Developers Enraged by Unreal Engine Plug-in's Broken Promise

I bought Oceanology last year for a one time fee of £150 under the reasonable expectation that any subsequent updates would be free.  

After Galidar Studios announced that they would be expecting customers to pay twice for the same product in order to keep Oceanology compatable with Unreal beyond version 5.4 I have started the regretable steps of stripping out the plug-in entirely from my work.  

I also left them a 1 star review on the Epic Marketplace warning other buyers.  In response to this Galidar have replied with "This decision was made because the product was no longer generating enough income" and then banned me from their discord community, which I was forced to join in the first place due to their dodgy review manipulation scheme in order to access the scant documentation that did exist about the plug-in.  

So now I am a paying customer that has been blocked from all documentation to a product I legally own.  Galidar is going to be crushed by rival water tech developers entirely due to their own greed so good riddance.

0

Macleod Michael

·a month ago·

I am the developer Galidar, I appreciate the publication of this article but I must deny 2 sections of this article

( In our community you can find a channel called manual-verification where we indicate that the verification process must be carried out exclusively in the questions section and it is directly clarified that verifying in the reviews section is prohibited.)

Galidar has been criticized for a questionable way to access documentation, requiring users to leave a review in the digital store in order to "verify" themselves, but this system has been removed, so perhaps paying anew will as well, but I doubt it.  


(Regarding this section you may notice on Reddit that my Galidar account never mentions that you have to buy again, This is a false statement)

"[The developers] deleted their "you must pay us again" messages, which got a ton of negative emojis. ... Customers who left negative feedback were banned from the server. Even customers, who just left negative emojis on their message, were banned," said one Reddit user.

Although the article may be casual, the information is not completely true or at least not complete, since Oceanology 6 was created from scratch and is different from Oceanology 5, you can find our Changelog channel where we show the life process of the 2 plugins over time 2019 to 2024, Not to mention that the publication of this article does not belong to Oceanology or the Official creator so I could have a lot of suggested information.

0

Reset Galidar

·a month ago·

This is very similar to what Movella did with Xsens users.

First they sold their suits with unlimited access to their proprietary software (essential to export any data out of the suit) and then they gradually introduced quite absurd paywalls.

The price gradually went up from 0$, to 250$, then to 500$ (per month) over the span of 3/4 years, often without even making an announcement, until some users started complaining.

In some cases, they literally just changed their price overnight and hoped to get away with it.

A few months ago they increased the pricing again, introducing a minimum spending of nearly 2200$ for a 3 month period, and removed the month by month subscription, as some users have reported.

Many users now cannot afford to use the suit they have paid full price for, and quite a few are trying to sell it on ebay hoping to recoup part of their investment.

Whatever reason there is behind changing pricing model should not affect existing users to the point they cannot use the product they purchased in the first place.

0

Grossi Matteo

·a month ago·