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Unity is adding additional developer fee 20¢ per install (After $200k/year income threshold) [UP: new updates to Runtime Fee policy]
- Thread starter VibrantStorm
- Start date
It's pretty clear.
Or do you not want a bad actor who's implementing a malicious policy that is objectively terrible for the entire industry to be punished for it and potentially forced to retract it?
User banned (1 week): concern trolling; history of trolling infractions
Unlikely, but fair enough to hope for that.
That's a terrible attitude. 99.9% of people working there had no say in this decision, part of their compensation is Unity shares, and they don't have the luxury of falling back on a net worth of half a billion like Riccitiello.
See above. JR barely feels the stock dropping. Meanwhile everyone else there who had nothing to do with this gets punished. I don't root for that.
It's the only way they're going to walk this back. And if they don't, they're completely finished as a company. Even if they do, the damage is there. Unless they fire Ricottelli or are bought by a reputable company, they're living on borrowed time at this point.
Oh come on.
Every time a malicious company does a malicious thing, somebody appears and is like "well uh actually you can't wish harm towards Big Corporation because Big Corporation has People in it and they don't deserve it"
By that logic I should be rooting for Facebook's sucess, or Twitter's success, and every company's success.
It's basically a guilt trip, and I'm not willing to entertain it.
So, fuck Unity. Unity, the company itself, deserves to bleed money and be generally unsuccessful until this decision is reversed. Don't try to guilt trip me into not telling Unity to fuck off. 🤷♂️
Wether I want them to be hurt by this or not makes no difference to anyone working at Unity. I literally have no control over their stock. Plus the company losing money is the only thing that might make them reverse this decision. Which by the way, also effects the livelihoods of countless developers.
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If this go through they will be out of jobs anyway because no one will use this engine anymore
If everyone had this attitude, literally nothing would change in a capitalist society. While it sucks for employees caught in the crossfire, historically companies only revert their decision if it hits their bottom line. They don't care what consumers or creatives think if they continue to increase their profits.
That too.
We can't wish harm towards Unity because oh no, there's PEOPLE working there!!!
And that completely ignores that if they go through with this bullshit, then all the PEOPLE who make videogames will be hurt a lot.
Maybe they shouldn't make catastrophically poor business decisions that greatly affect the income of a large number of non-employees that don't get bonus stock benefits. Fuck them.
I understand why it didn't happen but in situations like this I wish the dev community would have coalesced around a FOSS solution back then so that this could have been potentially avoided.
Get out of here with this. Fuck Unity as a whole and their disgusting greed. Watching my developer friends scramble because they can't afford a 6.5x increase in licensing fees and the threat of this bullshit "Runtime" fee is insane.
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no but you see, you should root for the wellbeing of the people working at unity and nobody else's
reason: I said so
I have friends who work at Unity. Trust me when I say that nobody likes anything that Unity upper management is doing, repeatedly tried to get them to stop, and it didn't work. Only plunging the stock will fix this.
I wonder how they would be able to implement this for Unity games with physical releases on Switch, considering those usually run off the cart, and they don't always have some kind of install onto the system memory/storage?
5% drop in stock is fairly minor. If that's all we get then investors probably think of this move by Unity as inconsequential to Unity's botton line. The damage caused by negative PR cancels out the extra revenue.
But I'm still kinda hoping Unity walks this back. But time will tell. Hopefully not too much time, a lot of game companies will be in trouble because of this.
But I'm still kinda hoping Unity walks this back. But time will tell. Hopefully not too much time, a lot of game companies will be in trouble because of this.
Bankrupting a small indie dev couldn't be any easier.
Management didn't think that far ahead.
The immediate stock impact is fairly irrelevant. Unity is going to die a long, slow death because of this; every single Unity dev I've spoken to is firmly off the train.
LMFAO. These fuckers are out here doing blantantly illegal things with retroactive contact changes and they think they'll be able to get away with shaking down fucking MICROSOFT.
Oh I'm dying. I can't stop fucking laughing. This is a racket. Microsoft's Lawyers are going to fucking roast them in court so bad they'll have no choice but to declare actual bankruptcy and sell their company, to Microsoft for pennies.
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I hope the impacted devs do a big sale this holiday if this policy stands and if they decided to just delist their games in new year; I would want to buy them before they are gone. Like Cult of the Lamb, Hollow Knight, etc.
Highly unlikely. Let's say the worst case scenario is this plan holds. Devs like you mentioned will then have the choice of:
A) Keep selling when every unit sold is clear profit, and give up a bit of those future profits to Unity.
