Hacker News Reader

Comment by ekanes | Hacker News Reader

This seems almost impossible to fix: When a person or company is caught violating their promises, it's a big hurdle to differentiate between:

A: "Sorry we got caught / sorry you're upset" and

B: "Oh snap. Our internal values are obviously way wrong. The board has fired the CEO, we are going to solve this in the open along with the community, and then we'll bind our own hands in every way legal that we won't do this again."

So far this still smells a lot like A.

View on HN

Yeah if you look at the Unity leadership and board, you can see clearly who is in charge and what their values are. If that doesn't change, then talk is cheap.

Unity has entered the enshittification (or more generously "value extraction") phase of their existence, and you should assume that going forward no matter what they do, it will be in the context of prioritizing value extraction over customer success or happiness.

Companies are allowed to make money, but how it's done really matters.

They have taken the FB approach. Backpeddle on changes. Wait for heat to cool off. Then back to fucking you over.

They likely won't ever escape it. Unity entered the market as a free, batteries-included game engine. It rose to prominence in the indie community because it was free and it had a LOT of user-generated materials. Their whole brand has this foundation of being friendly to small developers. You take that away in even the smallest way and they have nothing to stand on.

By comparison, Epic didn't have that sort of baggage. They were a big company with a big engine made for big games. And over time they made that engine cheaper and more accessible to smaller devs.

Exactly. Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggy" until you can find a big enough rock.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com