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Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

farewell.bostonunitygroup.com

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Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#411

Post by wredue »

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.

50 hours is not the expectation from an ARPG mainline title. If their goal was to just push the story forward, fine. But that clearly isn’t what they were going for. From that perspective, it’s not great.

Overwatch got review bombed because they just remonetized overwatch 1 and did things they said they wouldn’t do. It’s actually a pretty good parallel to the unity story.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#412

Post by BoorishBears »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #375
BoorishBears wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 la…

> I'm pretty sure the users in general wanted it for at least a whole bunch of the subreddits.

No, they didn't, most of the users never even spoke.

r/DIY mods never asked before going from the original 48 hrs to permanently deleting.

> Polls are usually pretty accurate.

I hope you're being facetious and realize a time limited self-selective poll where most of the population can't even vote is not accurate.

Polls are accurate when you put work into making them accurate. They're not magic.

> the action of the admins is a betrayal that hasn't been walked back in the slightest.

So what? If you feel betrayed, remove the content you own and walk away instead of locking away content you don't own off the internet and enticing people to post porn of John Oliver.

Tantrum is the perfect word to describe what these people did.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#413

Post by packetlost »

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...

The bit had snapped in half iirc, not worn out.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#414

Post by Pet_Ant »

LoganDark wrote: post #367
ffgjgf1 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now they kind of did though. Since you can pick between 2.5% and paying the install fee. Also I’m not sure how are “promises” legally binding unless they are part of a contract?

> Also I’m not sure how are “promises” legally binding unless they are part of a contract? You'd be surprised. Claims that are made as part of any marketing material or promotion can absolutely result in lawsuits if someone built their business on that claim and then Unity screwed them over. In that way at least, Unity is liable for the things that they say in a public capacity.

Most contracts I've seen have clauses that specifically say that you are agreeing that the contract is limited to the terms in the contract itself and waiving everything else so you are probably out of luck there.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#415

Post by ilyt »

LoganDark wrote: post #386
ilyt wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it was a plan to lock in current customers that didn't look into license every time they updated engine. That's why they removed the repo too, too easy to see the changes.

Whatever, a plan to lock in anyone who accidentally "agrees" to the new terms. You know what I meant.

I just wanted to highlight it wasn't for just new customers like you wrote but potentially every game in development using Unity. That's a massive difference.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#416

Post by jsmith45 »

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.

Yes and no. In practice evidence suggests they were planning to heavily rely on app store install counts for games not using unity services, and thus for which they had no better data. This is part of the reason why they were being so cagey about how they would estimate the install counts, because they would be heavily using relatively crude approaches like that. (and also hadn't fully worked out the details).

For IOS, for example, reinstalls don't increase that counter. I'm not sure how it works with the Play Store.

They almost certainly said that reinstalls would could because they might count for some platforms.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#417

Post by JohnFen »

amrocha wrote: post #235
JohnFen wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that doesn't make it a viable alternative for the games industry. It makes it legally viable, in that it would allow the production of an SDK that isn't restricted by any NDA, and therefore could be incorporated into opens source projects.

If it was a homebrew project then sure, but this isn't viable for commercial projects: - The platform holders can and will ban software built without the official SDK - You'd get delayed access to patches, which might break compatibility with new OS versions - You're relying on someone being able to reverse engineer new versions for the life of the console. This is a rare skill. It's like saying you can write your ow…

> If it was a homebrew project then sure, but this isn't viable for commercial projects

None of your points appear insurmountable or showstoppers to me, to be honest, but they would require approaches to mitigate them.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#418

Post by Qwertious »

MattRix wrote: post #295
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…

There is no way this was intentional. First you’d have to argue that only the top execs were aware of this, because a bunch of Unity employees quit due to this. Secondly, if it was a form of anchoring, they did it in the worst possible way. The problem wasn’t really the numbers, it was the base idea of using installs and having it apply retroactively. If they had just wanted to anchor they could have come out with a…

>First you’d have to argue that only the top execs were aware of this, because a bunch of Unity employees quit due to this.

This doesn't follow - it's entirely possible that the execs planned to do this, a bunch of dev's said "that's insane and we'll quit if you do this", the execs followed through, and the devs followed through on their threats to quit.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#419

Post by WorldMaker »

berniedurfee wrote: post #310
anymouse123456 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 q…

You actually bought a Haier dishwasher with a GE sticker on it. It’s hard to tell these days whether you’re buying a product from a brand you trust or from a company that bought the brand you trust. Though, having said that, I recently bought a Bosch refrigerator because Bosch is still Bosch and I trusted Bosch. But the refrigerator is crap, broken on arrival and it took 5 phone calls and 3 weeks to get service.

In Haier's case they bought way more than "just" the GE sticker. Haier is still using factories built by GE Appliances for many of their GE branded appliances and in many cases using the same people/processes/pipelines as before.

There's still plenty of nuance in these rebadging situations. It's also hard to tell without following a lot of business news whether the new owner just bought "the stickers" or bought all the original factories or bought some complicated deal in between.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#420

Post by WorldMaker »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #306
worldsayshi wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very much feels like long term brand building has fallen out of fashion. Has the incentives shifted or is it just viral greed?

Basic greed is sufficient, no need for the viral part

A "race to the bottom" can certainly feel like "viral" collective behavior even if you want to consider all the individual inputs just "basic greed"
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