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I don't think this is a problem of company structure. It's solely a problem of bad management. If they had listened to their users or their own developers, or a

I don't think this is a problem of company structure. It's solely a problem of bad management. If they had listened to their users or their own developers, or any remotely sane person with some touch of reality, then this wouldn't have happened. But if you hire the former CEO of EA - a guy with no low level industry experience and who left his last job because of poor financial performance - then this whole fiasco seems like it was inevitable.

miragecraft 3y ago
On the surface that is the case, but once you're a publicly traded company you're beholden to your shareholders, not your customers, so your goals and incentives changes drastically and "bad management decisions" gets made. You think the management made a mistake, I think the management (as a result of going public) is the mistake.
- tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
  That’s a simplistic view. “Beholden to shareholders” does not mean prioritising short-term gain at all costs. That’s not just my ideology, it is how publicly traded companies work a lot of the time, including the one that I work for. To imply that there’s such a stark binary difference between a privately held and publicly held company misses a lot of nuance. Investors can want a quick out or be in for the long game in either case. The controlling parties pre-IPO have plenty of knobs they can turn to limit drive-by influence if they choose. If a company gets fucked by going public, it was already fucked before it went public, because the people behind the float either didn’t care about protecting the company, or didn’t know how.
  - miragecraft 3y ago
    Thanks for the insight. So I guess the conclusion is that Unity was fucked pre-IPO?
    - Iulioh 3y ago
      The fact that the CEO was slowly selling millions of shares was an indication
      - lotsofpulp 3y ago
        I would expect any CEO to continuously sell shares as they are awarded. Diversifying investments is a very recommended and common investment choice.
        giobox 3y ago
        The CEO's role though is to help make the stock attractive to other investors, not just optimize for their own personal finances. I personally would expect most CEOs to hold a significant portion of their stock awards as a show of confidence in the future value of the company - if the CEO won't hold the investment, why should anyone else?
        lotsofpulp 3y ago
        Surely the CEO has both interests, and securing resources for themselves is of higher priority than securing them for others. They might be expected to hold proportionally more of it than others, but I also would not expect any half intelligent person to put all their eggs in one basket just for the benefit of others.
        johnnyanmac 3y ago
        > if the CEO won't hold the investment, why should anyone else? I don't think you understand how many shares a CEO has. There are directors at Unity throwing around hundreds of thousands of shares and I'm sure the C execs have an order of magnitude more than that. You never want all your eggs in one basket, if only because you don't want everything to be beholden to the power of your country's economy (something even a CEO can't control).
  - trinsic2 3y ago
    Sorry, it sounds like you're defending the system that doesn't empower the public good. I hear reports time and time again that private companies that go publicly are burned by the artificial and unnatural need for constant growth. Going public serves greedy individuals (shareholders) that have no connection to the service or product that real people depend on.
  - Draiken 3y ago
    In theory, that's true. But what I see every day is the opposite. It's essentially what people are calling "enshitification". Mostly short term decisions that screw customers up for a quick buck. I do agree that private does not mean good. It all falls under the CEO/Founders in my view. But there seems to be way more greedy short term thinking leaders out there. I can probably count in my hands the amount of companies I follow that are not prioritizing the short-term. Maybe I just don't follow that many companies and I'm biased, but that's the impression I get. Public companies seem to have an even higher rate of short-term profit seeking though.
    - foobarian 3y ago
      It starts out noble. Once a company goes public, the first few town halls after the shareholder call the CEO or CFO will be like, "Don't worry about the stock price, we're better than all the other short-termist companies, we care about long term quality and blah blah." But bit by bit, little by little, like Pavlov's dogs the employees get trained to peek at that stock ticker around reporting time. And over time they sync up their decision making with that schedule, and internal planning starts to reflect it. And new initiatives get created and judged by investor reactions. And it's all downhill from there :-(
    - lancesells 3y ago
      Public companies see their stock rise when they fire thousands of people even though they are profitable. The entire system is perverse.
mnau 3y ago
A CEO under who EA introduced lootboxes. A person that proposed that when player runs out of ammo could make an easy instant payment for a quick reload. Unity engine seems to flounder under him, despite rather insane headcount (7,703), acquisition spree laden Unity Technologies with significant debt... I am not impressed, not with his ideas and even less with his results. For comparison, Larry Elisson (Oracle) has distasteful business practices, but very profitable.
- bmitc 3y ago
  It is amazing how easy some people make falling upwards look.
  - kibwen 3y ago
    It is easy, all you need to do is be a member of the executive class.
- linuxftw 3y ago
  Running out of ammo and instant payment sounds a lot like an arcade, which is how video games became commercially successful in the first place.
  - chambored 3y ago
    But imagine having to do that if you owned the arcade game.
    - linuxftw 3y ago
      If there's an EULA, do you really own it?
      - BlueTemplar 3y ago
        How much of it is enforceable ?
  - 3y ago
kdfjgbdfkjgb 3y ago
I saw a reddit comment from a Unity developer that alleged that Unity told them not to worry about the changes because this dev used ironSource for their ads. ironSource merged with Unity last year and other commenters were speculating that this whole thing is a play to try to coerce the huge amount of mobile games that are made with Unity to switch to ironSource.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  To parent's opinion, I'd respond that bad management is a possibility in any company. However, a broken revenue model misaligns incentives and makes user-bad decisions a certainty. Laying it at the feet of management is blaming the messenger -- the root cause was revenue and expectations being strategically unbalanced. It's surprising how many people watch companies make "dumb" moves and gnash their teeth over "how could they be so stupid?" They're not being stupid... they're looking at the cards they have in their hand, what they need to win, and playing it the best way they can. As people have quipped elsewhere in the comments, there were no ways Unity could deliver the financial performance that was expected of them, with a developer-friendly business model.
  - fredsmith219 3y ago
    Since management sets the expectations, laying the blame at their feet is correct. Who else would you hold accountable for management decisions?
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      Majority shareholders for choosing an ownership model that their operating model couldn't service. Unity going public was like .org's PIR being sold to PE.
- gochi 3y ago
  You would be right, they have informally stated if developers switch to ironSource/Unity Ads, they would have their runtime fee slashed.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
>It's solely a problem of bad management. If they had listened to their users or their own developers, or any remotely sane person with some touch of reality, then this wouldn't have happened TBH I think the growth argument is better. Ricetellio isn't some especially bad CEO, and I'm sure 50 other CEOs woulda done the exact same thing if it wasn't him. Which is exactly why every other tech company was also hit with massive layoffs this year. It's not some standout, it's the 20th consequence of actions every other public company pursued. Look at all the industries Unity tried to branch out into in 4-5 years and you see why they became balooned to 7K employees: https://i.imgur.com/3Ume4Qm.png https://i.imgur.com/3Ume4Qm.png

