Unity May Never Win Back the Developers It Lost in Its Fee Debacle

- Oh we're well beyond "Find Out." We're at Uniexit

They shouldn't. They're not apologizing for what they're doing, but are behaving like politicians, changing the rhetoric to try to get people to like what they're going to do anyway.
- Are we sure it's not the politicians behaving like they're running a business? 😅
  (It's probably both groups behaving like they're trying to manipulate a large populace to meet their goals, no big conspiracy, just coincidentally they're both trying to accomplish the same thing.)
  
  Are there even distinct groups we're talking about anymore?
  
  Another fun thing to deal with thanks to Reagan's worthless ass. The only good thing to come from that pile of shits presidency was his dementia.

The thing is, they don't even have to lose all their developers. They just have to lose enough so that introductory gamedev classes start being taught in Godot, indie devs start seeing Godot as a viable option and employers start posting listings looking for Godot experience. Unity was the default engine for lower-budget games for years, and now that's gone.
- one of the best things out of all this is how many new people are now making youtube tutorials on Godot. The huge amount of new monthly donations to the Godot Foundation is also great
- I hope to see a lot of the features added to Godot that Unity refugees have been requesting and working on (because, yknow, open-source) and would expect to see at least 25% Godot 25% Unity 50% Unreal in the job market. Although honestly it is more likely that Unreal takes up a larger share of the market going forward, whereas in the past it has been like 60% Unity positions and 40% Unreal positions (due to Unity use on smaller projects, indie games, and use in the VR training industry).
  
  2D projects also used Unity at a very high rate. Unreal has never really been considered suitable for 2D work. I'm not sure if Godot is.
  
  Waiting for the ability to target mobile in c# and for embedding to work.. should see that in the next year I think with the renewed focus on it.. we don't use many unity features but those two are kinda showstoppers right now.
- Should I start learning Godot? I’m not a game dev, but I know C/Cpp and game dev has been interesting to me.
  
  Nobody can tell you in advance how far your interest in game dev will take you. Only one way to find out: start small (some tutorials, build some crappy first) and see if your interest sticks around as you up the challange.
  Maybe game dev in Godot will end up being a significant chapter in your life, maybe it will just be a small sidequest. But once you've given it an honest try, no matter the outcome, you at least will know if it's something for you or not. That in itself is already worth something.
  And who knows: maybe Godot is just your entry gateway to something else you discover along the way, which you wouldn't have discovered if you hadn't taken on the challange in the first place.
  
  If you know C++ already, Unreal is a much more natural starting point than either Unity or Godot.
  Unreal is what gets used in many AAA shops - it's not a monopoly by any means but it is the most common off-the-shelf engine in the industry. Unity's main edge is that it's easy to learn but if you are comfortable in C++ then there's no real benefit to Unity.
  Godot uses GDScript, which is a custom scripting language that's meant to be easy to learn. It's FOSS so you don't need to worry about being screwed over - but it's a lot less mature than something like Unreal which can ship on everything you can think of.
  But my advice is to make small things. Don't hyperfocus on a dream game. Just make things that will take a weekend (maybe a week at most). Then move on to something else.
  When I was getting into game dev, I made a couple simple projects then jumped into my dream game. I spent so long making that one game that I never finished.
  When I got hired in the industry, they cared more about what I released than what my education or job experience was. Because that one big game was never finished, I wound up with my smaller "just getting started" games on my resume; stuff I had made but wasn't proud of. But those games were at least finished and available to the public... and they were what got me hired, not my magnum opus overscoped unfinished indie game I never completed.
  
  If you want to use C/C++ you may be more interested in O3DE, although it's a AAA specialized game engine that's not very user friendly. If you're new to game dev in general, then Godot is definitely the easiest to get started with, but you should use GDScript and not C/C++.
  EDIT: or just make your own little game engine with OpenGL or Vulkan, That's probably the most effective way to learn nearly everything..
  
