Unity apologises.
Unity apologises.
www.pcgamer.com Unity apologizes for controversial new pricing scheme, 'will be making changes to the policy'
"Thank you for your honest and critical feedback."
190 comments
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Developers remain critical of this latest statement from Unity. "There wasn't any 'confusion'," said Trent Kusters of Jumplight Odyssey studio League of Geeks. "In fact, the exact opposite is the concerning issue here; That we all, very clearly, understood the devastating impact and anti-developer sentiment of your new pricing model far better than you ever did (or cared to) before rolling it out."
That's the exact point. The apology is a joke.
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Indeed. They had the whole chart showing exactly what would be paid by who. Their original post was designed not to be confusing and it wasn't.
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The confusion is that they want more money and are confused why developers don't want to give them more money.
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Good God, what an arsehole.
We apologize for the confusion...
Confusion? No, there was no confusion. You announced a policy that was terrible, but there was nothing confusing about it, it was just stupid. I wasn't at all confused you condescending twat, I fully understood what was being announced, as did everyone else, hence the backlash.
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The article says it best:
Developers remain critical of this latest statement from Unity. "There wasn't any 'confusion'," said Trent Kusters of Jumplight Odyssey studio League of Geeks. "In fact, the exact opposite is the concerning issue here; That we all, very clearly, understood the devastating impact and anti-developer sentiment of your new pricing model far better than you ever did (or cared to) before rolling it out."
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We were confused about how much backlash there would be. We didn't think it would hurt our bottom line this much. Sorry for the confusion.
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We thought you would love to throw money at us!
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We apologise for you all being hysterical, and any Angst that may have caused.
Twats.
I don't think Unity has any chance of healing while that moron is still there. He poisonous.
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Sorry you confused greed with annoyance.
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You know a significant number of devs will be OK with Unity's statement and stick with them. Unity won't learn their lesson. They'll just be sneakier
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Yeah ok. It doesn't affect me, I won't be using them, but what other people choose to do is their problem.
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They were confused why we didn't love their amazing decision. Don't we care about the shareholders?
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They are implementing the "Anchor High" plan.
- Come out with a ridiculously high number
- Take the back lash
- Issue an apology, claim you are "listing to the team, partners, etc" <---- We are here
- Release a "revised" plan, which is really what you wanted all along
- Profit (quite literally)
I'm willing to bet they are angling for an acquisition, and trying to bump up their value to get a higher number.
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Precisely what I'm talking about. They can afford to do so, since they lost the trust of the user about 2 statements from the CEO ago.
And not to go too deep into it, but how the hell are you going to create a brand new pricing scheme in only "a couple of days", without already having a draft of it ready? Don't you wanna check in with your lawyer? Your CFO? This shit must take more than 2 days to do.
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I don’t think they checked with their lawyer before releasing the first one (that had some pretty obviously legally dubious provisions). Why would they start asking the legal team now?
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They want apple to buy them. Apple can't really lean on unreal at this point since the epic lawsuit. So unity is the next viable option. They want apple to buy them and/or they wanted a piece of every download on apples phones/vr.
Apples last announcement is telegraphing a shift towards gaming on some level. Unity is being opportunistic albeit tone-deaf AF.
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This is the part they’re missing: apple actually care about the appearance of quality.
I’m not saying apple makes quality products, there’s some good debate there that they really don’t. But they certainly foster the belief that apple products are superior in quality to their competitors.
Unity is a great engine when it’s used well, but it doesn’t have a reputation for quality. It has a Reputation that says “anyone can publish a bolted together asset flip and make a quick buck off of twitter hype”
I doubt apple would acquire unity based purely on the fact that unity does not adhere to apple’s ideals on branding. Apple tends to buy rights from young companies that don’t have large established brands yet, because it’s easier to fold them into the cult of apple. An established brand with a known reputation would be a tough sell, especially when Apple has the resources to simply make their own product that’s tailored to their hardware.
