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what they don't realize is that if the company is making huge amounts of money unity needs them not the other way around. with enough resources an engine switch while extremely difficult can still be done.
@@mnemonix1315 Look at the business logic, though. "With enough resources" is meaningless. What matters is whether the expenditure is profitable or not, and basically reimplementing the game from scratch, investing a couple of years worth of man hours to build everything, including asset pipelines, just to get to the present state of the game, not adding anything at all to the game... I struggle to imagine cases where that business logic would make sense. I suspect the bigger question is whether companies will commit to future projects in Unity, not whether they'll try and engine switch their existing project.
LOL, I found this video, and saw Bootdev, and I got excited since I have been looking for coders for a while to help me make a game, (nobody was intrested) but 5 minutes in the Founder of it, said asking for stuff is against the rules, who I didnt really care since I was gonna leave, but then since I said I dont care, he said "yep easy ban" and it reminded be of a guy I knew who plays DND who is the type of guy that if you disargreed with him, you get banned from the game, which was exactly like this, and the funny part was another guy messaged the puppet meme, like they KNEW he was gonna ban me almost like he has done that WAY too many times. anyway that guy was quite rude and I would not recommend Boot, since if the Founder is a massive jerk then it might not be the best place for a newbie or really anyone, no offense Bellular News, great ya got money,
eh, thats kind of out of context - he was describing how it MTX are the way to go as it much easier to sell someone a small fee to get rid of an inconvenience multiple times than a complete game. I would say he is pretty damn right too about MTX.
Don't forget how they removed the ToS from their website, saying "nobody looked at it anyways". I can forgive incompetence once the other side shows they are willing to improve and fix the issue. Intentional malice, however, I can't.
Maybe if it were just a ToS it might've worked, but that was there as a signal and assurance because they'd tried changing agreements previously. Everything last year was deliberate and they apparently thought they could pull it off. I'm still stuck using it though I'd rather change to get further away from the investment bankers calling the shots.
The funny thing was, they also pulled down the Git repo with the old ToS. The same Git repo that they set up the first time they tried to change the ToS behind people's backs. It's almost like when a company tries something, it's because they expect that the increased profits will be worth the backlash they suffer. Basically, if a company does something, never trust them if they roll back a change. They're only rolling back because they're waiting to try again.
@@alexlowe2054 what pisses me off are the unity defenders who told everyone 99% of devs won't be successful enough to be affected anyways and then gloats as if they contributed to unity backtracking.
Correction: They removed the GitHub repository with their ToS. It was still on their website - it had to, after all. But they removed the git repo where you can very easily see changes, in hopes that people wouldn't notice the fact that they quietly removed the term stating that any version of Unity you use will always be usable under the terms you originally agreed with.
I think one reason why people rejected this so hard even when it didn't immediately affect them was the fear that other companies would do similar monetization strategies all over if this succeeded.
The reason people rejected it so hard is that it was such a massive breach of trust. It didn't affect them much then, but at any point in the future Unity could change that.
Well, it kind of would affect us all. It would have made a lot of existing small and indie studios go bankrupt, since many of them were using Unity. It also would have made free games completely impossible, including the already existing ones. I forget the exact numbers but I remember one indie dev did the math and said he'd owe Unity some crazy 6 or 7 figure number each month for his game that was pretty much free for people to play. I'm glad Unity took the hit they did. Hopefully it's a lesson that a lot of other companies listen to.
The big problem is that unlike Business-2-Consumer (B2C), Business-2-Business (B2B) is built on trust. You don't build a company on a foundation that is shaky, and Unity has proven they will RETROACTIVELY CHANGE CONTRACTS. They are absolutely untrustworthy. Are you really going to sink YEARS into building a game on Unity when they might just pull the rug one day and completely screw you over? Even if Godot is not as advanced as Unity at this point. At least a completely open source engine with no ability to drag your company down, is a better choice to build a game on. In fact, Second Dinner, the developers who make Marvel Snap, are working with Godot to make tools they need, because their next game is being built on Godot.
The hilarious irony is, B2B is a corporate myth. All business is to consumer, even if Company X only makes widgets that Company A uses in their final product which only they then sell to the final consumer. If the consumer sinks, it doesn't matter that Company X is B2B with Company A. They both suffer.
11:38 they said the exact same thing in 2019 but then went back on their word. Now, 5 years later, they're promising the same thing again... I have no reason to believe that they will honor it this time.
@@defaulted9485 did you watch the video? John R left the company, and 8 powefull figures from iron sourse as well. Basicly Unity regained control over the board now.
@@The28studio ironsauce is still embedded inside unity operatively and also higher up, just because those 8 took a step back it doesn't mean they're gone, their part of the company gone, and their relationship gone. they are still shareholders, they just backed into the shadows but the leashes are still in their hands
Two things, as a dev: 1) The trust is gone, permanently. If an employee stole money from me, I might forgive them personally, but they'll never work here again. It just can't happen. 2) The product isn't worth taking a chance on anymore. Unity's quality and focus as a game engine has slid downward ever since 19.
@@MassiveMawEntertainment Adobe only survives because they don't have real competitors yet. As soon as there are alternatives that work just as well (or better) Adobe is finished.
The main problem is that Apple seems immune to customer disapproval, however they abuse them. Whatever happens to these little guys, Apple is the evidence that corpos look to to guide their behaviour. As long as customers keep taking whatever Apple dishes out and like it, then I'm afraid others will continue to adopt their strategies.
@@theguyfromsaturn the only thing thats containing Apple rn is eu putting sanction on those a****** and giving them heavy fine for abusing customer and breaching eu laws about this. Istg if there wasnt that it would be even worse. Idk why people are so obscessed with Apple when you have Samsung and co as alternative
@@sunniedunbar6889 yeah but no one gets to make mistakes!!! Lol being sarcastic.. I'm over it, I'm a a c# developer and will be picking up unity soon as I applaud their response l.
Any public company is a pure money-making machine, dont expect any sincerity or empathy. They will do ANYTHING to get more money. sometimes, they seem nicer, but it all a facade.
Shareholders kill games, as soon as a developer serves share-holders instead of gamers, it's game over. Constantly demanding more profit year-to-year is extremely damaging to a developer's creative freedom and is a super unrealistic expectation.
@@Dunestorm333 not just for games, shareholders and investors demanding constant year on year increases in profit and value are killing the entire world right now. it’s an obviously unsustainable business model and when it fails a handful of people get away mega rich, meanwhile other people lose money and jobs, industries slowly lose experience/expertise, etc. etc.
@@AkaRystikit’s actually worse when companies prioritize expansion over profits. They end up expanding and chewing through resources without any net positives. They end up collapsing. That is even more cancerous.
@@nickcarroll8565 No really. What you are describing is without a doubt really bad, I won't argue against you there. But at least unsustainable expansion doesn't funnel as much money to a small number of people. Both are bad for companies and staff, but only one is disastrous for the economy as a whole.
The thing is Unity fell into the same trap most American businesses are in. Whatever product/service they nominally make/provide is not their true business anymore. Their true product is the stock price. Nothing else.
Take it from a guy who works for the railroad. You are 100% correct. Customers dont matter and the only thing that means anything is how happy the shareholders are
Yep, we stop being the customer as soon as a company goes public, the stockholders and investors are now the customers while we have to ride out the storm or bail out of a sinking ship. The shareholders and investors are only looking for short term gains year over year, they usually drive the company to destruction.
I posted this elsewhere, but the reason small developers, ones who would never ever see the fee, got upset is because Unity may be making a game engine, but they are also selling a dream. Every developer hopes that their game, their little labor of love, is that indie darling that somehow goes viral and sells millions of copies. That is the dream - even if it is incredibly unlikely to happen. With the new fee, those developers now had a cloud in their idyllic dream landscape. If they did become successful, Unity would come back in and go, "Nope, that's ours." It was a tax in every horrible connotation of that word. Add in the initial design that could see developers bankrupted by fraud, the need for Unity to install spyware and other "totally not malicious" software to track installs, and you can see why everyone got upset - not just the "big guys" where the fee was most likely to apply. (That also says nothing of the outright illegal idea to apply the fee retroactively. Kind of wish Unity had gotten smacked down in court for that one just because any lawyer who thought that was a good idea and was stupid enough to sign off on it deserved the loss.)
@Smartcom5 Appreciate the feedback. Wrote this message on my phone and trying to add lind spacing usually ends up causing my RUclips app to screw up. I'll try to see if it works in the future when I can.
You hit the nail on the head. Like America' the actual dream is all the money Unity would be taking from the smaller hobbies devs and disadvantaged artists INSTEAD of the people that can have others bleed from the wallets when they trip.
Most people aren't mad at the policy. Most are mad at the execution and comments made behind closed doors. It ruined trust for a lot of developers, mostly indie devs.
@@DigitalApex the problem whit the new license agreement was that. the devs made there money on the first sell and install. the problem is that most gamers if the game is any good will install the game multiple times over 10+ years. how many time have we not reinstalled HL1 on our PC. me about 12 times... plus the amount of time I messed up a mod install so badly that I thought you know what a complete reinstall of hl1 is easier. and that would be really bad like thing of it you as a dev studio make a game sell it its okey sells well and keep the studio afloat. and then 10 years later you get a massive bill from unity the game that sold 100K copies the first year (40 usd) and then another 200K at (10-20usd when there was a sale over 5 years). then suddenly had a massive reinsurgion because the great mod of year X came out for that game and all 300K copies now reinstalled the game so that they could play it again. and company is bust. the dev had not make any money on that game for 5 years. even worse you are dev you release your game it sells reviews are good the feedback is a few bugs(what that means I leave blank) the tower or ark is oblivious cut short or cut completely because the last sprint (that got readded back in whit the game of the game year release), the crafting system now works properly and dont feel like an afterthought or is who fully underdeveloped. not only did you get an some new sales but you also got alot of reinstall from the day 1 buyer that wanted to try and run the game again (whit all the performance upgrade). if the game was a hit back then you already did the sale and you now bust. if the game sort of failed well hopefully the new wave of sale will cover it. the runtime/install fee have no selling point for the dev or more correctly the only way a dev would want to touch that kind of deal was if they could sell the game and have a one time install, want to reinstall the game later buy it again... and well stop killling game campagn would tear that another one. If I as a gamer saw a game whit you can only install this game ones I would not buy it or pirate it. yes there exist games today whit limit amount of activations (most can by bypass some steam can bypass (might need to call support for it) or you call devs/publisher and have them reset it.
had they just increased the prices of the paid services they had at the time instead of trying to do per install monetization then they would not be going out of business because of a historically huge loss of trust by doing unacceptable retroactive changes
The pricing model was so idiotic. Anyone with business sense should have seen that it made their product unusable to their customers. "Come use out engine!-Maybe, what do you charge?-I dunno!-Uhm what?-It is raaandom!-What?-It depends on what the user do with the game!-That is the stu... Does it at least scale with the income?-Nope!-Then how am I supposed to do budgeting for any product that use it? No thanks!"
Cannot believe you'd believe anything they'd say given they think their own legally binding agreements can just be deleted and retroactively not apply anymore.
Let's look back at the Unity customer experience: Constantly changing their rev-share conditions (this was before the runtime policy). Forced integration with ethically dubious tools. Publicly insults devs with any shread of morality. Announce an abusive policy with no clear system of implementation or accountability. (It felt like they would charge you based on how successful they thought the game is). Threaten the business and livelihoods of almost all customers from solo devs to full studios. Forced people to waste time and scrap assets in order to pivot workflows. Comes crawling back with a fistful of dead roses and a ChatGPT apology, realizing they would be dead without us. Yeh. Combined with Adobe and Microsoft bs, I'm moving all the computing systems I can to an open source base. Not nearly as smooth, but there's no existential blackmail.
@@MonsieurDeVeteran For businesses it was about the Entra ID, and 365 licensing. They basically kept promising more features that on-prem AD had and the convenience of enforceable anywhere policy management. This got a lot of people to move on the promise that it would just be like the current access management, but better. Then once everyone transitioned, locked them behind tiers of licensing that have been steadily rising as "new"(read: new to cloud managed AD) features get locked away. Add in their new draconian contract scheme that prevents you from changing licensing on the fly and you are set with a nicely embossed card that tells small business to kindly jump off a bridge. So many of the small business clients I serviced are being hurt by this. For me it was largely around Win11. It has continually been the center of controversial decisions, features, and straight up bloat. I don't need the OS to do everything under the sun and use all my resources in the process. I don't need it taking pictures of my screen on intervals for "convenience". I don't need it to force me to sign in with a microsoft account on install or go through the command line just to use a local account on install. I need it to get out of my way so that I can decide what I want it to do.
@@MonsieurDeVeteran Probably referencing the originally opt-out Windows 11 "feature" that continually stored snapshots of all your activity ostensibly so you could "rewind" through it... which is obviously alarming from privacy & security perspectives but iirc also speculated to be a veiled mechanism for Microsoft to mass harvest training data it could feed its AI model (itself incidentally the basis of a sketchy & opt-out feature in Windows 11). Then again, maybe referencing the Windows 11 installation/upgrade requirement of registering & linking w/ a Microsoft online user account - circumventable through the command prompt but only kinda, because even if successfully installed offline Windows 11 will continue regularly pestering you to connect your MS account. There's more but the long and short of popular beef w/ Microsoft is that Windows 11's kinda a pile of hot stinky mess nobody asked for squeezed out on top of what's otherwise seemingly just Windows 10. Demonstrates a remarkable lack of foresight for what's supposed to be a reliable vendor of a critical system component.