  There is C# support in Godot. I'm not sure how many tutorials have been made with it in particular, but I think there's plenty. Plus their docs go over the API differences so shouldn't be hard to use in any case

Unity engaged not only in a massive attepted money grab but then tried to back it with some bad-faith action like quietly deleting user protections from its TOS.
We have seen the true face of the Unity company and it wants to prey on its clients. Also the timing (during an ongoing trend of enshittification) reminds us publicly-owned companies are not our friends. In fact, the are adversarial to their own employees and customers.
The company needs to show an immense amount of contrition (say firing its top officers) or it needs to wither to a quarter of its current value.

I'm reminded of a motivational poster at my first job. "Unhappy customers may not complain. They just won't come back."
- That's how I do. I don't like to publicly complain unless I was clearly ripped off.
- Your first job had a weird idea of motivation.
  “You might suck, but no one will tell you!”
- ‘90s: “And that’s why we need to make sure they’re happy with our products and services”
  2020s: “And where the F they wanna go? We’re a monopoly and they’re locked into our tech ecosystem”

Why should anybody trust their livelihood to this company now, knowing that the rug could get pulled out from under them at any moment? Building up good faith takes years, losing it only takes one day.

You know, companies could avoid situations like this if they just engaged directly with their fanbases more, proposing ideas and collecting feedback. This way, even if they decide to do the unpopular thing anyway because they have to for financial reasons or something, at least they're not springing a sudden surprise on their fans.
People really don't like negative surprises. They can usually handle plain old negative news though, especially if they got time to prepare for the idea first.
I think they sometimes try to use focus groups to collect feedback, but members of a focus group may exhibit unique behavior simply because they're in a focus group. It's not an actual representative sample of the public.
- You know, companies could avoid situations like this if they just engaged directly with their fanbases more . . .
  Not even their fanbase in this scenario, but the majority of their paying business customers. Pissing off your fanbase/hobbyists is one thing, but completely alienating your biggest profit generating consumers is just beyond incompetent.
  
  Minor quibble that game devs are actually a smaller fraction of their overall revenues, as their tech has uses far beyond games. They have industrial product lines too.
  Kinda like how Amazon's main thing isn't selling shippable products anymore, it's cloud computing and digital infrastructure. Or was last I checked anyway, it might've changed again.
  You're otherwise totally right though.
- I completely agree, old school RuneScape does this very well and I wish more companies tried to engage their users as much as those devs do
  
  Jagex has supposedly been barely successful forever tho, unity takes in billions by being shitters. In the end that’s all some companies care about
- You know, companies could avoid situations like this if they just engaged directly with their fanbases more, proposing ideas and collecting feedback.
  Good news: Apparently Unity did engage with its developers behind closed door for a whole year, they told them this was a bad idea; internally the execs were told this was a bad idea, and here we are.
- I'm sure even floating the idea would have been bad. One of the biggest problems with the unity changes was that they were retroactive. That they can even change the fee structure so dramatically after you've already built and shipped your game should give anyone using them pause. I don't think people really considered that as a possibility before.
- That's the problem - based on the CEO selling almost all his stock over time and rumors attributed to employees, they knew.
  A company turning a consistent modest profit is good for many people, but makes no one rich. It's a good investment and provides for many people, but is meaningless if you're already rich.
  A company exploding to 100x its size makes a bunch of people very rich and a lot of people more wealthy, but is very rare in this age where the world is already as industrialized as anyone wants it to be. There's nowhere else to expand, no underdeveloped countries with resources to buy for pennies on the dollar
  A company imploding can make a few people rich... but it's a big guaranteed payout if you see it coming.
  That's the stage of capitalism we've been at for a while - cannibalization.
- I feel like it's pretty obvious this was a greedy and terrible idea. The fact they proposed this at all alone is enough to never trust them again. It's not that they didn't know. They knew. No one would be okay with this cash grab and they know it. They just didn't realize HOW big the pushback was going to be but they DID know what they were doing was wrong.
  
  This is probably going to improve, not decrease, their profitability. They wouldn't have been so blase about burning all those bridges otherwise.
  Yeah, they make revenue from game devs, but there's costs there too. If the costs are too high compared to their industrial contracts, then the smartest move is to kick all their game dev customers out. While preserving as much general public goodwill as possible.
  So, how else could they escape the game engine business? The method they chose would be more effective than any other I can think of. It preserves a trickle of game dev revenue and makes them look silly instead of backstabbing. When a proper backstab was actually the desired result, but too bold to actually say they wanted.
  My hypothesis anyway.

