2:50 - The Unity CEO, John Riccitiello, actually suggested charging PER BULLET in Battlefield back in 2011 (he would later be fired 2 years later for costing EA lots of money by alienating consumers with microtransactions).
Woolie could have specified that reload-MTX was a real Idea Riccitiello suggested. I believe he left EA after the $10 Online Pass, that stopped being a thing in the next console generation. LMAO, imagine NOT wanting every possible player to get invested in your Online Service. Just because Used Games bad for business.
This is why devs should make their own dev software or use something open source. There have been a few examples of Unreal screwing over devs in the past too. It's a giant racket.
When I was reminded that Hollow Knight uses Unity, my heart dropped at the thought of Silksong possibly never coming out because of this bullshit. This needs to stop.
@@HumanoidCableDreads The equivalent of saying everyone who cooks should farm and butcher their own food. Easy to say, much more difficult to actually do, especially when we're talking about indie devs.
This is reminiscent of the OGL-debacle a while ago, where Wizards of the Coast tried to overwrite a previous open licensing agreement where third party content developers also had to pay once royalties reached a certain threshold. They moved back from that once people started boycotting their online service. At least it drove a bunch of people into trying out competitors/indie products.
It's different though. Consumers are idiots, John Riccitiello is 100% right on that. Look how many people are now ok with spending $30 extra to beta test on unfinished, broken, disaster game. Consumers will hop onto every spiked dildo in sight if it's shiny enough. Companies are different, they will go for throat.
I've seen a lot of people putting all this on John Riccitiello. He's undoubtedly involved, the idea might even have been his to begin with, but don't make the mistake of putting all of the blame on him and him alone just because he's the most recognizable name. He wouldn't have been able to do this without the consent of the rest of the board of directors. And their investors were completely okay with this too, since they haven't fired anyone. This happened due to a lot of greedy, stupid, shortsighted assholes, not just one.
I saw a long post saying how Riccitello's biggest part in this is maybe just the "taking Unity public" step (back in what, 2014?) and the rest of the board that are all muskian tech vultures that bought themselves in play a huge part in this. The CEO stepping down wouldn't really do anything since he's only one head of the hydra so to speak.
Honestly the idea of investors being greedy is downright expected. They will live and die by the dollar, and will demand that the company make additional money value at any cost. This is as expected as believing a fish can swim. On the other hand, it's the job of the CEO and the board of directors to *not* succumb to the voices of greed that come from the investors while at least vaguely appeasing them for their money. That's why they're far more at fault for this disaster than the investors.
In summary the reason behind this, is to either completely sink Unity, or see if this new "business" model works because they have sold their company stock shares before saying anything about this news, and whatever's the result may be in the end, they have already won
@@ShinigamiTerror The "good" thing is they actually only sold a tiny amount of shares which is APPARENTLY sort of "regularly scheduled", they'll hopefully be holding SOME kind of bag when everything implodes
@@ShinigamiTerror While the timing was SUPER suspicious, the actual amount of shares they sold were absolutely tiny compared to how many they retained. It doesn’t fit dumping shares before the price craters
The thing is, this feels like the usual "Company does The Worst Thing Imaginable so they can walk it back and do The Second Worst Thing Imaginable and people won't complain", but that shit works on teenagers and sports fans, not on companies and professionals. Anyone who is putting money, expertise and work hours on the line is making research in the product they're investing in, and Unity has just told all these people they really really really should not put money in Unity in any way, and that won't go away now that they are already talking about "communication issues" and stuff like that. They tried to pull a move that works on consumers and use it on other companies with investors and shareholders, and they thought it would play out the same way? Nah, there is the very possible chance that in 4-6 months the number of new serious projects started with Unity will have dropped to basically zero.
Need to reinforce how no more heroes had the Ceo of unity be the final boss of both Travis Strikes Again and 3. Hell, in TSA's opening scene he makes it very explicit that the game runs on Unreal, even bring Travis's main shirt for the game
Unity: "Help, we're not making enough money, our budget needs balancing if we want to stay solvent!" The Budget: $200 Million Employee Pay: $20 Million R&D: $30 Million Company Acquisitions: $120 Million Executive Stock Options and Performance Bonuses: $500 Million Unity: "Stock options / Performance bonuses budget is non-negotiable, please help."
The real problem is Ceos have every incentive to raise profits in short term and then bail to another company for even more pay, along with a generous payout upon quitting. There are nonconsequences to them personally. So why wouldn't they nickel and dime consumers and then gtfo with their money and avoid any responsibility? Just look at Bobby Kotick and others and thats the basic rule of Ceos. Short term profits, and then abandon the sinking ship to repeat the process.
There's so many ways to make short term gains that isn't this though. They could've just jacked up the price, but now they are implementing a system they themselves obviously don't understand.
Shoutout to Godot, which has just gotten its largest advertisement without paying so much as a penny for it. This is just like WOTC's retroactive new license, that ended up giving Paizo and similar companies boosts. The only thing they'll get out of this attempt is, at best, a tarnished reputation. At worst, they've just signed a slow death warrant for the company.
Imagine if you had to pay the person who sold you pencils for every drawing you sold because they believed they were entitled a piece of your profit, because they sold you the pencils you used to make the drawing.
Isn't that why tech stuff is so fucked and expensive? basically like 10 different people own the copyright or whatever for a single piece of equipment/attachments with an insane setting of prices
while not directly related, iirc, that was the reasoning why 3D software prior to subscription models were priced into the quadruple digits, the publisher basically saying "You can earn a lot of money with this, so we charge you accordingly".
