13 ms·

Unity's Self-Combustion Engine

159 points by erickhill 3y ago

Rapzid 3y ago
> John Riccitiello, now there is a guy who is going to attract and retain top management and engineering talent! The Unity board apparently. The stuff that comes out of this guys mouth inspires confidence.. In shorting the company. How have they not replaced him ages ago?
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  They will probably pick up Phil Harrison!
beefnugs 3y ago
Let the wars begin: - Unity itself can hire dark botnets to beef up their profits at any time - game developers need to start selling with the caveat "5 re-installs included" and of course you change the price to over-sell how many installs the average person does - game developers are now incentivized to make huge huge huge game downloads for no good reason other than to make people think twice about uninstalling and reinstalling later since it takes so long - steam and game distribution platforms now need to start limiting re-installs and downloads for everyone, more complexity, more hassle, more bugs - everyone needs to start running whitelist firewalls again, since automatic private data exfiltration is getting so out of control we need to block all internet access by default now
- gmerc 3y ago
  This exactly (minus the huge downloads, no point). If they were successful with their “trust us, we can magically figure out number of installs” game; the incentives of the entire industry would be reconfigured to the 2000s of EA downloader expiring your purchase after 5 installs. We can thank the heavens for Steam to murder that in its crib and we can hope they, still privately owned, won’t be tempted by the ultimate sin here.
dirteater_ 3y ago
> I see a lot of developers talking about Godot, but I also see developers talking about Linux whenever Microsoft pulls some underhanded shenanigans with Windows and that doesn't seem to have cracked the OS market wide open This is not even close to a fair comparison.
- dirteater_ 3y ago
  They share upsides, but the major downside that end users tradeoff compatibility with the rest of the software on their system is something Godot does not share.
rwmj 3y ago
> $2.6 billion – Unity's lifetime accumulated deficit over 19 years of operations, a figure we got by combining the $2.2 billion lifetime debt of its last annual report with the $447 million in net losses it reported for the first two quarters of its current fiscal year. Anyone know how a start up company can possibly finance such a gigantic debt?
bentt 3y ago
I think their actual strategy is to cut deals with vulnerable devs. They are waving a gun around and seeing who flinches.
octacat 3y ago
It does as much sense as sites with "Do you want to enable browser notifications?" popups. No sense, sites still do it, regardless of what there users press.
icepat 3y ago
2023 has really been the year of established companies self-immolating in the name of more money. Is this the result of some new business strategy being pushed to high level execs? Or has the idiocracy produced by failing upwards finally come home to roost?
- aschearer 3y ago
  When the tide goes out you find out who's swimming without their trunks.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- WJW 3y ago
  Companies have been self-immolating for short term gains since basically forever, so that is nothing new. Raising interest rates have definitely pushed some long-term money losers over the edge though. Rather than subsisting on ever more funding rounds they now need to figure out how to make money out of their huge "free tier" subscriber base and the quickest way is to start charging them money. Predictably, the people who formerly got valuable stuff for free are not fans of this idea.
- finite_depth 3y ago
  [dead]
- vinyl7 3y ago
  End of ZIRP is making them all suddenly have to actually make money instead of relying on loans and investments. Unfortunately two decades of ZIRP means that none of the current leadership knows how to make money.
ThePhysicist 3y ago
I think it would make more sense to take a cut of the revenue when a game is sold, as that is easier to calculate for the developers. I can understand why they chose installs though as that's easier to measure for them and they would need to trust developers with their revenue numbers as they don't own the distribution platform like e.g. Apple does, but honestly they could've just used the installation rate as a sanity check for the license numbers reported by developers. As a game developer I would be very wary about signing such a contract as I'm sure these metrics can be easily gamed, so anyone with enough malicious intent could probably install-bomb my game and rack up large charges for me, and in the end I would be responsible for proving that those installs were malicious (which I imagine could be quite difficult).
