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Comment by sigmoid10 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this is a problem of company structure. It's solely a problem of bad management. If they had listened to their users or their own developers, or any remotely sane person with some touch of reality, then this wouldn't have happened. But if you hire the former CEO of EA - a guy with no low level industry experience and who left his last job because of poor financial performance - then this whole fiasco seems like it was inevitable.

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A CEO under who EA introduced lootboxes. A person that proposed that when player runs out of ammo could make an easy instant payment for a quick reload.

Unity engine seems to flounder under him, despite rather insane headcount (7,703), acquisition spree laden Unity Technologies with significant debt...

I am not impressed, not with his ideas and even less with his results.

For comparison, Larry Elisson (Oracle) has distasteful business practices, but very profitable.

I have a few friends that work or have worked at Unity. This is purely anecdotal but from what I've heard it sounds like the place is fairly dysfunctional at this point. A lot of the dysfunction that exists now wasn't there even 3-4 years ago.

It is amazing how easy some people make falling upwards look.

It is easy, all you need to do is be a member of the executive class.

Running out of ammo and instant payment sounds a lot like an arcade, which is how video games became commercially successful in the first place.

Then consoles all but killed arcades because it turns out no one really wanted to keep feeding quarters (and then dollars) into an unfair game even if that turned out to be cheaper than buying a game outright. Removing that monetization strategy improved the quality and diversity of games as well. I'm not keen on rolling back the clock to that version of yesteryear.

A key difference is that you paid nothing up front to play an arcade game compared to Battlefield 2024 (or whatever). There's decades of expectations/inertia not having microtransactions on home games, but I understand that is what publishers are trying to fight against.

It's worth noting that the death of the golden age of arcade games was due to no small part of the rise of console games. People didn't want to pump quarters into a machine to keep playing, they wanted to buy a game once and play it forever.

> Running out of ammo and instant payment sounds a lot like an arcade

Any chance you have an example? I can't recall an arcade game that had you pay per bullet.

This guy wasn't proposing anything as crazy as pay-per-bullet. There's lots of games with limited ammo and you find more in the environment. Even in Doom you might run out of ammo for your favorite gun and need to put it away until you found another ammo pack in the level. This is why Valorant has a knife you can switch to, because if you waste gun ammo you run out on your main weapon. In Fortnite you have to find ammo and weapons in chests, etc. This guy was proposing an option to pay to refill your inventory immediately. But people heard "reload" and assumed something completely different.

The real problem with his proposal is it quickly falls apart if you think about it for even a minute. It's a classic pay-to-win mechanic. And once something is pay-to-win it becomes a slippery slope and a race to the bottom for the game makers. Every game has some amount of edge cases where you're playing only to realize "Damn, I'm out, this sucks. I'd pay a buck right now to refill." But once you add in some options to pay in those scenarios, the game maker has a perverse incentive to no longer make it an edge case. Some PM will realize if they make the rare event 10x more likely they'll make 10x more $$$$ and they're off to the races. They start messing with the ammo drop rates to create "pinch points" and now your super fun game really does require you to be "paying to reload" and it's not fun anymore.

This guy was trying (and failing) to present it as a player benefit but the reality is he know exactly where this road lead. It's the same place EA games with loot boxes landed in the end.

Arcades in the 90s used the countdown clock,more lives type buy in. You bought time, or they would make the game so seriously hard you had to feed it quarters to keep the game going. Paying on an instant 'hey you could use more ammo for 50cents' at a exploitive time is something I am surprised we did not see as a mechanic in arcades. But they probably would have if they had thought of it. But the idea of feed more quarters in to keep playing was most certainly there.

I remember there were arcade games where your health continuously drained and inserting another quarter would heal you. That's worse than a per-bullet price because you were losing even when there were no enemies on the screen. I don't remember the titles because I played those kinds of games exactly once and never again. Total rip off.

It sounds like you're talking about Gauntlet Dark Legacy. I also remember guides about how to leave levels with more health than you entered them (there were ways to regain health). It's hard to single this series out as "a total ripoff" among all kinds of arcade games designed to extract quarters out of you. You can't expect someone to stay on a screen or backtrack forever. Some games use a timer, some throw an endless amount of mobs at you. The nature of the game (which was built in part around exploration) was that they used the health amount as HP + timer.

I don't think that's a thing in arcade games. There are pay to continue in arcades, and pay to win in regulated gambling that are light on gaming aspect, but never seen one in arcades.

Maybe it's similar to how there are "Dungeons and Something" || "Something and Dragons" but somehow never both?

This was my impression: running out of ammo leads to death leads to paying for continue credits.

Except this was in connection with Battlefield 3, a title you’d have to buy. So it’s more like buying the arcade machine but somebody still takes quarters from you anyway.

But imagine having to do that if you owned the arcade game.

If there's an EULA, do you really own it?

How much of it is enforceable ?

Gauntlet is a very specific example of this but with health and not ammo.

