The Unity pricing debacle: the infamous clip of Riccitiello, the CEO of EA, and the Cult of the Lamb
The Unity pricing debacle has taken an unfortunate, dangerous turn. The town hall meeting has been canceled because of death threats, according to a new report. According to Bloomberg, Unity CEO John Riccitiello was set to address employees Thursday morning, but the companywide meeting was canceled and two of Unity’s offices were closed because of the alleged threats.
Without taking into account the many reasons that a game may be installed without being purchased, Unity wanted to charge developers for installs. If the new model is adopted, developers will have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees without revenue to pay for it.
Nikita Guk, CEO of PR firm GIMZ, organized a letter where he said the new rules from Unity will affect projects that don’t generate enough income per user. It was pushing developers to migrate to alternative game engines or place more emphasis on monetization that hurt the experience.
Riccitiello himself became a central figure of the controversy as some see him as the driving force behind the new model. He was the CEO of Electronic Arts when loot boxes were added to the game. He made news when he called developers “fucking idiots” over some developers’ reluctance to introduce monetization schemes earlier in the development process. There’s also the infamous clip of Riccitiello talking during a shareholder call about charging Battlefield players a dollar to reload their guns. The stock price dropped after it was reported that the CEO sold 2,000 shares before the news of the company’s existence was announced.
Many developers shared a similar sentiment, explaining they were considering abandoning Unity as a game engine. Massive Monster was more drastic in threatening to delist its title Cult of the Lamb, than most other game developers.
Source: [Developers respond to Unity’s new pricing scheme] “Is it a surprise that Unity was rushed out before the announcement?”
All of the concerns that are blowing up had been raised internally by many weeks before the announcement. I can only speculate as to why it was rushed out this way.
Source: Developers respond to Unity’s new pricing scheme
Why Is Butcher’s Creek My Last Game on Unity? An Introspective Comment on a Game Engine Critique and Unity Terms of Service
I want to be clear. the cost isn’t a big issue to us,” wrote Garry Newman, founder of Rust developer Facepunch Studios. “If everything worked out, the tracking was flawless and it was 10p per sale, no biggy really. If that’s what it costs, then that’s what it costs. That is not the reason why we are angry. It hurts because we didn’t agree to this. We used the engine because we have to pay for it before we can ship. We weren’t told this was going to happen. We weren’t warned. We were not consulted. We have spent 10 years making Rust on Unity’s engine. We pay them every year. And now they changed the rules.”
There were other people who weighed in on this. Some game engine companies and publishers expressed their unhappiness more creatively than others.
Devolver Digital, notable for being both an indie developer powerhouse and for its unorthodox communication style, posted, “Definitely include what engine you’re using in game pitches. It appears that it would look less favorably on the future games that have been developed in Unity for unknown costs.
“One of the cool things about RPG Maker is that once you buy the engine, you can sell your game as many times as you want and never owe us another dime,” RPG Maker, the engine for games including Yume Nikki, Corpse Party, and Always Sometimes Monsters, posted.
“I’ve been through ‘this will destroy indies’ policy changes before, and none of them were as bad as they looked […] so I’m hoping this Unity thing will be similar,” posted David Szymanski, developer of Dusk. “That said, regardless of what happens, Butcher’s Creek will be my last game on Unity.”
Others thought it was bluntly. “Despite the immense amount of time and effort our team has already poured into our new title, we will be migrating to a new game engine unless the changes are completely reverted,” posted Mega Crit, developers of Slay the Spire. “We have never made a public statement before. That is what you did.
However, Unity has since deleted that GitHub repository. A new terms of service agreement was introduced in April of 1994 and removed the clause that allowed developers to use older TOS while introducing a new clause that seemed to suggest that they were going to charge runtime fees.
Unity stated that it would track changes to the GitHub terms in order to give developers full transparency about what changes are happening.
“As a course of immediate action, our collective of game development companies is forced to turn off all IronSource and Unity Ads monetization across our projects until these changes are reconsidered,” the letter read.