- lancesells 3y ago
  I think it would be even easier to charge for tiers of software instead of the rent-seeking until the end of time.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  As you can see, they have promised they would not take a cut of the revenue, as well as specified in their license that you would not have to accept the new license as long as you used an old version. Then changed the license and are now claiming that you can't do that.
  - t0suj4 3y ago
    Isn't that grounds for a lawsuit?
    - BlueTemplar 3y ago
      You would think so, but maybe not in the USA ?!? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37527060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37527060
- gmerc 3y ago
  Install tracking is impossible. Especially unique install tracking.
troupo 3y ago
No one has mentioned Apple yet. Unity is Apple's exclusive partner on Vision Pro (for now at least). I can't see Apple being especially thrilled with this.
- solardev 3y ago
  I hope this leads to a fire sale. Maybe Apple could buy Unity and make it free, period, just to encourage Mac and Vision development. (edit: and iOS! Lol I always forget mobile gaming is a thing. Facepalm.)
  - kowbell 3y ago
    To be fair - Unity did start on OS X and was very early on iOS!
  - jwells89 3y ago
    That would be quite something. Perhaps this would also result in Unity's ad business being shuttered or at least sanitized, similar to how Shazam shed all of its third party tracking junk after Apple bought it.
  - gryn 3y ago
    If apple buy unity the last thing I see them do is make it open source. I can see them make it apple exclusive and more integrated to the apple ecosystem though.
    - jwells89 3y ago
      Open source is indeed unlikely, but there's a very good chance they'd make it free or inexpensive relative to competitors. Plenty of precedent for that in the video editing tools they've bought and turned first-party. They might not kill off cross-platform support this time, though. Today's Apple maintains true native (not just "port half of the Mac/iOS userland" native) Android and Windows apps.
    - mst 3y ago
      I don't consider it -likely- but Apple do have form for "buy a thing to -use- it and who cares if other people use it as well" in FoundationDB.
htk 3y ago
There's really no way for them to recover the lost trust. Even if they backtrack everything the mistrust will be there. The only way out in the end might be to open source the engine.
- WJW 3y ago
  > The only way out in the end might be to open source the engine. The problem for unity is that it costs a ton of money to develop the engine and not enough people pay them for it. Open sourcing the engine does not help with that problem and might even make it worse.
- throaway3nfn 3y ago
  > The only way out in the end might be to open source the engine. Do you have faith they know to monetize an open source engine? Wouldn't that actually expedite the fall in their case?
  - htk 3y ago
    You're probably right, but when I put myself in the game developer's shoes I can't think of any other way for me to touch Unity again.
- jayd16 3y ago
  I don't think that would solve it for them at all. They'll still want to lock you in with their services and whatnot. Besides, they probably don't have the rights to open source the engine. They should just cap their take at "up to 5% rev share". At least at that point there's no worry about runaway costs.
- NooneAtAll3 3y ago
  > There's really no way for them to recover the lost trust. As many have discovered throughout the years, Companies don't need "trust" to be profitable Ubisoft has been a laughing stock for a decade, EA still holds the record for lowest rated reddit comment (feel your pride and accomplishment), and "it just works" in Bethesda world
alangibson 3y ago
Because of ZIRP, there's an entire generation of business leaders that have mastered raising money but have no idea how to make it. Expect to see many more own goals like this in the next few years as they try to figure out how.
- glimshe 3y ago
  This. Also, this entire generation has no problems speaking about what make them successful, writing books/blogs about business, being keynote speakers etc when they would never be able to build a single business without massive financing. This is changing American entrepreneurship for the worse - in the past, the stories used to be all about someone starting a small business with no or limited seed money and slowly building an empire from scratch.
  - magospietato 3y ago
