Upper Echelon video • The Unity Disaster Get... This is the greatest unity engine of All Time Merch moistglobal.com/ Comics badegg.co/ Use code MOIST at gamersupps.gg/
“Massive corporations making terrible decisions out of greed and then immediately facing the consequences” has to be one of my favorite genres of entertainment
Except the ceo sold his stocks before all this, so its really just a massive L for people you should have sympathy for like devs. All the shit asses got their golden parachute already.
@@samuelhummingbird8059of course, that’s just a staple strategy that people like them do, they *know* that they’re running their company into the ground for their lust of money, and they think they can get away from the consequences.
Imagine a paint company charging an artist for everyone who views their painting. Imagine a concrete company charging a builder for everyone who walks into a building. Imagine a tool company charging a carpenter for everyone who sits in a chair.
There is no way their terms of service hold up in court in US and EU. This CEO is literally devaluing the company. He must be playing a game so he gets money somehow. FTC needs to investigate immediately.
@@josephnolan8217Imagine it's the courtroom or the negotiating table, and on one side, it's Unity, and on the other it's the lawyers of: Apple (Unity was partnered for VisionOS), Disney (Marvel SNAP), Microsoft (Gamepass) Valve (Steam) Sony (PlayStation store) Nintendo (Pokemon GO) Epic (epic Games store) And someone from the Department of Defence, since the odds of some simulation, recruitment or otherwise DARPA program somewhere using Unity platform as a base is likely above the number Zero. All with a reason to shed legal and financial blood and make an example out of Unity.
UnityIsEA2.0 stream changed my life the flavourness and the fruitfulness of the stream changed my perspective of the world I wish I could feel the feeling again
I want Charlie to talk to me 😩 I want him to whisper a sweet wisper in me ears to make them climax with his reincarnated voice of Jesus 😫 DADDY CHARLIE AHAHAH
@@miauw8762genuinely, these buy outs and take overs are genuinely baffling to me? Like why buy a popular service that basically runs itself and then…run it into the ground
I also didn't understand why anyone would give John Riccitiello another job after EA, until I looked into it. It appears that, at the time that he was forced to resign from EA, he was already on the Board of Directors for Unity, a position he still holds. Who decides the new CEO of a company? The board of directors. How much do you want to bet that the newly jobless John Riccitiello, at the next Unity board meeting, pitched himself as the new CEO and had made enough friends on that board that (along with his own vote) he was able to get the majority he needed to hire himself and give himself a $20+ million a year salary? Every member of Unity's board should be sued for betrayal of fiduciary duty by their investors.
@@tepakira9348 They could argue that. But it's a question of whether, by a preponderance of the evidence, a jury would agree that a *reasonable* person would believe the same as them.
@@SyntheticDivineconsidering under his tyrannical rule EA turned nearly all tripple A companies evil, became a devil, and led the way to double A company supremecy Id think not
Because he's not there to help the company. He's probably the guy you bring on to sink a company. He was probably kicked out of EA after the other boards realized what he was doing but the damage was too much.
Wait a second, are you telling me that a former CEO of a gaming mega corp went to work for Unity, a platform much more commonly used by indie studios, and then deliberately tanked it? That's some conspiracy fuel right there.
It's a stupid conspiracy. As much of a greedy move as it was, it's not like Unity was focusing on AMONG US or other titles like that. Unity is looking at all the remakes and mobile games made by other soulless companies and trying to chase big money. Unity is a lightweight engine and Unity thought they could survive the backlash.
I think what's funnier about it is EA has been known since as far back as the 80's for acquiring then just dissolving promising game studios after enough time has passed that theyre forgotten about to minimize backlash.
It was John Riccitello's idea to encorporate loot boxes into FIFA, which then spiraled into the entire industry adopting microtransactions. It's how he got the CEO position at EA. He is personally responsible for ruining AAA Gaming. Now he's also personally responsible for ruining indie gaming. It's almost poetic. He's literally the main antagonist of video games. The final boss.
@@Hadeto_AngelRust The horse armor was innocent in comparison to putting multiple generations of people at risk to develop gambling addictions. Statistically speaking, there are people who have / will develop gambling problems stemming from opening loot boxes as a child, and chasing that thrill. And they will gamble their lives away.
