Unity is a game engine used by a lot of developers, many of them indies. Some popular games that use Unity are Among Us, Cuphead, Cult of the Lamb, and Tunic. They recently made several changes to their TOS that has upset the gaming community.
Unity used to have a clause in the TOS stating:
“if the Updated Terms adversely impact your rights, you may elect to continue to use any current-year versions of the Unity Software (e.g., 2018.x and 2018.y and any Long Term Supported (LTS) versions for that current-year release) according to the terms that applied just prior to the Updated Terms (the “Prior Terms”)”
This meant that if you didn’t agree with the new terms, you could continue using a different version of Unity and the new terms wouldn’t apply to you. In April 2023, they removed that clause completely. A week ago, they announced new terms: every game install will be charged a fee of up to $0.20 starting next year, depending on what Unity subscription the developers have and how much revenue/installs the game receives.
This change was set to cover all existing Unity games, even ones made on older versions. Any time anyone installed the game, even if they had installed it previously, the developer would be charged a fee. Many of the games made with Unity are under $20, with some of the popular ones being $5 or less. Immediately people thought of ways this could be trouble: Scripts to install the same game over and over, people sharing their game libraries with family/friends, those with multiple computers/laptops/tablets.
Unity announced on Sep 17, 2023 that they would not be going forward with this new policy:
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.
It’s unclear what Unity will do now. Many developers have started looking at an alternative called Godot, and some even plan on canceling their Unity subscription because they have lost faith in the company.
Unity is a tool that game developers use to build games. You don’t have to use Unity, but lots of really popular games use it and it makes development easier. Recently, the company behind Unity (also called Unity) decided to add an extra fee for using Unity. That would have been bad enough, but Unity went with adding a fee in which the game developers need to pay every single time a customer installs their game.
This was a startlingly bad idea, because you end up punishing games that sell well. But it also opens up entire cans of worms, because trolls could easily mess with developers by simply buying a game, then installing, uninstalling, then reinstalling again and again. And because the fee is applied per install, a single troll could easily build up massive fees for the developers. On top of that, this new fee is applied retroactively to all games that were built with Unity. So it doesn’t matter if you built your game 10 years ago - you’ll still get charged if a user installs your game.
In response, many developers are pushing to boycott Unity, with many saying that they would go bankrupt with the new fees. It also came to light that many of the top executives at Unity sold a large number of their shares in the company shortly before making the announcement of the new fee, showing that the top executives knew that the fee would be unpopular but went with it anyways. It also brought up the concern that they were engaging in insider trading, which is illegal.
Unity is a game engine and a bunch of ancillary services, analytics and tracking and what not. It’s been free to use and publish games with as long as your company revenue was under a certain amount. Over that amount and you’d have to buy a license for I think about $1600 a year.
The brouhaha was because they changed their income model to charge people/companies who create their game using the unity engine to make games on a per install basis. Up to 20cents per install of your game ( but only if your revenue was over $200k AND installs was over 200k, raising to $1m AND 1m installs with the unity pro license) .
The changes would take place next January leaving developers with very little time to make any changes to their revenue model. Unity (the company) also changed the terms of use of Unity (the game engine software) so that it was retroactive across all previous versions of unity, ie. If you didn’t like the new terms you couldn’t just carry on using an older version of it.
If you were being charitable you’d call it a clumsy launch or even ill considered. But it went down like a bucket of cold sick with the game dev’ community who viewed it like a greedy shakedown.
The really big bruhaha came from the doing it retrospectivelly (the legality of which is yet to be clarified and likely depends on jurisdiction) which means games made on top of Unity and shipped would also have to start paying this install fee (even though the version of Unity with which the game was devloped and shipped had no such conditions in their Terms Of Service so the game makers never agreed to these new conditions).
Theoretically if found legal this could not just kill certain business models in the game development community and even bankrupt companies (especially for games distributed free and funded by ads).
Now, maybe, hopefully, such retroactive changes to the pricing will be found illegal in the applicable jurisdictions, but in some it might require a quite expensive legal fight to clarify it and meanwhile many gamedev companies working with Unity run a huge business risk if they ship their products with it.
