Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
farewell.bostonunitygroup.com
farewell.bostonunitygroup.com
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Or it's an objectively very bad game that you just happen to enjoy.
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.
They are games we come back to again, and again, and again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
That's why they removed the repo too, too easy to see the changes.
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.
(IANAL)
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.
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.
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.
Businesses should consider the pregnant wife divorce papers test of any change they're making BEFORE they make it.
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.
[0] https://rebuild.fm/344/#chapters on the chapter on Stadia around 2h12
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.
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.
Profoundly sad, and completely avoidable. Have never seen a company so quickly and completely just throw away all of their public good will.
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".
Except you can fork the last open source version and continue as before. See ... mariadb?
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.
Are those really the exception? Do we have examples of large projects that made a monetization TOS change and didn't immediately get forked?
The only one I can think of is Docker maybe?
LibreOffice is doing pretty well compared to OpenOffice:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37645160
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.
It's hard, but the FOSS model has a long, successful history at this point.
With a proprietary solution, you might get A, but you have zero hope of B. It's an objectively worse proposition.
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.
The examples of successful forks are anecdotal, they are the exceptions not the rule. This is survivor's bias.
Oh but you do. Unless you want to be one of those 10000 asset store games that no one buys.
> You do not need to innovate if you plan to let your game rot and become unplayable 10-20 years later.
They stop maintaining games in 2-3 years, not 10. The few exceptions that maintain sales forever are just that, exceptions.
Are you thinking of multiplayer free to play games? Those aren't games, they're predatory grinding treadmills and I don't care what happens to them.
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.
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.
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.
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).
For the full nuanced details I've listed the relevant links here:
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.
Same goes for Apple App Store as well
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.
Yes, I know it's possible to reverse engineer the consoles, but 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.
- The platform holders can and will ban software built without the official SDK
- You'd get delayed access to patches, which might break compatibility with new OS versions
- You're relying on someone being able to reverse engineer new versions for the life of the console. This is a rare skill.
It's like saying you can write your own C compiler. Yeah you can, but you wouldn't use it in production at your job.
None of your points appear insurmountable or showstoppers to me, to be honest, but they would require approaches to mitigate them.
Obligatory relevant Godot-related links:
* https://docs.godotengine.org/en/4.1/tutorials/platform/conso...
* https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-...
* https://w4games.com/2023/08/06/w4-games-unveils-w4-consoles-...
Couple of Godot-based games available on console:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_Beasts#Development / https://godotengine.org/article/godot-showcase-cassette-beas...
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.
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 Engine can 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.
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.
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.
In short, no.
The most detailed explanation of why is probably this section of this article: https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-...
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.
To clarify, I don't endorse this behavior, but unfortunately, it's the modern way of business.
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.
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.
e.g. https://www.amazon.ca/Glamaours-Climbing-Strawberry-Deliciou...
or
https://www.amazon.ca/Rosepoem-100pcs-rainbow-vegetable-Non-...
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Open source completely avoid this one problem. Apache-style development was created exactly for that.
You can complain that it's way overkill and a company doesn't actually need that level of assurance. But you can't claim it's not sufficient.
Without the concentration of diverse efforts that go into maintaining and advancing a project, having the source code (alone) is of minimal benefit.
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.
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?
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)?
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Sad to see them as an empty house brand now. Just like GE appliances, all that’s left is a sticker.
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.
It’s hard to tell these days whether you’re buying a product from a brand you trust or from a company that bought the brand you trust.
Though, having said that, I recently bought a Bosch refrigerator because Bosch is still Bosch and I trusted Bosch.
But the refrigerator is crap, broken on arrival and it took 5 phone calls and 3 weeks to get service.
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.
Crap like that is why companies have walked away from consumer-biased warranty policies. LLBean had to change theirs as well: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-ll-bean-changed-its-retu...
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.
If they offer the warranty on drill bits, then there's nothing wrong with using the warranty on drill bits. It's not being a bad customer.
Could be. Maybe it snapped?
Oh, I agree - I've snapped dozens as well due to misuse.
But it is not inconceivable that a bit snapped due to manufacturing defect (I just don't know how the store can tell the difference).
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.
And everyone is pulling the same shit.
Dutch : Vertrouwen komt te voet en gaat te paard ( Thorbecke )
https://thalein.medium.com/trust-arrives-on-foot-and-leaves-...
> people and organisations alike tend to be judged by the worst thing they do
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.
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.
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".
> 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.
I'll note companies seem genuinely okay with being on lists of the most hated brands in America.
