91–100 of 215 posts
Missteps implies accidents. This was not accidental, it was an attempt at extracting rent - retroactively.
Purely conjecture, but somehow I suspect that private equity has crunched the numbers and decided it's time to milk this one dry.
Instead, look at their EPS. They have been negative since they IPO and never posted a profit.
Had an audible chuckle the other day when I saw humble bundle's current massive Godot sale. Hopefully with this increased attention we can draw new programmers to gamedev with an approachable language like python.
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Unity had 7000+ employees before layoff. Valve maintains one of the biggest platforms, and their own game engine. Valve also developed CSGO, TF2, and Dota, all popular online games that need constant maintenance (and even big content updates sometimes). Valve also invested in VR and sells hardware. Valve has 1200 employees. To me it's easy to see why Unity lose money.
Unity are currently asking for 4% of revenue over $1M for developing the engine and toolchain that game developers will use all day every day. Valve skim 30% of the retail price of the game for the priveledge of hosting a game on their storefront. This is why Valve makes money.
I'm not "defending" Valve (actually I find it's very worrisome that they're a game developer and a platform at the same time.) I'm pointing out the fact in no way Unity can sustain 6x of employees than Valve.
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They are making a billion dollars loss a year. So with no vc cash available they need to get profitable if they want to survive. You can argue this is wrong way to go about it but they do need to get profitable.
They miscalculated, which is a risk with investments. Miscalculated badly and executed worse. They bet on ads and ads is not the growth market it used to be. They bought IronSource and their main competitor, AppLovin is kicking their ass. The neglected the core product and have the gall to justify their retroactive change of terms (after sneakingly deleting assurances to the contrary from the TOS and deleting the git…
And before the acquisition, AppLovin even offered to buy Unity for $17 bil. I'm skeptical it wouldn't have turned into a shitfest in that direction either given that they would have either focused on mobile exclusively or worked to turn normal PC gaming into adware.
Even now, Unity's quarterly statements are wtf, wth are they spending $500 million a year on "sales and marketing" for.
Missteps implies accidents. This was not accidental, it was an attempt at extracting rent - retroactively.
Purely conjecture, but somehow I suspect that private equity has crunched the numbers and decided it's time to milk this one dry.
Unity is publicly traded: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/U
Can’t blame private equity for this one.
> crunched the numbers and decided it's time to milk this one dry.
More realistically, they crunched the numbers and saw that they aren’t making enough money to keep the company going forever. It’s not a secret, because it’s a public company: They need to make more money to survive.
More monetization was inevitable. I know it’s unpopular public opinion, but Unity as it is today cannot exist forever on the monetization model they had in the past. The numbers didn’t add up. They had to change something.
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They are making a billion dollars loss a year. So with no vc cash available they need to get profitable if they want to survive. You can argue this is wrong way to go about it but they do need to get profitable.
Massive over hiring and random acquisitions are there main reasons why are they here. If they hadn't increased their headcount by 5k and continued focusing on their core products the company would already be profitable (even if revenue would be lower). At this point it's too late to significantly cut costs, so yeah seems like they pushed themselves into a corner. The sad part is that it was already perfectly obvious…
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Unity had 7000+ employees before layoff. Valve maintains one of the biggest platforms, and their own game engine. Valve also developed CSGO, TF2, and Dota, all popular online games that need constant maintenance (and even big content updates sometimes). Valve also invested in VR and sells hardware. Valve has 1200 employees. To me it's easy to see why Unity lose money.
Unity are currently asking for 4% of revenue over $1M for developing the engine and toolchain that game developers will use all day every day. Valve skim 30% of the retail price of the game for the priveledge of hosting a game on their storefront. This is why Valve makes money.
Distribution, Analytics, Multiplayer, Anticheat, Publishing Services, Anti Piracy, Storefront, Sales, Mods, Custom Content Integrations, Localisation, and most importantly discovery (things you pay for dearly outside on mobile).
They never had need to convince developers that the fee is worth it and they never had to retroactively change terms of service. They have continually invested into the system and built the trust.
Most of all, Valve chose the long term sustainable business model when everyone else in the industry tried to extract per download charges from gamers. So gamers chose the company that sold them their game collection, just in the cloud instead of nickel and diming.
And developers chose valve because they were infinitely more trustworthy and offered better tools than any of the legacy publishers. They never increased the fees because they made bad bets either (and they had a few like VR)
Yes there’s a case to be made that the 30% should be reduced now, but realistically few could compare Valve to Unity when it comes to execution and long term value balancing for developers and gamers.
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They used to have a clause that you could use the old terms of service from when you published your game. But it was removed in favor of even games developed under those terms of services needing to pay. That is very much a retroactive change.
I still don't see how that is retroactive. The TOS changed, but I only accepted the TOS how they were when I paid my license. So the new TOS do not apply until my contract ends. That is the law (at least here in Europe)
Correct, it's illegal. They are trying to do an illegal retroactive change. That's the point.
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Purely conjecture, but somehow I suspect that private equity has crunched the numbers and decided it's time to milk this one dry.
> but somehow I suspect that private equity Unity is publicly traded: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/U Can’t blame private equity for this one. > crunched the numbers and decided it's time to milk this one dry. More realistically, they crunched the numbers and saw that they aren’t making enough money to keep the company going forever. It’s not a secret, because it’s a public company: They need to make more money to…
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In case anyone cares, this commenter is absolutely incorrect; Unreal does support mobile development, and it obviously uses a more lithe package than its full GPU stack. Using only the UI objects, 2D is pretty simple and I haven't had any major package size issues. Using a 3D context to render 2D as planes in the scene, I can still get a package down around 70MB with optimizations left on the table. It's harder to wo…
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