- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
Unity May Never Win Back the Developers It Lost in Its Fee Debacle::Even though the company behind the wildly popular game engine walked back its controversial new fee policy, the damage is done.
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Yeah I can’t imagine why I would start a project with Unity at this point. That’s just asking to get screwed over later with no warning.
It appears that Unity shot itself in both feet and also its face. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen such a spectacular betrayal of trust by a business where confidence in your product is paramount. Even with extreme backpedling, it’s in the can.
Wizard of the Coast license fiasco is about the same. Except of course that “confidence in your product” is a bit of a misnomer. It’s not a confidence in the D&D, but the license. A lot of people were trusting the OGL, and the changes would have fucked over half of the industry with their “retroactive” changes.
I was maybe 10 hours of work into a small side project and I just said fuck it and started over in Godot. No reason to use Unity unless you are a studio that’s deep into development or supporting a game that’s already out.
Unity engaged not only in a massive attepted money grab but then tried to back it with some bad-faith action like quietly deleting user protections from its TOS.
We have seen the true face of the Unity company and it wants to prey on its clients. Also the timing (during an ongoing trend of enshittification) reminds us publicly-owned companies are not our friends. In fact, the are adversarial to their own employees and customers.
The company needs to show an immense amount of contrition (say firing its top officers) or it needs to wither to a quarter of its current value.
They were willing to fuck over some people and drive them completely out of business.
Which people? Developers. The very people that helped make Unity what it is. Unity wanted to completely crush their own developers. Some estimates put Unity’s fees higher than 100% revenue in some scenarios.
Them back-tracking and saying “wow! we didn’t expect this to be so hated!” shows that they either don’t understand numbers (they do) or that they think their users are idiots.
So why would developers want to come back to them?
John Riccitello literally called developers “fucking idiots” in an interview, so yeah, it’s the second option.
And they never should, the fact that they can push this outrageous policy in the first place just means that they can do it again in the near future
The takeaway is to never hire people from EA into decision making roles.
If they had just listened to the feedback, realized their mistake, even if it took a while, and then backpedaled to the current compromise, they probably wouldn’t have hurt their business much. It was the disdain they showed for small developers, basically saying they weren’t going to address issues like reinstallation and other things that would make a big difference to smaller projects. And then quietly altering their TOS, to make the small developers that made the platform able to exist, have to start paying even if the contract at the time protected them from the fees if they didn’t upgrade.
This kind of disregard for the people who made your company what it is today, just to make some short term profit is exactly why Reddit, Twitter, and so many other tech companies are falling apart right now. It’s just happening to such extremes that it’s not just let’s price gouge our customers and patrons, but let’s actively commit fraud to squeeze out every possible dime from all but our biggest customers and throw them away. Fortunately, places like Lemmy and Mastodon are here to catch them. Hope they can make it.
Goes to show that destroying trust is quite easy, but earning trust is very hard.
If you destroy good will you’re likely not going to get it back in any situation.
Can be destroyed in an instant, but takes years to build.
I had no idea John ricitiello was the CEO of unity. Holy shit that’s bad. With his reputation I’m surprised anyone even used unity. Should have seen this coming a mile away. He wants to slurp money out of every conceivable orifice.
That guy fucking sucks.
Saw a bunch of idiots calling the smaller devs “not serious about making games” for switching engines.
For the best. Companies need to learn to tread carefully when dealing with customers, they can’t be allowed to get off lightly for trying anti-consumer practices like this.
Actually the reason this didn’t work out is because they are in the B2B, not business to consumer business.
Turns out other businesses aren’t fond of being asked to pay a dollar to reload, who knew?
They keep walking back further and their stock prices just keep plummeting. I would like to say I hope the CEO, who is the former CEO of EA, for any who aren’t aware, gets fired for this. But we all know that no matter how hard he messes up, some other business will pay him millions in incentives to pick him up.
In another thread someone said the board is made up of assholes, so don’t get your hopes up for any positive changes…
I tried to do some googling, but googling and sourcing out the history of each board member is cumbersome. So instead I will just post this snippet from a reddit post by u/Xijit
I apologize in advance for the length.
"Yes, John is undoubtedly an asshole, since they don’t let you be a CEO unless you are one. But he has also been the CEO of Unity since 2014 and oversaw its progress from “that engine that lets you port your game to anything” to “the platform that every single mobile game is made on and the backbone of the inde developer market.” The main reason why so many of you are only hearing about him being the CEO now, is because he HAD (past tense) been doing a relatively good job.
