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An open letter to our community

blog.unity.com

121–130 of 223 posts

Re: An open letter to our community

#121
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well Unity is being accused of some dishonesty with updating things and not disclosing it [1]. If that's true, then it's possible that it's been somewhat purged to make themselves look better. That said, that's a big "if", I'm just regurgitating what I read in news articles. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37615183

Jan '22 TOS does not have such a clause either (from archive.org): https://web.archive.org/web/20220716041837/https://unity.com... At this point I'm pretty sure this is a dishonest attempt to dig up a 2020 change (if this clause even ever existed, which I've seen zero proof of) and correlate it to a 2023 announcement as if these things were done in tandem. Downvote me all you want. I don't think Godot et al will surv…

I seriously doubt this is some conspiracy from the Godot team, even if it's dishonest. I think people are probably drawing some correlations as a response to an announcement that they don't like, and then saying "Godot doesn't have this bullshit because it's open source". I don't think the Godot team is engaging in "scummy tactics" explicitly.

ETA:

Also, if you're going to edit your responses after you post them, I recommend using the `delay` feature in your HN settings, or adding an addendum section like I'm doing here, as it's a little unfair to people responding to you to make undisclosed changes so it looks like people responding to you aren't responding to all your points. I'm not saying you're being dishonest, I'm just saying that it feels a little unfair to responders.

Re: An open letter to our community

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rigamar…

>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.

There was a whole HN thread about it[0], and the response[1].

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37561762

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37598985

Re: An open letter to our community

#123
post #77

If 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?

That's my point, I think it is! The fact that the Unity executives didn't consider that people will jump ship to Unreal baffles me.

Re: An open letter to our community

#124
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Got it - I mixed up the reply levels

Re: An open letter to our community

#125
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

It wouldn't bother me so much if not for the fact that they get lauded as geniuses for every innovation coming out of their companies.

I've seen dozens of people on LinkedIn claiming that Elon Musk invented self-landing rockets, and they get mad at me when respond with "no he fucking didn't! He hired people to figure that stuff out".

So I think "Fine, I guess you could make some kind of transitive argument that he hired the right people so he's responsible for the self-landing rocket", but in the same breath they will claim he's not responsible for any of the failures involved with his handling Twitter.

Well which is it? Is this executive some genius pulling all the strings of the company and should be given credit for all the innovations? Or are they just idiots like the rest of us and like to take credit for when things go well?

Re: An open letter to our community

#126
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jan '22 TOS does not have such a clause either (from archive.org): https://web.archive.org/web/20220716041837/https://unity.com... At this point I'm pretty sure this is a dishonest attempt to dig up a 2020 change (if this clause even ever existed, which I've seen zero proof of) and correlate it to a 2023 announcement as if these things were done in tandem. Downvote me all you want. I don't think Godot et al will surv…

I seriously doubt this is some conspiracy from the Godot team, even if it's dishonest. I think people are probably drawing some correlations as a response to an announcement that they don't like, and then saying "Godot doesn't have this bullshit because it's open source". I don't think the Godot team is engaging in "scummy tactics" explicitly. ETA: Also, if you're going to edit your responses after you post them, I r…

Thanks, I'll use the delay feature. I accept that this has nothing to do with Godot.

I did find the TOS in question, as expected, it's very old (from 2019):

https://web.archive.org/web/20201111183311/https://github.co...

So people saying "who's to say they won't do this again," if four years isn't enough for you to catch up, I don't know what to tell you.

Edit: They have also brought the repo back, which was likely another unrelated change:

https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/TermsOfService

Re: An open letter to our community

#127
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh they didn't walk it back. It's now one of two ways for them to get a percent of your revenue - that did change. (It also was only going to kick in once your revenue hit a certain point.) The CEO John R. didn't chime in here, and that would have meant him being accountable for this decision and its effect on Unity. His mask slipped here.

They did walk back charging per download/install. There was no way they couldn't. Its literally not practical.

Sorry, where did they walk it back? The letter linked in this thread still refers to the "runtime fee".

Re: An open letter to our community

#128
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh they didn't walk it back. It's now one of two ways for them to get a percent of your revenue - that did change. (It also was only going to kick in once your revenue hit a certain point.) The CEO John R. didn't chime in here, and that would have meant him being accountable for this decision and its effect on Unity. His mask slipped here.

They did walk back charging per download/install. There was no way they couldn't. Its literally not practical.

They only walked back it applying retroactively. Now it's from the next LTS release.

It applying to free games was walked back immediately and isn't news

Re: An open letter to our community

#129
post #91

Earlier 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…

> Yeah, I really do not understand why these executives get such huge salaries.

Because they can. What do you have to fight back with? All you can do is bargain individually, and they'll laugh at that.

Re: An open letter to our community

#130
post #4

I 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…

This is it, in a nutshell. People don't want the apology. They want to know that a decision like this doesn't have a chance of happening because the people in charge know it's a bad idea before it leaves the door. No one wants to be stuck in a cycle of getting fucked and then boycotting to get what they want, especially for something that their livelihood depends on. They want a product made by people they trust who…

I don't have a horse in the Unity issue, though I've been following it loosely. I can speak to my own response to another organisation.

I'd written off Reddit personally around five-six years ago. This despite having a fairly long-lived bloggy subreddit (and a small smattering of others) on the site, which I still use as a reference (despite having taken it private).

It wasn't specifically on account of the specific technical decisions they'd made, or the site changes (or lack of site changes) resulting, but the fact that those decisions were being made. That is, as with other business organisations I've encountered over the years, Reddit had repeatedly proven themselves antithetical to my own interests and values.

I suspect that's the issue Unity's going through here, and that though the final endgame may take some time in coming, it could well doom the company.

One business strategy that seems to have been increasingly widely adopted over the past decade or two, or perhaps I'm only simply far more cognisant of it and recognise it where it occurs, is the "walk right up to the creepy line" approach (as Eric Schmidt put it: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/71739-schmidt-google-g...>), or moving products or services right to the pain or tolerance threshold.

In the short term this can work. It can even be successful over a longer term, in cases. But there are two inherent problems with the concept:

1. The threshold, whether it's pain, tolerance, creepiness, or whatever, can change, and often startlingly suddenly. At which point the organisation is caught high and dry.

2. The long-term erosion of trust and affection for the firm and its products effectively primes a trigger of latent demand for any viable alternative which appears. An example that comes to mind is the exclusive launch of Apple's iPhone in the US by AT&T. On the day that Verizon began officially supporting the iPhone on their own network, people were cramming Verizon stores and phone lines trying to make the switch. (A cow-orker at the time was one of those people.) They were absolutely fed up with AT&T's service and behaviour. See: https://web.archive.org/web/20110112092318/http://www.engadg...> and https://web.archive.org/web/20101007000511/http://online.wsj...>, discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2092273> and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1765104>.

I've seen IBM, Microsoft, and Google subject to similar shifts, some more pronounced than others, over the years.

Leaving a considerable goodwill moat around offerings is an alternative. I'm too far outside the consumer mainstream to know what business, products, services, and/or brands exemplify this, though I suspect Costco and Trader Joe's might be among these.

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