miragecraft 3y ago

On the surface that is the case, but once you're a publicly traded company you're beholden to your shareholders, not your customers, so your goals and incentives changes drastically and "bad management decisions" gets made. You think the management made a mistake, I think the management (as a result of going public) is the mistake.

tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
That’s a simplistic view. “Beholden to shareholders” does not mean prioritising short-term gain at all costs. That’s not just my ideology, it is how publicly traded companies work a lot of the time, including the one that I work for. To imply that there’s such a stark binary difference between a privately held and publicly held company misses a lot of nuance. Investors can want a quick out or be in for the long game in either case. The controlling parties pre-IPO have plenty of knobs they can turn to limit drive-by influence if they choose. If a company gets fucked by going public, it was already fucked before it went public, because the people behind the float either didn’t care about protecting the company, or didn’t know how.
- miragecraft 3y ago
  Thanks for the insight. So I guess the conclusion is that Unity was fucked pre-IPO?
  - Iulioh 3y ago
    The fact that the CEO was slowly selling millions of shares was an indication
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      I would expect any CEO to continuously sell shares as they are awarded. Diversifying investments is a very recommended and common investment choice.
      - giobox 3y ago
        The CEO's role though is to help make the stock attractive to other investors, not just optimize for their own personal finances. I personally would expect most CEOs to hold a significant portion of their stock awards as a show of confidence in the future value of the company - if the CEO won't hold the investment, why should anyone else?
        lotsofpulp 3y ago
        Surely the CEO has both interests, and securing resources for themselves is of higher priority than securing them for others. They might be expected to hold proportionally more of it than others, but I also would not expect any half intelligent person to put all their eggs in one basket just for the benefit of others.
        johnnyanmac 3y ago
        > if the CEO won't hold the investment, why should anyone else? I don't think you understand how many shares a CEO has. There are directors at Unity throwing around hundreds of thousands of shares and I'm sure the C execs have an order of magnitude more than that. You never want all your eggs in one basket, if only because you don't want everything to be beholden to the power of your country's economy (something even a CEO can't control).
- trinsic2 3y ago
  Sorry, it sounds like you're defending the system that doesn't empower the public good. I hear reports time and time again that private companies that go publicly are burned by the artificial and unnatural need for constant growth. Going public serves greedy individuals (shareholders) that have no connection to the service or product that real people depend on.
- Draiken 3y ago
  In theory, that's true. But what I see every day is the opposite. It's essentially what people are calling "enshitification". Mostly short term decisions that screw customers up for a quick buck. I do agree that private does not mean good. It all falls under the CEO/Founders in my view. But there seems to be way more greedy short term thinking leaders out there. I can probably count in my hands the amount of companies I follow that are not prioritizing the short-term. Maybe I just don't follow that many companies and I'm biased, but that's the impression I get. Public companies seem to have an even higher rate of short-term profit seeking though.
  - foobarian 3y ago
    It starts out noble. Once a company goes public, the first few town halls after the shareholder call the CEO or CFO will be like, "Don't worry about the stock price, we're better than all the other short-termist companies, we care about long term quality and blah blah." But bit by bit, little by little, like Pavlov's dogs the employees get trained to peek at that stock ticker around reporting time. And over time they sync up their decision making with that schedule, and internal planning starts to reflect it. And new initiatives get created and judged by investor reactions. And it's all downhill from there :-(
  - lancesells 3y ago
    Public companies see their stock rise when they fire thousands of people even though they are profitable. The entire system is perverse.

