7 ms·

I think it might be too little too late. I do wonder if this was always the plan with classic door-in-the-face technique, but I can't imagine they would have an

I think it might be too little too late. I do wonder if this was always the plan with classic door-in-the-face technique, but I can't imagine they would have anticipated the absolute magnitude of backlash. Their product certainly isn't as special as they clearly think it is, and the fact that they attempted to unilaterally change the contract in as egregious as way as they did is unacceptable and not behaviour I would want from a vendor I'm reliant on. Anecdotally, I'm seeing a lot of game devs being surprised at relative ease of migration in some instances, though I imagine there are megaprojects which will have a much worse time. Crow had to be eaten but it looks like they're only tasting the feathers.

octacat 3y ago
Companies in 2023 are just competing in how hostile they could be to the users/workers and still get away with it.
cowsup 3y ago
Unity lost a lot of goodwill among developers, and it took over a week for them to admit fault. I seriously doubt they planned all along to present a temporary horrible plan, to make their “real” plan easier to swallow. If this were a 48- or 72-hour turnaround, maybe. But Unity lost a lot of goodwill amongst developers and there are some they may never get back as a result.
- intelVISA 3y ago
  Developers aren't the ones choosing Unity most of the time...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - msk-lywenn 3y ago
    Huh? Who then?
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    But they were at one point. I'm not in gamedev but I do recall people being enthused about it some years ago. When you lose that audience and enthusiasm among the people who influence next year's technical decisions, eventually you enter the dustbin of history.
  - Macha 3y ago
    It feels like any game developer or publisher big enough to be dictating engines top down probably has their own engine?
    - johnfernow 3y ago
      For a lot of studios, even very large ones, that's not the case anymore, and even those that have their own engines don't use them for everything. Nintendo has several engines, but Pokémon Go is made in Unity, as was Mario Kart Tour and Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Pokémon Shining Pearl. miHoYo has over 5000 employees but they still use Unity for Genshin Impact and some of their other games. Blizzard surely had the money to make their own engine for Hearthstone, but they chose Unity. This is even more pronounced for Unreal, where Final Fantasy VII Remake, Valorant, Apex Legends Mobile, Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order and Survivor, Octopath Traveler, and tons of other wildly profitable games are made in it. CD Projekt Red is making the next Witcher game in Unreal as well. Square Enix has a ton of money and thousands of employees, as does Riot Games, EA, and plenty of other huge companies. Nearly all of these companies have developed their own engines in the past, but Unity and Unreal are just really hard to beat: not only can they offer great performance and stability, as well as easy multiplatform support (can publish on Windows, PlayStation, Switch, Xbox, iOS, Android, etc.), but it also can make development easier since new employees likely already are familiar with the engine, versus if you build your own it can take months for new employees to be productive and contribute much of anything to the project. Often times they'll still make changes to the engine's source code (miHoyo didn't just download the latest Unity LTS from the website or Unity Hub), but that's still considerably less work than building your own engine from scratch, and in many cases even that's not necessary.
      - bigstrat2003 3y ago
        On the topic of Square Enix, what's bizarre to me is that FF7R is the odd one out among recent games. FF15 and FF16 were on two different internally developed engines! I wonder if the reason FF7R used UE is because it was originally being developed outside, before Square was unhappy with how development was going and brought it back in house.
      - 3y ago
  - drpossum 3y ago
    If you're working in a development environment where management is drawing hard lines at choosing your tooling you should find a place that's going to succeed.
    - djbusby 3y ago
      Sometimes the tooling is in place before you arrive.
      - drpossum 3y ago
