Unity's oldest community announces dissolution • Hacker News Board

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#431

Post by neilv » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 7:17 PM UTC

chx wrote: post #387

neilv wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually had a different company in mind. I'm much less familiar with Oracle. The one time I bumped into Larry Ellison, he managed to come across as intensely competitive, in just a moment. I'd guess that's probably reflected in his company. Does Oracle seem a steady in-your-face aggressive, and you know what you get? Or is more a cyclic and plotting: in-your-face shameless when they can get away with it, and makes…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21550932

Sounds like everyone knows roughly what the relationship with Oracle will be like. :)

Around some other vendors, there's collective loss of institutional (field) knowledge about what you're going to get.

I suppose contributing to this could be a lot of new people who aren't mentored-in as well as they could be.

Also, there's been a field shift towards many (most?) ICs and even managers/execs not being incentived to become aware of non-short-term implications of vendor and tech choices. Whether it's ICs driven by sprint metrics, startups motivated to rapidly throw up appearances of growth to hit funding rounds, or people job-hopping every 18 months before they see longer-term cause&effect.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#432

Post by wolverine876 » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 7:31 PM UTC

transcriptase wrote: post #219

wolverine876 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you find authentic sellers?

I'm assuming you're being sardonic, but remarkably it's still a great place to buy live cuttings of succulents and other plants from enthusiasts. In contrast to buying seeds off Amazon or eBay, where the plants that sellers are claiming they're shipping you seeds for are often just random weeds rather than the hilariously photoshopped or non-existent flowers/fruits shown in the product listing. e.g. https://www.amazo…

Thanks for answering. I was not being sardonic; it was a genuine question.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#433

Post by chrz » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 8:04 PM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #13

asynchronous wrote: post #2

Unity really showing the world how to tank a business by letting a few MBA’s at the top make a decision for profit.

To play devil's advocate... Unity isn't close to profitable, and never has been. At some point money has to be made or the lights get turned off.

Doesnt make profit because directors are paying themselves millions, spending 400 million a year on marketing (how??) and buying ironsource for 4billion in exchange for 1billion bonus for directors. They getting rich and dont care about the dried up carcas they will leave behind

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#434

Post by tristan957 » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 8:34 PM UTC

insanitybit wrote: post #141

tristan957 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would customers leave you if your product was AGPL?

I think it's extremely common for companies to sit every engineer down during onboarding and say "never touch code with these licenses". Certainly in my experience it is.

MongoDB was AGPL before moving to the SSPL. So this doesn't make sense.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#435

Post by tristan957 » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 8:34 PM UTC

insanitybit wrote: post #398

Zuiii wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All stupid people think they are right. Give me one concrete AGPL case that justifies their aversion. Anyway, it's their loss.

Is there an AGPL case that can be used to say "there's no risk" ?

MongoDB rose to fame on the back of the AGPL.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#436

Post by Cpoll » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 9:20 PM UTC

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.

They would have to be, because deniability is important for a gambit like this. I'm not sure how you would announce "we're going to psychologically manipulate our customers" to the team anyway.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#437

Post by jconley » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 10:11 PM UTC

golergka wrote: post #242

jconley wrote: post #179

Unity's just outgrowing the early adopters. The starving indies will move on to the next up and coming engine. Professionals will continue using Unity (and UE, which also charges royalties) because of the breadth and depth of the toolsets. I first used Unity when their WebGL system was in private beta. IIRC they tried charging royalties early on but then reverted that for marketshare, but I don't have time to look it…

I've worked in game development for a long time, including a couple of games with over 100 million installs. Professional game studios making mobile free2play games, which is Unity's main moat, are VERY uneasy right now. For many games, the install tax would push them into unprofitability. Especially in hypercasual, where an average user may have LTV of a few cents total. These are billion dollar companies, and they…

A 2.5% royalty will make them unprofitable? [0]

[0] https://unity.com/pricing-updates

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#438

Post by Daegalus » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 10:52 PM UTC

neurostimulant wrote: post #380

Daegalus wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rend…

You are correct, they used it for production, building the scenes, getting camera data. I then assume they exported the scenes and camera data to whatever they used for the final render. So Unity was used for 70-80% of the work.

It is possible but I don't know. Just was trying to point out that it's more than just some demo that it was used for.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#439

Post by sfink » Tue, Sep 26, 2023, 11:31 PM UTC

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

It makes a difference. If you start with several quality brands and one of them sells out, you can switch to one of the others. If everyone pulls the same shit, there's nowhere to go.

And everyone is pulling the same shit.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#440

Post by midoridensha » Wed, Sep 27, 2023, 12:58 AM UTC

betamist wrote: post #233

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…

Discussions online have had this nature ever since they went mainstream I think. Especially Reddit I mean, some of those more popular subreddits are run mostly by kids is what I make out of it. Maybe not kids in terms of age but people who never grew up. Censorship seems to be the natural order of things in online communities where people don’t see or know each other, and when a lot of the context gets lost in the te…

Censorship is necessary for a civil forum. If you don't censor, you get 8chan, a place full of nothing but vileness. All the shitty people congregate there because no one will censor them or ban them, and all the decent people leave.

Of course, we usually call this "moderation" instead of "censorship", but it's mostly the same, except it isn't done by a government.

So the quality of any forum just comes down to the quality of the moderation. Good moderators keep out the off-topic crap and general nastiness, shitty moderators ban people for saying they don't like the company's new game.