“Sorry not sorry. Here are the amended prices that we intended to change all along, but knew you’d revolt unless we did something thoroughly obnoxious first.”
For someone asking, then “apologizing”, for such ridiculous money grab figures to use Unity he should have taken off the Royal Oak (I believe it’s a steel double balance openworked ~$135,000 US).
They’ve burned so much trust in leadership after this, and Unity is now going to be known as a sketchy platform to develop for since they’ve done really scummy monetization policies over night. This is extremely important if you’re going to be pouring millions in budget for game development in that engine.
This is not a CEO thing. The board asked for this. Look it up. There are some of the worse out of touch executives, which includes owners of scam software. Unity is done for, changing the CEO will not change a thing since the new CEO will be asked to do the same or worse things by the board, all in the name of profit.
If the value of Unity tanks after this, wouldn’t surprise me if MiHoYo or someone bought them just to not risk their huge projects that are currently using Unity.
For context, MiHoYo runs all their games on Unity (Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, etc), and their net worth ($16 billion) is more than Unity’s itself ($13 billion).
Tencent also has a huge chunk of games that run in Unity, and their market value is too massive to even utter.
I don’t think they can buy Unity, but I do know those games use a custom version of Unity that’s heavily modified. That version should still fall under the old license. Also you know they have the money to sue the hell out of Unity. It’d be cool if they moved their games to Godot, but I really doubt that’d happen lol.
Eh, he said the word apologize, but that’s not a full apology. All they essentially did was acknowledge that they noticed the public was mad at them. A full apology includes that acknowledgment and then what they did wrong and how they’re going to try to prevent it again. I doubt that last point will happen.
Even if whatever their new terms are turns out to be ok, it’s now an unacceptable risk to use Unity since they’ve shown us the terms can change at any time.
Not even the first time they’ve done it. Changing engines isn’t the easiest thing in the world, and corporations don’t have that big of an incentive to do so. Having said that, do migrate to Godot - 4.0 and beyond are much better than previous versions, having effectively 1:1 feature parity with Unity, plus some other cool additions.
Confusion? No, there was no confusion. You announced a policy that was terrible, but there was nothing confusing about it, it was just stupid. I wasn’t at all confused you condescending twat, I fully understood what was being announced, as did everyone else, hence the backlash.
Developers remain critical of this latest statement from Unity. “There wasn’t any ‘confusion’,” said Trent Kusters of Jumplight Odyssey studio League of Geeks. “In fact, the exact opposite is the concerning issue here; That we all, very clearly, understood the devastating impact and anti-developer sentiment of your new pricing model far better than you ever did (or cared to) before rolling it out.”
The ONLY acceptable apology at this point is a complete roll back and a full announcement of the direction they plan to take the company in for the next 5+ years.
They’ve absolutely lost the trust of devs, designers and hobbyists.
Anything short of a perpetual, binding agreement to never do this type of shit again is nothing more than “we’re sorry if being awesome made you idiots mad”. Get fucked.
Wasn’t it just six months ago or so that Dungeons & Dragons was going through a similar debacle? That they can change the terms of the license post release is insane.
Ahemm as I understand the previously license did have a “we don’t change this license on you” clause, which they removed shortly before this change. As I understand there is atleast possibility, that some existing customer developers might upon being pressed take unity to court over “you said you wouldn’t change the license fundamentally without our consent, we had a deal”.
What the exact language of that clause and would it hold in court challenge, I don’t know. Just heard one interviewed developer say something to affect of “hey they did have we don’t change the deal clause, which they sneak removed on pretty recent license update”.
I atleast as business would not agree to deal of “yeah we have a deal, except this deal allows us to change the deal however we want”.
It might mean having to do time limited or project limited deals, since on otherhand no provider would agree to “we have no room to change deal ever”. I would atleast in case of say game development expect clause for example “any fundamental license change must have 2 year announcement time for existing customer.” Such clauses are very common in “on-going basis contracts and deals”. Heck international treaties use such clauses “If you want to leave this treaty, you must give other treaty parties 1/2/3/5 year notice and for the duration of that notice period you are still bound by the treaty”.
So I would guess: If this ends ugly, there will be lawsuits over was the license change contractually legal, were the possibble change notices clear enough upon the main change being in itself legal and for example was some jurisdictions fair and good behavior clauses of national contract law itself violated. Was enough notice time given etc. Since one cant make any contrac or contract change whatever one likes, business contracts are always subservient to local contract law regulating what can be agreed, how and what amounts to stuff like informed consent, how contract terms can be changed and regulation on prohibition of underhanded or deceptive business practices.
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