B) Stop making tons of profits.
I can't see many choosing option A. They might threaten to switch engines for future games, they might actually switch engines, but they're not going to cripple their own income stream like that.
Threaten to delist in January? Lots. It's a powerful bargaining chip.
Actually do it? I don't see profitable devs following through on it.
Unity will end up walking some stuff back, and then those devs will back down from their January delisting threat.
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Don't care, to be honest. I have many gamedev friends and industry colleagues that are having their entire livelihood threatened (including myself) thanks to this bullshit. While it sucks for Unity staff have their compensation hurt, it sucks WAY harder for so many friends and folks that I personally know, so yeah I honestly couldn't care less about this.
I certainly think that there will be some devs who simply don't pay when Unity invoice them.
Oh god, shut up.
"Oh, don't wish CONSEQUENCES TO ACTIONS THE CEOS MADE on a company! People work there! Pay no attention that several small developers will get punished from this BRAIN DEAD DECISION, it's everyone who is calling this out who are wrong."
I hope their stocks crater into the Earth's core and I hope everybody (journalists, developers, publishers, distributors, customers, etc) gives them so much shit everyday until they walk this shit back.
The catch-22 of late-stage capitalism when it comes to labour - if companies do well, the employees see none of the benefits. If companies do poorly, the employees are the first ones to suffer the consequences.
Don't do anything, let things just run their course, there is no choice, no say, no democracy in play.
Are you also going to ignore all the replies to this bad take?
I assume this has already been covered?
kotaku.com
All this feels like part of an orchestrated plunder, burn down the place, and make off with the loot scheme.
Unity Bosses Sold Stock Ahead Of Scummy Dev Fees Announcement
CEO John Riccitiello sold 2,000 shares a week before Unity revealed its Runtime Fee
kotaku.com
All this feels like part of an orchestrated plunder, burn down the place, and make off with the loot scheme.
Capcom: Hey Microsoft, we've decided to start charging you $1 every time someone installs one of our RE engine games on an Xbox. Thanks!
Yes, as horrible the decision he makes are, that is probably nothing.I assume this has already been covered?
Unity Bosses Sold Stock Ahead Of Scummy Dev Fees Announcement
CEO John Riccitiello sold 2,000 shares a week before Unity revealed its Runtime Fee
All this feels like part of an orchestrated plunder, burn down the place, and make off with the loot scheme.
He has several million shares, selling 2.000 is nothing, and probably part of some recurring sales he seems to make to get stock he gets as compensation to liquid money he can use / invest somewhere else.
It's absolutely nothing and it gets called out as such each time it gets reposted.I assume this has already been covered?
Unity Bosses Sold Stock Ahead Of Scummy Dev Fees Announcement
CEO John Riccitiello sold 2,000 shares a week before Unity revealed its Runtime Fee
All this feels like part of an orchestrated plunder, burn down the place, and make off with the loot scheme.
It's a nothingburger. This was pre-scheduled (which is pretty much required to avoid insider trading charges), and is 2,000 out of several million shares he has -- you'd want to sell way more than that to turn any real profit.I assume this has already been covered?
Unity Bosses Sold Stock Ahead Of Scummy Dev Fees Announcement
CEO John Riccitiello sold 2,000 shares a week before Unity revealed its Runtime Fee
All this feels like part of an orchestrated plunder, burn down the place, and make off with the loot scheme.
The usual way you do insider trading legally is to preschedule a sale of a massive amount of shares, say, every quarter -- and then cancel the scheduled sale in every quarter you know you're not burning the company down from the inside. This is surprisingly legal whereas suddenly selling shares isn't, despite it ending up being effectively the same thing.
New Statement from Unity
Feel free to remind me in January of all the hugely successful devs delisting then.
As I said, absolutely threaten to, more should join in to sway Unity execs and the Board into changing this, but to actually follow through with cutting off their own hugely profitable income streams when the time comes, nah, I don't see it happening.
So backtracked on web and streaming, demos and EA games. Good. But still counting installs somehow, and fraud will still end up with a period of time where you've lost money and are waiting on Unity to investigate and fix it.
So yeah, can't see this really moving the needle.
So yeah, can't see this really moving the needle.
I hope they still choke on shit. Anything short of a complete revocation is unacceptable.
But zero information on how they would even know...
Generally Humble for example gives same keys as those who paid for game, can't even give separate build.
Also big omission, pirated copies, no promises not to charge for those.