Unity: We Have Heard You
twitter.comThere are a few things Unity needs to address (I'm about to go write a couple of games because I've spent a career writing boring business software) before I will consider using Unity:
* One of Unity's spokespersons actually said that Unity could add fees at any time, and customers could not do anything about it. Aside probably being illegal in most jurisdictions, this mentality shows a complete lack of integrity and an abundance of power-drunkenness. What is being done to ensure that you can actually do a contract with Unity and trust them to live up to their obligations? (spirit of the agreement, not letter of the agreement)
* What is going to be done to make sure that Unity's executive team does not make a future mistake like this?
Finally, we'll all have to wait. The tweet said "we heard you and we're going to do something different". Not exactly a decisive move.
> One of Unity's spokespersons actually said that Unity could add fees at any time, and customers could not do anything about it. Aside probably being illegal in most jurisdictions, this mentality shows a complete lack of integrity and an abundance of power-drunkenness.
Part of me really wanted this to happen just to put it to the legal test. So many modern sales, especially digital, are actually an indefinite license rather than ownership. Imagine the fun possibilities of:
* iTunes/Amazon/Google/etc charging an additional "viewing fee" any time you listened or watched music, movies, or TV you previously paid for.
* Tesla charging a network access fee any time you start your car.
* Your smart TV getting a firmware upgrade that starts invoicing you for minutes watched. These charges can be offset by advertisement credits that you earn by shouting "McDonald's!" at your television.
I suspect with the death of ZIRP, Unity won't be the last company who tries to pull something like this.
I have heard someone said the runtime wasn't covered by the agreement it was just technically free.
However Unity also said the terms came into effect as part of license renewal. Requiring a new fee structure as part of a renewal is bog standard.
The main thing people were pushing back on was it was promised that old titles could preserve the existing terms.
If anyone cut ties with Unity and Unity went after them anyway would have been what you mention.
At least in EU, what they did could be legal while your suggestions wouldn’t. Because there are different laws for B2C and B2B. B2C is far stricter.
If you haven't already started a project then just don't use unity. There's a lot of really good stuff out there already that don't have such nebulous terms.
Feel free to send me a message and I can send you a list of alternatives. I don't consider myself much of an expert but for what it's worth I've been making games for almost 25 years.
could you share that list right here please?
Here's a bunch, in no particular order:
Sorry I should have done that from the first place.
Here's a quick one as I'm on a movie break. I'll make a note to update this in the morning.
Haxe + Haxeflixel : pixel art games
Haxe + Heaps : More general 2d/3d framework with webgl target
Godot : I havent used it personally but I've had a myriad of co-workers tell me how good it is
Monogame/FNA : Open source multi-target C# framework that more or less fits the XNA api. I love this one. Might be really good for C# programmers.
To add to this, some people I've worked with are talking about the stride engine (formally known as Xenko). MIT/C# engine
Roblox?
They haven't heard anyone. They are just playing the "Overshoot then Back Off" negotiation playbook.
I don’t think that’s true in this case. Usually that’s a “the structure is fine but the price increase is way too much” move.
This completely wrecked faith in Unity. They also took too long for this response. If it was their plan, it was an absolutely terrible one.
I think you and GP are right at the same time. The fee was probably knowingly overshot and then right after they offered to practically waive it to people who would be using their ad delivery services.
Getting people to use their ads was imo the main plan for them.
But they completely botched it by using a stupid fee structure and disregarding all the non-ad supported game developers who obviously won't get the waiver.
The idea that execs did not see this coming is well - ok may be I am too old think this was not planned.
Apparently they previously had a clause in their terms allowing you to keep using any previous version of the terms subject to certain restrictions, and also maintained a github repo tracking all changes to their terms. The clause was removed and the repo taken down some months/years prior to this change. Supposedly they were added in the first place after some similar drama whose details I missed. The issue at this point isn't "what are they going to do to address this", it's "what are they going to do to make sure that whatever they do to address this doesn't get undone the next time they're feeling greedy". I really don't see them having a good answer to that, and I don't think anybody should accept whatever feeble answer they do come up with.
Just get started using anything but Unity.
When Hasbro, publisher of D&D, engaged in shady license shenanigans, they were able to - sort of, partially - regain trust of the community by more aggressively open sourcing the D&D license (releasing them as creative commons, I think).
