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Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

farewell.bostonunitygroup.com

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Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#51

Post by ROFISH »

TylerE wrote: post #13
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.

To play devil's advocate... Unity isn't close to profitable, and never has been. At some point money has to be made or the lights get turned off.

Unity has been on a buying spree including traditional TV/Movie CGI firms for some insane reason†. They're just plain _bad_ at spending money.

(† Yes, I know the growth potential from real-time to rendered. I still think it's a terrible investment.)

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#52

Post by wetpaws »

Aditya_Garg wrote: post #40
yoyohello13 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Good will" is an asset just like any other to be spent when the time is right. Sometimes a company will make the wrong bet and accidentally go out of business. Far more often there is a ton of backlash, their reputation goes in the tank, then they spend the next couple years building good will back up until the majority of people forget all about the past transgressions. Meanwhile the unpopular decision makes stacks…

Besides Reddit, do you have other examples ?

[dead]

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#53

Post by digging »

brookst wrote: post #49
yoyohello13 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Good will" is an asset just like any other to be spent when the time is right. Sometimes a company will make the wrong bet and accidentally go out of business. Far more often there is a ton of backlash, their reputation goes in the tank, then they spend the next couple years building good will back up until the majority of people forget all about the past transgressions. Meanwhile the unpopular decision makes stacks…

But isn’t that as it should be? 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 year…

Maybe, if new people are in charge.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#54

Post by karaterobot »

I grant the premise that Unity sucks and has made changes that make it much harder to be an indie developer using its runtime.

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.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#55

Post by wredue »

Willish42 wrote: post #45

I wish I had a large enough Twitter following to make a public claim about this before Unity "went back" on the first version of the recently-announced pricing changes, but I was nearly certain this was an intentional move to make the "Update on our update" second version more palatable. There's probably a wiki link somewhere to the Proper Noun PR phenomenon in business school for this strategy, but the "terrible pla…

I was also considering this, but while this strategy works wonders on the consumer, I don’t know how well it works in more B2B offerings.

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.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#56

Post by SolarNet »

TylerE wrote: post #13
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.

To play devil's advocate... Unity isn't close to profitable, and never has been. At some point money has to be made or the lights get turned off.

> Unity isn't close to profitable, and never has been

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.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#57

Post by Buttons840 »

malfist wrote: post #25
Buttons840 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have mixed feelings about the word "enshitification". 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",…

All it is is a fun sounding word for "rent-seeking"

It's supposed to refer to a company's priorities shifting away from the customer's, "rent seeking" is instead about profiting from owning limited resources. They are different things.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#58

Post by harpiaharpyja »

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.

This "for profit" thing seems like the wrong framing. Customer goodwill and community are extremely valuable. It seems like what we are looking at is more about short-termism and the distortive effects of suddenly (post-IPO) having to report to investors who are essentially outsiders to the business and have no knowledge or stake in the operation-as-an-entity-in-a-larger-ecosystem other than having dumped a bunch of money into it.

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.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#60

Post by andrewclunn »

TylerE wrote: post #13
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.

To play devil's advocate... Unity isn't close to profitable, and never has been. At some point money has to be made or the lights get turned off.

Build product / service at a loss. Product becomes popular because it provides so much value so cheaply (because is being sold at loss). Maintain through continual investment and chasing "growth." Bill comes due. Investors left holding the bag and ecosystems built around assuming bubble was real have a bad time.

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.

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