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The charge per install fiasco seemed like a last ditch effort. I have no doubt that Unity has been having financial issues for a while, and they were looking f
by jdlyga 3y ago
The charge per install fiasco seemed like a last ditch effort. I have no doubt that Unity has been having financial issues for a while, and they were looking for a way to bump the needle.
- kuchenbecker 3y agoYeah, the issue is one of: 1 - Unity has an unprofitable Business model 2 - Unity chose their business model 3 - Changing the business model will, as we have now seen, require time. This is the startup trouble I see in that all the promises of the previous decade are void in the fave of financial hardship.
- giantg2 3y agoI feel like at least they tried a pricing change before going to layoffs. A lot of places would have gone straight to cutting people.
- newswasboring 3y agoThey could have also tried cutting top management salaries before laying off developers.
- giantg2 3y agoMaybe, that seems extremely rare though. Didn't they already roll some upper management heads?
- newswasboring 3y agoThey fired one person (CEO) and probably proceeded to hire someone else at a higher salary. Of course it's rare, upper management will never decide to make less money personally in the short term. The only time I've heard of this happening is in some Japanese companies.
- tokai 3y agoWould have been much healthier for their business to cut people before they burn their customers.
- anonymousab 3y agoBased on the leaks in the Ars article, it seems like their real focus is to use Unity and Unity changes to bolster the ironSource ads side of things, and they were/are? willing to slash and burn a lot of the core Unity engine business to do so.
- spandrew 3y agoI thought the backlash was a bit greedy by the devs? Unity is a great tool that you don't really pay for compared to foundational software in other verticals? It was like installs over 1 million (so over 1 million in revenue), which functionally netted out to about 10k - 20k per company. That seems... OK?
- izacus 3y agoWas it? Where was this idea that you owe library developers a % of your full revenue (vs. licensing costs) automatically come from? That sounds exceptionally greedy, especially since it wasn't negotiated with individual developers like most of similar contracts.
- BearOso 3y agoAgreed. The retroactive revenue cost was illegal, so it wouldn't have gotten past the courts. Unity execs probably thought devs were more locked into their platform than they actually are, so it wouldn't be challenged.
- dagmx 3y agoThere’s multiple aspects. 1. It retroactively applied to existing licenses. So was a bait and switch to many 2. Installs are a terrible metric for revenue. A lot of Unity based games are F2P, where installs would then turn into negative revenue. 3. They didn’t outline any of the edge cases of users getting refunds. That would allow a user to be a negative revenue suddenly. Their change as it was first announced was really out of touch with their own community of developers, and failed to even encompass the most basic of real world details that a developer may face. At the end of the day, the model itself isn’t really bad, but all the implementation details, or lack of, were. Internal Unity staff had raised all these issues with leadership and been ignored.
- x0x0 3y agoCounterpoint: if you don't have a longterm contract w/ a foundational piece of software for your business, that's kind of on you too.