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"More importantly, we've seen how easily and flippantly an executive-led business decision can risk bankrupting the studios we've worked so hard to build, threa

• miohtama 3y ago
  This is why it is good to build on the top of open source solutions
  • solardev 3y ago
    Does that really help? Even when open-source, it's only a matter of time before an Oracle or Google or Microsoft or Meta takes it over (if they didn't develop it to begin with). I wonder if it's less about the source code here but about the people involved, and how to prevent a consolidation of capital and power in the hands of greedy financiers. Maybe developing the projects as nonprofits (like Blender or Mozilla), or at least employee co-ownership rather than VC money or institutional funders? If only the laid off FAANGers could pool their fat checks and start up something employee-driven and not subject to outside influences, in the style of Valve or similar. And preferably with legal protections against "selling out".
    • nottorp 3y ago
      > Even when open-source, it's only a matter of time before an Oracle or Google or Microsoft or Meta takes it over Except you can fork the last open source version and continue as before. See ... mariadb?
      • linkdd 3y ago
        MariaDB, OpenTofu, etc... Those are the exceptions. Forking is easy. Maintaining a fork, keeping the quality and innovation alive, and the community involved is hard. There are many more failed forks than successful forks. So saying "you can fork" is utopist at best. Sure you can, but you'll probably be the only one maintaining it and it will slowly rot as there won't be a community to keep it bug-free and compatible with new hardware/standards.
        • nottorp 3y ago
          However that doesn't matter when you have an existing game title already in the market. You just maintain your title, which you need to do anyway.
        • amrocha 3y ago
          The idea is that the community decides on a fork and maintainers move over. Are those really the exception? Do we have examples of large projects that made a monetization TOS change and didn't immediately get forked? The only one I can think of is Docker maybe?
          • nani8ot 3y ago
            Audacity made some bad decisions but the forks never got anywhere. That said, this particular issue was blown out of proportion, so the forks going nowhere isn't an issue.
        • xmprt 3y ago
          I think it's a self regulating system. If the product was so important and so many people relied on it (eg. Unity) where a cash grab by the Unity development team results in the entire community considering switching to a completely different product (eg. Godot), then I'm sure the community would rather fork the existing product and make it better. On the other hand, if the product wasn't that important or the cash grab wasn't that bad, then fewer people will be likely to fork and the current product will continue to be the mainline. Open source gives users more options which is always better.
        • throw0101c 3y ago
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • fooqux 3y ago
      > Does that really help? Even when open-source, it's only a matter of time before an Oracle or Google or Microsoft or Meta takes it over (if they didn't develop it to begin with). Of course it can help. For example, when Oracle bought MySQL, it was forked and we got Maria. When Emby pissed off people, it was forked and we got Jellyfin. There are plenty of other examples. Whether or not you like these products, the point is that open source gives the community the ability to continue development if the original project gets bought and/or otherwise changes its philosophy for the worse.
      • Modified3019 3y ago
        OpenZFS is another great example.
        • wiktor-k 3y ago
          Also OpenTofu (Terraform).
          • deleted 3y ago
            [deleted]
    • JohnFen 3y ago
      > Even when open-source, it's only a matter of time before an Oracle or Google or Microsoft or Meta takes it over (if they didn't develop it to begin with). True, but there's no rule that says you have to update when they do. You can just stick with what you have until/unless you find or create another option.
  • jameshart 3y ago
    Great advice… Unless you’re a game studio who wants to ship on PlayStation and Switch some day. If you want to build on an engine that lets you target proprietary platforms your options are, in practice, limited.
    • amrocha 3y ago
      Are open source tools banned on playstation and switch?
      • cableshaft 3y ago
        Not banned, just that every build platform has to be supported and not every open source project prioritizes each platform. Godot, for example, doesn't support console builds, only working with a third party to facilitate porting to those platforms (that may change in the future now that they're getting a lot more support from the community after all this).