Yeah I can't imagine why I would start a project with Unity at this point. That's just asking to get screwed over later with no warning.
- It appears that Unity shot itself in both feet and also its face. It's been a long time since I've seen such a spectacular betrayal of trust by a business where confidence in your product is paramount. Even with extreme backpedling, it's in the can.
  
  Wizard of the Coast license fiasco is about the same. Except of course that "confidence in your product" is a bit of a misnomer. It's not a confidence in the D&D, but the license. A lot of people were trusting the OGL, and the changes would have fucked over half of the industry with their "retroactive" changes.
- I was maybe 10 hours of work into a small side project and I just said fuck it and started over in Godot. No reason to use Unity unless you are a studio that's deep into development or supporting a game that's already out.

- Right? Do they think executive compensation grows on trees?
  
  "Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.”
  Ford stared in disbelief at the crowd who were murmuring appreciatively at this and greedily fingering the wads of leaves with which their track suits were stuffed.
  “But we have also,” continued the management consultant, “run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying one ship’s peanut."
  Murmurs of alarm came from the crowd. The management consultant waved them down.
  “So in order to obviate this problem,” he continued, “and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and. . .er, burn down all the forests. I think you'll all agree that's a sensible move under the circumstances."
  The crowd seemed a little uncertain about this for a second or two until someone pointed out how much this would increase the value of the leaves in their pockets whereupon they let out whoops of delight and gave the management consultant a standing ovation. The accountants among them looked forward to a profitable autumn aloft and it got an appreciative round from the crowd.”
- ❤️shareholder value❤️

They were willing to fuck over some people and drive them completely out of business.
Which people? Developers. The very people that helped make Unity what it is. Unity wanted to completely crush their own developers. Some estimates put Unity's fees higher than 100% revenue in some scenarios.
Them back-tracking and saying "wow! we didn't expect this to be so hated!" shows that they either don't understand numbers (they do) or that they think their users are idiots.
So why would developers want to come back to them?
- John Riccitello literally called developers "fucking idiots" in an interview, so yeah, it's the second option.

We’re here on lemmy and mastodon, but Reddit and twitter still have waaaay more users. Unities move has boosted the popularity of other (open source) alternatives, sure, and if I was a game dev I would transition, but most of the devs and studios are going to need a lot more incentive to abandon the tool they spend decades getting to know
- Good point. All unity users are basically (small) businesses, which does make a difference in how they might react. But I still think the entire platform going under because of this decision is more wishful thinking (wishing that corporate greed is punished) then an inevitability at this point in time
- I could still use Reddit for free. At any point, I can easily decide to install the app and use it in parallel. I can go back-and-forth with 0 consequences. My income is not dependent on my ability to access Reddit.
  Developers have made the business decision to use Unity or not, and this debacle pretty seriously impacts that decision.
- Unfortunately, this is likely true. If people can keep using Twitter after all that has happened, people will certainly continue to use Unity and for more legitimate reasons.
  
  I don’t think so. Twitter doesn’t fundamentally change the finances of your business. People are unlikely to feel safe building their entire passion project around an untrustworthy corporation.
- They’ll see longtime customers start to divest, I’m sure. I’d imagine most of the damage done was to their future new customer numbers. Anyone starting a project today would be pretty foolish to even consider Unity, and they’ll feel that more and more going forward. The death rattle’s begun.
  
  I’d personally seek out any good open source alternatives before trying anything else nowadays. I’m pretty happy with blender and krita now I’m starting to get back into animation and drawing. But I’m old, I don’t know if joung people would not simply choose the one that is free-ish and more popular and better supported
- Yeah but with the macroeconomics nowadays, this is not a good time to be losing users.

you mean all the people who said they weren't coming back even after the obvious rollback of the policy aren't coming back? 😱
- breaking news: betrayed devs arent coming back

And they never should, the fact that they can push this outrageous policy in the first place just means that they can do it again in the near future

The takeaway is to never hire people from EA into decision making roles.

GOOD

Unity doesn’t deserve them back.

