We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days. Thank you for your honest and critical feedback.
Big “I’m sorry you were offended by the correct things I said and did” energy
Unity have already established market dominance, if not effective monopoly, as the mobile gaming development platform. They are in a position of power, they have invested large sums of money to get there, and there is really very little game developers with a product 1 or 2 years in development can do about it.
While this is going to be difficult for Indy developers, they really only have themselves to blame. Part of the task when you are making a major software platform decision as a company is to research your vendor’s financial strategy - that’s basic due diligence. Unity has been loss making for years, which either means they are not financially viable (and not a safe bet), or they are engaging in a strategy of establishing an effective monopoly position to later squeeze dependant customers until the pips squeak.
This is likely just the start, whether it’s through runtime charges, Unity control of in-game advertising, or huge hikes in seat license fees. Possibly all three.
While this is going to be difficult for Indy developers, they really only have themselves to blame
In the same way that underpaid workers are to blame for not “just” finding and getting a better job or “learning skills”. Fuck off with that pro-corporate victim blaming.
Not pro-corporate in any way, I don’t see how you could possibly read that into what I posted. But if you choose to sup with the devil, best use a long spoon.
You’re actually making some valid points here, in regard to the trend of companies losing money as a strategy to obtain market dominance and then turning to monetization after. It’s exactly how Uber and AirBNB got where they are, and it’s a strategy that people need to get more wise to. You’re right, and you should say it.
But for the love of God, say it better than this. The “users only have themselves to blame because they got hoodwinked by a pack of liars and thieves who are very good at being liars and thieves” angle kills any chance of anyone listening to the actual point you’re making because you went and wrapped it up in a giant dose of victim blaming.
If you cook an absolutely perfect hamburger and then spit in it right before serving, you can’t act surprised when no one wants to even try a bite.
Security company Guarda permanently operates in the red in the US but keeps itself alive by constantly buying up all the small security companies it can in the US. It’s essentially a MASSIVE ponzi scheme in a sense that it would die if it couldn’t continue to add to it’s ranks.
But for the love of God, say it better than this. The “users only have themselves to blame because they got hoodwinked by a pack of liars and thieves who are very good at being liars and thieves” angle kills any chance of anyone listening to the actual point you’re making because you went and wrapped it up in a giant dose of victim blaming.
I really don’t agree. His phrasing was harsh and unsympathetic, but the world owes nothing to anyone and those developers should have done their due diligence. Trying to cast this in highly broad black-and-white morality isn’t productive. Is it moral what Unity is doing? No. Is it Unity’s right to do this? Legally maybe, but in every other sense, no. Are the developers who decided to use Unity a bunch of wishful thinkers who chose to ignore red flags? Yes. Unity may be thieves, but it’s been clear for a while now that their business model was unsustainable. Everyone who chose to do business with them anyway chose to ignore the warning signs. People are responsible for their own actions, and while they aren’t responsible for being cheated, they are still responsible for ignoring massive red flags with “we’re not a legit business” on them in bright white letters. I, too, blame developers for their share of their predicament, for the same reason that I blame would-be mountain men who starve to death and then get eaten by wolves because they tried to tame a national park with a pocketknife and a Walmart tent.
As for the other people who got really upset, I think choosing to allow yourself to be upset by style to the extent of ignoring the substance is exactly that: an active choice, one you have to consciously make. If you explained to someone why continuing to burn coal for electricity is bad and then finished it with something harsh like “only a total dumbshit would disagree with this”, would that person be justified in saying “What an asshole. Clearly fossil fuels can’t be that bad”? Of course not. If a person did that, they would be in the position of taking in the argument, understanding it, and then actively choosing to disregard it because it conflicts with their feelings. That’s the kind of magical thinking conservatives stoop to when they dispute climate change, the efficacy of vaccines, etc. because they’re butthurt about people saying “of course the world isn’t flat you fucking idiot”. I would hope that people who have a greater degree of emotional maturity than them (i.e. any) would be able to look at a person’s argument from a calmer and more objective point of view. It’s not like that’s even hard.
To be clear, you’re not being unreasonable, but the other people responding to this guy are having proper hissy fits and they really need to get a grip.
“They should have researched that thing the company hadn’t done and given no signals that they would do.”
Dear God, do you listen to yourself talk? I hope no one else fucking has to.
If your vendor is constantly making huge losses while establishing more and more market share, your guy in charge of the financial decisions should be asking themselves what the investors long term plans are. That’s not rocket science.
they really only have themselves to blame […] research your vendor’s financial strategy - that’s basic due diligence
Really? They really only have themselves to blame for Unity suddenly making a drastic and poorly thought out change to their pricing policies? Researching with what, a crystal ball?
What did they think Unity’s investors plans were, to endlessly subsidise a constantly loss-making platform just for the fun of it?
Something something Stallman was right (about this specific thing, anyway).
While we were very reasonable, we understand that you just didn’t get it, which made you sad. We understand it feels bad to be sad. To remedy this, we will try again using different words.
