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So, classic corporate walk-back. Put something out that's horrible, get backlash, walk it back to what you originally wanted to do which is "less horrible", then make people feel good cause they feel like they won while you're still laughing to the bank.
Fuck unity, let them rot.
That doesn't add up, in this case. If they simply announced a revenue share, something that Unreal Engine already has, it wouldn't have been anywhere as controversial. Some devs would grumble but it wouldn't have been taken as an existential threat worth jumping ship as soon as possible.
The whole charge per download was likely an attempt to get more money out of freemium mobile games, but nobody was willing to accept that.
Really, the damage to their image so significant, it's likely many dev studios will drop it even under those conditions, just out of lost trust.
I'm telling my computers teacher friends to drop Unity from their courses. There are lots of other options. Just not Roblox, which is even worse than Unity.
If I were in a university course with Unity, I'd be asking my professor some pretty pointed questions about platform visibility and stability, too.
The reputation damage from this change will be lasting.
Whats the official term for this? Tactical walkbacks? Its been happening a lot lately
Idk if there is an official term for it. But yes, it's a very well known corporate and/or political tactic.
Door-in-the-face method
I call it the Highball method of negotiating, the opposite of lowballing
I think you’re giving them too much credit. These companies are run by people who fundamentally don’t understand their market or customers, and they over reach out of greed and over estimating their worth. We are in a time of companies needing to prove profitability, so here we are.
These corporate "apologies" always rub me the wrong way. A policy like this had to pass through so many hands before getting certified. You just know that a whole room full of C-Suite executives genuinely thought this was a good idea and couldn't think through its potential problems.
That's because they still think it's a good idea, they just thought that they could get away with it
He says so right in the article:
“I don’t think there’s any version of this that would have gone down a whole lot differently than what happened,” Riccitiello said. “It is a massively transformational change to our business model.”
But, he acknowledged, “I think we could have done a lot of things a lot better.”
[...] Under the tentative new plan, Unity will limit fees to 4% of a game’s revenue for customers making over $1 million and said that installations counted toward reaching the threshold won’t be retroactive,
really? Thats nearly the same appeasement Wizards of the Hasbro offered after that huge debacle earlier this year.
FUCK THEM!
And that turned out for the best, too.
I started playing Pathfinder.
me as well... well some months before that debacle but...
One of the most controversial elements of the policy concerned how Unity would track installations of its software. Although the company first said it would use proprietary tools, Whitten said Monday management will rely on users to self-report the data.
Do I even need to comment on this or can we just get some popcorn and watch while they find out that self-reporting doesn’t work?
Its such a shame that Ultrakill has zero downloads and as such has to pay no fees.
4% royalty is fine, but they might as well remove the weird install-tracking bullshit at this point.
And stop unilaterally, retroactively modifying contracts.
If they thought they could get away with it once, they will try to get away with it again
I still don't understand how modifying contracts that already exist without written consent from the other party is even legal. I mean, isn't the whole point of a contract to enforce the conditions of an agreement? If one side can just change it willy-nilly, doesn't that kind of defeat the whole purpose of a contract in the first place?
Seriously, if someone more legal-minded could explain this, that would be fantastic.
I don't get it, either. Can't developers just abide by their old contract and not update to newer versions of Unity?
Unity themselves have committed to that option (if you don't like our new future TOS, keep the old version and don't update) in writing (that was in their deleted github repo). So it seems extremely likely that they would lose in court.
The key words in the above are 'in court'. If you're an indie unhappy with an x*$.20 charge, chances are a lawsuit will not improve your day.
Not sure about the first part (you'd think so), but as for the second part, a lot of clients are set by default to auto-update. Don't know about Unity, though.
Not usually game engines, updates break builds
Oh, there won’t be any install-tracking. They will „rely on users to self-report the data“. Sounds to me like they didn’t have any plan for how to reliably track installations in the first place because this is CEO bullshit bingo that was never cleared with the r&d department. So now „I’m sure the users won’t lie to us“ is their best option.