Game development engine Unity has U-turned on some parts of its hugely controversial plan to enforce fees on game creat…
Reminder that Godot exists for anyone who needs to hear it.
Godot
I feel like I have been waiting for that guy forever.
Godot 4.0 is quite good. As long as your game doesn’t use precanned store assets,.its fantastic.
Twas a joke
For reference.
Ah I see. Thanks
He didn’t say for sure he’d come.
Maybe tomorrow he will return.
Yeah, in light of the existence and steady improvement of the Godot engine, feels like not a great time to be pissing off a lot of your customers.
A bit harder to ship on console, though.
At least Unreal is source-available and you only need to use the license for the version of Unreal you use. If Epic changes their license, you don’t need to agree to it and can still ship under the older license.
Godot is a great engine but it isn’t a silver bullet. It can get there, though.
Ngl I was expecting them to walk it back a bit. It’s a tactic to announce something so absolutely absurd that it makes what you actually want to do look more reasonable. I’m still not gonna touch unity again
Yeah, it’s not a great tactic because even if you walk it back and always intended to. People who take what you say at face value are left thinking that’s what you wanted to do and might still want to do it if you can manage the PR better in the future. And the people who figure out what you were really doing see that you will lie to manipulate the reaction to what you really want to do.
Targeting installs (which based on another article with their wording they still intend to do, just with an asterisk now) was a bad approach. They should set up different payment options for the new subscription service model rather than try to fit one solution to two wildly different customer models.
This is absolutely true. I was left with a disgusted feeling towards Unity that translates to disgust and disappointment. I don’t think I can trust them again after this.
its a toss up that theyll even do that these days though.
companies are so bold now knowing theres a strong chance theyll get away with whatever bullshit while losing minimal consumers.
It doesn’t matter, they’ve shown their hand.
If not now, then when?
I don’t think people realize how horrifying these addendums are.
Not only do they not really fix the issue, but they prove that no, yeah, they hadn’t thought about the possibility of “install bombing” at all until just now and it would totally have triggered massive fees.
I mean, the announcement was terribly worded, and some of the stuff (like wha’t a “monthly fee” or a “retroactive fee”) were very unclear, so you could hold out hope that they knew what they wanted to do and were just bad at explaining it.
But nope, that ship has sailed. They clearly didn’t give this any amount of thought.
So yeah, I’m more worried about it now than I was yesterday, believe it or not. Like, a LOT more.
Yeah this feels like Wizard of the Coast’s first response to the OGL drama. Make some changes that are technically better than the first terrible system, but is ultimately still completely unacceptable. WotC eventually had to walk back everything, we’ll see if Unity does the same.
I mean, they have to.
But honestly at this point that’s not even enough. You know they tried, you know whatever need for cash they were trying to fulfill remains. It’s one thing to let that go when buying a piece of software that you just… have, but building an entire business on top of this middleware and knowing you have a business relationship with them indefinitely as a result?
At this point it’s a dealbreaker. You can’t trust them again. If I start a new dev studio tomorrow Unity would not even be in the running to start choosing an engine. They made themselves into a liability overnight. It’s stunning. I don’t know what the hell they’re putting in the filtered, flavored water they sell to executives, but this year has been an endless chain of self-immolation I had never witnessed before.
Not to mention the OGL stuff was only a risk to 3PP as a lawsuit of WoTC decided to act on it. This debacle is a direct attack on the bottom lines of games publishers that will kill independent development and seriously hamper even AAA companies. I know I’m not going to waste my time learning it.
I’m sure the CEO put plenty of thought in how much they could cash out before destroying the company and moving on to the next company to destroy
He comes from EA, I’m not surprised
What an interesting year. This has to be the 4th or 5th large tech-centric company that’s
- introduced some really shitty policy
- pissed off it’s consumers
- then backtracks to some degree after backlash
Just like every other company that’s done this, the backtrack is likely meant to appease the consumers before the policy gets re-introduced later. Perhaps with slightly different wording.
This is what libertarians call innovation.
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I’m so, so tired of them, tbh.
The back tracking isn’t even a reversal. They just said they were going to keep the charges but try to reduce the impact of “install bombing”.
It’s too late. Cat’s out of the bag. It’s crystal clear to everyone now what kind of people run the company, and they’re not content to fish for whales anymore.
My first thought was:
This can only apply to games that begin development after this announcement…right? Otherwise it fells like a massive bait and switch.
It even applies to new installs of existing games.
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after the Epic debacle
*Tongue pop* Noice
This issue exists with all proprietary software; if they make changes you dislike then either you put up with it or stop using it. They have unjust power of their users and even the most moral devs cannot forever resist temptation to use that power to earn money at the user’s expense.
Anyone that uses unity is as foolish as any that use java. Just begging for meritless lawsuits to extract rent.
You know how OpenJDK works right? Not every runtime requires payment to Oracle.
You know how Oracle works right? Not every license is adhered to by Oracle.
They sued over copyright of the function names my dude. The fact that that was insane did not stop them and did not stop google from paying massive amounts of money to Lawyers to get the License terms enforced.
https://www.eff.org/cases/oracle-v-googleNever have anything to do with Oracle. Not even tangentially.