        • amrocha 3y ago
          Gotcha, so it's not that open source isn't possible, the industry just needs to invest in community support for an engine
        • follower 3y ago
          > Godot, for example, doesn't support console builds, only working with a third party to facilitate porting to those platforms For the full nuanced details I've listed the relevant links here: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37649430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37649430
          • amrocha 3y ago
            That's a really useful comment, thank you!
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  • bmitc 3y ago
    Open source solutions are not a magical solution to every problem. Open source solutions are often, if not more so, subject to the whims of just a few people.
  • d3w4s9 3y ago
    Ah, these comments again. Open source is great and I have my self contributed to several open source projects, but it is not the solution to everything. Products like Word/Excel/PowerPoint/etc, Visual Studio, Photoshop, Figma, Windows and Mac all have many open source alternatives, but the fact that these products and companies have been hugely successfully and continue to do so says something -- commercial companies can organize and reward work in a way hardly found in open source projects, and their products often provide added value (more features/specific support for certain workflows/professionally designed UX/product support etc) that can be rare or nonexistent in open source projects. For some thing that is as complicated as a game engine, maybe there is a reason open source solutions are not mainstream yet.
• yoyohello13 3y ago
  "Good will" is an asset just like any other to be spent when the time is right. Sometimes a company will make the wrong bet and accidentally go out of business. Far more often there is a ton of backlash, their reputation goes in the tank, then they spend the next couple years building good will back up until the majority of people forget all about the past transgressions. Meanwhile the unpopular decision makes stacks of cash. Repeat the cycle ad-infinitum. To clarify, I don't endorse this behavior, but unfortunately, it's the modern way of business.
  • Aditya_Garg 3y ago
    Besides Reddit, do you have other examples ?
    • wetpaws 3y ago
      [dead]
    • red_hare 3y ago
      Etsy. Ever since the 2017 activist investor event, it feels like they've been trading good will with sellers for profits.
      • transcriptase 3y ago
        I used to be able to buy amazing handmade items for reasonable prices and reasonable shipping from actual people running small storefronts on Etsy. Now it’s just another e-commerce site that’s been completely and utterly overrun with marked up Aliexpress junk and low quality copies of anything novel that gains the slightest bit of popularity. The few remaining authentic sellers now charge so much it’s laughable unless you’re wealthy enough that cost isn’t a concern.
        • wolverine876 3y ago
          Where do you find authentic sellers?
• duped 3y ago
  Reminds me of something I once heard a VP say at a very old, established company. Something along the lines of, "Our brand is trust. It took 90 years to build it, but it would take just one day to destroy it." The point he was making was that this old, established company's biggest asset was its brand, and its brand identity was just "trust" (they made professional products, and others could undercut them, but pros would always return to buy from them because they knew they would get what they paid for). It's the kind of attitude I think every toolmaker (software or otherwise) should keep in mind. Professionals value trust more than they do dollars in their pocket, and the companies with the best reputation and longevity understand that. But also that company was privately owned by a family, and their name is still over the front door. I think that when the execs answer to people whose name is synonymous with the products and culture of the organization, avoiding short term profit motivated garbage strategy is part of your MO.
  • gameman144 3y ago
    As an example here, my father and grandfather used to swear by Craftsman tools. No matter the context, if there was a Craftsman version, they'd go for it because they implicitly trusted the quality. Then the Craftsman brand downshifted its production quality to compete in price and their reliability fell through the floor. Now my family will skip over Craftsman entirely even if it's competitive in price, since the breach of perceived trust soured them on the brand so completely.
    • taylodl 3y ago
      Lowe's supposedly honors the Craftsman lifetime warranty. I haven't tried it, last time I needed to use the warranty was 30 years ago when in the middle of some car repair job I was doing I took the busted wrench into Sears, still dressed in my grimy clothes I was wearing and covered in grease, I handed them the broken wrench and they simply handed me a new one. No questions asked, no paperwork. They handed me a new one and I walked out the door.
      • berniedurfee 3y ago
        Had the same experience many years ago. I have a bunch of old Craftsman tools that are superb quality and will last decades more. Sad to see them as an empty house brand now. Just like GE appliances, all that’s left is a sticker.
