5 ms·

I don't understand the hate. They did a very bad decision and had major backlash. Fast-forward one year: they rectified it completely, they greatly improved the

by lnrd 2y ago

I don't understand the hate. They did a very bad decision and had major backlash. Fast-forward one year: they rectified it completely, they greatly improved the free terms compared to what was before, they replaced the CEO and other involved executives. That's seems a sensible way of addressing a fuckup, especially considering that the plans now are very reasonable and indie-friendly.

diggan 2y ago
People were kind of sleeping on the fact that Unity could at any times alter the deal to their own benefit. It wasn't until Unity did what they did, that people realized that maybe it's not a mutually beneficial relationship when one of the parts can change the terms whenever they want. So naturally, people start exploring other options that don't suffer from the same problem. Unity, realizing this, backpedals. Which yeah, makes sense, but people who got burned by the change already got burned, and they want to avoid it in the future. I understand both sides, Unity needs to make money, otherwise it won't be around. And game developers need to feel like they're making a choice they can still justify and feel safe about in the future.
- dspillett 2y ago
  > but people who got burned by the change already got burned, and they want to avoid it in the future. They likely have also put effort into moving to other frameworks, and if those are working out well enough for them there is no point making the effort to go back even with this change reverted. Same for new projects that went directly elsewhere: unless Unity offers significant benefits (and the project controllers feel that Unity can be trusted not to repeat the rug-pull later) the effort of changing stack are likely not worth it.
- sbuttgereit 2y ago
  > people realized that maybe it's not a mutually beneficial relationship when one of the parts can change the terms whenever they want. Unity's thinking they could change the terms unilaterally whenever they want and not actually being able to make it stick suggests to me that Unity misunderstood the arrangement more than the users on the other side of that agreement. Yes, Unity had the legal power to change the agreement, but clearly the market disagreed with that move and Unity bore consequences that apparently they weren't ready to bear. In the end it seems that Unity learned that legal power is not the same as market power and that they didn't have the real power to change that deal... and they learned it the all the hard way.
  - gopher_space 2y ago
    I'd go further and add that the fact a change like this could make its way through leadership and be implemented in such a manner demonstrates a disconnect in their understanding of how games are planned out and what their role in the process is. If you just look at things like market share it's easy to lose sight of the fact that we're all tool vendors like the dude in the Snap-On truck.
laserbeam 2y ago
Yup. It’s the correct move. Late, but correct. Yet, trust once lost is hard to regain. In the grand scheme of things it’s probably too late.
- jayd16 2y ago
  > it’s probably too late. For what? The damage is done but the engine is still ...fine. They'll have this black eye but they're not dead in the water. If you're an enterprise customer, you'll probably be asking to lock in terms for quite a while, though.
  - rincebrain 2y ago
    The engine is fine, but existing projects all invested effort into moving off it if they could, and new projects won't touch it with a 50 foot pole. Large orgs are, indeed, likely locking in terms, but Unity's whole market was basically people building things initially in tiny setups with it, with more convenient access than Unreal. It's more or less the same mistake flavor that IBM made with killing CentOS - they killed their onramp of the 500000 tiny projects using it because it was trustworthy enough, and that also kills the existence of 50 projects that go onto to be massive successes built on it.
- mentos 2y ago
  “Trust is built in drops and lost in buckets.”
legohead 2y ago
I work at a fairly large mobile gaming company. We are stuck on the old version of Unity that doesn't have this fee. But to Unity's credit they are still supporting that version and doing bugfixes for us, but it sucks to be walled off like that, trying to eke out our existence as long as possible until we have to pay a lot more money.
- lnrd 2y ago
  So this is a very good news for you I guess?
  - legohead 2y ago
    Yes, very exciting. People at work are already talking about it. But will take some time before we switch versions, that takes research, QA, etc.
  - jayd16 2y ago
    And their last words were "Finally, we get to upgrade unity from this ancient version!"
midnitewarrior 2y ago
Developers spend hundreds of hours of their lives to learn these platforms. When that fee came out, many had to pivot, letting all that experience go to waste, and starting over in other platforms. It's hugely disruptive to their time, their careers, and income. Many have moved on. Dropping the fee doesn't mean they will come back. Even if it made financial / career sense, they were burned, still with a bad taste in their mouth from the experience. They cannot trust that Unity won't screw them over some other way in the future, better to keep going with their newfound direction if it's starting to pay off. When your users / developers lose trust in you, it's the beginning of the end.
rambojohnson 2y ago
you can't build a fledgling indie game dev business on broken trust. it's that simple really.
xeromal 2y ago
Once the magic smoke is let out, you can't put it back in.
- Xen9 2y ago
  What's with the magic smoke? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41522542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41522542
  - stronglikedan 2y ago
    Electronics run on magic smoke. Once you let the smoke out, they no longer work.
  - alwa 2y ago
    I hear the term “magic smoke” (or “magic blue smoke”) mainly from people who are messing around with electricity and who put it through an electronic component in volumes or directions that burn the component out. The resultant puff of smoke brings the component’s behavior from the logical world to the physical one—tangible evidence of an unfortunate finality-of-outcome, an intricate IC become just a lump of charred sand again. Likewise Unity could have done a whole lot of things with their licensing framework while users still had trust in their behavior. But now that they’ve blown out the figurative trust “chip,” they’re gonna have to find a way to get a new one before they get much out of tinkering further with their licensing circuit.
  - braunshedd 2y ago
    TLDR: When electronics burn out, they often release "magic smoke" that is believed to be the source of their power (since they almost always fail to work afterwards). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_smoke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_smoke
    - Xen9 2y ago
      I see, it's then from the same document as blinkenlights. https://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-4.4.6.dos.txt https://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-4.4.6.dos.txt
jarsin 2y ago
They are constantly changing and abandoning things every six months. How many times have they abandoned a networking library or built a new UI system that you have to relearn. Then right when you get the hang of it they release the next thing that maybe is better but also has big problems. There are now so many half baked systems it just feels like a mess.
wccrawford 2y ago
It isn't the first questionable move, and it really shook a lot of people. Flipping back again a year later is the right move, but it doesn't instill confidence. It merely ceases the erosion of it. Firing the CEO did help, though.
- progbits 2y ago
  They probably fired him because of the 90% stock drop, not because of any user complaints. There is no reason to believe the new leadership has different values, and people are right not to trust the company.
  - wccrawford 2y ago
    Firing him was the move people wanted, and they did it. We don't know why, but it at least feels like they listened. Not firing him was 100% certain to be for the wrong reasons.
  - BobaFloutist 2y ago
    And what caused the 90% stock drop?
glimshe 2y ago
It doesn't work like that. This is a business, not a family member or old buddy. Their move last year underscored the immense risk that business have when dealing with them. Your game is a single CEO change away from bankruptcy when you give them so much power.
gaius_baltar 2y ago
> I don't understand the hate. They did a very bad decision and had major backlash. Fast-forward one year: they rectified it completely, they greatly improved the free terms compared to what was before, they replaced the CEO and other involved executives. But nothing prevent them from doing the same again if their indicators say it would be profitable. Developers just don't want to take the risk anymore.
- WillPostForFood 2y ago
  There is something effectively preventing from doing it again, the experience of what just happened.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
exsomet 2y ago
> I don't understand the hate. They did a very bad decision and had major backlash. One element of why the recoil was so strong was that this wasn’t consumers reacting angrily when the price of their favorite widget went up. This was Unity threatening to bankrupt entire companies and destroy livelihoods. Once that trust is broken, specific to the tech stack underpinning your whole business, it is very hard to get it back.