Look at the silver lining though... Godot is improving rapidly and is true open source... Already it can do almost everything Unity can in the indie space. This might provide the impetus for migration to Godot and its more rapid development - providing the game development community with a much stronger and more stable foundation. A bit like how Blender became the industry standard in 3D modelling and animation and it is completely free and open source. When I see Unity plugin developers announcing they will begin porting to Godot, just like so many game developers are I'll know this game is over and a better new chapter is ahead of us.
@@aceofswords1725 I like Godot, but let's not stretch it too far just yet. Godot is great at 2D, but atm it is still far from Unity on 3D. Also, overhyping is bad. So just be modest.
This will lead to game developers cutting their losses and switching to Unreal Engine or perhaps Godot. Every game that has ever used Unity as their engine and the ones that were going to at some point may end up becoming lost media because no sane developer will ever want to fork out a runtime fee just to install a game. It's madness.
I love unity it has great ui and it uses C++ all that, but unity is just getting worse and fucking worse, unreal engine was something I was once against, but now it seems that ue has become one of the only usable options. Unity killed itself, and it's sad.
This will never go through 5o retroactively charge people as that is a major breach in the terms and condition of Unity's contract. Legislators are already on their asses for this. They will probably be able to monetize this way moving forward, but not backward. So no one will use unity from now on, but games previously made with it are safe. That's my educated guess at least.
I'm up for godot because godot lacks proper Tutorial from pros, so hopefully if godot ever make it, they'll able to make morenopen source project that we can use to learn and adapt to our own game style
@@kun4i_135 Unity isn't the only middleware that skims profit, its just the most absurd and egregious on top of being the most common for stuff like mobile game dev. This move is mostly to try to force game devs to look at every install as potential profit and boost monetization, one of the smoothest brain ideas I've seen come to fruition in a long time - though not unexpected from the guy who killed Renderware.
UnityIsEA2.0 stream changed my life the flavourness and the fruitfulness of the stream changed my perspective of the world I wish I could feel the feeling again
If EA, the literal embodiment of the sin greed, fired you for being too greedy, yeah no. You have surpass the human limit of greed and gone to where no man has gone before.
I honestly hope the indie and triple a gaming industry just target unity with lawsuits until the board has a massive change and this new rule gets killed (you know you really done did it when you got indie game devs and mega corporations on the same side against you)
Honestly I don’t think they should get another chance. Forget changing the board, they need to go down. These large companies are taking for granted the needs and wants of the consumers and we need to remind them that if enough peasants band together, they can still commit regicide.
Interesting point about the change in TOS being "not" being applied retroactively. While Unity may not seek payment for past installations, will past installations count for its pricing model? If so, developers are still being punished.
The CEO of Unity is one of the most short sighted money hungry business execs out there. He's the reason Battlefield as a franchise is basically done, and now it looks like he's going to be the reason Unity ends up losing out to Unreal Engine.
Can we stop acting like CEOs are the only ones responsible for these decisions? I know people like Zuckerberg exist who seem to run everything, but the vast majority of companies are run by committees, board members, and investors. All of whom are part of the leadership of the company, whose sole purpose is to make as much money as possible. These decisions are GROUP efforts, not the greedy acts of a single individual.
This is definitely going to be hard to argue in court. This is no longer unitys property, how do they have any right over who plays it, let alone devs who haven't agreed to the new terms of service
This is why I laugh whenever a greedy corporate villain in a movie is called "too cartoonishly greedy and malicious to be realistic" in reviews. Because people like Riccitiello exist, and executives like him aren't even that rare.
@@mago_malvado96 I forget his name but that sounds fmailiar yeah, the fact reality is imitating art so much lately is kinda worrying not going to lie. Idiocracy is coming true, RPO is coming true, Theyre trying to clone dinosaurs, skynet on the way. Its like no one watches movies or something
I'm convinced the EA guy just walked into Unity headquarters, started shouting "MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY" at all the employees until it summoned the actual devil, and this is what he came up with
It’s like a paint brush company charging for every pair of eyes that sees a painting or a construction tool company getting paid based of how much whatever the building that was worked on was sold for
I like how John thinks people would just pay a dollar to reload instead of just playing a different game that doesn’t constantly charge you to do essential game functions
Right!? What idiot would pay a dollar for every reload when there are hundreds of games that don't do that? What's more likely is that the player will uninstall the game. I swear there's a point where when you have too much money, your brain ceases to function.
He essentially wants a world where every game does that. I bet he has never played a video game, and doesn't personally care. Games are just a product to him.
Unity's CEO practically said, 'if someone is in a desert, runs out of water, and is about to die, sell them a water bottle for a dollar, they don't care about the money at that point', and then do the same to millions more people.