@@sunkeyavad6528its not because Game tools like Unreal Engine already do charge you royalties they simply do it after they know you have money since the threshold is a the game has to earn a million dollars first This is like the pencil thing but they heard Picaso became famous and now are charging people because they learned art makes money
Reminder that Riccitiello was at EA when they tried to introduce the "Extended Download Service" to their PC games a $7 fee to be able to redownload your games for a whopping two years.
It baffles me that this is not blatantly illegal. Like imagine if you're landlord suddenly raised your rent and also demanded that you needed to also retroactively pay him that rate for every month you'd already spent on the property
and the people who have left the property!! Just send a bill to the last four tenants too! It’s worth it even if only one dumb schmuck panics and pays.
I was just ABOUT to start a project with some friends when these news broke out. Thank fucking god we were still documenting things so we can hard pivot to Godot from the get go.
It's escaping into gaming twitter since it's the user's installs that cost devs, this means there is a chilling effect on the customer as well as now customers have to think twice about if their install will actually support a developer or not. A question they've never had to ask before and a question that they hate having to ask.
@@kaijuultimax9407 this has been the year with most transparent greed and I'm glad the general consensus is less brain rotten than before. I believe in actual change.
The CEO of Unity is that one guy who dresses horribly for a big party event and doesn't listen to any of his friends warning him that it's a stupid outfit.
Bringing it back to the arcade days. 50cents to launch the game and another 25cents per game-over. There's a reason home entertainment systems killed arcades and it wasn't graphics.
When Reggie said "charge me per boot" I thought he meant the literal boot as in the foot garment. I was hoping he'd be going for either a "kiss the boot" bit or maybe a "boot to the head" bit 😂
This can't like, happen. Legally I mean, there's no way this doesn't break some law. The fact they think they can get away with something like THIS is insane. Corporations have always sucked ass but we've gotten to a point in capitalism where they don't even fucking care anymore, like they can just do insane things like this or the HBO animation wipe. It is cartoonish, comedic
"The TOS you clicked 'I agree' on without reading says we can do anything we want, change whatever we want, whenever we want, and you have no recourse"
Well first off if they try to retroactively apply this rule to past released games, they'll get hit with breach of contract. Because the previous ToS has a specific line addressing this issue; If they don't want to abide by this contract they can just use the last version of the engine with it's accompanying ToS. 2nd off, the big 3 plus Steam can slap Unity with racketeering charges because of the dumb idea of passing the charges per install to THEM, not the developers if they are in those agreements like subscriptions. 3rd off they can also be charged with market manipulation because the head guy in charge sold some little bit of stocks before this happened. The FTC(or whatever governmental watchdog the stock market has) can bleed Unity for years making them spend time and money fighting the charges. Or at least getting yanked around by the justice system as the FTC stalls and delays while their legal team gets paid to go in and out of meetings before the first day in court ever gets set. Think MS-ActiBlizz and the chain yanking they had to go through before the gubmint had to step aside and let the deal happen. Imagine it taking longer and coating more expensively because the FTC has a probably proof to drag the court case longer than it should: Head guy sold some little bit of stocks. There's more, but I'm sure you can see what I mean.
It will depend on the language of the user agreement and how the lawsuit that is invariably gonna happen, turns out. If the user agreement doesn’t say something like “this agreement cannot be retroactively altered/overwritten by new agreements/is unrevokable in perpetuity”, there are legal arguments to be made that they can do this. Wizards of the coast tried to do it with their open gaming license under which people could publish third party content for DnD.
@SierenGreenwalt they care about potential punishment by the law, even if they wish to bypass the spirit of the law, they will do their best to keep within the letter of the law.
@RipOffProductionsLLC Not if the potential profits or potential loss in revenue, outweigh the potential fines. See for example Universal Studios illegally cutting down trees to deny shade to protestors, with the fine being a slap on the wrist.
I like how at 2:47 Woolie is joking and making a hypothetical. But, John Riccitiello, Ceo of Unity once said this exact thing about Battlefield in an interview While he was President/CEO at EA a while back!
The answer is port immediately to another platform and eat the costs. Unity has communicated very loudly that they cannot be trusted even if they do walk it back.
It's not just the monetary cost, it's the years of experience in this specific engine being abandoned. And while yeah that can be converted to monetary cost, it's horrible to lose time and experience.
Well, the guy running Unity right now is the same guy who was in charge of EA when they started unapologetically wringing money from their customer's wallet, so that explains a lot about this specific incident. Dude even suggested that waiting until players were multiple hours into a session of Battlefield and then charging them real money to reload their weapon was a good idea. Edit: Should've waited before commenting. Given his background before the Super Best Friends, it makes sense that Woolie would know about this and mention it in the video.
The current CEO of Unity is John Riccitiello, former EA top dog at the height of EA's microtrasanction hell. There is no way it would have gone any differently.
@@kaneqost We don't even have Capitalism anymore. It's such a Champagne Marxy thing to even call what we're experiencing now a runaway "free market". There is nothing free or competitive about any of it. It is literally socialism exclusively for Monopolies and the Institutional Bureaucracy that has infiltrated every level of our judicial, regulatory, and local governments.
And to think that about a decade back when Steam was getting flooded with low-effort Unity-made garbage that a lot of us stood up for Unity as an engine and defended it by listing all the genuinely good games that had been made with it. And now all those games are either going to change or just disappear entirely. The death of art and entertainment comes, as always, at the hands of Dr. Nickle and Mr. Dime.
