Video-Game Company Unity Closes Offices Following Death Threat 135
Unity canceled a planned town hall and closed two offices Thursday after receiving what it said was a credible death threat in the wake of a controversial pricing decision earlier this week, Bloomberg News reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Unity, the maker of tools and technology for video games, set off a firestorm on Sept. 12 by announcing it will begin charging developers a new fee for games made using its software, called the Unity Engine. Beginning Jan. 1, makers of Unity games will have to pay per user installation after a certain threshold is reached. Some video-game makers accused Unity of violating its own terms of service and lamented that the new charges could threaten their livelihoods. Many game studios put out harshly worded statements urging the technology company to reconsider.
What do editors actually do here? (Score:4, Informative)
Could you at least check the summary and make sure the links don't point to the same place? It's not that hard [rockpapershotgun.com]to include a link to an external site with the actual report.
Re: What do editors actually do here? (Score:2)
Re: What do editors actually do here? (Score:2)
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How much are you paying them?
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They WERE originally different links, but theeditors had to change the first one because the target got Slashdotted.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaaaaa.
So close (Score:5, Insightful)
So close to the anniversary of 9/11, when we learned that terrorism really does bring about complete, total, and irrecoverable systemic change. Good job!
Re:So close (Score:5, Informative)
So close to the anniversary of 9/11, when we learned that terrorism really does bring about complete, total, and irrecoverable systemic change. Good job!
If you don't give up all freedom and privacy, the terrorists will have won!
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Might makes right. Victors write history.
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or your adversary is stronger than you.
It's true. (Score:2)
Being a kind person makes friends, but not money.
Being a cruel person makes money, which can in turn be used to make friends.
You need to pay attention to who is stronger than you, and follow their rules. If you aren't smart enough to do that, you will just wind up in jail. But within whatever set of rules applies to you there will be some freedom of action, and at some point an opportunity to gain advantage through cruelty. Those who do so are widely reviled, both for the suffering they create and all th
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It's maybe not better to be feared than loved (no matter what old Nicky said or didn't say), but it's a more stable way to ensure compliance, at the very least in the short term.
Cash grab (Score:2)
Seriously, what is Unity's reasoning for this? Do they provide server infrastructure, download bandwidth, disk space, ANYTHING relating to the download and installation of the finished product?
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Re:Cash grab (Score:5, Insightful)
did you read all 500 pages in the EULA
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I'd challenge you to find a single person (including the lawyers) who actually have.
Can I include AIs in the challenge?
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Unless they are unconscionable. I'd not be eager to put most EULAs to the test, were I the commercial entity.
Re:Cash grab (Score:4)
Now you know why people hate Oracle.
Re:Cash grab (Score:4, Insightful)
By that logic, Adobe is ok to charge everyone who views an image made with Photoshop.
not the same thing. You dont have to send everyone a copy of Photoshop with your image each time, just so they can open it, do you?
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Actually, it depends on your licensing agreement. There are licensing agreements for Adobe (eg. for education) where commercial work with said licenses is prohibited, any any such would would be licensed to and royalty fees collectible by Adobe.
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Alright, and? How is it actually different? Do you need to pay extra to the farmer that grew the grain that became the flour for each cake you sell made with said flour?
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By that logic, Adobe is ok to charge everyone who views an image made with Photoshop.
not the same thing. You dont have to send everyone a copy of Photoshop with your image each time, just so they can open it, do you?
Not quite, This would be if everything you edited in Adobe Photoshop required a special Photoshop viewer that is unique to each license of Photoshop. Previously you could distribute this for free but now they're asking you for a per deployment fee.
The best Adobe analogy would be if they started to charge for every Flash install or if the ITU-T changed the MPEG-LA to make every H.264 codec installed chargeable to movie producers.
Unity recently got an ex-EA exec in there and now he's "altering the deal
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They might try, but it won't end well for them. They're not without competition, you know. Unity, OTOH...
Another thing is that you can take a picture created by Photoshop and migrate it to some other editor, and forget about Photoshop. With an Unity-using project it's not that easy, even if Unity had some serious competition.
