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.
While we were very reasonable, we understand that you just didn’t get it, which made you sad. We understand it feels bad to be sad. To remedy this, we will try again using different words.
“We recognize that our recent runtime fee policy announcement wasn’t well-received. We genuinely apologize for the oversight and any confusion or concern it caused. Your feedback is invaluable to us. We are actively discussing the policy with our teams and the community and will be revising it based on your inputs. Please bear with us as we work through this, and expect an update soon.”
Yep, that has a better tone. There’s a limit to how good a statement you can make when at the core you really plan to do enshittification one way or another, but they could have thrown in a smidgeon of accepting blame also. E.g. “We were unable to provide clear and unambiguous answers to questions that came up” costs them nothing.
Too late, they already communicated their greed to every gamedev out there and no one can ignore the potential of Unity fucking them over again anymore. Overall the whole shitshow was good advertisement for Godot.
It’s truly the year of mask-off corporate reveals. WotC, Reddit, Unity, Twitter. Probably more I’m forgetting or unaware of. So many big moves to capitalize on long time stability that, quite predictably, result not in amazing increase in profits but the irrevocable tarnishing of public trust that they relied on. It’s kinda wild to watch, honestly.
It’s IMO a sign that the current financial bubble is about to burst and it’s going to do so in a very violent way despite greedy bulls still pushing the “it’s different this time, we have AI now” bullshit.
Investors have their money trapped in these companies, and when they see what riskless treasury bills yield, they naturally start losing their minds because their money is instead in companies that fail to make significantly more than that riskless benchmark. So those investors then pressure those companies to do whatever they can to produce a good enough return on investment in a short period of time as they run out of patience and they themselves know that hell is coming in the financial markets so their shares might lose an even more significant amount soon.
The end result of CEOs and executives under pressure by investors, and engineers stressing out because they understand the financial situation and that they have to either be yes-men and agree with whatever changes the executives propose or be laid off (because another way to reach the target set by investors is to reduce costs by firing people), is obviously the enshittification that we witness today.
The conventional wisdow is that in time of economic turmoil, companies should lower their profit margins and weather out the storm.
However, in today’s capitalism, this is not not acceptable. Shareholders demand ever increasing profits and anything short of that is considered a failure. If you don’t keep your margin, you are to be scolded and discarded.
Now, the loans that many of the companies have cost a lot more money than 2 years ago. So the enshittification is used to enable the continued growth to keep the profits growings.
That’s how it is once the free money dries up. The profits must rise, no matter the long-term damage this causes - so they try to bleed the existing customer base dry to keep things rising for one or two more quarters. What does it matter to them if all the employees who have worked hard for years will lose their jobs due to their mismanagement?
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’.
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”.
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’.
Unity have already established market dominance, if not effective monopoly, as the mobile gaming development platform. They are in a position of power, they have invested large sums of money to get there, and there is really very little game developers with a product 1 or 2 years in development can do about it.
While this is going to be difficult for Indy developers, they 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 - that’s basic due diligence. Unity has been loss making for years, which either means they are not financially viable (and not a safe bet), or they are engaging in a strategy of establishing an effective monopoly position to later squeeze dependant customers until the pips squeak.
This is likely just the start, whether it’s through runtime charges, Unity control of in-game advertising, or huge hikes in seat license fees. Possibly all three.
Stallman has always had a bunch of good points. It's just that he's rigid and uncompromising enough about them, and a weird enough dude in general, to turn a lot of people off. "Weird dude" shouldn't matter, but basic human psychology says it does - every time.
they really only have themselves to blame [...] research your vendor’s financial strategy - that’s basic due diligence
Really? They really only have themselves to blame for Unity suddenly making a drastic and poorly thought out change to their pricing policies? Researching with what, a crystal ball?
Changing the pricing structure would be a perfectly understandable and predictable outcome. Unity choosing to adopt a wildly unfair and entirely unprecedented pricing model is definitely not something their customers could have expected.
Why not? And how is it even “unfair”? They want to charge for every copy sold, that was made using, and is still using, their software.
