It's fascinating to watch the fallout from this. I've seen a few "insider trading" conspiracy pieces about the CEO selling 50k shares of stock this year with the knowledge that the announcement would tank the stock price. I feel like that ignores the other 3+ million shares he owns.
In any case, I think it's more a story about hubris and miscalculation. Even the apology misses the most important fact, which is not necessarily the cost of the change itself, but the demonstration that Unity is willing to change terms AFTER you've shipped software using their engine. That's a massive breach of trust as well as a massive risk. What's preventing them from announcing next September that new installs will incur an even larger cost or that the thresholds will be lowered.
> Even the apology misses the most important fact, which is not necessarily the cost of the change itself, but the demonstration that Unity is willing to change terms AFTER you've shipped software using their engine. That's a massive breach of trust as well as a massive risk.
And the obvious fix to that is to put out an announcement saying "Sorry about that, you can trust us, and if you release a game using Unity you can stick with that version of the ToS instead of us being able to foist new terms on you whenever we want forever."
Except.... Unity did that already last time they made company destroying ToS changes, and then just went back on the promise and said they're forcing the new ToS on everyone. So why the hell is anyone supposed to trust whatever apology they put out this time?
Updated Terms of Service and commitment to being an open platform (2019)
Retroactive TOS changes
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.
In practice, that is only possible if you have access to bug fixes. For this reason, we now allow users to continue to use the TOS for the same major (year-based) version number, including Long Term Stable (LTS) builds that you are using in your project.*
> if you release a game using Unity you can stick with that version of the ToS instead of us being able to foist new terms on you whenever we want forever.
IANAL but isn't this how it works by default? If two parties agree to a contract, one party doesn't get to unilaterally change the contract after the fact. The only way they get to change it is if they put some wording in the contract to the effect of "As long as the game runs on the Unity engine, Unity has the right to charge whatever it wants." So it would simply be a matter of removing this language from the TOS.
> Our terms of service provide that Unity may add or change fees at any time. We are providing more than three months advance notice of the Unity Runtime Fee before it goes into effect. Consent is not required for additional fees to take effect, and the only version of our terms is the most current version; you simply cannot choose to comply with a prior version. Further, our terms are governed by California law, notwithstanding the country of the customer.
They're saying "the terms of service say we can add whatever new fees we want whenever we want."
I'm not sure whether the original fee structure that people had agreed to was outlined in the earlier version of the ToS or not. If people agreed to allow Unity to unilaterally change the pricing structure then they may be stuck with it.
But if they need to actually change the ToS to make these fees, then I'm skeptical it would stand up in court (IANAL). They made very definitive public statements that people would be able to use the existing agreements with your current engine version, and saying "you simply cannot choose to comply with a prior version" now can't possibly hold water.
I think it's also an incredible case study in how your users who are themselves most profitable (in this case, the Mihoyo's of the world), and who you see yourself wanting to emulate in levels of profitability, are not necessarily the pillars holding up your ecosystem.
If this were just a skirmish between Unity and microtransaction-heavy mobile game publishers, then there would be legal battles, but all in all they would rather pay a per-install fee than rewrite their games from the ground up. But every small and mid-sized developer and publisher feels like they were considered fodder for this battle, and their goodwill is why the big guys chose Unity in the first place.
And a $1M annual revenue threshold might as well be nothing - that barely feeds a two-pizza team! It would be as if Github made every open source repository with more than 5 regular contributors pay per git pull. Absolutely absurd.
Sad thing is they ALSO lost the gamble with the large studios. A half dozen of them turned off ads in protest. Even if the price was dirt cheap, businesses don't like contracts being changed, so that was another miscalculation.
Maybe if they actually promised something exciting in Unity 2024, they could change the contract there and entice people to join. But that's another historical pain point for the company. What's the last actually shipped feature that really excited developers? HDRP? I sympathize with how they went about it, but they underestimated how much people wanted some sort of migration strategy. DOTS thats still floundering on what it wants to be 5+ years into development, and also a shakey target?
Altering the deal is SOP where law permits it. Read any privacy policy or user "agreement" and note that they all have "Darth Vader" clauses where they get to alter the deal when ever it suits them. It's even your job to spam refresh on the page and use a diff tool to figure out what changed.
The difference is that these customers potentially can defend themselves with lawsuits and switching to a competitor.
In a sense, those clauses seem like the embodiment of a best alternative to a negotiated agreement. They reserve broad leeway to account for possibilities that might not have been anticipated; for the fact you can never anticipate everything. They are tolerated to the extent to which they are applied conservatively for this implicit, reasonable purpose.
The problems arise when some cowboy executive comes in and reads the letter of the law without regard for the spirit of the law and starts thinking they can get away with radical innovations that destroy the stability of the business ecosystem. Business partners in a contract may grant broad leeway conditioned on the trust that it will not be abused, but now that trust has been destroyed, how can you continue to do business with such a counterparty?
The only way for them to regain trust is for top executives to resign, starting with the CEO. The breach of trust is so severe, you can't take anything they say at face value, and you can't trust them to not try this again.
This is the second time they've tried to change the terms retroactively, and this time they broke their promise to not try it again.
No, the execs need to be let go. This is what would happen to any non-exec that messed up so egregiously, they need to feel the pain they're used to inflicting.
Really the board needs to go as well; someone pointed out that the founder of Iron Source is now on the board of Unity. The CEO has been in place since 2014, but recent changes were probably motivated by recent board members joining. I'd say the board all need to be replaced for trust to be regained.
The board can only be fired by stockholders, right? Apparently, stockholders don't think this announcement is too big a deal, since the stock hasn't moved much (in a way that's distinguishable from noise).
