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 would want from a vendor I'm reliant on. Anecdotally, I'm seeing a lot of game devs being surprised at relative ease of migration in some instances, though I imagine there are megaprojects which will have a much worse time.
Crow had to be eaten but it looks like they're only tasting the feathers.
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 are making decisions in the best interest of the users/creators and not only decisions that are in the best interest of the company.
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 recommendations:
1. This is where a "neuro-diverse" person or two can really be an asset. The social dynamic in corporations often leads to people eventually shaking their heads in agreement, even if they have big underlying concerns. Those of us somewhere on the spectrum are less likely to understand those social dynamics in the first place and be more willing to call out BS.
2. Good corporate leaders have trusted outside council that they can run ideas by to get brutally honest feedback.
Exactly. If your project or organization is dependent on some external product or platform, that thing had better be boring and predictable. Busy people don't have the time or the patience to be jerked around by external surprises.
Walk-back or not, Unity is demonstrably not boring and predictable anymore. That's done.
>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.
A lot of devs and studios are, they know they are, Unity knows they are, and there's little anyone can afford to do about it. I suspect most of the crowd that ostensibly abandoned Unity will return because they've already sunk too much time and energy into the platform, and that's the path of least resistance. They will tolerate whatever deal Unity gives them because they can't afford to do otherwise. Even if they liked the alternatives, the only reasonable business decision is to return to Unity and pretend this never happened.
Unfortunately this probably means much of the interest in Godot and other open source alternatives this debacle created is about to evaporate. Inertia is a harsh mistress.
Is Unity's CEO a product guy? It appears that the CEO does not give a shit to the product, or details of pricing policy in this particular case. If so, I could never understand how a tech company would get someone who wouldn't pay attention to such details.
I don't have a horse in the Unity issue, though I've been following it loosely. I can speak to my own response to another organisation.
I'd written off Reddit personally around five-six years ago. This despite having a fairly long-lived bloggy subreddit (and a small smattering of others) on the site, which I still use as a reference (despite having taken it private).
It wasn't specifically on account of the specific technical decisions they'd made, or the site changes (or lack of site changes) resulting, but the fact that those decisions were being made. That is, as with other business organisations I've encountered over the years, Reddit had repeatedly proven themselves antithetical to my own interests and values.
I suspect that's the issue Unity's going through here, and that though the final endgame may take some time in coming, it could well doom the company.
One business strategy that seems to have been increasingly widely adopted over the past decade or two, or perhaps I'm only simply far more cognisant of it and recognise it where it occurs, is the "walk right up to the creepy line" approach (as Eric Schmidt put it: <https://thehill.com/policy/technology/71739-schmidt-google-g...>), or moving products or services right to the pain or tolerance threshold.
In the short term this can work. It can even be successful over a longer term, in cases. But there are two inherent problems with the concept:
1. The threshold, whether it's pain, tolerance, creepiness, or whatever, can change, and often startlingly suddenly. At which point the organisation is caught high and dry.
I've seen IBM, Microsoft, and Google subject to similar shifts, some more pronounced than others, over the years.
Leaving a considerable goodwill moat around offerings is an alternative. I'm too far outside the consumer mainstream to know what business, products, services, and/or brands exemplify this, though I suspect Costco and Trader Joe's might be among these.
Unity lost a lot of goodwill among developers, and it took over a week for them to admit fault. I seriously doubt they planned all along to present a temporary horrible plan, to make their “real” plan easier to swallow.
If this were a 48- or 72-hour turnaround, maybe. But Unity lost a lot of goodwill amongst developers and there are some they may never get back as a result.
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 for the enshittification of the next round of companies - people like cloudflare - then I guess I'll just give up on anything mainstream and remain an indy Dev doing indy things for fun
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.
I definitely agree with this sentiment. And it's not just publicly traded companies - I like the saying "private equity kills everything it touches" because whenever PE buys a a company I have never seen it turn to anything but a shit pile eventually.
