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Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

farewell.bostonunitygroup.com

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Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#371

Post by BoorishBears »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #354
pests wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You didn't approve, but many people did. "at the expense of their users" isn't a fair characterization.

Why are you turning "at the expense of their users" into "at the expense of all their users"? Most people using a forum don't speak. They're readers who visit, gain some value, and leave.

You're even contradicted by the mods themselves: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65855608

> They said they wanted Reddit admins to realise that they rely on moderators to operate the site and felt that the only way to send a message was by harming Reddit's traffic.

That traffic was users, most of whom had no say in the matter.

_

That's also why statements like this were especially ridiculous:

> "Our entire community is supporting us against this change," they said.

r/DIY was a community of 24 million people with decades of posts. A few dozen people got upset, queried a few hundred of those tens of millions, and now a significant chunk of the internet is just gone.

Content the moderators didn't own and didn't write is forever locked behind a monument to their tantrum.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#372

Post by makeitdouble »

nickserv wrote: post #355
makeitdouble wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, founders stepping down as the company gets bigger or is faced with completely different challenges is usually for the better. I can't imagine Daimler-Benz as it is now being led by the 3rd grandson of the original founder for instance. It would be a miracle if that person was well suited for directing a multi-national car manufacturer. Same way Microsoft wouldn't be the same if Bill Gates' son was…

If he's been groomed his whole life for running a multi national car company, there's reason to believe he would be better suited than just about anyone.

Thing is, education is hard and individual potential also varies a lot. We see this with royalty, where you have literally a country's resources to groom someone into being a high level individual who can deal with most social situations, but having them lead and expand a whole country in another issue altogether.

You'll have some Louis XIV sometimes, and many Louis XVI the rest of the time, with sprinkles of Charles II in the mix to spice it up.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#373

Post by nottorp »

linkdd wrote: post #268
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> If my business is making games, I don't want to fix/modify/add things to a game engine.

Oh but you do. Unless you want to be one of those 10000 asset store games that no one buys.

> You do not need to innovate if you plan to let your game rot and become unplayable 10-20 years later.

They stop maintaining games in 2-3 years, not 10. The few exceptions that maintain sales forever are just that, exceptions.

Are you thinking of multiplayer free to play games? Those aren't games, they're predatory grinding treadmills and I don't care what happens to them.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#374

Post by raxxorraxor »

Miraste wrote: post #315
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's why people like Jonathan blow and Casey Muratori have for so many years now warned game devs about this and learn how to make a game engine from scratch. Hopefully some listened.

Being wary of large corporate engines is a good piece of advice. "Make a game engine from scratch" is a terrible recommendation and shouldn't be linked to the first one. Every dollar and hour spent on a custom engine isn't being spent on the end result. There's a place for it, sure, for people like Blow who are in love with the craft--but most indie game devs don't want to make an engine, they want to make a game.

There are also costs to use the ecosystem of an engine, as you need training and experience. The main advantage is that an ecosystem exists that can provide advanced tooling and resource management. There are quite a few alternatives if it is just rendering and general media playback. There are some generic frameworks to develop games, but most rely on custom architectures. Adapting the read-to-use engine takes time as well.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#375

Post by Dylan16807 »

BoorishBears wrote: post #371
Dylan16807 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't approve, but many people did. "at the expense of their users" isn't a fair characterization.

Why are you turning "at the expense of their users" into "at the expense of all their users"? Most people using a forum don't speak. They're readers who visit, gain some value, and leave. You're even contradicted by the mods themselves: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65855608 > They said they wanted Reddit admins to realise that they rely on moderators to operate the site and felt that the only way to send a mes…

> Why are you turning "at the expense of their users" into "at the expense of all their users"?

I'm not. But "at the expense" implies that it's not what the users in general want, and I'm pretty sure the users in general wanted it for at least a whole bunch of the subreddits.

> queried a few hundred of those tens of millions

Polls are usually pretty accurate.

> tantrum

You can call it a tantrum, but if we're using language that strong then the action of the admins is a betrayal that hasn't been walked back in the slightest.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#376

Post by Dylan16807 »

justinclift wrote: post #361
Dylan16807 wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What else is a lifetime warranty supposed to mean on a drill bit? It's not something vague like the "100% satisfaction" you linked. If they offer the warranty on drill bits, then there's nothing wrong with using the warranty on drill bits. It's not being a bad customer.

It's kind of like returning sandpaper that you've worn out though. :/

Same thing, if the sandpaper has an over the top warranty for the product category then it's fine to use it.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#377

Post by raxxorraxor »

deciplex wrote: post #238
jsmith45 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the dumb thing is that if they had listened to the engineers who were telling them the customer base was going to freak out at this, the company could have avoided large parts of the drama, since a few of their fixes were not even really a change in plan, so much as better more clear wording. The big drama causes 1. People assuming unity was going to add additional telemetry to track installs. (Reality: Unity see…

> 4. Unclear definition of install was used. What they eventually settled on: once per unique end user per distribution platform (e.g. app store), was pretty much what Unity was going for anyway, but the initial announcement royally messed up here. That was not a miscommunication though: it was brought up directly to Unity and the initial response was that it would be per install, per device.

Plus, as a user of the endproduct and not the engine, I am not keen of my installs getting tracked.

It has become quite normal to create device identifiers, some crazy people do it in the name of security even, but I resist this development where I can.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#378

Post by josephg »

nurettin wrote: post #326
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…

Strange, I heard from fans of 1&2 (and disliked 3) that Diablo 4 is excellent. How did you conclude that it is so bad and everyone who plays it is just a slave to blizzard?

I don’t think we can see the player numbers, but the number of people following D4 twitch streams has decreased by over 99% since launch. A lot of people played it - but almost everyone who played it has stopped playing it.

Personally I get it. I found D4 to be a fun, but bland and uninspired arpg. It has terrible class balance and skill balance. Despite a lot of promises, there’s almost no endgame to speak of. And there are basically no new ideas in D4 that weren’t already pioneered in D3 or path of exile. The art and music is beautiful, and the first few hours are definitely fun. But it’s not excellent by any means. It’s a bland, uninspired game lacking the depth, creativity and longevity that used to make blizzard games great.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#379

Post by uxcolumbo »

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…

I don't think this was planned.

This is purely down to C-suite's arrogance and moving into extraction mode. And not understanding their core audience. As Cory Doctorow said - enshittification.

Otherwise they would have released the 2nd update faster, since they would have prepped it beforehand to reduce the pressure and bad PR building up over multiple days.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#380

Post by neurostimulant »

Daegalus wrote: post #328
berkut wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it wasn't... Unity used some of their tech in 2022 to create a demo with some lions in it.

Incorrect: https://www.engadget.com/2019-07-29-lion-king-remake-vfx-mpc... The film was shot almost entirely in Unity, then the final render used some extra stuff and other tools. But the scenes, shots, etc were done in Unity. A quick google shows you this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WupuXjvO9uA Making of videos on Youtube, you see the Unity editor in many places while they film in VR

That article I seems to imply Unity only used to generate "camerawork" data (camera positions and movements), and the actual rendering is done on other system using that camerawork data. IIRC on 2019 (Lion King release year) Unity didn't even have ray tracing support yet, so I think the final render might not use Unity at all, but Unity editor itself used extensively during production.

In contrast, Unreal Engine rendered scenes seems to be used in actual footages on some recent shows. Was Unity acquisitions of CGI firms meant to pursue this direction, or boost Unity editor usage during firm production like in Lion King?

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