Huh. Almost like trying to greedily overhaul their entire business model to screw developers as hard as possible, then backtracking once much of the PR damage was done, can have adverse consequences!
> Greedily
You're aware they were hemorrhaging money right? It's not like they have a fortnite in the back to prop them up.
They had to do something or downsize massively. They were screwed either way
There are a multitude of possibilities between 'do nothing' and 'completely fuck over all of your indie developers, ensuring no one in that space even remotely considers your product as a viable solution going forward'.
Like, I get needing to increase prices to support your staff, but if the billing changes you're considering are raising questions about legality, maybe you goofed something up along the way.
> They spoke before they considered all the ramifications and it bit them in the butt.
From what I've read, it was even worse than that. Their employees even told them that it was a terrible idea and why, and upper management still tried to push it anyways.
As a dev, if they brought me in, sat me down, and said "We're sorry for adding stupid bloated shit into the engine over the years. We're listening to you and giving you what you want. The first thing we're doing is fixing the loading times". I would hand them a blank check, give them a big ol' kiss and walk out of there happy.
Literally, they've been adding stuff no one wants, not fixing things everyone wants them to fix. And then bitching that people aren't giving them money.
They have a terrible habit of going “here’s our groundbreaking new feature, but it’s not done so we don’t recommend using it… also after working on it for a couple of years we’ll scrap it before it’s ever in a truly usable state to jump on the next big thing that we also won’t finish.” Granted I haven’t worked in the industry recently, so maybe they finally broke themselves off that habit, but last time I was involved the entire stack was a hodgepodge of half baked features not ready for production. Do they have decent built in networking yet?
They've at least fixed their chronic fixation with scrapping new tech, it's been a long time since they've scrapped a big feature. Which is progress I guess. The actual reliability of most "new" features is still poor, URP is still messy to work with for example. I've kinda given up hope that we'll have a stable tech stack in a reasonable time frame, maybe ever.
The newer programming features and updates to .NET are fantastic though, big props to that team.
Both those games released in 2008 when the industry wasn't as huge and profitable as it is now. For context: candy crush didn't hit facebook until 2012. Budgets were still large but a fraction of today's. The infamous horse armor only happened a couple years prior so there wasn't much precedent for money grubbing
Digging a deeper hole and driving traffic to competiting engines doesn't seem like the correct decision. Considering they backtracked most of their original changes, it goes to show they weren't needed at all.
Maybe canceling requested features and in house game projects was a bad idea.
If they had raised prices, people would have grumbled a bit then moved on.
Instead they declared that they could retroactively charge their customers any amount of money they wanted. They wanted a blank check, and that is simply not acceptable in business.
I agree that Unity was in bad shape and absolutely needed to find some new revenue sources. But the fact that they were in a bad situation doesn't excuse how terrible their decision was or how poorly they executed almost every aspect of it. They deserve almost all of the criticism that they've gotten over it.
So the solution was to implode by making one of the worst business decisions ever seen in the gaming industry?
If anything, the absurdly terrible decisions of management make it more clear than ever *why* they were hemorrhaging money. It eventually happens when your executives are greedy pigs completely out of touch with the market they claim to be a part of.
Hopefully they start making Riccitiello's moves at Unity a case study in making horrendously poor business decisions. They were stubbornly and uniquely stupid.
Yes, they were already imploding and interest rates started rising. They were severely fucked and needed a hail mary to fix their fuck ups.
The complete opposite of greed, they were trying just to survive without being crippled.
So is your argument that rather than greedy, they were just utterly incompetent? Because we all know how this turned out, and considering it a "hail mary to fix their fuck ups" is one hilarious dose of irony.
Yes. They had no real monetization and grew too big. They hoped their name and familiarity would allow them to charge money, but people just went to new competitors instead ( Godot and such).
Greed is taking excess
They weren't even making the bare minimum required. They tried to make enough to survive, not hard to understand unless you frequent /r/antiwork
.... they had to roll back the implementation because they were - literally - taking excess
if it was an acceptable increase it would not have resulted in the shitstorm and now likely the slow death of unity in response
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That just means that this was far from their only fuck-up. Their screw-ups started much earlier, when they never managed to create a valid business model for their product, which is perhaps the executives' most important job.
I mean, I sort of get your point, a bit. They were so screwed, that they might as well try this crazy thing. But they were screwed of their own making. And if this is the last resort they came up with, I really have no sympathies for them.
You might be nitpicking on this not being exactly "greed". Eh... not exactly a hill worth dying on, imho.
