Unity issue an apology on Twitter for "confusion and angst" over the runtime fee policy.

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨helloharu@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨games@lemmy.world⁩

https://nitter.net/unity/status/1703547752205218265

We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days. Thank you for your honest and critical feedback.

Direct Twitter link

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Comments

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Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Big “I’m sorry you were offended by the correct thing I said and did” energy

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Deestan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
While we were very reasonable, we understand that you just didn’t get it, which made you sad. We understand it feels bad to be sad. To remedy this, we will try again using different words.

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- danielbln@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Yep. What they should have written:
  
  To make the initial PR release more sincere and straightforward, you could try the following:
  
  “We recognize that our recent runtime fee policy announcement wasn’t well-received. We genuinely apologize for the oversight and any confusion or concern it caused. Your feedback is invaluable to us. We are actively discussing the policy with our teams and the community and will be revising it based on your inputs. Please bear with us as we work through this, and expect an update soon.”
  
  PR is hard, let’s go shopping!
  
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  - Deestan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Yep, that has a better tone. There’s a limit to how good a statement you can make when at the core you really plan to do enshittification one way or another, but they could have thrown in a smidgeon of accepting blame also. E.g. “We were unable to provide clear and unambiguous answers to questions that came up” costs them nothing.
    
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TheSpookiestUser@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Any PR statement that includes the words “we hear you” can be safely ignored

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- hitmyspot@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Also any apology for how it was perceived rather than what was done is worthless.
  
  It’s pretty speak for I’m sorry you are stupid and expendable.
  
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- assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  RuneScape 3 recently made an extremely controversial change, and I think they handled the apology perfectly. When they finally made changes and dropped some heavily disliked things, they opened with “we messed up”. Unity needs to do the same thing here if they want a chance to rebuild
  
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  - Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Jagex is respectful not the company I’d look to for inspiration in terms of correcting past mistakes 🙂 For the uninitiated, they legally gaslit the community when they made their first major controversial change roughly a decade ago by “removing the feature” then “adding” the same feature with a different coat of paint.
    
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SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
This is bullshit. There is no confusion. Their new policy was very clear and easy to understand. If the word confusion applied at all, it would be to how/why Unity is doing such a brain dead move that alien ants their entire user base. This is a weasel word announcement that doesn’t say what it should, namely ‘we fucked up and we’re sorry’.

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- detalferous@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  “we’re sorry for how you reacted”
  
  Appalling
  
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- zepheriths@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  My god, they’re becoming alien ants
  
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  - Beemoe@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    And just like, the movies, we play out our last scene.
    
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  - CountVon@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    The Unity execs thought they were being smooth criminals, instead they came in too rough and got busted.
    
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  - SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Stupid voice typing… fixed :{
    
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- cjsolx@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Brain dead is such an understatement too. They lost everyone’s trust, and I’m not sure there’s anything they can say to regain it. They’re gonna try something like this again at some point, and I don’t think anyone should give them the opportunity. They deserve to go under.
  
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  - SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Trust is hard to build and easy to break and even harder to rebuild.
    
    To truly rebuild trust, they’d need to commit to never doing this again. That would mean 1. a change to the legal TOS that a developer who licenses for a project at a certain pricing level may remain at that price level for that project / that generation of Unity for as long as they wish, 2. a public commitment to never require per-install pricing, and ideally 3. the resignation of whoever came up with this brain dead idea.
    
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- uranibaba@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  doesn’t say what it should, namely ‘we fucked up and we’re sorry’.
  
  I don’t think they fucked up in the way you mean (from their point of view). Their mistake was not getting away with the change, their “apology” sounds to me like they are going to reword their new policy but ultimately still have it do somewhat the same thing.
  
  IMO they should never had done this in the first place and should now say “we are sorry, our mistake, it won’t happen again”.
  
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  - SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Yeah, this 100%.
    
    To truly restore trust, it should be ‘we’re sorry, our mistake, it won’t happen again, our new TOS will guarantee the right to remain at a current license price structure for a given generation of the engine, we hereby promise to never ever require per-install pricing, and the person responsible for this change is no longer with the company’.
    
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style99@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
That was not an apology. That was them calling us stupid.

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- Chainweasel@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  “what, you guys don’t have phones?”
  
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AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Too late, they already communicated their greed to every gamedev out there and no one can ignore the potential of Unity fucking them over again anymore. Overall the whole shitshow was good advertisement for Godot.

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- ech@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  It’s truly the year of mask_off corporate reveals. WotC, Reddit, Unity, Twitter. Probably more I’m forgetting or unaware of. So many big moves to capitalize on long time stability that, quite predictably, result not in amazing increase in profits but the irrevocable tarnishing of public trust that they relied on. It’s kinda wild to watch, honestly.
  
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  - Ferris@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    microsoft making ux worse, google fighting adblock with drm
    
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  - AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    It’s IMO a sign that the current financial bubble is about to burst and it’s going to do so in a very violent way despite greedy bulls still pushing the “it’s different this time, we have AI now” bullshit.
    
