Unity Fallout Continues: Dev Group Shuts Down While Developers Refuse To Come Back
from the the-book-of-exodus dept
The fallout from game engine Unity’s decision to try to cram a completely new and different pricing structure down the throats of game developers continues. Originally announced in mid-September, Unity took a bunch of its tiered structures of its offerings and suddenly instituted per-install fees, along with a bunch of other fee structures and requirements for its lower-level tiers that never had these pricing models. The backlash from developers and the public at large was so overwhelmingly one-sided and swift that the company then backtracked, making a bunch of noise about how it will listen better and learn from this fiasco. The backtracking did make a bunch of changes to address the anger from its initial announcement, including:
- The newly amended pricing structure no longer applies to games already made using the engine, ending questions as to how any of this could be legal
- The Personal tier of Unity will once again be free of any fees until a game reaches $200k in annual revenue and will no longer be required to show a “Made With Unity” screen on boot
- Per-use fees will only kick in for the other tiers once a game reaches $1 million in revenue over a calendar year and 1 million in initial purchases/installations of a game. Those per-use fees are also capped at 2.5% of gross revenue for a game once it meets those requirements
- Those per-use fees also are somewhat lower than the initial plan
You can see the table below provided by Unity for the details mentioned above:
Is this better? Yes! And some developers have even come back with positive comments on the new plan. Others, not so much.
“Unity fixed all the major issues (except trust), so it’s a possibility to use again in the future,” indie developer Radiangames wrote. “Uninstalling Godot and Unreal and getting back to work on Instruments.”
Others were less forgiving. “Unity’s updated policy can be classified as the textbook definition of, ‘We didn’t actually hear you, and we don’t care what you wanted,'” Cerulean and Drunk Robot Games engineer RedVonix wrote on social media. “We’ll never ship a Unity game of our own again…” they added.
That “except trust” parenthetical is doing a lot of work, because that’s the entire damned problem. If Unity came out with this plan initially, and had actually worked constructively with its customers, the blow up about this almost certainly would have been far more muffled. But trust is one of those things that takes forever to build and only a moment to destroy.
Along those lines, we’ve learned subsequently both that some community groups that have sprung up around Unity are disbanding out of disgust for the company’s actions and that plenty of developers aren’t coming back to try this second bite at the pricing model apple that Unity wants to offer them.
As to the first, the oldest Unity dev group that exists, Boston Unity Group (BUG) has decided to call it quits, putting its reasons why in no uncertain terms.
“Over the past few years, Unity has unfortunately shifted its focus away from the games industry and away from supporting developer communities,” the group leadership wrote in a departure note. “Following the IPO, the company has seemingly put profit over all else, with several acquisitions and layoffs of core personnel. Many key systems that developers need are still left in a confusing and often incomplete state, with the messaging that advertising and revenue matter more to Unity than the functionality game developers care about.”
BUG says the install-fee terms Unity first announced earlier this month were “unthinkably hostile” to users and that even the “new concessions” in an updated pricing model offered late last week “disproportionately affect the success of indie studios in our community.” But it’s the fact that such “resounding, unequivocal condemnation from the games industry” was necessary to get those changes in the first place that has really shaken the community to its core.
“We’ve seen how easily and flippantly an executive-led business decision can risk bankrupting the studios we’ve worked so hard to build, threaten our livelihoods as professionals, and challenge the longevity of our industry,” BUG wrote. “The Unity of today isn’t the same company that it was when the group was founded, and the trust we used to have in the company has been completely eroded.”
Ouch. That’s about as complete a shellacking as you’re going to get from what, and I cannot stress this enough, is a dedicated group of Unity’s fans and customers. And while these organically created dev groups quitting on Unity certainly is bad enough, there are plenty of developers out there chiming in on these changes, essentially stating that the trust has been broken and there isn’t a chance in hell that they’re coming back on board the Unity train.
Vampire Survivors developer Poncle, for instance, gave a succinct “lol no thank you” when asked during a Reddit AMA over the weekend if their next game/sequel would again use the Unity Engine. “Even if Unity were to walk back entirely on their decisions, I don’t think it would be wise to trust them while they are under the current leadership,” Poncle added later in the AMA.
“Basically, nothing has changed to stop Unity from doing this again in the future,” InnerSloth (Among Us) developer Tony Coculuzzi wrote on social media Friday afternoon. “The ghouls are still in charge, and they’re thinking up ways to make up for this hit on projected revenue as we speak… Unity leadership still can’t be trusted to not fuck us harder in the future.”
Other developers chimed in that they did have discussions with Unity about the new pricing structure… and were summarily ignored. In those cases, those developers appeared to be solidly in the camp of “Fool me once shame on you…”.
There are certain things that are just really difficult to walk back. And breaking the trust of your own fans and customers, where loyalty is so key to the business, is one of them. The picture Unity painted for its customers is one where it simply does not care and is now pretending to, only because it landed itself in hot water.
Filed Under: development, fees, trust, video games
Companies: unity
Comments on “Unity Fallout Continues: Dev Group Shuts Down While Developers Refuse To Come Back”
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...
They mostly walked back their plans after a sufficiently loud and angry public outcry but the fact they did it in the first place means so long as they retain the people who had the idea and put it into action one would have to be a fool to trust them to not try something similar in the future since they’ve shown that they are willing to do so.
When someone makes a good go at sticking a knife into your back the fact that they only nicked you before getting caught is no reason to trust them and offer your back to them again.
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Agreed. After this the only way I’d trust them again is if I got a written contract laying out in detail the schedule of license fees with an iron-clad guarantee that fees would never change, with ruinous penalties if Unity even tries to change them and language making Unity liable for the full costs of any litigation needed to collect those penalties.