The CEO answers to the shareholders. Unfortunately in 2020 Unity went publicly traded, and three shitheads bought their way onto the board of directors. Tomer Bar Zeev, Roelof Botha and Egon Durban. These are the people you should be talking about, not a figurehead like John Riccitello. Because those three people I mentioned? They're all chums with Elon Musk, which should speak volumes about what kind of stupid, greedy assholes they are. Tomer was the founder of Ironsource - a garbage monetization company that effectively sold malware (no surprise that the new Unity monetisation policies have a whiff of intrusive monitoring practises). Egon was on Twitter's board of directors, and was the one that pushed them to sell to Musk before being kicked out by the others in the ensuing lawsuit, when it became clear he was just spying for Musk. Roelof was the CEO of Paypal, and has a history of being involved in mergers that made lots of money for some, but lead to shit deals for end-users.
I'll play the devil's advocate here. You're comparing a life or death-situation to someone forcing to do an action while playing a game. I get your example is hyperbole, but it's not really a sensible comparison. Although I don't doubt Riccitiello would go that far, he would probably claim an extra fee for the starving mans stomach holding the f*cking water in it as some kind of taxation.
I'd like to see a documentary on the life of John Riccitello. I'm sure it will be one of those inspiring rags-to-riches stories that we keep hearing about.
Looking at the recent events with Reddit, Twitter, and now Unity, I came to a conclusion that the most harmful thing that can happen to a company is investors and CEOs. They're like cancer of corporations.
Ironically, corporations (except for Valve because Valve is privately owned by Gabe Newell) require investors and CEOs to even exist in the first place
To be fair, Twitter and Reddit have never been profitable... I think Twitter had one profitable year in it's history. A lot of these tech corporations have only been propped up by essentially free venture capital investments backed by borderline free money from the government money printing presses. Now that the global economy has been slowly forced back to reality by inevitable inflationary pressures... the 10-20 years of endless investor cash is starting to dry up. Investors in the recent past could make their money back by flipping overvalued stock based on the company having dominant market share, not because it had a solid balance sheet.... and those days are winding down. None of this is meant to defend any particular decisions... and I think this mess with Unity is largely a different animal as they already had a perfectly reasonable revenue stream in place... but the "don't worry, ads will pay for everything" approach to the internet is over.
I love how they use the term "qualify." It's like "Congratulations, you have successfully qualified to give us more money. Pat yourself on the back, you made it."
Let's call this what it is: Unionization in the game development space! Hopefully with the WGA/SAG-AFTRA, Teamsters, and the big-three auto workers strikes and overall more positive feelings towards unions can continue in the direction of the Gaming industry and improve conditions and compensation for workers, who- lets be honest- are in a very similar situation as the writers striking in hollywood right now because of unimaginably unfair compensation!
Unfair compensation,contractor churning,extreme hours during crunch,etc. The first demand of any union in a game studio is that any short term contractor currently employed by the studio should be offered full time employment instead of being lead on by promises of more permanent employment.
@@redenginner Absolutely! And let’s also be honest with ourselves here: not a SINGLE person who engages in that kind of anti-labor behavior has done even a minuscule thing for any of the great games we experience, and are somehow also the reason why games that should be great games are absolute dog. Literally just theft of labor on a mass scale. Not that it’s unique to the game industry, but it’s awesome to see some unionization there too!
Some more background information on John Riccitielo: - He was brought on into EA as Chief Operating Officer from 1998 - 2004. - While COO, he claims to have pioneered EA's infamous policy of aquiring talented studios to develop heavily monetized new releases in hopes of more profits from already established titles (i.e. Command & Conquer series). - His actions led to 10+ studios shutting down due to poor sales and destroyed reputation. - He became CEO of EA in 2007 and is directly responsible (he even claims credit in his LinkedIn) for the FIFA series transitioning to casino mechanics. He is also directly responsible for BioWare's implementation of the first ever "loot boxes" in the ME3 multiplayer, a mechanic that now plagues most AAA titles. John Riccitielo wants to be a modern day Midas, but instead he's the exact opposite as everything he touches withers and dies. This guy has caused so much damage to the video game industry that he should've been blacklisted from any position over a decade ago. As for selling stock days before a controversial announcement? That's insider trading, which carries 20 years in prison and/or a $5,000,000 USD fine as the maximum penalty. The company itself can face a $25,000,000 fine as a maximum penalty.
