They’ll either do a complete reversal of the policy once they see the amount of games pulled from store fronts, or implode burying their head in the sand.
They’re going to get sued by all the developers who already put out games with the existing license that Unity is trying to unilaterally change the terms of. They’re trying to charge money for installs on games that are already published and already sold.
Unity "Vadering the deal" is enough reason that no business should choose Unity for anything whatsoever going forward. They are now a huge legal and financial risk to any business endeavor at all.
No matter how much they relent, developers should not get complacent and trust that things will stay this way. Unity will go back on the offense once the outrage quiets down a little. Don't do it. Transition now before you end up in a worse situation.
I think companies tend to overvalue support and undervalue software freedom. You get developer lock-in once people are trained on closed software, then they start squeezing you for every dime because they know it’s too expensive to migrate.
Them hiring that EA exec as the chief financial officer, and another as their CEO, around the same time they stopped offering lifetime subscriptions near the end of Unity 4, while at the same time reworking their sub plans to pull back support for devs with recently-expired subs, should’ve been a massive red flag at the slippery slope they were aiming to go down
Yeah that’s the thing, you don’t have to install anything. You just have to figure out how unity “phones home” and spoof the traffic 100 times a second.
As for Game Pass and other subscription services, Whitten said that developers like Aggro Crab would not be on the hook, as the fees are charged to distributors, which in the Game Pass example would be Microsoft.
In which case, Microsoft and other distributors will not release Unity games on their subscription services. This will harm game developers either way.
Geez, the internet and the tech industry as a whole is collapsing. Twitter, Reddit, Unity… What the fuck is going on in the last few years?
Capitalism defines success as profits increasing at an ever-increasing rate. During the height of the pandemic, tech companies tended to fare better than other industries because they were better able to handle the switch to remote work (among other things). This wasn’t lost on investors, who smelled money in the water, and went all in on tech. Like, seriously, colossal amounts of money, and they expect returns on those investments. Problem is, we’ve hit the point where the easy profit sources for these companies have more or less dried up, and now they’re having to squeeze whatever they can out. This is why we’ve seen massive layoffs, quick money making schemes, and things like this that will be disastrous in the long run, but stand to make some short-term profits.
It’s a boneheaded move, but when all you care about is pleasing the investors right now, it’s the logical way to operate.
This sums up every industry poisoned by big money parasites. Look around, over 30% of the inflation of the last few years is literally attributed to just straight greed. fortune.com/…/end-of-capitalism-inflation-greedfl… for those who want to read about where I’m getting that figure from.
We’re living in the Robber Baron Era: Volume 2. When governments fail to properly regulate massive corpos and protect consumers–mostly due to regulatory capture–this is what happens. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture if you want to read up on the topic and get angry about how pervasive regulatory capture is, especially in the US (like, really, really pervasive in the US…).
It’s the incessant want and need for more, more more. If they made $2 billion in profit last year it needs to be $3 billion this year, it can’t just be a continued $2 billion (which is still an amazing amount of profit). It’s just a never ending scheme of incurable human greed.
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank caused a bit of a stir in the venture capital world. Things used to be able to be horrifically unprofitable for a reasonably long time before vulture capital would swoop down and tighten the thumbscrews.
Now that “normal” banks are the ones dealing with the finance side of VC, they seem to care about profits, and that if you’re not squeezing every cent you can out of your investment, then it’s a failure.
Or, like, whatever. Just kinda how I feel about it…
This isn’t it. The svb run was a symptom, not a cause. You’ll note this is not something limited to the tech world.
Markets, in general, are risk adverse because of the whole global economic shutdown thing. Executives are driving shareholder growth, not through investment like a giant ponzi scheme, or through competition, but through whatever hairbrained scheme they can come up with that will raise stock prices in the short term.
It's global warming. All the natural disasters, insurance and repairs are extreme and accelerating, and those funds need/want more money and are collecting in every way they can.
I can't believe it either - our inability to prepare for global warming has caused Unity to charge per install.
It'd be a shame for these companies to build some kind of cosmetic DLC priced at 10k or higher that "unlocks the full game" to avoid the charges. I'm sure Unity would just build some legal lingo to get around that loophole however.
The people in charge over there at Unity are some pretty stupid people if they think we won’t see right through their bullshit.
There is no solid way for them to track this. Not everything is distributed on an app/game store. And what constitutes an initial install anyway? What if I have ten gaming rigs and I buy direct from a developer and install the game to all ten rigs…is that ten initial installs?
I’m thinking they might addsome engine-side telemetry we don’t know about, but they’re refusing to actually say anything about how they’re tracking this.
Right, and I know this isn’t anything any of us can answer, but what constitutes an initial install? What specific keys are sent in the telemetry to know that I, ulkesh, have already installed this game once? It is literally impossible in so many ways to know this without forcing the user to provide some static key (such as a license code). Technically steam has such license codes, as do most, if not all app/game stores like it. But if the developer decides to publish without using such an app store, does this mean Unity will force them to put in some kind of license code mechanism? What if it’s a simple game that happens to get downloaded and installed over 200,000 times and the game costs the consumer only $0.99? What if the game is distributed for free? What if a user refunds post-installation? How can a developer even trust the data Unity gathers for this?
Perhaps some of this has been addressed, but Unity doesn’t control distribution – this is the WHOLE reason they should stick to their tiers of licensing their platform and not try to get a piece of the distribution pie. If they want to control distribution, then set up their own damn app store and force people who develop on Unity to use it (which will be met with exactly the same resistance). And, we all know it would fail miserably. They’re not the only game engine in town, they’re just one with a low barrier for entry. Why is it so many companies that were once doing good become such greedy pieces of crap? Reddit (fuck Spez), Twitter (well we know whose fault that was), and now Unity. I suspect there are betting pools at casinos on which company will be next to be so stupid as to cause their own demise.
Unity saying that Microsoft is on the hook for game pass installs is the quickest way to get your ass destroyed in court by Microsoft lawyers. Microsoft has dumped so much money into game pass to beat Sony off the block that any threat to that business model will be seen as an act of fucking war.
Honestly, thats probably a better alternative to the current CEO, formerly from EA, who sold 2000 shares just prior to this announcement and has never purchased any additional shares in Unity.
After all of the drama over the Activision acquisition, I doubt MS is trying to make any more bold gaming moves for a second. Buying an entire non-proprietary engine would be an easy target for anti-trust lawsuits.
This is a truly pathetic attempt to save face. Fuck Unity, its now proven definitively that they cannot be trusted for current and future projects. The only thing they’ll learn from this is to not be so loud about these sorts of changes.
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