I wish I had a large enough Twitter following to make a public claim about this before Unity "went back" on the first version of the recently-announced pricing changes, but I was nearly certain this was an intentional move to make the "Update on our update" second version more palatable.
There's probably a wiki link somewhere to the Proper Noun PR phenomenon in business school for this strategy, but the "terrible plan then less terrible plan but still worse than before the initial terrible plan" strategy seems like essentially a confirmation Unity is not to be trusted for small developers. It's sad to lose a great dev community but it sounds like BUG is making the right call here.
I remember a game developer on a podcast saying that business relations in the field where not just about the money, and commitment and proof of perseverance was the strongest currency.
Basically each game developer is gambling their time and livelyhood, and no one would start a game studio just to make money (that would be crazy given the odds). In this respect, a platform has to also show they're commited and will fight in the trenches with everyone else when winter comes (basically the exact opposite of Stadia...).
Unity playing with developers' trust feels like showing your pregnant wife divorce papers. You can retract it and apologize, but it will never be the same from there after.
I might have heard it a few times, but the only instance I clearly remember is from a Japanese podcast [0] with a former Sega engineer, who then went to Microsoft and stayed in the gaming sphere, sith Stadia being one of the latest project he worked on.
He mentions an FAQ used to discuss between devs and an newcommer in the console market (I assume xbox) going like:
Q: Won't you quit the market as soon as you see how hard it is ?
A: We'll do this to the bitter end. As long as I'm on this team this project will keep going.
There is no way this was intentional. First you’d have to argue that only the top execs were aware of this, because a bunch of Unity employees quit due to this. Secondly, if it was a form of anchoring, they did it in the worst possible way. The problem wasn’t really the numbers, it was the base idea of using installs and having it apply retroactively. If they had just wanted to anchor they could have come out with a plan at 5% revshare or something.
They can't ever introduce any revenue sharing because they promised not to do that and would be immensely vulnerable to lawsuits if they ever went back on that promise. This was their attempt to do something that doesn't technically count as revenue sharing.
Yeah I agree with you on this. This might have been the CEO too proud to not go back on his strong words against revenue share. That said the alternative they presented is a really stupid alternative. I don't think anyone has argued that Unity shouldn't be able to make money or increase their fees if necessary, but they should have followed their word on "stay on the terms you signed up to" and not do such a crazy version of fee increase as they did (install fee is a really stupid metric and that the install fee didn't have a roof was really bad).
They had already promised to abide by the terms of the license in force at the moment it was agreed to, so the fact that they promised not to do something does not stop them, apparently.
Someone who agreed to a prior version of the license will always be able to abide by that version of the license. The fact that they removed the provision going forward is just them trying to lock-in future customers.
I just wanted to highlight it wasn't for just new customers like you wrote but potentially every game in development using Unity. That's a massive difference.
> Also I’m not sure how are “promises” legally binding unless they are part of a contract?
You'd be surprised. Claims that are made as part of any marketing material or promotion can absolutely result in lawsuits if someone built their business on that claim and then Unity screwed them over. In that way at least, Unity is liable for the things that they say in a public capacity.
Most contracts I've seen have clauses that specifically say that you are agreeing that the contract is limited to the terms in the contract itself and waiving everything else so you are probably out of luck there.
It’s known as promissory estoppel. The main reason promises are often not binding is that you can’t prove the other party said it. If you can prove the other party said it, and you “reasonably” relied on their statements, and suffered damages because their statements were false, you can recover those damages from them.
>First you’d have to argue that only the top execs were aware of this, because a bunch of Unity employees quit due to this.
This doesn't follow - it's entirely possible that the execs planned to do this, a bunch of dev's said "that's insane and we'll quit if you do this", the execs followed through, and the devs followed through on their threats to quit.
Or someone may have postulated that people would quit over this change, and that wasn't considered a deal breaker at the time. Depending on how cynical we feel, they may have viewed people quitting as a positive; people who won't play ball with the new vision leave the company.
> First you’d have to argue that only the top execs were aware of this.
They would have to be, because deniability is important for a gambit like this. I'm not sure how you would announce "we're going to psychologically manipulate our customers" to the team anyway.
Stop using Hanlon's Razor. The only thing it cuts is the people using it over and over again. Say it with me: stupidity is weaponized so as to be indistinguishable from malice.
These are both exactly what I had in mind. DITF was specifically something I'd definitely read about but couldn't remember the name for. Also think this reply correctly identifies that anchoring bias is the underlying more generic version of this effect / tactic.
Thanks!
Edit: Specifically, reading through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negotiation#Tactics, I believe both the "Highball/Low-ball or Ambit claim" and "Anchoring" sections describe the phenomena I was thinking of.
Thanks to you, I learned and named some interesting concepts today.
I also found that vaguely explaining to GPT-4 the description you start with, also produced the proper names for me. Unstructured querying that I could not Google-Fu
This is purely down to C-suite's arrogance and moving into extraction mode. And not understanding their core audience. As Cory Doctorow said - enshittification.
Otherwise they would have released the 2nd update faster, since they would have prepped it beforehand to reduce the pressure and bad PR building up over multiple days.
Most if not all governments also play this card. Fictional example: "we'll raise the tax to 10%" sh-t hits the fan as expected "after careful considerations we'll "only" raise it to 8%" everyone is cheerful thinking they made decision-makers change their mind. A similar version: when they promise to do something knowing it's impossible to achieve, then sell it as "they don't let us do it but trust us we'd have done it otherwise". All in all, the shocking thing is how effective this is despite having been in practice for (probably) centuries and centuries.
I was also considering this, but while this strategy works wonders on the consumer, I don’t know how well it works in more B2B offerings.
Video games specifically get away with this because, as we saw with Diablo 4, people are going to give game companies money regardless how bad and unpalatable the game is.
Man. My Reddit account became limited in the Diablo subreddit for saying that I cancelled my preorder after the beta.
Historically, subreddits were run by community volunteers because people were tired of being censored on official forums. Now subreddits are the official channel more often than not, and we're back to square one.
Some of us saw what was going to happen with D4. It was pretty obvious.
After DI, and D3, to expect D4 to launch in any decent state would have been naive at best.
I've said as much in the Diablo subreddit. D3 is now a good game, if it is what you are looking for. It's a fun romp, but... It isn't a truly heavy ARPG. If you want that POE is calling you.
Diablo 4 was great. I put probably 50+ hours into it and enjoyed it a lot.
I also completely ignored the opionion of whatever communities existed for it, because they ALWAYS complain and turn toxic, especially for Blizzard games. It’s inevitable and says very little about the actual game. Same thing happened with Overwatch 2 as well. It’s a great game yet somehow has only 10% positive reviews on Steam.
It is okay to like and enjoy a game that the majority of the playerbase does not, I've had similar experience in multiple games, mostly MMORPGs and ARPGs with expansions but that does not take away from the experience of other players.
It comes down to personal preference. If you find yourself liking a game/expansion when most of the playerbase does not, it is best to avoid online forums/subreddits where the game is put on full blast (sometimes unfairly) becuase people are extrememly emotional, when the best thing for the to do is to walk away and play games they enjoy, it is just a game the stakes couldn't be any lower.
50 hours is not the expectation from an ARPG mainline title. If their goal was to just push the story forward, fine. But that clearly isn’t what they were going for. From that perspective, it’s not great.
Overwatch got review bombed because they just remonetized overwatch 1 and did things they said they wouldn’t do. It’s actually a pretty good parallel to the unity story.
You think they want to pan the people handing them early review codes TOO hard given that it is how they make a living?
Often critics have little time to review a game, a few hours, etc... they have a ton of games to review, they'll use cheats in single player games, or play through on easy mode etc.
For a game like D4 that is played at the end game, and really the big problems will only show up later in the game... There's no way a review was going to be right.
Understanding what a critic can, and can not see is critical to understanding what they can tell us about a game. Personally, I give them some weight, but I've taken to waiting a bit and listening to people who love the genre speak about it.
When Raxx is panning D4... it's bad. Bad enough that 79 is a WAY overrate.
Strange, I heard from fans of 1&2 (and disliked 3) that Diablo 4 is excellent. How did you conclude that it is so bad and everyone who plays it is just a slave to blizzard?
I don’t think we can see the player numbers, but the number of people following D4 twitch streams has decreased by over 99% since launch. A lot of people played it - but almost everyone who played it has stopped playing it.
Personally I get it. I found D4 to be a fun, but bland and uninspired arpg. It has terrible class balance and skill balance. Despite a lot of promises, there’s almost no endgame to speak of. And there are basically no new ideas in D4 that weren’t already pioneered in D3 or path of exile. The art and music is beautiful, and the first few hours are definitely fun. But it’s not excellent by any means. It’s a bland, uninspired game lacking the depth, creativity and longevity that used to make blizzard games great.
Discussions online have had this nature ever since they went mainstream I think. Especially Reddit I mean, some of those more popular subreddits are run mostly by kids is what I make out of it. Maybe not kids in terms of age but people who never grew up. Censorship seems to be the natural order of things in online communities where people don’t see or know each other, and when a lot of the context gets lost in the text only format. Here on HN too. Too many people with flagging abilities just flagging anything they disagree with, and good luck getting any mod’s attention after that. Unless you dance around the topic and never spell out certain types of takes, your posts will get fagged if the official narrative doesn’t match, and you will be accused of flaming.
Unfortunately people have convinced themselves that some opinions -those they disagree with- are dangerous for others to read. From cancelling your preorder for a game after a beta to “let’s think twice about pharmaceutical companies’ motives”, there will be someone who thinks your motives are unclean, you’re an agitator, or full on evil, and therefor deserve to be silenced.
> Unfortunately people have convinced themselves that some opinions -those they disagree with- are dangerous for others to read.
Or more likely than seeing them as "dangerous" they recognize that if you allow opinions to be expressed, others may gain a new perspective by reading it or even adopt that opinion themselves.
