"It's a calculated risk. We're prepared for the fallout," say the Unity board members, as they vigorously apply sunscreen to shield themselves from the thermonuclear warhead about to go off on their conference room table.
It's like companies just keep seeing each other shoot themselves directly in the balls and go "Okay but I bet _my_ nuts are totally bulletproof, check it out"
I think it's more "I bet I'll make more from shooting myself in the nuts than the hospital bill will cost". Venture capitalists are all about that short term profit and peacing out before the company's gutted and rotting in the street.
It's more like shareholders look at other companies shooting themselves in the nuts and then turn to their company and go : "That wouldn't happen with *your* nuts, would it?" "No what, me, no never my nuts are totally bulletproof" Cut to the investors stone faced handing them the gun.
The sad thing is that all of the people responsible for this will probably just get new executive jobs at different companies as soon as Unity finally goes bankrupt.
He almost gets it but just won't go the final step. In his McDonalds analogy, when mcdonalds run out of new customers to make money off of, they don't focus on finding ways to get even more money from existing customers, they want to get even more customers. But when every person in the country is already a mcdonalds customers where do you get more? Well you just import more people into the country to serve as more fuel for the infinite capitalism machine. But the very same people who hate capitalism have also been preemptively indoctrinated to think they need to support the endless importation of more "capitalism fuel" to their countries or else they're an immoral person, so nothing ever changes.
I can't understate how amazing this ANY% is YEARS of Unity being seen as an engine for anyone. YEARS of Unity being THE ultimate tool for people wanting to get into game design. They took any possible goodwill they had OR WILL HAVE into the trash. They just didn't just speedrun destroying all their goodwill built up over years, they have mad it nearly impossible to ever build up goodwill ever again. It's almost impressive to fuck up this bad.
It's also worth noting that Unity itself was built on the post-Flash era, where people were playing smaller-scale individual made games all the time and getting inspired. They were *the* notable engine coming out of the User-Experience focused game engines craze, and yet they still went and systematically demonstrated how they can and will subvert any agreement they make.
Plus who knows how many indie devs will be delisting their games over this, creating even more backlash. The damage, like the policy itself, is retroactive.
As someone who had to study programming in Unity in highschool for preperation for University, I feel like my efforts might have been wasted in the long run. Hopefully, univeristy just sticks to their prior schedule for some time. Cause yeah, even future employees will suffer from this event, not just game developers.
@@leithaziz2716 your skills aren’t wasted, if that’s some consolation. Sure, it will take time and effort to learn another engine, but many of the fundamental skills will still transfer over. It’s a pain, but doable.
@@m3hh3mhe was told what game Pat asked about being cancelled and took psychic damage. You can prob determine what game it is looking at western releases and games Woolie likes to figure it out. Prob not Titanfall 3 :Y
I always wonder how these corporate CEOs can make such impressively stupid decisions and continue to do so over and over again, and then I realize that they are super rich and completely out of touch with reality and humanity and it all makes sense again.
It's worse then that, this was specifically a rug pull. They sold all their shares at high prices and then tanked the company knowing how much of a disaster it would be. The real problem is with shareholders as a concept, being people with no actual on-the-ground investment with the company, merely with short-term profit for themselves.
@nspade9252 There is a big caveat here though; people like that regularly sell off portions of their shares on a schedule. Them selling shares isn't necessarily indicative of a rug pull, unless they sold off more than usual and/or off schedule. I don't know if that's the case or not, if you do, please point me to evidence confirming that. Mind you, I'm not excusing anything. The decision is outrageous enough by itself. I'm just saying that from what I've seen, it seems less like an attempted rug pull and more like the CEOs are just greedy idiots living in a bubble.
@@Necromancist The CEO get's paid in shares and regularly sells them which is normal. The guy under him sold off 30,000 shares (much more than normal I think) the week before this announcement .
This is another reason why companies need what I’ve decided to call a CVO: a chief veto officer. The CVO goes to all of the important meetings and his sole job is to listen carefully to ideas presented, think about them, and then, if necessary, say, “No, we’re not doing that because it’s a stupid idea.” If someone wants them fired, it has to go through an outside veto officer who reviews the reasons why they want to fire the CVO and they can say, “No, they’re not fired because you want to fire them for stupid reasons.”
Fun fact, Japanese business have a role called the "Loud American" whose role is basically this, to be a completely retaliation-free voice to tell the higher ups if they're planning something idiotic, since their business culture is so yes-manny and subservient.
The issue with woolie saying that outrage was factored in, is that this only works on customer facing products. Unity is not a product for general consumers, its more akin to direct selling where you're selling to a manufacturer who then makes products to customers. Those people have way less tolerance for bullshit. Applying outrage mechanics just makes them go to a different supplier. This is reflected even in the massive flux of game design professors going "Whats a good alternative to unity?" And dropping it from their ciriculum. Unity doesn't have customers, it has wholesalers, and it just told all of them to fuck off.
Yeah, I don't think Woolie understands that at all. It's not about dumb frat boys with disposable income throwing $70 at a game series every year, this the developer having to deal with this Most of them are working on tight budgets, which is why they didn't license a more expensive option in the first place. Most devs are very price sensitive, and the "whales" are businesses like Nintendo who are price super-sensitive, instead of the opposite. It's the exact opposite environment to what Woolie thinks it is.
A consumer might say "This product sucks, but it would take like an hour round trip to another store to buy something better and cheaper" A manufacturer says "this is our quarterly expense report. If we switch to this, we'll save $x." And they might get fired by their boss if they want to waffle and not do it.
Nah, they're ninjas. Like one day some high up is going to enter their office, see their chair is spun the other way. Then slowly turn to reveal a REALLY disappointed man. And he's about to ruin that CEO or whoever's day.
@@Shadest One Piece's walk to Arlong Park, but it's lawyers from Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and Disney walking up and punching down the wall of Unity's office.
After this, the discovery merger, twitter, most of EA and Actiblizz's existence, and many other less spectacular examples, can we please start calling billionaires "Job Destroyers"?
@@johnrivers3813 can’t wait for the machine learning algorithms to just. do a bad amalgamation of every terrible decision every ceo has ever made but worse
Never thought someone would explain part of the tendency of the Falling Rate of Profit explained as opening McDonalds franchises until it hits a ceiling.
Which is funny since the McDonalds franchise could get sued by the owners of the McDonalds resturaunts for putting their resturaunts too close to one another. But I suppose Starbucks in the Seattle area also works with that concept.
The board knew this move was gonna tank their stock prices and sold a bunch of stock off before hand. That is the textbook definition of insider trading.
I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say it's not the textbook. Like imagine your boss shows up with a Molotov cocktail saying he's going to burn everything down. You'd be leaving as fast as possible.
Surely there will be repercussions for that right? Surely the legal system isn’t so useless that it would let them get away with something so incredibly blatant right???
It’s wild to me that execs can make decisions like this and set a company on fire, then get on the board of some other company. Like who looks at their CV and their track record, and goes “yeah, this guy’s got the good ideas”
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: $500 Million Unity: "Stock options budget is non-negotiable, please help."
Literally the only way for Unity to regain trust at this point would be to completely roll this decision back, fire the entire board of directors, and announce that the company will henceforth be run as a worker-owned coop.