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The only way id trust them again. Is it they made it collective commons and they can never gain fees like this from their users. Then they can go all all in to the ad revenue.
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Perhaps if the game engine went to a CC-BY license and a pass-the-hat business model, I might trust them.
But I’d be sure to lock the engine code each update, to ensure that the license doesn’t change under me.
Unity Fallout? Don’t be silly. Fallout is Creation Engine.
it's not losing trust
It’s proving that you are untrustworthy.
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Distinction without a difference. Trust is like a spinal cord: It only takes a moment to sever and repairing it doesn’t mean it’ll work like it did before.
Re: Re: Distinction without a difference
I tried to make it as simple as possible.
Unity management have allowed their product to degrade for years and trust in them has slowly fallen. Now they’ve issued a policy saying, literally, you can’t trust us with your money.
Do you see the distinction?
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A) He said the distinction didn’t matter, not that it didn’t exist. B) it does matter, but you aren’t evidencing the point.
Every person who loses trust was previously untrustworthy, that’s definitionally why they broke your trust. The distinction is meaningful when you point out a history of actions that were warnings, precursors to the proof.
Unity’s feature set and bugs, while a sign of a revenue-centric focus, are not harbingers of a retroactive rug-pull. Unity would not have lost dev trust if it wasn’t retroactive, and openly communicated. They’d have burned some devs, but that’s over the terms, not a lost in trust that Unity would abide by the terms.
You want to be right? Fool me once, fool me twice.
The reason your distiction is important is Unity tried something like this before. put up a whole tos change tracker to rebuild trust. included language that should have prevented this. A big reason they can’t get trust back is that this is the second time. Anyone who stuck through that fiasco is personally being burned by this. They proved it was only talk. That the cash grab was the goal.
Re: Re: Re:2 Agreed,
As far as I’m concerned people should have been worried again the moment they hired some troll for a CEO from EA (I was). Not just any troll either, one that was there and making decisions in EA that hurt them to. When they were shoving loot boxes and micro transactions in every game they made and in some games these boxes were the only way to truly progress. Take this nonsense and couple it with the fact that Unity bet on AD revenue and said revenue is actually falling off and you got a recipe for consumer disaster. This is definitely time for devs to stand ground cause this definitely isn’t over it’s simply postponed. Until they simply find a way to implement something more quietly both in essence and public outcry. Just sad this is happening really, it hurts the industry and I understand needing added revenue to shut investor’s up but they need to think of a better way. So much for Unity I guess.
Re: Re: Re:3
Sadly, there’s apparently no way to balance the customers and investors.
IPO is the sound of doom.
Unless you have a clear corporate charter that says other things are higher priority than profits, but why would you do that? It will lower the stock price and you won’t be able to cash out all the further millions you need for reasons.
And despite all this, one thing is for certain:
None of these developers will be scrambling to use Meshpage as a replacement engine.
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That’s a bit too far.
At least Unity works as intended.
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Technically if you were to take Terop’s word for it, Meshpage works as intended: a massive waste of code occupying otherwise useful space on computers, purely to uphold one Finnish lunatic’s fever dream of regaining the significance he thought he had while working at Nokia.
Note that I said works as “intended”, not “advertised”.
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You say that like Tero Pulkinnen advertises. He doesn’t advertise. He puts out a tech demo so shitty, he makes the work of a programming student writing a game engine code in C++ for the first time look like goddamn Unreal Tournament 4. Then he goes to a London bus company willing to separate a fool from his money, runs one campaign on one bus for a week and calls that marketing genius.
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Debatable if you’ve been following all of their pitiful attempts at introducing new major features for the last three years. I’m still not sure Unity multiplayer actually works.
Unity discovers how to blow up their own financial future using this one weird trick.
Oopsie
As with Politicians. Unity leadership is only sorry they got caught. Should not have started recording those oval office conversations.
Per install fee?
What’s next, a charge per hour after some arbitrary time period.
How is it that most normal people do a job and get paid for that one time… getting paid over and over for one bit of work is fucking ridiculous. The work is done, stop milking it.
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Bu… but-but but… Money!
If possible, they’d charge per CPU instruction executed, and make the customer glad about it.
F*** Unity
All me and my homies hate Unity
This article misses a few key points. The big one is that Unity attempted this back in 2019, had immediate blowback, walked it back, and set up a license tracker on Github to regain trust… which it then silently took offline prior to making license changes from last year through February of this year, in what was an obvious preparation for the big announcement in September.
The other one is that the 2019 changes were in preparation for an IPO which happened in 2020. Following the IPO, some investors became members of the board of directors… a particular group who owned and ran ironSource and other similar companies. Then they went and spent Unity’s money to buy most of ironSource, whose entire reason for being is per-install licensing; they had previously been losing marketshare in the utility software market once people wised up to their InstallCore product being much more than the installation and telemetry framework product it was billed as to independent utility developers.
These are the people who now control Unity. Which makes regaining community trust rather… difficult for anyone who has done their homework.
Only way unity will ever be able to regain any semblance of trust would be to fire the idiot CEO who I have no idea how he is still in this industry after he tried to implement his battlefield idea. He is a clear example of what a joke of a person would look like.
And even after that it’s a 50/50 chance whether they can pull back from this
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Apologies if I’m cynical, but I doubt they’ll fire him.
And if they do, they’ll likely choose someone worse.
No
Installation tax is a sin and shall never be made part of normal consumerism.
I moved to Unreal in 2020 when I felt that Unity was not interested in improving the engine properly which was not the case in the past. In 2023 they proved that the only thing that mattered to them was money. Unity is a good engine but the management is cancerous.