by lnrd 2y ago

diggan 2y ago

People were kind of sleeping on the fact that Unity could at any times alter the deal to their own benefit. It wasn't until Unity did what they did, that people realized that maybe it's not a mutually beneficial relationship when one of the parts can change the terms whenever they want. So naturally, people start exploring other options that don't suffer from the same problem. Unity, realizing this, backpedals. Which yeah, makes sense, but people who got burned by the change already got burned, and they want to avoid it in the future. I understand both sides, Unity needs to make money, otherwise it won't be around. And game developers need to feel like they're making a choice they can still justify and feel safe about in the future.

dspillett 2y ago
> but people who got burned by the change already got burned, and they want to avoid it in the future. They likely have also put effort into moving to other frameworks, and if those are working out well enough for them there is no point making the effort to go back even with this change reverted. Same for new projects that went directly elsewhere: unless Unity offers significant benefits (and the project controllers feel that Unity can be trusted not to repeat the rug-pull later) the effort of changing stack are likely not worth it.
sbuttgereit 2y ago
> people realized that maybe it's not a mutually beneficial relationship when one of the parts can change the terms whenever they want. Unity's thinking they could change the terms unilaterally whenever they want and not actually being able to make it stick suggests to me that Unity misunderstood the arrangement more than the users on the other side of that agreement. Yes, Unity had the legal power to change the agreement, but clearly the market disagreed with that move and Unity bore consequences that apparently they weren't ready to bear. In the end it seems that Unity learned that legal power is not the same as market power and that they didn't have the real power to change that deal... and they learned it the all the hard way.
- gopher_space 2y ago
  I'd go further and add that the fact a change like this could make its way through leadership and be implemented in such a manner demonstrates a disconnect in their understanding of how games are planned out and what their role in the process is. If you just look at things like market share it's easy to lose sight of the fact that we're all tool vendors like the dude in the Snap-On truck.

laserbeam 2y ago

Yup. It’s the correct move. Late, but correct. Yet, trust once lost is hard to regain. In the grand scheme of things it’s probably too late.

