Crow had to be eaten but it looks like they're only tasting the feathers.
Crow had to be eaten but it looks like they're only tasting the feathers.
Walk-back or not, Unity is demonstrably not boring and predictable anymore. That's done.
(It also was only going to kick in once your revenue hit a certain point.)
The CEO John R. didn't chime in here, and that would have meant him being accountable for this decision and its effect on Unity. His mask slipped here.
There was no way they couldn't. Its literally not practical.
ACCOUNTABILITY would not be practical.
Them charging for whatever they can make up and claim to be true, is neither walked back or not walked back. It's waiting to happen again, in whatever way they dream up. You're assuming they wouldn't simply make stuff up and that there would be a chain of accountability, so the process would make sense.
Such things are for making money, not sense. You have not seen the last of them.
> After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unity'sWhitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation. (A spokesperson told Axios that Unity had "regrouped" to discuss the issue.)
It applying to free games was walked back immediately and isn't news
2 recommendations:
1. This is where a "neuro-diverse" person or two can really be an asset. The social dynamic in corporations often leads to people eventually shaking their heads in agreement, even if they have big underlying concerns. Those of us somewhere on the spectrum are less likely to understand those social dynamics in the first place and be more willing to call out BS.
2. Good corporate leaders have trusted outside council that they can run ideas by to get brutally honest feedback.
Basically, execs (especially public company execs) have the responsibility for growing revenue and earnings. Ideally they do that by just making better products, but some times you do need to "thread the needle" by charging more for your products while not pissing off customers too much.
I'm sure the devs and customer support folks were screaming bloody murder, but they are also not responsible for satisfying public markets, so it's easier to say those things without having to worry about revenue growth.
So point being, I'm sure execs thought there would be some blowback, but they probably felt it would be "manageable", and like others have said, they overestimated the irreplaceability of Unity. So its important at the exec level to have someone who can whisper in your ear, someone who does understand the requirement for growing revenue, that can honestly say "you've managed to convince yourself of this bullshit."
Thinking back to recent controversies:
- reddit with third party apps
- the D&D open gaming license
- redhat and centos
- etc...
Another "genius" improvement. Yes, I recommend buy factorio directly from the dev now.
A lot of devs and studios are, they know they are, Unity knows they are, and there's little anyone can afford to do about it. I suspect most of the crowd that ostensibly abandoned Unity will return because they've already sunk too much time and energy into the platform, and that's the path of least resistance. They will tolerate whatever deal Unity gives them because they can't afford to do otherwise. Even if they liked the alternatives, the only reasonable business decision is to return to Unity and pretend this never happened.
Unfortunately this probably means much of the interest in Godot and other open source alternatives this debacle created is about to evaporate. Inertia is a harsh mistress.
I'd written off Reddit personally around five-six years ago. This despite having a fairly long-lived bloggy subreddit (and a small smattering of others) on the site, which I still use as a reference (despite having taken it private).
It wasn't specifically on account of the specific technical decisions they'd made, or the site changes (or lack of site changes) resulting, but the fact that those decisions were being made. That is, as with other business organisations I've encountered over the years, Reddit had repeatedly proven themselves antithetical to my own interests and values.
I suspect that's the issue Unity's going through here, and that though the final endgame may take some time in coming, it could well doom the company.
One business strategy that seems to have been increasingly widely adopted over the past decade or two, or perhaps I'm only simply far more cognisant of it and recognise it where it occurs, is the "walk right up to the creepy line" approach (as Eric Schmidt put it: <https://thehill.com/policy/technology/71739-schmidt-google-g...>), or moving products or services right to the pain or tolerance threshold.
In the short term this can work. It can even be successful over a longer term, in cases. But there are two inherent problems with the concept:
1. The threshold, whether it's pain, tolerance, creepiness, or whatever, can change, and often startlingly suddenly. At which point the organisation is caught high and dry.
2. The long-term erosion of trust and affection for the firm and its products effectively primes a trigger of latent demand for any viable alternative which appears. An example that comes to mind is the exclusive launch of Apple's iPhone in the US by AT&T. On the day that Verizon began officially supporting the iPhone on their own network, people were cramming Verizon stores and phone lines trying to make the switch. (A cow-orker at the time was one of those people.) They were absolutely fed up with AT&T's service and behaviour. See: <https://web.archive.org/web/20110112092318/http://www.engadg...> and <https://web.archive.org/web/20101007000511/http://online.wsj...>, discussed at the time: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2092273> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1765104>.
I've seen IBM, Microsoft, and Google subject to similar shifts, some more pronounced than others, over the years.
Leaving a considerable goodwill moat around offerings is an alternative. I'm too far outside the consumer mainstream to know what business, products, services, and/or brands exemplify this, though I suspect Costco and Trader Joe's might be among these.
