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Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

farewell.bostonunitygroup.com

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Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#341

Post by bmacho »

MattRix wrote: post #290
ilc wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It’s a great game yet somehow has only 10% positive reviews on Steam.

Or it's an objectively very bad game that you just happen to enjoy.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#342

Post by mcv »

Karellen wrote: post #201
musicale wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have never seen a company so quickly and completely just throw away all of their public good will. Over the past year Docker and D&D/Wizards of the Coast come to mind...

And tumblr, when they announced they would no longer support creators of "adult" content. And (nearly) OnlyFans, when they announced they would no longer support creators of "adult" content (aka, "did a tumblr"). They just about backpedalled quickly enough, and had enough stickyness (no pun intended) from followers, to contain most of the damage.

I think Unity did a lot more damage than any of the above. D&D is still a powerful brand, and while they angered hardcore fans and creators, the vast majority of roleplayers didn't even notice, and those are their real customers. Tumblr is apparently still around, and OnlyFans is still synonymous with amateur porn. But Unity has only those creators as their customers, and those stake their livelihood on their trust in the company, and with that trust gone, Unity could lose all its customers.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#343

Post by Already__Taken »

nextaccountic wrote: post #332
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…

> Why did it come to this? Just more profits? It seemed to be specifically aimed at free to play mobile games - and if studios really had to pay per install, it would basically kill this entire genre on Unity (because it would count every install of f2p games, even though people aren't buying them - so the economics don't work out, and the more popular the game, the harder is to pay the install fees). Except that.. t…

burning a real game engine business that enhances an industry (a lot of new talent is coming in through learning unity) to pivot into the advertising scam as the big players desperately try to diversify... that's some weapons grade MBA short sightedness.

advertising in mobile games too, that's like barely under the table gambling. You'd be more ethically clear making missiles.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#344

Post by ahonhn »

globalnode wrote: post #232
musicale wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have never seen a company so quickly and completely just throw away all of their public good will. Over the past year Docker and D&D/Wizards of the Coast come to mind...

I'm still upset at Sony for cancelling Star Wars Galaxies. I avoid Sony products now. I know its immature of me and the product most likely would have been eclipsed by other mmo tech that was coming out but thats the emotional response.

I've been avoiding Sony products almost 20 years now because they thought it was a cool idea to put autorunning rootkits on audio CDs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#345

Post by LoganDark »

rendall wrote: post #327
LoganDark wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't ever introduce any revenue sharing because they promised not to do that and would be immensely vulnerable to lawsuits if they ever went back on that promise. This was their attempt to do something that doesn't technically count as revenue sharing.

They had already promised to abide by the terms of the license in force at the moment it was agreed to, so the fact that they promised not to do something does not stop them, apparently.

Someone who agreed to a prior version of the license will always be able to abide by that version of the license. The fact that they removed the provision going forward is just them trying to lock-in future customers.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#346

Post by raxxorraxor »

Willish42 wrote: post #45

I wish I had a large enough Twitter following to make a public claim about this before Unity "went back" on the first version of the recently-announced pricing changes, but I was nearly certain this was an intentional move to make the "Update on our update" second version more palatable. There's probably a wiki link somewhere to the Proper Noun PR phenomenon in business school for this strategy, but the "terrible pla…

Given that we deal with advertisers now, I would agree that this is very likely. This theory might increase appeal and make the first proposal more palatable, but developers aren't stupid and many know, that the engine got far less dependable to a point where alternatives are more attractive.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#347

Post by mcv »

gameman144 wrote: post #104
duped wrote: post #42

Earlier 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…

Far too many companies these days are willing to burn down their brand for some quick bucks. It's so common that I'm sure it's part of the MBA curriculum.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#348

Post by raxxorraxor »

ketzo wrote: post #203
shmatt wrote: post #62

Earlier 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.

I doubt this was a sensible business perspective at all. They would have different audiences to consider and they didn't. This fallout is pretty much the invoice for that strategy.

It may come up as one of the worst decision in the modern industry. Granted, time will tell and nothing is certain.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#349

Post by mcv »

linkdd wrote: post #109
throw0101c wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Forking is easy. Maintaining a fork, keeping the quality and innovation alive, and the community involved is hard. LibreOffice is doing pretty well compared to OpenOffice: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37645160 EGCS was eventually merged back into GCC (or rather it became the new GCC?). I don't pay attention recently, but XEmacs was/is pretty active along with Emacs.

More anecdotal examples of "survivor's bias" do not dismiss the initial argument.

I haven't seen any evidence in support of the original argument, though. Which open source projects have been killed explicitly by Big Tech that they didn't originally create? Microsoft spent ages trying to kill Linux but never succeeded.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#350

Post by henrikschroder »

plagiarist wrote: post #302
Karellen wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And tumblr, when they announced they would no longer support creators of "adult" content. And (nearly) OnlyFans, when they announced they would no longer support creators of "adult" content (aka, "did a tumblr"). They just about backpedalled quickly enough, and had enough stickyness (no pun intended) from followers, to contain most of the damage.

I don't understand how it is possible to advance to a decision-making role if someone is stupid enough to attempt to remove porn from OnlyFans, the household name for amateur porn.

They were pressured by their payment provider.
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