Brandon, your point in the article that this is some scumfuck vampire’s wet dream in being able to pump the stock price up at will or buff out the edges of a bad quarter or year by retroactively justifying further extraction of revenue from subscribers or users or whatever is totally spot on. Like, I guess it backfired enormously given the stock price now, but, anyone else take note of how this is being announced near the end of a fiscal quarter, and would be taking effect in the beginning of the last one for the fiscal year…?
Although, it’s unclear how well that would even work. I know these are the kinds of vampires who deliberately choose to not recognize the difference between actually collecting revenue and just sending out invoices to an entire industry of stones from who no blood will or even can be squeezed from, but, like, presumably Accounts Receivable over at Unity could say they have total outstanding runtime fees of anything at all, I guess, and I would assume that there is some delusional failson whose main job at Unity is to spin that into sounding good at a meeting despite how bad it might actually be in practice.
A lot of this feels like it just, like, completely flies in the face of like, fundamental principles of contract law. It’s not just that developers would not agree to this, they did not, and, if I’m being ignorant right now about how EULAs can hold you to terms in an ongoing fashion as they are updated rather than as they are agreed upon just ignore this, but like, surely even if they have a legal right to unilaterally change an EULA, changing it to such a degree that one party to the contract can just amend it in such a way that will allow them to plunder your company for damn near everything just can’t be following the spirit of the original contract.
yeso restaurants pay for the business license but are now charged an additional fee per chew
And the restaurant’s haters are gonna sneak into the bathroom with big water jugs and a bunch of Big League Chew
exodus They can’t tell, and also I have found out that they’re planning on estimating your installs and charging you based on their handwavey estimate.
Their decision might only really make logical sense if, yes, exactly, the tools don’t actually fuckin’ work with any reasonable degree of certainty. How they work is probably that some scumfuck failson (I know I’ve already used that insult in this post but it’s evergreen) was able to cook the books on the results from it to make it look the bare minimum of legitimacy, just enough so that when Riccitielo and other Unity execs saw it through their eyes which were popping out of their skulls and turning into giant dollar signs, it seemed reasonable to invent a new source of revenue over it.
Assuming that their tools actually worked to a reasonable degree of certainty, and that they actually were somehow able to capture the legitimacy of the copy of the game/activation, and (well this is getting into Minority Report territory lol) determined the good intent of the user in question in installing or re-installing a game, and could weed out redundant installs on to multiple devices from the same licence or the same device(s), well, it would be clear this is an absolutely insane way to monetize the use of their game development engine. If it even makes sense for Unity to be entitled to a cut every time someone installs your game (huh, weird, you’d think these are the kinds of people who would hate profit sharing), or even just buys it, why on Earth would you be asking the people who already bought and paid for your product to insert yourself even further? I mean, if any of that could be made to make sense, you’d think it’d be Steam or Epic they’d be asking for co-operation and more handouts.
rejj time for indies to sunset their LLCs / GmbHs / Pty Ltds / etc, so the bill goes nowhere.
(Problem: the revenue also goes nowhere, but for old material donated to a charity bundle perhaps that isn’t a concern?)
(No, this isn’t a 100% serious suggestion — but not 0% either)
Or maybe organize some kinda pre-emptive debtor’s union type thing and collectively boycott Unity and proactively de-authorize payments being made out to them, until such time that they either shove it all back up their cavernous asses, or some kinda business regulatory body or whatever can intervene, or some kind of lawsuit by whoever else can establish a precedent of the even remote legality of any of this. Or… perhaps launching a class action of some kind?
This is not a 100% serious or 0% serious suggestion, but, it’s closer to a 100% serious suggestion than a 0% serious suggestion. I mean, they are basically making a choice that will make their product unfeasible to subscribe to, but why let them self immolate in peace? At least not without some further proof that this would even be ruled to be remotely legal.