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Discussion Unity introducing new fee attached to game installs
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AstroOhHey
#theprocessbroke
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I wonder how many developers including the mega huge corps like Nintendo/Microsoft/Disney/etc. privately threatened holy hell behind the scenes for them to backtrack like this? Their reputation is still fucked either way of course but I wonder how much of a dent the universally negative PR scared the top brass internally.
Tangerine_Cookie
Stylish Magical Girl
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"Making changes" isn't "Reverting everything".
Though at this point I feel like they have burned through a lot of bridges.
Honestly hoping they get Blender'd at this point and a foundation buys the entire thing to open source the engine.
Though at this point I feel like they have burned through a lot of bridges.
Honestly hoping they get Blender'd at this point and a foundation buys the entire thing to open source the engine.
SNP
Sorcerer Supreme
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Sorry "for the confusion and angst of the policy" but not the actual "policy" itself.
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King_Dodongo
Bob-omb
"we still want more money"
TomNookYankees
Bob-omb
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It being a bunch of Musk shitbags would also explain why they are selectively deciding to not treat a children's hospital or PP as "valid charities".
darthdiablo
Bob-omb
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I think Unity just wants some more time to keep talking with customers and bring them to their side with their "free installs if you adopt our ad platform". In a couple of days they'll probably post an update with some minimal changes like the policy not affecting already released games (which was something they were never able to enforce, neither technically nor legally) and maybe some other meaningless promises.
Unity has no credit left to ask for a couple of days, they made that impossible when they deleted the ToS Git repo. You can argue that the whole install-fee policy is a result of management incompetence driven by a critical financial situation, but the ToS switcharoo? That is a huge act of bad faith and they haven't even addressed it.
Unity has no credit left to ask for a couple of days, they made that impossible when they deleted the ToS Git repo. You can argue that the whole install-fee policy is a result of management incompetence driven by a critical financial situation, but the ToS switcharoo? That is a huge act of bad faith and they haven't even addressed it.
Well, there are two issues. One, is that it's linked to installs, instead of sales or profits. Some people will install or reinstall multiple times, so there's potentially some double dipping. This is on top of the cuts that publishers, or steam takes too. So, it does cut into profits.
But the second and most important thing is: Does Unity deserve royalties for providing a game engine that developers already pay upfront for?
Think about it: Unity is simply a tool used to make games. One that's already pretty expensive. Why should they get a cut if the game is successful? Because someone else used their tool to make a product?
The art store doesn't collect royalties on artists. If you buy paint and a canvas from a store, you don't own them anything, regardless of how much money you make with the supplies.
The whole point of running a company like Unity is that they'd rather make the tools so other people can make products. If they could make the games themselves, they would. But it's more profitable and easier to make and maintain the tool instead. So, why should they get royalties on other people's work because their tool was used?
Imagine: Everytime someone sold something, you'd have to pay royalties to the entire supply chain because "their tools are linked to the success of your product." It'd be madness!
This really isn't "capitalism" though. It's more just conventional market economy based greed. Or really, just greed in general, with respect to most exchange based economies. Or reference, look at Mercatalism, Fuedalism...oh heck, what ever the Complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir was from. It's important to realize that business people scamming each other is practically older than recorded history!
ziggyrivers
Serenade
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Sometimes I ask why they teach “break-even point” in Accounting when corporations are just gonna go full growth
Shareholder Chad
Nintendo Shareholder
As someone who made a career in the market trading, Narroo is 100% correct. The GFC of 2008 was directly caused by business people scamming each other. I think there is a major disconnect between what capitalism is supposed to be and what people are observing today. There used to be a time where companies were not forced to take drastic measures to preserve or grow profit every year. They used to allow hits to profit YoY based on macro economic pressures which prevented what we are seeing today. Companies since Covid don't want to give back that profit margin.
My fellow shareholders are so quick to move their capital around that companies FEAR this happening to their own company and will do everything they can to make shareholders not move their money out.
Things that happen today that isn't apart of what capitalism was intended to be but is GREED: Stock buybacks, Layoffs, Predatory selling, Upselling at the counter, Tips in the drive thru/take out, Snake oil scams like Crypto, Politician based stimulus, etc.
ziggyrivers
Serenade
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I think the disconnect is because Capitalism permits this, with no real mechanism of prevention. Plus the Invisible Hand is really honoring itself here: no where to be seen.
Whether or not the system permits this, something has to be done. This is all predatory and exploiting
Shareholder Chad
Nintendo Shareholder
Fair point but USA based free speach freedom allows spoken racism. See my point? All systems have drawbacks and this is the drawback to Capitalism. The pro's can be seen in the dollar as the global reserve currency. It is how the USA gets away with such a massive national debt with zero consequences. Capitalism aided this. Its "freedom" nature is a massive reason other countries invested in the USA and profit off of it. Im getting off track though.