No. You just have to have insider information. Anything that is not know prior to the public. Like, for example, one week from here, changing the terms of service to add per install fees
Mainstream sports games (thankfully indie titles do a much better job with less budget these days) slowly became absolutely garbage around exactly that timeline (2007-08) until now. We are not gonna see a SSX or NBA Street or damn, even something like an amazing Midway title such as NFL Blitz, that era is gone for shitty people like him and babies nowadays getting used to "sIm" sports games.
The CEO of Unity has accomplished a feat that I don't think the Creator himself could pull off. This guy united game devs and gamers in a homogenous, glorious torch and pitchfork wielding mob under one single banner of fury.
He's 2 for 2 if you consider what EA did while he was in charge. Guy is definitely getting a medal for douchebaggery and it looks like he's going for gold.
UnityIsEA2.0 stream changed my life the flavourness and the fruitfulness of the stream changed my perspective of the world I wish I could feel the feeling again
@@Emot10ns You're really not making the argument you think you are. The boycott against blizzard was thankfully highly successful in helping sink that dog turd of a company.
Upper Echalon is pretty much THE premier investigative journalist on RU-vid right now. And once in a while he still talks about and reviews video games, which is why I originally started following him. The depth of his research is incredible and he covers so many subjects.
Eh, I don't know about that. He came to the very weird conclusion in his video on Masterworks (his main channel sponsor) that he thinks that all of their hidden fees were simply "accidental" and "not malicious" - despite those fees being deliberately only visable in the fine print and not at all disclosed in the massive amounts of adds Masterworks throws around.
I just feel sorry for the people working at Unity, they dont deserve to go down just because their boss is completely off his rocker and wants all the money in the world.
There's no use in being a King without a kingdom. They all need to find new jobs, so that rich c0cksucker is left by himself without anyone to run his schemes
I feel more sorry for all the people who invested years if not decades in building skillsets working with Unity who now have to choose between being locked into working with tech controlled by a company that sold out or moving to a different engine.
If i knew the shit is going down i jump out of the boat because i know is going to explode because im sure ceo is gonna charge their employers for work there
This is a classic case of the dog with the steak. A dog with a steak comes across a river and when he looks into the river he sees another dog holding a steak, he bites at the other dog to steal the steak but instead of having two steaks the dog now has none because he let go of the one already in his mouth and now it flows away down the river.
This situation was discussed a little bit in my level design class (I'm a game design student), but we didn't go into this much detail about all of this. Thank you, Charlie, for all this detail.
I think the dumbest part is if it was just about the money, why not just just increase the percentage developers already pay right now on their revenue? The main problem about his new model is not even the price but that it moves fees out of control of the developers. Unity was never expensive but the good part about them is that you were priced based on revenue so if a game performs poorly and the developer needs to lower the price, the fees are very low and when the game performs well and the develpoer makes a lot of profit, then the fees are high but this is not a problem because the developer got the cash to pay for it. With this new model, developers are forced to abandon their games when it performs poorly because the price per sale may not be high enough to pay for the fee per install.
@@CHR15718NOr just take a percentage of the money made. They make money, if it doesn't perform well you'll be fine, if it performs well both parties are still making a profit. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but it's still infinitely better than the fee
He know. He literally know what would happened if he announce it. That's why he sell his stock (just some, not all of them) before announce it. When the share price take deep dive to the ground, he can easily buy them cheaper before backtracking his decision. Tbh, if he have the power to remotely control stock price to your advantage just by giving out shitty policy, he should be sued.
I don’t even have a problem with this, people are spreading misinfo. It only works up to 2 installs and applies to those that reach a threshold of success
Craziest part is that it's not sales they're taking money from. It's downloads. That means a F2P game could be screwed over if too many people play it.
@@Sparrowly1I mean, if it's fully f2p, like a passion project, then the game isn't making revenue and you don't cross the threshold. If it's ad-supported or mtx whatever, it's making money I guess. Not to defend what Unity is doing, just saying that anyone who wants to use it for fully f2p games still can without fear of being in debt to Unity.
This whole situation really pissed me off. I had invested over a year working on a project that I now have to abandon because I can’t trust Unity won’t try even worse shit in the future.
Wealth, Fame, Power. One man desired all these worldly things, the CEO of Unity, John Riccitiello. His final words before he was executed on social media sent all the people of the world out into the internet. “Our game engine? Pay me per launcher for it! All of your money will go to one place!” Gamers everywhere then headed towards the dark web to pirate their launchers. The world has entered the Great Age of Pirates!
