The thing is they can't even do this reliably. If you charge the customer once on purchase, but don't know if they are going to install it once or ten times or if they are going to fuck with you and install it a hundred times, then how much do you want to charge?
Why stay at all whether they revert it or not? They’re egregiously incompetent and if they’ve done this sort of thing once, they’re going to do it again. Developers should go where their support will help make something better (Godot) and not stick with the crusty old Unity hag that is constantly pawing at their pockets hoping for the jingle of coins.
Even though it’s just one dev, they’re giving Unity a reason to revert. If you just say “Yo, I’m OUT!” then they’ve already lost you and they have no reason to revert on your behalf.
If Developers were in a relationship with Unity, it’d be the sort where Unity always comes home drunk and is verbally abusive, but they stick around with the belief that Unity will change.
It really depends on how modular their codebase is. The Doom 1/2 modern ports they did in 2019 use Unity. But it’s actually still the original Doom underneath and just using Unity for input and output to make porting easier
I agree, although a lot of the work going into a game is the game design, art, and iteration, and not just the programming and rigging. And it may actually be a catalyst to rewrite parts better
Strongly disagree. While a lot of work does go on to art assets which should be simpler to migrate, the code is absolutely what makes the game. There are tons of very successful games with low quality or stock assets, there are very few popular games with broken code.
Even then, it’s still a lot of effort to check every asset you’re using to ensure they work as expected in your new engine.
I agree for a specific scenario: if you don’t use many unity specific packages or assets. Then, perhaps you are correct, still I don’t blame anyone staying even in that case, as it is still daunting to take on such a task.
This is the classic tactic of doing something just to see if people will accept it. Even if they backtrack, they absolutely WILL do shit like this again. It’s just like EA and micro transactions
Is the Game Porting Toolkit starting to pay dividends? I didn’t really buy my Mac to play games, but I won’t complain about more of my Steam library being playable on-the-go.
Unity have already established market dominance, if not effective monopoly, as the mobile gaming development platform. They are in a position of power, they have invested large sums of money to get there, and there is really very little game developers with a product 1 or 2 years in development can do about it.
While this is going to be difficult for Indy developers, they really only have themselves to blame. Part of the task when you are making a major software platform decision as a company is to research your vendor’s financial strategy - that’s basic due diligence. Unity has been loss making for years, which either means they are not financially viable (and not a safe bet), or they are engaging in a strategy of establishing an effective monopoly position to later squeeze dependant customers until the pips squeak.
This is likely just the start, whether it’s through runtime charges, Unity control of in-game advertising, or huge hikes in seat license fees. Possibly all three.
While this is going to be difficult for Indy developers, they really only have themselves to blame
In the same way that underpaid workers are to blame for not “just” finding and getting a better job or “learning skills”. Fuck off with that pro-corporate victim blaming.
Not pro-corporate in any way, I don’t see how you could possibly read that into what I posted. But if you choose to sup with the devil, best use a long spoon.
In the case of most of the companies affected by the changes, they literally signed up under a different agreement and then Unity changed the terms once they were pretty much locked in and couldn’t change to another engine without serious costs and/or difficulty.
There’s literally no way indie devs are at fault here and yes, blaming them for being victims of corporate fuckery IS taking the side of the corporation fucking them.
Unity have lost huge amounts of money, in fact never made a profit for a single quarter, while establishing more and more market share, and their customers never asked themselves how or why?
They're game devs, not an acquisition and mergers team. "We signed contract to do business with xyz terms" should be plenty reliable enough for conducting business. Not "Lol, whut? You didn't read the fine print? Psyche! We're changing everything."
If I buy a service, I care about the service, not how the company is doing financially. In fact, I don’t even take the time to look at their finances because who the fuck does that? Are you looking into Netflix each month?
Stallman has always had a bunch of good points. It's just that he's rigid and uncompromising enough about them, and a weird enough dude in general, to turn a lot of people off. "Weird dude" shouldn't matter, but basic human psychology says it does - every time.
If your vendor is constantly making huge losses while establishing more and more market share, your guy in charge of the financial decisions should be asking themselves what the investors long term plans are. That’s not rocket science.
they really only have themselves to blame [...] research your vendor’s financial strategy - that’s basic due diligence
Really? They really only have themselves to blame for Unity suddenly making a drastic and poorly thought out change to their pricing policies? Researching with what, a crystal ball?
Changing the pricing structure would be a perfectly understandable and predictable outcome. Unity choosing to adopt a wildly unfair and entirely unprecedented pricing model is definitely not something their customers could have expected.
Why not? And how is it even “unfair”? They want to charge for every copy sold, that was made using, and is still using, their software.
People who compare this to Visual Studio vs. the MSVC DLLs, are forgetting all the privative libraries which charge for every copy they get released with.
Unity is pulling one of those; only because they didn’t before, doesn’t make it “unfair”, just a dick move.
You’re actually making some valid points here, in regard to the trend of companies losing money as a strategy to obtain market dominance and then turning to monetization after. It’s exactly how Uber and AirBNB got where they are, and it’s a strategy that people need to get more wise to. You’re right, and you should say it.
But for the love of God, say it better than this. The “users only have themselves to blame because they got hoodwinked by a pack of liars and thieves who are very good at being liars and thieves” angle kills any chance of anyone listening to the actual point you’re making because you went and wrapped it up in a giant dose of victim blaming.