I think it's vital that the community now makes the effort to recreate what was made around Unity with the voluntary support material and everything that made it a reference of approachability, over with an open source alternative that may become definitive.
Going to Unreal Engine, even though it might look like the obvious move atm, might be near sighted, and unwise.
What's preventing this from happening again down the line with another big corporation? Monetary incentives always change.
Is it Godot? Maybe.
The community needs it's blender, and now may be the best opportunity to do it. It's a matter of organization and foresight. It's been proven to be doable.
- Godot is the only really viable alternative, IMO. No other open source engine comes close.
- Just wanted to point out that, actually, Blender has an integrated game engine. It's not very feature rich, but it integrates it's 3D renderer seamlessly. Just find it ironic, that Blender is really a candidate to be gamedev new Blender.

Why would they? When you choose a platform to sink multiple years of effort into, you look for stability, for example the stability of not having a history of trying to rugpull their customers.

Of course they won't. They basically took a hammer to their reputation and completely smashed it to bits. All for that gacha game scratch that will also diminish as those developers move future projects to a new engine.

If they had just listened to the feedback, realized their mistake, even if it took a while, and then backpedaled to the current compromise, they probably wouldn't have hurt their business much. It was the disdain they showed for small developers, basically saying they weren't going to address issues like reinstallation and other things that would make a big difference to smaller projects. And then quietly altering their TOS, to make the small developers that made the platform able to exist, have to start paying even if the contract at the time protected them from the fees if they didn't upgrade.
This kind of disregard for the people who made your company what it is today, just to make some short term profit is exactly why Reddit, Twitter, and so many other tech companies are falling apart right now. It's just happening to such extremes that it's not just let's price gouge our customers and patrons, but let's actively commit fraud to squeeze out every possible dime from all but our biggest customers and throw them away. Fortunately, places like Lemmy and Mastodon are here to catch them. Hope they can make it.

For the best. Companies need to learn to tread carefully when dealing with customers, they can't be allowed to get off lightly for trying anti-consumer practices like this.
- Actually the reason this didn't work out is because they are in the B2B, not business to consumer business.
  
  Turns out other businesses aren't fond of being asked to pay a dollar to reload, who knew?
  They keep walking back further and their stock prices just keep plummeting. I would like to say I hope the CEO, who is the former CEO of EA, for any who aren't aware, gets fired for this. But we all know that no matter how hard he messes up, some other business will pay him millions in incentives to pick him up.

Goes to show that destroying trust is quite easy, but earning trust is very hard.

This shouldn't be news. It should be expected that when a company does something that shows it doesn't have its customers' best interests in mind, it's immediately and wholly abandoned. That is the only reaction that gives consumers a level playing field with corporations. If we show them we can forgive them, they'll purposefully use the forgiving nature against us.

If you destroy good will you're likely not going to get it back in any situation.
- Can be destroyed in an instant, but takes years to build.

Good! Companies who let shitty people run it and let those people make shitty decisions should die. It's time for there to be some actual risk involved in being C-suite.

I had no idea John ricitiello was the CEO of unity. Holy shit that's bad. With his reputation I'm surprised anyone even used unity. Should have seen this coming a mile away. He wants to slurp money out of every conceivable orifice.
That guy fucking sucks.

Saw a bunch of idiots calling the smaller devs "not serious about making games" for switching engines.

Sure as shit not winning me back. Hell, even the Discord server has taken on some of the same attitudes as StackOverflow, and who wants to deal with that all day?
- Can you elaborate about the "attitudes of stackoverflow"?
  
  Can't speak for @sebinspace, but StackOverflow tends to be aggressive if not outright hostile towards inexperienced users. I have a lot of nub questions because I'm awful at programming, but almost everything I come across from searches have a layer of smug disdain that I have to look past.
  It's not a paid Helpdesk by any means, but there's no need to treat honest and respectful requests for help with attitudes and insults.
  
