[dagmx]

Unity got raked over the coals for *retroactively* changing the licensing fees for developers in a way that negatively impacted a common existing business model amongst their customers.

It’s fair to not like the Apple fees but the scenario isn’t equivalent.

One was a rug pull. If they did that all along it wouldn’t have been as big an issue.

[johnnyanmac]

I'd say it's still equivalent. I just think apple was smart knowing most people are comfy in the walled garden and won't throw up a fuss.

Similar to Unity, these pricing ding the smaller people the most. But unlike Unity, the bigger players aren't joining the protest. I guess I was just foolish thinking businesses would at least think in the middle-term of "what if we want our own storefront one day ". I guess the EU might pick up that ball, but the Apathy from other devs is a bit disenheartening. The same Apathy that let these companies enshittify the net and turn into trillionaires as punishment

[ffgjgf1]

> Unity, these pricing ding the smaller people the most

I don’t think that’s true. A very small proportion of smaller developers might have been disproportionately affected but Unity was just complete garbage at communicating the changes (not trying to downplay the retroactive bit, no excuse for that). Most people just didn’t bother reading the fine print or calculating the actual fees themselves and just looked at the published headlines.

[johnnyanmac]

>A very small proportion of smaller developers might have been disproportionately affected

I don't think it was a small portion. The main point was that the lowest cost plan was horrible and a ploy to get you to buy Unity Pro. If you weren't a free (as in freedom) app, it as a complete negative to be on the base plan.

[ffgjgf1]

IIRC you weren’t affected if your revenue was under $100k and you couldn’t use the free version before the change anyway if it was over that. I might be wrong but I’m almost sure that that proportion was close to zero.

> it as a complete negative to be on the base plan.

With the changes if you didn’t get pro after surpassing the revenue it would have gotten price but that wasn’t even an option previously.

I think it was actually a significant improvement for some people in that position:

- the cap was now per game/project instead of company

- you could still surpass the previous cap a bit and save some money by paying for install instead of immediately being required to get pro.

Everybody just seem to ignore that/ didn’t notice it because Unity did such a garbage job explaining the changes.

(I’m not really defending them, they only had to introduce this few because they almost literally burnt billions between by pointlessly buying random companies and going on some deranged hiring spree for no reason..)

[dagmx]

How are they equivalent other than a fee existing at all, and how is that different than a revenue share that Epic do? Apple hasn’t added a new fee to existing devs. The reason you see apathy is that this doesn’t negatively change the status quo.

It provides new options. Granted they might not like the terms of the new options , as you clearly don’t. But nothing has been taken away from them in the process. It is completely unsurprising that there is apathy.

Unity tried to change the terms from under people which changed their livelihood prospective negatively.

If the only equivalence is that there’s a fee, then that applies to a lot more to the point it’s meaningless. Epic do a revenue share. Unity should have done a revenue share but did something more trackable without requiring regular audits.

Ultimately it wasn’t Unity’s actual fee that was the problem, had it been a new tier. But it retroactively changed things for people.

[johnnyanmac]

If you had any plans at all to maybe think of an alternative app store, it's equivalent. You have an expectation from a competitor who allows this and IOS instead will charge you despite not using their own store. Pricing that is worse than staying in the walled garden.

If you were apathetic/supportive of Apple and would stay on the App Store anyway, nothing changes. And I suppose a lot of businesses are in this group.

>But nothing has been taken away from them in the process. It is completely unsurprising that there is apathy.

Yes, that's my core problem. But the last two years should have taught me thst companies aren't looking in the long term these days. Epic is, sort of. if only because they have no option given their whole kerfuffle.