Honestly, I don't blame them for not wanting to put up with Unity's unreliance. It took Unity 10 days after announcing this awful change to backtrack to a normal revenue cut. That 10 days was filled with justified outrage from a ton of developers to the point of Re-Logic donating $100k to Godot and FNA in protest.
this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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Those ten days were them seeing if it would 'blow over'. Can't trust them an inch now
When will they learn? You could possibly pull that crap Business to consumer... BUT B2B? Hell no!
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Yup. They were hoping it would fall out of the news cycle and people would forget about it. Once it stretched past a week, they started to panic because people weren’t dropping it, and had to plan an announcement to save face.
The harsh truth is even if they lose half of their current users they will end up making more anyway, even with the amended changes. They planned to lose a large chunk of their user base, regardless. The "seats" model is dead now that AI is changing how game development is done from the ground up. And they needed to do this because they were never profitable (the engine's development costs hundreds of millions of dollars) and couldn't really compete with unreal when it came to the type of customers they could actually pay for the engine from
Sure, but if they'd implemented the revised changes they wouldn't have lost so many users. And despite their messaging, they did already speak to some devs who'd already told them this would be a disaster, but they tried it anyway, and in a retroactive way that completely disregarded prior promises regarding changing EULA agreements, so there's no faith in this not still changing.
They fucked it up. Plain and simple.
Nah this went really bad for them. Even if they do make more, it will almost certainly be short term. Godot got so much free advertising. It firmly sat itself next to unreal as far as who should be choosing it, but it is definitely the inferior engine if you are making AAA. It's going to get cut from the high by unreal and the low from Godot, defold, and even gamemaker.
I don't get this weird apologist attitude. Let us not forget Unity just spent over $4 billion less than a year ago buying the malware ad service ironsource. They are not profitable because they make bad business decisions. This was one more. And in all likelihood we will see the sale of unity before too long. And it will probably be less than the $20 billion offer they had prior to the ironsource purchase.
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I wonder if this will result in the shareholders holding the ex-EA CEO accountable for destroying their revenue stream.
Good luck. If the SEC hasn’t already started building a case against him for insider trading, then nothing is going to happen to him. He’ll get a golden parachute and scurry off to ruin some other company.
"Selling shares before the announcement" was a pretty egregious misrepresentation. He has scheduled pre-registered sales on a regular basis because he gets paid partly in stock.
It was always going to be relatively soon after a sale of stock.
As if you can't schedule your announcements to fall just after the scheduled stock sales... Or just before them, if you want.
Just want to add you’re right but what pisses me off is that they still can influence decisions based on this. Let’s say his shares are sold at x day, just do some decisions before that and boom your auto sell share price is now either higher or lower. Only because it’s predetermined they still influence it and SEC now can’t do shit.
This has nothing in common with insider trading and doesn't resemble it in any way. The shares he sold weren't a relevant proportion of his ownership. He didn't sell then deliberately tank them. He sold then announced something he thought would improve the value of his big stake in the company. The decision almost definitely cost him a lot of money by substantially lowering the trajectory of his company's ability to maintain market share.
He sold then announced something he thought would improve the value of his big stake in the company.
In what universe?
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You know, that might just make it worse. As in, this wasn't some 5d plot, he genuinely thought this would work.
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This was a board decision, not the CEO as an individual.
They are all equally resonate and if they fire him it's to save face and kick him as a scape goat
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I think you mean a nice golden parachute to reward them for taking the heat, so they can swap in a new expensive face to implement slightly less unpopular fees.
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There's also the matter of future developers to consider. I'm in the process of looking at game engines to learn, and Unity has decisively crossed itself off the list. Even if current studios and developers stick with Unity, startups and novices would be foolish to pick a game engine that might suddenly decide to charge them out the ass with little to no notice. Existing developers have the issue where they already have tools and experience with Unity, but newer folks don't.
Myself I really wish that Godot would finally start getting traction in being the most advanced and the most used game engine. And it's free.
Just look at Linux - it's free, most used and most customizable server platform, even tho paid alternatives (e.g. Windows server) exists. I wish Godot would become de facto standard game engine.
Honestly, then use it. The more folk using it, the more people will be contributing to it, the better it will get.
Like all open source projects, if people don’t want them to wither on the vine then people need to keep the projects active in any way they can.
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Developers would be foolish not to begin transition plans off of Unity. The next Unity LTS version will still require the runtime fee.
They forgot they were B2B... where did the C suite and board go to Business school? 🤣
I am voting for the usual:
"My parents made a generous donation to the school I attended MBA"
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Fantastic, let them die Let a company, just once, learn a lesson
Not a good idea to leave Unreal Engine without decent competitors. Other universal engines are too small to compete with UE.
