The same board of directors who put him there are in charge. The same corporate culture that let him push these decisions is still in place. The same critical mass of people in leadership who would care enough to block such crap still don’t work there.
Honestly, I don't blame them for not wanting to put up with Unity's unreliance. It took Unity 10 days after announcing this awful change to backtrack to a normal revenue cut. That 10 days was filled with justified outrage from a ton of developers to the point of Re-Logic donating $100k to Godot and FNA in protest.
That’s what confused me the most. When your customers are consumers, screwing them over might be no big deal. But when your customers are businesses, how were you planning to get away with something like this where anything involving fees in the 6 to 9 figures is game changing. That’s, “Cheaper to move my business elsewhere” levels of money.
Yup. They were hoping it would fall out of the news cycle and people would forget about it. Once it stretched past a week, they started to panic because people weren’t dropping it, and had to plan an announcement to save face.
The harsh truth is even if they lose half of their current users they will end up making more anyway, even with the amended changes. They planned to lose a large chunk of their user base, regardless. The “seats” model is dead now that AI is changing how game development is done from the ground up. And they needed to do this because they were never profitable (the engine’s development costs hundreds of millions of dollars) and couldn’t really compete with unreal when it came to the type of customers they could actually pay for the engine from
Sure, but if they’d implemented the revised changes they wouldn’t have lost so many users. And despite their messaging, they did already speak to some devs who’d already told them this would be a disaster, but they tried it anyway, and in a retroactive way that completely disregarded prior promises regarding changing EULA agreements, so there’s no faith in this not still changing.
Nah this went really bad for them. Even if they do make more, it will almost certainly be short term. Godot got so much free advertising. It firmly sat itself next to unreal as far as who should be choosing it, but it is definitely the inferior engine if you are making AAA. It's going to get cut from the high by unreal and the low from Godot, defold, and even gamemaker.
I don't get this weird apologist attitude. Let us not forget Unity just spent over $4 billion less than a year ago buying the malware ad service ironsource. They are not profitable because they make bad business decisions. This was one more. And in all likelihood we will see the sale of unity before too long. And it will probably be less than the $20 billion offer they had prior to the ironsource purchase.
They are not profitable because they make bad business decisions.
Exactly this. Just like how reddit very quickly made enough in reddit gold sales to cover their server costs for decades, the only reason it’s operating at a loss is because they’re running it that way.
it’s a known strategy in tech startups and most non inventory based businesses in general (think moviepass) to undercut your competition to try and get as much market share as possible, even operating at a loss, and then slowly turn up the prices on your users once they are locked into your system and make back the lost revenue over time. I don’t agree with it either, but the y-combinator business tech crowd seem to love this model, so I can’t really say if it’s a bad decision or not.
I can however, point to evidence that it’s a popular business model, if you don’t mind accepting hacker news and y-combinator articles, as well as YouTube media of startup CEOs in earnings calls, but I refuse to defend it otherwise. These are often people with lots of money and advanced stem + business degrees however, so Im not going to sit here and act like I easily know better than them. I can say it did work for Google, but this is after they already were dominating with ad revenue and had the means to slowly introduce ads into every platform they owned ( youtube, maps, android). Popular platforms like DoorDash also have yet to become profitable, despite commanding a 70% market share on food delivery.
I can cite an example of it with an inventory based company. KIA sold their cars at damn near a loss in the US for a long time to get a good foothold. And it worked. Iirc they had a bogo on cars at one point even.
80 percent of unity users don’t pay and a large percentage of the 20% remaining don’t pay close to enough to maintain the engine. they did this on purpose, so it’s their fault, but it is the truth. most large studios these days that actually hit the numbers to pay unity are doing more with AI so they are paying less and those who the changes actually were attempting to make up lost revenue from. as I said, either way the “seats” model is dead regardless.
honestly as shitty as the changes were (and of course they were trying to make profit) they were actually attempting to help devs at least financially. For many use cases the install fee would come out as less than a 1% rev share. It was the other shit that made it worse, the install counting malware proposal, and the uncertainty behind the legitimacy of the numbers. (demos, piracy, repeated reinstalls)
if you’re interested in the insight from a tech investor who is familiar with the situation from the inside, but remains unbiased as someone not employed by unity, check this link for a good breakdown of what Unity’s leadership was actually thinking when they cooked this insanity up.
