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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In other words, what you're really upset about is being downvoted into oblivion.
What you're ignoring is that Unity did not offer the option to stick with previous terms if devs stuck with previous versions, but imposed the new terms retroactively, and it's not the first time they've done that. That is why people don't trust them.
You can be naive and assume they'll stick to their promises this time, but nobody else is under the same obligation. Given they are claiming the ToS tracker was removed because it "didn't have enough views", there is evidence this latest turnaround is not at all sincere.
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That's the problem. That bolded bit. My emphasis added.
That's also how WotC "solved" their problem: irrevocable. They went to their lawyers and said "hey, figure us out a way to make it so we can't revoke this even if we want to," and then did that.
You're not being downvoted because we disagree. At least, that's not why I've done it. It's because you seem very credulous, ridiculously naive. You're asking us to apply standards to corporate behavior that are usually reserved for interpersonal relationships -- it's ridiculous to think of "forgiving" a company. It's either good business or bad business, and it's silly to apply the ethics of people to business choices.
They've demonstrated a "long con," starting with deleting the old TOS and ending up at this shitshow.
If you accidentally ran over my dog, I'd be angry, and the situation would obviously suck. But I'd forgive you.
If you ran over my dog on purpose, IDGAF how sorry you are, and I would forgive(1) you, but I'd never have anything to do with you ever again, and I'd be telling everyone "hey, @SplatMan_DK ran over my dog on purpose," and let them know that.
They want "forgiveness"? Look what WotC did: they made the new license ironclad. Sure, they can change it in the future, and might, but stuff from right now is 100% safe. Unity is still faffing about with lies, like the "doesn't start til next year" that actually will apply to this year's projects.
What you're doing is the equivalent of Shotwell defending Musk because he's never screwed Shotwell over, so that means he can't possibly have done it to anyone else. You had a good experience with them and that's coloring your response to a degree that seems naive and foolish from where I'm sitting.
...
(1) forgiveness isn't about them it's about you. not holding a grudge. That doesn't mean you necessarily let them back into your life, and sometimes means you restructure your life to avoid the person you've forgiven because you can't trust them any longer. I'm intimately familiar with that -- as the person who was forgiven. I lost one of my best friends to a trust issue that meant he could never, fundamentally, trust me again. He gave me his forgiveness. And then structured his life so I haven't been a part of it for 16 years. I miss him terribly -- but he's right to have done so. And more importantly, he has the right to have done so. If their bullshit doesn't move your personal feelings, that's fine for you, but to insist that people should "give them another chance," is telling the abused to welcome back their abuser.
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Making the same mistake a second time shows that they didn't learn the first time. Or, since they tried something worse this time, they learned the wrong lesson.
People gave them the benefit of the doubt the first time. This time they tried something worse, then tried to back down with the same move of apologising and adding "you can't stick to the old terms if you stick to the old Unity" to their TOS.
Why should they get the benefit of the doubt a second time ?
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I get that you have a sense of national pride as a Dane over Unity. But you should put that aside for now. When they were new and hadn't become a company that so many people were dependent on for their livelihood, then yes, you could've equated something like this to inexperience. That ship has sailed. They may not be like Microsoft or the others in size, but they're a huge player in the gaming industry. Now other rules apply. They don't get to as simply write it off with "we're sorry, we didn't know any better.". Not good enough.
They have existed for close to 20 years and have 8k+ employees. And they're not all juniors, many of them industry veterans. And yes, I don't think they all had a hand in this, of course not, that was surely some directors and top management. I'm just saying that they as a collective are skilled and experienced.
But, as they say, the proof is in the pudding.
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You're very busily telling everyone that their reaction to Unity isn't correct. That they should react like you do because Unity isn't actually doing what everyone can see Unity is actually doing. That's textbook gaslighting. You're telling those disagreeing with you that they're part of a mob, when they aren't part of a mob. That's more textbook gaslighting.
I don't agree with your conclusions, but I'm not telling you you're wrong for reacting that way. Return the favor.
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Slapping things together and throwing it out the door does seem to be the order of the day at many businesses these days. I would guess a push for quarterly returns and a certain lack of interest leads to this.
