It’s not about about money: corporate would spend more money when you’re in the office.
It’s not about productivity: shit has been getting done from home and then some, for literally years.
It’s not about team building: productivity requires focus, open space bullshit floor plans hamper that and most everyone is gonna wear headphones and try to block out the background noise and social distractions as much as possible.
It’s about control, power and obedience: butts in chairs are reassuring to managers who have no fucking clue what they’re doing, nor what you’re doing, nor what the company needs done.
Management usually has no idea what anyone is really doing, they’ve never figured how to measure actual productivity, so they equate butts in chairs with productivity.
I don’t work for Ubi, but I’ve been the one remote player of an in-office team for the last 15 years.
Nobody ever cared where the fuck I was working from until after covid, where suddenly some insecure execs fear we might all be wanking all day, probably because they think we’re like them.
I’m perpetually busy at work, mostly because we’re understaffed, but I know what needs to be done and I do it.
I don’t need a babysitter to do that.
Them? They’ve always been useless, but now it shows, because there’s no-one to boss around, shit still gets done, but they’re not around, so they can’t delude themselves into thinking their bullshit is what makes things work.
Since they no longer have anything to do, they fuck around at home all day.
Faced with their uselessness, they pull a Seymour Skinner… it’s everyone else who’s wrong and not them.
They extrapolate and think that if they’re fucking around, surely we’re all doing what they’re doing and thus need reigning in. They fail to realize they’ve never had a productive purpose even before.
It’s all just a symptom that your management is full of old useless farts.
Some manager usually chimes in with some remote lazy bitch they “caught”, as if these people didn’t exist in the office.
Having been the outsider remote guy since way before, I can say the rest of my team fucked around a lot more when they were on-prem than when they’re remote.
If everyone just… didn’t go back at all, what are they gonna do, for everyone and close the whole studio?
I keep telling them the same thing.
Our jobs involve working with people in offices on the other side of France and that’s no problem, surely. Therefore what difference does it make if a remote worker is at home rather than on a different site? None. It’s all bullshit to control people, just like you said.
You should see HR people squirming trying to justify that one…
One of the really fun details about this fiasco is a few years back, after they had made a big PR fuck up like this, Unity stated they would make their Terms of Service version-bound. If you had Unity 2019 and continued to use it forever, you would only have to abide by the ToS for that version. Put simply, they could not retroactively apply new changes to you.
...Guess which segment got quietly removed last year!
I would think their public statements would significantly hurt the ability to do this, even if developers "agreed" to the terms without that clause.
I straight up don't think they could legally do it either way. But if they made public statements specifically addressing this particular thing, it has to significantly weaken their case.
That's the part I don't get. If I bought it in 2020 or whenever that was in the license, how can they decide to violate the license on the software you bought?
It's one thing of you go into the agreement knowing about the fees, but enforcing them retroactively against your own license agreement sounds like you're asking for a lawsuit.
Put simply, they could not retroactively apply new changes to you.
Sounds like they could though?
Jokes aside, this is another in a recent string of "let's pretend our ToS are legally binding documents as fool-proof as the law" actions by major companies because ... well, who's stopping them?
your customers retroactively owe you money just because you unilaterally said so?
John Riccitiello is Unity's CEO, you may remember him from being EA's CEO or for being the guy who said the devs who don't monetize (you know adding microtransactions, loot boxes and all that greedy stuff) their videogames are "fucking idiots". I think that explains all
Only monetized games have to pay. If they stop selling the game, they shouldn't be affected anymore.
Also
Does the Unity Runtime Fee apply to pirated copies of games?
We are happy to work with any developer who has been the victim of piracy so that they are not unfairly hurt by unwanted installs. (source)
As far as I understand (someone correct me if I'm wrong) games that are free / non-commercial and have zero revenue are not affected at all by this, they still don't have to pay anything regardless of the number of installs.
If the game is no longer being sold (and thus no longer commercial / having revenue), then I expect that even under those new rules Unity would also not charge the dev.
“Will games made with Unity phone-home to track installs?
We will refine how we collect install data over time with a goal of accurately understanding the number of times the Unity runtime is distributed. Any install data will be collected in accordance with our Privacy Policy and applicable privacy laws.”
Sounds like they’re gonna add tracking data to the game, so probably pirated installs won’t count
“Will games made with Unity phone-home to track installs?
We will refine how we collect install data over time with a goal of accurately understanding the number of times the Unity runtime is distributed. Any install data will be collected in accordance with our Privacy Policy and applicable privacy laws.” They already do, and fuck you for asking.
CS is what got me to finally open a steam account too. I can’t remember if it was the only way to play, or if it was a considerably better way to play. Either way, everyone playing CS was on Steam so I finally opened an account.
I played cs 1.6 at a few LAN parties, but didn’t own it. I didn’t actually join steam until after CS:S had been out a while. I actually bought a hard copy of it.
I hated the idea of an installer to install programs that had their own installers. It seemed like a pointless extra program to me, so I resisted getting it until I wanted to play Counterstrike and Steam was the best, or maybe the only way to do that. So I broke down and opened a Steam account.
There’s never been a CS2. Other than a version of the name of the set of Adobe programs (ie, Photoshop CS2)
CS 1.6 is the popular one. That version is about to turn 20 as well.
You’re probably thinking of Counter Strike: Source, the name they gave it when they released it built on the Source engine.
Then there was the current one, Global Offensive.
However, there’s a new one about to be released that I think is still being called CS2. Not sure if that’s the final name or not, I haven’t been following it very closely. But I think it’s due to release this month. Or sometime soon.
I saw at least 2, maybe 3 other comments mentioning CS2, so you’re not the only one. Unless you were talking about it elsewhere in these comments and that was you.
I was beginning to think there was another OG stream game I hadn’t heard of.
Fellow sept 12th here! Never would have thought that the simple looking launcher would turnout to be one of biggest juggernaut of selling digitale games!
Had to make a account so I could keep on playing CS 1.6. good times.
Riccitiello also came under fire in 2022 for referring to developers who don’t focus on microtransactions as the “biggest f*cking idiots” before apologizing.
Classic CEO brainrot. There’s more to life than just maximizing profit.
Maybe this will be the kick in the rear that gets people to drop them enmasse. I’d definitely explore the other options for any new projects I was starting.
Even if they drop this fee, is it really worth the headache in the future when they try something again?
No, Unity has always been an inferior engine to others such as Unreal Engine, Lumberyard, Blender, etc. In fact, the Unreal Engine 3 UDK became free well over a decade ago, and it’s basically Unity if Unity weren’t the scummy corporate vampires they’ve always been.
I’m sorry but Blender game engine was pretty cumbersome to use. It was officially dropped awhile ago and last I heard it was picked up by the community
To be fair, while unreal isn’t FOSS, it’s source code is at least openly viewable so devs would find it easier to make easily transferable alternatives
Also if theirs a engine bug you can crack it open and fix it yourself, handy if you’re not a AAA studio who has epic Devs on speed dial. Though I believe you do have to share any code alterations with epic if it’s hosted on a private repo
I can see why you would think that, but there’s alot of stuff unreal just isn’t that good at, things like 2d games are a massive struggle to work with in unreal, so it’ll gain more popularity, but mainly from devs making 3d games with a focus on high graphics
Because a lot of mobile games are made in Unity, and mobile has a higher rate of people who install and then uninstall without really playing the game. People also install things by mistake on mobile, thinking they’re something else.
So by charging based on installs, they’re able to squeeze developers a lot more (especially mobile game developers). Competitor engines like Unreal don’t run very well on mobile.
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Aktywne