I hate to tell them but... too late. They proved they were willing (and able) to destroy previous agreements (which said they wouldn't do that), and to make changes at the expense of the end-users. That was when the grim reaper finished sharpening his sickle, and went on the prowl. That was also when a significant portion of their end-users (developers) dropped Unity completely, and moved to a different engine. Those customers are gone now, because realistically, it would cost them more money to return, and potentially face this type of alteration again, than it would to stick with wherever they went, which will probably never have that problem. Godot saw a surge of developers in the aftermath of the Unity debacle, and Unreal probably did too. Unity is a backburner option at best now, and the company 100% screwed themselves over completely with the runtime fee nonsense. They deserved the backlash, and they deserve the fallout.
It was the logical end. Look at Unity 2018. Free education programs. Free games to code with tutorials kept active. Millions of free assets. Built in free integration with unity marketplace. Now? May have to pay for the software. Next to no free assets. The free games are mostly for two+ versions ago. Tutorials have died because the creator ecosystem existed because it was free. Long live Godot for free dev, long live UE for corporate efficiency
The Ferrari statement just makes my blood boil. Ferrari operates that way because letting the creative juices flow and creating beautiful cars makes them a shit ton of money. Not from the cars themselves, but the feeling those cars create. They make their money off the Ferrari brand. Merch, models, the "idea" of Ferrari. The fact that executives can't see that is exactly what's wrong with the gaming industry. And the car industry too. So many brands killed off their hero cars because they weren't profitable and wondered why they lost even more money. Because those cars showed off what they could do. The Lancer Evo moved tens of thousands of base Mitsubishi Lancers, for example. When they killed it, Mitsubishi the car company essentially died in the eyes of the public.
You are not wrong. I bought a lancer ES because it was the "evo" i could afford at the time back in '12. Now that I can afford it and I am looking for something better, the vehicle i wanted is long gone they have absolutely nothing else of value to me. Its such a shame...
amazingly said. once bean counters looked at things like the lancer evo and saw that it caused a negative number on the sheets, they axe it without thinking and then wonder why everything else starts failing. same with all the other companies that went public and then choked on their own drive for immediate profit
@@gamerscomplete then again, valve has unlimited money and time due to owning the entire pc market with their storefront. what your saying is still 100% correct but not exactly the best example to demonstrate that
Don't go public. But also, don't hire a former CEO whose crowning achievement was driving one of the biggest gaming companies on Earth into a 20 year low point. The scary thing is, there are people who STILL want to hire him.
@@ImNotFine44 they own the entire pc market because they prioritize making their customers happy instead of stock holders happy at quarterly earnings announcements. that results in more customers and more profits, but stock market short term greed cant cope with long term investment in the company of focusing on what your customers want over immediate profits
The rot is still on the board and they have their talons in Unity via contracts. They've only changed their figure head, the skilled people are gone, their dev made tutorials, support and ideas departments are all gone too. The only places they are investing into are tracking and mobile ads. I wouldn't go back, they will bite you a second time.
@sav9737 Discord was always planning on going public. People need to understand that these tech startups are explicitly designed to be as attractive as possible so that they can capture an audience and use that to make a ton of money by drawing in investors with hopes of monetizing them. Discord isn't profitable currently, and it never will be because right now it's too generous to free users. The idea is for the people who started it to develop it to the point where they can cash out and move on while the shareholders run things into the ground trying to suck every dollar out of it. Make use of these products while they're still good, but don't invest so heavily into them that you can't pull out when they degenerate.
Fear is the biggest reason why developers aren't going to use unity again. Imagine developing games for more than a year then suddenly unity got greedy again, and doomed your hardwork, you have to deal with it or restart all over again in other engine, make you even more stressed out.
As an aspiring Indie dev: the trust is gone. I was fortunate enough that during brainstorming for my current project the whole thing went down so i was lucky enough to be able to switch to Godot with minimal effort. I just do not want to use an engine where the presedent has been set that my contract with said engine may be randomly altered to my detrement. If you where a logistics company and years later went to the stores you stock with wares and than go and say: btw i retroactively want 20ct for every item you sold that i provided you. They are gonna look at you and tell you to F off aswell.
Omg a fellow Godot user!!! I love open-source stuff!! That was the exact reason I switched to Godot too. I considered Unreal for just a split second before trashing that idea lol. I absolutely love the idea that I could put 30 years of experience into Godot, and i'll never have my career uprooted over night by some awful TOS change, like Unity or Unreal. That career security was why I chose Godot, and will likely be using it for decades. I'm worried about the people who switched from Unity to Unreal. Good for them that they switched off of Unity, but nothing is stopping Epic Games from pulling the same kind of shady TOS changes that can ruin a game designer's career overnight. I can only hope that Epic Games won't ruin the lives of indie devs 10 or so years from now, just like how Unity did. Instead i'll just be using Godot.
Exactly. If a company proves that they can be taken over by a John Riccitello, unless they do some serious restructuring then you will ALWAYS have the opportunity to get ANOTHER John Riccitello type of guy running your company. Even after serious restructuring, you can never remove that iconic Riccitello stain either.
"Back to the start" ... Except much lighter. Hundreds or even thousands of gamedevs have migrated their games to different engines already, and I don't think they are going to migrate back. Their trust had been burnt. With how easy Unity changed the licensing agreement -- and even forcing a retroactive licensing fee -- gamedevs will see this as just a trap.
Personally, i've been using Godot and I really recommend it, it's great. The main reason I made the switch from Unity to Godot was because Unity announced a huge terrible change out of nowhere that could ruin any potential game-making career and would be easy to exploit by bad actors. Unreal seems nice, but at the end of the day, Epic Games is just another giant company concerned with profits above all, just like Unity. Godot is open-source and they can't force you into some bogus TOS changes that uproot your entire career. Godot has also been getting more advanced over time too. Whatever you make in Godot you have complete control over, and you'll never need to worry about a TOS change suddenly uprooting your entire career over-night because of out-of-touch executives and shareholders. I never looked back when making the switch to Godot, I absolutely love open-source programs.
Business grads in today's age seem to have forgotten the most important currency isn't USD. It's trust/goodwill. You can always make money back. Once you betray trust, it's almost never coming back.
Kinda like what happened with Boeing lol. Boeing was an esteemed company because it was ran by engineers. Then a bunch of morally-bankrupt hotshot business grad losers took over the company and started running it into the ground. I mean, just a few years ago people either loved Boeing or just didn't think about them. Now because of the work of those awful hotshots and their corner-cutting that infamously led to the planes falling apart, the name Boeing is forever tainted, one of the most common searches about airplanes is "where to fly in planes that arent made by boeing" It's true, business grads are morally bankrupt and forgot that it's about trust and long-term relationships (aka long term profit) not just short-term profit by any means necessary.
@@kranichkrone SimCity was single player game that required to be always online. They added few multiplayer features, that required coop between different players, but it made game terrible. Maps were really small, and they argued that it's because game engine wouldn't handle bigger ones. They also said, that it would be impossible to remove "always online" requirement, because of the way that game works. It was all bullshit, moders proved that game can run easily in offline mode, and engine can handle bigger maps. That's more or less what was situation, but it was years ago so I may be missing some details.
@@kranichkrone He was CEO of EA between1997 to 2004 and 2007 to 2014. He is THE reason EA is so hated. He's the mastermind of their studio-slaying spree of the 90s and 2000s. He's also partly responsible for why many games are such a greedy mess today. SimCity 2013 was particularly infamous because it was online-only and worse than its predecessors by a long margin. EA won the Consumerist's Golden Poo two years in a row due to his mismanagement.
He was just the fall guy, the board of directors was the issue. The board of directors used him as bait as they knew people would go after him instead of them. People took the bait hook line and sinker. They got rid of people, but the board of directors are all still there.
@damsen978 you're going to have to Google search as there is not a single source I can direct you towards. A lot on reddit and other places even a few videos when this initially took place a year ago.
@damsen978 RUclips keeps shadow banning my comment. But you're going to have to do your own leg work unfortunately. Just look at who is on the board of directors as a start.
It’s not just gaming companies that used Unity. At my last job (before the company folded in April), the app they were prepping for their upcoming product was powered by Unity. So other companies were using it too. So they definitely wanted money not just from indie devs who make feee games, but from developers who have free apps that link to other subscriptions. So that’s what they were really going after.
@b33lze6u6 vengeance is an act. I plan to DO exactly nothing. I just won't forgive them. And "gay bugs." I have absolutely no idea where you came up with that. If you have played Hollow Knight or seen literally anything about Silk Song and "gay bugs" was your take way. Then you have actual problems. And you really need to seek professional help.
@@renmcmanus I've not played HK but isn't the main character just a little void bug with no mention of sexuality? Like most things in that game are kinda ambiguous in terms of sex other than the town hub characters for familiarity and the _banker._ It does not matter in game right?
@HazeEmry you are quite correct the main character is completely genderless because it is not "living" in a biological sense. There are a handful of characters with spasific genders. But there are only a few times when gender is relevant in any way. Such as the Pale King having hundreds of children with the Pale Lady. Or his one child with Hara the beast. There are exactly one and a half non straight relationships in the game. The first is the Gray Mourner and the daughter of the mantis traitor lord. This is from a side quest. And you wouldn't know either of their true identities or genders unless you literally research them. And read information outside of the game. Neither the game itself nor any of the external information makes a big deal about it. Or even elaborates in any way beyond saying they loved each other. The other half is a completely unfounded fan theory that isn't worth explaining. So as you can see. The game is hardly about "gay bugs" and the one time it is in the game is tasteful. And in no way pushing an agenda.
@@HazeEmryas someone who doesn't like those propagandist and who's actually played hollow knight. I'll say : it's a bug . It doesn't need to show what gender it is. But if you want to know it does portrait a male like figure. Also there's not any propaganda in the game. There's several male & female characters. So far I have yet to encounter a gay bug. The game is actually really good. If you love dark souls you'll love it too. But if they decide to add those shit ideas to silk song then the community will let it sink .
Demanding a fee per each install is nuts. The most popular mobile games are F2P, and this absolutely guts this model, as Unity would be demanding a fee to be taken from the people who didn't pay anything for the game = direct losses for the devs. Imagine alienating the most popular, most profitable and most wide segment of the gaming market.
It's really no surprise that the general public reacted like it did. People are soooooo tired of corporations trying to take exploit everyone and everything.
I had to move a 17 month project from unity to godot. Required me to pay 66k+ over this year to hire 3 guys to help convert it all. Worst part is. I had to let go 3 guys for 3 other guys due to unity policy. I was directly impacted and so was my past employees
@yourmajesty9025my thoughts too. Unless higher-ups said absolutely not to using it, or this is an 8-yo long Concord-like project, I don’t see why they wouldn’t just finish on Unity after 17 months.
"Going public" means "we will stop at nothing to get as much money out of our customers as we possibly can to make our next quarter look good". Whenever a company "goes public", that's your signal to "go somewhere else". I bet they are investing a lot of money into making the "rug" more slippery, so that next time developers don't notice it being pulled from under them.
Yup. That's when the original customers become the product, and the shareholders become the new customers. And every moment is dedicated to finding new ways to squeeze increasing numbers on quarterly reports out of you.
I heard Discord is going to go public fairly soon. I can only imagine how much of a nightmare that's going to be in the coming years. As if they didn't try to squeeze us for every penny already, now it's going to get exponentially worse as shareholders will inevitably ask Discord "I just invested money into this. Where's my profit?"
"heads have rolled" means nothing, they are all millionaire CEOs that don't care much where they work, and they will just be replaced by nearly the same people.
No heads have rolled. All heads remain firmly attached to torso. I'm tired of all the hyperbole. I'm "don't recommend channel" option these people. It's just trying to pump up stories that aren't even worth talking about more than 30 seconds.
Yeah heads have rolled, but the board of directors have remained in place, it was all the board of directors doing, the rolling heads was just a scapegoat.
In EU if you destroyed a company you are barred from holding director role ever again, that's good extremely based EU is. There are consequences to fucking Up
It's only the job where even if you've failed, you would still get rewarded. CEOs get golden parachutes that stated if they somehow got fired, they would receive compensations.
Yeah, it's possible for some businesses to get away with breaking trust if it's the kind of thing that can easily be switched away from (ie. if you're just selling some product and they later change their terms to something dumb then you just stop buying their product and switch to something else - even if you wouldn't be thrilled that they're not trustworthy, you wouldn't really suffer any big losses by only switching once they do something stupid).. but when it comes to game developers, they often need to plan years in advance - they can't just switch to a different engine mid way through development without adding a whole lot of extra work, and in those kinds of contexts it's really, really hard to overlook an untrustworthy game engine.
@@asdfqwerty14587Exactly. It’s one thing for me to buy a different cat litter if one turns out poorly. My cat won’t like it, but it’ll get used to it in a few days. It’s something completely different if I’m working on an extensive Excel document with dozens of calculations/formulas and suddenly I have to switch everything to Google Sheets. Crazy amount of work.
