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

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 702 points – Unity May Never Win Back the Developers It Lost in Its Fee Debacle
wired.com

Unity May Never Win Back the Developers It Lost in Its Fee Debacle::Even though the company behind the wildly popular game engine walked back its controversial new fee policy, the damage is done.

104

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.

Are we sure it's not the politicians behaving like they're running a business? 😅

(It's probably both groups behaving like they're trying to manipulate a large populace to meet their goals, no big conspiracy, just coincidentally they're both trying to accomplish the same thing.)

Another fun thing to deal with thanks to Reagan's worthless ass. The only good thing to come from that pile of shits presidency was his dementia.

Reagan should certainly be known as one of the worst people to occupy the Presidency, but I think for a bigger perspective on how we got to this place, the 1886 SCOTUS decision to recognize corporations as people is a good start.

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.

I hope to see a lot of the features added to Godot that Unity refugees have been requesting and working on (because, yknow, open-source) and would expect to see at least 25% Godot 25% Unity 50% Unreal in the job market. Although honestly it is more likely that Unreal takes up a larger share of the market going forward, whereas in the past it has been like 60% Unity positions and 40% Unreal positions (due to Unity use on smaller projects, indie games, and use in the VR training industry).

2D projects also used Unity at a very high rate. Unreal has never really been considered suitable for 2D work. I'm not sure if Godot is.

Godot has been used mainly for 2D as it didn't support 3D until fairly recently.

Godot actually has supported 3D since at least 2.1 when I started using it in 2016.

But really sucked for a long time. It's pretty good now.

For general 2d development, Godot is much better than unity already. It doesn't have everything that unity does but what it has is much more efficient and easy to understand.

Though the opposite is true for 3d.

In short: Unity is a 3d tool where you can pretend one of the dimensions doesn't exist to make 2d games (but it's still running a 3d environment behind the curtains, you're just not seeing one of them), while godot is a 2d tool that gives you an optional third dimension for some stuff.

Wrong.

Godot has fully independent 2D and 3D engines. Each one has it's own backend, that is specialized for that purpose.

Yes, but the general feel with the 3d stuff in Godot is that it's just an added dimension on top of things that were thought for 2d. In unity everything feels like it was thought for 3d. It's a bit hard to explain.

Waiting for the ability to target mobile in c# and for embedding to work.. should see that in the next year I think with the renewed focus on it.. we don't use many unity features but those two are kinda showstoppers right now.

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."

That's how I do. I don't like to publicly complain unless I was clearly ripped off.

‘90s: “And that’s why we need to make sure they’re happy with our products and services”

2020s: “And where the F they wanna go? We’re a monopoly and they’re locked into our tech ecosystem”

Your first job had a weird idea of motivation.

“You might suck, but no one will tell you!”

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.

You know, companies could avoid situations like this if they just engaged directly with their fanbases more . . .

Not even their fanbase in this scenario, but the majority of their paying business customers. Pissing off your fanbase/hobbyists is one thing, but completely alienating your biggest profit generating consumers is just beyond incompetent.

Minor quibble that game devs are actually a smaller fraction of their overall revenues, as their tech has uses far beyond games. They have industrial product lines too.

Kinda like how Amazon's main thing isn't selling shippable products anymore, it's cloud computing and digital infrastructure. Or was last I checked anyway, it might've changed again.

You're otherwise totally right though.

Ahh, I always forget that Unity has industrial product services/solutions, that makes sense. Thanks for clarifying that!

And yes, AWS is Amazon's bread and butter (unfortunately). I can only hope that one day they're completely dethroned, but I doubt anyone could ever compete with them and Microsoft at this point (and even if a startup managed to make a vastly superior product, either of those two would just buy them out anyway). I think even Google's cloud service is only a fraction of what AWS and Azure pull in, I could be wrong though.

You know, companies could avoid situations like this if they just engaged directly with their fanbases more, proposing ideas and collecting feedback.

Good news: Apparently Unity did engage with its developers behind closed door for a whole year, they told them this was a bad idea; internally the execs were told this was a bad idea, and here we are.

I completely agree, old school RuneScape does this very well and I wish more companies tried to engage their users as much as those devs do

Jagex has supposedly been barely successful forever tho, unity takes in billions by being shitters. In the end that’s all some companies care about

I'm sure even floating the idea would have been bad. One of the biggest problems with the unity changes was that they were retroactive. That they can even change the fee structure so dramatically after you've already built and shipped your game should give anyone using them pause. I don't think people really considered that as a possibility before.

