[cmcaleer]

I think it might be too little too late. I do wonder if this was always the plan with classic door-in-the-face technique, but I can't imagine they would have anticipated the absolute magnitude of backlash. Their product certainly isn't as special as they clearly think it is, and the fact that they attempted to unilaterally change the contract in as egregious as way as they did is unacceptable and not behaviour I would want from a vendor I'm reliant on. Anecdotally, I'm seeing a lot of game devs being surprised at relative ease of migration in some instances, though I imagine there are megaprojects which will have a much worse time.

Crow had to be eaten but it looks like they're only tasting the feathers.

[dpkonofa]

This is it, in a nutshell. People don't want the apology. They want to know that a decision like this doesn't have a chance of happening because the people in charge know it's a bad idea before it leaves the door. No one wants to be stuck in a cycle of getting fucked and then boycotting to get what they want, especially for something that their livelihood depends on. They want a product made by people they trust who are making decisions in the best interest of the users/creators and not only decisions that are in the best interest of the company.

[hn_throwaway_99]

It's amazing to me how very smart people in corporations can convince themselves (and I mean, like really believe it) that the shit sandwich they are serving up is actually filet mignon. It's the whole "it's very hard for someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on not understanding it" issue. I've seen it a few times in person, where I'm like "How the f are we convincing ourselves of this?"

2 recommendations:

1. This is where a "neuro-diverse" person or two can really be an asset. The social dynamic in corporations often leads to people eventually shaking their heads in agreement, even if they have big underlying concerns. Those of us somewhere on the spectrum are less likely to understand those social dynamics in the first place and be more willing to call out BS.

2. Good corporate leaders have trusted outside council that they can run ideas by to get brutally honest feedback.

[coldpie]

I haven't seen any evidence that anyone smart was involved in this decision. There's been some hints that the actual smart people (devs, customer support folks) were screaming bloody murder that it was a terrible idea, but the execs pushed it through anyway. This is yet another entry in the enormous list of evidence that becoming the head of a company does not require any intelligence. Quite the opposite, apparently.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Don't mean to defend the execs that made this decision too much, but I think saying "they're all just idiots" is probably not what really happened.

Basically, execs (especially public company execs) have the responsibility for growing revenue and earnings. Ideally they do that by just making better products, but some times you do need to "thread the needle" by charging more for your products while not pissing off customers too much.

I'm sure the devs and customer support folks were screaming bloody murder, but they are also not responsible for satisfying public markets, so it's easier to say those things without having to worry about revenue growth.

So point being, I'm sure execs thought there would be some blowback, but they probably felt it would be "manageable", and like others have said, they overestimated the irreplaceability of Unity. So its important at the exec level to have someone who can whisper in your ear, someone who does understand the requirement for growing revenue, that can honestly say "you've managed to convince yourself of this bullshit."

[lamontcg]

So they're just sociopaths who minmax how much they can abuse their customers and get away with it.

[jenkstom]

There are so many things left unsaid, but implied, in this post. I love it.

[m463]

I wonder what the reality really is? Does this stuff all blow over?

Thinking back to recent controversies:

- reddit with third party apps

- the D&D open gaming license

- redhat and centos

- etc...

[dpkonofa]

I think it does, to an extent. Reddit is still alive, for example. It's just nowhere near the community and content it used to be and, in my mind, it won't ever be that way again. Reddit's biggest benefit was that most of the moderators were people who were really, really into very niche topics. The big subs were all moderated by the same 10 people so they devolved into meme depositories and made up stories that stoked emotions. Now that the principled mods have left and those niche subreddits are being taken over by people who care more about the memes than the topic at hand, it's falling apart.

[badRNG]

Reddit, like Twitter, isn't going anywhere. It's just a worse value for the end user, and in Reddit's case the business is potentially better off for it, users be damned.

