Unity May Never Win Back the Developers It Lost in Its Fee Debacle::Even though the company behind the wildly popular game engine walked back its controversial new fee policy, the damage is done.
If I was a developer, I wouldn’t give them a second chance at this point.
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Unity engaged not only in a massive attepted money grab but then tried to back it with some bad-faith action like quietly deleting user protections from its TOS.
We have seen the true face of the Unity company and it wants to prey on its clients. Also the timing (during an ongoing trend of enshittification) reminds us publicly-owned companies are not our friends. In fact, the are adversarial to their own employees and customers.
The company needs to show an immense amount of contrition (say firing its top officers) or it needs to wither to a quarter of its current value.
you mean all the people who said they weren’t coming back even after the obvious rollback of the policy aren’t coming back? 😱
breaking news: betrayed devs arent coming back
GOOD
For the best. Companies need to learn to tread carefully when dealing with customers, they can’t be allowed to get off lightly for trying anti-consumer practices like this.
Actually the reason this didn’t work out is because they are in the B2B, not business to consumer business.
Turns out other businesses aren’t fond of being asked to pay a dollar to reload, who knew?
They keep walking back further and their stock prices just keep plummeting. I would like to say I hope the CEO, who is the former CEO of EA, for any who aren’t aware, gets fired for this. But we all know that no matter how hard he messes up, some other business will pay him millions in incentives to pick him up.
It’s not like getting fired as a CEO is a negative. They leave with a golden parachute and get hired elsewhere
In another thread someone said the board is made up of assholes, so don’t get your hopes up for any positive changes…
I tried to do some googling, but googling and sourcing out the history of each board member is cumbersome. So instead I will just post this snippet from a reddit post by u/Xijit
I apologize in advance for the length.
"Yes, John is undoubtedly an asshole, since they don’t let you be a CEO unless you are one. But he has also been the CEO of Unity since 2014 and oversaw its progress from “that engine that lets you port your game to anything” to “the platform that every single mobile game is made on and the backbone of the inde developer market.” The main reason why so many of you are only hearing about him being the CEO now, is because he HAD (past tense) been doing a relatively good job.
What changed … In 2020 Unity went public, and a bunch of shit heads bought their way onto Unity’s board of directors. Ultimately the CEO works for the Board, so when these new bosses tell him to do something self destructive, he does it.
Here are the names you should be talking about instead of John:
Tomer Bar Zeev
Roelof Botha
Egon Durban.
(Edit: I forgot to say that they are Board members)
Remember IronSource, that dog shit monetization company that absolutely everyone in the industry dumped, and was circling the drain until Unity bought them for $4.4 billion? Tomer Bar Zeev is the founder of IronSource, and following the merger he became Unity’s 3rd president (along with John and Marc) … yes, this is the asshole who sold a package of malware under the guise of monetization software & ultimately is the root cause of this install tax. Given IronSource’s history of malware, I feel that it is safe to say that the Unity runtime will likely start getting flagged by antivirus programs and casually request admin rights during installation.
How Unity got infected with IronSource, is that Sequoia Capitol and Silver lake pledged to invest $1 billion into Unity if the deal went through. Frankly, the math doesn’t add up for Unity to trade $4.4 billion to buy a plague blanket of a company, only to receive $1 billion in return. Especially when a rival mobile monetization company offered to pay Unity $17 billion if they called off the IronSource deal & merge with them instead. Unless that $1b was for the sake of C-suite bonuses, in which case all of this makes perfect sense.
But who the Hell is Roelof Botha & Egon Durban, and why are they important names? Roelof is a Director of Sequoia, Egon is the founder of Silver Lake, and both of them have ties back to Elon Musk … which is pretty obvious for how fast Unity has caught on fire.
If Egon’s name is familiar, it is because he was on Twitter’s Board and was the one who pushed to have them accept the deal, & then got thrown off the board when they realised that he was just spying for Elon during the resulting lawsuit. He also was the one who helped Elon with his fake " Taking Tesla private" scam.
Roelof was the CFO of PayPal before it got acquired and has a long history of being involved with mergers that result in a lot of money for some, but absolute shit deals for end users and employees.
Looping back to the top … I think John is done with Unity, but not in the “yay, us consumers have protested hard enough to get him fired” kind of way the internet wants. I think he was done in 2020 when he went from being the guy actually running the company, to the guy who answers to a room full of investment fuck heads (of the 13 board members, 11 are investment managers), and then gets to take the blame for their shit decisions. I feel like the reason why he sold his stock is because he knew this was a shit idea that was going to tank the company, but these assholes wouldn’t listen. So he cashed out his stock and will be announcing his retirement at the start of Q4.
Don’t be shocked when Tomer Bar Zeev gets named as his replacement."
(P.S does anyone know how to quote inline and keep the paragraph spacing?)
The quoting in Lemmy is block quotes, so it appears you’d have to quote each paragraph individually. Definitely inconvenient, I wonder if there’s a way they could rework the system.
This is completely unsurprising. Often when a company goes to shit it’s the board of directors, ultimately, they control the CEO and the rest of the executive team at a company. I feel horribly for the indie devs that were using Unity, though there’s always a chance for this to happen to proprietary software it still sucks when it does happen.
