Interview: "It was not our intent to nickel-and-dime it, but it came across that way."
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Unity exec tells Ars he’s on a mission to earn back developer trust
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I don't disagree. My anecdote around trust is whether or not you believe him when he says he didn't know about the repo until last week.
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I suppose Lucy really means it when she holds football for Charlie Brown to kick.
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A
A TOS tracker is not very useful if the TOS is still revokable.
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Celery Man
Ars Legatus Legionis
Unless they make it so they legally cannot do another rug pull in the future, these promises aren't worth the electrons that delivered them to your screen.
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This sounds nice on paper but the statement is kinda useless unless we know what Unity means by "a user".
Can a user be a student, a teacher, hobbyist, a QA Tester, someone downloading it to just to play with the models, etc?
Then the people making and shipping games would be technically a small percentage, but the install fees would screw most of them over.
People didn't talk about it as much because those install fees took most of the attention but it stinks that the free Unity will need an internet connection still. The old proposed change had every three days but now it's 30 which is...better, but still sucks.
The trust is gone, people with projects right now won't have to worry about switching but the next projects? Godot and Unreal exist, lol.
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I love this quote, "having an option where you could do a revenue share... is a better approach for everyone because it allows them to plan."
Do universities ever clawback the MBAs they give out because there's an entire company leadership here that should lose them?
Yes, I know it is an after-the-fact lie but still, it's so mind bogglingly stupid that this entire management team should be making me hamburgers in a drive thru somewhere.
Do universities ever clawback the MBAs they give out because there's an entire company leadership here that should lose them?
Yes, I know it is an after-the-fact lie but still, it's so mind bogglingly stupid that this entire management team should be making me hamburgers in a drive thru somewhere.
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Here's the thing. It WAS ALREADY a feature. They removed it a few months ago before these changes.
You can't trust anything they say
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Fancy Internet Person
Ars Praefectus
Was this his idea? If not, why is he apologizing for it?
This decision was made over his head and he can't promise his boss won't try this again.
This decision was made over his head and he can't promise his boss won't try this again.
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I heard you, and believe you.
Just like I heard and believed you when you tried to play hardball.
Just like I heard and believed when you retroactivly changed your tos.
Just like I heard and believed wizards of the coast when they tried the EXACT SAME STUNT.
And I also believe I haven't spent a dime on Wizards’ products since January.
Guess where this is going when I'm a 15 year veteran unity dev that was shilling your engine.
Don't worry, you won't miss me. It's probably a fluke.
Just like I heard and believed you when you tried to play hardball.
Just like I heard and believed when you retroactivly changed your tos.
Just like I heard and believed wizards of the coast when they tried the EXACT SAME STUNT.
And I also believe I haven't spent a dime on Wizards’ products since January.
Guess where this is going when I'm a 15 year veteran unity dev that was shilling your engine.
Don't worry, you won't miss me. It's probably a fluke.
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After reading the new terms, i felt a tad bit better. After reading the quotes from this interview, i am even more mad than before about how misguided this leadership is. Specifically the part about him saying they realized a lot of Unity developers thought they were going to hit it big and would be affected by the new license.
I get there are a lot of dreamers out there that never finish a game, but a lot of unity developers (myself included) are not new comers to the engine. We've worked in it and with it for years and some of those years proffessionally (myself 9 years), and we've released games and learned the hard way that we arent going to make it big on our own. To me, this reads as if the leadership views the entire backbone of the Unity community as dreamers and gamers, and they dont understand the harm they walked into by attempting to change terms on the studios that were making money with the engine. People who didnt make it big have to work at those companies if they want to get paid using the Unity skills that take years to grow. The forecast for those years learning Unity have never felt as wasted as they have today.
I get there are a lot of dreamers out there that never finish a game, but a lot of unity developers (myself included) are not new comers to the engine. We've worked in it and with it for years and some of those years proffessionally (myself 9 years), and we've released games and learned the hard way that we arent going to make it big on our own. To me, this reads as if the leadership views the entire backbone of the Unity community as dreamers and gamers, and they dont understand the harm they walked into by attempting to change terms on the studios that were making money with the engine. People who didnt make it big have to work at those companies if they want to get paid using the Unity skills that take years to grow. The forecast for those years learning Unity have never felt as wasted as they have today.