Microsoft could in theory pull a similar stunt with Visual Studio, but it would harm Windows, so it won't happen. While Unity has nothing to lose from their decision.
In conclusion, when
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Okay? Any programming language in history is set for a LOT of missed royalties, then.
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Okay? Any programming language in history is set for a LOT of missed royalties, then.
Programming language creators are free to do something similar, if they like. In the case of programming languages the result will be that no one uses the language.
This has played out many times in the past. One that I saw personally in the early 2000s was JavaCard vs MULTOS. Both were programming environments for smart card (the chips in your credit cards). MULTOS used a "safe" variant of C, complete with unsigned data types and the ability to overlay structs onto chunks of memory (with some restrictions
Re: Cash grab (Score:2)
Threatening violence is dumb here but understandable. Small companies will literally be destroyed by this move, and their employees will become unemployed. If you're anywhere past the very early stages of development, it is a major undertaking to change engines. It can require manpower investments that are literally unaffordable for some developers.
Re: Cash grab (Score:3)
Re: Cash grab (Score:4, Interesting)
So asshole shareholders wanting more for doing next to nothing. Sounds abut right.
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This is an old practice. Way back when Computer Associates would do the same thing. Acquire a company with a decent product, then lay off many of the people except for a couple of the most novice peons to do minimal maintenance, turning the product into a hated product by customers. Not just computing either, companies do this for other types of companies as well, acquire them, sell off all assets, and squeeze out all pennies until it's dead, dead, dead. There is even a company out there named Vampire C
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Re:Cash grab (Score:5, Insightful)
Am I correct in understanding that these new fees apply retro-actively to games already released?
Or do the people who made already-existing Unity games have the option to simply halt development of the game completely, consider its current form final, and wash their hands of the unity toolkit, without having to pay these new fees?
It seems truly egregious if their contracts allow them to suddenly charge more for games that were built and released prior to the new pricing. If this is the case, I really hope some law suits get off the ground.
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Not all that long ago, there were clauses in the contract that allowed users of Unity to continue using old versions under old terms, And even get bug fixes for the old versions under those terms. Those clauses were removed a little while ago, probably in preparation for these shenanigans. Already released games may be able to dodge the terms. I don't remember what the average game release cycle is, but I believe it is years at this point. So games currently in late development with Unity, that intend to re
Re:Cash grab (Score:5, Informative)
It's not just games late in development: Unity claims that any sales from 2024 onward, even for games that were released earlier, will fall under the new license terms. And they will count installs before 2024 to determine whether the payment threshold has been reached.
I'm not sure if that will stand up to legal scrutiny: it is a big change to the original license terms (not just upping the rates, but replacing the entire model) and it contradicts earlier public statements made by the company. IANAL though. I guess they're hoping that they can dodge a class action and kept the high-volume cost low enough to make it unattractive for large developers to sue.
In the short term, the small but successful developers are screwed: they will go over the payment threshold, but do not rake in enough cash per player to be able to afford $0.20 per install. In the long term, Unity is screwed, as the trust is broken and developers that can afford to switch engines will likely do so, while developers that can't afford to switch might also not be able to pay up.
Re:Cash grab (Score:5, Interesting)
I read Unity's FAQ to try to figure this out. I am not sure if I am reading this right, but it sounds like the only way out is to stop renewing your Unity license. The Unity license is renewed once a year. You pay your two grand to renew it, and that lets you use the Unity devkit to develop your game, and it grants you rights to distribute the game. If you stop renewing the license, that means you can't use the devkit anymore. No new games, no DLC, no updates or even bugfixes to existing games. But you can continue to sell them.
Based on the FAQ, these new fees kick in and apply to all your Unity games, even ones already released, but only if you renew your license. If you just don't renew your license (I think, but may be wrong) then you can keep on selling your already-released games, and you DON'T have to pay the new fees, but you cannot make any updates to the games whatsoever. You must abandon them. No new Unity games either. You are locked-out.