Pat is the only person that has been talking about this to mention the malware company aspect. I didn't even know they'd be using that to track installs. Now i'm not even gonna buy games made in unity. Because I don't need malware on my computer
If you're on Windows, the malware is preinstalled. If you have a phone, the malware is preinstalled. If you use a game client, especially any Riot ones, you have Kernel level malware you can't ever really get rid of.
They were anchoring. The second proposal of 4% max and no retroactive was always the plan. First proposal's point is making second one feel reasonable. Problem is their anchor was TOO unreasonable and it tanked goodwill instead of just inspiring pushback.
This whole thing isn't just some sort of calculated risk vs reward thing, this is a psychological tactic. The idea is that you give your consumers an absolutely horrid 'deal' so that, after you 'reconsider' and come back with a 'much more well thought out' deal, you give them a much less shitty by comparison (or much more subtly shitty) deal. Either people will resign themselves to accepting the deal, they won't read or they'll gloss over the fine print, or outrage will die down because they 'walked back' to a certain extent; whatever the case, they're just trying to slip a less egregious but still shit policy past people after the outrage of their first 'idea'. And in the end it really doesn't change anything; to your guys' point, they can just run back the run back and change things to whatever scummy policy they wanted to push originally, at any time. IDK if you happened to cover it cuz it is gaming related (but more tabletop than video), but Wizards of the Coast did the EXACT same thing with Dungeons and Dragons licensing a little while ago, and the exact same kind of shitstorm and mass exodus happened. Lo and behold they did what I imagine Unity is going to do very soon: run the scum back and seem apologetic and on our side, and come back with a 'new' still-terrible deal (it's just not as bad as before so it's fine right). The only difference is that the shitty CEO that came into WotC very recently came in (but funnily enough I think she was from Microsoft), and so they really didn't care if they burned their new house to the ground - AFAIK there was no blatant share selling that told the real story behind this shit decision. I believe their scum-greedy quote was something about wanting to tap more into the potential monetization of DnD... yuck. I would however recommend reading that 'apology post' they made detailing their 'new' plan - it is fucking hilariously cringe. Like on the one hand I feel bad for the PR person who had to write anything to even attempt to remedy that shitstorm, but it very much 'how do you do fellow DnD players'. I digress; whichever case it is, it's the same story: greedy people don't care whose livelihoods they destroy or upturn for their own benefit.
Nah. This was too nuclear for that tactic. Players and random people will not care but devs have buisness to run and they can't trust somronr that will pull the rug under them Similarly with the DnD thing. Players don't really give a shit even though they outraged at the time. But stuff like Pathfinder right now is doing a remake to fully divorce themselves from the DnD TOS
@nahuel3433 The DnD fiasco most certainly wasn't just about the players - they were just the ones to have the loudest voices because by virtue of it being a game with multiple players there are more of them. There were devs of games, both tabletop and video, who used the free version of DnD as a basis for their games - or they did before the change in policy, lest WotC threaten them with legal action unless they paid up. And yes, that same feeling of having the rug pulled from under them is exactly how these devs felt. And sure, a lot of people tried to distance themselves from DnD and turn to alternatives... much like people are doing with Unity right now. So no, this is nearly the exact same situation as the DnD crap - the only real difference, if you want to get into semantics, is that Unity has far more to gain because the video game market is far more lucrative than DnD. That and WotC wasn't putting their only horse in the race at risk - WotC also has Magic the Gathering to fall back on if the whole situation went worse-case, whereas Unity is their company's only product AFAIK. To be fair, I'm not an exec or anything so I have no idea what their real motive was - but given how their new policy that they dropped yesterday is, lo and behold, far less scummy but still very greedy, I am only more convinced that this was their intent from the getgo - get the loudest voices to calm down with their less egregious deal so the policy passes quietly, then people will forget and get the newest version so they can start raking in free money (which would be even more effective by forcing people to have to upgrade, which I imagine they can easily do by totally stopping support on older versions and as newer hardware demands better software).
The reason this won't blow over is because of who is part of the 'transaction'. Most of the time when a company makes a stupid decision, it's a business to consumer transaction. And for every smart consumer, there are 10 dumb ones. So ultimately, while there is some backlash things will return to business as usual. But this time the transaction was business to business, and businesses *hate* it when they have to pay fees they never agreed to because someone retroactively changed the terms of their contract. So all trust is lost. Everyone is jumping ship
@@NJR0091 This is still wildly different I feel. WotC going after creators is like Skyrim going after modders (but somewhat worse) The main point is that WotC main clients are the randos that buy the books and the dnd beyond subs and shit which while there IS overlap with creators it is hardly all if not most of their cliens base. So, a lot of players with low empatgy can go "sucks to suck" and keep playing unnaffected or at the very least not give q shit when things go back to a better state Unity's entire client base are the creators they are fucking over. The people they directly hurt and the people that will study alternatives to not get hurt again. The players here will not give a shit, much like it happened with dnd. But they aren't the ones giving unity their money. The fucked over creators that need to think how to get food in the table are. And Unity proved they are a risk. People won't go back to a risk of losing all their money just cause "oh yeah I just used unity for years and it's cozy like that" like how players went back to dnd after like a month of other ttrpgs.
@@TAMAMO-VIRUS Well sure, pretty sure anyone would hate that no matter how big or small they are haha. And yes I understand the situation. I was just saying that their 'solution' doesn't actually cater to the people they really want to make money from; they are trying to appease the louder majority who don't really care so they shut up, and then they can pass their new policy in relative peace... or at least that's the idea. I certainly hope people don't go for it, and if everyone is trying to abandon ship then great, I hope they ended up poisoning their well because of this. We don't need this kind of precedent established, otherwise every engine creator will start doing it, and of course those costs will eventually have to trickle down to the consumer...
If I remember it right, one assholle pretending he can just change the terms of a contract whenver is how the story of one of the characters in Octopath Traveler 2 begins. The prologue ends with said characters marching onto the motherfucker's house fully intending on murdering him.
I have not seen a company so aggressively shoot itself in the foot in quite awhile, and that includes these past few years of Activision coverage. Also Pat's prostitute metaphor is god damn hilarious. Had me laughing lol.
Though I would adjust the analogy. Rather than telling your wife you're about to hire a prostitute, it's more like telling your wife you're going to amputate her limbs, but then backing down at the last second. Like sure, you're no longer going to handicap, or even kill your wife, but the trust is long gone.
Unity's move was possibly one of the dumbest company "hail mary's" to get extra cash in recent memory and now they cant ever take it back. They're screwed. As Pat basically said, even if they were retract the whole thing it'll mean nothing because you'll never be able to trust them again. Personally however, its tough to say if they'll go bankrupt from this move, but it is fair to say that Unity's time in the spotlight is now officially over.
I wouldn't be surprised if this drives them bankrupt. This has the feel of a desperation move, a last ditch attempt to get revenue. I'd bet the numbers were already in pretty dire straights. This'll likely kill the company, but it might have been dead anyway
I hope people have followed Caves of Qud dev and Freehold Games owner Brian Bucklew's porting of Qud's core to Godot over a working weekend, and his pivot now to writing a unity->godot conversion software
Unity also offered to waive the fees entirely if developers moved to Unity's own "LevelPlay" ad-serving tech, which was seen as a direct attempt to put competitor AppLovin out of business. So there were plenty of layers to this rotten onion.
What gets me is that they wanted more money they could have gone for all sorts of options, but no, they go for not only go for the worst option, they go for blowing their whole leg off.
