Dana Callista Lexa 🏳️‍⚧️

EDIT 2023-9-15: added a couple of events regarding unity's military contracts, and fixed the ToS timeline which was MASSIVELY incorrect. there's a lot more i wanna add, so stay tuned.

• August 2020: Unity announces the filing of a registration statement for a proposed IPO (Initial Public Offering).
• September 2020: Unity begins trading publicly on the New York Stock Exchange.
• August 2021: Unity employees express deep ethical concerns and the lack of transparency about the company actively pursuing contracts with the US Military.
• November 2021: Unity spends $1.6 billion to acquire Wētā Digital, a company that exclusively works in pre-rendered high-end VFX, in order to convince Wall Street that they're down with the metaverse. Seriously.
• June 2022: In light of the rapid decline of Unity's stock price between the end of 2021 (~$191) to mid-2022 (~$37), Unity CEO John Riccitiello assures employees that the company is not in any financial trouble, and they would not be laying anyone off. This was followed up 2 weeks later with ~200+ employees being laid off.
• June(?) 2022: Unity quietly deletes their GitHub repo that was once used to allow developers to view previous versions of their Terms of Service, which was previously critical as developers only had to worry about the ToS that was in effect at the time of game publishing. Keep this in mind for later.
• July 2022: Unity cancels their only "AAA" sample game project "Gigaya" (within 4 months of its initial announcement, no less), because they think that actually improving the engine by putting it through a full AAA development cycle is a waste of time.
• July 2022: Unity spends $4.4 billion to acquire ironSource, an in-game ads company that was well-known to be the developer of InstallCore, a wrapper for software installation bundling responsible for tons of adware/malware distribution.
• July 2022: Almost immediately following the outrage surrounding Unity's acquisition of ironSource, CEO John Riccitiello loudly and proudly calls game developers who do not consider monetization "fucking idiots".
• August 2022: Unity partners with CACI International in a 3 year, "multi-million dollar" contract to aid in development of "Smart Human Machine Interfaces" for the US Military. Yes, the US Military. Again.
• January 2023: Unity lays off another 284 employees, for "streamlining" purposes.
• April 2023: Unity updates their Terms of Service, which no longer includes the clause allowing developers to stick with the ToS they published their games with.
• May 2023: Unity files a form 8-K, laying off yet another 600 employees.
• June 2023: Unity jumps into the AI-generated content hypetrain, introducing Muse and Sentis. Unity also makes zero effort to assure developers regarding the legal uncertainties AI content has, nor to explain what data their AI systems are trained on.
• September 2023: Over 150,000 shares of Unity stock are sold by various Unity executives (including CEO John Riccitiello) over the course of 3 weeks leading up to Unity's upcoming pricing change announcement. (EDIT: there's a possibilty that this is just regularly scheduled sells. i gotta dig into it a bit further)
• September 2023: Unity announces changes to their pricing plans, which includes a "runtime fee" based on game installs and the previous 12 months of revenue. This change applies retroactively to every game ever made in Unity, resulting in mass panic in the game development community, forcing many developers to pre-emptively delist their games in protest, and/or fear of the massive debts to come. They also discontinued the Unity Plus plan, making the next best thing Unity Pro, which costs $2,040/yr per seat, only 5x the original price of Unity Plus at $399/yr per seat. No big deal, obviously.

did i miss anything?

I do trace basically every bad decision made at unity over the last 5 years back to either doing the IPO or getting ready to do the IPO, but this timeline starts WAY before 2020.

• October 2009: Unity Technologies closes a $5.5 million investment round with Sequoia Capital, Diane Greene & David Gardner
• July 2011: Unity Technologies closes a $15 million investment round with iGlobe Partners, Westsummit Capital Management & Sequoia Capital
• September 2015: Unity Technologies closes a $25 million investment round with iGlobe Partners & Sequoia Capital (AGAIN!?!)
• December 2015: Unity Technologies closes a $62.7 million investment round with iGlobe Partners & Sequoia Capital (AGAIN AGAIN!?! wtf!)
• July 2016: Unity Technologies closes a $181 million investment round with iGlobe Partners, Max Levchin, Westsummit Capital Management, Thrive Capital, China Investment Corporation, Sequoia Capital, FREES FUND & Dfj Growth
• May 2017: Unity Technologies closes a $400 million (ALMOST HALF BILLION??) investment round with private equity firm Silver Lake Partners

I remember being at a xfest (the xbox developer conference) around the time when the xbox one came out (so like.. 2013?) and having lunch with some Unity people, one of them was talking about a recently closed round of investment that had happened and how that cash was mostly just sitting in the bank. They didn’t really know what to do with it all. I remember them saying that at the time, the business was mostly sustainable from licence sales, so they didnt even really need it, but they would figure something out. (This was before the subscription model was introduced, we were paying $1500 per platform per seat, for a perpetual licence).
That was a real no OH moment for me. The second they took a single penny from investors that made the path to going public inevitable (or a sale, which could have happened but didn't). The investors need their exit eventually. They need their blood. The second that the first round closed, trying to make this a sustainable business was over.

