4 ms·

> Without retreading old ground too much, the backlash was so severe – from alleged threats to big names announcing intent to jump ship – that last week Unity r

> Without retreading old ground too much, the backlash was so severe – from alleged threats to big names announcing intent to jump ship – that last week Unity rolled back much of the new policy. Companies of this size don't do things like this willy-nilly. They do them after extensive data collection, analysis, research, etc. Both internally and externally corporations routinely deploy a policy change that is severe, and then to look good, "roll back" the policy...but not all the way. The result is a roll forward, but yet even fairly savvy press like The Reg call it "rolling back much of the new policy." The whole point is to advance a policy while looking like you "listened" to your employees/customers...while getting nearly or exactly what you originally planned. Raise your hand if you've ever worked somewhere the health insurance coverage became more expensive or vacation policy was strongly curtailed, and then a couple days later there was a "we listened" email announcing something between the old and new policy.

squeaky-clean 3y ago
> The whole point is to advance a policy while looking like you "listened" to your employees/customers...while getting nearly or exactly what you originally planned. Pretty much everyone who uses Unity is aware of this and not falling for it. The only people I've seen give the "they listened, everything is good again" take have been youtubers who make Unity tutorial content.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
dylan604 3y ago
>Companies of this size don't do things like this willy-nilly Twitt...er, X would like to have a 140 chars with you
- OoooooooO 3y ago
  Tweets are 280 chars for 7? years now.
gonehome 3y ago
Usually the dumber thing is the true thing, I doubt this was some three dimensional company strategy (and it doesn't make sense for that to even be the case if you think it through). I wouldn't be surprised if the CEO gets fired for this given how strategically misguided it was and the fallout it caused, that's the kind of change probably required given the error to help claw back any amount of lost trust they can. Apple is probably annoyed they became friendlier to Unity (in order to punish Epic), looks like not a great choice in hindsight.
- techdragon 3y ago
  I wonder how much deals and business relationships like the one they have with Apple might have contributed to Unity’s confidence in the ability to make the ludicrous policy changes stick. Given Unity’s 3d performance is “good enough” but not good enough that most AAA Unity games don’t wind up basically rewriting more than half the engine to get acceptable performance for their particular game… I really was shocked by the big Unity hype with the whole Vision OS apps part of that Apple announcement… particularly since the worst offenders for “under optimised” giving phone warning levels of CPU burn and battery consumption have been pretty 2.5D Unity apps where the only 3D effect is some parallax scrolling and using the built in Z index to control which sprites will wind up in front of others as they move around in an otherwise completely 2D fashion… some absolutely surprising moments over the years as I’ll start playing a “visually good and polished game” only to notice at the end of 5-10 minutes bus or train ride, my phones gotten very warm and my battery is now 10-25% lower… I learned how shitty Unity can be before I got any experience developing with it and the experiences I have had developing with it and the experiences shared with me by others who develop with it … It feels like a major disconnect has grown over the years between management running the company, project management setting goals for the development/engineering staff, and the multiple classes of end users of the engine, with my suspicion being that it’s hard for them to avoid getting drowned in feedback from novices who easily achieve their goals with the tools in Unity, leveraging their store, some vendor plugins maybe and don’t do much more than build 2D, 2.5D or very basic 3D games… The next tiers above that of intermediate and advanced Unity users being progressively more silent about their problems as they have learned to rely less and less on what Unity provides with the end outcome being some experienced Unity developers I’ve met being pretty honest that they basically only use Unity because it’s a C# game engine and there’s a lot of benefit in using C# like a big developer pool, performant backend systems in the same programming language, etc… and they are throwing away >90% of the engine and either they or their team are doing everything themselves because what Unity gives them is completely useless, or unsuitable, or not just simply not performant enough. When your “experts” are “throwing away” your product and just “using the box it comes in” because it’s a convenient shape… something is very very wrong and your product’s days are numbered. Their recent attempted policy’s change seems completely ignorant of the current state of their product’s “sticking power”. The users who make it look like anything is possible in Unity and who are effectively creating marketing material for Unity by crediting them as the game engine they used regardless of how much of the engine they throw away in order to get any particular AAA game completed… these critical users who are helping pull in new users are also very close to not using the product at all. Doing anything that alienates them is the marketing equivalent of a massive act of self sabotage, and I don’t think they are going to survive this. For me the writing was on the wall from the merger with the malware pile of an “ad tech” company a while back and the boneheaded comments about monetisation that were made back then… it’s just been a question of how long till it fails… and boy has the policy change and backlash accelerated things…
gota 3y ago
I've seen this referred to as a 'cock-thumb' proposal. As in, you ask for the greater sacrifice (cutting off the first) and hope they answer proposing the smaller sacrifice (to cut off the second) instead; which is what you wanted in the first place.
solumunus 3y ago
> Companies of this size don't do things like this willy-nilly. They do them after extensive data collection, analysis, research, etc. And yet they sometimes make mistakes and die. There are countless examples of this.
theshrike79 3y ago
> Companies of this size don't do things like this willy-nilly. They do them after extensive data collection, analysis, research, etc. Yes, and there was huge amounts of internal pushback about the pricing model, people inside the company saw it was 100% bonkers. They released it anyway without any hints given to their biggest clients beforehand, everyone learned it from the press release. The customer reps the big companies have were caught off guard and had to spend a week apologising and saying "I don't know" and "I'll get back to you" a _lot_. Those weren't fun meetings for either side of the table. Source: first hand spoke to two people who had to have these meetings with Unity. Unity did walk back on the changes yes, but there still aren't any promises they won't try something like this again. Switching engines and toolchains has a cost and now even medium to big companies are evaluating whether it's worth the risk to keep trusting that Unity doesn't alter the deal further vs. switching to a new engine or building their own.