Or in the case of HN, certain topics of conversation are censored or discouraged because they tend to lead to boring/repetitive/annoying/aggressive comment threads.
Censorship is necessary for a civil forum. If you don't censor, you get 8chan, a place full of nothing but vileness. All the shitty people congregate there because no one will censor them or ban them, and all the decent people leave.
Of course, we usually call this "moderation" instead of "censorship", but it's mostly the same, except it isn't done by a government.
So the quality of any forum just comes down to the quality of the moderation. Good moderators keep out the off-topic crap and general nastiness, shitty moderators ban people for saying they don't like the company's new game.
One man's nastiness is another's joke, or opinion. What people don't understand is that if you are ok with the idea of a so called "moderation" that's more on the limiting side, some other group of moderators will come later and apply he same rules but from the different side, and your sides ideas won't see the light of day. It's a very simple concept that people have forgotten why freedom of expression is the first amendment. The problem imo is that it doesn't translate well to online communities that are open to anyone. I'm sure people have thought about this endlessly before, but I don't know if there's any progress.
Online communities are communities like any other: they're a product of the people in them, and the people that control them. You may find some are more to your liking than others. There's no perfect way of doing moderation. If you don't like any kind of moderation at all, you're free to hang out on 8chan with the neo-Nazis.
I promise you I wasn’t. This exactly what I meant. You are in favor of censoring not only the “nasty”, but also what doesn’t go along the narrative you believe in. Nothing by different between that and the church in Middle Ages.
But I’m glad we got to the point where you show your true self :) for what it’s worth, I support your right to say and disagree, tho I think you need to find a better way to express yourself.
Yes, and you showed your true self too: you used this as an opportunity to push your anti-vax conspiracy theory bullshit. So again, go fuck yourself, troll.
We've banned this account for egregiously breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our request to stop.
Commenters here need to stick to the rules regardless of how right they are or feel they are. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll use the site as intended in the future.
> you used this as an opportunity to push your anti-vax conspiracy theory bullshit
I'm not anti-vax at all! What did I say that made you think so?
> So again, go fuck yourself, troll.
I'm not trolling at all. And you're breaking multiple HN guidelines in your last three replies: name-calling, dismissiveness, snark, and you're definitely not maintaining a respectful tone.
Maybe you're the one that needs to be hanging around on 8chan?
It could be both: a stupid anchoring idea driven by greed and hubris.
But the fact that they tried to hide the original terms suggests to me they thought they could get away with the original plan, despite its obvious illegality.
I don't think the potential gains from the rolled back stunt will even remotely outweigh the damage done to their reputation. Maybe if they are lucky they manage to extract some short time win out of the game developers they fucked over, but in the long term they will have a hard time finding paying customers.
For me the whole thing reeks of a decision by the classical manegerial narcissist, that thinks they (and by extension their company) are important because it is them and not because of a value they deliver to those using their product.
Never make that mistake. Unless you sell commodity goods like toilet paper your relationship with your customer is to be treated as a valuable asset. You totally are allowed to increase prices, but if the existence of your customer depends on it, maybe consider doing so in a predictable manner (e.g. "in one year the price will increase to X amount"). This way customers don't feel betrayed and can decide whether they will stay with you on a rational basis.
Given that we deal with advertisers now, I would agree that this is very likely. This theory might increase appeal and make the first proposal more palatable, but developers aren't stupid and many know, that the engine got far less dependable to a point where alternatives are more attractive.
Yes, thank you, it was bothering me I could not remember the label for this. The 'update' and responses all felt like a planned and intentional campaign with the disaster/consequences being completely miscalculated by Unity.
"More importantly, we've seen how easily and flippantly an executive-led business decision can risk bankrupting the studios we've worked so hard to build, threaten our livelihoods as professionals, and challenge the longevity of our industry. The Unity of today isn't the same company that it was when the group was founded, and the trust we used to have in the company has been completely eroded."
Profoundly sad, and completely avoidable. Have never seen a company so quickly and completely just throw away all of their public good will.
Reminds me of something I once heard a VP say at a very old, established company. Something along the lines of, "Our brand is trust. It took 90 years to build it, but it would take just one day to destroy it."
The point he was making was that this old, established company's biggest asset was its brand, and its brand identity was just "trust" (they made professional products, and others could undercut them, but pros would always return to buy from them because they knew they would get what they paid for).
It's the kind of attitude I think every toolmaker (software or otherwise) should keep in mind. Professionals value trust more than they do dollars in their pocket, and the companies with the best reputation and longevity understand that.
But also that company was privately owned by a family, and their name is still over the front door. I think that when the execs answer to people whose name is synonymous with the products and culture of the organization, avoiding short term profit motivated garbage strategy is part of your MO.
As an example here, my father and grandfather used to swear by Craftsman tools. No matter the context, if there was a Craftsman version, they'd go for it because they implicitly trusted the quality.
Then the Craftsman brand downshifted its production quality to compete in price and their reliability fell through the floor. Now my family will skip over Craftsman entirely even if it's competitive in price, since the breach of perceived trust soured them on the brand so completely.
Lowe's supposedly honors the Craftsman lifetime warranty. I haven't tried it, last time I needed to use the warranty was 30 years ago when in the middle of some car repair job I was doing I took the busted wrench into Sears, still dressed in my grimy clothes I was wearing and covered in grease, I handed them the broken wrench and they simply handed me a new one. No questions asked, no paperwork. They handed me a new one and I walked out the door.
I don't doubt there are plenty of experiences that went the wrong way, but wanted to share an alternative anecdote that went well.
I bought a brand new ~$900 GE dishwasher last year (for a non-intended purpose) and needed to take it apart - for reasons.
IMO, the engineering in this thing was just marvelous. It was almost entirely tool-free click/snap fittings for full disassembly and reassembly. The parts were good quality molded, stamped or machined. It was clearly a master class in balancing competing trade-offs (price, assembly labor, reliability, noise, power, efficiency, etc). The simplicity of the thing was really remarkable.
Water falls into the side at whatever rate your tap delivers, and when a pressure sensor in the reservoir indicates enough volume to start, the thing begins. It does this a few times, pumping, re-pumping, heating and replacing that reservoir depending on the selected cycle, but overall, the thing is just incredibly simple and (hopefully, somewhat?) reliable.
In Haier's case they bought way more than "just" the GE sticker. Haier is still using factories built by GE Appliances for many of their GE branded appliances and in many cases using the same people/processes/pipelines as before.
There's still plenty of nuance in these rebadging situations. It's also hard to tell without following a lot of business news whether the new owner just bought "the stickers" or bought all the original factories or bought some complicated deal in between.
While I was pleased with this particular purchase, my ability to trust any brand in general has been diminishing with age and each new betrayal of that trust.
I have a growing heuristic that is (at least in part) inversely related to number of employees and the time a company has been publicly traded.
On the bright side, due to how the Power Tool industry works, that Craftsman is in many cases the previous gen Dewalt for 1/3 the price. Others are Porter Cable in red and without a sales rep. I’m tied to Ryobi batteries but I happily pick up Craftsman corded tools when those are an option.
Lol, yeah, if you Google “who owns which power tool brands” you can find the Rosetta Stone of tool brands to figure out which cheaper brands come from the same factories as the expensive stuff. It’s a web of deception for sure.
I’d totally bring one back if it failed because they forgot to harden it or something. Put it in some wood and the first time you use it the threads reverse because the metal is so soft.
It is plausible that it did not live up to reasonable expectations in some way. Equally likely that someone was being dishonest though.
Example: I once returned a board that I had cut in half. It was window trim with a shaped profile, and I had previously purchased and installed some of the same SKU before. When I went to install my freshly cut board next to the first ones, it was a little too obvious that it was from a different batch or manufacturer with a slightly different profile.
Same thing happened with Canadian Tire's "Mastercraft" brand. I think it was always viewed as a Craftsman knock off, but they used to have a lifetime warranty and pretty good quality. I now mostly regard Mastercraft as disposable junk.
Far too many companies these days are willing to burn down their brand for some quick bucks. It's so common that I'm sure it's part of the MBA curriculum.
It makes a difference. If you start with several quality brands and one of them sells out, you can switch to one of the others. If everyone pulls the same shit, there's nowhere to go.
this also happens on day to day consumer grade stuff. new brands of hotdogs will be yummy, the next batches will be shitty. same with bread from bakeries.
it's crazy how the loss in quality begets them increased profits in nthe short term, but costs them their entire business in the long term.
the high quality products can be the loss leaders, and they can just commoditize the compliments.
why would you reduce the size of bread, when you can just sell me overpriced peanut butter, jams, and spreads to come along with it?
a good lesson in trust and social psychology. when trust is built, people throw their money at you.
Sadly, I just assume that no company can be trusted these days.
It wasn't too long ago that the leadership of companies was often fairly stable. Now you see people rotating through every couple of years, rarely having to face the fallout of their bad decisions.
There are a few. Cockos makes an amazing Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) that competes with the top names in the industry.
While much of the rest of the industry is moving to subscriptions or jacking prices, Cockos has kept their prices extremely low and push new releases consistently.
A history of doing the right thing doesn't matter in the slightest, unless you can somehow guarantee their leadership won't change (or is unlikely to, at least).
> A history of doing the right thing doesn't matter in the slightest
If we all thought this way, certainly there'd be no incentive for anyone to do the right thing at all? A good track record should be rewarded, up until the point when it stops. You shouldn't trust any company indefinitely, but there are a few that you can trust "for now".
> > A history of doing the right thing doesn't matter in the slightest
> If we all thought this way, certainly there'd be no incentive for anyone to do the right thing at all? A good track record should be rewarded, up until the point when it stops. You shouldn't trust any company indefinitely, but there are a few that you can trust "for now".
They are doing "right thing" now so later when they dominate market they will be able to squeeze you like a lemon. Scorpion and a frog situation. It's just in their nature.
When does the “for now” stop? When is a brand actually a mark of a certain quality and when is it a facade for a swapped tooling line backed by a dozen products? We might have had reliable brands once, but no longer — now all products have to be evaluated individually.