    My concern here is that we've run out of low hanging fruit that can be managed by small teams. Everything is so exceptionally complex these days I just don't think it's feasible to bootstrap an innovative business from your garage.
    - XCSme 3y ago
      If anything, I think it's easier than ever to bootstrap your own business. The entry-cost is so low and risks are almost zero.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    Seems rife for a new generation of immigrants to sweep in and get shit done.
    - GenerocUsername 3y ago
      Why do they need to be immigrants?
      - 3y ago
alangibson 3y ago
> "We leverage our own proprietary data model, so you can appreciate that we won't go into a lot of detail, but we believe it gives an accurate determination of the number of times the Runtime is distributed for a given project." This is incredible. They've given themselves the right to demand any amount of money as determined by them alone.
- throw16180339 3y ago
  I never thought I'd say this, but they make Oracle license audits seem reasonable by comparison.
- diego_sandoval 3y ago
  "Trust me, bro"
- aschearer 3y ago
  "We won't go into a lot of detail" but they still expect to be paid based on the data they collect? What happens when a popular game or publisher claims they had X installs and Unity claims they had Y? Hard to imagine people will simply accept Unity's position when there's real money at stake...
- solardev 3y ago
  Isn't that how ad networks work too?
  - alangibson 3y ago
    Yes, and it's an open secret that they're crooked as a dog's hind leg.
  - galleywest200 3y ago
    Yes. In fact, Unity merged with a company that sort of specializes in mobile advertising: ironSource. [1] Here is an example of one of their mobile ad products: https://www.is.com/mobile-advertising-sdk/ https://www.is.com/mobile-advertising-sdk/ [1]: https://investors.unity.com/news/news-details/2022/Unity-Announces-Merger-Agreement-with-ironSource/default.aspx https://investors.unity.com/news/news-details/2022/Unity-Ann...
mschuster91 3y ago
> Unity lit money on fire for decades to buy a market advantage that overrules the basic economic incentives that supposedly ensure free markets work best for customers. It was successful in doing that because it's very hard for a sustainable business to compete against one that is fine losing billions of dollars. This right here is the most notable part of the article, and it is entirely correct - it has been for years. Venture capital is fine to use for actual ventures, to create new markets or hell, to break into a market with entrenched powers... but when it is used on a long time purely to undercut and destroy legitimate prior businesses (taxis/Uber, hotels/AirBnB, game engines/Unity), authorities should step in. It's time to revive anti-trust, anti-dumping and other anti-predatory politics.
- dirteater_ 3y ago
  They have won "market share" I'm not sure exactly which competitors they've undercut in the process? Are there any examples of a legitimate competitor that failed because they couldn't compete on price?
- MrStonedOne 3y ago
  Everybody points to uber but uber won against taxis because they had an app and taxis had a phone number that often wouldn't even accept a downtown cross st. As a seattlite who got tired of hunting for a building that still had a street number just to get a cab on 5th and Jackson or what ever I'm glad uber killed taxis
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    In Austin ~2012-ish, we had Austin Cab. It had an app. It was like Uber, but worse in every way you can possibly imagine and outrageously priced. I don't like an Uber monopoly either, but it doesn't mean the status quo was better before.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    This is exactly it. It would be like if no pizza place had mobile ordering and a new one started that had it; that was the killer feature. Everything else (I personally believe) was hyped up by Uber so that the taxis wouldn't realize what the real competitor was until too late. Now there may be taxi hailing apps, but nobody knows the name of them, and they're different for every city.
tezza 3y ago
I make WebGL multiplayer games using Unity. The original changes essentially shut me down. Yesterday, I just found out Unity has changed their definition to exempt WebGL games: a partial relief. I have little confidence Unity will stick to their plans. In between I evaluated all the alternatives to Unity specifically about WebGL players. unfortunately WebGL is either impossible or crippled in other engines, frameworks. Further, other engines are like MS Paint versus Unity who would be Adobe Creative Cloud. Here is my WebGL summary: Godot uses Node trees instead of Entity Component. Porting Unity scripts almost impossible because of this amongst other reasons. Attempts to weld Entity Component only supported on Godot 4 but…. Godot 4+ WebGL does not work on Mac with no plans to change. Godot is waiting for Chrome to fix something, no comment on Safari, FF, others. One forum poster doing Godot WebGL export noticed that the Empty Scene WebGL export of Godot is 17MB versus 4MB for Unity. Unreal 5 does not export to WebGL. However you can use UE 4 UE4 WebGL is not much discussed and the pieces you can find imply the output size, and thus customer download time, is significantly larger than Unity’s Stride does not export to WebGL. So UE4 seemed the only other option