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'confusion'. Yeah, right. Not a single person was confused. You went for the cash grab and it blew up in your face.
Now you're going to go for slightly less cash grab and because it's 'better' and 'we listened' everyone is supposed to just accept it. Been here before..
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It's like if I mugged you at gun point and said "give me all your money", and you said "this is bullshit, I don't want to give you my money."
Then I said, "I'm sorry for your confusion, but I'm going to shoot you in the fucking face if you don't give me all your money."
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That’s not an apology.
And if we’re talking about apologies and corrective action: the only real way forward is a completely fresh executive team at Unity. Anything short of that means they’re simply going to try this all again in a slightly different fashion once focus on their clusterfuck dies down.
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Shareholders need to demand board change, I doubt it's entirely on C.
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A trifecta of VC and PE firms own a majority share or Unity’s shares. Those guys love a monetization scheme, which is all this is. The board’s not going anywhere.
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The real question is whether or not people will continue to use Unity. Apologies mean less than nothing in a case like this regardless of whether or not they're sincere. This is a company that's shown their cards. Why give them business when you can go elsewhere?
Personally, this has made me start looking more into Godot. I've got a project I'm going to be working on that I was going to do in Unreal, but this Unity stuff has made me skeptical of tying my creative output to any one company that can't be easily replaced. Getting that wrapped up with a proprietary platform that comes with licensing that might change just seems like a bad idea now. Maybe Unreal is okay today, but what about down the road? Why start building into a system that there's no guarantee won't enshittify a few years down the road?
I'd like to get my major mechanical stuff squared away and develop a visual style and then tell more stories without reinventing the wheel every time. Once I've got my assets built on top of an engine, I'd rather add to it over time than arbitrarily scrap it every few years. Updating and refactoring is all well and good, but I'm not in it to code the same system over and over.
That makes Godot look pretty appealing, and any closed source corporate offering look pretty shady.
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They went for a retroactive pricing change.
Imagine that you start a game project (which will cost you years and a lot of $$$ to develop) and at any point Unity just arbitrarilly changes the conditions (which can be of any kind, not just extra charges) that apply to your game, after you're too far into development to feasibly replace Unity, and do it retroactivelly, so after your game is already out it can still get impacted by it.
Suddenly a totally viable project might become unviable or, worse, an active drain on your company's finances or even your own (i.e. your company and, depending on how you structured it, even you yourself can go bankrupt), and all of that based on the fickle wishes of a higher up in Unity.
At this point it makes no business sense whatsoever to choose Unity: there is way, WAY, WAY too much risk involved by choosing it (new charges that apply retroactivelly as this one can literally kill your company) and at the same times there are viable alternatives out there without such risks.
For any project not yet deeply tied to Unity, from the day they came up with a retroactive change to their pricing, the obvious, clear as day, choice from a business point of view became to not use anything from Unity, even for shitty shit asset-flipping "near zero investment" projects.
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They went for a retroactive pricing change.
Which in some countries could also be illegal.
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Can you quickly tell me what's the applicable jurisdition for this if say, a gamedev company based in Uruguay sells a game made with Unity (HQ US) via Apple Store (HQ US) to a user in China who installs it 3 times?
At the very least it will cost you quite some legal fees to merelly figure out the jurisdiction because there are multiple legal angles to go after this (contract law, intellectual property) which might yield different jurisdictions (maybe it's contract law and then maybe its the US, maybe Uruguay, or maybe it's IP law and it's the copy of the game to the device local storage i.e. the installation - that is treated as requiring licensing of the Unity IP, and it defines the jurisdiction as China because that's were the user did it ... or maybe the US because that's what the IP owner is).
This "cleared up", next you'll have to figure out if it such retroactive pricing changes were legal there or not: maybe you're lucky, maybe you're screwed.
For new projects I don't think it's worth it for a small gamedev company to spend time and money pursuing the "let's clear the legal status every way Unity can screw me in the future so that I can use Unity" option rather than the "let's use something else" option.