I feel like it's pretty obvious this was a greedy and terrible idea. The fact they proposed this at all alone is enough to never trust them again. It's not that they didn't know. They knew. No one would be okay with this cash grab and they know it. They just didn't realize HOW big the pushback was going to be but they DID know what they were doing was wrong.

This is probably going to improve, not decrease, their profitability. They wouldn't have been so blase about burning all those bridges otherwise.

Yeah, they make revenue from game devs, but there's costs there too. If the costs are too high compared to their industrial contracts, then the smartest move is to kick all their game dev customers out. While preserving as much general public goodwill as possible.

So, how else could they escape the game engine business? The method they chose would be more effective than any other I can think of. It preserves a trickle of game dev revenue and makes them look silly instead of backstabbing. When a proper backstab was actually the desired result, but too bold to actually say they wanted.

My hypothesis anyway.

That's the problem - based on the CEO selling almost all his stock over time and rumors attributed to employees, they knew.

A company turning a consistent modest profit is good for many people, but makes no one rich. It's a good investment and provides for many people, but is meaningless if you're already rich.

A company exploding to 100x its size makes a bunch of people very rich and a lot of people more wealthy, but is very rare in this age where the world is already as industrialized as anyone wants it to be. There's nowhere else to expand, no underdeveloped countries with resources to buy for pennies on the dollar

A company imploding can make a few people rich... but it's a big guaranteed payout if you see it coming.

That's the stage of capitalism we've been at for a while - cannibalization.

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.

It appears that Unity shot itself in both feet and also its face. It's been a long time since I've seen such a spectacular betrayal of trust by a business where confidence in your product is paramount. Even with extreme backpedling, it's in the can.

Wizard of the Coast license fiasco is about the same. Except of course that "confidence in your product" is a bit of a misnomer. It's not a confidence in the D&D, but the license. A lot of people were trusting the OGL, and the changes would have fucked over half of the industry with their "retroactive" changes.

I was maybe 10 hours of work into a small side project and I just said fuck it and started over in Godot. No reason to use Unity unless you are a studio that's deep into development or supporting a game that's already out.

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?

John Riccitello literally called developers "fucking idiots" in an interview, so yeah, it's the second option.

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

I could still use Reddit for free. At any point, I can easily decide to install the app and use it in parallel. I can go back-and-forth with 0 consequences. My income is not dependent on my ability to access Reddit.

Developers have made the business decision to use Unity or not, and this debacle pretty seriously impacts that decision.

Unfortunately, this is likely true. If people can keep using Twitter after all that has happened, people will certainly continue to use Unity and for more legitimate reasons.

I don’t think so. Twitter doesn’t fundamentally change the finances of your business. People are unlikely to feel safe building their entire passion project around an untrustworthy corporation.

Unity also doesn't have the network effects that Twitter has. People use Twitter because the people they follow use Twitter, and those people use Twitter because enough other people use Twitter that it's the easiest place to build an audience. Network effects do exist for game engines (it's a lot easier to use a tool when enough other people use it that the solution to any given problem is likely just a web-search away) but the critical mass that needs to be overcome to become competitive is a lot lower.

They’ll see longtime customers start to divest, I’m sure. I’d imagine most of the damage done was to their future new customer numbers. Anyone starting a project today would be pretty foolish to even consider Unity, and they’ll feel that more and more going forward. The death rattle’s begun.

I’d personally seek out any good open source alternatives before trying anything else nowadays. I’m pretty happy with blender and krita now I’m starting to get back into animation and drawing. But I’m old, I don’t know if joung people would not simply choose the one that is free-ish and more popular and better supported

Yeah but with the macroeconomics nowadays, this is not a good time to be losing users.

Business and the economy is doing pretty good atm tho. I feel like the whole reason for all these blatant cash grabs so many companies are doing rn, is because they made so much money last year they want to keep getting that much richer every year, which is plain stupid from a long term perspective if you ask me

4 more...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

1 more...

Goes to show that destroying trust is quite easy, but earning trust is very hard.

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.

Godot is the only really viable alternative, IMO. No other open source engine comes close.

Just wanted to point out that, actually, Blender has an integrated game engine. It's not very feature rich, but it integrates it's 3D renderer seamlessly. Just find it ironic, that Blender is really a candidate to be gamedev new Blender.

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.

Actually the reason this didn't work out is because they are in the B2B, not business to consumer business.

Turns out other businesses aren't fond of being asked to pay a dollar to reload, who knew?

They keep walking back further and their stock prices just keep plummeting. I would like to say I hope the CEO, who is the former CEO of EA, for any who aren't aware, gets fired for this. But we all know that no matter how hard he messes up, some other business will pay him millions in incentives to pick him up.