- jarsin 3y ago
  > The original changes essentially shut me down. A webgl game making > $1m in revenue per year? Which one?
  - tezza 3y ago
    (projected)
- nightowl_games 3y ago
  Godot 3 on web is solid. I was pretty sure unity web export was pretty big. How are you getting 4mb? We strip out a ton of the code in Godot using a "custom modules" file and the .wasm export is much smaller. I think it's ~4mb actually. You should look at defold or play canvas. And Godot 3, compiled from source, with just the modules you need.
- devit 3y ago
  It looks like the Godot problem is that Chrome on Apple systems by default uses the native Apple OpenGL driver, which are broken, and can be worked around by passing --use-angle=metal to Chrome to tell it to use the new experimental Metal backend. So in practice it's probably going to be fixed by the time a new game is released, and otherwise you can tell users to start the browser with the proper command line, or contribute a workaround to Godot yourself.
scott_w 3y ago
No, the problem isn’t trust. The problem is the pricing model is both bad and retroactively applied. Given a good number of games won’t be modified or updated, just sold over time, I struggle to see a justification for applying to them beyond “we want more money.”
Dudester230602 3y ago
> ...but companies don't exist to grow market share. They exist to earn money. This is not what HN/YC "taught" me...
vertis 3y ago
How long until someone weaponises the 'installs' to bankrupt competitors? I can see this happening in the already somewhat scummy free-to-play market.
- jayd16 3y ago
  Not even competitors. When you talk about games, even jilted fans are a liability.
- morkalork 3y ago
  People used to pay less-than-reputable businesses for services that would spam ad clicks on competitor's search ads, draining their advertising budgets. So I could definitely see the same "services" for installs.
- gmerc 3y ago
  Anyone who knows what’s going on in the Minecraft server scene knows it won’t even need competitors for that.. There is so much wrong here: - “Trust us we figured our install measurements” is insane. We all worked on this for decades, it’s a dilemma with multiple axes, one being piracy. - Everyone in games for a decade or so has been in a company that’s been screwed by publishers or partners on sales. Developers embraced unique activation keys and master servers to stop publisher fraud at least as much as as an anti consumer piracy measure. - The only tradeoff to install transparency is surveillance and tracking which trades off against piracy. Most developers are not interested in pushing boundaries there. Trust us with a company that now has broken every single promise they have made… I don’t think so
- danboy4 3y ago
  They clarified it will only be initial installs. Depending on how they’re uniquely identifying that, I guess it could still be gamed though.
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    > They clarified They backtracked. https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-marc-whitten https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-ma... > After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unity's Whitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation. (A spokesperson told Axios that Unity had "regrouped" to discuss the issue.) This is an important distiction.
jmyeet 3y ago
> Unity lit money on fire for decades to buy a market advantage that overrules the basic economic incentives that supposedly ensure free markets work best for customers This is, quite literally, pretty much every consumer-facing startup. Uber anyone? As an aside, the very idea of "free markets" is a myth. Markets only function effectively with strong government. Period. Let's see how far anyone gets in a libertarian fairy land without courts. ARM's IPO valuation is pretty much based on jacking up licensing fees too. We need to get back to the idea that companies are vehicle for generating income without the endless expectation of growth at all costs.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  If you have been around more than a few years, you are not a startup any more.