They could've pushed for revenue share and cap it at 5%, but they wanted to see if they could push the envelope further. It's not just about making money to them, it's about making the most money and seeing what they can get away with to squeeze more
So it's worth correcting Woolie, it's not Download OR Revenue threshold, it's Download AND Revenue threshold, and you can later fall below the revenue threshold since the fees only apply if the last 12 months were above it. Doesn't make it much less shitty, but it is an important distinction. Also, the whole thing about the board members selling their stock means they expected it to fail requires us to know if it was all of their stock or not
I love that we had one of the best years of gaming so far with so many new releases and little drama (outside the usual like OW2 or whatever) only for unity CEO to come in and be like "things are too good, let me just threaten the existence of gaming to balance things out"
I've been making projects in godot for a couple years! It's a fantastic engine, with VERY similar capabilities as Unity, but with a much better UI. The craziest part is that the engine interface is a 60MB executable, so it's a perfectly viable deployment method to literally just ship the engine with your game. Compare that to the tens of GB that Unity requires for even a bare-bones intstall.
The fascinating this is almost identical to what Wizards of the Coast did earlier *this year*. They also tried to change a contract that was already signed retroactively.
What is it with companies who just have that moment of thinking "yea we can now do a really negative change that will fuck up everyone's opinion of us, we're ready" like is it that hard to realize this shit results in massive blowback after seeing it mess up with tons of other companies that pull this crap before ?
"Yeah, but maybe this time, people will just roll their eyes and accept the inevitability of it, abd we get to be on the ground floor of this new industry standard..."
Mainly higher-ups and investors focused on short term gains without thinking on the the long term , why many mega companies start thinking like that is beyond me.
That's what companies do, a lot of them see public goodwill as a currency and will cash out to make absolutely malefic decisions in the hopes their prior goodwill will be an insulator to public criticism. Unity thought it had enough saved up, and it turns out there are some decisions you can't make without irrevocably damaging the trust of your consumer base. No one wants to learn Unity anymore, no one wants to pay Unity this cut, distributors aren't happy, bigwigs in the industry can't support this decision, and some studios are even threatening to remove their games entirely from any storefront. They gravely miscalculated this whole situation
"A Unity employee got so mad they called in some death threats" Or a scummy PR agent thought that faking death threats would garner public sympathy, could be either one of those...
@scatzilla99 oh I'm not saying it can't be legit, but I also can't rule out the possibility that these scumbags wouldn't droop that low. If anything fake death threats for public sympathy is morally abd ethically superior to their normal behavior.
Me and some friends are working on a prototype and I am so fucking glad our programmer pushed us over to using Godot right away, 2 weeks before this new dropped.
"The Death Threat" is one of the most impressive tools corporations can use. "I'm gonna do a big kill" - Mean Man, suddenly everyone feels bad for 1 percenters that were bending them over 20 seconds ago.
@@miguelnewmexico8641 It's a weak excuse. All public figures will get them inevitably. You don't want them? Don't make entertainment products you stamp your name on.
I thought the Apple vs Epic lawsuit would be the funnest gaming lawsuit to happen for a decade… but BRO, UNITY VS NINTENDO/SONY/MICROSOFT/EVERYONE WOULD BE STRAIGHT FIRE. I wanna see that go down!!
I hadn't even considered this angle of this shitty situation. I genuinely feel bad for you. Hope there is some way you can put what you learned to good use on another engine.
That sucks really bad, but in some good news, most of those skills are transferable, take some time to look at other engines and see what ones feel right. (Also I loved unity but it has the clunkiest engine features of all of em)
It feels like these CEO types hire themselves. Like, how the heck do you even become CEO? They're clearly hell bent on running the company into the ground and its not a secret at all, so who the hell let them be CEO?
Not a lawyer, but have studied Law. Just FYI, you can change contract terms once they've been signed. Humans are fallible and mistakes can be made. However this requires the consent of both parties and essentially a new contract to be written up. In a case such as this where you've got a party making unrealistic demands, none of it's enforceable until both parties agree. Existing businesses can continue on, abiding to the terms of the original contract and telling Unity to go fuck themselves. It's then on Unity if they decide to walk those demands back or they break the contract by filing for a dissolution; which in this specific case leads to games being pulled and demonstrable economic damage of which Unity would be liable for. So I'm not surprised that they've started to backpedal hard on this issue. Their plan to scrape out a few extra bucks will very quickly turn into costing them millions in just legal fees alone.
They could've just simply said, "Hey, we're putting in a .02% revenue fee" and make craptons off soooo many games. Instead, they tried to take the whole hoard, and awoke several dragons. Nintendo, Disney and Genshin off the top of my head.
This also hits Disney, so they pretty much got the entire entertainment industry coming down on them as well, Unity ironically brought everyone together to smite them.
while they DO have millions of shares, people in these positions also have limits on how many shares they can sell before getting approval from the board in a fiscal year. They likely sold as many as they could, and will buy them back up in greater quantities when the price dips so when they DO sell the company, they have more.
"Didnt Yuji Naka just go to jail over this exact thing??" See the difference here is that in the West (primarily America) thats just called good business skills and nobody faces consequences other than the consumers.
The more this story comes out this is hands down the most preditory shit I've ever heard of, if this goes through and they can collect any of this money its just going to embolden other companies to follow suit, this is literally like a bad parody of where we all thought DLC and microtransactions would end up.
Dudes reaching for his glory years. The stage, the company, the money. He definitely thought it was EA again not realizing the actual audiences that use Unity. Or in general, the product they are selling.
This is such a strange move that begs many questions. What will happen for example if a game studio goes bankrupt? Will all of their games available for download on steam be pulled from the platform completely because Unity isn't getting their money? Or will the "reinstall fee" have to be payed by the owner? What about older games who's reinstall fees from Unity are greater than the sales profits? Now developers and publishers would have strong incentive to pull older titles that are reinstalled many times and sold very little because they will end up being money losers. Or again, the reinstall fee would have to be passed on to the customer. If they wanted to raise the price for a Unity license they could just do that. Having this utterly strange pricing structure only makes it impossible for developers to really calculate how much they are going to have to pay. It also discourages things like free updates and patching on older titles, as that would trigger a ton of re-installs. So it actively removes incentives for developers to spend any amount of time improving games that have already been released! No more No-Man's Sky stories, ever, because it will cost the studio too much.
What's also messed up about this is the effect it would have on education. So many courses pick just one engine and leave the graduating students to figure the rest out from there. For a lot of universities, that first program is Unity. That means a lot of fresh blood will enter into the industy with Unity experience, no further training required. Now, what happens when Unity is devalued for being a shit option to enter into the games industry? Well, courses that teach other programs might become more common and popular. Which means that in a couple of years when the new wave of fresh employees enters the workforce... Less to none of them know how to use Unity. And NO ONE wants to pay for additional training! At that point, Unity will die _even harder._ So yeah, this is the definition of gambling guaranteed long term profits for deadly short term ones.
We went too long without a new Activision/Blizzard crisis, so Unity stepped up to the plate. Let's all give Unity a round of applause for generating more content to keep podcasts alive, truly keeping the gaming community in their hearts.
@@theotherjared9824 Sad part is he's 100% right. Look at how games today are just skinner box scams, yet pull a billion or 2 in profits every single time. Overwatch 2 got rid of the casino, and added the credit card swipe, and became universally despised... to the tune of 100 million in profits for god damn skins in an FPS.
