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Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

666 points by Morizero 3y ago

asynchronous 3y ago
Unity really showing the world how to tank a business by letting a few MBA’s at the top make a decision for profit.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  ^H^Hby going public without a business model.
  - dbingham 3y ago
    I feel like we've seen a bunch of businesses show what happens when you take private capital and scale on a community based product with out a clear business model that doesn't involve retroactively screwing the community in some way. I mean, Unity's just the latest example. Before it came Hashicorp and Docker. I'm sure we could think of many more examples if we tried. And what's really frustrating is that if these businesses had focused on simply "building a product the community wanted, supporting that community, and making enough money to comfortably keep going" - all of them could have been successful. I'd really love to see the tech community try more models that simply aim for comfortable sustainability - not astronomical growth. You know, enough to pay a modest engineering team market salaries indefinitely while they continue to support and develop the product.
    - dylan604 3y ago
      VCs don't like this. How are they going to get their ROI immediately? Having normal investors vs funders changes the mentality of long term to cash grab.
    - rmelton 3y ago
      My company is actively using this model now. It's really hard watching competitors raise multi-million dollar rounds though.
      - Eisenstein 3y ago
        Unless your plan is to vest and cash out, you shouldn't envy them.
        ethbr1 3y ago
        That's why it happens so often though -- the very people who are directly enriched by doing it (holders of the majority of the company's equity) are the only ones asked to decide to do it (board votes). Canonical example: MailChimp The founders retained essentially all the equity (Atlanta), so when push came to shove they decided "Fuck it, we'd rather be rich than work" and sold the company. It feels like the only way to avoid this would be aligning the equity structure with employees and customers in a better way.
    - harpiaharpyja 3y ago
      Exactly. I think what we are seeing is the result of decision makers at these businesses now having to report to investors who are essentially outsiders to the community. Their only stake or interest in the operation comes from having dumped a bunch of money into it. But now they get to call the shots or if not, exert a ton of pressure. I think the takeaway is that businesses built around a community really should not go public.
  - qwytw 3y ago
    They have a business model and they would've been fine if they hadn't started increasing their headcount by 50% every year and focused on their core products.
- dylan604 3y ago
  i remember back when Avid decided they were no longer going to offer a Mac version of their NLEs because Apple's new machines were only going to have 3 expansion slots. while admittedly, there were probably a much smaller number of affected users than the Unity decision, it did cause a huge amount of turmoil. urban legend has people dumping their Avid stations on the doorstep of the Avid offices. Avid survived. Unity will too
  - raytopia 3y ago
    Unity will survive but this could be the start of a steady decline of users, which isn't good for any game engine. Leads to a loss of knowledge which makes the engine even less popular. Ghe whole situation is somewhat similar to when GameMaker Studio switched to subscription model.
    - dylan604 3y ago
      what would be better for the community would be not just a decline in devs using the engine, but also the devs working on the engine. working for Unity should now be a stain just like working for FB/socials/ad-tech. there will be tons of people willing to do it, but hopefully the great minds leave the rot
      - ditonal 3y ago
        That’s the opposite of what would be better. We need more engineer solidarity not more divisiveness. Give me a list of your past employers and I can guarantee I can find some sketchball business practice you indirectly contributed to and make some tenuous argument for you to be blackballed. 95% of shitty tech industry practices can be root caused to people identify more strongly with their employer than with their profession. We desperately need a professional organization / union with teeth and the main thing that should be shunned is rhetoric that divides rather than unites it . Engineers can hang together or hang separately.
        dylan604 3y ago
- TylerE 3y ago
  To play devil's advocate... Unity isn't close to profitable, and never has been. At some point money has to be made or the lights get turned off.
  - generalizations 3y ago
    Well, that kinda makes sense then. If they weren't profitable, then this could be seen as a last-ditch survival strategy.
    - gs17 3y ago
      This strategy is still pretty awful. If 2.5% revenue share after $1,000,000 would be enough to survive on, they probably could have opened with matching Unreal's 5% instead of all the bullshit and won people over.
      - kevingadd 3y ago
        Yeah their new pricing model is quite literally more expensive than Unreal for many of their customers (mostly the ones who make less money - for massive studios it's cheaper) and it's ALSO more complex to comply with. A simple "we're doing revshare now, and the per-seat fee is going away" would have been viewed more favorably I think.
        tetha 3y ago
        I mean in my naive world, you'd slap some minimum revenue onto the rev-share and you'd have a clear separation between hobbyists, unsuccessful indies, indies, and huge successes. It'd be muddled in the middle, sure, but if some companies hits jackpot with a unity project, you'll know and could act on it.
        TylerE 3y ago
        That's what they did though. It was several hundred thousand dollars in revenue before any of it kicked in.
- harpiaharpyja 3y ago
  This "for profit" thing seems like the wrong framing. Customer goodwill and community are extremely valuable. It seems like what we are looking at is more about short-termism and the distortive effects of suddenly (post-IPO) having to report to investors who are essentially outsiders to the business and have no knowledge or stake in the operation-as-an-entity-in-a-larger-ecosystem other than having dumped a bunch of money into it. Sure, you can argue that said investors are treating the business as nothing but a vehicle "for profit", but that framing loses something essential. You can have profit and be a player in something mutually beneficial. In fact you need profit to be sustainable.
  - finite_depth 3y ago
    [dead]
  - andrewflnr 3y ago
    Yep, it's not profit motive that's the problem, but short term profit above all else, including long term profit. Because in the long term, whoever is making the decision will already be gone.
    - willis936 3y ago
      I wonder how the investors are feeling about their decisions.
      - andrewflnr 3y ago
        They feel bad about the individual losses, but haven't noticed their role in the pattern yet.
- rmbyrro 3y ago
  Expect MBAs to show up here condemning the derogatory use of MBA
  - troymc 3y ago
