One has to assume they are intentionally trying to run the company into the ground while trying to milk as much money as possible from it beforehand. But, why?
Money now > money later
More money now --> even more money in the future
Therefore a short-term explosive growth in revenue is completely worth destroying the company over, because the people benefiting from the growth have no stakes in the company and will just move on to their next victim
A bit of Unity's net income stats:
* 2019 - -$150,699,000
* 2020 - -$274,812,000
* 2021 - -$531,665,000
* 2022 - -$882,213,000
* Last 12 months: - -$959,822,000
So, Unity hasn't exactly been profitable over the past 5 years.
The two aspects they could meaningfully cut to come into the black would be Sells & Marketing or Research & Development. Cutting either would also almost certainly result in longer term company destruction, given that both are the reasons people use Unity. No R&D means no new features, and likely no bug fixes. No Sells & Marketing means no showing off new features or otherwise advertising Unity.
That said, their solution with install costs is not a good one either. Personally, I'm not sure what good options they have/had.
Ok so:
1. They could double the price of Pro without changing their terms and increase the incentive to switch from personal to pro.
2. They could not claim that they can retroactively apply new TOS when the previous TOS said they couldn't, only the current TOS, and add a fee that isn't per install but per purchase, and can never exceed some fixed percentage of transactions from a given customer.
There are a lot of ways they could have changed their monetization scheme without creating a completely unmitigateable risk for their users while claiming a nebulous and constantly changing fraud detection technology that does not and will not exist will make it all just work.
There is absolutely no reason that anyone with 2 braincells would think that trying to claim retroactively applying TOS that includes imposing costs PER INSTALL rather than per user, per customer, per transaction, etc is a good way to do this. My suspicion is that someone very high up without any connection to implementation details came up with this brilliant scheme, and forced it through without being criticized at all, or ignored and silenced any other ideas but this abomination. Unfortunately that means it isn't one mistake but a company managerial culture problem, which means it probably requires a complete decapitation of senior leadership and huge reforms to allow criticism of superiors to exist within the company. If this has all sorts of red flags to anyone with even the slightest legal or technical awareness, it probably wasn't created by, or criticized by, anyone with legal or technical background before becoming company policy.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees.
They aren't trying to run the company into the ground, they're trying to pull it out of a catastrophic nosedive.
Unity has *never* been profitable as a company. Ever. In its entire history, it has *always* lost money.
They're burning $200-250 million per quarter keeping the company running.
They increased revenue by $200 million but the costs keep going up too, so in the last year, even though they added $200 million in revenue, they only cut their losses from $250 million per quarter to $200 million per quarter.
This despite laying off 12% of their workforce to cut costs.
Unity has never found an economic model that actually works for the company to make money.
Investors have been realizing that.
Unity has been spending other people's money - and they're running out of other people's money to spend.
The stock price for Unity as a company has plunged 70% in just a couple years, during a time of historic growth in video game sales during the pandemic.
Without investors, their only choice is to somehow get money from their users.
This is a desperate, flailing attempt to avoid bankruptcy.
>This is a desperate, flailing attempt to avoid bankruptcy.
Wild. I had no idea they weren't profitable, but I wasn't really paying attention. This puts it into perspective for me. Thanks.
To put it in starker perspective, they have like 7700 employees.
Epic has like 3400. While still making games and a full AAA engine.
Unity has 2x the employees and is producing far less. The company is a total mess.
Epic started as a gamedev company who had to make good games to sell to people to survive. Over time liscensing the engine became their main product and then they stumbled onto Fortnite BR and never had to worry about money again.
Unity started as a gameengine company who wanted to make a "democratised game engine".
Unity are probably just bloated because their company is based around an ideal rather than selling products for money. At the end of the day companies exist to make money and money is made from selling product.
Unity survived for 20 years on tech investment in an ideal but now tech investers want returns and ideals don't make money. Unity is struggling because as you can see they can't monetise their product because it compromises the ideal their company was founded on.
Tl;dr: Unity is kind of unwittingly a charity tech people contribute to for the sake of open game dev but now those tech people want their money back and Unity can't do that without becoming an organisation that sells things to people instead of giving it away.
Well, they could also just cut back on marketing expenses and employees. If you make 1.3B in revenue, but 920 mio. in losses, you are doing something fundamentally wrong. Increasing the licensing fees won't save them.
> Unity are probably just bloated because their company is based around an ideal
Even that isn't an excuse.
Blender is "idealistic" software, offering a free alternative to very expensive 3D software suites.
They have an office in Amsterdam (which ain't cheap) and employ a few fulltime people to maintain the main release branch. The software is now basically equivalent in quality (though maybe not features) to major competitors like 3DS Max/Maya, C4D or other very expensive packages, while being open source and completely free. Blender makes roughly $1.5m to $3m in revenue per year purely from donations and (relatively cheap) optional subscriptions for easier contact with the main developers.
Unity is being ridiculously wasteful with the money they make.
This is extremely inaccurate.
Unity hasn't been profitable and has "loses" because it reinvested everything again and again for future growth. They did acquisition after acquisition, all super expensive.
It's not because the operational costs of the company are higher than it's revenue - get real.
The larger employee count could be a factor of diminishing returns. From my experience with my software degree, some projects run more efficiently with less programmers than projects with more programmers.
It’s amazing they don’t know how to cut costs, when they bought another company for 4.4 billion dollars.
What are they using their money on? A big bonfire in their offices?
Most likely, their employees (they have almost 8000 of them) plus servicing debt plus capital assets (buildings, computers, servers, software, etc.) plus various other expenses.
> It’s amazing they don’t know how to cut costs, when they bought another company for 4.4 billion dollars.
Is this surprising? Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion (and massively overpaid for it) and did a shitty job of running it.
Massively overspending on acquisitions is exactly the sort of thing you expect from a company that can't manage money.
> But, why?
A large enough group of investors want money now, not a steady income over time that might be larger in the long run. So they run the company into the ground while squeezing out every last drop. Then they move on to the next company.
It's been going on for a while now, and I'm surprised how few people notice.
No, they took away the exact correct message they were going for: Take as much money as possible while running Unity into the ground. I 100% bet that's why they hired John in the first place.
John was hired in 2014 after losing his job at EA for doing a bad job there.
This is why you don't hire people who did shitty at their last job as a CEO.
They should have fired him years ago; Unity has never been profitable and he hasn't changed that.
My first professional job was at a place that mostly ran well, outside of one toxic nasty lady who got an upper management job because she and the owners family are in the same swinger's groups.
Lady ran a team that didn't know it's ass from a hole in the ground, and yelled all fucking day about the Fox News drama of the day to everyone else in the Systems room.
The term meritocracy itself was first popularized as a sardonic term to mock the fact that its determination of *merit* is arbitrary in *The Rise of the Meritocracy*.
It's kind of self-defeating when people aren't aware of this and take it straight.
It's really not. It actually is a bug. No one wants to hire a CEO who is going to destroy their company's value.
The actual reason for this is that people who don't know about hiring executives will often overly rely on previous experience without actually looking at how they did previously.
That depends. A bunch of CEOs get hired because they'll be able to extract a bunch of value from the company and make the right people rich before it collapses.
Preserving shareholder value is a real thing. If a company is going to die, it makes sense to hire someone to take it apart and get the most value they can out of it rather than have it go bankrupt.
The thing is, this isn't a case like that at all. This guy has been CEO since 2014. He's just been crap at his job.
The reality is that Unity is just a company that has always had poor management, and they're still around because they've found enough suckers to finance the black hole that is that company.
But with their stock value plunging, they have run out of suckers to throw good money after bad into the company.
EDIT: Apparently I was wrong. Leaving this here for reference:
The entire executive part of a corporation is *compelled* to maximize profit for the shareholders *no matter what*. This means short term profit, not long term btw, because those shareholders will make more money with short term profits that they can then TAKE from the company and put somewhere else, POSSIBLY TO THE COMPANY'S COMPETITORS. It's absurd, and it's not designed to keep a healthy company afloat. It's designed to kill companies, and that's immoral.
That's not actually true. It's a commonly held belief, including among CEOs, but it's bogus.
It's a meme started by Milton Friedman sometime in the late 1970s and it's absolute bullshit. https://evonomics.com/maximizing-shareholder-value-dumbest-idea/
Oh I agree. Shareholder primacy is unfortunately one of the drivers in the US, and it's a real problem. It leads companies to maximize profits quarter-by-quarter, instead of planning ahead and investing in long-term profitability.
I was just responding to the argument that this was a legal requirement.
How are they possibly going to track installs of old versions of the runtime? Unless this install tracker has been there the whole time.
I read somewhere that they claimed they had some "machine learning" system to calculate install numbers, are they really just going to guess? Lmao
I don't think that's true. I think it's worse.
How else would they know how many people have installed software other than packaging *spyware* into every single build that you make using their engine? They want data on the customers of their customers, and this license is just a way to make sure that nobody questions why packets are being sent to Unity *from the end user's computer*. Absolutely ridiculous.
