1.5 years of learning unity gone down the shitter. here I come, godot
even if they backtrack, trust is ruined at this point. this only makes sense if you’re trying to destroy the company intentionally and short your stock on the way out. what the fuck
1.5 years of learning unity gone down the shitter.
And this is the real damage to their business here. They clearly lost sight of their business model: Create an army of developers who know their product very well, so that it’s on a short list of products studios are all but forced to consider.
A wave of developers who know soemthing other than Unity or Unreal has the potential to turn the games development ecosystem totally on its head. They didn’t shoot themselves on the foot, they possibly shot themselves in the femoral artery.
They didn’t shoot themselves on the foot, they possibly shot themselves in the femoral artery.
I myself have been describing it as them shooting themselves in the chest, and are now bleeding out on the floor asking how it happened.
The CEO did sell a bunch of shares before this was announced, I hear.
That’s clickbait journalism.
He sold 2000 shares for $40/share, which he then immediately bought back for $1.42/share.
https://finance.yahoo.com/screener/insider/RICCITIELLO JOHN S
Which means he sold at the top, then bought more at the bottom so he can ride the train back up to do the same thing again.
This isn’t a good thing.
Pretty much the dream insider trading plan. But $80k doesn’t deem like much for a CEO
It’s definitely not. It’s probably just a free $80k his contract allowed him to get.
It was probably part of his contract. It wasn’t $40 when he sold it. As probably allowed by his contract, he sold it back to the company and bought it back for pennies. It’s just compensation not some conspiracy on his individual part.
When you sell your time and labour for a living, you tend to not have any idea about how people who own property for a living get paid. And the ownership class does a pretty good job at misinforming the working class about those details, since it benefits them to be seen as just doing the same things at a different scale. Insights into the actual process of their compensation will look like some sort of conspiratorial scheme because… Well, because it is. It’s just not the one people will tend to tie it to. And it’s not an illegal one.
They want us to believe they’re playing baseball in the major leagues while we’re on the company softball team, instead of highlighting that they’re actually playing poker with a stacked deck against a casino they own.
What you said doesn’t make any sense. Either it wasn’t $40 a share when he sold it like you said in this comment or it was $40 a share like you said in the previous comment.
It makes sense if the company had agreed to buy the shares off of him at market rates and then sell him stock back at a significant discount. Doing this would allow him to claim the money gained as capital gains rather than employment income, and it wouldn’t count as insider trading if it was an arrangement made and timelines settled upon before the bullshit was planned.
It could be something like having his contract say that the company will buy back X shares when the share price hits $Y in value, for instance.
I guarantee you his contract looks like something like this, “If you meet X performance metric, the company will buy N amount of shares (maximum 2000) back at the maximum/average stock price within Y days and sell you back the amount of shares sold (maximum 2000) for Z dollars.”
You’re describing something worse.
It’s actually neither of those, the biggest impact is free-to-play games. Hearthstone, Legends of Runeterra, virtually every Unity mobile game in the market… Having to pay per install has huge potential for abuse and can cost a fortune for games with millions of downloads.
JFC, I just learned that they are retroactively applying this new rule. This means that games that are out already or have been on sale for multiple years will have to pay the runtime fee too. Insane. They can bankrupt a studio before they even release their next game.
I still can’t believe that retroactive fees like that are legal.
Welcome to capitalism! Ain’t it grand!
I don’t think they can enforce that, right? I assume that would be a change of the contract, which they can’t just do willy nilly.
Yeah, I think that’s straight up illegal and I would simply refuse to pay.
If they can retroactively change terms, why can’t I, as a bonafide counterparty in that agreement? Maybe something like a 100% discount on runtime fees for days that end with ‘y’.
Otherwise I could simply “retroactively apply” a 100% discount on my lease or new car purchase.
The correct answer and what all studios/devs should do: tell them to retroactively pound sand and ditch Unity for all future projects.
I don’t think this is true? Their site https://unity.com/pricing-updates says “The fee applies to new installs beginning January 1, 2024”
New installs not new releases. So if you put out a game a few years back and suddenly a bunch of people start installing it on their new PCs, you’d get hit with this fee… assuming it is legally enforceable.
Hell, even if it isn’t strictly legally enforceable, if you still need to deal with Unity in some way in future you could be forced into dealing with this fee in order to get Unity’s cooperation.
