im super on the fuck unity train right now but like, real normal people work there that need employ and have families to support. I hope unity changes course due to public sentiment but i don’t really think that death threats forcing an office closed are going to be the way to invite that change
I think it’s more the “find employment” thing, not the “piece of shit” thing. Tech companies have been doing massive layoffs recently so the market is flooded with people looking for jobs when fewer places are hiring.
Tech companies have been doing massive layoffs recently
A. Sort of big, not recession-inducing.
B. Intentionally done by the larger companies to price-fix the tight job market so they don’t have to pay so much.
I hope they do. But for now I’d rather them not all lose work overnight, nor do I want all of the indie devs getting blindsided by these changes to unity to have to give up on, port, or delist their projects. I want unity to change for the better more than I want them to crash and burn. But I do think this will serve as an awakening for some segments of the industry to not put all their eggs in one basket with a company as greedy as unity. I hope Godot takes off in use, or Epic keeps using fortnite money to make unreal an attractive development platform and continues to be a good steward of it. That’s wishful thinking though, given the current state of unity lol
I’d say it’s suspiciously-timed. My guess is Unity were tired of the shit PR, then tried to flip things around and use this to cast themselves as the victim. So I’m taking this one with about a planet’s worth of salt.
Given current events, it seems very plausible to me they got at least one - but let’s not pretend it means the backlash is all wrong and we should start giving up all indie revenue to the great lord engine provider.
While I have no sympathy for the upper management behind this stupidity, I would like to remind people to ensure their fire is focused away from developers and other non-management staff. They generally have no say in these calls.
If you have the connections to pull their staff away into jobs at other companies, please do that instead. It may not feel like it, but it will do more long-term damage if you can extract their senior talent.
Maybe I'm just a cynic, but this seems very much part of the PR script for any controversy of the past 20 years or so.
Cause controversy
Get backlash
Say there were death threats in basklash
Paint opposition in bad light, claim to be the real victim and bask in all the feel good comments from people saying "it was controversial, but come on, death threats are not cool"
Conversation derailed, continue as planned
Seriously, go look at one of the comment threads on that other site. It's now all about how "deranged indie devs" are hurting honest hard working Unity employees. Maybe it was a real threat, maybe it wasn't, but they're sure as fuck going to milk it for all they can now.
But is it just me that’s unaffected by such a script? I’m just like “Death threats? shrugs Fair enough.” Unity threatened a lot of dev’s livelihoods. What did they expect, for them all to just roll over and take it?
I imagine this is a mix of things. UE5 has officially been out for a while, their biggest competitor just offed themselves, Fortnite’s UE editor support is out and thus Fortnite probably doesn’t need as many devs now with UGC to pick up the slack, etc.
That’s still a huge chunk of people though. Wonder if all these financial gambles they’ve taken are starting to add up.
I don’t know what it costs Epic to grab all these “exclusives”, and I know lots of people (myself included) who just wait and get whatever it is on Steam anyway. It can’t cost nothing, and it doesn’t seem to be terribly good business.
Likewise, devs must make something when Epic offers a game for free (I think?).
It does seem to me like a deep-pockets game, and I’m not sure how deep Epic’s are anymore.
Epic bought a lot of companies over the last few years and they also rapidly grew. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games#Subsidiaries_and… They rapidly grew and bought up all these companies in the last 5 years and are now slimming down these ventures and focusing on what they want to do with them.
I’ve been 10 years in the industry and honestly. This feels familiar. I feel like there was mass layoffs about 4+ years ago. There was also the Boston Games collapse around 2013. I’ve been told this industry has a very direct pattern. Expand, contract, expand, contract. What you want to do is to get into it when it’s expanding and hope by the time it contracts you have enough experience to be vital to a project.
And before that in the big 2008 crisis, sure. And, to put forth a silver lining, layoffs tends to get a lot of press and happen all at once, while people start new projects and get new jobs all the time without making headlines.
It still sucks to see social media erupt in lost job notifications every so often, though.
I think this time bothers me more because... well, there isn't much reason for it. Mostly everything blew up during the pandemic, a lot of money was made and now things are going back to baseline. But public companies will NEVER report they're shrinking if they can help it, and if they do they will try to appear to be becoming cheaper to compensate, so the obvious call is to let go of a bunch of people you were mostly hoarding anwyay.
