their engineers explicitly told them it’s a horrible idea. Those same engineers gave their resignations when the management decided to go forward with it anyway.
I also doubt it’s going back to normal either. It’ll seem normal for a while because there are plenty of games in development (or being supported) right now that use Unity, but I imagine the gaming industry will slowly turn away from Unity, unless Unity does something to regain the trust of their customers.
