The news isn’t a surprise as Unity angered a lot of its loyal game developers a few weeks ago after pushing through a price increase based on numbers of downloads — and then retracted it after an uproar.
He cash out his stock, tried this clown moved as he was instructed by the BoD, it didn’t work.
He gets more money and he gets to exit…
Nothing to celebrate. They will try something similar soon enough and by then public will be beaten up enough to accept it as it happen with everything else.
Enshitification appears to be unstoppable.
Vote with your money and feet folks
Yes, this is totally a symbolic move and nothing has meaningfully changed at Unity. Riccitiello is probably walking away with many millions of dollars and the rest of the leadership team who were fully onboard with the new licensing plan are still there. Once the negative press dies down, Unity will try something equally shitty again.
Developers would be foolish to trust this company ever again.
About that, he did sell a portion of his Unity stock a week before the happening, but wasn’t it something like only 5% of his portfolio?
Nice postering, but CEOs are not ideas guys, this likely wasn’t even his brain child. The people responsible are still likely there and will continue to push the company in the wrong direction.
Whether or not it was his idea is irrelevant, he’s the one who approved it.
I mean, realistically these days nothing gets done without the investment boards decision. Investors control fucking everything, and IMO are directly the root cause of the enshitification of everything.
He was at Unity for nine years.
As a consumer I will not buy newly made Unity games anymore. Whatever they might do now does not matter, because with the new TOS they can walk back on this at any time. Asking fees for installs on games that were made with a recent enough version of Unity that will prompt the developers to remove them from the stores.
If they wanted to regain trust, they would rectify the TOS that allows for garbage like this, but I don’t see that happening…
The problem is that this hurts developers more than it hurts Unity. And many developers just can’t afford switching engines mid-development.
While unfortunate, as a consumer it’s the only recourse we have. We don’t buy unity, we buy games. I won’t buy a game that might just suddenly disappear from a store where I bought it, cause the developer can’t or won’t carry install fees that may or may not come at any point.
Yes, it hurts developers. Yes, he shouldn’t have to suddenly have to pay that fee, but that is out of my control. But I’m still not taking the risk with my money. Unity clearly wants to do this, eventually they probably will.
Let’s stop buying games with unity so they have no customers left that can slam with install fees after-the-fact. All we can do.
This right here.
The only way to hurt Untiy is for devs to stop using it. And the only way to force devs to stop using it is to stop buying the games they make with it. I’m sorry it hurts the devs, but there’s no way around it. And if you keep giving money to it, then you’re supporting what Unity is doing.
So all the effort and money they spent in developing their games, before knowing about this movement from Unity, should be punished?
I understand your intentions, but indie devs don’t have the capacity to switch engines, let alone redevelop everything when it’s already or almost finished. I’d understand if you do it at the start of 2024.
Also, this is speculation, but I’ve seen devs provide alternatives to get their games. A lot of developers have already declared their intentions to switch engines from now on and they can’t do that if they don’t have a budget.
They can finish up those projects and then move on to another engine. We shouldn’t encourage a hostage situation where we have to stay with an untrustworthy platform just because they have a metaphorical gun to some developers’ heads.
They can finish up those projects and then move on to another engine.
So you’re saying for them to finish their current unity projects, then for nobody to buy those games so they go out of business before they can start using a different engine for their next game?
Don’t do this, it absolutely hurts Devs more than big bad Unity. Devs should make the choice to move away from Unity if they can, but as a consumer it’s not your call.
It will be easier for devs to justify moving away from Unity if there’s more consumer demand for non-unity games.
And presumably @Sina isn’t going to stop buying games entirely - they can still buy the same number of games and continue to support indie developers as much as they otherwise would.
Proprietary game engines like Unity are a dead end. The company behind them is always going to extract as much revenue as they possibly can from the industry and that hurts indie developers. A lot. The sooner devs rip off the bandaid and switch to Godot/etc the better.
If Godot is missing a feature you need… it’s open source and you’re a developer. Simply add that feature to the engine.
So long, ya greedy dumb bastard.
If they wrote his exit arc into a movie I’d be like “Hollywood rolls eyes”, but here it is IRL
