An absurd change followed by rolling it back to an “acceptable” version that is still worse than their original position prior to the initial announcement.
This is a psychological manipulation.
And more to the point it ignores the issue of their violation of trust and consistency.
This is still precedent, they still showed their hand.
They want to have “passive income” at your expense.
Considering the trust they've lost I don't think they've planned to do it this way. And if they didn't plan it, they assumed that their original plan wasn't going to result in much opposition, so that was the plan they wanted to go with.
They’ve proven they can’t be trusted. The people who devised and attempted to enact this plan - the exec team - have not gone anywhere, and they aren’t going to. They have shown the industry who they are, and they clearly don’t give a shit about business ethics or even legality (the AppLovin shit smells an awful fucking lot like anticompetitive market interference). They will definitely try something similar in the future.
Don’t worry, 90% of our users won’t have to pay anything at all! Just ignore that like 50% are people who downloaded Unity to mess around for a bit and never made anything other than a “hello world” or similar.
So if you've published a game, just keep on keeping on. You can sell that game, maintain an older copy of Unity to update it for bugs, even develop new content for that game with the older version of Unity.
I figured this must have been in here. No professional organization would allow a TOS to pass into publishing that allowed a company to unilaterally change fees.
Yes, the fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.
So if you've published a game, just keep on keeping on. You can sell that game, maintain an older copy of Unity to update it for bugs, even develop new content for that game with the older version of Unity.
According to the article, probably no.
Many devs may have updated unity and used it for minor updates, but also the clause in question probably doesn't protect anyone anyway. There's a broader ToS that supercedes it with much more restrictive language.
According to the article, it's not that simple. This is from the ToS for the Unity Editor, which is subservient to a broader Unity ToS that has much stricter legal language about changing anything without warning and the customer being able to go fuck themselves.
So, yes, technically this bullshit may be completely legal. Devs who were sold Unity on "no royalties" may be forced to pay royalties. Which is definitely healthy for our society and not obviously a problem.
I agree. I am not a game dev, but I have considered making a game before. I do have programming experience. I just started a Godot tutorial today.
The tutorial focused on how to use the interface for the most part. I will not continue the tutorial I was using as it was video, and I really prefer to read. I’ll see if No Starch Press has a book. I typically like the books they publish.
Update It does not look like they have a Godot book. I will keep looking for one.
Honestly at this point just the peace of mind of working in a FOSS engine and not under a corporation that can do this whenever is enough to motivate me to learn godot. I’ve got some prototypes I can port into that engine to learn on, it might even be some good motivation to start integrating them into a single project.
This price change would be not for gaming industry gains, but for the capitalist's private appetite. Unity engine would be added unneccesary features for it.
Dude every company does this shit. The whole “announce something twice as bad as what you wanna do so you look good when you roll it back” schtick is as old as sliced bread. I do it to my wife all the time.
Sometimes the find out nobody really cares and they get to do the even worse thing. It’s a win win.
I think we could have done a lot of things a lot better.
No shit, Sherlock. Not fucking over your client-base, for one. One would think he’s not fit to be CEO of cow shit after this douche was previously in charge of EA during some of the worst years of that company.
There are alternatives to Unity. Time to move on if possible.
arstechnica.com
Gorące