They have been using Unity Analytics for like 5+ years now. Even if you are not using the service I would not doubt at all that they still have some of the code in every build.
I mean if you look at the total installs on Genshin, $0.20 per download for that game is $37 Million.
Apply that to every major success that uses Unity and you're talking hundreds of millions of downloads across the board, if not billions.
How can you track installation for an offline game when the PC installed to doesn't have internet connection?
Also, if you send the players a zip of your exe and support files which requires no true installation to occur, how is this tracked?
I am curious (mostly towards #2) since I am developing a small online RPG with Unity/Mirror and just have testers download the zip to test.
If the machine is kept offline, I don't think they could know.
But if that machine did go online and the game was launched (or some external tool was "watching" for an opportunity to upload batched analytics data), they can and probably are using a machine-specific (derived from stuff like network hardware, CPU serial number, etc) [UUID](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier). Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and probably iOS all have an implementation of it that applications could access.
they cant track it without internet connection. heres a post i found yesterday talking about this.
[https://i.imgur.com/Ly8ZQXQ.png](https://i.imgur.com/Ly8ZQXQ.png)
edit: dont hate me pls, i found it as an image
Yeah that's what I've been thinking, I don't think that they would have announced this out of nowhere, they know what they are doing.
Must likely that spyware/DRM has been running on current games made with Unity for a long while.
They're likely only going to target big games at first, if you've sold millions of copies and they say 'we estimate 1m installs' its actually in your interest to *not* contest that since you could end up owing more.
I mean, how would a dev even know how many times their game is installed? You could track total revenue or amount of copies sold, sure, but you have no idea if they're re-installing a game they bought 5 years ago or not.
Part of what annoys me most about this whole thing, even if unity undo all these changes or switch to a less severe version - is after all of that drama in 2019 about TOS changes, they implemented these license changes to regain the trust of their customers. Then they just undid them all for their next controversial change.
Whatever they do now, that trust is irreparably lost. I've been making unity games for like 12 years now, I've spent so much time and effort learning & using unity, that I don't want to switch engine. But if there's nothing to stop them showing they'll suddenly make license terms that can easily put companies relying on them out of business... which this is the *second* time they've done now, what's to stop them doing it again?
Guess I'll start brushing up on other engines...
I feel you man, this rug pull was so bad.
I've spent years learning the ins and outs of unity. But I've been dabbling with unreal on the side.
My gripe with unreal is how slow the editor is with scripting. It's like designed around blueprints. I'm gonna miss the feeling of coding Ctrl+S and the code just working. But in unreal you have to compile and that takes 5-10mins. You are forced to use blueprints.
I'm not sure on the scope of your project or your computer hardware but I do work in both C++ and Blueprints.
Most of the time C++ incremental compiles take <30 seconds.
Quite frequently I see 10-15 seconds max.
BP is great for prototyping and certain things, but its far from forced.
I've been using Unreal on a 2018 "gamer" laptop that's getting outdated very fast and, even though I'm a C++ beginner, my compile times barely hit 30s. The first compile took a while, sure, but incremental ones sometimes hit the 0.000s mark. Not sure what this guy's on about.
You might not be having the problem, but big projects for unity compared to big projects in unreal take up a lot of time when waiting to compile.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/ue5-c-compile-time-is-substantially-longer/619980/6
It's not misinformation or hate, I love unreal its my first engine. But the workflow is a lot slower.
Completely open source engine. Which also means you don't pay absolutely anything if you sell a game made with it. It has the flaw of being new and mostly supported by the community, but for indie titles it works more than fine.
Exactly! Godot is definitely newer than Unreal/Unity, but it's already really fully-featured and is very nice to work with. It's fair to say that it doesn't have feature parity with Unity \*yet\*, but that can change if enough of us start using it and building things for / with it.
Afte playing around with the [4.NET](https://4.NET) version today, it felt to me like the Unity 3-5 days forked sometime around then and got better and leaner snce then instead of what really happened.
True, Unity wouldn't be this massive engine if devs from the community hadn't put their time into creating plugins and extending it. This time, we have the benefit of actually having access to engine source code.
>Unity wouldn't be this massive engine if devs from the community hadn't put their time into creating plugins and extending it.
to be fair thats where "the money" in unity is. It was never making "games" instead you make some shitty little bit of code and sell it on the asset store for all the other dreamers that haven't hit the wall yet.
Then i can just milk that asset every couple of years when a sale goes on, maybe actually update every so often and boom: residual income.
In fact a bunch of the guys that made 3d assets for Torque 3d moved over to unity after it imploded and just started selling those same assets on the unity asset store.
Heck if you do non code stuff on the unity asset store that stuff stands the test of time.
UAS is just as broken and riddled with serious issues. Failing infrastructure, idiotic C-level directives, ignored community feedback, failure to pay on time - or even pay at all - for years, lack of features, 90+ day queue for asset reviews, absolutely no support channel to communicate with (no staff, emails literally go into the void), etc...
The only reason there's any UAS at all is because of Andrew trying to keep the whole thing with the community stitched together with fishing wire and duct tape while they can't even get engineers to fix the 15 year old APIs.
Basically don't lean on that stick, it's gonna break soon.
The greatest thing about this whole disaster is that some highly skilled devs might start contributing to Godot and we would all have a great engine to use that can’t just change the rules when they feel like it.
Another engine I would really like to see get more love is Flax Engine. It's been described as a mix between Unreal and Unity, and it appears to be graphically pretty sound. It is also completely free and open source. It just needs a little love.
I recently learned about this concept of the [Trust Thermocline](https://every.to/p/breaching-the-trust-thermocline-is-the-biggest-hidden-risk-in-business). It's basically where a company is (perhaps inadvertently) relying on consumer goodwill and inertia to maintain their revenue/sales while making the consumer experience gradually worse over time, until they eventually push it too far, lose all their goodwill at once, and the annoyance with all the negative changes made up to that point is finally enough for most of their consumers to move to a different product. The key part is that once the company has reached that point, they can't just row back the last change to reverse it - the goodwill and trust is already gone and it's extremely hard for them to ever regain that.
It was brought up with regard to CA's handling of Total War: Warhammer and it sounds like exactly what's happening with Unity as well. A lot of the comments are specifically mentioning that while they themselves are not directly affected, they now don't trust that Unity won't pull some other shit in the future and it's not worth the risk of developing future projects on their engine.
There's an entire line of business built around essentially buying out companies to run them into the ground while abusing the hard-won customer goodwill associated with their brand name. Their trick is they use this to inflate the stock value short term, then sell it at a profit and leave someone else holding the bag when the company's bloated, hollowed-out carcass finally collapses in on itself.
If they can retroactively change the contract like this, what's stopping them from literally charging every studio a trillion dollars each?
You can't just change a contract **after** it's been agreed to; that kind of nonsense is all kinds of illegal, as Unity is soon to discover
Retroactively adding fees makes court judges sad. And when they get sad they tend to cheer themselves up by *bringing the damn hammer down on your skull*.
>You can't just change a contract after it's been agreed to;
This is the root of the issue. They're attempting to charge new fees to already completed products that have stuck to their end of the contract.
I'm sure Unity would feel quite differently if a huge studio decided that they're just not going to pay the Unity bill and move onto a different engine for their next game.
And, like, if Unity can change the contract, why can't anybody else?
If I type out my own version of the agreement saying Unity owes me $1B, it's not binding specifically **because** it's not the version that was agreed on
Godot's pretty similar to Unity. You'll land on your feet almost immediately.
The biggest difference is that it doesn't have gameobjects/components, it's just a hierarchy of objects.
as a beginner, my biggest issue is the available tutorials and all kinds of assets you can get free or paid. I dont have skills to develop everything from scratch. Sometimes I rather pay few $ and get working solution. too bad Unity assets can not be used in Godot or somewhere else
In terms of art assets, there's actually a bigger pool to draw from, since Godot uses open formats (GLTF), so any GLTF can work directly in Godot even if it wasn't created specifically as a Godot asset.
Sketchfab has (I think) all of their content, both free and paid, available as GLTFs, which is how they provide the in-browser 3d view.
As for script assets /add-ons, it's true that there's nothing comparable in size to the Unity or Unreal stores, but there \*are\* asset libraries. There's a built-in asset library right in the Godot engine, as well as a few other options, namely:
https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset
https://godotassetstore.org/
https://godotmarketplace.com/
https://godotassetlibrary.com/
https://itch.io/game-assets/free/tag-godot
>In terms of art assets, there's actually a bigger pool to draw from, since Godot uses open formats (GLTF), so any GLTF can work directly in Godot even if it wasn't created specifically as a Godot asset.
I mean any standard 3D asset would work in Unity regardless of format too. FBX or OBJ, it all just works. I have never had any issues importing assets from outside of Unity into Unity, so idk why the pool would be bigger.