Going back to the racism point, The citizens have risen up to to socially police that. People who partake are ostracized from society (More needs to be done but thats a separate conversation). This is WHAT WE need to do for cons of capitalism.
Stock buyback in news: Don't give them your business
Predatory selling practices: Don't give them your business
Exploiting workers with low pay: Don't give them your business
Rallying everybody behind this is near impossible but it is the solution. Otherwise, The market will correct itself with a recession we have never experienced in our lifetimes. What is happening now is EXACTLY what happened to Japan in the early 90's. They entire economy crashed and STILL in 2023 have yet to recover. Wonder why the Yen is 100x the dollar? Thats why.
TLDR: We need to STOP giving out hard earned money mindlessly. We must think of it as a reward to businesses.
Branduil
Bob-omb
Just go full heel at this point; "We HEAR YOUR SCREAMS and they NOURISH OUR DEMONIC SOULS."
Like they're not fooling anyone and their business is finished, literally no one can trust them as a partner.
Shinespark
Moblin
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Just to piggyback on the first point, the fact that Unity is looking at installs exposes how nonsensical this is. Publishers and digital storefronts take a cut of sales bc they help to sell games and they have the data to adjust their cut based on the work they do promoting/selling games.
Unity has zero access to this sales information and does zero work promoting anything. As a result, they think they can add tracking malware to any product that's made with their engine so they can determine installs. It's very much Adobe deciding that they should be paid a percentage of sales for artwork made in Adobe.
There's also a major third reason ppl are upset, which is that it's retroactive. It was impossible to budget for Unity deciding they were going to take money for game sales and they never agreed to this deal in the first place. When you tell ppl after the fact that they owe money they couldn't prepare to pay, they're going to be pissed.
Because other "economies" inherently have mechanisms of prevention? Would socialism or communism somehow prevent scams, abuse, and crimes within their own systems in a way that capitalism or other systems couldn't? It's very easy to define a socio-economic system that would work perfectly if people were somehow forced to follow the rules. But that's not how people really work.
It's also important to understand that "capitalism" was supposed to be a qualitative description of certain economies, and that capital "C" Capitalism is actually more of an invention of socialists trying to take down "capitalism," more than anything. Capitalism isn't a plan for how one run's their economy. It's taxonomic classification. The absolute worst thing a person can do is subscribe to broad "economic -ism"'s like it's a religious dogma.
But I think we're getting off track.
Just to be clear: Freedom of speech doesn't exactly 'allow' spoken racism; that's only half true. Depends on what you mean.
The USA's Freedom of speech means the following: "Speech in of itself isn't illegal in of itself. But it's still illegal to use speech to commit a crime."
For example: If you go up to your neighbor and start calling them racial slurs, that's a crime. It's called harassment.
On the otherhand, if you simply ask someone their opinion on XXX-people, and they have a racist opinion, that's freedom of speech. You asked, they answered.
In the latter case, it would be straight up thought policing, which would be bad. You can't just try people for the crime of "not being a good person," or "having reprehensible beliefs." God knows every single person in the country would end up in jail if you did.
The grey area is political speech. I.e.: Donald Trump. But that's a whole 'nother mess that mixes the entire concept and conceits of Democracy into itself. So we're getting REALLY off topic. Perhaps I should stop responding to opinions that needle me?
Anyways, the whole thing with Unity is ridiculous. I can understand greed, but the idea that they wanted to retroactively charge people for games they've released. There's just so much wrong with that on so many levels beyond the ethical. How did that even make it out of a single meeting room?
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“we hear/here for you”
browneyes84
Octorok
I'm not defending their proposed policies obviously, but how is it "pathetic" to admit they were wrong and suggest they're going to abandon the plans?
God the gamer community just needs to be angry about something.
Rhythm Shift
Koopa
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John Riccitiello needs to go, immediately. That's probably the only way the trust and relationships with developers can be repaired.
browneyes84
Octorok
I suspect maybe, just maybe, the actual developers with Unity games out might just disagree and prefer to accept the apology + abandoning of the plan.
Raccoon
Warpstar Knight
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Yes, that'd be better in the short term. However, any developer of any size should be doing everything they can to pivot to a different engine as quickly as they can. No matter what Unity does now, they've demonstrated that they can and will destroy livelihoods on a whim.
edit: i.e. they should by no means "accept the apology"
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To summarize my feelings a bit more, now that it has sunk down more.