But it seems like since Unity probably can't open source their product and stay in business, Unity has put their customers in a position where they can't trust the company but need to trust the company to use the product.
I'm totally outside the gaming industry but jeesh, how could anyone use that product if they had any choice about it?
After I finish my current unity project I think I'm done with unity. It's a small non-monetized project so I'm not too worried.
Haxe + heaps.io are open source/free/MIT and can publish to webGL which was generally my unity use case so I'm looking forward to moving over to that environment.
Ooh that looks great. Thanks.
They could open source it. It's not the majority of their revenue. 100 years from now it will probably be open source.
It’s truly terrifying what copyright has become.
How about you fire the CEO that allowed such a boneheaded decision? With them in charge, how could one ever trust your company to not make such moves again?
The problem is not really the CEO, though he's the one getting the attention here.
It's the new board that got 3 new heads from IronSource and Sequoia VC (who pushed for the IronSource merger).
Sequoia, the same geniuses that backed SBF: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33571734
Sequoia also backed Apple, Cisco, Google, Youtube, Instagram, LinkedIn, PayPal, Reddit, Zoom and many more. They are just one of the largest VCs out there.
Sequoia invested in Apple 46 years ago.
Many of those other investments date from the 90s and 2000s.
The firm has since lost its mojo. The transcript of the discussions behind the SBF investment are embarrassing.
Fun, do you have the link handy?
There is a difference from backing a fraud vs backing a failure.
No one is pointing fingers for the latter.
SBF would have never done anything with a simple BoD requirement: independent auditor. That was not done by BoD. This is a very standard requirement for most companies beyond A. SBF got special treatment. Why is the question
No. The problem is the CEO. The buck stops with him. When you are at the top making millions, a major strategic failure is always your responsibility.
The CEO does what the board tells him to do or gets fired ultimately
"I was just following orders"? In the very specific case of the CEO, considering their position of power and control, they are still responsible - civically and criminally.
Also, a good CEO knows how to manage the board and provide sensible strategic alternatives; even if the board liked this dumb move, it's the CEO's fault for not having leveraged the company's resources (business directors, other C-level executives, etc) to produce a better strategy. The board was certainly pushing for more profits, but the CEO is the one to say how the company will get these increased profits.
Less "I was following orders" and more "my job is the make the company money". And sure, if I had to make the company money in the next quarter or two there's no initiative I can make on the technical end to launch a new product and run up buzz. Unity tried doing that all throughout the pandemic with a bunch of expansion to other industries (automotive, sports, construction, etc.).
So in comes the fees. But then those pesky LTS means nothing I charge to 2024 Unity will stick next quarter, nor all of 2024. The only question at this point is why I chose to do install based fees instead of the Rev share model standard in every other industry. It might have worked if they undercut Unreal and said "we'll only charge 2% of revenue after $1m". I wonder what the CTO was thinking because everywhere I've read suggests that there is simply no effective and ethical way to track installs as a Middleware.
or if they have any integrity they raise a stink and quit. but that's maybe a 1/100 CEO if you're lucky.
The CEO will probably be punished with a $1,000,000 yearly bonus instead of $2,000,000
In a public company like Unity we still don't know the truth of who said what, in the board room, to decide this horrific path.
I agree the board is responsible, it's too dramatic an f-up for just one.
Even Apple did similar with their proposed CSAM scanning, and after the uproar, walked that decision back. So at least Unity is at least giving a head nod towards decency. It could definitely be worse. Imagine if Musk was in charge.
“The good news is that I’ve seen worse, the bad news is that not a lot”.
I’m sure some executive did even worse. But a scorched Earth cash grab is very bad business. No need to spin it positively.
If Musk was in charge of Unity, he'd cut 90% of the staff and just charge $8/mo for a blue sign on your game.
PS: for those without a sense of humor, this is a joke.
To be fair, cutting staff seems like it would be reasonable. How do they have ~2x the number of employees that Epic has? I know the ad side probably takes some numbers but Epic actually makes games.
From an outsider it seems horribly mismanaged.
No it’s not a joke but what will really happen.
That’s the entire point of a CEO: to be a well-paid martyr to blame when bad things happen. It’s the company to blame; putting the CEO specifically on blast plays into the narrative that things will be better if they are replaced.