The thing is, they don’t even have to lose all their developers. They just have to lose enough so that introductory gamedev classes start being taught in Godot, indie devs start seeing Godot as a viable option and employers start posting listings looking for Godot experience. Unity was the default engine for lower-budget games for years, and now that’s gone.
Should I start learning Godot? I’m not a game dev, but I know C/Cpp and game dev has been interesting to me.
If you know C++ already, Unreal is a much more natural starting point than either Unity or Godot.
Unreal is what gets used in many AAA shops - it’s not a monopoly by any means but it is the most common off-the-shelf engine in the industry. Unity’s main edge is that it’s easy to learn but if you are comfortable in C++ then there’s no real benefit to Unity.
Godot uses GDScript, which is a custom scripting language that’s meant to be easy to learn. It’s FOSS so you don’t need to worry about being screwed over - but it’s a lot less mature than something like Unreal which can ship on everything you can think of.
But my advice is to make small things. Don’t hyperfocus on a dream game. Just make things that will take a weekend (maybe a week at most). Then move on to something else.
When I was getting into game dev, I made a couple simple projects then jumped into my dream game. I spent so long making that one game that I never finished.
When I got hired in the industry, they cared more about what I released than what my education or job experience was. Because that one big game was never finished, I wound up with my smaller “just getting started” games on my resume; stuff I had made but wasn’t proud of. But those games were at least finished and available to the public… and they were what got me hired, not my magnum opus overscoped unfinished indie game I never completed.
Thanks! My C/Cpp knowledge is from embedded programming, arduino and now moving to just Cpp coding. I keep hearing people say python is easier or such thing is simpler but I just can’t see c/Cpp as unapproachable. Plus at least with embedded python gets translated to c for the core to run. Right now I’m playing with LVGL for embedded screen interfaces. It’s fun. I’ll dig into unreal when I get a moment of boredom/hyperfocus.
Nobody can tell you in advance how far your interest in game dev will take you. Only one way to find out: start small (some tutorials, build some crappy first) and see if your interest sticks around as you up the challange.
Maybe game dev in Godot will end up being a significant chapter in your life, maybe it will just be a small sidequest. But once you’ve given it an honest try, no matter the outcome, you at least will know if it’s something for you or not. That in itself is already worth something.
And who knows: maybe Godot is just your entry gateway to something else you discover along the way, which you wouldn’t have discovered if you hadn’t taken on the challange in the first place.
I side quested JS/React and went back to embedded. But the side quest definitely allowed me to understand more things and the variations in coding languages.
If you want to use C/C++ you may be more interested in O3DE, although it’s a AAA specialized game engine that’s not very user friendly. If you’re new to game dev in general, then Godot is definitely the easiest to get started with, but you should use GDScript and not C/C++.
EDIT: or just make your own little game engine with OpenGL or Vulkan, That’s probably the most effective way to learn nearly everything…
There is C# support in Godot. I’m not sure how many tutorials have been made with it in particular, but I think there’s plenty. Plus their docs go over the API differences so shouldn’t be hard to use in any case
I hope to see a lot of the features added to Godot that Unity refugees have been requesting and working on (because, yknow, open-source) and would expect to see at least 25% Godot 25% Unity 50% Unreal in the job market. Although honestly it is more likely that Unreal takes up a larger share of the market going forward, whereas in the past it has been like 60% Unity positions and 40% Unreal positions (due to Unity use on smaller projects, indie games, and use in the VR training industry).
Waiting for the ability to target mobile in c# and for embedding to work… should see that in the next year I think with the renewed focus on it… we don’t use many unity features but those two are kinda showstoppers right now.
2D projects also used Unity at a very high rate. Unreal has never really been considered suitable for 2D work. I’m not sure if Godot is.
For general 2d development, Godot is much better than unity already. It doesn’t have everything that unity does but what it has is much more efficient and easy to understand.
Though the opposite is true for 3d.
In short: Unity is a 3d tool where you can pretend one of the dimensions doesn’t exist to make 2d games (but it’s still running a 3d environment behind the curtains, you’re just not seeing one of them), while godot is a 2d tool that gives you an optional third dimension for some stuff.
Wrong.
Godot has fully independent 2D and 3D engines. Each one has it’s own backend, that is specialized for that purpose.
Yes, but the general feel with the 3d stuff in Godot is that it’s just an added dimension on top of things that were thought for 2d. In unity everything feels like it was thought for 3d. It’s a bit hard to explain.
Godot has been used mainly for 2D as it didn’t support 3D until fairly recently.
Godot actually has supported 3D since at least 2.1 when I started using it in 2016.
But really sucked for a long time. It’s pretty good now.
one of the best things out of all this is how many new people are now making youtube tutorials on Godot. The huge amount of new monthly donations to the Godot Foundation is also great
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes shrugs
It’s the trust thermocline again. When will companies learn to do more ground level research before pulling bullshit like this?
You know, companies could avoid situations like this if they just engaged directly with their fanbases more, proposing ideas and collecting feedback. This way, even if they decide to do the unpopular thing anyway because they have to for financial reasons or something, at least they’re not springing a sudden surprise on their fans.