It's really only worth checking it for companies with existing or advanced projects on top of Unity were the income/potential-income from those projects justifies it (vs the options of just pulling the project out from distribution or redo it with another framework).
I mean, sure, eventually somebody will have paid the legal costs of this and maybe the legal decision is broad enough and in the right jurisdiction for your company and it's applicable ... and then Unity just goes and comes up with some other shit that somebody has to take through the legal rigmarole to figure out if they can. Also, unless its illegal everywhere, some companies will be affected.
Meanwhile "Don't use Unity on any future projects" is a pretty straighforward way to minimize your project risks...
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This seems to be a case of start with a horrible plan that they know will make everyone angry only to roll it back to a plan that still sucks but isn't quite as bad to try to reduce the sting. The thing is, I don't think their customers are that stupid.
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They underestimate their customers. They keep forgetting they're business to business, not business to customer.
Developers are other businesses, even if they're a business with an employee of one, although often they are small but not tiny teams. The relationship that they have with unity is a business relationship and it can end at any time should that relationship cease to be productive, for we don't have random undying loyalty to one platform, that wouldn't be financially sensible.
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I hear this accusation a lot, but how many times does it work out for the company? Maybe the second plan doesn’t get any press and that’s proving your point?
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People keep comparing this to how WotC had to give up more gorund than they started with after announcing their DnD bullshit. As someone who plays Magic I can tell you they do and get away with stuff like that multiple times a year and the DnD thing was a rare exception of people holding them to account. They've shown no signs of having changed things either.
Businesses who act like this know that in the long run they get very slightly more profit out of it than they lose from the times people stand up to them.
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Oh, I don't think it often works out. But a business person can make the data show what they want to do while ignoring what is likely to happen.
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We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days. Thank you for your honest and critical feedback.
Allow me to translate:
We're now publishing the terms that we were actually going for from the very beginning. We've always known that the flaming bag of shit that we laid on your doorstep was unreasonable. If it worked, it worked, but if it didn't, it can stand in contrast to the new less shit terms that you're either supposed to agree to or rewrite your whole game. Not like our PR was great before this gambit. What have we to lose?
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I mean, they have a lot to lose. There are strong alternatives. Unreal and Godot are at the doorstep. Godot doesn't take anything at all, Unreal takes, but in a reasonable manner and it's of course on 3D a lot more powerful and also offers an asset store.
The games already developed and deep into development are unlikely to jump, but future games will have a huge argument against Unity now. Unreal could completely snap their necks now by putting into writing that they never do such move.
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Correct. The right course of action would be to backtrack this per download idea completely, fire the person who thought of this, and add a clause on their ToS that such bullshit will never happen again, and that of they broke that agreement, they will refund everyone affected by it.
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fire the
person who thought of thisCEO
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“Well I’m sorry that you feel that way.”
That’s how this comes off. The ultimate non-apology. Fuck off, Unity.
Edit: something to consider is that Unity intentionally made this change as terrible as it is so that they could put out this apology, and roll things back to where their main goal was the entire time. It’s kind of like when you list your house for a high price so that it gets negotiated down to the price range you wanted from the outset. Don’t be shocked if Unity changes this a bit but keeps it essentially the same. It means they can then reflect on history and go “hey, remember that time we listened to the developers?” while still fucking them over.
They seem to think we’re all stupid.
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This is called the "Door in the face method" of bargaining. Start with a request so high and absurd that you "slam the door in their face" because it's so absurd.
The next time they try, they'll come back with an offer that sounds far more reasonable than the original request. Since you're still primed with the previous context, your brain makes it sound less bad than it probably is ("At least it's not the first offer!). You're more likely to accept after this.
The opposite technique is called "foot in the door", start with a small request (get your foot in the door) and then increase the ask after the small request goes over.
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TIL. Now I know how to refer to those methods. Thanks!
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Seems like they assumed their original foot-in-the-door would hold the slam, here.
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Reputation is a perishable commodity. It is very hard to replenish it once gone.