I know I'm not in the zone. I know this doesn't directly affect me, my income or my games. I know I'm nowhere near crossing the threshold for revenue in the immediate future. Yet, this has still destroyed one highly significant aspect of my life - my trust in Unity. I've worked and lived with this game engine for almost exactly a decade now, and I know it more or less like the back of my hand at this point. With something like this happening, I legitimately don't dare to touch the engine again. This has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that Unity will stop at nothing to make more money. How far into the future until they introduce something even more drastic than this? As things are now, absolutely no one will be surprised if they pull shit like yanking the free version altogether, introducing forced monetization for all games, or just introduce some kind of ad tracking privacy invasion tactic that would make the engine go against European law, Threads-style. I ask myself: Why would I start now, and go on an 1-2 year journey to create a game, only to watch it burn to the ground when the next decision of this magnitude hits? I can't take that risk. I simply can't.
But my feelings regarding to my own projects is of course less than half of my worries. More than anything, I feel my heart going out to all of the devs who will be affected by this. Someone made a graph that shows a fraction of devs using Unity that will either barely break even or go bankrupt. A fraction, sure, but a highly significant one - and one fraction in this debacle is one fraction too much. Then there's the people who have invested their lives into one single project made with Unity. They are perhaps at the biggest receiving end of this debacle - especially if it's a Kickstarter campaign - and I hate how this has to go down for them.
I know how it feels like to invest your entire life into making games, or one game - Heck, that is exactly what I have done, though I make smaller, standalone, 1-2 year projects with occasional dry spells. Still, it's devastating.
Also this.
I know I'm not in the zone. I know this doesn't directly affect me, my income or my games. I know I'm nowhere near crossing the threshold for revenue in the immediate future. Yet, this has still destroyed one highly significant aspect of my life - my trust in Unity. I've worked and lived with this game engine for almost exactly a decade now, and I know it more or less like the back of my hand at this point. With something like this happening, I legitimately don't dare to touch the engine again. This has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that Unity will stop at nothing to make more money. How far into the future until they introduce something even more drastic than this? As things are now, absolutely no one will be surprised if they pull shit like yanking the free version altogether, introducing forced monetization for all games, or just introduce some kind of ad tracking privacy invasion tactic that would make the engine go against European law, Threads-style. I ask myself: Why would I start now, and go on an 1-2 year journey to create a game, only to watch it burn to the ground when the next decision of this magnitude hits? I can't take that risk. I simply can't.
But my feelings regarding to my own projects is of course less than half of my worries. More than anything, I feel my heart going out to all of the devs who will be affected by this. Someone made a graph that shows a fraction of devs using Unity that will either barely break even or go bankrupt. A fraction, sure, but a highly significant one - and one fraction in this debacle is one fraction too much. Then there's the people who have invested their lives into one single project made with Unity. They are perhaps at the biggest receiving end of this debacle - especially if it's a Kickstarter campaign - and I hate how this has to go down for them.
I know how it feels like to invest your entire life into making games, or one game - Heck, that is exactly what I have done, though I make smaller, standalone, 1-2 year projects with occasional dry spells. Still, it's devastating.
Also this.
If I was a dev, after the demonstration that they are perfectly willing to screw people over, I would never trust Unity again
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The one thing I would say in response to this is that a modern game engine is a heck of a lot more complicated than paint and canvases.
Unreal runs a revenue share program where they take 5% of revenue once you've reached a million dollars in sales. However, what they offer developers is:
- Completely free use of the engine for as many licenses as you want
- A suite of cutting edge graphical features built into the engine, including nanite, ray traced lighting and the metahuman character creator
- Even more new features constantly being tested out and implemented, such as motion capture using every day smartphone cameras
- Tools such as Blueprint to allow for code free scripting
- Near 24/7 tech support from a small army of engineers and Epic employees
- Native console support
- Anything up to your first million in sales is royalty free (so if you're an indie and your game bombs, you likely won't owe a cent to Epic for using the engine)
For a developer to create their own engine that has parity with the above, you would need to invest millions of dollars to get it up and running. So yes, Epic are asking for revenue share in exchange for the engine, but it's hard not to still see it as a pretty compelling deal when you look at everything that Unreal offers now, and what the alternatives are.
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you’re clearly not an artist, lmao
centuries of research and development on pigments and mediums, what shit’ll kill ya, what will stay, what will degrade, canvas tooth, stretching, etc etc etc have all gone into it, and it’s always changing. they are, in fact, similar
It's not about accepting the apology, it's about minimizing collateral damage. Most devs that currently use Unity are probably at a point where they want to get off of it over the long term, regardless of if Unity backtracks or not. The problem is all the games that are either already released or are currently in development. Unity sticking to their guns here would be immensely disruptive to those, and could be a major source of both massive delays and lost media.