[dpkonofa]

I disagree. Twitter is already dying, albeit slowly. Reddit will suffer the same fate. The entire reason Reddit grew the way it did was because it had content that other sites didn't have and the reason it had that content was because of the niche subreddits modded by people who were extremely passionate about niche stuff. Reddit won't grow anymore because the content being fed to it now is just content stolen from other sites and it's not any easier to access or better for being on Reddit. It's a worse value for the end user because the value was in the people that have now all left.

[octacat]

+ steam now opens steam + shows you ads, each time when you start a game, using a game shortcut from the desktop. You still could disable ads in settings, but not starting steam.

Another "genius" improvement. Yes, I recommend buy factorio directly from the dev now.

[drpossum]

Maybe, judging by their actions, they're not actually that smart.

[the_snooze]

Exactly. If your project or organization is dependent on some external product or platform, that thing had better be boring and predictable. Busy people don't have the time or the patience to be jerked around by external surprises.

Walk-back or not, Unity is demonstrably not boring and predictable anymore. That's done.

[sounds]

Oh they didn't walk it back. It's now one of two ways for them to get a percent of your revenue - that did change.

(It also was only going to kick in once your revenue hit a certain point.)

The CEO John R. didn't chime in here, and that would have meant him being accountable for this decision and its effect on Unity. His mask slipped here.

[brucethemoose2]

They did walk back charging per download/install.

There was no way they couldn't. Its literally not practical.

[3836293648]

They only walked back it applying retroactively. Now it's from the next LTS release.

It applying to free games was walked back immediately and isn't news

[Applejinx]

You misunderstand, I think.

ACCOUNTABILITY would not be practical.

Them charging for whatever they can make up and claim to be true, is neither walked back or not walked back. It's waiting to happen again, in whatever way they dream up. You're assuming they wouldn't simply make stuff up and that there would be a chain of accountability, so the process would make sense.

Such things are for making money, not sense. You have not seen the last of them.

[coldpie]

Sorry, where did they walk it back? The letter linked in this thread still refers to the "runtime fee".

[brucethemoose2]

https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-ma...

> After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unity'sWhitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation. (A spokesperson told Axios that Unity had "regrouped" to discuss the issue.)

[usea]

If you're working on strategy at Unity in good faith right now, I think you announce like they did rather than having the CEO take accountability. Because I think the CEO apology strategy depends on the CEO's ability to convince people he's sincere and contrite. That's a tall order under these circumstances.

[Macha]

Even for a decision by middle management, the trustworthiness of senior management is a cap on how much you can trust middle management - how can you trust a decision more than you trust the people with the ability to overrule it?

[krapp]

>No one wants to be stuck in a cycle of getting fucked and then boycotting to get what they want, especially for something that their livelihood depends on.

A lot of devs and studios are, they know they are, Unity knows they are, and there's little anyone can afford to do about it. I suspect most of the crowd that ostensibly abandoned Unity will return because they've already sunk too much time and energy into the platform, and that's the path of least resistance. They will tolerate whatever deal Unity gives them because they can't afford to do otherwise. Even if they liked the alternatives, the only reasonable business decision is to return to Unity and pretend this never happened.

Unfortunately this probably means much of the interest in Godot and other open source alternatives this debacle created is about to evaporate. Inertia is a harsh mistress.

[hintymad]

Is Unity's CEO a product guy? It appears that the CEO does not give a shit to the product, or details of pricing policy in this particular case. If so, I could never understand how a tech company would get someone who wouldn't pay attention to such details.

[octacat]

more like bonuses guy.

[dredmorbius]

I don't have a horse in the Unity issue, though I've been following it loosely. I can speak to my own response to another organisation.

I'd written off Reddit personally around five-six years ago. This despite having a fairly long-lived bloggy subreddit (and a small smattering of others) on the site, which I still use as a reference (despite having taken it private).

It wasn't specifically on account of the specific technical decisions they'd made, or the site changes (or lack of site changes) resulting, but the fact that those decisions were being made. That is, as with other business organisations I've encountered over the years, Reddit had repeatedly proven themselves antithetical to my own interests and values.

I suspect that's the issue Unity's going through here, and that though the final endgame may take some time in coming, it could well doom the company.

