After a week of intense criticism and backlash, Unity has apologised for the "confusion and angst" caused by the announcement of its unpopular Runtime fee policy. In a post to social media, the company has promised to make changes following the strong reaction from the development community.
Unity is a game engine platform utilised by many studios large and small, and currently has a pretty normal payment system, whereby a royalty fee is paid based on sales of a game. The proposed new policy relates to Unity Runtime, which is "code that executes on player devices and makes Made with Unity games work at scale". The company announced that a Runtime fee will be introduced in 2024 that, past a certain threshold, will incur a payment every time a Unity game is installed by a user.
Many development studios have expressed their feelings on this policy change; in a nutshell, the Runtime fee would be incredibly costly for dev teams, so much so that a lot of outspoken studios say they'll move to a new engine unless the policy is abandoned, or at least heavily reworked.
Unity has attempted to answer the many questions brought up by developers, but most of its public communications so far have done little to convince them the new policy is a good idea. Now, the company has issued a new statement on the matter:
The company apologises for the "confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused". It "will be making changes to the policy" after feedback and conversations with "team members, community, customers, and partners". Unity will "share an update in a couple of days".
So, now we wait to see what changes. The statement has already rubbed developers the wrong way, who say there was never "confusion" about the Runtime fee. Many are saying the damage is already done, and that even if the policy is dropped altogether, trust in Unity has been heavily compromised.
[source x.com, via engadget.com]
Comments 45
In short: they smelled money and got greedy. Thought they would get away with it only to find out they couldn't that easily.
Textbook example of hubris.
Epic Games and GODOT just had a great week of free marketing.
But yeah, the statement doesn't really sound like they'll change the policy, rather they seem to think people don't know how it works.
"We apologize for the confusion [we] caused."
Good joke. I don't think game devs or gamers were ever confused.
I think the confusion is completely on Unity's side, for thinking this business model would float.
Seems they tried to take a leaf out of reddit's book by the looks of it.
Isnt unity led by the ex EA CEO? So not a surprise what they tried to get away with.
I suspect this is the beginning of the end for unity now, damage is done and developer trust is gone
Didn't 1983 have a videogame industry crash due to greed and lots of unplayable garbage released? Is time repeating itself in 2023?
The backlash on Twitter (or whatever it's called) was intense. So many prominent names in the industry asking Unity wtf they think they are doing.
I saw one from an indie studio along the lines of, "We're switching engines. We never make public posts. This is how bad you f***ed up."
@SonOfPSXDave not even close.
Well well well, greed is good eh?
Feels like a nothing insert South Park BP "We're sorry",statement. Wouldn't a sensible exec team have "talked to our staff,partners & community" etc ,before deciding on this train wreck?🙄
Saw a tweet over the weekend that suggested looking beyond just the CEO. Seemingly the adware tech company they bought,(& use in Unity especially mobile),exec is now part of the board alongside,financial/board members associated with a certain space rocket chap who's heavily monetised "his" social platform.
Though it is the internet & rabbit hole theorising it makes more sense than the utterances thus far!
As always its the staff still there that haven't been purged in recent months & devs mid project or relying on older titles to supplement the next that have been thrown onto the train tracks by this nonsense.😕
We apologize for the confusion. We have no idea why you are all confused about this company being greedy but stocks are down so we are doing a u turn
Trustlevel=0
@Martijn87 it's all about IronSource - the advertising platform they bought recently, but in doing so they gave its shareholders enough money to pay much perform a hostile takeover of Unity. On mobile they're waiving the install fees for anyone who integrates IronSource, which says it all, but then there's controversy over whether IronSource itself is malware.
I just cannot understand how a contract can be rewritten like this and then applied retrospectively. It seems like a pretty scummy practice to me.
I would say this kind of this is unheard of, but the UK Government did something very similar when they changed the pension scheme for Police Officers, and applied it to everyone with less than 10 years service. Imagine signing a contract of employment at the commencement of your employment, and then, after just under 10 years service, being told that you would get a smaller pension, and that you would have to serve and extra 5 years to get it? That's precisely what happened, so I guess this kind of thing has some legal standing, but it is absolutely morally bankrupt.
How could you trust any organisation that even contemplates something like this?
Ah, I see now, the gaming community and studios are just confused. Don't worry, Unity will soon alleviate any confusion and make it perfectly clear just how much they are going to screw everyone over.
They thought they were clear enough the first time, but apparently not!
I imagine that they will likely remove the retrospective element, but still try to run with the idea for all new releases. Imagine being about to release a game that uses Unity, after several years of development, and then seeing what is planned with Unity? What do you do? Start again without Unity, or continue and take a hit to your profits?
What a nightmare...
Have to wonder if MS and Sony knew this was coming and raised their subscription prices because of it. There are an awful lot of Unity based games on both services and that per install tax bill has to be paid by the service provider where those games are part of the subscriptions they offer.
I think the only people in a state of "confusion" were the ones who greenlit this policy. Probably drug-induced.
@Fiendish-Beaver What you describe with the police in UK has happened along Europe in almost all jobs in the 2010's. It is not unheard of. The countries simply had no money to pay the pensions.
As for the topic I do not know to code in Unity and how convenient it is but it seems like the damage is done and the trust is broken.
Devs who are still early enough in dev with unity should try to switch engines if possible. That dollar-store Bond villain CEO should be bleeding money with studios switching engine left and right and unity eventually disappearing into obscurity. Renderware vanished and so can unity.
They messed up real bad. And their intention of still keeping the policy with out scraping it out completely means developers should leave them behind ASAP.