31:35 ooohhhh yeah..... whenever pat breaks the sound limits on the mic intake, you KNOW he's having the time of his life lol also, i remember way back when Flash was still a thing and unity was emerging. i looked at Unity and saw their games and thought "this shit is just worst flash" Flash died and i looked at Unity games and still thought "worse flash but whatever" skip to now when Unity is incredibly versatile and used by millions of devs and create outstanding games, but is now nuking itself into oblivion. i look at the alternatives and think "worse Unity but whatever" it's almost certain the next major "indie dev kit" like Flash or Unity will nuke itself into oblivion again. seeing fate repeat is both hilarious and saddening.
Besides the obvious "they want Genshin/Pokemon Go/Marvel Snap's money" arguments that people have been saying, there was another video where the point was brought up that if Unity gets away with the apology, however sincere it may have been, not even from the CEO himself and the "final" pricing structure change, then a knock-on effect is that there's a precedent set for other software companies, including non-gaming companies like Adobe, to pull the same nonsense in the future assuming people have short memories and attention spans and such. Hopefully Pat's analogy of the husband and wife holds stronger and people have longer memories than these companies give us credit for.
People are making a big deal out of Nintendo using Unity for Pokemon, but there is zero chance that Nintendo would not have gotten a super special boy agreement that doesn't have install fees. But I have my doubts this was ever intended to be put into effect and not used as an anchoring tactic so that they can cause a shitstorm, "hear our complaints" and "roll back" the proposed changes to still include some other scummy change that would be ignored because it's not this idiocy.
I remember when this happened so many people had the typical response of "people will buy it anyway or the CEO wont face consequences". But now Unity has had two rounds of lay offs in the last month and the CEO left. I know he got a big paycheck or whatever, but this clearly was a monumental fuck up. I really think they would have gotten away with it a bit longer if they had an actual answer to "what happens if people redownloading a game" instrad of "lol idk".
I did a serious doubletake at 0:25 cos I had no idea that Shlomo was a real jewish name. I assumed it was a slur. For a moment I though that Woolie dropped the antisemetic N-word.
Normally I think Woolie is on point when companies like Microsoft and EA pull the fake apology thing, but in this instance I think Pat is the one who is right, this just reeks of absolute greed and zero forthought, this isn't a decision that gives your company a bad look, this is the kind of decision that utterly tanks your company so hard that all the golden parachutes melt before the plane even hits the ground
"It's a calculated risk. We're prepared for the fallout," say the Unity board members, as they vigorously apply sunscreen to shield themselves from the thermonuclear warhead about to go off on their conference room table.
"It was a calculated risk. But man, am I bad at math."
"We have calculated the risks, it is 100% chance of failure and we have put all the chips on green."
It's like companies just keep seeing each other shoot themselves directly in the balls and go "Okay but I bet _my_ nuts are totally bulletproof, check it out"
😂 Great analogy.
I think it's more "I bet I'll make more from shooting myself in the nuts than the hospital bill will cost".
Venture capitalists are all about that short term profit and peacing out before the company's gutted and rotting in the street.
It's more like shareholders look at other companies shooting themselves in the nuts and then turn to their company and go : "That wouldn't happen with *your* nuts, would it?"
"No what, me, no never my nuts are totally bulletproof"
Cut to the investors stone faced handing them the gun.
This isn't just a class action lawsuit in the making. This is a class action-adventure lawsuit in the making.
Class character-action lawsuit.
Investor May Cry
@@Shadestfeaturing Dante
@@Shadest Maybe the real class character-action-adventure lawsuit was the friends we made along the way
@@Shadest"Investor May Cry" is great, good word play.
I can't wait for the video game based on this
Unity has apologized, earning themselves a total of 0 goodwill back
To paraphrase Law and Order; "Your credibility is not a boomerang. If you throw it away, _it doesn't come back."_
The sad thing is that all of the people responsible for this will probably just get new executive jobs at different companies as soon as Unity finally goes bankrupt.
THE BACKDOWN
Further evidence that apologizing will always be a waste of time.
That was absolutely not an apology.
Pat's analogies were on point this podcast. He's always more powerful when fueled by righteous indignation.
Righteus indignation as a pasive buff sounds usefull
I associate righteous indignation with Pat, I enjoy it
@@gurtygeeSure, but you're not the wife in his analogy, the game devs are and they DO have emotional investment in their project.
He almost gets it but just won't go the final step.
In his McDonalds analogy, when mcdonalds run out of new customers to make money off of, they don't focus on finding ways to get even more money from existing customers, they want to get even more customers. But when every person in the country is already a mcdonalds customers where do you get more? Well you just import more people into the country to serve as more fuel for the infinite capitalism machine.
But the very same people who hate capitalism have also been preemptively indoctrinated to think they need to support the endless importation of more "capitalism fuel" to their countries or else they're an immoral person, so nothing ever changes.
@@Malamite That's cause they're DEI cultists, the "good capitalism".
I can't understate how amazing this ANY% is
YEARS of Unity being seen as an engine for anyone. YEARS of Unity being THE ultimate tool for people wanting to get into game design.
They took any possible goodwill they had OR WILL HAVE into the trash.
They just didn't just speedrun destroying all their goodwill built up over years, they have mad it nearly impossible to ever build up goodwill ever again. It's almost impressive to fuck up this bad.
It's also worth noting that Unity itself was built on the post-Flash era, where people were playing smaller-scale individual made games all the time and getting inspired. They were *the* notable engine coming out of the User-Experience focused game engines craze, and yet they still went and systematically demonstrated how they can and will subvert any agreement they make.
Plus who knows how many indie devs will be delisting their games over this, creating even more backlash.
The damage, like the policy itself, is retroactive.
As someone who had to study programming in Unity in highschool for preperation for University, I feel like my efforts might have been wasted in the long run. Hopefully, univeristy just sticks to their prior schedule for some time. Cause yeah, even future employees will suffer from this event, not just game developers.
@@leithaziz2716 your skills aren’t wasted, if that’s some consolation. Sure, it will take time and effort to learn another engine, but many of the fundamental skills will still transfer over. It’s a pain, but doable.
The only possible thing they could do to make it worse is follow in WOTC's footsteps and send the Pinkertons after somebody.
Who knew the CEO that suggested that to charge for reloading ammo, would in the future charge to reload a game.
in a couple of years after he fails upwards from this he'll be proposing a fee for every time you load your game library
17:50 Woolie passes the death saving throw
What happens exactly? Was that part of the bit? I was a bit confused when I listened
@@m3hh3mhe was told what game Pat asked about being cancelled and took psychic damage. You can prob determine what game it is looking at western releases and games Woolie likes to figure it out.
Prob not Titanfall 3 :Y
He sounds like that demon in smiling friends that Charlie punches.
was it Gigaya?
@@FireFlyDark
I can't, what is it?
I always wonder how these corporate CEOs can make such impressively stupid decisions and continue to do so over and over again, and then I realize that they are super rich and completely out of touch with reality and humanity and it all makes sense again.
11 out of 12 members have Unity's board are finance ghouls.
They're also usually psychopaths, which means some of their brain regions related to empathy are literally not functioning. Literally brain-damaged.
It's worse then that, this was specifically a rug pull. They sold all their shares at high prices and then tanked the company knowing how much of a disaster it would be. The real problem is with shareholders as a concept, being people with no actual on-the-ground investment with the company, merely with short-term profit for themselves.
