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.
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.
Sad to see them as an empty house brand now. Just like GE appliances, all that’s left is a sticker.
I bought a brand new ~$900 GE dishwasher last year (for a non-intended purpose) and needed to take it apart - for reasons.
IMO, the engineering in this thing was just marvelous. It was almost entirely tool-free click/snap fittings for full disassembly and reassembly. The parts were good quality molded, stamped or machined. It was clearly a master class in balancing competing trade-offs (price, assembly labor, reliability, noise, power, efficiency, etc). The simplicity of the thing was really remarkable.
Water falls into the side at whatever rate your tap delivers, and when a pressure sensor in the reservoir indicates enough volume to start, the thing begins. It does this a few times, pumping, re-pumping, heating and replacing that reservoir depending on the selected cycle, but overall, the thing is just incredibly simple and (hopefully, somewhat?) reliable.
It’s hard to tell these days whether you’re buying a product from a brand you trust or from a company that bought the brand you trust.
Though, having said that, I recently bought a Bosch refrigerator because Bosch is still Bosch and I trusted Bosch.
But the refrigerator is crap, broken on arrival and it took 5 phone calls and 3 weeks to get service.
There's still plenty of nuance in these rebadging situations. It's also hard to tell without following a lot of business news whether the new owner just bought "the stickers" or bought all the original factories or bought some complicated deal in between.
While I was pleased with this particular purchase, my ability to trust any brand in general has been diminishing with age and each new betrayal of that trust.
I have a growing heuristic that is (at least in part) inversely related to number of employees and the time a company has been publicly traded.
Crap like that is why companies have walked away from consumer-biased warranty policies. LLBean had to change theirs as well: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-ll-bean-changed-its-retu...
Example: I once returned a board that I had cut in half. It was window trim with a shaped profile, and I had previously purchased and installed some of the same SKU before. When I went to install my freshly cut board next to the first ones, it was a little too obvious that it was from a different batch or manufacturer with a slightly different profile.
If they offer the warranty on drill bits, then there's nothing wrong with using the warranty on drill bits. It's not being a bad customer.
Could be. Maybe it snapped?
Oh, I agree - I've snapped dozens as well due to misuse.
But it is not inconceivable that a bit snapped due to manufacturing defect (I just don't know how the store can tell the difference).
it's crazy how the loss in quality begets them increased profits in nthe short term, but costs them their entire business in the long term.
the high quality products can be the loss leaders, and they can just commoditize the compliments.
why would you reduce the size of bread, when you can just sell me overpriced peanut butter, jams, and spreads to come along with it?
a good lesson in trust and social psychology. when trust is built, people throw their money at you.
And everyone is pulling the same shit.
Dutch : Vertrouwen komt te voet en gaat te paard ( Thorbecke )
https://thalein.medium.com/trust-arrives-on-foot-and-leaves-...
> people and organisations alike tend to be judged by the worst thing they do
It wasn't too long ago that the leadership of companies was often fairly stable. Now you see people rotating through every couple of years, rarely having to face the fallout of their bad decisions.
While much of the rest of the industry is moving to subscriptions or jacking prices, Cockos has kept their prices extremely low and push new releases consistently.
If we all thought this way, certainly there'd be no incentive for anyone to do the right thing at all? A good track record should be rewarded, up until the point when it stops. You shouldn't trust any company indefinitely, but there are a few that you can trust "for now".
> If we all thought this way, certainly there'd be no incentive for anyone to do the right thing at all? A good track record should be rewarded, up until the point when it stops. You shouldn't trust any company indefinitely, but there are a few that you can trust "for now".
They are doing "right thing" now so later when they dominate market they will be able to squeeze you like a lemon. Scorpion and a frog situation. It's just in their nature.
I'll note companies seem genuinely okay with being on lists of the most hated brands since America.
Perhaps a poll of the employees, or an association of customers, ought to figure somewhere.
An other strategy would be to place a financial value on "trust". That should be too hard, since brands already have financial value tied to them.
There are some nice examples of founding members going above and beyond to maintain their control, which may not look like it from the get go. Ubisoft comes to mind. I may not like some of their games, but I really appreciate the efforts of the Guillemot brothers.
I can't imagine Daimler-Benz as it is now being led by the 3rd grandson of the original founder for instance. It would be a miracle if that person was well suited for directing a multi-national car manufacturer. Same way Microsoft wouldn't be the same if Bill Gates' son was at the helm.