If you cook an absolutely perfect hamburger and then spit in it right before serving, you can’t act surprised when no one wants to even try a bite.
Security company Guarda permanently operates in the red in the US but keeps itself alive by constantly buying up all the small security companies it can in the US. It’s essentially a MASSIVE ponzi scheme in a sense that it would die if it couldn’t continue to add to it’s ranks.
But for the love of God, say it better than this. The “users only have themselves to blame because they got hoodwinked by a pack of liars and thieves who are very good at being liars and thieves” angle kills any chance of anyone listening to the actual point you’re making because you went and wrapped it up in a giant dose of victim blaming.
I really don’t agree. His phrasing was harsh and unsympathetic, but the world owes nothing to anyone and those developers should have done their due diligence. Trying to cast this in highly broad black-and-white morality isn’t productive. Is it moral what Unity is doing? No. Is it Unity’s right to do this? Legally maybe, but in every other sense, no. Are the developers who decided to use Unity a bunch of wishful thinkers who chose to ignore red flags? Yes. Unity may be thieves, but it’s been clear for a while now that their business model was unsustainable. Everyone who chose to do business with them anyway chose to ignore the warning signs. People are responsible for their own actions, and while they aren’t responsible for being cheated, they are still responsible for ignoring massive red flags with “we’re not a legit business” on them in bright white letters. I, too, blame developers for their share of their predicament, for the same reason that I blame would-be mountain men who starve to death and then get eaten by wolves because they tried to tame a national park with a pocketknife and a Walmart tent.
As for the other people who got really upset, I think choosing to allow yourself to be upset by style to the extent of ignoring the substance is exactly that: an active choice, one you have to consciously make. If you explained to someone why continuing to burn coal for electricity is bad and then finished it with something harsh like “only a total dumbshit would disagree with this”, would that person be justified in saying “What an asshole. Clearly fossil fuels can’t be that bad”? Of course not. If a person did that, they would be in the position of taking in the argument, understanding it, and then actively choosing to disregard it because it conflicts with their feelings. That’s the kind of magical thinking conservatives stoop to when they dispute climate change, the efficacy of vaccines, etc. because they’re butthurt about people saying “of course the world isn’t flat you fucking idiot”. I would hope that people who have a greater degree of emotional maturity than them (i.e. any) would be able to look at a person’s argument from a calmer and more objective point of view. It’s not like that’s even hard.
To be clear, you’re not being unreasonable, but the other people responding to this guy are having proper hissy fits and they really need to get a grip.
That’s public information and it’s very basic information. Anyone running a business knows to check to make sure anyone they form a partnership with is a legitimate business, the same way you know not to hire a sore-covered meth addict from Facebook marketplace to redo your floors. The fact that they were using proprietary software was already a red flag anyway,
By the way, yes I’m aware you’re just sealioning, no I’m not going to engage with it.
Too late, they already communicated their greed to every gamedev out there and no one can ignore the potential of Unity fucking them over again anymore. Overall the whole shitshow was good advertisement for Godot.
It’s truly the year of mask-off corporate reveals. WotC, Reddit, Unity, Twitter. Probably more I’m forgetting or unaware of. So many big moves to capitalize on long time stability that, quite predictably, result not in amazing increase in profits but the irrevocable tarnishing of public trust that they relied on. It’s kinda wild to watch, honestly.
It’s IMO a sign that the current financial bubble is about to burst and it’s going to do so in a very violent way despite greedy bulls still pushing the “it’s different this time, we have AI now” bullshit.
Investors have their money trapped in these companies, and when they see what riskless treasury bills yield, they naturally start losing their minds because their money is instead in companies that fail to make significantly more than that riskless benchmark. So those investors then pressure those companies to do whatever they can to produce a good enough return on investment in a short period of time as they run out of patience and they themselves know that hell is coming in the financial markets so their shares might lose an even more significant amount soon.
The end result of CEOs and executives under pressure by investors, and engineers stressing out because they understand the financial situation and that they have to either be yes-men and agree with whatever changes the executives propose or be laid off (because another way to reach the target set by investors is to reduce costs by firing people), is obviously the enshittification that we witness today.
That’s how it is once the free money dries up. The profits must rise, no matter the long-term damage this causes - so they try to bleed the existing customer base dry to keep things rising for one or two more quarters. What does it matter to them if all the employees who have worked hard for years will lose their jobs due to their mismanagement?
The conventional wisdow is that in time of economic turmoil, companies should lower their profit margins and weather out the storm.
However, in today’s capitalism, this is not not acceptable. Shareholders demand ever increasing profits and anything short of that is considered a failure. If you don’t keep your margin, you are to be scolded and discarded.
Now, the loans that many of the companies have cost a lot more money than 2 years ago. So the enshittification is used to enable the continued growth to keep the profits growings.
While we were very reasonable, we understand that you just didn’t get it, which made you sad. We understand it feels bad to be sad. To remedy this, we will try again using different words.
“We recognize that our recent runtime fee policy announcement wasn’t well-received. We genuinely apologize for the oversight and any confusion or concern it caused. Your feedback is invaluable to us. We are actively discussing the policy with our teams and the community and will be revising it based on your inputs. Please bear with us as we work through this, and expect an update soon.”
Yep, that has a better tone. There’s a limit to how good a statement you can make when at the core you really plan to do enshittification one way or another, but they could have thrown in a smidgeon of accepting blame also. E.g. “We were unable to provide clear and unambiguous answers to questions that came up” costs them nothing.
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