Lupi

@lupi

cow of tailed snake (gay)

they/them/moo
chimoora.zone/

you can say "chimoora" instead of "cow of tailed snake" if you want. its a good pun.

i ramble about aerospace sometimes
I take rocket photos and you can see them @aWildLupi

I have a terminal case of bovine pungiform encephalopathy, the bovine puns are cowmpulsory

they/them/moo where "moo" stands in for "you" or where it's funny, like "how are moo today, Lupi?" or "dancing with mooself"

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Lupi @lupi9/14/2023, 5:38 PM

Jeff Gerstmann @jeffgerstmann

Jeff Gerstmann @jeffgerstmann9/14/2023, 4:05 AM

@shieldfoss asked:

I have a A question about New Unity and maybe you can answer :#

Can they pull this nonsense retroactively? I've seen people talking about that but why would anybody comply with that? "Your game has had a new install, you owe us money" -> "No I don't, I never signed that."

I get that, if these are the new terms, going out today and deciding to use Unity would be a bad choice but how do they Alter The Deal for people they already have a deal with?

I am guessing a bit here, but maybe someone who knows better can jump in on this.

Anyway, maybe that's why they attach it to the runtime and try to call it a "runtime fee." Since you, An Esteemed Game Developer, are shipping a game that includes their runtime, you more or less have to have some kind of active relationship with them, or else you'd be shipping their runtime illegally. And since that relationship is active and ongoing, they're able to change the parameters of it because if you don't agree, then you more or less lose your ability to ship your game mixed with their code? Like I said, kinda guessing at some of this.

DeliciousBees @deliciousbees9/14/2023, 3:47 PM

Yeah, it's complex. There's some ambiguous language in the current-ish versions of the TOS that talks about how you have to delete all copies of the "Unity Software" when ending a subscription - the intent is that you delete the editor if you're not paying for it, but there's enough legal weasel wording that you could see them claiming that this also impacts the Unity Runtime and Unity Editor together if they wanted to be absolute assholes and burn every bridge they had. It would be extreme bad faith, but hey, we're talking about JR here.

HOWEVER

Some of us shipped games before Unity was in a subscription model in 2016, and a lot of console games even past that point shipped on the Unity Runtime without a subscription thanks to some real ridiculous quirks with how protective they were with shipping console code and who paid for what. There's zero room to revoke or change terms on these cases. There's also the Unity statement about "if you're on LTS, your TOS is also bound to that time period" which is pretty rough in terms of intent for them.

For us with 2014 and 2016 titles, it puts us firmly in "bless your heart, good luck with that!" territory. We switched in 2017 to Unreal partially because of the sad state of Unity 5, but mainly because we needed to make sure we had control of our destiny - Unity's lack of response to engine issues when we were trying to get into cert nearly killed our studio, and I refused to let a middleware vendor have complete control over our ability to patch and ship ever again. It's super heartbreaking to see our fears were right in a way that will impact hundreds/thousands of developers.

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in reply to @jeffgerstmann's post:

Nick @4gateftw9/14/2023, 4:59 AM

Remember that you own zero pieces of software you use, including Unity. You have a revocable license instead (this gets weird and complicated for the individual devs in big studios but that's not important for this), and they retain the rights to change the terms. If you stop complying with the terms after a change that you received notice of, they simply revoke your license, and as you said, you lose the ability to legally ship their runtime, and thus your game.

@shieldfoss9/14/2023, 7:55 AM

Ah. It had never occurred to me that anybody might build their company around a revocable license like that. I guess, then, that companies do this because they expected the reputational cost of doing sketchy things was too high for Unity, and have been blindsided by Unity's decision to burn their rep?

Nick @4gateftw9/15/2023, 1:23 AM

Two main reasons. First, developing a game engine is really goddamn expensive (I say this as an engine dev; we are not cheap) and if you try to do it from scratch it will easily eat up years of your funding depending on the complexity of your project. Just look at Jon Blow, who vanishes for 7+ years after every project because he maintains his own engine. Anything that seems reputable and has talent available on the market that saves you from that is great, and a lot can be overlooked as long as the company doesn't seem sketchy and especially if the engine has a proven track record of shipping games like Unity does. Second, for a long time, a revocable license was pretty much the only option if you didn't have the resources to build your own engine. Unreal had a revocable license too for a really long time, though they don't anymore (they got rid of that during the Apple case), and that's been the case for every licensed engine I've ever heard of, so if you didn't want to build your own engine, it was either get a precarious license for one, or don't make a game.

Blindsided is exactly the term I would use. The thing is that this isn't just a royalty increase or something like that, which you kinda need to understand would be an option if you build your business around something that takes royalties. This is a totally unheard of pricing practice that is not just completely out of place for anything Unity's done before, it also doesn't align with the interests of Unity's partners at all in the way that royalties would, which, for a company whose entire existence is predicated on having partners who trusts you, is baffling and makes you not want to touch them with a ten foot pole.

Assessed Unoriginal @UncreativeOpinions9/14/2023, 5:43 PM

This is a pernicious myth. One that has been decided in court in the other direction, in Australia at least.

Remember the court case with Valve Software years ago about refund requests. Where every news outlet laughed at the fact that the court made them set up a landline phone to handle requests and ignored the rest of the case. That case set precedent that digital purchases of software were 'goods' that you own (and thus were entitled to refunds where applicable.)

Nick @4gateftw9/15/2023, 12:59 AM

Ok, maybe for Australia, but I am telling you from experience working at a large studio that partnered with Unity that this is how it works, at least in the U.S.

@Fungal-fae9/14/2023, 1:24 PM

So idk if it's strictly relevant, but I think it's worth bringing up that they've previously stated that "in the scenario where are game that is legitimately developed under a free license makes too much money to continue development under said license, we still allow the continued distribution of said game, but require the purchase of an other license if the developer wishes to carry on developing/maintaining the unity version of the game"
^paraphrasing

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