Unity talks of price cap and fees for only largest games developers Unity is backtracking on commercial Ts&Cs for developers using its games engine, claiming that as part of a new tiering system under consideration fees will be capped and will apply only to top tier customers. In what could be a business school case study on how not to introduce drastic changes to a pricing plan, Unity last …
No sane Dev will bet their livelihood on them now. I could see some working with them under a strict contract, but I can't see too many small devs being able to afford lawyers to negotiate their deal with the devil, let alone sue when they inevitably alter the deal. (Cue Darth Vader breathing)
I mean, some devs are going to be stuck more or less no matter what. Take Genshin Impact for example. There's basically no way they would reasonably be able to convert all that over to Unreal or any other engine without it being more trouble and expense than it's worth. However, their newer Honkai Star Rail game is still relatively new, so... I'd be shocked if there weren't internal discussions at Hoyoverse to evaluate the possibility going on right now. And if they have any unannounced games in the works, those too are probably under review.
That's where Unity has fucked itself over in an action usually seen as a last desperate attempt by failing companies to remain in business, but is becoming more and more common in late state capitalism. They've got a certain captive audience of games already written using Unity and those that are too far along to make switching feasible. However, that gale force wind you feel is all the developers rushing to evaluate other game engines for any projects that haven't crossed the rubicon yet. Unity basically sold their future profits for pennies on the dollar, or pence on the pound, today.
"Confusion" was a bit of a weasel word in Unity's statement. The changes were crystal clear and completely understood. That's why people were angry, because they could see exactly what impact they would have. As "Angst" , let it pass.
The correct response would have been "we screwed up, and we're rethinking this". As it stands it feels like one of those classic passive-aggressive fake apologies.
> games engine biz admits mistakes
But won't stop making them. They're not even doing damage control, apparently rather bluntly claiming they are sorry those lunatic, overreacting customers didn't understand the genius behind their plan. Poor Unity! Baaad customers!...
He knew what he was doing and willfully turned the fan up to high before dropping this turd. He sold his shares before hand and most probably then turns around and shorted the stock through some proxy. He is just that vile. Just look at his history. The SEC should climb up his *** and go as far back as possible and hammer him with max penalties. Then the shareholders should sue him for willfully doing egregious harm to the company and permanently tarnishing the name of the company.
It's tempting to think there's a correlation here, but there are narrow windows during which the CEO of any publicly traded company can buy/sell shares and they typically have to file paperwork with the SEC months in advance. It doesn't preclude the possibility of some insider trading, but it'd be a lot harder to pull off than you might think. As long as he filed the paperwork with the SEC in a timely manner, they're not going to do anything. The shareholders probably wouldn't have any standing to sue over this decision, but they could, and IMO should, pressure the board to fire his ass, or start firing board members until they get people on the board willing to fire his ass. Sadly, that requires a lot of effort to track down large shareholders, many of which are probably things like mutual or pension funds, and then get a large enough bloc to really affect some change.
""I don't think there's any version of this that would have gone down a whole lot differently than what happened…. It is a massively transformational change to our business model.""
Lol, yeah, like others have stated, going from business to 0 business is indeed a "massively transformational change to our business model".
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