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No. Just no. None of this ludicrous corporate double-speak. Doing that interview should make anyone feel dirty beyond cleansing.
For once, just stop with that and say: "we wanted to grab much more of your money and didn't give a d@mn about our promises from the past, nor the fact you'd feel betrayed. Because we pretty much have you over the barrel. We launched this news into the ether, fully knowing you would be outraged, and then we walk back on some of the more crazy things, call it 'listening' to your 'feedback' and still get the terms we wanted."
Just gross.
Edit: autocorrect
For once, just stop with that and say: "we wanted to grab much more of your money and didn't give a d@mn about our promises from the past, nor the fact you'd feel betrayed. Because we pretty much have you over the barrel. We launched this news into the ether, fully knowing you would be outraged, and then we walk back on some of the more crazy things, call it 'listening' to your 'feedback' and still get the terms we wanted."
Just gross.
Edit: autocorrect
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Celery Man
Ars Legatus Legionis
I get the sense that the only developers Unity cares about are the ones pulling in big bucks from F2P mobile games, because Unity wants to get in on that money (and push their spyware suite). It doesn't sound like they know much about, well, everyone else using the product.
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I think this opens up other opportunities for other engines actually. Unity and Unreal are the two big ones, but there is Godot which is excellent, but needs a bit more maturity on its platform support (It can go onto PC, mac, linux just fine, but PS5, Xbox, Switch, etc... their documentation literally says hire a porting company haha).
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I didn't downvote this but I have the same response to Unity leadership as I do to all the other swindling C-levels: I do not want an apology. I want everyone involved in this operation to resign or get fired, and I want their replacement to negotiate/discuss/plan in good faith.
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I can only laugh at their claims that they had no idea about the impacts of this. The impacts were obvious if you just spent a few minutes thinking about it.
If they really had no idea, then someone just slapped this together and threw it up with no forethought...
If they really had no idea, then someone just slapped this together and threw it up with no forethought...
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Thing is, they already promised that in 2019. Fool me once...
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I'm rather disappointed in this interview. It feels more like a PR piece than a hard hitting interview.
Why not grill the guy on any legal assurances that Unity can't simply change the TOS as they already did?
Why not question any of the dubious claims he made?
Why not grill the guy on any legal assurances that Unity can't simply change the TOS as they already did?
Why not question any of the dubious claims he made?
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Celery Man
Ars Legatus Legionis
I've never seen someone so eager to believe corporate PR. You should rent your services out, these big companies would love you.
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Godot is FOSS (MIT license) which is a major advantage if one prefers freedom to being at the mercy of the Marc Vhittens of the world.
https://github.com/godotengine/godot/blob/master/LICENSE.txt
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Not without ousting the board as well; they called the shots, and have an even more questionable background and track record than John.
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Except they didn't walk everything back; they only walked back the biggest stuff -- retroactive license changes and the likely illegal clauses that could put someone in debt. The royalty+subscription format that they promised they'd never employ is still very much in evidence, as are other things they previously promised they'd never do.
And the transparency stuff and multi-license shuffle might be re-set now, but starting in 2019 it was being manipulated in a long play that continued right up until someone noticed and called them on it.
Which means you know that in the future they'll continue to do whatever they can do without getting caught, and then walk back the bits that people are MOST upset about while keeping the stuff that's both legal and not drawing a lot of attention.
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If the CEO doesn't get fired, it's not good enough for me as an end user of the games (not a dev, to be clear. Just a guy who won't buy games built on Unity anymore).
I don't mean spending more time with his family or whatever lie, I mean publicly made an example of.
I don't mean spending more time with his family or whatever lie, I mean publicly made an example of.
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I finally subscribed to post this 
It's probably known throughout the industry, but just in case it's not:
John Riccitiello has a long history of Fail with EA. Back in the late 90's he was in charge of what was then called "EA.com", which was a no limits effort to take make EA into an online presence as a separate corporate entity which would issue Class B stock. This was the late 90's when every worker was hoping to make their millions in a startup. EA promoted EA.com internally as a chance to do this, though at the time it was clear to me that Class B stock was likely to be worthless.