(Meaning: the first generation starts off poor, is self made, hands over to the second generation which is less dynamic, which hands over to the third who wreck it and end up poor clog wearers again)
You'll have some Louis XIV sometimes, and many Louis XVI the rest of the time, with sprinkles of Charles II in the mix to spice it up.
A security architect at a Bank offered a very pithy version of this to me: "People hate banks, but they trust us. Best not lose their trust."
To clarify, I don't endorse this behavior, but unfortunately, it's the modern way of business.
Just like you never step in the same river twice, you never do business with the same company twice. Staff and executives change over time, and companies shift for better or worse.
Should we hold grudges against brands for things totally different people did 10? 20? 50? years ago? That seems weird to me.
Unity specifically deserves loss of trust and all the pain they get. But in 5 years, or 10 years or whatever, should we assume they are less trustworthy than other companies because of what this group of managers did?
It might be fine! Maybe on that particular day, somebody with cholera had just taken a shit upstream, and the bacteria are totally gone now. But it's still a useful prior, and that's the case here with whom you choose to conduct business.
I think it's a question of burden of proof. You'd ordinarily not worry too much about cholera, but after an incident you'd want the water thoroughly and repeatedly tested. You probably would not say "eh, it's been 5 or 10 years, it's most likely fine."
Similarly you'd want some concrete evidence that a company has actually changed, in a degree sufficient to offset your negative prior, before you'd consider engaging in any further business with them.
But actually doing that research is a pain in the ass, so I think it's a reasonable strategy to simply prefer companies that haven't screwed you over wherever good options exist.
No. Further, I'd stop drinking untreated water from all rivers. (Just answering your hypothetical. I spend a lot of time in the wilderness and wouldn't drink untreated water from a river or lake to begin with.)
This effect, though, has happened with software for me years ago. Enough bad actors exist that I've reached the place where I trust very few software houses (and I trust exactly zero SV-style companies). Not that all of those rivers are polluted, of course, but that it's impossible to tell which ones are and which ones aren't by looking at them.
I would never dare to start a business that depended on any of them. The risk is simply too great.
I may be stretching the limits of the analogy here, but either way that "verify, then trust" approach is more work than "adaptive blissful ignorance", and a lot of people aren't going to do it, or will at least slack off as the pain of the original incident becomes a more distant memory.
The only protection against this is contracts, but when a company -- like Unity has done twice now -- decides to retroactively change the terms of existing contracts, that means that you cannot trust them at all going into the future even if they're solidly "good" right now.
There's limited benefit to having the source code when the community has been splintered, and the future direction is contrary to your needs. Sure, you can make your own fixes, etc, but you no longer enjoy the leverage community development.
And that's still better than being stuck with arbitrary price changes.
Open source completely avoid this one problem. Apache-style development was created exactly for that.
You can complain that it's way overkill and a company doesn't actually need that level of assurance. But you can't claim it's not sufficient.
Without the concentration of diverse efforts that go into maintaining and advancing a project, having the source code (alone) is of minimal benefit.
For example, the first company that comes to mind has seemed to have shameless underhandedness deep in its DNA, and to exhibit its malevolent side each new chance it gets, as much as it can. This has repeated over the course of decades, and over multiple top leadership changes.
If it's true that certain kinds of underhandedness are in that company's DNA, to a degree unlike most other companies, I wonder how deep they'd have to decapitate the org chart, to cut out the roots of that culture. Including SVPs? VPs? Further? It's in the board, too?
The one time I bumped into Larry Ellison, he managed to come across as intensely competitive, in just a moment. I'd guess that's probably reflected in his company.
Does Oracle seem a steady in-your-face aggressive, and you know what you get?
Or is more a cyclic and plotting: in-your-face shameless when they can get away with it, and makes nice when they have to, while running long-cons (some of them very underhanded)?
Around some other vendors, there's collective loss of institutional (field) knowledge about what you're going to get.
I suppose contributing to this could be a lot of new people who aren't mentored-in as well as they could be.
Also, there's been a field shift towards many (most?) ICs and even managers/execs not being incentived to become aware of non-short-term implications of vendor and tech choices. Whether it's ICs driven by sprint metrics, startups motivated to rapidly throw up appearances of growth to hit funding rounds, or people job-hopping every 18 months before they see longer-term cause&effect.
We certainly believed it when Google started, and they were talking like the then-familiar Internet-savvy altruistic forward-looking engineer types.
Today, you can still see many examples of Google doing things well. (And of course many examples of things that we wouldn't have expected them to do, including some that would've gotten them ostracized.)