And if you ever do renew that license, even just to make bug fixes or to make completely separate products, everything you have made that uses Unity falls under the new agreement, and you owe the new fees.
So, the nightmare scenario in which an indie dev suddenly owes so much money they go bankrupt can be avoided. The indie dev can simply stop renewing their license. But that's it for their games, they are done. The dev will have to reskill on a different engine if they want to continue being game devs. And if they want to continue to support any of their unity games, they will have to completely re-write them in the new engine.
It seems to me that Unity has enjoyed good success in the market precisely because its license has been much better than those offered by all the other game engines. Unity was by far the most bang for your buck. They have just shot themselves directly in the foot on that, so I would expect to see their business decline significantly in the coming years. Maybe if they do an about-face and bake something into the current contract that protects current games from future changes like this, as well as fire their CEO, maybe they can save face and regain trust.
Maybe.
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Even not renewing may not be enough to get you clear. In April of this year Unity modified the TOS removing the terms that allow you to continue using the current year version without accepting the new changes.
Unless you can show that you are only covered by the previous terms that modification would make you unable to continue distributing without being possible bound by the new licensing terms.
Yes you might be able to get out of it with good lawyers - you will still be stuck either paying the new fees or
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It's not just games late in development: Unity claims that any sales from 2024 onward, even for games that were released earlier, will fall under the new license terms. And they will count installs before 2024 to determine whether the payment threshold has been reached.
There's also a good chance they'll be counting pirated copies against the install count. [reddit.com]
Re:Cash grab (Score:4, Informative)
That enough reason?
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The response is a bomb threat? Really? Over the licensencing terms of a software library?
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Well, do consider that that engine has gotten extremely realistic over the last couple of releases.
Maybe this is just all a game in a very...realistic....gaming engine....
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You're threatening a mans (or womans) ability to survive. For themselves and/or their loved ones.
And that's not stated to be dramatic. I mean that quite literally. Humans survive on this planet by working. Threaten that hard enough, and you may in fact see a response that means to stop or threaten in return the harm being created.
Worse, the impact on big corporate authors is lost in the noise, but the impact on small independent developers could be catastrophic; the changes are effectively targeting those individual developers for harm while not meaningfully affecting the big corporate titles that they compete against.
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It also benefits bigger developers since bigger projects will cost more to the consumer.
$0.20 of $5 is a lot more than $0.20 of $30
Re: Cash grab (Score:2)
Re: Cash grab (Score:2)
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They provide the runtime: the engine implementation that ships as part of the game. However, while the runtime does cost money to develop, charging for it in this way does look like a cash grab: their customers use both the runtime and the development tools (not just one or the other), so why would they have to license them separately, other than to double dip?
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Unity is a lot more than just the engine. It's almost everything in some games. I think you can even get some graphical assets and models. Which for a small hobbyist is great, but for a tiny team on an independent game the Unity license is vital and essential. Lose Unity and the independent studios have lost their games as well, they don't have money after mortgaging the house multiple times to get a different engine or to hire a large team to try and migrate the game to a different engine or platform.
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So Unity is now doing the same thing as Oracle, licenses that are horrible for everyone except themselves.
Just look at what Oracle do with Java - if you have one computer running their Java engine you'll have to pay licensing for Java for every CPU in your company. A humungous cost for international corporations.
billing per unit with an mystery counting system? (Score:2)
billing per unit with an mystery counting system?
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I think there is either already some mechanism in place to tie per-unit installs to the developer, or there soon will be.
It's not even a quarter. (Score:4, Interesting)
They're charging $0.20 per client install, only after both 200,000 installs, and $200,000 earned.
That does not seem like a large barrier to profitability unless most of their clients are FreeToPlay or $1 game makers. Will impact their ability to hire additional people? Absolutely - if they're charging only a dollar, that's like 20% of of their revenue.
I can see this doing several things, both of which (IMO) are a net benefit:
* FreeToPlay and ad-supported games become less common/people start charging more for the game. (This will result in more negative reviews for shit games, making it clear which games are good.)
* Shitty games with slim margins stop being developed.
