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
When will they learn? You could possibly pull that crap Business to consumer… BUT B2B? Hell no!
That’s what confused me the most. When your customers are consumers, screwing them over might be no big deal. But when your customers are businesses, how were you planning to get away with something like this where anything involving fees in the 6 to 9 figures is game changing. That’s, “Cheaper to move my business elsewhere” levels of money.
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.
They are not profitable because they make bad business decisions.
Exactly this. Just like how reddit very quickly made enough in reddit gold sales to cover their server costs for decades, the only reason it’s operating at a loss is because they’re running it that way.
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.
“Selling shares before the announcement” was a pretty egregious misrepresentation. He has scheduled pre-registered sales on a regular basis because he gets paid partly in stock.
It was always going to be relatively soon after a sale of stock.
Just want to add you’re right but what pisses me off is that they still can influence decisions based on this. Let’s say his shares are sold at x day, just do some decisions before that and boom your auto sell share price is now either higher or lower. Only because it’s predetermined they still influence it and SEC now can’t do shit.
Don’t you bring facts into this! We want to be outraged!
Being serious though, they ought to be investigating whether there were any changes in those sale orders. If they’ve been the same and unchanged for the last two years or some long period of time, I don’t think there’s a case. But if they’re was an adjustment a month or two ago, that would be very problematic.
I think he might autosell his stock so that wouldn’t be insider trading, but since of the board members might.
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
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.
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.
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’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.
Unreal has been in a different league basically since its inception. Compare the original Unreal engine to its contemporaries like Quake or Half Life and it’s amazing what they could do, if you had a box that could run it.
The difference between Unreal and Unity is Unreal has a sustainable viable business model (I think I’ve come to the conclusion that there are no “sustainable” business models under capitalism, what with demanding infinite growth and lal that). Epic Games develops their own games; the development of Unreal Engine has pulled its weight as a component of Fortnite and such. Same thing with Valve; I don’t think they ever bothered to charge for developing a game in the Source engine because they made their money for engine development through Half Life 2, Portal, TF2, Left 4 Dead etc.
Unity on the other hand doesn’t make and sell games, so they have to either directly charge developers (which they both do and don’t) or they operate their own adware nonsense. And neither of those revenue streams are enough. Which means they don’t have a viable business model. So they pull a stunt like this to hasten their inevitable bankruptcy.