What changed … In 2020 Unity went public, and a bunch of shit heads bought their way onto Unity’s board of directors. Ultimately the CEO works for the Board, so when these new bosses tell him to do something self destructive, he does it.
Here are the names you should be talking about instead of John:
Tomer Bar Zeev
Roelof Botha
Egon Durban.
(Edit: I forgot to say that they are Board members)
Remember IronSource, that dog shit monetization company that absolutely everyone in the industry dumped, and was circling the drain until Unity bought them for $4.4 billion? Tomer Bar Zeev is the founder of IronSource, and following the merger he became Unity’s 3rd president (along with John and Marc) … yes, this is the asshole who sold a package of malware under the guise of monetization software & ultimately is the root cause of this install tax. Given IronSource’s history of malware, I feel that it is safe to say that the Unity runtime will likely start getting flagged by antivirus programs and casually request admin rights during installation.
How Unity got infected with IronSource, is that Sequoia Capitol and Silver lake pledged to invest $1 billion into Unity if the deal went through. Frankly, the math doesn’t add up for Unity to trade $4.4 billion to buy a plague blanket of a company, only to receive $1 billion in return. Especially when a rival mobile monetization company offered to pay Unity $17 billion if they called off the IronSource deal & merge with them instead. Unless that $1b was for the sake of C-suite bonuses, in which case all of this makes perfect sense.
But who the Hell is Roelof Botha & Egon Durban, and why are they important names? Roelof is a Director of Sequoia, Egon is the founder of Silver Lake, and both of them have ties back to Elon Musk … which is pretty obvious for how fast Unity has caught on fire.
If Egon’s name is familiar, it is because he was on Twitter’s Board and was the one who pushed to have them accept the deal, & then got thrown off the board when they realised that he was just spying for Elon during the resulting lawsuit. He also was the one who helped Elon with his fake " Taking Tesla private" scam.
Roelof was the CFO of PayPal before it got acquired and has a long history of being involved with mergers that result in a lot of money for some, but absolute shit deals for end users and employees.
Looping back to the top … I think John is done with Unity, but not in the “yay, us consumers have protested hard enough to get him fired” kind of way the internet wants. I think he was done in 2020 when he went from being the guy actually running the company, to the guy who answers to a room full of investment fuck heads (of the 13 board members, 11 are investment managers), and then gets to take the blame for their shit decisions. I feel like the reason why he sold his stock is because he knew this was a shit idea that was going to tank the company, but these assholes wouldn’t listen. So he cashed out his stock and will be announcing his retirement at the start of Q4.
Don’t be shocked when Tomer Bar Zeev gets named as his replacement."
(P.S does anyone know how to quote inline and keep the paragraph spacing?)
The quoting in Lemmy is block quotes, so it appears you’d have to quote each paragraph individually. Definitely inconvenient, I wonder if there’s a way they could rework the system.
This is completely unsurprising. Often when a company goes to shit it’s the board of directors, ultimately, they control the CEO and the rest of the executive team at a company. I feel horribly for the indie devs that were using Unity, though there’s always a chance for this to happen to proprietary software it still sucks when it does happen.
It’s not like getting fired as a CEO is a negative. They leave with a golden parachute and get hired elsewhere
When you make your business dependent on a single supplier, that’s a massive risk. I don’t quite understand why many Managers don’t grasp that concept. There are two solutions: build your own infrastructure or use something that’s either publicly available (like open source software) or easily replaceable (like a library with a common interface that many others also implement in a way that would also solve your usecase).
If you don’t do that, one day in the future your supplier will increase the cost until it’s just below the cost of switching. If the cost of switching is more than you can afford at that point, you are screwed.
Cloud computing anyone?
I’d hope not. I hope the devs realize that its a gamble to put all your eggs in one basket
GOOD
I think it’s time to revisit the question of why these corporations exist as “people” under the law, when they clearly operate without humanity. The perversion of justice that granted them this right was taken directly from the 14th Amendment in 1886. That amendment was written to grant citizenship to freed slaves. What a coincidence that slavery ended, but was immediately replaced with a new structure called corporations.
It’s a practical policy. You want corporations to be able to enter into contracts, pay taxes, have legal responsibilities, etc.
Corporations already existed before the 14th amendment. So many valid critiques of capitalism but I don’t understand the fixation with this one.