Posted this on pure xnox:
This means nothing until they actually roll back the whole thing. “Changes” might be something stupid as simply re-phrasing what an “install” means.
As far as I care Unity is no longer safe to use regardless what they do unless they do every single one of these things:
Even then the trust is gone, but at lest those steps would give room for a developer to use Unity without “trust”, simply continuously keeping an eye on any license changes.
I personally am not going back to Unity regardless.
Riccitiello seems to tank every company he infests. Despite failing, people like him hop from one CEO position to the next for a lifetime.
Seems that there’s just no accountability once one has accumulated enough wealth.
The brainiacs at HR just be like: “Well, if he’s rich AF, he must be great at what he’s doing.” O_o
You're absolutely right about the 2010' era, @belmont, though the changes to the Police pensions happened in around 2000. The Police do not have the right to industrial action in the UK, and so are an easy target for this kind of thing. It is a very scummy thing to do.
On topic though, I cannot see much of the Unity changes going through as the mere threat of losing vast amounts of future developments, which would likely see a massive hit to their profits, should be enough to scare off these plans. That said, trust has been broken, and it takes a long time for it to be regained. The Developers (unlike the Police) are able to take some remedial action, and I hope they do. This kind of thing should never be allowed to stand...
@belmont as modern 3d engines go, Unity has pretty much the lowest barriers to entry when it comes to getting something to work, but then there's a lot of pain points later in development when it turns out that advertised features don't work how you'd expect and you end up having to either integrate a load of 3rd party middleware or make those features yourself.
In terms of actually getting a project out of the door, in my experience, Unreal isn't actually much more complicated as long as you hold your nose and suck up writing C++, and tends to be easier to optimise well. Godot on the other hand is perhaps a little more complicated, but being open source you can change everything about the engine, right down to the nuts and bolts, and has no fees associated, instead relying on voluntary contributions to fund further development
@theheadofabroom Thanks for the info, I was not sure of the differences of Unity and Unreal Engine/Godot!
Rob_230 wrote:
Yes John Riccitiello. A man so greedy that Suda-51 (creator of No More Heroes and more) made him the evil-CEO villain of his game No More Heroes 2 (and 3 to an extent), only bothering to change his first name to Damon.
EDIT: But as unpopular as he may be the real source of this was probably the board that is now filled with members of IronSource, the monetisation and gaming ads company Unity bought for $4.4bn
Thats just greed at its finest.and when you get call out.oh yeah we didn't mean it.its like a racist company did something horrible and gets call out.and now they changing they're policies.word up son
Whoever thought it was a good idea should be fired and the CEO replaced. This happens when the higher-ups only care about shareholders and growth instead of the users who use Unity. In the end, it wasn't worth the backlash. This is not the developers but the higher-ups who only work inside a glass tower looking over their employees.
Riccitiello is the one who to blame! And any company who hire this *****! This people should be fired and forgotten...
@videoman190 the problem is that the CEO answers to the shareholders, and if he doesn't do what they want that can just replace him. A couple of the shareholders who were with IronSource happen to be mates with a certain billionaire who's been obsessed with running a particular social network into the ground, so you can guess how reasonable they are (there was also a story about a games industry union having their paid-for blue tick removed after speaking out against Unity, which was only resolved after they threatened legal action for Union busting)
Guessing some angry shareholders caused this since it was causing them to lose money. No matter what happens, they’ve permanently damaged themselves. And they weren’t confused, you out of touch a-holes! They should’ve reversed it immediately.
Hilarious how they are trying to act like the negative reaction was simply everyone being confused and misunderstanding them, shows how the people at the top of this company are completely out of touch and clueless.
What Unity needs is not a revision to this policy, but entirely new leadership. Everyone at the top of the organization needs to be gone.
@Gryzor That is called "failing up" and sadly it's become too common in big corporations these days.
Lol 'Confusion and Angst'
They're pathetic and greedy and the reaction is completely justifiable from both devs and players. Unity should be ashamed of themselves for even considering this.
What developers want is to save their current games but once Unity puts something like revenue share from the moment of implementation instead of per install all the devs will move to something else.
Godot needed a push to put it over unity and this is that push. (because cancelled highly demanded projects and having outdated tools wasn't enough) So thanks Unity for the auto destruction.
Greed 🤦 unbelievable.
They come up with a RIDICULOUS policy to set expectations insanely low, then pretend they "heard the voice of the devs" and implement something that's still stupid, but seems reasonable by comparison.
Make up a $0.20 per download policy that takes effect retroactively, then "Oh no, that's too much! We've decided on another system that's soooooo not unreasonable now that you've seen a much worse one, right?"
“Confusion and angst” is rather passive aggressive isn’t it?
“Sorry you didn’t like us being greedy. It’s your fault really, but fine, we’ll be a bit less greedy I GUESS”
Disappointed you have not chosen to use the scene in Charlie Murphys Rick James story from the Chapelle show when he has “Unity” imprinted into his forehead when Rick James throws a punch with a Unity emblazoned ring on his fist.. Next Unity story, please PushSquare!
@naruball This new new group of fans will fight for big corp and the kids don't know any better today we already lost.
@JayJ They did it with microtransactions and people now think the practice is normal give them a finger and in the end they will take our hand and we won't even notice.
This sort of thing should have been announced at least 3 years in advance. I think that's a reasonable timeframe for the game devs that use Unity to be able to stop and say "ok, this is what it will cost if we go with that engine, how does that affect our financial modelling" and any games in early development still have the opportunity to turn around and go "nope, that breaks the maths for us, let's go with [Engine B] instead".
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