@nspade9252 There is a big caveat here though; people like that regularly sell off portions of their shares on a schedule. Them selling shares isn't necessarily indicative of a rug pull, unless they sold off more than usual and/or off schedule. I don't know if that's the case or not, if you do, please point me to evidence confirming that. Mind you, I'm not excusing anything. The decision is outrageous enough by itself. I'm just saying that from what I've seen, it seems less like an attempted rug pull and more like the CEOs are just greedy idiots living in a bubble.
@@Necromancist The CEO get's paid in shares and regularly sells them which is normal.
The guy under him sold off 30,000 shares (much more than normal I think) the week before this announcement .
This is another reason why companies need what I’ve decided to call a CVO: a chief veto officer. The CVO goes to all of the important meetings and his sole job is to listen carefully to ideas presented, think about them, and then, if necessary, say, “No, we’re not doing that because it’s a stupid idea.” If someone wants them fired, it has to go through an outside veto officer who reviews the reasons why they want to fire the CVO and they can say, “No, they’re not fired because you want to fire them for stupid reasons.”
A "Devil's advocate" if u will. Or a "No Man", opposite to the yes man.
Good idea.
You might as well call that persons position "Executive Enemy #1". One way or another it would not end well for them
Or do a sort of (fantasy book) "court jester" thing where you _can_ just fire the CVO... but then you get fired yourself
Clearly a position of such power would absolutely be free of corruption.
Fun fact, Japanese business have a role called the "Loud American" whose role is basically this, to be a completely retaliation-free voice to tell the higher ups if they're planning something idiotic, since their business culture is so yes-manny and subservient.
“Blizzard self reports as evil corpo”
Unity: I can try that too
"Unity, look at us. Gamers give us a billion dollars every time we ream them. They're not smart" - Lizzard.
I'd say this is more akin to the nonsense that Wizards of the Coast tried to pull a little while back.
The issue with woolie saying that outrage was factored in, is that this only works on customer facing products. Unity is not a product for general consumers, its more akin to direct selling where you're selling to a manufacturer who then makes products to customers.
Those people have way less tolerance for bullshit. Applying outrage mechanics just makes them go to a different supplier. This is reflected even in the massive flux of game design professors going "Whats a good alternative to unity?" And dropping it from their ciriculum. Unity doesn't have customers, it has wholesalers, and it just told all of them to fuck off.
Yeah, I don't think Woolie understands that at all. It's not about dumb frat boys with disposable income throwing $70 at a game series every year, this the developer having to deal with this Most of them are working on tight budgets, which is why they didn't license a more expensive option in the first place. Most devs are very price sensitive, and the "whales" are businesses like Nintendo who are price super-sensitive, instead of the opposite. It's the exact opposite environment to what Woolie thinks it is.
A consumer might say "This product sucks, but it would take like an hour round trip to another store to buy something better and cheaper"
A manufacturer says "this is our quarterly expense report. If we switch to this, we'll save $x." And they might get fired by their boss if they want to waffle and not do it.
I'm just picturing Nintendo's lawyers showing up like a Undertaker entrance
Nah, they're ninjas. Like one day some high up is going to enter their office, see their chair is spun the other way. Then slowly turn to reveal a REALLY disappointed man. And he's about to ruin that CEO or whoever's day.
Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and Steam lawyers all enter in a single file line like a RPG party
@@Shadest One Piece's walk to Arlong Park, but it's lawyers from Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and Disney walking up and punching down the wall of Unity's office.
nintendo has payed people to stalk 3DS hackers, there are people in Riccitellos house RIGHT NOW
Nintendo lawyers show up to your office with paperwork, then rip off their shirts before having a Yakuza styled dynamic intro
This is the scam that started the Ed, Edd, and Eddy movie
After this, the discovery merger, twitter, most of EA and Actiblizz's existence, and many other less spectacular examples, can we please start calling billionaires "Job Destroyers"?
Let's replace CEOs with AI
problem there is then the AI is directed by the shareholders instead of CEOs, and we're in the same problem if not worse@@johnrivers3813
@@johnrivers3813 can’t wait for the machine learning algorithms to just. do a bad amalgamation of every terrible decision every ceo has ever made but worse
@@ElvenSonic oh shit... you're right
No, we do not give Elon musk types a cool name, keep it simple and call them “idiots”
And the devil said:
"Every good game studio will end with a businessman"
Pat still being able to psychically damage Woolie so badly with a single word after all this time is part of what makes this deadly alliance so good
Never thought someone would explain part of the tendency of the Falling Rate of Profit explained as opening McDonalds franchises until it hits a ceiling.
... but what if every burger had tapeworms..?
Which is funny since the McDonalds franchise could get sued by the owners of the McDonalds resturaunts for putting their resturaunts too close to one another.
But I suppose Starbucks in the Seattle area also works with that concept.
The board knew this move was gonna tank their stock prices and sold a bunch of stock off before hand. That is the textbook definition of insider trading.
I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say it's not the textbook. Like imagine your boss shows up with a Molotov cocktail saying he's going to burn everything down. You'd be leaving as fast as possible.
@@NEEDbaconthey'd have a better chance of coming back from a molotov in the office than this mess
Surely there will be repercussions for that right? Surely the legal system isn’t so useless that it would let them get away with something so incredibly blatant right???
The horse has not just bolted, it's ripped the stable door off its hinges and is it using it as a snowboard.
It’s wild to me that execs can make decisions like this and set a company on fire, then get on the board of some other company. Like who looks at their CV and their track record, and goes “yeah, this guy’s got the good ideas”
they're not hired for their competence, but for their connections and wealth.
Loadin' up on cheeseburgers as you throw the t-virus over your shoulder on your way out of the McDonalds.
Collect all six tapeworm variants! (while supplies last)
I can't believe just how wild and inflamatory Pat's analogy was, and yet it is so on point. GJ Pat!
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: $500 Million
Unity: "Stock options budget is non-negotiable, please help."
You don't get it, you need to pay the executives half a billion dollars to tank the company.
john riccitiello
all must remember the name
at the very top of the executive black list
right there next to bobby kotick
Literally the only way for Unity to regain trust at this point would be to completely roll this decision back, fire the entire board of directors, and announce that the company will henceforth be run as a worker-owned coop.
& change their name, too.
Basically, Unity would have to become something completely different to reset their karma
@@gingermcgingin4106 New Game Plus unlocked!
not fire
execute
@@gingermcgingin4106they would need to rebrand even harder than Blackwater PMC did after that massacre.
a disney lawyer declaring an objection to every single unity lawyer argument like they're executing a daigo parry
Pat is the only person that has been talking about this to mention the malware company aspect. I didn't even know they'd be using that to track installs. Now i'm not even gonna buy games made in unity. Because I don't need malware on my computer
If you're on Windows, the malware is preinstalled. If you have a phone, the malware is preinstalled. If you use a game client, especially any Riot ones, you have Kernel level malware you can't ever really get rid of.
@@SeasoningTheObese Despite all my rage, I'm still just a rat in a cage
They were anchoring. The second proposal of 4% max and no retroactive was always the plan.
First proposal's point is making second one feel reasonable.
Problem is their anchor was TOO unreasonable and it tanked goodwill instead of just inspiring pushback.