Xwitter and Reddit understood it the hard way. Even if Unity goes back to exactly where they were before this ruckus - people will think twice before trusting them again.
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How to be a company in 2023
- Make a controversial move to please your shareholders without caring about your loyal customers.
- Don't use a proper PR team, just use the same apology template on Twitter that everyone is using.
- People are angry... Could anyone seen that coming? 🙈
- Undo some changes without addressing the root problem.
- ????
- Profit (if by profit, you mean loose every inch of respect people had about you)
Rinse & repeat, because we're all humans and we can't learn from our mistakes. Surely, this won't happen again... right?
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Why do you think it was a mistake? They put themselves in the spot where taking back just the most egregious fees will be considered a victory by the users while in reality the company basically got what they were hoping for.
It's like on a Turkish bazaar when you buy a fake jersey. He will ask for 800 lira and then you talk him down to 400 and feel like a winner, but the jersey is maybe worth 100.
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Sorry, I thought it was obvious I was sarcastic about their "mistake". They want to be seen as the victims like they didn't know in advance the outcome of their decisions. Backing down on the changes only to show something "less worst" is only a way to make the pill easier to swallow. Unity cannot be trusted anymore.
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Companies don’t desire to be treated as people under the law, the 1886 Supreme Court decision that interpreted the 14th Amendment as corporate personhood was the most racist decision we still live with today. The amendment was written to grant freed slaves citizenship, but the same greedy capitalists that benefited from slavery used it to begin the neofeudaism that still enriches the few while causing suffering for the masses today and it’s only getting worse. Don’t “love” any corporation, they’re literally born out of the greatest evil in US history.
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Nothing short of a full reversal and Unity's entire board standing down would restore the goodwill they burned.
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They don't really need the goodwill; at least, the current board doesn't need it. The amount of lock-in a game engine has on a game being developed with it is staggering. Game devs already using Unity, or at least making assets for Unity, are going to finish the projects in Unity.
The next gen won't be using Unity though, but the current board will have picked all the pockets they need to pick by then, and be retired on an island with their grift-money.
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And even then people will be keeping a wary eye on them. Same thing happened with Wizards of the Coast a while ago. It's good to see that these companies can still be forced to back off, though.
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Anyone who still uses Unity for their new projects after this would have to be completely stupid. Of course they'll jack up the pricing again as soon as they can.
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It wasn't that they increased prices, they added new fees to things without notice, breaking some business models entirely.
They've only backed down on fees for reinstalling games after it was pointed out you could trivially cost a developer millions of dollars by running an install/uninstall script on a loop.
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Some groups have invested a lot of time and money into a product based on Unity.
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Let me introduce you to the concept of sunk cost.
In economics and business decision-making, a sunk cost (also known as retrospective cost) is a cost that has already been incurred and cannot be recovered.
The money already spent cannot be gotten back. Spending more continuing to develop using Unity instead of cutting your losses and moving on is a fools game.
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I read it, it's clearly not an apology. Companies don't ever apologise. Ever.
Nobody in charge there is sorry whatsoever, they're just looking out for their wallets.
They're busy trying to figure out the best way to spin this to get what they want. That's it.
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Dominos apologized for having shitty pizza and using misleading product photos, then improved their quality and nearly doubled their market share.
I’m sure it was motivated by profit and PR, but that doesn’t change the fact that it had all the hallmarks of a genuine apology.
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Eh, he said the word apologize, but that's not a full apology. All they essentially did was acknowledge that they noticed the public was mad at them. A full apology includes that acknowledgment and then what they did wrong and how they're going to try to prevent it again. I doubt that last point will happen.
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Too late. Everyone I know is deep into their Godot or Stride projects.
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This is a weird way of saying "I don't know anyone developing games in unity over the last few years".
Switching engines of this scale isn't something you do in a week for any project past inception.
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Most of my network is hobbyists who have no loyalty and are not bound by existing commitments
Those who are, are probably going to ship their last Unity game and bounce. At least that's what i'm hearing.