159 points by erickhill 3y ago

> John Riccitiello, now there is a guy who is going to attract and retain top management and engineering talent! The Unity board apparently. The stuff that comes out of this guys mouth inspires confidence.. In shorting the company. How have they not replaced him ages ago?

brucethemoose2 3y ago
They will probably pick up Phil Harrison!

beefnugs 3y ago

Let the wars begin: - Unity itself can hire dark botnets to beef up their profits at any time - game developers need to start selling with the caveat "5 re-installs included" and of course you change the price to over-sell how many installs the average person does - game developers are now incentivized to make huge huge huge game downloads for no good reason other than to make people think twice about uninstalling and reinstalling later since it takes so long - steam and game distribution platforms now need to start limiting re-installs and downloads for everyone, more complexity, more hassle, more bugs - everyone needs to start running whitelist firewalls again, since automatic private data exfiltration is getting so out of control we need to block all internet access by default now

gmerc 3y ago
This exactly (minus the huge downloads, no point). If they were successful with their “trust us, we can magically figure out number of installs” game; the incentives of the entire industry would be reconfigured to the 2000s of EA downloader expiring your purchase after 5 installs. We can thank the heavens for Steam to murder that in its crib and we can hope they, still privately owned, won’t be tempted by the ultimate sin here.

dirteater_ 3y ago

> I see a lot of developers talking about Godot, but I also see developers talking about Linux whenever Microsoft pulls some underhanded shenanigans with Windows and that doesn't seem to have cracked the OS market wide open This is not even close to a fair comparison.

dirteater_ 3y ago
They share upsides, but the major downside that end users tradeoff compatibility with the rest of the software on their system is something Godot does not share.

rwmj 3y ago

> $2.6 billion – Unity's lifetime accumulated deficit over 19 years of operations, a figure we got by combining the $2.2 billion lifetime debt of its last annual report with the $447 million in net losses it reported for the first two quarters of its current fiscal year. Anyone know how a start up company can possibly finance such a gigantic debt?

bentt 3y ago

I think their actual strategy is to cut deals with vulnerable devs. They are waving a gun around and seeing who flinches.

octacat 3y ago

It does as much sense as sites with "Do you want to enable browser notifications?" popups. No sense, sites still do it, regardless of what there users press.

icepat 3y ago

2023 has really been the year of established companies self-immolating in the name of more money. Is this the result of some new business strategy being pushed to high level execs? Or has the idiocracy produced by failing upwards finally come home to roost?

aschearer 3y ago
When the tide goes out you find out who's swimming without their trunks.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
WJW 3y ago
Companies have been self-immolating for short term gains since basically forever, so that is nothing new. Raising interest rates have definitely pushed some long-term money losers over the edge though. Rather than subsisting on ever more funding rounds they now need to figure out how to make money out of their huge "free tier" subscriber base and the quickest way is to start charging them money. Predictably, the people who formerly got valuable stuff for free are not fans of this idea.
finite_depth 3y ago
[dead]
vinyl7 3y ago
End of ZIRP is making them all suddenly have to actually make money instead of relying on loans and investments. Unfortunately two decades of ZIRP means that none of the current leadership knows how to make money.

ThePhysicist 3y ago

I think it would make more sense to take a cut of the revenue when a game is sold, as that is easier to calculate for the developers. I can understand why they chose installs though as that's easier to measure for them and they would need to trust developers with their revenue numbers as they don't own the distribution platform like e.g. Apple does, but honestly they could've just used the installation rate as a sanity check for the license numbers reported by developers. As a game developer I would be very wary about signing such a contract as I'm sure these metrics can be easily gamed, so anyone with enough malicious intent could probably install-bomb my game and rack up large charges for me, and in the end I would be responsible for proving that those installs were malicious (which I imagine could be quite difficult).