At some point with all companies the finance people take over. But well-loved products and companies are never created by finance people - they're created by people with a passion for something.
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 rigamarole to get a result.
It's possible to hack in more direct access for those who can make sense of it. I don't think there's a thing going on in Godot's 3d engine that some of these Unity refugees can't understand. They're running into arbitrary obstacles based on Godot's attitude towards what's clean and elegant code. These obstacles could go away really quickly under the right conditions…
I think the bottom line damage is that no one is going to develop new games on Unity if they have any other choice. Even if Unity walks this back 100%, why would a dev trust them not to pull this again in the future? Maybe some large projects will stop looking at migration in the short-term, but any new work is going to start happening elsewhere for sure.
> Even if Unity walks this back 100%, why would a dev trust them not to pull this again in the future?
This is why I stopped paying JetBrains, despite them 100% walking back their idiotic licensing change proposal many years ago. I love(d) the products, but could no longer trust the decision-makers.
You don't build buildings on sinking sand regardless of whether for now it appears not to be sinking. Once the footing has proved unstable its best to build elsewhere.
My anecdoate is that many people in this industry don't even know the existance of Godot. Yeah, I mean Godot, not Love2D or LibGDX. People can work in video games but are completly unaware of Godot.
I think their product is technically special -- as with all of the commercial game engines -- but they were not in the market position they thought they were, which is what led to them to thinking this was a good idea.
"When you make a game with Unity, you own the content and you should have the right to put it wherever you want. Our TOS didn't reflect this principle - something that is not in line with who we are.
We charge a flat fee per-seat -- not a royalty on all of your revenue. Building Unity takes a lot of resources, and we believe that partnerships make better services for developers and augment our business model -- as opposed to charging developers to pay for Unity’s development through revenue share.
When you obtain a version of Unity, and don’t upgrade your project, we think you should be able to stick to that version of the TOS."
Well, that all sounds pretty good to me! Perhaps its time for Joe to pull a Steve Jobs style comeback.
This is basically everything policy wise they needed to do to quell the storm. This is honestly what should have just been announced originally. So much reputational damage just to arrive at a reasonable model weeks later.
I'm happy for all the Unity developers out there that are breathing a sigh of relief. Hopefully they can ship their ongoing projects but I'd be hesitant about a continued long term relationship with Unity after this.
This isn't the first Unity backlash and I'd be surprised if it's the last.
How does this help anything when they have already demonstrated their willingness to alter terms and retrospectively add fees or alter licensing conditions. They already walked back changes once before saying “Okay you can keep the terms you agreed on your version” and went back on that promise for this clusterfuck.
They burned the trust bridge and nothing they _ever_ do or can say will bring that trust back.
Compared to how other companies behave, Reddit for example, it's a good signal to their customers that they've come to their senses and reached a reasonable compromise. Also, a second mistake like this would be devastating, so hopefully Unity will handle changes better from now on.
Ever since the mobile ad-first approach that's been a result of their buyout/merger/whatever it was, I think most Unity developers are bouncing. No one in their right might would leave their potential income in the hands of these sycophants.
Unity has cultivated this reputation as a provider for artsy indies and small studios, and now some larger AAs, but I think they want to be a provider for mobile casinos. That's where all the money is, and they are less likely to balk at more fees.
If you have a game that has been X months/years in development, porting to a different platform was not a realistic option. Those people are mega relieved they can get the current project out the door. Greenfield development should do a significant amount of consideration before starting a Unity project.
If they are willing to retroactively change the TOS once, why wouldn't they do it again once the smoke has settled?
I don't make games, I have nothing at stake in this fight, but this just feels like PR damage control and to be completely honest, I don't think most software engineers are so absolutely dependent on (proper noun) Unity to risk this company doing shady stuff again, and I suspect this entire ordeal will work as great marketing for engines like Unreal.