Need the Summoning Salt video on "The Quest to Beat EA (History of the worst company in the U.S. speedrun)"
Need to luck that up
This whole thing isn't just some sort of calculated risk vs reward thing, this is a psychological tactic. The idea is that you give your consumers an absolutely horrid 'deal' so that, after you 'reconsider' and come back with a 'much more well thought out' deal, you give them a much less shitty by comparison (or much more subtly shitty) deal. Either people will resign themselves to accepting the deal, they won't read or they'll gloss over the fine print, or outrage will die down because they 'walked back' to a certain extent; whatever the case, they're just trying to slip a less egregious but still shit policy past people after the outrage of their first 'idea'. And in the end it really doesn't change anything; to your guys' point, they can just run back the run back and change things to whatever scummy policy they wanted to push originally, at any time.
IDK if you happened to cover it cuz it is gaming related (but more tabletop than video), but Wizards of the Coast did the EXACT same thing with Dungeons and Dragons licensing a little while ago, and the exact same kind of shitstorm and mass exodus happened. Lo and behold they did what I imagine Unity is going to do very soon: run the scum back and seem apologetic and on our side, and come back with a 'new' still-terrible deal (it's just not as bad as before so it's fine right). The only difference is that the shitty CEO that came into WotC very recently came in (but funnily enough I think she was from Microsoft), and so they really didn't care if they burned their new house to the ground - AFAIK there was no blatant share selling that told the real story behind this shit decision. I believe their scum-greedy quote was something about wanting to tap more into the potential monetization of DnD... yuck.
I would however recommend reading that 'apology post' they made detailing their 'new' plan - it is fucking hilariously cringe. Like on the one hand I feel bad for the PR person who had to write anything to even attempt to remedy that shitstorm, but it very much 'how do you do fellow DnD players'.
I digress; whichever case it is, it's the same story: greedy people don't care whose livelihoods they destroy or upturn for their own benefit.
Nah. This was too nuclear for that tactic.
Players and random people will not care but devs have buisness to run and they can't trust somronr that will pull the rug under them
Similarly with the DnD thing. Players don't really give a shit even though they outraged at the time. But stuff like Pathfinder right now is doing a remake to fully divorce themselves from the DnD TOS
@nahuel3433
The DnD fiasco most certainly wasn't just about the players - they were just the ones to have the loudest voices because by virtue of it being a game with multiple players there are more of them. There were devs of games, both tabletop and video, who used the free version of DnD as a basis for their games - or they did before the change in policy, lest WotC threaten them with legal action unless they paid up. And yes, that same feeling of having the rug pulled from under them is exactly how these devs felt. And sure, a lot of people tried to distance themselves from DnD and turn to alternatives... much like people are doing with Unity right now.
So no, this is nearly the exact same situation as the DnD crap - the only real difference, if you want to get into semantics, is that Unity has far more to gain because the video game market is far more lucrative than DnD. That and WotC wasn't putting their only horse in the race at risk - WotC also has Magic the Gathering to fall back on if the whole situation went worse-case, whereas Unity is their company's only product AFAIK.
To be fair, I'm not an exec or anything so I have no idea what their real motive was - but given how their new policy that they dropped yesterday is, lo and behold, far less scummy but still very greedy, I am only more convinced that this was their intent from the getgo - get the loudest voices to calm down with their less egregious deal so the policy passes quietly, then people will forget and get the newest version so they can start raking in free money (which would be even more effective by forcing people to have to upgrade, which I imagine they can easily do by totally stopping support on older versions and as newer hardware demands better software).
The reason this won't blow over is because of who is part of the 'transaction'. Most of the time when a company makes a stupid decision, it's a business to consumer transaction. And for every smart consumer, there are 10 dumb ones. So ultimately, while there is some backlash things will return to business as usual.
But this time the transaction was business to business, and businesses *hate* it when they have to pay fees they never agreed to because someone retroactively changed the terms of their contract. So all trust is lost. Everyone is jumping ship
@@NJR0091 This is still wildly different I feel. WotC going after creators is like Skyrim going after modders (but somewhat worse)
The main point is that WotC main clients are the randos that buy the books and the dnd beyond subs and shit which while there IS overlap with creators it is hardly all if not most of their cliens base. So, a lot of players with low empatgy can go "sucks to suck" and keep playing unnaffected or at the very least not give q shit when things go back to a better state
Unity's entire client base are the creators they are fucking over. The people they directly hurt and the people that will study alternatives to not get hurt again. The players here will not give a shit, much like it happened with dnd. But they aren't the ones giving unity their money. The fucked over creators that need to think how to get food in the table are. And Unity proved they are a risk.
People won't go back to a risk of losing all their money just cause "oh yeah I just used unity for years and it's cozy like that" like how players went back to dnd after like a month of other ttrpgs.
@@TAMAMO-VIRUS Well sure, pretty sure anyone would hate that no matter how big or small they are haha. And yes I understand the situation. I was just saying that their 'solution' doesn't actually cater to the people they really want to make money from; they are trying to appease the louder majority who don't really care so they shut up, and then they can pass their new policy in relative peace... or at least that's the idea. I certainly hope people don't go for it, and if everyone is trying to abandon ship then great, I hope they ended up poisoning their well because of this. We don't need this kind of precedent established, otherwise every engine creator will start doing it, and of course those costs will eventually have to trickle down to the consumer...
If I remember it right, one assholle pretending he can just change the terms of a contract whenver is how the story of one of the characters in Octopath Traveler 2 begins.
The prologue ends with said characters marching onto the motherfucker's house fully intending on murdering him.
I really really want to play OT2 now.
If only we could all follow such an example.
@@UltimaKeyMasterI hope you did!
@@Kango234 I didn't finish the first yet!
Do they get to murder him?
I have not seen a company so aggressively shoot itself in the foot in quite awhile, and that includes these past few years of Activision coverage. Also Pat's prostitute metaphor is god damn hilarious. Had me laughing lol.
Though I would adjust the analogy. Rather than telling your wife you're about to hire a prostitute, it's more like telling your wife you're going to amputate her limbs, but then backing down at the last second. Like sure, you're no longer going to handicap, or even kill your wife, but the trust is long gone.
This wasn’t a shot in the foot. This was right through the head
Of course Pat hasn’t heard of Godot.
We’ve been waiting for Godot.
Unity's move was possibly one of the dumbest company "hail mary's" to get extra cash in recent memory and now they cant ever take it back. They're screwed. As Pat basically said, even if they were retract the whole thing it'll mean nothing because you'll never be able to trust them again.
Personally however, its tough to say if they'll go bankrupt from this move, but it is fair to say that Unity's time in the spotlight is now officially over.
I wouldn't be surprised if this drives them bankrupt. This has the feel of a desperation move, a last ditch attempt to get revenue. I'd bet the numbers were already in pretty dire straights. This'll likely kill the company, but it might have been dead anyway
and wizard of the coast was a VERY recent memory.
That prostitute scenario was so hilarious
17:52 Been a minute since I saw Woolie die on-camera.
I hope people have followed Caves of Qud dev and Freehold Games owner Brian Bucklew's porting of Qud's core to Godot over a working weekend, and his pivot now to writing a unity->godot conversion software
New Battlefield price plan.
Your first 100 reloads free!
Edit: Price per 5.56 round $0.54, 30 round mag = $16.02 per reload.