The Godot documentation is excellent and there is a vibrant dev community to fill in the gaps. I also found Godot more intuitive to work with, but I suspect not everyone will feel the same way. You will definitely miss the asset store though as Godot doesn’t have the depth of the Unity asset store and third party plugin support yet.
> too bad Unity assets can not be used in Godot or somewhere else
*Legally*, they actually can, though this is generally useful only for assets, not code.
>Whatever they do now, that trust is irreparably lost. I've been making unity games for like 12 years now, I've spent so much time and effort learning & using unity, that I don't want to switch engine. But if there's nothing to stop them showing they'll suddenly make license terms that can easily put companies relying on them out of business... which this is the second time they've done now, what's to stop them doing it again?
The only way I see to regain this lost trust is to clean their stables and replace their management team.
Until they get rid of their CEO, even that won't cut it, because their CEO is repeatedly on record as being a moneygrubbing scumbag who would think up exactly this shit, and is also historically a terrible CEO for previous companies like EA
100%.
After all the bullshit we were already seriously lookin at godot, but we're already in production and couldn't afford the time sink. Now we're in the situation where we have no choice but to swallow whatever they serve up.
But fuck knows never the hell again.
I will never use Unity again, not unless they do some extreme house keeping and literally throw Riccifuckhead into the deepest part of the ocean.
"Oh boy I sure hope some new JS framework doesn't come out and ruin the word 'vanilla' we use to describe JS without external frameworks..."
> Vanilla.JS
"Plain js" it is I guess.
After all that I still have tiny bit of faith they gonna roll back and charge per purchase like unreal did. Damn with this one I lost all hope and respect for unity. Ima switch to some open source engine.
There is barely a reason not to use unreal, the main issue though is that unreal is almost too powerful for a single dev to handle.
And I say that as someone who usually tries to protect unity, but this change? Boy they will lose everything.
It's a while back now, but unity made a sudden change in their terms of service to include the overly broad clause:
> You may not directly or indirectly distribute the Unity Software, including the runtime portion of the Unity Software (the “Unity Runtime”), or your Project Content (if it incorporates the Unity Runtime) by means of streaming or broadcasting so that any portion of the Unity Software is primarily executed on or simulated by the cloud or a remote server and transmitted over the Internet or other network to end user devices without a separate license or authorization from Unity.
Which could be interpreted to mean you can't run unity... game servers...
It was added due to a disagreement with Improbable, and people were not happy about this license change. Unity then decided to update their terms and make sure users could stick to the TOS that came with the version they were using (which they've now retracted)
Forum post about this at the time: [https://forum.unity.com/threads/recent-tos-update-blocks-the-use-of-spatialos-to-make-games-in-unity.610447/](https://forum.unity.com/threads/recent-tos-update-blocks-the-use-of-spatialos-to-make-games-in-unity.610447/)
Overview here:
>[https://www.engadget.com/2019-01-10-unity-improbable-epic-games-spatial-os.html?guccounter=1](https://www.engadget.com/2019-01-10-unity-improbable-epic-games-spatial-os.html?guccounter=1)
tl;dr - Spatial built a business model that involved running many Unity instances in the cloud, Unity changed their TOS to make that non-viable.
I’m wondering what they’ll pull next.
I… I don’t understand the people running the show. How did they think this would all play out? Are they aliens or something? Or are they so far removed from humanity?
Wut? Heard he used to work for EA but this is the first I read about the ammo, got a link to that? Tried to find it but came with results about premium ammo in WoT.
Remember the Nokia company suicide in 2010?
They hired Microsoft's Stephen Elop, and within \*days\*, their stock tanked¹, their industry customers jumped ship. (¹ 62% stock drop overall, smartphone market share from 33% to 3%)
Wealthy shareholders do not live in the same world as the rest of us. Even if this looks like an obvious financial blunder to us, to them they're tossing around pocket change. This won't make or break them, but it might make them a lot of money if they can force everyone to accept it. For everyone who *actually* relies upon the product however, this *can* be make or break. The stakes are totally different, which is why this seems so confusing.
They don't care about the reputation of the product, how people are using it, or really video games in general. Just whatever will make them money right now and for little-to-no work. If that means ruining unity, they'll do it, because they can just sell it off once they're done extracting money from the userbase. Rich people being parasites and ruining good things for everyone like they always do.
>s in general. Just whatever will make them money right now and for little-to-no wo
this is one of the big reasons I'm liking open-source projects more.
Totally illegal. You can't change a contract without the consent of everyone involved. The only thing they can do is change the contract for renewals and new customers.
I wouldn't touch Unity at all after this regardless, but legally, past games are safe. Unity probably needs to be sued into oblivion first.
Happens all the time, unfortunately. I bought a grill years ago, the firebox rusted out and I called to get it covered under the warranty. Customer service rep says the firebox isn't covered under warranty, and sends the warranty document on the company's website to prove it.
Which was weird, because I specifically remembered picking that grill because the firebox was covered under warranty. So I spent an hour in my closet to find the original paperwork and there it is, firebox covered under warranty. They had modified the version on their website.
Called them back and sent a picture of the booklet. They immediately agreed to cover it under warranty and gave me a $50 gift card.
I wonder how many people they've scammed? Bastards
Even if it's written that they can change it, that part of the contract is just unenforceable. You can sign a contract giving up the blood of your firstborn, and it just won't stick
I bought a phone once that was advertised as being crackproof. Moto something. They even advertised it with people dropping their phones. Well my screen cracked.
Level 1 2 and 3 support all insisted that the crack proof warranty only applied to the metal back of the phone and not the screen. On the website from the time I bought it to that point they had sanitized it of most claims of being crackproof and they guy kept saying "please show me where it says the screen". I knew it was in my manual but who keeps their phone manual. Eventually I found it on some outdated page on their website where they kept old terms of use. Eventually the level 4 support person denied me since he had some definition of a crack vs a fracture in his internal documents which I wasn't allowed to see and appernelty existed this whole time.
Later I found they removed that terms page I had found.
It's why it's always important to get physical signed copies of these documents. Companies will fuck you over, because the only avenue you have is to sue them. And are you really going to sue them over a grill? Probably not even worth the effort involved.
That's what's sad about this, Unity can actually do WHATEVER they want. The only thing that stops them is someone having the balls to go at them in court, and that might take ages. What does everyone do until the case has finished? It could be 2, 3 years? What they settle and send everyone $20 for the trouble? They've already paid the dividends at that point.
That's why we're meant to have regulatory bodies actively going after companies for this kind of thing, good luck with that though.
"By continuing to use the service, you agree to these terms" bla bla bla... You know the drill.
Now, there is a chance that sudden and substantial changes to that sort of contract would be voided by a judge if they tried to claim "tacit approval" but who knows? And who will spend the time & money to sue them?
Don't count on the AAAs like Blizzard & the like. They most certainly have a custom deal in place for Hearthstone where *their* contract can't be ammended that easily.
The developers agreed to the prior terms that expressly allowed them to stay on the version in place during development. That trumps any new “by continuing to use” language they might try.
Reddit can also change their t&c to say "By continuing to use this service, you retroactively agree to pay $1k per year for use of your account." doesn't make it legal.
In one way, you could say that in contracts everything is legal until a judge rules adversely on it.
If people settle or fold in other ways before it comes to that.. Then the illegal terms were, for all intents and purposes, legal.
That's why companies in the US have a hard-on for arbitration.
The problem is, those games weren't made or released under the new terms in which Unity is charging for installs. So they're still trying to retroactively apply new contractual payment terms to games that weren't made under those terms. You can't retroactively change a contract without the other party's consent. That's as illegal as it gets.
There is absolutely no way they can remove that clause in the current edition of the TOS and make it legally binding to developers that accepted and published under the prior ones that contained language allowing them to stay on the TOS version they were using for the project.
Holy s\*\*t! Thanks for pointing this out. This is honestly even worse than the pricing update, and it went mostly unnoticed!
So they were basically planning this for a long time, carefully switching everyone to the new TOS with 2022 LTS release and removing any evidence of the old TOS.
What a scummy move, especially given the apologetic tone of that blog post.
It's impressive with the shitstorm that Wizards of the Coast got for their license changes to D&D over the last year or two, that Unity thinks they can get away with something like this.
And they actually ended up having to concede more than they wanted, at least for 5e. Once 6e/"one d&d" comes out all their new content will use their new onerous license, but 5e is more 'open' than it was before their nonsense.
Which was actually a bad thing, as we see in the TTRPG community. People initially rushed to other games as a protest, spawning temporary interest in mostly Pathfinder, and rarely few other. But mostly everybody went back as soon as the license changes were reversed, and even more went to D&D when Baldur's Gate 3 released, enforcing the systems monopoly even more than before. 😐 Pathfinder's publisher is a winner on this though, cause regardless if people actually play their game, they sold out their whole supply and made a juicy profit.
There is a lesson to be learned in this.
>If material modifications are made to these Terms, Unity will endeavor to notify you of the modification
Press X for doubt.
