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Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

farewell.bostonunitygroup.com

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Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#121

Post by taylodl »

gameman144 wrote: post #104
duped wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of something I once heard a VP say at a very old, established company. Something along the lines of, "Our brand is trust. It took 90 years to build it, but it would take just one day to destroy it." The point he was making was that this old, established company's biggest asset was its brand, and its brand identity was just "trust" (they made professional products, and others could undercut them, but pros w…

As an example here, my father and grandfather used to swear by Craftsman tools. No matter the context, if there was a Craftsman version, they'd go for it because they implicitly trusted the quality. Then the Craftsman brand downshifted its production quality to compete in price and their reliability fell through the floor. Now my family will skip over Craftsman entirely even if it's competitive in price, since the br…

Lowe's supposedly honors the Craftsman lifetime warranty. I haven't tried it, last time I needed to use the warranty was 30 years ago when in the middle of some car repair job I was doing I took the busted wrench into Sears, still dressed in my grimy clothes I was wearing and covered in grease, I handed them the broken wrench and they simply handed me a new one. No questions asked, no paperwork. They handed me a new one and I walked out the door.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#122

Post by neurostimulant »

ROFISH wrote: post #51
TylerE wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unity has been on a buying spree including traditional TV/Movie CGI firms for some insane reason†. They're just plain _bad_ at spending money. († Yes, I know the growth potential from real-time to rendered. I still think it's a terrible investment.)

Is unity used for movie's CGI? I can only think of one example of shows made with unity (it's bad): https://myanimelist.net/anime/38853/Ex-Arm

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#123

Post by TylerE »

ajcp wrote: post #68
malfist wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All it is is a fun sounding word for "rent-seeking"

Sounds lazy and crass to me. Instead of a word meant to accurately convey a concept it's meant to broadly convey a concept and ones feelings on it in the same breath; much like the term "woke". I'd rather use something around a historical event that can also be used to help understand a concept through allegory, like "Dutch disease", or "cargo cult". Those are fun.

You think "rent seeking" is crass and "enshitification" isn't?

I know which one I would say in polite company.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#125

Post by starkparker »

karaterobot wrote: post #54

I grant the premise that Unity sucks and has made changes that make it much harder to be an indie developer using its runtime. That said, I don't understand the decision to shut the group and encourage members to move to a more general game dev group instead. If the reason is "everyone stopped using Unity, we don't have any members" then I understand, but the press release didn't say that. In fact it implied there mi…

If the volunteer organizers of a group don't want to organize the group anymore, the group ceases to exist. If BUG members want BUG to continue to exist, they can volunteer to organize it. Nobody has any obligations past that.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#126

Post by rmbyrro »

hightrix wrote: post #111
TylerE wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would argue that Unity is about 10x the size it needs to be. They could shed a significant portion of their employees and still produce a good product. They are in the perpetual growth trap that so many of these companies fall into when they get bigger than a niche audience

That sounds like a Musk job

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#127

Post by ethbr1 »

Eisenstein wrote: post #14
rmelton wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company is actively using this model now. It's really hard watching competitors raise multi-million dollar rounds though.

Unless your plan is to vest and cash out, you shouldn't envy them.

That's why it happens so often though -- the very people who are directly enriched by doing it (holders of the majority of the company's equity) are the only ones asked to decide to do it (board votes).

Canonical example: MailChimp

The founders retained essentially all the equity (Atlanta), so when push came to shove they decided "Fuck it, we'd rather be rich than work" and sold the company.

It feels like the only way to avoid this would be aligning the equity structure with employees and customers in a better way.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#128

Post by wiktor-k »

Modified3019 wrote: post #96
fooqux wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does that really help? Even when open-source, it's only a matter of time before an Oracle or Google or Microsoft or Meta takes it over (if they didn't develop it to begin with). Of course it can help. For example, when Oracle bought MySQL, it was forked and we got Maria. When Emby pissed off people, it was forked and we got Jellyfin. There are plenty of other examples. Whether or not you like these products, the po…

OpenZFS is another great example.

Also OpenTofu (Terraform).

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#129

Post by a_e_k »

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…

I think the noun phrase and wiki link you're looking for is "door-in-the-face technique", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door-in-the-face_technique.
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