Unity May Never Win Back the Developers It Lost in Its Fee Debacle
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.
Honestly, I don't blame them for not wanting to put up with Unity's unreliance. It took Unity 10 days after announcing this awful change to backtrack to a normal revenue cut. That 10 days was filled with justified outrage from a ton of developers to the point of Re-Logic donating $100k to Godot and FNA in protest.
Those ten days were them seeing if it would 'blow over'. Can't trust them an inch now
Yup. They were hoping it would fall out of the news cycle and people would forget about it. Once it stretched past a week, they started to panic because people weren’t dropping it, and had to plan an announcement to save face.
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Sure, but if they'd implemented the revised changes they wouldn't have lost so many users. And despite their messaging, they did already speak to some devs who'd already told them this would be a disaster, but they tried it anyway, and in a retroactive way that completely disregarded prior promises regarding changing EULA agreements, so there's no faith in this not still changing.
They fucked it up. Plain and simple.
Nah this went really bad for them. Even if they do make more, it will almost certainly be short term. Godot got so much free advertising. It firmly sat itself next to unreal as far as who should be choosing it, but it is definitely the inferior engine if you are making AAA. It's going to get cut from the high by unreal and the low from Godot, defold, and even gamemaker.
I don't get this weird apologist attitude. Let us not forget Unity just spent over $4 billion less than a year ago buying the malware ad service ironsource. They are not profitable because they make bad business decisions. This was one more. And in all likelihood we will see the sale of unity before too long. And it will probably be less than the $20 billion offer they had prior to the ironsource purchase.
I wonder if this will result in the shareholders holding the ex-EA CEO accountable for destroying their revenue stream.
Good luck. If the SEC hasn’t already started building a case against him for insider trading, then nothing is going to happen to him. He’ll get a golden parachute and scurry off to ruin some other company.
This was a board decision, not the CEO as an individual.
They are all equally resonate and if they fire him it's to save face and kick him as a scape goat
Going to need proof of that.
In nearly every company, CEO makes the plan. Board wants a process and results. CEO is the one who spearheads it.
I think you mean a nice golden parachute to reward them for taking the heat, so they can swap in a new expensive face to implement slightly less unpopular fees.
The American dream.
Why, it was THEIR idea in the first place.
Yes, it was their genius idea, if it worked. Must be blamed on somebody else if it does not work.
He resigns. gizmodo
There's also the matter of future developers to consider. I'm in the process of looking at game engines to learn, and Unity has decisively crossed itself off the list. Even if current studios and developers stick with Unity, startups and novices would be foolish to pick a game engine that might suddenly decide to charge them out the ass with little to no notice. Existing developers have the issue where they already have tools and experience with Unity, but newer folks don't.
Myself I really wish that Godot would finally start getting traction in being the most advanced and the most used game engine. And it's free.
Just look at Linux - it's free, most used and most customizable server platform, even tho paid alternatives (e.g. Windows server) exists. I wish Godot would become de facto standard game engine.
Honestly, then use it. The more folk using it, the more people will be contributing to it, the better it will get.
Like all open source projects, if people don’t want them to wither on the vine then people need to keep the projects active in any way they can.
Godot definitely profited from Unity's fuckup. Godot Engine hits over 50K euros per month in funding
I doubt it will ever happen but if it dose that would be a perfect fit for open source, big studios could contributr and share parts of their progress between each other like big companies do in the Linux space and at that part it would probably become and stay the most advanced option fairly quickly because you can't compete with a entire industry and community at once!
Developers would be foolish not to begin transition plans off of Unity. The next Unity LTS version will still require the runtime fee.
They forgot they were B2B... where did the C suite and board go to Business school? 🤣
I am voting for the usual:
"My parents made a generous donation to the school I attended MBA"
I've worked on older projects such as 2019 and overall they all work very similar, so I'm assuming people will still start projects on 2020/2021 LTS given they're fairly stable
The only thing I'd be keen on in be versions of unity would be if they came with better versions of FSR / DLSS baked in, instead of having to wait on third party addons
Fantastic, let them die Let a company, just once, learn a lesson
Not a good idea to leave Unreal Engine without decent competitors. Other universal engines are too small to compete with UE.
Honestly, Unreal has been in a different league ever since Epic started dumping Fortnite money into it. That's probably why Unity tried to start charging more, because they've been falling behind for the past few years and can't afford to keep up. Not that I think it's good to leave Epic/Unreal without decent competition, but I'm more inclined to blame Fortnite for the downfall of Unity than the indie devs Unity just scared off with their desperate cash-grab.
I'm sure the person responsible for the change is going to be feeling devastated as they buy back all the stocks for fractions of what they paid.
Yeah, once you show that you can and will fuck someone over, they tend to lose trust in you.
It shouldn't. Developers have a moral responsibility to snub Unity now. A lesson must be learned here
Good. The terrible marketing team who made this decision is still there, and they still want this end result. They just learned they need to approach that goal more slowly.
This kind of decision is not made by marketing.
I would bet money that it's from their CEO, someone too greedy for fucking EA shouldn't ever be a option for your company!
They fucked themselves like WotC (Wizards of the Coast) did with the OGL (Open Gaming Licensing) changes.
I wonder who is gonna fuck up like that next. I wanna start shorting them now.
Nah, they'll go back. If it's one thing I've learned from Greedy companies doing dumb shit. People will always go back to trust them again.