People who compare this to Visual Studio vs. the MSVC DLLs, are forgetting all the privative libraries which charge for every copy they get released with.
Unity is pulling one of those; only because they didn’t before, doesn’t make it “unfair”, just a dick move.
While this is going to be difficult for Indy developers, they really only have themselves to blame
In the same way that underpaid workers are to blame for not “just” finding and getting a better job or “learning skills”. Fuck off with that pro-corporate victim blaming.
Not pro-corporate in any way, I don’t see how you could possibly read that into what I posted. But if you choose to sup with the devil, best use a long spoon.
In the case of most of the companies affected by the changes, they literally signed up under a different agreement and then Unity changed the terms once they were pretty much locked in and couldn’t change to another engine without serious costs and/or difficulty.
There’s literally no way indie devs are at fault here and yes, blaming them for being victims of corporate fuckery IS taking the side of the corporation fucking them.
Unity have lost huge amounts of money, in fact never made a profit for a single quarter, while establishing more and more market share, and their customers never asked themselves how or why?
They're game devs, not an acquisition and mergers team. "We signed contract to do business with xyz terms" should be plenty reliable enough for conducting business. Not "Lol, whut? You didn't read the fine print? Psyche! We're changing everything."
If I buy a service, I care about the service, not how the company is doing financially. In fact, I don’t even take the time to look at their finances because who the fuck does that? Are you looking into Netflix each month?
If your vendor is constantly making huge losses while establishing more and more market share, your guy in charge of the financial decisions should be asking themselves what the investors long term plans are. That’s not rocket science.
You’re actually making some valid points here, in regard to the trend of companies losing money as a strategy to obtain market dominance and then turning to monetization after. It’s exactly how Uber and AirBNB got where they are, and it’s a strategy that people need to get more wise to. You’re right, and you should say it.
But for the love of God, say it better than this. The “users only have themselves to blame because they got hoodwinked by a pack of liars and thieves who are very good at being liars and thieves” angle kills any chance of anyone listening to the actual point you’re making because you went and wrapped it up in a giant dose of victim blaming.
If you cook an absolutely perfect hamburger and then spit in it right before serving, you can’t act surprised when no one wants to even try a bite.
But for the love of God, say it better than this. The “users only have themselves to blame because they got hoodwinked by a pack of liars and thieves who are very good at being liars and thieves” angle kills any chance of anyone listening to the actual point you’re making because you went and wrapped it up in a giant dose of victim blaming.
I really don’t agree. His phrasing was harsh and unsympathetic, but the world owes nothing to anyone and those developers should have done their due diligence. Trying to cast this in highly broad black-and-white morality isn’t productive. Is it moral what Unity is doing? No. Is it Unity’s right to do this? Legally maybe, but in every other sense, no. Are the developers who decided to use Unity a bunch of wishful thinkers who chose to ignore red flags? Yes. Unity may be thieves, but it’s been clear for a while now that their business model was unsustainable. Everyone who chose to do business with them anyway chose to ignore the warning signs. People are responsible for their own actions, and while they aren’t responsible for being cheated, they are still responsible for ignoring massive red flags with “we’re not a legit business” on them in bright white letters. I, too, blame developers for their share of their predicament, for the same reason that I blame would-be mountain men who starve to death and then get eaten by wolves because they tried to tame a national park with a pocketknife and a Walmart tent.
As for the other people who got really upset, I think choosing to allow yourself to be upset by style to the extent of ignoring the substance is exactly that: an active choice, one you have to consciously make. If you explained to someone why continuing to burn coal for electricity is bad and then finished it with something harsh like “only a total dumbshit would disagree with this”, would that person be justified in saying “What an asshole. Clearly fossil fuels can’t be that bad”? Of course not. If a person did that, they would be in the position of taking in the argument, understanding it, and then actively choosing to disregard it because it conflicts with their feelings. That’s the kind of magical thinking conservatives stoop to when they dispute climate change, the efficacy of vaccines, etc. because they’re butthurt about people saying “of course the world isn’t flat you fucking idiot”. I would hope that people who have a greater degree of emotional maturity than them (i.e. any) would be able to look at a person’s argument from a calmer and more objective point of view. It’s not like that’s even hard.