It also doesn't solve the fundamental problem of how and why we got here. If the thing we as devs use Unity for doesn't actually make money to continue the engine's existence and ongoing support then either it will have to pivot models again or go out of business. And that's before considering the fact that your average shareholder has the brain of an iPad baby and thinks if every quarter doesn't see an increase in everything the company is on life support. I'd like to imagine Unity will get a lucky break but we're seeing the red flags.
Yeah no, there are still too many unity user and they consider this a good news. Of course they will be more cautious just in case there's another backstab, but they aren't leaving just yet,
Here’s my problem: Why are we celebrating getting rid of the runtime fee NOW? It’s already been nerfed to the point where it was just neutral or positive for devs, pick whichever fee was lower. Now they’re removing that choice and on top of that hiking prices and everyone’s blowing the trumpets like this is some huge victory? Unity has an incredible amount of work to do before I’d ever consider using them again… and unless I’m misunderstanding the layoffs hit their dev team too, it’s not like they fired all the bean counters and the people who decided to hire Johnny boy in the first place.
He was hired. He made a loooots of money for himself. Ruined the company. And basically got 1800 staff fired because of it. In the meantime made a lots of money on the stocks as well. What is the downside of this for him? Nothing. Not a damn thing. But hey, noone cares how 1800 people got laid off...
Need everyone to understand something here Once a company goes public, the CEO is now beholden to and takes orders from the Shareholders. This is not by choice. This is by law. By law, once public, the CEO gains Feduciary responsibility to the Shareholders to make As Much Profit As Possible If, at any point, the Shareholders feel that is *not* what leadership is doing, they can unilaterially remove said leadership, hand pick the replacement, and possibly sue the company for the gains they felt they were denied. This is why CEOs implament terrible ideas from shareholder calls-- they got the person's balls in a vice because our government GIVES LEGAL CONTROL AND ALL POWER to the shareholders once a company is public. The CEO is just the cop.
Yeah, and that didn't happen here because Unity took a massive hit for this horrendous implementation. Trying to satisfy shareholders by increasing profits would be the opposite of what happened... Having happy customers and good brand identity would most certainly benefit profit and shareholders more than alienating their users.. What you're saying is contradicting the outcome. Happy paying customers -> increased profit -> happy shareholders. Going public isn't some "evil elite devil move."
This is absolutely correct. Corporations are not evil, Public Corporations are evil. They are technically sociopathic, because they are legally required to make as much money as possible.
UE takes 5% from games making over $1 million, and they're doing fine, Unity could just do something similar, but had to do something insane instead...
@@ussassu Unreal is owned by Epic Games, which is a gaming company and still is not profitable (said by the verge on 6 nov 2023, I am not sure but some other reports suggests same is true for 2024 as well) same as Unity. So their model only works if the company have some other means to earn money and Unity unfortunately can't follow the same path.
Unity's pricing is a lot cheaper than Unreal's, if you have full-time devs (with maybe some corner cases in developing countries where Unreal is cheaper). It really goes to show how overcomplicating it made Unity's pricing less appealing.
@@rajshashank202 Epic also makes a lot of other questionable financial decisions. Like giving out a ton of dev grants, charging a hilariously low platform fee, spending more on court battles against Apple than they would've just paying out the app store fee (though this is definitely a good thing and I'm glad someone tried to fight this battle), buying an entire abandoned mall to construct a new office then not building anything, paying a fine for not doing anything with the lot, etc. The engine itself though, definitely gets some help from the fact that a lot of the R&D that goes into it is for Fortnite. Engine development pushes Fortnite forward, then proceeds can come from Fortnite back into the engine. Kinda like how Croteam has Serious Engine and the Serious Sam series, Bethesda has Creation Engine and their games made on it, Valve has source, etc. Most game engines are made so that the companies themselves can make games with it. The ones that don't... Gamemaker gets it's financial support from Opera (which, while at the moment seems innocent, Gamemaker says they have free reign to develop their engine as they like, and even stopped doing the monthly sub thing, but it seems like a "too good to be true" thing that probably wont last forever), and Godot benefits from being free and open source, supported by donations. Unity is an outlier, so their motive was to spin into the ad market (and who knows what they plan on trying now.)
@@rajshashank202 The Verge was reporting on the Epic Games *_Store_* not being profitable. Profits from Unreal Engine (and Fortnite) are subsidizing that. They've been making Unreal Engine for decades, licensing it out has been their main source of revenue for most of Epic Games' history.
@@EonwulfGames it was 2.5% of revenue, not 10%. However, that was 2.5% on top of $2000/seat-year. Which would have been cheaper than 5% for pretty much any dev big enough to have to pay it.
@@stupidburp "I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it further." *switches to Godot* "I have un-altered the deal. I pray that you come back and I pinky promise I won't alter the deal again." -Unity
It looks like things are really moving forward in the PC space. Linux has been getting a lot of support and love too. I already use Godot and plan to use Linux in the coming years when more games and apps I use support it. Using an open-source OS to make a living off of making games in an open-source game engine... what a dream come true. 😌
Nah, if he cheats me again, its still on him. He still chose to do it. And lied when promising not to do it again. Always shame on the person who chose to do harm.
@@loorthedarkelf8353you are right, which is why the saying is supposed to be "fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me." It's not the fault that changes sides, it's the shame.
@loorthedarkelf8353 The saying is meant to userline that it was stupid to trust a 2nd time. That's why past actions are the best indicator of future actions.
The required splash screen was long overdue for removal. It was good for getting their name out in the beginning, but at this point it's spent over a decade making the Unity logo synonymous with shovelware garbage. Because that's when you see the logo.
That was true for a long time. Just when I started to see a consistent spree of good low budget games that show the Unity splashscreen, they decided to have a scandal. I remember talking to my boss about it when they first revealed their dumb plan.
@@baseddepartment9656 Yup. I know plenty of people thought Unity was a publisher rather than the engine, and they assumed all they did was publish shovelware.
Yes. Let people use the version they have with the terms they agreed to. If they changed prices and made things more expensive that just happens. In economics this is common and just kinda sucks. It was the scummy rug pull nature of these changes that really made my opinion of them totally sour.
'I know, let's hire an ex EA CEO Harvard business grad and put them in charge. They know nothing about programing languages or game engines, but Harvard business!' Yeah, never hire Harvard business or econ. Or poli-sci.
@@rorschacht8478 I'm not defending Unity here, but ofc it doesn't. But there are a lot of people who think that math = coding. It isn't. I have a 5 year CS degree and we studied a lot of math for various reasons, but the amount of people from school who use any kind of proper math in their jobs is miniscule. I happen to use some, since I'm in computer security. But even even then it's limited to cryptography. And it's mostly for understanding background. Almost nobody sits with f'ing high level math in their day-to-day activities. In fact in my engineering school(which is a pretty good one, globally) , the people who got the far worst results in math out of everyone were the CS students. It's kind of a point of pride even.
@@rorschacht8478 They don't, but they must know enough to understand the business and how programming works, what is possible and what is not and how much effort is needed to achieve what is possible.
The coding course I stopped a while ago was using Unity to teach begginners how to code, i think I'll eventually pick it up again and finish but after that I'll never touch unity again, I'll go straight to godot, i'd rather learn unreal engine than trust unity again.
The sad part is that, in the end, it's the employees and developers who pay for the poor decisions made by management. Thousands of families left adrift-I hope they can find a way to recover.
I'm one of the people who lost their jobs at Unity in May 2023. There were around 600 of us at that time, and I think it was the third wave. As soon as they mentioned the IronSource merger internally, I thought it was a terrible idea, but who cares about employees' opinions, right? Shortly after the merger, they removed all the fun and practical employee benefits that made Unity interesting, and a few months later, the layoffs started. There are so many other things that didn't make sense, but I guess not many of us spoke about it. Anyway
"Essentially malware" describes everything from IronShart to Windows 11 to every single new car's software, these days. What a time to be alive. Edit: Also, I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for anyone who stayed with Unity after the IronShite announcement. It was a corporation making its future plans abundantly clear. Trusting a corporation - _any_ corporation - these days is the absolute pinnacle of stupidity. No company wants anything but your money. This has never been truer than today.
@damsen978 Well, windows 11 was the cutoff for local accounts on the pc, if i remember right. Like, you have to not be connected to the internet in order to be allowed to have a local account set up. I'm still on 10 but because of 11 have to keep saying no to backing up my computer to one drive. They want me to be signed in and have a copy of my computer. 11 also introduced copilot, which i don't think anyone has actually enjoyed using on their pc. Additionally, 11 introduced the recall feature, where they take a screenshot of your display every few minutes and keep it unencrypted on your pc while you're logged in. This means any personal info you have at any point on your pc would be ripe for the taking, such as bank details, if your computer happens to take the screenshot at that time, and hold onto it for an unknown amount of time. After much backlash, they said they would make it opt-in instead of opt-out, and i think they pushed back the release of the feature as of a few months ago Win11 also lead to many issues when upgrading from 10 (i think it broke one of my friend's pc because it didn't install correctly back when it first came out and it turned out it was not that uncommon of an issue) My work computer forced the upgrade earlier this year and i've gotten more used to it but still dislike it. I hated it a lot more when i first got it and had to reset things to look like how i would use them, and i do still with relative frequency click where the power options used to be in the menu.
@damsen978 Windows 11 is definitely better than Windows 10, unless you're actually paying even a shred of attention. Windows 11 should be considered malware. I'm kinda glad though. I've been trying to make the switch to Linux full time for so many years. Windows 10 going EoL is just the kick I needed to actually do it. Thankfully, gaming on Linux has been getting a ton more support in recent years.
@damsen978win11 at it's core is basically win10 with a more Mac looking skin It changes both not enough of what people wanted and too much noone asked for, which is why it took until now for it to overtake 10 in terms of market share Some of it is also just people overreacting like the SSD requirement A lot of it is also just the general hate MS has been getting, especially recently with their AI stuff
@@HDL_CinC_Dragon Linux support has been the main thing holding me back from jumping ship from Windows 10 to Linux. My wife uses Linux and it's a real pain when I just wanna play a game with her but something always goes wrong because the game we wanted to play bugs out on her OS. I'm so glad Linux has been getting more support in games recently. Although I don't use Linux YET, I plan to switch once more games are supported by it so I can always do game nights with family and friends with no hassle. Even though I don't currently use Linux, i'm rooting for them. It makes me so happy to see an open source OS get so much support recently, and that support is only growing. More games supporting it, and the OS becoming easier to set up and use, it makes me happy for the future of personal computers. :')
They made the right move, but its too late. It took them a year to unfuck their pricing, but the platform itself is still fucked. You said it yourself, traditional devs were at the end of their rope with the platform and this was the breaking point for a lot of concerns. They still haven't fixed most of their tech stack, its still a mess of outdated optional include packages for beta's that never end for basic functionality they still haven't finished, and its just awful to work with. I moved to Godot for 2d work because of the cost change, but I've stayed because the engines actually good. Now Unity has to try and win developers like me back off the back of an aging tech stack I have to pay for the privilege of fight the tools in. Hopefully they take this revenue bump from the price change and reinvest it into actually finishing all the stuff they started for hype, and never polished off.
I called them out for breaking a store policy when he was CEO.... In RETURN they rewarded me by "fixing" their policies and deprecating all my store assets without notice! Luckily, things have changed since the day Riccitiello left.
"You may continue your current version of the software under the previously agreed terms" So in other words, they agreed to honor the terms people agreed to, which is literally the bare minimum expected
yeah so TLDR here my friends & I a team of 16 had an RTS/Factory sim/Hero RPG game nearly ready to push to steam built in unity & then this shit happened with unity & we ended up DELETING all the work & abandoning UNITY because this runtime fee would KILL US I have advanced medical issues to the tune of $2,000 a month & I'm on social assistance so that's free but after we launched we'd form a company & we did the math UNITY Fee's would crush profits to the point we'd be heavy in the negative... & that's just me the other 15 people have families to support. Now we're still looking at rebuilding in godot or even UE5 & dealing with EPIC's BS management cause at least them we'd be supporting ourselves & able to make more stuff.
I can't recommend Godot enough, it's a fantastic choice. There's a bit of a misconception that Godot is only for primitive 2D games, but imo that's a false rumor based off of earlier, more primitive models of Godot. Current Godot can most certainly do 3D games amazingly now. A good example is the indie game Road to Vostok, which if I recall correctly is being made by 1 man. Godot is open-source and is improving over-time. You'll never have to worry about sudden TOS changes because there isn't any TOS to use the engine and sell games in the first place. I used to make games in ROBLOX as a kid, tried out Unity right before the fiasco, then switched to Godot and haven't looked back. Although Godot isn't super advanced yet and isn't really used to make big budget AAA games, I still highly recommend it because you have complete control over your product and how you sell your product. No CEO can suddenly step in and tell you the rules have changed and you have to fork over a bunch of money. No CEO can suddenly force you to pay some huge subscription, big fees, or force you to install an update that only makes the program worse. That's why I love Godot.
