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?
Kind of. In the past investors were willing to be more patient, and company values were artificially high, because they were based on potential profits rather than actual profits. That’s shifting a bit as interest rates go up.
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.
It’s less about being profitable, and more about increasing revenue, forever, until you have all the money on earth, I guess. There’s no stopping point, each quarter must be more profitable than the previous quarter or the higher up executives panic because $$$$
I find it interesting how common it is to blame executive greed/stupidity, as if we all merely got super unlucky when companies were picking their CEOs. Every CEO is different, yet the outcome is almost universally the same: when company longevity and quarterly profits come into conflict, profits win.
The CEO of the modern public corporation embodies that conflict of interest, which is perhaps why they are so hateable – the job is inherently two-faced – but at the end of the day they’re just a face, a name, and a bundle of core competencies. No matter how many CEOs we go through, there will never be one who could satisfy the unending hunger of the public stock market. You will never find one who is not ultimately enthralled. The fundamental concept of know-nothings owning everything is just outright broken.
I don’t know if I think we should burn it all down, but one thing I’m sure of is that the problems won’t stop until we bring the people with investment money into close alignment with the long-term interests of the corporations they own (and/or oust/eat them)
Simplified: If you can borrow 1 Million USD for 0% apr and earn 1000 USD with that, you have 1000 USD in profits. Now change the apr to 5% and you are 49,000 USD in the red.
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.
Why can’t they remain solvent by adjusting their fee schedule though? It’s the same boilerplate terms other engines seem to make ends meet with. There are many different ways to correct course in the scenario presented, but the action taken doesn’t suggest that’s the scenario they’re in. Corporate profit-seeking is the primary driver of the inflation in the global economy - I think the above commenter has put the cart before the horse.
Why can’t they remain solvent by adjusting their fee schedule though?
Likely they’ve been remaining solvent through private equity, which has probably dried up. Their fees were probably just enough to entice further investment, but most of these companies operate on paying loans with new loans until they can become profitable in the long term.
Usually when a price hike that doesn’t make sense happens, it’s because they’ve failed to get a new injection of capital to remain in solvency. So they have to speed up the fee schedule to make their payments to the investors.
Corporate profit-seeking is the primary driver of the inflation in the global economy - I think the above commenter has put the cart before the horse.
It’s a public IPO, they don’t have to be profitable, they just have to appear as if they will be profitable to increase share price. This kind of hike is not something that a public IPO would do as it will assuredly drop stock price, which is illegal unless there is no alternative.
Without providing any basis for their charges, and without a way for devs to independently validate them, I can’t see how the charges could even be considered valid legally, let alone pull them out of insolvency. A dev fee per fingerprinted installation doesn’t have any precedent in the SaaS space to my knowledge. I don’t think it would be illegal for an IPO to do this if it was truly meant to increase longterm profitability - e.g. price speculation that’s happened today could similarly happen for any reason at any time on any stock. But the point is it won’t work without a monopoly they don’t have - they’ll have to go back on it (at least with regard to games already released), or end up in costly litigation
Without providing any basis for their charges, and without a way for devs to independently validate them, I can’t see how the charges could even be considered valid legally
Ehhh, it very well might not be. But service providers have an awful lot of control of their platforms and who and how they allow access to it, and for how much. A lot of the interpretations in IP courts when it comes to the digital service seem to be about 5 years behind the actual industry. Add on the fact that a lot of the people running the IP courts barely know how to operate a computer, let alone the ins and outs of digital media and we usually get an environment that’s skewed towards the industry.
A dev fee per fingerprinted installation doesn’t have any precedent in the SaaS space to my knowledge.
I think it would be interpreted pretty close to what reddit did with their API access. Technically it’s just a different type of service fee, and it’s backed by a pretty simple logic of offsetting the cost of the involved traffic.
I don’t think it would be illegal for an IPO to do this if it was truly meant to increase longterm profitability - e.g. price speculation that’s happened today could similarly happen for any reason at any time on any stock.