Honestly this decision by Unity really doesn't affect the average gamer all that much. At the end of the day, your average gamer doesn't care if the game they're playing is built on Unity, Unreal, Godot, Source, Frostbite, or some other proprietary engine. As long as the game looks good and plays well, they don't care. This decision affects the game developers much more, and why this is such a bad move for Unity; Unity just lost all the trust and goodwill they built up over a decade of existence, and developers are the ones who are in a position to do something about it.
@@earthadept that's a hot take. I'd say that by making terrible decisions that utterly ruin game dev companies, he is directly reducing the amount of games on the market. If he had his way EVERY single game would contain microtransactions that went straight to his wallet. Maybe YOU'RE cool getting ripped off, but anyone with a brain was pissed off by the inclusion of MT's in AAA games. And by annihilating Unity (one of the main engines games are built on) he's literally setting game development back decades. It affects the average gamer HUGELY.
@@MetalLizardJesus Hey I hear you, I hate loot boxes and battle passes as much as the next person. However we, as more informed gamers know about things like that, there're so many more people who either don't know or don't care, and that's who the market caters to. As an example, look at how lazy the FIFA series has gotten, basically the same game but with updated rosters and look at the amount of money they pull in. If it doesn't directly impact the gameplay of the game they have in front of them at the moment, they can cope. However the same is not true for the Unity fiasco, specifically because it affects the development of a game rather than the enjoyment of a game. As a side note, I feel like the other members of the Unity board of directors aren't getting enough blame. Yeah John Riccitello is a greedy slimeball, but who hired this guy knowing his record and who decided that they were going to give him control of the company? They deserve to be blamed as well.
i doubt current projects will get canned, it will be next cycle of projects which end up in something else. It makes sense for a ceo to do this as short term bonus of money will still happen and then they can just leave to go somewhere else before the fallout rains down.
UnityIsEA2.0 stream changed my life the flavourness and the fruitfulness of the stream changed my perspective of the world I wish I could feel the feeling again
My favorite part of this whole thing is their plan of charging for things that only they can verify. "You have to pay us every time this thing happens, but also we are the only ones who know how many times this thing happens. So just trust us to charge you appropriately."
yeah right, and they have an ability to "report piracy/pricing inaccuracy" which we all know is either a dead link, a dead inbox, or manned by 1 person who is told to just reassure the developer that Unity is "right" with their math.
Call me crazy, but I'm starting to believe that Unity's CEO and some of his staff members deliberately crashed this company. They were selling Unity's stock days before this announcement. Too many indie developers smoking AAA company's asses with their games. And some of those games that are super famous don't have microtransactions or any other kind of bullshit. He even called "Fucking Idiots" developers that don't like to implement microtransactions in their games! This man was an executive at EA and pushed a lot of what we are seen as "normal" in many games these days. I know I know... but who knows?
The ceo only sold like 70k worth of stocks (which is pretty much nothing to him) you should look at some other share holders selling upwards of millions of dollars right before the change
They are shorting the stock, or at least gave information to certain parties to short the stock for major money before they pulled off their announcement to tank the price of unity
Being a junior developer this really sucks, I just got my bachelors degree in creative technologies and I primarily used / was trained in Unity to complete a majority of my assignments. I'm now faced with a huge decision to re-train into another engine (and toss away 3 years of engine experience) or take it on the chin and literally pay the fine if a project of mine does above average.
I've been a Unity developer for almost a decade now. Since the announcement, I've stopped all payments to them, and installed a dozen different engines to play with. I'll play with them all for the next few months, and run with whatever feel good hopefully before the new year.
Any Unity dev here. Before this, I had honestly started to give up on Unity anyway. The lag in the new versions is atrocious. Real shame, because I loved Unity.
good luck; that's why is so important an open market. Any corporate will screw consumers over if they have the chance, monopoly gives that chance as twitter and reddit had
You can trust the people who sold shares in the company right before they decided to exploit developers. At least until the CEO decides he want's a 5th summer home in Italy. Then His Majesty will squeeze the peasant developers for more taxes. It was brazen, naked exploitation.
When you remember the current CEO of Unity was previously the CEO of EA who proposed the idea of charging to reload your gun in battlefield this all starts to make a lot of sense.
