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Comment by kruuuder | Hacker News Reader

This sounds so much like the Reddit drama. I doubt that this pushback matters. They expected the negative feedback, for sure, did the math, and decided that it's still worth it.

u/spez was right, I guess. "The protest over the API changes will pass".

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They didn't pass for me. I do not use reddit on mobile whatsoever anymore (was daily, active user). Unfortunately Reddit still seems to be the best place (aside from lurking hundreds of telegram channels) to get up to date info on Ukraine.

I went from probably 150-200Hrs/Mo. To about 5.

I know I cannot be the only one. Reddit will live on; but technically so did MySpace.

Exactly. I don't use Reddit anymore and when they will inevitably kill old.reddit.com I will stop altogether.

As for Twitter I'm one leg into Mastadon, but the space flight news folk is still on Twitter.

And yet their traffic has completely recovered and maybe even increased, at least if you trust https://www.semrush.com/website/reddit.com/overview/# and similar social media tracking sites

Although tbf it’s probably accelerated the shift in Reddits demographic from users that post longform content to more casual users that just browse and upvote/downvote stuff without engaging beyond that. I doubt they care much bc they probably just want ad impressions and to become a titan akin to Facebook/twitter/etc. it seems short sighted but growth at the expense of community seems to be a common theme of vc backed anything

Congrats. What are you doing with that extra 195 hours?

Pointlessly surfing YouTube.

I'm the same.

My reddit usage is now about 5% of what it was before. I also use it for Ukraine info, but now I do it at home on old.reddit.com, and not doomscrolling on mobile throughout the day.

I think that the bulk of the complaints is that Unity has become unusable for small developers due to the pricing model changes. It's not unusable in the sense of a personal pet peeve, but in the sense of not being commercially viable versus existing options, which include Godot, GameMaker, Love, etc.

Maybe Unity no longer cares about small indie developers so they priced them out of the engine, but only time will be able to tell whether they made a major business miscalculation. It's possible that larger developers are the bulk of Unity's income and they will be totally fine with the changes.

Still, I don't see a world where what Unity did was a good business move due to the trust issues mentioned by so many other people. I think that a model more similar to Unreal's would have been much better received.

I don't know, I think the unpredictability of how much you will owe Unity each month will be a big sticking point for all developers, big and small. A percentage of revenue is easy to account for; if we make this much money we will pay this much to Unity. A bill based on the vague "number of installs" calculated by a black box at Unity themselves is a financial disaster waiting to happen.

I do think the current reactions are a bit out of proportion, although that might be to pressure Unity into reversing their changes.

Unlike for Reddit users though, these pricing changes impact revenue calculations of developers and there are viable alternatives. Additionally from what I gleaned a lot if developers are not particularly happy with the state of the Unity tools, and sudden pricing changes surely don't inspire much confidence either.

So, I don't think no games will release in two years or so made in Unity, but this might have kicked off or accelerate an erosion of Unity's developer base. At least those developers that give Unity the prestige of being the engine of choice for Indie and AA games.

Maybe all of this is, purely from a revenue point of view, still worth it for them though.

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