This is ruining my friends' lives. Publishers are avoiding unity developers immediately, store bundles are not including unity games anymore. And damage towards trust between the devs and the company is already done, no reason to not jump ship even if they go back on this.
multiplayer games have been at that point for over a decade. Singleplayer is still safe *for the most part*. Lots of singleplayer games charge you microtransactions to make the game not shit (modern assassins creed, various other ubisoft titles, every mobile game, etc) Also, single purchase critical and commercial successes (ever since Skyrim, but especially now with titles like Elden Ring, Breath of the Wild, Baldurs Gate 3, etc) are considered failures and leaving money on the table as you only pay one price for potentially hundreds of hours of video game, and they make the games that consistently charge per hour of game via mtx look bad. There are many, many extremely depressing hyper-capitalist gdc talks with producers and investors discussing this unironically. If you “overdeliver” you’re part of the problem in the industry now and actively damaging potential monetization.
Man, it's so twisted knowing a lot of people started these indie projects years ago, just to have the rug pulled out from under them. It's a goddamn hostage situation, where people at the tail end of game development are either forced to grin and bear a broken, predatory policy conceived by some evil, out of touch CEO, or they potentially lose over half a decade of their work by switching to another engine they haven't even learned how to use. I'm glad there's been such a push-back to the whole thing, but even if Unity reverts the policy completely you can't just say, "Oops, sorry," and rebuild trust after a move like that. What a mess...
you'd think after hearing such batshit news, people would do a quick look up on said CEO... also, yes, the whole world isn't running on "night city" logic just yet: unilaterally / retroactively changing contract terms IS illegal
Thing is that if the world actually starts working on night city logic, a lot of businessmen aren't going to be in peaceful times up in offices. This type of mentality, if it were prevalent, would involve a hell of a lot of murder as a solution on their level against eachother, because lack of morality in droves means that for someone to get their way, people have to actually die due to the gambit buildup, which is why society doesn't do this anymore, because this behavior essentially corners people and few options are left in both citizenship and the business world. It's complicated, but from a sociology standpoint, "night city logic" has already happened in multiple cities in the ancient past. The world running on this logic means breakdown of modern society entirely. It wouldn't just mean people being more greedy, it would mean that people would be subject to greed on such a level that it becomes immoral to not kill and steal to save themselves. And this leads to war.
"Every time you see an ad for our game, muscular men will come to your residence and take things from you. It's the only way we're gonna make back all those marketing expenses!"
7:21 hey this has nothing to do with the talk, but in mentioning okami I remembered finding out that Toby fox did some of its music. So there ya go At least I think it was okami *Omori, totally different thing apparently
Let's not forget that Unity's response to the question of piracy and malicious repeat installs was basically, "Not our problem." They _really_ don't care.
Diamond and pearl as well as Genshin make me think this wont happen because the pokemon company will be going home with somebodies head before they let someone touch their money
I think hoyoverse is a good since they have the genshin impact engine which was derived and custom made from unity but from what I heard is proprietarily owned by hoyoverse. Leave it to them to find a way.
Hopefully this goes the way of the XBoxOne planning to be download-only or PS5 having discs that break after you download the game from them onto your console.
Just another example why you shouldnt rely on anything under capitalisms as the rules can always change when the thing you rely on gets "too popular". TH-camrs know this feeling
Just two weeks ago i was getting excited about the news that Ice-Pick Lodge is working on the Bachelor route in Pathologic 2 (a Unity game) and then just a week later this Unity news comes out Can't have shit in Detroit
its not even the pure scumminess its the fact that they though out of all the things, to charge for something that the devs specifically don't charge for has no correlation to profits whatsoever. Infact its so downright ridiculous that free to play games that have 2mil userbases with 1-5% of money spenders would go from the most profitable model to COMPLETELY UNVIABLE model because unity has decided to charge devs for the size of their install base which highly outnumbers the whales instead of ANY OTHER METRIC.
I feel awful for Sea of Stars man. They just got out the door too and is super successful. I hope this doesn’t go through and also please fire Mr. CEO John Fellatio.
There seems to be a fuse in the millionaire brain that eventually burns out and causes them to think "I bet those people are just looking for excuses to give me more money!".
It's really just astonishing how massive the balls are on Unity to think that they would possibly get away with this. I don't care what their terms say, there is absolutely zero chance in hell that they could possibly have the legal right to just casually retroactively change the terms of an agreement like this. To suggest they have this right would be like Adobe deciding that they don't like the fact that I bought the single-purchase version of their software a decade ago, so they changed their new terms and now have decided that I have to pay their subscription fees despite not actually using any new version of their work. And like if everything that Unity is doing *is* legal, then it would be fucking insane to ever work with them ever again. What's stopping them from just deciding tomorrow that it costs 1 billion dollars per install for any unity game that has ever existed? Oh you released a game 10 years ago and don't even support it anymore? Give us your money! There's just no fucking way that makes any goddamn sense!
I'm tossing out like 2 years worth of work. But I refuse to give a single penny to Unity. You don't get to retroactively change the rules. I know they've walked this back (a tiny bit) now, but the fact they wanted to, breaks all trust from me.
So the problem with “the board sold stocks ahead of time” is that it was only a couple thousand vs the millions that they are still holding. In practice it doesn’t work from a “dump the stocks while price is high” position, because they sold a bare fraction of what they own
I don't pretend to know *anything* about how the stock market works, but... with the top brass selling stocks just before this announcement... does that not count as insider trading?
They're still not clear on what a fresh install is. If I download cult of the lamb on my pc and my steamdeck are the devs charged twice? Is it tied to the IP or the hardware? If I clean out my hardrive and download it again is that a new install? In any case it's alllll scummy.
