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Unity: We Have Heard You

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Re: Unity: We Have Heard You

#91

Post by PaulKeeble »

I really have grown a strong dislike for these non-apologies where they claim some of problem is with you/us instead of purely their own actions. There is no confusion, there is no misunderstanding and the only reason you are changing anything is because you could see your business loosing customers so fast you got scared it was all over not because you have some culture of listening to feedback.

I really hate these apologies that blame their customers, they are ridiculously narcissistic.

Re: Unity: We Have Heard You

#92

Post by clnq »

danielvaughn wrote: post #34

According to Freya Holmer (who I trust since she has some insight into what's going on within Unity), their own employees were actively trying to warn them about the public response to the proposed change, long before and leading up to the release. Trust takes a lifetime to earn and a moment to destroy. I think this could actually kill Unity. It's easy to opine from the armchair, but what I think they should have don…

> their own employees were actively trying to warn them

This is almost always the case. But executives tend to listen to the yes-men more.

Re: Unity: We Have Heard You

#93

Post by thiht »

glimshe wrote: post #65
VHRanger wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is not really the CEO, though he's the one getting the attention here. It's the new board that got 3 new heads from IronSource and Sequoia VC (who pushed for the IronSource merger).

No. The problem is the CEO. The buck stops with him. When you are at the top making millions, a major strategic failure is always your responsibility.

The CEO will probably be punished with a $1,000,000 yearly bonus instead of $2,000,000

Re: Unity: We Have Heard You

#94

Post by johnnyanmac »

glimshe wrote: post #87
VHRanger wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CEO does what the board tells him to do or gets fired ultimately

"I was just following orders"? In the very specific case of the CEO, considering their position of power and control, they are still responsible - civically and criminally. Also, a good CEO knows how to manage the board and provide sensible strategic alternatives; even if the board liked this dumb move, it's the CEO's fault for not having leveraged the company's resources (business directors, other C-level executives…

Less "I was following orders" and more "my job is the make the company money". And sure, if I had to make the company money in the next quarter or two there's no initiative I can make on the technical end to launch a new product and run up buzz. Unity tried doing that all throughout the pandemic with a bunch of expansion to other industries (automotive, sports, construction, etc.).

So in comes the fees. But then those pesky LTS means nothing I charge to 2024 Unity will stick next quarter, nor all of 2024. The only question at this point is why I chose to do install based fees instead of the Rev share model standard in every other industry. It might have worked if they undercut Unreal and said "we'll only charge 2% of revenue after $1m". I wonder what the CTO was thinking because everywhere I've read suggests that there is simply no effective and ethical way to track installs as a Middleware.

Re: Unity: We Have Heard You

#95

Post by johnnyanmac »

jraph wrote: post #36
nonrandomstring wrote: post #28

"Hear" is a slippery word. Hearing is not listening. First you hear, but you do not listen. Then you want to listen. Then you can listen. Finally, with effort, you listen. In addition to intent there must be theory of mind, and inter-subjectivity, some one to listen to. Then, say back what you really think you heard - acknowledge the reality not your own lens; "We hear that you feel we were greedy, took our users for…

"We heard you" sounds like an idiom though, for which the difference between hearing and listening is not really relevant. (English is not my primary language, but I've seen on Linguee at least one occurrence of "We heard you" translated into the equivalent French phrase, which does use the literal translation of "listen")

They are synonymous, and in reality it doesn't matter much for the PR here. but there is some idiomatic and metaphorical differences between the two that can be hard to explain to someone that is ESL. "hearing" is receiving sound to your ears. "listening" is understanding those sounds. People in this case really want to be understood.

Also keep in mind that "We're listening" is another common PR response.

Re: Unity: We Have Heard You

#96

Post by johnnyanmac »

Havoc wrote: post #22

> We apologize for the confusion Confusion? Nope pretty sure everyone was 100% clear that this was a money grab & giant f you to the devs.