        That's right and you have a choice to accept that job. If the tooling takes you by surprise you either didn't do your due diligence with a new employer or you were lied to.
EA-3167 3y ago
I think the bottom line damage is that no one is going to develop new games on Unity if they have any other choice. Even if Unity walks this back 100%, why would a dev trust them not to pull this again in the future? Maybe some large projects will stop looking at migration in the short-term, but any new work is going to start happening elsewhere for sure.
- sangnoir 3y ago
  > Even if Unity walks this back 100%, why would a dev trust them not to pull this again in the future? This is why I stopped paying JetBrains, despite them 100% walking back their idiotic licensing change proposal many years ago. I love(d) the products, but could no longer trust the decision-makers.
  - PaulKeeble 3y ago
    They went back to the monthly billing with no option for buying a version permenantly. I think you can still fix your version for a while without upgrades but they will force an upgrade at some point now. The original issue I complained about has returned.
    - Macha 3y ago
      Jetbrains? Seems the same model it was when they moved to subscriptions: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/206544479-Subscription-based-licensing-model-vs-perpetual-licensing-model https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/206544479-Subs... https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What-is-perpetual-fallback-license- https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...
      - sangnoir 3y ago
        > Jetbrains? Yes! > Seems the same model it was when they moved to subscriptions Indeed, but there was a period of brain-dead decision making in 2015 where they announced a very different direction and back-tracked 2 weeks later. They announced plans for an evergreen subscription model, but the flip side was that they'd brick your IDE (with no fallback) the moment your subscription lapsed[1]. The only reason the subscription model seems unchanged from their initial one was because of the outrage their controversial change generated. I found this unconscionable - they backtracked (faster than Unity to their credit, but still) 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10170089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10170089
dpkonofa 3y ago
This is it, in a nutshell. People don't want the apology. They want to know that a decision like this doesn't have a chance of happening because the people in charge know it's a bad idea before it leaves the door. No one wants to be stuck in a cycle of getting fucked and then boycotting to get what they want, especially for something that their livelihood depends on. They want a product made by people they trust who are making decisions in the best interest of the users/creators and not only decisions that are in the best interest of the company.
- the_snooze 3y ago
  Exactly. If your project or organization is dependent on some external product or platform, that thing had better be boring and predictable. Busy people don't have the time or the patience to be jerked around by external surprises. Walk-back or not, Unity is demonstrably not boring and predictable anymore. That's done.
  - sounds 3y ago
    Oh they didn't walk it back. It's now one of two ways for them to get a percent of your revenue - that did change. (It also was only going to kick in once your revenue hit a certain point.) The CEO John R. didn't chime in here, and that would have meant him being accountable for this decision and its effect on Unity. His mask slipped here.
    - brucethemoose2 3y ago
      They did walk back charging per download/install. There was no way they couldn't. Its literally not practical.
      - Applejinx 3y ago
        You misunderstand, I think. ACCOUNTABILITY would not be practical. Them charging for whatever they can make up and claim to be true, is neither walked back or not walked back. It's waiting to happen again, in whatever way they dream up. You're assuming they wouldn't simply make stuff up and that there would be a chain of accountability, so the process would make sense. Such things are for making money, not sense. You have not seen the last of them.
PaulKeeble 3y ago
You don't build buildings on sinking sand regardless of whether for now it appears not to be sinking. Once the footing has proved unstable its best to build elsewhere.
morrbo 3y ago
