Well after their pay-per-download debacle, their latest quarter’s earnings may not be indicative of the shit that is coming down on them. There are dark clouds on the horizon for Unity.
The best programmers there probably see the writing on the wall. The best small game dev studios will also.
I think unity is going to see a big quality drop even if it manages to get out of this death spiral.
And I’m still curious if they’ll get targeted by regulators for the anti-competitive shit that started this (the whole thing was intended to strong arm developers into using their ad platform to get an exemption from the new pricing model and put a rival ad platform out of business).
Exactly. The colossal lost of trust is not easy to regain (if it can ever be regained at all) and that’s will be a specter haunting Unity’s economic performance for the years to come. I’ve seen so much outpouring of support for Godot and other open source / free game engines, and really hope that support continues.
I work at Unity. The brain drain is for real. It started 2 layoffs ago and is picking up speed. My department lost some really valuable workers, because layoffs are imminent they don’t let leads hire many replacements, and the resulting critical work gets dropped on people already doing full work loads. Some of the people my department has lost helped build core systems from scratch years ago so that intimate knowledge of those systems is just gone.
Thanks for commenting, it’s interesting to get an inside perspective instead of just speculating.
Out of curiosity, how are they (executives/management) communicating about this whole thing internally? Like are they trying to downplay the impact of that screw up or are they being genuine in how they present the situation?
I can’t get too specific on that one because people get fired for leaking meeting info (I’m hoping to keep this job for one more year wish me luck lol). But in my opinion the new CEO has been a lot more open about what’s going on. He’s very straightforward and has been engaging with us in a more human way than JR ever did.
Unity tripled in size in like 4 years iirc. It is trying very hard to be a large company. Like the culture has been shifting from small company feel to big corporate feel for a while now (since before I joined). It still is clinging very hard to having small company feel though because that’s the kind of culture almost everyone here was sold on.
As far as the efficiency of our size, I’m honestly not super sure. We’ve been multitasking a lot and have cut things in the past, like Gigaya. My department has always felt understaffed and I get the vibe that a lot of departments feel the same. I haven’t talked to anyone that was like “my team is too big to function well”. So if there is an inefficiency issue it is maybe a broad thing that could be hard to see from any one part of the whole. That said I work in a very specific part of the company and don’t branch out a whole lot to other groups so my interdepartmental knowledge is limited.
Its insanity, Unity is a good product. There is a place for it in reality. In any sane world this product would have continued to operate how it was and it would have benefited people. But since profits are attached everything will have to be ruined eventually. Unreal is next to bat.
That’s really well said and an underrated comment here. In a sane world, Unity would “make a living” just fine. Another user commented on where they spent their margins, and my bet is that it’s on bullshit. Executive compensation should be first to get slashed, and if anything they should concentrate on keeping the “golden goose” or core development team alive.
Allowing leaders to use profits however they wish has been a disaster. I don’t know if it was codified into law, but when companies had to invest in R&D, and they had to invest in employees before drinking their own koolaid the world was a better place. Employees were taken care of, average people could thrive. Now its an open feeding trough everyone else is exempt from. The modern world only thrives with checks and balances, its proven that without them the powerful cannot be trusted.
They didn’t earn $544M, they had $544M in revenue. They lost $124M but it’s all due to their decisions. They have a great operating margin in the 60s and spent all the money elsewhere.
Revenue is how much you sold stuff for. Profit is how much did you make after paying for everything to run your business. They got $544M but spent $668M, so they didn’t make a profit.
SteamOS also uses an immutable filesystem and the system updates as a whole. Because of that, there is no risk of something updating separately and breaking compatibility.
It's fairly common for things to update on regular linux distros and break e.g. anticheat support in Proton or some other thing.
Another thing SteamOS does, at least on the Steam Desk, is actually using two partitions. The updates are always installed to the inactive one, so there's always one image that's known to work. Even if an update fails, the device will simply boot into the intact OS image. Regular distros usually don't have much in terms of fail-safes, so if things break, they have to be fixed manually.
Basically, SteamOS is trying to be as reliable and "hands-off" of an OS as possible to provide best console-like experience.
It provides an alternative UI environment built and optimized for gaming. It has a separate windows manager, a complete ui, and a set of menus to simplify customization of whatever is needed for gaming and power saving.
And quick access to steam store.
It is extremely convenient if you like a console-like experience, but, if you are a tinker gamer, it has anyway a lot of nice additional features.
It is inconvenient as general purpose desktop os, because on update you basically lose packages not installed as flatpack
And it is somehow moddable, like people created plugins for the UI. I hope someone ends up adding alternative stores directly there and not just steam. But in any case you can install the respective apps and so on.
yes, it doesn’t run plasma when it’s in big picture, it runs it in github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope along with other tweaks, so it’s lower overhead and game windows tend to behave better
it also handles updates to os as well as to steam so you don’t ever end up with an update that breaks steam, they’re always in sync
Mainly that it’s specifically calibrated for running games on Linux. I’ve tried the Steam Deck and it works pretty damn well out the box, compared to any other distros, so a PC version would be cool.
Aside from native proton, being able to do everything (easily) from the controller. It’s amazing how often you still need a mouse, or just the windows key, in windows :(
What I really appreciate is that it’s geared toward handhelds, but has a decent desktop experience and is powerful enough to be a nice mobile media/piracy box with a remote and a USB-C breakout dongle. You don’t even need to change the read-only filesystem if you use WireGuard VPN (this might take some legwork to generate the .conf files you need, depends on VPN provider) and a streaming/torrenting program that comes in flatpak.
EDIT: Also forgot, you can add a custom shortcut to your Steam Library and have (some) programs launch from the SteamOS frontend rather than desktop.
Mostly just Valve specific software implements to make the experience better. SteamOS has a really good suspend/resume sleep feature where you can just power off the Deck during a game like any other console, then when you hit the power button again it just lights back up to where you were in the game.
The Steam deck is very quick though. I just paused Like a Dragon Gaiden and it took about 2 seconds to go to sleep, left it sitting on the table for an hour or so while I did some errands. Picked it back up and hit thepower button and I was back on the pause menu in about another 2 seconds.
Steam Deck "sleep" is more like locking your phone than it is like putting a Windows PC to sleep
We are dependent on the success of our customers in the gaming market. Adverse events relating to our customers or their games could have a negative impact on our business
Remind me, why did you alienate your customer base with a per install fee Unity?
It’s because they keep buying random companies. Then weirdly there’s those random companies don’t make them any money, and so the obvious illusion is to buy some more random companies.
Headline really feels like it's trying to imply unity is currently making a profit. They haven't been out of the red in a while. Businesses tend to die when they're bleeding money and there's no VC.
It’s a bit more complicated than that. There are a lot of accounting tricks to be constantly making losses but end up cash flow positive.
I don’t work or invest in Unity so I don’t have a great understanding of their metrics but companies I worked at would constantly capitalize new projects to add expenses in the future. You can structure sales deals so a new feature is added late in the contract. That pushes revenue out, but you can collect more cash early.
If unity didn’t do share buy backs this quarter, they would have a positive cash flow. Which points to they should be a profitable company but instead are using accounting tricks to post losses to lower tax bills.
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