jayd16 2y ago
> it’s probably too late. For what? The damage is done but the engine is still ...fine. They'll have this black eye but they're not dead in the water. If you're an enterprise customer, you'll probably be asking to lock in terms for quite a while, though.
- rincebrain 2y ago
  The engine is fine, but existing projects all invested effort into moving off it if they could, and new projects won't touch it with a 50 foot pole. Large orgs are, indeed, likely locking in terms, but Unity's whole market was basically people building things initially in tiny setups with it, with more convenient access than Unreal. It's more or less the same mistake flavor that IBM made with killing CentOS - they killed their onramp of the 500000 tiny projects using it because it was trustworthy enough, and that also kills the existence of 50 projects that go onto to be massive successes built on it.
mentos 2y ago
“Trust is built in drops and lost in buckets.”

legohead 2y ago

I work at a fairly large mobile gaming company. We are stuck on the old version of Unity that doesn't have this fee. But to Unity's credit they are still supporting that version and doing bugfixes for us, but it sucks to be walled off like that, trying to eke out our existence as long as possible until we have to pay a lot more money.

lnrd 2y ago
So this is a very good news for you I guess?
- legohead 2y ago
  Yes, very exciting. People at work are already talking about it. But will take some time before we switch versions, that takes research, QA, etc.
- jayd16 2y ago
  And their last words were "Finally, we get to upgrade unity from this ancient version!"

midnitewarrior 2y ago

Developers spend hundreds of hours of their lives to learn these platforms. When that fee came out, many had to pivot, letting all that experience go to waste, and starting over in other platforms. It's hugely disruptive to their time, their careers, and income. Many have moved on. Dropping the fee doesn't mean they will come back. Even if it made financial / career sense, they were burned, still with a bad taste in their mouth from the experience. They cannot trust that Unity won't screw them over some other way in the future, better to keep going with their newfound direction if it's starting to pay off. When your users / developers lose trust in you, it's the beginning of the end.

rambojohnson 2y ago

you can't build a fledgling indie game dev business on broken trust. it's that simple really.

xeromal 2y ago

Once the magic smoke is let out, you can't put it back in.

Xen9 2y ago
What's with the magic smoke? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41522542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41522542
- stronglikedan 2y ago
  Electronics run on magic smoke. Once you let the smoke out, they no longer work.
- alwa 2y ago
  I hear the term “magic smoke” (or “magic blue smoke”) mainly from people who are messing around with electricity and who put it through an electronic component in volumes or directions that burn the component out. The resultant puff of smoke brings the component’s behavior from the logical world to the physical one—tangible evidence of an unfortunate finality-of-outcome, an intricate IC become just a lump of charred sand again. Likewise Unity could have done a whole lot of things with their licensing framework while users still had trust in their behavior. But now that they’ve blown out the figurative trust “chip,” they’re gonna have to find a way to get a new one before they get much out of tinkering further with their licensing circuit.
- braunshedd 2y ago
  TLDR: When electronics burn out, they often release "magic smoke" that is believed to be the source of their power (since they almost always fail to work afterwards). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_smoke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_smoke
  - Xen9 2y ago
    I see, it's then from the same document as blinkenlights. https://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-4.4.6.dos.txt https://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-4.4.6.dos.txt

jarsin 2y ago

They are constantly changing and abandoning things every six months. How many times have they abandoned a networking library or built a new UI system that you have to relearn. Then right when you get the hang of it they release the next thing that maybe is better but also has big problems. There are now so many half baked systems it just feels like a mess.

wccrawford 2y ago

It isn't the first questionable move, and it really shook a lot of people. Flipping back again a year later is the right move, but it doesn't instill confidence. It merely ceases the erosion of it. Firing the CEO did help, though.

progbits 2y ago
They probably fired him because of the 90% stock drop, not because of any user complaints. There is no reason to believe the new leadership has different values, and people are right not to trust the company.
- wccrawford 2y ago
  Firing him was the move people wanted, and they did it. We don't know why, but it at least feels like they listened. Not firing him was 100% certain to be for the wrong reasons.
- BobaFloutist 2y ago
  And what caused the 90% stock drop?

glimshe 2y ago

It doesn't work like that. This is a business, not a family member or old buddy. Their move last year underscored the immense risk that business have when dealing with them. Your game is a single CEO change away from bankruptcy when you give them so much power.

gaius_baltar 2y ago

> I don't understand the hate. They did a very bad decision and had major backlash. Fast-forward one year: they rectified it completely, they greatly improved the free terms compared to what was before, they replaced the CEO and other involved executives. But nothing prevent them from doing the same again if their indicators say it would be profitable. Developers just don't want to take the risk anymore.

WillPostForFood 2y ago
There is something effectively preventing from doing it again, the experience of what just happened.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

exsomet 2y ago

> I don't understand the hate. They did a very bad decision and had major backlash. One element of why the recoil was so strong was that this wasn’t consumers reacting angrily when the price of their favorite widget went up. This was Unity threatening to bankrupt entire companies and destroy livelihoods. Once that trust is broken, specific to the tech stack underpinning your whole business, it is very hard to get it back.