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The licensing model as originally announced had three problems: 1. The fees were to be retroactively applied even to games that were already released and may h

The licensing model as originally announced had three problems: 1. The fees were to be retroactively applied even to games that were already released and may have ended development. That alone would have been a dealbreaker for trust, but... 2. Unity was incorporating a price-per-sale fee model when its original sales pitch was all about how it was never going to go to such a model. 3. The changes were interpreted in the greediest way possible. It's not price-per-sale, it's price-per-install (so if I buy it once and install it on all three of my computers, it's 3 times the price to the developer), etc. And when the inevitable backlash of "are you really this colossally stupid?" came back, the company doubled and tripled down on it. After the immense backlash, Unity did eventually backtrack to a more reasonable and typical price-per-sale model, but not without colossal and perhaps fatal damage to their reputation.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago
I will be incredibly shocked if they come out of this alive. How's that old saying go? "Trust takes years to build and seconds to break." I wouldn't touch Unity for a new project now, especially since corporate America has demonstrated so many times as a culture that when they do something, get backlash, and back off, it's extremely rarely a permanent back-off; they just do it again, get smaller backlash, back off, do it again, smaller, back off until they've gone through enough news cycles that nobody gives a shit, and then do what they wanted to do anyway. And even more than that: that their management structure saw this as anything besides shooting developer trust in it's head and watching it hit the ground paints a picture of leadership that is astonishingly out of touch with their customers, to a degree rarely seen even lately. How do you know so little about the people you're selling to where this looks like anything but the worst idea in their company's history?

ToucanLoucan 3y ago

I will be incredibly shocked if they come out of this alive. How's that old saying go? "Trust takes years to build and seconds to break." I wouldn't touch Unity for a new project now, especially since corporate America has demonstrated so many times as a culture that when they do something, get backlash, and back off, it's extremely rarely a permanent back-off; they just do it again, get smaller backlash, back off, do it again, smaller, back off until they've gone through enough news cycles that nobody gives a shit, and then do what they wanted to do anyway. And even more than that: that their management structure saw this as anything besides shooting developer trust in it's head and watching it hit the ground paints a picture of leadership that is astonishingly out of touch with their customers, to a degree rarely seen even lately. How do you know so little about the people you're selling to where this looks like anything but the worst idea in their company's history?