Developers of indie puzzle game Orgynizer have claimed that Unity said organisations like Planned Parenthood are “not valid charities” and are instead “political groups.”
In a blog post, the EU-based developer LizardFactory said the plans to charge developers up to $0.20 per install if they reach certain thresholds would cost them “around 30% of the funds we have gathered and already sent to charity.”
As Unity clarified the runtime fee will not apply to charity games, LizardFactory reached out to the company to clarify their game would be exempt from the plan.
However, Unity reportedly said their partners were not “valid charities” and were viewed as “political groups.”
Profits made from the game go directly to non-profit organisation Planned Parenthood and C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, Michigan.
“We did this to raise money for a good cause, not to line the coffers of greedy scumbags,” the developers wrote in a blog post. “We have been solid Unity fanboys for over ten years, but the trust is scattered all over the floor.”
The developers are considering a move to open-source game engine Godot, “but we will have to recode our entire game because we refuse to give you a dime,” they wrote. “This is a mafia-style shakedown, nothing more, nothing less.”
Today, Unity responded to the ongoing backlash and apologised, acknowledging the “confusion and angst” surrounding the runtime fee policy.
The company has promised that changes to the policy will be shared in “a couple of days.”
Calling Planned Parenthood a political group is just telling on yourself. You hate women’s bodily autonomy and/or trans people enough to overlook the fact that they offer free and income cost adjusted birth control and vasectomies and hysterectomies and fertility treatments. They are a non-profit organization offering every type of sexual and reproductive health care. They, in fact, do not engage in politically driven discrimination against certain types of sexual health issues. They treat those trying to get pregnant with the same level of evidence based care as those seeking abortion or hrt or to be made infertile, without concern for public opinion or political discourse. I assume all of the above can be said of the children’s hospital mentioned, but I don’t have an ongoing relationship with them to base my comments on…
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Unity management doing an mega-asshole speedrun or what?
The 2020s hot new business practice is self immolation through hypercapitalist greed and assuming that just because you’re the most popular in an industry you’re the only choice.
I guess the vulture capitalism has turned inward.
More CEO crying for “why isn’t line going up quicker?!? make more now!”
I mean, look at the eyes of the CEO - if he was featured in a Unity game, he’d have “DEAD INSIDE” painted on him in indie developer blood.
Holy shit those eyes
At this point? Fuck Unity!
Yes even if they backpedal no one knows if they don’t try something again in the future. So everyone who can switch to a different engine should do so.
Trust is broken now. If they can just drop a new charge like this when ever they want how can you possibly plan a business around it.
After all this would there really be any reason to use them especially when Unreal has just been crushing it lately with lumen, nanite, etc.
I’ve used unreal professionally for 10 years. It’s not very good for smaller teams. There is plenty of reason to pick another engine over it. Unreal is great for medium to large studios. 15 people or more. It can absolutely be used with less but the pain of doing so it’s more apparent.
Also before this whole unity fee change, unity was cheaper than unreal. Although I’ve always skipped over it because I want source access.
There’s also this:
Unity’s CEO Sold Company Shares Before This Week’s Unpopular Announcement
It was 2000 shares, he’s already sold like 50k in the last year. Nothing sinister about it.
Not sure if /s or not, but:
I generally agree, 2k shares overall is nothing, but there have been changes to the ToS(s) over the last couple years that lead to this possibility.
The major change of course being the April 2023 ToS change, which was already some time ago.
Additionally, as Ars’ points out, they made auto-acceptance of ToS fee changes in their superseding general ToS, from continued use of their products, back in January 2022.
So it is very possibly a year of trickle selling in laying the groundwork for the new fee structure change, could very well still be insider trading; those ToS changes are of course public, but the changes being made in preparation for this recent announcement, I would believe to be insider trading if proven true.
Pure conspiracy for now.
How else do you want to handle a CEO owning stock? From his perspective: He sees hard times coming for Unity so he sells his stock. At the same time he tries to turn the situation around, uncertain if he will succeed.
And AFAIK the trades are public so everyone would know that the CEO is sceptical about the company’s future. There are obviously problems with the ToS changes but is the stock selling really all that relevant in this discussion?
He sees hard times coming for Unity so he sells his stock.
This is called insider trading, using his inside knowledge of the company to buy/sell shares before material information becomes public.
The selling was planned a long time ago right? I think the main problem here is a CEO owning stock in the first place. If he owns stock he will obviously sell it when he no longer thinks it’s a good investment. And if it’s planned some time ahead it’s not exactly inside knowledge. At least I don’t think that this is a bad case of insider trading.
Devs may as well bite the bullet & switch engines mid development now, because I’m not buying any new games made in Unity.
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You can go to the SteamDB page for a game, click App Info on the left, then look for the “Detected Technologies”. This will usually tell you what they’re using if it’s not a custom engine. You can use the Augmented Steam or SteamDB browser extensions to get a direct link to the SteamDB page from a game’s store page.
Also, SteamDB has a page here with aggregate data of how much each detected engine is used across Steam. Unity currently accounts for over half of the games using known engines (snapshot).
Edit: For non-Steam games you could check out IGDB.com. It has crowd-sourced data on all video games, including which game engine was used.
I am not a developer but don’t they have to state the engine at the beginning of the game? Really no idea, just guessing, as I’ve seen a lot of games with it.
That would involved buying/downloading the game first to find out though (which would defeat the purpose of avoiding Unity in the first place). Out of curiosity I checked some of the games on my Steam wishlist to see if Steam had the engine listed anywhere, and unfortunately they don’t. A few had it under the fine print copyright section under System Requirements, but not all. Because of this whole thing, it would be nice if Steam would include that as well, like in the sidebar where they list the developer and publisher. I can’t speak for other pc storefronts though.
I took some game dev classes so take this with a grain of salt. In my experience with unreal, that is not added and bundled with the game by default, so I imagine it as a deal they strike with the engine to get better rates or such, basically gives the engine an ad slot. I think one common reason would be for new GPUs / new engine updates like ray tracing support they pay the game dev $ to use their engine and put in the new features to show case them. On the flip side if you think the engines good as a customer and see that on splash screen maybe you then associate good engine with good game.
Some people might be 80% done with the game, making it not doable to remake the game.
Unreal about to have a really good October.
As a heads up, Humble Bundle already has an Unreal book bundle, and a separate Godot video bundle going right now:
Unreal: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/game-programming-with-c-unreal-packt-books
Godot: https://www.humblebundle.com/software/everything-you-need-to-know-about-godot-4-encore-software
Okay. I was already annoyed, but now I’m like “seriously, fuck these people.” I hope Unity is driven out of business.
That doesn’t sound like a great outcome: one less game engine in the market, developers having to change all their codes, tons of layoff, c-suites finding a new job like nothing happened.
No, it’s far from great, but it’s better than allowing shenanigans like this to become the norm - and they will become the norm unless Unity pays severely.
Then I’d rather wish for the execs to be fired and replaced. They are the ones making those decisions that should pay for it.
Eh it’s okay. I mean it evens out considering Unity’s no longer a valid gamibg engine…