If Unity was smarter (not that I want them to get better at gouging their devs) they would have kept the price they charged their devs per install extremely low and reasonable at first, and slowly raised the price over time, getting people used to the charge before raising the temperature, like the old adage about a frog in a boiling pot. I'm kind of glad that they were so greedy, that they went right for the jugular right away, pissed off a TON of people, and got a backlash so bad that it tanked the entire endeavor! Now that this precedent has been set, everyone will be on the lookout for this kind of behavior in the future, and can point to this attempt any time this is tried in the future, anywhere.
I remember pivoting my game development from unity when this happened. Even though my indie game (a little Roman inspired city builder - Glory of Rome) on steam wouldn't be primarily affected, the principal of the changes and the overall industry impact was super off-putting! It's going to take ages to get past the feeling of betrayal from unity and I'll always be a bit apprehensive going forward
We need more competition in the game engine industry. I feel like it's a bottleneck holding back the game industry itself. I can't imagine designing a programming language is as fun as making games, tho.
There's actually tons of engines out there, and a fair amount of them are free to use (Godot, Flax, etc). It's just that, before the Unity situation, you rarely hear about anything other than Unreal and Unity. Thankfully, the Unity fiasco has changed that a bit and people are realizing there's lot of alternatives out there depending on your needs. Heck, the amount of money Godot has for development doubled over night from the Unity thing and I think since then it has only grown more and more.
Just gone through a similar thing in corporate IT with Synology. After standardizing on their storage systems for years, they have been increasingly restricting their devices, forcing customers to use only their own overpriced, Synology-branded disk drives. It was a painful process, but we've pulled off the band aid and successfully switched to an open storage platform. It feels great, like standing up to a bully. There is literally nothing they could ever do to win our business back.
I'm typing this during the opening, but any developer who would consider going back is asking to be hurt. Also, the Unity debacle is what led me to you as a dev focused view of the industry, to sit aside Steph Sterling taking a more "pop" take on the consumer perspective.
Yeah, Steph has warned everyone for decades now about the crap that's finally starting to fall off the ceiling and onto their faces, I appreciate that she's become so jaded about the business of games, but it's nice to have a perspective that isn't quite as blackpilled as me or her.
Unity Trust, before going public: 120%, everywhere you look there are goodwill endorsements from old devs to new devs to check out the engine and its platforms. Unity Trust, after going public: 90%, Nobody really discredits it, but there are doubts about ironsource and the reputation of the engine is declining from shovelware mobile titles. Unity Trust, after Runtime Fee: 20%, Everyone in the circle couldn't believe their eyes, like looking at your parents burning down your house and asking for rent. Unity Trust, now? Haha, hovering above 10% I suppose. Anyone that 'was there' when this debacle happened will always have a doubt and never endorse the platform for newcomers.
with unreal and godot available with some reputation, unity is looking for a slow death. if you are a unity shareholder, this is your signal now to jump ship.
Regarding sponsors. I really want to thank you for just having a logo on the sponsored segments. A lot of channels are flaky about this. Jumping into any part of the video it must be completely clear if a segment is sponsored or not. ..... as an extra I love when there is a timer, but I do of course concede that that is because it makes it easier to skip.
My favorite part is when the sponsor is a standalone chapter which makes it even easier to skip, because there's already a built in feature to skip to the next chapter in RUclips. I have sponsorblock on my PC, but I can't use such a thing on mobile, so I really appreciate youtubers that make my viewing experience easier on mobile. On a sidenote, I absolutely despise when creators try to make a "clever" segue into a sponsor and make it extremely hard to tell when the sponsor starts and ends. Like when they string you along some elaborate story and then pull the rug out from under you to reveal the entire story was just to plug an annoying sponsor. And I hate how other people seem to think it's "clever" and "funny" to make an invisible segue to a sponsor that completely ruins the flow of the video. RUclipsrs like that are insufferable in my eyes.
Companies don't choose where people spend their money. Customers do. A market leader has SOME degree of freedom over steering those customers, but they should never forget their place at the end of the day. Unity did and they learned that lesson hard.
Unity made a handful of mistakes. One of them was buying up useless firms like Parsec or Weta, this didnt help them at all. In terms of improving the engine they had an internal project called Gigaya, which would've helped Unity devs understand where issues lie with Unitys current workflow, what needs to improve and would also double as an awesome demo to learn from vs. regular simple tech demos, as this was supposed to be an actual game. They also hired Mr. Stracciatello, who litteraly was fired at EA for terrible business decisions, man what a great person to hire. All of this made Unitys past successful attempts of actually improving the engine, like IL2CPP, Burst Compiler, DOTS and RT support mean nothing and heavily ruined the connection to many devs out there. Unity isnt gone today, but this left a stain for sure.
Weta is far from being useless. They are still one of the top vfx studios in the world. There was a lot of potential for them working with Unity and bringing their tools to game developers.
I can understand a company getting away with something like this if they essentially have no competition but what the hell did they expect would happen in a space with many competitors? I feel sorry for the normal employees who constantly get screwed over by financial executives. They should never hold decision making roles.
"Back where they started" is far too generous, imo. If I ever got into indie development, one of my first questions would be "what was that one engine that tried to extort all its users? Let's avoid them at all costs." They've publicly disgraced themselves in a way that nobody will forget and that might be the main thing they're remembered for if their plan is to try to quietly pretend it never happened.
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If Unity wanted to try monetize their core business then in my opinion they should finance indie developers in return for a slice of the profits and extra support with unity products for the development. They could have had something if they just nurtured their own user base and I am sure there would be a lot of brilliant new games proudly sporting Unity by first time developers that never would have taken the plunge or succeeded without having their development compensated. Unity could even have taken a larger slice than Valve is and people would still thank them for investing into new up and coming developers.
Oh, hell yes, if I could get a grant, subsidy, or sponsorship I'd be able to go full time indie a few years ahead of schedule instead of working full time and trying to squeeze in home dev between family requirements.
I've no idea how good Unity is from a dev stand point, but after pulling a stunt like that who would be mad enough to buid an entire project around this engine without set in stone guarantees to be protected from futur moronic decisions...
Unity has clearly cut investments in making the engine better. Mass firings are the focus on non core businesses likely is going to lead to a mostly frozen software product. Which means that Unreal will widen their lead on features and Godot will catch up to parity with Unity in features in a finite amount of time. There will be a shrinking of loyalists who are committed to their paid assets and knowledge baee and are unwilling or unable to leave. Over time Unity is only going to be less competitive.
Yep, run time fee wouldn't affect me but 3 things got me to not want to partner with Unity: 1. Invasive requirement and tracking of my development by forcing me to be online while developing as they tracked my data. 2. DOTs release was a joke, a mess and attacked the core reason to use Unity by instead of speeding up dev time slowed it down drastically. 3. Tyrant like changes to TOS and expecting that I had no where else to go anyway. Yeah the whole firing of their internal devs en masse was not cool, but I think that was just a lowering of their damage resist by the time they gave themselves the fatal blow.
I've gotten used to Godot already and I'm not going back lol This whole thing reminded me again to avoid proprietary software as much as possible. Corporations will always fuck things up for more profit.
The fact that they have applied that fee on developers retroactively is a breach of trust that is impossible to reverse. The damage is done, and no one can say they won't try that again in the future.
While I still don't trust the company further than I could throw their tax-evading HQ I still use Unity because it's the best mid-tier engine solution. I use Godot for jams, Unity for mobile and personal projects, and Unreal for serious business. It feels like that's just the ecosystem of engines right now.
For the 2024 GMTK Game Jam, Unity was used for 43% of submission while Godot was used for 37% of submission. Unity was down by over 10% from the previous year. Godot will surpass Unity next year. Do not discredit Godot. Godot is the Blender of game engines right now. *GODOT IS THE FURTURE* 100% Free. 100% Open Source. 100% Community Driven.
It's so sad, because pre- going public, it was a fantastic company. Then Riccitiello came in and slashed the AI branch, slashed the demo games showing off features, and dumping billions in acquiring other companies instead of innovating.
Trying to find a comprehensive take on the runtime fee story was how I found this channel! Hope they can make a worthwhile difference, we need something positive in the industry for a change
They made me change engine, and lose a lot of progress and had to learn things all over, never going back. Godot is free and open source, just need more documentation and tutorials.
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Unity got purchased by the Military and then dumped on its domestic market.
@BellularNews is the sponsor's lessons only in py or do they offer other languages like c#, java, etc?
what they don't realize is that if the company is making huge amounts of money unity needs them not the other way around. with enough resources an engine switch while extremely difficult can still be done.
@@mnemonix1315 Look at the business logic, though. "With enough resources" is meaningless. What matters is whether the expenditure is profitable or not, and basically reimplementing the game from scratch, investing a couple of years worth of man hours to build everything, including asset pipelines, just to get to the present state of the game, not adding anything at all to the game... I struggle to imagine cases where that business logic would make sense.
I suspect the bigger question is whether companies will commit to future projects in Unity, not whether they'll try and engine switch their existing project.
LOL, I found this video, and saw Bootdev, and I got excited since I have been looking for coders for a while to help me make a game, (nobody was intrested) but 5 minutes in the Founder of it, said asking for stuff is against the rules, who I didnt really care since I was gonna leave, but then since I said I dont care, he said "yep easy ban" and it reminded be of a guy I knew who plays DND who is the type of guy that if you disargreed with him, you get banned from the game, which was exactly like this, and the funny part was another guy messaged the puppet meme, like they KNEW he was gonna ban me almost like he has done that WAY too many times. anyway that guy was quite rude and I would not recommend Boot, since if the Founder is a massive jerk then it might not be the best place for a newbie or really anyone, no offense Bellular News, great ya got money,
Remember that Riccitiello was also the genius who suggested that they should make people pay a fee every time they reloaded their guns.
He’s not the one who came up with this.
If you think about it, it’s basically what some arcade machines did. Arcade is dead now of course.
eh, thats kind of out of context - he was describing how it MTX are the way to go as it much easier to sell someone a small fee to get rid of an inconvenience multiple times than a complete game. I would say he is pretty damn right too about MTX.
This literally cannot be true.
@@zalternative1He said it during a meeting with investors years ago iirc
“We are sorry our policies lost us a lot of money”
It would be a shame, if your golden goose can no longer lay an egg after what you did to your business 'customers'.
Hopefully they get sued by their investors.
We are sorry you as a service consumer for once stood up to our moneygrabbing.
The one time the apologies are sincere
Or another take, "We are sorry you weren't stupid enough to buy our bullshit"
Don't forget how they removed the ToS from their website, saying "nobody looked at it anyways". I can forgive incompetence once the other side shows they are willing to improve and fix the issue. Intentional malice, however, I can't.
Maybe if it were just a ToS it might've worked, but that was there as a signal and assurance because they'd tried changing agreements previously. Everything last year was deliberate and they apparently thought they could pull it off. I'm still stuck using it though I'd rather change to get further away from the investment bankers calling the shots.
The funny thing was, they also pulled down the Git repo with the old ToS. The same Git repo that they set up the first time they tried to change the ToS behind people's backs. It's almost like when a company tries something, it's because they expect that the increased profits will be worth the backlash they suffer. Basically, if a company does something, never trust them if they roll back a change. They're only rolling back because they're waiting to try again.
How to legally invalidate your TOS across europe 101.
@@alexlowe2054 what pisses me off are the unity defenders who told everyone 99% of devs won't be successful enough to be affected anyways and then gloats as if they contributed to unity backtracking.
Correction: They removed the GitHub repository with their ToS. It was still on their website - it had to, after all. But they removed the git repo where you can very easily see changes, in hopes that people wouldn't notice the fact that they quietly removed the term stating that any version of Unity you use will always be usable under the terms you originally agreed with.
I think one reason why people rejected this so hard even when it didn't immediately affect them was the fear that other companies would do similar monetization strategies all over if this succeeded.
Bingo ! People didn't want more bullshit from companies.
The reason people rejected it so hard is that it was such a massive breach of trust. It didn't affect them much then, but at any point in the future Unity could change that.
Adobe has pulling shit like this since ages.
But adobe is only for companies. No indie creator pays for it.
Well, it kind of would affect us all. It would have made a lot of existing small and indie studios go bankrupt, since many of them were using Unity. It also would have made free games completely impossible, including the already existing ones. I forget the exact numbers but I remember one indie dev did the math and said he'd owe Unity some crazy 6 or 7 figure number each month for his game that was pretty much free for people to play. I'm glad Unity took the hit they did. Hopefully it's a lesson that a lot of other companies listen to.
The big problem is that unlike Business-2-Consumer (B2C), Business-2-Business (B2B) is built on trust. You don't build a company on a foundation that is shaky, and Unity has proven they will RETROACTIVELY CHANGE CONTRACTS. They are absolutely untrustworthy. Are you really going to sink YEARS into building a game on Unity when they might just pull the rug one day and completely screw you over? Even if Godot is not as advanced as Unity at this point. At least a completely open source engine with no ability to drag your company down, is a better choice to build a game on. In fact, Second Dinner, the developers who make Marvel Snap, are working with Godot to make tools they need, because their next game is being built on Godot.
They've also repeated this offense, after making gestures to acknowledge how bad it was and promises they wouldn't.
