Unity issue an apology on Twitter for "confusion and angst" over the runtime fee policy.
Unity issue an apology on Twitter for "confusion and angst" over the runtime fee policy.
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.
Big "I'm sorry you were offended by the correct things I said and did" energy
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.
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.
they really only have themselves to blame [...] research your vendor’s financial strategy - that’s basic due diligence
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?
If they were so hard up than they should have left Parsec alone instead on lobotomizing it by killing Arcade.
While we were very reasonable, we understand that you just didn't get it, which made you sad. We understand it feels bad to be sad. To remedy this, we will try again using different words.
Yep. What they should have written:
"We recognize that our recent runtime fee policy announcement wasn't well-received. We genuinely apologize for the oversight and any confusion or concern it caused. Your feedback is invaluable to us. We are actively discussing the policy with our teams and the community and will be revising it based on your inputs. Please bear with us as we work through this, and expect an update soon."
PR is hard, let's go shopping!
Yep, that has a better tone. There's a limit to how good a statement you can make when at the core you really plan to do enshittification one way or another, but they could have thrown in a smidgeon of accepting blame also. E.g. "We were unable to provide clear and unambiguous answers to questions that came up" costs them nothing.
Any PR statement that includes the words "we hear you" can be safely ignored
Also any apology for how it was perceived rather than what was done is worthless.
It's pretty speak for I'm sorry you are stupid and expendable.
RuneScape 3 recently made an extremely controversial change, and I think they handled the apology perfectly. When they finally made changes and dropped some heavily disliked things, they opened with "we messed up". Unity needs to do the same thing here if they want a chance to rebuild
Jagex is respectful not the company I'd look to for inspiration in terms of correcting past mistakes 🙂 For the uninitiated, they legally gaslit the community when they made their first major controversial change roughly a decade ago by "removing the feature" then "adding" the same feature with a different coat of paint.
This is bullshit. There is no confusion. Their new policy was very clear and easy to understand. If the word confusion applied at all, it would be to how/why Unity is doing such a brain dead move that alienates their entire user base. This is a weasel word announcement that doesn't say what it should, namely 'we fucked up and we're sorry'.
"we're sorry for how you reacted"
Appalling
My god, they're becoming alien ants
And just like, the movies, we play out our last scene.
The Unity execs thought they were being smooth criminals, instead they came in too rough and got busted.
Stupid voice typing... fixed :{
Brain dead is such an understatement too. They lost everyone's trust, and I'm not sure there's anything they can say to regain it. They're gonna try something like this again at some point, and I don't think anyone should give them the opportunity. They deserve to go under.
Trust is hard to build and easy to break and even harder to rebuild.
To truly rebuild trust, they'd need to commit to never doing this again. That would mean 1. a change to the legal TOS that a developer who licenses for a project at a certain pricing level may remain at that price level for that project / that generation of Unity for as long as they wish, 2. a public commitment to never require per-install pricing, and ideally 3. the resignation of whoever came up with this brain dead idea.
doesn’t say what it should, namely ‘we fucked up and we’re sorry’.
I don't think they fucked up in the way you mean (from their point of view). Their mistake was not getting away with the change, their "apology" sounds to me like they are going to reword their new policy but ultimately still have it do somewhat the same thing.
IMO they should never had done this in the first place and should now say "we are sorry, our mistake, it won't happen again".
Yeah, this 100%.
To truly restore trust, it should be 'we're sorry, our mistake, it won't happen again, our new TOS will guarantee the right to remain at a current license price structure for a given generation of the engine, we hereby promise to never ever require per-install pricing, and the person responsible for this change is no longer with the company'.
Too late, they already communicated their greed to every gamedev out there and no one can ignore the potential of Unity fucking them over again anymore. Overall the whole shitshow was good advertisement for Godot.
It's truly the year of mask-off corporate reveals. WotC, Reddit, Unity, Twitter. Probably more I'm forgetting or unaware of. So many big moves to capitalize on long time stability that, quite predictably, result not in amazing increase in profits but the irrevocable tarnishing of public trust that they relied on. It's kinda wild to watch, honestly.
It's IMO a sign that the current financial bubble is about to burst and it's going to do so in a very violent way despite greedy bulls still pushing the "it's different this time, we have AI now" bullshit.
Investors have their money trapped in these companies, and when they see what riskless treasury bills yield, they naturally start losing their minds because their money is instead in companies that fail to make significantly more than that riskless benchmark. So those investors then pressure those companies to do whatever they can to produce a good enough return on investment in a short period of time as they run out of patience and they themselves know that hell is coming in the financial markets so their shares might lose an even more significant amount soon.
The end result of CEOs and executives under pressure by investors, and engineers stressing out because they understand the financial situation and that they have to either be yes-men and agree with whatever changes the executives propose or be laid off (because another way to reach the target set by investors is to reduce costs by firing people), is obviously the enshittification that we witness today.
microsoft making ux worse, google fighting adblock with drm, not to mention all sorts of non-tech catastrophe
somebody is gonna make a 'we didnt start the fire' about 2023 called 'we started the fire'
That's how it is once the free money dries up. The profits must rise, no matter the long-term damage this causes - so they try to bleed the existing customer base dry to keep things rising for one or two more quarters. What does it matter to them if all the employees who have worked hard for years will lose their jobs due to their mismanagement?
