Picture taken from their Twitter
I love that last line.
“We have never made a public statement before. This is how badly you fucked up.”
It must have felt good to say but I suspect they’d have better chance of seeing positive results if they avoided confronting the Unity team’s egos.
The only way Unity can realistically fix it at this point is to pull a WotC and not just backtrack all these changes, but implement a legal mechanism that guarantees changes like this cannot ever be retroactively applied to past versions of the engine.
I don’t think Unity will do that.
Is it just me or are all big companies killing themself right now?
Yeah, inflation rate is high, so central banks are trying to counteract that by basically slowing down the economy, so that our normally scheduled inflation countermeasures kick in appropriately. Well, and the usual way to slow down the economy is to make it more costly to loan money, i.e. increase interest rates. Which means investors can’t just pump money into any company anymore, they want that money to actually pay out to cover those interest rates. And that means companies need to actually be profitable to get money to finance their operation.
So does that mean all these businesses were always doomed to fail anyways, just living on borrowed money/time, and now the bill comes due, they’re all fucked?
Eh. Most of these companies were profitable. Just not seeing the exponential growth that the stock market dictates when interest rates are high. Unity, not so much, but its revenue was always fine, its just a really poorly run company. Who knows where they piss the kind of money they are pulling in to.
I’d guess that companies that failed to turn profit when money was cheap are most likely doomed. However not all of the hype companies are like that. Some could be barely profitable, but shareholder pressure might push them to heavier monetization practices.
A lot of the wealth created by venture capital and the service economy were only ever possible with the help of what is essentially free money. With the increase in interest rates and the collapse of a major venture capital bank, those corporations dependent on low interest payments are going to collapse as well.
As interest rates climb and venture capital dries up, the companies who were just scraping by, or dependent on debt loading during development have had their runway cut short.
We are getting to the point where companies aren’t going to be utilize fronting a huge amount of debt as a strategy for long term growth.
Unity looks to be one of the companies who wanted to utilize the slow boil tactic perfected by the likes of Google or Amazon. Where they front the cost of tons of free and convenient services, hoping that companies become dependent on them, slowly creating fees over time until they become profitable.
If I were a guessing guy, they’ve hit the end of their run way, and have failed to secure a new injection of capital sufficient enough to make the payments on their loans. Likely their options have come to find a way to make your payments, or you’ll be giving your entire operation to a bank.
This would make sense if Unity increased their fees, but it doesn’t make sense to invent a new revenue stream based on a metric you can’t even accurately measure. That’s profit-seeking.
I’m guessing it’s their last ditch effort to remain in good solvency. A board member making trades before a big change is almost always a sign of the rats abandoning the ship.
And it’s most costly to increase interest rates not because those directly affect the investors, but because those interest rates affect the borrowers since the borrowers will need to make more and more money to be able to pay back the initial injection + interest.
If borrowers don’t think they can pay back, then they probably won’t borrow in the first place. If they do borrow but don’t make enough to pay back those loans + interest, then the investor loses out.
And if borrowers don’t borrow in the first place, then investors sit on their money when they could theoretically inject it into other businesses so they can earn on what they own, and not just let their assets stagnate (or decay). To investors, this might also be perceived as a loss.
Do I have that right?
In principle, yes, although two things to note:
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Borrowing isn’t always the active part. When a company is listed on the Stock Exchange, then investors play the active role by buying or selling their stock.
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Most investors don’t just have tons of money laying around. They have property, which they can list as security when borrowing money from banks. And then they lend that borrowed money to companies seeking(/allowing) investment. That means:
a) With high interest rates, investors do have a need for their lent money to pay out, too. As do the banks, because they borrowed it from the central bank.
b) Ultimately, lots of money will be given back to the central bank. The money is effectively removed from the economy then. If you’ve ever heard that inflation comes from too much money being in circulation, that’s how that ties back in.
I’m no expert either, though. I’m just summarizing what makes sense to me and what I’ve learnt from making this post a few weeks ago: https://feddit.de/post/2514573
I’ve said this for about a decade now: I firmly believe this world we live in now is the inevitable, unavoidable result of having every company run by people with business degrees and no passion for the businesses they run. When your entire education was focused on how to extract one more penny from customers and how to psychologically make addicts out of everyone, this is what we end up with. I fucking hate it. Everything is enshitified and it sucks.
Agreed, VC have poured free money into excellent, but unsustainable businesses trying to chase ‘growth’ long enough that they can sell out just before everyone realizes that it won’t make money. It’s just a scam of rich people preying on other rich people.
Instead of trying to build a self sustaining company to begin with (which requires hard work to balance revenue against customer needs and desires) they build ‘free’ products that people love, but can’t make money, only to switch the company to crappy products that people hate, but now are trapped into using.
