Wait, is Unity allowed to just change its fee structure like that? | Confusing, contradictory terms of service clauses leave potential opening for lawsuits.::Confusing, contradictory terms of service clauses leave potential opening for lawsuits.
Hey unity specialist programmers, if you want to boost your career out of this, learn another engine asap focusing on “how to do cool things I could do in unity in the other engine” and then market yourself as a “unity exit programmer” that specializes in converting projects from unity to different engines.
Your expertise still has value, you just need to pivot its direction.
Edit: extra word removed
That’s one of the smartest things I read all day (outside of the Rust book and sdl2 doc :p)
There’s discussions about stopping the teaching of Unity in Universities too.
Damn, I hadnt even thought about that. A class on Unity right now would be only a month in, and those professors are probably agonizing over whether to continue teaching a course on an engine that might not even be a relevant skill by the time the semester is over, or desperately try to switch gears and teach something completely different. I don’t envy that decision, prepping a new course in the middle of a semester is a nightmare
It’s unlikely a lecturer will change the course material this quickly. There’s a lot of planning and work that goes into a class. They probably will change strategy for the next semester, though.
In addition, game dev is game dev. The skills are 90% transferrable. A university class (should, at least) will teach you about the foundational and general concepts, using a game engine like unity to put theory into practice. Classes generally don’t use and teach a tool to teach how to use that tool specifically, but to teach something more general/foundational, that will be useful in the future no matter how the tech landscape changes.
Lmao holy fuck. First I’ve heard about it. If that’s true, not only is that a very sensible choice for universities to make in this context, but also a pretty clear indicator to the entire industry that Unity has become a platform that is no longer feasible or acceptable to work with… and the industry is already reaching that consensus of its own accord.
Meanwhile wall st seems to be out of touch and unaware the industry is currently turning on unity because this article was released yesterday, bullish on unity. https://invezz.com/news/2023/09/15/unity-stock-price-forecast-bank-of-america-analyst/
Honestly the only way they could possibly give this recommendation is if they understand literally nothing about either the industry in which Unity operates or the legal implications of what Unity kicked off last week
Time to short the stock?
Lmao if this turns into a reverse GME that’d be hilarious.
I’m shorting $U. This is not investment advice. I just don’t like the stock.
Link?
Zelda?
Donkey?
Psycho Mantis?!?
Shawn!
Jason
Well excuse me princess
That might be surprising for developers that released a Unity game back in, say, 2015, when Unity CEO John Riccitiello was publicly touting Unity’s “no royalties, no fucking around” subscription plans. Now, even developers who paid $1,500 for a “perpetual license” to Unity back then could theoretically be subject to additional per-install fees starting next year (provided their game is still generating sufficient revenue and installs).
This reminds me of a story from earlier this year from Wizards of the Coast, publishers of Dungeons & Dragons (and subsidiary of Hasbro). It hinged on exactly the same semantics.
The short version is that, in 2000, Wizards of the Coast released D&D under the “Open Gaming License (OGL),” which gave third parties explicit approval to make and sell their own material using most of the D&D content, under a perpetual license. Cut forward 23 years, and lots of major publishers got their start making D&D supplements, and continue to use the OGL because (a) it’s a cover-your-ass license in case they tread into a legal gray area, and (b) allows them to open up their own content to third parties. Plans for an update OGL leaked, with predictably dogshit terms that I won’t get into right now, but essentially killed the license as anything anyone would want to use. The malicious part was that they would be “de-authorizing” the OGL 1.0a, because while it was a perpetual license, that didn’t make it irrevocable.
(IIRC, it’s also a legal argument based on case law established after the OGL was written. Not a lawyer, though.)
Predictably, there was a huge backlash. WotC backtracked, and even gave up ground by releasing a bunch of stuff under the Creative Commons. However, the OGL is still dead, because third parties can no longer trust that WotC (or Hasbro) won’t try this ratfuckery again. (Sound familiar?) Lots of products were subtly rewritten to no longer need the OGL, and several publishers worked on an industry license amusingly called the Open RPG Creative License, or ORC.
The thing is, D&D’s going to survive this a lot better than Unity. The business model was to sell D&D and D&D supplements, they only indirectly benefited from third-party material, and people are still going to make D&D stuff because it’s D&D. Unity’s entire business model relies on licensing, so if people stop using it… that’s it.