To be clear, you’re not being unreasonable, but the other people responding to this guy are having proper hissy fits and they really need to get a grip.
That’s public information and it’s very basic information. Anyone running a business knows to check to make sure anyone they form a partnership with is a legitimate business, the same way you know not to hire a sore-covered meth addict from Facebook marketplace to redo your floors. The fact that they were using proprietary software was already a red flag anyway,
By the way, yes I’m aware you’re just sealioning, no I’m not going to engage with it.
Security company Guarda permanently operates in the red in the US but keeps itself alive by constantly buying up all the small security companies it can in the US. It’s essentially a MASSIVE ponzi scheme in a sense that it would die if it couldn’t continue to add to it’s ranks.
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
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…
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
They might be doing exactly that FWIW. There’s some evidence Jagex is working on a “RuneScape universe” oriented game in Unreal Engine.
Still, that’s not the silver bullet that people often think it is. Rewrites are often far more expensive than originally anticipated and extremely risky as even if you intend to make the exact same game, there are often differences that come down to the underlying engine in how the game plays that can be controversial.
For context, I’ve been on a team that did a full rewrite of a large complicated C# web application in Ruby and I’ve also worked on several C/C++ “desktop” applications that have roots in the late 80s and early 90s. The former is more “fun” in a sense, you can make up for a lot of sins. However, I fundamentally believe that unless the language you’re moving from has serious fundamental issues (e.g. you’re insane and wrote a million line application in Bash), you’re probably better taking a hard look at your application and retrofitting new systems inside of the old application where you most badly need those changes.
Even in the “worst case” it’s in practice true that most of the code doesn’t need touched, it’s just some really intertwined portions that need revamped. You can often get away with making a new system that replaces the guts of the old, thus powering both the existing code, and allowing you to achieve whatever goal you had in rewriting in the first place (working faster, safer, more readably, etc).
Yeah that’s fair. It’s you can nearly cordon off the engine and then upgrade it to keep the same functionality it could work well. I guess it really depends on estimated hours to figure out if it would be more economic to make a new game or new engine.
I also just wanted to add; if you want to look at what this looks like when the game development company is functioning properly look at Crytek and Hunt Showdown.
Crytek has publicly stated Hunt has a lot of issues internally in its code base. They then responded by committing to fix those issues (i.e. fix their spaghetti), and then they followed up by actually fixing issues (off the top of my head, an advantage when peeking from the left down to how the game handled the player camera was fixed, bugs in the ammo system resulting in a number of issues with reloading were fixed).
They didn’t stop there though. They said in their last roadmap update, they’re working with their internal CryEngine development team to make major changes to CryEngine (and this is reflected by Crytek’s CryEngine team stopping release of CryEngine to make major refactors for CryEngine 7) to do everything they want to do, remove hacks coded into Hunt’s fork of CryEngine, and pay all the tech debt down to get Hunt running on the most recent CryEngine (and hopefully keep it there, with all the tech advances that brings).
I just am cynical about Jagex’s willingness to spend money in this space. Ever since they’ve been owned by venture capital, everything is penny pinched; it needs to have an obvious return on investment.
We as players normally only see the content developers in interviews, and they’re often folks that don’t even have proper computer science degrees or training. Jagex internally for years has hired largely unskilled workers into their QA department and then promoted them into “developer” positions that work with RuneScript.
I’m fairly confident the engine team was a skeleton crew (and one split among developing iOS, Android, and Desktop clients) until the last few years when it became apparent at least some investment into the engine on the server side/more broadly was necessary.
I looked into joining their engine team at one point, and then promptly walked away when I saw the payscale.
Basically, I see no reason to give them slack; it’s actually a bit counter productive in my view. The community should be stern that Jagex should address their issues rather than running from them and constantly blaming “yesterday’s Jagex” for why “today’s Jagex” is making bad decisions, can’t do XYZ, etc
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.
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).
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