    Investors have their money trapped in these companies, and when they see what riskless treasury bills yield, they naturally start losing their minds because their money is instead in companies that fail to make significantly more than that riskless benchmark. So those investors then pressure those companies to do whatever they can to produce a good enough return on investment in a short period of time as they run out of patience.
    
    The end result of CEOs and executives under pressure by investors, and engineers stressing out because they understand the financial situation and that they either have to be yes-men or be laid out, is obviously the enshittification that we witness today.
    
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  - Croquette@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    The conventional wisdow is that in time of economic turmoil, companies should lower their profit margins and weather out the storm.
    
    However, in today’s capitalism, this is not not acceptable. Shareholders demand ever increasing profits and anything short of that is considered a failure. If you don’t keep your margin, you are to be scolded and discarded.
    
    Now, the loans that many of the companies have cost a lot more money than 2 years ago. So the enshittification is used to enable the continued growth to keep the profits growings.
    
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  - FooBarrington@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    That’s how it is once the free money dries up. The profits must rise, no matter the long-term damage this causes - so they try to bleed the existing customer base dry to keep things rising for one or two more quarters. What does it matter to them if all the employees who have worked hard for years will lose their jobs due to their mismanagement?
    
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amio@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
"Angst". Quite a choice of words.

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- CaptObvious@literature.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Isn’t it? Like the entire industry is composed of teenagers without enough life experience to see the big picture.
  
  But then, did anyone expect Unity not to be tone deaf?
  
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  - amio@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    That was my first impression. I suppose it could be an honest mistake (especially since they apparently fired all the PR people a while back, too, heh) but it doesn't look great.
    
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- Elderos@lemmings.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Must be AI-written.
  
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lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
So they apologize for being caught, not for wrecking stuff, as usual.

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- Trihilis@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  It’s worse. They’re not even apologizing for their actions but the “confusion and angst”.
  
  It’s kind of like saying “we’re sorry you feel that way” and are somehow misunderstanding what they’re trying to do. They might as well have said, sorry dumbasses but it’s going to happen regardless. Perhaps in some watered down form, perhaps not this/next year, but it will happen.
  
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  - Shush@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Remember Blizzard when they released Warcraft 3 Reforged? “We’re sorry you didn’t get the experienced you thought you deserved”. Gold mine, that one. It wasn’t phrased like that exactly but that was what they meant.
    
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sirico@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
“confusion” no confusion here chum don’t gaslight us enjoy your new shareprices sure your CEO is loving they successful dump

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pfannkuchen_gesicht@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
As expected. And now they’ll publish their actual policy which will still be pretty bad but less worse.

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Chailles@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It took them a week to make a tweet saying basically nothing?

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- sebinspace@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  You should see how long ECS and the Jobs system has been in development.
  
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ObviouslyNotBanana@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Now everyone is going to trust them.

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JokeDeity@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
They’ve already sealed their fate. Only a fool would start making a new project in Unity going forward.

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Jaysyn@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

they really only have themselves to blame. Part of the task when you are making a major software platform decision as a company is to research your vendor’s financial strategy

This is basically victim blaming & the old Unity license was fine because it allowed you to create console ports. Godot still isn't a valid solution for consoles.

Attachment: media.kbin.social ↗
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mycroft@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It’s almost like the CEO of the company (John Riccitiello) supporting the most Indie game developers holds 53 million dollars in EA shares or something…

Even, and most likely especially, if Unity does poorly does EA benefit… I bet ya Riccitiella knows all the features of Frostbite, but couldn’t tell you if you can do native reliable UDP networking in Unity…

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AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
"We thought you were locked in and realised you may not be. We might have to rethink our evil master plans "

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arc@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Unless the CEO walks and takes his yes-men with him, I don’t see Unity recovering from this self-inflicted shitshow in the near term. I bet it has motivated a lot of devs to look at the viability of using Godot instead and being free of future shakedowns.

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- Uranium3006@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  If you switch to Godot and implement a feature you needed but it didn't have, please do us a favor and take that part of the code and put it out there under the MIT license (unless I'm misremembering what license they use) it will help the next person switch easier
  
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buru5@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
The apology seems insincere, as they always do; however, a company bending to consumer feedback in this manner is a good thing (if they actually make meaningful changes).

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LiveLM@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
*wE hAvE hEArD yOu, wE aRe lIsTEnInG"
Like fuck you are damn vultures

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Jaysyn@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Fuck off & die, Unity.

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mojo@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
There was no confusion and this is empty PR until they publicly post the policy changes.

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Zellith@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
John Riccitiello is trying to get another Worst Company In America award for his mantlepiece.

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Cyberflunk@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Burn your company, delete your repos, never return

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Scotty_Trees@lemmy.world [bot] ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Appreciate the nitter link, thank you! A few (many?) of us no longer user Twitter actively or even have an account there, it’s essentially de-listed site to avoid for me, but at least with Nitter you can still see some of the content when needed to.

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- helloharu@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  No problem. I still have my account there but if I can avoid it then I will, so always prefer Nitter too. I also respect that there is content that others want to see without giving Twitter data and/or a click.
  
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MaxPow3r11@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Fuck off.

God damn.

Fuck these assholes “running” these shit companies.

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