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.
In a couple of generations when path tracing with reasonable levels of performance is available on mid-range cards (eg. equivalent of 4070) I might consider Nvidia. Until then team red for me
Exactly. I wonder if it’s possible to make a commercial game that’s fully decentralized. Sell the licenses as NFTs, use activitypub for the masterserver so you just toot out your games, release the game and dedicated server as free binaries. I hate NFTs but they’d be more consumer-rights friendly than the current approach of steam owns everything.
Seriously, it’s a four-player game. Not some MMO clusterfuck. Not an arena shooter bragging about 128 codblops on a single map, like it’s Stand On Nuketown. You need matchmaking - you want anticheat - you’ll do some DRM bullshit. Other than that you should want to offload bandwidth and latency to your players. They’re all on the same team!
I went to work but apparently some of my friends are still struggling to get into games so it’s not fixed yet, we just have caught a downtime period I guess.
It’s a shame that this game got written of by so many people due to its shaky launch. The game’s story and side quests are good and most of the game breaking stuff has been fixed. The visuals and art direction are great so it’s nice to see it getting support for new technologies even if no one can run them.
Yeah I think it’s mostly a meme now. Either you read comments from people who loved it, or jokes from people who haven’t played it. I had no expectations before playing it and liked it so much that I even preordered the DLC, to show my support. (I don’t care about the preorder bonus, and I don’t think preordering games is reasonable, but I’m gonna play it right away anyway, so it doesn’t matter in this case)
I never noticed many bugs and had 93 hours in the game under two starts, never finished it though, to be fair I don’t finish most games so not much of a difference there. Was playing today and was reminded how gorgeous it is. I love cyberpunk as a genre and have a half decent video card (3070) and the neon, reflections, smoke all look like some of the best of not the best I’ve seen in my 39ish years of gaming. The downside is at 1080p (yeah I know) is the hair looks distorted/crimped close up (mostly bangs and end of the hair) but still looks better overall than any hair I recall and the rest is all eye candy.
Oh guess I should add, it really does feel like a cyberpunk world should, least to me. The setting is perfect for me but I’m sure there’s flaws I haven’t noticed.
Meanwhile Larian (BG3 devs) held the newest patch for one additional day to test it out and make sure it works properly. You really see the difference.
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