Ultimately, it's the consumer's fault about games, mainly because there's already an enormous library from the past without all these exploitations, but the fear of missing out is so strong for many people that even if the products will get worse over time it doesn't matter, they'll have to get that shiny new toy asap
Danm... now that DOES suck for indy fighting game makers. GODOT is making insane progress for an open SDK but I don't think it's going to cut it yet for the sort of Parsec integration tools and frame=perfect performance needed to do playable fighting games
Remember kids Don't blame the system that allows you to trade labor for bread, blame the criminal who wants extort the baker to pay them for every bite you take, because it was baked *their* oven.
I learned Unity 4.0 as part of my degree when big changes were happening with Mecanim, upgraded UI elements (never got finished lol) and performance improvements across the board. Unity allowed me to create amazing things quickly, and with little programming experience on my side. To see what a mess it has become in the past half-decade makes me sad. It was so close to being the indie-development-darling that would unite developers to create amazing things but suffered so much from poor management and executive direction. Godot is awesome. The improvements the team has made sets it in a unique position for developers to use as an alternative. The 3D alone barely worked last time I tried it. Now I can see it provides a unique learning prospect in that a lot of the language and scripting practice can be transferred to Unreal, if developers want to attempt more advanced projects in the future, which is always fun!
I have a lot to say about this. 1. I think we've all met this kind of person at least once in our lives where someone gets into a high positioned role where people are below them and it becomes their identity, their ego. It is so difficult to get through to these kinds of people because they wear their title as a badge and say "I made this decision because I'm in this position and you're not so shut up and do what I say" because questioning their decisions is equivalent to questioning their identity and it's unbearable for them to accept any critique. 2. I know they're going to try their best to push this through because of what I'd mentioned before but I think the underlining issue is that it's going to be near impossible for their own dev and program team to implement this is a reasonable and legal fashion. I have a feeling it's either going to be delayed, be super broken and end up over or under charging or they're going to have to do it manually and look at game downloads and try to guesstimate how many installs that'd be.
This isn't sticking around the moment I saw Nintendo games being affected by this. They HATE when people make money off their properties this is the worst version of that and they WILL sue, Nintendo ninjas out for blood and they're a way bigger company than unity.
The CEO selling stocks isnt actually THAT odd. Stocks are a big part of the CEOs "payment". I mean the stock market is mostly bullshit but that in of itself isnt that odd.
The fact that John Riccitiello sold some shares and made the announcement might constitute as Securities Fraud. John's doing his best to mark a target on his back for not just developers, but also the SEC.
Does woolie know that John Riccatielo is a former EA CEO (current Unity CEO) that wanted to turn reloading in Battlefield games into a mtx. For once this wasn't Kotick.
The fact that it ALSO applies retroactively has to be illegal. It HAS to be.
It sounds like one of those instances where's it's perfectly legal in the US of A but super "get that shit outta here, you fraud" in Belgium
nothing some good old under the table money can't change
it's technically not illegal because it's not a criminal act, but it's something they will definitely lose a lawsuit on.
It probably is, but like with a lot of whitecollar crimes, with enough money the crime can go unpunished
It is, in the EU. The EU has done some dumb stuff sure, but sometimes they get things very right.
2:50 - The Unity CEO, John Riccitiello, actually suggested charging PER BULLET in Battlefield back in 2011 (he would later be fired 2 years later for costing EA lots of money by alienating consumers with microtransactions).
Oh yeah I heard that from another podcast
Woolie could have specified that reload-MTX was a real Idea Riccitiello suggested. I believe he left EA after the $10 Online Pass, that stopped being a thing in the next console generation. LMAO, imagine NOT wanting every possible player to get invested in your Online Service. Just because Used Games bad for business.
"Charging per reload"
"It costs $400,000 to fire this weapon... for 12 seconds."
That list of "random" indie games in unity affected by this put a chill down my spine.
Most developers and most games rely on unity
This is why devs should make their own dev software or use something open source. There have been a few examples of Unreal screwing over devs in the past too. It's a giant racket.
When I was reminded that Hollow Knight uses Unity, my heart dropped at the thought of Silksong possibly never coming out because of this bullshit. This needs to stop.
@@HumanoidCableDreads The equivalent of saying everyone who cooks should farm and butcher their own food. Easy to say, much more difficult to actually do, especially when we're talking about indie devs.
@@GrayVBoat silksong was never a real game. just a wish our hearts made
This is reminiscent of the OGL-debacle a while ago, where Wizards of the Coast tried to overwrite a previous open licensing agreement where third party content developers also had to pay once royalties reached a certain threshold.
They moved back from that once people started boycotting their online service.
At least it drove a bunch of people into trying out competitors/indie products.
It's different though. Consumers are idiots, John Riccitiello is 100% right on that. Look how many people are now ok with spending $30 extra to beta test on unfinished, broken, disaster game. Consumers will hop onto every spiked dildo in sight if it's shiny enough. Companies are different, they will go for throat.
Man, to think I chose to study Godot over Unity thanks to a freakin coin flip
Fuckin' lucky coin man holy shit.
If you by chanse still have that coin - save it. (I saved mine)
@@fooxid4997 Yup, still got it. Definitely one to keep.
Did you keep the coin?
@@SoaringLettuce Yep!
I've seen a lot of people putting all this on John Riccitiello. He's undoubtedly involved, the idea might even have been his to begin with, but don't make the mistake of putting all of the blame on him and him alone just because he's the most recognizable name. He wouldn't have been able to do this without the consent of the rest of the board of directors. And their investors were completely okay with this too, since they haven't fired anyone. This happened due to a lot of greedy, stupid, shortsighted assholes, not just one.
I saw a long post saying how Riccitello's biggest part in this is maybe just the "taking Unity public" step (back in what, 2014?) and the rest of the board that are all muskian tech vultures that bought themselves in play a huge part in this.