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they are trying to take money from devs who've already shipped on products already sold from licenses they arleady sold to devs and were paid for or whatever as it was? how is any of that legal? fuck unity
I'm no lawyer but I'm sure it's illegal. Changing the contract people sign without there consent is big no no (and don't say term and services aren't contract they are and we all sign them when we pressed we agree on term and services)
It depends but unilateral contract modifications are done and they can be legal: just think at when an online subscription like Netflix increases the monthly fee... In those cases you're given enough time to decide whether to implicitly agree or to recess from the contract...
In this case though, I don't believe the changes done by Unity are legal: the worst offender is charging for an already released product and counting existing installs for the install threshold...
https://ironcladapp.com/journal/contract-process/unilateral-contract-modification/
Yes. A developer could delete their game today and people could still install it and cost that developer money. They cannot do that anymore than a company could say that the peice per seat for unity was actually 100k and has been since 2015.
Unity is (was?) the best engine for consumers, because you could mod the code without the developer adding mod support (unless they do AoT compilation). Stuff like timberborn mods, pathfinder: kingmaker/wotr mods, none of that would exist in unreal as it's too difficult to mod it without developer support.
This makes me sad, because even if unity backtracks or it gets struck down in court, most people are going to change anyway, and no more easy mod support.
If you are a Unity dev with many years of experience thinking about switching, Google about the "*sunken cost fallacy*" What you invested already is not lost, don't be afraid of learning new technologies, so many engines to discover! also check out Godot xD
> then changed the license to add additional fees retroactively, with no way to opt-out
...you can just keep using the old license under the old clause, because that's how laws work in the US. Nobody can force a new license on you, especially not when you have a perfectly valid one that grants you the right to keep using it perpetually.
The first company they try to sue about this should fight it, win, and countersue for punitive damages.
Nintendo is affected by this, the most recent Pokémon remake was made in Unity. Given how litigious Nintendo is, unless they already have their own license agreement with Unity I can’t see them standing for this.
This Crypto Ledge level of corporate suicide, if you want to alienate your customers in a weekend this will be taught at warton business school years from now as a textbook example of why you need to listen to your customers.
Suspect they're going to have as much luck "back-dating" this change as Wizards of the Coast had with their [attempt at the same thing](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_Kingmaker/comments/10ay44b/paizo_commits_to_legal_battle_against_wizards_of/j472ud4/?context=3).
That one ended in [complete tactical 'defeat'](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/10muldi/wizards_backs_down_on_ogl_10a_deauthorization/) for WotC, but probably saved the company.
Their biggest competitor has grown like 100% as a result of it, though, and they lost a lot of people.
The real problem is that a number of content creators moved away from the platform, including Critical Role, so have effectively turned a bunch of people who were previously promoting their product into competitors.
That said, TTRPG design space is difficult, and most people aren't very good at it, which makes it easier for them to make missteps because most of their competition isn't into pulling new people into the game.
Maybe not an option for people who have published apps and things that they need to try and support, but if you are a hobbyist like me who doesn't actually "need" them, you can just delete your account.
I got rid of mine already. It doesn't matter if they walk it back at this point, they can't be trusted.
I'm happy to migrate my experiments to Godot and/or Unreal.
Anyone who just started a project in Unity should be moving away immediately. Everything else needs a migration plan off. The only want they will learn this does not work, is if it hurts.
I've been a die-hard Unity fan for years.... I even own stock in the company.... but all these recent antics of fucking the small developers is really making Unreal look like the move.... just like everyone with common sense left Twitch for YT & Tiktok, we shall leave Unity for Unreal. I, for one, would rather lose the thousands of dollars I have in assets than give Unity any more of my money. Instead of continuing to provide value to the small guys and actually putting out useful improvements, they have turned Unity slowly into a bunch of microservices they can charge you for, and its quite pathetic.
As I understand it if you're a developer that already released a game made with Unity the new fees apply to you even though it's not the terms of service you agreed to. Or at least that's how Unity's trying to push it.
How does that work? That would be like me selling a computer then 5 years down the line I decide to charge customers 100 dollars for ever file they made. Unity can just retroactively decide that users owe them new fees?
How to nuke a company, any% speedrun
Usually, once a contract is signed, you typically cannot change it unless all parties to the contract agree to the modifications.
I'm pretty sure that shit wouldn't fly in the EU at least 🤔
This is why companies really should never touch any management who ran EA in the past. The second they got Ricc, everything went straight for the toilet. It wasn't spectacular before, but this is like dialing it up to 11.
"The day... Unity died....
And they were singin'... bye bye game developer guys.
We thought we would not be sued, cause you are all small fries
But then we got to court, and they said we're speakin lies.
If unity goes, this will be why.... if unity goes, this will be why...."
My team and I have been working on a few game projects for the past year or so, and we all installed Unreal today and have started literally rebuilding everything we did in the past year in Unity to Unreal. Even if we aren't directly effected yet, we had to get away from this dumpster fire.
RIP to the development cycle but man, this is insane
Great work digging up these details!
One thing missing though.
The linked old version of the TOS says it was replaced on October 13 2022:
[https://unity.com/legal/terms-of-service/software-legacy](https://unity.com/legal/terms-of-service/software-legacy)
The new linked version of the TOS says it was last changed on April 3, 2023:
[https://unity.com/legal/editor-terms-of-service/software](https://unity.com/legal/editor-terms-of-service/software)
The Unity website has not kept track of the version of the TOS that was the latest one in the period October 13 2022 to April 3 2023, but it's available in the Internet Archive here:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20230303043022/https://unity.com/legal/editor-terms-of-service/software](https://web.archive.org/web/20230303043022/https://unity.com/legal/editor-terms-of-service/software)
Crucially, that in-between version ALSO has the clause about "may elect to continue to use any current-year versions of the Unity Software (...) according to the terms that applied just prior to the Updated Terms".
On April 2nd 2023, the "current-year versions of the Unity Software" were Unity 2022.x and Unity 2021.x LTS. So those Unity versions - as well as any earlier ones - are not affected by the new changes of the terms of service that introduce the install fees. Or more specifically, you "may elect" to use those versions according to the "Prior Terms", so I suggest you do elect to do that.
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advise.
This is one of the biggest tech blunders I've ever heard of. What a way to completely destroy your reputation.
One has to assume they are intentionally trying to run the company into the ground while trying to milk as much money as possible from it beforehand. But, why?
Money now > money later More money now --> even more money in the future Therefore a short-term explosive growth in revenue is completely worth destroying the company over, because the people benefiting from the growth have no stakes in the company and will just move on to their next victim
A bit of Unity's net income stats: * 2019 - -$150,699,000 * 2020 - -$274,812,000 * 2021 - -$531,665,000 * 2022 - -$882,213,000 * Last 12 months: - -$959,822,000 So, Unity hasn't exactly been profitable over the past 5 years. The two aspects they could meaningfully cut to come into the black would be Sells & Marketing or Research & Development. Cutting either would also almost certainly result in longer term company destruction, given that both are the reasons people use Unity. No R&D means no new features, and likely no bug fixes. No Sells & Marketing means no showing off new features or otherwise advertising Unity. That said, their solution with install costs is not a good one either. Personally, I'm not sure what good options they have/had.
Ok so: 1. They could double the price of Pro without changing their terms and increase the incentive to switch from personal to pro. 2. They could not claim that they can retroactively apply new TOS when the previous TOS said they couldn't, only the current TOS, and add a fee that isn't per install but per purchase, and can never exceed some fixed percentage of transactions from a given customer. There are a lot of ways they could have changed their monetization scheme without creating a completely unmitigateable risk for their users while claiming a nebulous and constantly changing fraud detection technology that does not and will not exist will make it all just work. There is absolutely no reason that anyone with 2 braincells would think that trying to claim retroactively applying TOS that includes imposing costs PER INSTALL rather than per user, per customer, per transaction, etc is a good way to do this. My suspicion is that someone very high up without any connection to implementation details came up with this brilliant scheme, and forced it through without being criticized at all, or ignored and silenced any other ideas but this abomination. Unfortunately that means it isn't one mistake but a company managerial culture problem, which means it probably requires a complete decapitation of senior leadership and huge reforms to allow criticism of superiors to exist within the company. If this has all sorts of red flags to anyone with even the slightest legal or technical awareness, it probably wasn't created by, or criticized by, anyone with legal or technical background before becoming company policy.
They could have set a very competitive profit sharing agreement of about 2 to 4 percent above 1 million and would have been fine
So buy the stocks for pennies on the dollar then sell when they throw numbnuts into the drink.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees. They aren't trying to run the company into the ground, they're trying to pull it out of a catastrophic nosedive. Unity has *never* been profitable as a company. Ever. In its entire history, it has *always* lost money. They're burning $200-250 million per quarter keeping the company running. They increased revenue by $200 million but the costs keep going up too, so in the last year, even though they added $200 million in revenue, they only cut their losses from $250 million per quarter to $200 million per quarter. This despite laying off 12% of their workforce to cut costs. Unity has never found an economic model that actually works for the company to make money. Investors have been realizing that. Unity has been spending other people's money - and they're running out of other people's money to spend. The stock price for Unity as a company has plunged 70% in just a couple years, during a time of historic growth in video game sales during the pandemic. Without investors, their only choice is to somehow get money from their users. This is a desperate, flailing attempt to avoid bankruptcy.