It's not like getting fired as a CEO is a negative. They leave with a golden parachute and get hired elsewhere

In another thread someone said the board is made up of assholes, so don't get your hopes up for any positive changes...

I tried to do some googling, but googling and sourcing out the history of each board member is cumbersome. So instead I will just post this snippet from a reddit post by u/Xijit

I apologize in advance for the length.

"Yes, John is undoubtedly an asshole, since they don't let you be a CEO unless you are one. But he has also been the CEO of Unity since 2014 and oversaw its progress from "that engine that lets you port your game to anything" to "the platform that every single mobile game is made on and the backbone of the inde developer market." The main reason why so many of you are only hearing about him being the CEO now, is because he HAD (past tense) been doing a relatively good job.

What changed ... In 2020 Unity went public, and a bunch of shit heads bought their way onto Unity's board of directors. Ultimately the CEO works for the Board, so when these new bosses tell him to do something self destructive, he does it.

Here are the names you should be talking about instead of John:

Tomer Bar Zeev

Roelof Botha

Egon Durban.

(Edit: I forgot to say that they are Board members)

Remember IronSource, that dog shit monetization company that absolutely everyone in the industry dumped, and was circling the drain until Unity bought them for $4.4 billion? Tomer Bar Zeev is the founder of IronSource, and following the merger he became Unity's 3rd president (along with John and Marc) ... yes, this is the asshole who sold a package of malware under the guise of monetization software & ultimately is the root cause of this install tax. Given IronSource's history of malware, I feel that it is safe to say that the Unity runtime will likely start getting flagged by antivirus programs and casually request admin rights during installation.

How Unity got infected with IronSource, is that Sequoia Capitol and Silver lake pledged to invest $1 billion into Unity if the deal went through. Frankly, the math doesn't add up for Unity to trade $4.4 billion to buy a plague blanket of a company, only to receive $1 billion in return. Especially when a rival mobile monetization company offered to pay Unity $17 billion if they called off the IronSource deal & merge with them instead. Unless that $1b was for the sake of C-suite bonuses, in which case all of this makes perfect sense.

But who the Hell is Roelof Botha & Egon Durban, and why are they important names? Roelof is a Director of Sequoia, Egon is the founder of Silver Lake, and both of them have ties back to Elon Musk ... which is pretty obvious for how fast Unity has caught on fire.

If Egon's name is familiar, it is because he was on Twitter's Board and was the one who pushed to have them accept the deal, & then got thrown off the board when they realised that he was just spying for Elon during the resulting lawsuit. He also was the one who helped Elon with his fake " Taking Tesla private" scam.

Roelof was the CFO of PayPal before it got acquired and has a long history of being involved with mergers that result in a lot of money for some, but absolute shit deals for end users and employees.

Looping back to the top ... I think John is done with Unity, but not in the "yay, us consumers have protested hard enough to get him fired" kind of way the internet wants. I think he was done in 2020 when he went from being the guy actually running the company, to the guy who answers to a room full of investment fuck heads (of the 13 board members, 11 are investment managers), and then gets to take the blame for their shit decisions. I feel like the reason why he sold his stock is because he knew this was a shit idea that was going to tank the company, but these assholes wouldn't listen. So he cashed out his stock and will be announcing his retirement at the start of Q4.

Don't be shocked when Tomer Bar Zeev gets named as his replacement."

(P.S does anyone know how to quote inline and keep the paragraph spacing?)

The quoting in Lemmy is block quotes, so it appears you'd have to quote each paragraph individually. Definitely inconvenient, I wonder if there's a way they could rework the system.

This is completely unsurprising. Often when a company goes to shit it's the board of directors, ultimately, they control the CEO and the rest of the executive team at a company. I feel horribly for the indie devs that were using Unity, though there's always a chance for this to happen to proprietary software it still sucks when it does happen.

If you destroy good will you're likely not going to get it back in any situation.

Can be destroyed in an instant, but takes years to build.

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

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.

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?

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?

Can you elaborate about the "attitudes of stackoverflow"?

Can't speak for @sebinspace, but StackOverflow tends to be aggressive if not outright hostile towards inexperienced users. I have a lot of nub questions because I'm awful at programming, but almost everything I come across from searches have a layer of smug disdain that I have to look past.

It's not a paid Helpdesk by any means, but there's no need to treat honest and respectful requests for help with attitudes and insults.

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

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

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.

It's a practical policy. You want corporations to be able to enter into contracts, pay taxes, have legal responsibilities, etc.