    Main-belt asteroids don't have a very cohesive lobby group.
    - rmbyrro 3y ago
      MBA asteroids are well motivated on their own. No need for asteroid cohesion to complain on HN
  - dingosity 3y ago
    FWIW, I have an MBA and Unity's behaviour doesn't make sense to me either. Oh... and... "Not all MBAs"
    - rmbyrro 3y ago
      To me, at least, you and even MBAs that like Unity's behavior are welcome here. It's essential to understand broad perspectives, especially the ones I dislike.
      - dingosity 3y ago
        I probably should have led with "I spent 35 years as a software developer and THEN got an MBA." Which is to say... when I make snarky comments, they're firmly grounded on basic comp sci and extensive software dev experience. However, When I show the kids at work how to use old-school command line tools like awk, sed, cut, grep and find, I leave off the bit that they've been educated by an MBA.
- indymike 3y ago
  > letting a few MBA’s at the top make a decision for profit. I'm not sure the profit part will work out for them in the long run.
  - asynchronous 3y ago
    Really I should have stated “short term profits”
  - dagw 3y ago
    Don't worry, most of the people making and approving these decisions aren't there for the long run either.
- hcks 3y ago
  And by tank a business you mean trying to increase revenues to stop losing 500 millions a year I guess
  - dpig_ 3y ago
    Yes - trying to do so in a way that tanks the business and loses them even more.
kdottt 3y ago
"More importantly, we've seen how easily and flippantly an executive-led business decision can risk bankrupting the studios we've worked so hard to build, threaten our livelihoods as professionals, and challenge the longevity of our industry. The Unity of today isn't the same company that it was when the group was founded, and the trust we used to have in the company has been completely eroded." Profoundly sad, and completely avoidable. Have never seen a company so quickly and completely just throw away all of their public good will.
- Mystery-Machine 3y ago
  Have you ever heard of Twitter and Reddit?
  - raincole 3y ago
    Since when Twitter has "good will"? I'm sure even before Musk, most people considered Twitter the equivalent of soap opera. It was bad. It was tasteless. It was a time waster. But people just need to have something to scroll. Unity, on the other hand, was actually loved by some devs. Of course it was buggy from time to time, but it was huge time-saver especially for mobile games.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 3y ago
      In 2010..2012 Twitter was always in the news because of how they screwed the developers again. So no, Musk's policies are nothing new for Twitter.
- miohtama 3y ago
  This is why it is good to build on the top of open source solutions
  - solardev 3y ago
    Does that really help? Even when open-source, it's only a matter of time before an Oracle or Google or Microsoft or Meta takes it over (if they didn't develop it to begin with). I wonder if it's less about the source code here but about the people involved, and how to prevent a consolidation of capital and power in the hands of greedy financiers. Maybe developing the projects as nonprofits (like Blender or Mozilla), or at least employee co-ownership rather than VC money or institutional funders? If only the laid off FAANGers could pool their fat checks and start up something employee-driven and not subject to outside influences, in the style of Valve or similar. And preferably with legal protections against "selling out".
malfist 3y ago
I think enshitification will be the word of the year this year
- hnreport 3y ago
  What is the etymology of this term “enshitification”?
  - jaggs 3y ago
    https://doctorow.medium.com/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse-3cc01e7e4604 https://doctorow.medium.com/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-in...
  - pocketarc 3y ago
    There's a Wikipedia article on it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- Buttons840 3y ago
  I have mixed feelings about the word "enshitification". Like a politician shutting down thought and debate by simply labeling something "socialism", half the people using the word don't really know what it means, or at least, they don't know the original meaning. The word comes to be fake form of intellectual sophistication. A politician says the word and people think "oh, he knows the fancy word, he must be right", and thought ends, further discussion is difficult because nobody would dare speak in defense of something after it has been labeled. Just hearing the word raises certain peoples blood pressure 10 points and causes them to raise their voice. And yet, I'm happy to see the good guys play psyops for a change. Like the world "socialism", "enshitification" will originally mean a specific social phenomenon, but most people will come to use it as a catch-all word for all bad corporate behavior and it will shut down thought and just hearing the world will rile people up to fight against the evil corporations. And I'm okay with that; words have power and, again, I'm glad to see words being invented to help the common people organize.
soulbadguy 3y ago
like getting blood from a stone... Most of those open-source companies turn "evil" stories (like IBM/redhat ) seems to follow the same pattern. IMO, there is a limit of the amount of value one can extract from those venture. Trying to increase revenue beyond a certain limit will always result very bad outcome. But i also think it's a lesson for the gaming industry. Why is something as core are a game engine, not something properly open-source and license such as QT, LLVM or GCC...
- jimmaswell 3y ago
  Redhat is evil now?
  - chucksta 3y ago
    indirectly yes https://newsroom.ibm.com/2019-07-09-IBM-Closes-Landmark-Acquisition-of-Red-Hat-for-34-Billion-Defines-Open-Hybrid-Cloud-Future https://newsroom.ibm.com/2019-07-09-IBM-Closes-Landmark-Acqu... more importantly; https://www.servethehome.com/red-hat-goes-full-ibm-and-says-farewell-to-centos/ https://www.servethehome.com/red-hat-goes-full-ibm-and-says-...
  - codetrotter 3y ago
    https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/im-done-red-hat-enterprise-linux https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/im-done-red-hat-enter...
    - thorncorona 3y ago
      Hard to run an open source enterprise company when Amazon's playbook is to take your shit for free and host it themselves.
      - azemetre 3y ago
        Wouldn't using an AGPL license be better for this than just GPL?
Willish42 3y ago
I wish I had a large enough Twitter following to make a public claim about this before Unity "went back" on the first version of the recently-announced pricing changes, but I was nearly certain this was an intentional move to make the "Update on our update" second version more palatable. There's probably a wiki link somewhere to the Proper Noun PR phenomenon in business school for this strategy, but the "terrible plan then less terrible plan but still worse than before the initial terrible plan" strategy seems like essentially a confirmation Unity is not to be trusted for small developers. It's sad to lose a great dev community but it sounds like BUG is making the right call here.
- wredue 3y ago