Good luck. If the SEC hasn’t already started building a case against him for insider trading, then nothing is going to happen to him. He’ll get a golden parachute and scurry off to ruin some other company.
"Selling shares before the announcement" was a pretty egregious misrepresentation. He has scheduled pre-registered sales on a regular basis because he gets paid partly in stock.
It was always going to be relatively soon after a sale of stock.
Just want to add you’re right but what pisses me off is that they still can influence decisions based on this. Let’s say his shares are sold at x day, just do some decisions before that and boom your auto sell share price is now either higher or lower. Only because it’s predetermined they still influence it and SEC now can’t do shit.
This has nothing in common with insider trading and doesn't resemble it in any way. The shares he sold weren't a relevant proportion of his ownership. He didn't sell then deliberately tank them. He sold then announced something he thought would improve the value of his big stake in the company. The decision almost definitely cost him a lot of money by substantially lowering the trajectory of his company's ability to maintain market share.
Exactly. It was plopping his dick on the table, then realizing "oh shit, no one actually is impressed by this".
Insider trading would be more "I know we're about to get sued for this egregious fuckup and have no defense, so I'm going to sell before the news leaks". Strategy knowledge can be part of insider trading, but it would tend to be more buying shares because you have advanced knowledge that a highly lucrative contract has been signed before the announcement. It would be harder to have selling because of a strategy decision be insider trading unless you were opposed to it internally, because decisions you make are intended to make the shareholders (you) money.
Don’t you bring facts into this! We want to be outraged!
Being serious though, they ought to be investigating whether there were any changes in those sale orders. If they’ve been the same and unchanged for the last two years or some long period of time, I don’t think there’s a case. But if they’re was an adjustment a month or two ago, that would be very problematic.
I think you mean a nice golden parachute to reward them for taking the heat, so they can swap in a new expensive face to implement slightly less unpopular fees.
There's also the matter of future developers to consider. I'm in the process of looking at game engines to learn, and Unity has decisively crossed itself off the list. Even if current studios and developers stick with Unity, startups and novices would be foolish to pick a game engine that might suddenly decide to charge them out the ass with little to no notice. Existing developers have the issue where they already have tools and experience with Unity, but newer folks don't.
Myself I really wish that Godot would finally start getting traction in being the most advanced and the most used game engine. And it’s free.
Just look at Linux - it’s free, most used and most customizable server platform, even tho paid alternatives (e.g. Windows server) exists. I wish Godot would become de facto standard game engine.
I doubt it will ever happen but if it dose that would be a perfect fit for open source, big studios could contributr and share parts of their progress between each other like big companies do in the Linux space and at that part it would probably become and stay the most advanced option fairly quickly because you can’t compete with a entire industry and community at once!
Godot should definitely be adopted more by the indie and small studio scene. I think there’s going to be some folks who slide over to Unreal because Godot’s 3D capabilities don’t even match Unity’s yet, but there’s some stuff it can do, and it’s in active development.
I’ve worked on older projects such as 2019 and overall they all work very similar, so I’m assuming people will still start projects on 2020/2021 LTS given they’re fairly stable
The only thing I’d be keen on in be versions of unity would be if they came with better versions of FSR / DLSS baked in, instead of having to wait on third party addons
Honestly, Unreal has been in a different league ever since Epic started dumping Fortnite money into it. That’s probably why Unity tried to start charging more, because they’ve been falling behind for the past few years and can’t afford to keep up. Not that I think it’s good to leave Epic/Unreal without decent competition, but I’m more inclined to blame Fortnite for the downfall of Unity than the indie devs Unity just scared off with their desperate cash-grab.
