935 – Disunity
on September 20, 2023
Dropping this one a little early, as it’s topical, and topical things never last.
For those not following this, the CEOs plan is basically to just tell everyone “you owe us lots of extra money” and expect them to pay it with no issues.
Well at least they seem to have rolled the worst of this back.
Yeah, it’s a big improvement over what they originally posted (although it’s still a pretty awful move overall..)
They did immediately put their foot in their mouth by following it up by saying “We’re disappointed how people are framing us deleting our TOS. We weren’t trying to hide it, we deleted it because it had a low viewcount.”
Like this passes the smell test…
The good news I suppose is that it shows that when companies try to do terrible things like this, they do generally face the wrath of their market and are punished for it in immediately visible ways. May future CEOs have the tale of this mismanagement engraved on a sword to be suspended above their luxury office chair.
The big issue here is that Unity got exactly what they wanted (taking royalty payments from engine users) using the old shitty tactic where they come out with outlandish, horrendous demands, and then scaling back to their original plan.
Users feel like they won, because Unity apparently made concessions, but in reality we still lost when we accept these terms as the lesser of two evils, where before there was no evil at all.
I despise these dirty tactics, and I despise Unity enough that I’ll probably not use it again, ever.
Well technically the terms are better than before, but only because their outlandish demands were too harsh and the backlash was much stronger than they expected. So they dialed it back more than they intented too.