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"We should have spoken with more of you and we should have incorporated more of your feedback before announcing our new Runtime Fee policy. Our goal with this policy is to ensure we can continue to support you today and tomorrow, and keep deeply investing in our game engine."

It is hard to think of a diplomatic response to this specific framing. Of course the first substantive paragraph was this. It's inevitable, and I'm convinced it's encoded into some fundamental physical constant.

If a company actually, once, for-real avoided this specific sort of mealy-mouthed, boilerplate-indirect-corporatese semi-apology, I would seriously consider using their product solely on that merit alone. I'm fairly certain I'm not the only one who feels that way, and it's sort of amazing that nobody appears to have figured that out.

Surely someone in some sort of corporate PR position at some company is reading this. Think about it. Seriously think about it.

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Edit: this isn't a personal criticism of the author either, I'm pretty darn sure that this the post was vetted and revised by at least one layer of PR and legal. The issue is an intractably systemic one that is not rectifiable by any individual. Outside of maybe the C-suite, I'm skeptical the that it makes any sort of sense to attribute blame to any individual for this type of corporate apology.

discuss

avalys|2 years ago

I’m curious, what would you recommend they should have said instead?

PoignardAzur|2 years ago

Not GP, but for a while I have thought that PR shitstorms should be treated like security breaches and outages.

So you do a blameless post-mortem where you outline what went wrong, your five whys, and what steps you are taking to make sure it doesn't happen again.

The Rust leadership did it right during the RustConf scandal. Key figures resigned (from leadership, not from their respective teams), changes in procedure were announced, process transitions were accelerated, etc.

Here Unity is just saying "here's somsome decisions we're lightly amending, sorry you got upset".