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Depends on the scale of the game. Bigger games with multiple teams? Timescale of months. Small indie team with one dev and one artist working out of their college dorms? Much quicker.
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This after the ceo dumped shares
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Anything short of a perpetual, binding agreement to never do this type of shit again is nothing more than "we're sorry if being awesome made you idiots mad". Get fucked.
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Wasn't it just six months ago or so that Dungeons & Dragons was going through a similar debacle? That they can change the terms of the license post release is insane.
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2023 has been a bang up year for attempted enshittification. DnD, Twitter, Reddit, now Unity. It's a clown bus of failure.
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You say that, but it's common practice.
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Ahemm as I understand the previously license did have a "we don't change this license on you" clause, which they removed shortly before this change. As I understand there is atleast possibility, that some existing customer developers might upon being pressed take unity to court over "you said you wouldn't change the license fundamentally without our consent, we had a deal".
What the exact language of that clause and would it hold in court challenge, I don't know. Just heard one interviewed developer say something to affect of "hey they did have we don't change the deal clause, which they sneak removed on pretty recent license update".
I atleast as business would not agree to deal of "yeah we have a deal, except this deal allows us to change the deal however we want".
It might mean having to do time limited or project limited deals, since on otherhand no provider would agree to "we have no room to change deal ever". I would atleast in case of say game development expect clause for example "any fundamental license change must have 2 year announcement time for existing customer." Such clauses are very common in "on-going basis contracts and deals". Heck international treaties use such clauses "If you want to leave this treaty, you must give other treaty parties 1/2/3/5 year notice and for the duration of that notice period you are still bound by the treaty".
So I would guess: If this ends ugly, there will be lawsuits over was the license change contractually legal, were the possibble change notices clear enough upon the main change being in itself legal and for example was some jurisdictions fair and good behavior clauses of national contract law itself violated. Was enough notice time given etc. Since one cant make any contrac or contract change whatever one likes, business contracts are always subservient to local contract law regulating what can be agreed, how and what amounts to stuff like informed consent, how contract terms can be changed and regulation on prohibition of underhanded or deceptive business practices.
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CEO needs to step down after this
They've burned so much trust in leadership after this, and Unity is now going to be known as a sketchy platform to develop for since they've done really scummy monetization policies over night. This is extremely important if you're going to be pouring millions in budget for game development in that engine.
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This is not a CEO thing. The board asked for this. Look it up. There are some of the worse out of touch executives, which includes owners of scam software. Unity is done for, changing the CEO will not change a thing since the new CEO will be asked to do the same or worse things by the board, all in the name of profit.
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The only possible way forward for Unity is for him to go.
He has a pattern of maverick pricing ideas that are totally at odds with what the community will tolerate.
As long as he's around, there's no knowing what else he'll come out with.
A percentage of the profits; it's a classic for a reason.
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If the value of Unity tanks after this, wouldn't surprise me if MiHoYo or someone bought them just to not risk their huge projects that are currently using Unity.
For context, MiHoYo runs all their games on Unity (Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, etc), and their net worth ($16 billion) is more than Unity's itself ($13 billion).
Tencent also has a huge chunk of games that run in Unity, and their market value is too massive to even utter.
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I don't think they can buy Unity, but I do know those games use a custom version of Unity that's heavily modified. That version should still fall under the old license. Also you know they have the money to sue the hell out of Unity. It'd be cool if they moved their games to Godot, but I really doubt that'd happen lol.
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That wasn't an apology at all.
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The ONLY acceptable apology at this point is a complete roll back and a full announcement of the direction they plan to take the company in for the next 5+ years.
They've absolutely lost the trust of devs, designers and hobbyists.
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I'm sorry. We're sorry. Sorry. Sorry.... Sorry Sorry. We're sorry. We're soary. Sorry.
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South Park hit this nail on its head.
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"we are sorry you feel that way. Cope".
That's what it reads like, honestly
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"Sorry not sorry. Here are the amended prices that we intended to change all along, but knew you'd revolt unless we did something thoroughly obnoxious first."
