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Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

farewell.bostonunitygroup.com

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Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#281

Post by spookie »

duped wrote: post #42
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…

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…

Your last point is very much true. If the family no longer controls their company, or even, just their founding members, it sets off a huge red flag for me. Sometimes, it's for the better. But, if I had trust in that company, it most likely stemmed from their work.

There are some nice examples of founding members going above and beyond to maintain their control, which may not look like it from the get go. Ubisoft comes to mind. I may not like some of their games, but I really appreciate the efforts of the Guillemot brothers.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#282

Post by WillPostForFood »

CountVonGuetzli wrote: post #169
wolverine876 wrote: post #158

> Over the past few years, Unity has unfortunately shifted its focus away from the games industry and away from supporting developer communities. Following the IPO, the company has seemingly put profit over all else, with several acquisitions and layoffs of core personnel. Many key systems that developers need are still left in a confusing and often incomplete state, with the messaging that advertising and revenue ma…

Yes, Milton Friedman, 1970, New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr... Wikipedia has a summary on the idea behind the essay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

Unity is running as fast as possible in the opposite direction of Friedman's advice.

The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned “merely” with profit but also with promoting desirable “social” ends; that business has a “social conscience” and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers.

San Francisco based Unity is on the vanguard of the new socially aware Corp.

https://unity.com/esg

https://unity.com/unity-uk-binary-gender-pay-gap-report

https://unity.com/inclusion-diversity

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#283

Post by ncallaway »

shmatt wrote: post #72
malfist wrote: post #6

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

I think we need to decide on its meaning first. Most people these days use it as a death mark. Except the original op-ed often quoted used Meta, Uber, TikTok and Google - companies who make billions of clean profit per quarter, and more profits than they ever have, as examples Enshitification = more profits is unfortunately correct in my mind, but most people use it with a much different meaning. I don't think Unity…

Enshitification is when you make a product worse for the users with the goal of increasing profit.

It may work. It may work in the short term, but cause collapse in the long term. It may fail in the short term. All are enshitification.

There are two keys elements in my mind:

- the product gets worse

- in an attempt to increase profit

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#284

Post by jandrese »

sokoloff wrote: post #255
packetlost wrote: post #251

Earlier 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...

I’d totally bring one back if it failed because they forgot to harden it or something. Put it in some wood and the first time you use it the threads reverse because the metal is so soft.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#285

Post by rodgerd »

duped wrote: post #42
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…

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…

> 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."

A security architect at a Bank offered a very pithy version of this to me: "People hate banks, but they trust us. Best not lose their trust."

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#286

Post by pests »

flakes wrote: post #280
pests wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a repeat of the reddit API backlash and protest. Moderators deciding to close down subs or to change the rules to hurt reddit at the expense of their users and community. Many of which have already backpedaled or opened up. It was important to look involved during the important parts of the protest but now that its blown over subreddits are silently reopening and back to business as usual. Some subreddits hav…

My issue had nothing to do with morals. If I cant use Apollo, then I wont use reddit. All of the other clients are awful, and I dont miss the content enough to justify using the official app, or finding other ways to circumvent the restrictions.

Thats fine and no one is forcing anyone to use a site. I personally don't think the offical app or website is that bad. I was just talking about moderators closing down subreddits for everyone.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#287

Post by nani8ot »

amrocha wrote: post #48
linkdd wrote: post #33

Earlier 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…

The idea is that the community decides on a fork and maintainers move over. Are those really the exception? Do we have examples of large projects that made a monetization TOS change and didn't immediately get forked? The only one I can think of is Docker maybe?

Audacity made some bad decisions but the forks never got anywhere. That said, this particular issue was blown out of proportion, so the forks going nowhere isn't an issue.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#289

Post by anymouse123456 »

berniedurfee wrote: post #185
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…

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.

I don't doubt there are plenty of experiences that went the wrong way, but wanted to share an alternative anecdote that went well.

I bought a brand new ~$900 GE dishwasher last year (for a non-intended purpose) and needed to take it apart - for reasons.

IMO, the engineering in this thing was just marvelous. It was almost entirely tool-free click/snap fittings for full disassembly and reassembly. The parts were good quality molded, stamped or machined. It was clearly a master class in balancing competing trade-offs (price, assembly labor, reliability, noise, power, efficiency, etc). The simplicity of the thing was really remarkable.

Water falls into the side at whatever rate your tap delivers, and when a pressure sensor in the reservoir indicates enough volume to start, the thing begins. It does this a few times, pumping, re-pumping, heating and replacing that reservoir depending on the selected cycle, but overall, the thing is just incredibly simple and (hopefully, somewhat?) reliable.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#290

Post by MattRix »

ilc wrote: post #175
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…

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.

Diablo 4 was great. I put probably 50+ hours into it and enjoyed it a lot.

I also completely ignored the opionion of whatever communities existed for it, because they ALWAYS complain and turn toxic, especially for Blizzard games. It’s inevitable and says very little about the actual game. Same thing happened with Overwatch 2 as well. It’s a great game yet somehow has only 10% positive reviews on Steam.

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