Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

gamerbraves.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 180 posts

Re: Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

#131

Post by cezart »

harles wrote: post #104
brundolf wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'll see I guess! But even if it's not illegal the shortsightedness is staggering, which makes me question if leadership would have even foreseen legal problems

I think this is called a single round game. They screw everyone over and will never be trusted again, but get a one time payout in the process. It just seems like a company of Unity’s scale must have a better plan than that.

Since the goal of management is to provide shareholder value, could the current management be sued by the shareholders for basically destroying the long term value of the company?

Re: Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

#132

Post by wodenokoto »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #64
bhouston wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those 27cents per install are a lot of money for those type of games and will even make some business models no longer feasible. Exactly. So if they did this in an upfront way, they would have said that starting with Unity 2024 there is this new cost structure. Then game devs can make informed choices if they want to build those types of games on the platform. This retroactive stuff is insane and I cannot figure ou…

> This retroactive stuff is insane and I cannot figure out how a company can make that type of move if they care about their users. I can't even understand how it can possibly be legal. How on earth is it even possible to say "your game which was released before we updated this license is subject to the updated version"? IANAL but that sure seems like something which would require both parties to agree to the updated…

Well, it depends on how you think of the license. Is it like you buy a license for a specific release or do you subscribe to a license to the software across all releases?

I don’t know. I can see how it would be ridiculous if Amazon said “oh, by the way, starting next year you have to pay a cent every time you finish any of the books you bought on your kindle”

But if Netflix went “starting next year, there’s a surcharge of 1 cent per episode you watch” nobody would go “surely it can only count for episodes released from next year!

Which raises an interesting question to me: what if a developer wants out of the Unity contract? Does that mean they have to somehow break games consumers already purchased so as not to be liable to install fees?

Re: Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

#133

Post by hawkguy »

noduerme wrote: post #117

Adobe put a silent kill switch into Flash player, rendering 10 years worth of casual games I'd written immediately unplayable. As a result of Adobe's actions, a whole sector of lone devs and small teams turned to Unity to build games that would've otherwise been built in AS3. I'm glad I didn't end up going that route, but I really feel for the folks who are now getting screwed again.

I just got started learning about Flash so I could mod Starfield’s UI. The kill switch thing actually disgusted me, like I had to re-read the article explaining it because I couldn’t believe it was possible, let alone thinkable. All that history, just gone. I spent so many hours in the computer lab at school playing Flash games, man. Glad Ruffle exists.

Re: Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

#134

Post by meheleventyone »

TheRoque wrote: post #87
perryizgr8 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can say whatever you want in a contract. If the other party thinks it is illegal they take you to court and the judge decides.

But it means that their legal teams say that it's legit already, so that's why most people assume that this is legal.

This is an extremely bad way to view a contract.

Re: Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

#135

Post by j5155 »

wodenokoto wrote: post #132
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This retroactive stuff is insane and I cannot figure out how a company can make that type of move if they care about their users. I can't even understand how it can possibly be legal. How on earth is it even possible to say "your game which was released before we updated this license is subject to the updated version"? IANAL but that sure seems like something which would require both parties to agree to the updated…

Well, it depends on how you think of the license. Is it like you buy a license for a specific release or do you subscribe to a license to the software across all releases? I don’t know. I can see how it would be ridiculous if Amazon said “oh, by the way, starting next year you have to pay a cent every time you finish any of the books you bought on your kindle” But if Netflix went “starting next year, there’s a surcha…

Reminder that Amazon did something like that once: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/techn...