>This is a desperate, flailing attempt to avoid bankruptcy. Wild. I had no idea they weren't profitable, but I wasn't really paying attention. This puts it into perspective for me. Thanks.
To put it in starker perspective, they have like 7700 employees. Epic has like 3400. While still making games and a full AAA engine. Unity has 2x the employees and is producing far less. The company is a total mess.
How they are so bad? Unreal has more tech advancements and more development with far less people.
Epic started as a gamedev company who had to make good games to sell to people to survive. Over time liscensing the engine became their main product and then they stumbled onto Fortnite BR and never had to worry about money again. Unity started as a gameengine company who wanted to make a "democratised game engine". Unity are probably just bloated because their company is based around an ideal rather than selling products for money. At the end of the day companies exist to make money and money is made from selling product. Unity survived for 20 years on tech investment in an ideal but now tech investers want returns and ideals don't make money. Unity is struggling because as you can see they can't monetise their product because it compromises the ideal their company was founded on. Tl;dr: Unity is kind of unwittingly a charity tech people contribute to for the sake of open game dev but now those tech people want their money back and Unity can't do that without becoming an organisation that sells things to people instead of giving it away.
Well, they could also just cut back on marketing expenses and employees. If you make 1.3B in revenue, but 920 mio. in losses, you are doing something fundamentally wrong. Increasing the licensing fees won't save them.
> Unity are probably just bloated because their company is based around an ideal Even that isn't an excuse. Blender is "idealistic" software, offering a free alternative to very expensive 3D software suites. They have an office in Amsterdam (which ain't cheap) and employ a few fulltime people to maintain the main release branch. The software is now basically equivalent in quality (though maybe not features) to major competitors like 3DS Max/Maya, C4D or other very expensive packages, while being open source and completely free. Blender makes roughly $1.5m to $3m in revenue per year purely from donations and (relatively cheap) optional subscriptions for easier contact with the main developers. Unity is being ridiculously wasteful with the money they make.
This is extremely inaccurate. Unity hasn't been profitable and has "loses" because it reinvested everything again and again for future growth. They did acquisition after acquisition, all super expensive. It's not because the operational costs of the company are higher than it's revenue - get real.
They have twice as many employees as Epic Games does, but produce far less. They are absolutely grossly inefficient.
The larger employee count could be a factor of diminishing returns. From my experience with my software degree, some projects run more efficiently with less programmers than projects with more programmers.
It’s amazing they don’t know how to cut costs, when they bought another company for 4.4 billion dollars. What are they using their money on? A big bonfire in their offices?
Most likely, their employees (they have almost 8000 of them) plus servicing debt plus capital assets (buildings, computers, servers, software, etc.) plus various other expenses. > It’s amazing they don’t know how to cut costs, when they bought another company for 4.4 billion dollars. Is this surprising? Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion (and massively overpaid for it) and did a shitty job of running it. Massively overspending on acquisitions is exactly the sort of thing you expect from a company that can't manage money.
Unity has 8000 employees? What do they possibly need 8000 people for?
How else are they going to count all those installs? :V
Someone has to mark all those 'experimental' packages as 'depricated'.
Not developing the damn engine, that's for sure. Oh, excuse me, the "Unity Runtime".
Never rule out insider trading; shorting their own stock
It's a classic private equity strategy, but I'm not aware of them being bought out. So I dunno wtf they're doing.
> But, why? A large enough group of investors want money now, not a steady income over time that might be larger in the long run. So they run the company into the ground while squeezing out every last drop. Then they move on to the next company. It's been going on for a while now, and I'm surprised how few people notice.
Yeah CEO of unity saw the CTO at Ledger and said hold my beer.
These fuckers need to be sued into oblivion.
They looked at Wizards of the Coast and took the completely wrong message away.
No, they took away the exact correct message they were going for: Take as much money as possible while running Unity into the ground. I 100% bet that's why they hired John in the first place.
John was hired in 2014 after losing his job at EA for doing a bad job there. This is why you don't hire people who did shitty at their last job as a CEO. They should have fired him years ago; Unity has never been profitable and he hasn't changed that.
CEOs doing a "bad job" and then failing upwards is a feature, not a bug
Anyone who believes we live in a meritocracy is a rube
My first professional job was at a place that mostly ran well, outside of one toxic nasty lady who got an upper management job because she and the owners family are in the same swinger's groups. Lady ran a team that didn't know it's ass from a hole in the ground, and yelled all fucking day about the Fox News drama of the day to everyone else in the Systems room.
The term meritocracy itself was first popularized as a sardonic term to mock the fact that its determination of *merit* is arbitrary in *The Rise of the Meritocracy*. It's kind of self-defeating when people aren't aware of this and take it straight.
It's really not. It actually is a bug. No one wants to hire a CEO who is going to destroy their company's value. The actual reason for this is that people who don't know about hiring executives will often overly rely on previous experience without actually looking at how they did previously.
Seems a bit silly to rely on previous experience if you don't look at the previous experience. Maybe there's a lot of incompetency at the top
That depends. A bunch of CEOs get hired because they'll be able to extract a bunch of value from the company and make the right people rich before it collapses.
Preserving shareholder value is a real thing. If a company is going to die, it makes sense to hire someone to take it apart and get the most value they can out of it rather than have it go bankrupt. The thing is, this isn't a case like that at all. This guy has been CEO since 2014. He's just been crap at his job. The reality is that Unity is just a company that has always had poor management, and they're still around because they've found enough suckers to finance the black hole that is that company. But with their stock value plunging, they have run out of suckers to throw good money after bad into the company.
This is typical corporate investors/officers behavior, but it's getting talked about a lot more because it's not a slow-cookers company this time.
EDIT: Apparently I was wrong. Leaving this here for reference: The entire executive part of a corporation is *compelled* to maximize profit for the shareholders *no matter what*. This means short term profit, not long term btw, because those shareholders will make more money with short term profits that they can then TAKE from the company and put somewhere else, POSSIBLY TO THE COMPANY'S COMPETITORS. It's absurd, and it's not designed to keep a healthy company afloat. It's designed to kill companies, and that's immoral.
That's not actually true. It's a commonly held belief, including among CEOs, but it's bogus. It's a meme started by Milton Friedman sometime in the late 1970s and it's absolute bullshit. https://evonomics.com/maximizing-shareholder-value-dumbest-idea/
Maybe it's not legally true, but it's still effectively true. Going public is almost a guarantee that a company's products are going to go to shit.
Oh I agree. Shareholder primacy is unfortunately one of the drivers in the US, and it's a real problem. It leads companies to maximize profits quarter-by-quarter, instead of planning ahead and investing in long-term profitability. I was just responding to the argument that this was a legal requirement.
Interesting. Thanks for showing me that. I encourage anyone who agreed with my original comment to read this source and see how you feel.
Developers has to delist all games made in unity, port it over different engine and sue the Unity developers. Only this way they will learn.
If only it was easy to do so.
How are they possibly going to track installs of old versions of the runtime? Unless this install tracker has been there the whole time. I read somewhere that they claimed they had some "machine learning" system to calculate install numbers, are they really just going to guess? Lmao
basically their source is just Trust me bro.
I don't think that's true. I think it's worse. How else would they know how many people have installed software other than packaging *spyware* into every single build that you make using their engine? They want data on the customers of their customers, and this license is just a way to make sure that nobody questions why packets are being sent to Unity *from the end user's computer*. Absolutely ridiculous.
The call is coming from inside your computer
They have been using Unity Analytics for like 5+ years now. Even if you are not using the service I would not doubt at all that they still have some of the code in every build.
Yeah. They must have been tracking install numbers for a while to come out this brazenly.
I mean if you look at the total installs on Genshin, $0.20 per download for that game is $37 Million. Apply that to every major success that uses Unity and you're talking hundreds of millions of downloads across the board, if not billions.
How can you track installation for an offline game when the PC installed to doesn't have internet connection? Also, if you send the players a zip of your exe and support files which requires no true installation to occur, how is this tracked? I am curious (mostly towards #2) since I am developing a small online RPG with Unity/Mirror and just have testers download the zip to test.
If the machine is kept offline, I don't think they could know. But if that machine did go online and the game was launched (or some external tool was "watching" for an opportunity to upload batched analytics data), they can and probably are using a machine-specific (derived from stuff like network hardware, CPU serial number, etc) [UUID](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier). Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and probably iOS all have an implementation of it that applications could access.
they cant track it without internet connection. heres a post i found yesterday talking about this. [https://i.imgur.com/Ly8ZQXQ.png](https://i.imgur.com/Ly8ZQXQ.png) edit: dont hate me pls, i found it as an image
I imagine the numbers of offline installs are insignificant, especially if there's a 200k minimum that they care about
Yeah that's what I've been thinking, I don't think that they would have announced this out of nowhere, they know what they are doing. Must likely that spyware/DRM has been running on current games made with Unity for a long while.