Oh yeah good point. The word “retroactively” just gave me the idea that it would apply to old installs, because this whole thing is about installs.
Still, that is a major dick move.
Pricing should protect indie and small businesses. When it destroys those, we need government to step in because we’re on track to create oligarchs in every industry that are too big to fail.
I don’t want Silksong developed on Unity. Scrap it, start fresh. I’ll wait.
Scrap it. Start fresh.
The number of games that should do this is too damn high
The number of games that can do this is too damn low
The number of gamed that want to do this is pretty much nil
Pain, suffering and debugging
From their FAQ, looks like Unity doesn’t have any real way of dealing with pirated or fake installs. Their FAQ says you have to work with them when that happens so they can correct your bill. It doesn’t say Unity will automatically filter those installs out.
pirated? they want developers to pay Unity for people pirating their game???
Officially no, but the wording on the FAQ says it’s the developer’s job to take it up with them to resolve it. So it’s clear they don’t have any safeguard and only after you’re affected you can talk to them lmfao.
Does the Unity Runtime Fee apply to pirated copies of games? We are happy to work with any developer who has been the victim of piracy so that they are not unfairly hurt by unwanted installs.
Same thing goes for “install-bombing”:
We are not going to charge a fee for fraudulent installs or “install bombing.” We will work directly with you on cases where fraud or botnets are suspected of malicious intent.
So not only are the fees outrageous, but now devs are responsible for making sure this whole system isn’t being abused. It’s not gonna be long until people figure out how the install count is updated, and will proceed to weaponize it lmfao.
and don’t forget that this is “we’ll work with you” - i.e. you’d better build your own analytics into your game to prove your case otherwise unity can go “well assume 10% are bad installs - now pay for 90%”
This needs to turn into a class action suit that results in John Tortellini having his oxygen rights revoked. I can’t imagine shareholders will be happy finding out that John Riceroni has been selling off Unity’s stock, and I’m pretty sure what Unity’s trying to do here is straight-up illegal in the US. Fuck John Rigatoni. God, I was so happy thinking he’d died and gone to hell after EA, but nope, still alive and well.
Hahaaa nah, ToS:
The Parties agree that any arbitration will be conducted in their individual capacities only and not as a class action or other representative action, and the Parties expressly waive their right to file a class action or seek relief on a class basis.
Forced arbitration is one of the most villainous legal practices still somehow allowed in the US.
Arbitration is often a good thing, by avoiding clogging up courts and arbitrators can sometimes be better than whatever judge you’d get (since both parties have to agree to the arbitrator). It’s still legally binding and arbitrators have made lots of great rulings.
But not as a replacement for class action. The whole point of class actions is to make it much more viable for many people to be represented because only one affected person has to deal with managing an expensive lawsuit and there’s just one case instead of hundreds of thousands of arbitration cases (which still cost a ton of money for lawyers). So IMO arbitration is great, but shouldn’t be allowed to replace class actions specifically.
With all your puns, I still don’t what John Cappelletti’s real name is.
I think it’s, never working in this industry again.
You mean that Silksong could be delayed? pikachu face
It’s going to be the new Duke Nukem Forever…
Except it might be good :p
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The difference here is that it’s pissing off businesses, not users.
Yeah businesses can sue you for pulling out the rug like this.
Users cannot.
Pokemon is made on the unity engine, so one of the scariest legal teams in the world. Nintendo doesn’t like it when people take a little whipped cream off of the mcflurry, and this threatens to take the whole McFlurry.
Oh that’s gonna be a treat to watch, assholes punching each other
What exact grounds would a business sue for?
No it is not - those businesses ARE the users. Unless by user you mean consumers
My real point is that one of these userbases has lawyers and are highly risk-averse.
Pedantically though, yes.
We barely had a mass exodus from Reddit. It was quite modest lol
That being said, I popped my head in on reddit last week to find something, and it definitely seems noticeably worse at a glance. Or maybe I’ve just had enough distance from it now that I see the warts more plainly.
No we did have a mass Exodus from reddit, it’s just people stopped using the platform altogether instead of coming here.