People really don’t like negative surprises. They can usually handle plain old negative news though, especially if they got time to prepare for the idea first.
I think they sometimes try to use focus groups to collect feedback, but members of a focus group may exhibit unique behavior simply because they’re in a focus group. It’s not an actual representative sample of the public.
I’m sure even floating the idea would have been bad. One of the biggest problems with the unity changes was that they were retroactive. That they can even change the fee structure so dramatically after you’ve already built and shipped your game should give anyone using them pause. I don’t think people really considered that as a possibility before.
I feel like it’s pretty obvious this was a greedy and terrible idea. The fact they proposed this at all alone is enough to never trust them again. It’s not that they didn’t know. They knew. No one would be okay with this cash grab and they know it. They just didn’t realize HOW big the pushback was going to be but they DID know what they were doing was wrong.
This is probably going to improve, not decrease, their profitability. They wouldn’t have been so blase about burning all those bridges otherwise.
Yeah, they make revenue from game devs, but there’s costs there too. If the costs are too high compared to their industrial contracts, then the smartest move is to kick all their game dev customers out. While preserving as much general public goodwill as possible.
So, how else could they escape the game engine business? The method they chose would be more effective than any other I can think of. It preserves a trickle of game dev revenue and makes them look silly instead of backstabbing. When a proper backstab was actually the desired result, but too bold to actually say they wanted.
My hypothesis anyway.
That’s the problem - based on the CEO selling almost all his stock over time and rumors attributed to employees, they knew.
A company turning a consistent modest profit is good for many people, but makes no one rich. It’s a good investment and provides for many people, but is meaningless if you’re already rich.
A company exploding to 100x its size makes a bunch of people very rich and a lot of people more wealthy, but is very rare in this age where the world is already as industrialized as anyone wants it to be. There’s nowhere else to expand, no underdeveloped countries with resources to buy for pennies on the dollar
A company imploding can make a few people rich… but it’s a big guaranteed payout if you see it coming.
That’s the stage of capitalism we’ve been at for a while - cannibalization.
You know, companies could avoid situations like this if they just engaged directly with their fanbases more, proposing ideas and collecting feedback.
Good news: Apparently Unity did engage with its developers behind closed door for a whole year, they told them this was a bad idea; internally the execs were told this was a bad idea, and here we are.
I completely agree, old school RuneScape does this very well and I wish more companies tried to engage their users as much as those devs do
Jagex has supposedly been barely successful forever tho, unity takes in billions by being shitters. In the end that’s all some companies care about
Unity hasn’t been profitable ever. Jagex is marginally profitable.
That’s not true, Unity was profitable FY2022 (for the first time ever as a public company, not necessarily ever in their history): https://investors.unity.com/news/news-details/2023/Unity-Announces-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2022-Financial-Results/default.aspx
You know, companies could avoid situations like this if they just engaged directly with their fanbases more . . .
Not even their fanbase in this scenario, but the majority of their paying business customers. Pissing off your fanbase/hobbyists is one thing, but completely alienating your biggest profit generating consumers is just beyond incompetent.
Minor quibble that game devs are actually a smaller fraction of their overall revenues, as their tech has uses far beyond games. They have industrial product lines too.
Kinda like how Amazon’s main thing isn’t selling shippable products anymore, it’s cloud computing and digital infrastructure. Or was last I checked anyway, it might’ve changed again.
You’re otherwise totally right though.
Ahh, I always forget that Unity has industrial product services/solutions, that makes sense. Thanks for clarifying that!
And yes, AWS is Amazon’s bread and butter (unfortunately). I can only hope that one day they’re completely dethroned, but I doubt anyone could ever compete with them and Microsoft at this point (and even if a startup managed to make a vastly superior product, either of those two would just buy them out anyway). I think even Google’s cloud service is only a fraction of what AWS and Azure pull in, I could be wrong though.
Oh we’re well beyond “Find Out.” We’re at Uniexit
Once they cheat on you, you can’t trust them again.
Unity doesn’t deserve them back.
This shouldn’t be news. It should be expected that when a company does something that shows it doesn’t have its customers’ best interests in mind, it’s immediately and wholly abandoned. That is the only reaction that gives consumers a level playing field with corporations. If we show them we can forgive them, they’ll purposefully use the forgiving nature against us.
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They shouldn’t. They’re not apologizing for what they’re doing, but are behaving like politicians, changing the rhetoric to try to get people to like what they’re going to do anyway.
Are we sure it’s not the politicians behaving like they’re running a business? 😅
(It’s probably both groups behaving like they’re trying to manipulate a large populace to meet their goals, no big conspiracy, just coincidentally they’re both trying to accomplish the same thing.)
Are there even distinct groups we’re talking about anymore?
insert “They’re the same picture” image here
Another fun thing to deal with thanks to Reagan’s worthless ass. The only good thing to come from that pile of shits presidency was his dementia.
Reagan should certainly be known as one of the worst people to occupy the Presidency, but I think for a bigger perspective on how we got to this place, the 1886 SCOTUS decision to recognize corporations as people is a good start.
