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Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

farewell.bostonunitygroup.com

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Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#4

Post by dbingham »

ethbr1 wrote: post #3
asynchronous wrote: post #2

Unity really showing the world how to tank a business by letting a few MBA’s at the top make a decision for profit.

^H^Hby going public without a business model.

I feel like we've seen a bunch of businesses show what happens when you take private capital and scale on a community based product with out a clear business model that doesn't involve retroactively screwing the community in some way.

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.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#5

Post by kdottt »

"More importantly, we've seen how easily and flippantly an executive-led business decision can risk bankrupting the studios we've worked so hard to build, threaten our livelihoods as professionals, and challenge the longevity of our industry. The Unity of today isn't the same company that it was when the group was founded, and the trust we used to have in the company has been completely eroded."

Profoundly sad, and completely avoidable. Have never seen a company so quickly and completely just throw away all of their public good will.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#7

Post by miohtama »

kdottt wrote: post #5

"More importantly, we've seen how easily and flippantly an executive-led business decision can risk bankrupting the studios we've worked so hard to build, threaten our livelihoods as professionals, and challenge the longevity of our industry. The Unity of today isn't the same company that it was when the group was founded, and the trust we used to have in the company has been completely eroded." Profoundly sad, and c…

This is why it is good to build on the top of open source solutions

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#8

Post by dylan604 »

asynchronous wrote: post #2

Unity really showing the world how to tank a business by letting a few MBA’s at the top make a decision for profit.

i remember back when Avid decided they were no longer going to offer a Mac version of their NLEs because Apple's new machines were only going to have 3 expansion slots. while admittedly, there were probably a much smaller number of affected users than the Unity decision, it did cause a huge amount of turmoil. urban legend has people dumping their Avid stations on the doorstep of the Avid offices.

Avid survived. Unity will too

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#9

Post by soulbadguy »

like getting blood from a stone...

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...

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#10

Post by rmelton »

dbingham wrote: post #4
ethbr1 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^H^Hby going public without a business model.

I feel like we've seen a bunch of businesses show what happens when you take private capital and scale on a community based product with out a clear business model that doesn't involve retroactively screwing the community in some way. 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 b…

My company is actively using this model now. It's really hard watching competitors raise multi-million dollar rounds though.
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