this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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[–] [email protected] 217 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Basically don't update existing games & stop using Unity completely & you're good.

[–] [email protected] 110 points 1 year ago (4 children)

No, Unity is still saying they want a cut of old games if they're ever newly installed.

[–] [email protected] 191 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

And this clause will give unity some fun lawsuits for those old versions

[–] [email protected] 82 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm really hoping some of the bigger Unity devs, like the people that made Rust or Among Us sue, as most of us don't have enough money to even stand a chance in court against Unity's lawyers...especially once they have all that nice runtime money to spend. 😒

[–] [email protected] 54 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Thinking small there, there are several Unity games published by big dick AAA corps.

Like Hearthstone, most of Kings catalog, the Doom ports were wrapped in Unity. Plus there's a lot of Unity games on Gamepass and that's Xbox 's bread and butter right now so Microsoft could just slap the shit out of em or just buy em out entirely (might be smart just for the King purchase itself).

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (2 children)

My guess is that AAA developers will just negotiate individual contracts that are more favorable for the developers. They're not going to sue when they can just work out a special deal.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Well yesterday, Unity decided they were gonna get Sony and Nintendo and Microsoft to pay the fees for smaller studios (lmao wat).

I don’t think Unity understands exactly how many top-tier lawyers those companies are going to bring to the table in the interest of legally curbstomping then.

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[–] [email protected] 170 points 1 year ago (4 children)

"y'know, maybe Reddit and Twitter are on to something"
-Unity CEO, probably

[–] [email protected] 64 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maybe a tiktok challenge for rich people?

[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Company bankruptcy speedrun any% no hacks

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[–] [email protected] 166 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Lmao when you're trying to turn your company into a bloodsucking vampire but you forgot that long ago, you told your lawyer to chain the coffin in case this very thing happened.

[–] [email protected] 92 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Seriously, tech enshittiffication is feeling all too familiar.

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[–] [email protected] 134 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (19 children)

I want to know who hired that fucking CEO and put him up to purposefully tank Unity.

This can't be anything less than a blatant attempt to destroy a company so who would have a vested interest in destroying Unity? It can't just be for money.

[–] [email protected] 108 points 1 year ago (15 children)

Sadly, there often comes a time when a critical mass of the business leaders decide "you know what, I want to cash out and no matter how disastrous this will be long term, I think short term this will milk some revenue out of some captive audience".

In the IT industry, that time is usually when Broadcom buys you.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (14 children)

You've hurt me right in the vSphere.

What a lot of people at these companies don't understand is that other options existing means people will find a way to continue without you... The more that happens, the larger the community... the faster you fail.

When Broadcom announced buying VMWare, literally all the IT subreddits in unison looked for other alternatives. We're on Proxmox now, it's been a better product than VMWare in literally every way.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago

It's also called the trust thermocline. Once a certain level of exploitation is reached, customers leaving suddenly goes very quickly and usually unrecoverable. The straw that breaks the camel's back.

Or in the case of unity, you smash the poor camel with a baseball bat and are very surprised it tries to bite you.

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[–] [email protected] 99 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

this means that if Unity sends you a bill, you don't have to pay it, and if they take you to court, you prove that you're acting within the terms of the license you agreed to, which keeps your lawyer fees to a manageable level because you already have all the documents you need: the contract and your source code.

I mean right? IANAL.

[–] JackbyDev 38 points 1 year ago (6 children)

If it affects your rights then yes. It's not just that they're sending a bill. For example, if it is illegal to change a TOS to suddenly charge for something that wasn't in your jurisdiction then it's probably affecting "your rights".

Even then, it only says the current calendar year. They're making the pricing change on January 1st, right? If so then you're probably out of luck.

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[–] [email protected] 98 points 1 year ago (67 children)

So basically unity wants money even for games made on their engine before this shitty update. All older versions of games with older versions of unity are eligible to be monetized. Forget ethical, how is that even legal?

Unity, I hope you die. Sorry to all the Devs who put their soul into developing it.

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[–] [email protected] 82 points 1 year ago (8 children)

What is it with tech companies being too shitty lately?