Yep. What they should have written:
“We recognize that our recent runtime fee policy announcement wasn’t well-received. We genuinely apologize for the oversight and any confusion or concern it caused. Your feedback is invaluable to us. We are actively discussing the policy with our teams and the community and will be revising it based on your inputs. Please bear with us as we work through this, and expect an update soon.”
PR is hard, let’s go shopping!
Yep, that has a better tone. There’s a limit to how good a statement you can make when at the core you really plan to do enshittification one way or another, but they could have thrown in a smidgeon of accepting blame also. E.g. “We were unable to provide clear and unambiguous answers to questions that came up” costs them nothing.
Any PR statement that includes the words “we hear you” can be safely ignored
RuneScape 3 recently made an extremely controversial change, and I think they handled the apology perfectly. When they finally made changes and dropped some heavily disliked things, they opened with “we messed up”. Unity needs to do the same thing here if they want a chance to rebuild
Jagex is respectful not the company I’d look to for inspiration in terms of correcting past mistakes 🙂 For the uninitiated, they legally gaslit the community when they made their first major controversial change roughly a decade ago by “removing the feature” then “adding” the same feature with a different coat of paint.
Which feature are you thinking of?
And the only reason they’re decent about mistakes is because of the plethora they’ve accumulated. By no means does that mean they get to it quickly nor fix it adequately all the time. But in the grand scheme of company fuck ups, that’s still one of the best. It says more about everyone else than it does Jagex. Still, I appreciate they can flat out say they fucked up.
This is bullshit. There is no confusion. Their new policy was very clear and easy to understand. If the word confusion applied at all, it would be to how/why Unity is doing such a brain dead move that alienates their entire user base. This is a weasel word announcement that doesn’t say what it should, namely ‘we fucked up and we’re sorry’.
The Unity execs thought they were being smooth criminals, instead they came in too rough and got busted.
Brain dead is such an understatement too. They lost everyone’s trust, and I’m not sure there’s anything they can say to regain it. They’re gonna try something like this again at some point, and I don’t think anyone should give them the opportunity. They deserve to go under.
Trust is hard to build and easy to break and even harder to rebuild.
To truly rebuild trust, they’d need to commit to never doing this again. That would mean 1. a change to the legal TOS that a developer who licenses for a project at a certain pricing level may remain at that price level for that project / that generation of Unity for as long as they wish, 2. a public commitment to never require per-install pricing, and ideally 3. the resignation of whoever came up with this brain dead idea.
doesn’t say what it should, namely ‘we fucked up and we’re sorry’.
I don’t think they fucked up in the way you mean (from their point of view). Their mistake was not getting away with the change, their “apology” sounds to me like they are going to reword their new policy but ultimately still have it do somewhat the same thing.
IMO they should never had done this in the first place and should now say “we are sorry, our mistake, it won’t happen again”.
Yeah, this 100%.
To truly restore trust, it should be ‘we’re sorry, our mistake, it won’t happen again, our new TOS will guarantee the right to remain at a current license price structure for a given generation of the engine, we hereby promise to never ever require per-install pricing, and the person responsible for this change is no longer with the company’.
Too late, they already communicated their greed to every gamedev out there and no one can ignore the potential of Unity fucking them over again anymore. Overall the whole shitshow was good advertisement for Godot.
It’s truly the year of mask-off corporate reveals. WotC, Reddit, Unity, Twitter. Probably more I’m forgetting or unaware of. So many big moves to capitalize on long time stability that, quite predictably, result not in amazing increase in profits but the irrevocable tarnishing of public trust that they relied on. It’s kinda wild to watch, honestly.
It’s IMO a sign that the current financial bubble is about to burst and it’s going to do so in a very violent way despite greedy bulls still pushing the “it’s different this time, we have AI now” bullshit.
Investors have their money trapped in these companies, and when they see what riskless treasury bills yield, they naturally start losing their minds because their money is instead in companies that fail to make significantly more than that riskless benchmark. So those investors then pressure those companies to do whatever they can to produce a good enough return on investment in a short period of time as they run out of patience and they themselves know that hell is coming in the financial markets so their shares might lose an even more significant amount soon.
The end result of CEOs and executives under pressure by investors, and engineers stressing out because they understand the financial situation and that they have to either be yes-men and agree with whatever changes the executives propose or be laid off (because another way to reach the target set by investors is to reduce costs by firing people), is obviously the enshittification that we witness today.
That’s how it is once the free money dries up. The profits must rise, no matter the long-term damage this causes - so they try to bleed the existing customer base dry to keep things rising for one or two more quarters. What does it matter to them if all the employees who have worked hard for years will lose their jobs due to their mismanagement?
The conventional wisdow is that in time of economic turmoil, companies should lower their profit margins and weather out the storm.
However, in today’s capitalism, this is not not acceptable. Shareholders demand ever increasing profits and anything short of that is considered a failure. If you don’t keep your margin, you are to be scolded and discarded.
Now, the loans that many of the companies have cost a lot more money than 2 years ago. So the enshittification is used to enable the continued growth to keep the profits growings.