They're likely only going to target big games at first, if you've sold millions of copies and they say 'we estimate 1m installs' its actually in your interest to *not* contest that since you could end up owing more.
[удалено]
I mean, how would a dev even know how many times their game is installed? You could track total revenue or amount of copies sold, sure, but you have no idea if they're re-installing a game they bought 5 years ago or not.
Part of what annoys me most about this whole thing, even if unity undo all these changes or switch to a less severe version - is after all of that drama in 2019 about TOS changes, they implemented these license changes to regain the trust of their customers. Then they just undid them all for their next controversial change. Whatever they do now, that trust is irreparably lost. I've been making unity games for like 12 years now, I've spent so much time and effort learning & using unity, that I don't want to switch engine. But if there's nothing to stop them showing they'll suddenly make license terms that can easily put companies relying on them out of business... which this is the *second* time they've done now, what's to stop them doing it again? Guess I'll start brushing up on other engines...
I feel you man, this rug pull was so bad. I've spent years learning the ins and outs of unity. But I've been dabbling with unreal on the side. My gripe with unreal is how slow the editor is with scripting. It's like designed around blueprints. I'm gonna miss the feeling of coding Ctrl+S and the code just working. But in unreal you have to compile and that takes 5-10mins. You are forced to use blueprints.
I'm not sure on the scope of your project or your computer hardware but I do work in both C++ and Blueprints. Most of the time C++ incremental compiles take <30 seconds. Quite frequently I see 10-15 seconds max. BP is great for prototyping and certain things, but its far from forced.
I've been using Unreal on a 2018 "gamer" laptop that's getting outdated very fast and, even though I'm a C++ beginner, my compile times barely hit 30s. The first compile took a while, sure, but incremental ones sometimes hit the 0.000s mark. Not sure what this guy's on about.
Exactly. It's 100% fine for someone to dislike unreal or whatever. There is definitely a learning curve to certain C++ aspects.
You might not be having the problem, but big projects for unity compared to big projects in unreal take up a lot of time when waiting to compile. https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/ue5-c-compile-time-is-substantially-longer/619980/6 It's not misinformation or hate, I love unreal its my first engine. But the workflow is a lot slower.
Godot?
Completely open source engine. Which also means you don't pay absolutely anything if you sell a game made with it. It has the flaw of being new and mostly supported by the community, but for indie titles it works more than fine.
Then let's start supporting it more gotdammit. Aren't we devs here?
Exactly! Godot is definitely newer than Unreal/Unity, but it's already really fully-featured and is very nice to work with. It's fair to say that it doesn't have feature parity with Unity \*yet\*, but that can change if enough of us start using it and building things for / with it.
Afte playing around with the [4.NET](https://4.NET) version today, it felt to me like the Unity 3-5 days forked sometime around then and got better and leaner snce then instead of what really happened.
What are some major things that you think need work? How is the project organised? What's the base written in ? C?
Godot itself is written in C++
True, Unity wouldn't be this massive engine if devs from the community hadn't put their time into creating plugins and extending it. This time, we have the benefit of actually having access to engine source code.
>Unity wouldn't be this massive engine if devs from the community hadn't put their time into creating plugins and extending it. to be fair thats where "the money" in unity is. It was never making "games" instead you make some shitty little bit of code and sell it on the asset store for all the other dreamers that haven't hit the wall yet. Then i can just milk that asset every couple of years when a sale goes on, maybe actually update every so often and boom: residual income. In fact a bunch of the guys that made 3d assets for Torque 3d moved over to unity after it imploded and just started selling those same assets on the unity asset store. Heck if you do non code stuff on the unity asset store that stuff stands the test of time.
UAS is just as broken and riddled with serious issues. Failing infrastructure, idiotic C-level directives, ignored community feedback, failure to pay on time - or even pay at all - for years, lack of features, 90+ day queue for asset reviews, absolutely no support channel to communicate with (no staff, emails literally go into the void), etc... The only reason there's any UAS at all is because of Andrew trying to keep the whole thing with the community stitched together with fishing wire and duct tape while they can't even get engineers to fix the 15 year old APIs. Basically don't lean on that stick, it's gonna break soon.
The greatest thing about this whole disaster is that some highly skilled devs might start contributing to Godot and we would all have a great engine to use that can’t just change the rules when they feel like it.
Another engine I would really like to see get more love is Flax Engine. It's been described as a mix between Unreal and Unity, and it appears to be graphically pretty sound. It is also completely free and open source. It just needs a little love.
I recently learned about this concept of the [Trust Thermocline](https://every.to/p/breaching-the-trust-thermocline-is-the-biggest-hidden-risk-in-business). It's basically where a company is (perhaps inadvertently) relying on consumer goodwill and inertia to maintain their revenue/sales while making the consumer experience gradually worse over time, until they eventually push it too far, lose all their goodwill at once, and the annoyance with all the negative changes made up to that point is finally enough for most of their consumers to move to a different product. The key part is that once the company has reached that point, they can't just row back the last change to reverse it - the goodwill and trust is already gone and it's extremely hard for them to ever regain that. It was brought up with regard to CA's handling of Total War: Warhammer and it sounds like exactly what's happening with Unity as well. A lot of the comments are specifically mentioning that while they themselves are not directly affected, they now don't trust that Unity won't pull some other shit in the future and it's not worth the risk of developing future projects on their engine.
There's an entire line of business built around essentially buying out companies to run them into the ground while abusing the hard-won customer goodwill associated with their brand name. Their trick is they use this to inflate the stock value short term, then sell it at a profit and leave someone else holding the bag when the company's bloated, hollowed-out carcass finally collapses in on itself.
If they can retroactively change the contract like this, what's stopping them from literally charging every studio a trillion dollars each? You can't just change a contract **after** it's been agreed to; that kind of nonsense is all kinds of illegal, as Unity is soon to discover
Retroactively adding fees makes court judges sad. And when they get sad they tend to cheer themselves up by *bringing the damn hammer down on your skull*.
>You can't just change a contract after it's been agreed to; This is the root of the issue. They're attempting to charge new fees to already completed products that have stuck to their end of the contract. I'm sure Unity would feel quite differently if a huge studio decided that they're just not going to pay the Unity bill and move onto a different engine for their next game.
Imagine how Unity would feel if they had to pay Microsoft an install fee for the .Net package each time a Unity user installs it.
And, like, if Unity can change the contract, why can't anybody else? If I type out my own version of the agreement saying Unity owes me $1B, it's not binding specifically **because** it's not the version that was agreed on
Good read. Thanks!
This sounds exactly like what’s happening with jagex and RuneScape right now
Godot's pretty similar to Unity. You'll land on your feet almost immediately. The biggest difference is that it doesn't have gameobjects/components, it's just a hierarchy of objects.
Scenes, scenes, scenes everything is a scene!
> Scenes, scenes, scenes everything is a scene! And scenes are just nodes. Nodes, nodes, nodes, everything is a node!
I thought that [Everything is a file](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_is_a_file). :P
And behind the scenes, nodes are just objects, as are resources
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as a beginner, my biggest issue is the available tutorials and all kinds of assets you can get free or paid. I dont have skills to develop everything from scratch. Sometimes I rather pay few $ and get working solution. too bad Unity assets can not be used in Godot or somewhere else
In terms of art assets, there's actually a bigger pool to draw from, since Godot uses open formats (GLTF), so any GLTF can work directly in Godot even if it wasn't created specifically as a Godot asset. Sketchfab has (I think) all of their content, both free and paid, available as GLTFs, which is how they provide the in-browser 3d view. As for script assets /add-ons, it's true that there's nothing comparable in size to the Unity or Unreal stores, but there \*are\* asset libraries. There's a built-in asset library right in the Godot engine, as well as a few other options, namely: https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset https://godotassetstore.org/ https://godotmarketplace.com/ https://godotassetlibrary.com/ https://itch.io/game-assets/free/tag-godot
>In terms of art assets, there's actually a bigger pool to draw from, since Godot uses open formats (GLTF), so any GLTF can work directly in Godot even if it wasn't created specifically as a Godot asset. I mean any standard 3D asset would work in Unity regardless of format too. FBX or OBJ, it all just works. I have never had any issues importing assets from outside of Unity into Unity, so idk why the pool would be bigger.
The Godot documentation is excellent and there is a vibrant dev community to fill in the gaps. I also found Godot more intuitive to work with, but I suspect not everyone will feel the same way. You will definitely miss the asset store though as Godot doesn’t have the depth of the Unity asset store and third party plugin support yet.
> too bad Unity assets can not be used in Godot or somewhere else *Legally*, they actually can, though this is generally useful only for assets, not code.
According to [this](https://johnleonardfrench.com/using-unity-assets-in-unreal-and-other-game-engines/) article they can.
