Can Steam buy Unity and end this nightmare?
I know Valve has a good reputation but I really don’t want another company owning both a major storefront and a major game engine. It’s not great to have Epic in that situation, but at least they provide competition to Steam.
If Unity fails hopefully that means another game engine company can grow and take their place and keep market competition strong.
Valve already owns Source 2 which I assume is better than unity
Source 2 is ancient and doesn’t even come close to modern Unity. Unity added a lot of modern stuff in the last few years (obviously) like physically-based rendering, which make a world of a difference in games.
How do you know, source 2 isn’t publicly available yet if I’m not mistaken.
You’re never going to see Source 2, you will see S&box though which is based on Source 2
I’m pretty sure valve has stated source 2 will be publicly available in the future just like source 1 is. They haven’t ever really betrayed or misled me in the 10+ years I’ve been on steam so I’m going to believe Valve.
Valve’s really slow to announce anything and given that there’s only I dunno, three games right now using Source 2, they’ve probably forgotten about it. Furthermore, looking at how S&box is shaping up, they could always just buy Facepunch and make it the ‘licensable’ option because it looks more feature complete. I wouldn’t be surprised if S&box shakes out to be the Source 2 you can use at home. Source 2’s featureset is more or less dictated by what Valve wants to build, which makes it a poor choice unless you wanna make a VR FPS game or a Moba.
Well, to be fair the Epic Games Store is not a major storefront.
The only way I see Unity being saved is by developers buying it out, only to render it Open-Source. And for the purpose of an open-source 3D game engine, you’ve got Godot.
It’s actually neither of those, the biggest impact is free-to-play games. Hearthstone, Legends of Runeterra, virtually every Unity mobile game in the market… Having to pay per install has huge potential for abuse and can cost a fortune for games with millions of downloads.
JFC, I just learned that they are retroactively applying this new rule. This means that games that are out already or have been on sale for multiple years will have to pay the runtime fee too. Insane. They can bankrupt a studio before they even release their next game.
I still can’t believe that retroactive fees like that are legal.
Because they’re not charging for previous installs, not new ones, and they operate technically on a free “subscription” model it’s going to be hard to challenge legally
Welcome to capitalism! Ain’t it grand!
They aren’t and likely won’t hold up in court.
Gotta pay the lawyers to go to court though.
Hope enough teams can band together and file jointly, combined with decent fundraising and fair lawyers.
Fuck these Unity execs and their ilk. I guess they need more motivation to run a business properly, and not be rampaging sociopaths and enshittification experts. Perhaps some lawyers and lawmakers can offer them some humiliation and fear of personally feeling the consequences of their actions.
I don’t think this is true? Their site https://unity.com/pricing-updates says “The fee applies to new installs beginning January 1, 2024”
New installs not new releases. So if you put out a game a few years back and suddenly a bunch of people start installing it on their new PCs, you’d get hit with this fee… assuming it is legally enforceable.
Hell, even if it isn’t strictly legally enforceable, if you still need to deal with Unity in some way in future you could be forced into dealing with this fee in order to get Unity’s cooperation.
Oh yeah good point. The word “retroactively” just gave me the idea that it would apply to old installs, because this whole thing is about installs.
Still, that is a major dick move.
I don’t think they can enforce that, right? I assume that would be a change of the contract, which they can’t just do willy nilly.
Yeah, I think that’s straight up illegal and I would simply refuse to pay.
If they can retroactively change terms, why can’t I, as a bonafide counterparty in that agreement? Maybe something like a 100% discount on runtime fees for days that end with ‘y’.
Otherwise I could simply “retroactively apply” a 100% discount on my lease or new car purchase.
The correct answer and what all studios/devs should do: tell them to retroactively pound sand and ditch Unity for all future projects.
Pricing should protect indie and small businesses. When it destroys those, we need government to step in because we’re on track to create oligarchs in every industry that are too big to fail.
