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Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

farewell.bostonunitygroup.com

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Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#251

Post by packetlost »

taylodl wrote: post #121
gameman144 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Lowe's supposedly honors the Craftsman lifetime warranty. I haven't tried it, last time I needed to use the warranty was 30 years ago when in the middle of some car repair job I was doing I took the busted wrench into Sears, still dressed in my grimy clothes I was wearing and covered in grease, I handed them the broken wrench and they simply handed me a new one. No questions asked, no paperwork. They handed me a new…

Sears was still doing this when I worked there in 2016. They went as far as to bust open a set of 24 drill bits to replace one of them on the spot.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#252

Post by 015a »

robocat wrote: post #95
malfist wrote: post #6

I think enshitification will be the word of the year this year

Cory Doctorow coined it to mean something different from how it is now used: Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification. It now means something like "the process where products or servic…

Look at Enshitification through the lens that its basically just Inflation localized to a single company. When companies are poorly managed, they die. Except: now enters awesomely sophisticated Financial Engineering, enabling companies to metastasize far longer than the market alone would allow them. Take out debt; venture funding; unsupported valuations; high expectations; market ebbs and flows; you can fly a Cessna at 70mph just fine, but a jet going that slow crashes.

Unity was running $200M in losses on $500M in revenue, per quarter. And they've never been profitable (since going public). A government can safely print money if it has the economic growth and tax base to support it; but if it doesn't have that, over enough time, you get: Inflation. The bill always comes due.

Enshitification is just company-localized inflation after unsupportable financial engineering. There are really good examples in Doctorow's original piece; most of them actually cover the more-common stagflationary effect, but stagflation is just inflation through a different lens. It really doesn't have much to do with B2B versus B2C; its intimately related to attempts toward increasing profit margins, but the critical piece is the path the company walked to get there; and, in the most severe cases, the fact that they should have stopped walking and died three miles back.

Or, maybe Doctorow would disagree with all of that. But that's the fun part of inventing such a meme-able, excellent term; it outgrows you!

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#253

Post by OkayPhysicist »

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…

You don't need to innovate on the foundation of your product. It's a game engine: If it fulfilled your needs when you started, it's fulfilling your needs now. With open-source solutions A) you can't have the rug pulled from under you, as you have a perpetual license, and B) you can fix/modify/add things yourself if the business needs arise.

With a proprietary solution, you might get A, but you have zero hope of B. It's an objectively worse proposition.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#254

Post by neilv »

chx wrote: post #218
neilv wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The only fix is to burn Oracle to the very ground and sow the remnants with salt to ensure it doesn't regrow.

I actually had a different company in mind. I'm much less familiar with Oracle.

The one time I bumped into Larry Ellison, he managed to come across as intensely competitive, in just a moment. I'd guess that's probably reflected in his company.

Does Oracle seem a steady in-your-face aggressive, and you know what you get?

Or is more a cyclic and plotting: in-your-face shameless when they can get away with it, and makes nice when they have to, while running long-cons (some of them very underhanded)?

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#255

Post by sokoloff »

packetlost wrote: post #251
taylodl wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lowe's supposedly honors the Craftsman lifetime warranty. I haven't tried it, last time I needed to use the warranty was 30 years ago when in the middle of some car repair job I was doing I took the busted wrench into Sears, still dressed in my grimy clothes I was wearing and covered in grease, I handed them the broken wrench and they simply handed me a new one. No questions asked, no paperwork. They handed me a new…

Sears was still doing this when I worked there in 2016. They went as far as to bust open a set of 24 drill bits to replace one of them on the spot.

Wait. Someone returned a drill bit (a wear item) for replacement?

Crap like that is why companies have walked away from consumer-biased warranty policies. LLBean had to change theirs as well: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-ll-bean-changed-its-retu...

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#256

Post by ChicagoDave »

lovich wrote: post #209
aetherspawn wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess that’s the opposite problem of having an overly sensitive sense of pattern recognition

I set em up, you guys knock em down.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#257

Post by raytopia »

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.

They can it would just have to be a separate private branch. This is how SDL amd others do it.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#258

Post by SecretDracula »

aetherspawn wrote: post #178
ChicagoDave wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

KFC really isn't cheap anymore. I went there the other day with some friends and was aghast at the prices. We left and went across the parking lot to the grocery store and got a big platter of fried chicken and a tub of slaw for less than half the price.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#259

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

nitwit005 wrote: post #208
berniedurfee wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a few. Cockos makes an amazing Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) that competes with the top names in the industry. While much of the rest of the industry is moving to subscriptions or jacking prices, Cockos has kept their prices extremely low and push new releases consistently.

A history of doing the right thing doesn't matter in the slightest, unless you can somehow guarantee their leadership won't change (or is unlikely to, at least).

> A history of doing the right thing doesn't matter in the slightest

If we all thought this way, certainly there'd be no incentive for anyone to do the right thing at all? A good track record should be rewarded, up until the point when it stops. You shouldn't trust any company indefinitely, but there are a few that you can trust "for now".

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#260

Post by neilv »

raincole wrote: post #248
neilv wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think a nice thing about Google is that it seems many people there still believe that to some degree.

We certainly believed it when Google started, and they were talking like the then-familiar Internet-savvy altruistic forward-looking engineer types.

Today, you can still see many examples of Google doing things well. (And of course many examples of things that we wouldn't have expected them to do, including some that would've gotten them ostracized.)

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