Picture taken from their Twitter
With the words of the rust developer: Unity can get fucked
I read rust as the programming language for way too long reading that article, lmao.
Ohhhh me too, right until “Rust 2 won’t be a Unity game”
Same I was way confused. Didn’t know of a game also named Rust
I’m buying rust and a few other games that I am probably not going to have time to play in order to support these companies.
Fuck unity! Unite!
Why stay at all whether they revert it or not? They’re egregiously incompetent and if they’ve done this sort of thing once, they’re going to do it again. Developers should go where their support will help make something better (Godot) and not stick with the crusty old Unity hag that is constantly pawing at their pockets hoping for the jingle of coins.
Because changing the engine in an existing project is a huge pita that requires many, many hours and possibly in some cases a full rewrite.
This also applies to games that would be released in 2023 or 2024.
Nobody should be considering Unity for a new project, but it’s understandable to make either decision for many existing projects.
Ripping out the engine of your game isn’t a trivial thing.
Many many hours is a massive understatement.
Thousands and thousands of hours is more appropriate
I don’t know how you could change the engine without rewriting the entire thing basically from scratch.
It really depends on how modular their codebase is. The Doom 1/2 modern ports they did in 2019 use Unity. But it’s actually still the original Doom underneath and just using Unity for input and output to make porting easier
I agree, although a lot of the work going into a game is the game design, art, and iteration, and not just the programming and rigging. And it may actually be a catalyst to rewrite parts better
Strongly disagree. While a lot of work does go on to art assets which should be simpler to migrate, the code is absolutely what makes the game. There are tons of very successful games with low quality or stock assets, there are very few popular games with broken code.
Even then, it’s still a lot of effort to check every asset you’re using to ensure they work as expected in your new engine.
You’re completely right
I agree for a specific scenario: if you don’t use many unity specific packages or assets. Then, perhaps you are correct, still I don’t blame anyone staying even in that case, as it is still daunting to take on such a task.
In this case it sounds like they were talking about their next game rather than a current project.
“has been hard at work these past 2+ years”
That doesn’t sound like a current project to you?
I didn’t click through and was going based on the headline. My mistake.
Their next game would be a current project.
Yeah, you’re right. I was thinking of it in terms of current project -> next project, but I see that’s not what was meant.
- It’s a significant effort to change engines
- Even though it’s just one dev, they’re giving Unity a reason to revert. If you just say “Yo, I’m OUT!” then they’ve already lost you and they have no reason to revert on your behalf.
If Developers were in a relationship with Unity, it’d be the sort where Unity always comes home drunk and is verbally abusive, but they stick around with the belief that Unity will change.
Cause it’s probably not worth it for them to migrate and learn/train on a new engine unless Unity goes forward with their plans.
But you’re right, this completely destroyed Unity’s reputation. Even if they revert, who’s to say they won’t try something like this in the future.
This is the classic tactic of doing something just to see if people will accept it. Even if they backtrack, they absolutely WILL do shit like this again. It’s just like EA and micro transactions
We have never made a public statement before now. That is how badly you fucked up.
Lmao shots fired. Unity’s C-suite made their own bed… and the bed is made out of anti-personnel mines. I genuinely hope this picks up steam.
Unity showed their hand when they made the announcement. I had never thought to look up who owned them before. Now that I am aware that they’re majority-owned by VC and PE firms, it’s pretty clear to me that this category of monetization-oriented behavior is here to stay, because that’s how VC and PE operate. Unless and until they somehow get a new owner, it’s my sincere opinion that Unity should absolutely not be seriously considered as a game engine for any new game project.
LOL this is how capitalism operates.
This. We’re only just now feeling the sting more keenly in a number of ways because companies are desperate to stay the course with increased profits year over year despite there being a massive global economic slump.
The 2010’s were full of venture capital pumping money into companies, and when we asked, “How is this business profitable,” they’d respond “Just trust us, bro.” Well, now the well has dried up, the venture capitalists are here to collect, and we all get to be surprisedpikachuface.jpg watching this trainwreck unfold in slow motion.
I love that last line.
“We have never made a public statement before. This is how badly you fucked up.”
It must have felt good to say but I suspect they’d have better chance of seeing positive results if they avoided confronting the Unity team’s egos.
Yeah fuck Unity, I’d love to see devs abandon them altogether whether they revert the changes or not.
The Unity to Godot Importer is looking awfully tempting!
Is it just me or are all big companies killing themself right now?
Yeah, inflation rate is high, so central banks are trying to counteract that by basically slowing down the economy, so that our normally scheduled inflation countermeasures kick in appropriately. Well, and the usual way to slow down the economy is to make it more costly to loan money, i.e. increase interest rates. Which means investors can’t just pump money into any company anymore, they want that money to actually pay out to cover those interest rates. And that means companies need to actually be profitable to get money to finance their operation.