I used to get some great stuff from icebreaker too, but after they were acquired by VF (also owners of Vans and North face), surprise, surprise, pretty much zero purchases since.
Because the owners are not in it for the long term. It’s an agent problem - if they can take a company with a 2% profit margin and juice that up to 10%, they’ve captured 5 years worth of profits in a single year. If it takes 5 years for the market to catch on that the company’s gone to hell, that’s 25 years worth of profits available for stock buybacks-err, new investments. The company’s dead within a decade, but the owners and investors got a bucket full of cash.
Under Clinton, there was an effort to tie executive compensation to company performance. The idea was good, but the consequence was that executives got paid much more in stock than in cash. That led executives to juice the stock price.
Your last point is very much true. If the family no longer controls their company, or even, just their founding members, it sets off a huge red flag for me. Sometimes, it's for the better. But, if I had trust in that company, it most likely stemmed from their work.
There are some nice examples of founding members going above and beyond to maintain their control, which may not look like it from the get go. Ubisoft comes to mind. I may not like some of their games, but I really appreciate the efforts of the Guillemot brothers.
On the other hand, founders stepping down as the company gets bigger or is faced with completely different challenges is usually for the better.
I can't imagine Daimler-Benz as it is now being led by the 3rd grandson of the original founder for instance. It would be a miracle if that person was well suited for directing a multi-national car manufacturer. Same way Microsoft wouldn't be the same if Bill Gates' son was at the helm.
If he's been groomed his whole life for running a multi national car company, there's reason to believe he would be better suited than just about anyone.
Thing is, education is hard and individual potential also varies a lot. We see this with royalty, where you have literally a country's resources to groom someone into being a high level individual who can deal with most social situations, but having them lead and expand a whole country in another issue altogether.
You'll have some Louis XIV sometimes, and many Louis XVI the rest of the time, with sprinkles of Charles II in the mix to spice it up.
You'd think, but as the old saying goes: clogs to clogs in three generations.
(Meaning: the first generation starts off poor, is self made, hands over to the second generation which is less dynamic, which hands over to the third who wreck it and end up poor clog wearers again)
I don't know how much people know or have heard about ironSource. It's kind of an open secret in Israel on how they built a company to profit by building what is essentially malware (installers disguised as OEM while they're really adding extra trackers to your computer). They always paid 25% more than most of the other tech companies, but still had issues recruiting because it takes a special kind of person to be willing to do these kinds of things
I didn't really understand the merger when it happened, but I have no doubt all these new policies are a result of the ironSource people integrating into Unity
The merger makes a ton of sense — Unity was super late to the game building their own Demand-Side Platform for ads, and that’s how you make money in mobile games now, so they had to buy their way out of the problem.
I mean, it’s horrible for consumers/gamers/developers, obviously, but from a business perspective it was the correct move.
I doubt this was a sensible business perspective at all. They would have different audiences to consider and they didn't. This fallout is pretty much the invoice for that strategy.
It may come up as one of the worst decision in the modern industry. Granted, time will tell and nothing is certain.
Well, clearly not, if the community is going to have a fallout with the product and never trust it again. You can have the most maggotty type of an ad company, if you don’t have shelf space to show ads you won’t be making money.
IronSource is the good guy of ad-tech. Anyone that says something else just don't know anything about it. You can ask google security team.
Apploving wanted to merge Unity instead of IronSource because they knew the combined power of Unity/iron and apple will hurt their business.
All the buzz now is due to apploving UniFree project...
"Good will" is an asset just like any other to be spent when the time is right. Sometimes a company will make the wrong bet and accidentally go out of business. Far more often there is a ton of backlash, their reputation goes in the tank, then they spend the next couple years building good will back up until the majority of people forget all about the past transgressions. Meanwhile the unpopular decision makes stacks of cash. Repeat the cycle ad-infinitum.
To clarify, I don't endorse this behavior, but unfortunately, it's the modern way of business.
I guess it's a gamble on whether you could gain users faster than you'd be losing them. Either way I don't think this can be the case with Unity due to how niche their product is with many alternatives (including free ones).
Just like you never step in the same river twice, you never do business with the same company twice. Staff and executives change over time, and companies shift for better or worse.
Should we hold grudges against brands for things totally different people did 10? 20? 50? years ago? That seems weird to me.
Unity specifically deserves loss of trust and all the pain they get. But in 5 years, or 10 years or whatever, should we assume they are less trustworthy than other companies because of what this group of managers did?
If you drink from a river and get cholera, would you drink from that river again in the future?
It might be fine! Maybe on that particular day, somebody with cholera had just taken a shit upstream, and the bacteria are totally gone now. But it's still a useful prior, and that's the case here with whom you choose to conduct business.
I think it's a question of burden of proof. You'd ordinarily not worry too much about cholera, but after an incident you'd want the water thoroughly and repeatedly tested. You probably would not say "eh, it's been 5 or 10 years, it's most likely fine."
Similarly you'd want some concrete evidence that a company has actually changed, in a degree sufficient to offset your negative prior, before you'd consider engaging in any further business with them.
But actually doing that research is a pain in the ass, so I think it's a reasonable strategy to simply prefer companies that haven't screwed you over wherever good options exist.
> If you drink from a river and get cholera, would you drink from that river again in the future?
No. Further, I'd stop drinking untreated water from all rivers. (Just answering your hypothetical. I spend a lot of time in the wilderness and wouldn't drink untreated water from a river or lake to begin with.)
This effect, though, has happened with software for me years ago. Enough bad actors exist that I've reached the place where I trust very few software houses (and I trust exactly zero SV-style companies). Not that all of those rivers are polluted, of course, but that it's impossible to tell which ones are and which ones aren't by looking at them.
I would never dare to start a business that depended on any of them. The risk is simply too great.
I was going to observe that another totally-understandable reaction to getting fucked in a business transaction (or getting cholera from untreated water) is to begin researching everyone you do business with (or testing/treating all the water you drink).
I may be stretching the limits of the analogy here, but either way that "verify, then trust" approach is more work than "adaptive blissful ignorance", and a lot of people aren't going to do it, or will at least slack off as the pain of the original incident becomes a more distant memory.
"verify, then trust" is problematic in a world where companies get bought and sold, management changes, business goals shift, etc.
The only protection against this is contracts, but when a company -- like Unity has done twice now -- decides to retroactively change the terms of existing contracts, that means that you cannot trust them at all going into the future even if they're solidly "good" right now.
The thing is, I think no amount of research would have pointed to this possibility. At least it would not a couple of years back. The mere fact that this group in OP exists/existed would have pointed to their trustworthiness.
There are limits to what open source can do too. Perhaps it's necessary, but not sufficient?
There's limited benefit to having the source code when the community has been splintered, and the future direction is contrary to your needs. Sure, you can make your own fixes, etc, but you no longer enjoy the leverage community development.
> There's limited benefit to having the source code when the community has been splintered, and the future direction is contrary to your needs. Sure, you can make your own fixes, etc, but you no longer enjoy the leverage community development.
And that's still better than being stuck with arbitrary price changes.
Does that actually happen all that much? In the cases I can think of (OpenOffice.org, ffmpeg, OpenWRT), the community ended up concentrating around either the original project or the fork (in other words, the community didn’t really splinter, just move).
Having a tarball of the source code for something isn't the same as having the community, the history, the culture, the processes, the infrastructure ... all the accumulated other stuff that makes up an open source project.
Without the concentration of diverse efforts that go into maintaining and advancing a project, having the source code (alone) is of minimal benefit.
> Should we hold grudges against brands for things totally different people did 10? 20? 50? years ago? That seems weird to me.
You've inverted the sense here, by treating reputation as something based on default trust and exceptional "grudges". What has really happened is that they've destroyed the exceptional positive reputation they spent the past decade and a half building. A new reputation can certainly be built over the next decade, but for now they're mostly back to the default state of deserving no trust.
Does it depend on the company culture, which can persist awhile?
For example, the first company that comes to mind has seemed to have shameless underhandedness deep in its DNA, and to exhibit its malevolent side each new chance it gets, as much as it can. This has repeated over the course of decades, and over multiple top leadership changes.
If it's true that certain kinds of underhandedness are in that company's DNA, to a degree unlike most other companies, I wonder how deep they'd have to decapitate the org chart, to cut out the roots of that culture. Including SVPs? VPs? Further? It's in the board, too?
I actually had a different company in mind. I'm much less familiar with Oracle.
The one time I bumped into Larry Ellison, he managed to come across as intensely competitive, in just a moment. I'd guess that's probably reflected in his company.
Does Oracle seem a steady in-your-face aggressive, and you know what you get?
Or is more a cyclic and plotting: in-your-face shameless when they can get away with it, and makes nice when they have to, while running long-cons (some of them very underhanded)?
Sounds like everyone knows roughly what the relationship with Oracle will be like. :)
Around some other vendors, there's collective loss of institutional (field) knowledge about what you're going to get.
I suppose contributing to this could be a lot of new people who aren't mentored-in as well as they could be.
Also, there's been a field shift towards many (most?) ICs and even managers/execs not being incentived to become aware of non-short-term implications of vendor and tech choices. Whether it's ICs driven by sprint metrics, startups motivated to rapidly throw up appearances of growth to hit funding rounds, or people job-hopping every 18 months before they see longer-term cause&effect.
I think a nice thing about Google is that it seems many people there still believe that to some degree.
We certainly believed it when Google started, and they were talking like the then-familiar Internet-savvy altruistic forward-looking engineer types.
Today, you can still see many examples of Google doing things well. (And of course many examples of things that we wouldn't have expected them to do, including some that would've gotten them ostracized.)
> Should we hold grudges against brands for things totally different people did 10? 20? 50? years ago? That seems weird to me.
It only seems weird because it's irrational, but the irrationality of vengeance is what has made humans the dominant species on the planet.
If your child is killed by a lion it makes sense to avoid lions. It makes no rational sense to seek out lions to kill, but guess what a human will do. And see what the result is.