A part of me thinks that the CEO (and all the other executive morons who decided to make the installation fee) was sitting there thinking "what are they going to do? Move to Godot?", but if that was their line of thinking, and if they seriously did not think they were competing with Unreal, then I really do not see what business they have being multimillionaires in charge of any kind of decision-making process.
> A part of me thinks that the CEO (and all the other executive morons who decided to make the installation fee) was sitting there thinking "what are they going to do? Move to Godot?"
Their CEO gives me the impression of a rich but unsophisticated mba type who can only deliver revenue growth by raising prices. I doubt he even thought about captive customers and lack of what he might have thought alternative engines, let along open source and free.
He’s the type that thinks open source is maybe a toy.
I knew he was a stink when i read that he ordered unity employees back to offices. He thought he can order customers a new fee. He confirmed my suspicion. A shame that we as a society and industry allow these zeroes to end up leading tech companies.
I know John Riccitiello from when I worked at Maxis/EA on The Sims last century, and when he was involved with investing in Will Wright's Stupid Fun Club, and later when he was involved as CEO of EA in open sourcing SimCity for the One Laptop Per Child. We (including Eben Moglen, Free Software Foundation general counsel) explained to him why EA should open source the original SimCity source code under GPL-3, and what open source software and GPL-3 mean, and he approved the deal, and I gave him credit and positive feedback and sincerely thanked him. And we earned EA a lot of good publicity during a time when they were considered one of the worst companies in the world.
EA Donates Original City-Building Game, SimCity, to ''One Laptop per Child'' Initiative:
When Unity joined the Blender development fund as a Patron member while Riccitiello was CEO of Unity, I also gave him positive feedback and sincerely thanked him again, telling him how important Blender is to Unity game developers, and how important it is for them to work well together.
Unity Joins the Blender Development Fund as a Patron Member:
I recommended he watch Ton Roosendaal's excellent "Money doesn't interest me" interview, in which he does not hold back on his feelings about Autodesk:
Then when Joe Biden endorsed Unity three times in his inaugural address, I asked Riccitiello how much Unity paid for that product placement, but he wouldn't tell me:
>"With Unity we can do great things, important things!"
>"For without Unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury."
>"And Unity is the path forward."
>-Joe Biden's inaugural address.
Then after Unity recently announced they're pulling the rug out from under their developers, I posted to Riccitiello's Facebook page a screen snapshot of the github star ranking table showing that Godot suddenly had a 535.6% increase in stars, and sincerely thanked him again, writing "Thank you for your substantial contribution to open source gaming engines, at the expense of your own company!"
So I'm pretty sure he's aware of open source software, but I don't think he actually meant to benefit the Godot project so much at the expense of Unity.
The Godot folks, who have greatly benefited from this fiasco through no fault of their own, immediately condemned the death threat that somebody (who turned out to be a Unity employee) posted, which caused Unity to cancel an event and close their office.
>We extend our sincere solidarity and support to the Unity workers. The recent reactions have left us profoundly disappointed. Threats of violence should have no place in the gamedev community.
>Update: San Francisco police told Polygon that officers responded to Unity’s San Francisco office “regarding a threats incident.” A “reporting party” told police that “an employee made a threat towards his employer using social media.” The employee that made the threat works in an office outside of California, according to the police statement.
Reddit thread from 8 years ago, with recent posts:
TIL Unity CEO John Riccitiello was former CEO of EA. He saved EA from declining profits by sellings games EA made online (Origin) rather than physical packages and raising game quality. Also, he's barely known for being CEO at Unity Technologies.
>drakfyre 8 yr. ago
>I am honestly really pleased the hate has died down. Riccitiello is a pretty damn good CEO and Unity's former CEO (though a SUPER COOL dude) really didn't have the practice nor want to be a CEO of such a rapidly expanding company.
> If they are willing to retroactively change the TOS once, why wouldn't they do it again once the smoke has settled?
I haven't seen any evidence they did that, it's mostly been FUD from Godot supporters. The initial communication was messy, but where are actual TOS changes that are being touted so loudly?