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What an absolutely ridiculous excuse. Even if the views WERE low, there is no reason at all to remove the page. None. It's TEXT. It's not eating up any bandwidth. Heck, if the views are that low, it would eat up even LESS bandwidth. Unless your TOS page consisted of an 8K 3 hour long video streamed in 3D of someone reading it out, this is a ridiculous complaint. Things like TOS shouldn't be measured in viewer count, but necessity, and it was necessary.
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Only way to build back trust is for the CEO to step down and take responsibility.
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Hold on, Did this C-Suite executive just admit that in general, the C-suite executives have no clue who their customers are? That they have no clue as to how TOS changes might affect their customers. That they are kind of like a bunch of inexperienced noobs who wandered in off the street and are "trying their best" to learn on the job. But it is hard and they should be forgiven for not understanding the business that they were hired to run.
Yea, right. Not buying it buddy.
Yea, right. Not buying it buddy.
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Not just the CEO, I believe.
The fact that an entire suite of executives had meetings about this where it was considered and ultimately approved seemingly without any pushback should be enough to make any game developer jump ship. This move clearly showed their intentions and lack of foresight/research, so how can anyone trust that this won't be subtly forced upon them a year or two from now, after the news has died down? Investing further into Unity when this is a clear possibility doesn't seem wise to me.
Something that I haven't seen be further addressed is the tiny matter of how they're seemingly capable of remotely identifying the number of installations; where it has been installed and uninstalled from; and how they're able to discern whether it was a legitimate copy of the game or not.. Feels like a privacy nightmare that is being overlooked at the moment.
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Their latest statement is that it will come from data the devs report to them, but capped at 2.5% of revenue. So the smart move for devs who aren't in a position to change engines would be to assume they are always going to be paying the 2.5%. Until the dev is sure that Unity has fiddled with the numbers enough so that the dev has overpaid by enough to justify legal action.
As for the rest of us, we should still care what data Unity is demanding. Especially anything Unity demands that Unreal doesn't. Though we should focus on what that data is and why Unity wants it instead of being distracted by trying to work out how Unity is using it to get engagement numbers.
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What's Sony's shitty behaviour got to do with Unity's shitty behaviour, other than neither of them issued an actual apology?
I didn't get an apology from Adobe when they rewarded me for my purchase of Photoshop with leaking my credit card all over the dark web, but that also has nothing to do with Unity.
Unity is the topic of discussion here, not Microsoft, not Sony, not Google, not Apple, not Adobe, et al.
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The contract was perfectly clear. Until Unity decided to unilaterally and retroactively change the terms.
That's not only shady, it's almost certainly illegal, and it demonstrates to any devs using Unity that they are not to be trusted and continuing to use Unity is an unacceptable business risk.
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That's not the point though, is it? It's not the transition from "free" to "paid" that has generated such a massive backlash. It's the unilateral and retroactive change to the terms of service done in bad faith and possibly illegally.
Had they said "We're going to be enforcing this pay structure from Jan 2024 for new users, but existing ones will be grandfathered on the terms they've already accepted" then there would have been anger but it would have passed. That isn't what they did.
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They've done this twice. Why on God's green earth would you give them the benefit of the doubt?
edit, a half-hour later: and they did it with the same executive team. This isn't a mistake, it's an MO!
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See, the reason you're getting downvoted stems from you acting like that's relevant. "Well, they never did anything bad to me or anyone I know, I don't know why people hate on the Manson family so much".
Yes, the things out of their mouths that were not predatory and vile were not predatory and vile, and you can and no doubt will go on and on about all the things they did and continue to do that are not predatory and vile.
People are not mad about the things they did that are not predatory and vile.
People are mad about the things they did that are predatory and vile., and the problem is, what they did is so predatory, so vile that it speaks to personal character, so vile that them doing it at all makes them the sort of person who'd do that, ever. "I have altered the deal" does not end well. And they're lying about it, making them the sort of person who'd not just do that, but lie about it, which makes everyone believe they're not just the sort of person that will do it again at the first opportunity, but the sort of person who will work to engineer an opportunity for it. Hammering on the cultural Overton window as a way of life, The sort of person whose reaction to a win-win deal is "let's drive that closer to win-lose, more for me!".
