I’m really hoping some of the bigger Unity devs, like the people that made Rust or Among Us sue, as most of us don’t have enough money to even stand a chance in court against Unity’s lawyers…especially once they have all that nice runtime money to spend. 😒

No, they have some magical “proprietary method” for determining those, with additional hand-waving for not counting “illegitimate” installs. Translation: they pull these numbers out of their ass, fuck you.

A pre-sale cut could be considered “reasonable” since there’s a paper trail with real numbers that basically everyone can agree on. Unity is just trying to muddy the waters.

My understanding is that one of the services Unity provides Devs is analytics telemetry, and they just have to hook into that to read some telemetry of their own.

Egomaniac Category

Facebook (a long time ago), Twitter, Reddit, Google (they even removed the don’t be evil modo), now Unity. Apple being Apple… Arduino going closed source, Raspberry Pi becoming for profit. Samsung, at least never ever even tried to look nice.

Quick shoutout to my prehistorical homies for passing down only the choicest and most salient of allegories. We meme on the shoulders of giants.

It’s also called the trust thermocline. Once a certain level of exploitation is reached, customers leaving suddenly goes very quickly and usually unrecoverable. The straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Or in the case of unity, you smash the poor camel with a baseball bat and are very surprised it tries to bite you.

And this is why we shouldn’t have monopolies. People shouldn’t be held hostage by one or two companies. When they go full stupid like Unity is, the customers grumble, shrug, and get to work with a different system.

I’m forced to use VMware for cisco classes.

I remember at the time that a presentation circulated on a previous Broadcom acquisition, as a preview of what was in store for vmware. I never saw analagous material for vmware exactly, and I can’t remember what Broadcom acquisition it was.

Their analysis was that they predicted their changes would kill off any new business, and kill off 80% of the existing customer base. However, this was fine as the other 20% was so stuck that they could charge more than 5x to make up for it, and all without spending any money on R&D and reducing customer support load.

It will cost them in future earnings… Companies won’t want to work on their platform if these policies are still in place… and many will never want to work with them again since they’ve shown their hand.

Oh, plenty of business “geniuses” make some pretty boneheaded moves, especially when they feel a need to try to produce huge growth after saturating a market, or if their business results somehow fall short of some need (either actually losing money, or some arbitrary self-imposed “goal” not being hit).

Currently there’s an epidemic of businesses making some pretty dubious long term decisions for the sake of trying to prop up numbers amidst a receding market reality. Recessions are, in part, a self-fulfilling prophecy, where whatever impetus exists, it’s exacerbated by every participant screwing things up further.

Yeah, it’s looking like 1776 time.

I wouldn’t put it past them to short their own stock while they make announcements then go long once things settle down…

No one said they were good at their job

Maybe it grew too big or the wrong way for their taste? Good reason to fire a few hundred and restructure.

Even though this is bad and many developers won’t want to use Unity, I think there still may be enough devs that will comply and generate more profit.

No, because if you download it right now, you’ll be agreeing to the current terms which no longer gives you permission to ignore new terms as they are released.

Up until now, you could continue using the old engine and never agree to newer terms, and that would be defensible in court. Now, even if you do not update and do not click agree, they will still take you to court and send you a bill, which you probably will have to pay.

Use what, Unity or the ToS? Assuming you meant the ToS under the old version you could stop using an updated ToS only if it violated your rights. (Which is such a weird thing to even mention, if a contract violated your rights then it probably already doesn’t apply.) You can stop using Unity whenever you want though because you have free will. Not trying to be sassy about that last point, just explaining why I think I misunderstood you lol.

Taking profits means that:

• They know the developer is making profits
• There are actually profits - no one will ever be charged for money they don’t have
• It can all be traced and taxed fairly and legally
• Non-profit developers aren’t punished

Doing it based installs is none of that.

It’s insane. It’s a stupid idea from an idiot who probably arrogantly ignored everyone who told him it was a stupid idea.

If I was a shareholder of Unity I would want this moron investigated for selling shares and then tanking the company.

No doubt they are going to buy shares at the lower price before they announce a total reversal or this plan.

Tracking revenue of thousands of developers over the whole world is impossible. Maybe put yourself in Unity’s position?

Yeah, maybe. It is a bit of honeydick.

Good question.

Let me ask you the reverse with a hypothetical: imagine that you spend a great deal of time building a library for generating realistic engine sounds, like this guy. Now you make an OEM deal with Sony and your work goes into the next version of Gran Turismo. Now let’s say everybody loves the new version, because of the great engine sound and a number of other awesome features. Would you want your work to be rewarded by how much value Sony extracted from it? You would right? (otherwise tell me why not and we’ll have that discussion, but I can hardly imagine you’ll say no to this)

Then put yourself in Unity’s position. It’s not one company you’ve got to track, but perhaps hundreds of thousands. New ones popping up, old ones dying without a trace. You want to be rewarded for your continuous effort based on how much value people are getting from your product. This is only reasonable, right? Now you’ve got to come up with a way to do that. So one way to do that would be to track the revenue of each developer and charge a percentage. This is mission impossible. Perhaps you can do that with the larger companies, who are less likely to forge data and easy to get hold of, but you’ve got thousands on thousands of developers that are making peanuts or making just enough that are one man shops. There is also no reliable way to get accurate revenue data from developers across the world. You can’t just ask the tax office of the Philippines or Norway for income statements of random developers. So instead they use a heuristic, which is very common by the way. The heuristic goes like this: revenue ∝ usage ∝ installs ∝ downloads (∝ means “is proportional to”, but in this context I think it would be better to say: “correlates highly with”) .

Now if you proof to me that downloads does not positively or significantly correlate with revenue made then I’ll agree with all the people who feel they need to hate on Unity right now, but the way I see it this isn’t an unreasonable business model.

One last thing. It is an oversimplification to say that Unity doesn’t have any cost to usage. Sure once the binaries have been built, there are no costs to those binaries being copied across the globe, but more usage means more demands on the developer, which translates to demands on Unity to make sure their engine works well on all platforms and devices and is able to keep up with the queries and demands of the developer. Imagine just having to QA the Unity engine; it’s gotta be an enormous undertaking. They’ve got to offer active support on a number of versions (n) of their platform for a number of platforms (m) and supported devices/hardware (o). That makes n^m^o combinations that could cause issues and then still that is an oversimplification. A game that is used a lot is going to hit a lot of these combinations and that’ll certainly translate into a lot more work for Unity to ship updates. So I would even argue that usage ∝ costs.

Haha, well you are the joker, so maybe I can borrow yours?

It’s based on downloads. Of course those are easy to track. Outrage exists because people hate change. I get that, but it still isnt unreasonable.

Proof me wrong then. Downloads/installs is not proportional to usage? Sounds like a nice null hypothesis that is easily disproven with a bit of data.

You want to run a pearson correlation line throught the number of downloads and the amount of usage. You’ll find P approaches 1. I don’t have the data, but if you do I’m willing to take the bet.

That’s only fair if I am making three pennies for every single time someone downloads that document. Microsoft Office made it possible and so the deserve a share.

The problem is that the kind of people that run these types of companies will first see the world burnt to ashes before losing profits and power.

So yes, they will fall, but they’ll be taking us down with them.