That works for consumers because they don't have nothing to lose. Smaller devs will still gravitate towards Unity because the various fees don't apply to them, but any big studio won't touch it with a ten feet pole. Immagine putting the salaries of a full studio in the hands of a company that might decide out of the blue to ruin your business model, it's a nightmare scenario for any CEO! More so when there are viable alternatives
Publishers will force smaller devs to move away.
I bet you Paradox Interactive has been shitting down its leg as this event unfolded. They almost exclusively publish Unity games.
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If the changes were launched this way, being tied to a new version in 2024 then this would have been a perfectly fair approach, you could stick with 2022 / 23 LTS for your projects and only if you want 'new' features would you pick up 2024 LTS and agree to the new terms.
I've honestly not seen much difference between major versions e.g. 2021 - 2022 LTS, so unless these new versions come out with amazing new features, devs can still stick to these old reliable versions.
It's much better overall but the way they've handled this has been shithouse
Deserved
It's times like this I wish we did things more like china. The one person who is actually responsible for this change is going to get a huge payout, but the same can't be said for everyone else at the company whose lives are going to be completely thrown off from the incoming layoffs.
They have over 7,000 employees they need to lay people off anyway. The reason they're not profitable is because they've massively overextended themselves. Why did they buy Wetter, utterly bizarre purchase choice.
If they had a sensible number of employees and didn't buy random companies every 5 minutes they'd be profitable.
Haha Unity. Ironic
I think they will lose some already established studios that can afford to retool and reskill on another engine. But I think the vast vast majority of current unity developers are breathing a sigh of relief that they /dont/ need to reskill or retool on another engine.
Unity is still on shaky ground, but they have been since they went public. They need revenue, and their big ad revenue plan got ruined by dastardly apple protecting users' privacy. Couple that with an upstart and promising engine following in Blenders footsteps. In five years, they might have lost every hand they had left to play. Irregardless of the missteps of the last week.
Every indie dev I'm following on YouTube has basically made a "My thoughts on the situation"-type videos where they talk about how they've "won against Unity" despite Unity basically doing a textbook of the "Door in the face" technique to pass changes that would've been unpopular before this whole mess.
Edit: Fixed typo.
Claiming it's "door in the face" is a little crazy here. If this is where they wanted to be, the "bait" changes could have been much much less bad than they were, and they still could've walked back to this.
Hell, they could have announced a 10% revenue split and it would've looked much better than what they pitched. And they could still walk back to 2.5% and looked like heroes. And it wouldn't have lost them nearly as much trust. Nor made them look as bad.
If this was what they were trying to do, they'd have to have been even dumber to have made it this bad.
I'm more willing to bet they're just fucking stupid. Or that a few people on the board had this as a fucking moronic idea, and the rest managed to take back control after it went totally sideways.
But claiming that it's a door in the face requires them to be evil enough to do it, stupid enough to not realize they're overdoing it, crazy enough to think it'd work, etc. It seems way too contrived.
As soon as I heard Unity was back pedaling, I thought "there's part 2 of the plan"
1: release abusive payment scheme to see just how much push back they get. If push back is minimal or losses are acceptable, end here and enjoy the profit.
2: if push back is strong, implement the actual payment policy that is still a significant increase, but less significant than the one above. And wait until the controversy blows over, which it will.
Yes, lots of developers will leave, lots of developers will choose a different engine for their new games, but there are a ton that will decide that it isn't feasible to switch engines and plenty that will just eat the added cost. The thing that remains to be seen is just how much damage Unity has done in terms of new projects choosing other engines over theirs.
Yeah, very few studios would retool an existing project. The real question is whether any of them will be picking unity for their next project. And will young people getting into game dev choose Unity over others? I don't expect to see a sharp decrease in the number of Unity projects in the next year, but rather a slow descent, while Godot picks up steam and Unreal further cements itself as the professional's tool.
All the tutorials and learning resources are hyper unity focused. That's why so many game devs pick it up. That's why they cornered the less than AAA industry. A young person will choose unity over the others for the same reason as they did last year. The endless resources to teach.
It's likely almost all developers will pick unity for the next project too. All their knowledge is in unity, not Godot or unreal. We have this problem in other software industries too, some languages and frameworks are just better, but you can't use them in your project because there are only five people in the industry that know how to use it well.
...which engine is the upstart and promising engine following in Blender's footsteps? Do you mean what Unity was supposed to be until they ruined it, or did you forget to drop the name of the engine in question?
The engine following in Blender's footsteps would most likely be Godot.
Unity was never open source and thus could never follow blender's path. They're almost certainly referring to Godot.
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It might now win any new developers but people who work many years to build things like custom simulations have no way of switching to other platforms.
It's not impossible to switch engines on new projects lots of devs have stated this. Devs have switch engines for far less or made their own.
It depends on a lot of factors though. Creating your own engine is by far not an easy task. The more feature rich it shall become, the more work it will need. Especially if it should have high 3D graphics quality while also running performant. That alone can cost a good team at least 2 to 5 years.
Switching engines also depends on how portable your work from the old engine is with regard to the new engine. It may not be impossible but can still be a lot of work. The earlier that decision is made, the better.
If the devs are determined enough they can surely do a switch. But they might sweat a lot. And especially for smaller studios, or studios without sufficient funding, this quickly becomes a matter of financial survival.
So it's not impossible, yes. But don't take that lightly as well.
Yup!