Edit: typo
Perhaps a poll of the employees, or an association of customers, ought to figure somewhere.
An other strategy would be to place a financial value on "trust". That should be too hard, since brands already have financial value tied to them.
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.
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.
(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)
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.
A security architect at a Bank offered a very pithy version of this to me: "People hate banks, but they trust us. Best not lose their trust."
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
I mean, it’s horrible for consumers/gamers/developers, obviously, but from a business perspective it was the correct move.
It may come up as one of the worst decision in the modern industry. Granted, time will tell and nothing is certain.
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...
Over the past year Docker and D&D/Wizards of the Coast come to mind...
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unity just gave every one of their developers food poisoning.
I suspect similar results.
Because they have the cheap crispy chicken.
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.
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.
This behaviour isn't really all that uncommon. An obvious recent example would be Boeing with the 737 Max.
To save a few bucks they've thrown away a quality process that was best-in-class. Only cost a few billion a few years later...
Our implementation of capitalism rewards only short-term thinking, that is why this behaviour persists.
Ever heard about reddit?
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.
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.
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.
People don't really seem to care about not being able to share games, but they hate being told they can't do something.
Steam doesn’t allow you to share specific games, only your entire library (excluding any games that the seller has made unsharable.)
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".
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.
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)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/16j6cip/ironsource...
https://mobilegamer.biz/unity-is-offering-a-runtime-fee-waiv...
advertising in mobile games too, that's like barely under the table gambling. You'd be more ethically clear making missiles.
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.
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.
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.
You're even contradicted by the mods themselves: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65855608
> 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.
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.
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.
Okay that's bad then, you didn't mention that one before.
> So what?
So... you should be blaming them a lot too.
> remove the content you own
That's still a tantrum, isn't it? And even less likely to get results.
See the about section here: https://www.meetup.com/bostongamedev/
It's a real shame that BUG is dying, it was one of my favorite meetup groups prior to COVID.
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.
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.
I think the takeaway is that businesses built around a community really should not go public.
Avid survived. Unity will too
Ghe whole situation is somewhat similar to when GameMaker Studio switched to subscription model.
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 .
Engineers can hang together or hang separately.
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.
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.
(† Yes, I know the growth potential from real-time to rendered. I still think it's a terrible investment.)
Unity used some of their tech in 2022 to create a demo with some lions in it.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WupuXjvO9uA Making of videos on Youtube, you see the Unity editor in many places while they film in VR
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?
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.
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.
"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.
They pay their employees and executives in stock. They'd have to spend much more cash if they stopped doing that.
I implore devs to watch any of the business 101 class they think they’re too smart for
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.
They are in the perpetual growth trap that so many of these companies fall into when they get bigger than a niche audience
Talk about the consequences of letting a bunch of incompetent MBAs loose at the top.
They had more than enough revenue to be profitable.
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.
Oh... and... "Not all MBAs"
I'm not sure the profit part will work out for them in the long run.
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...
https://newsroom.ibm.com/2019-07-09-IBM-Closes-Landmark-Acqu...
more importantly; https://www.servethehome.com/red-hat-goes-full-ibm-and-says-...
In all seriousness, it’s just that the AGPL considers network use to be distribution and thus entitled to the source[https://medium.com/swlh/understanding-the-agpl-the-most-misu...]
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.
Anyway, it's their loss.
Honestly, go talk to your org's lawyer.
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.
Everyone takes their cut.
https://therightstuff.medium.com/the-trust-thermocline-expla...
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.
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.
I know which one I would say in polite company.
I think it's crass nature gives it a sort of charm and really gets the point across.
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.
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.
This is exactly what Unity has done.
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 may work. It may work in the short term, but cause collapse in the long term. It may fail in the short term. All are enshitification.
There are two keys elements in my mind:
- the product gets worse
- in an attempt to increase profit
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.
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).
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!
so even databrokers saw that word and were like "nah"
> 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?
I wonder if people are idiotically applying the same thing to the marketplace.
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.
Wikipedia has a summary on the idea behind the essay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
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.
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.
I adored Unity's tooling. After working with Godot on a project, I loved Unity even more.
I can't sanely recommend it to anyone at this point.
It's a project that deserves far more attention, and I hope in a few years that it's far more common in popular game development.
If true that makes it so limited as to never be a replacement for Unity.
Even with Unity though you can't just publish to consoles without getting the SDK and licencing.
With Godot you basically pay Lone Wolf Technology, a Sony/Nintendo/MS licenced company for their export module and you're done.
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!