When did we start talking about the airline industry?
But seriously, the reason it works for the airline industry is because there is literally no other alternative, unlike in this case.
TINA. Until suddenly, with COVID-19, there was an alternative.
And the real estate market is now (slowly) imploding.
If this were a 48- or 72-hour turnaround, maybe. But Unity lost a lot of goodwill amongst developers and there are some they may never get back as a result.
When you lose that audience and enthusiasm among the people who influence next year's technical decisions, eventually you enter the dustbin of history.
This is even more pronounced for Unreal, where Final Fantasy VII Remake, Valorant, Apex Legends Mobile, Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order and Survivor, Octopath Traveler, and tons of other wildly profitable games are made in it. CD Projekt Red is making the next Witcher game in Unreal as well. Square Enix has a ton of money and thousands of employees, as does Riot Games, EA, and plenty of other huge companies. Nearly all of these companies have developed their own engines in the past, but Unity and Unreal are just really hard to beat: not only can they offer great performance and stability, as well as easy multiplatform support (can publish on Windows, PlayStation, Switch, Xbox, iOS, Android, etc.), but it also can make development easier since new employees likely already are familiar with the engine, versus if you build your own it can take months for new employees to be productive and contribute much of anything to the project.
Often times they'll still make changes to the engine's source code (miHoyo didn't just download the latest Unity LTS from the website or Unity Hub), but that's still considerably less work than building your own engine from scratch, and in many cases even that's not necessary.
At some point with all companies the finance people take over. But well-loved products and companies are never created by finance people - they're created by people with a passion for something.
It was interesting seeing some people bounce off it on the grounds of woeful inefficiency. I don't remember the person, but one Unity refugee traced the path of a raycast and Godot more or less needed to treat it as a dynamically typed generic thing, going through a huge rigamarole to get a result.
It's possible to hack in more direct access for those who can make sense of it. I don't think there's a thing going on in Godot's 3d engine that some of these Unity refugees can't understand. They're running into arbitrary obstacles based on Godot's attitude towards what's clean and elegant code. These obstacles could go away really quickly under the right conditions…
There was a whole HN thread about it[0], and the response[1].
It already is pretty darn performant - but without the many convenience features unity and unreal have. Also it does lack means to modify vertex buffers directly on the GPU - a feature I liked in Unity (https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Mesh.GetVertexBuffe...). However, I think godot shouldn't try and implement everything - the project should focus on getting core functionality performant and flexible enough.
Everything else - managing massive world, etc, should be done by 3rd parties and monetised. I hope the game dev world wont take the web dev world path where code is in oversupply and there are little options to monetise.
Unity's asset store allowed many people to gain freedom by selling assets. I think godot should follow the same path. But indeed for that the engine needs even more low level access exposed in a nice manner.
Very beneficial for the consumer however. Right now the bar to create a good videogame is rather high, and this leads to the current hellscape where so many videogames are plagued with lootboxes, season passes and other microtransactions to make up for the multiple years in dev time required with many employees.
If the tooling gets better to the point that it takes less time and less devs to create good games that don't require the insane levels of monetisation, then this trend is more likely to be reversed.
For example, the Cloth bindings with annotations like [NativeHeader("Modules/Cloth/Cloth.h")] and [NativeClass("Unity::Cloth")]:
https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/UnityCsReference/blob/...
>These obstacles could go away really quickly under the right conditions…
I'm not sure why you feel the need to paraphrase this so much but the GDextension API is a thing and it is more efficient but it hasn't been implemented for C#. The blog poster extrapolated from the C# bindings that there are unfixable flaws in the engine when in reality the C# bindings aren't up to date yet.
This is why I stopped paying JetBrains, despite them 100% walking back their idiotic licensing change proposal many years ago. I love(d) the products, but could no longer trust the decision-makers.
Seems the same model it was when they moved to subscriptions:
https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/206544479-Subs...
https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...
Yes!
> Seems the same model it was when they moved to subscriptions
Indeed, but there was a period of brain-dead decision making in 2015 where they announced a very different direction and back-tracked 2 weeks later.
They announced plans for an evergreen subscription model, but the flip side was that they'd brick your IDE (with no fallback) the moment your subscription lapsed[1]. The only reason the subscription model seems unchanged from their initial one was because of the outrage their controversial change generated.
I found this unconscionable - they backtracked (faster than Unity to their credit, but still)
My anecdoate is that many people in this industry don't even know the existance of Godot. Yeah, I mean Godot, not Love2D or LibGDX. People can work in video games but are completly unaware of Godot.
Now they ALL know it.
Very much an unforced error on their part.