They already did that during the Improbable debacle, and attempted to undo that safeguard here by sneaking in a retraction in a terms of service change months ago.
Unity has made it abundantly clear they haven't cared about the engine for a long time. They used to be working on a game to help identify areas where the engine could be improved and ended up firing the team who was working on that to "refocus priorities." There's also been the wave of lay offs for top talent and even more leaving voluntarily, of which Mike Acton of data-oriented fame was one of.
If nothing else, I think we should thank Unity for reminding us to read the license of anything we sign. I too have become accustomed to the "next next next finish" method of installing things, which is a bad habit to fall into. A company can sneak in little clauses like "pay 20 cents per client install" and no one is the wiser.
I don't make games but if I start then I'll probably use Godot or GDevelop. They both use the MIT license and I feel like that one is decidedly non-bullshittey.
I used to work for Unity. What used to be a culture of “users first” was replaced with top-down decision making based on balance sheets of made-up numbers. There are a lot of good, well-meaning people there who I’m certain would have presented well-reasoned arguments against this new policy, and I’m equally certain they were overridden by C-level management who are in turn being micro-managed by VC board members whose only goal is “make stock price go up”.
Unity stock is down about 10% since the announcement. I'm sure that's driving the action plan & messaging more than any actual feelings about harming their userbase. They knew the users would be irate, but investors... That's a different story.
I certainly sold all my Unity stock after hearing about the ToS changes. I only invested in them in the first place because I value the indie gaming community and they seemed to be reneging on that with this change.
How does buying Unity stock help indie gaming community? You bought it on the open market from somebody else who was selling it, and Unity hasn't seen a single cent of your money.
Owning stock in a company means you own a bit of that company and are participating in the journey that company is taking. The change they made to ToS made me and many others sell stock in that company, which tanked the price and probably had a lot to do with their about-face on the new policy. Buying stock in Unity wasn't about giving charity to a publicly-held company - it was about wanting to be a part of their mission (until I didn't).
He didn’t say it helped. Just that he did it because he values the community. It’s possible he is an ethical investor, where you only make investments in companies that follow your beliefs regardless of their potential profitability
Rising stock price helps a public corporation directly because corporations own their own stock, too. A high price allows a company to sell some of those shares, or issue new shares. Among other things.
Unity stock declined 25% in the first two weeks of August, and it went up 15% in the first two weeks of September. Looking at Unity's stock chart for the past year[1], a 10% decline looks pretty routine, so I think it's hard to pin this on the announcement.
Which would be surprising, I think most investors just buy whatever they're told from the board but usually don't care about customers and their reactions
I would love to be a fly in the wall of Unity or Wizards of the Coast after the reveal of their updated licensing terms.
Did the execs expect blowback? How much was expected? Did they estimate X% of users fleeing would be ok? Or had they just been sniffing their own farts the entire time?
If they didn’t expect blowback, it really shows how out of touch they are. I’m assuming it’s more like the recent Reddit drama where Huffman was like “we don’t care if people are mad, they won’t go anywhere”.
> We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days. Thank you for your honest and critical feedback.
It was a confusion? I feel like people understand what the change was about, and was vocal about how horrible they think that this change is and its consequences.
Every time I see "* apologize for the confusion", I now assume ChatGPT wrote the text.
This may be a little unfair given ChatGPT is trained on humans writing for other humans; on the other hand, corporations having clichéd stock phrases when they attempt apologies, is itself a cliché because it happens often enough.
“Write an apology note to a bunch of angry game developers who are made about a recent TOS change. Make it seem like we are going to change the policy back, but in reality we really won’t”
> We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days. Thank you for your honest and critical feedback.
You might say "Gas lighting" or "Deflection" in colloquial terms, and then understand the 2nd sentence:
> We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused.
That is saying that we are confused, and experiencing angst. As if we do not appreciate or understand the harmless thing. It's an apology at first, but then simultaneously degrades the audience as "confused", as if the audience did not understand the message.
Nextly, we see:
> We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy.
Take note the ordering of the 2nd list, and the weird run-on of the first list into the second. They are "Listening" and "Talking" to... The author of these words seems to the type of mind who wants to emphasis the fakeness first, but then minimize the reality last. Read that as "we are not listening, and will be talking to...", and the 2nd list goes the same way, pretty much ignore all the stuff up-front, and look at the last part where is says "partners". Full translation: "We are talking to our Partners, while monitoring dissident employees (some of whom called in bomb threats to the SF office earlier this week), identifying defectors in the influencer community, and auditing belligerent customer accounts likely to evade the licensing.
> Thank you for your honest and critical feedback.
Again, look at the last part of the writing... the writer does that, they probably mentally compartmentalize the bad news, and mention last. We are reading a not so masterful manipulator, somebody not quite proficient in their personality disorder, whatever that might be... Borderline, Sociopath, Narcissist, or whatever....
I am always curious in the situation where the tipping point was. For unity, was it anger from fans, death threats, developers dropping it, or ..something else.
Almost certainly the collective shutting off the ad monetization via Iron Source from the monetary side, and big names live-tweeting/live-streaming porting their games to other engines from the PR side.
Taken together and projecting that forward a couple of years, the company is dead.
It's been a whirlwind and a half this week with a few dozen links pertaining to Unity (and this place doesn't talk about gamedev as much as other communities).
In any case, I think it's more a story about hubris and miscalculation. Even the apology misses the most important fact, which is not necessarily the cost of the change itself, but the demonstration that Unity is willing to change terms AFTER you've shipped software using their engine. That's a massive breach of trust as well as a massive risk. What's preventing them from announcing next September that new installs will incur an even larger cost or that the thresholds will be lowered.