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.
Any PR statement that includes the words “we hear you” can be safely ignored
Also any apology for how it was perceived rather than what was done is worthless.
It’s pretty speak for I’m sorry you are stupid and expendable.
RuneScape 3 recently made an extremely controversial change, and I think they handled the apology perfectly. When they finally made changes and dropped some heavily disliked things, they opened with “we messed up”. Unity needs to do the same thing here if they want a chance to rebuild
Jagex is respectful not the company I’d look to for inspiration in terms of correcting past mistakes 🙂 For the uninitiated, they legally gaslit the community when they made their first major controversial change roughly a decade ago by “removing the feature” then “adding” the same feature with a different coat of paint.
Which feature are you thinking of?
And the only reason they’re decent about mistakes is because of the plethora they’ve accumulated. By no means does that mean they get to it quickly nor fix it adequately all the time. But in the grand scheme of company fuck ups, that’s still one of the best. It says more about everyone else than it does Jagex. Still, I appreciate they can flat out say they fucked up.
The Squeal of Fortune, replaced by Treasure Hunter.
But in the grand scheme of company fuck ups, that’s still one of the best.
I really don’t know about that. They seem to do it so regularly that it’s been a borderline abusive relationship over the years. Back when the Gowers ran the company, things operated much more smoothly and particularly the pay-to-win aspects were completely absent.
There’s no other game I know of with a subscription, pay-to-win loot boxes, cosmetics store, season pass, and bonds. There’s also no other game I’m aware of that has overhauled its combat system to such controversy that it split the game in half (and seemingly most people play the old version) – the closest being Minecraft. There’s also absolutely no game where the developers regularly say “that’s engine work so we can’t do it”, when they own their own engine.
I still like RuneScape, but at this point I’ve completely given up on PvP in the game and anything resembling fairness. I just expect Jagex to do everything they can to try and entice me to give them more and more money for … ultimately … less.
Ahhhh I totally see what you mean. Yeah the whole thing with SoF going away for TH was disgusting. I don’t even consider it a change really, it’s pretty much the same thing. It still doesn’t sit right with me that they had an option to kill Yelps in a quest as effectively a scapegoat while they changed nothing.
Completely agree that MTX is out of control and badly designed. I understand why they need it, but they’re going about it the completely wrong way and monetizing the wrong things. It should only ever provide cosmetics. And Jagex is absolutely trying to get more money out of us in return for providing less.
EOC is something I’ve come to see as a mistake over time. It was way too much scope creep. They should’ve left items and armors and stats the same, and only changed how you dealt damage. Maybe introduce only a couple of abilities to augment combat instead of outright replace it, like bleeds, stuns, freedoms, etc. Plus, OSRS clearly shows that the old combat system could still do interesting and challenging encounters. And yeah PvP on RS3 is laughable and a lost cause, at least as far as the wilderness goes. The popularity of PvP in WE2 makes me think they could do something, but maybe that window has completely passed.
I don’t know that the engine criticism is fair though. The game has tons of spaghetti code that its built on. And the downside of having a custom engine is that you have to train anyone who’s going to work on it. You can’t hire someone experienced in the system.
EOC is something I’ve come to see as a mistake over time. It was way too much scope creep.
Agreed.
The popularity of PvP in WE2 makes me think they could do something, but maybe that window has completely passed.
Yeah, I think the right thing to do would’ve been to make the wilderness a safe PvP faction vs faction area that’s basically a continuous version of one of those events.
I don’t know that the engine criticism is fair though. The game has tons of spaghetti code that its built on. And the downside of having a custom engine is that you have to train anyone who’s going to work on it. You can’t hire someone experienced in the system.
Any code base can be fixed, it’s just a function of time and money. They can yell spaghetti code all they want, but ultimately Jagex is the one that allowed that to happen in the first place. It’s not an excuse to further gaslight your customers. It’s something you should take accountability on, and work to fix. Done right, having your own engine is an opportunity to do new and exciting things.
It’s certainly a very large financial undertaking to change the engine like that, and at that point they’re honestly better off just making a new game entirely.
I love your idea for the wilderness, safe PvP for factions would’ve been a lot of fun.
This is bullshit. There is no confusion. Their new policy was very clear and easy to understand. If the word confusion applied at all, it would be to how/why Unity is doing such a brain dead move that alienates their entire user base. This is a weasel word announcement that doesn’t say what it should, namely ‘we fucked up and we’re sorry’.
“we’re sorry for how you reacted”
Appalling
My god, they’re becoming alien ants
And just like, the movies, we play out our last scene.
The Unity execs thought they were being smooth criminals, instead they came in too rough and got busted.
Stupid voice typing… fixed :{
Brain dead is such an understatement too. They lost everyone’s trust, and I’m not sure there’s anything they can say to regain it. They’re gonna try something like this again at some point, and I don’t think anyone should give them the opportunity. They deserve to go under.
