We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days. Thank you for your honest and critical feedback.
Big “I’m sorry you were offended by the correct things I said and did” energy
While we were very reasonable, we understand that you just didn’t get it, which made you sad. We understand it feels bad to be sad. To remedy this, we will try again using different words.
Yep. What they should have written:
“We recognize that our recent runtime fee policy announcement wasn’t well-received. We genuinely apologize for the oversight and any confusion or concern it caused. Your feedback is invaluable to us. We are actively discussing the policy with our teams and the community and will be revising it based on your inputs. Please bear with us as we work through this, and expect an update soon.”
PR is hard, let’s go shopping!
Yep, that has a better tone. There’s a limit to how good a statement you can make when at the core you really plan to do enshittification one way or another, but they could have thrown in a smidgeon of accepting blame also. E.g. “We were unable to provide clear and unambiguous answers to questions that came up” costs them nothing.
Any PR statement that includes the words “we hear you” can be safely ignored
RuneScape 3 recently made an extremely controversial change, and I think they handled the apology perfectly. When they finally made changes and dropped some heavily disliked things, they opened with “we messed up”. Unity needs to do the same thing here if they want a chance to rebuild
Too late, they already communicated their greed to every gamedev out there and no one can ignore the potential of Unity fucking them over again anymore. Overall the whole shitshow was good advertisement for Godot.
It’s truly the year of mask-off corporate reveals. WotC, Reddit, Unity, Twitter. Probably more I’m forgetting or unaware of. So many big moves to capitalize on long time stability that, quite predictably, result not in amazing increase in profits but the irrevocable tarnishing of public trust that they relied on. It’s kinda wild to watch, honestly.
It’s IMO a sign that the current financial bubble is about to burst and it’s going to do so in a very violent way despite greedy bulls still pushing the “it’s different this time, we have AI now” bullshit.
Investors have their money trapped in these companies, and when they see what riskless treasury bills yield, they naturally start losing their minds because their money is instead in companies that fail to make significantly more than that riskless benchmark. So those investors then pressure those companies to do whatever they can to produce a good enough return on investment in a short period of time as they run out of patience and they themselves know that hell is coming in the financial markets so their shares might lose an even more significant amount soon.
The end result of CEOs and executives under pressure by investors, and engineers stressing out because they understand the financial situation and that they have to either be yes-men and agree with whatever changes the executives propose or be laid off (because another way to reach the target set by investors is to reduce costs by firing people), is obviously the enshittification that we witness today.
That’s how it is once the free money dries up. The profits must rise, no matter the long-term damage this causes - so they try to bleed the existing customer base dry to keep things rising for one or two more quarters. What does it matter to them if all the employees who have worked hard for years will lose their jobs due to their mismanagement?
The conventional wisdow is that in time of economic turmoil, companies should lower their profit margins and weather out the storm.
However, in today’s capitalism, this is not not acceptable. Shareholders demand ever increasing profits and anything short of that is considered a failure. If you don’t keep your margin, you are to be scolded and discarded.
Now, the loans that many of the companies have cost a lot more money than 2 years ago. So the enshittification is used to enable the continued growth to keep the profits growings.
They’ve already sealed their fate. Only a fool would start making a new project in Unity going forward.
It took them a week to make a tweet saying basically nothing?
You should see how long ECS and the Jobs system has been in development.
It’s almost like the CEO of the company (John Riccitiello) supporting the most Indie game developers holds 53 million dollars in EA shares or something…
Even, and most likely especially, if Unity does poorly does EA benefit… I bet ya Riccitiella knows all the features of Frostbite, but couldn’t tell you if you can do native reliable UDP networking in Unity…
Now everyone is going to trust them.
"We thought you were locked in and realised you may not be. We might have to rethink our evil master plans "
Unless the CEO walks and takes his yes-men with him, I don’t see Unity recovering from this self-inflicted shitshow in the near term. I bet it has motivated a lot of devs to look at the viability of using Godot instead and being free of future shakedowns.
There was no confusion and this is empty PR until they publicly post the policy changes.
The apology seems insincere, as they always do; however, a company bending to consumer feedback in this manner is a good thing (if they actually make meaningful changes).
Burn your company, delete your repos, never return
Appreciate the nitter link, thank you! A few (many?) of us no longer user Twitter actively or even have an account there, it’s essentially de-listed site to avoid for me, but at least with Nitter you can still see some of the content when needed to.
No problem. I still have my account there but if I can avoid it then I will, so always prefer Nitter too. I also respect that there is content that others want to see without giving Twitter data and/or a click.
Fuck off.
God damn.
Fuck these assholes “running” these shit companies.