• shmatt 3y ago
  I don't know how much people know or have heard about ironSource. It's kind of an open secret in Israel on how they built a company to profit by building what is essentially malware (installers disguised as OEM while they're really adding extra trackers to your computer). They always paid 25% more than most of the other tech companies, but still had issues recruiting because it takes a special kind of person to be willing to do these kinds of things I didn't really understand the merger when it happened, but I have no doubt all these new policies are a result of the ironSource people integrating into Unity
  • eevo 3y ago
    Rumor has it that an IronSource guy was installed on the board and pushed very hard for this (and the anticompetitive stance with AppLovin)
    • deciplex 3y ago
      That's not even a rumor: he is on the board, and he did push for this.
  • ketzo 3y ago
    The merger makes a ton of sense — Unity was super late to the game building their own Demand-Side Platform for ads, and that’s how you make money in mobile games now, so they had to buy their way out of the problem. I mean, it’s horrible for consumers/gamers/developers, obviously, but from a business perspective it was the correct move.
    • betamist 3y ago
      Well, clearly not, if the community is going to have a fallout with the product and never trust it again. You can have the most maggotty type of an ad company, if you don’t have shelf space to show ads you won’t be making money.
    • raxxorraxor 3y ago
      I doubt this was a sensible business perspective at all. They would have different audiences to consider and they didn't. This fallout is pretty much the invoice for that strategy. It may come up as one of the worst decision in the modern industry. Granted, time will tell and nothing is certain.
• dickersnoodle 3y ago
  u/spez from Reddit would like a word...
• musicale 3y ago
  > Have never seen a company so quickly and completely just throw away all of their public good will. Over the past year Docker and D&D/Wizards of the Coast come to mind...
  • globalnode 3y ago
    I'm still upset at Sony for cancelling Star Wars Galaxies. I avoid Sony products now. I know its immature of me and the product most likely would have been eclipsed by other mmo tech that was coming out but thats the emotional response.
    • ahonhn 3y ago
      I've been avoiding Sony products almost 20 years now because they thought it was a cool idea to put autorunning rootkits on audio CDs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
  • all2 3y ago
    What happened with Docker? (WotC have been killing goodwill for years at this point, but I guess the MtG folks have a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome.)
    • musicale 3y ago
      "Docker is sunsetting Free Team organizations" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35154025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35154025
      • flurdy 3y ago
        More likely the Docker Hub rate limit https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24262757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24262757 and the following exodus and confusion
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• Mystery-Machine 3y ago
  Have you ever heard of Twitter and Reddit?
  • raincole 3y ago
    Since when Twitter has "good will"? I'm sure even before Musk, most people considered Twitter the equivalent of soap opera. It was bad. It was tasteless. It was a time waster. But people just need to have something to scroll. Unity, on the other hand, was actually loved by some devs. Of course it was buggy from time to time, but it was huge time-saver especially for mobile games.
    • Andrew_nenakhov 3y ago
      In 2010..2012 Twitter was always in the news because of how they screwed the developers again. So no, Musk's policies are nothing new for Twitter.
• willio58 3y ago
  The only thing that could save face in this situation is the immediate removal of the CEO and any leadership that allowed this to happen. Short of that, Unity will always hold this badge of shame in the eyes of developers.