We were on this trajectory from the start imo. Capital is the reason we can’t have nice things!

if you want to make a game engine, make a game engine

if you want to make a game, do not under any circumstances make a game engine

Unity posted a FAQ on their official forums (source: https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/) that basically amounts to confirming everyone's worst fears.

Q: How are you going to collect installs?
A: We leverage our own proprietary data model. We believe it gives an accurate determination of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project.

"Trust us bro"

Q: Is software made in unity going to be calling home to unity whenever it's ran, even for enterprice licenses?
A: We use a composite model for counting runtime installs that collects data from numerous sources. The Unity Runtime Fee will use data in compliance with GDPR and CCPA. The data being requested is aggregated and is being used for billing purposes.

Just an insane response. Unity is saying that they are basically guessing those numbers. They're also not answering the actual question of whether telemetry will be mandatory even for enterprise licensed runtimes.

Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs?
A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data.

The problems with this are of course numerous.

Q: If a game that's made enough money to be over the threshold has a demo of the same game, do installs of the demo also induce a charge?
A: If it's early access, Beta, or a demo of the full game then yes. If you can get from the demo to a full game then yes. If it's not, like a single level that can't upgrade then no.

Unity is now basically dictating what type of demo or release strategy you can have, lest you be charged for installs of a demo.

Q: What's going to stop us being charged for pirated copies of our games?
A: We do already have fraud detection practices in our Ads technology which is solving a similar problem, so we will leverage that know-how as a starting point. We recognize that users will have concerns about this and we will make available a process for them to submit their concerns to our fraud compliance team.

"Trust us bro."

Q: When in the lifecycle of a game does tracking of lifetime installs begin? Do beta versions count towards the threshold?
A: Each initialization of an install counts towards the lifetime install.

Imagine an online multiplayer game that does a limited closed-beta network test to stress test their servers. Poof! That's potentially thousands of installs right there.

Q: Does this affect WebGL and streamed games?
A: Games on all platforms are eligible for the fee but will only incur costs if both the install and revenue thresholds are crossed. Installs - which involves initialization of the runtime on a client device - are counted on all platforms the same way (WebGL and streaming included).

Another nonanswer. How in the fuck are you tracking installs in the WebGL implementation?

Q: Are these fees going to apply to games which have been out for years already? If you met the threshold 2 years ago, you'll start owing for any installs monthly from January, no? (in theory). It says they'll use previous installs to determine threshold eligibility & then you'll start owing them for the new ones.
A: Yes, assuming the game is eligible and distributing the Unity Runtime then runtime fees will apply. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.

Utterly deranged, shameless, insane.

Aaand they're already doing a weak backpedal, now claiming that Unity will not count multiple installs and instead will only count initial installs (per device). Besides the fact that a mildly sophisticated attacker could still abuse this system to 'install-bomb' a developer (as hardware identifiers are easy to spoof), it doesn't exactly inspire confidence that earlier they were claiming they were going to be billing studios for runtime fees based on a "proprietary model" that couldn't distinguish between initial and later installs... which is to say, Unity is now promising to do something that a couple hours ago they were claiming was impossible.

Once again, fuck John Riccietielo, and I don't think anyone should take this bad spin job as meaningful. Unity is still planning to do something tremendously harmful to lots of studios, they're just now showing how ill-considered and lazy their stupid little plan was.

“Our made-up numbers will be smaller now, we promise *wink*”

you could make money betting on these antics

indie game dev is just about cheating, always, all the time, whenever it saves you a headache. just constantly doing the most illegal stuff. wacko art styles, hacky one-off scripts, doors that are also tables that are also clouds... games combine 15+ creative disciplines into a single medium and you do not have enough lifespan to do things with propriety

ok ok ok, i thought of a good example of this i ran into recently!!

There's a certain boss fight in Bossgame that has a lot of story beats within the fight, like big plot points are happening, it's a climax of the story, everything is very important. this is pretty much the only fight in the game like this, every other mid-fight conversation is very minimal - characters only speak in one-sentence popups and yell short "battle quotes"

So basically i had NO way of portraying a complex plot mid-battle. I thought about possibly changing scenes to the standard "phone text cutscene" but that code would be a pain and it'd kill the pace. I thought about just doing dozens of the one-sentence popups, but that would take ages and wouldn't have the dramatic feel i was hoping for

SO, what i did: after beating phase 1, i made the boss spawn an empty object, which had a script that would spawn other objects on a timer. Then i had the boss pause its AI for ~55 seconds. the controller object spawns a giant solid black plane to hide the battle, and a bunch of image & text objects play directly over top the battle. the whole cutscene is all just weird one-off objects spawning over each other in sequence.

From there, i just winged the rest. Like, i couldn't really figure out how to convey who was speaking at first, until i realized I could just make massively size up the 48px character heads. i made everything slide around a bit for dynamism and damn, it just... came together. the cutscene is surprisingly complex for me just spawning things over top a battle (i think you can even still press character buttons during it...)

programming a battle cutscene manager would have been a pain to do for a single battle, so i just slapped it all together with gum and it worked!! in fact, i think the limitations inspired me to try some creative workarounds and helped me come up with ideas!! basically, sometimes hacking is great.