mnau 3y ago

A CEO under who EA introduced lootboxes. A person that proposed that when player runs out of ammo could make an easy instant payment for a quick reload. Unity engine seems to flounder under him, despite rather insane headcount (7,703), acquisition spree laden Unity Technologies with significant debt... I am not impressed, not with his ideas and even less with his results. For comparison, Larry Elisson (Oracle) has distasteful business practices, but very profitable.

bmitc 3y ago
It is amazing how easy some people make falling upwards look.
- kibwen 3y ago
  It is easy, all you need to do is be a member of the executive class.
linuxftw 3y ago
Running out of ammo and instant payment sounds a lot like an arcade, which is how video games became commercially successful in the first place.
- chambored 3y ago
  But imagine having to do that if you owned the arcade game.
  - linuxftw 3y ago
    If there's an EULA, do you really own it?
    - BlueTemplar 3y ago
      How much of it is enforceable ?
- 3y ago

kdfjgbdfkjgb 3y ago

I saw a reddit comment from a Unity developer that alleged that Unity told them not to worry about the changes because this dev used ironSource for their ads. ironSource merged with Unity last year and other commenters were speculating that this whole thing is a play to try to coerce the huge amount of mobile games that are made with Unity to switch to ironSource.

ethbr1 3y ago
To parent's opinion, I'd respond that bad management is a possibility in any company. However, a broken revenue model misaligns incentives and makes user-bad decisions a certainty. Laying it at the feet of management is blaming the messenger -- the root cause was revenue and expectations being strategically unbalanced. It's surprising how many people watch companies make "dumb" moves and gnash their teeth over "how could they be so stupid?" They're not being stupid... they're looking at the cards they have in their hand, what they need to win, and playing it the best way they can. As people have quipped elsewhere in the comments, there were no ways Unity could deliver the financial performance that was expected of them, with a developer-friendly business model.
- fredsmith219 3y ago
  Since management sets the expectations, laying the blame at their feet is correct. Who else would you hold accountable for management decisions?
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    Majority shareholders for choosing an ownership model that their operating model couldn't service. Unity going public was like .org's PIR being sold to PE.
gochi 3y ago
You would be right, they have informally stated if developers switch to ironSource/Unity Ads, they would have their runtime fee slashed.

johnnyanmac 3y ago

>It's solely a problem of bad management. If they had listened to their users or their own developers, or any remotely sane person with some touch of reality, then this wouldn't have happened TBH I think the growth argument is better. Ricetellio isn't some especially bad CEO, and I'm sure 50 other CEOs woulda done the exact same thing if it wasn't him. Which is exactly why every other tech company was also hit with massive layoffs this year. It's not some standout, it's the 20th consequence of actions every other public company pursued. Look at all the industries Unity tried to branch out into in 4-5 years and you see why they became balooned to 7K employees: https://i.imgur.com/3Ume4Qm.png https://i.imgur.com/3Ume4Qm.png