I saw a reddit comment from a Unity developer that alleged that Unity told them not to worry about the changes because this dev used ironSource for their ads. ironSource merged with Unity last year and other commenters were speculating that this whole thing is a play to try to coerce the huge amount of mobile games that are made with Unity to switch to ironSource.

To parent's opinion, I'd respond that bad management is a possibility in any company.

However, a broken revenue model misaligns incentives and makes user-bad decisions a certainty.

Laying it at the feet of management is blaming the messenger -- the root cause was revenue and expectations being strategically unbalanced.

It's surprising how many people watch companies make "dumb" moves and gnash their teeth over "how could they be so stupid?"

They're not being stupid... they're looking at the cards they have in their hand, what they need to win, and playing it the best way they can.

As people have quipped elsewhere in the comments, there were no ways Unity could deliver the financial performance that was expected of them, with a developer-friendly business model.

Since management sets the expectations, laying the blame at their feet is correct. Who else would you hold accountable for management decisions?

Majority shareholders for choosing an ownership model that their operating model couldn't service.

Unity going public was like .org's PIR being sold to PE.

You would be right, they have informally stated if developers switch to ironSource/Unity Ads, they would have their runtime fee slashed.

On the surface that is the case, but once you're a publicly traded company you're beholden to your shareholders, not your customers, so your goals and incentives changes drastically and "bad management decisions" gets made.

You think the management made a mistake, I think the management (as a result of going public) is the mistake.

That’s a simplistic view. “Beholden to shareholders” does not mean prioritising short-term gain at all costs. That’s not just my ideology, it is how publicly traded companies work a lot of the time, including the one that I work for.

To imply that there’s such a stark binary difference between a privately held and publicly held company misses a lot of nuance. Investors can want a quick out or be in for the long game in either case. The controlling parties pre-IPO have plenty of knobs they can turn to limit drive-by influence if they choose. If a company gets fucked by going public, it was already fucked before it went public, because the people behind the float either didn’t care about protecting the company, or didn’t know how.

In theory, that's true. But what I see every day is the opposite. It's essentially what people are calling "enshitification". Mostly short term decisions that screw customers up for a quick buck.

I do agree that private does not mean good. It all falls under the CEO/Founders in my view. But there seems to be way more greedy short term thinking leaders out there.

I can probably count in my hands the amount of companies I follow that are not prioritizing the short-term. Maybe I just don't follow that many companies and I'm biased, but that's the impression I get.

Public companies seem to have an even higher rate of short-term profit seeking though.

It starts out noble. Once a company goes public, the first few town halls after the shareholder call the CEO or CFO will be like, "Don't worry about the stock price, we're better than all the other short-termist companies, we care about long term quality and blah blah."

But bit by bit, little by little, like Pavlov's dogs the employees get trained to peek at that stock ticker around reporting time. And over time they sync up their decision making with that schedule, and internal planning starts to reflect it. And new initiatives get created and judged by investor reactions. And it's all downhill from there :-(

Public companies see their stock rise when they fire thousands of people even though they are profitable. The entire system is perverse.

Sorry, it sounds like you're defending the system that doesn't empower the public good. I hear reports time and time again that private companies that go publicly are burned by the artificial and unnatural need for constant growth. Going public serves greedy individuals (shareholders) that have no connection to the service or product that real people depend on.

Thanks for the insight.

So I guess the conclusion is that Unity was fucked pre-IPO?

The fact that the CEO was slowly selling millions of shares was an indication

I would expect any CEO to continuously sell shares as they are awarded. Diversifying investments is a very recommended and common investment choice.

The CEO's role though is to help make the stock attractive to other investors, not just optimize for their own personal finances. I personally would expect most CEOs to hold a significant portion of their stock awards as a show of confidence in the future value of the company - if the CEO won't hold the investment, why should anyone else?

> if the CEO won't hold the investment, why should anyone else?

I don't think you understand how many shares a CEO has. There are directors at Unity throwing around hundreds of thousands of shares and I'm sure the C execs have an order of magnitude more than that. You never want all your eggs in one basket, if only because you don't want everything to be beholden to the power of your country's economy (something even a CEO can't control).

Surely the CEO has both interests, and securing resources for themselves is of higher priority than securing them for others. They might be expected to hold proportionally more of it than others, but I also would not expect any half intelligent person to put all their eggs in one basket just for the benefit of others.

>It's solely a problem of bad management. If they had listened to their users or their own developers, or any remotely sane person with some touch of reality, then this wouldn't have happened

TBH I think the growth argument is better. Ricetellio isn't some especially bad CEO, and I'm sure 50 other CEOs woulda done the exact same thing if it wasn't him. Which is exactly why every other tech company was also hit with massive layoffs this year.

It's not some standout, it's the 20th consequence of actions every other public company pursued. Look at all the industries Unity tried to branch out into in 4-5 years and you see why they became balooned to 7K employees: https://i.imgur.com/3Ume4Qm.png

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