Except when they let go a few key personnel and mandate culture change from above. It's not as enduring, unfortunately, even if most of us would like it so.
I used to be able to buy amazing handmade items for reasonable prices and reasonable shipping from actual people running small storefronts on Etsy.
Now it’s just another e-commerce site that’s been completely and utterly overrun with marked up Aliexpress junk and low quality copies of anything novel that gains the slightest bit of popularity. The few remaining authentic sellers now charge so much it’s laughable unless you’re wealthy enough that cost isn’t a concern.
I'm assuming you're being sardonic, but remarkably it's still a great place to buy live cuttings of succulents and other plants from enthusiasts.
In contrast to buying seeds off Amazon or eBay, where the plants that sellers are claiming they're shipping you seeds for are often just random weeds rather than the hilariously photoshopped or non-existent flowers/fruits shown in the product listing.
And the dumb thing is that if they had listened to the engineers who were telling them the customer base was going to freak out at this, the company could have avoided large parts of the drama, since a few of their fixes were not even really a change in plan, so much as better more clear wording.
The big drama causes
1. People assuming unity was going to add additional telemetry to track installs. (Reality: Unity seemed to always be planning on using App store numbers and the numbers from any opt-in unity services as the basis of their model). This one was a complete communication failure by unity.
2. Announcing a new payment model never before used by the industry. This alone (without looking at the details) is not a huge deal, but it makes people nervous.
3. This metric is hard to measure, and unity's initial announcement was basically that they would be estimating it in their sole discretion, which makes people uncomfortable. Their fix was to allow self reporting the data, which must be based on something that reliably approximates the revised install count definition.
4. Unclear definition of install was used. What they eventually settled on: once per unique end user per distribution platform (e.g. app store), was pretty much what Unity was going for anyway, but the initial announcement royally messed up here.
5. The metric was abusable, and there was apparently no cap to it. This was honestly one of the biggest issues. This got fixed by adding the 2.5% revenue share cap.
6. Trying to make this apply retroactively to previously published applications. This was the other biggest issue. This was especially bad because only a few years ago the company had another smaller scandal, and promised to allow people to keep using the terms of service of each version as it was when people downloaded it. Indeed, for a while this was explicitly part of the terms, and people who used those versions probably could get a court to side with them.
If they had listened to their engineers, I think they could have fixed/avoided 1, 4, and 6. Numbers 3 and 5 may have remained, still causing huge outcry, and eventually getting fixed, but at least if number 6 were addressed before initial announcement, it would not have been a loss-of-trust issue so much as a: you are a moron for proposing this without the needed backstop, and requiring companies to blindly trust your estimations.
#1 would have been much less of a problem if it weren't for the IronSource merger [0]. When you merge with a spyware company and then announce you're going to use a weird new metric, it's entirely reasonable for your customers to assume you'll be using the spyware to measure that metric.
> 4. Unclear definition of install was used. What they eventually settled on: once per unique end user per distribution platform (e.g. app store), was pretty much what Unity was going for anyway, but the initial announcement royally messed up here.
That was not a miscommunication though: it was brought up directly to Unity and the initial response was that it would be per install, per device.
Yes and no. In practice evidence suggests they were planning to heavily rely on app store install counts for games not using unity services, and thus for which they had no better data. This is part of the reason why they were being so cagey about how they would estimate the install counts, because they would be heavily using relatively crude approaches like that. (and also hadn't fully worked out the details).
For IOS, for example, reinstalls don't increase that counter. I'm not sure how it works with the Play Store.
They almost certainly said that reinstalls would could because they might count for some platforms.
Plus, as a user of the endproduct and not the engine, I am not keen of my installs getting tracked.
It has become quite normal to create device identifiers, some crazy people do it in the name of security even, but I resist this development where I can.
And that's why people like Jonathan blow and Casey Muratori have for so many years now warned game devs about this and learn how to make a game engine from scratch. Hopefully some listened.
Being wary of large corporate engines is a good piece of advice. "Make a game engine from scratch" is a terrible recommendation and shouldn't be linked to the first one. Every dollar and hour spent on a custom engine isn't being spent on the end result. There's a place for it, sure, for people like Blow who are in love with the craft--but most indie game devs don't want to make an engine, they want to make a game.
There are also costs to use the ecosystem of an engine, as you need training and experience. The main advantage is that an ecosystem exists that can provide advanced tooling and resource management. There are quite a few alternatives if it is just rendering and general media playback. There are some generic frameworks to develop games, but most rely on custom architectures. Adapting the read-to-use engine takes time as well.
KFC really isn't cheap anymore. I went there the other day with some friends and was aghast at the prices. We left and went across the parking lot to the grocery store and got a big platter of fried chicken and a tub of slaw for less than half the price.
You can probably get that for much cheaper and better quality from your local grocery store chain’s deli.
When I still worked in an office, the grab and go section at the grocery market really helped me cut down on food costs/expenses. I use the grocery story grab and gos on roadtrips too. Bathrooms, massive food and drink selection (with alternatives to pop), good quality and at better price than you’d get from any fast food chain. Publix, Big Y, Meijers are all favorites for me.
And tumblr, when they announced they would no longer support creators of "adult" content.
And (nearly) OnlyFans, when they announced they would no longer support creators of "adult" content (aka, "did a tumblr"). They just about backpedalled quickly enough, and had enough stickyness (no pun intended) from followers, to contain most of the damage.
I don't understand how it is possible to advance to a decision-making role if someone is stupid enough to attempt to remove porn from OnlyFans, the household name for amateur porn.
I think Unity did a lot more damage than any of the above. D&D is still a powerful brand, and while they angered hardcore fans and creators, the vast majority of roleplayers didn't even notice, and those are their real customers. Tumblr is apparently still around, and OnlyFans is still synonymous with amateur porn. But Unity has only those creators as their customers, and those stake their livelihood on their trust in the company, and with that trust gone, Unity could lose all its customers.
I'm still upset at Sony for cancelling Star Wars Galaxies. I avoid Sony products now. I know its immature of me and the product most likely would have been eclipsed by other mmo tech that was coming out but thats the emotional response.
> "Have never seen a company so quickly and completely just throw away all of their public good will."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner - head of a chain of jewellery shops described his company's products as 'total crap' and that speech tanked the shares by £500M in 1991 money - around $1.2Bn equivalent today.
Does that really help? Even when open-source, it's only a matter of time before an Oracle or Google or Microsoft or Meta takes it over (if they didn't develop it to begin with).
I wonder if it's less about the source code here but about the people involved, and how to prevent a consolidation of capital and power in the hands of greedy financiers. Maybe developing the projects as nonprofits (like Blender or Mozilla), or at least employee co-ownership rather than VC money or institutional funders?
If only the laid off FAANGers could pool their fat checks and start up something employee-driven and not subject to outside influences, in the style of Valve or similar. And preferably with legal protections against "selling out".
> Does that really help? Even when open-source, it's only a matter of time before an Oracle or Google or Microsoft or Meta takes it over (if they didn't develop it to begin with).
Of course it can help. For example, when Oracle bought MySQL, it was forked and we got Maria. When Emby pissed off people, it was forked and we got Jellyfin. There are plenty of other examples.
Whether or not you like these products, the point is that open source gives the community the ability to continue development if the original project gets bought and/or otherwise changes its philosophy for the worse.
MariaDB, OpenTofu, etc... Those are the exceptions.
Forking is easy. Maintaining a fork, keeping the quality and innovation alive, and the community involved is hard.
There are many more failed forks than successful forks. So saying "you can fork" is utopist at best. Sure you can, but you'll probably be the only one maintaining it and it will slowly rot as there won't be a community to keep it bug-free and compatible with new hardware/standards.
I think it's a self regulating system. If the product was so important and so many people relied on it (eg. Unity) where a cash grab by the Unity development team results in the entire community considering switching to a completely different product (eg. Godot), then I'm sure the community would rather fork the existing product and make it better. On the other hand, if the product wasn't that important or the cash grab wasn't that bad, then fewer people will be likely to fork and the current product will continue to be the mainline. Open source gives users more options which is always better.
EGCS was eventually merged back into GCC (or rather it became the new GCC?). I don't pay attention recently, but XEmacs was/is pretty active along with Emacs.
I haven't seen any evidence in support of the original argument, though. Which open source projects have been killed explicitly by Big Tech that they didn't originally create? Microsoft spent ages trying to kill Linux but never succeeded.
You don't need to innovate on the foundation of your product. It's a game engine: If it fulfilled your needs when you started, it's fulfilling your needs now. With open-source solutions A) you can't have the rug pulled from under you, as you have a perpetual license, and B) you can fix/modify/add things yourself if the business needs arise.
With a proprietary solution, you might get A, but you have zero hope of B. It's an objectively worse proposition.
If my business is making games, I don't want to fix/modify/add things to a game engine.
You do need to innovate on the foundation if you plan to maintain your game long term: new consoles support, new hardware support, obsolescence of old platforms, etc...
You do not need to innovate if you plan to let your game rot and become unplayable 10-20 years later.
Yes having a FOSS solution for the foundation would be ideal. That was not the topic of the discussion. The topic was about the claim "we can fork if we're not in agreement".
No, as a game developer you won't be forking and maintaining a game engine. No a "just fork it" is not a viable solution in the majority of cases as you need a strong community behind you and your fork to make it last long term and not rot after 2 weeks.
Actually it's quite common for game dev studios to make custom mods to engines (source code to Unreal engine available here for example: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ue-on-github). The idea with forking an open source engine as a game dev would not necessarily be to maintain it for the community, but to bring it in house and ensure continuity for your own projects.
That's fair, but if we consider the amount of game dev studio that have the resources (time and money) to do that, versus the amount of indie game devs and small studio who do not, I'm not sure that it's fair to say "you can just fork it".
The examples of successful forks are anecdotal, they are the exceptions not the rule. This is survivor's bias.