This smells like the Reddit drama. Are we going to see a mass exodus to Godot now?
I imagine it will get a bump. I’d love to see more developers using Godot, more tutorials, more in the asset library. The engine itself is quite good, but it doesn’t have a huge ecosystem built around it the way Unity does.
Plus unlike unity, being closed source, devs can actually contribute to the engine for others to benefit, as well as go in a fix problems they used to have to wait for unity to fix.
FOSS makes so much more sense when the people using the software, are devs themselves.
Not to mention that they eat their own dog food. The Godot application is itself running on Godot engine (which is also super useful for people wanting to add to it or make changes. eg. if you can make a UI for a game in Godot, then you can mod the actual Godot interface quite easily.)
The difference here is that it’s pissing off businesses, not users.
No it is not - those businesses ARE the users. Unless by user you mean consumers
My real point is that one of these userbases has lawyers and are highly risk-averse.
Pedantically though, yes.
Unity games include Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, Pokémon GO, Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail and Marvel Snap.
I doubt The Pokémon Company, MiHoYo and Marvel/Disney will just let Unity shove this decision at them, especially when some of these are have tens of millions of players and many more downloads per player.
MiHoYo’s games are free-to-play on mobile platfroms, right? If they’ll going to get charged 20c per install, they’ll going to get royally fucked because most of free-to-play users aren’t buying anything. IMO that’s a huge incentive to switch ASAP, unless they have special deal with unity and not affected by this new pricing scheme.
I wouldn’t say MiHoYo would be fucked because they are making bank. But they will definitely get a massive bill on top of however much they already paid Depending on whether Unity counts updates as additional downloads, that’s even more money. It might be enough to make them fight it. This whole change in monetization is probably aimed at mobile games in general
Add Hearthstone and Legends of Runeterra to that list as well
Yeah businesses can sue you for pulling out the rug like this.
Users cannot.
What exact grounds would a business sue for?
Retroactive change of terms for already released unchanged products? I don’t know the legal details but it seems pretty strange that they can just say they will charge over something for products that were finished and released under different terms before all this. The devs may not even be opening those projects on Unity anymore.
There’s nothing implicit about “opening the project in unity” that needs to be a trigger for terms to change.
If you make and distribute a game made in unity, then you are distributing some unity IP. You would need the license holder to grant you permission to do that. The terms you agree to with unity are what grant you the right to distribute this.
So this has very little to do with “have you opened the editor lately”, and is more similar to when e.g. Dead By Daylight has to stop selling a dlc character because they don’t renew an agreement with the rights holders.
That’s because digital media licensing is a whole circus. We aren’t talking of using someone else’s likeness or characters. What if Microsoft Office decides that they will charge retroactively about every file previously created with those tools regardless of what compensation they may already have agreed to and received? Does that seem even remotely reasonable in the least?
Do publishing houses need to pay leases to printer manufacturers per page printed on top of their own material costs? Do they need to pay every time a new reader opens the book the first time?
It’s not reasonable to just go “the company said so, therefore this is how it has to work”, that’s just being a chump.
Pokemon is made on the unity engine, so one of the scariest legal teams in the world. Nintendo doesn’t like it when people take a little whipped cream off of the mcflurry, and this threatens to take the whole McFlurry.
Oh that’s gonna be a treat to watch, assholes punching each other
Unity did something like this before with built in advert data or such, and some left. Now is drawing a new line, perhaps too far for many more.
My hope is that this backlash extends to all proprietary software eventually. Discord banned 3rd party apps before Reddit thought it was cool to overcharge for the privilage.
The thing is that something like this and further similar actions were clearly in the future back when companies decided they didn’t care about the last scandal enough to leave. There will be a few companies this pisses off enough to leave but fewer than people might be hoping for.
I don’t know the figures but it appears the trend is slow. Who is to say all the people trying out Godot will continue on it and not go back to using Unity (assuming they don’t go through with this).
