Heads has to roll in the c-level space for them to Ever get the trust back. This walk-back is reasonable but they will still lose a majority of their customers. I am glad that people late in their projects can still ship and see a profit and hopefully move on to another engine.
An open letter to our community
111–120 of 223 posts
Re: An open letter to our community
#112I think it might be too little too late. I do wonder if this was always the plan with classic door-in-the-face technique, but I can't imagine they would have anticipated the absolute magnitude of backlash. Their product certainly isn't as special as they clearly think it is, and the fact that they attempted to unilaterally change the contract in as egregious as way as they did is unacceptable and not behaviour I woul…
I think their product is technically special -- as with all of the commercial game engines -- but they were not in the market position they thought they were, which is what led to them to thinking this was a good idea.
Very much an unforced error on their part.
Re: An open letter to our community
#113If they are willing to retroactively change the TOS once, why wouldn't they do it again once the smoke has settled? I don't make games, I have nothing at stake in this fight, but this just feels like PR damage control and to be completely honest, I don't think most software engineers are so absolutely dependent on (proper noun) Unity to risk this company doing shady stuff again, and I suspect this entire ordeal will…
> A part of me thinks that the CEO (and all the other executive morons who decided to make the installation fee) was sitting there thinking "what are they going to do? Move to Godot?"
Their CEO gives me the impression of a rich but unsophisticated mba type who can only deliver revenue growth by raising prices. I doubt he even thought about captive customers and lack of what he might have thought alternative engines, let along open source and free.
He’s the type that thinks open source is maybe a toy.
I knew he was a stink when i read that he ordered unity employees back to offices. He thought he can order customers a new fee. He confirmed my suspicion. A shame that we as a society and industry allow these zeroes to end up leading tech companies.
Re: An open letter to our community
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
They went back to the monthly billing with no option for buying a version permenantly. I think you can still fix your version for a while without upgrades but they will force an upgrade at some point now. The original issue I complained about has returned.
Jetbrains? Seems the same model it was when they moved to subscriptions: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/206544479-Subs... https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...
> Jetbrains?
Yes!
> Seems the same model it was when they moved to subscriptions
Indeed, but there was a period of brain-dead decision making in 2015 where they announced a very different direction and back-tracked 2 weeks later.
They announced plans for an evergreen subscription model, but the flip side was that they'd brick your IDE (with no fallback) the moment your subscription lapsed[1]. The only reason the subscription model seems unchanged from their initial one was because of the outrage their controversial change generated.
I found this unconscionable - they backtracked (faster than Unity to their credit, but still)
Re: An open letter to our community
#115I think it might be too little too late. I do wonder if this was always the plan with classic door-in-the-face technique, but I can't imagine they would have anticipated the absolute magnitude of backlash. Their product certainly isn't as special as they clearly think it is, and the fact that they attempted to unilaterally change the contract in as egregious as way as they did is unacceptable and not behaviour I woul…
Unity definitely hurt itself in confusion.
My anecdoate is that many people in this industry don't even know the existance of Godot. Yeah, I mean Godot, not Love2D or LibGDX. People can work in video games but are completly unaware of Godot.
Now they ALL know it.
Re: An open letter to our community
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. An apology isn't enough in this case-- words clearly mean nothing to them. We were always told C-level compensation is as absurd as it is because they're expected to fall on their sword for fucking up. Keeping your position after defrauding customers is not a sign of good faith, it's just another [social] contract broken.
Yeah, I really do not understand why these executives get such huge salaries. They get all the credit when something goes well (see: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, probably a dozen other CEOs in big tech), but when their decisions lead to a drop in revenue they get to fire 12,000 people, get to keep their exorbitant salaries and/or stock options, and just blame everyone else for the problem, or b…
> I really do not understand what it is that they actually do
Their main purpose is to occupy the same social circles as other executives and board members.
Re: An open letter to our community
#117I think it might be too little too late. I do wonder if this was always the plan with classic door-in-the-face technique, but I can't imagine they would have anticipated the absolute magnitude of backlash. Their product certainly isn't as special as they clearly think it is, and the fact that they attempted to unilaterally change the contract in as egregious as way as they did is unacceptable and not behaviour I woul…
Cat’s out of the bag. I gave godot a try and it’s absolutely amazing! It felt great working with open source tools - i could finally read the source when i needed to understand something. Indeed it lacks some features but it is an amazing engine. Unity and their ceo has proven to be untrustworthy. I am getting the sense that open source engines will eat their market share.
I'm curious to see how quickly it gains a performant 3D layer now that people capable of getting performance out of Unity are looking at it.
It was interesting seeing some people bounce off it on the grounds of woeful inefficiency. I don't remember the person, but one Unity refugee traced the path of a raycast and Godot more or less needed to treat it as a dynamically typed generic thing, going through a huge rigamarole to get a result.
It's possible to hack in more direct access for those who can make sense of it. I don't think there's a thing going on in Godot's 3d engine that some of these Unity refugees can't understand. They're running into arbitrary obstacles based on Godot's attitude towards what's clean and elegant code. These obstacles could go away really quickly under the right conditions…
Re: An open letter to our community
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. An apology isn't enough in this case-- words clearly mean nothing to them. We were always told C-level compensation is as absurd as it is because they're expected to fall on their sword for fucking up. Keeping your position after defrauding customers is not a sign of good faith, it's just another [social] contract broken.
Yeah, I really do not understand why these executives get such huge salaries. They get all the credit when something goes well (see: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, probably a dozen other CEOs in big tech), but when their decisions lead to a drop in revenue they get to fire 12,000 people, get to keep their exorbitant salaries and/or stock options, and just blame everyone else for the problem, or b…
At that level it's often just a big club that you don't get to be a part of because you don't have the right connections.
Many CEO's (and execs in general) are not extraordinary people in any sense of the word.
I think people underestimate just how often a business leader gets to where they are because of nepotism. Many of the biggest companies in the world operate like a royal dynasty, with children inheriting the leading roles from parents.
When you consider that decision making is often inherited, rather than earned, these displays of incompetence make much more sense.
Re: An open letter to our community
#119If they are willing to retroactively change the TOS once, why wouldn't they do it again once the smoke has settled? I don't make games, I have nothing at stake in this fight, but this just feels like PR damage control and to be completely honest, I don't think most software engineers are so absolutely dependent on (proper noun) Unity to risk this company doing shady stuff again, and I suspect this entire ordeal will…
"What are they going to do? Move to Godot?"
I'm a casual observer in this space. Is Unreal not a viable alternative?
Re: An open letter to our community
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jetbrains? Seems the same model it was when they moved to subscriptions: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/206544479-Subs... https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...
> Jetbrains? Yes! > Seems the same model it was when they moved to subscriptions Indeed, but there was a period of brain-dead decision making in 2015 where they announced a very different direction and back-tracked 2 weeks later. They announced plans for an evergreen subscription model, but the flip side was that they'd brick your IDE (with no fallback) the moment your subscription lapsed[1]. The only reason the subs…
Yes, that was years ago, the "move to subscriptions" that the since in my post referred to. The parent poster was claiming they'd backtracked since on getting the perpetual fallback license, which doesn't seem true.