The takeaway here, if you ask me, is to never have loyatly for an employer, at least when it comes to moving on to a different job or ask for better conditions. This sort of thing happens all the time and especially publicly traded companies will not hesitate to cut you loose if it makes business sense. You have less leverage, so the thing to do is a) bargain collectively to get more of that leverage, and b) treat your labour negotiations with the company with the same business sense they do.
In the meantime, I still recommend hugging a developer. Patting lightly the back of the head could also be acceptable. Just ask for a preference first.
Loyalty to a company is silly. A lot of people in games learn that quickly in their career because they want to go work for some huge name-brand company that they grew up with just for them to either harshly reject or if they actually get the job, they end up in a crunch cycle trying to prove themselves.
That said people do have loyalty, to other people and to projects. People are passionate about working with people they like and on projects they care about. You only get to make like 20-30 games in your career. Even then that includes all the games that didn’t release. It only really allows for 2-3 years per game whereas lots of games are 5+ years. Projects and people matter a lot and it’s important to not just chase money. Otherwise, you end up working at Google Stadia or Amazon.
Well, yeah, but that bit comes in between the buisness bits. Most managers do care about the people working there, too, but ultimately that will not drive the decisionmaking when it comes to the business, paritcularly in public companies with an obligation to shareholders. It's only fair to reciprocate.
So absolutely be loyal to your team and your project, but never at the expense of your working conditions or compensation.
That's one of the reasons why collective bargaining is important. Short of having representation, like they do on the film business, you want to compartimentalize somehow, and having a designated representative to negottiate with everybody else behind them is a way to get there.
Company was ‘spending way more than we earn,’ CEO said in memo
It needs a genius to see that. All those contracts for timed exclusivity, all those games given for free. Most people just play free to play games on the platform and get the games for free. I thought the idea was to eat the cost and spend more money than to earn, so they can build a loyal customer base. If that wasn't the entire goal, what was it then? Why punish the staff (holy cow its 870 employees!) by cutting them off the company now? The store and launcher of Epic games already struggle to get better.
Unfortunately I can't read the article on Bloomberg, as it requires an account.
I’m guessing it was the goal but it didn’t work as well as they’d hoped. I’ve got a couple of the freebies but I’ve stuck mostly with Valve because most of my games are already on Steam and they haven’t seriously fucked up yet.
They made enticing incentives for developers and publishers, but what incentive would I have as a customer to buy a game from EGS rather than Steam or GOG or even Humble?
I’m guessing here because I don’t sit on Epic’s board of directors, but I would imagine their angle for consumers was mostly to grab new markets with the appeal of free games, which would also establish a library that would be a pain point if they ever wanted to move away, coupled with some of those one-year exclusives that would peel people away from Valve if they wanted to play them day-of.
But there are so many features built in to Steam that if even one or two of them are important to you, there's less of a reason to ever default to someone else doing the same thing but less so. Like with GOG, they don't match Steam feature for feature, but DRM-free and easy preservation of previous versions of games are good selling points that matter to people.
Epic would need to have a “import your games and achievements and saves from Steam” feature AND THEN ALSO have a much better performing app than they currently do, for me to convert. But years later and EGS is still a pretty awful user experience compared to Steam. There’s just no way.
For me, it’d also need a Linux compatibility layer on par with (or exceeding that of) Steam. On paper, I’m not a fan of Valve’s exclusive hold on that market, but in practice nothing has come close for me so far (that I know of, at least).
I tried Lutris and Wine, but I had difficulties getting stuff to run, and the fixes required patience and some level of technical understanding (of Wine, specifically, not just Linux in general). They just don’t have the same (comparatively simple) convenience of “check ProtonDB before you buy it, download game, run it, and usually it’ll work fine”.
The more advanced fixes usually involve nothing more than a few well-documented steps like copy/pasting a launch command, selecting something in a dropdown or downloading and extracting a file into some directory. It’s not a universal “It Just Works”, but I feel like it’s been getting better and better, and that’s just a headstart any competitor would have to work really hard to catch up with.
All these companies that are suddenly having layoffs and/or enshittifying everything at once all shared the same basic business model (pardon the Bronze Age meme format from Slashdot…):
Give goods or services away for free
Attract customers on the basis of getting goods or services for free
???
Profit!
Years of basically free debt service and stupid VC money let them kick the can down the road for a long time in terms of figuring out what Step 3 was gonna be, up to the point that many such services didn’t even bother, replacing both Steps 3 and 4 with “Sell to whichever FAANG is sucker enough to think they can leverage our userbase for their own product.” High interest rates have suddenly put a stop to the money party, though, and now they’re all scrambling to find ways of aggressively monetizing their services.
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