Ive been making my game in Godot for a few months now. Its a really good engine after the 4.0 update.
I’m looking forward to try it out next time I get the energy to do game development for fun.
I’d heard Godot 4.0 made massive improvments to multiplayer systems.
We barely had a mass exodus from Reddit. It was quite modest lol
That being said, I popped my head in on reddit last week to find something, and it definitely seems noticeably worse at a glance. Or maybe I’ve just had enough distance from it now that I see the warts more plainly.
No we did have a mass Exodus from reddit, it’s just people stopped using the platform altogether instead of coming here.
Do you have any numbers? The only stats I saw were in the early throes of the black out. I haven’t seen anything lately showing a significant drop in DAU’s.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, I just haven’t seen anything indicating that
deleted by creator
If W4 doesn’t enshitiffy it to push people to their proprietary fork (which is unfortunately required because Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft don’t allow making their APIs public).
Do W4 have a publically available fork they want people to switch to? I was under the impression they were just offering third party porting to consoles. I don’t really understand how they would be able to even offer a proprietary version with support to directly build console versions.
There is no way they can legally enforce retroactively charging. How the fuck is that even possible or legal?
Depends what is in the contract. If the contract says devs on are the hook for any future fees they deem necessary, then the devs are on the hook. Unless they want to pay a lawyer big bucks to take on the company behind Unity with their billions of dollars of revenue and the lawyers that buys. How many indie devs do you think can afford to do that?
Not just indie devs bro
Pokemon is made in unity
Hearthstone too
I’ve been wondering about this too.
I’m waiting for a Legal Eagle breakdown or something. I’ve been thinking the exact same thing. Sneakily removing stuff from their TOS in GitHub a while back is dodgy.
I read somewhere that they removed their TOS entirely from GitHub but I would love a breakdown of this too. I’m not familiar with how the Unity agreement works.
Unity is not a product, it’s an ongoing subscription. You can distribute Unity as part of your game as long as you have a subscription.They changed the terms of the subscription for next year. If you don’t have a subscription then you cannot redistribute Unity. So your choice is to either accept the new terms, or pull your game from the stores.
Why the ever loving fuck would any company willingly use a library or framework in their product that uses a subscription model instead of a licensing model? That’s absolutely mind blowing. Having critical tools with subscriptions is bad enough, but at least those aren’t shipped to customers.
If it’s really true that Unity uses a perpetual subscription rather than a license I’m utterly flabbergasted that it ever got as popular as it was.
Licencing and subscriptions are generally the same thing.
When you get a subscription, you’re paying a regular payment to have a licence to use the product. Stop paying? Licence revoked.
In a normal setup, you pay once for a licence.
The terms of the licence dictate how you can use the software, and what happens when you break those rules.
Companies love subscription pricing and customers keep it up. Lots of software went this route and proved people still want the product. It shouldn’t be a surprise
Sure, for services or stuff used internally, but not for things that they’re selling to their own customers. Unless a company is also using a subscription model for their software it makes absolutely no sense to use a subscription library in your product, you’re putting yourself on the hook for recurring expenses on something you’re only receiving income on once. Any way you slice it that’s an absolutely braindead decision, and anyone that makes it should be terminated immediately for gross negligence.
There were no recurring expenses per-install under the old terms. The only expense was your own, per-developer expense. Als long as you had developer seats you could ship infinite units at no cost. Unity has often said that they were never going to change that. But that was just a pinky promise and wasn’t actually in their terms.
Have you used Unity? If you haven’t. You’d understand why if you did. Its incredibly easy to use with a vast public storefront people can sell things on. Extremely extensible. Before this bullshit anyway
We got used to letting one company control everything
I wasn’t aware either, but the devs who use this in their product should have known this could happen. Now the question is: did they just not consider the possibility, or is it a known risk because all the engines require a license? In that case, Unity might just very well be the first one to do this, and others will follow suit in the coming years.
