- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
Unity May Never Win Back the Developers It Lost in Its Fee Debacle::Even though the company behind the wildly popular game engine walked back its controversial new fee policy, the damage is done.
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Oh we’re well beyond “Find Out.” We’re at Uniexit
Unity engaged not only in a massive attepted money grab but then tried to back it with some bad-faith action like quietly deleting user protections from its TOS.
We have seen the true face of the Unity company and it wants to prey on its clients. Also the timing (during an ongoing trend of enshittification) reminds us publicly-owned companies are not our friends. In fact, the are adversarial to their own employees and customers.
The company needs to show an immense amount of contrition (say firing its top officers) or it needs to wither to a quarter of its current value.
You know, companies could avoid situations like this if they just engaged directly with their fanbases more, proposing ideas and collecting feedback. This way, even if they decide to do the unpopular thing anyway because they have to for financial reasons or something, at least they’re not springing a sudden surprise on their fans.
People really don’t like negative surprises. They can usually handle plain old negative news though, especially if they got time to prepare for the idea first.
I think they sometimes try to use focus groups to collect feedback, but members of a focus group may exhibit unique behavior simply because they’re in a focus group. It’s not an actual representative sample of the public.
I completely agree, old school RuneScape does this very well and I wish more companies tried to engage their users as much as those devs do
You know, companies could avoid situations like this if they just engaged directly with their fanbases more, proposing ideas and collecting feedback.
Good news: Apparently Unity did engage with its developers behind closed door for a whole year, they told them this was a bad idea; internally the execs were told this was a bad idea, and here we are.
That’s the problem - based on the CEO selling almost all his stock over time and rumors attributed to employees, they knew.
A company turning a consistent modest profit is good for many people, but makes no one rich. It’s a good investment and provides for many people, but is meaningless if you’re already rich.
A company exploding to 100x its size makes a bunch of people very rich and a lot of people more wealthy, but is very rare in this age where the world is already as industrialized as anyone wants it to be. There’s nowhere else to expand, no underdeveloped countries with resources to buy for pennies on the dollar
A company imploding can make a few people rich… but it’s a big guaranteed payout if you see it coming.
That’s the stage of capitalism we’ve been at for a while - cannibalization.
I’m sure even floating the idea would have been bad. One of the biggest problems with the unity changes was that they were retroactive. That they can even change the fee structure so dramatically after you’ve already built and shipped your game should give anyone using them pause. I don’t think people really considered that as a possibility before.
Yeah I can’t imagine why I would start a project with Unity at this point. That’s just asking to get screwed over later with no warning.
It appears that Unity shot itself in both feet and also its face. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen such a spectacular betrayal of trust by a business where confidence in your product is paramount. Even with extreme backpedling, it’s in the can.
Wizard of the Coast license fiasco is about the same. Except of course that “confidence in your product” is a bit of a misnomer. It’s not a confidence in the D&D, but the license. A lot of people were trusting the OGL, and the changes would have fucked over half of the industry with their “retroactive” changes.
I was maybe 10 hours of work into a small side project and I just said fuck it and started over in Godot. No reason to use Unity unless you are a studio that’s deep into development or supporting a game that’s already out.
Removed by mod
Right? Do they think executive compensation grows on trees?
"Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.”
Ford stared in disbelief at the crowd who were murmuring appreciatively at this and greedily fingering the wads of leaves with which their track suits were stuffed.
“But we have also,” continued the management consultant, “run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying one ship’s peanut."
Murmurs of alarm came from the crowd. The management consultant waved them down.
“So in order to obviate this problem,” he continued, “and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and. . .er, burn down all the forests. I think you’ll all agree that’s a sensible move under the circumstances."
The crowd seemed a little uncertain about this for a second or two until someone pointed out how much this would increase the value of the leaves in their pockets whereupon they let out whoops of delight and gave the management consultant a standing ovation. The accountants among them looked forward to a profitable autumn aloft and it got an appreciative round from the crowd.”
❤️shareholder value❤️
They were willing to fuck over some people and drive them completely out of business.
Which people? Developers. The very people that helped make Unity what it is. Unity wanted to completely crush their own developers. Some estimates put Unity’s fees higher than 100% revenue in some scenarios.
Them back-tracking and saying “wow! we didn’t expect this to be so hated!” shows that they either don’t understand numbers (they do) or that they think their users are idiots.
So why would developers want to come back to them?
John Riccitello literally called developers “fucking idiots” in an interview, so yeah, it’s the second option.
We’re here on lemmy and mastodon, but Reddit and twitter still have waaaay more users. Unities move has boosted the popularity of other (open source) alternatives, sure, and if I was a game dev I would transition, but most of the devs and studios are going to need a lot more incentive to abandon the tool they spend decades getting to know
I think there’s merit to what you’re saying, but it’s not a one to one comparison. Most users aren’t gambling with their future livelihood and financial well-being on Twitter or Reddit.
They’ll see longtime customers start to divest, I’m sure. I’d imagine most of the damage done was to their future new customer numbers. Anyone starting a project today would be pretty foolish to even consider Unity, and they’ll feel that more and more going forward. The death rattle’s begun.
I’d personally seek out any good open source alternatives before trying anything else nowadays. I’m pretty happy with blender and krita now I’m starting to get back into animation and drawing. But I’m old, I don’t know if joung people would not simply choose the one that is free-ish and more popular and better supported
Yeah but with the macroeconomics nowadays, this is not a good time to be losing users.
Business and the economy is doing pretty good atm tho. I feel like the whole reason for all these blatant cash grabs so many companies are doing rn, is because they made so much money last year they want to keep getting that much richer every year, which is plain stupid from a long term perspective if you ask me
Business and the economy is doing pretty good atm tho.
Interest is high which is why you are seeing pushes from all these companies to monetize and generate revenue. Borrowing money isn’t cheap or near-free anymore, and investors are on their backs.
And they never should, the fact that they can push this outrageous policy in the first place just means that they can do it again in the near future
The takeaway is to never hire people from EA into decision making roles.
you mean all the people who said they weren’t coming back even after the obvious rollback of the policy aren’t coming back? 😱
breaking news: betrayed devs arent coming back
Goes to show that destroying trust is quite easy, but earning trust is very hard.
If they had just listened to the feedback, realized their mistake, even if it took a while, and then backpedaled to the current compromise, they probably wouldn’t have hurt their business much. It was the disdain they showed for small developers, basically saying they weren’t going to address issues like reinstallation and other things that would make a big difference to smaller projects. And then quietly altering their TOS, to make the small developers that made the platform able to exist, have to start paying even if the contract at the time protected them from the fees if they didn’t upgrade.
This kind of disregard for the people who made your company what it is today, just to make some short term profit is exactly why Reddit, Twitter, and so many other tech companies are falling apart right now. It’s just happening to such extremes that it’s not just let’s price gouge our customers and patrons, but let’s actively commit fraud to squeeze out every possible dime from all but our biggest customers and throw them away. Fortunately, places like Lemmy and Mastodon are here to catch them. Hope they can make it.
Unity doesn’t deserve them back.
Why would they? When you choose a platform to sink multiple years of effort into, you look for stability, for example the stability of not having a history of trying to rugpull their customers.
If you destroy good will you’re likely not going to get it back in any situation.
Can be destroyed in an instant, but takes years to build.
