I ended up grabbing the Affinity bundle since it's half off despite concerns about Canva. I'd expect even if they end up moving to a subscription I'd at least have the versions I bought for an extended amount of time. I still have a working copy of Photoshop CS 5 as well. Hopefully we see Affinity remain committed to affordable non subscription plans but if they don't I think the one time purchase will last me a long time. If they put out a version 3 without subscription and it's compelling i'll upgrade, if not i'll continue to use 2 for I'm sure years to come.
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I'm in a lot of gamedev communities and I'm not seeing any complaints. Everyone agrees this is fine. I believe if they announced this initially people probably would have complained but nothing close to the backlash there was. Most people just don't trust Unity after this. This is after all the second time we're getting a promise not to change the terms on an existing engine version as a result of backlash. How long until the third?
This is basically everything policy wise they needed to do to quell the storm. This is honestly what should have just been announced originally. So much reputational damage just to arrive at a reasonable model weeks later.
I'm happy for all the Unity developers out there that are breathing a sigh of relief. Hopefully they can ship their ongoing projects but I'd be hesitant about a continued long term relationship with Unity after this.
This isn't the first Unity backlash and I'd be surprised if it's the last.
How does this help anything when they have already demonstrated their willingness to alter terms and retrospectively add fees or alter licensing conditions. They already walked back changes once before saying “Okay you can keep the terms you agreed on your version” and went back on that promise for this clusterfuck.
They burned the trust bridge and nothing they _ever_ do or can say will bring that trust back.
Compared to how other companies behave, Reddit for example, it's a good signal to their customers that they've come to their senses and reached a reasonable compromise. Also, a second mistake like this would be devastating, so hopefully Unity will handle changes better from now on.
I'm not so sure. Although the opportunity hasn't really even come up, one thing that Reddit has never done is make an agreement along the lines of, "You can use X version of this software under this license forever," in their own ToS, and then suddenly go back on it and declare that, actually, everyone they had that agreement with is now subject to arbitrary new rules. While Reddit has done some sketchy and user-hostile things in the past, it's an entirely different category.
It's a can of worms that cannot be closed. Even the apology-promises they're making right now are subject to random change, because they've made clear that they don't see their own ToS as binding for them. The article says, "We will make sure that you can stay on the terms applicable for the version of Unity editor you are using – as long as you keep using that version," and we're supposed to be reassured by that, but they've already said that exact thing before and shown that it was meaningless. What's to stop them from deciding next week that they changed their minds on their commitments again? They may have learned that they can't make such grand changes all at once without a boycott, but they could think that they can still roll out the same types of changes piecemeal over the next few years (and they might be right). What's to stop them from finding new ways to skirt around these commitments in the future (for example: adding some sort of planned obsolescence to future LTS versions to ensure that, even though you are technically allowed to use them under an old ToS, actually doing so would be completely untenable)?
Personally, I wouldn't trust anything this company says unless I have a legally binding contract with them, with clear damages defined if they break it (this may be the case for some larger studios, and that's fine for them). They can say anything they want in a PR release.
According to the GP, this already was their second mistake like this. I'm not in game development and I'm not aware of the first, but maybe someone else can explain what/when their first "mistake" was.
Ever since the mobile ad-first approach that's been a result of their buyout/merger/whatever it was, I think most Unity developers are bouncing. No one in their right might would leave their potential income in the hands of these sycophants.
Unity has cultivated this reputation as a provider for artsy indies and small studios, and now some larger AAs, but I think they want to be a provider for mobile casinos. That's where all the money is, and they are less likely to balk at more fees.
No, most Unity developers. Unity the company definitely wants into that market but, unfortunately for them, that's not the majority of their customers.
If you have a game that has been X months/years in development, porting to a different platform was not a realistic option. Those people are mega relieved they can get the current project out the door. Greenfield development should do a significant amount of consideration before starting a Unity project.
This video[1] talks a bit about this from a lawyer's point of view and is a really good overview.
For people who are not paying as much attention to this I'd like to summarize the main points of frustration.
1. Unity has just shown they believe they are able, and they are willing, to change the terms on what you have to pay them. What are the bounds to terms like this? What if Unity is tight on money and decide to squeeze developers further? The risk to continuing business with Unity is very high as you have unknown future exposure.
2. The monetization model they've chosen is tied to installs, not revenue. On the initial day of announcement they even claimed re-installs would count but they've since walked that back (or "clarified a miscommunication"). Unity has been extremely wishy-washy on how they even plan to track this mentioning proprietary systems they can't elaborate on and your only recourse is to appeal if you think they got the numbers wrong. This is not a metric tied to your revenue and is difficult to plan around.
There are a lot of people arguing against a strawman of people who don't want to pay unity but that is not at all what this is about. Unity chose a terrible model they can't even explain for how they want to bill people and apply it to all past games that use the engine for all future sales.
This would be similar to if Microsoft said everyone who ever built anything on C# has to start paying a fee for every future install because it includes the .net runtime.
I hope so, but if it’s likely to get smacked down by the FTC, it’s unlikely Unity would try this path. I’m sure this has been in the works for a long time and all the backlash was anticipated - they just expect huge profits on the other side.
We'll see I guess! But even if it's not illegal the shortsightedness is staggering, which makes me question if leadership would have even foreseen legal problems
I think this is called a single round game. They screw everyone over and will never be trusted again, but get a one time payout in the process. It just seems like a company of Unity’s scale must have a better plan than that.
Since the goal of management is to provide shareholder value, could the current management be sued by the shareholders for basically destroying the long term value of the company?
Believe it or not this is completely legal in the US.
The way it works is that company insiders can’t freely sell or buy stock, instead they have to submit a form (Form 4) to the SEC on which they report the sale, almost always based on a prior setup plan (called Rule 10b5-1 plan) that can’t be changed and automatically effectuates. These forms get published.
