This is a speedrun on killing a company.
I adored Unity's tooling. After working with Godot on a project, I loved Unity even more.
I can't sanely recommend it to anyone at this point.
Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
261–270 of 465 posts
Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
#262I 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 s…
The dumbest thing about Microsoft's "no game sharing" thing is that they could have just waited. Digital game sales made up 90% of game sales in 2022, which can't be shared.
People don't really seem to care about not being able to share games, but they hate being told they can't do something.
Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
#263"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 never seen a company so quickly and completely just throw away all of their public good will.
This behaviour isn't really all that uncommon. An obvious recent example would be Boeing with the 737 Max.
To save a few bucks they've thrown away a quality process that was best-in-class. Only cost a few billion a few years later...
Our implementation of capitalism rewards only short-term thinking, that is why this behaviour persists.
Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
#264Earlier 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…
Sadly, I just assume that no company can be trusted these days. It wasn't too long ago that the leadership of companies was often fairly stable. Now you see people rotating through every couple of years, rarely having to face the fallout of their bad decisions.
Darn Tough has made some fairly consistently awesome socks up in VT for a couple decades now.
Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
#265Earlier 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.
What you mean?
Open source completely avoid this one problem. Apache-style development was created exactly for that.
You can complain that it's way overkill and a company doesn't actually need that level of assurance. But you can't claim it's not sufficient.
Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
It is plausible that it did not live up to reasonable expectations in some way. Equally likely that someone was being dishonest though.
Example: I once returned a board that I had cut in half. It was window trim with a shaped profile, and I had previously purchased and installed some of the same SKU before. When I went to install my freshly cut board next to the first ones, it was a little too obvious that it was from a different batch or manufacturer with a slightly different profile.
Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
#267Earlier 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…
Had the same experience many years ago. I have a bunch of old Craftsman tools that are superb quality and will last decades more. Sad to see them as an empty house brand now. Just like GE appliances, all that’s left is a sticker.
Have you tried the GE Big Boys series of appliances? They look built like tanks.
Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If my business is making games, I don't want to fix/modify/add things to a game engine.
You do need to innovate on the foundation if you plan to maintain your game long term: new consoles support, new hardware support, obsolescence of old platforms, etc...
You do not need to innovate if you plan to let your game rot and become unplayable 10-20 years later.
Yes having a FOSS solution for the foundation would be ideal. That was not the topic of the discussion. The topic was about the claim "we can fork if we're not in agreement".
No, as a game developer you won't be forking and maintaining a game engine. No a "just fork it" is not a viable solution in the majority of cases as you need a strong community behind you and your fork to make it last long term and not rot after 2 weeks.
Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
#269Earlier 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…
Very much feels like long term brand building has fallen out of fashion. Has the incentives shifted or is it just viral greed?
Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution
#270Earlier 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…
Sadly, I just assume that no company can be trusted these days. It wasn't too long ago that the leadership of companies was often fairly stable. Now you see people rotating through every couple of years, rarely having to face the fallout of their bad decisions.
Is there a reason for this trend? Why does so many companies seem to have stopped caring about their long term reputation?