You updated your post with the TOS, but from what I read the concern was that the new TOS said it applied to any new distribution of the Unity Runtime, without specifying versions and the like.
> What’s changed: We have posted an update to our Unity Editor Software Terms to, among other things, provide for our Industry Offering. We’ve also updated other sections, including those relating to data collection and modification of terms.
Interestingly, their linked FAQ (https://web.archive.org/web/20230605071610/https://unity.com...) provides no mention of the fact that they've removed the clause. I can't know what was going through Unity executives' heads when that FAQ was written, but they apparently didn't think it important to draw attention or specifically notify users about that revocation of their rights.
Why would "Godot supporters" care about what Unity is doing? It's not like they are on payroll and more users means more bug reports and feature requests for the maintainers without necessarily gaining more capacity to implement them. An open source project doesn't need an exodus of users from another project, it needs to get parity with its competitors and then quietly take over the market with little resistance.
"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 convinced it's encoded into some fundamental physical constant.
If a company actually, once, for-real avoided this specific sort of mealy-mouthed, boilerplate-indirect-corporatese semi-apology, I would seriously consider using their product solely on that merit alone. I'm fairly certain I'm not the only one who feels that way, and it's sort of amazing that nobody appears to have figured that out.
Surely someone in some sort of corporate PR position at some company is reading this. Think about it. Seriously think about it.
---
Edit: this isn't a personal criticism of the author either, I'm pretty darn sure that this the post was vetted and revised by at least one layer of PR and legal. The issue is an intractably systemic one that is not rectifiable by any individual. Outside of maybe the C-suite, I'm skeptical the that it makes any sort of sense to attribute blame to any individual for this type of corporate apology.
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".
A definite improvement but the CEO needs to go. It's the only way to begin restoring long term trust. Developers & publishers are extremely wary of unstable business partners.
Yeah. An apology isn't enough in this case-- words clearly mean nothing to them.
We were always told C-level compensation is as absurd as it is because they're expected to fall on their sword for fucking up. Keeping your position after defrauding customers is not a sign of good faith, it's just another [social] contract broken.
>We were always told C-level compensation is as absurd as it is because they're expected to fall on their sword for fucking up.
We were? I thought it was as simple as "big leader + big company = big money". Made sense in the days where those leaders rose the company off the ground. Not so much when it's just some MBA that comes in or a friend of some other rich guy that simply wants to increase stock numbers.
Yeah, I really do not understand why these executives get such huge salaries. They get all the credit when something goes well (see: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, probably a dozen other CEOs in big tech), but when their decisions lead to a drop in revenue they get to fire 12,000 people, get to keep their exorbitant salaries and/or stock options, and just blame everyone else for the problem, or blame a "bad market".
I really do not understand what it is that they actually do, outside of being an extremely overpriced and lazy spokesperson.
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).
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.
Unity is not trustworthy. This was not the first time they've changed terms unilaterally, and will not be the last.
This letter should be seen as a rickety runway extension: finalize any Unity projects you already have in development, but make sure you move to another engine in the immediate future.
well, this at least saves Silksong. That's all I can ask for at this point.
But if they are considering a 3rd Hollow Knight it'd be the biggest W if they chose an open-source engine (and hopefully not take 7 years, but TBH I'd take my time too if I made hollow knight money).
Readit News
Crow had to be eaten but it looks like they're only tasting the feathers.
2 recommendations:
1. This is where a "neuro-diverse" person or two can really be an asset. The social dynamic in corporations often leads to people eventually shaking their heads in agreement, even if they have big underlying concerns. Those of us somewhere on the spectrum are less likely to understand those social dynamics in the first place and be more willing to call out BS.
2. Good corporate leaders have trusted outside council that they can run ideas by to get brutally honest feedback.
Walk-back or not, Unity is demonstrably not boring and predictable anymore. That's done.