If they weren’t “persons” then contracts would simply change their wordings but would still be functionally the same. It’s like changing the color of a sports team jersey.
You should be more concerned with the workers owning the means of production. That can happen with or without corporate personhood. And that will be what actually brings us an equitable society.
It’s certainly “practical” for shareholders with controlling interests in these publicly traded companies, but very impractical for everyone else.
The word corporation may have existed before the 14th Amendment, but the legal definition was entirely different. The word “Country” was also used to describe the state a person was from in the 19th century, if asked about one’s country, one would would reply with the name of their state of residence. The meaning over a word can change entirely in a couple generations.
What criticism of capitalism is more relevant than the abomination of corporate personhood? Toss a few more right-wing Supreme Court rulings into the mix like Citizen’s United giving corporations the ability to spend unlimited and unregulated money lobbying (buying) the legislative system and you have a nation in decline with a failing economic system.
Legally only citizens are allowed to lobby congress, if corporations were no longer considered people, then real people would have more access to power than their corporate overlords.
Corporations have existed since before the USA was even a thing. It’s a group of men with part ownership in some type of organization designed to make profit. Hell, corporations were arguably much more powerful back then. Just look at the British East India Company. It had over 260,000 troops and owned massive swathes of territory.
If corporations weren’t persons and couldn’t lobby for that single reason, then they would funnel money into actual persons and then those people would lobby.
The solution if you don’t want people to lobby (which I agree, is a goal you should aim for) then get rid of lobbying altogether. Changing the legal mechanics by which it happens accomplishes nothing. Which is what I mean by changing color of a sports jersey. It’s focusing on trivial details and ignoring the fundamental issue. Missing forest for the trees.
Thanks for the civil tone of your reply, I have to agree that even if corporate personhood was abolished the oligarchs would just find another way to control the political system keeping rigged to favor their interests. Lobbying in the US started during the Civil War from what I understand, this lad to the creation of a Military Industrial Complex that continues to lobby US lawmakers into conflicts motivated by greed and not diplomatic interests. If you don’t believe me, please listen to the warning from President Eisenhower in his farewell address.
Do you think it’s in the people’s best interest to keep the current corporate structure in tact and legislate lobbying reforms instead?
I think unfortunately democracy lends itself to oligarchy. It’s a constant war of back and forth between democracy trying to fight back and then the oligarchs taking back control. Eternal struggle, essentially.
Look at for examples in the 1800s with the expansion of the railroads. We realized monopolies were dangerous so we create anti-trust laws. For a while, the government enforces this to break monopolies. This is good for democracy- it reduces the power of large corporations controlling policies.
Eventually, however, they sneak back in. Look at the original AT&T. I forget the name but it was Edison’s company. They became massive, were broken up, but then slowly merged together over a long period of time.
However by the time they combine together again, there is little public will to break them up. We’re at the point today where we have powerful anti-trust legislation but our politicians either have no will to change it or are too scared to change it.
We could break up Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. They buy up their potential competitors before they are any risk and we live in a world where vast majority of internet traffic gets routed through the big 5. Google (YouTube, search), Meta (Facebook, Instagram, whatsapp), Twitter, reddit, tiktok.
Instead of breaking these companies up to maintain a free market with competition - we don’t do anything. Why? It’s a pendulum and corporate interests are in the driver’s seat right now.
There are many other industries where a few big companies control everything. Internet like Comcast & AT&T… Media - I remember reading in 2019 half of all movies that came out in theaters was owned by Disney. Airlines are another example. 80% of trips happen under 4 companies. American airlines, delta, southwest, and United.
There are similar oligopolies in many industries that are less visible. Pharmaceuticals, defense contractors, cloud infrastructure, etc.
As long as these companies have such power… they will find a way to manipulate our democratic system. You can change the rules and they will get around them. For example we have anti-trust and depending on your interpretation many of the companies above can be broken up.
Yet we don’t do it. So the law doesn’t actually matter. What matters is where the real power is currently located. The laws are guidelines…
So the solution? I have no idea, really. I think there is no ultimate solution as long as there is capitalism. It will always be a war between people trying to assert their own private power and the institutions trying to keep the system legitimate.
However, I think we can make the situation better by breaking up the power of these companies by actually enforcing anti-trust laws and making it harder for them by for example getting rid of legal lobbying and making them do it illegally. That will incur extra costs for them, ultimately making them less effective.
When you launder money, you lose a good chunk of it. Somstimes a significant chunk.