@@logancracraftgaming7124now, close your eyes, imagine yourself not being such a spineless coward feeding off clout from people rioting against something that so greatly impacted the gaming industry, then open these same eyes and weep, for how heartless you are
This reminds me so much of what Wizard of the Coast tried to do a few months back, their goodwill among the community vanished overnight, especially after they said "Give it time, they'll get over it and we can do it anyway". It didn't end well for them, and hopefully Unity faces the same consequences.
@@arshaghazie Backpedaled so hard it wasn't even funny. The old OGL is unchanged and the same. As for the rest...unclear. They will either do the model with dnd1 and forward, or simply got rid of it, I don't know. All that matters is the OGL is the same. Nothing changed except for them pissing off their entire community and losing a lot of money. Greedy wretches. They'll never get another cent out of me. Everything second hand of from creators for me from now on.
Imagine this guys charisma if his resume would truthfully read "successfully destroyed two companies by employing abilities a CEO has" and to somehow rewrite it in a positive way
The API changes on Reddit and Twitter are hugely different to the Unity install fee. If you install a game made in a Unity that doesn't directly cost Unity any money. If you make API requests to a server it has a cost. Considering Reddit and Twitter are losing money it's not surprising that they would try to turn something that costs them money into something that can break even or make money
I am a game dev student and this is frustrating. I have been learning Unity over the past few years at university. I chose Unity over Unreal Engine when I started my journey. Now I have to learn another engine from scratch because some greedy guy wants a big chunk of developers' success. smh.
All these horrible decisions aside, was there any advantage that made you initially learn Unity over Unreal Engine? I was going to start Unity this week but then Mr Krabs did what he did and I think I’m choosing Unreal now. I don’t know anything about game engines yet so I’m not sure if I’m sacrificing anything here.
@@UsernameUsername0000I’m gonna preempt this comment with idk jack shit about what I’m talking about but I think it comes down to game complexity. More complex prob go with unreal, it’s more powerful afaik. I just don’t know how anyone could ever trust unity again despite how they try to resolve this
@@monhi64 It's not just that, unity can be used for both 2d, 2.5d and 3d, unreal only has 2.5d and 3d as a real option which is why it needs to be more powerful, this means unity screwing itself seriously harms 2d gaming.
I swear, this period in time is the greediest I’ve seen corporations behave. They’ve always been greedy to a certain extent, but they’re just being blatant at this point.
It’s probably because of climate change. No seriously. They know something is gonna break under the pressure of how crap everything is, and they have known for decades that climate change is going to happen and be bad. They’re taking all they can get before they either fool themselves into thinking they can go to mars or they make some underground bunker.
@@niiii_niiii What Raiden6156 said. It's the demographic that dominates finance, law, media, and politics who then cry about how hateful you are if you point out their disproportionate control over the system.
CORRECTION : You don't just lose money. You pay for the privilege to lose money. See unity also has a pro and enterprise license which is what most studios use. Free version doesn't have some features so you need to buy Pro if you are actually making a game. For pro its 2K / year / per seat. Meaning if 10 people in your team need to work in unity that is 20K per year. That is how unity worked until last week. This new stuff is now on top of the subscription.
I just can't understand how they would think "trust me bro" is good enough for people. How on Earth are you going to make sure install bombing isn't a thing? There's absolutely nothing that can mark a device as unique that you cannot easily change with software. There's a reason no game can ban a device permanently. Trying to claim otherwise is saying you've solved piracy entirely.
After finding out that pokemon brilliant diamond and shining pearl was made using Unity, I'm looking forward to a clash of the titans. Pokemon lawyers are perhaps the most aggressively protective of there IP than any other franchise in the world besides maybe Disney. I can't Imagine Pokemon backing down. I'm gonna go grab some popcorn, because Unity messed with the wrong videogame company.
please let this be what happens. i am so ready to see nintendo as like the antihero we all dont like but are willing to tolerate because theyre not as bad as the other guy. and also itd be kind of cathartic to see the thing that took away so many good fangames absolutely shrek this bullshittery
as a long time unity user, watching the soul of the company i fell in love with get absolutely gutted over the past few years has been heartbreaking. we built careers, relationships, entire lives around this platform. and now we're stuck watching it slowly die, with every one of these decisions another nail in the coffin
I'm friends with former unity staff, and it's the same story. They used to love the company culture, then suddenly a year ago their entire dept was gutted. What was once a thriving community outreach program became a wasteland. A god damned shame
Platform assassination, except unlike Tumblr, it sadly destroyed the biggest AAA and Indie gamedev ecosystems. On the positive note, a corpse will become other's fertilizer.