So does that mean all these businesses were always doomed to fail anyways, just living on borrowed money/time, and now the bill comes due, they’re all fucked?
Simplified: If you can borrow 1 Million USD for 0% apr and earn 1000 USD with that, you have 1000 USD in profits. Now change the apr to 5% and you are 49,000 USD in the red.
Kind of. In the past investors were willing to be more patient, and company values were artificially high, because they were based on potential profits rather than actual profits. That’s shifting a bit as interest rates go up.
A lot of the wealth created by venture capital and the service economy were only ever possible with the help of what is essentially free money. With the increase in interest rates and the collapse of a major venture capital bank, those corporations dependent on low interest payments are going to collapse as well.
As interest rates climb and venture capital dries up, the companies who were just scraping by, or dependent on debt loading during development have had their runway cut short.
We are getting to the point where companies aren’t going to be utilize fronting a huge amount of debt as a strategy for long term growth.
Unity looks to be one of the companies who wanted to utilize the slow boil tactic perfected by the likes of Google or Amazon. Where they front the cost of tons of free and convenient services, hoping that companies become dependent on them, slowly creating fees over time until they become profitable.
If I were a guessing guy, they’ve hit the end of their run way, and have failed to secure a new injection of capital sufficient enough to make the payments on their loans. Likely their options have come to find a way to make your payments, or you’ll be giving your entire operation to a bank.
Eh. Most of these companies were profitable. Just not seeing the exponential growth that the stock market dictates when interest rates are high. Unity, not so much, but its revenue was always fine, its just a really poorly run company. Who knows where they piss the kind of money they are pulling in to.
Welcome to capitalism.
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I’d guess that companies that failed to turn profit when money was cheap are most likely doomed. However not all of the hype companies are like that. Some could be barely profitable, but shareholder pressure might push them to heavier monetization practices.
This would make sense if Unity increased their fees, but it doesn’t make sense to invent a new revenue stream based on a metric you can’t even accurately measure. That’s profit-seeking.
I’m guessing it’s their last ditch effort to remain in good solvency. A board member making trades before a big change is almost always a sign of the rats abandoning the ship.
Why can’t they remain solvent by adjusting their fee schedule though? It’s the same boilerplate terms other engines seem to make ends meet with. There are many different ways to correct course in the scenario presented, but the action taken doesn’t suggest that’s the scenario they’re in. Corporate profit-seeking is the primary driver of the inflation in the global economy - I think the above commenter has put the cart before the horse.
Why can’t they remain solvent by adjusting their fee schedule though?
Likely they’ve been remaining solvent through private equity, which has probably dried up. Their fees were probably just enough to entice further investment, but most of these companies operate on paying loans with new loans until they can become profitable in the long term.
Usually when a price hike that doesn’t make sense happens, it’s because they’ve failed to get a new injection of capital to remain in solvency. So they have to speed up the fee schedule to make their payments to the investors.
Corporate profit-seeking is the primary driver of the inflation in the global economy - I think the above commenter has put the cart before the horse.
It’s a public IPO, they don’t have to be profitable, they just have to appear as if they will be profitable to increase share price. This kind of hike is not something that a public IPO would do as it will assuredly drop stock price, which is illegal unless there is no alternative.
Without providing any basis for their charges, and without a way for devs to independently validate them, I can’t see how the charges could even be considered valid legally, let alone pull them out of insolvency. A dev fee per fingerprinted installation doesn’t have any precedent in the SaaS space to my knowledge. I don’t think it would be illegal for an IPO to do this if it was truly meant to increase longterm profitability - e.g. price speculation that’s happened today could similarly happen for any reason at any time on any stock. But the point is it won’t work without a monopoly they don’t have - they’ll have to go back on it (at least with regard to games already released), or end up in costly litigation
Without providing any basis for their charges, and without a way for devs to independently validate them, I can’t see how the charges could even be considered valid legally
Ehhh, it very well might not be. But service providers have an awful lot of control of their platforms and who and how they allow access to it, and for how much. A lot of the interpretations in IP courts when it comes to the digital service seem to be about 5 years behind the actual industry. Add on the fact that a lot of the people running the IP courts barely know how to operate a computer, let alone the ins and outs of digital media and we usually get an environment that’s skewed towards the industry.
A dev fee per fingerprinted installation doesn’t have any precedent in the SaaS space to my knowledge.
I think it would be interpreted pretty close to what reddit did with their API access. Technically it’s just a different type of service fee, and it’s backed by a pretty simple logic of offsetting the cost of the involved traffic.
I don’t think it would be illegal for an IPO to do this if it was truly meant to increase longterm profitability - e.g. price speculation that’s happened today could similarly happen for any reason at any time on any stock.