Do you have any numbers? The only stats I saw were in the early throes of the black out. I haven’t seen anything lately showing a significant drop in DAU’s.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, I just haven’t seen anything indicating that
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I imagine it will get a bump. I’d love to see more developers using Godot, more tutorials, more in the asset library. The engine itself is quite good, but it doesn’t have a huge ecosystem built around it the way Unity does.
Plus unlike unity, being closed source, devs can actually contribute to the engine for others to benefit, as well as go in a fix problems they used to have to wait for unity to fix.
FOSS makes so much more sense when the people using the software, are devs themselves.
Not to mention that they eat their own dog food. The Godot application is itself running on Godot engine (which is also super useful for people wanting to add to it or make changes. eg. if you can make a UI for a game in Godot, then you can mod the actual Godot interface quite easily.)
If W4 doesn’t enshitiffy it to push people to their proprietary fork (which is unfortunately required because Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft don’t allow making their APIs public).
Do W4 have a publically available fork they want people to switch to? I was under the impression they were just offering third party porting to consoles. I don’t really understand how they would be able to even offer a proprietary version with support to directly build console versions.
There is no way they can legally enforce retroactively charging. How the fuck is that even possible or legal?
Unity is not a product, it’s an ongoing subscription. You can distribute Unity as part of your game as long as you have a subscription.They changed the terms of the subscription for next year. If you don’t have a subscription then you cannot redistribute Unity. So your choice is to either accept the new terms, or pull your game from the stores.
Another reason why everything is subscription based these days, they can change the terms at will
I’m waiting for a Legal Eagle breakdown or something. I’ve been thinking the exact same thing. Sneakily removing stuff from their TOS in GitHub a while back is dodgy.
I read somewhere that they removed their TOS entirely from GitHub but I would love a breakdown of this too. I’m not familiar with how the Unity agreement works.
Per their lawyers it’s in the TOS. Everyone just hits “I agree” when they get that EULA but there’s always a “we reserve the right to fuck you over” buried in the fine print.
So there’s a little nuance here. They aren’t going to charge you for the downloads that already happened, it’s on all downloads moving forward, even if the game has already been released. I still think it’s ridiculous, but it is not the same as suddenly hitting you with a bill for all the downloads the game already had. That would not hold up in any court. But the latter case…we’ll see. Depends on the specifics of the initial agreement I suppose. Totally possible they are within their rights even if it’s scummy.
Correct me if I’m wrong, that’s my understanding. I don’t think if you had a million downloads last year, for instance, you’ll be charged for those.
they said it was retroactive, but only for new installs - or something.
they are super unclear and have changed the rules twice in the last dayYes, the fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. We look at a game’s lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.
I read that as it’s billing moving forward but they’ve been very opaque thus far so I’m willing to entertain there’s a contradiction elsewhere lol
I’ve been wondering about this too.
They aren’t retroactively charging. They’re charging a new fee going forward.
They are retroactively applying the new pricing model to games that have been out for years. That’s what I meant. So they’re not back-billing for previous downloads, but already-released games don’t get grandfathered in.
I’m always open to corrections though.
Games that have been out for years arent going to hit the minimum 12 month downloads/revenue figures unless they are still very popular, no?
I dont agree with this downloads based fee to be clear.
Yeah, I’m not 100% sure. There are instances too though where someone gets a new PC and installs their old games. I think it would still count in those cases, which is just silly to me. It all feels like a massive cash grab, or they’re trying to fudge the stock value.
Can they go retroactively? Aren’t there contracts?
You click a check box with a really long user agreement that does in fact allow them to make these changes.
Damn, it works with anyone. I should find a way to make one too.
By reading this comment you agree to send me one bitcoin.
God dammit loch Ness monst- oh, wait, you’re not asking for tree fiddy
Apparently they snuck a clause into an update to the ToS at some point, after years of saying they’d never do such a thing. So people agreed to a loophole without realizing. The legality of such a thing is highly questionable, hence the rumblings of potential lawsuits are already brewing.
If you want to change the terms of contract then you have to contact every affected individual or company and make it explicitly clear what terms of contract are being changed and then get explicit approval that these changes can go ahead. Obviously you do otherwise we live in a world of anarchy and business couldn’t possibly happen.
When companies want to renegotiate tiny intricate details of contracts it often takes months because of these requirements, even when both parties are already in verbal agreement.