Our entire digital economy is built on these bait and switch companies and it sucks
I disagree. This is all the system working as expected. There is no such thing as infinite growth and yet we are conditioned to always need it or else it’s a failure.
We are on an ever accelerated race to the bottom.
The definition of success is woefully broken.
result of having every company run by people with business degrees and no passion for the businesses they run
You’d think that even soulless business ghouls would’ve learned somewhere along the way to put a price tag on things like long-term customer loyalty and the soft power of your brand. So either they’re too dumb to take all the variables into account or they’re looking only at short term gains.
Short term gains, every time. These people will take a dollar today over ten tomorrow every chance because they have tunnel vision and only focus on immediate profits happening RIGHT NOW. Ironically the people most likely to drone on about investments are the least likely to really understand their functionality and what investing time or money into something is supposed to mean and accomplish. Most companies these days feel like their just trying to gobble up enough cash to survive their impending failure, it feels so bleak.
Sort of but not exactly, the recent shift is because money has gotten expensive and now investors are wanting to take a profit rather than tossing money around hoping to get lucky. So now these business types are scrambling to do anything that makes the business profitable when their entire business plan was unsustainable without the constant influx of money keeping them afloat under the guise of “growth”.
The poor guys just want to fulfil the infinite company growth expectations of their stakeholders.
Eat the rich. ALIVE.
What really bugs me is that it’s not even infinite growth they’re after. What they want is as high growth as possible as soon as possible. Planning a sustainable long term profit business would mean great employee benefits to attract and keep the best, a ton of funding for new product development, and building things slightly more expensive so that they last longer.
There is no financial analysis that would say cutting safety measures is a net positive to your money in the long run. The bill will come due and you’ll lose an extraordinary amount of money when things blow up or derail. If I make a change that raises my risk to 1% over a year to have a safety incident which would cost me 5 billion, I’d have to save more than 50 million each year with that decision for it to make me more money. Plus it would take 100 years for the realized savings to cancel out the event. If it happened before 100 years, I’m at a net negative.
All of that is to say that the stakeholders aren’t just greedy bastards, they’re also dumb as fuck. But that’s not surprising – the type of person with that much money didn’t get it from consistently working over time. They think playing fast and loose will work in their favor always.
Publicly traded companies*
Private ones dont always have CEOs chasing every penny looking for only short term gains.
Not just companies, but countries too. We’ve apparently reached the Age of Idiocy where everyone that got big is just doing these epic face-plants. I don’t know if it’s desperation, arrogance, greed, or a combination, but so many shitty decisions coming out left and right all over the place.
Late stage capitalism. You can’t expect year over year growth for eternity without running into a resource cap. Profit growth is all the shareholders care about because it’s literally written into United States economics laws that investors get paid first. All these dirty tricks and bad decisions are coming from CEO’s with limited understanding of the effects of their policies, trying to push for an extra 2% on top of their already obscene margins
They should honestly just move their engine anyway. Unity has played their hand, and showed they are willing to make changes to their pricing retroactively.
Yep, they might roll back the changes this time but they’ve shown where they want to be and now we know. They’ll work their way slowly towards it instead of a sudden change now and it will be less noticeable and harder to fight legally when they do that
They’re cranking the bad PR to 11 so they can dial it back to 9 and point to it as a compromise.
The exact same thing was said about Reddit execs like Huffman. They never cared enough to compromise. We’ll see if the Unity execs are similarly terrible people, whose greed will destroy the company. Seems like the trend these days.
I think most developers can see the writing in the wall there, but switching mid-way through a project will be costly and time consuming. If the changes were fully rolled back, I would still bet many would finish what they working on and then switch for their next game.
Problem is that if your current unity game is successful this year, and then they reimplement the retroactive charge next year, you’re still screwed. If you can afford it then it’s best to change now in order to avoid that mess that might mean you have to delist your game
Exactly. They should take this as the warning it is, and start work on moving to an engine not run by morons.
I bet they will do so for their next game but reimplementing a entire game is FAR easier said than done, something like that could very well bankrupt a smaller studio!
I mean it’s easy to reimplement entire games if you’ve built it modularly. Just swap your core game logic to run on another library and the game works the same it did before.
Edit: 'course, exceptions exist like if you wrote everything using their proprietary coding language, instead of using something universal.
Edit 2: It MAY still be possible that a translation/compiler exists that’ll run as a plugin in a proprietary engine, and converts it into something universal.
Game Dev isnt just code. Remaking a project from scratch is a massive undertaking. Porting the code could be difficult too especially if relying on core unity libraries.
I’ve written game engine wrappers and converters for all sorts of code and file types.
It would honestly be easier to fire up Unreal Engine 5 or Godot and start again.