The main sticking point would be that you would have to prove that there is a logical path to long-term profitability that surpasses or offsets the resulting devaluation of pursuing a completely different profit model.
I think it really depends on how big the devaluation will be at the end of everything, and if they loose large clients specify their reasons for leaving.
It’s all pretty complicated, but Im still guessing theyre having solvency issues, just by looking at their IPO price since the last quarter of 2021 they’ve lost about 50% of their value without any real signs of recovery.
And it’s most costly to increase interest rates not because those directly affect the investors, but because those interest rates affect the borrowers since the borrowers will need to make more and more money to be able to pay back the initial injection + interest.
If borrowers don’t think they can pay back, then they probably won’t borrow in the first place. If they do borrow but don’t make enough to pay back those loans + interest, then the investor loses out.
And if borrowers don’t borrow in the first place, then investors sit on their money when they could theoretically inject it into other businesses so they can earn on what they own, and not just let their assets stagnate (or decay). To investors, this might also be perceived as a loss.
Do I have that right?
In principle, yes, although two things to note:
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Borrowing isn’t always the active part. When a company is listed on the Stock Exchange, then investors play the active role by buying or selling their stock.
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Most investors don’t just have tons of money laying around. They have property, which they can list as security when borrowing money from banks. And then they lend that borrowed money to companies seeking(/allowing) investment. That means:
a) With high interest rates, investors do have a need for their lent money to pay out, too. As do the banks, because they borrowed it from the central bank.
b) Ultimately, lots of money will be given back to the central bank. The money is effectively removed from the economy then. If you’ve ever heard that inflation comes from too much money being in circulation, that’s how that ties back in.
I’m no expert either, though. I’m just summarizing what makes sense to me and what I’ve learnt from making this post a few weeks ago: https://feddit.de/post/2514573
Oh I see, so it’s like a merry-go-round, and everyone wants to have their money returned with more than they borrowed so that not only can they have some left over for themselves, but to also pay back those they themselves borrowed money from in order to lend in the first place. Recursive lending/borrowing up until the central banks, like you said.
Risky stuff. If any single entity along that lending/borrowing chain/network flops, it can send shockwaves to everyone else, all the way back to the central bank.
Thanks for the 2 cents.
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I’ve said this for about a decade now: I firmly believe this world we live in now is the inevitable, unavoidable result of having every company run by people with business degrees and no passion for the businesses they run. When your entire education was focused on how to extract one more penny from customers and how to psychologically make addicts out of everyone, this is what we end up with. I fucking hate it. Everything is enshitified and it sucks.
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Agreed, VC have poured free money into excellent, but unsustainable businesses trying to chase ‘growth’ long enough that they can sell out just before everyone realizes that it won’t make money. It’s just a scam of rich people preying on other rich people.
Instead of trying to build a self sustaining company to begin with (which requires hard work to balance revenue against customer needs and desires) they build ‘free’ products that people love, but can’t make money, only to switch the company to crappy products that people hate, but now are trapped into using.
Our entire digital economy is built on these bait and switch companies and it sucks
We just live in a dystopia. The leadership will milk you dry, for pennies, for short term profits. When you’re this greedy, you can’t see more than a day into the future. It’s just another reminder than corporations aren’t your friends
I think I disagree a bit. It is the owners of the companies that have no passion for what they do. They just want that particular position in their portfolio to appreciate or spit out dividends.
Then they put the MBAs in charge to get the most efficient use of capital.
Sort of but not exactly, the recent shift is because money has gotten expensive and now investors are wanting to take a profit rather than tossing money around hoping to get lucky. So now these business types are scrambling to do anything that makes the business profitable when their entire business plan was unsustainable without the constant influx of money keeping them afloat under the guise of “growth”.
result of having every company run by people with business degrees and no passion for the businesses they run
You’d think that even soulless business ghouls would’ve learned somewhere along the way to put a price tag on things like long-term customer loyalty and the soft power of your brand. So either they’re too dumb to take all the variables into account or they’re looking only at short term gains.
Short term gains, every time. These people will take a dollar today over ten tomorrow every chance because they have tunnel vision and only focus on immediate profits happening RIGHT NOW. Ironically the people most likely to drone on about investments are the least likely to really understand their functionality and what investing time or money into something is supposed to mean and accomplish. Most companies these days feel like their just trying to gobble up enough cash to survive their impending failure, it feels so bleak.
I disagree. This is all the system working as expected. There is no such thing as infinite growth and yet we are conditioned to always need it or else it’s a failure.
We are on an ever accelerated race to the bottom.
The definition of success is woefully broken.
The system may be failing, but “infinite growth” is the natural result of inflation which is intentionally targeted to a positive number.
If you think your salary should keep up with inflation, then you too need infinite growth.