  I was also considering this, but while this strategy works wonders on the consumer, I don’t know how well it works in more B2B offerings. Video games specifically get away with this because, as we saw with Diablo 4, people are going to give game companies money regardless how bad and unpalatable the game is. Man. My Reddit account became limited in the Diablo subreddit for saying that I cancelled my preorder after the beta.
  - tacticalmook 3y ago
    Historically, subreddits were run by community volunteers because people were tired of being censored on official forums. Now subreddits are the official channel more often than not, and we're back to square one.
    - fuzzzerd 3y ago
      I think this really succinctly describes why reddit sucks now.
  - ilc 3y ago
    Some of us saw what was going to happen with D4. It was pretty obvious. After DI, and D3, to expect D4 to launch in any decent state would have been naive at best. I've said as much in the Diablo subreddit. D3 is now a good game, if it is what you are looking for. It's a fun romp, but... It isn't a truly heavy ARPG. If you want that POE is calling you.
karaterobot 3y ago
I grant the premise that Unity sucks and has made changes that make it much harder to be an indie developer using its runtime. That said, I don't understand the decision to shut the group and encourage members to move to a more general game dev group instead. If the reason is "everyone stopped using Unity, we don't have any members" then I understand, but the press release didn't say that. In fact it implied there might be thousands of members. The closest thing to a reason they gave was that Unity has become hostile to indie devs. But Unity doesn't run BUG, so if some people are still using Unity, which I assume is the case, wouldn't they still benefit from having a users group? If it's an act of protest by the group organizers, that seems annoying for the people who still use Unity and got value out of having access to that community. Without sufficient context to understand the decision, I find I'm not sure what this act accomplishes, or what it intended to accomplish.
- deely3 3y ago
  I think one of the reason of the group existing is because members trusted Unity. Now this trust is throwed out in trash. They can't force Unity to be good to users and they don't want to support Untity anymore. Thats all.
  - BoorishBears 3y ago
    Given the meetup group has 2,000+ members, and they haven't had an event since the announcement, I have a hard time believing all, or even a majority, (since it's so rare for the majority to even speak) had much input on this decision. The wording sounds like a few key members felt a certain way and decided to take the ball home with them instead of stepping down and leaving whoever didn't feel as strongly hurt to continue in their stead. _ It happens often with groups past a certain size: Some people argue that having contributed to the growth up to that size justifies being able to take unilateral actions like this But in my opinion, once you get past a certain size, it's larger than you. Even if you've poured blood sweat and tears in, it's obviously taken contributions from many small players, who may have been willing to step up as big players. It's hard to believe that out of 2,000 people there's no group of people who couldn't have continued to get value out of the existence of the group post-Unity's actions.
napierzaza 3y ago
It took me a little while to get it but now I do. They want their community to continue on even if some of their members are moving off of Unity.
dang 3y ago
We changed the URL from https://bostonunitygroup.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/index.html https://bostonunitygroup.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/index.ht..., which is what the submitted URL redirects to. Our software follows redirect; in this case it seems worth reversing. Thanks to the user who pointed this out!
hartator 3y ago
I remember at a game trade show, there was an Unity stand. I was really excited by Unity at the time, was in line to ask the representation random questions, and was trying to get my friend excited as well. The representant (I think some head of Sales) took my excitement talking to my friend as impatience and was rude about us "he is busy and us having to wait our time" when we weren't trying to talk to him. We left and never got excited by Unity again. I guess that was a premise of things to come.
taikahessu 3y ago
I have a hard time coming up with a worse decision in the history of game industry. Why did it come to this? Just more profits? I mean the landscape is highly competitive with free tools getting better and Unreal Engine eating all the highlights. Unity's stock price was even before this decision a third of it's all time high. I mean there must've been a dramatic cultural twist quite some time ago. That would've lead champions to leave and the codebase comes crashing down. This will be a great lecture material for business schools, goes in the same bucket as Nokia.
- 015a 3y ago
  One could argue that Microsoft's "no game sharing" decision at the beginning of Xbox One, right off the heals of a generation that experienced both high success, but also extremely high costs (RROD recalls, estimates say it cost them over $1.1B), was a bigger one. It seems unnaturally likely to me that single decision by Mattrick's Xbox leadership is the largest component to Xbox One's relatively lower success (58M sales, versus 102M PS4 and 84M XB360), and has cascaded to, possibly permanently, suppress Xbox's potential (Series is at 21M to PS5's 41M). I tend to think that decision was worse, because it was Just Bad. There was no reason they had to do it. It had very little prior art (digital games, naturally, always did this, so non-zero). It was a pure, absolute failure to read the room, and the XB1 era had so many decisions like this that it seriously paints the picture that Xbox is alive today literally only because of Spencer and despite Microsoft's leadership at the time (pre-release, Xbox One also required Kinect to be plugged in. This was walked back, but it still shipped in the box, lowering margins and depressing sales volume for no reason.) In comparison: Unity has been in trouble for a long time. They've never posted a profit, at least since going public, and have instead accumulated an aggregate of over $2B in losses. Their main competitor (Epic) is a technological savant of a company, which has a literal money-printing machine in their closet to finance engine development. They never really broke into AAA game production, partly because Unreal is just better at hyper-scale development, and partly because AAA game shops are surprisingly welcoming to in-house engine development. In that framing, this outcome seems inevitable. There's a reason they made this decision; a very real, dollars and cents, reason, and backing away from it (especially after the outcry, but even without it) isn't going to save them. The best, but unlikely, outcome for Unity and their customers is deep layoffs, focusing hard on ease of use instead of technological prowess, spending years rebuilding the trust they lost, and depressing their stock price enough that they can find a path to going private without losing control. The much more realistic outcome is: deep layoffs, coasting the product, monetizing every addon they can outside of the toxic "core pricing structure", and private equity acquisition.
