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David Helgason, former Unity CEO and current board member, said the company “f*cked up” on many levels with its price increase. The company said it was planning to backpedal on the fee by making “changes to the policy.”
Helgason stepped down in 2014 and was replaced by current CEO John Riccitiello. Helgason heard the outcry from game developers upset about last week’s new Unity Runtime Fee, which targeted developers with a new fee based on their numbers of downloads, after meeting threshold amounts. It didn’t go over well and led to a boycott of Unity Ads and ads from its IronSource division.
In fact, the organizers announced today that the boycott has grown to more than 424 companies with more than 20 billion downloads.
On Friday, I joined an X (Twitter) Spaces session on Unity’s price increase and lots of game developers weighed in. An attorney also noted the price increase would like catch the attention of European antitrust regulators.
Tomorrow at 930 am pst I have the treat of cohosting with @deantak and other game industry vets to talk about the changes @unity announced this week.
Come and hear thoughts on impact this may have and more.https://t.co/yG46uNaLCf#UnityEngine #gamedevelopment — Susan Cummings (@cummingssi) September 14, 2023
In a post on Facebook, Helgason said, “We f*cked up on many levels. No other way to put it: a new business model for Unity was announced in a way that was hard to understand, but it also missed a bunch of important ‘corner’ cases, and in central ways ended up as the opposite of what it was supposed to be. Now to try again and try harder. I am provisionally optimistic about the progress. So sorry about this mess.”
And on its Twitter account, Unity said:
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… — Unity (@unity) September 17, 2023
We’ll have an update as soon as we hear more.
helava on September 19th, 2023 at 02:36 UTC »
Of critical importance: Nothing at Unity is changing. They’re just going to “try again” to figure out how to do runtime fees, but make it seem palatable enough for now to quell the revolt. But once those fees are in place, there’s no going back. And there’s no way to trust that Unity won’t just incrementally get to the goal they originally wanted anyway.
The problem with this wasn’t necessarily the pricing structure. There are obvious ways to make it “reasonable” or “endurable” in every situation.
The problem has always been their desire to push this feature in ways that completely cut the legs out from under developers. No warning. No discussion. No nothing. Folks had an expectation that their business would operate one way, and Unity said HAHA FUCK YOU.
Until there are large-scale leadership changes - board, CEO, etc. - or unless they make very clear binding rules on how they’re going to make sure this breach of trust can never happen again, it’s literally impossible for any sane person running a business to work with them in any capacity.
g0ku on September 19th, 2023 at 02:09 UTC »
they sure gave Godot a ton of free publicity from this blunder, i keep seeing their name everywhere now.
i’m also real curious how many companies are going to switch to something else in fear of something similar happening again in the future.
burningcpuwastaken on September 19th, 2023 at 01:36 UTC »
He's not saying that the policy has issues, but rather the explanation of the policy.