I can't think of a single example of an unsuccessful fork of a large project caused by a monetization change. So I am not convinced that success is the exception for that case.
> let your game rot and become unplayable 10-20 years later
Don't worry about it. Other people will literally solve that problem for you if they like your game enough no matter what you do. They won't even bother asking for permission.
Audacity made some bad decisions but the forks never got anywhere. That said, this particular issue was blown out of proportion, so the forks going nowhere isn't an issue.
> Even when open-source, it's only a matter of time before an Oracle or Google or Microsoft or Meta takes it over (if they didn't develop it to begin with).
True, but there's no rule that says you have to update when they do. You can just stick with what you have until/unless you find or create another option.
Ah, these comments again. Open source is great and I have my self contributed to several open source projects, but it is not the solution to everything. Products like Word/Excel/PowerPoint/etc, Visual Studio, Photoshop, Figma, Windows and Mac all have many open source alternatives, but the fact that these products and companies have been hugely successfully and continue to do so says something -- commercial companies can organize and reward work in a way hardly found in open source projects, and their products often provide added value (more features/specific support for certain workflows/professionally designed UX/product support etc) that can be rare or nonexistent in open source projects. For some thing that is as complicated as a game engine, maybe there is a reason open source solutions are not mainstream yet.
Open source solutions are not a magical solution to every problem. Open source solutions are often, if not more so, subject to the whims of just a few people.
Great advice… Unless you’re a game studio who wants to ship on PlayStation and Switch some day. If you want to build on an engine that lets you target proprietary platforms your options are, in practice, limited.
Providing these links without context, after claiming that MIT licensed engines won’t have any issues, sort of implies that open source engines can be used fine to target consoles.
The fact developers have been able to ship Godot games on console doesn’t help much unless those developers are willing to share whatever proprietary engine-to-console-SDK-interface code they wrote.
Unity and Unreal, in contrast, will happily license equivalent code to you.
I think this section of the second Godot link is worth pulling out and quoting:
> … it is impossible for Godot to include first-party console support out of the box. Even if someone would contribute it, we simply could not host this code legally in our Git repository for anyone to use.
> Additionally, it would not be possible to distribute this code under the same license that Godot uses (MIT) because this is in direct conflict with the proprietary licenses and non-disclosure terms that console manufacturers require to have access to the knowledge needed to write this code.
> To make it simple, it is not possible for Godot to support consoles as an open source project.
The Godot core developers have a company you can partner with for a Godot build for those platforms. It's not really a big deal if you're making the kind of money to make that port worth it.
> [...] sort of implies that open source engines can be used fine to target consoles.
That was my intention.
> The fact developers have been able to ship Godot games on console doesn’t help much [...]
Well, it demonstrates that it's entirely possible, either via DIY, hiring an in-house specialist or contracting to one of the companies who has already implemented the functionality.
> [...] unless those developers are willing to share whatever proprietary engine-to-console-SDK-interface code they wrote.
The third party porting companies are willing to "share" that code--for a fee. They could also do the same for free as long as they respect the terms of their contract with the console platform (which probably is along the lines of "don't disclose anything to people who don't also have a contact with the console platform").
A group of companies could even cooperate on this but we'd presumably not know the details.
> Unity and Unreal, in contrast, will happily license equivalent code to you.
Sure, but it's also neither free[0] nor Open Source, e.g.:
"Build and deploy to closed platforms such as Nintendo Switch™, PlayStation®, and Xbox®. An active Unity Pro subscription is required to access these build modules via developer platform forums."
The nuance of "it is not possible for Godot to support consoles as an open source project" is that "it is not possible for [the] Godot [Project] to support consoles as an open source project [but the Godot Enginecan be used on consoles if you write the support code yourself or license it from someone]".
Despite detailed explanations (from the devs) of the nuances, too many people interpret the situation as "you can't deploy Godot-based games on consoles" rather than "you can deploy Godot-based games on consoles but you can't get the code to do so from the Godot Project itself because vendors won't let it".
But perhaps for some people this isn't a significant distinction.
I mean, sure, but the situation is actually "we know multiple vendors who will compete & sell you what you need and if that's not satisfactory you can DIY".
At the end of the day the situation is entirely driven by the requirements of the console platform owners.
You can choose to:
* depend on a closed source proprietary game engine & console integration and associated risks/benefits; or,
* an open source game engine & console integration via one of multiple vendors or DIY and associated risks/benefits.
W4Games, owned by one of the core developers of Godot, will happily license a plugin module that allows you to do console export. So there's no difference here, it's just a plugin instead of part of the engine itself.
Under terms that are even less predictable and subject to capricious change than those of the major commercial engines.
The question developers are asking themselves is ‘if I start out building a game for the next two or three years, when I come to commercialize this, will I have palatable and viable options to do so?
Unity’s random adjustment of their terms is precisely what is driving developers away. But at least Unity is making it clear what those terms are. ‘Talk to one of us privately when you get to the point where you’re ready to port to a console’ is even less certain.
Can't Godot org itself offer the commercial support required for those projects that want/need to release on commercial platforms? It's not like they have to add those device-specific exporters on their main repo.
A key aspect is that neither Godot (the project--which doesn't exist as a legal entity) nor Godot Foundation (which exists as a legal entity but AIUI has restrictions on what activities it can perform) would be able to satisfy the requirements of the console platform vendors in terms of qualifying for access to a platform SDK.
The issue is that console SDKs are under NDA, meaning that open source tools can't target consoles because they would reveal details about the SDK. Some projects have workarounds for this, for example SDL maintains a private Switch port that you can get access to by emailing one of the maintainers with proof you're a Nintendo licensee.
There is no one open source, but various open source licenses.
Nintendo Switch and Playstation and titles from Sony and Nintendo incorporate BSD-licensed open source code, so it is obvious that “open source is banned” is not true. It’s only GPL and other viral licenses that lawyers argue is too risky, because it might require disclosing proprietary source when linked.
Look at the other comments in this thread, the reason is more complicated than that. Open source tools might be fine but game engines can't be open source if they want to support console builds because that would disclose proprietary information.
> game engines can't be open source if they want to support console builds because that would disclose proprietary information.
Technically, they could. It would require someone who hasn't actually licensed the SDK, and so aren't subjected to an NDA, to reverse-engineer things and produce their own implementation under an open source license.
Certainly would be an enormous project, but it is well within the realm of the possible. It's been done with complex systems before.
> that doesn't make it a viable alternative for the games industry.
It makes it legally viable, in that it would allow the production of an SDK that isn't restricted by any NDA, and therefore could be incorporated into opens source projects.
Not banned, just that every build platform has to be supported and not every open source project prioritizes each platform.
Godot, for example, doesn't support console builds, only working with a third party to facilitate porting to those platforms (that may change in the future now that they're getting a lot more support from the community after all this).
The only thing that could save face in this situation is the immediate removal of the CEO and any leadership that allowed this to happen. Short of that, Unity will always hold this badge of shame in the eyes of developers.
It's really more nuanced than that - from a business/financial perspective.
"goodwill" is a major component of a companies financial accounting. It's an asset and can be invested or squandered like any other asset. A large and well-run public company will have a risk management team evaluate the impact of major decisions on the financial health of the business. Clearly Unity did not do that. They are public, right? Seems to me (IANAL) this is a breach of fiduciary duty that could be actionable.
I'm sure even before Musk, most people considered Twitter the equivalent of soap opera. It was bad. It was tasteless. It was a time waster. But people just need to have something to scroll.
Unity, on the other hand, was actually loved by some devs. Of course it was buggy from time to time, but it was huge time-saver especially for mobile games.
I know you’re being sarcastic here, but indie game developers really don’t get compensated well enough unless they break very big. Most keep doing it for the passion.
To price your product so you make money to “stay afloat” with your tens of thousands engineers working mostly on ad tech or non-core stuff, while your customers are barely scraping is typically very bad strategy yes. You know how you can tell? They’ve lost a ton of business and the brand damage they’ve suffered is beyond that even. Maybe Unity will stick around, but it’ll be the engine those ad filled mobile casino games use, good luck finding developers who’d be happy doing that for the rest of their life.
I have a hard time coming up with a worse decision in the history of game industry.
Why did it come to this? Just more profits? I mean the landscape is highly competitive with free tools getting better and Unreal Engine eating all the highlights. Unity's stock price was even before this decision a third of it's all time high.
I mean there must've been a dramatic cultural twist quite some time ago. That would've lead champions to leave and the codebase comes crashing down. This will be a great lecture material for business schools, goes in the same bucket as Nokia.
It seemed to be specifically aimed at free to play mobile games - and if studios really had to pay per install, it would basically kill this entire genre on Unity (because it would count every install of f2p games, even though people aren't buying them - so the economics don't work out, and the more popular the game, the harder is to pay the install fees).
Except that.. they later announced that they would waive the install fees if mobile devs migrated to their ad solution. So they didn't want anyone to actually pay the install fee; the idea is that game devs would need to choose between shutting down their game, or using Unity's ad tech.
So in the end this was all a ploy to get ad revenue, which is analogous to revenue share, but for f2p games.
Here are some sources for this (I just found at Google, but I saw this discussed in many places)
burning a real game engine business that enhances an industry (a lot of new talent is coming in through learning unity) to pivot into the advertising scam as the big players desperately try to diversify... that's some weapons grade MBA short sightedness.
advertising in mobile games too, that's like barely under the table gambling. You'd be more ethically clear making missiles.
One could argue that Microsoft's "no game sharing" decision at the beginning of Xbox One, right off the heals of a generation that experienced both high success, but also extremely high costs (RROD recalls, estimates say it cost them over $1.1B), was a bigger one. It seems unnaturally likely to me that single decision by Mattrick's Xbox leadership is the largest component to Xbox One's relatively lower success (58M sales, versus 102M PS4 and 84M XB360), and has cascaded to, possibly permanently, suppress Xbox's potential (Series is at 21M to PS5's 41M).