The CEO stepping down wouldn't really do anything since he's only one head of the hydra so to speak.
Honestly the idea of investors being greedy is downright expected. They will live and die by the dollar, and will demand that the company make additional money value at any cost. This is as expected as believing a fish can swim.
On the other hand, it's the job of the CEO and the board of directors to *not* succumb to the voices of greed that come from the investors while at least vaguely appeasing them for their money. That's why they're far more at fault for this disaster than the investors.
In summary the reason behind this, is to either completely sink Unity, or see if this new "business" model works because they have sold their company stock shares before saying anything about this news, and whatever's the result may be in the end, they have already won
@@ShinigamiTerror The "good" thing is they actually only sold a tiny amount of shares which is APPARENTLY sort of "regularly scheduled", they'll hopefully be holding SOME kind of bag when everything implodes
@@ShinigamiTerror While the timing was SUPER suspicious, the actual amount of shares they sold were absolutely tiny compared to how many they retained. It doesn’t fit dumping shares before the price craters
The thing is, this feels like the usual "Company does The Worst Thing Imaginable so they can walk it back and do The Second Worst Thing Imaginable and people won't complain", but that shit works on teenagers and sports fans, not on companies and professionals. Anyone who is putting money, expertise and work hours on the line is making research in the product they're investing in, and Unity has just told all these people they really really really should not put money in Unity in any way, and that won't go away now that they are already talking about "communication issues" and stuff like that. They tried to pull a move that works on consumers and use it on other companies with investors and shareholders, and they thought it would play out the same way? Nah, there is the very possible chance that in 4-6 months the number of new serious projects started with Unity will have dropped to basically zero.
Need to reinforce how no more heroes had the Ceo of unity be the final boss of both Travis Strikes Again and 3. Hell, in TSA's opening scene he makes it very explicit that the game runs on Unreal, even bring Travis's main shirt for the game
Unity: "Help, we're not making enough money, our budget needs balancing if we want to stay solvent!"
The Budget: $200 Million
Employee Pay: $20 Million
R&D: $30 Million
Company Acquisitions: $120 Million
Executive Stock Options and Performance Bonuses: $500 Million
Unity: "Stock options / Performance bonuses budget is non-negotiable, please help."
The real problem is Ceos have every incentive to raise profits in short term and then bail to another company for even more pay, along with a generous payout upon quitting.
There are nonconsequences to them personally. So why wouldn't they nickel and dime consumers and then gtfo with their money and avoid any responsibility?
Just look at Bobby Kotick and others and thats the basic rule of Ceos. Short term profits, and then abandon the sinking ship to repeat the process.
Predatory capitalism, predatory ceos.
There's so many ways to make short term gains that isn't this though. They could've just jacked up the price, but now they are implementing a system they themselves obviously don't understand.
It's wild how Kotick can threaten to have his own employees killed but not be arrested.
Two legal systems
@Kaarl_Mills
I'm completely unfamiliar with Bobby K., he what now?
Reggie: “How about we charge for boot?”
Reggie I’m gonna need you to NOT put this out, you don’t know who is listening.
Shoutout to Godot, which has just gotten its largest advertisement without paying so much as a penny for it.
This is just like WOTC's retroactive new license, that ended up giving Paizo and similar companies boosts.
The only thing they'll get out of this attempt is, at best, a tarnished reputation.
At worst, they've just signed a slow death warrant for the company.
Imagine if you had to pay the person who sold you pencils for every drawing you sold because they believed they were entitled a piece of your profit, because they sold you the pencils you used to make the drawing.
Isn't that why tech stuff is so fucked and expensive? basically like 10 different people own the copyright or whatever for a single piece of equipment/attachments with an insane setting of prices
Good analogy.
Imagine if you had to pay the person who sold you pencils for every person who *saw* any drawing you ever did
while not directly related, iirc, that was the reasoning why 3D software prior to subscription models were priced into the quadruple digits, the publisher basically saying "You can earn a lot of money with this, so we charge you accordingly".
@@sunkeyavad6528its not because Game tools like Unreal Engine already do charge you royalties they simply do it after they know you have money since the threshold is a the game has to earn a million dollars first
This is like the pencil thing but they heard Picaso became famous and now are charging people because they learned art makes money
Reminder that Riccitiello was at EA when they tried to introduce the "Extended Download Service" to their PC games a $7 fee to be able to redownload your games for a whopping two years.
It baffles me that this is not blatantly illegal. Like imagine if you're landlord suddenly raised your rent and also demanded that you needed to also retroactively pay him that rate for every month you'd already spent on the property
and the people who have left the property!! Just send a bill to the last four tenants too!
It’s worth it even if only one dumb schmuck panics and pays.
Your Bobby Cottic impression was flawless
I was just ABOUT to start a project with some friends when these news broke out.
Thank fucking god we were still documenting things so we can hard pivot to Godot from the get go.
I'm happy this shit is blowing up, usually unity shenanigans are kept on game dev twitter.
It's escaping into gaming twitter since it's the user's installs that cost devs, this means there is a chilling effect on the customer as well as now customers have to think twice about if their install will actually support a developer or not. A question they've never had to ask before and a question that they hate having to ask.
@@kaijuultimax9407 this has been the year with most transparent greed and I'm glad the general consensus is less brain rotten than before. I believe in actual change.
The CEO of Unity is that one guy who dresses horribly for a big party event and doesn't listen to any of his friends warning him that it's a stupid outfit.
The sixty boots bit was good, but when he added "per month" then it got diabolical.