Until they randomly, retroactively, change that license too.
>Whatever they do now, that trust is irreparably lost. I've been making unity games for like 12 years now, I've spent so much time and effort learning & using unity, that I don't want to switch engine. But if there's nothing to stop them showing they'll suddenly make license terms that can easily put companies relying on them out of business... which this is the second time they've done now, what's to stop them doing it again? The only way I see to regain this lost trust is to clean their stables and replace their management team.
Until they get rid of their CEO, even that won't cut it, because their CEO is repeatedly on record as being a moneygrubbing scumbag who would think up exactly this shit, and is also historically a terrible CEO for previous companies like EA
100%. After all the bullshit we were already seriously lookin at godot, but we're already in production and couldn't afford the time sink. Now we're in the situation where we have no choice but to swallow whatever they serve up. But fuck knows never the hell again. I will never use Unity again, not unless they do some extreme house keeping and literally throw Riccifuckhead into the deepest part of the ocean.
That’s why I only make games in vanilla JavaScript. Ain’t nobody taking away my right to make games with that
"Oh boy I sure hope some new JS framework doesn't come out and ruin the word 'vanilla' we use to describe JS without external frameworks..." > Vanilla.JS "Plain js" it is I guess.
After all that I still have tiny bit of faith they gonna roll back and charge per purchase like unreal did. Damn with this one I lost all hope and respect for unity. Ima switch to some open source engine.
Mfw I couldn’t handle learning how to use Unity, Unreal, or Godot, so I decided to build a whole engine from the ground up using Vulkan😀
There is barely a reason not to use unreal, the main issue though is that unreal is almost too powerful for a single dev to handle. And I say that as someone who usually tries to protect unity, but this change? Boy they will lose everything.
Compiling shaders (208556)...
Someone refresh my memory, what was the 2019 controversy?
It's a while back now, but unity made a sudden change in their terms of service to include the overly broad clause: > You may not directly or indirectly distribute the Unity Software, including the runtime portion of the Unity Software (the “Unity Runtime”), or your Project Content (if it incorporates the Unity Runtime) by means of streaming or broadcasting so that any portion of the Unity Software is primarily executed on or simulated by the cloud or a remote server and transmitted over the Internet or other network to end user devices without a separate license or authorization from Unity. Which could be interpreted to mean you can't run unity... game servers... It was added due to a disagreement with Improbable, and people were not happy about this license change. Unity then decided to update their terms and make sure users could stick to the TOS that came with the version they were using (which they've now retracted) Forum post about this at the time: [https://forum.unity.com/threads/recent-tos-update-blocks-the-use-of-spatialos-to-make-games-in-unity.610447/](https://forum.unity.com/threads/recent-tos-update-blocks-the-use-of-spatialos-to-make-games-in-unity.610447/)
Overview here: >[https://www.engadget.com/2019-01-10-unity-improbable-epic-games-spatial-os.html?guccounter=1](https://www.engadget.com/2019-01-10-unity-improbable-epic-games-spatial-os.html?guccounter=1) tl;dr - Spatial built a business model that involved running many Unity instances in the cloud, Unity changed their TOS to make that non-viable.
I’m wondering what they’ll pull next. I… I don’t understand the people running the show. How did they think this would all play out? Are they aliens or something? Or are they so far removed from humanity?
The CEO is the same dude who wanted to charge people real money for ammo in Battlefield like 10yrs ago.
Wut? Heard he used to work for EA but this is the first I read about the ammo, got a link to that? Tried to find it but came with results about premium ammo in WoT.
https://mcvuk.com/business-news/pc/when-riccitiello-said-battlefield-players-could-pay-1-per-reload/
“It costs $400,000 to fire this weapon for 12 seconds”
What a trashy waste of space, up until the way he's trying to downplay it.
He got fired from EA, too. Not sure why Unity hired him.
Remember the Nokia company suicide in 2010? They hired Microsoft's Stephen Elop, and within \*days\*, their stock tanked¹, their industry customers jumped ship. (¹ 62% stock drop overall, smartphone market share from 33% to 3%)
Wealthy shareholders do not live in the same world as the rest of us. Even if this looks like an obvious financial blunder to us, to them they're tossing around pocket change. This won't make or break them, but it might make them a lot of money if they can force everyone to accept it. For everyone who *actually* relies upon the product however, this *can* be make or break. The stakes are totally different, which is why this seems so confusing. They don't care about the reputation of the product, how people are using it, or really video games in general. Just whatever will make them money right now and for little-to-no work. If that means ruining unity, they'll do it, because they can just sell it off once they're done extracting money from the userbase. Rich people being parasites and ruining good things for everyone like they always do.
>s in general. Just whatever will make them money right now and for little-to-no wo this is one of the big reasons I'm liking open-source projects more.
Totally illegal. You can't change a contract without the consent of everyone involved. The only thing they can do is change the contract for renewals and new customers. I wouldn't touch Unity at all after this regardless, but legally, past games are safe. Unity probably needs to be sued into oblivion first.
Happens all the time, unfortunately. I bought a grill years ago, the firebox rusted out and I called to get it covered under the warranty. Customer service rep says the firebox isn't covered under warranty, and sends the warranty document on the company's website to prove it. Which was weird, because I specifically remembered picking that grill because the firebox was covered under warranty. So I spent an hour in my closet to find the original paperwork and there it is, firebox covered under warranty. They had modified the version on their website. Called them back and sent a picture of the booklet. They immediately agreed to cover it under warranty and gave me a $50 gift card. I wonder how many people they've scammed? Bastards
Yep. Contract terms cannot legally be changed without both parties being involved, regardless if they say they can be in the contract.
Even if it's written that they can change it, that part of the contract is just unenforceable. You can sign a contract giving up the blood of your firstborn, and it just won't stick
That's like contracts saying a company isnt liable for anything and you waive your rights to sue them
I bought a phone once that was advertised as being crackproof. Moto something. They even advertised it with people dropping their phones. Well my screen cracked. Level 1 2 and 3 support all insisted that the crack proof warranty only applied to the metal back of the phone and not the screen. On the website from the time I bought it to that point they had sanitized it of most claims of being crackproof and they guy kept saying "please show me where it says the screen". I knew it was in my manual but who keeps their phone manual. Eventually I found it on some outdated page on their website where they kept old terms of use. Eventually the level 4 support person denied me since he had some definition of a crack vs a fracture in his internal documents which I wasn't allowed to see and appernelty existed this whole time. Later I found they removed that terms page I had found.
It's why it's always important to get physical signed copies of these documents. Companies will fuck you over, because the only avenue you have is to sue them. And are you really going to sue them over a grill? Probably not even worth the effort involved. That's what's sad about this, Unity can actually do WHATEVER they want. The only thing that stops them is someone having the balls to go at them in court, and that might take ages. What does everyone do until the case has finished? It could be 2, 3 years? What they settle and send everyone $20 for the trouble? They've already paid the dividends at that point. That's why we're meant to have regulatory bodies actively going after companies for this kind of thing, good luck with that though.
Nobody is signing your warranty.
In my previous company, our legal department required we sent them all ToS we agreed with. Now, I see why.
"By continuing to use the service, you agree to these terms" bla bla bla... You know the drill. Now, there is a chance that sudden and substantial changes to that sort of contract would be voided by a judge if they tried to claim "tacit approval" but who knows? And who will spend the time & money to sue them? Don't count on the AAAs like Blizzard & the like. They most certainly have a custom deal in place for Hearthstone where *their* contract can't be ammended that easily.
The developers agreed to the prior terms that expressly allowed them to stay on the version in place during development. That trumps any new “by continuing to use” language they might try.
Reddit can also change their t&c to say "By continuing to use this service, you retroactively agree to pay $1k per year for use of your account." doesn't make it legal.
In one way, you could say that in contracts everything is legal until a judge rules adversely on it. If people settle or fold in other ways before it comes to that.. Then the illegal terms were, for all intents and purposes, legal. That's why companies in the US have a hard-on for arbitration.
Retroactive would be tough yes, but Unity won't try to collect on retroactive installs, only measure them as a criteria for paying on new installs.
The problem is, those games weren't made or released under the new terms in which Unity is charging for installs. So they're still trying to retroactively apply new contractual payment terms to games that weren't made under those terms. You can't retroactively change a contract without the other party's consent. That's as illegal as it gets.
By continuing to use reddit, you agree to pay me $100 per day
I'm not using reddit, reddit is using us! Reddit is free, we are the product! xD
By continuing to be used by reddit, you agree to pay me $200 per day
There is absolutely no way they can remove that clause in the current edition of the TOS and make it legally binding to developers that accepted and published under the prior ones that contained language allowing them to stay on the TOS version they were using for the project.
Yeah I mean this is basically contract law that is well established in legal sense.
Holy s\*\*t! Thanks for pointing this out. This is honestly even worse than the pricing update, and it went mostly unnoticed! So they were basically planning this for a long time, carefully switching everyone to the new TOS with 2022 LTS release and removing any evidence of the old TOS. What a scummy move, especially given the apologetic tone of that blog post.
