Unity, - bad and worse then bad

[Warenwolf]

I wonder how much money they threw at him to step down? Got to have been a big Golden Parachute there, but he's being replaced temporarily with some ex-Red Hat exec. Either way, bye John!

He was selling his shares in the company* way ahead of Unity licensing debacle so I doubt he did not see this coming. Also do not underestimate how much board members have power over such things so while Mr. Riccitiello gets the blame, rest of the people behind the whole thing may very well still be pulling the strings in the company.

*source:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/unity-so ... 15124.html

[Imperial Good]

In retrospect it looks like the entire issue came down to poor communication and understanding skills of the Unity marketing team. The actual changes to to the Unity licencing agreement were nowhere near as bad as what their marketing made them out to be. Specifically the install fee which got so many developers up in arms was not literally for every install like their marketing made it sound, but rather for each person/account which owns the game that at some stage actually plays the game. So free games on Epic that people claim because they are free and never intend to play them do not trigger the install fee, neither does a person reinstalling a game they have already played before as that has already had the fee paid for it.

The vocal developers likely managed to get some concessional improvements to the new licencing as well, which is good for everyone.

[matthewfarmery]

Does that mean that their marketing team was also responsible for the QaA session that they did? I mean, if you take a look at the video I linked, and skip to the near the end, many questions were asked, and unity's responses to those question raised alarm bells ringing. Even unity insiders were saying they tried their best to stop the announced changes from happening.


It wouldn't surprise me, if unity was going to do these changes, but the backlash was so great, they had to walk back on it. I don't see how this could be a bad communication issue. But even if it was, it was a disastrous move by Unity, and they still lost a lot of trust from developers over this.

Hopefully the new changes will help a lot, and will keep indie gaming alive. But trust will take a long time to get back mind, lets hope Unity isn't that stupid to pull this stunt again.