There are so, so many horrible games out there now. It's hard to find anything decent to play.
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If the telemetry just tracks installs, they only need to download once, then repeatedly install and uninstall.
Whether or not the telemetry can be faked, I'll leave it to others to find out.
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That does not seem like a large barrier to profitability unless most of their clients are FreeToPlay or $1 game makers.
Not just "FreeToPlay" (by which I assume you mean free with ads), but anything for which no money is charged. Those games are as good as dead.
And this is why proprietary game engines aren't worth adopting. Ever. For any reason. Unless the license grants you a perpetual right to use it in any way that you want, by using somebody else's game engine, you're putting your product permanently at the mercy of the company that owns the engine, and they can stab you in the back mercilessly at any time, and there
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That does not seem like a large barrier to profitability unless most of their clients are FreeToPlay or $1 game makers.
Not just "FreeToPlay" (by which I assume you mean free with ads), but anything for which no money is charged. Those games are as good as dead.
Now that I read the GP post again, I see that I missed the $200,000 threshold. Still, it likely means the end of free demo versions of games that cost money. Worse, it could actually encourage free-to-play crap.
Re:It's not even a quarter. (Score:4, Informative)
That does not seem like a large barrier to profitability unless most of their clients are FreeToPlay or $1 game makers.
Not just "FreeToPlay" (by which I assume you mean free with ads), but anything for which no money is charged. Those games are as good as dead.
Now that I read the GP post again, I see that I missed the $200,000 threshold. Still, it likely means the end of free demo versions of games that cost money. Worse, it could actually encourage free-to-play crap.
Looks like Unity has already backed down a lot [theguardian.com], exempting free standalone demos, charity bundles, reinstallation on the same device, malicious downloading, etc.
But still, the point remains that if they can change the license once, they can change it again, and you're entirely at their mercy. And giving less than four months' notice before fees start accumulating is just plain wrong, given that this sort of software is developed over a multi-year cycle.
I also wonder about how things like the Patreon model for games under development would affect this, and whether getting $200k in Patreon donations would then subject all subsequent downloads (even if free) to that fee.
This seems like the sort of thing that should take effect January 1, 2025 at the earliest, so that all of those details can be discussed, and developers have time to plan.
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Not just "FreeToPlay" (by which I assume you mean free with ads), but anything for which no money is charged. Those games are as good as dead.
Why? If no money is earned, they'll never hit the $200k earned mark, and the fees will never apply.
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Not just "FreeToPlay" (by which I assume you mean free with ads), but anything for which no money is charged. Those games are as good as dead.
Why? If no money is earned, they'll never hit the $200k earned mark, and the fees will never apply.
Yeah, I noticed the $200k part and commented about a minutes before you did.
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Re:It's not even a quarter. (Score:5, Informative)
It's a fee schedule that could *technically* be over 100% of your *revenue*, if you do have a free tier of some sort, which could include trial. If you had $200k revenue with 2 million installs, then congratulations, you owe Unity $400k. This is absurd.
Further, the accounting is a huge question mark. It's bad enough that they announced without a lot to go on to concretely predict the impact to your project, but even worse they seemed to be blindsided on the simple question of reinstalls, first saying reinstalls will cost, then hastily saying oh yeah, they won't cost. When even they don't seem too sure about the details of accounting, and you are about to be potentially reamed by the accounting, then you have plenty of reason to be worried no matter your pricing structure.
It's a huge business change being inflicted on an industry in less than a financial quarter.
So if Unity sees a rapid descent into obscurity, I wouldn't be surprised.
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It does indeed seem poorly conceived. You'd think they'd have talked to more customers. But...
Re: customers with 2 million installs and only 200k revenue... I would think those are the customers you want to either a) help monetize, or b) get rid of. They're a net drain on your ecosystem, and are either producing unprofitable games, or bad games.
That's the way I see it, at any rate. They may have not given that much thought to it, and 200k installs may be a relatively insignificant amount. But I can see it p
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Well maybe but $200k revenue does not mean $200k profit, in fact $200k seems like peanuts if you are considering hiring 3-4 people to do the work for even a year.
