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Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

farewell.bostonunitygroup.com

421–430 of 465 posts

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#421

> 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…

> Does anyone know the story behind this phenomenon? People on the left wing generally call it "late stage capitalism" or "the end game of rent seeking": dumping competitors on price, subsidized by seemingly infinite amounts of VC money (domestic, foreign and dark/blood - i.e. Saudi oil money) until you achieve total and utter dominance, and then jack up prices while letting the product itself rot. After all why inve…

>Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification"

Excellent 2023 terminology that we can use going forward.

I used to call it "Ballmerization", which is sadly still taking place at Microsoft in spite of the good percentage of outstanding engineers there who have always tried to work around it.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or someone may have postulated that people would quit over this change, and that wasn't considered a deal breaker at the time. Depending on how cynical we feel, they may have viewed people quitting as a positive; people who won't play ball with the new vision leave the company.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#423
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The dumbest thing about Microsoft's "no game sharing" fiasco was that they let it be PR spun into "no game sharing" and people remembering that fight that way. It was never about no game sharing: it was about building a robust digital game sharing system (because Microsoft knew digital game sales were already the majority).

The original Xbox One plan would have been an unprecedented amount of support for digital game sharing. They were working on something a lot like "Steam Family Sharing" but taken to an extreme: you didn't have to prelink Xbox libraries with your friends and manage a "family" of accounts, you just "email your buddy" a loan of a game you owned. You could even sell it to your buddy directly there in your game library while they were borrowing it (and Microsoft would get a small cut).

Microsoft's mistake was tying all these new digital game tools system-wide to physical purchased games too. They decided that discs would just be digital unlocks and disc loans/resales would have to go through the same digital system as every other game. (Similar to Steam making all Half-Life 2 sales just Steam unlocks; but Microsoft's mistake was making it console-wide rather than just their own games.) They thought it would be easier (for themselves, and conceptually for users) to manage one combined system of digital loans/resales than the confusion of mixed cases like someone buying a disc for the base game but then a bunch of DLC through the digital store.

When the physical stores went angry that physical copy resales would need to be tracked in Microsoft's digital systems and resold through that and that Microsoft would get some or all of their cut, they spun the whole plan as "no game sharing" and won on that PR. But that original plan would have been the largest game sharing system on any digital goods platform if it actually had been delivered as promised. It's just incredibly sad that Microsoft didn't figure out a better answer to that "hybrid" problem, didn't have a great PR fix for the spin from the pawn shops that at the time still owned too much of the game sales market, and had to kill the digital game sharing system in its infancy to "fix" the physical disc resale "problem".

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Providing these links without context, after claiming that MIT licensed engines won’t have any issues, sort of implies that open source engines can be used fine to target consoles. The fact developers have been able to ship Godot games on console doesn’t help much unless those developers are willing to share whatever proprietary engine-to-console-SDK-interface code they wrote. Unity and Unreal, in contrast, will happ…

Can't Godot org itself offer the commercial support required for those projects that want/need to release on commercial platforms? It's not like they have to add those device-specific exporters on their main repo.

I think they would prefer to avoid even the perception that Godot the open source project was a vehicle for funnelling business to "Godot Pro".

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember a game developer on a podcast saying that business relations in the field where not just about the money, and commitment and proof of perseverance was the strongest currency. Basically each game developer is gambling their time and livelyhood, and no one would start a game studio just to make money (that would be crazy given the odds). In this respect, a platform has to also show they're commited and will…

What podcast was this? Sounds interesting.

I might have heard it a few times, but the only instance I clearly remember is from a Japanese podcast [0] with a former Sega engineer, who then went to Microsoft and stayed in the gaming sphere, sith Stadia being one of the latest project he worked on.

He mentions an FAQ used to discuss between devs and an newcommer in the console market (I assume xbox) going like:

Q: Won't you quit the market as soon as you see how hard it is ?

A: We'll do this to the bitter end. As long as I'm on this team this project will keep going.

[0] https://rebuild.fm/344/#chapters on the chapter on Stadia around 2h12

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember a game developer on a podcast saying that business relations in the field where not just about the money, and commitment and proof of perseverance was the strongest currency. Basically each game developer is gambling their time and livelyhood, and no one would start a game studio just to make money (that would be crazy given the odds). In this respect, a platform has to also show they're commited and will…

Man, your last paragraph cracked me up! Great comparison

"Pregnant wife divorce papers" is such an apt analogy.

Businesses should consider the pregnant wife divorce papers test of any change they're making BEFORE they make it.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#427
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Providing these links without context, after claiming that MIT licensed engines won’t have any issues, sort of implies that open source engines can be used fine to target consoles. The fact developers have been able to ship Godot games on console doesn’t help much unless those developers are willing to share whatever proprietary engine-to-console-SDK-interface code they wrote. Unity and Unreal, in contrast, will happ…

W4Games, owned by one of the core developers of Godot, will happily license a plugin module that allows you to do console export. So there's no difference here, it's just a plugin instead of part of the engine itself.

Under terms that are even less predictable and subject to capricious change than those of the major commercial engines.

The question developers are asking themselves is ‘if I start out building a game for the next two or three years, when I come to commercialize this, will I have palatable and viable options to do so?

Unity’s random adjustment of their terms is precisely what is driving developers away. But at least Unity is making it clear what those terms are. ‘Talk to one of us privately when you get to the point where you’re ready to port to a console’ is even less certain.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

Okay that's bad then, you didn't mention that one before.

> So what?

So... you should be blaming them a lot too.

> remove the content you own

That's still a tantrum, isn't it? And even less likely to get results.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#429

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...

> Wait. Someone returned a drill bit (a wear item) for replacement?

Could be. Maybe it snapped?

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> Wait. Someone returned a drill bit (a wear item) for replacement? Could be. Maybe it snapped?

I've snapped dozens of drill bits in my life (from many different brands). Exactly zero of those were a manufacturing defect.
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