Bringing it back to the arcade days. 50cents to launch the game and another 25cents per game-over. There's a reason home entertainment systems killed arcades and it wasn't graphics.
Unity tried to issue an "apology" after trying to scam people.
"We're sorrrrrrryyyy..."
this is what happens when "Mr. EA microtransactions" took hold of Unity
Edit: thanks for the clarification
"If"? Isn't it literally the same guy?
@@RipOffProductionsLLCit is quite literally the same guy
Don't just blame him, he's definetly involved but he couldn't have done this without the consent of the rest of the board.
9:43 everyone was having a great time on Unity but here we are... Waiting for Godot.
THATS MY TIME FOLKS THANKS FOR COMING OUT!
That's really solid.
I have heard that joke before but never got the reference
Holy shit, Spoony you’re alive! And using a different account?
[slow clap]
[Nodding, a single tear rolls down cheek]
When Reggie said "charge me per boot" I thought he meant the literal boot as in the foot garment. I was hoping he'd be going for either a "kiss the boot" bit or maybe a "boot to the head" bit 😂
Reggie prefers his footwear cheap, but he'll pay for feet.
This can't like, happen. Legally I mean, there's no way this doesn't break some law. The fact they think they can get away with something like THIS is insane. Corporations have always sucked ass but we've gotten to a point in capitalism where they don't even fucking care anymore, like they can just do insane things like this or the HBO animation wipe. It is cartoonish, comedic
"The TOS you clicked 'I agree' on without reading says we can do anything we want, change whatever we want, whenever we want, and you have no recourse"
Well first off if they try to retroactively apply this rule to past released games, they'll get hit with breach of contract. Because the previous ToS has a specific line addressing this issue; If they don't want to abide by this contract they can just use the last version of the engine with it's accompanying ToS.
2nd off, the big 3 plus Steam can slap Unity with racketeering charges because of the dumb idea of passing the charges per install to THEM, not the developers if they are in those agreements like subscriptions.
3rd off they can also be charged with market manipulation because the head guy in charge sold some little bit of stocks before this happened. The FTC(or whatever governmental watchdog the stock market has) can bleed Unity for years making them spend time and money fighting the charges. Or at least getting yanked around by the justice system as the FTC stalls and delays while their legal team gets paid to go in and out of meetings before the first day in court ever gets set. Think MS-ActiBlizz and the chain yanking they had to go through before the gubmint had to step aside and let the deal happen. Imagine it taking longer and coating more expensively because the FTC has a probably proof to drag the court case longer than it should: Head guy sold some little bit of stocks.
There's more, but I'm sure you can see what I mean.
It will depend on the language of the user agreement and how the lawsuit that is invariably gonna happen, turns out.
If the user agreement doesn’t say something like “this agreement cannot be retroactively altered/overwritten by new agreements/is unrevokable in perpetuity”, there are legal arguments to be made that they can do this.
Wizards of the coast tried to do it with their open gaming license under which people could publish
third party content for DnD.
@SierenGreenwalt they care about potential punishment by the law, even if they wish to bypass the spirit of the law, they will do their best to keep within the letter of the law.
@RipOffProductionsLLC Not if the potential profits or potential loss in revenue, outweigh the potential fines.
See for example Universal Studios illegally cutting down trees to deny shade to protestors, with the fine being a slap on the wrist.
Suda 51 tried to warn us! At least in one universe we got our revenge.
I like how at 2:47 Woolie is joking and making a hypothetical. But, John Riccitiello, Ceo of Unity once said this exact thing about Battlefield in an interview While he was President/CEO at EA a while back!
Reggie gets possessed by a CEO and Woolie finally has a use for all that ingrained Bible knowledge
Capitalist once again shoots himself in the foot and destroys their own company
The answer is port immediately to another platform and eat the costs. Unity has communicated very loudly that they cannot be trusted even if they do walk it back.
It's not just the monetary cost, it's the years of experience in this specific engine being abandoned. And while yeah that can be converted to monetary cost, it's horrible to lose time and experience.
This unity shitshow is insane! I still don't know how we've reached this point.
Well, the guy running Unity right now is the same guy who was in charge of EA when they started unapologetically wringing money from their customer's wallet, so that explains a lot about this specific incident. Dude even suggested that waiting until players were multiple hours into a session of Battlefield and then charging them real money to reload their weapon was a good idea.
Edit: Should've waited before commenting. Given his background before the Super Best Friends, it makes sense that Woolie would know about this and mention it in the video.
Capitalism
The current CEO of Unity is John Riccitiello, former EA top dog at the height of EA's microtrasanction hell. There is no way it would have gone any differently.
Mr. Krabs: I like money
@@kaneqost We don't even have Capitalism anymore. It's such a Champagne Marxy thing to even call what we're experiencing now a runaway "free market". There is nothing free or competitive about any of it. It is literally socialism exclusively for Monopolies and the Institutional Bureaucracy that has infiltrated every level of our judicial, regulatory, and local governments.
St. Peter, don't call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the Unity store
And to think that about a decade back when Steam was getting flooded with low-effort Unity-made garbage that a lot of us stood up for Unity as an engine and defended it by listing all the genuinely good games that had been made with it. And now all those games are either going to change or just disappear entirely.
The death of art and entertainment comes, as always, at the hands of Dr. Nickle and Mr. Dime.
This is ruining my friends' lives. Publishers are avoiding unity developers immediately, store bundles are not including unity games anymore. And damage towards trust between the devs and the company is already done, no reason to not jump ship even if they go back on this.
Moments like this make me wonder if there will be a time where video games become so vile that i just stop playing video games all together.
Multiplayer games or singleplayer games, both? Cause right now multiplayer games are vile but, singleplayer games are alright.
