An open letter to our community | Unity Blog
blog.unity.com
external-link
An open letter from Marc Whitten to the Unity community in September 2023.
@Hazzard@lemm.ee
link
fedilink
28
edit-2
1Y

Seems like a sensible overhaul, hitting the major issues with the fee, but still going ahead with a version of it. Big points for me:

  • Not retroactive. Only affecting the next version of Unity, and you can even opt out of updating to skip the fee.
  • Data is now reported by the customers. Still not sure how that plan to enforce this, but it’s a hell of a lot better than some arbitrary data collection scheme being baked into the game.
  • Free version is excluded. No charging tiny side projects, or students or something, it only affects already paying customers.

Still not sure I love charging per install as a concept, and they’ve already overplayed their hand and burnt many bridges, but at least this implementation isn’t insanely hostile. Guess we’ll see how this plays out from here.

BolexForSoup
link
fedilink
6
edit-2
1Y

And you can even opt out of updating to skip the fee.

Yeah but how long is this solution really viable? It’s not “skipping” the fee. It’s just putting it off. Eventually your version won’t be supported/will lack too many critical new features. No serious studio is going to work around you if they decided to just pony up.

@nous@programming.dev
link
fedilink
English
81Y

Long enough to learn and switch to a new engine, possibly on your next game.

BolexForSoup
link
fedilink
11Y

deleted by creator

Ferk
link
fedilink
8
edit-2
1Y

Free version is excluded. No charging tiny side projects, or students or something, it only affects already paying customers.

Wasn’t the free version already excluded from the changes before?

What they have done for the Free version is set the limit to 200k (it was 100k before) and they’ll no longer be requiring the Unity logo to be shown, even on the free version.

No game with less than $1 million in trailing 12-month revenue will be subject to the fee.

Uranium3006
link
fedilink
311Y

The trust is already gone. I would never use unity after all this

That’s great but they didn’t say a single word about:

  • the silent license update they made to enable this whole shitshow, which people discovered after they changed the license and had to find archived copies of the previous license to compare against
  • the scummy and anticompetitive (and, in some jurisdictions, possibly illegal) fee vouchers they were handing out to try to nuke AppLovin’s customer base

The retroactive fee stuff was pure idiocy, but the above points are also deeply concerning and problematic, and indicate a leadership culture that appears entirely unconcerned with business ethics. And the exec team is not changing. They will try something similar in the future.

Create a post

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person’s post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you’re posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don’t want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev



  • 1 user online
  • 1 user / day
  • 1 user / week
  • 1 user / month
  • 1 user / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 1.21K Posts
  • 17.8K Comments
  • Modlog