Unreal licensing is explicitly tied to the version you use. So if you use Unreal 5.3, you are bound to the license attached to the code for Unreal 5.3.
If that license changes in Unreal 5.4 and you disagree with the new license, you don’t need to follow the terms as long as you never move from Unreal 5.3.
Yeah, that sounds much more sane to me. With the Jetbrains IDE (my tools off the trade), you pay an annual subscription and when you stop paying you still get to use the last version you paid for. Apples to oranges, I know, but I sure did check that up front before I bought in to that ecosystem.
It’s normal for a engine to have licensing requirements, but those are laid out up front and will typically be defined based on income. So like a pretty common thing would be something approximately like free for the first $10K earned, then 10% for up to $100K, and then 30% for everything past $100K. Importantly though, that’s NOT a subscription, it’s the terms of the license you agree to in order to use the software, you aren’t paying a fee based on time, but rather based on money earned. You can choose to back out of the license at any time, you just need to stop selling the software, and as long as you keep paying the engine developer their cut you can keep on selling copies. Further the terms of the license are what they are when you download the library/framework, and they can’t be retroactively changed. If tomorrow they decide to start charging you based on total downloads, you can choose to keep distributing the previous version under the previous license terms based on profits.
Unity on the other hand, has done two things. First they require an ongoing subscription, so if you stop paying for your subscription, technically you’re no long allowed to sell your game. Secondly, and much more controversially, they’re defining the license based on installs rather than based on earnings, which is tying your debt to actions of your customers rather than your own, which is a very precarious position to be in.
This whole thing reminds me of the D&D shenanigans a few months back where Hasbro tried to retroactively re-define the terms of their “open source” license, and the TTRPG community collectively told Hasbro where they could stick their new license. There are a LOT of parallels here.
Thanks, very comprehensive. So unity developers could have expected this to happen sooner or later. Not the retroactively charging for installs, of course, but the continuous subscription should have been a huge red flag.
Because it is the best choice financially in the short to medium term and it’s pretty much impossible for most businesses to make decisions based on any other factor. Which is why most companies will end up just swallowing this change.
wait so if unity goes bankrupt everyone is fucked?
Pretty much, yes
They’d sell off the IP, and somebody else would continue licensing out the engine. Development might be dead, but that doesn’t matter for already released games anyways.
If there’d be truly no successor, people could just continue using their existing Unity engine binary, since there’d be nobody to stop them.
Another reason why everything is subscription based these days, they can change the terms at will
Per their lawyers it’s in the TOS. Everyone just hits “I agree” when they get that EULA but there’s always a “we reserve the right to fuck you over” buried in the fine print.
I don’t think I’ve ever read one where the clause “we can change any if this at any point in the future and you automatically accept it” wasn’t there. All the fucking time it’s there. Everyone is always agreeing to this shit all the time. That’s why many services can just change their prices and whatever how they want and only send an email “next month the price is X”.
Everything is rotten.
They aren’t retroactively charging. They’re charging a new fee going forward.
They are retroactively applying the new pricing model to games that have been out for years. That’s what I meant. So they’re not back-billing for previous downloads, but already-released games don’t get grandfathered in.
I’m always open to corrections though.
Games that have been out for years arent going to hit the minimum 12 month downloads/revenue figures unless they are still very popular, no?
I dont agree with this downloads based fee to be clear.
Yeah, I’m not 100% sure. There are instances too though where someone gets a new PC and installs their old games. I think it would still count in those cases, which is just silly to me. It all feels like a massive cash grab, or they’re trying to fudge the stock value.
So there’s a little nuance here. They aren’t going to charge you for the downloads that already happened, it’s on all downloads moving forward, even if the game has already been released. I still think it’s ridiculous, but it is not the same as suddenly hitting you with a bill for all the downloads the game already had. That would not hold up in any court. But the latter case…we’ll see. Depends on the specifics of the initial agreement I suppose. Totally possible they are within their rights even if it’s scummy.
