Unity has flipped a switch to become one of the most baffling companies in the video game industry overnight. After rolling out some changes to their newly announced, controversial fee structure meant to not harm smaller games, while still raking in new revenue from whales like Genshin Impact, the company’s Twitter account has taken to responding to individual concerns.
It’s not going great.
This began with a bizarre conversation where an indie dev, David Vallieres, asked about Terms of Service which were going to be retroactively changed, and for a time, were deleted altogether. This drew a response from Unity representative “Dana” that is…deeply confusing and disconcerting:
Unity appears to be saying that it deleted its Terms of Service ahead of the release of the new fee structure because it…wasn’t being viewed enough. As in, its pageviews were low so they figured they might as well just delete it. Of course, Terms of Service do not exist to rake in pageviews, they are there for legal reasons and to delete them entirely seems rather absurd, particularly in this context.
And Unity appears to be somehow offended that this was being framed as a nefarious move on their part so people couldn’t read the old Terms of Service when this price hike landed and terms were going to be retroactively changed. They appear to be claiming it was a coincidence the ToS had been removed due to this pressing problem of low pageviews before the pricing change happened. Even if that’s true, it’s inexplicable that they were removed at all.
The ToS appear to have been restored in the wake of this, and the tweet also reminds everyone that the most recent change to the terms now says that the fees will only arrive when the next version of Unity ships next year. So it’s not retroactive anymore. Or if you stay on the current version of Unity and avoid that, it seems. The account then says “if you aren’t happy with my answer” you can tune into a “fireside chat” with a Unity exec where he was answering more questions. How cozy. How weird.
While Unity has significantly altered the original new terms it proposed, and seems to have reconciled internally that this was poorly conceived and rolled out. But clawing back developer trust is going to be a long-term project, and attempts to explain all the craziness that went on since this began is not exactly reassuring. At this point it’s unclear what might happen next in this situation, as Unity’s behavior is increasingly hard to predict.
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