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An open letter to our community

blog.unity.com

151–160 of 223 posts

Re: An open letter to our community

#151
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It says that they're trusting developer provided numbers, and they've basically moved from literal installs to basically a user count metric provided by the developer, so it seems there is no need for it to be DRMed or phone home.

Ah, I didn't spot that they no longer require counting installs. But you're right; this is probably what "the number of new people" means. And the "2.5% revenue share" variant means no hurdles for freeware. So a real improvement indeed. Thanks for the corrections!

And freeware can get rid of the Made with Unity splash screen now, so it's honestly a big step up from where we were before. I'd still rather switch to Godot, but at least I can walk away from Unity calmly instead of running away screaming.

Re: An open letter to our community

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did walk back charging per download/install. There was no way they couldn't. Its literally not practical.

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

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.)

Re: An open letter to our community

#153
Their executives make millions. They make millions because they are supposed to have unique insights and skills that the rest of us don't have. These insights are supposed to exactly avoid this situation where they probably killed the company with an absolutely irresponsible plan (from a business perspective). I think this is a historical blunder in the the industry and will be studied in business schools in the future.

There is no amount of walkback that will work here. The only possible way out, if any is even possible, would be a summary dismissal of their entire leadership team due to gross incompetence. These people don't deserve even minimum wage, much less the millions they make. A junior business manager out of school wouldn't have made such irresponsible, company-killing move. These are some of the worst executives in gaming history, to be honest.

Re: An open letter to our community

#154
If you as a gamer or developer are unhappy with this outcome or are unhappy that this happened at all.

Have a reminder that Godot (an open source MIT License) game engine could use your support, Godot offers a way to address this long term instead of relying on a contract with an untrustworthy company:

Use:

Homepage with download links for Latest and LTS versions for Android, Linux, macOS, Windows, and Web (you can build for iOS but cannot write on it).

https://godotengine.org/

Code/document/contribute:

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/contributing/ways_to_...

Donate/fund: https://fund.godotengine.org/

IMO there is nothing Unity can realistically do to regain trust, when a corporation shows you what their goals are and how they plan to reach them; believe it.

Re: An open letter to our community

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 rigamar…

> 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.

Re: An open letter to our community

#156
post #80
post #4

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 woul…

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…

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.

Re: An open letter to our community

#157
post #103

"We should have spoken with more of you and we should have incorporated more of your feedback before announcing our new Runtime Fee policy. Our goal with this policy is to ensure we can continue to support you today and tomorrow, and keep deeply investing in our game engine." It is hard to think of a diplomatic response to this specific framing. Of course the first substantive paragraph was this. It's inevitable, and…

I’m curious, what would you recommend they should have said instead?

Not GP, but for a while I have thought that PR shitstorms should be treated like security breaches and outages.

So you do a blameless post-mortem where you outline what went wrong, your five whys, and what steps you are taking to make sure it doesn't happen again.

The Rust leadership did it right during the RustConf scandal. Key figures resigned (from leadership, not from their respective teams), changes in procedure were announced, process transitions were accelerated, etc.

Here Unity is just saying "here's somsome decisions we're lightly amending, sorry you got upset".

Re: An open letter to our community

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn't bother me so much if not for the fact that they get lauded as geniuses for every innovation coming out of their companies. I've seen dozens of people on LinkedIn claiming that Elon Musk invented self-landing rockets, and they get mad at me when respond with "no he fucking didn't! He hired people to figure that stuff out". So I think "Fine, I guess you could make some kind of transitive argument that he hi…

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Re: An open letter to our community

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 reco…

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...

Re: An open letter to our community

#160
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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.

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