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Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

farewell.bostonunitygroup.com

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Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#241

Post by 015a »

taikahessu wrote: post #134

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…

One could argue that Microsoft's "no game sharing" decision at the beginning of Xbox One, right off the heals of a generation that experienced both high success, but also extremely high costs (RROD recalls, estimates say it cost them over $1.1B), was a bigger one. It seems unnaturally likely to me that single decision by Mattrick's Xbox leadership is the largest component to Xbox One's relatively lower success (58M sales, versus 102M PS4 and 84M XB360), and has cascaded to, possibly permanently, suppress Xbox's potential (Series is at 21M to PS5's 41M).

I tend to think that decision was worse, because it was Just Bad. There was no reason they had to do it. It had very little prior art (digital games, naturally, always did this, so non-zero). It was a pure, absolute failure to read the room, and the XB1 era had so many decisions like this that it seriously paints the picture that Xbox is alive today literally only because of Spencer and despite Microsoft's leadership at the time (pre-release, Xbox One also required Kinect to be plugged in. This was walked back, but it still shipped in the box, lowering margins and depressing sales volume for no reason.)

In comparison: Unity has been in trouble for a long time. They've never posted a profit, at least since going public, and have instead accumulated an aggregate of over $2B in losses. Their main competitor (Epic) is a technological savant of a company, which has a literal money-printing machine in their closet to finance engine development. They never really broke into AAA game production, partly because Unreal is just better at hyper-scale development, and partly because AAA game shops are surprisingly welcoming to in-house engine development.

In that framing, this outcome seems inevitable. There's a reason they made this decision; a very real, dollars and cents, reason, and backing away from it (especially after the outcry, but even without it) isn't going to save them. The best, but unlikely, outcome for Unity and their customers is deep layoffs, focusing hard on ease of use instead of technological prowess, spending years rebuilding the trust they lost, and depressing their stock price enough that they can find a path to going private without losing control. The much more realistic outcome is: deep layoffs, coasting the product, monetizing every addon they can outside of the toxic "core pricing structure", and private equity acquisition.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#242

Post by golergka »

jconley wrote: post #179

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…

I've worked in game development for a long time, including a couple of games with over 100 million installs. Professional game studios making mobile free2play games, which is Unity's main moat, are VERY uneasy right now. For many games, the install tax would push them into unprofitability. Especially in hypercasual, where an average user may have LTV of a few cents total. These are billion dollar companies, and they have the resources to build their own engines, they just didn't have a real reason until now.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#243

Post by jaimex2 »

ClassyJacket wrote: post #217
Quindecillion wrote: post #200

Best thing about this divisive action by Unity is all the attention it's giving Godot. It's a project that deserves far more attention, and I hope in a few years that it's far more common in popular game development.

Am I understanding correctly that due to licensing Godot can never support consoles? If true that makes it so limited as to never be a replacement for Unity.

It's just licencing shenanigans, they can't taint the open source licence by putting proprietary code/assets in the godot repo.

Even with Unity though you can't just publish to consoles without getting the SDK and licencing.

With Godot you basically pay Lone Wolf Technology, a Sony/Nintendo/MS licenced company for their export module and you're done.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#244

Post by Tijdreiziger »

__d wrote: post #184
marcosdumay wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the correct analogue here are the people saying "open source or GTFO".

There are limits to what open source can do too. Perhaps it's necessary, but not sufficient? There's limited benefit to having the source code when the community has been splintered, and the future direction is contrary to your needs. Sure, you can make your own fixes, etc, but you no longer enjoy the leverage community development.

Does that actually happen all that much? In the cases I can think of (OpenOffice.org, ffmpeg, OpenWRT), the community ended up concentrating around either the original project or the fork (in other words, the community didn’t really splinter, just move).

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#245

Post by DangitBobby »

betamist wrote: post #233
wredue wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Discussions online have had this nature ever since they went mainstream I think. Especially Reddit I mean, some of those more popular subreddits are run mostly by kids is what I make out of it. Maybe not kids in terms of age but people who never grew up. Censorship seems to be the natural order of things in online communities where people don’t see or know each other, and when a lot of the context gets lost in the te…

> Unfortunately people have convinced themselves that some opinions -those they disagree with- are dangerous for others to read.

Or more likely than seeing them as "dangerous" they recognize that if you allow opinions to be expressed, others may gain a new perspective by reading it or even adopt that opinion themselves.

Or in the case of HN, certain topics of conversation are censored or discouraged because they tend to lead to boring/repetitive/annoying/aggressive comment threads.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#246

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

__d wrote: post #184
marcosdumay wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the correct analogue here are the people saying "open source or GTFO".

There are limits to what open source can do too. Perhaps it's necessary, but not sufficient? There's limited benefit to having the source code when the community has been splintered, and the future direction is contrary to your needs. Sure, you can make your own fixes, etc, but you no longer enjoy the leverage community development.

> There's limited benefit to having the source code when the community has been splintered, and the future direction is contrary to your needs. Sure, you can make your own fixes, etc, but you no longer enjoy the leverage community development.

And that's still better than being stuck with arbitrary price changes.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#247

Post by andrewflnr »

harpiaharpyja wrote: post #58
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…

Yep, it's not profit motive that's the problem, but short term profit above all else, including long term profit. Because in the long term, whoever is making the decision will already be gone.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#248

Post by raincole »

neilv wrote: post #77
brookst wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Does it depend on the company culture, which can persist awhile? For example, the first company that comes to mind has seemed to have shameless underhandedness deep in its DNA, and to exhibit its malevolent side each new chance it gets, as much as it can. This has repeated over the course of decades, and over multiple top leadership changes. If it's true that certain kinds of underhandedness are in that company's DNA…

People once believed that "Don't be evil" is in Google's DNA.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#249

Post by fuzzzerd »

tacticalmook wrote: post #140
wredue wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this really succinctly describes why reddit sucks now.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#250

Post by raincole »

Mystery-Machine wrote: post #118
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…

Have you ever heard of Twitter and Reddit?

Since when Twitter has "good will"?

I'm sure even before Musk, most people considered Twitter the equivalent of soap opera. It was bad. It was tasteless. It was a time waster. But people just need to have something to scroll.

Unity, on the other hand, was actually loved by some devs. Of course it was buggy from time to time, but it was huge time-saver especially for mobile games.

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