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Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

farewell.bostonunitygroup.com

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Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#131

Post by JohnFen »

nwiswell wrote: post #97
JohnFen wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you drink from a river and get cholera, would you drink from that river again in the future? No. Further, I'd stop drinking untreated water from all rivers. (Just answering your hypothetical. I spend a lot of time in the wilderness and wouldn't drink untreated water from a river or lake to begin with.) This effect, though, has happened with software for me years ago. Enough bad actors exist that I've reached the…

I was going to observe that another totally-understandable reaction to getting fucked in a business transaction (or getting cholera from untreated water) is to begin researching everyone you do business with (or testing/treating all the water you drink). I may be stretching the limits of the analogy here, but either way that "verify, then trust" approach is more work than "adaptive blissful ignorance", and a lot of p…

"verify, then trust" is problematic in a world where companies get bought and sold, management changes, business goals shift, etc.

The only protection against this is contracts, but when a company -- like Unity has done twice now -- decides to retroactively change the terms of existing contracts, that means that you cannot trust them at all going into the future even if they're solidly "good" right now.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#132

Post by axus »

thorncorona wrote: post #37
codetrotter wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/im-done-red-hat-enter...

Hard to run an open source enterprise company when Amazon's playbook is to take your shit for free and host it themselves.

Red Hat had over a billion dollars in revenue last year and it's never stopped growing. Free Red Hat-compatible operating systems did not stop them from making a lot of money.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#133

Post by AlexandrB »

gameman144 wrote: post #104
duped wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 br…

Same thing happened with Canadian Tire's "Mastercraft" brand. I think it was always viewed as a Craftsman knock off, but they used to have a lifetime warranty and pretty good quality. I now mostly regard Mastercraft as disposable junk.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#134

Post by taikahessu »

I have a hard time coming up with a worse decision in the history of game industry.

Why did it come to this? Just more profits? I mean the landscape is highly competitive with free tools getting better and Unreal Engine eating all the highlights. Unity's stock price was even before this decision a third of it's all time high.

I mean there must've been a dramatic cultural twist quite some time ago. That would've lead champions to leave and the codebase comes crashing down. This will be a great lecture material for business schools, goes in the same bucket as Nokia.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#135

Post by dylan604 »

ditonal wrote: post #75
dylan604 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what would be better for the community would be not just a decline in devs using the engine, but also the devs working on the engine. working for Unity should now be a stain just like working for FB/socials/ad-tech. there will be tons of people willing to do it, but hopefully the great minds leave the rot

That’s the opposite of what would be better. We need more engineer solidarity not more divisiveness. Give me a list of your past employers and I can guarantee I can find some sketchball business practice you indirectly contributed to and make some tenuous argument for you to be blackballed. 95% of shitty tech industry practices can be root caused to people identify more strongly with their employer than with their pr…

You must subscribe to the idea that the employees can change the culture of a company from bottom up. I strongly disagree. Company culture is dictated from top down, and only rarely does the bottom get to make substantive changes. However, I'm willing to have my mind change with examples of companies changing their culture based on employees changing the minds of the execs.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#136

Post by miohtama »

amrocha wrote: post #50
jameshart wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great advice… Unless you’re a game studio who wants to ship on PlayStation and Switch some day. If you want to build on an engine that lets you target proprietary platforms your options are, in practice, limited.

Are open source tools banned on playstation and switch?

There is no one open source, but various open source licenses.

Nintendo Switch and Playstation and titles from Sony and Nintendo incorporate BSD-licensed open source code, so it is obvious that “open source is banned” is not true. It’s only GPL and other viral licenses that lawyers argue is too risky, because it might require disclosing proprietary source when linked.

Same goes for Apple App Store as well

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12827624

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#137

Post by AlexandrB »

rmbyrro wrote: post #126
hightrix wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that Unity is about 10x the size it needs to be. They could shed a significant portion of their employees and still produce a good product. They are in the perpetual growth trap that so many of these companies fall into when they get bigger than a niche audience

That sounds like a Musk job

He would just fold it under "X" so he can claim to be closer to an "everything app". I'm sure he's annoyed that "Xbox" is already taken.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#138

Post by ajcp »

TylerE wrote: post #123
ajcp wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds lazy and crass to me. Instead of a word meant to accurately convey a concept it's meant to broadly convey a concept and ones feelings on it in the same breath; much like the term "woke". I'd rather use something around a historical event that can also be used to help understand a concept through allegory, like "Dutch disease", or "cargo cult". Those are fun.

You think "rent seeking" is crass and "enshitification" isn't? I know which one I would say in polite company.

You misunderstood me. The subject of his statement, the "fun sounding word", that I don't think is fun sounding is "enshitification".

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#139

Post by tristan957 »

insanitybit wrote: post #69
azemetre wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't using an AGPL license be better for this than just GPL?

That would be a hilarious way to lose every customer over night.

Why would customers leave you if your product was AGPL?

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#140

Post by tacticalmook »

wredue wrote: post #55
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 th…

Historically, subreddits were run by community volunteers because people were tired of being censored on official forums. Now subreddits are the official channel more often than not, and we're back to square one.
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