I have to give it to them - who knows what they’re thinking - but the fact that they adjusted the pricing scheme and that the leader is leaving at least suggests they’re taking (and have took) the feedback seriously.
That being said, even before the drama, unity was a sinking ship that was not profitable. Something will have to give eventually.
>> That being said, even before the drama, unity was a sinking ship that was not profitable.
Surely the new pricing is the solution to that? The fact that we have these massive companies, creating complex software, used by tens of thousands of people to build their own companies, and they are unprofitable is insane. Their original pricing scheme was a mess, but charging more generally and becoming profitable is good for them and therefore good for the tens of thousands of companies building their businesses using Unity software (given that Unity doesn't die and they don't have to retool their entire dev stack).
$4,400,000,000USD spent buying IronSource (I think? It's a weird deal).
At 20c per install, every person in the world would have to install four Unity games just to make back what was spent on those two deals. At the lower 1c per install rate, everyone in the world needs to install 75 Unity games.
I've probably got the actual cost of the IronSource dal wrong, but there's also salary for what is apparently 9000 employees. Maybe $500,000,000USD/year for that?
It seems like the goal is to use promises of not having to pay the fee as leverage to get devs buying their brand of related services. For instance, they suggest you might earn "credits on the Unity Runtime Fee based on the adoption of Unity services beyond the Editor, such as Unity Gaming Services or Unity LevelPlay mediation for mobile ad-supported games."
I mean John fucked up the delivery of the message, somehow the cheapest pricing scheme I've ever seen was interpreted by the customers as an example of dastardly extreme greed, and the fix was to roll out a much more expensive pricing scheme. Something was lost in the sauce and that was all John's fault.
I know for me (as someone who would likely never have had to pay a dime under either pricing scheme) the crux of the issue was unilateral, retroactive changes to a license that was supposed to be tied to the software version, as well as the nebulous "we'll know what to charge you because of our proprietary data model, trust us" messaging that they first went with.
That, combined with the fact that there was no safeguard for the install fee to be capped at some percentage of gross revenue made it so clear that they were trying to get something out of their free to play market specifically, which seems to have been to force their F2P customers to use their Unity Ads service over Applovin or similar competitors since they gave credits towards the runtime fee if you vertically integrated with Unity.
The biggest problem was applying it to already released products. You have to give the developers the chance to pivot their business model to meet the new reality. They can't do that for already sold products that they would still be charged for under the new scheme.
If they tried to enforce that on previous version they'd get sued from all directions for contract violations. It was never going to work like that, there's no way Unity could have even afforded to defend themselves against such a barrage of lawsuits.
So the only question remaining is this: Did they announce these changes with the intent to walk them back to something else, or are they really that stupid?
During the initial kerfuffle, a Unity employee did quote one of their lawyers saying the following[1]:
> 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.
The communication around this rollout was absolute rubbish. Even employees were trying to get clarity, and they were forced to figure it out and real time.
> Further, our terms are governed by California law, notwithstanding the country of the customer.
So presumably if you’re a customer in the EU you’re still doing business directly with their CA HQ and not an office registered in Ireland/Luxemburg/etc. (pretty much how every other major company does it?)?
Then again why wouldn’t you say stuff like that as a lawyer? The fees from all the lawsuits would’ve been pretty immense (regardless of who wins..)
Not really. It’s just that they didn’t realize that their byzantine pricing model was far too complex for many people (who looked at it for 5 seconds and jumped to Twitter) to understand.
Almost nobody who could do basic math would’ve paid the $0.2 fee. They would’ve just upgraded to pro (considering that’s something they already had to do if their company’s revenue* was above 200k under the old model).
* the fact that Unity switched from a per company rev. limit to a per project one was also a significant discount to some users (e.g. if you work in an actual company but need Unity for a temporary/side project you now get it for free).
There were definitely many free to play games that would be overly negatively affected.
I’m not sure why folks appeal to a smug sense of “well I can do math”. You most certainly cannot account for every single case.
Free to play based on their initial plan of install based metrics with no revenue cap would have become infeasible unless you also happened to use Unity’s ad network.
Considering how high CPI is for mobile game ads ($0.2 to $2.5 or so depending on country) I don’t believe that would have been the case.
Of course the fees would still be significant for a large proportion of F2P developers and possibly crushing for those who make very little per user.
> I’m not sure why folks appeal to a smug sense of “well I can do math”
I was aiming that entirely towards the people who were focusing on the $.20 fee. Doesn’t make Unity’s announcement/model any less stupid but I’ll reiterate that only those who can’t do basic math would’ve ended up paying that much.
That wasn't at all why people got mad. The unilateral claims (perceived or otherwise) on prior releases of the engine, claiming that the platforms (e.g., Microsoft) would just pay it--it was badly messaged, badly considered, and the initial feedback from their customer base was blown off and dismissed.
Steam could take 90% and the 'gaming community' would probably defend it (and therefore developers don't want to be seen criticising the almighty Valve)
Epic got a lot of hate for merely trying to compete, to weaken the Steam near-monopoly over PC game distribution.
With Unity though, the outrage was over a loss of trust more than the cost of the fees themselves. And it came at a time when it seemed that the engine had been stagnating for years, after they'd made significant redundancies and cancelled the Gigaya project (their attempt to actually make a game themselves with their engine - which could have been very beneficial, creating internal pressure to fix/improve provlem areas), and while the main competition seemed to be adding exciting features at a much more rapid pace.
Even if you're right about the pricing. Launching this change with so many unanswered questions (like how they're going to track "installs") was going to end in disaster. Should have gotten their ducks in a row first.
Worst thing was that they had a collection of pre-made FAQs that proudly confirmed all the worst ways to understand the changes and actually left no real path for "misunderstood what we meant".
This whole stunt was a painful communications nightmare but also the rude asymmetric breaking of trust that most people saw in it.
So, this final step was needed for cleaning up that mess (and it still might need some detail work, if one looks at that apology interview), no matter how deeply strategic one wants to look at firing a CEO.
Not to mention the loss of trust from having the new pricing retroactively affect already-launched titles, as opposed to giving developers advanced notice of a policy change at some point in the future. No one wants that kind of unpredictability from a critical dependency.
I don’t know how you are coming up with this take. Everyone that i know in the industry, big or small, calculated their fees with the faq open next to them so they wouldn’t make a mistake. Everyone would have owed more to Unity. A few owed more to Unity than they had in the bank.
Because the edge cases were loud on account of the "just made it past 200k" line literally bankrupting some studios. They forgot their market isn't just mobile f2p and didn't at least offer an alternative pricing model for premium games.
It's also just a plain bad model to retroactively change a license, full stop. If Unity was actually inrotoducing some exciting tech with 2024.1 or whatever it could entice devs to move and take the hit. But they know that they haven't done that in 5+years, so there's that underpinning.
>When Steam and Epic pockets 30%?
Epic pockets 12%, and if you use UE and publish to EGS they waive the engine royalties. Since we're speaking of "doing the right thing and idiots crucified him for it".
That being said, even before the drama, unity was a sinking ship that was not profitable. Something will have to give eventually.