EA.com was an epic fail which resulted in the business being dissected and the remnants being folded back into EA. Lots of people were laid off. The stock options were worthless. That Riccitiello was able to stay at EA until 2004 is shocking given his lack of ability.
Similarities between then and how are notable: EA.com wanted to make money with online games, but internal marketing for some games (Motor City Online) intially refused to put a note on the product box that a subscription was required to play. Under pressure they relented slightly and put it in very small letters. Buyers were very unhappy. In addition not very many people wanted to pay a subscription for ported online games that would run through a browser. There were some very good games, one of them a sort of mech battle game, which might have raised the value proposition, but they were dropped (I don't know why.
When Riccitiello was made CEO of Unity I sent an email to a buddy who worked at EA during the above mentioned time with the note "I wonder how long it will be before Unity gets broken"?
Looks like we know now.
It's probably known throughout the industry, but just in case it's not:
John Riccitiello has a long history of Fail with EA. Back in the late 90's he was in charge of what was then called "EA.com", which was a no limits effort to take make EA into an online presence as a separate corporate entity which would issue Class B stock. This was the late 90's when every worker was hoping to make their millions in a startup. EA promoted EA.com internally as a chance to do this, though at the time it was clear to me that Class B stock was likely to be worthless.
EA.com was an epic fail which resulted in the business being dissected and the remnants being folded back into EA. Lots of people were laid off. The stock options were worthless. That Riccitiello was able to stay at EA until 2004 is shocking given his lack of ability.
Similarities between then and how are notable: EA.com wanted to make money with online games, but internal marketing for some games (Motor City Online) intially refused to put a note on the product box that a subscription was required to play. Under pressure they relented slightly and put it in very small letters. Buyers were very unhappy. In addition not very many people wanted to pay a subscription for ported online games that would run through a browser. There were some very good games, one of them a sort of mech battle game, which might have raised the value proposition, but they were dropped (I don't know why.
When Riccitiello was made CEO of Unity I sent an email to a buddy who worked at EA during the above mentioned time with the note "I wonder how long it will be before Unity gets broken"?
Looks like we know now.
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Someone's getting roasted over the coals in one of the other threads for saying this, but for most devs who want to write professional quality games and don't have either an in-house engine or the resources to create one, you have two choices: Unity or Unreal Engine.
I know the community loves FOSS, but Godot isn't anywhere close to ready outside a fairly narrow set of 2D games on a fairly narrow set of platforms (they don't really support the Apple platforms, for example, because it still doesn't talk to Metal, but rather some sort of weird compatibility layer). And Godot is both further along and has broader support than any other game engine project I'm aware of like Monogame and O3DE.
Almost thirty years ago, we were told that GIMP would replace Photoshop just as soon as they added a few things. We're still waiting. Blender is amazing, but there's reasons why people still pay the $5K/year/seat or whatever for Maya. OBS Studio hasn't replaced the expensive Camtasia and pro video editors.
I'm struggling to think of a single complex, high level, end-user application or suite where the Open Source version has replaced a professional one. OpenOffice is probably the closest, and it has negligible user share.
FOSS wins a lot (maybe most of the time) at low-level stuff like web servers, databases, compilers, command-line tools, and the like. But game engines are closer to something like the Adobe Suite in complexity than they are to something like Apache. If your aim is to build a modern, high-level indie -> AAA title, none of these other tools are ready yet, and if history is any indication, they won't ever be.
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One thing is to change the terms forward, this was not forward only but previous versions were going to be hit too.
Trust is lost, a tracker is useless without a legally binding contract. Why should I expect them to not do this again in the future?
I am a person who gives second chances to people. Corporations are not receivers of said chances, because there is literally a set of persons who have to agree to do something.
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I really wish our business culture wasn't so cut-throat as to make the simple, honest, ethical way to handle this kind of thing impossible: to wit, just have an honest conversation with your customers, tell 'em you need to raise revenue, and have a nice public discussion about how to do that in ways that work "the least worst for the most of us."
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Oh yes, the tooling is hugely important, and is also a way for them to stay competitive with each other outside featuresets. At least with these 3 engines, they all have great editors, with realtime play within the editor (no more pre-compiling your map like the good olde Source Engine days).