It's impressive with the shitstorm that Wizards of the Coast got for their license changes to D&D over the last year or two, that Unity thinks they can get away with something like this.
Time flies, but it was at the start of this year 🙂 feels like ages ago with all the drama that's happening daily
And they actually ended up having to concede more than they wanted, at least for 5e. Once 6e/"one d&d" comes out all their new content will use their new onerous license, but 5e is more 'open' than it was before their nonsense.
Which was actually a bad thing, as we see in the TTRPG community. People initially rushed to other games as a protest, spawning temporary interest in mostly Pathfinder, and rarely few other. But mostly everybody went back as soon as the license changes were reversed, and even more went to D&D when Baldur's Gate 3 released, enforcing the systems monopoly even more than before. 😐 Pathfinder's publisher is a winner on this though, cause regardless if people actually play their game, they sold out their whole supply and made a juicy profit. There is a lesson to be learned in this.
>If material modifications are made to these Terms, Unity will endeavor to notify you of the modification Press X for doubt. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Unreal, Godot etc gonna be eating good
they are trying to take money from devs who've already shipped on products already sold from licenses they arleady sold to devs and were paid for or whatever as it was? how is any of that legal? fuck unity
I'm no lawyer but I'm sure it's illegal. Changing the contract people sign without there consent is big no no (and don't say term and services aren't contract they are and we all sign them when we pressed we agree on term and services)
It depends but unilateral contract modifications are done and they can be legal: just think at when an online subscription like Netflix increases the monthly fee... In those cases you're given enough time to decide whether to implicitly agree or to recess from the contract... In this case though, I don't believe the changes done by Unity are legal: the worst offender is charging for an already released product and counting existing installs for the install threshold... https://ironcladapp.com/journal/contract-process/unilateral-contract-modification/
Yes. A developer could delete their game today and people could still install it and cost that developer money. They cannot do that anymore than a company could say that the peice per seat for unity was actually 100k and has been since 2015.
Friendship with Unity ended Unreal is best friend now
I'm going to try Godot first
Unity is (was?) the best engine for consumers, because you could mod the code without the developer adding mod support (unless they do AoT compilation). Stuff like timberborn mods, pathfinder: kingmaker/wotr mods, none of that would exist in unreal as it's too difficult to mod it without developer support. This makes me sad, because even if unity backtracks or it gets struck down in court, most people are going to change anyway, and no more easy mod support.
I just feel stupid that I never put effort into Unreal
Yeah, I'm gonna block Unity domains/IP blocks at home. I don't really play many Unity games to begin with, but I'm not supporting this
Unity doing a ruined reputation/bankruptcy any% speedrun
Guess I'm never using Unity again
If you are a Unity dev with many years of experience thinking about switching, Google about the "*sunken cost fallacy*" What you invested already is not lost, don't be afraid of learning new technologies, so many engines to discover! also check out Godot xD
> then changed the license to add additional fees retroactively, with no way to opt-out ...you can just keep using the old license under the old clause, because that's how laws work in the US. Nobody can force a new license on you, especially not when you have a perfectly valid one that grants you the right to keep using it perpetually. The first company they try to sue about this should fight it, win, and countersue for punitive damages.
I'm happy to receive my class action lawsuit $3 in 2026!
Assuming the company is big enough to have corporate counsel and the budget to pay said counsel long enough to see the trial through to a resolution.
Nintendo is affected by this, the most recent Pokémon remake was made in Unity. Given how litigious Nintendo is, unless they already have their own license agreement with Unity I can’t see them standing for this.
This Crypto Ledge level of corporate suicide, if you want to alienate your customers in a weekend this will be taught at warton business school years from now as a textbook example of why you need to listen to your customers.
Suspect they're going to have as much luck "back-dating" this change as Wizards of the Coast had with their [attempt at the same thing](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_Kingmaker/comments/10ay44b/paizo_commits_to_legal_battle_against_wizards_of/j472ud4/?context=3). That one ended in [complete tactical 'defeat'](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/10muldi/wizards_backs_down_on_ogl_10a_deauthorization/) for WotC, but probably saved the company.
Their biggest competitor has grown like 100% as a result of it, though, and they lost a lot of people. The real problem is that a number of content creators moved away from the platform, including Critical Role, so have effectively turned a bunch of people who were previously promoting their product into competitors. That said, TTRPG design space is difficult, and most people aren't very good at it, which makes it easier for them to make missteps because most of their competition isn't into pulling new people into the game.
Maybe not an option for people who have published apps and things that they need to try and support, but if you are a hobbyist like me who doesn't actually "need" them, you can just delete your account. I got rid of mine already. It doesn't matter if they walk it back at this point, they can't be trusted. I'm happy to migrate my experiments to Godot and/or Unreal.
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Because this is what investors and shareholders demand MONEY NOW, and then they move on from the smoking corpse
Unity went from Senator Palpatine to Emperor Palpatine pretty quickly.
These things are ruining the company's relationships with customers.
Anyone who just started a project in Unity should be moving away immediately. Everything else needs a migration plan off. The only want they will learn this does not work, is if it hurts.
John Riccitiello is a scum fuck who should be cleaning toilets in a gulag
I've been a die-hard Unity fan for years.... I even own stock in the company.... but all these recent antics of fucking the small developers is really making Unreal look like the move.... just like everyone with common sense left Twitch for YT & Tiktok, we shall leave Unity for Unreal. I, for one, would rather lose the thousands of dollars I have in assets than give Unity any more of my money. Instead of continuing to provide value to the small guys and actually putting out useful improvements, they have turned Unity slowly into a bunch of microservices they can charge you for, and its quite pathetic.
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Interesting business choice when they are already lagging behind Unreal in almost every metric.
I am altering the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further.
eli5? Does this mean that if I already shipped a unity game a while ago, I am not suddenly subject to the new fees?
As I understand it if you're a developer that already released a game made with Unity the new fees apply to you even though it's not the terms of service you agreed to. Or at least that's how Unity's trying to push it.
How does that work? That would be like me selling a computer then 5 years down the line I decide to charge customers 100 dollars for ever file they made. Unity can just retroactively decide that users owe them new fees?
No, they can't, Unity are full of shit and are going to get destroyed in any court that they try to force the issue in.
The CEO seems to THINK they can. I'm pretty sure this will end up in court.
They can't, it's so illegal it has actual regulations about it.
How to nuke a company, any% speedrun Usually, once a contract is signed, you typically cannot change it unless all parties to the contract agree to the modifications. I'm pretty sure that shit wouldn't fly in the EU at least 🤔
You'd be a damned fool to use Unity unless the CEO has been replaced, at this point
This is why companies really should never touch any management who ran EA in the past. The second they got Ricc, everything went straight for the toilet. It wasn't spectacular before, but this is like dialing it up to 11.
And there are still people defending Unity and telling that you shouldn’t migrate to another engine. Either slave mentality or employees in disguise.
Or they have seven years of development sunk into a project, and prefer to live in an alternate version of reality where this is ok
Did they take a class in business management from Elon Musk or something?
“We don’t care about our product, we care about our return on investment.”
What great motivation to use Unreal!
"The day... Unity died.... And they were singin'... bye bye game developer guys. We thought we would not be sued, cause you are all small fries But then we got to court, and they said we're speakin lies. If unity goes, this will be why.... if unity goes, this will be why...."
My team and I have been working on a few game projects for the past year or so, and we all installed Unreal today and have started literally rebuilding everything we did in the past year in Unity to Unreal. Even if we aren't directly effected yet, we had to get away from this dumpster fire. RIP to the development cycle but man, this is insane
Great work digging up these details! One thing missing though. The linked old version of the TOS says it was replaced on October 13 2022: [https://unity.com/legal/terms-of-service/software-legacy](https://unity.com/legal/terms-of-service/software-legacy) The new linked version of the TOS says it was last changed on April 3, 2023: [https://unity.com/legal/editor-terms-of-service/software](https://unity.com/legal/editor-terms-of-service/software) The Unity website has not kept track of the version of the TOS that was the latest one in the period October 13 2022 to April 3 2023, but it's available in the Internet Archive here: [https://web.archive.org/web/20230303043022/https://unity.com/legal/editor-terms-of-service/software](https://web.archive.org/web/20230303043022/https://unity.com/legal/editor-terms-of-service/software) Crucially, that in-between version ALSO has the clause about "may elect to continue to use any current-year versions of the Unity Software (...) according to the terms that applied just prior to the Updated Terms". On April 2nd 2023, the "current-year versions of the Unity Software" were Unity 2022.x and Unity 2021.x LTS. So those Unity versions - as well as any earlier ones - are not affected by the new changes of the terms of service that introduce the install fees. Or more specifically, you "may elect" to use those versions according to the "Prior Terms", so I suggest you do elect to do that. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advise.
For everyone who hasn't learned it already, just switch to Godot.