Unity Overhauls Controversial Price Hike After Game Developers Revolt - BNN Bloomberg
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Maker of video-game development tools backtracks after customers threaten boycott

Under the tentative new plan, Unity will limit fees to 4% of a game’s revenue for customers making over $1 million and said that installations counted toward reaching the threshold won’t be retroactive, according to recording of the meeting reviewed by Bloomberg. Last week, Chief Executive Officer John Riccitiello delayed an all-hands meeting on the pricing changes and closed two offices after the company received what it said was a credible death threat.

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One of the most controversial elements of the policy concerned how Unity would track installations of its software. Although the company first said it would use proprietary tools, Whitten said Monday management will rely on users to self-report the data.

  • @Gradually_AdjustingEnglish
    28•1 year ago

    It’s good that they’re limiting their fees to a percentage of revenue, but it seems high.

    These days corporations love to bargain this way. Door in the face, big uproar on socials, back down publicly (but to a deal they would have been happy with anyway).

    • @PM_Your_Nudes_Please
      23•1 year ago

      Yup. Lots of people were saying that right at the start too. That unity was only doing this to make the real shit-sandwich slightly more palatable when they finally unveiled it.

      Because if they had simply announced that they were going to be taking 4% of game companies’ revenue, the game companies would have rioted. But now Unity can claim that they’re doing it because “we listened to you and made adjustments accordingly. See how reasonable we’re being?”

      Movie directors are known to do something similar when trying to avoid an Adults Only rating. An AO rating kills movie sales, because you can’t take your teenage kid with you to see it. So directors will shoot for R ratings instead. They’ll have a movie that should probably be rated AO, but then they’ll throw in one horribly shocking scene, right in the middle of the movie. Then when the raters come out of the movie, the director has a chance to go over the rating with them and negotiate. The raters all go “it’s definitely rated AO because of that one scene.” And so the director “reluctantly” agrees to pull that scene if they’ll agree to rate it R instead. The raters don’t remember any of the other stuff that should’ve pushed it towards an AO rating, because that one scene was so out of proportion. So they happily agree to rate it R without that scene. Now the director has the R rating they wanted, while still getting to keep lots of Adult Only content in the movie. The director never intended to keep that one scene in the movie. It was sacrificial, so the raters would have something to compromise on.