There's no way you don't have an incredible backlog.
multiplayer games have been at that point for over a decade. Singleplayer is still safe *for the most part*. Lots of singleplayer games charge you microtransactions to make the game not shit (modern assassins creed, various other ubisoft titles, every mobile game, etc)
Also, single purchase critical and commercial successes (ever since Skyrim, but especially now with titles like Elden Ring, Breath of the Wild, Baldurs Gate 3, etc) are considered failures and leaving money on the table as you only pay one price for potentially hundreds of hours of video game, and they make the games that consistently charge per hour of game via mtx look bad. There are many, many extremely depressing hyper-capitalist gdc talks with producers and investors discussing this unironically. If you “overdeliver” you’re part of the problem in the industry now and actively damaging potential monetization.
Man, it's so twisted knowing a lot of people started these indie projects years ago, just to have the rug pulled out from under them. It's a goddamn hostage situation, where people at the tail end of game development are either forced to grin and bear a broken, predatory policy conceived by some evil, out of touch CEO, or they potentially lose over half a decade of their work by switching to another engine they haven't even learned how to use.
I'm glad there's been such a push-back to the whole thing, but even if Unity reverts the policy completely you can't just say, "Oops, sorry," and rebuild trust after a move like that. What a mess...
I'll bet there was 1 accountant Andy pushing this through and said "what are they going to do, change their game engine?"
you'd think after hearing such batshit news, people would do a quick look up on said CEO... also, yes, the whole world isn't running on "night city" logic just yet: unilaterally / retroactively changing contract terms IS illegal
Thing is that if the world actually starts working on night city logic, a lot of businessmen aren't going to be in peaceful times up in offices. This type of mentality, if it were prevalent, would involve a hell of a lot of murder as a solution on their level against eachother, because lack of morality in droves means that for someone to get their way, people have to actually die due to the gambit buildup, which is why society doesn't do this anymore, because this behavior essentially corners people and few options are left in both citizenship and the business world. It's complicated, but from a sociology standpoint, "night city logic" has already happened in multiple cities in the ancient past.
The world running on this logic means breakdown of modern society entirely. It wouldn't just mean people being more greedy, it would mean that people would be subject to greed on such a level that it becomes immoral to not kill and steal to save themselves. And this leads to war.
"Every time you see an ad for our game, muscular men will come to your residence and take things from you. It's the only way we're gonna make back all those marketing expenses!"
It's some real monkey-brain shit to say "oh, we have X many installs, therefore, if we charge $Y for an install, we'll make $XY!!!".
Theyve clarified that all those installs off PSPlus and GamePass would be charged to Sony and Microsoft. I'm getting the popcorn.
7:21 hey this has nothing to do with the talk, but in mentioning okami I remembered finding out that Toby fox did some of its music. So there ya go
At least I think it was okami
*Omori, totally different thing apparently
You are incorrect
*Omori, totally different thing apparently
Let's not forget that Unity's response to the question of piracy and malicious repeat installs was basically, "Not our problem." They _really_ don't care.
Diamond and pearl as well as Genshin make me think this wont happen because the pokemon company will be going home with somebodies head before they let someone touch their money
I want to see them get sued by Mihoyo.
Let's see Genshin Impact hit someone else's wallet for a change
I think hoyoverse is a good since they have the genshin impact engine which was derived and custom made from unity but from what I heard is proprietarily owned by hoyoverse. Leave it to them to find a way.
If I'm not mistaken they tried to buy Unity a while back but the deals failed for some reason.
Pirates are going to be *EATING GOOD TONIGHT!*
Not only did the CEO sell stock before the announcement, they had sold over 1.6 million dollars worth of stock this year alone
Hopefully this goes the way of the XBoxOne planning to be download-only or PS5 having discs that break after you download the game from them onto your console.
Whatever education path one pursues to become a "monetization specialist" should be put on their criminal record by default.
Just another example why you shouldnt rely on anything under capitalisms as the rules can always change when the thing you rely on gets "too popular".
TH-camrs know this feeling
Just two weeks ago i was getting excited about the news that Ice-Pick Lodge is working on the Bachelor route in Pathologic 2 (a Unity game) and then just a week later this Unity news comes out
Can't have shit in Detroit
I hope this opens up more game engine diversity. Everything being made in either Unity or Unreal has kind of made a lot of games really samey.
I can't wait for "Dark Nity" to come out as a perfect replacemwnt for Unity
its not even the pure scumminess
its the fact that they though out of all the things, to charge for something that the devs specifically don't charge for has no correlation to profits whatsoever.
Infact its so downright ridiculous that free to play games that have 2mil userbases with 1-5% of money spenders would go from the most profitable model to COMPLETELY UNVIABLE model because unity has decided to charge devs for the size of their install base which highly outnumbers the whales instead of ANY OTHER METRIC.
silksong is never gonna come out at this rate 😭
And to think, when we were upset about the **FUCKING** horse armor, people mocked us.
Welp, time to add a few more years to Silksong's release I guess.
Supposedly a lot of Unity employees are leaving the company.
It's disco, baby.
I feel awful for Sea of Stars man. They just got out the door too and is super successful. I hope this doesn’t go through and also please fire Mr. CEO John Fellatio.
I am godoted and FOSSpilled
There seems to be a fuse in the millionaire brain that eventually burns out and causes them to think "I bet those people are just looking for excuses to give me more money!".
I think an important point is that Genshin runs on Unity and Unity got very greedy.
It's really just astonishing how massive the balls are on Unity to think that they would possibly get away with this. I don't care what their terms say, there is absolutely zero chance in hell that they could possibly have the legal right to just casually retroactively change the terms of an agreement like this.