One business strategy that seems to have been increasingly widely adopted over the past decade or two, or perhaps I'm only simply far more cognisant of it and recognise it where it occurs, is the "walk right up to the creepy line" approach (as Eric Schmidt put it: <https://thehill.com/policy/technology/71739-schmidt-google-g...>), or moving products or services right to the pain or tolerance threshold.

In the short term this can work. It can even be successful over a longer term, in cases. But there are two inherent problems with the concept:

1. The threshold, whether it's pain, tolerance, creepiness, or whatever, can change, and often startlingly suddenly. At which point the organisation is caught high and dry.

2. The long-term erosion of trust and affection for the firm and its products effectively primes a trigger of latent demand for any viable alternative which appears. An example that comes to mind is the exclusive launch of Apple's iPhone in the US by AT&T. On the day that Verizon began officially supporting the iPhone on their own network, people were cramming Verizon stores and phone lines trying to make the switch. (A cow-orker at the time was one of those people.) They were absolutely fed up with AT&T's service and behaviour. See: <https://web.archive.org/web/20110112092318/http://www.engadg...> and <https://web.archive.org/web/20101007000511/http://online.wsj...>, discussed at the time: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2092273> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1765104>.

I've seen IBM, Microsoft, and Google subject to similar shifts, some more pronounced than others, over the years.

Leaving a considerable goodwill moat around offerings is an alternative. I'm too far outside the consumer mainstream to know what business, products, services, and/or brands exemplify this, though I suspect Costco and Trader Joe's might be among these.

[SleekEagle]

> moving products or services right to the pain or tolerance threshold

When did we start talking about the airline industry?

But seriously, the reason it works for the airline industry is because there is literally no other alternative, unlike in this case.

[dpkonofa]

This is a great take because I suspect that the airline industry is exactly the reason why all these companies are now in the "death by a thousand cuts" stage of their strategies. Literally no one prefers the airlines today and the experience of flying to the same degree (and especially not more) than they did a decade ago or more. Everything about the experience, from the boarding to the seating to the food, is objectively worse than it was before and yet people still need to fly.

[dredmorbius]

Commercial office real estate is another example that comes to mind.

TINA. Until suddenly, with COVID-19, there was an alternative.

And the real estate market is now (slowly) imploding.

[cowsup]

Unity lost a lot of goodwill among developers, and it took over a week for them to admit fault. I seriously doubt they planned all along to present a temporary horrible plan, to make their “real” plan easier to swallow.

If this were a 48- or 72-hour turnaround, maybe. But Unity lost a lot of goodwill amongst developers and there are some they may never get back as a result.

[intelVISA]

Developers aren't the ones choosing Unity most of the time...

[drpossum]

If you're working in a development environment where management is drawing hard lines at choosing your tooling you should find a place that's going to succeed.

[djbusby]

Sometimes the tooling is in place before you arrive.

[drpossum]

That's right and you have a choice to accept that job. If the tooling takes you by surprise you either didn't do your due diligence with a new employer or you were lied to.

[Macha]

It feels like any game developer or publisher big enough to be dictating engines top down probably has their own engine?

[johnfernow]

For a lot of studios, even very large ones, that's not the case anymore, and even those that have their own engines don't use them for everything. Nintendo has several engines, but Pokémon Go is made in Unity, as was Mario Kart Tour and Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Pokémon Shining Pearl. miHoYo has over 5000 employees but they still use Unity for Genshin Impact and some of their other games. Blizzard surely had the money to make their own engine for Hearthstone, but they chose Unity.

This is even more pronounced for Unreal, where Final Fantasy VII Remake, Valorant, Apex Legends Mobile, Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order and Survivor, Octopath Traveler, and tons of other wildly profitable games are made in it. CD Projekt Red is making the next Witcher game in Unreal as well. Square Enix has a ton of money and thousands of employees, as does Riot Games, EA, and plenty of other huge companies. Nearly all of these companies have developed their own engines in the past, but Unity and Unreal are just really hard to beat: not only can they offer great performance and stability, as well as easy multiplatform support (can publish on Windows, PlayStation, Switch, Xbox, iOS, Android, etc.), but it also can make development easier since new employees likely already are familiar with the engine, versus if you build your own it can take months for new employees to be productive and contribute much of anything to the project.