Also if you decide to do a demo, having installs that far exceed your actual sales doesn't seem unreasonable. If you are small with a small advertising budget this maybe the only way to get people to buy your game.
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Well, it was a vague example of a scenario to show the money might make zero sense. I assume the scale could be even bigger. However since there have existed games from like a couple of people, one might imagine a scenario where $200k might not be too shabby for a couple of friends out of college to get out there.
I think the last thing Unity needs is to 'get rid of' customers. Already they've been suffering from heavy competition from Unreal. These customers aren't really a 'drain', they just passively
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What business is it of Unity's if their system has been used to make a functional deep-dive VR MMORPG a la Sword Art Online or a copy of Tic-Tac-Toe as a school assignment and then dropped on Steam for a bit of pocket change? Once the game is compiled and made available it is not a drain on Unity at all. It's not like there's a finite number of games that can be made in Unity ... is there?
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They're charging the developer $0.20 per install, but the developer will not get 100% of the sales price. First, the platform takes a cut, typically 30%. Then the publisher will take their cut, which can be around 50%, depending on the publishing agreement. For a $10 game, the developer might have to pay $0.20 per install from their $3.50 cut. And one sale might be installed to more than one device, for example if the customer has a desktop and a laptop, or something like the Steam Deck, or just buys a new
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More expensive games too. There are lots of expenses out there. A $4.99 game might only be pulling in 50 cents a game in revenue. Maybe they have to pay Valve a 30% cut to be on Steam (Epic siphoned off a lot of potential Steam games by offering only a 12% cut). Maybe they have to pay partners who helped them out. They have to pay off the second mortgage they took to fund the game. They have to pay an advertisement agency to push their games. Etc.
What is it next? (Score:3)
Death threats for not getting a straw at the drive thru? Shut down the legislature 'cuz of that guy's hair? Threaten all the babies 'cuz someone's eating all the babies?
People need to get their heads out of their own asses and look around. It's just not that bad. We have almost everything, at least in the West.
It's not so fair for the test of the world, and they've got plenty of reason to complain, but... a death threat because a business wants to charge more?
Really?
mcdonald's ice cream shake down (Score:3)
mcdonald's ice cream shake down
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Re: What is it next? (Score:3)
But nobody promises (unless they do promise, contractually) any company a successful business if they build on someone else's platform.
Maybe it's worth a lawsuit. But crap, not worth a death threat.
You got a contract that promises you success, take it to court, take it to the voting machine.
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Re: What is it next? (Score:2)
The outrage is certainly that it rises to a death threat in some idiot's mind.
But if you build on Google and Google loses focus and axes the product you built on, or you build on AWS and the YouTube isn't all you'd like, or you build on Unity and they want more for their product, them's the breaks.
People sign their autonomy away when they rely on a business other than their own, esp. a single-source arrangement, as this really has to be.
This is why one has contracts.
Re: What is it next? (Score:2)
Don't know why spell check rendered "uptime" as "YouTube" (and it just tried again...)
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Don't know why spell check rendered "uptime" as "YouTube" (and it just tried again...)
That's some sneaky product placement. Do you feel a sudden urge to watch cat videos?
Re: What is it next? (Score:2)
Yes! In Toronto! Which is what it tried to type when I swiped YouTube!
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Only if you think clearly. And when your livelihood is under a threat and your body is awash with catecholamines, you might not think clearly for a moment, even if you're otherwise a calm and sane person.
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It gets the "page views", man.... (Score:2)
It's *always* been the case, at least in America, that only a few outliers resort to physical violence and threats of death over relatively minor issues. That doesn't stop the occasional crazy person from trying to kill McDonalds workers over food orders:
https://www.kiro7.com/news/tre... [kiro7.com]
https://www.13newsnow.com/arti... [13newsnow.com]
But .... you want 5 minutes of fame or attention, and it's a sure-fire way to get it. So ....
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Whoa, baby eaters? Slashdot missed out on the real story!