From what I understand it is a popular game engine many developers have used in their games, and are still developing games with. This happened under a regular licensing agreement, which usually means a fixed sum or something tied to sales.
Now unity had the benighted idea to unilaterally add an additional charge to this, billing the developers for each and every installation of their game, which is not only incredibly greedy but also short sighted and ignorant of many common cases that would inflate those numbers (reinstallation for any reason being one of them).
Naturally developers affected by this are quite upset and are considering possible solutions to this self inflicted hostage situation.
I’ve tried to stay out of controversial topics on Lemmy for my sanity, but I get the sense that many commenters haven’t watched much of Bill Maher (not just in this thread). I’ve watched him pretty regularly for years, so I have a fair amount of context. I’m about as lefty as it gets fwiw (not a libertarian).
Here’s the way I’ve interpreted Bill Mahers perspective and belief system: he’s a very intelligent, well-informed yet blunt asshole, who genuinely says what he believes, even if it doesn’t fit in a box that’s on a recognizable political spectrum. He is willing to have frank discussions about issues that other arms of the media are afraid to touch, even though he knows it will piss off a big chunk of the public.
He has some opinions that I find appalling, but I very much respect the way he conducts himself and the way he exposes the voices of some truly poisonous people in society, as well as some truly heroic and often lesser known activists and community leaders.
I believe people need to be seen and heard to be understood, and Maher will talk to anyone and try to understand their point of view so it gets some oxygen. Because of that, he has had some terrible people as guests on his show. Though I’ll concede his interviews can be a bit inconsistent, he’s usually pretty relentless in trying to pull the real shit out of people.
I’ve seen some comments that he is conservative. He is not. Please watch a few episodes and report back. He TALKS to conservatives, but clearly is not one. He’s also not what we might call a liberal these days, but that label might have applied to him a decade ago. Now he’s mostly just a skeptic with a traditional left-leaning perspective, but he’s one of the few out there willing to engage with extremists on the right.
He’s a complex individual, and there is a lot of reductionism when talking about Maher. Like I said, he holds some beliefs that make me very uncomfortable, but he’s a great example of the fact that the world is not black and white, and not everybody fits into a neat little box.
It might help if he was slightly less of an asshole, but that’s a big part of his schtick. I value his voice, and hope he stays on the air for a long time.
I’m glad to hear from someone else who actually watched Bill Maher. I even kept watching after he dropped the N word to shock an interviewed guest.
But I think in some more recent episodes his pushback against his audience being “too sensitive” and “woke” has been misguided. He’s platformed a ton of grifters since then. His show became downright exhausting, compared to the fun I used to have. He’s bringing on LGB not the T anti-trans grifters. He’s constantly whining about California. The jokes and in-between segments that used to lighten the tension have gotten super corny. The New Rule at the end has him preaching absolute shit.
Absolutely. The way he treats his audience is one of the things that bothers me, and his view on trans folks is another one that I find pretty abhorrent. So yeah, great examples. I still think he brings a valuable and unique voice to an otherwise homogenous and unchallenging discourse.
What discourse: Trans issues? Progressivism? Since then I’ve gone so far left. I think I started with The Young Turks. It’s a lot harder to find people who are having fun and making jokes about leftist issues, though, and that’s one reason I’m here on Lemmy.
I mean discourse in the most general sense. Not specific topics per se, but the way we talk about and engage with societal issues that are not always cut and dry.
I think he’s what we need a lot more of in this country, thoughtful, honest, well intentioned. Regardless of what we may think on an individual topic, being able to discuss it and not being locked into the confines of two radical ideologies is sorely missing in today’s society.
If you want to install your games on multiple computers too. If you sell your computer and installs on the new one too.
Unity pinky promises that if you get into an argument with the game author and decides to install it in 10,000,000 virtual machines, that they won’t screw the author. They aren’t telling how they will be able to do that.
Anyway, there are new terms coming, as they may need a few more years to screw all their customers without pushback.
