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.
Big “I’m sorry you were offended by the correct things I said and did” energy
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.”
Unity deserve to get sued into oblivion for this
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?
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.
Let’s say that you are right, one should always look at each company you are buying a service from, before buying said service.
How do you even go about knowing if a company is doing something like this? Where do you start?
At what point have you done your due diligent, and can assume that, yes, I will still have the same contract tomorrow as I had today?
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.
No sealioning, I just don’t agree.
“They should have researched that thing the company hadn’t done and given no signals that they would do.”
Dear God, do you listen to yourself talk? I hope no one else fucking has to.
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.
No one ever expected them to go this far.
This retroactively fucks up devs who could never have seen such a move coming.
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?
What did they think Unity’s investors plans were, to endlessly subsidise a constantly loss-making platform just for the fun of it?
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.
Something something Stallman was right (about this specific thing, anyway).
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 they were so hard up than they should have left Parsec alone instead on lobotomizing it by killing Arcade.
Removed by mod
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.
Yep. What they should have written:
“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.”
PR is hard, let’s go shopping!
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.
Any PR statement that includes the words “we hear you” can be safely ignored
Also any apology for how it was perceived rather than what was done is worthless.
It’s pretty speak for I’m sorry you are stupid and expendable.
RuneScape 3 recently made an extremely controversial change, and I think they handled the apology perfectly. When they finally made changes and dropped some heavily disliked things, they opened with “we messed up”. Unity needs to do the same thing here if they want a chance to rebuild
Jagex is respectful not the company I’d look to for inspiration in terms of correcting past mistakes 🙂 For the uninitiated, they legally gaslit the community when they made their first major controversial change roughly a decade ago by “removing the feature” then “adding” the same feature with a different coat of paint.
Which feature are you thinking of?
And the only reason they’re decent about mistakes is because of the plethora they’ve accumulated. By no means does that mean they get to it quickly nor fix it adequately all the time. But in the grand scheme of company fuck ups, that’s still one of the best. It says more about everyone else than it does Jagex. Still, I appreciate they can flat out say they fucked up.
The Squeal of Fortune, replaced by Treasure Hunter.
But in the grand scheme of company fuck ups, that’s still one of the best.
I really don’t know about that. They seem to do it so regularly that it’s been a borderline abusive relationship over the years. Back when the Gowers ran the company, things operated much more smoothly and particularly the pay-to-win aspects were completely absent.
There’s no other game I know of with a subscription, pay-to-win loot boxes, cosmetics store, season pass, and bonds. There’s also no other game I’m aware of that has overhauled its combat system to such controversy that it split the game in half (and seemingly most people play the old version) – the closest being Minecraft. There’s also absolutely no game where the developers regularly say “that’s engine work so we can’t do it”, when they own their own engine.
I still like RuneScape, but at this point I’ve completely given up on PvP in the game and anything resembling fairness. I just expect Jagex to do everything they can to try and entice me to give them more and more money for … ultimately … less.
Ahhhh I totally see what you mean. Yeah the whole thing with SoF going away for TH was disgusting. I don’t even consider it a change really, it’s pretty much the same thing. It still doesn’t sit right with me that they had an option to kill Yelps in a quest as effectively a scapegoat while they changed nothing.
Completely agree that MTX is out of control and badly designed. I understand why they need it, but they’re going about it the completely wrong way and monetizing the wrong things. It should only ever provide cosmetics. And Jagex is absolutely trying to get more money out of us in return for providing less.
EOC is something I’ve come to see as a mistake over time. It was way too much scope creep. They should’ve left items and armors and stats the same, and only changed how you dealt damage. Maybe introduce only a couple of abilities to augment combat instead of outright replace it, like bleeds, stuns, freedoms, etc. Plus, OSRS clearly shows that the old combat system could still do interesting and challenging encounters. And yeah PvP on RS3 is laughable and a lost cause, at least as far as the wilderness goes. The popularity of PvP in WE2 makes me think they could do something, but maybe that window has completely passed.
I don’t know that the engine criticism is fair though. The game has tons of spaghetti code that its built on. And the downside of having a custom engine is that you have to train anyone who’s going to work on it. You can’t hire someone experienced in the system.
EOC is something I’ve come to see as a mistake over time. It was way too much scope creep.
Agreed.
The popularity of PvP in WE2 makes me think they could do something, but maybe that window has completely passed.
Yeah, I think the right thing to do would’ve been to make the wilderness a safe PvP faction vs faction area that’s basically a continuous version of one of those events.
I don’t know that the engine criticism is fair though. The game has tons of spaghetti code that its built on. And the downside of having a custom engine is that you have to train anyone who’s going to work on it. You can’t hire someone experienced in the system.
Any code base can be fixed, it’s just a function of time and money. They can yell spaghetti code all they want, but ultimately Jagex is the one that allowed that to happen in the first place. It’s not an excuse to further gaslight your customers. It’s something you should take accountability on, and work to fix. Done right, having your own engine is an opportunity to do new and exciting things.
It’s certainly a very large financial undertaking to change the engine like that, and at that point they’re honestly better off just making a new game entirely.
I love your idea for the wilderness, safe PvP for factions would’ve been a lot of fun.
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’.
“we’re sorry for how you reacted”
Appalling
My god, they’re becoming alien ants
And just like, the movies, we play out our last scene.
The Unity execs thought they were being smooth criminals, instead they came in too rough and got busted.
Stupid voice typing… fixed :{
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”.
Yeah, this 100%.
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’.
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.
microsoft making ux worse, google fighting adblock with drm, not to mention all sorts of non-tech catastrophe
somebody is gonna make a ‘we didnt start the fire’ about 2023 called ‘we started the fire’
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.
That was not an apology. That was them calling us stupid.
“what, you guys don’t have phones?”
Were sorry youre so stupid
“Angst”. Quite a choice of words.
Isn’t it? Like the entire industry is composed of teenagers without enough life experience to see the big picture.
But then, did anyone expect Unity not to be tone deaf?
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.
Must be AI-written.
So they apologize for being caught, not for wrecking stuff, as usual.
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.
“confusion” no confusion here chum don’t gaslight us enjoy your new shareprices sure your CEO is loving their successful dump
It took them a week to make a tweet saying basically nothing?
You should see how long ECS and the Jobs system has been in development.
As expected. And now they’ll publish their actual policy which will still be pretty bad but less worse.
They’ve already sealed their fate. Only a fool would start making a new project in Unity going forward.
Now everyone is going to trust them.
Of course. The emergency damage control PR firm said so.
The advice was practically free!
"We thought you were locked in and realised you may not be. We might have to rethink our evil master plans "
It’s almost like the CEO of the company (John Riccitiello) supporting the most Indie game developers holds 53 million dollars in EA shares or something…
Even, and most likely especially, if Unity does poorly does EA benefit… I bet ya Riccitiella knows all the features of Frostbite, but couldn’t tell you if you can do native reliable UDP networking in Unity…
