We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days. Thank you for your honest and critical feedback.
Unity have already established market dominance, if not effective monopoly, as the mobile gaming development platform. They are in a position of power, they have invested large sums of money to get there, and there is really very little game developers with a product 1 or 2 years in development can do about it.
While this is going to be difficult for Indy developers, they really only have themselves to blame. Part of the task when you are making a major software platform decision as a company is to research your vendor’s financial strategy - that’s basic due diligence. Unity has been loss making for years, which either means they are not financially viable (and not a safe bet), or they are engaging in a strategy of establishing an effective monopoly position to later squeeze dependant customers until the pips squeak.
This is likely just the start, whether it’s through runtime charges, Unity control of in-game advertising, or huge hikes in seat license fees. Possibly all three.
In the same way that underpaid workers are to blame for not “just” finding and getting a better job or “learning skills”. Fuck off with that pro-corporate victim blaming.
Not pro-corporate in any way, I don’t see how you could possibly read that into what I posted. But if you choose to sup with the devil, best use a long spoon.
In the case of most of the companies affected by the changes, they literally signed up under a different agreement and then Unity changed the terms once they were pretty much locked in and couldn’t change to another engine without serious costs and/or difficulty.
There’s literally no way indie devs are at fault here and yes, blaming them for being victims of corporate fuckery IS taking the side of the corporation fucking them.
Unity have lost huge amounts of money, in fact never made a profit for a single quarter, while establishing more and more market share, and their customers never asked themselves how or why?
They’re game devs, not an acquisition and mergers team. “We signed contract to do business with xyz terms” should be plenty reliable enough for conducting business. Not “Lol, whut? You didn’t read the fine print? Psyche! We’re changing everything.”
Unity deserve to get sued into oblivion for this
If I buy a service, I care about the service, not how the company is doing financially. In fact, I don’t even take the time to look at their finances because who the fuck does that? Are you looking into Netflix each month?
You’re actually making some valid points here, in regard to the trend of companies losing money as a strategy to obtain market dominance and then turning to monetization after. It’s exactly how Uber and AirBNB got where they are, and it’s a strategy that people need to get more wise to. You’re right, and you should say it.
But for the love of God, say it better than this. The “users only have themselves to blame because they got hoodwinked by a pack of liars and thieves who are very good at being liars and thieves” angle kills any chance of anyone listening to the actual point you’re making because you went and wrapped it up in a giant dose of victim blaming.
If you cook an absolutely perfect hamburger and then spit in it right before serving, you can’t act surprised when no one wants to even try a bite.
Security company Guarda permanently operates in the red in the US but keeps itself alive by constantly buying up all the small security companies it can in the US. It’s essentially a MASSIVE ponzi scheme in a sense that it would die if it couldn’t continue to add to it’s ranks.
I really don’t agree. His phrasing was harsh and unsympathetic, but the world owes nothing to anyone and those developers should have done their due diligence. Trying to cast this in highly broad black-and-white morality isn’t productive. Is it moral what Unity is doing? No. Is it Unity’s right to do this? Legally maybe, but in every other sense, no. Are the developers who decided to use Unity a bunch of wishful thinkers who chose to ignore red flags? Yes. Unity may be thieves, but it’s been clear for a while now that their business model was unsustainable. Everyone who chose to do business with them anyway chose to ignore the warning signs. People are responsible for their own actions, and while they aren’t responsible for being cheated, they are still responsible for ignoring massive red flags with “we’re not a legit business” on them in bright white letters. I, too, blame developers for their share of their predicament, for the same reason that I blame would-be mountain men who starve to death and then get eaten by wolves because they tried to tame a national park with a pocketknife and a Walmart tent.
As for the other people who got really upset, I think choosing to allow yourself to be upset by style to the extent of ignoring the substance is exactly that: an active choice, one you have to consciously make. If you explained to someone why continuing to burn coal for electricity is bad and then finished it with something harsh like “only a total dumbshit would disagree with this”, would that person be justified in saying “What an asshole. Clearly fossil fuels can’t be that bad”? Of course not. If a person did that, they would be in the position of taking in the argument, understanding it, and then actively choosing to disregard it because it conflicts with their feelings. That’s the kind of magical thinking conservatives stoop to when they dispute climate change, the efficacy of vaccines, etc. because they’re butthurt about people saying “of course the world isn’t flat you fucking idiot”. I would hope that people who have a greater degree of emotional maturity than them (i.e. any) would be able to look at a person’s argument from a calmer and more objective point of view. It’s not like that’s even hard.
To be clear, you’re not being unreasonable, but the other people responding to this guy are having proper hissy fits and they really need to get a grip.
Let’s say that you are right, one should always look at each company you are buying a service from, before buying said service.
How do you even go about knowing if a company is doing something like this? Where do you start?
At what point have you done your due diligent, and can assume that, yes, I will still have the same contract tomorrow as I had today?
That’s public information and it’s very basic information. Anyone running a business knows to check to make sure anyone they form a partnership with is a legitimate business, the same way you know not to hire a sore-covered meth addict from Facebook marketplace to redo your floors. The fact that they were using proprietary software was already a red flag anyway,
By the way, yes I’m aware you’re just sealioning, no I’m not going to engage with it.
No sealioning, I just don’t agree.
“They should have researched that thing the company hadn’t done and given no signals that they would do.”
Dear God, do you listen to yourself talk? I hope no one else fucking has to.
If your vendor is constantly making huge losses while establishing more and more market share, your guy in charge of the financial decisions should be asking themselves what the investors long term plans are. That’s not rocket science.
No one ever expected them to go this far.
This retroactively fucks up devs who could never have seen such a move coming.
Really? They really only have themselves to blame for Unity suddenly making a drastic and poorly thought out change to their pricing policies? Researching with what, a crystal ball?
What did they think Unity’s investors plans were, to endlessly subsidise a constantly loss-making platform just for the fun of it?
Changing the pricing structure would be a perfectly understandable and predictable outcome. Unity choosing to adopt a wildly unfair and entirely unprecedented pricing model is definitely not something their customers could have expected.
Why not? And how is it even “unfair”? They want to charge for every copy sold, that was made using, and is still using, their software.
People who compare this to Visual Studio vs. the MSVC DLLs, are forgetting all the privative libraries which charge for every copy they get released with.
Unity is pulling one of those; only because they didn’t before, doesn’t make it “unfair”, just a dick move.
Something something Stallman was right (about this specific thing, anyway).
Stallman has always had a bunch of good points. It’s just that he’s rigid and uncompromising enough about them, and a weird enough dude in general, to turn a lot of people off. “Weird dude” shouldn’t matter, but basic human psychology says it does - every time.
If they were so hard up than they should have left Parsec alone instead on lobotomizing it by killing Arcade.
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