Ah, I meant a source to how California’s government is making it more difficult to move out of the state.
In another news: Unity finally responded.
Too little, too late. And they just can’t let go of that runtime fee for pro and enterprise users.
The trust is gone. Who is to say management will not pull another one of these stunts in a year’s time when the dust has settled? They still seem to be bent on enforcing that runtime fee – if not now, it’s as certain as death they will in a few years’ time down the road.
how California’s government is making it more difficult to move out of the state
Ah, that I do not know.
But I am sure that it is a difficult decision to switch to another engine for developers who are already familiar with Unity. While porting a game to another game engine is certainly not impossible, it is time-consuming and tedious, new skills have to be acquired … leaving is probably hard.
I am happy that I did not install Unity. For example, Godot seems to have a wonderful community too, at least my first experience there was really nice. And I am generally more interested in the new features of Unreal Engine – and Blender of course!
It is interesting to see a number of Unity users who already converted their projects completely to Godot - within a few days! It seems that C# in Unity is relatively painless to convert to Godot’s C#.
I’ve also seen a Unity to Godot converter GitHub repo.
But yes: switching to a different game engine in the middle of a project is not to be taken lightly.
Some interesting Godot projects on youtube. Congrats to the Godot devs with the new ppl trying out the engine. Hopefully from here on out with the engine used more, the development pace will pick up faster.
As long as Unity users enjoy the abuse, management will not change.
My theory is that if customer-company relation goes sideways there is a point when both sides starts to reinforce pathological behavior because all reasonable people left the stage.
Exactly. If someone insults you all the time, you shouldn’t keep coming back for more – that doesn’t teach the insulter anything and in fact validates that behavior in their mind. If users leave in droves and Unity’s ->stock value<- plummets, maybe they’ll get the hint that they are doing something wrong (I pointed out stock value because that’s obviously the only thing they care about).
And now the new thread on the Unity forum is a runaway train with devs. continuing to announce their departure from Unity in favor of other engines. They managed to keep some users on board, but what the company has done so far is allow them to bleed users a little more slowly compared to last week.
Meanwhile, Godot’s development fund is now over 50000 Euros a month and, at the rate it is going, the new foundation could realistically have half the funding of the BF right out of the gate (which is meteoric compared to how long it took for the BF to get its development fund to those numbers). The Godot team in its timing to get out of the conservancy and into a standalone entity allowed them to catch lightning in a bottle.
In short, Epic is finally hitting the limits of what it can do with the Fortnite money amid the game’s shift to a lower margin business model, meaning the era of rapid growth has come to an end. Be on the lookout for the possibility of increased monetization of the Unreal ecosystem (even though they are very unlikely to repeat Unity’s mistake).
That is somewhat impressive actually, that the company seemingly listened to this specific user request
(as many wanted him gone and they got it). However, the userbase still wants a number of other board members to follow him out the door before they re-commit to the engine.
Oh look, the big rat is leaving the dumpster fire. No doubt with a very generous golden parachute (this is one of the things that tends to aggravate me the most about these people; no matter how much they screw over a company, and in the end the little guy, customer and employee alike, they never pay for it)… oh yeah, $26 million. Just look at that number and weep.
I’m not sure that’s particularly impressive, nor do I think they listened much to the users per se as more to the repercussions of the dumpster fire; it’s that initial damage control has failed – the rollbacks didn’t pacify the outrage enough, the executive apology tour didn’t work, and the stock keeps falling, so executive sacrifice is the next move in the book, which was facilitated by Riccitiello being so unwise as to disrespect customers by calling them “fucking idiots”, and Unity never making a profit under his leadership. The interim CEO James M Whitehurst is new to Unity, and doesn’t have the dastardly reputation Riccitiello has built over the years, so that’s another flag waving “It was all John’s fault! New blood here! All will be magically well!”. While Whitehurst is new to Unity, he is advisor to a private equity group that owns a nice chunk of Unity – I think I can read between those lines as to who wanted Riccitiello gone and why, and had the pull to make it happen.
Even without political machinations and assuming the best intention behind the change, changing CEO is just a tiny step towards fixing the lost of trust (and overall other problems that the company have and had for years).
In another bit of news, Unity’s Stock has lost nearly a third of its value since this initially blew up and getting lower. I can imagine this leading to Autodesk eyeing another opportunity to purchase market leadership in game creation after their purchase of Stingray went bust (since they already had a partnership with Unity to tighten I/O integration with Maya and Max).
Finally, the new thread on the Unity forums that was supposed to resolve everything now has more than 7000 posts, meaning that two of the longest threads in the history of that community is about the PR disaster.
Yes, They dont care, its only 5% of net revenue with 260 millions $. But they are ones that could afford to buy Unity. They had gross profit of almost 4 billion $ in 2022.
It doesn’t matter if they can afford or not. Game it not their core business, and they have no interest. They have reasons to care about ShotGrid and Max among M&E because both also serves their core industry. But, that’s about it.
Also, their revenue is 4 billion not gross profit.
Total revenue was $4.39 billion, an increase of 16 percent as reported, and 14 percent on a constant currency basis. Recurring revenue represents 96 percent of total.
Another baby step in backpedaling, Unity is now saying that the new terms will not apply for developers who do not upgrade to any 2024 release. They still really want that install fee though, even if they have to limit it to the biggest studios at first to avoid too much backlash. Unity updates user terms to reflect Runtime Fee changes (gamedeveloper.com)
Meanwhile in their community, the staff appear to be confident enough that they resolved the whole issue that they are now locking all relevant threads and (to the best I can tell) banning all future discussion on these specific changes (so as to whitewash the forum and give the impression this was a non-issue).