Yeah, Unity was the VERY NEXT engine my studio was going to integrate and now I don't care if they backpeddle this, we never will. Charge what your tool is worth and then get the hell out of the way. A game's success has nothing to do with Unity, else every decent game made on it would be a smash hit. I've said this about other greedy companies and I'll say it again: It would be like Home Depot selling me the materials to build a new house that I rent out and then wanting part of that rent because "Well, we gave you the quality wood you couldn't just source yourself."
I described this to people who don't understand games/computers as "Imagine you start a band with your friends. And you become successful and start making money. But the person who manufactured your guitar wants a dollar every time you sell an album because you used their instrument to produce your music." which is an oversimplification but it gets the point across for people who don't grasp the situation. Edit: Again, this is a way to describe the situation to someone who has zero concept of what a computer is, how it works, much less the tools involved in the creation of programs. Games or otherwise. This way they can grasp why its a stupid thing to charge for. I'm fully aware there's a lot more nuance to the actual issue.
@@whattonamemyself1185 that's a blatant lie. Only games that earn a significant amount of money have to pay. It says so in this video, and shows the terms.
My conspiracy theory is that this whole situation was intended to incentivize devs to jam monetization systems into their games and to cull indie game studios that don't fall in line
What's crazy to me is that if Unity is saying they deserve compensation for successful games because it's their tool, that means that they're also responsible for anything made using Unity that is outright criminal. If some bonehead develops malware with Unity, that'd make Unity just as liable as the person who made it because it's their tool.
Honestly as a developer, I wish they just added a 5% revenue share instead of all this obtuse bullshit like this new thing, and the unity pro licenses. Other services and engines do this already and it works fine.
@@brummii Genuine question; do you think it'd be fair for a company that constructs buildings to say they deserve a revenue split of any businesses they build? Why would unity deserve anything you've earned outside of the initial purchase of software or a subscription service?
What pains me the most, is that even if Unity literally falls as a corporation, these fuckers already took out all the money they could have with the stock they had, so they probably wouldn't even mind. Even thought Unity is - was - one of the best engines to develop a game on
I once saw a video of Game Theorists that mentioned Unity and Unreal aren't actually competitors, but they have divided their services in such a way that they both can coexist in the game development market. Unity caters to the indie developers while Unreal is more focused on AAA development. A decision like this is sure to tip the balance in Unreal's favour, and when (not if, when) everyone sees that Unreal can also be used just as easily with a bit of practice, there will be one one left for Unity to rely on. The only people who wouldn't use Unreal for game development are those whose computers can't run it, but even then there are other much better options like Godot. Maybe CryEngine and Source will see how Unity's collapse is creating a void, so they will make their own engines available for public use.
@@PurooRoyIt’s simply not true. Unity has barely ever catered to indie devs even if they are the majority of devs on the platform. They pretend to by releasing tutorial videos and such, but their primary target has been mobile games and product/entertainment filming for quite a while now.
They sacrifice the company to secure themselves the fattest paycheck. Even through insider trading. Apparently nobody checks these guys and the SEC looks the other way. But dare as an individual not to pay taxes and they will destroy you
The definition of malware is anything you do not want on your system. If you don't approve, it's malware. If it downloads without your approval, it's malware. If it installs without your approval, it's malicious. Why else would it install without your approval? No, it's not in your better interest. Cause they don't know what your interests are. That definition of malware will never change no matter how much they bastardize it.
UnityIsEA2.0 stream changed my life the flavourness and the fruitfulness of the stream changed my perspective of the world I wish I could feel the feeling again
I've been of the opinion that people mention Riccitiello's name way too little. They always talk about "Unity" being the problem, when it's Jon and some other authority figures, who should be called out by name. You did a great job on that.
That’s funny because every single video I’ve seen on unity has mentioned John Ricciticello and his past. I’ve seen like 6 or 7 videos already all putting the blame on John. And yes unity is to blame because John is the CEO of Unity you can’t blame one without the other because unity is a product of John now
Agreed! These devs have poured their heart and soul into this engine. Now some scumbag has come along and tried to ruin all of that. Ironically, exactly what EA did to the games from their developers. Literally Unity's gimmick was anyone can jumpstart their project and only have to pay for commercial success or a small seat fee for larger teams (such as a school).
