Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

Yes, Milton Friedman, 1970, New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...

Wikipedia has a summary on the idea behind the essay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

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.

https://unity.com/esg

https://unity.com/unity-uk-binary-gender-pay-gap-report

https://unity.com/inclusion-diversity

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].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

>Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification"

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.

A name for it is Gouging. The motivation behind it is called Greed.

enshittification? No papers as far as I'm aware

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