SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Unity (NYSE: U) (the “Company”), the world’s leading platform for creating and growing real-time 3D (RT3D) content, today announced that John Riccitiello will retire as President, Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and a member of the Company’s Board of Directors, effective immediately. James M. Whitehurst has been appointed Interim Chief Executive Officer, President and a member of the Board. Roelof Botha, Lead Independent Director of the Unity Board, has been appointed Chairman. Mr. Riccitiello will continue to advise Unity to ensure a smooth transition.
I haven’t followed the topic beyond the initial backlash - has Unity totally / partially gone back on the changes?
Yes, they retracted the original policy changes with one of those boilerplate “we’re listening to the community” apologies. But the fact still remains that they have done it once and could just as easily decide to do it again in the future. One of the biggest reasons people shifted to Godot is because it’s free and open source. Godot (like many other free open-source softwares) had struggled with adoption until now. But now that Godot has exploded in popularity and game devs have begun learning it, the hardest hurdle is already passed and there isn’t much incentive to switch back to Unity.
It’d be like if there was a mass exodus from Windows to Linux. And then Microsoft apologized for whatever caused the exodus, but everyone had already installed and learned the basics for Linux. There would be very little incentive for everyone to change back to Windows, because as Linux gets more popular and development progresses, it gets easier to use and more robust.
The biggest hurdle for switching to a new platform is overcoming user apathy. After all, users will choose to use what they already know, even if it’s slightly inconvenient. That’s why the first phase of pretty much any software launch is making it look similar to something that already exists. If you can greet users with a familiar UI, they’ll be more likely to consider adoption. But Unity managed to actively drive users away from their platform (and into the arms of an open-source competitor) so the biggest hurdle has already been jumped.
Mostly. The runtime fee now only kicks in after $1 mil, and you are limited to a 4% cap, and they are honoring the old EULAs, so if you want to avoid the fee, you just stay on the current version of Unity. They can still eat my farts, but this is much better and won’t kill a bunch of games the way it would have before.
Somewhat… Not completely but most of the really bad parts were changed https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/09/unity-makes-major-changes-to-controversial-install-fee-program/