lancesells 3y ago
I think it would be even easier to charge for tiers of software instead of the rent-seeking until the end of time.
BlueTemplar 3y ago
As you can see, they have promised they would not take a cut of the revenue, as well as specified in their license that you would not have to accept the new license as long as you used an old version. Then changed the license and are now claiming that you can't do that.
- t0suj4 3y ago
  Isn't that grounds for a lawsuit?
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    You would think so, but maybe not in the USA ?!? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37527060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37527060
gmerc 3y ago
Install tracking is impossible. Especially unique install tracking.

troupo 3y ago

No one has mentioned Apple yet. Unity is Apple's exclusive partner on Vision Pro (for now at least). I can't see Apple being especially thrilled with this.

solardev 3y ago
I hope this leads to a fire sale. Maybe Apple could buy Unity and make it free, period, just to encourage Mac and Vision development. (edit: and iOS! Lol I always forget mobile gaming is a thing. Facepalm.)
- kowbell 3y ago
  To be fair - Unity did start on OS X and was very early on iOS!
- jwells89 3y ago
  That would be quite something. Perhaps this would also result in Unity's ad business being shuttered or at least sanitized, similar to how Shazam shed all of its third party tracking junk after Apple bought it.
- gryn 3y ago
  If apple buy unity the last thing I see them do is make it open source. I can see them make it apple exclusive and more integrated to the apple ecosystem though.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    Open source is indeed unlikely, but there's a very good chance they'd make it free or inexpensive relative to competitors. Plenty of precedent for that in the video editing tools they've bought and turned first-party. They might not kill off cross-platform support this time, though. Today's Apple maintains true native (not just "port half of the Mac/iOS userland" native) Android and Windows apps.
  - mst 3y ago
    I don't consider it -likely- but Apple do have form for "buy a thing to -use- it and who cares if other people use it as well" in FoundationDB.

htk 3y ago

There's really no way for them to recover the lost trust. Even if they backtrack everything the mistrust will be there. The only way out in the end might be to open source the engine.

WJW 3y ago
> The only way out in the end might be to open source the engine. The problem for unity is that it costs a ton of money to develop the engine and not enough people pay them for it. Open sourcing the engine does not help with that problem and might even make it worse.
throaway3nfn 3y ago
> The only way out in the end might be to open source the engine. Do you have faith they know to monetize an open source engine? Wouldn't that actually expedite the fall in their case?
- htk 3y ago
  You're probably right, but when I put myself in the game developer's shoes I can't think of any other way for me to touch Unity again.
jayd16 3y ago
I don't think that would solve it for them at all. They'll still want to lock you in with their services and whatnot. Besides, they probably don't have the rights to open source the engine. They should just cap their take at "up to 5% rev share". At least at that point there's no worry about runaway costs.
NooneAtAll3 3y ago
> There's really no way for them to recover the lost trust. As many have discovered throughout the years, Companies don't need "trust" to be profitable Ubisoft has been a laughing stock for a decade, EA still holds the record for lowest rated reddit comment (feel your pride and accomplishment), and "it just works" in Bethesda world

alangibson 3y ago

Because of ZIRP, there's an entire generation of business leaders that have mastered raising money but have no idea how to make it. Expect to see many more own goals like this in the next few years as they try to figure out how.

glimshe 3y ago
This. Also, this entire generation has no problems speaking about what make them successful, writing books/blogs about business, being keynote speakers etc when they would never be able to build a single business without massive financing. This is changing American entrepreneurship for the worse - in the past, the stories used to be all about someone starting a small business with no or limited seed money and slowly building an empire from scratch.
- magospietato 3y ago
  My concern here is that we've run out of low hanging fruit that can be managed by small teams. Everything is so exceptionally complex these days I just don't think it's feasible to bootstrap an innovative business from your garage.
  - XCSme 3y ago
    If anything, I think it's easier than ever to bootstrap your own business. The entry-cost is so low and risks are almost zero.
- hinkley 3y ago
  Seems rife for a new generation of immigrants to sweep in and get shit done.
  - GenerocUsername 3y ago
    Why do they need to be immigrants?
    - 3y ago

alangibson 3y ago

> "We leverage our own proprietary data model, so you can appreciate that we won't go into a lot of detail, but we believe it gives an accurate determination of the number of times the Runtime is distributed for a given project." This is incredible. They've given themselves the right to demand any amount of money as determined by them alone.