wolverine876 3y ago
> Over the past few years, Unity has unfortunately shifted its focus away from the games industry and away from supporting developer communities. Following the IPO, the company has seemingly put profit over all else, with several acquisitions and layoffs of core personnel. Many key systems that developers need are still left in a confusing and often incomplete state, with the messaging that advertising and revenue matter more to Unity than the functionality game developers care about. > Recently, Unity unveiled a set of unthinkably hostile terms of service and pricing changes for its users. The resounding, unequivocal condemnation from the games industry was unprecedented and Unity had no choice but to rescind some of the most egregious changes. Even with these new concessions, the revised pricing model disproportionately affects the success of indie studios in our community. That strategy, including hyper-aggressive changes in terms, seems common across different businesses and industries. A recent one in the news was Hasbro's move with some of their leading game products. I asked something similar in another thread: Does anyone know the story behind this phenomenon? Is there a name for it? A paper or book or 'expert' that is its genesis?
- PrimeDirective 3y ago
  enshittification? No papers as far as I'm aware
- withinboredom 3y ago
  A common strategy taught in MBA school in the US, is to “hire a bunch of assholes to push non-dedicated people out of the org; then fire the assholes and hire actually good people.” This was nearly 15 years ago since I learned about it in class, I don’t remember if there is a name for it. I just remember thinking “this can’t be real.” I wonder if people are idiotically applying the same thing to the marketplace.
  - VladimirGolovin 3y ago
    This might work in a company where institutional knowledge is insignificant or can be easily rebuilt. In companies that maintain big complex products like Unity (or Diablo, for that matter) this strategy can result in the company becoming irreversibly incompetent at maintaining its own product.
jconley 3y ago
Unity's just outgrowing the early adopters. The starving indies will move on to the next up and coming engine. Professionals will continue using Unity (and UE, which also charges royalties) because of the breadth and depth of the toolsets. I first used Unity when their WebGL system was in private beta. IIRC they tried charging royalties early on but then reverted that for marketshare, but I don't have time to look it up. In any case the royalties aren't burdensome at that scale. I don't think it'll affect much. Vocal minority, yada yada. Maybe it'll even get them to profitability next year!
- junon 3y ago
  This is way, way beyond charging royalties. Nobody has been upset about existing royalty models.
- golergka 3y ago
  I've worked in game development for a long time, including a couple of games with over 100 million installs. Professional game studios making mobile free2play games, which is Unity's main moat, are VERY uneasy right now. For many games, the install tax would push them into unprofitability. Especially in hypercasual, where an average user may have LTV of a few cents total. These are billion dollar companies, and they have the resources to build their own engines, they just didn't have a real reason until now.
  - wetpaws 3y ago
    [dead]
  - jconley 3y ago
    A 2.5% royalty will make them unprofitable? [0] [0] https://unity.com/pricing-updates https://unity.com/pricing-updates
gumballindie 3y ago
The difference between game developers and other types of developers is that they figured out how to fire companies and mediocre executives. Should take notes. Well done, and hopefully Unity's done, along with all other mediocre MBAs that think their clientelle works for them and not the other way around. Game devs are badass.
Quindecillion 3y ago
Best thing about this divisive action by Unity is all the attention it's giving Godot. It's a project that deserves far more attention, and I hope in a few years that it's far more common in popular game development.
- ClassyJacket 3y ago
  Am I understanding correctly that due to licensing Godot can never support consoles? If true that makes it so limited as to never be a replacement for Unity.
  - Shawnecy 3y ago
    Not first-party, but there is third-party console support for Godot: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/consoles.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/co...
  - jaimex2 3y ago
    It's just licencing shenanigans, they can't taint the open source licence by putting proprietary code/assets in the godot repo. Even with Unity though you can't just publish to consoles without getting the SDK and licencing. With Godot you basically pay Lone Wolf Technology, a Sony/Nintendo/MS licenced company for their export module and you're done.
  - raytopia 3y ago
    They can it would just have to be a separate private branch. This is how SDL amd others do it.
debacle 3y ago
This is a speedrun on killing a company. I adored Unity's tooling. After working with Godot on a project, I loved Unity even more. I can't sanely recommend it to anyone at this point.
protocolture 3y ago
The term I am using most often this year. https://therightstuff.medium.com/the-trust-thermocline-explains-how-companies-suddenly-lose-customers-and-employees-2657c9535e6a https://therightstuff.medium.com/the-trust-thermocline-expla...
- viscountchocula 3y ago
  That article seems strange. The example shows the opposite phenomenon. The upper layers change temperature quickly (going from 22°C to 6°C over the course of ~500ft. The lower layers change slowly (going from 6°C to around 1°C over the next 6000ft. The graph makes it look like top changes slowly, but that's because the axes are inverted: the independent variable (depth) is on the Y.
skymast 3y ago
[dead]
wly_cdgr 3y ago
The idea that Unity was ever to be trusted is incredibly naive. They were obviously corporate tools from the very earliest get go. The fact is, indies used it because it was the best way to make money, something to which they are no way entitled, and now they are big mad that the devil they themselves signed a contract with has decided to collect. Boo fckin hoo. The Unity dev community has always been the most soulless corpocreep indie gamedev community out there, good riddance, I hope most of them go out of business
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
deafpolygon 3y ago
This signals the beginning of the community brain drain from Unity. This will continue to happen until no one is enthusiastic about Unity anymore.
nla 3y ago
Ouch.
ilyt 3y ago
Should've just renamed to Boston Unrealengine Group
HeavyStorm 3y ago
I keep saying it: the only way Unity will possibly convince the community that this was a mistake that won't happen again is by firing the CEO and whichever other C-levels involved in the affair. This signals that they understand this to be a fatal mistake, removes the people who has this distorted agenda, and makes it clear to future C-levels that other mistakes like this won't be tolerated.
- bitcharmer 3y ago
  Something tells me this would only happen if Unity were a Korean or Japanese company. No way in the world the CEO will resign or be let go after this.

