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Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

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Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#441

Post by timetraveller26 »

zoogeny wrote: post #412

I think we are starting to see the cracks in the utopic vision of open source. I know it sounds very harsh, but I feel the vast majority of people complaining about these kind of situations are people who want the benefit of the tremendous engineering accomplishment of a game engine like Unity without contributing or paying in any way. Somehow people have convinced themselves that just using a technology is equivalen…

I hoped that some kind of blockchain could solve this, but they were too busy getting rich to solve actual problems.

Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#442

Post by turndown »

linuxftw wrote: post #425
mnau wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A CEO under who EA introduced lootboxes. A person that proposed that when player runs out of ammo could make an easy instant payment for a quick reload. Unity engine seems to flounder under him, despite rather insane headcount (7,703), acquisition spree laden Unity Technologies with significant debt... I am not impressed, not with his ideas and even less with his results. For comparison, Larry Elisson (Oracle) has di…

Running out of ammo and instant payment sounds a lot like an arcade, which is how video games became commercially successful in the first place.

Except this was in connection with Battlefield 3, a title you’d have to buy. So it’s more like buying the arcade machine but somebody still takes quarters from you anyway.

Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#443

Post by Draiken »

enlyth wrote: post #19
kypro wrote: post #12

I kinda feel bad for Unity. The company is in a bad place finacially. They're burning almost $1 billion a year and they have no good solutions to this. Either they try to increase pricing and piss off their customers, or they cut costs (which they've been doing with mass layoffs) and risk losing ground to other game engineers like Unreal. For years the only thing really holding the company a float was their valuation…

I wouldn't feel bad for their executives. They are the ones who chose the 'growth at all costs' path, and this is what you get. They could've probably been sustainable and profitable if they mainly serviced their core audience of indie developers with a smaller amount of employees and a simpler product, but it seems they really wanted to brute force themselves into the AAA market.

As far as I can tell that's the most common IPO company cycle repeating itself.

The early investors and founders cash out first and the public that bought into the unsustainable growth trajectory are left with a failing company.

This is so common I truly don't understand why people still buy into these companies.

Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#444

Post by f33d5173 »

zoogeny wrote: post #412

I think we are starting to see the cracks in the utopic vision of open source. I know it sounds very harsh, but I feel the vast majority of people complaining about these kind of situations are people who want the benefit of the tremendous engineering accomplishment of a game engine like Unity without contributing or paying in any way. Somehow people have convinced themselves that just using a technology is equivalen…

I don't think anything is "crumbling". Some companies got a large amounts of investment and sky high valuations on a product they were practically giving away. Now they need to figure out how to make those valutions work and return that investment. That sucks for them, but that doesn't prove that its impossible to sustain an open source business to make a certain piece of software.

I use open source software because quality of certain things isn't very important to me, and I don't want to pay for them. If push really came to shove, I could replace large portions of my stack myself using something handrolled. If enough people who want something for free and are willing to build it themselves come together, they can make something that competes with large companies. The large companies in turn can start releasing their product for free in order to maintain market dominance, or they can let themselves be replaced. There's no "free lunch" here, its all simple econmics.

Youtube has largely the same struture: for a while, videos were being made by people doing it as a hobby, then by people doing it as a job, but alone in their bedroom. Now some of them have large production teams and expensive facilities. It sure would suck for them if they stopped being able to make payroll, but I can go back to watching amateurs anytime. Your business model is your problem, not mine.

Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#445

Post by sixothree »

linuxftw wrote: post #425
mnau wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A CEO under who EA introduced lootboxes. A person that proposed that when player runs out of ammo could make an easy instant payment for a quick reload. Unity engine seems to flounder under him, despite rather insane headcount (7,703), acquisition spree laden Unity Technologies with significant debt... I am not impressed, not with his ideas and even less with his results. For comparison, Larry Elisson (Oracle) has di…

Running out of ammo and instant payment sounds a lot like an arcade, which is how video games became commercially successful in the first place.

Gauntlet is a very specific example of this but with health and not ammo.

Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#446

Post by pxoe »

miragecraft wrote: post #340

The logic that Epic and Unreal Engine will do something similar as Unity doesn't track for me. The argument hinges on the premise that Epic, who operates their own game store and is courting developers aggressively with generous revenue split, is willing to burn their bridge with developers for questionable increase in profit; in addition it presumes that the plain old revenue share model that Unreal Engine utiltizes…

people trusted in unity for years, enough to build their products and careers on it and around it, and something like this still happened. was it foreseeable? even if it was, well what then, 'great, i have no options besides sucking it up or switching, since i built upon this'. what guarantees do epic/unreal customers have?

oh wait, this isn't about 'what worth does 'trust in company' even have', but more like 'public companies bad'

Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#447

Post by dgb23 »

zoogeny wrote: post #412

I think we are starting to see the cracks in the utopic vision of open source. I know it sounds very harsh, but I feel the vast majority of people complaining about these kind of situations are people who want the benefit of the tremendous engineering accomplishment of a game engine like Unity without contributing or paying in any way. Somehow people have convinced themselves that just using a technology is equivalen…

More often than not, open source licenses are given for very practical reasons that aren’t directly tied to extracting money directly.

Foundational libraries, tools, frameworks etc. is often open sourced so people don’t have to “reinvent the weel” every time they switch jobs and positions. Additionally, large orgs can benefit from having a larger talent pool to draw from, because there’s more people familiar with open source software.

Do you think Oracle is maintaining Java (etc.) for altruistic reasons?

OSS is often also a vehicle for marketing, selling expertise or ops services.

Stuff is open sourced so it gets used, built upon and to gain mindshare, community and to find collaborators etc.

You using or building on the software doesn’t in any way detract from that value proposition and often adds to it in indirect ways.

Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#448

Post by bigfishrunning »

zoogeny wrote: post #412

I think we are starting to see the cracks in the utopic vision of open source. I know it sounds very harsh, but I feel the vast majority of people complaining about these kind of situations are people who want the benefit of the tremendous engineering accomplishment of a game engine like Unity without contributing or paying in any way. Somehow people have convinced themselves that just using a technology is equivalen…

>But I think about all of it. nginx, haproxy, redis, postgresql, nodejs, python. I don't think I could even write out all of the open source I am using in my projects within the confines of a Hacker News comment. Just trying to wrap my head around how I could even pay for all of that software if I had to is anxiety inducing.

Luckily, the licenses of these projects are all such that, the minute the maintainer pulls the rug out, you are perfectly free to fork the project and move on as if nothing happened. Open source protects you.

Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#449

Post by degreesoffun »

mnau wrote: post #367
sigmoid10 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is a problem of company structure. It's solely a problem of bad management. If they had listened to their users or their own developers, or any remotely sane person with some touch of reality, then this wouldn't have happened. But if you hire the former CEO of EA - a guy with no low level industry experience and who left his last job because of poor financial performance - then this whole fiasco se…

A CEO under who EA introduced lootboxes. A person that proposed that when player runs out of ammo could make an easy instant payment for a quick reload. Unity engine seems to flounder under him, despite rather insane headcount (7,703), acquisition spree laden Unity Technologies with significant debt... I am not impressed, not with his ideas and even less with his results. For comparison, Larry Elisson (Oracle) has di…

I have a few friends that work or have worked at Unity. This is purely anecdotal but from what I've heard it sounds like the place is fairly dysfunctional at this point. A lot of the dysfunction that exists now wasn't there even 3-4 years ago.

Re: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source

#450

Post by pxc »

ahoka wrote: post #37
TMM2K wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source is that protection. There's no way for an open source project to change their terms that drastically. The whole hasicorp disaster is a prime example of that. Terraform is forked and continues on like normal, users are not impacted. For programming platforms (like game engines) this is even MORE of an advantage, as with something like terraform you could conceivably rewrite your stuff in a matter of weeks…

“There's no way for an open source project to change their terms that drastically.” Like going from GPLv2 to GPLv3 or straight to AGPL, so now you are stuck with an old version forever? Yeah, that would never happen!

That's only a problem for you if you yourself have a business model that depends on curtailing the freedom of your users. Playing the victim when a license prevents you from victimizing your own customers and users in the way that has happened in this incident is pretty rich.
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