@@Shinius exactly, pouring money on Godot is gonna improve it and make it better, pouring money on unity gonna only blow on tour face
The hilarious irony is, B2B is a corporate myth. All business is to consumer, even if Company X only makes widgets that Company A uses in their final product which only they then sell to the final consumer. If the consumer sinks, it doesn't matter that Company X is B2B with Company A. They both suffer.
I agree dude but its more than that I was project leader in a company that was killed in the crib by this unity disaster.
B2C is also built on trust. Consumers are not dumb.
11:38 they said the exact same thing in 2019 but then went back on their word. Now, 5 years later, they're promising the same thing again... I have no reason to believe that they will honor it this time.
I would only believe Unity if they unmerged their IronSource merger as well as John R., the root of all this mess
@@defaulted9485 did you watch the video? John R left the company, and 8 powefull figures from iron sourse as well.
Basicly Unity regained control over the board now.
@@The28studio ironsauce is still embedded inside unity operatively and also higher up, just because those 8 took a step back it doesn't mean they're gone, their part of the company gone, and their relationship gone.
they are still shareholders, they just backed into the shadows but the leashes are still in their hands
@@defaulted9485 holy ignorance. They even removed the run time fee 🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡
Good for you then. For a lot of others they will go with Unity
Two things, as a dev:
1) The trust is gone, permanently. If an employee stole money from me, I might forgive them personally, but they'll never work here again. It just can't happen.
2) The product isn't worth taking a chance on anymore. Unity's quality and focus as a game engine has slid downward ever since 19.
and yet Adobe and many others still run amuck.
@@MassiveMawEntertainment it's industry wide Stockholm syndrome at this point.
@@MassiveMawEntertainment im glad i figured out how to use adobe for free
@@Fritz_Salad If Affinity gets enough momentum, Adobe is in trouble.
@@MassiveMawEntertainment Adobe only survives because they don't have real competitors yet. As soon as there are alternatives that work just as well (or better) Adobe is finished.
Unity needs to suffer from this. Corpos need to be scared away from abusing their customers.
The main problem is that Apple seems immune to customer disapproval, however they abuse them. Whatever happens to these little guys, Apple is the evidence that corpos look to to guide their behaviour. As long as customers keep taking whatever Apple dishes out and like it, then I'm afraid others will continue to adopt their strategies.
@@theguyfromsaturn the only thing thats containing Apple rn is eu putting sanction on those a****** and giving them heavy fine for abusing customer and breaching eu laws about this. Istg if there wasnt that it would be even worse. Idk why people are so obscessed with Apple when you have Samsung and co as alternative
They did suffer, the corpus left, and things changed. Don’t see why they should suffer more. Seems like they’re doing their best to right themselves.
@@sunniedunbar6889 yeah but no one gets to make mistakes!!! Lol being sarcastic.. I'm over it, I'm a a c# developer and will be picking up unity soon as I applaud their response l.
Any public company is a pure money-making machine, dont expect any sincerity or empathy. They will do ANYTHING to get more money. sometimes, they seem nicer, but it all a facade.
Shareholders kill games, as soon as a developer serves share-holders instead of gamers, it's game over. Constantly demanding more profit year-to-year is extremely damaging to a developer's creative freedom and is a super unrealistic expectation.
When a company's customer is no longer the customer, that's when you know there is a problem.
@@Dunestorm333 not just for games, shareholders and investors demanding constant year on year increases in profit and value are killing the entire world right now. it’s an obviously unsustainable business model and when it fails a handful of people get away mega rich, meanwhile other people lose money and jobs, industries slowly lose experience/expertise, etc. etc.
@@owenyin3316 yep, generally we call things that exhibit constant unchecked growth "cancerous" but when companies do it we call it capitalism.
@@AkaRystikit’s actually worse when companies prioritize expansion over profits. They end up expanding and chewing through resources without any net positives. They end up collapsing. That is even more cancerous.
@@nickcarroll8565 No really. What you are describing is without a doubt really bad, I won't argue against you there. But at least unsustainable expansion doesn't funnel as much money to a small number of people.
Both are bad for companies and staff, but only one is disastrous for the economy as a whole.
The thing is Unity fell into the same trap most American businesses are in. Whatever product/service they nominally make/provide is not their true business anymore. Their true product is the stock price. Nothing else.
Take it from a guy who works for the railroad. You are 100% correct. Customers dont matter and the only thing that means anything is how happy the shareholders are
Yep, we stop being the customer as soon as a company goes public, the stockholders and investors are now the customers while we have to ride out the storm or bail out of a sinking ship.
The shareholders and investors are only looking for short term gains year over year, they usually drive the company to destruction.
Forgetting they will have no stock price if they loose their customers. . .
We just aren't their customers, and we realized that far to late
The Ouroboros consumes all
I posted this elsewhere, but the reason small developers, ones who would never ever see the fee, got upset is because Unity may be making a game engine, but they are also selling a dream. Every developer hopes that their game, their little labor of love, is that indie darling that somehow goes viral and sells millions of copies. That is the dream - even if it is incredibly unlikely to happen. With the new fee, those developers now had a cloud in their idyllic dream landscape. If they did become successful, Unity would come back in and go, "Nope, that's ours." It was a tax in every horrible connotation of that word. Add in the initial design that could see developers bankrupted by fraud, the need for Unity to install spyware and other "totally not malicious" software to track installs, and you can see why everyone got upset - not just the "big guys" where the fee was most likely to apply. (That also says nothing of the outright illegal idea to apply the fee retroactively. Kind of wish Unity had gotten smacked down in court for that one just because any lawyer who thought that was a good idea and was stupid enough to sign off on it deserved the loss.)
Dude, please hit the darn *↵-Key* _(Return)_ from time to time - *You input is way too valuable to be disregarded over broken spelling!*
@Smartcom5 Appreciate the feedback. Wrote this message on my phone and trying to add lind spacing usually ends up causing my RUclips app to screw up. I'll try to see if it works in the future when I can.
@@WeenieWalkerGames I am a dreamer!
You hit the nail on the head.
Like America' the actual dream is all the money Unity would be taking from the smaller hobbies devs and disadvantaged artists INSTEAD of the people that can have others bleed from the wallets when they trip.
> own a programming engine famous for its low cost
> increase the cost exponentially
> lose customers
> "How could this happen?"
Except Unity has been in the red for years because of its low cost. Why do you think they updated the monetization policy in the first place?
Most people aren't mad at the policy. Most are mad at the execution and comments made behind closed doors. It ruined trust for a lot of developers, mostly indie devs.
@@DigitalApex the problem whit the new license agreement was that.
the devs made there money on the first sell and install.
the problem is that most gamers if the game is any good will install the game multiple times over 10+ years. how many time have we not reinstalled HL1 on our PC.
me about 12 times... plus the amount of time I messed up a mod install so badly that I thought you know what a complete reinstall of hl1 is easier.
and that would be really bad like thing of it you as a dev studio make a game sell it its okey sells well and keep the studio afloat.
and then 10 years later you get a massive bill from unity the game that sold 100K copies the first year (40 usd) and then another 200K at (10-20usd when there was a sale over 5 years).
then suddenly had a massive reinsurgion because the great mod of year X came out for that game and all 300K copies now reinstalled the game so that they could play it again.
and company is bust. the dev had not make any money on that game for 5 years.
even worse you are dev you release your game it sells reviews are good the feedback is a few bugs(what that means I leave blank) the tower or ark is oblivious cut short or cut completely because the last sprint (that got readded back in whit the game of the game year release), the crafting system now works properly and dont feel like an afterthought or is who fully underdeveloped. not only did you get an some new sales but you also got alot of reinstall from the day 1 buyer that wanted to try and run the game again (whit all the performance upgrade).
if the game was a hit back then you already did the sale and you now bust. if the game sort of failed well hopefully the new wave of sale will cover it.
the runtime/install fee have no selling point for the dev or more correctly the only way a dev would want to touch that kind of deal was if they could sell the game and have a one time install, want to reinstall the game later buy it again... and well stop killling game campagn would tear that another one.
If I as a gamer saw a game whit you can only install this game ones I would not buy it or pirate it.
yes there exist games today whit limit amount of activations (most can by bypass some steam can bypass (might need to call support for it) or you call devs/publisher and have them reset it.
Gru_meme.png
perfection
had they just increased the prices of the paid services they had at the time instead of trying to do per install monetization then they would not be going out of business because of a historically huge loss of trust by doing unacceptable retroactive changes
The pricing model was so idiotic. Anyone with business sense should have seen that it made their product unusable to their customers. "Come use out engine!-Maybe, what do you charge?-I dunno!-Uhm what?-It is raaandom!-What?-It depends on what the user do with the game!-That is the stu... Does it at least scale with the income?-Nope!-Then how am I supposed to do budgeting for any product that use it? No thanks!"
This is really hard to read
They are not sorry they had an extremely bad anticonsumer policy. They are sorry we didn't agree with it.
Cannot believe you'd believe anything they'd say given they think their own legally binding agreements can just be deleted and retroactively not apply anymore.
Let's look back at the Unity customer experience:
Constantly changing their rev-share conditions (this was before the runtime policy).
Forced integration with ethically dubious tools.
Publicly insults devs with any shread of morality.
Announce an abusive policy with no clear system of implementation or accountability. (It felt like they would charge you based on how successful they thought the game is).
Threaten the business and livelihoods of almost all customers from solo devs to full studios.
Forced people to waste time and scrap assets in order to pivot workflows.
Comes crawling back with a fistful of dead roses and a ChatGPT apology, realizing they would be dead without us.
Yeh. Combined with Adobe and Microsoft bs, I'm moving all the computing systems I can to an open source base. Not nearly as smooth, but there's no existential blackmail.
the way the internet was meant to be. User generated, not corpo controlled!
I know of the Adobe BS, but what Microsoft BS recently-ish?
@@MonsieurDeVeteran For businesses it was about the Entra ID, and 365 licensing. They basically kept promising more features that on-prem AD had and the convenience of enforceable anywhere policy management. This got a lot of people to move on the promise that it would just be like the current access management, but better. Then once everyone transitioned, locked them behind tiers of licensing that have been steadily rising as "new"(read: new to cloud managed AD) features get locked away. Add in their new draconian contract scheme that prevents you from changing licensing on the fly and you are set with a nicely embossed card that tells small business to kindly jump off a bridge. So many of the small business clients I serviced are being hurt by this.
For me it was largely around Win11. It has continually been the center of controversial decisions, features, and straight up bloat. I don't need the OS to do everything under the sun and use all my resources in the process. I don't need it taking pictures of my screen on intervals for "convenience". I don't need it to force me to sign in with a microsoft account on install or go through the command line just to use a local account on install. I need it to get out of my way so that I can decide what I want it to do.
@@MonsieurDeVeteran Probably referencing the originally opt-out Windows 11 "feature" that continually stored snapshots of all your activity ostensibly so you could "rewind" through it... which is obviously alarming from privacy & security perspectives but iirc also speculated to be a veiled mechanism for Microsoft to mass harvest training data it could feed its AI model (itself incidentally the basis of a sketchy & opt-out feature in Windows 11).
Then again, maybe referencing the Windows 11 installation/upgrade requirement of registering & linking w/ a Microsoft online user account - circumventable through the command prompt but only kinda, because even if successfully installed offline Windows 11 will continue regularly pestering you to connect your MS account.
There's more but the long and short of popular beef w/ Microsoft is that Windows 11's kinda a pile of hot stinky mess nobody asked for squeezed out on top of what's otherwise seemingly just Windows 10. Demonstrates a remarkable lack of foresight for what's supposed to be a reliable vendor of a critical system component.
@@GoldenPantaloons Thanks ^_^
I hate to tell them but... too late.
They proved they were willing (and able) to destroy previous agreements (which said they wouldn't do that), and to make changes at the expense of the end-users. That was when the grim reaper finished sharpening his sickle, and went on the prowl. That was also when a significant portion of their end-users (developers) dropped Unity completely, and moved to a different engine. Those customers are gone now, because realistically, it would cost them more money to return, and potentially face this type of alteration again, than it would to stick with wherever they went, which will probably never have that problem.
Godot saw a surge of developers in the aftermath of the Unity debacle, and Unreal probably did too.
Unity is a backburner option at best now, and the company 100% screwed themselves over completely with the runtime fee nonsense. They deserved the backlash, and they deserve the fallout.
It was the logical end.
Look at Unity 2018. Free education programs. Free games to code with tutorials kept active. Millions of free assets. Built in free integration with unity marketplace.
Now? May have to pay for the software. Next to no free assets. The free games are mostly for two+ versions ago. Tutorials have died because the creator ecosystem existed because it was free.
Long live Godot for free dev, long live UE for corporate efficiency
@damsen978 Well, good luck to you. I'm starting in GODOT and hope to eventually grow it.
The real issue for unity now is, the DEVs moved no one has a reason to drop unreal or godot now so they aren’t going back
@@niccosalonga9009godot is pretty sweet as an indie.
To late for you but not for many
The Ferrari statement just makes my blood boil.
Ferrari operates that way because letting the creative juices flow and creating beautiful cars makes them a shit ton of money. Not from the cars themselves, but the feeling those cars create. They make their money off the Ferrari brand. Merch, models, the "idea" of Ferrari.
The fact that executives can't see that is exactly what's wrong with the gaming industry.