Honestly, Unreal has been in a different league ever since Epic started dumping Fortnite money into it. That's probably why Unity tried to start charging more, because they've been falling behind for the past few years and can't afford to keep up. Not that I think it's good to leave Epic/Unreal without decent competition, but I'm more inclined to blame Fortnite for the downfall of Unity than the indie devs Unity just scared off with their desperate cash-grab.
Unreal has been in a different league basically since its inception. Compare the original Unreal engine to its contemporaries like Quake or Half Life and it's amazing what they could do, if you had a box that could run it.
The difference between Unreal and Unity is Unreal has a ~~sustainable~~ viable business model (I think I've come to the conclusion that there are no "sustainable" business models under capitalism, what with demanding infinite growth and lal that). Epic Games develops their own games; the development of Unreal Engine has pulled its weight as a component of Fortnite and such. Same thing with Valve; I don't think they ever bothered to charge for developing a game in the Source engine because they made their money for engine development through Half Life 2, Portal, TF2, Left 4 Dead etc.
Unity on the other hand doesn't make and sell games, so they have to either directly charge developers (which they both do and don't) or they operate their own adware nonsense. And neither of those revenue streams are enough. Which means they don't have a viable business model. So they pull a stunt like this to hasten their inevitable bankruptcy.
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Yeah, once you show that you can and will fuck someone over, they tend to lose trust in you.
It shouldn't. Developers have a moral responsibility to snub Unity now. A lesson must be learned here
Good. The terrible marketing team who made this decision is still there, and they still want this end result. They just learned they need to approach that goal more slowly.
This kind of decision is not made by marketing.
I would bet money that it's from their CEO, someone too greedy for fucking EA shouldn't ever be a option for your company!
They fucked themselves like WotC (Wizards of the Coast) did with the OGL (Open Gaming Licensing) changes.
I wonder who is gonna fuck up like that next. I wanna start shorting them now.
Nah, they'll go back. If it's one thing I've learned from Greedy companies doing dumb shit. People will always go back to trust them again.
That works for consumers because they don't have nothing to lose. Smaller devs will still gravitate towards Unity because the various fees don't apply to them, but any big studio won't touch it with a ten feet pole. Immagine putting the salaries of a full studio in the hands of a company that might decide out of the blue to ruin your business model, it's a nightmare scenario for any CEO! More so when there are viable alternatives
Publishers will force smaller devs to move away.
I bet you Paradox Interactive has been shitting down its leg as this event unfolded. They almost exclusively publish Unity games.
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If the changes were launched this way, being tied to a new version in 2024 then this would have been a perfectly fair approach, you could stick with 2022 / 23 LTS for your projects and only if you want 'new' features would you pick up 2024 LTS and agree to the new terms.
I've honestly not seen much difference between major versions e.g. 2021 - 2022 LTS, so unless these new versions come out with amazing new features, devs can still stick to these old reliable versions.
It's much better overall but the way they've handled this has been shithouse
Haha Unity. Ironic
No shit
I think they will lose some already established studios that can afford to retool and reskill on another engine. But I think the vast vast majority of current unity developers are breathing a sigh of relief that they /dont/ need to reskill or retool on another engine.
Unity is still on shaky ground, but they have been since they went public. They need revenue, and their big ad revenue plan got ruined by dastardly apple protecting users' privacy. Couple that with an upstart and promising engine following in Blenders footsteps. In five years, they might have lost every hand they had left to play. Irregardless of the missteps of the last week.
Every indie dev I'm following on YouTube has basically made a "My thoughts on the situation"-type videos where they talk about how they've "won against Unity" despite Unity basically doing a textbook of the "Door in the face" technique to pass changes that would've been unpopular before this whole mess.
Edit: Fixed typo.
Claiming it's "door in the face" is a little crazy here. If this is where they wanted to be, the "bait" changes could have been much much less bad than they were, and they still could've walked back to this.
Hell, they could have announced a 10% revenue split and it would've looked much better than what they pitched. And they could still walk back to 2.5% and looked like heroes. And it wouldn't have lost them nearly as much trust. Nor made them look as bad.
If this was what they were trying to do, they'd have to have been even dumber to have made it this bad.
I'm more willing to bet they're just fucking stupid. Or that a few people on the board had this as a fucking moronic idea, and the rest managed to take back control after it went totally sideways.
But claiming that it's a door in the face requires them to be evil enough to do it, stupid enough to not realize they're overdoing it, crazy enough to think it'd work, etc. It seems way too contrived.
Agreed, this whole Unity thing seemed more like they were surprised the peasants were revolting. Completely unaware of the danger of putting developer bills directly in to the hands of the end users, and not considering that a "trust me bro I counted how much you owe me" blackbox accounting method was too much to ask.
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It might now win any new developers but people who work many years to build things like custom simulations have no way of switching to other platforms.
It's not impossible to switch engines on new projects lots of devs have stated this. Devs have switch engines for far less or made their own.
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