Proven recipe (Score:2)
1. Do something stupid.
2. Get massive backlash from everywhere.
3. Claim Death Threats.
And some of you still bite, everytime.
Shocked (Score:4, Insightful)
They had a life, though. That's why they're upset. (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of the people affected by this are probably not thinking rationally because, you know, years of work have just gone to waste and they don't know how they're going to feed their families or pay their bills. Obviously death threats are not the answer and are not acceptable, but generally speaking, the people affected by Unity's changes are most likely not "no-lifers," they're working people who have been driven into a corner. Whoever broke the law and made these threats should be held responsible for their actions even considering the circumstances, but implying that this pricing change is something that doesn't or shouldn't matter to anyone with a "life" is ridiculous. This matters a whole lot to certain people and those who are negatively impacted at least deserve a bit of empathy for the shitty situation that's been thrust upon them.
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And yet, it is not at all unimaginable. People have shot up the premises of former employers merely for losing a job several times. Losing your entire business is likely to cause some to similarly "go postal". Most people won't go nuts over it though, but there are always the individuals who would rather go out in the blaze of glory venting their righteous anger than to join the local homeless encampment.
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Personally I am shocked that death threats are issued for a gaming engine policy change. Get a life.
Whilst I abhor death threats, this isn't simply a "policy" change. It's a bald faced attempt to put indie developers out of business.
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In this day and age were one driver will shoot another over being cut off and honked at it's hard to tell in today's society.
important note (Score:3, Informative)
I find it pertinent to note a few things here. Unity's big 2 products are their runtime, and their editor. These new proposed fees are for games made with their runtime. If you're selling games with the unity runtime, then you are *already* paying a subscription fee to unity. This link breaks down the distinction a bit.
https://blog.unity.com/news/pl... [unity.com]
The verbage is what is most baffling. If it were a "per sale" fee, then that would make slightly more sense (yet still greedy), like making royalties. But per *install*? By the letter, if I purchased a game once, and uninstalled it and reinstalled it enough, then that "install fee" could balloon past the purchase price of the game. Utter nonsense.
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Pretty sure they backpedaled on that one. For now. Allegedly they're going to modify the license terms and telemetry to account for "malicious installs" and charge on a per-device basis. Though if a user were to use a new VM per install, how would they know?
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Oh no doubt about it. And if it's true that the license changes are retroactive, publishers could owe based on installs for games that don't sell for full price anymore, if at all. The only saving grace there is that devs could just not update their old titles, though Unity has featured telemetey for awhile now.
Unity is like a drug dealer (Score:3)
What did you expect? (Score:2)
I mean we've all allowed companies to start charging ongoing subscriptions for their product, even office 365. Everyone wants to sub and recur revenue forever from you. They did this to you when you accepted streaming services, streaming music, software subscriptions etc. It very quickly changed from you owning the rights to running the software and using it to you need to pay forever if you use it. You used to buy outlook, and it would last you for 5 or more years. It was significantly more effective. Cost
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Not saying you are wrong, but you choose a poor example with office 365, which actually makes sense for a subscription since you get access to a lot of value for the money while not having to worry about hosting infrastructure or depreciation of assets.
Yes, if all you use is Word, then a subscription is ridiculous. But office 365 is so much more than that.
What is enraging is a single software vendor that suddenly moves to a subscription model for no reason other than as a money grab.
We use a PDF editor app
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365 services are a different story. I'm specifically talking about the office suite that I mentioned there. Outlook, word, etc. A lot of the features are similar to older versions that people were content with, and Microsoft pushes hard for you to subscribe for their applications.
You're right that the 365 hosting, email etc, is actually more reasonable to be paying for it's continued use and it has an ongoing cost.
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I actually have stopped using applications that went to a subscription model. UltraEdit was one of those. It was a nice editor. I liked it, but paying a sub annually for a fucking editor...get lost.
Notepad++ isn't as good but is 'good enough'.
Sounds like Reddit all over again. (Score:2)
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The orange dude ordered one, except he's still agitated.
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God still loves you.
I hope.
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