- Company makes wildly negative changes
- Public outcry occurs
- Company walks back overwhelmingly negative parts of the deal to what they originally intended to happen
- The public is placated into thinking they won the fight
We're at step 3, y'all
this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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Yeah and it won't work this time.
Unity is B2B, they tried to change the deal retrospectively. That's toxic to a business relationship, it's not viable to do business with such a company because they may try to do it again.
The only thing they can do now is fire the CEO.
Or add a clause to the TOS banning retroactive updates of TOS to existing games.
Like they already had but sneakily removed
AND add a clause to the TOS banning retroactive updates of TOS to existing games.
Lawyers really are minions of hell, aren't they?
Oh yeah I'm sure that will work
Which is exactly the plan. Short term cash boost and loss of trust followed by a new CEO who builds that trust again. Rinse and repeat.
The current CEO gets a golden parachute and the investors get some quick cash and likely buy more stock when the value falls.
I hope you're right! Just drawing attention to this page of their playbook.
I mean you definitely got a point, but don't forget that there are long term consequences. The trust is completely gone (which is needed if you invest in this game engine and you will probably see the unity market share drop in the coming year.
But don't you think that pretty much this debacle resembles Reddit and by now most of the users are back to their platform, exactly what they wanted.
Only the nerds and some mods left their platform permanently but percentage wise the number is probably very low and now Reddit is probably earning even more than before. So it is a win win situation for them.
The big difference is Reddit isn't taking a portion of their wages. It was purely moral outrage.
Things are different once money is involved.
Choosing an engine is a business decision for a lot of people and using a free alternative that isn't quite as feature rich sure seems like the better option now.
Idk why everyone is like "well Reddit won and we're just on Lemmy because we're nerds and no one believes in FOSS anyway". Yes, I get you, there's currently not much consequence visible for the Reddit debacle. I genuinely think we're in the middle of a slow and painful death to Reddit. A lot of big companies don't implode, but they die slowly in front of their competition. Yeah, currently we only are a fraction of users compared to Reddit, but if people truly believe in Lemmy as the better platform, this will be competition.
There's no long term consequences unless you have serious competitors and Unity doesn't really, just Unreal Engine.
Maybe not today, but getting serious competitors is another long term consequence.
Pssh, long term consequences are for the next CEO. I got my bonus and stock options.
I agree- hopefully we can remember long enough for it to really matter in the long term. Just wanted to bring attention to this cycle because it's been happening a lot lately (Facebook, DnD, etc) and I think the companies are starting to copy eachother.
Lastly, the installation threshold won’t be retroactive, so only new installations made after the policy’s announcement will count toward reaching the Runtime Fee thresholds.
That's still retroactive though.
Yeah, this isn't a concession.
The only installations they could count would be those made after devs accepted the new terms and conditions.
Any installs before the announcement were already covered under a different TOS, whether unity wants to force a new TOS or not.
Plus, like you say, this is still retroactive. Any games made under the old TOS would be forced onto the new TOS for new installs or be kicked off the unity platform.
It also isn't any different than what was originally announced, no? It was always like that and still shit.
It's the same shit with a sightly different spin.
A turd is a turd no matter how much you polish it.
Unity in a few years when investors want money again
I don't know why, I burst out laughing seeing this comment.
Still trying to shoehorn in a "runtime fee". That's not going to work and with this model it's pointless anyway. Just make it a 4% revenue for sales after $1 million. Same end results (actually potentially more in fees) without all the runtime issues. Make it apply only to a specific version and later and after a certain date and then you also don't have the retroactive problem and the massive blowback.
They're trying to monetize the free-to-play mobile market, which is much more lucrative than a percentage of the sales. Cunning bastards.
It works for that market too even without install fees, you just make it a percentage of revenue generated from microtransactions. It's still tied to the game.
For every paying customer, there are one thousand installations. A quick maths will tell you why they are trying so much to be paid for runtime.
Quick math shows that's irrelevant with a 4% revenue cap, as I pointed out in my original comment, and at best they will be paid the same as just doing a 4% revenue fee. More likely they will get some amount less than 4% from most devs.
The only reason I see for them going this route instead is to claim they are still royalty free, install fees aren't royalties. Which is BS anyway.
You know whats better? Not reporting shit, I just published my game. I don't want to report a bunch of numbers to Unity each month. I want to push updates to fix issues my users are complaining about. How the fuck are the biggest chucklefucks in charge of every company? Give me the fucking reigns I can do better than this.
I saw a theory from another lemmy user a while back that made a lot of sense. Basically shareholders get to a point where the want cash now. So they make a deal with the current CEO to do something shitty for short term profits. The shareholders get paid in the short term and then once the share price takes a hit they buy more shares at a discount. They then fire the current CEO who takes a nice exit fee and install someone else to do damage control and grow the stock price again. This is the only thing that makes sense to me because the alternative is that the current CEO is just actually that dumb.
It's the infinite growth bullshit that every publicly traded company suffers from. They're making enough money, but with capitalism it's never enough...
For me the problem is that the shareholders are putting enormous pressure on publicly traded companies requiring ever lasting exponential growth.
Back then I posted a thread about why I think publicly traded companies are bad for our society, as an unpopular opinion and I got severely downvoted, but hey isn't this another example for the latter?
This SaaS model was born exactly out of this and it is the worst offender.
Back then we were able to own our own software/hardware, now everything is leasing and perpetual paying for things you need/use everyday. Thank God we have foss apps that in most cases are better alternatives.
I feel like most digital stores already gives you all the statistics you need to make this trivial though. Steam even reports the difference after refunds/returns for you.
Wow, thats amazing! You know what is even more trivial? Not having to do it at all.
it's the best way to do a rev share. pretty sure unreal engine lets you self report too. If you start a business you can't complain about having to run a a business by tracking sales.
I can when I didn't have to do it before and this policy is forced upon me by an established vendor. Thats like saying you can't bitch about material vendors in the construction industry, you absolutely can because they make your business work and you've entrusted them not to fuck you.
With all intentions of respect, and in complete agreement that Unity's new terms are alarming, If you dont have any intentions of tracking your sales unless you are forced to by the creators of your engine you are using, I'm questioning if you have the chops to be a successful dev in the first place. This is why the vast majority of devs don't even make enough to even pay Unity the fee and should just stick with a publisher instead of trying to handle the business end of things on their own.
Its not the tracking of sales thats the issue. Its having to report it to someone so they can take even more of my money when we haven't been doing that for years.
Hopefully development studios can hold strong and continue their boycott anyway. Backing down now basically means Unity got away with it, in a sense. Plus, companies are learning from each other's shitty tactics lately ala Twitter, Reddit, and Recently Facebook coming out with payment schemes on things that used to be free.
So if Unity does this, other software companies will probably try some similar stuff.
This changes nothing, unity. Fuck off. Fire your CEO and put in some real leadership.
"It's the craziest thing Unity™, I know people have bought my game, but I shit you not, not one person has actually installed it."
The games making over a million are the ones who can afford the new rates. This is so regressive. It should get more expensive as your sales go up, not down. Small devs should be charged less than big studios
The fee is zero for games making less than $1,000,000.
Oh did they change that too? I was just going off the "capped at 4%" part. Before you only had to exceed $200k to have to start paying
The grammar in the article is not great.
Can't put that "we have access to the data" toothpaste back in the tube I'm afraid.