Unity really showing the world how to tank a business by letting a few MBA’s at the top make a decision for profit.
And by tank a business you mean trying to increase revenues to stop losing 500 millions a year I guess
Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
221–230 of 465 posts
Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know how much people know or have heard about ironSource. It's kind of an open secret in Israel on how they built a company to profit by building what is essentially malware (installers disguised as OEM while they're really adding extra trackers to your computer). They always paid 25% more than most of the other tech companies, but still had issues recruiting because it takes a special kind of person to be wi…
The merger makes a ton of sense — Unity was super late to the game building their own Demand-Side Platform for ads, and that’s how you make money in mobile games now, so they had to buy their way out of the problem. I mean, it’s horrible for consumers/gamers/developers, obviously, but from a business perspective it was the correct move.
Well, clearly not, if the community is going to have a fallout with the product and never trust it again. You can have the most maggotty type of an ad company, if you don’t have shelf space to show ads you won’t be making money.
Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
#223"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…
Yes they threw it all away when they could just have continued subsidising video games and losing millions every year
Were those the only two options available to them?
Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
#224Earlier 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…
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-...
Interesting correlate with "stocks take the stairs up and the elevator down" - stock prices being strongly influenced by trust.
Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"It’s profitable if you ignore cost of capital"
I implore devs to watch any of the business 101 class they think they’re too smart for
Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
#226"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…
Yes they threw it all away when they could just have continued subsidising video games and losing millions every year
I know you’re being sarcastic here, but indie game developers really don’t get compensated well enough unless they break very big. Most keep doing it for the passion.
To price your product so you make money to “stay afloat” with your tens of thousands engineers working mostly on ad tech or non-core stuff, while your customers are barely scraping is typically very bad strategy yes. You know how you can tell? They’ve lost a ton of business and the brand damage they’ve suffered is beyond that even. Maybe Unity will stick around, but it’ll be the engine those ad filled mobile casino games use, good luck finding developers who’d be happy doing that for the rest of their life.
Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
#227Earlier 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.
I don't think this is true. Unless I'm misreading their S1, they have been operating at a loss: https://www.meritechcapital.com/blog/unity-software-ipo-s-1-...
...with nearly 8,000 employees. I'd love to see a breakdown of how much is being lost by each of their various business units.
Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
#228"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…
Twitter (well X, now) surely has to be in the running as well.
Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
#229I 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 live in Boston and frequently went to BUG events prior to COVID. The pandemic killed off many in-person meetups, and nowadays game developer events meet much less frequently. There already is a game dev meetup group called Boston GameDev which seems to have absorbed all of the meetups into one umbrella - and this includes BUG. There is no pressing need to rename the group or transfer members because this umbrella organization already exists.
See the about section here: https://www.meetup.com/bostongamedev/
It's a real shame that BUG is dying, it was one of my favorite meetup groups prior to COVID.
Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
#230Earlier 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…
this also happens on day to day consumer grade stuff. new brands of hotdogs will be yummy, the next batches will be shitty. same with bread from bakeries.
it's crazy how the loss in quality begets them increased profits in nthe short term, but costs them their entire business in the long term.
the high quality products can be the loss leaders, and they can just commoditize the compliments.
why would you reduce the size of bread, when you can just sell me overpriced peanut butter, jams, and spreads to come along with it?
a good lesson in trust and social psychology. when trust is built, people throw their money at you.