666 points by Morizero 3y ago

asynchronous 3y ago

Unity really showing the world how to tank a business by letting a few MBA’s at the top make a decision for profit.

ethbr1 3y ago
^H^Hby going public without a business model.
- dbingham 3y ago
  I feel like we've seen a bunch of businesses show what happens when you take private capital and scale on a community based product with out a clear business model that doesn't involve retroactively screwing the community in some way. I mean, Unity's just the latest example. Before it came Hashicorp and Docker. I'm sure we could think of many more examples if we tried. And what's really frustrating is that if these businesses had focused on simply "building a product the community wanted, supporting that community, and making enough money to comfortably keep going" - all of them could have been successful. I'd really love to see the tech community try more models that simply aim for comfortable sustainability - not astronomical growth. You know, enough to pay a modest engineering team market salaries indefinitely while they continue to support and develop the product.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    VCs don't like this. How are they going to get their ROI immediately? Having normal investors vs funders changes the mentality of long term to cash grab.
  - rmelton 3y ago
    My company is actively using this model now. It's really hard watching competitors raise multi-million dollar rounds though.
    - Eisenstein 3y ago
      Unless your plan is to vest and cash out, you shouldn't envy them.
      - ethbr1 3y ago
        That's why it happens so often though -- the very people who are directly enriched by doing it (holders of the majority of the company's equity) are the only ones asked to decide to do it (board votes). Canonical example: MailChimp The founders retained essentially all the equity (Atlanta), so when push came to shove they decided "Fuck it, we'd rather be rich than work" and sold the company. It feels like the only way to avoid this would be aligning the equity structure with employees and customers in a better way.
  - harpiaharpyja 3y ago
    Exactly. I think what we are seeing is the result of decision makers at these businesses now having to report to investors who are essentially outsiders to the community. Their only stake or interest in the operation comes from having dumped a bunch of money into it. But now they get to call the shots or if not, exert a ton of pressure. I think the takeaway is that businesses built around a community really should not go public.
- qwytw 3y ago
  They have a business model and they would've been fine if they hadn't started increasing their headcount by 50% every year and focused on their core products.
dylan604 3y ago
i remember back when Avid decided they were no longer going to offer a Mac version of their NLEs because Apple's new machines were only going to have 3 expansion slots. while admittedly, there were probably a much smaller number of affected users than the Unity decision, it did cause a huge amount of turmoil. urban legend has people dumping their Avid stations on the doorstep of the Avid offices. Avid survived. Unity will too
- raytopia 3y ago
  Unity will survive but this could be the start of a steady decline of users, which isn't good for any game engine. Leads to a loss of knowledge which makes the engine even less popular. Ghe whole situation is somewhat similar to when GameMaker Studio switched to subscription model.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    what would be better for the community would be not just a decline in devs using the engine, but also the devs working on the engine. working for Unity should now be a stain just like working for FB/socials/ad-tech. there will be tons of people willing to do it, but hopefully the great minds leave the rot
    - ditonal 3y ago
      That’s the opposite of what would be better. We need more engineer solidarity not more divisiveness. Give me a list of your past employers and I can guarantee I can find some sketchball business practice you indirectly contributed to and make some tenuous argument for you to be blackballed. 95% of shitty tech industry practices can be root caused to people identify more strongly with their employer than with their profession. We desperately need a professional organization / union with teeth and the main thing that should be shunned is rhetoric that divides rather than unites it . Engineers can hang together or hang separately.
      - dylan604 3y ago
TylerE 3y ago
To play devil's advocate... Unity isn't close to profitable, and never has been. At some point money has to be made or the lights get turned off.
- generalizations 3y ago
  Well, that kinda makes sense then. If they weren't profitable, then this could be seen as a last-ditch survival strategy.
  - gs17 3y ago
    This strategy is still pretty awful. If 2.5% revenue share after $1,000,000 would be enough to survive on, they probably could have opened with matching Unreal's 5% instead of all the bullshit and won people over.
    - kevingadd 3y ago
      Yeah their new pricing model is quite literally more expensive than Unreal for many of their customers (mostly the ones who make less money - for massive studios it's cheaper) and it's ALSO more complex to comply with. A simple "we're doing revshare now, and the per-seat fee is going away" would have been viewed more favorably I think.
      - tetha 3y ago
        I mean in my naive world, you'd slap some minimum revenue onto the rev-share and you'd have a clear separation between hobbyists, unsuccessful indies, indies, and huge successes. It'd be muddled in the middle, sure, but if some companies hits jackpot with a unity project, you'll know and could act on it.
        TylerE 3y ago
        That's what they did though. It was several hundred thousand dollars in revenue before any of it kicked in.
harpiaharpyja 3y ago
This "for profit" thing seems like the wrong framing. Customer goodwill and community are extremely valuable. It seems like what we are looking at is more about short-termism and the distortive effects of suddenly (post-IPO) having to report to investors who are essentially outsiders to the business and have no knowledge or stake in the operation-as-an-entity-in-a-larger-ecosystem other than having dumped a bunch of money into it. Sure, you can argue that said investors are treating the business as nothing but a vehicle "for profit", but that framing loses something essential. You can have profit and be a player in something mutually beneficial. In fact you need profit to be sustainable.
- finite_depth 3y ago
  [dead]
- andrewflnr 3y ago
  Yep, it's not profit motive that's the problem, but short term profit above all else, including long term profit. Because in the long term, whoever is making the decision will already be gone.
  - willis936 3y ago
    I wonder how the investors are feeling about their decisions.
    - andrewflnr 3y ago
      They feel bad about the individual losses, but haven't noticed their role in the pattern yet.
rmbyrro 3y ago
Expect MBAs to show up here condemning the derogatory use of MBA
- troymc 3y ago
  Main-belt asteroids don't have a very cohesive lobby group.
  - rmbyrro 3y ago
    MBA asteroids are well motivated on their own. No need for asteroid cohesion to complain on HN
- dingosity 3y ago
  FWIW, I have an MBA and Unity's behaviour doesn't make sense to me either. Oh... and... "Not all MBAs"
  - rmbyrro 3y ago
    To me, at least, you and even MBAs that like Unity's behavior are welcome here. It's essential to understand broad perspectives, especially the ones I dislike.
    - dingosity 3y ago
      I probably should have led with "I spent 35 years as a software developer and THEN got an MBA." Which is to say... when I make snarky comments, they're firmly grounded on basic comp sci and extensive software dev experience. However, When I show the kids at work how to use old-school command line tools like awk, sed, cut, grep and find, I leave off the bit that they've been educated by an MBA.
indymike 3y ago
> letting a few MBA’s at the top make a decision for profit. I'm not sure the profit part will work out for them in the long run.
- asynchronous 3y ago
  Really I should have stated “short term profits”
- dagw 3y ago
  Don't worry, most of the people making and approving these decisions aren't there for the long run either.
hcks 3y ago
And by tank a business you mean trying to increase revenues to stop losing 500 millions a year I guess
- dpig_ 3y ago
  Yes - trying to do so in a way that tanks the business and loses them even more.

