Latest on the Unity Backlash
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Unity's CEO hinted at their intention to change pricing back in May 2023
I stumbled upon the webcast from the execs (CEO and CFO) from earlier in May 2023, and since it’s a call with investors, investors can ask a bunch of questions and there’s usually some interesting things discussed about strategy for increasing profitability and such. Turns out that John Riccitiello, the CEO of Unity, mentioned back at that time, while answering a question, that the company would be looking at turning the low-tier users (who were not paying much for far) into a new revenue source (he’s specifically mentioning the runtime, which is what is installed at the end of the day on every machine that runs Unity games). Check it out: [...]
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The Obvious Warning Sign: The decision by Unity to screw over its developers, even if they reverse it, points at deeper unresolved issues in the digital economy.
I’m not a console gamer at this point—and I admit my taste leans a little more in the retro direction, largely because of what I grew up with. But if you were to ask me who created these games, I would most assuredly say their developers. I understand that, at a higher level, developers use tools that come with their own sunk costs—they have to pay for the laptops, the development environments, and the tooling. But when it comes down to it, the spark of creation is all theirs.
Which is why the Unity situation is so infuriating. It’s not that we don’t understand the fact that Unity, in creating a gaming-oriented development environment, created something important by building a development infrastructure and ecosystem—of course they did. But at some point, their role in the creation should end. They should remain the helping hand behind the scenes—not the constant reminder in front of them.
But with some policy sleight-of-hand and a sudden rate change, that is very much not the case. They want to charge developers per install for the right to use their runtime. It’s a classic case of the studio upstaging the director and the cast which … is kind of a trend right now.
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Unity Considers Tentative Changes To Controversial Policies
The backlash to this scheme was immediate and painful. Indie devs announced they would either be pulling their games or swapping to a new engine. CEO John Riccitiello got put back on the radar as everyone's CEO to hate after he had done so well to avoid the spotlight since ruining EA. Death threats were sent in which forced an office closure. And Unity's stock price plunged in the following days as doubts over the company's future were cast.
In response, Unity sent out a feckless apology last night and promised changes. However, they kept hush about what those changes would be, which only served to open them up to more mockery and hate. Now, as reported by Jason Schreier of Bloomberg, Unity has laid out a tentative plan to try and repair its reputation while still wringing money out of devs.