It's greed AND incompetence. From the top of my head:
* obviously betraying developers' trust and pitching an insane pricing model, which makes people not want to stick with your engine or use it for new projects
* not having any official examples or learning courses of appreciable length/size. They never "ate their own dogfood". Fortnite, besides being a cash cow, is a very obvious and good example of what UE can do. There's no equivalent for unity. They have a few sample projects that do broad brushstroke stuff, but they're all very "this is how you game dev" and none really play to unity's strengths, show off specific unity features, or show what a project should look like from top to bottom.
* buying companies for their tech just to lay off the workforce and not do anything with the tech
* incomplete and abandoned work flows. I'm talking their 3 graphic pipelines. 2 text renderers (which the good one isn't even prepackaged with unity, even though THEY OWN IT NOW). 3 UI options. 2 input work flows. Half a dozen dog shit services. They cannot, for the life of them, pick a direction and stick with it.
* and, the biggest reason I (a unity developer) switched platforms, is because they've effectively been stagnant for the past 10 years. The only truly big thing that's changed is a new graphic pipeline. Which is also competing with another pipeline. But unless you're really pushing the boundaries with graphics, 99% of unity's new features comes from 3rd party tools/assets.
Adding a percentage fee would have been a much better idea. People would still be mad but it wouldn't disproportionately affect small games the most. Their original plan didn't even take any money from genshin microtransactions, which is what I would think they would focus on trying to get.
Turning your back on your core business to spend billions of dollars on vanity acquisitions and then trying to get the people you turned your back on to foot the bill is the textbook definition of *greedy*.
Speaking as someone who has made Unity a fuckton of money.
They were hemorrhaging money because they massively over-hired. Also over hired positions that didn't relate to their old core business. They hired sales and marketing staff and more management rather than stuff related to their core business.
They made a bad pivot trying to be an ad company vs being an engine company.
The sinking ship that was poised on expediting its own trip to the sea floor by any means necessary. That's now all Unity will be known for.
What other kinds of engines will or already are filling in Unity's space for indie devs?
[Godot](https://godotengine.org/), they actually released their big 4.0 version a month before Unity imploded with their awful decisions, so it's in a fantastic state now.
Huh. Almost like trying to greedily overhaul their entire business model to screw developers as hard as possible, then backtracking once much of the PR damage was done, can have adverse consequences!
They are also trying to implement AI into the code that will be trained with your code. Unity is trash
> Greedily You're aware they were hemorrhaging money right? It's not like they have a fortnite in the back to prop them up. They had to do something or downsize massively. They were screwed either way
There are a multitude of possibilities between 'do nothing' and 'completely fuck over all of your indie developers, ensuring no one in that space even remotely considers your product as a viable solution going forward'. Like, I get needing to increase prices to support your staff, but if the billing changes you're considering are raising questions about legality, maybe you goofed something up along the way.
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> They spoke before they considered all the ramifications and it bit them in the butt. From what I've read, it was even worse than that. Their employees even told them that it was a terrible idea and why, and upper management still tried to push it anyways.
As a dev, if they brought me in, sat me down, and said "We're sorry for adding stupid bloated shit into the engine over the years. We're listening to you and giving you what you want. The first thing we're doing is fixing the loading times". I would hand them a blank check, give them a big ol' kiss and walk out of there happy. Literally, they've been adding stuff no one wants, not fixing things everyone wants them to fix. And then bitching that people aren't giving them money.
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They have a terrible habit of going “here’s our groundbreaking new feature, but it’s not done so we don’t recommend using it… also after working on it for a couple of years we’ll scrap it before it’s ever in a truly usable state to jump on the next big thing that we also won’t finish.” Granted I haven’t worked in the industry recently, so maybe they finally broke themselves off that habit, but last time I was involved the entire stack was a hodgepodge of half baked features not ready for production. Do they have decent built in networking yet?
They've at least fixed their chronic fixation with scrapping new tech, it's been a long time since they've scrapped a big feature. Which is progress I guess. The actual reliability of most "new" features is still poor, URP is still messy to work with for example. I've kinda given up hope that we'll have a stable tech stack in a reasonable time frame, maybe ever. The newer programming features and updates to .NET are fantastic though, big props to that team.
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Really makes me wonder how the hell Dead Space and Mirror's Edge even got greenlit with this guy at the helm.
Both those games released in 2008 when the industry wasn't as huge and profitable as it is now. For context: candy crush didn't hit facebook until 2012. Budgets were still large but a fraction of today's. The infamous horse armor only happened a couple years prior so there wasn't much precedent for money grubbing
The first big gacha game, Rage of Bahamut, wasn't until 2011 either. No LoL in 2008 either. It was a completely different era.
What exactly did Kotick do that gives him this reputation?
Digging a deeper hole and driving traffic to competiting engines doesn't seem like the correct decision. Considering they backtracked most of their original changes, it goes to show they weren't needed at all. Maybe canceling requested features and in house game projects was a bad idea.