You've inverted the sense here, by treating reputation as something based on default trust and exceptional "grudges". What has really happened is that they've destroyed the exceptional positive reputation they spent the past decade and a half building. A new reputation can certainly be built over the next decade, but for now they're mostly back to the default state of deserving no trust.
It only seems weird because it's irrational, but the irrationality of vengeance is what has made humans the dominant species on the planet.
If your child is killed by a lion it makes sense to avoid lions. It makes no rational sense to seek out lions to kill, but guess what a human will do. And see what the result is.
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.
In contrast to buying seeds off Amazon or eBay, where the plants that sellers are claiming they're shipping you seeds for are often just random weeds rather than the hilariously photoshopped or non-existent flowers/fruits shown in the product listing.
e.g. https://www.amazon.ca/Glamaours-Climbing-Strawberry-Deliciou...
or
https://www.amazon.ca/Rosepoem-100pcs-rainbow-vegetable-Non-...
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
I mean, it’s horrible for consumers/gamers/developers, obviously, but from a business perspective it was the correct move.
It may come up as one of the worst decision in the modern industry. Granted, time will tell and nothing is certain.
Apploving wanted to merge Unity instead of IronSource because they knew the combined power of Unity/iron and apple will hurt their business. All the buzz now is due to apploving UniFree project...
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".
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.
Except you can fork the last open source version and continue as before. See ... mariadb?
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.
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?
LibreOffice is doing pretty well compared to OpenOffice:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37645160
EGCS was eventually merged back into GCC (or rather it became the new GCC?). I don't pay attention recently, but XEmacs was/is pretty active along with Emacs.
It's hard, but the FOSS model has a long, successful history at this point.
With a proprietary solution, you might get A, but you have zero hope of B. It's an objectively worse proposition.
You do need to innovate on the foundation if you plan to maintain your game long term: new consoles support, new hardware support, obsolescence of old platforms, etc...
You do not need to innovate if you plan to let your game rot and become unplayable 10-20 years later.
Yes having a FOSS solution for the foundation would be ideal. That was not the topic of the discussion. The topic was about the claim "we can fork if we're not in agreement".
No, as a game developer you won't be forking and maintaining a game engine. No a "just fork it" is not a viable solution in the majority of cases as you need a strong community behind you and your fork to make it last long term and not rot after 2 weeks.
The examples of successful forks are anecdotal, they are the exceptions not the rule. This is survivor's bias.
Oh but you do. Unless you want to be one of those 10000 asset store games that no one buys.
> You do not need to innovate if you plan to let your game rot and become unplayable 10-20 years later.
They stop maintaining games in 2-3 years, not 10. The few exceptions that maintain sales forever are just that, exceptions.
Are you thinking of multiplayer free to play games? Those aren't games, they're predatory grinding treadmills and I don't care what happens to them.
Don't worry about it. Other people will literally solve that problem for you if they like your game enough no matter what you do. They won't even bother asking for permission.
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.
Obligatory relevant Godot-related links:
* https://docs.godotengine.org/en/4.1/tutorials/platform/conso...
* https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-...
* https://w4games.com/2023/08/06/w4-games-unveils-w4-consoles-...
Couple of Godot-based games available on console:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_Beasts#Development / https://godotengine.org/article/godot-showcase-cassette-beas...
The fact developers have been able to ship Godot games on console doesn’t help much unless those developers are willing to share whatever proprietary engine-to-console-SDK-interface code they wrote.
Unity and Unreal, in contrast, will happily license equivalent code to you.
I think this section of the second Godot link is worth pulling out and quoting:
> … it is impossible for Godot to include first-party console support out of the box. Even if someone would contribute it, we simply could not host this code legally in our Git repository for anyone to use.
> Additionally, it would not be possible to distribute this code under the same license that Godot uses (MIT) because this is in direct conflict with the proprietary licenses and non-disclosure terms that console manufacturers require to have access to the knowledge needed to write this code.
> To make it simple, it is not possible for Godot to support consoles as an open source project.
That was my intention.
> The fact developers have been able to ship Godot games on console doesn’t help much [...]
Well, it demonstrates that it's entirely possible, either via DIY, hiring an in-house specialist or contracting to one of the companies who has already implemented the functionality.
> [...] unless those developers are willing to share whatever proprietary engine-to-console-SDK-interface code they wrote.