Correct me if I’m wrong, that’s my understanding. I don’t think if you had a million downloads last year, for instance, you’ll be charged for those.
No, you won’t be charged retroactively for previous downloads. But the change does retroactively affect games previously released on Unity.
So last year you made decisions on your game’s price and revenue model that are no longer true. if you made your small game free to play with microtransactions and its had more than 200,000 installs you’re probably shitting yourself. Unity will be charging $0.20 per install even if it’s to the same device multiple times. A million installs of your game is you having to write a check to Unity for $160,000 for installations alone.
So your microtransactions game now must average a spend of at least $0.20 per install, plus per seat licensing of Unity, plus your overhead for it to even begin to make a profit.
And Unity has said that multiple installations on the same device will all be charged. So it’s inevitable that script kiddies with bad attitudes are going to install a game thousands of times. Unity has said you can appeal this type of behavior, but that puts the onus of detecting and reporting this stuff on the devs, further increasing their workload and risk.
deleted by creator
Yes, the fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. We look at a game’s lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.
I read that as it’s billing moving forward but they’ve been very opaque thus far so I’m willing to entertain there’s a contradiction elsewhere lol
As I understand it, they’re billing moving forward but counting past installs for the purpose of figuring out if you have to pay.
yeah i deleted my post because they keep changing their minds.
its retroactive (for now) in the sense that they started counting from before, just only billing for new ones.
You mean that Silksong could be delayed? pikachu face
It’s going to be the new Duke Nukem Forever…
Except it might be good :p
I understand the controversy, especially in light of the recent Reddit bullshit. But I don’t think I understand the tech.
For the sake of it, let’s focus only on games that are paid for, installed on a system (or downloaded using Game Pass), and do not involve a multiplayer element. (Hollow Knight, Cuphead, etc)
Is there some ongoing resource use (on Unity’s end) when people download or play these games? Like, when I play Hollow Knight, my system isn’t connecting to Unity to use their servers to run the game on my home system, is it? When I download a game to my system, an I downloading the engine separately from the software, thereby using Unity’s servers?
As abhorrent as the Reddit API change was, at least they were charging for the ongoing consumption of some digital resource (Reddit data). Unless I’m misunderstanding something, this just seems more like trying to collect a residual after the fact.
Is there some ongoing resource use (on Unity’s end)
Nope. The engine is part of the game once compiled. So all hosting and bandwidth cost goes to steam/gog/whoever is selling the game.
They are just trying to get more of that sweet viral game money.
How do they track installs then?
They can’t really… unity itself doesn’t have an installer so not sure how they could track ‘installs’ reliably, the installer is added by the developer. If they add tracking to the library that (a) creates issues for people using app stores as now you have to declare you’re tracking people, and that can be grounds for rejection (you need a watertight privacy policy at the very least, and ‘we send it to a company in the US’ isn’t going to fly), and (b) not all apps are installed over the internet, or given internet access. 3d visualisation is more than games.
I’d assume they’d amend the contract to require that a tracker be added to the binaries of the game. Or something.
Unity hasn’t been very profitable, for most of its users it’s completely free. I don’t blame them for needing money to improve the engine, but not like this
This is basically like if John Deere started following everyone around so they could charge a farmer 1 cent every time you bite into a vegetable you bought at Walmart.
Unity Revenue reporting has always been “self-reported” by users. If they think you’re lying and aren’t on the right license they send the complkance team to make sure you’re giving enough. Unity has no way of knowing installs because as you said it doesn’t connect to Unity.
You don’t download anything separately, the runtime is included with the game.
The runtime could be updated with a phone home feature to track the install
No because this goes against GDPR. They aren’t allowed to have anything identifying users “phoning home” without explicit consent/logging into a launcher.
