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Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

farewell.bostonunitygroup.com

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Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#171

Post by mschuster91 »

dylan604 wrote: post #135
ditonal wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We can't, but many of us are forced by circumstances we can't control to stay on board even if we don't like where the company is heading. The most recent and probably most nastiest story I'm aware of is post-Musk Twitter - Musk ordered that everyone put in effort like hell, people slept in conference rooms... so, naturally, many people left but one group had to stay because their literal legal existence in the US was tied to that job: H1B employees.

Other cases include if you've got a house that's not paid off, a child on the way... that's where common sense says to not change anything major due to the consequences of shit going down very very VERY hard.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#172

Post by TylerE »

tetha wrote: post #167
kevingadd wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah their new pricing model is quite literally more expensive than Unreal for many of their customers (mostly the ones who make less money - for massive studios it's cheaper) and it's ALSO more complex to comply with. A simple "we're doing revshare now, and the per-seat fee is going away" would have been viewed more favorably I think.

I mean in my naive world, you'd slap some minimum revenue onto the rev-share and you'd have a clear separation between hobbyists, unsuccessful indies, indies, and huge successes. It'd be muddled in the middle, sure, but if some companies hits jackpot with a unity project, you'll know and could act on it.

That's what they did though. It was several hundred thousand dollars in revenue before any of it kicked in.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#173

Post by TylerE »

qwytw wrote: post #153
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.

> stock shenanigans They pay their employees and executives in stock. They'd have to spend much more cash if they stopped doing that.

Could it not be argued that the situation they're in is exactly because "big number go brrrr" over building a sustainable business?

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#174

Post by jameshart »

follower wrote: post #86
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.

That would be an issue with e.g. GPL-licensed game engine but not an Open Source licensed one (e.g. MIT). Obligatory relevant Godot-related links: * https://docs.godotengine.org/en/4.1/tutorials/platform/conso... * https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-... * https://w4games.com/2023/08/06/w4-games-unveils-w4-consoles-... Couple of Godot-based games available on console: * https://en.wikipedia.or…

Providing these links without context, after claiming that MIT licensed engines won’t have any issues, sort of implies that open source engines can be used fine to target consoles.

The fact developers have been able to ship Godot games on console doesn’t help much unless those developers are willing to share whatever proprietary engine-to-console-SDK-interface code they wrote.

Unity and Unreal, in contrast, will happily license equivalent code to you.

I think this section of the second Godot link is worth pulling out and quoting:

> … it is impossible for Godot to include first-party console support out of the box. Even if someone would contribute it, we simply could not host this code legally in our Git repository for anyone to use.

> Additionally, it would not be possible to distribute this code under the same license that Godot uses (MIT) because this is in direct conflict with the proprietary licenses and non-disclosure terms that console manufacturers require to have access to the knowledge needed to write this code.

> To make it simple, it is not possible for Godot to support consoles as an open source project.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#175

Post by ilc »

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…

Some of us saw what was going to happen with D4. It was pretty obvious.

After DI, and D3, to expect D4 to launch in any decent state would have been naive at best.

I've said as much in the Diablo subreddit. D3 is now a good game, if it is what you are looking for. It's a fun romp, but... It isn't a truly heavy ARPG. If you want that POE is calling you.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#176

Post by ChicagoDave »

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…

I got food poisoning from a very well known fast food chain about 25 years ago. I haven’t eaten there since.

Unity just gave every one of their developers food poisoning.

I suspect similar results.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#177

Post by withinboredom »

tristan957 wrote: post #139
insanitybit wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why would customers leave you if your product was AGPL?

Because people are stupid. Never underestimate stupidity.

In all seriousness, it’s just that the AGPL considers network use to be distribution and thus entitled to the source[https://medium.com/swlh/understanding-the-agpl-the-most-misu...]

This terrifies people for some reason. Basically because they want the freedom to modify open source projects and call it their own without giving back to the project that actually created it.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#178

Post by aetherspawn »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #176
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…

I got food poisoning from a very well known fast food chain about 25 years ago. I haven’t eaten there since. Unity just gave every one of their developers food poisoning. I suspect similar results.

I’ve been food poisoned from KFC probably 10 times, but I still eat there once or twice a fortnight for the last IDK 20 years.

Because they have the cheap crispy chicken.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#179

Post by jconley »

Unity's just outgrowing the early adopters. The starving indies will move on to the next up and coming engine. Professionals will continue using Unity (and UE, which also charges royalties) because of the breadth and depth of the toolsets.

I first used Unity when their WebGL system was in private beta. IIRC they tried charging royalties early on but then reverted that for marketshare, but I don't have time to look it up. In any case the royalties aren't burdensome at that scale. I don't think it'll affect much. Vocal minority, yada yada. Maybe it'll even get them to profitability next year!

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#180

Post by hnreport »

bee_rider wrote: post #70
MrRadar wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Enshittification" is not a hard word. It's describes itself: "En-" to make, "shit" bad, "-ification" the process of; in sum the process of making something bad. I think everyone understands that the products and services they use daily are getting worse and now they have a word to describe that experience. I think that by basing itself on the mild swear "shit" it actually distances itself from academic jargon or oth…

I think it is a more specific thing that just “things get bad.” Lots of tech services start by giving things away, or providing services for cheap/free unsustainably, and then start making unpopular moves when the free money dries up and they have to become profitable. It is sort of like a subset of anticompetitive behavior (dumping) but done by a small player using investor funds instead of a large company throwing…

I suppose the polite version of the word would be Entropy.
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