Even though the company behind the wildly popular game engine walked back its controversial new fee policy, the damage is done.

Unity May Never Win Back the Developers It Lost in Its Fee Debacle::Even though the company behind the wildly popular game engine walked back its controversial new fee policy, the damage is done.

  • Candelestine@lemmy.worldEnglish
    661·
    1 year ago

    You know, companies could avoid situations like this if they just engaged directly with their fanbases more, proposing ideas and collecting feedback. This way, even if they decide to do the unpopular thing anyway because they have to for financial reasons or something, at least they’re not springing a sudden surprise on their fans.

    People really don’t like negative surprises. They can usually handle plain old negative news though, especially if they got time to prepare for the idea first.

    I think they sometimes try to use focus groups to collect feedback, but members of a focus group may exhibit unique behavior simply because they’re in a focus group. It’s not an actual representative sample of the public.

    • bassomitron@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      1 year ago

      You know, companies could avoid situations like this if they just engaged directly with their fanbases more . . .

      Not even their fanbase in this scenario, but the majority of their paying business customers. Pissing off your fanbase/hobbyists is one thing, but completely alienating your biggest profit generating consumers is just beyond incompetent.

      • Candelestine@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        Minor quibble that game devs are actually a smaller fraction of their overall revenues, as their tech has uses far beyond games. They have industrial product lines too.

        Kinda like how Amazon’s main thing isn’t selling shippable products anymore, it’s cloud computing and digital infrastructure. Or was last I checked anyway, it might’ve changed again.

        You’re otherwise totally right though.

        • bassomitron@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          Ahh, I always forget that Unity has industrial product services/solutions, that makes sense. Thanks for clarifying that!

          And yes, AWS is Amazon’s bread and butter (unfortunately). I can only hope that one day they’re completely dethroned, but I doubt anyone could ever compete with them and Microsoft at this point (and even if a startup managed to make a vastly superior product, either of those two would just buy them out anyway). I think even Google’s cloud service is only a fraction of what AWS and Azure pull in, I could be wrong though.

    • qooqie@lemmy.worldEnglish
      81·
      1 year ago

      I completely agree, old school RuneScape does this very well and I wish more companies tried to engage their users as much as those devs do

    • kingthrillgore@lemmy.mlEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      You know, companies could avoid situations like this if they just engaged directly with their fanbases more, proposing ideas and collecting feedback.

      Good news: Apparently Unity did engage with its developers behind closed door for a whole year, they told them this was a bad idea; internally the execs were told this was a bad idea, and here we are.

    • webhead@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I feel like it’s pretty obvious this was a greedy and terrible idea. The fact they proposed this at all alone is enough to never trust them again. It’s not that they didn’t know. They knew. No one would be okay with this cash grab and they know it. They just didn’t realize HOW big the pushback was going to be but they DID know what they were doing was wrong.

      • Candelestine@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        This is probably going to improve, not decrease, their profitability. They wouldn’t have been so blase about burning all those bridges otherwise.

        Yeah, they make revenue from game devs, but there’s costs there too. If the costs are too high compared to their industrial contracts, then the smartest move is to kick all their game dev customers out. While preserving as much general public goodwill as possible.

        So, how else could they escape the game engine business? The method they chose would be more effective than any other I can think of. It preserves a trickle of game dev revenue and makes them look silly instead of backstabbing. When a proper backstab was actually the desired result, but too bold to actually say they wanted.

        My hypothesis anyway.

    • candybrie@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I’m sure even floating the idea would have been bad. One of the biggest problems with the unity changes was that they were retroactive. That they can even change the fee structure so dramatically after you’ve already built and shipped your game should give anyone using them pause. I don’t think people really considered that as a possibility before.