If it included identifiable information then yeah it would be a breach. This is just using a mac address most likely that will also if they do it right will be hashed client side so even if a bad actor could do something with that info they won’t actually get it anything from it anyway.
Then we just fall back to the issue of them not being able to identify installs, reinstalls, bad actors spoofing the source etc…
If they could track installs properly they would have solved piracy already
Well they’ve mainly said (recently) that they’ll count new device installs, but not reinstallations on the same device. Which i believe. It’s the whole, exemptions of charity sales and pirate copies is where they’re spouting bullshit, or is PR/ higher ups making quick premises to placate without the engineers saying that that’s possible, but now they’ve got to find a way. Which I don’t think they will without heavily bloating the runtime into super shitty DRM realms
without explicit consent
Couldn’t they just add another ToS checkbox to click when installing the game?
TOS is given through the publisher who would be bound by GDPR by all sorts of regulations about storing that stuff.
No, there are no costs for Unity in this situation. The way they’ll need to track installs is with the unity runtime, which gets packaged with games made using Unity.
This is what economists call “rent-seeking”, where companies seek to extract more profit by charging subscriptions, rather than introducing desirable products. Adobe, AutoCAD, Microsoft Office, and the Reddit API are all high profile examples of rent-seeking.
I don’t want Silksong developed on Unity. Scrap it, start fresh. I’ll wait.
Scrap it. Start fresh.
The number of games that should do this is too damn high
The number of games that can do this is too damn low
The number of gamed that want to do this is pretty much nil
Pain, suffering and debugging
This needs to turn into a class action suit that results in John Tortellini having his oxygen rights revoked. I can’t imagine shareholders will be happy finding out that John Riceroni has been selling off Unity’s stock, and I’m pretty sure what Unity’s trying to do here is straight-up illegal in the US. Fuck John Rigatoni. God, I was so happy thinking he’d died and gone to hell after EA, but nope, still alive and well.
With all your puns, I still don’t what John Cappelletti’s real name is.
I think it’s, never working in this industry again.
Hahaaa nah, ToS:
The Parties agree that any arbitration will be conducted in their individual capacities only and not as a class action or other representative action, and the Parties expressly waive their right to file a class action or seek relief on a class basis.
Forced arbitration is one of the most villainous legal practices still somehow allowed in the US.
Arbitration is often a good thing, by avoiding clogging up courts and arbitrators can sometimes be better than whatever judge you’d get (since both parties have to agree to the arbitrator). It’s still legally binding and arbitrators have made lots of great rulings.
But not as a replacement for class action. The whole point of class actions is to make it much more viable for many people to be represented because only one affected person has to deal with managing an expensive lawsuit and there’s just one case instead of hundreds of thousands of arbitration cases (which still cost a ton of money for lawyers). So IMO arbitration is great, but shouldn’t be allowed to replace class actions specifically.
Can they go retroactively? Aren’t there contracts?
Apparently they snuck a clause into an update to the ToS at some point, after years of saying they’d never do such a thing. So people agreed to a loophole without realizing. The legality of such a thing is highly questionable, hence the rumblings of potential lawsuits are already brewing.
If you want to change the terms of contract then you have to contact every affected individual or company and make it explicitly clear what terms of contract are being changed and then get explicit approval that these changes can go ahead. Obviously you do otherwise we live in a world of anarchy and business couldn’t possibly happen.
When companies want to renegotiate tiny intricate details of contracts it often takes months because of these requirements, even when both parties are already in verbal agreement.
They can’t just announce they are changing the contract and then provide less than 2 months worth of warning and say you don’t get a choice this is the new contract now and forever and also in the past. They have to get explicit approval of this change, and obviously no one’s going to give them it.
You click a check box with a really long user agreement that does in fact allow them to make these changes.
Damn, it works with anyone. I should find a way to make one too.
By reading this comment you agree to send me one bitcoin.