[–] [email protected] 66 points 1 year ago

The Venture Capital Well is running dry, tech companies are turtling up their data so other tech companies dont use AI to scrape all their content... its the 12th hour of the tech bubble and they're all scrambling to become real companies that make, you know, money. Problem is they dont know how, and customers dont want to pay them for the garbage they used to tolerate when it was free.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The lack of "easy money". A lot of companies have had accelerated growth due to an influx of investments which were mostly interest-free (or very low interest) loans . You didn't have to have a good product - just overinflate your value till your IPO, then the value will determine stock price, everyone gets rich.

Now that interest rates are higher, investors want a lot more bang for their buck. Couple this with companies that no longer know how to make good products, now they're just squeezing shit dry and scheming and scamming their customers to fulfill their one and only legal obligation: make more money for the shareholders.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Capitalism. While the average person is frustrated over their grocery bills being 2x, the corporate ghouls are trying to milk as much money as they can. Not to mention I believe they pulled out their shares before the decision was made so it seems like they were trying to just cash out before shit hit the fan.

Everything is being run on borrowed money, even major studios like Marvel or Blizzard take injections and answer to share holders / venture capital, instead of just making a better product.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Greed and societal acceptance of greed.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I know Unity claim they can apply their new pricing to old versions anyway, but setting that aside, how practical is it to simply stay on Unity 2022 LTSB or earlier?

I'm not a software developer, I'm a CAD modeller. My company pays Autodesk a substantial amount of money every year for licence tokens which grants us access to new releases, but using the latest is pretty much unheard of.

For AutoCAD, 2022 is the default (2024 is current) although they don't seem to have added much of interest since v2019. For the likes of Civil 3D and Revit there are useful updates in newer versions, but the version used is locked in at the start of a project, and upgrading mid scheme is only done in exceptional circumstances.

If Autodesk came out with some kind of scheme in their 2025 tos that said "if you model a bridge in Revit, we will charge 5 cents for every car that crosses or passes under it" then we could easily stick on 2024 for a decade, more than enough time to skill up on the alternatives.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago

You can't do that in unity, because each version has somehow a major bug ruining your life or your project.

They usually only fix them after they introduce another bug that breaks another part of your project, so it's a neverending race.

You don't wan't to reimplement everything yourself and they are always "working on it" so you trust them

[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago (13 children)

If those were the terms you signed, those are the terms that matter.

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can someone help me understand? Maybe my understanding of contracts is too simple but in this example:

I've developed and published a unity game. The game is complete and will receive no future updates from me, but will remain on sale for the foreseeable future.

My understanding of the current situation is that unity is somehow claiming these new terms will apply to my game. But I don't see how that's feasible. Shouldn't my relationship with unity be at an end as the product was completed? Would I have to de-list my completed game to avoid charges? How is that legal?

[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

The game is complete and will receive no future updates from me, but will remain on sale for the foreseeable future.

That's the sticking point. A game could be complete, and receiving no material updates, but still need to be "updated". Sometimes the app stores require a re-compile and you will be bound by the new terms.

In the worst cases, a highly played but low earning game (like Flappy Bird) requires a recompile to update the minimum API level it supports in the Google play store. There are no gameplay changes what-so-ever. If you don't re-compile and update it, Google will de-list the game. But you also can't submit the update unless you accept the new terms.

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[–] Decompose 40 points 1 year ago

If this is true, they're really screwed. No one is gonna use the new versions.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Well good luck to Unity in fighting massive games like FGO or Genshin.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago

Internet archive is awesome

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm so scared for the Silksong developers right now.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (13 children)

Fuckin hell, one of my favourite game was about to ditch flash (yea I know lol) for Unity and then that. They invested tons of money, idk what will happen

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[–] Ryan 26 points 1 year ago

Not a game dev but I've had interest in using Unity for machine learning. I'm now trying out Godot since it does have quite a few ML libraries and it seems to be maintained better than Unity's ml-agents.

Unity-ml-agents is quite a hassle to deal with but a few months ago I wasn't able to find any altrrnatives. At least one good thing that came out of this is that I learned that there is an alternative to using Unity now.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (14 children)

I'm pretty sure there are open source alternatives to this?

Anybody care to shine some light on which projects would be comparable, and how they stack up against unity?

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Godot, it's the most mature of the bunch. It's a little different than Unity, but it's definitely very user friendly, really powerful and has an active community.

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