The trust is gone and Unity will never be able to gain it back. The damage is done.
I also wonder if this is just playing out as planned by Unity. Try to push out a change that will piss people off by adding a more egregious change and then say “we hear you” and roll back to the change they wanted to push initially.
They only way they could even have a shot at getting the trust back would be to do a 180, revert all the shit decision like remove license tracking and whatnot, and in their ToS commit to clear guarantees like the original ToS being applicable not just to the version of Unity you have, but to the whole major version so you apply for LTS updates under the original license you started developing for.
If they want to charge more or extra for free to play games or something, they can still do that, just not in a shit way.
Oh and they should take another look at their data collection to better comply with privacy laws and whatnot.
Their ToS did say that updates would only apply to the current major version and newer of Unity when the updated ToS was released, but they removed that clause without telling anyone about a year ago and are claiming their changes are retroactive, so that can’t even be trusted. At this point, I can’t see any game dev beginning work on a new Unity project ever again without some kind of ironclad guarantee that this would never happen again. My prediction is we’ll see maybe 1 or 2 years of games released on Unity, just from the ones that were already too far into development to start over on something else, and then Unity is done for good.
Ah was it for the major version already? Well they shozuld definitely go back to that, if not even further then to show their commitment (like, say, 2 LTS versions).
But yeah, you are right. We’ve already seen hundreds of people check out Godot, I hope it only grows from there.
I doubt any of this is going according to plan. After this debacle devs will leave Unity because you know they are gonna think up some new fee to screw devs over.
This at least makes it so that games in development with Unity have a chance to release and pick another engine after that project.
The trust is gone and Unity will never be able to gain it back. The damage is done.
I also wonder if this is just playing out as planned by Unity. Try to push out a change that will piss people off by adding a more egregious change and then say “we hear you” and roll back to the change they wanted to push initially.
Iirc this was the kinda thing Tortellini was doing while he was at EA. Shove out a bad thing, apologize, shove out slightly less bad thing.
Edit: Sure enough, they’re trying to push out a less shitty version now. They planned it this way the whole time.
They only way they could even have a shot at getting the trust back would be to do a 180, revert all the shit decision like remove license tracking and whatnot, and in their ToS commit to clear guarantees like the original ToS being applicable not just to the version of Unity you have, but to the whole major version so you apply for LTS updates under the original license you started developing for.
If they want to charge more or extra for free to play games or something, they can still do that, just not in a shit way.
Oh and they should take another look at their data collection to better comply with privacy laws and whatnot.
Their ToS did say that updates would only apply to the current major version and newer of Unity when the updated ToS was released, but they removed that clause without telling anyone about a year ago and are claiming their changes are retroactive, so that can’t even be trusted. At this point, I can’t see any game dev beginning work on a new Unity project ever again without some kind of ironclad guarantee that this would never happen again. My prediction is we’ll see maybe 1 or 2 years of games released on Unity, just from the ones that were already too far into development to start over on something else, and then Unity is done for good.
Ah was it for the major version already? Well they shozuld definitely go back to that, if not even further then to show their commitment (like, say, 2 LTS versions).
But yeah, you are right. We’ve already seen hundreds of people check out Godot, I hope it only grows from there.
I doubt any of this is going according to plan. After this debacle devs will leave Unity because you know they are gonna think up some new fee to screw devs over. This at least makes it so that games in development with Unity have a chance to release and pick another engine after that project.