God dammit loch Ness monst- oh, wait, you’re not asking for tree fiddy
1.5 years of learning unity gone down the shitter. here I come, godot
even if they backtrack, trust is ruined at this point. this only makes sense if you’re trying to destroy the company intentionally and short your stock on the way out. what the fuck
1.5 years of learning unity gone down the shitter.
And this is the real damage to their business here. They clearly lost sight of their business model: Create an army of developers who know their product very well, so that it’s on a short list of products studios are all but forced to consider.
A wave of developers who know soemthing other than Unity or Unreal has the potential to turn the games development ecosystem totally on its head. They didn’t shoot themselves on the foot, they possibly shot themselves in the femoral artery.
They didn’t shoot themselves on the foot, they possibly shot themselves in the femoral artery.
I myself have been describing it as them shooting themselves in the chest, and are now bleeding out on the floor asking how it happened.
6 years of professional experience for me, only engine I’ve used.
Yes, but no. My company is working in a proprietary engine, so there is almost no one we can hire with that engine experience, but we still want people who became familiar and strong with other engines because they can do it again with ours.
Don’t be too discouraged by this, but start learning your next engine.
The CEO did sell a bunch of shares before this was announced, I hear.
That’s clickbait journalism.
He sold 2000 shares for $40/share, which he then immediately bought back for $1.42/share.
https://finance.yahoo.com/screener/insider/RICCITIELLO JOHN S
deleted by creator
Which means he sold at the top, then bought more at the bottom so he can ride the train back up to do the same thing again.
This isn’t a good thing.
It was probably part of his contract. It wasn’t $40 when he sold it. As probably allowed by his contract, he sold it back to the company and bought it back for pennies. It’s just compensation not some conspiracy on his individual part.
When you sell your time and labour for a living, you tend to not have any idea about how people who own property for a living get paid. And the ownership class does a pretty good job at misinforming the working class about those details, since it benefits them to be seen as just doing the same things at a different scale. Insights into the actual process of their compensation will look like some sort of conspiratorial scheme because… Well, because it is. It’s just not the one people will tend to tie it to. And it’s not an illegal one.
They want us to believe they’re playing baseball in the major leagues while we’re on the company softball team, instead of highlighting that they’re actually playing poker with a stacked deck against a casino they own.
What you said doesn’t make any sense. Either it wasn’t $40 a share when he sold it like you said in this comment or it was $40 a share like you said in the previous comment.
It makes sense if the company had agreed to buy the shares off of him at market rates and then sell him stock back at a significant discount. Doing this would allow him to claim the money gained as capital gains rather than employment income, and it wouldn’t count as insider trading if it was an arrangement made and timelines settled upon before the bullshit was planned.
It could be something like having his contract say that the company will buy back X shares when the share price hits $Y in value, for instance.
I guarantee you his contract looks like something like this, “If you meet X performance metric, the company will buy N amount of shares (maximum 2000) back at the maximum/average stock price within Y days and sell you back the amount of shares sold (maximum 2000) for Z dollars.”
Pretty much the dream insider trading plan. But $80k doesn’t deem like much for a CEO
It’s definitely not. It’s probably just a free $80k his contract allowed him to get.
If they kill Cult of the Lamb over this. There will no longer be any reason to live.
The devs followed up indicating that the tweet about delisting the game on Jan 1st was a joke, but it’s still a shitty situation for developers
Cult of the Lamb did come out and say they weren’t serious about delisting.
deleted by creator
Cult of the Lamb has always been shitposty with their marketing. It would be a little silly to take them seriously immediately and buy on the spot.
deleted by creator
Nah dude, don’t be so eager to jump on people’s throats like this. They were being sarcastic about a difficult situation that they and many other indie developers might have to deal with, that in January 1st they might be sent a massive bill over a deal that they never agreed with.