The third party porting companies are willing to "share" that code--for a fee. They could also do the same for free as long as they respect the terms of their contract with the console platform (which probably is along the lines of "don't disclose anything to people who don't also have a contact with the console platform").
A group of companies could even cooperate on this but we'd presumably not know the details.
> Unity and Unreal, in contrast, will happily license equivalent code to you.
Sure, but it's also neither free[0] nor Open Source, e.g.:
"Build and deploy to closed platforms such as Nintendo Switch™, PlayStation®, and Xbox®. An active Unity Pro subscription is required to access these build modules via developer platform forums."
The nuance of "it is not possible for Godot to support consoles as an open source project" is that "it is not possible for [the] Godot [Project] to support consoles as an open source project [but the Godot Engine can be used on consoles if you write the support code yourself or license it from someone]".
Despite detailed explanations (from the devs) of the nuances, too many people interpret the situation as "you can't deploy Godot-based games on consoles" rather than "you can deploy Godot-based games on consoles but you can't get the code to do so from the Godot Project itself because vendors won't let it".
But perhaps for some people this isn't a significant distinction.
At the end of the day the situation is entirely driven by the requirements of the console platform owners.
You can choose to:
* depend on a closed source proprietary game engine & console integration and associated risks/benefits; or,
* an open source game engine & console integration via one of multiple vendors or DIY and associated risks/benefits.
The question developers are asking themselves is ‘if I start out building a game for the next two or three years, when I come to commercialize this, will I have palatable and viable options to do so?
Unity’s random adjustment of their terms is precisely what is driving developers away. But at least Unity is making it clear what those terms are. ‘Talk to one of us privately when you get to the point where you’re ready to port to a console’ is even less certain.
In short, no.
The most detailed explanation of why is probably this section of this article: https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-...
A key aspect is that neither Godot (the project--which doesn't exist as a legal entity) nor Godot Foundation (which exists as a legal entity but AIUI has restrictions on what activities it can perform) would be able to satisfy the requirements of the console platform vendors in terms of qualifying for access to a platform SDK.
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).
For the full nuanced details I've listed the relevant links here:
Nintendo Switch and Playstation and titles from Sony and Nintendo incorporate BSD-licensed open source code, so it is obvious that “open source is banned” is not true. It’s only GPL and other viral licenses that lawyers argue is too risky, because it might require disclosing proprietary source when linked.
Same goes for Apple App Store as well
Technically, they could. It would require someone who hasn't actually licensed the SDK, and so aren't subjected to an NDA, to reverse-engineer things and produce their own implementation under an open source license.
Certainly would be an enormous project, but it is well within the realm of the possible. It's been done with complex systems before.
Yes, I know it's possible to reverse engineer the consoles, but that doesn't make it a viable alternative for the games industry.
It makes it legally viable, in that it would allow the production of an SDK that isn't restricted by any NDA, and therefore could be incorporated into opens source projects.
- The platform holders can and will ban software built without the official SDK
- You'd get delayed access to patches, which might break compatibility with new OS versions
- You're relying on someone being able to reverse engineer new versions for the life of the console. This is a rare skill.
It's like saying you can write your own C compiler. Yeah you can, but you wouldn't use it in production at your job.
None of your points appear insurmountable or showstoppers to me, to be honest, but they would require approaches to mitigate them.
Over the past year Docker and D&D/Wizards of the Coast come to mind...
And (nearly) OnlyFans, when they announced they would no longer support creators of "adult" content (aka, "did a tumblr"). They just about backpedalled quickly enough, and had enough stickyness (no pun intended) from followers, to contain most of the damage.
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.
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.
That was not a miscommunication though: it was brought up directly to Unity and the initial response was that it would be per install, per device.
It has become quite normal to create device identifiers, some crazy people do it in the name of security even, but I resist this development where I can.
For IOS, for example, reinstalls don't increase that counter. I'm not sure how it works with the Play Store.
They almost certainly said that reinstalls would could because they might count for some platforms.
Unity just gave every one of their developers food poisoning.
I suspect similar results.
Because they have the cheap crispy chicken.
When I still worked in an office, the grab and go section at the grocery market really helped me cut down on food costs/expenses. I use the grocery story grab and gos on roadtrips too. Bathrooms, massive food and drink selection (with alternatives to pop), good quality and at better price than you’d get from any fast food chain. Publix, Big Y, Meijers are all favorites for me.
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.
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.
Ever heard about reddit?
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.
Profoundly sad, and completely avoidable. Have never seen a company so quickly and completely just throw away all of their public good will.