This is of course silly because the CEO can just plan something detrimental for September all the way back in April (which the fuckery with the terms suggests happens), create a plan in May to sell shares in September just before the announcement is made and make sure that the drop in stock price doesn’t affect his wallet.
But in the good old US of A that all considered above board.
I saw that, but I honestly think it’s a non-story. That’s ~$80k of stock. I sold more of my company’s stock the last quarter (just as part of my vesting schedule) and I’m no exec. I’m sure that’s just a small part of his vest for the quarter - possibly even less than 10%.
They might have well devised the first of its kind "ransom by installations" in the history of software, by making it possible for attackers to fake mass installations and get gamedevs into fatal debts. And they are taking the executioner role.
We've been calling it "Install Bombing" after the common abusive practice of review bombing. Unity claims they have anti-fraud systems in place and you can always appeal with their fraud team but I don't have an reason to blindly trust a black box that when fails makes Unity more money and puts the burden on me to prove otherwise.
It is completely impossible to keep track of DRM-free games being distributed illegally on private trackers that they are not members of, and there are surely tons of private trackers that are not mentioned on the public web that no one at Unity is aware of. Short of spying on the entire world (and processing all that info), it's impossible to keep track of people sharing DRM-free games illegally on USB and hard drives with their friends, or on private folders through Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. accounts.
So unless their anti-fraud system is asking Valve, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Apple, Google, Epic, GOG, itch.io, etc. how many downloads have occurred (no chance that they'll all agree to that), then their system is just going to make a guess, which they'll charge you for, and hope that holds up in court.
But even then they’re not going to proactively stop it, it’s up to devs to monitor their bill and go “wait we’re getting bombed”. Their whole approach is terribly sloppy and unprofessional.
This applies to any paid API and is something we check for when we do security audits, definitely not a "first of its kind". It's just not common that APIs that cost 20 cents per invocation are exposed directly to the general public.
>Unity has been extremely wishy-washy on how they even plan to track this mentioning proprietary systems they can't elaborate on and your only recourse is to appeal if you think they got the numbers wrong.
They must know that their methods will ultimately be revealed during discovery during the inevitable lawsuits. So I’m wondering if they haven’t actually figured out how they’re doing it yet.
All I can think of is some poor dev trying and failing to explain to the mbas why this can't be done with any precision. Two parallel lines that cross...
I am curious -- if you are a business and buy Google Ads, and they tell you how many impressions and clicks you got, are those numbers verifiable? How effective is it at filtering out "bad" clicks, like the ones from a competitor who wants to exhaust your ad money? Is the situation similar?
Ah, the difference here is that game developers have alternatives to Unity. You can't verify Google's numbers, but fortunately for them there's no (meaningful) alternative. The advantages of being a monopoly!
Not sure why I watched the whole hour's worth of content as I'm not involved tbh, but what I gather is that the whole speech amounts to, in essence, "yes it's legal (unless you want to appeal to empathy from a court); however, Unity is saying that they'll tell you how much you owe them and you have no way of verifying it, so with these one-sided changes blemishing trust while simultaneously asking for your trust in their estimations on how much you owe them... tread carefully"
>The terms have been changed so that all future installs can incur a fee even on older games that used unity even if the haven't been updated recently.
They'll be able to get away with that then, the weasels. Sounds like they are trying to make a golden goose and kill it in one fell swoop. The latest Unreal demos look mighty fine. Sounds like we will be seeing a bunch of games use it in the near future.
I wonder if the older engines used by older games have any way to detect installs. I'd hate to see devs who abandoned their projects years ago but are still downloadable somewhere get caught up in this.
I've been doing Godot development with my 9yo and he loves it. If you're looking for something with less emphasis on text based programming Construct and GDevelop are engines I've heard good things about as a continuation from Scratch.
To add to this I found these tutorials good starting points for a structured lesson with my kids. Would do about 30m-1h a day (mostly up to whenever they get bored). When we started off we'd focus on letting them run the GUI changes and I'd work on the code and explain the concepts to them until they started wanting to do the coding themselves.
After that my son wanted to switch to making his own game so we've been re-implementing boss fights from cuphead and lately he wants to make an idle game.
I've also found its fun to just get them to be part of the design process in game jams. It's really great to see the creative ideas that come out of young kids and game making with kids has been super fun and educational.
This is definitely a known issue that I've personally experienced but is even listed as a warning on the docs[1].
> Godot 4's HTML5 exports currently cannot run on macOS and iOS due to upstream bugs with SharedArrayBuffer and WebGL 2.0. We recommend using macOS and iOS native export functionality instead, as it will also result in better performance.
> Godot 3's HTML5 exports are more compatible with various browsers in general, especially when using the GLES2 rendering backend (which only requires WebGL 1.0).
Web exports are essentially unusable for Mac users. It's the biggest complaint I get from my games using Godot 4.x.
Would love to see more disruption in this space. Like others have said it's actually amazing how bad the calendar/scheduling portion of PagerDuty is. Multiple places I've worked we ended up making our own interface to managing schedules because the UI at PagerDuty is so bad. Also, people mentioning the rock solid reliability of PagerDuty likely don't have good monitoring of PagerDuty. When I worked on monitoring in the past we regularly encountered delayed notifications and ingestion failures. Pulling up their status page right now confirms they still have multiple issues a month. At a past employer we had our notification system actually check outstanding alert status and fall back to direct SMS when the ingestion latency was too high.
I worked on pygerduty, a python client library for PagerDuty, at a past job so I spent a lot of time talking to people at PagerDuty but I think they stopped inviting me to their "Founder's Club" meetings when I told them I didn't care about AI Alerts and wanted better UIs for scheduling and better reliability.