Once a company gets this big it’s simply a horde of independent maggots writhing in the pile. No true sense of direction, just a deep-rooted desire for growth at all costs. No one is sure what’s happening with other parts of the company, because that’s outside of their scope. All they know is that for their own sake they must continue growing the company.
No, no, not another company.. Let him stay.. Localize the damage
According to Freya Holmer (who I trust since she has some insight into what's going on within Unity), their own employees were actively trying to warn them about the public response to the proposed change, long before and leading up to the release.
Trust takes a lifetime to earn and a moment to destroy. I think this could actually kill Unity.
It's easy to opine from the armchair, but what I think they should have done is gone down Unreal Engine's path - buy up valuable properties like Quixel and give yourselves a unique selling point. Then they could have at least said they're adding new functionality to justify the price hike.
> their own employees were actively trying to warn them
This is almost always the case. But executives tend to listen to the yes-men more.
> I think this could actually kill Unity.
I see no way how it wouldn't. Which developer wouldn't be looking for alternatives now? Perhaps they have luck and their former good reputation especially with smaller studios will hold for a while.
"Hear" is a slippery word.
Hearing is not listening. First you hear, but you do not listen. Then you want to listen. Then you can listen. Finally, with effort, you listen. In addition to intent there must be theory of mind, and inter-subjectivity, some one to listen to. Then, say back what you really think you heard - acknowledge the reality not your own lens;
"We hear that you feel we were greedy, took our users for granted and treated you with disrespect."
Is different from;
"We are frightened and reacting to your signals of disengagement" (expect more manipulative acting-out as we try to "fix you")
"We heard you" sounds like an idiom though, for which the difference between hearing and listening is not really relevant.
(English is not my primary language, but I've seen on Linguee at least one occurrence of "We heard you" translated into the equivalent French phrase, which does use the literal translation of "listen")
In common language, I think that's true.
In carefully worded corporate PR speak, it has unfortunately been sullied by those particularly using it to appear to be listening to feedback without making the changes that the feedback wanted.
They are synonymous, and in reality it doesn't matter much for the PR here. but there is some idiomatic and metaphorical differences between the two that can be hard to explain to someone that is ESL. "hearing" is receiving sound to your ears. "listening" is understanding those sounds. People in this case really want to be understood.
Also keep in mind that "We're listening" is another common PR response.
Forgive me. its very much psychoanalytic babble. You sort of need to get that context before it really makes sense.
"Listen" is a slippery word.
Listening is not hearing. You can listen to a song and not hear the words it contains. Not hear the intent behind each line.
You hear by...
You heard what OP said, but did not listen to their message.
I'll bite :) There's a couple of research texts that I'd suggest make "listening" an attentive activity higher up the cognitive than hearing. Auditory neuroscience: Schnupp, Nelken and King (2011) and Thinking in Sound: Bigand and McAdams both talk about "hearing" mainly at the physioacoustic (signal perceptual) level, whereas "listening experiments" tend to focus on the structural and semantic processing faculties.
Of course that's an over-rigid appeal to scientific words, and I appreciate your saying it can kinda work with the words exchanged. Bit like the tussle we once had here over "ethics" versus "morals" :)
There's a bit of critical thinking that I'd suggest makes the distinction moot here:
Unity could have said 'listen', and given the insane mismatch between their past actions and the current rather predictable response, there'd be precious little comfort the sentence "We Have <Either> You" could provide compared to whatever their next actions are.
With all your research I'm sure you've come across this concept in the often quoted form: "actions speak louder than words"
(And for posterity, they even said they're listening: they just don't open with it...)
> We apologize for the confusion
Ah, I guess it was just a big misunderstanding!
That's always my favorite response. If only you understood what we were saying, you'd support our great (for us) idea!
Uh, no. I understood you perfectly. I still oppose it.
There was certainly a confusion of ideas in the process of reaching the original decision; maybe that's what they're talking about...
This is a water sandwich. As far as I'm concerned, Unity is pivoting to a door-in-the-face[0] strategy. Since it works on anchoring, the only counter to door-in-the-face is to treat the substitute offer more harshly than you would have otherwise. In other words, punish companies for being untrustworthy business partners.
I really hope game developers start demanding the following:
- Unity abandons all attempts to adopt a revenue share of any kind and funds itself solely on subscriptions to Unity[1].