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And it was hosted on Github, so they weren't even paying for the bandwidth.
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Celery Man
Ars Legatus Legionis
They also wouldn’t be able to see page views if it was a normal GitHub repo
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Wait, you mean that Unity executives lied about that? Surely, you can't be serious.They also wouldn’t be able to see page views if it was a normal GitHub repo
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So they might be lying about being able to see the page views.They also wouldn’t be able to see page views if it was a normal GitHub repo
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Want trust? Simple. Change the license so it states unequivocally that no changes can be made to the license retroactively and that there is no requirement to upgrade to a new version of the runtime/development software and Unity will not prevent old versions from running(eg no sabotage, no license servers that mysteriously go down, no DRM with a timebomb etc...).
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Donald Trump has entered many, many contracts. Fat lot of good it's done for the people who never got paid.
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I think your downvotes are coming from the tone of having more info and everyone else being an emotional rube. Comments like this
"Do you have any direct experience working with them, or are you in an industry related to this area? How do you determine the level of trust?"
To me this come off as your opinion is informed and everyone else's is not. In fact none of us are informed on this anymore than what is coming out in the media and what Unity is saying. Your emotional response to their apology and roll back of the TOS changes is greater than the emotional response to their TOS changes. Fine, you do you. Most other people on this forum has a greater response to their TOS changes and history of shady dealings, as well as the way they handled the fallout with defensiveness and blaming miscommunication instead of a full mea culpa. Not to even go into the CEO having a very long history of doing greedy bad things for the industry.
Both views have their own validity to some point, but if you take all emotion out of it I just can't come up with a way to believe they won't try this again, just in a different way. I think that because of the history of their company, how long they ramped this up with buying special software and planning it all out...and I personally think without the CEO stepping down their culture will not change because they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar. I have never seen a cultural shift in a company without that change. It is very very rare, and the CEO from what I have seen has not said this was a mistake at all. He pushed it down to the PR folks and the head of the Unity Create team.
In short you believe the companies words it seems, and many of us don't. The actions they have made are all reversible and not transformative. Until they show real change....they are the same. So why believe they won't try to sneak their hand back into the cookie jar?
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Yeah. I posted this in the other unity thread. Well, one of the other threads:
I only do business with people with whom I feel I could enter into a handshake deal -- and then, we sign a contract.
Having both -- trust AND a contract -- is ultimately the optimal position. Trust and a contract, or something like wotc's new irrevocable "we can't alter this deal, at all, ever" where you can be CERTAIN that the terms won't change.
Unity's behavior suggests that they were genuinely surprised by the responses from their community. That does NOT bode well: either they are incompetent, or they are untrustworthy. Or both; we can't discount that as a possibility. The delay between the initial new terms and their improved terms -- which, to be fair, ARE improved terms -- suggests that this wasn't the sort of Machiavellian move that some people have suggested.
I suspect there will be a lot fewer Unity games coming down the pipeline. They've shown us who they are.
We should believe them.
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Nobody cares about whether they can alter a deal. They care about whether they will in a way that screws up their own business. It matters not one iota to me that one of the suppliers has a contract that says they can change the terms at any time because if they do, we both know that we'd drop them at the next renewal and never work with them again. As Billy Joel sang, it's always been a matter of trust.
Moreover, the issue is retroactively altering terms. It's one thing to come to me and say "Hey we can't make it work at $4 per unit, we need $4.50 per" and then we can hash that out. Coming to me and saying "Hey, you've now paid $4.50 per unit going back to the beginning of our contracting history" I'd just laugh and say "See your dumb ass in court."
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Isn't what they did last time ?
Before taking down the Github repository and removing the clause that let devs stay on older licenses, if they stayed on older versions of Unity, to prepare for their retroactive runtime fee.
They are going to need to do something more this time.
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The level of deference some people are willing to show corporations, even ones that are actively harming them in a decision objectively made out of pure greed, is at times stunning. It's like cultural Stockholm syndrome.