And the car industry too. So many brands killed off their hero cars because they weren't profitable and wondered why they lost even more money. Because those cars showed off what they could do. The Lancer Evo moved tens of thousands of base Mitsubishi Lancers, for example. When they killed it, Mitsubishi the car company essentially died in the eyes of the public.
@@TheBrainSpecialist or trying to bring back an even worse take on an existing vehicle. The Integra was one of them.
You are entirely correct, the Nissan Skyline GTR has shipped so many Altima/Sentra CVT shit boxes it boggles the mind.
You are not wrong. I bought a lancer ES because it was the "evo" i could afford at the time back in '12. Now that I can afford it and I am looking for something better, the vehicle i wanted is long gone they have absolutely nothing else of value to me. Its such a shame...
The death of the Evo was a sad day in the automotive industry.
amazingly said. once bean counters looked at things like the lancer evo and saw that it caused a negative number on the sheets, they axe it without thinking and then wonder why everything else starts failing. same with all the other companies that went public and then choked on their own drive for immediate profit
Moral of the story: never hire John Riccitiello.
He looks like George Soros lmao
@@gamerscomplete then again, valve has unlimited money and time due to owning the entire pc market with their storefront. what your saying is still 100% correct but not exactly the best example to demonstrate that
What a weird comment@@GangnamStyle33
Don't go public. But also, don't hire a former CEO whose crowning achievement was driving one of the biggest gaming companies on Earth into a 20 year low point.
The scary thing is, there are people who STILL want to hire him.
@@ImNotFine44 they own the entire pc market because they prioritize making their customers happy instead of stock holders happy at quarterly earnings announcements. that results in more customers and more profits, but stock market short term greed cant cope with long term investment in the company of focusing on what your customers want over immediate profits
The rot is still on the board and they have their talons in Unity via contracts. They've only changed their figure head, the skilled people are gone, their dev made tutorials, support and ideas departments are all gone too. The only places they are investing into are tracking and mobile ads. I wouldn't go back, they will bite you a second time.
Yup, the board of directors was the problem, they chose people to be the fall guy, they only changed their masks.
I hate companies going public so much. They inherently lose the last drops of individuality to the system of completely mindless capitalism
Amen.
Discord is planning on going public and it angers me
@sav9737 Discord was always planning on going public. People need to understand that these tech startups are explicitly designed to be as attractive as possible so that they can capture an audience and use that to make a ton of money by drawing in investors with hopes of monetizing them. Discord isn't profitable currently, and it never will be because right now it's too generous to free users. The idea is for the people who started it to develop it to the point where they can cash out and move on while the shareholders run things into the ground trying to suck every dollar out of it. Make use of these products while they're still good, but don't invest so heavily into them that you can't pull out when they degenerate.
@@sav9737good thing i don't use it much, tho whatsapp is absolutely bad
Discord and Telegram going public soon
There was also talk of lawsuits from developers as trying to make contracts retroactive is pretty damn illegal in most places.
Oh it was crazy illegal. I'd be shocked if this would've flown anywhere at all.
No wonder. They can only change unsigned contracts. It's called grandfathered.
"Sure, we punched you in the jaw once, but we really feel bad about it now."
Twice.
"We might do it again at some point if we think we can get away with it"
They're not sorry they punched you in the jaw. They're sorry you took your business away after they punched you...
Fear is the biggest reason why developers aren't going to use unity again. Imagine developing games for more than a year then suddenly unity got greedy again, and doomed your hardwork, you have to deal with it or restart all over again in other engine, make you even more stressed out.
Greed is a heck of a drug.
@@dragonfalcon8474 prominent sin these days
Go greedy get needy.
@@earlofdoncaster5018 Good start, but we gotta workshop it.
@@earlofdoncaster5018 Go greedy, get needy, do something seedy, get bleedy, become worm feedy
It DOES allow you to draw 2 cards however
As an aspiring Indie dev: the trust is gone.
I was fortunate enough that during brainstorming for my current project the whole thing went down so i was lucky enough to be able to switch to Godot with minimal effort. I just do not want to use an engine where the presedent has been set that my contract with said engine may be randomly altered to my detrement.
If you where a logistics company and years later went to the stores you stock with wares and than go and say: btw i retroactively want 20ct for every item you sold that i provided you.
They are gonna look at you and tell you to F off aswell.
Omg a fellow Godot user!!! I love open-source stuff!! That was the exact reason I switched to Godot too. I considered Unreal for just a split second before trashing that idea lol. I absolutely love the idea that I could put 30 years of experience into Godot, and i'll never have my career uprooted over night by some awful TOS change, like Unity or Unreal. That career security was why I chose Godot, and will likely be using it for decades. I'm worried about the people who switched from Unity to Unreal. Good for them that they switched off of Unity, but nothing is stopping Epic Games from pulling the same kind of shady TOS changes that can ruin a game designer's career overnight. I can only hope that Epic Games won't ruin the lives of indie devs 10 or so years from now, just like how Unity did. Instead i'll just be using Godot.
John Riccitello or not. They did it once, they *will* do it again.
Exactly. If a company proves that they can be taken over by a John Riccitello, unless they do some serious restructuring then you will ALWAYS have the opportunity to get ANOTHER John Riccitello type of guy running your company. Even after serious restructuring, you can never remove that iconic Riccitello stain either.
"Back to the start" ... Except much lighter.
Hundreds or even thousands of gamedevs have migrated their games to different engines already, and I don't think they are going to migrate back.
Their trust had been burnt. With how easy Unity changed the licensing agreement -- and even forcing a retroactive licensing fee -- gamedevs will see this as just a trap.
7 years of experience in Unity, 1 year in Unreal. I'm not going back.
Personally, i've been using Godot and I really recommend it, it's great. The main reason I made the switch from Unity to Godot was because Unity announced a huge terrible change out of nowhere that could ruin any potential game-making career and would be easy to exploit by bad actors. Unreal seems nice, but at the end of the day, Epic Games is just another giant company concerned with profits above all, just like Unity. Godot is open-source and they can't force you into some bogus TOS changes that uproot your entire career. Godot has also been getting more advanced over time too. Whatever you make in Godot you have complete control over, and you'll never need to worry about a TOS change suddenly uprooting your entire career over-night because of out-of-touch executives and shareholders. I never looked back when making the switch to Godot, I absolutely love open-source programs.
Business grads in today's age seem to have forgotten the most important currency isn't USD. It's trust/goodwill. You can always make money back. Once you betray trust, it's almost never coming back.
Kinda like what happened with Boeing lol. Boeing was an esteemed company because it was ran by engineers. Then a bunch of morally-bankrupt hotshot business grad losers took over the company and started running it into the ground. I mean, just a few years ago people either loved Boeing or just didn't think about them. Now because of the work of those awful hotshots and their corner-cutting that infamously led to the planes falling apart, the name Boeing is forever tainted, one of the most common searches about airplanes is "where to fly in planes that arent made by boeing"
It's true, business grads are morally bankrupt and forgot that it's about trust and long-term relationships (aka long term profit) not just short-term profit by any means necessary.
Start of the actual current news: 10:00 everything before that is rehash of the old unity news.
@@Iceddddragon you a real one for that
I will never forgive nor forget what Riccitello did to SimCity back in 2013. It ruined Maxis and even led to EA firing him.
@@kraosdadafusfus8034 I already forgot that one because that was a time I had stopped following gaming news. Can you please remind me what he did?
@@kranichkrone SimCity was single player game that required to be always online. They added few multiplayer features, that required coop between different players, but it made game terrible.
Maps were really small, and they argued that it's because game engine wouldn't handle bigger ones. They also said, that it would be impossible to remove "always online" requirement, because of the way that game works.
It was all bullshit, moders proved that game can run easily in offline mode, and engine can handle bigger maps.
That's more or less what was situation, but it was years ago so I may be missing some details.
@@kranichkrone He was CEO of EA between1997 to 2004 and 2007 to 2014. He is THE reason EA is so hated. He's the mastermind of their studio-slaying spree of the 90s and 2000s.
He's also partly responsible for why many games are such a greedy mess today.
SimCity 2013 was particularly infamous because it was online-only and worse than its predecessors by a long margin.
EA won the Consumerist's Golden Poo two years in a row due to his mismanagement.
Thanks, both of you. I vaguely remember these things now. So he was the scumbag behind it all.
They got a EA bastard as head, what were they thinking?
@@gp-1542 money
EA suck PvsZ2 got bad used from them
He was just the fall guy, the board of directors was the issue. The board of directors used him as bait as they knew people would go after him instead of them. People took the bait hook line and sinker. They got rid of people, but the board of directors are all still there.
@damsen978 you're going to have to Google search as there is not a single source I can direct you towards. A lot on reddit and other places even a few videos when this initially took place a year ago.
@damsen978 RUclips keeps shadow banning my comment. But you're going to have to do your own leg work unfortunately. Just look at who is on the board of directors as a start.
It’s not just gaming companies that used Unity. At my last job (before the company folded in April), the app they were prepping for their upcoming product was powered by Unity. So other companies were using it too. So they definitely wanted money not just from indie devs who make feee games, but from developers who have free apps that link to other subscriptions. So that’s what they were really going after.
They delayed Silk Song. I'll forgive them when they are completely forgotten to history.
@@renmcmanus you dont need a lifelong vow of vengeance for sooner gay bugs
@b33lze6u6 vengeance is an act. I plan to DO exactly nothing. I just won't forgive them.
And "gay bugs." I have absolutely no idea where you came up with that. If you have played Hollow Knight or seen literally anything about Silk Song and "gay bugs" was your take way. Then you have actual problems. And you really need to seek professional help.
@@renmcmanus I've not played HK but isn't the main character just a little void bug with no mention of sexuality? Like most things in that game are kinda ambiguous in terms of sex other than the town hub characters for familiarity and the _banker._ It does not matter in game right?
@HazeEmry you are quite correct the main character is completely genderless because it is not "living" in a biological sense. There are a handful of characters with spasific genders. But there are only a few times when gender is relevant in any way. Such as the Pale King having hundreds of children with the Pale Lady. Or his one child with Hara the beast. There are exactly one and a half non straight relationships in the game. The first is the Gray Mourner and the daughter of the mantis traitor lord. This is from a side quest. And you wouldn't know either of their true identities or genders unless you literally research them. And read information outside of the game. Neither the game itself nor any of the external information makes a big deal about it. Or even elaborates in any way beyond saying they loved each other. The other half is a completely unfounded fan theory that isn't worth explaining.
So as you can see. The game is hardly about "gay bugs" and the one time it is in the game is tasteful. And in no way pushing an agenda.
@@HazeEmryas someone who doesn't like those propagandist and who's actually played hollow knight. I'll say : it's a bug . It doesn't need to show what gender it is. But if you want to know it does portrait a male like figure. Also there's not any propaganda in the game. There's several male & female characters. So far I have yet to encounter a gay bug. The game is actually really good. If you love dark souls you'll love it too.
But if they decide to add those shit ideas to silk song then the community will let it sink .
Demanding a fee per each install is nuts. The most popular mobile games are F2P, and this absolutely guts this model, as Unity would be demanding a fee to be taken from the people who didn't pay anything for the game = direct losses for the devs. Imagine alienating the most popular, most profitable and most wide segment of the gaming market.
It's really no surprise that the general public reacted like it did. People are soooooo tired of corporations trying to take exploit everyone and everything.
I had to move a 17 month project from unity to godot. Required me to pay 66k+ over this year to hire 3 guys to help convert it all. Worst part is. I had to let go 3 guys for 3 other guys due to unity policy. I was directly impacted and so was my past employees
@yourmajesty9025my thoughts too. Unless higher-ups said absolutely not to using it, or this is an 8-yo long Concord-like project, I don’t see why they wouldn’t just finish on Unity after 17 months.
@yourmajesty9025 thats why todays games suffer. do it right the first time or dont do it at all.
@yourmajesty9025
he didn't say the entire company was his, might have had orders from the actual CEO
@damsen978
You seem to not get it. If it's just simply not his decision he would get sacked for that
"Going public" means "we will stop at nothing to get as much money out of our customers as we possibly can to make our next quarter look good".
Whenever a company "goes public", that's your signal to "go somewhere else".
I bet they are investing a lot of money into making the "rug" more slippery, so that next time developers don't notice it being pulled from under them.
"Whenever a company 'goes public', that's your signal to 'go somewhere else'."
100% this. Every single time.
Yup. That's when the original customers become the product, and the shareholders become the new customers. And every moment is dedicated to finding new ways to squeeze increasing numbers on quarterly reports out of you.
I heard Discord is going to go public fairly soon. I can only imagine how much of a nightmare that's going to be in the coming years. As if they didn't try to squeeze us for every penny already, now it's going to get exponentially worse as shareholders will inevitably ask Discord "I just invested money into this. Where's my profit?"
"heads have rolled" means nothing, they are all millionaire CEOs that don't care much where they work, and they will just be replaced by nearly the same people.
No heads have rolled. All heads remain firmly attached to torso. I'm tired of all the hyperbole. I'm "don't recommend channel" option these people. It's just trying to pump up stories that aren't even worth talking about more than 30 seconds.
Yeah heads have rolled, but the board of directors have remained in place, it was all the board of directors doing, the rolling heads was just a scapegoat.
