Unity silently removed clause that let you use TOS from version you shipped with

Every now and again I see someone on this site saying things along the lines of &quot;it&#x27;s a shame that programmers in general are so unwilling to pay for quality tools&quot;, and I feel myself tempted to agree.<p>Then something like this comes along and it becomes clear why it&#x27;s so important that everything we rely on is, at the least, free from &quot;I changed the deal&quot; events.

The first comment of this FAQ thread is also talking about this.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.unity.com&#x2F;threads&#x2F;unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750&#x2F;#post-9288985" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.unity.com&#x2F;threads&#x2F;unity-plan-pricing-and-packa...</a><p>The FAQ is worth reading on its own (and very hard to believe as a Unity game dev, honestly, WTF).

Reality is that Unity loses vast sums of money year after year. Know that if you develop with them, you are tying your company to a company that is vaporizing money by developing their platform year after year.<p>If you are going to develop with them, then you should want them to earn a stable profit, so their platform is around for you. You may not agree with this pricing structure, but you should hopefully want them to make money and raise their prices somehow.<p>However, I think it&#x27;s perfectly rational to conclude that they are an unstable partner that isn&#x27;t earning a profit, and it&#x27;s too risky to tie your development to them as this article sort of suggests.<p>I just strongly suggest you either are in favor of them raising their prices somehow or switch providers, because losing over hundreds of millions of dollars every year is completely unsustainable.

I never thought I&#x27;d see Musks destruction of Twitter be beaten, this is unreal.

This kind of thing keeps happening with [semi] open, [semi] free products backed by a commercial company. That doesn&#x27;t make it good, but I wonder if the business model just doesn&#x27;t quite work.<p>It&#x27;s fine early on, especially if you have a funding backer (large company, generous VC etc). But eventually you need to produce revenue.<p>Worse still, once you realize this, you are perversely encouraged to lock in as many people into the &quot;free&quot; platform before pulling the rug. Even if that&#x27;s not your initial plan.<p>I sincerely feel for all the indie gamedevs, this must be terrifying, I&#x27;m only commenting on the broader problem.

It seems no company is shy of the inevitable enshitification when they get to a certain size

so basically using unity has become a legal&#x2F;risk liability especially for smaller studios ....<p>they are probably spending a non small amount of money on legal, marketing and other consulting ... how can you still f*-up that bad<p>like has there been a single company in history which charged per install (!= per license) and had long term success (and wasn&#x27;t a monopoly)

Wow that&#x27;s ugly, particularly the part about hiding the change in the repo history.

Unity used to be the symbol of indie developers rising against stifling Big Game. Now Unity is the incarnation of everything that made Big Game bad. Shame on you, Unity.

All this BS just reinforces the feeling I have that corporate executives have zero knowledge of the company they run.<p>How did unity leadership misjudge their market by so much?

I really hope one of the companies relying on Unity to make their billions sues them for this. They really need a reality check.

Why did this post disappear from the front page? I understand that this is now a heated topic, but I think it is good for people to know about things like this.

Would it make sense for some large studio to sue for specific performance of the contract they agreed to? I’d be surprised if unagreed TOS language were enforceable like this