I simply don't trust publicly traded companies these days. I genuinely can't think of an example where a private company in the tech space has become better since going public. I don't like to MBA bash, but it large tech companies genuinely seem filled with people who don't even like tech (let alone love it) and are just happy to squeeze everything and everyone at any opportunity. I'm genuinely concerned and waiting for the enshittification of the next round of companies - people like cloudflare - then I guess I'll just give up on anything mainstream and remain an indy Dev doing indy things for fun
- blastro 3y ago
  I got a new pair of lululemon pants this week and they're terrible quality compared to year's past. I remember their CEO saying they were trying to double their stock price this year. Know I know how.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  I definitely agree with this sentiment. And it's not just publicly traded companies - I like the saying "private equity kills everything it touches" because whenever PE buys a a company I have never seen it turn to anything but a shit pile eventually. At some point with all companies the finance people take over. But well-loved products and companies are never created by finance people - they're created by people with a passion for something.
HellDunkel 3y ago
Show some respect and let the CEO go.
gumballindie 3y ago
Cat’s out of the bag. I gave godot a try and it’s absolutely amazing! It felt great working with open source tools - i could finally read the source when i needed to understand something. Indeed it lacks some features but it is an amazing engine. Unity and their ceo has proven to be untrustworthy. I am getting the sense that open source engines will eat their market share.
- Applejinx 3y ago
  I'm curious to see how quickly it gains a performant 3D layer now that people capable of getting performance out of Unity are looking at it. It was interesting seeing some people bounce off it on the grounds of woeful inefficiency. I don't remember the person, but one Unity refugee traced the path of a raycast and Godot more or less needed to treat it as a dynamically typed generic thing, going through a huge rigamarole to get a result. It's possible to hack in more direct access for those who can make sense of it. I don't think there's a thing going on in Godot's 3d engine that some of these Unity refugees can't understand. They're running into arbitrary obstacles based on Godot's attitude towards what's clean and elegant code. These obstacles could go away really quickly under the right conditions…
  - krapp 3y ago
    >I don't remember the person, but one Unity refugee traced the path of a raycast and Godot more or less needed to treat it as a dynamically typed generic thing, going through a huge rigamarole to get a result. There was a whole HN thread about it[0], and the response[1]. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37561762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37561762 [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37598985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37598985
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    > it gains a performant 3D layer It already is pretty darn performant - but without the many convenience features unity and unreal have. Also it does lack means to modify vertex buffers directly on the GPU - a feature I liked in Unity (https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Mesh.GetVertexBuffer.html https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Mesh.GetVertexBuffe...). However, I think godot shouldn't try and implement everything - the project should focus on getting core functionality performant and flexible enough. Everything else - managing massive world, etc, should be done by 3rd parties and monetised. I hope the game dev world wont take the web dev world path where code is in oversupply and there are little options to monetise. Unity's asset store allowed many people to gain freedom by selling assets. I think godot should follow the same path. But indeed for that the engine needs even more low level access exposed in a nice manner.
vsareto 3y ago
I think their product is technically special -- as with all of the commercial game engines -- but they were not in the market position they thought they were, which is what led to them to thinking this was a good idea. Very much an unforced error on their part.
raincole 3y ago
Unity definitely hurt itself in confusion. My anecdoate is that many people in this industry don't even know the existance of Godot. Yeah, I mean Godot, not Love2D or LibGDX. People can work in video games but are completly unaware of Godot. Now they ALL know it.