kdottt 3y ago

"More importantly, we've seen how easily and flippantly an executive-led business decision can risk bankrupting the studios we've worked so hard to build, threaten our livelihoods as professionals, and challenge the longevity of our industry. The Unity of today isn't the same company that it was when the group was founded, and the trust we used to have in the company has been completely eroded." Profoundly sad, and completely avoidable. Have never seen a company so quickly and completely just throw away all of their public good will.

Mystery-Machine 3y ago
Have you ever heard of Twitter and Reddit?
- raincole 3y ago
  Since when Twitter has "good will"? I'm sure even before Musk, most people considered Twitter the equivalent of soap opera. It was bad. It was tasteless. It was a time waster. But people just need to have something to scroll. Unity, on the other hand, was actually loved by some devs. Of course it was buggy from time to time, but it was huge time-saver especially for mobile games.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 3y ago
    In 2010..2012 Twitter was always in the news because of how they screwed the developers again. So no, Musk's policies are nothing new for Twitter.
miohtama 3y ago
This is why it is good to build on the top of open source solutions
- solardev 3y ago
  Does that really help? Even when open-source, it's only a matter of time before an Oracle or Google or Microsoft or Meta takes it over (if they didn't develop it to begin with). I wonder if it's less about the source code here but about the people involved, and how to prevent a consolidation of capital and power in the hands of greedy financiers. Maybe developing the projects as nonprofits (like Blender or Mozilla), or at least employee co-ownership rather than VC money or institutional funders? If only the laid off FAANGers could pool their fat checks and start up something employee-driven and not subject to outside influences, in the style of Valve or similar. And preferably with legal protections against "selling out".

malfist 3y ago

I think enshitification will be the word of the year this year

hnreport 3y ago
What is the etymology of this term “enshitification”?
- jaggs 3y ago
  https://doctorow.medium.com/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse-3cc01e7e4604 https://doctorow.medium.com/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-in...
- pocketarc 3y ago
  There's a Wikipedia article on it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Buttons840 3y ago
I have mixed feelings about the word "enshitification". Like a politician shutting down thought and debate by simply labeling something "socialism", half the people using the word don't really know what it means, or at least, they don't know the original meaning. The word comes to be fake form of intellectual sophistication. A politician says the word and people think "oh, he knows the fancy word, he must be right", and thought ends, further discussion is difficult because nobody would dare speak in defense of something after it has been labeled. Just hearing the word raises certain peoples blood pressure 10 points and causes them to raise their voice. And yet, I'm happy to see the good guys play psyops for a change. Like the world "socialism", "enshitification" will originally mean a specific social phenomenon, but most people will come to use it as a catch-all word for all bad corporate behavior and it will shut down thought and just hearing the world will rile people up to fight against the evil corporations. And I'm okay with that; words have power and, again, I'm glad to see words being invented to help the common people organize.

soulbadguy 3y ago

like getting blood from a stone... Most of those open-source companies turn "evil" stories (like IBM/redhat ) seems to follow the same pattern. IMO, there is a limit of the amount of value one can extract from those venture. Trying to increase revenue beyond a certain limit will always result very bad outcome. But i also think it's a lesson for the gaming industry. Why is something as core are a game engine, not something properly open-source and license such as QT, LLVM or GCC...

jimmaswell 3y ago
Redhat is evil now?
- chucksta 3y ago
  indirectly yes https://newsroom.ibm.com/2019-07-09-IBM-Closes-Landmark-Acquisition-of-Red-Hat-for-34-Billion-Defines-Open-Hybrid-Cloud-Future https://newsroom.ibm.com/2019-07-09-IBM-Closes-Landmark-Acqu... more importantly; https://www.servethehome.com/red-hat-goes-full-ibm-and-says-farewell-to-centos/ https://www.servethehome.com/red-hat-goes-full-ibm-and-says-...
- codetrotter 3y ago
  https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/im-done-red-hat-enterprise-linux https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/im-done-red-hat-enter...
  - thorncorona 3y ago
    Hard to run an open source enterprise company when Amazon's playbook is to take your shit for free and host it themselves.
    - azemetre 3y ago
      Wouldn't using an AGPL license be better for this than just GPL?