  @car wasn’t far off, but the general attitude I get when going there is that, like StackOverflow, a lot of people there are professionals and will give you their professional opinion, and they do take the whole server fairly seriously. There’s not really anything wrong with that, but it’s not for me. I never had the kind of maturity required to fit in at a company like that or in a professional environment of that type. Shit, I even tried phone sales at one point, and it felt very office-y, and.. idk if I’m explaining what I mean very well. It just wasn’t for me. It feels stuffy, maybe that’s the word.
  In contrast, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in the Godot discord, specifically in voice, which the Unity discord very rarely participates in. While there have been a few toxic individuals, the feeling I get is that of a community that takes itself far less seriously, is far more laid back, and is more willing to shoot the shit, but at the same time, if someone needs help, it’s very well moderated, people will be very concise about their explanations, and doesn’t really tell you how to solve your problem with A by using B instead, unless you specifically ask if there’s a better general solution.
  Again, this is on the whole, YMMV, but I’ve been having more fun with gamedev just being around those people than I ever did on the Unity discord.
  Although both are better than the Unity Forums. Fuck you, Eric5h5

If I was a developer, I wouldn't give them a second chance at this point.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes shrugs

When you make your business dependent on a single supplier, that's a massive risk. I don't quite understand why many Managers don't grasp that concept. There are two solutions: build your own infrastructure or use something that's either publicly available (like open source software) or easily replaceable (like a library with a common interface that many others also implement in a way that would also solve your usecase).
If you don't do that, one day in the future your supplier will increase the cost until it's just below the cost of switching. If the cost of switching is more than you can afford at that point, you are screwed.
Cloud computing anyone?

It's the trust thermocline again. When will companies learn to do more ground level research before pulling bullshit like this?

I'd hope not. I hope the devs realize that its a gamble to put all your eggs in one basket

Unity could get them back if they fired their CEO, John Riticello
- don't forget: calling devs idiots
- Nope, don’t care.
  
  Yeah, I know. I just want them to fire the asshole anyway.
  
  Yep. No matter the CEO. The fact the even can do it means they'll probably try.

Once they cheat on you, you can’t trust them again.

I think it's time to revisit the question of why these corporations exist as "people" under the law, when they clearly operate without humanity. The perversion of justice that granted them this right was taken directly from the 14th Amendment in 1886. That amendment was written to grant citizenship to freed slaves. What a coincidence that slavery ended, but was immediately replaced with a new structure called corporations.
- It's a practical policy. You want corporations to be able to enter into contracts, pay taxes, have legal responsibilities, etc.
  Corporations already existed before the 14th amendment. So many valid critiques of capitalism but I don't understand the fixation with this one.
  If they weren't "persons" then contracts would simply change their wordings but would still be functionally the same. It's like changing the color of a sports team jersey.
  You should be more concerned with the workers owning the means of production. That can happen with or without corporate personhood. And that will be what actually brings us an equitable society.
  
  It's certainly "practical" for shareholders with controlling interests in these publicly traded companies, but very impractical for everyone else.
  The word corporation may have existed before the 14th Amendment, but the legal definition was entirely different. The word "Country" was also used to describe the state a person was from in the 19th century, if asked about one's country, one would would reply with the name of their state of residence. The meaning over a word can change entirely in a couple generations.
  What criticism of capitalism is more relevant than the abomination of corporate personhood? Toss a few more right-wing Supreme Court rulings into the mix like Citizen's United giving corporations the ability to spend unlimited and unregulated money lobbying (buying) the legislative system and you have a nation in decline with a failing economic system.
  Legally only citizens are allowed to lobby congress, if corporations were no longer considered people, then real people would have more access to power than their corporate overlords.

Am not sure why anyone would stay with them at this point. Even if they have a huge project which is massively popular, they have every reason to move away from them since they wanted to apply those changes retroactively. Imagine if they came up with half a million in fees years after your project has stopped selling and you have invested money into new project or elsewhere. Sure, it might be illegal to do so, but good luck fighting them in court.
New projects I wouldn't even think twice. They backpedaled on this occasion but their goal is clear and there was no guarantee they won't try this kind of thing again which leads me to thinking it's only a matter of time when they will try more sneakily to squeeze changes in.

Trust is a very strong but brittle thing. Once broken it tends to shatter like glass. I'm sure this situation would feel like a sword of Damocles to anyone who has significant investment in the unity platform, and who would want to voluntarily walk into such a position now?

I thought competition is supposed to be good?
Not like that I guess.

good.