So basically imagine a bad takes factory. That’s him. He’s an actual liberal elitist who seems hell bent on being a condescending jackass who’s rarely right
He used to make the occasional refreshing point… decades ago on politically incorrect.
The one that lost him that role honestly, pointing out that you can call the 9/11 suicide attackers a lot of things, deluded, fanatical, etc, but cowards doesn’t fit and there are plenty of derogatory concepts that fit, just not cowards.
I like when people point out that language and words have meanings and your enemies aren’t just all the bad words you know.
Since those days though, his politics shifted rightward from somewhat progressive to Neoliberal in the early days of Real Time to Conservative about 10 years ago, while still calling himself a real progressive. In recent years he’s been doing shrieking the opposite of his once insightful 9/11 point and telling anyone who will listen that all followers of Islam are a dangerous extremist group and a wholesale threat to civilization.
I stopped being able to stand tuning into him years ago.
20 years ago he was the only talking head that was atheist and given any mainstream time. I don’t know much about him other than that and I don’t think he does anything very interesting but I think a lot of people still have him sort of bookmarked for how he was in the early 2000s
The other commenters covered it but before Politically Incorrect and Real Time he was a minor comedian in the 80s. He did standup, bit parts on a few TV shows, and I think he got a movie.
So he had a career to speak of before he became primarily a political commentator. His standup act was very reactionary and critical of the “growing trend” (at the time) of political correctness/basic human decency, which is how he got his first show.
Edit: Oh, I forgot to mention he is somewhat left-leaning. He claims to be a liberal, or rather people claim he is, but his stances are all over the place. He’s mostly cultivated a brand of a smug asshole who would call out hypocrisy while being hypocritical…but it’s “okay” because he’s open about being a hypocrite?
He tried to fill the role of THE democrat-hard-hitting-common-sense-political-comedian but was quickly overtaken by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. In my opinion Bill Maher never truly fulfilled that role because he lacks empathy.
Oh, I forgot to mention he is somewhat left-leaning.
He’s not really a left leaning person IMO, just anti-religion and pro-pot.
On the last episode I watched of his show he had a twenty minute gripe session about how COVID affected the partial ownership of some ball club he had. I think that was what it was but I don’t 100% remember anymore because he sounded so fucking out of touch I turned it off.
Ahh I see thanks for the info - I’m not from the US so I’ve not come across those shows. They sound awful. Are they as full of right wing apologist talking points as they sound ?
I’m also not from the US but I’ve been watching Real Time for many years and I think it’s a great show. He’s an outspoken democrat (at least since the Trump era).
And while he does invite on republicans and right-wing guests, he’s usually quite critical when interviewing them.
But I guess just talking to people makes you an “apologist” in the eyes of some people.
He’s a malignant narcissist who can’t stand being out of the spotlight that long. He’s been saying bad things about the WGA strike since it started. It was only a matter of time before he crossed the picket line.
Yeah he used to be pretty decent to watch but now he is just neoliberal, asshole, rich white dude who is completely out of touch with the people who used to watch his show.
I don’t even care about his political views much. They’re mostly the sort of thing you would expect from your typical selfish Boomer. I’m more concerned about his health views. Apart from vaccine “skepticism,” there’s other medical woo. I never liked him much, but I watched his show for the great guests. Then one day he had on the so-called doctor from Mexico who claimed to have cured Charlie Sheen’s HIV and didn’t push back on a single bullshit claim. I never watched his show again. If that hadn’t done it, his vaccine position would have done it by the time COVID rolled around, but this was years before.
Also, as a former professional stand-up, I absolutely hated the way he berated his audience when a joke fell flat. That’s like the number one never do.
Don’t get me wrong, he has my respect for grilling so many right wingers. But he gave a deliberate platform to anti-trans talking points. No pushback provided. And I really hate him for that. He has since gotten much more right-wing in his New Rules. I felt like I was being scolded for being a leftist and enjoying the show. By the show’s host.
Believe it or not, he made his name as a wry liberalist, antagonising established conservatives (and Democrats).