Willish42 3y ago

I wish I had a large enough Twitter following to make a public claim about this before Unity "went back" on the first version of the recently-announced pricing changes, but I was nearly certain this was an intentional move to make the "Update on our update" second version more palatable. There's probably a wiki link somewhere to the Proper Noun PR phenomenon in business school for this strategy, but the "terrible plan then less terrible plan but still worse than before the initial terrible plan" strategy seems like essentially a confirmation Unity is not to be trusted for small developers. It's sad to lose a great dev community but it sounds like BUG is making the right call here.

wredue 3y ago
I was also considering this, but while this strategy works wonders on the consumer, I don’t know how well it works in more B2B offerings. Video games specifically get away with this because, as we saw with Diablo 4, people are going to give game companies money regardless how bad and unpalatable the game is. Man. My Reddit account became limited in the Diablo subreddit for saying that I cancelled my preorder after the beta.
- tacticalmook 3y ago
  Historically, subreddits were run by community volunteers because people were tired of being censored on official forums. Now subreddits are the official channel more often than not, and we're back to square one.
  - fuzzzerd 3y ago
    I think this really succinctly describes why reddit sucks now.
- ilc 3y ago
  Some of us saw what was going to happen with D4. It was pretty obvious. After DI, and D3, to expect D4 to launch in any decent state would have been naive at best. I've said as much in the Diablo subreddit. D3 is now a good game, if it is what you are looking for. It's a fun romp, but... It isn't a truly heavy ARPG. If you want that POE is calling you.

karaterobot 3y ago

I grant the premise that Unity sucks and has made changes that make it much harder to be an indie developer using its runtime. That said, I don't understand the decision to shut the group and encourage members to move to a more general game dev group instead. If the reason is "everyone stopped using Unity, we don't have any members" then I understand, but the press release didn't say that. In fact it implied there might be thousands of members. The closest thing to a reason they gave was that Unity has become hostile to indie devs. But Unity doesn't run BUG, so if some people are still using Unity, which I assume is the case, wouldn't they still benefit from having a users group? If it's an act of protest by the group organizers, that seems annoying for the people who still use Unity and got value out of having access to that community. Without sufficient context to understand the decision, I find I'm not sure what this act accomplishes, or what it intended to accomplish.

deely3 3y ago
I think one of the reason of the group existing is because members trusted Unity. Now this trust is throwed out in trash. They can't force Unity to be good to users and they don't want to support Untity anymore. Thats all.
- BoorishBears 3y ago
  Given the meetup group has 2,000+ members, and they haven't had an event since the announcement, I have a hard time believing all, or even a majority, (since it's so rare for the majority to even speak) had much input on this decision. The wording sounds like a few key members felt a certain way and decided to take the ball home with them instead of stepping down and leaving whoever didn't feel as strongly hurt to continue in their stead. _ It happens often with groups past a certain size: Some people argue that having contributed to the growth up to that size justifies being able to take unilateral actions like this But in my opinion, once you get past a certain size, it's larger than you. Even if you've poured blood sweat and tears in, it's obviously taken contributions from many small players, who may have been willing to step up as big players. It's hard to believe that out of 2,000 people there's no group of people who couldn't have continued to get value out of the existence of the group post-Unity's actions.

napierzaza 3y ago

It took me a little while to get it but now I do. They want their community to continue on even if some of their members are moving off of Unity.

dang 3y ago

We changed the URL from https://bostonunitygroup.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/index.html https://bostonunitygroup.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/index.ht..., which is what the submitted URL redirects to. Our software follows redirect; in this case it seems worth reversing. Thanks to the user who pointed this out!

hartator 3y ago

I remember at a game trade show, there was an Unity stand. I was really excited by Unity at the time, was in line to ask the representation random questions, and was trying to get my friend excited as well. The representant (I think some head of Sales) took my excitement talking to my friend as impatience and was rude about us "he is busy and us having to wait our time" when we weren't trying to talk to him. We left and never got excited by Unity again. I guess that was a premise of things to come.

taikahessu 3y ago

I have a hard time coming up with a worse decision in the history of game industry. Why did it come to this? Just more profits? I mean the landscape is highly competitive with free tools getting better and Unreal Engine eating all the highlights. Unity's stock price was even before this decision a third of it's all time high. I mean there must've been a dramatic cultural twist quite some time ago. That would've lead champions to leave and the codebase comes crashing down. This will be a great lecture material for business schools, goes in the same bucket as Nokia.

015a 3y ago
One could argue that Microsoft's "no game sharing" decision at the beginning of Xbox One, right off the heals of a generation that experienced both high success, but also extremely high costs (RROD recalls, estimates say it cost them over $1.1B), was a bigger one. It seems unnaturally likely to me that single decision by Mattrick's Xbox leadership is the largest component to Xbox One's relatively lower success (58M sales, versus 102M PS4 and 84M XB360), and has cascaded to, possibly permanently, suppress Xbox's potential (Series is at 21M to PS5's 41M). I tend to think that decision was worse, because it was Just Bad. There was no reason they had to do it. It had very little prior art (digital games, naturally, always did this, so non-zero). It was a pure, absolute failure to read the room, and the XB1 era had so many decisions like this that it seriously paints the picture that Xbox is alive today literally only because of Spencer and despite Microsoft's leadership at the time (pre-release, Xbox One also required Kinect to be plugged in. This was walked back, but it still shipped in the box, lowering margins and depressing sales volume for no reason.) In comparison: Unity has been in trouble for a long time. They've never posted a profit, at least since going public, and have instead accumulated an aggregate of over $2B in losses. Their main competitor (Epic) is a technological savant of a company, which has a literal money-printing machine in their closet to finance engine development. They never really broke into AAA game production, partly because Unreal is just better at hyper-scale development, and partly because AAA game shops are surprisingly welcoming to in-house engine development. In that framing, this outcome seems inevitable. There's a reason they made this decision; a very real, dollars and cents, reason, and backing away from it (especially after the outcry, but even without it) isn't going to save them. The best, but unlikely, outcome for Unity and their customers is deep layoffs, focusing hard on ease of use instead of technological prowess, spending years rebuilding the trust they lost, and depressing their stock price enough that they can find a path to going private without losing control. The much more realistic outcome is: deep layoffs, coasting the product, monetizing every addon they can outside of the toxic "core pricing structure", and private equity acquisition.