Often times they'll still make changes to the engine's source code (miHoyo didn't just download the latest Unity LTS from the website or Unity Hub), but that's still considerably less work than building your own engine from scratch, and in many cases even that's not necessary.

[bigstrat2003]

On the topic of Square Enix, what's bizarre to me is that FF7R is the odd one out among recent games. FF15 and FF16 were on two different internally developed engines! I wonder if the reason FF7R used UE is because it was originally being developed outside, before Square was unhappy with how development was going and brought it back in house.

[elondaits]

What amazed me the most of UE, is that ILM uses it for real time rendering of backgrounds in the immersive LED environment where they shoot The Mandalorian.

[imtringued]

Do you really think that a 10 person indie shop is going to have every single person choose their own favorite engine?

[Macha]

No, but I'd expect the person choosing the engine for the 10 person indie shop to be a developer.

[cmrdporcupine]

But they were at one point. I'm not in gamedev but I do recall people being enthused about it some years ago.

When you lose that audience and enthusiasm among the people who influence next year's technical decisions, eventually you enter the dustbin of history.

[msk-lywenn]

Huh? Who then?

[morrbo]

I simply don't trust publicly traded companies these days. I genuinely can't think of an example where a private company in the tech space has become better since going public. I don't like to MBA bash, but it large tech companies genuinely seem filled with people who don't even like tech (let alone love it) and are just happy to squeeze everything and everyone at any opportunity. I'm genuinely concerned and waiting for the enshittification of the next round of companies - people like cloudflare - then I guess I'll just give up on anything mainstream and remain an indy Dev doing indy things for fun

[blastro]

I got a new pair of lululemon pants this week and they're terrible quality compared to year's past. I remember their CEO saying they were trying to double their stock price this year. Know I know how.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I definitely agree with this sentiment. And it's not just publicly traded companies - I like the saying "private equity kills everything it touches" because whenever PE buys a a company I have never seen it turn to anything but a shit pile eventually.

At some point with all companies the finance people take over. But well-loved products and companies are never created by finance people - they're created by people with a passion for something.

[gumballindie]

Cat’s out of the bag. I gave godot a try and it’s absolutely amazing! It felt great working with open source tools - i could finally read the source when i needed to understand something. Indeed it lacks some features but it is an amazing engine. Unity and their ceo has proven to be untrustworthy. I am getting the sense that open source engines will eat their market share.

[Applejinx]

I'm curious to see how quickly it gains a performant 3D layer now that people capable of getting performance out of Unity are looking at it.

It was interesting seeing some people bounce off it on the grounds of woeful inefficiency. I don't remember the person, but one Unity refugee traced the path of a raycast and Godot more or less needed to treat it as a dynamically typed generic thing, going through a huge rigamarole to get a result.

It's possible to hack in more direct access for those who can make sense of it. I don't think there's a thing going on in Godot's 3d engine that some of these Unity refugees can't understand. They're running into arbitrary obstacles based on Godot's attitude towards what's clean and elegant code. These obstacles could go away really quickly under the right conditions…

[krapp]

>I don't remember the person, but one Unity refugee traced the path of a raycast and Godot more or less needed to treat it as a dynamically typed generic thing, going through a huge rigamarole to get a result.

There was a whole HN thread about it[0], and the response[1].

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37561762

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37598985

[gumballindie]

> it gains a performant 3D layer

It already is pretty darn performant - but without the many convenience features unity and unreal have. Also it does lack means to modify vertex buffers directly on the GPU - a feature I liked in Unity (https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Mesh.GetVertexBuffe...). However, I think godot shouldn't try and implement everything - the project should focus on getting core functionality performant and flexible enough.

Everything else - managing massive world, etc, should be done by 3rd parties and monetised. I hope the game dev world wont take the web dev world path where code is in oversupply and there are little options to monetise.