They can’t just announce they are changing the contract and then provide less than 2 months worth of warning and say you don’t get a choice this is the new contract now and forever and also in the past. They have to get explicit approval of this change, and obviously no one’s going to give them it.
I understand the controversy, especially in light of the recent Reddit bullshit. But I don’t think I understand the tech.
For the sake of it, let’s focus only on games that are paid for, installed on a system (or downloaded using Game Pass), and do not involve a multiplayer element. (Hollow Knight, Cuphead, etc)
Is there some ongoing resource use (on Unity’s end) when people download or play these games? Like, when I play Hollow Knight, my system isn’t connecting to Unity to use their servers to run the game on my home system, is it? When I download a game to my system, an I downloading the engine separately from the software, thereby using Unity’s servers?
As abhorrent as the Reddit API change was, at least they were charging for the ongoing consumption of some digital resource (Reddit data). Unless I’m misunderstanding something, this just seems more like trying to collect a residual after the fact.
Is there some ongoing resource use (on Unity’s end)
Nope. The engine is part of the game once compiled. So all hosting and bandwidth cost goes to steam/gog/whoever is selling the game.
They are just trying to get more of that sweet viral game money.
How do they track installs then?
I’d assume they’d amend the contract to require that a tracker be added to the binaries of the game. Or something.
They can’t really… unity itself doesn’t have an installer so not sure how they could track ‘installs’ reliably, the installer is added by the developer. If they add tracking to the library that (a) creates issues for people using app stores as now you have to declare you’re tracking people, and that can be grounds for rejection (you need a watertight privacy policy at the very least, and ‘we send it to a company in the US’ isn’t going to fly), and (b) not all apps are installed over the internet, or given internet access. 3d visualisation is more than games.
Unity Revenue reporting has always been “self-reported” by users. If they think you’re lying and aren’t on the right license they send the complkance team to make sure you’re giving enough. Unity has no way of knowing installs because as you said it doesn’t connect to Unity.
You don’t download anything separately, the runtime is included with the game.
The runtime could be updated with a phone home feature to track the install
This is basically like if John Deere started following everyone around so they could charge a farmer 1 cent every time you bite into a vegetable you bought at Walmart.
If they kill Cult of the Lamb over this. There will no longer be any reason to live.
The devs followed up indicating that the tweet about delisting the game on Jan 1st was a joke, but it’s still a shitty situation for developers
This is going to get so bad…Go godot.
For anyone interested to sign I found this petition against the new fee. https://chng.it/kYpqWBBHbB
Hoping with all the backlash Unity is forced to role it back. Thank you to everyone posting alternatives, I will be checking these out :)
I don’t think an online petition has ever changed anything in the history of the internet.
Honestly I don’t see most of the indie companies keep working with Unity unless they have no choice. Even if they roll it back, who’s to say that they won’t do that again next year?
The fact that they count you retroactively for eligibility means they want to try and rake as much money as possible.
There was some sort of similar issue a year or two ago and it wasn’t enough to drive people away. I suspect the long-term picture is that any given business either slowly grows to the scale that Unreal Engine is a better fit anyway and abandon Unity or very very very slowly we see Indies move to Godot. Though it’ll be more that new indies will form studios around breakthrough hits made in Godot and be Godot studios from the start (and replace older Unity studios as part of the natural turnover of small to medium sized studios) until there is a tipping point where there’s enough Godot developers floating around that it becomes easier for existing Unity studios to switch than to keep putting up with Unity’s shit. That’s a slow process though. 5-10 years imho (if ever.)
This is a far more nuanced situation, but even in what you’re describing the service is then ceased, you don’t get to continue using the service on the previous terms.
I’ve seen a claim that the old terms of service explicitly stated that you could do so so long as you didn’t update to the newer version. Which is probably fine for most developers who are already deep into a Unity project. (Though as Unity has now taken down their GitHub page with those terms on it, I haven’t yet seen anyone link to an easy to verify and read copy for people to see if that’s true or not.
Thoughts and prayers
Game Dev Story… And every Kairosoft game.
Did they just forget they sell mobile games?
Cult of the Lamb did come out and say they weren’t serious about delisting.
Telling people to purchase their game because they’re delisting it, then coming out later and saying, “haha jk” is kind of shitty.