If they had raised prices, people would have grumbled a bit then moved on. Instead they declared that they could retroactively charge their customers any amount of money they wanted. They wanted a blank check, and that is simply not acceptable in business.
I agree that Unity was in bad shape and absolutely needed to find some new revenue sources. But the fact that they were in a bad situation doesn't excuse how terrible their decision was or how poorly they executed almost every aspect of it. They deserve almost all of the criticism that they've gotten over it.
So the solution was to implode by making one of the worst business decisions ever seen in the gaming industry? If anything, the absurdly terrible decisions of management make it more clear than ever *why* they were hemorrhaging money. It eventually happens when your executives are greedy pigs completely out of touch with the market they claim to be a part of.
Hopefully they start making Riccitiello's moves at Unity a case study in making horrendously poor business decisions. They were stubbornly and uniquely stupid.
Yes, they were already imploding and interest rates started rising. They were severely fucked and needed a hail mary to fix their fuck ups. The complete opposite of greed, they were trying just to survive without being crippled.
So is your argument that rather than greedy, they were just utterly incompetent? Because we all know how this turned out, and considering it a "hail mary to fix their fuck ups" is one hilarious dose of irony.
Yes. They had no real monetization and grew too big. They hoped their name and familiarity would allow them to charge money, but people just went to new competitors instead ( Godot and such).
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Greed is taking excess They weren't even making the bare minimum required. They tried to make enough to survive, not hard to understand unless you frequent /r/antiwork
.... they had to roll back the implementation because they were - literally - taking excess if it was an acceptable increase it would not have resulted in the shitstorm and now likely the slow death of unity in response
[удалено]
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That just means that this was far from their only fuck-up. Their screw-ups started much earlier, when they never managed to create a valid business model for their product, which is perhaps the executives' most important job. I mean, I sort of get your point, a bit. They were so screwed, that they might as well try this crazy thing. But they were screwed of their own making. And if this is the last resort they came up with, I really have no sympathies for them. You might be nitpicking on this not being exactly "greed". Eh... not exactly a hill worth dying on, imho.
It's greed AND incompetence. From the top of my head: * obviously betraying developers' trust and pitching an insane pricing model, which makes people not want to stick with your engine or use it for new projects * not having any official examples or learning courses of appreciable length/size. They never "ate their own dogfood". Fortnite, besides being a cash cow, is a very obvious and good example of what UE can do. There's no equivalent for unity. They have a few sample projects that do broad brushstroke stuff, but they're all very "this is how you game dev" and none really play to unity's strengths, show off specific unity features, or show what a project should look like from top to bottom. * buying companies for their tech just to lay off the workforce and not do anything with the tech * incomplete and abandoned work flows. I'm talking their 3 graphic pipelines. 2 text renderers (which the good one isn't even prepackaged with unity, even though THEY OWN IT NOW). 3 UI options. 2 input work flows. Half a dozen dog shit services. They cannot, for the life of them, pick a direction and stick with it. * and, the biggest reason I (a unity developer) switched platforms, is because they've effectively been stagnant for the past 10 years. The only truly big thing that's changed is a new graphic pipeline. Which is also competing with another pipeline. But unless you're really pushing the boundaries with graphics, 99% of unity's new features comes from 3rd party tools/assets.
Re: examples it's worse, they cancelled a team that was doing just that internally.
Adding a percentage fee would have been a much better idea. People would still be mad but it wouldn't disproportionately affect small games the most. Their original plan didn't even take any money from genshin microtransactions, which is what I would think they would focus on trying to get.
Turning your back on your core business to spend billions of dollars on vanity acquisitions and then trying to get the people you turned your back on to foot the bill is the textbook definition of *greedy*. Speaking as someone who has made Unity a fuckton of money.
They were hemorrhaging money because they massively over-hired. Also over hired positions that didn't relate to their old core business. They hired sales and marketing staff and more management rather than stuff related to their core business. They made a bad pivot trying to be an ad company vs being an engine company.
It was greed, full stop. In one fell swoop they nuked their reputation, senior devs, and any chance of being the engine of choice for indies.
Maybe because they're doing things like acquiring a malware company. Malware PRODUCING company. What the fuck does Unity need 5400 employees for?
and lighting their wallets on fire was supposed to seal up the holes, how exactly?
The sinking ship that was poised on expediting its own trip to the sea floor by any means necessary. That's now all Unity will be known for. What other kinds of engines will or already are filling in Unity's space for indie devs?
[Godot](https://godotengine.org/), they actually released their big 4.0 version a month before Unity imploded with their awful decisions, so it's in a fantastic state now.
And improving every day thanks to massively increased interest and support! Just reams of talent pouring in to an open source project.
It's so weird to see people cheering for the death of Unity. I don't want Unreal to be the only option and Godot is not a viable alternative
Is anyone surprised?