In EU if you destroyed a company you are barred from holding director role ever again, that's good extremely based EU is. There are consequences to fucking Up
It's only the job where even if you've failed, you would still get rewarded. CEOs get golden parachutes that stated if they somehow got fired, they would receive compensations.
I dont think many people will be going back to Unity. Once you've broken that trust. There is no putting the cat back in the bag.
Yeah, it's possible for some businesses to get away with breaking trust if it's the kind of thing that can easily be switched away from (ie. if you're just selling some product and they later change their terms to something dumb then you just stop buying their product and switch to something else - even if you wouldn't be thrilled that they're not trustworthy, you wouldn't really suffer any big losses by only switching once they do something stupid).. but when it comes to game developers, they often need to plan years in advance - they can't just switch to a different engine mid way through development without adding a whole lot of extra work, and in those kinds of contexts it's really, really hard to overlook an untrustworthy game engine.
@@asdfqwerty14587Exactly. It’s one thing for me to buy a different cat litter if one turns out poorly. My cat won’t like it, but it’ll get used to it in a few days. It’s something completely different if I’m working on an extensive Excel document with dozens of calculations/formulas and suddenly I have to switch everything to Google Sheets. Crazy amount of work.
It also doesn't solve the fundamental problem of how and why we got here. If the thing we as devs use Unity for doesn't actually make money to continue the engine's existence and ongoing support then either it will have to pivot models again or go out of business. And that's before considering the fact that your average shareholder has the brain of an iPad baby and thinks if every quarter doesn't see an increase in everything the company is on life support. I'd like to imagine Unity will get a lucky break but we're seeing the red flags.
Hope not, but "stockholms" is a thing.
Yeah no, there are still too many unity user and they consider this a good news.
Of course they will be more cautious just in case there's another backstab, but they aren't leaving just yet,
Here’s my problem: Why are we celebrating getting rid of the runtime fee NOW? It’s already been nerfed to the point where it was just neutral or positive for devs, pick whichever fee was lower. Now they’re removing that choice and on top of that hiking prices and everyone’s blowing the trumpets like this is some huge victory? Unity has an incredible amount of work to do before I’d ever consider using them again… and unless I’m misunderstanding the layoffs hit their dev team too, it’s not like they fired all the bean counters and the people who decided to hire Johnny boy in the first place.
Who's blowing the horn of victory? I haven't seen anyone besides Unity itself claiming anything good about Unity.
John Riccitiello is that type of person who snatch your wallet in front of your eyes
Then help you look for it too😂
@@CrippledMercNo, he’d charge you money to look for it. 😅
And then charge you a "recovery fee" to get it back.
He was hired. He made a loooots of money for himself. Ruined the company. And basically got 1800 staff fired because of it. In the meantime made a lots of money on the stocks as well. What is the downside of this for him? Nothing. Not a damn thing. But hey, noone cares how 1800 people got laid off...
@@BoredPodcaster 50% of recovered funds and 20% finders fee. Be happy you even get the 30% back, we could’ve kept it!
Need everyone to understand something here
Once a company goes public, the CEO is now beholden to and takes orders from the Shareholders.
This is not by choice. This is by law. By law, once public, the CEO gains Feduciary responsibility to the Shareholders to make As Much Profit As Possible
If, at any point, the Shareholders feel that is *not* what leadership is doing, they can unilaterially remove said leadership, hand pick the replacement, and possibly sue the company for the gains they felt they were denied.
This is why CEOs implament terrible ideas from shareholder calls-- they got the person's balls in a vice because our government GIVES LEGAL CONTROL AND ALL POWER to the shareholders once a company is public.
The CEO is just the cop.
Placing all blame on choosing to go public.
Yeah, and that didn't happen here because Unity took a massive hit for this horrendous implementation. Trying to satisfy shareholders by increasing profits would be the opposite of what happened... Having happy customers and good brand identity would most certainly benefit profit and shareholders more than alienating their users.. What you're saying is contradicting the outcome.
Happy paying customers -> increased profit -> happy shareholders.
Going public isn't some "evil elite devil move."
This is absolutely correct. Corporations are not evil, Public Corporations are evil.
They are technically sociopathic, because they are legally required to make as much money as possible.
Corpos need to be scared away and banned forever from the Gaming industry. Unless the ones that are no gamers (and that is 90% of them).
😂 so you are saying private investors not have the same rights or what?)
UE takes 5% from games making over $1 million, and they're doing fine, Unity could just do something similar, but had to do something insane instead...
@@ussassu Unreal is owned by Epic Games, which is a gaming company and still is not profitable (said by the verge on 6 nov 2023, I am not sure but some other reports suggests same is true for 2024 as well) same as Unity. So their model only works if the company have some other means to earn money and Unity unfortunately can't follow the same path.
Unity's pricing is a lot cheaper than Unreal's, if you have full-time devs (with maybe some corner cases in developing countries where Unreal is cheaper). It really goes to show how overcomplicating it made Unity's pricing less appealing.
@@rajshashank202 Epic also makes a lot of other questionable financial decisions. Like giving out a ton of dev grants, charging a hilariously low platform fee, spending more on court battles against Apple than they would've just paying out the app store fee (though this is definitely a good thing and I'm glad someone tried to fight this battle), buying an entire abandoned mall to construct a new office then not building anything, paying a fine for not doing anything with the lot, etc.
The engine itself though, definitely gets some help from the fact that a lot of the R&D that goes into it is for Fortnite. Engine development pushes Fortnite forward, then proceeds can come from Fortnite back into the engine.
Kinda like how Croteam has Serious Engine and the Serious Sam series, Bethesda has Creation Engine and their games made on it, Valve has source, etc.
Most game engines are made so that the companies themselves can make games with it. The ones that don't... Gamemaker gets it's financial support from Opera (which, while at the moment seems innocent, Gamemaker says they have free reign to develop their engine as they like, and even stopped doing the monthly sub thing, but it seems like a "too good to be true" thing that probably wont last forever), and Godot benefits from being free and open source, supported by donations. Unity is an outlier, so their motive was to spin into the ad market (and who knows what they plan on trying now.)
@@rajshashank202 The Verge was reporting on the Epic Games *_Store_* not being profitable. Profits from Unreal Engine (and Fortnite) are subsidizing that.
They've been making Unreal Engine for decades, licensing it out has been their main source of revenue for most of Epic Games' history.
@@EonwulfGames it was 2.5% of revenue, not 10%. However, that was 2.5% on top of $2000/seat-year. Which would have been cheaper than 5% for pretty much any dev big enough to have to pay it.
Video actually starts at 1:48 team
@@DeidarasLilStudent legend
thanks sigma
@@DeidarasLilStudent cheers
Pov: you have youtube revanced so it already skips there
Don’t care they’re completely done, you simply can’t do business with a company that thinks it can change its contract with you on a whim.
They went full Darth Vader, altering the deal.
@@stupidburp "I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it further."
*switches to Godot*
"I have un-altered the deal. I pray that you come back and I pinky promise I won't alter the deal again."
-Unity
This whole thing has been amazing for Godot. It's kinda hilarious how quickly Godot tutorials went from GDScript to a mix of GDscript and C#.
It looks like things are really moving forward in the PC space. Linux has been getting a lot of support and love too. I already use Godot and plan to use Linux in the coming years when more games and apps I use support it. Using an open-source OS to make a living off of making games in an open-source game engine... what a dream come true. 😌
The problem is... if he cheats on you once, it's that his fault, if he cheats on you twice, it's your fault. Who is going to trust them again?
Nah, if he cheats me again, its still on him. He still chose to do it. And lied when promising not to do it again.
Always shame on the person who chose to do harm.
@@loorthedarkelf8353you are right, which is why the saying is supposed to be "fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me."
It's not the fault that changes sides, it's the shame.
@loorthedarkelf8353 The saying is meant to userline that it was stupid to trust a 2nd time. That's why past actions are the best indicator of future actions.
Unity is your boyfriend?
@@CadaverKuma was
Hobbyist dev here, never going back to Unity.
Did you switch to Godot? :D
The required splash screen was long overdue for removal. It was good for getting their name out in the beginning, but at this point it's spent over a decade making the Unity logo synonymous with shovelware garbage. Because that's when you see the logo.
That was true for a long time. Just when I started to see a consistent spree of good low budget games that show the Unity splashscreen, they decided to have a scandal.
I remember talking to my boss about it when they first revealed their dumb plan.
@@baseddepartment9656 Yup. I know plenty of people thought Unity was a publisher rather than the engine, and they assumed all they did was publish shovelware.
Yes. Let people use the version they have with the terms they agreed to. If they changed prices and made things more expensive that just happens. In economics this is common and just kinda sucks. It was the scummy rug pull nature of these changes that really made my opinion of them totally sour.
Well said.
'I know, let's hire an ex EA CEO Harvard business grad and put them in charge. They know nothing about programing languages or game engines, but Harvard business!'
Yeah, never hire Harvard business or econ. Or poli-sci.
@@bluehairedaigaming Getting rich does not equal competence.
@@bluehairedaigamingmath is not programming.
@@ShinkajoWhy does the CEO of Unity have to also be a programmer? That makes absolute no sense.
@@rorschacht8478 I'm not defending Unity here, but ofc it doesn't. But there are a lot of people who think that math = coding. It isn't. I have a 5 year CS degree and we studied a lot of math for various reasons, but the amount of people from school who use any kind of proper math in their jobs is miniscule. I happen to use some, since I'm in computer security. But even even then it's limited to cryptography. And it's mostly for understanding background. Almost nobody sits with f'ing high level math in their day-to-day activities. In fact in my engineering school(which is a pretty good one, globally) , the people who got the far worst results in math out of everyone were the CS students. It's kind of a point of pride even.
@@rorschacht8478 They don't, but they must know enough to understand the business and how programming works, what is possible and what is not and how much effort is needed to achieve what is possible.
Never trust them again just develop games with other options
Godot is supposed to be real nice...
Godot 4.3 is very nice to use, especially with 3D now
The coding course I stopped a while ago was using Unity to teach begginners how to code, i think I'll eventually pick it up again and finish but after that I'll never touch unity again, I'll go straight to godot, i'd rather learn unreal engine than trust unity again.
@@MisterWeltfrieden godot has 7000 reported bugs, use flax
Gdot has advanced Insanely fast! I saw how incredible it looks in o ly such a short time.
The sad part is that, in the end, it's the employees and developers who pay for the poor decisions made by management. Thousands of families left adrift-I hope they can find a way to recover.
I'm one of the people who lost their jobs at Unity in May 2023. There were around 600 of us at that time, and I think it was the third wave. As soon as they mentioned the IronSource merger internally, I thought it was a terrible idea, but who cares about employees' opinions, right? Shortly after the merger, they removed all the fun and practical employee benefits that made Unity interesting, and a few months later, the layoffs started. There are so many other things that didn't make sense, but I guess not many of us spoke about it. Anyway
"Essentially malware" describes everything from IronShart to Windows 11 to every single new car's software, these days.
What a time to be alive.
Edit: Also, I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for anyone who stayed with Unity after the IronShite announcement. It was a corporation making its future plans abundantly clear. Trusting a corporation - _any_ corporation - these days is the absolute pinnacle of stupidity. No company wants anything but your money. This has never been truer than today.
@damsen978
Well, windows 11 was the cutoff for local accounts on the pc, if i remember right. Like, you have to not be connected to the internet in order to be allowed to have a local account set up.
I'm still on 10 but because of 11 have to keep saying no to backing up my computer to one drive. They want me to be signed in and have a copy of my computer.
11 also introduced copilot, which i don't think anyone has actually enjoyed using on their pc.
Additionally, 11 introduced the recall feature, where they take a screenshot of your display every few minutes and keep it unencrypted on your pc while you're logged in. This means any personal info you have at any point on your pc would be ripe for the taking, such as bank details, if your computer happens to take the screenshot at that time, and hold onto it for an unknown amount of time. After much backlash, they said they would make it opt-in instead of opt-out, and i think they pushed back the release of the feature as of a few months ago
Win11 also lead to many issues when upgrading from 10 (i think it broke one of my friend's pc because it didn't install correctly back when it first came out and it turned out it was not that uncommon of an issue)
My work computer forced the upgrade earlier this year and i've gotten more used to it but still dislike it. I hated it a lot more when i first got it and had to reset things to look like how i would use them, and i do still with relative frequency click where the power options used to be in the menu.
@damsen978 Windows 11 is definitely better than Windows 10, unless you're actually paying even a shred of attention. Windows 11 should be considered malware.
I'm kinda glad though. I've been trying to make the switch to Linux full time for so many years. Windows 10 going EoL is just the kick I needed to actually do it. Thankfully, gaming on Linux has been getting a ton more support in recent years.
@damsen978win11 at it's core is basically win10 with a more Mac looking skin
It changes both not enough of what people wanted and too much noone asked for, which is why it took until now for it to overtake 10 in terms of market share
Some of it is also just people overreacting like the SSD requirement
A lot of it is also just the general hate MS has been getting, especially recently with their AI stuff
@@HDL_CinC_Dragon Linux support has been the main thing holding me back from jumping ship from Windows 10 to Linux. My wife uses Linux and it's a real pain when I just wanna play a game with her but something always goes wrong because the game we wanted to play bugs out on her OS. I'm so glad Linux has been getting more support in games recently. Although I don't use Linux YET, I plan to switch once more games are supported by it so I can always do game nights with family and friends with no hassle.
