Unity’s CEO published an apology but ultimately lost developers’ trust, perhaps forever

So, just yesterday, Marc Whitten published a mea culpa on the Unity Blog, stating that they should’ve listened to the community more and that they won’t ship out the changes as originally planned. I wrote about the original version of the Runtime Fee plan previously over here.

Updates to the Unity Pricing Model

According to the new proposal, Unity’s personal plan will remain free and there won’t be a Runtime Fee for that. In fact, the cap will be increased from $100,000 to $200,000 in revenue, and there will be no requirement to use the “Made in Unity” splash screen.

That said, “no game with less than $1 million in trailing 12-month revenue will be subject to the fee”, according to Marc Whitten.

Apart from that, Whitten also describes changes made to the Pro and Enterprise plans, namely games made on the current and previous versions of Unity won’t be subject to this fee. Rather, only games developed on the LTS version coming out in January of 2024 will be subjected to this.

Regarding the fee, games subjected to it will either share 2.5% of their revenue or a calculated amount based on monthly new users. Unity will take the smaller amount/give developers the choice, and the numbers of monthly new users will be based on a self-report system rather than the originally proposed change.

This also means that Unity won’t charge developers for pirated versions of their games or for games installed on multiple platforms or possibly acquired through a charity bundle. Developers can view the numbers and report them based on where the key was acquired.

This should be a better system, in theory at least.

For more information, you can also check out this page!

They changed the ToS retroactively!

So, this is a section I completely forgot to mention because Unity only allegedly changed the Terms of Service and I originally couldn’t find enough sources, so I ended up just not talking about that at all in the original post… but apparently, Unity did indeed retroactively and without any warning change the Terms of Service, so I’m now adding that to this post, uh [23/09/2023 11:46 PM].

In a tweet (xeet?) on X (formerly known as Twitter), Unity’s account states that they’re disappointed at how “the internet framed the ToS removal in the wrong light”.

“We removed it way before the pricing change was announced because the views were so low, not because we didn’t want people to see it”, or so the account states. I didn’t know that views and other statistics like that are now important for legal documents… Oh wait, they aren’t.

Did the marketing team decide that the ToS need to be shortened? Nobody reads them anyway, apparently, so they needed to remove some of the contents to make it easier to read and better to skim through, probably…?

All jokes and cynicism aside, Unity’s current proposal for the Runtime Fee is that any users of the current (or previous) Unity version(s) don’t have to pay this fee…

But if that’s part of the agreement and we all accept it, who’s to say that they won’t just remove that part of the agreement and retroactively charge everyone a fee…

If Terms of Service can be removed for a lack of views, why would we trust an apology by Marc?

Backpaddling, Haggling and Trust

So, we essentially got Unity proposing something outrageous, developers getting angry, and Unity backpaddling pretty much immediately all in a week. That’s pretty fast, perhaps even too fast.

While the new system isn’t the optimal solution, it is an improvement for sure… but that doesn’t mean that there is a Happy Ending now. Rather, this poses a big issue to the relationship that Unity built with their customers/developers.

You could argue that they really meant to ship out the outrageous proposal and that they’ve now “backpaddled”… but I think that that’s perhaps too naive of an outlook (which means a lot coming from me).

Rather, I believe that the current plan is what they intended to ship out in the first place but they knew that people would be opposed to it either way… so… they proposed a much worse option to then “listen to community feedback” and paddle back, dialling down the proposal to what they actually wanted.

That’s essentially haggling in a nutshell. It’s manipulation.

If you want to buy something, you propose a price that is way too low. Clearly, the shop owner (if they’re okay with haggling) will offer a price that is a bit too high. You “meet in the middle” but in reality, you were okay with paying the proposed price and the shop owner wanted to sell it at this price anyhow.

It’s but one of many tactics.

Anyway, the thing is, with tactics like this, that they’re fake and frankly quite damaging to the trust you build up over the years. A shopowner would be known as a greedy bastard selling stuff for high prices, even if he is willing to haggle them down.

Unity will be known as the greedy swine that merged with a Malware company and that also wanted to charge developers per installation.

People liked Unity… but to many, it appears that Unity is actually just playing around and not respecting their customer base in the slightest.

Terraria’s developers even announced funding open source engines that compete with Unity starting now with an initial donation and an on-going monthly donation. Take that, Unity…

Insider Trading Allegations

I just wanted this to also be out there. Not everyone reads these posts all the way to the end, so having the allegations in the table of contents helps get people to read more.

Anyway, the Unity CEO and some other people at the company decided to sell stocks and shares a week prior to the announcement, on the same day, seemingly at random.

I wonder if they were hungry for jail food because this smells like Insider Trading to me. Hence, they are currently under investigation. This stuff does get punished pretty severely after all, especially when the people involved are stupid enough to at least try to hide it.

Smh.

Media Outlets being stupid

Apart from that, the account of Massive Monster’s game “Cult of the Lamb” (here’s my review, btw) on Twitter (the platform now known as X) tweeted out that they’d delete the game on January 1st 2024.

This was a joke.

It was very obvious, too.

Holy shit. (this is a reference to Cult of the Lamb, knowers know)

The whole account is full of memes like that.

Anyway, media outlets have taken this too seriously and didn’t bother thinking for at least one second… they didn’t bother reaching out for a comment to the developers or the publisher, checking context, or even rubbing their two brain cells together a tiny bit to make sure they’re warmed up and functioning properly.

Look! The Hivemind!

I cannot believe that there was a need for a Polygon article to be released about the fact that a game developer (known for posting shitposts and literal shit posts, as well as memes on their Twitter account) was joking about this.

I complained about the outlets that were spreading misinformation in one post already…

…but this is beyond stupid.

I wish these people were meme-ing themselves but I severely doubt it.

This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.

If you see this article anywhere else other than Indiecator.org… then this article has been stolen. Please let me know of this via E-Mail. Other than that, feel free to stop by my Twitch streams!