Unity is publicly traded: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/U
Can’t blame private equity for this one.
> crunched the numbers and decided it's time to milk this one dry.
More realistically, they crunched the numbers and saw that they aren’t making enough money to keep the company going forever. It’s not a secret, because it’s a public company: They need to make more money to survive.
More monetization was inevitable. I know it’s unpopular public opinion, but Unity as it is today cannot exist forever on the monetization model they had in the past. The numbers didn’t add up. They had to change something.
According to their SEC fillings their staff almost tripled in just 4 years
> Dec 31, 2022 7,703
> Dec 31, 2021 5,245
> Dec 31, 2020 4,001
> Dec 31, 2019 2,715
Development of game engine is costly and take a lot of resources, but they already had a successful product back in 2019 and long before that. With all that hiring quality of their software was more or less constant (and not too high as always) which means all recent growth was not in their core business.
I don't really get why companies keep hiring themselves to death. It clearly does not translate to meaningful productivity gains, yet sends their labor and related costs skyrocketing. It's so alien to me from the outside.
Sure people wouldn't have been happy with higher fees, but current clusterfuck is an order of magnitude worse.
That would have been ... perfect. And when did they back up on charging per install?
Companies subsidize "free" by redirecting money from successful areas to fund new or unsuccessful areas. And in this case of "free" (advert, data collections) games, is basically a anticompetitive dumping ground and is a common trend with monopolists.
This seems likely, but from what I've been hearing from game devs, the issue isn't the increased fees so much as the fact that they retroactively changed licensing. That they did this (again, after promising not to the last time) indicates that regardless of what the fees actually are, you'd be a fool to enter into a business relationship with them.
The lesson to be learned here is to never trust a "promise". Enter contracts that one party can't change on a whim. If a product you're using to run a business can pull the rug out like this, maybe move your business to one that can't.
So the moral here is "don't patch your software without having a lawyer diff the TOS?" I don't think that's the world we want to live in. I don't think that leaves consuming proprietary software as a feasible option in today's fast moving security landacape. It's fair to call out bad actors who muddy the water to make the world that way.
This behavior is not only destructive of their legacy, the promises they kept, but of course of their own reputation as a game company... I don't see any independent developer choosing Unity from now on (without a radical change for the company) in their right minds.
I'm pretty sure this wasn't the only solution to the situation. If they're going to ruin the company anyway... might as well make it open source. Start charging a large amount for a license. Cut the company size (maybe competition for other open source software is too great, and they couldn't survive at that size!). We have the choice to do the right thing, although many times that isn't the easy thing to do.
This goes even to society at large. No social or economic system can exist without ethics -- to believe so is delusional. Not communism, capitalism, social democracy, or something else(and I think we need some other ideas in the mix... but that's another story!) can function well when individuals don't have a good grasp of ethics. Governments are made of people making decisions, and companies likewise. No matter how much structure you impose on top, if people don't generally cooperate, a good outcome is impossible (garbage in, garbage out). So, like a friend says, "Be excellent to each other, or else..." :)
And we need to support free software too. If you use it, please donate :)
Unity’s value was previously in the hype and now is possibly in the voting rights by shareholders. With enough voting rights, I bet you could vote for a 0% commission for your video game company and offer to vote out the CEO/COO/ECT or anyone overpaid if they don’t concede to your demands.
Yup, it's Epic which is the private equity rollup. They're innocent, unless there are some Stephen Elop-style shenanigans going on.
