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Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

farewell.bostonunitygroup.com

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Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#101

Post by [deleted] »

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 ?

[deleted]

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#103

Post by deely3 »

karaterobot wrote: post #54

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 mi…

I think one of the reason of the group existing is because members trusted Unity. Now this trust is throwed out in trash. They can't force Unity to be good to users and they don't want to support Untity anymore. Thats all.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#104

Post by gameman144 »

duped wrote: post #42
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…

Reminds me of something I once heard a VP say at a very old, established company. Something along the lines of, "Our brand is trust. It took 90 years to build it, but it would take just one day to destroy it." The point he was making was that this old, established company's biggest asset was its brand, and its brand identity was just "trust" (they made professional products, and others could undercut them, but pros w…

As an example here, my father and grandfather used to swear by Craftsman tools. No matter the context, if there was a Craftsman version, they'd go for it because they implicitly trusted the quality.

Then the Craftsman brand downshifted its production quality to compete in price and their reliability fell through the floor. Now my family will skip over Craftsman entirely even if it's competitive in price, since the breach of perceived trust soured them on the brand so completely.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#105

Post by infamia »

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…

People change but cultures endure. The larger the organization becomes, the more this is true.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#106

Post by fineIllregister »

maccard wrote: post #83
SolarNet wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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. "We're profitable if you ignore all the things we're spending money on"

The claim here is that none of that spending is generating revenue. They could stop spending that money, their income would remain the same, and then they would be profitable.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#107

Post by throw0101c »

linkdd wrote: post #33
nottorp wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even when open-source, it's only a matter of time before an Oracle or Google or Microsoft or Meta takes it over Except you can fork the last open source version and continue as before. See ... mariadb?

MariaDB, OpenTofu, etc... Those are the exceptions. Forking is easy. Maintaining a fork, keeping the quality and innovation alive, and the community involved is hard. There are many more failed forks than successful forks. So saying "you can fork" is utopist at best. Sure you can, but you'll probably be the only one maintaining it and it will slowly rot as there won't be a community to keep it bug-free and compatible…

> Forking is easy. Maintaining a fork, keeping the quality and innovation alive, and the community involved is hard.

LibreOffice is doing pretty well compared to OpenOffice:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37645160

EGCS was eventually merged back into GCC (or rather it became the new GCC?). I don't pay attention recently, but XEmacs was/is pretty active along with Emacs.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#108

Post by mardifoufs »

soulbadguy wrote: post #9

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 some…

Was unity ever open source? I don't think so

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#109

Post by linkdd »

throw0101c wrote: post #107
linkdd wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MariaDB, OpenTofu, etc... Those are the exceptions. Forking is easy. Maintaining a fork, keeping the quality and innovation alive, and the community involved is hard. There are many more failed forks than successful forks. So saying "you can fork" is utopist at best. Sure you can, but you'll probably be the only one maintaining it and it will slowly rot as there won't be a community to keep it bug-free and compatible…

> Forking is easy. Maintaining a fork, keeping the quality and innovation alive, and the community involved is hard. LibreOffice is doing pretty well compared to OpenOffice: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37645160 EGCS was eventually merged back into GCC (or rather it became the new GCC?). I don't pay attention recently, but XEmacs was/is pretty active along with Emacs.

More anecdotal examples of "survivor's bias" do not dismiss the initial argument.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#110

Post by the-dude »

duped wrote: post #42
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…

Reminds me of something I once heard a VP say at a very old, established company. Something along the lines of, "Our brand is trust. It took 90 years to build it, but it would take just one day to destroy it." The point he was making was that this old, established company's biggest asset was its brand, and its brand identity was just "trust" (they made professional products, and others could undercut them, but pros w…

Trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback

Dutch : Vertrouwen komt te voet en gaat te paard ( Thorbecke )

https://thalein.medium.com/trust-arrives-on-foot-and-leaves-...

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