I tend to think that decision was worse, because it was Just Bad. There was no reason they had to do it. It had very little prior art (digital games, naturally, always did this, so non-zero). It was a pure, absolute failure to read the room, and the XB1 era had so many decisions like this that it seriously paints the picture that Xbox is alive today literally only because of Spencer and despite Microsoft's leadership at the time (pre-release, Xbox One also required Kinect to be plugged in. This was walked back, but it still shipped in the box, lowering margins and depressing sales volume for no reason.)
In comparison: Unity has been in trouble for a long time. They've never posted a profit, at least since going public, and have instead accumulated an aggregate of over $2B in losses. Their main competitor (Epic) is a technological savant of a company, which has a literal money-printing machine in their closet to finance engine development. They never really broke into AAA game production, partly because Unreal is just better at hyper-scale development, and partly because AAA game shops are surprisingly welcoming to in-house engine development.
In that framing, this outcome seems inevitable. There's a reason they made this decision; a very real, dollars and cents, reason, and backing away from it (especially after the outcry, but even without it) isn't going to save them. The best, but unlikely, outcome for Unity and their customers is deep layoffs, focusing hard on ease of use instead of technological prowess, spending years rebuilding the trust they lost, and depressing their stock price enough that they can find a path to going private without losing control. The much more realistic outcome is: deep layoffs, coasting the product, monetizing every addon they can outside of the toxic "core pricing structure", and private equity acquisition.
The dumbest thing about Microsoft's "no game sharing" thing is that they could have just waited. Digital game sales made up 90% of game sales in 2022, which can't be shared.
People don't really seem to care about not being able to share games, but they hate being told they can't do something.
You can share digital games. The PS5 allows you to share games with one other console if your account is logged in on that console. Steam allows you to share games with friends (or family I can’t remember). You and your friend just can’t play the same game at the same time, which is the same way it would be if you shared a disc anyways.
> Steam allows you to share games with friends (or family I can’t remember). You and your friend just can’t play the same game at the same time, which is the same way it would be if you shared a disc anyways.
Steam doesn’t allow you to share specific games, only your entire library (excluding any games that the seller has made unsharable.)
The dumbest thing about Microsoft's "no game sharing" fiasco was that they let it be PR spun into "no game sharing" and people remembering that fight that way. It was never about no game sharing: it was about building a robust digital game sharing system (because Microsoft knew digital game sales were already the majority).
The original Xbox One plan would have been an unprecedented amount of support for digital game sharing. They were working on something a lot like "Steam Family Sharing" but taken to an extreme: you didn't have to prelink Xbox libraries with your friends and manage a "family" of accounts, you just "email your buddy" a loan of a game you owned. You could even sell it to your buddy directly there in your game library while they were borrowing it (and Microsoft would get a small cut).
Microsoft's mistake was tying all these new digital game tools system-wide to physical purchased games too. They decided that discs would just be digital unlocks and disc loans/resales would have to go through the same digital system as every other game. (Similar to Steam making all Half-Life 2 sales just Steam unlocks; but Microsoft's mistake was making it console-wide rather than just their own games.) They thought it would be easier (for themselves, and conceptually for users) to manage one combined system of digital loans/resales than the confusion of mixed cases like someone buying a disc for the base game but then a bunch of DLC through the digital store.
When the physical stores went angry that physical copy resales would need to be tracked in Microsoft's digital systems and resold through that and that Microsoft would get some or all of their cut, they spun the whole plan as "no game sharing" and won on that PR. But that original plan would have been the largest game sharing system on any digital goods platform if it actually had been delivered as promised. It's just incredibly sad that Microsoft didn't figure out a better answer to that "hybrid" problem, didn't have a great PR fix for the spin from the pawn shops that at the time still owned too much of the game sales market, and had to kill the digital game sharing system in its infancy to "fix" the physical disc resale "problem".
This.
."In comparison: Unity has been in trouble for a long time. They've never posted a profit, at least since going public, and have instead accumulated an aggregate of over $2B in losses. Their main competitor (Epic) is a technological savant of a company, which has a literal money-printing machine in their closet"
The Unity actions are purely financial.
That CEO was the one that Enshitified EA, but it was profitable.
Eventually it comes down to survival, you can be the most trusted, loved, adorated company, but if you can't pay employees, what good is it whether you self enshitify to stay alive, or die.
For the first 2-3 years, both Microsoft and Sony sold every single unit they could produce. Not sure if that generation of consoles is valid market data.
I grant the premise that Unity sucks and has made changes that make it much harder to be an indie developer using its runtime.
That said, I don't understand the decision to shut the group and encourage members to move to a more general game dev group instead. If the reason is "everyone stopped using Unity, we don't have any members" then I understand, but the press release didn't say that. In fact it implied there might be thousands of members.
The closest thing to a reason they gave was that Unity has become hostile to indie devs. But Unity doesn't run BUG, so if some people are still using Unity, which I assume is the case, wouldn't they still benefit from having a users group? If it's an act of protest by the group organizers, that seems annoying for the people who still use Unity and got value out of having access to that community.
Without sufficient context to understand the decision, I find I'm not sure what this act accomplishes, or what it intended to accomplish.
I think one of the reason of the group existing is because members trusted Unity. Now this trust is throwed out in trash. They can't force Unity to be good to users and they don't want to support Untity anymore. Thats all.
Given the meetup group has 2,000+ members, and they haven't had an event since the announcement, I have a hard time believing all, or even a majority, (since it's so rare for the majority to even speak) had much input on this decision.
The wording sounds like a few key members felt a certain way and decided to take the ball home with them instead of stepping down and leaving whoever didn't feel as strongly hurt to continue in their stead.
_
It happens often with groups past a certain size: Some people argue that having contributed to the growth up to that size justifies being able to take unilateral actions like this
But in my opinion, once you get past a certain size, it's larger than you. Even if you've poured blood sweat and tears in, it's obviously taken contributions from many small players, who may have been willing to step up as big players.
It's hard to believe that out of 2,000 people there's no group of people who couldn't have continued to get value out of the existence of the group post-Unity's actions.
This is a repeat of the reddit API backlash and protest. Moderators deciding to close down subs or to change the rules to hurt reddit at the expense of their users and community.
Many of which have already backpedaled or opened up. It was important to look involved during the important parts of the protest but now that its blown over subreddits are silently reopening and back to business as usual.
Some subreddits have taken to outright lying to their community in order to continue with the reddit-bashing or as an excuse for bad moderation or other issues.
I forget the subreddit but AutoModerator comments on every post making sure to mention how the API limits don't allow them to use the tools they need to moderate properly, blah blah, etc.
Except Reddit confirmed that only ~8 bots total on the entire site were going above the free usage limits and were willing to help or work with them.
My issue had nothing to do with morals. If I cant use Apollo, then I wont use reddit. All of the other clients are awful, and I dont miss the content enough to justify using the official app, or finding other ways to circumvent the restrictions.
Thats fine and no one is forcing anyone to use a site. I personally don't think the offical app or website is that bad. I was just talking about moderators closing down subreddits for everyone.
Why are you turning "at the expense of their users" into "at the expense of all their users"? Most people using a forum don't speak. They're readers who visit, gain some value, and leave.
> They said they wanted Reddit admins to realise that they rely on moderators to operate the site and felt that the only way to send a message was by harming Reddit's traffic.
That traffic was users, most of whom had no say in the matter.
_
That's also why statements like this were especially ridiculous:
> "Our entire community is supporting us against this change," they said.
r/DIY was a community of 24 million people with decades of posts. A few dozen people got upset, queried a few hundred of those tens of millions, and now a significant chunk of the internet is just gone.
Content the moderators didn't own and didn't write is forever locked behind a monument to their tantrum.
> Why are you turning "at the expense of their users" into "at the expense of all their users"?
I'm not. But "at the expense" implies that it's not what the users in general want, and I'm pretty sure the users in general wanted it for at least a whole bunch of the subreddits.
> queried a few hundred of those tens of millions
Polls are usually pretty accurate.
> tantrum
You can call it a tantrum, but if we're using language that strong then the action of the admins is a betrayal that hasn't been walked back in the slightest.
> I'm pretty sure the users in general wanted it for at least a whole bunch of the subreddits.
No, they didn't, most of the users never even spoke.
r/DIY mods never asked before going from the original 48 hrs to permanently deleting.
> Polls are usually pretty accurate.
I hope you're being facetious and realize a time limited self-selective poll where most of the population can't even vote is not accurate.
Polls are accurate when you put work into making them accurate. They're not magic.
> the action of the admins is a betrayal that hasn't been walked back in the slightest.
So what? If you feel betrayed, remove the content you own and walk away instead of locking away content you don't own off the internet and enticing people to post porn of John Oliver.
Tantrum is the perfect word to describe what these people did.
If the volunteer organizers of a group don't want to organize the group anymore, the group ceases to exist. If BUG members want BUG to continue to exist, they can volunteer to organize it. Nobody has any obligations past that.
I live in Boston and frequently went to BUG events prior to COVID. The pandemic killed off many in-person meetups, and nowadays game developer events meet much less frequently. There already is a game dev meetup group called Boston GameDev which seems to have absorbed all of the meetups into one umbrella - and this includes BUG. There is no pressing need to rename the group or transfer members because this umbrella organization already exists.
This "for profit" thing seems like the wrong framing. Customer goodwill and community are extremely valuable. It seems like what we are looking at is more about short-termism and the distortive effects of suddenly (post-IPO) having to report to investors who are essentially outsiders to the business and have no knowledge or stake in the operation-as-an-entity-in-a-larger-ecosystem other than having dumped a bunch of money into it.
Sure, you can argue that said investors are treating the business as nothing but a vehicle "for profit", but that framing loses something essential. You can have profit and be a player in something mutually beneficial. In fact you need profit to be sustainable.
Yep, it's not profit motive that's the problem, but short term profit above all else, including long term profit. Because in the long term, whoever is making the decision will already be gone.
The film was shot almost entirely in Unity, then the final render used some extra stuff and other tools. But the scenes, shots, etc were done in Unity. A quick google shows you this.