• jsmith45 3y ago
  And the dumb thing is that if they had listened to the engineers who were telling them the customer base was going to freak out at this, the company could have avoided large parts of the drama, since a few of their fixes were not even really a change in plan, so much as better more clear wording. The big drama causes 1. People assuming unity was going to add additional telemetry to track installs. (Reality: Unity seemed to always be planning on using App store numbers and the numbers from any opt-in unity services as the basis of their model). This one was a complete communication failure by unity. 2. Announcing a new payment model never before used by the industry. This alone (without looking at the details) is not a huge deal, but it makes people nervous. 3. This metric is hard to measure, and unity's initial announcement was basically that they would be estimating it in their sole discretion, which makes people uncomfortable. Their fix was to allow self reporting the data, which must be based on something that reliably approximates the revised install count definition. 4. Unclear definition of install was used. What they eventually settled on: once per unique end user per distribution platform (e.g. app store), was pretty much what Unity was going for anyway, but the initial announcement royally messed up here. 5. The metric was abusable, and there was apparently no cap to it. This was honestly one of the biggest issues. This got fixed by adding the 2.5% revenue share cap. 6. Trying to make this apply retroactively to previously published applications. This was the other biggest issue. This was especially bad because only a few years ago the company had another smaller scandal, and promised to allow people to keep using the terms of service of each version as it was when people downloaded it. Indeed, for a while this was explicitly part of the terms, and people who used those versions probably could get a court to side with them. If they had listened to their engineers, I think they could have fixed/avoided 1, 4, and 6. Numbers 3 and 5 may have remained, still causing huge outcry, and eventually getting fixed, but at least if number 6 were addressed before initial announcement, it would not have been a loss-of-trust issue so much as a: you are a moron for proposing this without the needed backstop, and requiring companies to blindly trust your estimations.
  • ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
    And that's why people like Jonathan blow and Casey Muratori have for so many years now warned game devs about this and learn how to make a game engine from scratch. Hopefully some listened.
• intrasight 3y ago
  It's really more nuanced than that - from a business/financial perspective. "goodwill" is a major component of a companies financial accounting. It's an asset and can be invested or squandered like any other asset. A large and well-run public company will have a risk management team evaluate the impact of major decisions on the financial health of the business. Clearly Unity did not do that. They are public, right? Seems to me (IANAL) this is a breach of fiduciary duty that could be actionable.
• ChicagoDave 3y ago
  I got food poisoning from a very well known fast food chain about 25 years ago. I haven’t eaten there since. Unity just gave every one of their developers food poisoning. I suspect similar results.
  • aetherspawn 3y ago
    I’ve been food poisoned from KFC probably 10 times, but I still eat there once or twice a fortnight for the last IDK 20 years. Because they have the cheap crispy chicken.
    • lovich 3y ago
      I guess that’s the opposite problem of having an overly sensitive sense of pattern recognition
      • ChicagoDave 3y ago
        I set em up, you guys knock em down.
    • SecretDracula 3y ago
      KFC really isn't cheap anymore. I went there the other day with some friends and was aghast at the prices. We left and went across the parking lot to the grocery store and got a big platter of fried chicken and a tub of slaw for less than half the price.
      • aetherspawn 3y ago
        In Australia a meal is like $12 (about $8 USD) and we don’t have to tip.
      • webworker 3y ago
        That’s what I’m talking about!
    • webworker 3y ago
• hcks 3y ago
  Yes they threw it all away when they could just have continued subsidising video games and losing millions every year
  • Scramblejams 3y ago
    Were those the only two options available to them?
  • betamist 3y ago
    I know you’re being sarcastic here, but indie game developers really don’t get compensated well enough unless they break very big. Most keep doing it for the passion. To price your product so you make money to “stay afloat” with your tens of thousands engineers working mostly on ad tech or non-core stuff, while your customers are barely scraping is typically very bad strategy yes. You know how you can tell? They’ve lost a ton of business and the brand damage they’ve suffered is beyond that even. Maybe Unity will stick around, but it’ll be the engine those ad filled mobile casino games use, good luck finding developers who’d be happy doing that for the rest of their life.
• yukkuri 3y ago
  Twitter (well X, now) surely has to be in the running as well.
• fzingle 3y ago
  > Have never seen a company so quickly and completely just throw away all of their public good will. This behaviour isn't really all that uncommon. An obvious recent example would be Boeing with the 737 Max. To save a few bucks they've thrown away a quality process that was best-in-class. Only cost a few billion a few years later... Our implementation of capitalism rewards only short-term thinking, that is why this behaviour persists.
• two_in_one 3y ago
  > Have never seen a company so quickly and completely just throw away all of their public good will Ever heard about reddit?
• jodrellblank 3y ago
  > "Have never seen a company so quickly and completely just throw away all of their public good will." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner - head of a chain of jewellery shops described his company's products as 'total crap' and that speech tanked the shares by £500M in 1991 money - around $1.2Bn equivalent today.