Really, it comes down to if Unity wants a quick and very painful (for everyone) death or a slow fade into obscurity.
Unity reportedly told dev Planned Parenthood and children's hospital are "not valid charities"
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/unity...hildrens-hospital-are-not-not-valid-charities
afternoon delight
Bob-omb
Their first "We're listening..." text is so weak, it's exactly the kind of thin gruel bullshit I expected to hear from completely out-of-touch drowning people who don't understand the ship is already sinking.
Mekanos
R U UP 2 IT?
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this is a function of capitalism. Corporations engage in rent seeking behavior when all other avenues for profit are tapped out, and without shareholders investing they can’t compete in the global market. Capitalism requires that corporations extract profit to exist, which is predatory by nature.
Yes, capitalism is an an evolution of other predatory economic systems. I don’t know what you’re proving by saying otherwise.
The "it's all over no matter what they do" doom posting going on is pretty over the top.
I know most forum posters know Unity as the 2010s asset flip engine, but many developers and hobbyist really like this engine, and for a good reason. It is a damn good engine. There's nothing quite like it.
If Unity decides to come out with a (seemingly) sincere apology and a proper, fair business plan along with a reasonable EULA, I have no doubt developers will keep using the engine. At least until Godot reaches maturity similar to Blender.
Now I'm not expecting a modern capitalist company to do that of course, but to say that Unity has no options to save themselves from this situation is just as foolish as charging 20 cents per install.
I know most forum posters know Unity as the 2010s asset flip engine, but many developers and hobbyist really like this engine, and for a good reason. It is a damn good engine. There's nothing quite like it.
If Unity decides to come out with a (seemingly) sincere apology and a proper, fair business plan along with a reasonable EULA, I have no doubt developers will keep using the engine. At least until Godot reaches maturity similar to Blender.
Now I'm not expecting a modern capitalist company to do that of course, but to say that Unity has no options to save themselves from this situation is just as foolish as charging 20 cents per install.
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Hello yes, I installed this game 3 million times, pay up!
"Customers self-reporting installations", what? This is an admission that Unity has no way of proving that their installation numbers will be right. And if that's the case, then why pay them anything at all? Any way, this all-hands meeting itself demonstrates how little thought had been put into the idea before launching it.
It's not going to happen instantly, but I do think a lot of devs are going to leave Unity in the months/years to come. Even if you leave the trust issues aside, this has exposed the over-reliance many dev teams have on a tool and how it's a necessity to branch out to other engines. It may also have given Godot the push it needs to become a more viable alternative than it is now in much shorter time.
The biggest problem remains with the big guys: Apple, Google, MS...are not going to pay Unity a cent. If they don't backtrack we may see them banning Unity games from their stores, or some publishers (like Devolver has hinted at) outright rejecting them. That would be catastrophic for Unity.
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The only thing worse then a magic black box determining the amount of installs for this fee is asking users to self report installs. How do you manage to make your policy even worse as a fix?
That’s a pretty big if
That’s pretty much what I expect will happen. You’d be dumb to keep all your eggs in the Unity basket. The majority of devs will look into other options.
TIL. At least their fees are already outlined and you do get a lot out of their engine.
Asking people to self-report is… certainly an idea.
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But in all of the cases in regards to the “I’m switching engines!!” posts you read here and there, it’s never only about the 20 cents. It’s about dedication, devotion and trust, and how so many that once had all three of those in the Unity engine are now jumping ship. And Unity will more or less never be able to repair this, no matter the amount of “we heard you” and walk-backs.
Sure, some of the “doomposters” might be keeping the engine in the long run but it’d be mostly out of necessity, or maybe even obligation, more than anything.
Tentacle-tropes
Tingle
We’ve gone from “trust me bro” to “self-reporting”
That trust is throughly shredded, diced, & chopped into a fine powder then burnt to a crisp. Even if he leaves, Unity would have to bend over backwards for years to get people to trust them again after a stunt like this.
catonkatonk
Like Like
Why are they so married to this stupid "pay per install" idea?
Tentacle-tropes
Tingle
Milking their consumer base because they want all the money now
Self reporting is such a funny idea because it's basically exclusively going to be used by bad actors.
Fercho
Touch Fuzzy get dizzy
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Several of these bullshit companies , especially in the videogame medium, try to impose and implement shitty practices hoping that they work or at the very least "to test" the response . If it doesn't work after protests they backtrack (for a while) and then they try to impose the same thing later just in a different way.
There are tons and tons of examples of this from videogame and software companies.
Attitudes like yours are part of the problem and a big reason why we are in this situation in the first place. No offense.