octacat 3y ago

Companies in 2023 are just competing in how hostile they could be to the users/workers and still get away with it.

cowsup 3y ago

Unity lost a lot of goodwill among developers, and it took over a week for them to admit fault. I seriously doubt they planned all along to present a temporary horrible plan, to make their “real” plan easier to swallow. If this were a 48- or 72-hour turnaround, maybe. But Unity lost a lot of goodwill amongst developers and there are some they may never get back as a result.

intelVISA 3y ago
Developers aren't the ones choosing Unity most of the time...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- msk-lywenn 3y ago
  Huh? Who then?
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  But they were at one point. I'm not in gamedev but I do recall people being enthused about it some years ago. When you lose that audience and enthusiasm among the people who influence next year's technical decisions, eventually you enter the dustbin of history.
- Macha 3y ago
  It feels like any game developer or publisher big enough to be dictating engines top down probably has their own engine?
  - johnfernow 3y ago
    For a lot of studios, even very large ones, that's not the case anymore, and even those that have their own engines don't use them for everything. Nintendo has several engines, but Pokémon Go is made in Unity, as was Mario Kart Tour and Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Pokémon Shining Pearl. miHoYo has over 5000 employees but they still use Unity for Genshin Impact and some of their other games. Blizzard surely had the money to make their own engine for Hearthstone, but they chose Unity. This is even more pronounced for Unreal, where Final Fantasy VII Remake, Valorant, Apex Legends Mobile, Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order and Survivor, Octopath Traveler, and tons of other wildly profitable games are made in it. CD Projekt Red is making the next Witcher game in Unreal as well. Square Enix has a ton of money and thousands of employees, as does Riot Games, EA, and plenty of other huge companies. Nearly all of these companies have developed their own engines in the past, but Unity and Unreal are just really hard to beat: not only can they offer great performance and stability, as well as easy multiplatform support (can publish on Windows, PlayStation, Switch, Xbox, iOS, Android, etc.), but it also can make development easier since new employees likely already are familiar with the engine, versus if you build your own it can take months for new employees to be productive and contribute much of anything to the project. Often times they'll still make changes to the engine's source code (miHoyo didn't just download the latest Unity LTS from the website or Unity Hub), but that's still considerably less work than building your own engine from scratch, and in many cases even that's not necessary.
    - bigstrat2003 3y ago
      On the topic of Square Enix, what's bizarre to me is that FF7R is the odd one out among recent games. FF15 and FF16 were on two different internally developed engines! I wonder if the reason FF7R used UE is because it was originally being developed outside, before Square was unhappy with how development was going and brought it back in house.
    - 3y ago
- drpossum 3y ago
  If you're working in a development environment where management is drawing hard lines at choosing your tooling you should find a place that's going to succeed.
  - djbusby 3y ago
    Sometimes the tooling is in place before you arrive.
    - drpossum 3y ago
      That's right and you have a choice to accept that job. If the tooling takes you by surprise you either didn't do your due diligence with a new employer or you were lied to.

EA-3167 3y ago

I think the bottom line damage is that no one is going to develop new games on Unity if they have any other choice. Even if Unity walks this back 100%, why would a dev trust them not to pull this again in the future? Maybe some large projects will stop looking at migration in the short-term, but any new work is going to start happening elsewhere for sure.

sangnoir 3y ago
> Even if Unity walks this back 100%, why would a dev trust them not to pull this again in the future? This is why I stopped paying JetBrains, despite them 100% walking back their idiotic licensing change proposal many years ago. I love(d) the products, but could no longer trust the decision-makers.
- PaulKeeble 3y ago
  They went back to the monthly billing with no option for buying a version permenantly. I think you can still fix your version for a while without upgrades but they will force an upgrade at some point now. The original issue I complained about has returned.
  - Macha 3y ago
    Jetbrains? Seems the same model it was when they moved to subscriptions: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/206544479-Subscription-based-licensing-model-vs-perpetual-licensing-model https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/206544479-Subs... https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What-is-perpetual-fallback-license- https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...
    - sangnoir 3y ago
      > Jetbrains? Yes! > Seems the same model it was when they moved to subscriptions Indeed, but there was a period of brain-dead decision making in 2015 where they announced a very different direction and back-tracked 2 weeks later. They announced plans for an evergreen subscription model, but the flip side was that they'd brick your IDE (with no fallback) the moment your subscription lapsed[1]. The only reason the subscription model seems unchanged from their initial one was because of the outrage their controversial change generated. I found this unconscionable - they backtracked (faster than Unity to their credit, but still) 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10170089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10170089

dpkonofa 3y ago

This is it, in a nutshell. People don't want the apology. They want to know that a decision like this doesn't have a chance of happening because the people in charge know it's a bad idea before it leaves the door. No one wants to be stuck in a cycle of getting fucked and then boycotting to get what they want, especially for something that their livelihood depends on. They want a product made by people they trust who are making decisions in the best interest of the users/creators and not only decisions that are in the best interest of the company.

the_snooze 3y ago
Exactly. If your project or organization is dependent on some external product or platform, that thing had better be boring and predictable. Busy people don't have the time or the patience to be jerked around by external surprises. Walk-back or not, Unity is demonstrably not boring and predictable anymore. That's done.
- sounds 3y ago
  Oh they didn't walk it back. It's now one of two ways for them to get a percent of your revenue - that did change. (It also was only going to kick in once your revenue hit a certain point.) The CEO John R. didn't chime in here, and that would have meant him being accountable for this decision and its effect on Unity. His mask slipped here.
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    They did walk back charging per download/install. There was no way they couldn't. Its literally not practical.
    - Applejinx 3y ago
      You misunderstand, I think. ACCOUNTABILITY would not be practical. Them charging for whatever they can make up and claim to be true, is neither walked back or not walked back. It's waiting to happen again, in whatever way they dream up. You're assuming they wouldn't simply make stuff up and that there would be a chain of accountability, so the process would make sense. Such things are for making money, not sense. You have not seen the last of them.