Corporations already existed before the 14th amendment. So many valid critiques of capitalism but I don't understand the fixation with this one.

If they weren't "persons" then contracts would simply change their wordings but would still be functionally the same. It's like changing the color of a sports team jersey.

You should be more concerned with the workers owning the means of production. That can happen with or without corporate personhood. And that will be what actually brings us an equitable society.

It's certainly "practical" for shareholders with controlling interests in these publicly traded companies, but very impractical for everyone else.

The word corporation may have existed before the 14th Amendment, but the legal definition was entirely different. The word "Country" was also used to describe the state a person was from in the 19th century, if asked about one's country, one would would reply with the name of their state of residence. The meaning over a word can change entirely in a couple generations.

What criticism of capitalism is more relevant than the abomination of corporate personhood? Toss a few more right-wing Supreme Court rulings into the mix like Citizen's United giving corporations the ability to spend unlimited and unregulated money lobbying (buying) the legislative system and you have a nation in decline with a failing economic system.

Legally only citizens are allowed to lobby congress, if corporations were no longer considered people, then real people would have more access to power than their corporate overlords.

Corporations have existed since before the USA was even a thing. It's a group of men with part ownership in some type of organization designed to make profit. Hell, corporations were arguably much more powerful back then. Just look at the British East India Company. It had over 260,000 troops and owned massive swathes of territory.

If corporations weren't persons and couldn't lobby for that single reason, then they would funnel money into actual persons and then those people would lobby.

The solution if you don't want people to lobby (which I agree, is a goal you should aim for) then get rid of lobbying altogether. Changing the legal mechanics by which it happens accomplishes nothing. Which is what I mean by changing color of a sports jersey. It's focusing on trivial details and ignoring the fundamental issue. Missing forest for the trees.

Thanks for the civil tone of your reply, I have to agree that even if corporate personhood was abolished the oligarchs would just find another way to control the political system keeping rigged to favor their interests. Lobbying in the US started during the Civil War from what I understand, this lad to the creation of a Military Industrial Complex that continues to lobby US lawmakers into conflicts motivated by greed and not diplomatic interests. If you don't believe me, please listen to the warning from President Eisenhower in his farewell address.

Do you think it's in the people's best interest to keep the current corporate structure in tact and legislate lobbying reforms instead?

I think unfortunately democracy lends itself to oligarchy. It's a constant war of back and forth between democracy trying to fight back and then the oligarchs taking back control. Eternal struggle, essentially.

Look at for examples in the 1800s with the expansion of the railroads. We realized monopolies were dangerous so we create anti-trust laws. For a while, the government enforces this to break monopolies. This is good for democracy- it reduces the power of large corporations controlling policies.

Eventually, however, they sneak back in. Look at the original AT&T. I forget the name but it was Edison's company. They became massive, were broken up, but then slowly merged together over a long period of time.

However by the time they combine together again, there is little public will to break them up. We're at the point today where we have powerful anti-trust legislation but our politicians either have no will to change it or are too scared to change it.

We could break up Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. They buy up their potential competitors before they are any risk and we live in a world where vast majority of internet traffic gets routed through the big 5. Google (YouTube, search), Meta (Facebook, Instagram, whatsapp), Twitter, reddit, tiktok.

Instead of breaking these companies up to maintain a free market with competition - we don't do anything. Why? It's a pendulum and corporate interests are in the driver's seat right now.

There are many other industries where a few big companies control everything. Internet like Comcast & AT&T.. Media - I remember reading in 2019 half of all movies that came out in theaters was owned by Disney. Airlines are another example. 80% of trips happen under 4 companies. American airlines, delta, southwest, and United.

There are similar oligopolies in many industries that are less visible. Pharmaceuticals, defense contractors, cloud infrastructure, etc.

As long as these companies have such power.. they will find a way to manipulate our democratic system. You can change the rules and they will get around them. For example we have anti-trust and depending on your interpretation many of the companies above can be broken up.

Yet we don't do it. So the law doesn't actually matter. What matters is where the real power is currently located. The laws are guidelines..

So the solution? I have no idea, really. I think there is no ultimate solution as long as there is capitalism. It will always be a war between people trying to assert their own private power and the institutions trying to keep the system legitimate.

However, I think we can make the situation better by breaking up the power of these companies by actually enforcing anti-trust laws and making it harder for them by for example getting rid of legal lobbying and making them do it illegally. That will incur extra costs for them, ultimately making them less effective.

When you launder money, you lose a good chunk of it. Somstimes a significant chunk.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes shrugs

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.