I feel like we’re saying the same thing.
Same thing different rhyming pattern ya.
I feel like this trend was outlined in economic theories over 100 years ago.
Corporate suicide is so hot right now, all the cool companies are doing it. Are you really even trying if you can’t feel the pain of the bullet in your foot?
I like to call it the “2023 Userbase Alienation Olympics”
The poor guys just want to fulfil the infinite company growth expectations of their stakeholders.
Eat the rich. ALIVE.
Publicly traded companies*
Private ones dont always have CEOs chasing every penny looking for only short term gains.
Depends on if they still have private investors propping them up.
If they’ve not paid back their loans to the private investors yet, said investors are looking for their loans to be paid back and then some.
“activist investors” of the worst kind has forgotten what makes the companies valuable and want quick money
Fuck yeah devs! Get em!
Slay the Spire is currently -66% on steam… just saying
OMG that last bolded line made me legit LOL. Gotta love it!
This is what we get with propietary software. We can’t go to another entity or create one to develop the engine for us moving forward. We can’t take the current state of the engine and just patch it to keep existing games alive.
If you depend on some work and that work is being done by software only some other company control, this company is really in the control of that work.
They should honestly just move their engine anyway. Unity has played their hand, and showed they are willing to make changes to their pricing retroactively.
Get fucked, you could have use godot to develop your game or any other free engine
Unity: Successfully implemented a product strategy that floods the market with game developers that know how to use its product.
You, an insufferable prick: “Why would they use a product they could find ready-trained developers for when they could use a niche product no one has any skills in??!?”
Get fucked, you could have use critical thinking to develop your opinion or not been a prick
Godot has just recently began to gain steam. I don’t think it was a viable option when StS was in development.
Unfortunately, it still isn’t for console development.
On their website it says it is via third party publishers.
Well that’s… a take.
They are technically correct in that it’s the developers fault that they tied themselves to a proprietary game engine.
In the other hand Godot was nowhere near mature when the slay the spire devs most likely started development. They would be dumb if they used unity for their next game 🤷
2014: “You guys should be careful building your industry around proprietary tools, you really should think about open source-” “Blah blah blah stop your moralizing, open source software isn’t 100% ready to go right now so we absolutely can’t use it, instead we’re just going to pay money for this turnkey solution.”
2023: “Help! The proprietary turnkey solution we’ve been paying for this whole time is enshitifying! Subscription models, mandatory cloud services, more and steeper fees!” “Open source tools are still a thing, you know.” “Yeah but we’ve spent a decade telling an entire generation of talent to learn the proprietary stuff so it’s hard to migrate, and we didn’t contribute any code or money to FOSS projects this whole time so it still isn’t up to snuff.”
Well I guess you can slide over to Unreal and kick that can down the road a bit waiting for Epic Games to enshitify their product as well, you can use and contribute to Godot, you can develop your own in-house engine, or you can keep taking it up the ass from Unity.
Just let me ask this: If even a few smaller games, something like Unrailed or Papers Please, used Godot and contributed what they paid to Unity to the Godot team…where would the engine be today?
It’s a business decision they made to go with Unity, there are risks that came along with it and they are dealing with it.
I’m sure FOSS options were considered at one point but it’s not really surprising that game devs are generally in the business of making games, and not in the business of spending money and resources to bootstrap FOSS tools or to please the community.
I think many would agree that it’d be great for FOSS engines to get more attention and contributions, but this is the most asinine way to get that message across
the “just don’t do it” argument ignores the problem. it’s like replying “just don’t buy Apple products” to people complaining about right to repair. the key part is that regular people won’t know beforehand until they need to notice. by that point, it’s profitable enough to show other companies like Samsung and Motorolla that restrictions are profitable, so jumping around brands will also never work when the intention is to have your phone for a long time.
back in the context of game dev, add that to the part where not only people don’t anticipate the retroactive changes of a license they have to rely on when choosing an engine, but there’s the added weight of having to learn an entirely new library and oftentimes even an entire new programming language, so you have to commit to it if you want to make a commercial product or else you risk losing literal years of development just from rewriting the same thing over and over.
not to say that there’s a reason why a lot of people chose Unity. Godot may be in development since 2014 but they are still relatively new in popularity. not only they have less total instructions resources from the community due to it obviously being smaller than Unity’s, but people also look for already known games as one of the first factors when choosing something, which is something Godot is still catching up on. knowing legal jargon to even comprehend the difference between free and proprietary is the least of their worries when someone wants to jump into game development and build stuff with it.
Yeah, fuck console sales, amiright?
@Voyajer is either a jackass or doesn’t understand sarcasm.
Buddy you’re at -6 for a low effort comment, don’t get buttmad at me. Why are you going back and checking your reduces so obsessively?