throw16180339 3y ago
I never thought I'd say this, but they make Oracle license audits seem reasonable by comparison.
diego_sandoval 3y ago
"Trust me, bro"
aschearer 3y ago
"We won't go into a lot of detail" but they still expect to be paid based on the data they collect? What happens when a popular game or publisher claims they had X installs and Unity claims they had Y? Hard to imagine people will simply accept Unity's position when there's real money at stake...
solardev 3y ago
Isn't that how ad networks work too?
- alangibson 3y ago
  Yes, and it's an open secret that they're crooked as a dog's hind leg.
- galleywest200 3y ago
  Yes. In fact, Unity merged with a company that sort of specializes in mobile advertising: ironSource. [1] Here is an example of one of their mobile ad products: https://www.is.com/mobile-advertising-sdk/ https://www.is.com/mobile-advertising-sdk/ [1]: https://investors.unity.com/news/news-details/2022/Unity-Announces-Merger-Agreement-with-ironSource/default.aspx https://investors.unity.com/news/news-details/2022/Unity-Ann...

mschuster91 3y ago

> Unity lit money on fire for decades to buy a market advantage that overrules the basic economic incentives that supposedly ensure free markets work best for customers. It was successful in doing that because it's very hard for a sustainable business to compete against one that is fine losing billions of dollars. This right here is the most notable part of the article, and it is entirely correct - it has been for years. Venture capital is fine to use for actual ventures, to create new markets or hell, to break into a market with entrenched powers... but when it is used on a long time purely to undercut and destroy legitimate prior businesses (taxis/Uber, hotels/AirBnB, game engines/Unity), authorities should step in. It's time to revive anti-trust, anti-dumping and other anti-predatory politics.

dirteater_ 3y ago
They have won "market share" I'm not sure exactly which competitors they've undercut in the process? Are there any examples of a legitimate competitor that failed because they couldn't compete on price?
MrStonedOne 3y ago
Everybody points to uber but uber won against taxis because they had an app and taxis had a phone number that often wouldn't even accept a downtown cross st. As a seattlite who got tired of hunting for a building that still had a street number just to get a cab on 5th and Jackson or what ever I'm glad uber killed taxis
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  In Austin ~2012-ish, we had Austin Cab. It had an app. It was like Uber, but worse in every way you can possibly imagine and outrageously priced. I don't like an Uber monopoly either, but it doesn't mean the status quo was better before.
- bombcar 3y ago
  This is exactly it. It would be like if no pizza place had mobile ordering and a new one started that had it; that was the killer feature. Everything else (I personally believe) was hyped up by Uber so that the taxis wouldn't realize what the real competitor was until too late. Now there may be taxi hailing apps, but nobody knows the name of them, and they're different for every city.

tezza 3y ago

I make WebGL multiplayer games using Unity. The original changes essentially shut me down. Yesterday, I just found out Unity has changed their definition to exempt WebGL games: a partial relief. I have little confidence Unity will stick to their plans. In between I evaluated all the alternatives to Unity specifically about WebGL players. unfortunately WebGL is either impossible or crippled in other engines, frameworks. Further, other engines are like MS Paint versus Unity who would be Adobe Creative Cloud. Here is my WebGL summary: Godot uses Node trees instead of Entity Component. Porting Unity scripts almost impossible because of this amongst other reasons. Attempts to weld Entity Component only supported on Godot 4 but…. Godot 4+ WebGL does not work on Mac with no plans to change. Godot is waiting for Chrome to fix something, no comment on Safari, FF, others. One forum poster doing Godot WebGL export noticed that the Empty Scene WebGL export of Godot is 17MB versus 4MB for Unity. Unreal 5 does not export to WebGL. However you can use UE 4 UE4 WebGL is not much discussed and the pieces you can find imply the output size, and thus customer download time, is significantly larger than Unity’s Stride does not export to WebGL. So UE4 seemed the only other option