Even though I don't currently use Linux, i'm rooting for them. It makes me so happy to see an open source OS get so much support recently, and that support is only growing. More games supporting it, and the OS becoming easier to set up and use, it makes me happy for the future of personal computers. :')
Remember guys: If you go back to them, at some point they'll try something similar again in the future.
Go to an open-source engine instead.
Godot and other open-source programs my beloved ❤
They made the right move, but its too late. It took them a year to unfuck their pricing, but the platform itself is still fucked. You said it yourself, traditional devs were at the end of their rope with the platform and this was the breaking point for a lot of concerns. They still haven't fixed most of their tech stack, its still a mess of outdated optional include packages for beta's that never end for basic functionality they still haven't finished, and its just awful to work with.
I moved to Godot for 2d work because of the cost change, but I've stayed because the engines actually good. Now Unity has to try and win developers like me back off the back of an aging tech stack I have to pay for the privilege of fight the tools in. Hopefully they take this revenue bump from the price change and reinvest it into actually finishing all the stuff they started for hype, and never polished off.
I called them out for breaking a store policy when he was CEO.... In RETURN they rewarded me by "fixing" their policies and deprecating all my store assets without notice!
Luckily, things have changed since the day Riccitiello left.
"You may continue your current version of the software under the previously agreed terms"
So in other words, they agreed to honor the terms people agreed to, which is literally the bare minimum expected
Haha hilarious to see a company get greedy and get absolutely slapped for it.
yeah so TLDR here my friends & I a team of 16 had an RTS/Factory sim/Hero RPG game nearly ready to push to steam built in unity & then this shit happened with unity & we ended up DELETING all the work & abandoning UNITY because this runtime fee would KILL US I have advanced medical issues to the tune of $2,000 a month & I'm on social assistance so that's free but after we launched we'd form a company & we did the math UNITY Fee's would crush profits to the point we'd be heavy in the negative... & that's just me the other 15 people have families to support. Now we're still looking at rebuilding in godot or even UE5 & dealing with EPIC's BS management cause at least them we'd be supporting ourselves & able to make more stuff.
I can't recommend Godot enough, it's a fantastic choice. There's a bit of a misconception that Godot is only for primitive 2D games, but imo that's a false rumor based off of earlier, more primitive models of Godot. Current Godot can most certainly do 3D games amazingly now. A good example is the indie game Road to Vostok, which if I recall correctly is being made by 1 man.
Godot is open-source and is improving over-time. You'll never have to worry about sudden TOS changes because there isn't any TOS to use the engine and sell games in the first place. I used to make games in ROBLOX as a kid, tried out Unity right before the fiasco, then switched to Godot and haven't looked back. Although Godot isn't super advanced yet and isn't really used to make big budget AAA games, I still highly recommend it because you have complete control over your product and how you sell your product. No CEO can suddenly step in and tell you the rules have changed and you have to fork over a bunch of money. No CEO can suddenly force you to pay some huge subscription, big fees, or force you to install an update that only makes the program worse. That's why I love Godot.
We all know they will bait and switch again when they recover. There's plenty of alternatives for both 2D and 3D games.
Gdot to be honest
Godot, my beloved
so what basically happened was company went public, some greedy investors hopped in and expected 500% return.
If Unity was smarter (not that I want them to get better at gouging their devs) they would have kept the price they charged their devs per install extremely low and reasonable at first, and slowly raised the price over time, getting people used to the charge before raising the temperature, like the old adage about a frog in a boiling pot.
I'm kind of glad that they were so greedy, that they went right for the jugular right away, pissed off a TON of people, and got a backlash so bad that it tanked the entire endeavor!
Now that this precedent has been set, everyone will be on the lookout for this kind of behavior in the future, and can point to this attempt any time this is tried in the future, anywhere.
I remember pivoting my game development from unity when this happened. Even though my indie game (a little Roman inspired city builder - Glory of Rome) on steam wouldn't be primarily affected, the principal of the changes and the overall industry impact was super off-putting!
It's going to take ages to get past the feeling of betrayal from unity and I'll always be a bit apprehensive going forward
Why would I go back, if I know they could try it again?
I kind of forgot Unity existed. After that bs they pulled I just mentally blocked them out of any consideration.
Honestly most of game devs just silently forget about unity. Its been a while since i see anybody talk about it
We need more competition in the game engine industry. I feel like it's a bottleneck holding back the game industry itself. I can't imagine designing a programming language is as fun as making games, tho.
Gdscript is a cool programming language now
There's actually tons of engines out there, and a fair amount of them are free to use (Godot, Flax, etc). It's just that, before the Unity situation, you rarely hear about anything other than Unreal and Unity. Thankfully, the Unity fiasco has changed that a bit and people are realizing there's lot of alternatives out there depending on your needs. Heck, the amount of money Godot has for development doubled over night from the Unity thing and I think since then it has only grown more and more.
Just gone through a similar thing in corporate IT with Synology. After standardizing on their storage systems for years, they have been increasingly restricting their devices, forcing customers to use only their own overpriced, Synology-branded disk drives. It was a painful process, but we've pulled off the band aid and successfully switched to an open storage platform. It feels great, like standing up to a bully. There is literally nothing they could ever do to win our business back.
I'm typing this during the opening, but any developer who would consider going back is asking to be hurt.
Also, the Unity debacle is what led me to you as a dev focused view of the industry, to sit aside Steph Sterling taking a more "pop" take on the consumer perspective.
Yeah, Steph has warned everyone for decades now about the crap that's finally starting to fall off the ceiling and onto their faces, I appreciate that she's become so jaded about the business of games, but it's nice to have a perspective that isn't quite as blackpilled as me or her.
Unity Trust, before going public: 120%, everywhere you look there are goodwill endorsements from old devs to new devs to check out the engine and its platforms.
Unity Trust, after going public: 90%, Nobody really discredits it, but there are doubts about ironsource and the reputation of the engine is declining from shovelware mobile titles.
Unity Trust, after Runtime Fee: 20%, Everyone in the circle couldn't believe their eyes, like looking at your parents burning down your house and asking for rent.
Unity Trust, now? Haha, hovering above 10% I suppose. Anyone that 'was there' when this debacle happened will always have a doubt and never endorse the platform for newcomers.
with unreal and godot available with some reputation, unity is looking for a slow death. if you are a unity shareholder, this is your signal now to jump ship.
Regarding sponsors. I really want to thank you for just having a logo on the sponsored segments. A lot of channels are flaky about this. Jumping into any part of the video it must be completely clear if a segment is sponsored or not.
..... as an extra I love when there is a timer, but I do of course concede that that is because it makes it easier to skip.
My favorite part is when the sponsor is a standalone chapter which makes it even easier to skip, because there's already a built in feature to skip to the next chapter in RUclips. I have sponsorblock on my PC, but I can't use such a thing on mobile, so I really appreciate youtubers that make my viewing experience easier on mobile.
On a sidenote, I absolutely despise when creators try to make a "clever" segue into a sponsor and make it extremely hard to tell when the sponsor starts and ends. Like when they string you along some elaborate story and then pull the rug out from under you to reveal the entire story was just to plug an annoying sponsor. And I hate how other people seem to think it's "clever" and "funny" to make an invisible segue to a sponsor that completely ruins the flow of the video. RUclipsrs like that are insufferable in my eyes.
Companies don't choose where people spend their money. Customers do.
A market leader has SOME degree of freedom over steering those customers, but they should never forget their place at the end of the day.
Unity did and they learned that lesson hard.
Unity made a handful of mistakes. One of them was buying up useless firms like Parsec or Weta, this didnt help them at all. In terms of improving the engine they had an internal project called Gigaya, which would've helped Unity devs understand where issues lie with Unitys current workflow, what needs to improve and would also double as an awesome demo to learn from vs. regular simple tech demos, as this was supposed to be an actual game. They also hired Mr. Stracciatello, who litteraly was fired at EA for terrible business decisions, man what a great person to hire.
All of this made Unitys past successful attempts of actually improving the engine, like IL2CPP, Burst Compiler, DOTS and RT support mean nothing and heavily ruined the connection to many devs out there. Unity isnt gone today, but this left a stain for sure.
> ...fired from EA for terrible business decisions...
Does this mean that "Even EAvil Has Standards"?
Weta is far from being useless. They are still one of the top vfx studios in the world. There was a lot of potential for them working with Unity and bringing their tools to game developers.
"we're sorry"
- Southpark episode
Please spend the time and money to reinvest fully in our ecosystem we pinky promise we won't screw you over again like we already proved willing to.
I can understand a company getting away with something like this if they essentially have no competition but what the hell did they expect would happen in a space with many competitors? I feel sorry for the normal employees who constantly get screwed over by financial executives. They should never hold decision making roles.
"Back where they started" is far too generous, imo. If I ever got into indie development, one of my first questions would be "what was that one engine that tried to extort all its users? Let's avoid them at all costs." They've publicly disgraced themselves in a way that nobody will forget and that might be the main thing they're remembered for if their plan is to try to quietly pretend it never happened.
As a game studio I banned Unity. We are now on Phaser and has gone very well
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That is lovely. But if i may ask, how did you come up with so much biweekly?
It's (Caroline Maria Bravo) doing she changed my life. A BROKER- like her is what you need.
$_700k and yet still counting on. Caroline Maria Bravo is the kind of person one needs in his or her life to be honest❤️❤️❤️>>>>>>
Wow 😱 I know her too, Caroline Maria Bravo is a remarkable individual who has brought immense positivity and inspiration into my life. Her unwavering wisdom has been an invaluable asset, enriching my journey in countless ways
Can I reach her?
When developers go back to Unity, they will just try this again, just differently, quietly
Don't go back to Unity
If Unity wanted to try monetize their core business then in my opinion they should finance indie developers in return for a slice of the profits and extra support with unity products for the development. They could have had something if they just nurtured their own user base and I am sure there would be a lot of brilliant new games proudly sporting Unity by first time developers that never would have taken the plunge or succeeded without having their development compensated. Unity could even have taken a larger slice than Valve is and people would still thank them for investing into new up and coming developers.
Oh, hell yes, if I could get a grant, subsidy, or sponsorship I'd be able to go full time indie a few years ahead of schedule instead of working full time and trying to squeeze in home dev between family requirements.
ironsource did in fact publish ad models that were basically like malware
but they also did straight up release malware on top of that.
I've no idea how good Unity is from a dev stand point, but after pulling a stunt like that who would be mad enough to buid an entire project around this engine without set in stone guarantees to be protected from futur moronic decisions...
Unity has clearly cut investments in making the engine better. Mass firings are the focus on non core businesses likely is going to lead to a mostly frozen software product. Which means that Unreal will widen their lead on features and Godot will catch up to parity with Unity in features in a finite amount of time. There will be a shrinking of loyalists who are committed to their paid assets and knowledge baee and are unwilling or unable to leave. Over time Unity is only going to be less competitive.
Yep, run time fee wouldn't affect me but 3 things got me to not want to partner with Unity:
1. Invasive requirement and tracking of my development by forcing me to be online while developing as they tracked my data.
2. DOTs release was a joke, a mess and attacked the core reason to use Unity by instead of speeding up dev time slowed it down drastically.
3. Tyrant like changes to TOS and expecting that I had no where else to go anyway.
Yeah the whole firing of their internal devs en masse was not cool, but I think that was just a lowering of their damage resist by the time they gave themselves the fatal blow.
I've gotten used to Godot already and I'm not going back lol
This whole thing reminded me again to avoid proprietary software as much as possible. Corporations will always fuck things up for more profit.
The fact that they have applied that fee on developers retroactively is a breach of trust that is impossible to reverse. The damage is done, and no one can say they won't try that again in the future.
While I still don't trust the company further than I could throw their tax-evading HQ I still use Unity because it's the best mid-tier engine solution. I use Godot for jams, Unity for mobile and personal projects, and Unreal for serious business. It feels like that's just the ecosystem of engines right now.
Unity is down 90% from their peak in 2021
Yeah, if I ever make games, I'm never using this company as a publisher.
Why should a business trust a company that has a history of trying to retroactively change existing contracts? Too risky.
For the 2024 GMTK Game Jam, Unity was used for 43% of submission while Godot was used for 37% of submission. Unity was down by over 10% from the previous year.
Godot will surpass Unity next year.
Do not discredit Godot. Godot is the Blender of game engines right now.
*GODOT IS THE FURTURE*
100% Free. 100% Open Source. 100% Community Driven.
The trust is gone. I've switched to Godot and will never go back to Unity.
It's so sad, because pre- going public, it was a fantastic company. Then Riccitiello came in and slashed the AI branch, slashed the demo games showing off features, and dumping billions in acquiring other companies instead of innovating.
Trying to find a comprehensive take on the runtime fee story was how I found this channel! Hope they can make a worthwhile difference, we need something positive in the industry for a change
They made me change engine, and lose a lot of progress and had to learn things all over, never going back. Godot is free and open source, just need more documentation and tutorials.