wolverine876 3y ago

> Over the past few years, Unity has unfortunately shifted its focus away from the games industry and away from supporting developer communities. Following the IPO, the company has seemingly put profit over all else, with several acquisitions and layoffs of core personnel. Many key systems that developers need are still left in a confusing and often incomplete state, with the messaging that advertising and revenue matter more to Unity than the functionality game developers care about. > Recently, Unity unveiled a set of unthinkably hostile terms of service and pricing changes for its users. The resounding, unequivocal condemnation from the games industry was unprecedented and Unity had no choice but to rescind some of the most egregious changes. Even with these new concessions, the revised pricing model disproportionately affects the success of indie studios in our community. That strategy, including hyper-aggressive changes in terms, seems common across different businesses and industries. A recent one in the news was Hasbro's move with some of their leading game products. I asked something similar in another thread: Does anyone know the story behind this phenomenon? Is there a name for it? A paper or book or 'expert' that is its genesis?

PrimeDirective 3y ago
enshittification? No papers as far as I'm aware
withinboredom 3y ago
A common strategy taught in MBA school in the US, is to “hire a bunch of assholes to push non-dedicated people out of the org; then fire the assholes and hire actually good people.” This was nearly 15 years ago since I learned about it in class, I don’t remember if there is a name for it. I just remember thinking “this can’t be real.” I wonder if people are idiotically applying the same thing to the marketplace.
- VladimirGolovin 3y ago
  This might work in a company where institutional knowledge is insignificant or can be easily rebuilt. In companies that maintain big complex products like Unity (or Diablo, for that matter) this strategy can result in the company becoming irreversibly incompetent at maintaining its own product.

jconley 3y ago

Unity's just outgrowing the early adopters. The starving indies will move on to the next up and coming engine. Professionals will continue using Unity (and UE, which also charges royalties) because of the breadth and depth of the toolsets. I first used Unity when their WebGL system was in private beta. IIRC they tried charging royalties early on but then reverted that for marketshare, but I don't have time to look it up. In any case the royalties aren't burdensome at that scale. I don't think it'll affect much. Vocal minority, yada yada. Maybe it'll even get them to profitability next year!

junon 3y ago
This is way, way beyond charging royalties. Nobody has been upset about existing royalty models.
golergka 3y ago
I've worked in game development for a long time, including a couple of games with over 100 million installs. Professional game studios making mobile free2play games, which is Unity's main moat, are VERY uneasy right now. For many games, the install tax would push them into unprofitability. Especially in hypercasual, where an average user may have LTV of a few cents total. These are billion dollar companies, and they have the resources to build their own engines, they just didn't have a real reason until now.
- wetpaws 3y ago
  [dead]
- jconley 3y ago
  A 2.5% royalty will make them unprofitable? [0] [0] https://unity.com/pricing-updates https://unity.com/pricing-updates

gumballindie 3y ago

The difference between game developers and other types of developers is that they figured out how to fire companies and mediocre executives. Should take notes. Well done, and hopefully Unity's done, along with all other mediocre MBAs that think their clientelle works for them and not the other way around. Game devs are badass.

Quindecillion 3y ago

Best thing about this divisive action by Unity is all the attention it's giving Godot. It's a project that deserves far more attention, and I hope in a few years that it's far more common in popular game development.

ClassyJacket 3y ago
Am I understanding correctly that due to licensing Godot can never support consoles? If true that makes it so limited as to never be a replacement for Unity.
- Shawnecy 3y ago
  Not first-party, but there is third-party console support for Godot: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/consoles.html https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/co...
- jaimex2 3y ago
  It's just licencing shenanigans, they can't taint the open source licence by putting proprietary code/assets in the godot repo. Even with Unity though you can't just publish to consoles without getting the SDK and licencing. With Godot you basically pay Lone Wolf Technology, a Sony/Nintendo/MS licenced company for their export module and you're done.
- raytopia 3y ago
  They can it would just have to be a separate private branch. This is how SDL amd others do it.

debacle 3y ago

This is a speedrun on killing a company. I adored Unity's tooling. After working with Godot on a project, I loved Unity even more. I can't sanely recommend it to anyone at this point.

protocolture 3y ago

The term I am using most often this year. https://therightstuff.medium.com/the-trust-thermocline-explains-how-companies-suddenly-lose-customers-and-employees-2657c9535e6a https://therightstuff.medium.com/the-trust-thermocline-expla...

viscountchocula 3y ago
That article seems strange. The example shows the opposite phenomenon. The upper layers change temperature quickly (going from 22°C to 6°C over the course of ~500ft. The lower layers change slowly (going from 6°C to around 1°C over the next 6000ft. The graph makes it look like top changes slowly, but that's because the axes are inverted: the independent variable (depth) is on the Y.

skymast 3y ago

[dead]

wly_cdgr 3y ago

The idea that Unity was ever to be trusted is incredibly naive. They were obviously corporate tools from the very earliest get go. The fact is, indies used it because it was the best way to make money, something to which they are no way entitled, and now they are big mad that the devil they themselves signed a contract with has decided to collect. Boo fckin hoo. The Unity dev community has always been the most soulless corpocreep indie gamedev community out there, good riddance, I hope most of them go out of business

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

deafpolygon 3y ago

This signals the beginning of the community brain drain from Unity. This will continue to happen until no one is enthusiastic about Unity anymore.

nla 3y ago

Ouch.

ilyt 3y ago

Should've just renamed to Boston Unrealengine Group

HeavyStorm 3y ago

I keep saying it: the only way Unity will possibly convince the community that this was a mistake that won't happen again is by firing the CEO and whichever other C-levels involved in the affair. This signals that they understand this to be a fatal mistake, removes the people who has this distorted agenda, and makes it clear to future C-levels that other mistakes like this won't be tolerated.

bitcharmer 3y ago
Something tells me this would only happen if Unity were a Korean or Japanese company. No way in the world the CEO will resign or be let go after this.