I recently built a POC in each engine to see what I liked best, and ultimately I went with Unreal, and it was a mix of platform features and tooling. I'm just a single person, and Unreal saves me the hassle of creating lower quality models (LODs) with their nanite tech. That is huge for me. But I absolutely loved the coding experience with Godot, and almost went with them, but I want to release on PS5/Xbox, and as mentioned before, they don't support that, you have to hire out a porting company.
But I prefered Godot over Unity for sure, even though they are very similarly setup with nodes/scripts.
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Yeah, I don't see that as an adequate analogy for the peasants rioting at the gates threatening to burn down the castle while setting fire to everything else in sight.
It's kind of like describing the Titanic disaster as "an excess of moisture".
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I just realized something. You know that bit about no longer requiring the Unity splash screen? That's likely their attempt to evade people not buying games because they're built on Unity.
Something for developers to think about.
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CEO John Riccitiello earned his $32,329 daily pay by doing nothing, and letting others take the flak for his decisions.
Marc Whitten's job is to say whatever it takes for people to use Unity.
Judge them by their actions.
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No, it really, really doesn't. Walking stuff back, because you find yourself in trouble isn't even a little bit worth of praise, it's just simply common sense. I mean, if you just blindly ran through bushes and found yourself behind a bear, the sensible thing would be to....back up quietly, wouldn't it? You do not deserve praise for doing that, just like the company doesn't deserve praise for trying to back out of the trouble they caused for themselves.
Are you really that gosh durn naïve? Unity isn't comparable to those companies, they aren't at the level of "too big to fail", whereas those companies are; they can easily afford to forge ahead with whatever plans they have and ignore anyone who doesn't like it.
Also, yes, I have seen plenty of Unity-size companies over the decades do exactly this. Unity isn't even a little bit special here.
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Per a couple other commenters, I'm glad Ars took the interview but sad that they didn't push harder - not to be a jerk, but to make the dude answer some hard questions rather than skating by on a few light talking points.
If he's wouldn't agree to the interview without some agreement about not holding his feet to the fire, then the Ars article can certainly be "dude wants to convince us it was all a misunderstanding but wouldn't agree to answer hard questions." More cred for Ars pushing real accountability, less easy coverage for PR hacks.
In particular, I'd like to see these interviews adopt practices like political debate moderators: don't allow distracting or fluff answers, and stick to an issue until either a real answer is forthcoming or the interviewee flat out refuses to answer. This would've been ideal for pressing him on the deleted TOS tracker - maybe he didn't know about it, but certainly someone in upper management gave the order to remove the tracker and then alter the deal.
That's been a prominent part of this whole thing, and he clearly prepped his talking points for this and similar interviews. How does he explain not bothering to look into that major issue in his prep time? That's the place where Ars should be asking why he didn't come to the table with an explanation rather than letting him off the hook with a shrug emoji (context: apparently in the interview chat he was asked and got away with saying he didn't know about it until last week). So why didn't he spend this week getting some answers?
Obviously evasive, and not even bothering to blame an intern or a rogue engineer for oopsie-ing it down right before uploading the altered version. I'm not gonna take and call Ars a shill, but it is a missed opportunity.
If he's wouldn't agree to the interview without some agreement about not holding his feet to the fire, then the Ars article can certainly be "dude wants to convince us it was all a misunderstanding but wouldn't agree to answer hard questions." More cred for Ars pushing real accountability, less easy coverage for PR hacks.
In particular, I'd like to see these interviews adopt practices like political debate moderators: don't allow distracting or fluff answers, and stick to an issue until either a real answer is forthcoming or the interviewee flat out refuses to answer. This would've been ideal for pressing him on the deleted TOS tracker - maybe he didn't know about it, but certainly someone in upper management gave the order to remove the tracker and then alter the deal.
That's been a prominent part of this whole thing, and he clearly prepped his talking points for this and similar interviews. How does he explain not bothering to look into that major issue in his prep time? That's the place where Ars should be asking why he didn't come to the table with an explanation rather than letting him off the hook with a shrug emoji (context: apparently in the interview chat he was asked and got away with saying he didn't know about it until last week). So why didn't he spend this week getting some answers?
Obviously evasive, and not even bothering to blame an intern or a rogue engineer for oopsie-ing it down right before uploading the altered version. I'm not gonna take and call Ars a shill, but it is a missed opportunity.
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