[HillRat]

[M]onkeying with the business model doesn't just mildly irritate prospective customers, it can and does throw off years of planning for thousands of people per company.

This, very much so. Unity made two cardinal sins: creating a pricing model that didn't align with customers' business models (tying price to downloads rather than revenue), and then attempting to apply it retroactively to existing contracts (which, at best, would have resulted in high-profile and ugly legal battles against their largest customers and, likely, would have ended in a judge slapping their lawyers around with a copy of Williams v. Walker-Thomas).

In both cases, creating business model risk and uncertainty drove developers towards other software choices, not because developers are opposed to Unity asking for an engine license fee (after all, they already incorporate console fees, app store fees, etc. into their business models), but because Unity created financial uncertainty: they couldn't forecast those fees with decent probability and precision, and because they no longer trusted Unity not to try to retroactively screw them years down the road. Unity fixed the first problem, but now they've got to work to win back trust on the second.

[Qwertious]

>Unity made two cardinal sins: creating a pricing model that didn't align with customers' business models (tying price to downloads rather than revenue)

Everyone is assuming the majority of Unity's customers ("most" as measured by $$$, not by quantity of devs) aren't F2P games. I'm not sure that's actually the case; if most of their revenue comes from F2P then shafting everyone else in order to shore up their F2P business would likely be the correct business decision.

[grotorea]

I'm not sure I follow. Aren't F2P games most misaligned with pricing per download since that means they end up with a bunch of negative value consumers and complete uncertainty whether they will end up with a positive or negative balance since they can't know much they will expend?

The traditional game developers can just go "Unity takes 1$ per download (or whatever), the average player downloads 3 times, the game costs 10$, 3$ goes to the storefront, so we have am average profit of 4$", which seems simple enough to deal with to me.

[ffgjgf1]

> complete uncertainty whether they will end up with a positive or negative balance since they can't know much they will expend?

Which forces them to use Unity’s Ads and other services which can be used to offset the per install fee. So on paper Unity would win either way.

[philipov]

Thanks for introducing me to Williams v Walker-Thomas. In the ocean of Paywalled Law School Study Guide SEO, I can't find anywhere that tells the last chapter of the story. In light of Wright's decision, how did the lower court finally rule? After being given permission, did they actually follow through and throw out the contract?

[gmerc]

It seems obscure, you’d probably have to pay for the records.

https://chat.openai.com/share/537dd325-1c5c-422b-8b4a-a44852...

[HillRat]

Apologies for not seeing this earlier; faced with an unfavorable ruling (and, I believe, the UCC coming into force in DC around that time, which surely couldn't have helped their position), the store dropped its attempts to repossess the furniture in question, and settled the case with a damages payment to Williams.