Oh hey, look.
The former CEO of EA made a greedy, short-sighted decision to fuck over his entire customer base.
I am shocked, friends.
SHOCKED.
Well… not that shocked.
Way to ruin a comedic moment.
I get the reference, I love that show, even though Bender may not approve, because I’m just a meat bag.
It’s not that guy that looked like a supervillain every time he got up on stage at E3, is it?
Not sure about that, but he is a boss character in not one but two Suda51 games. (Suda51 was apparently screwed over by the guy who was, at the time EA’s CEO.)
Oh yeah… I can’t see this being weaponed by the bad side of the consumers.
Game comes out, it does something stupid or just “woke” and pisses people off. They attack the dev by installing more copies. Company goes bankrupt. Dickhead gamers win.
Also, what counts as an install? Ive seen many unity based games that don’t have an installer and just run standalone? Would a standalone game count as already installed? Is it a first run thing in that case? Honestly this, and the additional clarification raises more questions than it answers?
RIP Unity. First they partnered with Ironsource. Who are the people behind InstallCore it’s a wrapper for bundling software installations. It tricks people into installing enough browser toolbars and other bloat to hurt their PCs. Windows Defender and MalwareBytes blocks it. Now Unity does this shit.
Unity’s CEO was EA’s CEO too. He is the guy who shaped EA into the greedy company that it is today. I’m literally not surprised
No wonder the article smelled like wet rats reading it
This is a good way to incentivize game developers to just not use Unity and just some other engine that does this.
Great for short term profits which makes the quarterly statements look good, but bad for long term sustainability.
The CEO of Unity used to the the CEO of EA.
It explains a lot.
A CEO who can’t manage. Shocker.
Short term profits making quarterly reports look better to stakeholders. Isn’t that how 80% of these bigwigs get their job in the first place? We should be calling it the Zaslav Model at this point 😂.
Just because it looks better to shareholders now doesn’t make it a good business decision. I swear the majority of CEO types don’t give a damn if the company goes under in a few years because they either:
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Have a golden parachute in place by sucking up to the Board.
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Will move on to another CEO position at another company before it folds. Bonus points if they golden parachute on the way out.
Modern corporate management model is just broken.
That’s what the golden parachute is supposed to be for: a payout long term so the CEO doesn’t make a short term decision that fucks the company up but pays out big. Ex: offering a stock package that you can’t sell for 5-10years.
A decision like this will pay out HUGE in the short term, but if they don’t change it I doubt many will be using unity in a few years.
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rule 1: get user by giving free candy rule 2: let’s them build their product, workflow on your tools rule 3: harvest.
Rule 4: get fucked by better and cheaper products (Unreal/Godot)
Rule 5: make an obituary presentation on what went wrong (hint: it’s always management)Rule 6: Unreal does the same thing, everyone switches to Godot 😂
It is management
CEO or whatever used to be head of EA
Unreal engine will probably do the same shit than Unity, Unreal engine might be opensource (not FOSS), I think there’s the same clauses about production royalties.
Even if Godot wins, there’s a cost to move.
I think Godot will not win simply because Unreal is so much better for 3D games what most comercial games use. I think Godot will become the indie favourite for 2D. Where it goes from there I’m not sure. Is the revenue sharing not enough to carry the game engine? Unreal/Epic is a special case. But is Unity mismanaged so hard? It still has huge market share.
Just a reminder that if Unity developers with pro licenses coming to Godot contribute even a small fraction of what they might have paid for those licenses on Unity, Godot can develop even faster.
I’m sure this will give a boost to Godot development.
It already has. The Godot Developer Fund went up by $4,000 yesterday alone.
Ha, yeah my immediate thought was imagining a situation like:
Godot Developers who have not yet read the news: “Huh. Why do we have 1000 new pull requests today?”
Ngl, I did visit their site right after reading the news. My next project will be using it. I hope it catches wind with this!
as someone who was reasonably deep with unity, the alternatives really are quite thin - Godot is a big contender or otherwise it’s time to pick up some Rust game development
Godot has Rust support with GDextensions
Stride might be worth looking into if you’re going for 3D stuff, it uses C#
Is Rust a game engine?
I’m familiar with the coding language but I wasn’t aware of any game engine stuff outside of developing your own
There are several projects to build a game engine in rust. The one I hear about most is Bevy. No experience with any of them personally
Thanks for sharing, I’ll check it out. Games in rust could help that whole endeavor in finding insecurities and whatnot even faster with game hackers and whatnot too
GODOT SQUUUUUUAAAAAD
This might kill entire indie projects.
I think we need to kill everything so this is a good start. Snake blisken LA
Indies are the ones who deserve to die the least.
I work for a small (15 people) Unity gaming company. Will let you know what the CEO says, just shared the actual Unity blogpost
Edit: Update - CEO added a gravestone emoji and said “yikes”
This is absolutely mad vendor lock in. I’m doing the maths and if you create the next flappy bird and it goes viral and gets 50 million downloads in a month, you’d owe unity $10 million dollars before you’d even received your first monetization cheque (you did launch with a full monetization plan, right? right? oh.)
edit: i forgot they had moneitzation limits too, so no - this situation wouldn’t quite happen until they earned $200,000 in revenue. Though the potential to go viral and find yourself underwater because of the massive unity bill in comparison to your income is still a possibility
So I only owe them 10 million if I’ve made $200,000?
This is incredibly scummy. Not just for the obvious reason, but also because this is a business to business deal that developers have little room to avoid. It essentially encourages per-install charges for users, or at least limits on how many times you can install the software - which is completely unreasonable, they should only ever limit concurrent installations. If I want to upgrade to a new computer I should be able to move all my software over to it.
Unity going the way of Reddit
Once [a company] can make more money by screwing its customers, that screw-job becomes a fait accompli.
Capitalism, yay!
Sounds like another problem we have thanks to DRM and telemetry.
Well, guess it’s time to learn Godot.
As someone who’s using Godot and giting gud at it, I hope you enjoy it. For programming, you can go with either its GDScript (python) or C#, so Unity veterans shouldn’t have much trouble.
That’s great to hear. C# has grown on me so much lately! It’s like TypeScript but not sucky.
GDScript (python)
I think GFScript is it’s own language, but looks definitely inspired by Python