The conventional wisdow is that in time of economic turmoil, companies should lower their profit margins and weather out the storm.
However, in today's capitalism, this is not not acceptable. Shareholders demand ever increasing profits and anything short of that is considered a failure. If you don't keep your margin, you are to be scolded and discarded.
Now, the loans that many of the companies have cost a lot more money than 2 years ago. So the enshittification is used to enable the continued growth to keep the profits growings.
That was not an apology. That was them calling us stupid.
"what, you guys don't have phones?"
Were sorry youre so stupid
"Angst". Quite a choice of words.
Isn’t it? Like the entire industry is composed of teenagers without enough life experience to see the big picture.
But then, did anyone expect Unity not to be tone deaf?
That was my first impression. I suppose it could be an honest mistake (especially since they apparently fired all the PR people a while back, too, heh) but it doesn't look great.
Must be AI-written.
So they apologize for being caught, not for wrecking stuff, as usual.
It's worse. They're not even apologizing for their actions but the "confusion and angst".
It's kind of like saying "we're sorry you feel that way" and are somehow misunderstanding what they're trying to do. They might as well have said, sorry dumbasses but it's going to happen regardless. Perhaps in some watered down form, perhaps not this/next year, but it will happen.
Remember Blizzard when they released Warcraft 3 Reforged? "We're sorry you didn't get the experienced you thought you deserved". Gold mine, that one. It wasn't phrased like that exactly but that was what they meant.
"confusion" no confusion here chum don't gaslight us enjoy your new shareprices sure your CEO is loving their successful dump
It took them a week to make a tweet saying basically nothing?
You should see how long ECS and the Jobs system has been in development.
As expected. And now they'll publish their actual policy which will still be pretty bad but less worse.
They've already sealed their fate. Only a fool would start making a new project in Unity going forward.
Now everyone is going to trust them.
Of course. The emergency damage control PR firm said so.
The advice was practically free!
It's almost like the CEO of the company (John Riccitiello) supporting the most Indie game developers holds 53 million dollars in EA shares or something....
Even, and most likely especially, if Unity does poorly does EA benefit... I bet ya Riccitiella knows all the features of Frostbite, but couldn't tell you if you can do native reliable UDP networking in Unity...
"We thought you were locked in and realised you may not be. We might have to rethink our evil master plans "
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
This is basically victim blaming & the old Unity license was fine because it allowed you to create console ports. Godot still isn't a valid solution for consoles.
Why isn't Godot a solution for consoles? Is it not implemented yet? Just curious. I'm starting to read about Godot given the debacle that Unity's management caused. It's been great advertising for Godot.
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/consoles.html
They're not licensed, and they don't even have templates for anything but steam deck.
Unity has the cash and manpower to jump through those hoops and keep them up to date.
There’s no official implementation for console. I think there’s a third party extension(?) in the works to allow godot to work with console though
Unless the CEO walks and takes his yes-men with him, I don't see Unity recovering from this self-inflicted shitshow in the near term. I bet it has motivated a lot of devs to look at the viability of using Godot instead and being free of future shakedowns.
If you switch to Godot and implement a feature you needed but it didn't have, please do us a favor and take that part of the code and put it out there under the MIT license (unless I'm misremembering what license they use) it will help the next person switch easier
There was no confusion and this is empty PR until they publicly post the policy changes.
The apology seems insincere, as they always do; however, a company bending to consumer feedback in this manner is a good thing (if they actually make meaningful changes).
And what, pray tell, will change?
This was always the plan, by the way. This is the Trump school of negotiation.
Make a horrendous, unrealistic, offensive proposition. Opponent is outraged.
Then, propose the offer you actually want. It now looks better relative to the initial proposition.
I fucking despise this type of action and will never touch unity or suggest it to anyone ever again. It's the only way to root out this type of bullshit from our society. Scorched earth.
Nothing. They hear us. We should be happy. They listened. Now they're going to go on with their plan. But it's great they heard us! /s
Not nothing.
People will drop Unity as an engine at a huge rate.
The limit will be increased to a whopping $250,000 and the fee will be only 18 cents
More like the limit will be decreased to $100,00 and the fee will go up to 0.4 (0.35 for pro). You don't get it, you just was confused and angsty, this is a better proposal!
*wE hAvE hEArD yOu, wE aRe lIsTEnInG"
Like fuck you are, damn vultures. Outta here with this generic ass PR apologyFuck off & die, Unity.
John Riccitiello is trying to get another Worst Company In America award for his mantlepiece.
Burn your company, delete your repos, never return
Appreciate the nitter link, thank you! A few (many?) of us no longer user Twitter actively or even have an account there, it's essentially de-listed site to avoid for me, but at least with Nitter you can still see some of the content when needed to.
No problem. I still have my account there but if I can avoid it then I will, so always prefer Nitter too. I also respect that there is content that others want to see without giving Twitter data and/or a click.
Fuck off.
God damn.
Fuck these assholes "running" these shit companies.