A lot of devs and studios are, they know they are, Unity knows they are, and there's little anyone can afford to do about it. I suspect most of the crowd that ostensibly abandoned Unity will return because they've already sunk too much time and energy into the platform, and that's the path of least resistance. They will tolerate whatever deal Unity gives them because they can't afford to do otherwise. Even if they liked the alternatives, the only reasonable business decision is to return to Unity and pretend this never happened.
Unfortunately this probably means much of the interest in Godot and other open source alternatives this debacle created is about to evaporate. Inertia is a harsh mistress.
I'd written off Reddit personally around five-six years ago. This despite having a fairly long-lived bloggy subreddit (and a small smattering of others) on the site, which I still use as a reference (despite having taken it private).
It wasn't specifically on account of the specific technical decisions they'd made, or the site changes (or lack of site changes) resulting, but the fact that those decisions were being made. That is, as with other business organisations I've encountered over the years, Reddit had repeatedly proven themselves antithetical to my own interests and values.
I suspect that's the issue Unity's going through here, and that though the final endgame may take some time in coming, it could well doom the company.
One business strategy that seems to have been increasingly widely adopted over the past decade or two, or perhaps I'm only simply far more cognisant of it and recognise it where it occurs, is the "walk right up to the creepy line" approach (as Eric Schmidt put it: <https://thehill.com/policy/technology/71739-schmidt-google-g...>), or moving products or services right to the pain or tolerance threshold.
In the short term this can work. It can even be successful over a longer term, in cases. But there are two inherent problems with the concept:
1. The threshold, whether it's pain, tolerance, creepiness, or whatever, can change, and often startlingly suddenly. At which point the organisation is caught high and dry.
2. The long-term erosion of trust and affection for the firm and its products effectively primes a trigger of latent demand for any viable alternative which appears. An example that comes to mind is the exclusive launch of Apple's iPhone in the US by AT&T. On the day that Verizon began officially supporting the iPhone on their own network, people were cramming Verizon stores and phone lines trying to make the switch. (A cow-orker at the time was one of those people.) They were absolutely fed up with AT&T's service and behaviour. See: <https://web.archive.org/web/20110112092318/http://www.engadg...> and <https://web.archive.org/web/20101007000511/http://online.wsj...>, discussed at the time: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2092273> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1765104>.
I've seen IBM, Microsoft, and Google subject to similar shifts, some more pronounced than others, over the years.
Leaving a considerable goodwill moat around offerings is an alternative. I'm too far outside the consumer mainstream to know what business, products, services, and/or brands exemplify this, though I suspect Costco and Trader Joe's might be among these.
If this were a 48- or 72-hour turnaround, maybe. But Unity lost a lot of goodwill amongst developers and there are some they may never get back as a result.
At some point with all companies the finance people take over. But well-loved products and companies are never created by finance people - they're created by people with a passion for something.
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 rigamarole to get a result.
It's possible to hack in more direct access for those who can make sense of it. I don't think there's a thing going on in Godot's 3d engine that some of these Unity refugees can't understand. They're running into arbitrary obstacles based on Godot's attitude towards what's clean and elegant code. These obstacles could go away really quickly under the right conditions…
This is why I stopped paying JetBrains, despite them 100% walking back their idiotic licensing change proposal many years ago. I love(d) the products, but could no longer trust the decision-makers.
My anecdoate is that many people in this industry don't even know the existance of Godot. Yeah, I mean Godot, not Love2D or LibGDX. People can work in video games but are completly unaware of Godot.
Now they ALL know it.
Very much an unforced error on their part.
Oh wait, apparently he is no longer CTO as of May 2023.
Well, what was his last official statement?
https://blog.unity.com/community/updated-terms-of-service-an...
"When you make a game with Unity, you own the content and you should have the right to put it wherever you want. Our TOS didn't reflect this principle - something that is not in line with who we are.
We charge a flat fee per-seat -- not a royalty on all of your revenue. Building Unity takes a lot of resources, and we believe that partnerships make better services for developers and augment our business model -- as opposed to charging developers to pay for Unity’s development through revenue share.