jarsin 3y ago
> The original changes essentially shut me down. A webgl game making > $1m in revenue per year? Which one?
- tezza 3y ago
  (projected)
nightowl_games 3y ago
Godot 3 on web is solid. I was pretty sure unity web export was pretty big. How are you getting 4mb? We strip out a ton of the code in Godot using a "custom modules" file and the .wasm export is much smaller. I think it's ~4mb actually. You should look at defold or play canvas. And Godot 3, compiled from source, with just the modules you need.
devit 3y ago
It looks like the Godot problem is that Chrome on Apple systems by default uses the native Apple OpenGL driver, which are broken, and can be worked around by passing --use-angle=metal to Chrome to tell it to use the new experimental Metal backend. So in practice it's probably going to be fixed by the time a new game is released, and otherwise you can tell users to start the browser with the proper command line, or contribute a workaround to Godot yourself.

scott_w 3y ago

No, the problem isn’t trust. The problem is the pricing model is both bad and retroactively applied. Given a good number of games won’t be modified or updated, just sold over time, I struggle to see a justification for applying to them beyond “we want more money.”

Dudester230602 3y ago

> ...but companies don't exist to grow market share. They exist to earn money. This is not what HN/YC "taught" me...

vertis 3y ago

How long until someone weaponises the 'installs' to bankrupt competitors? I can see this happening in the already somewhat scummy free-to-play market.

jayd16 3y ago
Not even competitors. When you talk about games, even jilted fans are a liability.
morkalork 3y ago
People used to pay less-than-reputable businesses for services that would spam ad clicks on competitor's search ads, draining their advertising budgets. So I could definitely see the same "services" for installs.
gmerc 3y ago
Anyone who knows what’s going on in the Minecraft server scene knows it won’t even need competitors for that.. There is so much wrong here: - “Trust us we figured our install measurements” is insane. We all worked on this for decades, it’s a dilemma with multiple axes, one being piracy. - Everyone in games for a decade or so has been in a company that’s been screwed by publishers or partners on sales. Developers embraced unique activation keys and master servers to stop publisher fraud at least as much as as an anti consumer piracy measure. - The only tradeoff to install transparency is surveillance and tracking which trades off against piracy. Most developers are not interested in pushing boundaries there. Trust us with a company that now has broken every single promise they have made… I don’t think so
danboy4 3y ago
They clarified it will only be initial installs. Depending on how they’re uniquely identifying that, I guess it could still be gamed though.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  > They clarified They backtracked. https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-marc-whitten https://www.axios.com/2023/09/13/unity-runtime-fee-policy-ma... > After initially telling Axios earlier Tuesday that a player installing a game, deleting it and installing it again would result in multiple fees, Unity's Whitten told Axios that the company would actually only charge for an initial installation. (A spokesperson told Axios that Unity had "regrouped" to discuss the issue.) This is an important distiction.

jmyeet 3y ago

> Unity lit money on fire for decades to buy a market advantage that overrules the basic economic incentives that supposedly ensure free markets work best for customers This is, quite literally, pretty much every consumer-facing startup. Uber anyone? As an aside, the very idea of "free markets" is a myth. Markets only function effectively with strong government. Period. Let's see how far anyone gets in a libertarian fairy land without courts. ARM's IPO valuation is pretty much based on jacking up licensing fees too. We need to get back to the idea that companies are vehicle for generating income without the endless expectation of growth at all costs.

BlueTemplar 3y ago
If you have been around more than a few years, you are not a startup any more.