- Unity poison-pills themselves such that if they attempt any additional significant change in business model, then all developers who have developed games on Unity are entitled to GPL source access to those versions of the Unity runtime. They can hold source code in escrow to be released should this poison pill trigger.
- Unity specifically fire John Riccitiello.
Choosing a game engine is a matter of trust in a particular development team. Unity has broken that trust, and as far as I can tell, that is specifically due to John's "gotcha" business tactics. Remember that quote from a decade ago about charging players a buck to reload? That's revealing of the mentality behind this business model change.
[0] Door-in-the-face refers to making a ridiculous offer intended to be rejected in order to make another offer seem less onerous in comparison.
[1] Yes I am aware this implies cancelling features. Given what people have said of Unity's development pipeline over the last half-decade, it sounds like most of those features weren't actually things Unity's customers wanted.
Why John? He works for the board, since like '13.
I presume you don't know what the board discussed to come to this plan It's a public company but those discussions are private.
> We apologize for the confusion
Confusion? Nope pretty sure everyone was 100% clear that this was a money grab & giant f you to the devs.
The CEO always takes the blame for decisions, and for the consumer market John has a bad reputation as being EA's CEO previously. So it's a pretty easy lightning rod.
I do think this buries the lede in that John has been around for a decade, but this is happening a little over a year after Unity merged/acquired Ironsource and 3 board members from IronSource became Unity's board.
Part of me believes this was just a bad faith bargaining tactic. The execs knew this would never fly as-is and would generate a huge outrage, so that they can then say "We heard you" and look charitable in walking back to the actual fees they planned to introduce. It's either that, or sheer stupidity and incompetence.
People often accept a worse "compromise" in that situation. But I don't think this style will work if you need to acquire new customers that will use their engine.
I really have grown a strong dislike for these non-apologies where they claim some of problem is with you/us instead of purely their own actions. There is no confusion, there is no misunderstanding and the only reason you are changing anything is because you could see your business loosing customers so fast you got scared it was all over not because you have some culture of listening to feedback.
I really hate these apologies that blame their customers, they are ridiculously narcissistic.
Changing the policy is not a complete u-turn on the policy. The trust is gone.
Honestly, a u-turn is not enough because of the broken trust. They'd need to cut off their (perceived or real) ability to "change the deal" like this again. Like make it clear you get a perpetual license to distribute the unity runtime for products produced while using a validly licensed unity editor. Make it so the customer has to take some affirmative action (not just clickthrough a generic new version TOS screen) to upgrade to any new TOS version which removes that license.
A short term memory is an acceptable substitute for trust
"Don't get us wrong: We're not changing a thing. But we heard you!"
I suspect this is going to be the case.
If only there was some way to talk to their customers ahead of time. Corporate infantilism at its finest.
"This is not who we are"
“A severe and continuous lapse in judgement”
"Not reflective of our core values"
I wonder if this is a real walk-back, or just one of those where they do the same thing anyways in a few months once the scandal dies down. It would not be below Unity, I think that has been communicated clearly.
There was no confusion. Stop gaslighting people.
They haven't said they're reverting it. Just changing it. Could be a change for the worst.
This is a great example of the power of spending all your money. Notice how many developers are saying they'd accept a revenue share on top of the existing per seat fee. If Unity had not overspent their revenue no one would be showing them pity.
Regular people see a profit or loss as an inevitable and uncontrollable result of fate. Anyone who has run a business knows costs are things you decide on. Contracts do not sign themselves. Employees do not show up at the door by themselves demanding payment.
Unity spent more money than it earns. Leadership decided to do that. Now devs and employees are treating that decision as a fact of nature and pleading to charge more.
Until the actions are corrected, changes prevented, and someone takes accountability, this is just asking to stop criticizing them
I love watching capitalists crash and burn their companies.
I feel like we need a new default corporate ownership model. A company can be in operation for decades and grow headcount massively but the shareholders at the top retain the same percentage of control as when it was tiny and new. Many people contribute to a company's success and its not reflected in the ownership.
If ownership could accrue in employees to a non trivial degree, they would have some power to push back when some bonehead exec tries to blow the whole place up. It's their livelihood as well as just the shareholders.
Right now when one of these giants at the top falls, they take out a lot of other people with them.
It can—just start a company and run it that way. There’s nothing magical about this, and acting like there is disempowers you in the long run.