Unity's asset store allowed many people to gain freedom by selling assets. I think godot should follow the same path. But indeed for that the engine needs even more low level access exposed in a nice manner.

[ajvs]

> I hope the game dev world wont take the web dev world path where code is in oversupply and there are little options to monetise.

Very beneficial for the consumer however. Right now the bar to create a good videogame is rather high, and this leads to the current hellscape where so many videogames are plagued with lootboxes, season passes and other microtransactions to make up for the multiple years in dev time required with many employees.

If the tooling gets better to the point that it takes less time and less devs to create good games that don't require the insane levels of monetisation, then this trend is more likely to be reversed.

[DonHopkins]

Unity also has a C# wrapper layer around C++ objects. Most of the performant stuff is written in C++, and the C# source code they provide as reference is just a wrapper around it.

For example, the Cloth bindings with annotations like [NativeHeader("Modules/Cloth/Cloth.h")] and [NativeClass("Unity::Cloth")]:

https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/UnityCsReference/blob/...

[imtringued]

>It's possible to hack in more direct access for those who can make sense of it.

>These obstacles could go away really quickly under the right conditions…

I'm not sure why you feel the need to paraphrase this so much but the GDextension API is a thing and it is more efficient but it hasn't been implemented for C#. The blog poster extrapolated from the C# bindings that there are unfixable flaws in the engine when in reality the C# bindings aren't up to date yet.

[EA-3167]

I think the bottom line damage is that no one is going to develop new games on Unity if they have any other choice. Even if Unity walks this back 100%, why would a dev trust them not to pull this again in the future? Maybe some large projects will stop looking at migration in the short-term, but any new work is going to start happening elsewhere for sure.

[sangnoir]

> Even if Unity walks this back 100%, why would a dev trust them not to pull this again in the future?

This is why I stopped paying JetBrains, despite them 100% walking back their idiotic licensing change proposal many years ago. I love(d) the products, but could no longer trust the decision-makers.

[PaulKeeble]

They went back to the monthly billing with no option for buying a version permenantly. I think you can still fix your version for a while without upgrades but they will force an upgrade at some point now. The original issue I complained about has returned.

[maccard]

I don't know of them for ing an upgrade. If you subscribe for 12 months you get perpetual access to the version that was available when you subscribed, so you can buy a version for 12 monthly subscriptions. There's nothing wrong with that IMO

[Macha]

Jetbrains?

Seems the same model it was when they moved to subscriptions:

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/206544479-Subs...

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

[sangnoir]

> Jetbrains?

Yes!

> Seems the same model it was when they moved to subscriptions

Indeed, but there was a period of brain-dead decision making in 2015 where they announced a very different direction and back-tracked 2 weeks later.

They announced plans for an evergreen subscription model, but the flip side was that they'd brick your IDE (with no fallback) the moment your subscription lapsed[1]. The only reason the subscription model seems unchanged from their initial one was because of the outrage their controversial change generated.

I found this unconscionable - they backtracked (faster than Unity to their credit, but still)

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10170089

[Macha]

Yes, that was years ago, the "move to subscriptions" that the since in my post referred to. The parent poster was claiming they'd backtracked since on getting the perpetual fallback license, which doesn't seem true.

[PaulKeeble]

You don't build buildings on sinking sand regardless of whether for now it appears not to be sinking. Once the footing has proved unstable its best to build elsewhere.

[raincole]

Unity definitely hurt itself in confusion.

My anecdoate is that many people in this industry don't even know the existance of Godot. Yeah, I mean Godot, not Love2D or LibGDX. People can work in video games but are completly unaware of Godot.

Now they ALL know it.

[vsareto]

I think their product is technically special -- as with all of the commercial game engines -- but they were not in the market position they thought they were, which is what led to them to thinking this was a good idea.

Very much an unforced error on their part.

[octacat]

Companies in 2023 are just competing in how hostile they could be to the users/workers and still get away with it.

[HellDunkel]

Show some respect and let the CEO go.