To suggest they have this right would be like Adobe deciding that they don't like the fact that I bought the single-purchase version of their software a decade ago, so they changed their new terms and now have decided that I have to pay their subscription fees despite not actually using any new version of their work.
And like if everything that Unity is doing *is* legal, then it would be fucking insane to ever work with them ever again. What's stopping them from just deciding tomorrow that it costs 1 billion dollars per install for any unity game that has ever existed? Oh you released a game 10 years ago and don't even support it anymore? Give us your money! There's just no fucking way that makes any goddamn sense!
And I start a Unity course next month, great. Here's hoping they roll it back.
There were at least enough people in the company that thought this was a bad idea that they made creditable death threats to close two of the offices.
Every rich man in a suit ever: "You owe me ALL!"
I'm tossing out like 2 years worth of work. But I refuse to give a single penny to Unity. You don't get to retroactively change the rules. I know they've walked this back (a tiny bit) now, but the fact they wanted to, breaks all trust from me.
I appreciate the list of games made with Unity
So whats stopping a dev from just pulling the game right before 200k then "re-releasing" it immediately after to reset the sales numbers?
It's not sales, it's installs.
Eat the rich. All I have to say.
God I hate capitalism.
So the problem with “the board sold stocks ahead of time” is that it was only a couple thousand vs the millions that they are still holding. In practice it doesn’t work from a “dump the stocks while price is high” position, because they sold a bare fraction of what they own
I don't pretend to know *anything* about how the stock market works, but... with the top brass selling stocks just before this announcement... does that not count as insider trading?
They're still not clear on what a fresh install is. If I download cult of the lamb on my pc and my steamdeck are the devs charged twice? Is it tied to the IP or the hardware? If I clean out my hardrive and download it again is that a new install?
In any case it's alllll scummy.
When that list popped out and saw Hollow Knight, I immediately took damage...
"7 days we out, nothing of value was lost."
>6 years of Unitydev
Ultimately, it's the consumer's fault about games, mainly because there's already an enormous library from the past without all these exploitations, but the fear of missing out is so strong for many people that even if the products will get worse over time it doesn't matter, they'll have to get that shiny new toy asap
Charge you 20 cents for every jump in mario games.
How long has Woolie had that Tamogachi hanging off his mic?
Danm... now that DOES suck for indy fighting game makers. GODOT is making insane progress for an open SDK but I don't think it's going to cut it yet for the sort of Parsec integration tools and frame=perfect performance needed to do playable fighting games
Remember kids
Don't blame the system that allows you to trade labor for bread, blame the criminal who wants extort the baker to pay them for every bite you take, because it was baked *their* oven.
60 boots is too generous. We'll do 20.
I learned Unity 4.0 as part of my degree when big changes were happening with Mecanim, upgraded UI elements (never got finished lol) and performance improvements across the board.
Unity allowed me to create amazing things quickly, and with little programming experience on my side. To see what a mess it has become in the past half-decade makes me sad. It was so close to being the indie-development-darling that would unite developers to create amazing things but suffered so much from poor management and executive direction.
Godot is awesome. The improvements the team has made sets it in a unique position for developers to use as an alternative. The 3D alone barely worked last time I tried it. Now I can see it provides a unique learning prospect in that a lot of the language and scripting practice can be transferred to Unreal, if developers want to attempt more advanced projects in the future, which is always fun!
LIKE DISCO ELYSIUM NEEDED ANOTHER KICK IN THE BALLS!!!!!!!!
It needs more tbh.
I have a lot to say about this.
1. I think we've all met this kind of person at least once in our lives where someone gets into a high positioned role where people are below them and it becomes their identity, their ego. It is so difficult to get through to these kinds of people because they wear their title as a badge and say "I made this decision because I'm in this position and you're not so shut up and do what I say" because questioning their decisions is equivalent to questioning their identity and it's unbearable for them to accept any critique.
2. I know they're going to try their best to push this through because of what I'd mentioned before but I think the underlining issue is that it's going to be near impossible for their own dev and program team to implement this is a reasonable and legal fashion. I have a feeling it's either going to be delayed, be super broken and end up over or under charging or they're going to have to do it manually and look at game downloads and try to guesstimate how many installs that'd be.
damn i guess there are some games i need to finish before year end.
This isn't sticking around the moment I saw Nintendo games being affected by this. They HATE when people make money off their properties this is the worst version of that and they WILL sue, Nintendo ninjas out for blood and they're a way bigger company than unity.
Vote with your money guys, dont use it.
The CEO selling stocks isnt actually THAT odd. Stocks are a big part of the CEOs "payment". I mean the stock market is mostly bullshit but that in of itself isnt that odd.
Unity will be imposing this fee on GamePass, etc. downloads and expects Microsoft/Sony to pay the fee. Also will count demos/early access.
The fact that John Riccitiello sold some shares and made the announcement might constitute as Securities Fraud.
John's doing his best to mark a target on his back for not just developers, but also the SEC.
after the dokapon journey, Reggie became Bobby
Unity and Wizards of the Coast: Let's make the tabletop and the videogame industries miserable!
Charge PER FRAME
Unity wants to create a platform to collect digital rents
Does woolie know that John Riccatielo is a former EA CEO (current Unity CEO) that wanted to turn reloading in Battlefield games into a mtx. For once this wasn't Kotick.
Unity Doesn't Care That You're Upset also has become the blizzard of game engines & has died on the hill
because GREED !!!!!!!
Silksong is never coming out is it...
Whelp Unity will take a tumble, independent games will be hurt and the bastards that caused this will jump with their golden parachutes.