If your conclusion here is Cult of the Lamb/Massive Monster/Devolver is being greedy rather than Unity, you are missing the point. Unity is the one actually making it so that the most sensible decision for many smaller developers barely making ends meet will be to delist before January 1st.
Sometimes people become so cynical that they go back around at losing perspective by always assuming the worst out of everything and everyone, that’s not great.
This, jumping on massive monster is definitely victim blaming. The real massive monster is unity
deleted by creator
Here we go back around to where I started with. They always been silly with their marketing. They also said they would sacrifice their players and they both have beef and flirted with Angry Birds. Nobody would take that seriously.
A quirky indie studio going “welp, better pack up and leave next year” at the Unity situation just seems par for the course. No reason to jump the gun unless they confirm that later.
I’m defending them because I think you are making too much of an issue out of it.
For anyone interested to sign I found this petition against the new fee. https://chng.it/kYpqWBBHbB
Hoping with all the backlash Unity is forced to role it back. Thank you to everyone posting alternatives, I will be checking these out :)
Honestly I don’t see most of the indie companies keep working with Unity unless they have no choice. Even if they roll it back, who’s to say that they won’t do that again next year?
The fact that they count you retroactively for eligibility means they want to try and rake as much money as possible.
This is a far more nuanced situation, but even in what you’re describing the service is then ceased, you don’t get to continue using the service on the previous terms.
I’ve seen a claim that the old terms of service explicitly stated that you could do so so long as you didn’t update to the newer version. Which is probably fine for most developers who are already deep into a Unity project. (Though as Unity has now taken down their GitHub page with those terms on it, I haven’t yet seen anyone link to an easy to verify and read copy for people to see if that’s true or not.
There was some sort of similar issue a year or two ago and it wasn’t enough to drive people away. I suspect the long-term picture is that any given business either slowly grows to the scale that Unreal Engine is a better fit anyway and abandon Unity or very very very slowly we see Indies move to Godot. Though it’ll be more that new indies will form studios around breakthrough hits made in Godot and be Godot studios from the start (and replace older Unity studios as part of the natural turnover of small to medium sized studios) until there is a tipping point where there’s enough Godot developers floating around that it becomes easier for existing Unity studios to switch than to keep putting up with Unity’s shit. That’s a slow process though. 5-10 years imho (if ever.)
Thoughts and prayers
I don’t think an online petition has ever changed anything in the history of the internet.
I encourage people here to check out Stride too, for something open sourced, C# based, and if Godot isn’t your cup of tea for some reason.
That’s excellent to know, thank you.
Doesn’t Godot have C# extentions available?
It does! But this is for people looking for more alternatives. Different people like different things.
Fair enough.
Also, speaking of alternatives, people should check out O3DE. It’s based on Amazon Lumberyard, which itself it based on CryEngine, but it’s FOSS and managed by the Linux Foundation.
Interestingly enough, Epic Games is a premier member, along with many other companies.
Epic games funds a lot of open source game projects, they’ve funded blender and Godot multiple times.
I wonder what their motive is.
The more game developers there are, the more potential talent they have. The more game developers there are, the more games there are to sell.
They also understand that Unreal isn’t super accessible for beginners.
Could also be to prevent a potential antitrust lawsuit, since they have a de facto monopoly on AAA game engines.
Kind of like Google funding Mozilla.
Contributors need to sign the following Contribution License Agreement.
How moral is this license? Im not good with legaleze
Pretty standard really. You don’t want contributions to the codebase come under questionable copyright concerns, or the original creator to revoke the code 4 years later causing huge headaches potentially.
You typically have to sign these types of CLA’s whenever you need to contribute to any serious project. I’ve had to do it for Google and Microsoft recently, and I’ve done it for various other open source projects as well.
Still that shouldn’t concern users/gamedevs as they don’t contribute to the engine code typically. Only if they want to upstream changes back into the engine publicly they would need to sign it ofcourse
Oh thats good.
If Silksong is delayed because of this I’m going to riot!
