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Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

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Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#81

What a joke I was there when the acquisition happened and it was both “yay” and “what?” There was so little communication with the overall staff - even at the M9 level - and the management seemed to be doing their own thing. My prediction: Unity is going to be BedBath&Beyonded

If the management continues to under perform, they will be acquired. The FTC investigation showed Zuckerberg was thinking about it. He probably couldn't for Sherman act reasons. But think about it: they have a good business that has better strategic value for a platform holder. Amazon spent a fortune trying to emulate their business to advantage AWS. That was an incredibly poorly managed endeavor. If they had bought…

I think everyone has tried to buy Unity at one time or another - I pushed for it at both Amazon and Facebook. Unity was steadfast in their refusal to sell, however. I'm curious to see how much of their business they have to set on fire before they are forced to abandon that position.

Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#82
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually why. Tl;dr the console owners want the system to be a little bit legally and technically complicated because they only want to developers that have legal and technical competency making product for their consoles. The implosion of the home console ecosystem in the United States between Atari and Nintendo is widely understood to have been caused by Atari giving up or losing the capacity to regulate who…

They can remove the NDA on the SDK but still require games to go through a strict quality control and approval process before allowing them to be sold. Those things aren't mutually exclusive.

It's risky. Remember Tengen games on the old NES? Tengen chose not to play Nintendo's game, reverse engineered the protocol, and started manufacturing cartridges of their own games without Nintendo's consent. Nintendo tried several flavors of technological and legal obstacle to them doing this, but ultimately those failed. In the end, Nintendo combated the problem by establishing the Seal of Quality branding which, as a trademark essentially, was something they could legally control and choose who received it and who did not. That, coupled with a propaganda campaign hinting that off label electronics could set your Nintendo on fire, eventually added too much friction for Tengen to see profit in continuing this mode of operation.

I had a conversation with an Xbox development producer back in the early aughts on this topic where I had the chance to ask why Microsoft cared if people cracked the console to turn it into a home system they controlled, given that consumers would almost certainly still feel more comfortable buying officially branded software from the official distributors. The answer was simple: Microsoft isn't concerned about the home user, they were still concerned about development houses making their own games outside of the Microsoft ecosystem control and, more importantly, developing peripherals and alternatives compatible with Microsoft software, up to and including clean room developed alternative versions of the Xbox itself sold by other companies.

A generation of console is one big game of architecture cracking, which is one of the things that keeps console generations evolving: sit on one console architecture for too long, and everything about it from the legal protections to the technical competency required to reproduce the artifact will age out. To give up the NDA is to willingly let that clock spin much faster, and ultimately disintermediate the console manufacturer from the flow of money they need to continue making product and developing the next generation of console.

Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#83
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually why. Tl;dr the console owners want the system to be a little bit legally and technically complicated because they only want to developers that have legal and technical competency making product for their consoles. The implosion of the home console ecosystem in the United States between Atari and Nintendo is widely understood to have been caused by Atari giving up or losing the capacity to regulate who…

Bad quality control is just one of the factors in the 1983 video game crash. PC games also became popular later and being able to freely install any game from any publisher you like hasn't killed the platform. The amount of crap on app stores and digital console stores still is quite high, even on the Switch store from 'quality minded' Nintendo which doesn't put a dent in sales. My guess is the other factors, most pr…

I believe it was mainly the technical limitations of the Atari 2600 console, which couldn't even run a decent version of Pac-Man. Instead they produced this blocky, flickering monstrosity:

https://atarionline.org/atari-2600/pac-man

As arcade games improved, Atari console games began to look like garbage by comparison, even the high-profile games produced by Atari, like Pac-Man.

Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#84
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can remove the NDA on the SDK but still require games to go through a strict quality control and approval process before allowing them to be sold. Those things aren't mutually exclusive.

It's risky. Remember Tengen games on the old NES? Tengen chose not to play Nintendo's game, reverse engineered the protocol, and started manufacturing cartridges of their own games without Nintendo's consent. Nintendo tried several flavors of technological and legal obstacle to them doing this, but ultimately those failed. In the end, Nintendo combated the problem by establishing the Seal of Quality branding which, a…

I mean I suppose, but the iPhone remains locked to the App Store despite the SDK being public. It might be easier to find an exploit chain to allow unsigned code to run, but those tend to be quickly patched if people want to play online.

Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#85

Unity bought other things that then they just proceeded to close a bit after. Perhaps it was just a strategy to inflate their shares. See for example ArtEngine, which I loved and they just killed after acquiring it. Now I’m so afraid for Parsec.

Oh no I had no idea Parsec was bought by Unity.

The software saved me during the pandemic and it remains the absolute best remote software I’ve ever used.

Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#86
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad quality control is just one of the factors in the 1983 video game crash. PC games also became popular later and being able to freely install any game from any publisher you like hasn't killed the platform. The amount of crap on app stores and digital console stores still is quite high, even on the Switch store from 'quality minded' Nintendo which doesn't put a dent in sales. My guess is the other factors, most pr…

I believe it was mainly the technical limitations of the Atari 2600 console, which couldn't even run a decent version of Pac-Man. Instead they produced this blocky, flickering monstrosity: https://atarionline.org/atari-2600/pac-man As arcade games improved, Atari console games began to look like garbage by comparison, even the high-profile games produced by Atari, like Pac-Man.

The flicker was not that bad on CRT TV's of the time (which had very long phosphor decay times). I still own a few 2600s and a lot of games including Pac Mac which is of course not the same as the arcade version but more of a simplified version requiring a bit of imagination. Which isn't surprising coming from a machine with 128 bytes of memory and no framebuffer ;)

Those arcade games didn't improve by themselves though, you needed better hardware for better games. While Atari didn't do themselves a favour by trying to squeeze every penny from the 2600 they did build successors. But by then the economy tanked and the competition from Nintendo started.

Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#87
post #70
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The things you miss... I wasn't even aware they'd disappeared. That history is some reading! When your CFO tragically jumps off a balcony, the company might not be doing well. Why do so many big box stores seem to follow the huge growth -> saturation -> quick implosion and bankruptcy script? Surely their margins don't materially change? Low per store sales from bad stores? But the first step seems to be closing store…

"Why do so many big box stores seem to follow the huge growth -> saturation -> quick implosion and bankruptcy script?" Debt financing. Zigging a bit, my family has been watching The Foods that Built America: https://www.history.com/shows/the-food-that-built-america It seems that about half the episodes tell the same story: Somebody built a new food concept, or polished an existing one in some very useful economic way…

According to the Wikipedia article, much of the debt BB&B acquired was to buy back stock.

Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#88
post #44

I have been revisiting Godot this past week after feeling that I didn't give it a fair shake a few months ago. I don't know that Unity has a future. Unity is still better than Godot, and in some ways by a wide margin, but Godot is gaining ground fast, the learning/tooling ecosystem has exploded in the last several months, and for most "indie" projects, which Unity's pricing change was targeting, Godot is the better c…

How is Godot for Movie VFX work?

Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#89
post #70
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The things you miss... I wasn't even aware they'd disappeared. That history is some reading! When your CFO tragically jumps off a balcony, the company might not be doing well. Why do so many big box stores seem to follow the huge growth -> saturation -> quick implosion and bankruptcy script? Surely their margins don't materially change? Low per store sales from bad stores? But the first step seems to be closing store…

"Why do so many big box stores seem to follow the huge growth -> saturation -> quick implosion and bankruptcy script?" Debt financing. Zigging a bit, my family has been watching The Foods that Built America: https://www.history.com/shows/the-food-that-built-america It seems that about half the episodes tell the same story: Somebody built a new food concept, or polished an existing one in some very useful economic way…

> Basically you're seeing the failing side of the bimodal distribution of this pattern.

Hum, kinda, but infinite-growth management doesn't get a bimodal distribution. They get a corporate version of the Peter principle, where the loans increase in value until the company can't grow enough to pay them.

You don't even get a distribution in final outcomes, just in lifetime. And since the growth is exponential, there isn't a lot of variance on it either.

Re: Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal

#90

This actually a good move. Focus on games rather than attempt to compete in VFX sector. The Billion dollar acquisition was probably driven by megalomaniac ex-CEO, wanting a piece of every pie and world domination.

No. It was a company who saw Unreal turn the Star Wars property Mandalorian into a profitable success. Someone thought Unity+WETA would be competitive/compelling.
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