Re: Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

#136

Post by ffhhttt »

umpalumpaaa wrote: post #13
bhouston wrote: post #6

This could have been done in a much better fashion to achieve the long term desired outcome (more income) while also ensuring continued trust and transparency with their community. Simply, they could have not made this retroactive on existing released games. Rather just be clear that going forward, games build using the new Unity versions would have a per-installation fee. And they would slowly discontinue support fo…

The problem is that they did it retroactively and they also added a per install/download fee. So if your game has 1mio installs you pad the install fee x 1 Million. Unreal has no install fee like this. “A 5% royalty is due only if you are distributing an off-the-shelf product that incorporates Unreal Engine code (such as a game). Provided that you notify us on time using the Release Form, you will only owe royalties…

> 27cents

Realistically it’s closer to 3-5 cents per install. Where did you get 27? Even personal/plus is cheaper than that in the worst case (ie. 100% of your users are in NA, the richer parts of Western Europe etc)

Re: Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

#137

Post by ffhhttt »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #97
gmerc wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are mistaking what the CEO and the VCs want with what a long term stable company would want. The incentives don’t work that way. The CEO gets his bonus and ability to sell shares if he pleases VCs and VCs are looking for bagholders for the company. So the CEO creates a revenue narrative to sell to institutional investors so they take an increasingly mediocre asset from the VCs at a premium. The pattern is all aro…

This comment makes no sense considering Unity is a publicly traded company.

Why? IMHO it makes more sense for a public company.

Re: Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

#138

Post by ffhhttt »

preommr wrote: post #84
bhouston wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most games on the Switch and Quest devices for sure. A lot of mobile games as well. Over 1B games sold on the switch: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/1-billion-switch-games-hav... We can assume at least one game per Quest was sold: https://www.roadtovr.com/quest-sales-20-million-retention-st... Hard to figure out the mobile numbers.

That list (which is at least half of switch game sales) are nintendo games that don't use Unity. I'd be shocked if half of the remaining 500mn games sold used unity. But if they did, at .20c, that's like 50mn dollars. As for the quest sales, that's another 4mn. It seems extremely foolhardy to cause this much damage to their reputation and potential growth as a multi-billion dollar company (market cap of 13bn) for 50-…

> at .20c

Zero of them would be paying $0.2 per instal. Probably much closer to $0.03-0.05.

Nobody could ship games in the Switch using the personal edition and nobody who understands basic math would be paying $0.2 even after these prices go into effect

Re: Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

#139

Post by ffhhttt »

tomnipotent wrote: post #76
zerocrates wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder just how much this change is geared at capturing value from what's already out there, i.e. the retroactivity is the point.

> geared at capturing value from what's already out there This sounds like a plausible motive. There's a handful of huge games using Unity that together generate upwards of 20bln annually, such as Pokemon GO, Honor of Kings, and Genshin Impact. I'm guessing their soundbite of "developers being excited" over the change is with those behemoths in mind, and not the other games that are barely making ends meet. These par…

> everyone else would now be more profitable with Unreal

To be fair only F2P games that makes less than ~$2 per user might be more profitable. For almost everyone else above the 1 million threshold Unity would still be cheaper.

Re: Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

#140

Post by jkaplowitz »

yAak wrote: post #91
numpad0 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That and/or they wanted to set up existing games. Something like 1 in 5 of top 50 iOS games, free-to-play and majority Asian(Chinese or Japanese), are making banks and on Unity. Personally I’m wondering if Chinese gamedev industry would “buy Godot” or do something to that effect. Japanese publishers won’t be able to do that nor would be willing to pay, so I’m guessing they’ll migrate existing to UE or wind down Unity…

Thankfully Godot is safe from acquisition: https://godotengine.org/governance/ (Or, at least they say they are.)

I just dug into the details. Yes, it looks pretty legitimate: copyright remains held by the individual contributors without a Contributor License Agreement, they are sponsored by a true non-profit foundation with robust non-profit policies and suitably non-profit legal status in the Netherlands, their money and important assets like the Godot trademark itself are held by a mixture of that non-profit foundation and (possibly as a transitional matter) the longstanding free software non-profit charity in the US which was their primary legal home for 7 years.

I was formerly heavily involved in the leadership of the other major US non-profit charity that does this kind of fiscal sponsorship (and which maintained a friendly and collaborative relationship with the charity that Godot previously used). They’re not scamming you in the way of a lot of executives at VC-funded for-profit startups (and their acquirers) when they make entirely legally unenforceable statements about what will or won’t happen in the future which they don’t necessarily even believe themselves.

Post reply on HN