The main sticking point would be that you would have to prove that there is a logical path to long-term profitability that surpasses or offsets the resulting devaluation of pursuing a completely different profit model.
I think it really depends on how big the devaluation will be at the end of everything, and if they loose large clients specify their reasons for leaving.
It’s all pretty complicated, but Im still guessing theyre having solvency issues, just by looking at their IPO price since the last quarter of 2021 they’ve lost about 50% of their value without any real signs of recovery.
It’s not really an intricacy of IP law though, it’s kinda one step away from a contract saying “I get to write a blank cheque from you to me. Don’t worry, I’ll put in the right amount you owe, and if you don’t think I did just tell me and we can talk about it. I reserve the right to say no though”
To legally charge the dev, an invoice has to be raised. That’s a legal document, there’s an item on it, a quantity, and a price. If the details of the invoice cannot be verified by either party, it is invalid. About as fundamental a principle in contract law as you can get, I imagine.
The way it’s different to reddit is that Unity wants to charge per installation on unique hardware. That is, if you buy a license for the game, and install it on your PC as well as your Steam deck, then the devs need to pay 2x install fees.
It is in the fact that the game was built on their platform using their IP. They may own the game they created, but they don’t own the right to distribution, that’s a service.
legally charge the dev, an invoice has to be raised. That’s a legal document, there’s an item on it, a quantity, and a price.
That’s if you are doing product business, the service industry has more flexibility in their terms of service and how much they can charge for it. The option is typically to discontinue the service or to pay for continued service.
The way it’s different to reddit is that Unity wants to charge per installation on unique hardware. That is, if you buy a license for the game, and install it on your PC as well as your Steam deck, then the devs need to pay 2x install fees.
Right, and as a service they will claim that additional downloads are an responsible for the loss of additional revenue, one they wish to offset to the customer who created it.
I’m not saying that this is a good thing, just explaining that the service industry has a lot leverage in court.
And I’m going a step further to say that’s not actually a defensible argument. The distribution is a distribution of game licenses with associated terms, and those terms don’t dictate a limit to the consumer on the number of installations on hardware they own for private/non-commercial purposes. For Unity to argue additional installations per license represent lost value is an argument against the terms of the licenses, not the terms of their arrangements with devs.
Lost revenue obviously isn’t the reason for it, anyway. It’s almost certainly due to technical limitations of their data collection method resulting in them not being able to associate unique installations with their associated license. So the reason devs must accept a degree of inaccuracy that inherently favours Unity is that it would be illegal for Unity to be accurate.
The distribution is a distribution of game licenses with associated terms, and those terms don’t dictate a limit to the consumer on the number of installations on hardware they own for private/non-commercial purposes.
Right, but it’s not unity who is selling the game license. Nor are they limiting the end consumers ability to download the game as many times as they wish. They are just charging the dev for the use of server space and traffic.
argument against the terms of the licenses, not the terms of their arrangements with devs.
The arrangement with the devs is literally the only thing they have control over… it’s a service based company. Services are allowed to change their terms whenever they want, you don’t own access to their services, you pay to access them. If they change their terms of services and you don’t agree, you stop paying for the continuation of service.
TOS agreements are for the benefit of the company, not the benefit of the consumer. You can sue or arbitrate over the TOS, but it’s primarily only successful in cases involving negligence that harms the client e.g a leak of sensitive data that makes someone loose an important client.
Lost revenue obviously isn’t the reason for it, anyway. It’s almost certainly due to technical limitations of their data collection method resulting in them not being able to associate unique installations with their associated license. So the reason devs must accept a degree of inaccuracy that inherently favours Unity is that it would be illegal for Unity to be accurate.
I think that’s quite an assumption… servers cost money, sending a large amount of traffic through them cost money, it’s pretty standard for service companies to increase fees with increased server usage.