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Good lord, I knew it was a lie, but I didn't realize the sheer depths of the lie until you pointed it out. They lied in every possible direction.They also wouldn’t be able to see page views if it was a normal GitHub repo
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This is getting downvoted so much that I'm suspecting people are reading more into it than I said (or they hate the term "X-cretion," I suppose).
I literally wonder how many of those resignations actually happened. That's key data on Unity's health, and we don't have it. If there were very few, it doesn't matter, but if they had a significant fraction of their tech expertise walk out the door, then whether or not they can regain trust is effectively irrelevant.
Ultimately, we customers don't matter directly--shareholders do. Unity isn't traded after hours, so we won't have another data point until Monday, but so far it ain't lookin' good. Honestly, I don't understand how they've kept their incompetent leadership even this far. Unity's share price was once over $200/share. It's under $33 today, and while a bit of that came in the last week, they've been utter failures as a publicly traded company much longer than most boards would tolerate.
I would be happiest with an actual buyout: let Apple, Microsoft, or some non-profit consortium buy them, dump all the services and malware crap, and return them to their "build a good game engine" roots. But if they've lost a significant fraction of their best engineers, even that isn't going to be enough.
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No, nononono. Getting gobbled up by an even bigger company won't "fix" them. Why do people delude themselves into thinking the answer to corporate greed is "more consolidation"? It never is. It has only ever made things worse, historically.
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Exactly! No surprises, except me writing a best-seller, as much as I think I have one in me, buried deep inside.
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I'm curious too.
I think they're probably done for long term. Not because "everyone" left -- but because the people actually doing the work were ignored by the C-suite.
What that leads to in my experience is disengagement. At best they will have turned passions into just collecting a paycheck. Whenever there's an exodus for cause it makes everyone else do less. And, with fewer colleagues and less money, Unity will be asking them to do more.
Which spirals in an obvious way.
I am quite curious -- and your inquiry seems reasonable. I guess the reason you're getting the DVs is the implication that a bunch of people said they'd resign and then didn't. It "feels" like you were calling out employees for hypocrisy. I don't think that's what you were actually doing, but that is the tonal mismatch, were I to guess.
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Many, many products have done better after acquisition; it's almost the default condition for the tech industry. And in this case, it's likely literally existential. It doesn't seem likely Unity can survive much longer without massively increasing its income, and they burned all the bridges that would allow them to do that.
The choice here might be "Unity exists, owned by someone for whom it is a key tool (e.g. Microsoft/Apple or some game studio)" vs. "Unity no longer exists."
Glib lines about how acquisitions are never successful notwithstanding, it's hard to argue that from the point of view of the company and its customers, existence is preferable to nonexistence. And honestly, it's a dev tool. Either of those companies would likely be a good steward in this case.
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Unity seems like it could be an awkward acquisition in that it's an important tool for many people. Either Apple or Google, say, would very likely prefer to have Unity continue to make putting games on their respective mobile OSes relatively easy and accessible, because that's a huge stream of app store money potentially at risk; but would either of them trust the other to continue making a sincere effort to treat the competitor's OS as a genuinely first-class port target; rather than making their own the clearly favored child and the other just adequate enough to be able to continue offering cross platform support as a checkbox feature?
It's easy to think of people with a strong interest in Unity's continued function(especially the "Unity Create" side of the business); it's less easy to think of one that would be reliable in its dealings with the others.
It seems like a (much pettier) analog to the ongoing debacle that Softbank has been having trying to sell ARM off: ARM is hugely valuable to the industry at large; but mostly as a reasonably neutral provider of licensed designs to anyone who is interested; but there's not really an "all the people who care a bit" buyer; only individual ARM licensees with especially deep pockets(like Nvidia) who are deeply suspect because their only real incentive to spend massive money on ARM would be to exploit market power vs. other licensees.
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If it dies, it dies. Better that than the steady monopolization infecting the entirety of the business world.
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Unity dying would create a monopoly, not prevent one. There are only two broadly used, fully cross-platform, professional-level game platforms available to non in-house devs right now, and Unity is one of them.
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