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The CEO of Unity was also CEO, COO, and president of EA. So, is anyone surprised?
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I'm surprised this fact hasn't been repeated more often. This guy is the Grim Reaper in that meme where he goes from door to door killing off various companies.
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Sorry our awesome plan was so clever it got you confused. We'll try and make it simple for you morons next time.
Ah yes, the Macron Apology.
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Between this and the WotC/D&D licensing scandal, companies ought to think twice about changing terms for things that rely heavily on the more mathematically/scientifically inclined portion of the population.
They tend to be a bit more vocal about this kind of bullshit.
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Between this and the WotC/D&D licensing scandal
Reddit too.
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Too late, shit waffle.
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Wonder if the shareholders that sold their stock shortly before the announcement of the pricing changes have bought them all back already 🥰
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Or even better: buy soon to expire put options just before the announcement. 10x your money.
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What's to keep someone from using a botnet to install tens or hundreds of thousands of installations?
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"trust us bro"
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They've shown their hand. Damage done.
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A resounding "fuuuuuck yooouuu" from all quarters is due for this pathetic apology.
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Genshin is one of the biggest games using Unity right now, and I doubt Mihoyo would want to take that risk of suddenly having to pay millions of dollars for no reason.
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Giving people an exception for using their ad service shows they're happy to apply the rules unequally. I expect a company that is a big litigation risk like mihiyo will be happily exempt from the runtime fee
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I install it every 6 months or so to check if android controller support has been added. I expect many other people do the same. It's just a drop in the bucket, but that bucket eventually fills up
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You think a Chinese company would give a single shit about this?
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It really is like they looked at what Wizards of the Coast did and said, “Hold my beer.”
No one is going to trust them after this.
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What did Wizards of the Coast do?
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They tried to revoke a perpetual license.
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Attempted to fuck with dungeons and dragons. Google will bring you all the wailing and gnashing of teeth, probably far more informatively than I would.
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That's exactly what I thought. It's like all the corporations have crossed some invisible threshold and decided that they need to burn all the bridges that got them there in the first place.
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Unity should be cast into the dust bin of history and obsolescence. Fuck off unity. The world is moving forward to a better future without you.
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My trust in companies is shattered in a big way. I don’t believe they are sincere. Words are words. Back up and roll it back. I don’t believe a single word from that apology. It’s damage control. They have no spine and will say anything to achieve a desired outcome. They’re worse than politicians
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I look at it like this. Companies, and media frankly, are under no obligation to tell the truth. That doesn't mean they are lying it just means if it's more profitable to lie they will. Basically, lying is on the table and they are only interested in getting your money.
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Under no obligation??? There are laws!! If a company lie about a product outright that’s a lawsuit waiting to happen; and media? I can’t say shit about that since all they do is lie and divert your attention. We know media is owned by the 1% anyway so it’s not real media anyway
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Too little, too late!
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If you really cared for feedback, you would have consulted game developers and your own employees on this scheme to hear it was a bad idea.
No matter what the revised plan is (besides a total reversal), the aim here is to do the switch part of a bait-and-switch, to change the rules on people who have invested their time and experience with Unity.
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The vampire had his fangs to your neck, and you're gonna believe him when he goes "sorry, I will only feed on bloodbags from now on I swear"?
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Don't drag vampires into this! My boy Astarion tried it only once and kept his word since then!
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I permabenched that guy when he pulled that shit
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
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I'm very sorry for taking your money, now hand it over, I promise I'll apologize again afterwards.
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For someone asking, then “apologizing”, for such ridiculous money grab figures to use Unity he should have taken off the Royal Oak (I believe it’s a steel double balance openworked ~$135,000 US).
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Time after time, companies think the greed will go unnoticed. ?!?!???
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Direct link to the announcement here
We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days. Thank you for your honest and critical feedback.
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Wow that website is cancer to load on mobile.
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Apology accepted, captain Needa.
190 comments