Unreal has been in a different league basically since its inception. Compare the original Unreal engine to its contemporaries like Quake or Half Life and it’s amazing what they could do, if you had a box that could run it.
The difference between Unreal and Unity is Unreal has a sustainable viable business model (I think I’ve come to the conclusion that there are no “sustainable” business models under capitalism, what with demanding infinite growth and lal that). Epic Games develops their own games; the development of Unreal Engine has pulled its weight as a component of Fortnite and such. Same thing with Valve; I don’t think they ever bothered to charge for developing a game in the Source engine because they made their money for engine development through Half Life 2, Portal, TF2, Left 4 Dead etc.
Unity on the other hand doesn’t make and sell games, so they have to either directly charge developers (which they both do and don’t) or they operate their own adware nonsense. And neither of those revenue streams are enough. Which means they don’t have a viable business model. So they pull a stunt like this to hasten their inevitable bankruptcy.
Yeah I was a game programmer in the early 2000s. Unreal made my jaw drop back then already. They’ve always been state of the art (although arguably CryEngine had the lead for a while), long before Unity came around. As you might remember, it started out in 1998 as the game Unreal (and then Unreal Tournament) which was a kickass first-person shooter. It has been around for 25 years now.
Unreal is now also selling their engine to Hollywood productions that want to replace green screen with real-time effects for the actors to play against. It’s impressive stuff, and I bet they’re going rake in tons of money through that channel as well. Unity is just not in the same ballpark.
That said, there’s room for Unity if they’re willing to find a business model where they don’t compete head-on with Unreal. As the article indicates there is (was) a strong community providing tons of cheap or free-of-charge assets, and it’s been very appreciated among indie devs for these reasons. Unity excels in support for mobile and web platforms. They don’t need to make their engine support all the latest cool technology. They just need good developer relations and tools that make it easy to turn cool ideas into fun games. The fact that they squandered their biggest asset (the community) shows that the leadership does not comprehend Unity’s value proposition. It is being lead by fucking morons.
We need to construct an economy that does not reward such behavior in the first place. If you incentivize bad behavior and punish the good, the fact that people go with the flow isnt really the problem. The problem is that we reward bad behavior and punish the good then chastize people for not sacrificing their own interests to swim against the current.
They found their scapegoat. But anyone with a brain knows he didn’t just do this all on a whim. The whole board knew, and at least a majority agreed to this shit idea of theirs.
Good. The terrible marketing team who made this decision is still there, and they still want this end result. They just learned they need to approach that goal more slowly.
Greedy out of touch old fuck.
Then again, it’s s not like the board is much better.
He’s gonna be their golden fall guy now, but it’s shit all the way up.
Every fucking capitalist/c-suite moron is so fucking desperate to join in on the financial subjugation of the lower class (US has no middle class anymore).
Eat the fucking rich, throw them out onto the streets and take the country back French style
The US still has a middle class, it’s just been perpetually shrinking for the last ~30-some-odd years.
Anywho, I fully support eliminating the billionaire class (financially, not guillotine style… hate-fueled violence like that tends to spread wildly out of control quite quickly, just like it did in the French Revolution). No one deserves a billion dollars. No one. And yes, I know the majority of billionaires don’t literally have billions just sitting in their checking account(s), but they still have access to that kind of money. Regardless, no one ethically attains billionaire status. It’s all ill-gotten wealth at the direct and indirect expense of others. It’s time to bring back pre-Reagan tax rates on the ultra rich. And while we’re at it, go ahead and destroy the Military Industrial Complex (US patch notes) so taxes aren’t just being diverted to other ultra rich fuckers in the defense contract business.
That works for consumers because they don’t have nothing to lose. Smaller devs will still gravitate towards Unity because the various fees don’t apply to them, but any big studio won’t touch it with a ten feet pole. Immagine putting the salaries of a full studio in the hands of a company that might decide out of the blue to ruin your business model, it’s a nightmare scenario for any CEO! More so when there are viable alternatives
wired.com
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