Unity also offered to waive the fees entirely if developers moved to Unity's own "LevelPlay" ad-serving tech, which was seen as a direct attempt to put competitor AppLovin out of business.
So there were plenty of layers to this rotten onion.
What gets me is that they wanted more money they could have gone for all sorts of options, but no, they go for not only go for the worst option, they go for blowing their whole leg off.
Ya, like the obvious answer, charge MORE for your services
@hunterlurvey698
Exactly!
But no, had to go full Belka on themselves.
They could've pushed for revenue share and cap it at 5%, but they wanted to see if they could push the envelope further. It's not just about making money to them, it's about making the most money and seeing what they can get away with to squeeze more
It's not about "making more money" it's about "making all the money that ever existed or ever will exist" regardless of how impossible that is.
Line must go up.
Wonder how long until all the people who left Unity build their own engine and make a new company?
Basically already a thing, but there's always other free engines put there like old unreal and such
Ah yes. Harmony
@@ColdNorth0628 I'd use the fuck out of an engine called "Harmony"
with Blackjack and Hookers!
@@kaijuultimax9407if it had Gill using seraphic wing on the cover it would be an infinite seller
“200K isn’t happening any time soon.”
It’s ten months later, and Woolie is at 199K.
My dad LITERALLY used to buy my mom jewellery whenever he was having an affair and he started to feel a bit guilty about it.
So it's worth correcting Woolie, it's not Download OR Revenue threshold, it's Download AND Revenue threshold, and you can later fall below the revenue threshold since the fees only apply if the last 12 months were above it. Doesn't make it much less shitty, but it is an important distinction.
Also, the whole thing about the board members selling their stock means they expected it to fail requires us to know if it was all of their stock or not
I love that we had one of the best years of gaming so far with so many new releases and little drama (outside the usual like OW2 or whatever) only for unity CEO to come in and be like "things are too good, let me just threaten the existence of gaming to balance things out"
I've been making projects in godot for a couple years! It's a fantastic engine, with VERY similar capabilities as Unity, but with a much better UI. The craziest part is that the engine interface is a 60MB executable, so it's a perfectly viable deployment method to literally just ship the engine with your game. Compare that to the tens of GB that Unity requires for even a bare-bones intstall.
Finally people acknowledge the other dirtbags dumping stocks, not just one guy. A whole lot of scumbags got together to plan this.
I see the unity Board meeting as Seele from Evangelion.
The fascinating this is almost identical to what Wizards of the Coast did earlier *this year*. They also tried to change a contract that was already signed retroactively.
What is it with companies who just have that moment of thinking "yea we can now do a really negative change that will fuck up everyone's opinion of us, we're ready" like is it that hard to realize this shit results in massive blowback after seeing it mess up with tons of other companies that pull this crap before ?
Yeah but I want more money and I want it RIGHT NOW
"Yeah, but maybe this time, people will just roll their eyes and accept the inevitability of it, abd we get to be on the ground floor of this new industry standard..."
Mainly higher-ups and investors focused on short term gains without thinking on the the long term , why many mega companies start thinking like that is beyond me.
@@carlosortigoza99exactly, I thought these dudes have a degree in economics and business and shit but nobody told them about long vs short term cost
That's what companies do, a lot of them see public goodwill as a currency and will cash out to make absolutely malefic decisions in the hopes their prior goodwill will be an insulator to public criticism. Unity thought it had enough saved up, and it turns out there are some decisions you can't make without irrevocably damaging the trust of your consumer base. No one wants to learn Unity anymore, no one wants to pay Unity this cut, distributors aren't happy, bigwigs in the industry can't support this decision, and some studios are even threatening to remove their games entirely from any storefront. They gravely miscalculated this whole situation
"A Unity employee got so mad they called in some death threats"
Or a scummy PR agent thought that faking death threats would garner public sympathy, could be either one of those...
What if it was both
In case of gaming related controversy break glass
[Fake, easily disproved death threats]
because the people who are the good guys can't possibly have shitheads in their midst.
I am numb to claims of 'bloo bloo I got death threats'.
Literally every public figure is going to get a death threat, it's fucking meaningless.
@scatzilla99 oh I'm not saying it can't be legit, but I also can't rule out the possibility that these scumbags wouldn't droop that low.
If anything fake death threats for public sympathy is morally abd ethically superior to their normal behavior.
Me and some friends are working on a prototype and I am so fucking glad our programmer pushed us over to using Godot right away, 2 weeks before this new dropped.
I like how this situation started with unity wanting to make more money and now unity is never gonna have any money ever again
"The Death Threat" is one of the most impressive tools corporations can use. "I'm gonna do a big kill" - Mean Man, suddenly everyone feels bad for 1 percenters that were bending them over 20 seconds ago.
im almost positive you've sent death threats. i bet you've even meant it.
@@miguelnewmexico8641 It's a weak excuse. All public figures will get them inevitably. You don't want them? Don't make entertainment products you stamp your name on.
@@miguelnewmexico8641 Absolutely 100%, mostly on Xbox live from 2007 to 2012, when it was the normal, correct thing to do.
I thought the Apple vs Epic lawsuit would be the funnest gaming lawsuit to happen for a decade… but BRO, UNITY VS NINTENDO/SONY/MICROSOFT/EVERYONE WOULD BE STRAIGHT FIRE. I wanna see that go down!!
The speedrun community was in remiss. There was never a faster loss of consumer loyalty than this. This. Was. It.
This consumer loyalty loss was good, but the next one will be even worse
Whelp there goes three years of learning unity in game design school down the drain.
I hadn't even considered this angle of this shitty situation. I genuinely feel bad for you. Hope there is some way you can put what you learned to good use on another engine.
i don't do video games, but i am a software dev, & almost certainly 90% of the skills you learned in unity will carry over to another engine
That sucks really bad, but in some good news, most of those skills are transferable, take some time to look at other engines and see what ones feel right. (Also I loved unity but it has the clunkiest engine features of all of em)
I see Woolie got hit with that 30+ year old heartburn debuff. Yeah it's a bitch.
"director of growth" sounds so much like a corpo version of 1984's names like "ministry of wealth"
Sooo… Godot sweep right guys?
It feels like these CEO types hire themselves. Like, how the heck do you even become CEO? They're clearly hell bent on running the company into the ground and its not a secret at all, so who the hell let them be CEO?
Their CEO friends who are in on the scheme.
"If you're upset, you can rent an apology" ~ The Fine Print by The Stupendium
Not a lawyer, but have studied Law.
Just FYI, you can change contract terms once they've been signed. Humans are fallible and mistakes can be made. However this requires the consent of both parties and essentially a new contract to be written up. In a case such as this where you've got a party making unrealistic demands, none of it's enforceable until both parties agree. Existing businesses can continue on, abiding to the terms of the original contract and telling Unity to go fuck themselves. It's then on Unity if they decide to walk those demands back or they break the contract by filing for a dissolution; which in this specific case leads to games being pulled and demonstrable economic damage of which Unity would be liable for.
So I'm not surprised that they've started to backpedal hard on this issue. Their plan to scrape out a few extra bucks will very quickly turn into costing them millions in just legal fees alone.
They could've just simply said, "Hey, we're putting in a .02% revenue fee" and make craptons off soooo many games.
Instead, they tried to take the whole hoard, and awoke several dragons. Nintendo, Disney and Genshin off the top of my head.
i want to see the lawsuit. i want to see nintendo, sony, micro, whoever is affected getting the bill and countering.
i want to see it so bad.