When you obtain a version of Unity, and don’t upgrade your project, we think you should be able to stick to that version of the TOS."
Well, that all sounds pretty good to me! Perhaps its time for Joe to pull a Steve Jobs style comeback.
But I'd take that 1000x over what other c execs were doing at other places I worked at.
I'm happy for all the Unity developers out there that are breathing a sigh of relief. Hopefully they can ship their ongoing projects but I'd be hesitant about a continued long term relationship with Unity after this.
This isn't the first Unity backlash and I'd be surprised if it's the last.
They burned the trust bridge and nothing they _ever_ do or can say will bring that trust back.
Deleted Comment
Most non mobile Unity developers?
Unity has cultivated this reputation as a provider for artsy indies and small studios, and now some larger AAs, but I think they want to be a provider for mobile casinos. That's where all the money is, and they are less likely to balk at more fees.
That’s not really how trust works. If I was a Unity developer, I’d still be migrating, just not in total panic mode.
I don't make games, I have nothing at stake in this fight, but this just feels like PR damage control and to be completely honest, I don't think most software engineers are so absolutely dependent on (proper noun) Unity to risk this company doing shady stuff again, and I suspect this entire ordeal will work as great marketing for engines like Unreal.
A part of me thinks that the CEO (and all the other executive morons who decided to make the installation fee) was sitting there thinking "what are they going to do? Move to Godot?", but if that was their line of thinking, and if they seriously did not think they were competing with Unreal, then I really do not see what business they have being multimillionaires in charge of any kind of decision-making process.
Their CEO gives me the impression of a rich but unsophisticated mba type who can only deliver revenue growth by raising prices. I doubt he even thought about captive customers and lack of what he might have thought alternative engines, let along open source and free.
He’s the type that thinks open source is maybe a toy.
I knew he was a stink when i read that he ordered unity employees back to offices. He thought he can order customers a new fee. He confirmed my suspicion. A shame that we as a society and industry allow these zeroes to end up leading tech companies.
EA Donates Original City-Building Game, SimCity, to ''One Laptop per Child'' Initiative:
https://ir.ea.com/press-releases/press-release-details/2007/...
OLCP EA Contract:
https://donhopkins.com/home/olpc-ea-contract.pdf
And I've given him credit for doing that here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23251414
When Unity joined the Blender development fund as a Patron member while Riccitiello was CEO of Unity, I also gave him positive feedback and sincerely thanked him again, telling him how important Blender is to Unity game developers, and how important it is for them to work well together.
Unity Joins the Blender Development Fund as a Patron Member:
https://www.blender.org/press/unity-joins-the-blender-develo...
I recommended he watch Ton Roosendaal's excellent "Money doesn't interest me" interview, in which he does not hold back on his feelings about Autodesk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJEWOTZnFeg
And also this video of Ton getting hit by a ceiling tile during a talk. (Presumably perpetrated by Autodesk!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-sgk
Then when Joe Biden endorsed Unity three times in his inaugural address, I asked Riccitiello how much Unity paid for that product placement, but he wouldn't tell me:
>"With Unity we can do great things, important things!"
>"For without Unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury."
>"And Unity is the path forward."
>-Joe Biden's inaugural address.
Then after Unity recently announced they're pulling the rug out from under their developers, I posted to Riccitiello's Facebook page a screen snapshot of the github star ranking table showing that Godot suddenly had a 535.6% increase in stars, and sincerely thanked him again, writing "Thank you for your substantial contribution to open source gaming engines, at the expense of your own company!"
So I'm pretty sure he's aware of open source software, but I don't think he actually meant to benefit the Godot project so much at the expense of Unity.
The Godot folks, who have greatly benefited from this fiasco through no fault of their own, immediately condemned the death threat that somebody (who turned out to be a Unity employee) posted, which caused Unity to cancel an event and close their office.
https://twitter.com/godotengine/status/1702413121086705951
>Godot Engine @godotengine
>We extend our sincere solidarity and support to the Unity workers. The recent reactions have left us profoundly disappointed. Threats of violence should have no place in the gamedev community.
