Unity May Never Win Back the Developers It Lost in Its Fee Debacle

They shouldn't. They're not apologizing for what they're doing, but are behaving like politicians, changing the rhetoric to try to get people to like what they're going to do anyway.

The thing is, they don't even have to lose all their developers. They just have to lose enough so that introductory gamedev classes start being taught in Godot, indie devs start seeing Godot as a viable option and employers start posting listings looking for Godot experience. Unity was the default engine for lower-budget games for years, and now that's gone.

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.

I'm reminded of a motivational poster at my first job. "Unhappy customers may not complain. They just won't come back."

Why should anybody trust their livelihood to this company now, knowing that the rug could get pulled out from under them at any moment? Building up good faith takes years, losing it only takes one day.

You know, companies could avoid situations like this if they just engaged directly with their fanbases more, proposing ideas and collecting feedback. This way, even if they decide to do the unpopular thing anyway because they have to for financial reasons or something, at least they're not springing a sudden surprise on their fans.

People really don't like negative surprises. They can usually handle plain old negative news though, especially if they got time to prepare for the idea first.

I think they sometimes try to use focus groups to collect feedback, but members of a focus group may exhibit unique behavior simply because they're in a focus group. It's not an actual representative sample of the public.

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.

But think of the short term profits!

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?

We’re here on lemmy and mastodon, but Reddit and twitter still have waaaay more users. Unities move has boosted the popularity of other (open source) alternatives, sure, and if I was a game dev I would transition, but most of the devs and studios are going to need a lot more incentive to abandon the tool they spend decades getting to know

you mean all the people who said they weren't coming back even after the obvious rollback of the policy aren't coming back? 😱

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.

GOOD

Unity doesn’t deserve them back.

Of course they won't. They basically took a hammer to their reputation and completely smashed it to bits. All for that gacha game scratch that will also diminish as those developers move future projects to a new engine.

I think it's vital that the community now makes the effort to recreate what was made around Unity with the voluntary support material and everything that made it a reference of approachability, over with an open source alternative that may become definitive.

Going to Unreal Engine, even though it might look like the obvious move atm, might be near sighted, and unwise.

What's preventing this from happening again down the line with another big corporation? Monetary incentives always change.

Is it Godot? Maybe.

The community needs it's blender, and now may be the best opportunity to do it. It's a matter of organization and foresight. It's been proven to be doable.

Why would they? When you choose a platform to sink multiple years of effort into, you look for stability, for example the stability of not having a history of trying to rugpull their customers.

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.

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.

This shouldn't be news. It should be expected that when a company does something that shows it doesn't have its customers' best interests in mind, it's immediately and wholly abandoned. That is the only reaction that gives consumers a level playing field with corporations. If we show them we can forgive them, they'll purposefully use the forgiving nature against us.

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.

Saw a bunch of idiots calling the smaller devs "not serious about making games" for switching engines.

Good! Companies who let shitty people run it and let those people make shitty decisions should die. It's time for there to be some actual risk involved in being C-suite.

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.

Sure as shit not winning me back. Hell, even the Discord server has taken on some of the same attitudes as StackOverflow, and who wants to deal with that all day?

If I was a developer, I wouldn't give them a second chance at this point.

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?

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes shrugs

It's the trust thermocline again. When will companies learn to do more ground level research before pulling bullshit like this?

I'd hope not. I hope the devs realize that its a gamble to put all your eggs in one basket

Unity could get them back if they fired their CEO, John Riticello

Once they cheat on you, you can’t trust them again.

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.

Am not sure why anyone would stay with them at this point. Even if they have a huge project which is massively popular, they have every reason to move away from them since they wanted to apply those changes retroactively. Imagine if they came up with half a million in fees years after your project has stopped selling and you have invested money into new project or elsewhere. Sure, it might be illegal to do so, but good luck fighting them in court.

New projects I wouldn't even think twice. They backpedaled on this occasion but their goal is clear and there was no guarantee they won't try this kind of thing again which leads me to thinking it's only a matter of time when they will try more sneakily to squeeze changes in.

Trust is a very strong but brittle thing. Once broken it tends to shatter like glass. I'm sure this situation would feel like a sword of Damocles to anyone who has significant investment in the unity platform, and who would want to voluntarily walk into such a position now?

I thought competition is supposed to be good?

Not like that I guess.

good.