Game Development

"I don’t think there’s any version of this that would have gone down a whole lot differently than what happened," Riccitiello reportedly said. "I think we could have done a lot of things a lot better."

Lmao what a dipshit. Redirecting blame, and then simultaneously casting last week as inevitable and unavoidable, but simultaneously something that could have been done better.

Doublespeak being used so shamelessly in situations like this is pretty infuriating.

The way forward is to dump the exec team. But that won’t happen, because the board makes those decisions, and the exec team are all buddies with the board.

Hopefully every developer who has the means to still drops Unity like a bad habit. They've tipped their hand and shown what they're willing to do, which is 'as much as we can possibly get away with'. It's only a matter of time until they find a new, more abusive way to do this. I think at this point, any developer who chooses to use Unity when other options are equally viable for their project is, to use Unity's CEO's own words, "a fucking idiot".

It's far too late for that.

Unity has already drank the polonium.

The problem with CEOs like Riccitiello is he is so focused on making money that he doesn't understand how to build a business. He is looking for existing processes to monetize instead of finding new ways to generate revenue. He's unimaginative and it's killing any business he runs. The people want to buy a product, not buy into a scheme.

As I posted on Mastodon:

Not enough. Even this sets precedent that #Unity or any other middleware provider can retroactively shake down its past customers for more money. One penny would be too much.

Any change to an agreement like this needs to be contingent on the customer doing something like updating to a new version of the software or renewing their subscription, and the law needs to make this explicit (if it isn't already; IANAL but I'm not a lawyer.)

At least Unity should remove retroactive effect from their new pricing terms. Then negotiation with users would start.