The truth behind the Unity "Death Threats":
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/16j21jg/the_truth_...
>Update: San Francisco police told Polygon that officers responded to Unity’s San Francisco office “regarding a threats incident.” A “reporting party” told police that “an employee made a threat towards his employer using social media.” The employee that made the threat works in an office outside of California, according to the police statement.
Reddit thread from 8 years ago, with recent posts:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/3cxogb/til_unity_c...
TIL Unity CEO John Riccitiello was former CEO of EA. He saved EA from declining profits by sellings games EA made online (Origin) rather than physical packages and raising game quality. Also, he's barely known for being CEO at Unity Technologies.
>drakfyre 8 yr. ago
>I am honestly really pleased the hate has died down. Riccitiello is a pretty damn good CEO and Unity's former CEO (though a SUPER COOL dude) really didn't have the practice nor want to be a CEO of such a rapidly expanding company.
>rvc3m8 8 days ago
>now, that didn't age well, did it? ;)
>drakfyre 7 days ago
>No, no it did not, not at all...
I'm a casual observer in this space. Is Unreal not a viable alternative?
I haven't seen any evidence they did that, it's mostly been FUD from Godot supporters. The initial communication was messy, but where are actual TOS changes that are being touted so loudly?
https://unity.com/legal/terms-of-service
https://unity.com/legal/terms-of-service-legacy
ETA:
You updated your post with the TOS, but from what I read the concern was that the new TOS said it applied to any new distribution of the Unity Runtime, without specifying versions and the like.
If you go to the next snapshot (https://web.archive.org/web/20230413210637/https://unity.com...), Section 6 will be missing and you'll see the following header at the top of the TOS:
> Last updated: April 3, 2023
> What’s changed: We have posted an update to our Unity Editor Software Terms to, among other things, provide for our Industry Offering. We’ve also updated other sections, including those relating to data collection and modification of terms.
Interestingly, their linked FAQ (https://web.archive.org/web/20230605071610/https://unity.com...) provides no mention of the fact that they've removed the clause. I can't know what was going through Unity executives' heads when that FAQ was written, but they apparently didn't think it important to draw attention or specifically notify users about that revocation of their rights.
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 convinced it's encoded into some fundamental physical constant.
If a company actually, once, for-real avoided this specific sort of mealy-mouthed, boilerplate-indirect-corporatese semi-apology, I would seriously consider using their product solely on that merit alone. I'm fairly certain I'm not the only one who feels that way, and it's sort of amazing that nobody appears to have figured that out.
Surely someone in some sort of corporate PR position at some company is reading this. Think about it. Seriously think about it.
---
Edit: this isn't a personal criticism of the author either, I'm pretty darn sure that this the post was vetted and revised by at least one layer of PR and legal. The issue is an intractably systemic one that is not rectifiable by any individual. Outside of maybe the C-suite, I'm skeptical the that it makes any sort of sense to attribute blame to any individual for this type of corporate apology.
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".
We were always told C-level compensation is as absurd as it is because they're expected to fall on their sword for fucking up. Keeping your position after defrauding customers is not a sign of good faith, it's just another [social] contract broken.
We were? I thought it was as simple as "big leader + big company = big money". Made sense in the days where those leaders rose the company off the ground. Not so much when it's just some MBA that comes in or a friend of some other rich guy that simply wants to increase stock numbers.
I really do not understand what it is that they actually do, outside of being an extremely overpriced and lazy spokesperson.
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.
This letter should be seen as a rickety runway extension: finalize any Unity projects you already have in development, but make sure you move to another engine in the immediate future.
But if they are considering a 3rd Hollow Knight it'd be the biggest W if they chose an open-source engine (and hopefully not take 7 years, but TBH I'd take my time too if I made hollow knight money).