That's not really what happened to Unity. Unity was started by 3 dudes in Copenhagen. Since then, the company moved its HQ to California, went public, and the original founders have all departed. 2 departed long ago before any of this. The last one was the CTO until being quietly replaced in March of this year.
If anything, Unity became a beast outside of the control of the very ones who fostered it. Sure, each founder could probably retire off the money they made, but this doesn't seem like something they would have allowed if they were still around.
Tangent aside:
>If ownership could accrue in employees to a non trivial degree, they would have some power to push back when some bonehead exec tries to blow the whole place up.
How would that happen? The thing is that employees in many places are paid in stock as is. In theory they can all collectively do the very thing you suggest by all pulling out stock. But it's hard for that many people to come together and rally under one cause.
Companies dying always was part of a healthy capitalism. That they can get this old and cling that long to their IPs is a historic first
..and so do other capitalists.
You do realize that one company's crisis is just another company's opportunity, right?
>> We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days. Thank you for your honest and critical feedback.
I have no involvement and I'm not a game developer (except for small weekend projects). Please do not make any change "to the policy" you have announced! Your decision seemed to be the straw that was lacking for many people to support Godot and I'm rooting for them. Please don't let us down now.
The best outcome if you're a Godot supporter and a developer supporter is Unity backs off the installation fees AND then everyone goes to Godot anyways.
Best outcome would be they decide to open source Unity.
Don't worry, even if Unity fully abandons these plans, trust has been irreversibiley destroyed, and everyone is now aware that their CEO is an EA scumbag.
I doubt many people will start new projects based on Unity after this..
The only defense against the door-in-face negotiating technique is that the perpetrators have to end up worse than they started to dissuade them for trying again. For every hasbro forced to back down and then some, that's more power and dissuasion power to consumers, but for every reddit who gets their way with some superficial concessions that's a point of reassurance for executives who might consider trying it,
A peek into the future: "Godot engine after becoming successful due to Unity flopping a decade ago has decided to change its licensing terms, requiring retroactive payments as well as advance payments for future estimated sales. The new CEO from Microsoft Games has stated that this approach brings the most value to shareholders, developers and gamers and brings the long sought stability to the development of the engine."
That is an advantage of a FLOSS solution: if such a thing happens, we can fork it.
Yup, it's not that FOSS is immune to enshittification, it's that it puts power into the user's hands should that time some.
The worst case is that Godot forks, rebrands, goes private with the rebrand, and leaves the public branch unmaintained. But in that case your current game isn't screwed. It is still yours, can't be nickle and died, and you have source code access to fix any bugs (even if you lost a lot of support). Though, it is very likely someone else decides to maintain Godot as a result of this.
This kind of sellout is why we have OpenOffice vs LibreOffice, or Nextcloud instead of Owncloud. If the project stops respecting users, the users can and will leave. And they'll be no worse off, because they can pretty well start off right where they were.
There is a reason open source is defined by the license. If all of the code is available with a permissive license it is impossible to do this without allowing people to fork your old version and maintain it in perpetuity.
I don't see anything here about firing the executives who forced through this plan. Rolling back the changes isn't enough when the biggest damage is the breach of trust in having a reliable business partner.
This reminds me of when Wizards of the Coast destroyed their D&D business by announcing they were cancelling the OGL. Many people had built a cottage industry around the OGL which helped to grow the player base, which in turn helped Wizards of the Coast make 5.0 the most popular D&D yet. Now everyone despises and mistrusts them, it doesn't matter that they backtracked.
By what measure did WotC or D&D get destroyed? The vast, vast majority of public figures in that space seem to have moved on from any opposition, including those who were most vocal about the OGL.
WotC completely got away with it. People will queue up for their new VTT and then be shocked, SHOCKED when Wizards leverages that to achieve the lock-in that they've so desperately pursued for years.
Destroyed is probably over selling it, but they did get the original OGL content and more licensed under creative commons as a concession which would prevent Wizards from attempting the same stunt again and provides rival VTT confidence in their continued ability to offer D&D and derived systems like pathfinder 1e.
No, pathfinder isn’t covered by this since the CC license was specifically only for 5e SRD content.
And wizards never retracted the claim that they could revoke the OGL. So pathfinder 1e in particular is directly in their crosshairs.
laughs in Baldur’s Gate 3