squeaky-clean 3y ago

> The whole point is to advance a policy while looking like you "listened" to your employees/customers...while getting nearly or exactly what you originally planned. Pretty much everyone who uses Unity is aware of this and not falling for it. The only people I've seen give the "they listened, everything is good again" take have been youtubers who make Unity tutorial content.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

dylan604 3y ago

>Companies of this size don't do things like this willy-nilly Twitt...er, X would like to have a 140 chars with you

OoooooooO 3y ago
Tweets are 280 chars for 7? years now.

gonehome 3y ago

Usually the dumber thing is the true thing, I doubt this was some three dimensional company strategy (and it doesn't make sense for that to even be the case if you think it through). I wouldn't be surprised if the CEO gets fired for this given how strategically misguided it was and the fallout it caused, that's the kind of change probably required given the error to help claw back any amount of lost trust they can. Apple is probably annoyed they became friendlier to Unity (in order to punish Epic), looks like not a great choice in hindsight.

techdragon 3y ago
I wonder how much deals and business relationships like the one they have with Apple might have contributed to Unity’s confidence in the ability to make the ludicrous policy changes stick. Given Unity’s 3d performance is “good enough” but not good enough that most AAA Unity games don’t wind up basically rewriting more than half the engine to get acceptable performance for their particular game… I really was shocked by the big Unity hype with the whole Vision OS apps part of that Apple announcement… particularly since the worst offenders for “under optimised” giving phone warning levels of CPU burn and battery consumption have been pretty 2.5D Unity apps where the only 3D effect is some parallax scrolling and using the built in Z index to control which sprites will wind up in front of others as they move around in an otherwise completely 2D fashion… some absolutely surprising moments over the years as I’ll start playing a “visually good and polished game” only to notice at the end of 5-10 minutes bus or train ride, my phones gotten very warm and my battery is now 10-25% lower… I learned how shitty Unity can be before I got any experience developing with it and the experiences I have had developing with it and the experiences shared with me by others who develop with it … It feels like a major disconnect has grown over the years between management running the company, project management setting goals for the development/engineering staff, and the multiple classes of end users of the engine, with my suspicion being that it’s hard for them to avoid getting drowned in feedback from novices who easily achieve their goals with the tools in Unity, leveraging their store, some vendor plugins maybe and don’t do much more than build 2D, 2.5D or very basic 3D games… The next tiers above that of intermediate and advanced Unity users being progressively more silent about their problems as they have learned to rely less and less on what Unity provides with the end outcome being some experienced Unity developers I’ve met being pretty honest that they basically only use Unity because it’s a C# game engine and there’s a lot of benefit in using C# like a big developer pool, performant backend systems in the same programming language, etc… and they are throwing away >90% of the engine and either they or their team are doing everything themselves because what Unity gives them is completely useless, or unsuitable, or not just simply not performant enough. When your “experts” are “throwing away” your product and just “using the box it comes in” because it’s a convenient shape… something is very very wrong and your product’s days are numbered. Their recent attempted policy’s change seems completely ignorant of the current state of their product’s “sticking power”. The users who make it look like anything is possible in Unity and who are effectively creating marketing material for Unity by crediting them as the game engine they used regardless of how much of the engine they throw away in order to get any particular AAA game completed… these critical users who are helping pull in new users are also very close to not using the product at all. Doing anything that alienates them is the marketing equivalent of a massive act of self sabotage, and I don’t think they are going to survive this. For me the writing was on the wall from the merger with the malware pile of an “ad tech” company a while back and the boneheaded comments about monetisation that were made back then… it’s just been a question of how long till it fails… and boy has the policy change and backlash accelerated things…

gota 3y ago

I've seen this referred to as a 'cock-thumb' proposal. As in, you ask for the greater sacrifice (cutting off the first) and hope they answer proposing the smaller sacrifice (to cut off the second) instead; which is what you wanted in the first place.

solumunus 3y ago

> Companies of this size don't do things like this willy-nilly. They do them after extensive data collection, analysis, research, etc. And yet they sometimes make mistakes and die. There are countless examples of this.

theshrike79 3y ago

> Companies of this size don't do things like this willy-nilly. They do them after extensive data collection, analysis, research, etc. Yes, and there was huge amounts of internal pushback about the pricing model, people inside the company saw it was 100% bonkers. They released it anyway without any hints given to their biggest clients beforehand, everyone learned it from the press release. The customer reps the big companies have were caught off guard and had to spend a week apologising and saying "I don't know" and "I'll get back to you" a _lot_. Those weren't fun meetings for either side of the table. Source: first hand spoke to two people who had to have these meetings with Unity. Unity did walk back on the changes yes, but there still aren't any promises they won't try something like this again. Switching engines and toolchains has a cost and now even medium to big companies are evaluating whether it's worth the risk to keep trusting that Unity doesn't alter the deal further vs. switching to a new engine or building their own.