PaulKeeble 3y ago

You don't build buildings on sinking sand regardless of whether for now it appears not to be sinking. Once the footing has proved unstable its best to build elsewhere.

morrbo 3y ago

I simply don't trust publicly traded companies these days. I genuinely can't think of an example where a private company in the tech space has become better since going public. I don't like to MBA bash, but it large tech companies genuinely seem filled with people who don't even like tech (let alone love it) and are just happy to squeeze everything and everyone at any opportunity. I'm genuinely concerned and waiting for the enshittification of the next round of companies - people like cloudflare - then I guess I'll just give up on anything mainstream and remain an indy Dev doing indy things for fun

blastro 3y ago
I got a new pair of lululemon pants this week and they're terrible quality compared to year's past. I remember their CEO saying they were trying to double their stock price this year. Know I know how.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
I definitely agree with this sentiment. And it's not just publicly traded companies - I like the saying "private equity kills everything it touches" because whenever PE buys a a company I have never seen it turn to anything but a shit pile eventually. At some point with all companies the finance people take over. But well-loved products and companies are never created by finance people - they're created by people with a passion for something.

HellDunkel 3y ago

Show some respect and let the CEO go.

gumballindie 3y ago

Cat’s out of the bag. I gave godot a try and it’s absolutely amazing! It felt great working with open source tools - i could finally read the source when i needed to understand something. Indeed it lacks some features but it is an amazing engine. Unity and their ceo has proven to be untrustworthy. I am getting the sense that open source engines will eat their market share.

Applejinx 3y ago
I'm curious to see how quickly it gains a performant 3D layer now that people capable of getting performance out of Unity are looking at it. It was interesting seeing some people bounce off it on the grounds of woeful inefficiency. I don't remember the person, but one Unity refugee traced the path of a raycast and Godot more or less needed to treat it as a dynamically typed generic thing, going through a huge rigamarole to get a result. It's possible to hack in more direct access for those who can make sense of it. I don't think there's a thing going on in Godot's 3d engine that some of these Unity refugees can't understand. They're running into arbitrary obstacles based on Godot's attitude towards what's clean and elegant code. These obstacles could go away really quickly under the right conditions…
- krapp 3y ago
  >I don't remember the person, but one Unity refugee traced the path of a raycast and Godot more or less needed to treat it as a dynamically typed generic thing, going through a huge rigamarole to get a result. There was a whole HN thread about it[0], and the response[1]. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37561762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37561762 [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37598985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37598985
- gumballindie 3y ago
  > it gains a performant 3D layer It already is pretty darn performant - but without the many convenience features unity and unreal have. Also it does lack means to modify vertex buffers directly on the GPU - a feature I liked in Unity (https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Mesh.GetVertexBuffer.html https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Mesh.GetVertexBuffe...). However, I think godot shouldn't try and implement everything - the project should focus on getting core functionality performant and flexible enough. Everything else - managing massive world, etc, should be done by 3rd parties and monetised. I hope the game dev world wont take the web dev world path where code is in oversupply and there are little options to monetise. Unity's asset store allowed many people to gain freedom by selling assets. I think godot should follow the same path. But indeed for that the engine needs even more low level access exposed in a nice manner.

vsareto 3y ago

I think their product is technically special -- as with all of the commercial game engines -- but they were not in the market position they thought they were, which is what led to them to thinking this was a good idea. Very much an unforced error on their part.

raincole 3y ago

Unity definitely hurt itself in confusion. My anecdoate is that many people in this industry don't even know the existance of Godot. Yeah, I mean Godot, not Love2D or LibGDX. People can work in video games but are completly unaware of Godot. Now they ALL know it.