RuneScape 3 recently made an extremely controversial change, and I think they handled the apology perfectly. When they finally made changes and dropped some heavily disliked things, they opened with “we messed up”. Unity needs to do the same thing here if they want a chance to rebuild
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.
There’s no way this is legal unless it’s already in a contract – and even then, it might still be illegal. The notion of charging people more money because you’ve raised your prices after they’ve already bought something just breaks economics completely. You’d be able to sell a bunch of a product for cheap, and then later say sike and charge everyone a lot more.
I’m sure companies would love to do that, but no company exists in isolation. Every single company is buying something from another company to sell their product. If they could do this to their buyers, then their suppliers could do it to them. It would probably end up cancelling any gains you’d get.
I’m guessing this was a move their executives made without any consultation with legal, because it’s the kind of idiotic move only they could think of.
I mean you’d think so, but look at how often companies get into lawsuits for clearly illegal shit. Plenty of places will still try to enforce arbitration/NDA clauses that have no actual legal basis or consequence.
It blows my mind how critical everyone was of Cyberpunk, despite it running fairly well on PC especially a few weeks after release, and how much of a pass everyone gives Starfield.
It’s disappointing that AAA studios don’t recognize this. I don’t want a bloated game that takes 300 hours to experience most of it. I don’t want a giant map. I want a good game. I want a small map filled with life, not a large one with soulless procedurally generated dungeons.
There was plenty of distaste for Elden Ring when it came out – devs at Ubisoft I believe ridiculed how the UI wasn’t informative and such.
I think AAA studios are terrified because they’re seeing just how much consumers value quality over quantity and MTX bullshit. Games that should be in self contained bubbles are now hitting mainstream and becoming absurdly popular.