If I were a guessing guy, I would imagine that being able to track unique downloads would be kinda important for a gaming dev service.
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.
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.
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: feddit.de/post/2514573
Oh I see, so it’s like a merry-go-round, and everyone wants to have their money returned with more than they borrowed so that not only can they have some left over for themselves, but to also pay back those they themselves borrowed money from in order to lend in the first place. Recursive lending/borrowing up until the central banks, like you said.
Risky stuff. If any single entity along that lending/borrowing chain/network flops, it can send shockwaves to everyone else, all the way back to the central bank.
Well, with the current happenings around the world loans got a lot more expensive and that’s basically what internet companies run on since the start, many of them never made a profit but even others will run their buissines to the ground during inflation and shit!
Corporate suicide is so hot right now, all the cool companies are doing it. Are you really even trying if you can’t feel the pain of the bullet in your foot?
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.
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”.
I think I disagree a bit. It is the owners of the companies that have no passion for what they do. They just want that particular position in their portfolio to appreciate or spit out dividends.
Then they put the MBAs in charge to get the most efficient use of capital.
We just live in a dystopia. The leadership will milk you dry, for pennies, for short term profits. When you’re this greedy, you can’t see more than a day into the future. It’s just another reminder than corporations aren’t your friends
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.
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
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.
TL;DR of the situation is that Unity released a statement 2 days ago saying they want successful developers to pay up to 20 cents every time a user installs a Unity game starting from Jan 1 2024, even if your game was already released. This caused a huge ruckus in the game dev community and many developers want to switch away from Unity.
Note that it’s “per install” (they clarified that reinstalling on the same device only counts as one install), not per unit sold. And Unity will also track pirated copies, so the devs would still have to pay the fee even if they didn’t sell it to you.
It’s because they literally don’t know how to differentiate a download from legit and illegitimate. They’re going to track every time their bundler is downloaded and bill the developer for it, that would include pirated copies and legit copies alike.
That’s assuming pirates would go through the trouble of removing said functionality. Pirates hate trackers, so they might do it, but not necessarily, as often the priority is just to get the game working.
That’s a recent change. According to the faq on the official forum, initially the idea was to charge every reinstallation. Then they realized it was crazy. Now it’s every first installations:
If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs? A: We are not going to charge a fee for reinstalls. The spirit of this program is and has always been to charge for the first install and we have no desire to charge for the same person doing ongoing installs. (Updated, Sep 13)
I fail to see how they can guarantee it’s the first install.
I game inside a VM with GPU passthrough and I’m pretty sure it would be trivial to install-bomb any game to rack up install numbers and costs.
Moreover, would anyone even trust any number of times Unity tells you your game was installed?
They could a magical 10% that would be hard to prove/disprove.
Anyone with a half-competent legal team would stay the fuck away from any of this nonsense going forward.
However, I’m not knowledgeable on any Game Industry economics, but isn’t $0.20 on a $20-$60 game negligible? I understand some people will have multiple devices so the developer could be out $1. On a $20 game that someone sells 1000 copies, that’s only $200 of $20,000 sales (maybe $800 in fees at the high end). I’ve used Unity before and it’s still a pretty solid game engine with easy to use tooling; using it would definitely save you time to build your game (time=money). Additionally, if I were to be building a game studio, everyone knows unity, so it would be easy to hire or find contractors who can help with pieces of the game. It makes sense from a business standpoint for me unless I’m missing something.
Is there a max fee? On the opposite side of the spectrum I could see DDOS-like attacks on game developers where an attacker can spin up a bunch of virtual machines and then keep installing the game to charge the developer $1mil dollars.
It’s the complete unpredictability that devs and businesses hate. 2% of every purchase they can plan for, but with install fees they could get randomly billed for copies that were already sold, and that is unacceptable. This isn’t a one time fee, whenever somebody installs the game on a new device, the dev gets charged. Not to mention the fact that some people might have multiple devices, but randomly in 3 years they could get a new PC and suddenly the dev gets charged again, all the while the dev didn’t make anymore money from that copy. Who the heck would agree to a system like that?