That article I seems to imply Unity only used to generate "camerawork" data (camera positions and movements), and the actual rendering is done on other system using that camerawork data. IIRC on 2019 (Lion King release year) Unity didn't even have ray tracing support yet, so I think the final render might not use Unity at all, but Unity editor itself used extensively during production.
In contrast, Unreal Engine rendered scenes seems to be used in actual footages on some recent shows. Was Unity acquisitions of CGI firms meant to pursue this direction, or boost Unity editor usage during firm production like in Lion King?
You are correct, they used it for production, building the scenes, getting camera data. I then assume they exported the scenes and camera data to whatever they used for the final render. So Unity was used for 70-80% of the work.
It is possible but I don't know. Just was trying to point out that it's more than just some demo that it was used for.
> Unity isn't close to profitable, and never has been
This isn't really true though, their core business is and was profitable if you exclude all the of acquisitions junk, stock shenanigans, and loans to pay for it they have been doing.
It just didn't have the margins expected of a public company and so they did all that other junk to pump those numbers.
> This isn't really true though, their core business is and was profitable if you exclude all the of acquisitions junk, stock shenanigans, and loans to pay for it they have been doing.
"We're profitable if you ignore all the things we're spending money on"
Not all the things, just their unprofitable side business attempts. It's like knowing a guy with a well paying job who always complains he is broke. But he conveniently never mentions that he's spending $4500 per month on a Lamborghini lease.
The claim here is that none of that spending is generating revenue. They could stop spending that money, their income would remain the same, and then they would be profitable.
I would argue that Unity is about 10x the size it needs to be. They could shed a significant portion of their employees and still produce a good product.
They are in the perpetual growth trap that so many of these companies fall into when they get bigger than a niche audience
Hiring is too much people is much easier than firing them. If you cut 90% of the staff keeping the people you'd want to retain is pretty much impossible (since obviously the management won't have any clue who they are).
He's done a lot of stupid things with twitter, but having a significant reduction in headcount doesn't seem to have been one of them. (The way he did it was awful, but that's a different matter.)
Doesnt make profit because directors are paying themselves millions, spending 400 million a year on marketing (how??) and buying ironsource for 4billion in exchange for 1billion bonus for directors. They getting rich and dont care about the dried up carcas they will leave behind
Build product / service at a loss. Product becomes popular because it provides so much value so cheaply (because is being sold at loss). Maintain through continual investment and chasing "growth." Bill comes due. Investors left holding the bag and ecosystems built around assuming bubble was real have a bad time.
In many ways it's the best form of socialism, cheaper products and services provided to the people, paid for by investors who are rolling the dice on a pyramid scheme posing as a business model. Completely voluntary and works even within a capitalist system.
Now all we have to do is hope Unity goes under really quickly, then gets bought up for cheap by a business either willing to make far less as their investment was well below the cost of development for the tools... or that another sucker comes along to buy them at a higher price to either enter the market or expand their own dominance in it as they are still on their "chase growth" curve.
This strategy is still pretty awful. If 2.5% revenue share after $1,000,000 would be enough to survive on, they probably could have opened with matching Unreal's 5% instead of all the bullshit and won people over.
Yeah their new pricing model is quite literally more expensive than Unreal for many of their customers (mostly the ones who make less money - for massive studios it's cheaper) and it's ALSO more complex to comply with. A simple "we're doing revshare now, and the per-seat fee is going away" would have been viewed more favorably I think.
I mean in my naive world, you'd slap some minimum revenue onto the rev-share and you'd have a clear separation between hobbyists, unsuccessful indies, indies, and huge successes. It'd be muddled in the middle, sure, but if some companies hits jackpot with a unity project, you'll know and could act on it.
i remember back when Avid decided they were no longer going to offer a Mac version of their NLEs because Apple's new machines were only going to have 3 expansion slots. while admittedly, there were probably a much smaller number of affected users than the Unity decision, it did cause a huge amount of turmoil. urban legend has people dumping their Avid stations on the doorstep of the Avid offices.
Avid is still around, but it's not looking very healthy. They've fired whole dev teams - one of whom was largely hired by a competitor, who have now developed a competing project that is eating Avid alive in that (fiarly niche) space.
I was wondering why the name Avid was familiar but also had a negative connotation in my head, then I remembered it was from a YouTube video [1] about how horrible its interface is.
man, i was hoping this was going to be a serious discussion on NLEs. instead, we get some niche product of a niche field. i'm not really sure this counts. that's like the team that works for lighting within Unity left to build a new tool that exports settings to JSON.
You're being overly dismissive. There are thousands of people working in such software every day - from serious composers, professional music engravers, orchestra libraians, down to church choirmasters and the like.
It's a several hundred dollar product that supports a dev team in the low double digits. It's niche, but it's not THAT niche.
Unity will survive but this could be the start of a steady decline of users, which isn't good for any game engine. Leads to a loss of knowledge which makes the engine even less popular.
Ghe whole situation is somewhat similar to when GameMaker Studio switched to subscription model.
what would be better for the community would be not just a decline in devs using the engine, but also the devs working on the engine. working for Unity should now be a stain just like working for FB/socials/ad-tech. there will be tons of people willing to do it, but hopefully the great minds leave the rot
That’s the opposite of what would be better. We need more engineer solidarity not more divisiveness. Give me a list of your past employers and I can guarantee I can find some sketchball business practice you indirectly contributed to and make some tenuous argument for you to be blackballed.
95% of shitty tech industry practices can be root caused to people identify more strongly with their employer than with their profession. We desperately need a professional organization / union with teeth and the main thing that should be shunned is rhetoric that divides rather than unites it
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You must subscribe to the idea that the employees can change the culture of a company from bottom up. I strongly disagree. Company culture is dictated from top down, and only rarely does the bottom get to make substantive changes. However, I'm willing to have my mind change with examples of companies changing their culture based on employees changing the minds of the execs.
We can't, but many of us are forced by circumstances we can't control to stay on board even if we don't like where the company is heading. The most recent and probably most nastiest story I'm aware of is post-Musk Twitter - Musk ordered that everyone put in effort like hell, people slept in conference rooms... so, naturally, many people left but one group had to stay because their literal legal existence in the US was tied to that job: H1B employees.
Other cases include if you've got a house that's not paid off, a child on the way... that's where common sense says to not change anything major due to the consequences of shit going down very very VERY hard.
To me, at least, you and even MBAs that like Unity's behavior are welcome here. It's essential to understand broad perspectives, especially the ones I dislike.
I probably should have led with "I spent 35 years as a software developer and THEN got an MBA." Which is to say... when I make snarky comments, they're firmly grounded on basic comp sci and extensive software dev experience. However, When I show the kids at work how to use old-school command line tools like awk, sed, cut, grep and find, I leave off the bit that they've been educated by an MBA.
I feel like we've seen a bunch of businesses show what happens when you take private capital and scale on a community based product with out a clear business model that doesn't involve retroactively screwing the community in some way.
I mean, Unity's just the latest example. Before it came Hashicorp and Docker. I'm sure we could think of many more examples if we tried.
And what's really frustrating is that if these businesses had focused on simply "building a product the community wanted, supporting that community, and making enough money to comfortably keep going" - all of them could have been successful.
I'd really love to see the tech community try more models that simply aim for comfortable sustainability - not astronomical growth. You know, enough to pay a modest engineering team market salaries indefinitely while they continue to support and develop the product.
That's why it happens so often though -- the very people who are directly enriched by doing it (holders of the majority of the company's equity) are the only ones asked to decide to do it (board votes).
Canonical example: MailChimp
The founders retained essentially all the equity (Atlanta), so when push came to shove they decided "Fuck it, we'd rather be rich than work" and sold the company.
It feels like the only way to avoid this would be aligning the equity structure with employees and customers in a better way.
Exactly. I think what we are seeing is the result of decision makers at these businesses now having to report to investors who are essentially outsiders to the community. Their only stake or interest in the operation comes from having dumped a bunch of money into it. But now they get to call the shots or if not, exert a ton of pressure.
I think the takeaway is that businesses built around a community really should not go public.
VCs don't like this. How are they going to get their ROI immediately? Having normal investors vs funders changes the mentality of long term to cash grab.
They have a business model and they would've been fine if they hadn't started increasing their headcount by 50% every year and focused on their core products.
Most of those open-source companies turn "evil" stories (like IBM/redhat ) seems to follow the same pattern. IMO, there is a limit of the amount of value one can extract from those venture. Trying to increase revenue beyond a certain limit will always result very bad outcome.
But i also think it's a lesson for the gaming industry. Why is something as core are a game engine, not something properly open-source and license such as QT, LLVM or GCC...
Red Hat had over a billion dollars in revenue last year and it's never stopped growing. Free Red Hat-compatible operating systems did not stop them from making a lot of money.
I think it's extremely common for companies to sit every engineer down during onboarding and say "never touch code with these licenses". Certainly in my experience it is.
This terrifies people for some reason. Basically because they want the freedom to modify open source projects and call it their own without giving back to the project that actually created it.
Why would I even want to build a game if I'm going to have to give between 4-8% of everything I make to steam and unity? I completely understand why nearly every AAA studio builds their own client and game engine, it's cheaper in the long run.
It depends on how much you're actually selling. Consider how much would it cost to hire devs to build your own custom engine? (Don't forget console support). Your game needs to pull in 20x higher than that in revenue for it to be worth the choice over a 5% rev share.
To be fair Unity is asking you to give them somewhere between 0.05% and 2.5% while Steam/Apple/etc. want 30%.
> AAA studio builds their own client and game engine, it's cheaper in the long run
I don't think it's because of the rev share. If they were able to acquire an engine which fully suits their needs for only 5% that'd would be a great deal. Unfortunately adapting an off the shelf for a AAA game might be just as expensive as building (or at least upgrading) your own engine.
