It’s worse. They’re not even apologizing for their actions but the “confusion and angst”.
It’s kind of like saying “we’re sorry you feel that way” and are somehow misunderstanding what they’re trying to do. They might as well have said, sorry dumbasses but it’s going to happen regardless. Perhaps in some watered down form, perhaps not this/next year, but it will happen.
Remember Blizzard when they released Warcraft 3 Reforged? “We’re sorry you didn’t get the experienced you thought you deserved”. Gold mine, that one. It wasn’t phrased like that exactly but that was what they meant.
The apology seems insincere, as they always do; however, a company bending to consumer feedback in this manner is a good thing (if they actually make meaningful changes).
This is bullshit. There is no confusion. Their new policy was very clear and easy to understand. If the word confusion applied at all, it would be to how/why Unity is doing such a brain dead move that alienates their entire user base. This is a weasel word announcement that doesn’t say what it should, namely ‘we fucked up and we’re sorry’.
Brain dead is such an understatement too. They lost everyone’s trust, and I’m not sure there’s anything they can say to regain it. They’re gonna try something like this again at some point, and I don’t think anyone should give them the opportunity. They deserve to go under.
Trust is hard to build and easy to break and even harder to rebuild.
To truly rebuild trust, they’d need to commit to never doing this again. That would mean 1. a change to the legal TOS that a developer who licenses for a project at a certain pricing level may remain at that price level for that project / that generation of Unity for as long as they wish, 2. a public commitment to never require per-install pricing, and ideally 3. the resignation of whoever came up with this brain dead idea.
Indeed, only a legal guarantee would satisfy me. Put it in writing in all the contracts that unity is not allowed to charge per install and then we can talk
doesn’t say what it should, namely ‘we fucked up and we’re sorry’.
I don’t think they fucked up in the way you mean (from their point of view). Their mistake was not getting away with the change, their “apology” sounds to me like they are going to reword their new policy but ultimately still have it do somewhat the same thing.
IMO they should never had done this in the first place and should now say “we are sorry, our mistake, it won’t happen again”.
To truly restore trust, it should be ‘we’re sorry, our mistake, it won’t happen again, our new TOS will guarantee the right to remain at a current license price structure for a given generation of the engine, we hereby promise to never ever require per-install pricing, and the person responsible for this change is no longer with the company’.
That was my first impression. I suppose it could be an honest mistake (especially since they apparently fired all the PR people a while back, too, heh) but it doesn't look great.
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
This is basically victim blaming & the old Unity license was fine because it allowed you to create console ports. Godot still isn't a valid solution for consoles.
Why isn't Godot a solution for consoles? Is it not implemented yet? Just curious. I'm starting to read about Godot given the debacle that Unity's management caused. It's been great advertising for Godot.
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.
nitter.net
Gorące