I’ve only watched some Real Time, in the early days it was kind of interesting, but it quickly becomes clear he holds conservative ideals. Nowadays he’s mostly a talking puppet for the conservatives. He strikes me as one or two rungs below Sean Hannity.
Don’t know about interesting, I’m guessing he got paid and thought “fuck you, I got mine” as conservatives are wont to do.
I haven’t watched in many years, but back then he geared himself towards “intellectuals”, but as the politics have become more polarised and the messaging dumbed down, maybe “middle class conservative” is more his brand.
Don’t know about actual viewership though, only his presentation.
My suspicion is his audience is the “smarter than thou” “centrists”. People who think both sides are the same and miss the Clinton administration. They probably on average think race was a non issue except people on the left keep making it one, they’re not pro union but support an amount of social safety, they may be cool with gay people but think that trans is too far (though they probably don’t like that pride is still a thing), probably support abortion but think it’s too common… And overwhelmingly his audience likely thinks they’re smarter than they are.
Last I checked, his audience was those self-proclaimed "intellectuals". The kind of atheists who define their identity by dunking on religious people, and the kind of mediocre people who feel superior by laughing others.
People who look at cherry-picked and out-of-context examples of progressivism and then dismiss the entirety as anti-science wokeness. People who cherry-pick scientific beliefs (without deeper research) in the same way most religious people cherry-pick passages from their holy text. Take the (out-of-context) quotes that reaffirm what you already belief in, ignore the rest, and most importantly: Declare that your "truth" is superior to others.
I imagine the audience of his shows has changed a lot in recent years. HBO went from HBO Go and Now to HBO MAX, which excluded a LOT of customers for a year while they negotiated with Roku and LG. Then HBO changed programming a lot. All the while Bill Maher started using more anti-woke talking points, and Twitter fell apart, this all shakes up who would listen to Bill.
Yeah my vibe was always that he went Democrat because he was a contrarian, an atheist, and smart enough to understand how ridiculous republican economic policies were. But it’s crystal clear he has no love for marginalized people or the working class and thinks that if he doesn’t understand something it’s ridiculous and that if he pisses people off that means he’s right and speaking truth to power.
I’ve seen snippets of Politically Incorrect from the 90s, as there were a few guests I was interested in. It seemed to be just another talk show, not right wing apologist at all. I’m chiming in just so you get an idea of the long career on air this man has, he’s been decades on tv.
Whatever he’s said recently that may have caused a reaction, I’m also out of the loop. I’m also not from the US.
Unity (led by an ex-EA CEO to give you an idea where this is headed) decided to change their pricing model to charging $0.20 per install (if you’re over $200K revenue and 200K installs) – they haven’t clarified how they’re planning on tracking install numbers (ie. can someone use a VM to tank a competitor?) – then someone pointed out they quietly changed their TOS back in April to “allow” this to go through – and apparently they’ve sent out letters saying they’ll wave the install fee if you use their own IronSource ad system instead of the AppLovin ad system – needless to say, devs are panicking, Godot is seeing a huge influx, and Unity has maintained radio silence all weekend … Monday should be “interesting” …
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.
To put some perspective on that. If you make $200,000 in sales, $60,000 is paid to the digital store.
Out of your remaining $140,000 if half of your 200k users reinstall your game then that’s another 100k x $0.20 = $20,000 out of your pocket.
And you can still get billed for future reinstalls.
Say an indie game with decent polish can easily get to 3 development years worth of effort, that leaves the developers with the equivalent of $40,000 each.
if you’re using Unity, you definitely want someone knowledgeable looking over all the terms and details (ie. I am not a lawyer)
from Sunday’s tweet, it seems they’re considering changes to their new pricing model in reaction to the blow back (“what? people got upset?”)
new pricing model doesn’t take effect until 1 Jan 2024
looks like they were planning on charging for any installs (for new and old games) from that point on
the changes to the TOS they sneaked through a few months back makes it look like they are trying to apply the new terms retroactively and replace whatever terms were in place when the game was developed – which sounds all sorts of shady (but then again, it’s an ex-EA CEO … )
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