I want Charlie to talk to me 😩 I want him to whisper a sweet wisper in me ears to make them climax with his reincarnated voice of Jesus 😫 DADDY CHARLIE AHAHAHDADDY CHARLIE TALK TO ME
"He has just given you the macaroni, so allow me to give you the cheese" jeez I swear Charlie comes up with the most random things and man it gets me wheezing every time 😭
They've also said they'll just charge per UNIQUE user, that means they'll probably have to break (European) privacy laws to do it as people who bought unity engine games never agreed to this kind of personal tracking. Unity has become malware.
Yeah that concerned me a lot when I heard it. I thought "either they won't be able to tell, and studios will be hurt by multiple installs. OR. They CAN tell, and then I would want to know how tf they would know when an install is unique, because I don't like the sound of that" And even if by some weird force of nature they roll all of this back im forever gonna be wondering if Unity is malware and how much they know/what their grubby little hands are in.
What is even worse is that most *Employees* disagreed with this change and warned higher ups of possible consequences but OF COURSE they were ignored and had to deal with the backlash that the higher up's caused...
As a game developer who is nearing completion of a potentially successful game, I was deeply saddened when I heard the news. It was so overwhelming that I couldn't even concentrate on my work. I sincerely hope that things improve soon.
In hindsight it's better that it happened before the game was finished? I hope you can transfer it to Unreal or that other one godod or something. There's no reason why things will improve for Unity, they took a grenade and put it inside their shoes. Leave while you still can.
Better to "waste" another year and some extra money and port your game to Godot or Unreal. Even if they U turn this decision, its not a company to be trusted with.
It's not all lost! I'm switching to Unreal ASAP, port your game, it will be worth it in the end! Even if they rolled back this pricing model, Unity isn't a company that should be supported right now frfr
@@geehammer1511 I don't think you guys understand what 'nearing completion' means. It's not even remotely possible to swap engines near the end. Even with the fees it would still be cheaper. This, of course is what Unity are banking on.
@@jessicacook1080 I suppose that's my only choice, but Unreal seems like a completely different realm. It took me quite a while to comprehend Unity and C#, and now I have to begin all over again and learn Unreal, C++, and various plugins. Nonetheless, I'll give it a shot. Thanks.
Unity absolutely should no longer exist after this blunder. Like even if they reversed everything, kissed all the babies, gave everyone a million dollars, I don't think it's possible to ever regain trust after a move like that
This might be a hot take, but anyone who thought that John Riccitello was going to make Unity survive was living on a prayer. This is the man who introduced Macro-transactions, and singlehandedly destroyed BioWare and many more studios. What did everyone expect? Regardless, if he doesn't get arrested for insider trading at this point, I don't know how he will ever get into any trouble. This is the most deliberate trading I've ever seen.
@@patheticbutharmless5269 If he were smart, he'd say he sold because he thought the assets were about to become worth a lot more, and he thought KEEPING them and benefitting off of it would be the mark of insider trading. No one with a brain would believe him, but it has a lot more plausible deniability
@@patheticbutharmless5269That said, your last point is 100% correct. Playing dumb is 100% the right call because for insider trading to be credible, they have to prove willful intent
They should go down in flames not only for the sociopathic level of greed, but because that reveals the absolute contempt they have for the art, the artists and the consumer. How can anyone who loves games continue to put money into the pocket of someone who so openly states: "Fvck games, fvck devs and fvck the idiots who play them... i need a new yacht"
we need to utterly blacklist the 'big people selling big stocks' right before making such an announcement cuz those kind of lesser-humanoid scumfucks needs to be socially boycotted and turned into horroshows NO ONE wants to be in contact with. I'm so sick and tired of this 'big ceo' dickweeds that gets massive serverance bonuses for having molested a co-worker and then goes on to be big-man at new busienss elsewhere and no one cares.
As a small solo dev that used Unity, this hurts to see. Luckily I moved away from Unity but they're making game development more complicated than it already is. I cannot imagine all the small devs working on their first major Unity project realizing they need to ditch their hard work, or "risk being successful" and losing it all to Unity.
> the small devs working on their first major Unity project This is me. In my case, even if a pass the thresholds, it's a mid-priced pc game (so lower volume, high margin) so 15c per install on new devices is *okay* (at least assuming no abuse by users or Unity's accounting). The issue for me is the violation of old Terms and the willingness to be so hostile to so many of their customers. They knew the consequences of the pricing structure (there was plenty of internal opposition), and they went ahead with it anyway, and even worse, applied it to already-release games and games in development, neither of whom agreed to it. You can't trust someone that is willing to treat others poorly, even if they're treating you fine.
