An open letter to our community | Unity Blog
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An open letter from Marc Whitten to the Unity community in September 2023.
    •  mrsgreenpotato   ( @mrsgreenpotato@discuss.tchncs.de ) OP
      14•9 months ago

      I want to start with this: I am sorry.

      If that’s not an apology, then I don’t know what is. I’m not defending them by any means, I’ve moved my projects away from Unity over to Godot already and am not planning to go back. But you can’t argue they haven’t apologized. If they proposed their fees in this form right from the beginning, there would probably be no drama at all.

  •  Hazzard   ( @Hazzard@lemm.ee ) 
    18•9 months ago

    Seems like a sensible overhaul, hitting the major issues with the fee, but still going ahead with a version of it. Big points for me:

    • Not retroactive. Only affecting the next version of Unity, and you can even opt out of updating to skip the fee.
    • Data is now reported by the customers. Still not sure how that plan to enforce this, but it’s a hell of a lot better than some arbitrary data collection scheme being baked into the game.
    • Free version is excluded. No charging tiny side projects, or students or something, it only affects already paying customers.

    Still not sure I love charging per install as a concept, and they’ve already overplayed their hand and burnt many bridges, but at least this implementation isn’t insanely hostile. Guess we’ll see how this plays out from here.

    •  Ferk   ( @Ferk@kbin.social ) 
      5•9 months ago

      Free version is excluded. No charging tiny side projects, or students or something, it only affects already paying customers.

      Wasn’t the free version already excluded from the changes before?

      What they have done for the Free version is set the limit to 200k (it was 100k before) and they’ll no longer be requiring the Unity logo to be shown, even on the free version.

    •  BolexForSoup   ( @BolexForSoup@kbin.social ) 
      4•9 months ago

      And you can even opt out of updating to skip the fee.

      Yeah but how long is this solution really viable? It’s not “skipping” the fee. It’s just putting it off. Eventually your version won’t be supported/will lack too many critical new features. No serious studio is going to work around you if they decided to just pony up.

  •  Bruisedback   ( @Bruisedback@kbin.social ) 
    14•9 months ago

    Even after this walk back, the whole situation still sucks for everybody but Unity. Even the part about removing the “requirement to use the Made with Unity splash screen” bit seems like blatant self-preservation more than capitulation. They’ve got to be aware that there are probably consumers out there willing to boycott any game with that splash screen, leading to lower install numbers. I’m not in game dev, so I’m just talking out of my ass, but it doesn’t seem like studios are really bothered by including those pre-roll splash screens all that much.