I keep saying it: the only way Unity will possibly convince the community that this was a mistake that won't happen again is by firing the CEO and whichever other C-levels involved in the affair. This signals that they understand this to be a fatal mistake, removes the people who has this distorted agenda, and makes it clear to future C-levels that other mistakes like this won't be tolerated.
That article seems strange. The example shows the opposite phenomenon. The upper layers change temperature quickly (going from 22°C to 6°C over the course of ~500ft. The lower layers change slowly (going from 6°C to around 1°C over the next 6000ft.
The graph makes it look like top changes slowly, but that's because the axes are inverted: the independent variable (depth) is on the Y.
The difference between game developers and other types of developers is that they figured out how to fire companies and mediocre executives. Should take notes. Well done, and hopefully Unity's done, along with all other mediocre MBAs that think their clientelle works for them and not the other way around. Game devs are badass.
Cory Doctorow coined it to mean something different from how it is now used:
Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification.
It now means something like "the process where products or services become worse as a vendor tries to make them more profitable".
Cory's definition doesn't really apply to B2B transactions (e.g. the word makes no sense for RedHat especially given abundance of other distros).
I don't see that much of a difference between those two definitions. Cory's explanation was more specific, but it still referred to a service taking steps to be more profitable and in the process making the experience shittier for users and business customers.
Look at Enshitification through the lens that its basically just Inflation localized to a single company. When companies are poorly managed, they die. Except: now enters awesomely sophisticated Financial Engineering, enabling companies to metastasize far longer than the market alone would allow them. Take out debt; venture funding; unsupported valuations; high expectations; market ebbs and flows; you can fly a Cessna at 70mph just fine, but a jet going that slow crashes.
Unity was running $200M in losses on $500M in revenue, per quarter. And they've never been profitable (since going public). A government can safely print money if it has the economic growth and tax base to support it; but if it doesn't have that, over enough time, you get: Inflation. The bill always comes due.
Enshitification is just company-localized inflation after unsupportable financial engineering. There are really good examples in Doctorow's original piece; most of them actually cover the more-common stagflationary effect, but stagflation is just inflation through a different lens. It really doesn't have much to do with B2B versus B2C; its intimately related to attempts toward increasing profit margins, but the critical piece is the path the company walked to get there; and, in the most severe cases, the fact that they should have stopped walking and died three miles back.
Or, maybe Doctorow would disagree with all of that. But that's the fun part of inventing such a meme-able, excellent term; it outgrows you!
I think we need to decide on its meaning first. Most people these days use it as a death mark. Except the original op-ed often quoted used Meta, Uber, TikTok and Google - companies who make billions of clean profit per quarter, and more profits than they ever have, as examples
Enshitification = more profits is unfortunately correct in my mind, but most people use it with a much different meaning. I don't think Unity is going to break all profit records soon
It's not the actual profitability of the move that's important, it's the motive. Enshittification comes from the ever-expanding _desire_ for profit. At some point the golden goose is killed to make next quarter's goals. Just so happens it was killed immediately in this case.
I have mixed feelings about the word "enshitification".
Like a politician shutting down thought and debate by simply labeling something "socialism", half the people using the word don't really know what it means, or at least, they don't know the original meaning. The word comes to be fake form of intellectual sophistication. A politician says the word and people think "oh, he knows the fancy word, he must be right", and thought ends, further discussion is difficult because nobody would dare speak in defense of something after it has been labeled. Just hearing the word raises certain peoples blood pressure 10 points and causes them to raise their voice.
And yet, I'm happy to see the good guys play psyops for a change. Like the world "socialism", "enshitification" will originally mean a specific social phenomenon, but most people will come to use it as a catch-all word for all bad corporate behavior and it will shut down thought and just hearing the world will rile people up to fight against the evil corporations. And I'm okay with that; words have power and, again, I'm glad to see words being invented to help the common people organize.
"Enshittification" is not a hard word. It's describes itself: "En-" to make, "shit" bad, "-ification" the process of; in sum the process of making something bad. I think everyone understands that the products and services they use daily are getting worse and now they have a word to describe that experience. I think that by basing itself on the mild swear "shit" it actually distances itself from academic jargon or other fancy words to try to be something that is closer to the common person.
I think it is a more specific thing that just “things get bad.” Lots of tech services start by giving things away, or providing services for cheap/free unsustainably, and then start making unpopular moves when the free money dries up and they have to become profitable.
It is sort of like a subset of anticompetitive behavior (dumping) but done by a small player using investor funds instead of a large company throwing weight around. Or in a field where the “cost” is something nebulous like ads, so it is harder to actually spot.
A weakness of the name is that it invites the broader definition, I think.
Enshittification not just making a product bad, and it's not just rent seeking. It's more than any of those things.
It's about making a product worse than it needs to be, by terrible pricing and ad infestation, in order to recoup the investment of years of underpricing to capture the market and kill competitors.
Sounds lazy and crass to me. Instead of a word meant to accurately convey a concept it's meant to broadly convey a concept and ones feelings on it in the same breath; much like the term "woke". I'd rather use something around a historical event that can also be used to help understand a concept through allegory, like "Dutch disease", or "cargo cult". Those are fun.
It's supposed to refer to a company's priorities shifting away from the customer's, "rent seeking" is instead about profiting from owning limited resources. They are different things.
I remember at a game trade show, there was an Unity stand. I was really excited by Unity at the time, was in line to ask the representation random questions, and was trying to get my friend excited as well. The representant (I think some head of Sales) took my excitement talking to my friend as impatience and was rude about us "he is busy and us having to wait our time" when we weren't trying to talk to him. We left and never got excited by Unity again. I guess that was a premise of things to come.
> Over the past few years, Unity has unfortunately shifted its focus away from the games industry and away from supporting developer communities. Following the IPO, the company has seemingly put profit over all else, with several acquisitions and layoffs of core personnel. Many key systems that developers need are still left in a confusing and often incomplete state, with the messaging that advertising and revenue matter more to Unity than the functionality game developers care about.
> Recently, Unity unveiled a set of unthinkably hostile terms of service and pricing changes for its users. The resounding, unequivocal condemnation from the games industry was unprecedented and Unity had no choice but to rescind some of the most egregious changes. Even with these new concessions, the revised pricing model disproportionately affects the success of indie studios in our community.
That strategy, including hyper-aggressive changes in terms, seems common across different businesses and industries. A recent one in the news was Hasbro's move with some of their leading game products.
I asked something similar in another thread: Does anyone know the story behind this phenomenon? Is there a name for it? A paper or book or 'expert' that is its genesis?
Unity is running as fast as possible in the opposite direction of Friedman's advice.
The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned “merely” with profit but also with promoting desirable “social” ends; that business has a “social conscience” and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers.
San Francisco based Unity is on the vanguard of the new socially aware Corp.
Interesting that this is enough evidence to the contrary for you. To me that looks more like what they say, not what they do, and is a well crafted smoke screen. They still seem to be acting as if they’re purely interested in extracting maximum shareholder value, at the expense of the public.
Interesting that this is enough evidence to the contrary for you.
It is just a few easy examples. I've used Unity for a decade, visited the offices, worked with ex-Unity employees. They aren't maximizing shareholder value, they are very bloated, and they are trying to survive and avoid bankruptcy.
at the expense of the public.
What does that even mean? There is no expense to the public. They give their product to 90% of developers for free. Unity used to charge every seat.
A common strategy taught in MBA school in the US, is to “hire a bunch of assholes to push non-dedicated people out of the org; then fire the assholes and hire actually good people.” This was nearly 15 years ago since I learned about it in class, I don’t remember if there is a name for it. I just remember thinking “this can’t be real.”
I wonder if people are idiotically applying the same thing to the marketplace.
This might work in a company where institutional knowledge is insignificant or can be easily rebuilt. In companies that maintain big complex products like Unity (or Diablo, for that matter) this strategy can result in the company becoming irreversibly incompetent at maintaining its own product.
> Does anyone know the story behind this phenomenon?
People on the left wing generally call it "late stage capitalism" or "the end game of rent seeking": dumping competitors on price, subsidized by seemingly infinite amounts of VC money (domestic, foreign and dark/blood - i.e. Saudi oil money) until you achieve total and utter dominance, and then jack up prices while letting the product itself rot. After all why invest into a product's maintenance or development when your users don't have any other choice left?
> Is there a name for it?
Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification" [1].
Excellent 2023 terminology that we can use going forward.
I used to call it "Ballmerization", which is sadly still taking place at Microsoft in spite of the good percentage of outstanding engineers there who have always tried to work around it.
The idea that Unity was ever to be trusted is incredibly naive. They were obviously corporate tools from the very earliest get go. The fact is, indies used it because it was the best way to make money, something to which they are no way entitled, and now they are big mad that the devil they themselves signed a contract with has decided to collect. Boo fckin hoo. The Unity dev community has always been the most soulless corpocreep indie gamedev community out there, good riddance, I hope most of them go out of business
Unity's just outgrowing the early adopters. The starving indies will move on to the next up and coming engine. Professionals will continue using Unity (and UE, which also charges royalties) because of the breadth and depth of the toolsets.
I first used Unity when their WebGL system was in private beta. IIRC they tried charging royalties early on but then reverted that for marketshare, but I don't have time to look it up. In any case the royalties aren't burdensome at that scale. I don't think it'll affect much. Vocal minority, yada yada. Maybe it'll even get them to profitability next year!
I've worked in game development for a long time, including a couple of games with over 100 million installs. Professional game studios making mobile free2play games, which is Unity's main moat, are VERY uneasy right now. For many games, the install tax would push them into unprofitability. Especially in hypercasual, where an average user may have LTV of a few cents total. These are billion dollar companies, and they have the resources to build their own engines, they just didn't have a real reason until now.
There's probably a wiki link somewhere to the Proper Noun PR phenomenon in business school for this strategy, but the "terrible plan then less terrible plan but still worse than before the initial terrible plan" strategy seems like essentially a confirmation Unity is not to be trusted for small developers. It's sad to lose a great dev community but it sounds like BUG is making the right call here.