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Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

farewell.bostonunitygroup.com

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Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#231

Post by solardev »

ilc wrote: post #175
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…

Some of us saw what was going to happen with D4. It was pretty obvious. After DI, and D3, to expect D4 to launch in any decent state would have been naive at best. I've said as much in the Diablo subreddit. D3 is now a good game, if it is what you are looking for. It's a fun romp, but... It isn't a truly heavy ARPG. If you want that POE is calling you.

Last Epoch is really good too.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#232

Post by globalnode »

musicale wrote: post #81
kdottt wrote: post #5

"More importantly, we've seen how easily and flippantly an executive-led business decision can risk bankrupting the studios we've worked so hard to build, threaten our livelihoods as professionals, and challenge the longevity of our industry. The Unity of today isn't the same company that it was when the group was founded, and the trust we used to have in the company has been completely eroded." Profoundly sad, and c…

> Have never seen a company so quickly and completely just throw away all of their public good will. Over the past year Docker and D&D/Wizards of the Coast come to mind...

I'm still upset at Sony for cancelling Star Wars Galaxies. I avoid Sony products now. I know its immature of me and the product most likely would have been eclipsed by other mmo tech that was coming out but thats the emotional response.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#233

Post by betamist »

wredue wrote: post #55
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 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 text only format. Here on HN too. Too many people with flagging abilities just flagging anything they disagree with, and good luck getting any mod’s attention after that. Unless you dance around the topic and never spell out certain types of takes, your posts will get fagged if the official narrative doesn’t match, and you will be accused of flaming.

Unfortunately people have convinced themselves that some opinions -those they disagree with- are dangerous for others to read. From cancelling your preorder for a game after a beta to “let’s think twice about pharmaceutical companies’ motives”, there will be someone who thinks your motives are unclean, you’re an agitator, or full on evil, and therefor deserve to be silenced.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#234

Post by lolinder »

jsmith45 wrote: post #154
kdottt wrote: post #5

"More importantly, we've seen how easily and flippantly an executive-led business decision can risk bankrupting the studios we've worked so hard to build, threaten our livelihoods as professionals, and challenge the longevity of our industry. The Unity of today isn't the same company that it was when the group was founded, and the trust we used to have in the company has been completely eroded." Profoundly sad, and c…

And the dumb thing is that if they had listened to the engineers who were telling them the customer base was going to freak out at this, the company could have avoided large parts of the drama, since a few of their fixes were not even really a change in plan, so much as better more clear wording. The big drama causes 1. People assuming unity was going to add additional telemetry to track installs. (Reality: Unity see…

#1 would have been much less of a problem if it weren't for the IronSource merger [0]. When you merge with a spyware company and then announce you're going to use a weird new metric, it's entirely reasonable for your customers to assume you'll be using the spyware to measure that metric.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32081051

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#235

Post by amrocha »

JohnFen wrote: post #207
amrocha wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about a viable alternative to proprietary game engines. Yes, I know it's possible to reverse engineer the consoles, but that doesn't make it a viable alternative for the games industry.

> that doesn't make it a viable alternative for the games industry. It makes it legally viable, in that it would allow the production of an SDK that isn't restricted by any NDA, and therefore could be incorporated into opens source projects.

If it was a homebrew project then sure, but this isn't viable for commercial projects:

- The platform holders can and will ban software built without the official SDK

- You'd get delayed access to patches, which might break compatibility with new OS versions

- You're relying on someone being able to reverse engineer new versions for the life of the console. This is a rare skill.

It's like saying you can write your own C compiler. Yeah you can, but you wouldn't use it in production at your job.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#236

Post by deciplex »

eevo wrote: post #181
shmatt wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how much people know or have heard about ironSource. It's kind of an open secret in Israel on how they built a company to profit by building what is essentially malware (installers disguised as OEM while they're really adding extra trackers to your computer). They always paid 25% more than most of the other tech companies, but still had issues recruiting because it takes a special kind of person to be wi…

Rumor has it that an IronSource guy was installed on the board and pushed very hard for this (and the anticompetitive stance with AppLovin)

That's not even a rumor: he is on the board, and he did push for this.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#238

Post by deciplex »

jsmith45 wrote: post #154
kdottt wrote: post #5

"More importantly, we've seen how easily and flippantly an executive-led business decision can risk bankrupting the studios we've worked so hard to build, threaten our livelihoods as professionals, and challenge the longevity of our industry. The Unity of today isn't the same company that it was when the group was founded, and the trust we used to have in the company has been completely eroded." Profoundly sad, and c…

And the dumb thing is that if they had listened to the engineers who were telling them the customer base was going to freak out at this, the company could have avoided large parts of the drama, since a few of their fixes were not even really a change in plan, so much as better more clear wording. The big drama causes 1. People assuming unity was going to add additional telemetry to track installs. (Reality: Unity see…

> 4. Unclear definition of install was used. What they eventually settled on: once per unique end user per distribution platform (e.g. app store), was pretty much what Unity was going for anyway, but the initial announcement royally messed up here.

That was not a miscommunication though: it was brought up directly to Unity and the initial response was that it would be per install, per device.

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#239

Post by Shawnecy »

ClassyJacket wrote: post #217
Quindecillion wrote: post #200

Best thing about this divisive action by Unity is all the attention it's giving Godot. It's a project that deserves far more attention, and I hope in a few years that it's far more common in popular game development.

Am I understanding correctly that due to licensing Godot can never support consoles? If true that makes it so limited as to never be a replacement for Unity.

Not first-party, but there is third-party console support for Godot: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/co...

Re: Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

#240

Post by deciplex »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #28
kdottt wrote: post #5

"More importantly, we've seen how easily and flippantly an executive-led business decision can risk bankrupting the studios we've worked so hard to build, threaten our livelihoods as professionals, and challenge the longevity of our industry. The Unity of today isn't the same company that it was when the group was founded, and the trust we used to have in the company has been completely eroded." Profoundly sad, and c…

"Good will" is an asset just like any other to be spent when the time is right. Sometimes a company will make the wrong bet and accidentally go out of business. Far more often there is a ton of backlash, their reputation goes in the tank, then they spend the next couple years building good will back up until the majority of people forget all about the past transgressions. Meanwhile the unpopular decision makes stacks…

It's extremely risky, and while it's relatively easy to calculate the gains realized, it's almost impossible to calculate the cost.
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