Trust is hard to build and easy to break and even harder to rebuild.
To truly rebuild trust, they’d need to commit to never doing this again. That would mean 1. a change to the legal TOS that a developer who licenses for a project at a certain pricing level may remain at that price level for that project / that generation of Unity for as long as they wish, 2. a public commitment to never require per-install pricing, and ideally 3. the resignation of whoever came up with this brain dead idea.
Indeed, only a legal guarantee would satisfy me. Put it in writing in all the contracts that unity is not allowed to charge per install and then we can talk
doesn’t say what it should, namely ‘we fucked up and we’re sorry’.
I don’t think they fucked up in the way you mean (from their point of view). Their mistake was not getting away with the change, their “apology” sounds to me like they are going to reword their new policy but ultimately still have it do somewhat the same thing.
IMO they should never had done this in the first place and should now say “we are sorry, our mistake, it won’t happen again”.
Yeah, this 100%.
To truly restore trust, it should be ‘we’re sorry, our mistake, it won’t happen again, our new TOS will guarantee the right to remain at a current license price structure for a given generation of the engine, we hereby promise to never ever require per-install pricing, and the person responsible for this change is no longer with the company’.
That was not an apology. That was them calling us stupid.
“what, you guys don’t have phones?”
Were sorry youre so stupid
“Angst”. Quite a choice of words.
Isn’t it? Like the entire industry is composed of teenagers without enough life experience to see the big picture.
But then, did anyone expect Unity not to be tone deaf?
That was my first impression. I suppose it could be an honest mistake (especially since they apparently fired all the PR people a while back, too, heh) but it doesn’t look great.
Must be AI-written.
So they apologize for being caught, not for wrecking stuff, as usual.
It’s worse. They’re not even apologizing for their actions but the “confusion and angst”.
It’s kind of like saying “we’re sorry you feel that way” and are somehow misunderstanding what they’re trying to do. They might as well have said, sorry dumbasses but it’s going to happen regardless. Perhaps in some watered down form, perhaps not this/next year, but it will happen.
Remember Blizzard when they released Warcraft 3 Reforged? “We’re sorry you didn’t get the experienced you thought you deserved”. Gold mine, that one. It wasn’t phrased like that exactly but that was what they meant.
It took them a week to make a tweet saying basically nothing?
You should see how long ECS and the Jobs system has been in development.
They’ve already sealed their fate. Only a fool would start making a new project in Unity going forward.
"We thought you were locked in and realised you may not be. We might have to rethink our evil master plans "
It’s almost like the CEO of the company (John Riccitiello) supporting the most Indie game developers holds 53 million dollars in EA shares or something…
Even, and most likely especially, if Unity does poorly does EA benefit… I bet ya Riccitiella knows all the features of Frostbite, but couldn’t tell you if you can do native reliable UDP networking in Unity…
Unless the CEO walks and takes his yes-men with him, I don’t see Unity recovering from this self-inflicted shitshow in the near term. I bet it has motivated a lot of devs to look at the viability of using Godot instead and being free of future shakedowns.
If you switch to Godot and implement a feature you needed but it didn’t have, please do us a favor and take that part of the code and put it out there under the MIT license (unless I’m misremembering what license they use) it will help the next person switch easier
The apology seems insincere, as they always do; however, a company bending to consumer feedback in this manner is a good thing (if they actually make meaningful changes).
There was no confusion and this is empty PR until they publicly post the policy changes.
And what, pray tell, will change?
This was always the plan, by the way. This is the Trump school of negotiation.
Make a horrendous, unrealistic, offensive proposition. Opponent is outraged.
Then, propose the offer you actually want. It now looks better relative to the initial proposition.
I fucking despise this type of action and will never touch unity or suggest it to anyone ever again. It’s the only way to root out this type of bullshit from our society. Scorched earth.
Nothing. They hear us. We should be happy. They listened. Now they’re going to go on with their plan. But it’s great they heard us! /s
Not nothing.
People will drop Unity as an engine at a huge rate.
The limit will be increased to a whopping $250,000 and the fee will be only 18 cents
More like the limit will be decreased to $100,00 and the fee will go up to 0.4 (0.35 for pro). You don’t get it, you just was confused and angsty, this is a better proposal!
*wE hAvE hEArD yOu, wE aRe lIsTEnInG"
Like fuck you are, damn vultures. Outta here with this generic ass PR apologythey really only have themselves to blame. Part of the task when you are making a major software platform decision as a company is to research your vendor’s financial strategy
This is basically victim blaming & the old Unity license was fine because it allowed you to create console ports. Godot still isn’t a valid solution for consoles.
Why isn’t Godot a solution for consoles? Is it not implemented yet? Just curious. I’m starting to read about Godot given the debacle that Unity’s management caused. It’s been great advertising for Godot.
There’s no official implementation for console. I think there’s a third party extension(?) in the works to allow godot to work with console though