Not to mention that if a game gets added to a service like GamePass, then the service gets the bill. No way Microsoft would say yes to that, which means the Dev misses out on deals that could’ve made them a bunch of money.
A competitor could literally buy one copy, make a script that spins up 1000 vms a minute and downloads your game over and over on “new devices” and put you out of business
Bethesda games are full of bugs, ill wait a year or so before i decide to buy it or not. Dont get me wrong, FO4 is still my favourite game of all time, so im sure ill like it. I bought FO76 at half price and i still feel ripped off, so I will wait and see how they screw up starfield.
K…I’ll wait for actual gameplay videos before I jump on this hype. Zero trust in the gaming industry, or any industry anymore. Too many pricks lying to steal money
@tomasz Działalność obywatelska w postaci inicjatyw ad-hoc, prowadzonych bez żadnych struktur, faktycznie jest praktycznie zmonopolizowana przez platFormę na której "są wszyscy". Ale... potencjał zmiany jest i trzeba go szukać (tzn łapać 😁) tam i wtedy, kiedy jakaś obywatelska działalność z nieformalnego "pospolitego ruszenia" zamienia się w coś bardziej zorganizowanego. Niekoniecznie chodzi o osobowość prawną, bardziej o taki moment kiedy luźne gadanie na facebooku zamienia się w jakieś konkretne zadania, które trzeba zaplanować, rozdzielić między ludzi, tworzyć przy tym jakieś dokumenty a to wszystko jeszcze w podgrupach, które powinny się ze sobą komunikować ale jednocześnie mieć własne wirtualne miejsce na to co robią. I to jest ten moment, kiedy jakieś bardziej ogarnięte jednostki z grupy zaczynają rozumieć, że potrzebna im jest do pracy platforma z prawdziwego zdarzenia, którą facebook tylko udaje. I to jest również ten moment, kiedy te "ogarnięte jednostki" zaczynają szukać alternatywy. Kierując się jednak głównie zestawem dostępnych usług, popularnością i ceną. A rzadko tym czy platforma jest oparta na #foss, czy będą faktycznie kontrolować swoje dane pod kątem przenośności i prywatności. No i właśnie na tym etapie powinni "jakoś" trafić (i chociaż przetestować) te projekty, które robią co trzeba a przy tym są wolne, niekorporacyjne zdecentralizowane.
I teraz wypadałoby zrobić jakąś listę rekomendacji albo zlinkować do takowej. Ciekawe jakie wy macie doświadczenia i co moglibyście "fejsbukowiczom" polecić. Ja np, poza takimi platformami pracy grupowej "ogólnego użytku" jak #nextcloud robiłem ewaluację kilku bardziej specjalizowanych pod działalność obywatelską (czyli m.in. debaty, podejmowanie decyzji, praca w podgrupach) i z wartych uwagi to np #loomio, #decidim, #adhocracy, #citizenos. Wszystkie #foss, z opcją #selfhosting 'u aktywnie rozwijane i sprawdzone w dużych organizacjach. Niestety, żadna z wymienionych nie ma struktury federacyjnej. Poza nextcloud, w którym widzę wielki potencjał pod warunkiem, że doprowadzą do porządku kilka rzeczy m.in aplikację, która konto na nexcloud uczyni pełnoprawnym uczestnikiem fediverse.
Mobilizon jest sfederowany. Posiada grupy, które można obserwować na fedi. Aby do takiej wstąpić, trzeba mieć jednak konto na Mobilizonie (a może Friendica też zadziała?). Grupa może organizować wydarzenia (tylko dla członków lub publiczne - te drugie pojawią się jako wpis grupy), zamieszczać ogłoszenia (tylko dla członków, tylko z linkiem, publiczne - też jako wpis), dyskusje (dla członków) i zasoby - zbiór odnośników.
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