The CEO always takes the blame for decisions, and for the consumer market John has a bad reputation as being EA's CEO previously. So it's a pretty easy lightning rod.

I do think this buries the lede in that John has been around for a decade, but this is happening a little over a year after Unity merged/acquired Ironsource and 3 board members from IronSource became Unity's board.

Re: Unity: We Have Heard You

#97

Post by johnnyanmac »

over_bridge wrote: post #44
timbit42 wrote: post #26

I love watching capitalists crash and burn their companies.

I feel like we need a new default corporate ownership model. A company can be in operation for decades and grow headcount massively but the shareholders at the top retain the same percentage of control as when it was tiny and new. Many people contribute to a company's success and its not reflected in the ownership. If ownership could accrue in employees to a non trivial degree, they would have some power to push back…

That's not really what happened to Unity. Unity was started by 3 dudes in Copenhagen. Since then, the company moved its HQ to California, went public, and the original founders have all departed. 2 departed long ago before any of this. The last one was the CTO until being quietly replaced in March of this year.

If anything, Unity became a beast outside of the control of the very ones who fostered it. Sure, each founder could probably retire off the money they made, but this doesn't seem like something they would have allowed if they were still around.

Tangent aside:

>If ownership could accrue in employees to a non trivial degree, they would have some power to push back when some bonehead exec tries to blow the whole place up.

How would that happen? The thing is that employees in many places are paid in stock as is. In theory they can all collectively do the very thing you suggest by all pulling out stock. But it's hard for that many people to come together and rally under one cause.

Re: Unity: We Have Heard You

#98

Post by johnnyanmac »

marcodiego wrote: post #56
treprinum wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A peek into the future: "Godot engine after becoming successful due to Unity flopping a decade ago has decided to change its licensing terms, requiring retroactive payments as well as advance payments for future estimated sales. The new CEO from Microsoft Games has stated that this approach brings the most value to shareholders, developers and gamers and brings the long sought stability to the development of the engi…

That is an advantage of a FLOSS solution: if such a thing happens, we can fork it.

Yup, it's not that FOSS is immune to enshittification, it's that it puts power into the user's hands should that time some.

The worst case is that Godot forks, rebrands, goes private with the rebrand, and leaves the public branch unmaintained. But in that case your current game isn't screwed. It is still yours, can't be nickle and died, and you have source code access to fix any bugs (even if you lost a lot of support). Though, it is very likely someone else decides to maintain Godot as a result of this.

Re: Unity: We Have Heard You

#99

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

em-bee wrote: post #76
ClimaxGravely wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you haven't already started a project then just don't use unity. There's a lot of really good stuff out there already that don't have such nebulous terms. Feel free to send me a message and I can send you a list of alternatives. I don't consider myself much of an expert but for what it's worth I've been making games for almost 25 years.

could you share that list right here please?

Here's a bunch, in no particular order:

https://godotengine.org/

https://o3de.org/

https://defold.com/

https://www.stride3d.net/

https://gdevelop.io/

https://armory3d.org/

https://torque3d.org/engine/

https://flaxengine.com/

https://pragma-engine.com/

https://wickedengine.net/

https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/

https://castle-engine.io/

https://solarus-games.org/

Re: Unity: We Have Heard You

#100

Post by southwesterly »

ClimaxGravely wrote: post #17
joe_the_user wrote: post #11

When Hasbro, publisher of D&D, engaged in shady license shenanigans, they were able to - sort of, partially - regain trust of the community by more aggressively open sourcing the D&D license (releasing them as creative commons, I think). But it seems like since Unity probably can't open source their product and stay in business, Unity has put their customers in a position where they can't trust the company but need t…

After I finish my current unity project I think I'm done with unity. It's a small non-monetized project so I'm not too worried. Haxe + heaps.io are open source/free/MIT and can publish to webGL which was generally my unity use case so I'm looking forward to moving over to that environment.

Ooh that looks great. Thanks.
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