This also hits Disney, so they pretty much got the entire entertainment industry coming down on them as well, Unity ironically brought everyone together to smite them.
@@The_Queen_ChrysalisDon't forget the creators of Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail.
27:17 Happy moment here boys
while they DO have millions of shares, people in these positions also have limits on how many shares they can sell before getting approval from the board in a fiscal year. They likely sold as many as they could, and will buy them back up in greater quantities when the price dips so when they DO sell the company, they have more.
"Didnt Yuji Naka just go to jail over this exact thing??"
See the difference here is that in the West (primarily America) thats just called good business skills and nobody faces consequences other than the consumers.
When people tell you who they are, listen to them
im Batman.
The more this story comes out this is hands down the most preditory shit I've ever heard of, if this goes through and they can collect any of this money its just going to embolden other companies to follow suit, this is literally like a bad parody of where we all thought DLC and microtransactions would end up.
Dudes reaching for his glory years. The stage, the company, the money. He definitely thought it was EA again not realizing the actual audiences that use Unity. Or in general, the product they are selling.
18:12 what was the message that did that to Woolie?
class character-action lawsuit
I wonder if those defenders are still around to claim that "things are being taken out of context"
This is such a strange move that begs many questions. What will happen for example if a game studio goes bankrupt? Will all of their games available for download on steam be pulled from the platform completely because Unity isn't getting their money? Or will the "reinstall fee" have to be payed by the owner? What about older games who's reinstall fees from Unity are greater than the sales profits? Now developers and publishers would have strong incentive to pull older titles that are reinstalled many times and sold very little because they will end up being money losers. Or again, the reinstall fee would have to be passed on to the customer. If they wanted to raise the price for a Unity license they could just do that. Having this utterly strange pricing structure only makes it impossible for developers to really calculate how much they are going to have to pay. It also discourages things like free updates and patching on older titles, as that would trigger a ton of re-installs. So it actively removes incentives for developers to spend any amount of time improving games that have already been released! No more No-Man's Sky stories, ever, because it will cost the studio too much.
What's also messed up about this is the effect it would have on education. So many courses pick just one engine and leave the graduating students to figure the rest out from there. For a lot of universities, that first program is Unity. That means a lot of fresh blood will enter into the industy with Unity experience, no further training required.
Now, what happens when Unity is devalued for being a shit option to enter into the games industry? Well, courses that teach other programs might become more common and popular. Which means that in a couple of years when the new wave of fresh employees enters the workforce... Less to none of them know how to use Unity. And NO ONE wants to pay for additional training! At that point, Unity will die _even harder._
So yeah, this is the definition of gambling guaranteed long term profits for deadly short term ones.
We went too long without a new Activision/Blizzard crisis, so Unity stepped up to the plate.
Let's all give Unity a round of applause for generating more content to keep podcasts alive, truly keeping the gaming community in their hearts.
I like charging for a GAME ENGINE’S active work
Hah! We're not gouging we're just charging. ⚰️
"All game developers that don't think about monetization first are fucking morons."- actual John Riccietelo quote
@@theotherjared9824 Sad part is he's 100% right. Look at how games today are just skinner box scams, yet pull a billion or 2 in profits every single time. Overwatch 2 got rid of the casino, and added the credit card swipe, and became universally despised... to the tune of 100 million in profits for god damn skins in an FPS.
The CEO Any% burn your company to the ground scene is really popping off.
31:35 ooohhhh yeah..... whenever pat breaks the sound limits on the mic intake, you KNOW he's having the time of his life lol
also, i remember way back when Flash was still a thing and unity was emerging. i looked at Unity and saw their games and thought "this shit is just worst flash" Flash died and i looked at Unity games and still thought "worse flash but whatever" skip to now when Unity is incredibly versatile and used by millions of devs and create outstanding games, but is now nuking itself into oblivion. i look at the alternatives and think "worse Unity but whatever" it's almost certain the next major "indie dev kit" like Flash or Unity will nuke itself into oblivion again. seeing fate repeat is both hilarious and saddening.
The only Godot game I can name is Cruelty Squad and this whole story reads like a mission from that game.
This is like if google came out and said they would charge every single G-Mail user ¢20 for every single email they have ever received and sent.
I guess we’ll have to wait another 5 years for Silksong… TFW.
Ah, love to hear Pat "Not an economist, but here's why capitalism is untenable" Boivin go off, like unironically.
"You just can't change contract agreements".
Oh you never met the "legal" system of the United States, my friends
So gang, how we feeling on hustle vs scam on this one?
It's scam.
Like the video they'd make would be five seconds long, one would declare scam and the other nods his head in agreement.
When it involves deleting a contract to act like they can get away with whatever they want, it's a hard and fast scam. And a really bad one, at that.
Besides the obvious "they want Genshin/Pokemon Go/Marvel Snap's money" arguments that people have been saying, there was another video where the point was brought up that if Unity gets away with the apology, however sincere it may have been, not even from the CEO himself and the "final" pricing structure change, then a knock-on effect is that there's a precedent set for other software companies, including non-gaming companies like Adobe, to pull the same nonsense in the future assuming people have short memories and attention spans and such. Hopefully Pat's analogy of the husband and wife holds stronger and people have longer memories than these companies give us credit for.
Pat is genuinely just a funny person
The good will destruction speedrun was spectacular and weird.
Unity executives saw the disaster Wizards of the Coast did to the entire tabletop industry this year and said: I can do the same but for video games!
People are making a big deal out of Nintendo using Unity for Pokemon, but there is zero chance that Nintendo would not have gotten a super special boy agreement that doesn't have install fees. But I have my doubts this was ever intended to be put into effect and not used as an anchoring tactic so that they can cause a shitstorm, "hear our complaints" and "roll back" the proposed changes to still include some other scummy change that would be ignored because it's not this idiocy.
Nintendo would have not paid them shit for retroactive fees no matter how low it got.
September 1st, 1989, dear diary.....
I remember when this happened so many people had the typical response of "people will buy it anyway or the CEO wont face consequences". But now Unity has had two rounds of lay offs in the last month and the CEO left. I know he got a big paycheck or whatever, but this clearly was a monumental fuck up. I really think they would have gotten away with it a bit longer if they had an actual answer to "what happens if people redownloading a game" instrad of "lol idk".
I did a serious doubletake at 0:25 cos I had no idea that Shlomo was a real jewish name.
I assumed it was a slur.
For a moment I though that Woolie dropped the antisemetic N-word.
Even a Ferengi would see this as bad business and profit.
I know the cancelled project that Pat was talking about probably isnt Scalebound but my heart tells me that it was Scalebound :(
I’m gonna say that the developer Pat saw was from Capcom and or platinum and the title was scalebound 😂😂😂
Normally I think Woolie is on point when companies like Microsoft and EA pull the fake apology thing, but in this instance I think Pat is the one who is right, this just reeks of absolute greed and zero forthought, this isn't a decision that gives your company a bad look, this is the kind of decision that utterly tanks your company so hard that all the golden parachutes melt before the plane even hits the ground
Let's not forget all the projects that have been damned to development hell by this fuckery, not least of which is Silksong.
About the install fee does that also include installing an update patch or just the first time you download the game.
Thats a good question that I'm sure they were hoping no one asked
As far as I'm aware, it didn't count update patches. It was only installs on "new machines"