Or be like me and abandon D&D outright in favour of Pathfinder.
Nice! I do love me some Pathfinder. When I want a superheroic high-fantasy game, I’d run Pathfinder over 5e without the slightest hesitation.
I decided to cut this bit for space (and I already ran long!) but part of the fallout of WotC’s shenanigans was that other publishers got a LOT of business. Paizo sold out of something like eight months of inventory in a matter of weeks, Goodman Games had similar record sales, and tons of others noticed a bump. D&D was synonymous with tabletop RPGs for a lot of people, but the backlash to the OGL changes put a huge dent in that market domination. I’ve never seen so many people talk about branching out and trying something new.
Play stupid EA CEO games, win stupid EA CEO prizes.
Complete corporate collapsed. IT’S IN THE GAME!!!
I hope that the Unity CEO feels as accomplished, and prideful as EA’s.
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Your game looks like a lot of fun :\
Is there a way for me to pirate it and hand you(r team) the money? I really don’t want to give unity an inch
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Maybe somebody will come up with a Unity-to-Godot converter that will handle most of the legwork.
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The people will find a way!
Is this what you are looking for? A friend of mine sent me this screenshot, unfortunately I don’t have the source for it.
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Can you port it to Godot?
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Game looks awsome, just wishlisted!
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This looks hella cool, just added to my wishlist. I hope this whole Unity bullshit doesn’t mess your plans up too much!
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I hope it’s illegal in the EU. Getting fined for a couple billions would put that piece of trash CEO in his place lol
It really wouldnt tho. There is a huge segmebt of C-Suite guys who are unashamedly going for that bag, no matter what happens to the company or its products once they are gone. This guy is one of the more prolific assholes of that sort.
Reminds me of those vultures that killed companies like Sears, K-Mart, and ToysR’Us
Isn’t fraudulent to change the terms of the deal after you’ve agreed to a contract? How are the new fees enforceable at all?
“I am altering the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further.”
Credit cards seem to have been doing this for ages. So have employers.
One of the most important things in a tool line this is long term stability. Unity just showed anyone intending to use their engine they are not a stable choice. I wanted to use unity for a recent project and found unreal engine terms more acceptable for my use case before these changes. Now there is no competition.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
This change led to a firestorm of understandable anger and recrimination across the game development community.
But in an FAQ, the company suggests that games released before 2024 will be liable for a fee on any subsequent installs made after the new rules are in effect.
Now, even developers who paid $1,500 for a “perpetual license” to Unity back then could theoretically be subject to additional per-install fees starting next year (provided their game is still generating sufficient revenue and installs).
Unity has yet to respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica, but a spokesperson outlined the company’s legal argument in a forum thread after reportedly “hunt[ing] down a lawyer”:
Broadly speaking, the general legal agreements signed by all Unity developers give some support to this position.
At least as far back as 2013, the Unity EULA has included a broad clause that says the company “may modify or terminate the subscription term or other Software license offerings at any time.”
The original article contains 420 words, the summary contains 163 words. Saved 61%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I hope that shit spark interest in decoupling things, your whole project depending on a single tool is very dangerous, and foss engines should try to agree on some standards to discourage vendor lock-in.
It’s a core part of any game. You basically CANNOT not make it a core part of the product.
At the point where you can write a “generic” wrapper for switching game engines you could damn near write your own engine.
Yep, and people try. It’s how a bunch of APIs come about, even. A good framework these days is just extra on further frameworks, like ReactJS is just a nice gap-filler between javascript and html.
Things standardize as best and as quickly as they can, but an entire game engine is… a lot more complex than a web page.
There are a bunch of fundamentally different approaches to designing game engines, and every single one is very different in that regard. There’s no way to find a common denominator.
Open source software, love it or…eventually be miserable
But the underlying problem here is even bigger than unity’s shitty practices - it means you can change your ToS at any point, at any time, without notice, without the need of consent, and the user has nothing to do about it.
Basically, the user agrees to a certain contract, that the other party can just silently change at any time, and if this is applicable in court, we are screwed.
What if visual studio suddenly added a line in their ToS “we have full rights to any code you ever write in VS” and they suddenly own your 10 years old project? What if android just silently added “we can take pictures of you from your front camera and sell them to porn sites”.
How the hell is it possible you can change the ToS without any notice or consent?
Everything is allowed if you have enough money