It also depends on how many engine unique features you used, and what optimizations you applied. It’s certainly possible, but doing it without changing any game logic will require very complicated translation layers which will likely cause performance issues. It might very well be easier to treat it as a porting and refactoring project. You might not even realize which behaviors are unique to each engine if you don’t regularly develop in multiple engines.
Technically you’re not wrong. The work is done, the logic already exists.
But systems like Unity aren’t like other code where you can rip one section out and still have 80% of a working codebase. Game engines are as fundamental to most of their game code as the language it’s written in. It’s not like you can just drop things into unreal or godot, connect a few interfaces and call it good. You still have to write the whole thing from the ground up.
The surface area is huge. This is not an SQL database where you can just change the ORM’s backend.
This. It’s not easy or trivial but as a long term strategy, they should already plan investing efforts into consolidating something like Godot or another FOSS engine. They should play like you calm down an abuser you can’t just escape yet while planning their demise when the time has come.
Get fucked, you could have use godot to develop your game or any other free engine
They are technically correct in that it’s the developers fault that they tied themselves to a proprietary game engine.
In the other hand Godot was nowhere near mature when the slay the spire devs most likely started development. They would be dumb if they used unity for their next game 🤷
2014: “You guys should be careful building your industry around proprietary tools, you really should think about open source-” “Blah blah blah stop your moralizing, open source software isn’t 100% ready to go right now so we absolutely can’t use it, instead we’re just going to pay money for this turnkey solution.”
2023: “Help! The proprietary turnkey solution we’ve been paying for this whole time is enshitifying! Subscription models, mandatory cloud services, more and steeper fees!” “Open source tools are still a thing, you know.” “Yeah but we’ve spent a decade telling an entire generation of talent to learn the proprietary stuff so it’s hard to migrate, and we didn’t contribute any code or money to FOSS projects this whole time so it still isn’t up to snuff.”
Well I guess you can slide over to Unreal and kick that can down the road a bit waiting for Epic Games to enshitify their product as well, you can use and contribute to Godot, you can develop your own in-house engine, or you can keep taking it up the ass from Unity.
Just let me ask this: If even a few smaller games, something like Unrailed or Papers Please, used Godot and contributed what they paid to Unity to the Godot team…where would the engine be today?
I think many would agree that it’d be great for FOSS engines to get more attention and contributions, but this is the most asinine way to get that message across
the “just don’t do it” argument ignores the problem. it’s like replying “just don’t buy Apple products” to people complaining about right to repair. the key part is that regular people won’t know beforehand until they need to notice. by that point, it’s profitable enough to show other companies like Samsung and Motorolla that restrictions are profitable, so jumping around brands will also never work when the intention is to have your phone for a long time.
back in the context of game dev, add that to the part where not only people don’t anticipate the retroactive changes of a license they have to rely on when choosing an engine, but there’s the added weight of having to learn an entirely new library and oftentimes even an entire new programming language, so you have to commit to it if you want to make a commercial product or else you risk losing literal years of development just from rewriting the same thing over and over.
not to say that there’s a reason why a lot of people chose Unity. Godot may be in development since 2014 but they are still relatively new in popularity. not only they have less total instructions resources from the community due to it obviously being smaller than Unity’s, but people also look for already known games as one of the first factors when choosing something, which is something Godot is still catching up on. knowing legal jargon to even comprehend the difference between free and proprietary is the least of their worries when someone wants to jump into game development and build stuff with it.
Yeah, fuck console sales, amiright?
@Voyajer is either a jackass or doesn’t understand sarcasm.
Godot has just recently began to gain steam. I don’t think it was a viable option when StS was in development.
Unity: Successfully implemented a product strategy that floods the market with game developers that know how to use its product.
You, an insufferable prick: “Why would they use a product they could find ready-trained developers for when they could use a niche product no one has any skills in??!?”
The Unity training materials are amazing. I took their beginner programming course and even made a tiny little game of my own afterwards. I had plans to make a real game later for fun. It’s awesome software and they have a great ecosystem for beginners with no experience.
So it’s a huge loss, but why would I support them now when Godot exists? The only prospective user I can think of now is someone with no experience that needs all the tutorials, so they’re only using them to learn and have no dreams of making a successful game. All the wannabe devs who think they’re going to make the next great indie hit (and trust me based on game dev forums - there are a ton), why would they set themselves up to pay a ton of money to Unity when starting out? The people they’re going to hold onto are those who don’t have the skill or resources to switch, which probably coincides fairly well with those who don’t have the skill or resources to make a commercially successful game. So they’ve limited the amount of money this move makes to existing games they can squeeze some money out of, and maybe some potential breakout hits from people who are pot committed to Unity and not skilled enough to switch. It’s a crazy move.