One could argue that Microsoft's "no game sharing" decision at the beginning of Xbox One, right off the heals of a generation that experienced both high success, but also extremely high costs (RROD recalls, estimates say it cost them over $1.1B), was a bigger one. It seems unnaturally likely to me that single decision by Mattrick's Xbox leadership is the largest component to Xbox One's relatively lower success (58M sales, versus 102M PS4 and 84M XB360), and has cascaded to, possibly permanently, suppress Xbox's potential (Series is at 21M to PS5's 41M).

I tend to think that decision was worse, because it was Just Bad. There was no reason they had to do it. It had very little prior art (digital games, naturally, always did this, so non-zero). It was a pure, absolute failure to read the room, and the XB1 era had so many decisions like this that it seriously paints the picture that Xbox is alive today literally only because of Spencer and despite Microsoft's leadership at the time (pre-release, Xbox One also required Kinect to be plugged in. This was walked back, but it still shipped in the box, lowering margins and depressing sales volume for no reason.)

In comparison: Unity has been in trouble for a long time. They've never posted a profit, at least since going public, and have instead accumulated an aggregate of over $2B in losses. Their main competitor (Epic) is a technological savant of a company, which has a literal money-printing machine in their closet to finance engine development. They never really broke into AAA game production, partly because Unreal is just better at hyper-scale development, and partly because AAA game shops are surprisingly welcoming to in-house engine development.

In that framing, this outcome seems inevitable. There's a reason they made this decision; a very real, dollars and cents, reason, and backing away from it (especially after the outcry, but even without it) isn't going to save them. The best, but unlikely, outcome for Unity and their customers is deep layoffs, focusing hard on ease of use instead of technological prowess, spending years rebuilding the trust they lost, and depressing their stock price enough that they can find a path to going private without losing control. The much more realistic outcome is: deep layoffs, coasting the product, monetizing every addon they can outside of the toxic "core pricing structure", and private equity acquisition.

The dumbest thing about Microsoft's "no game sharing" thing is that they could have just waited. Digital game sales made up 90% of game sales in 2022, which can't be shared.

People don't really seem to care about not being able to share games, but they hate being told they can't do something.

You can share digital games. The PS5 allows you to share games with one other console if your account is logged in on that console. Steam allows you to share games with friends (or family I can’t remember). You and your friend just can’t play the same game at the same time, which is the same way it would be if you shared a disc anyways.

> Steam allows you to share games with friends (or family I can’t remember). You and your friend just can’t play the same game at the same time, which is the same way it would be if you shared a disc anyways.

Steam doesn’t allow you to share specific games, only your entire library (excluding any games that the seller has made unsharable.)

The dumbest thing about Microsoft's "no game sharing" fiasco was that they let it be PR spun into "no game sharing" and people remembering that fight that way. It was never about no game sharing: it was about building a robust digital game sharing system (because Microsoft knew digital game sales were already the majority).

The original Xbox One plan would have been an unprecedented amount of support for digital game sharing. They were working on something a lot like "Steam Family Sharing" but taken to an extreme: you didn't have to prelink Xbox libraries with your friends and manage a "family" of accounts, you just "email your buddy" a loan of a game you owned. You could even sell it to your buddy directly there in your game library while they were borrowing it (and Microsoft would get a small cut).

Microsoft's mistake was tying all these new digital game tools system-wide to physical purchased games too. They decided that discs would just be digital unlocks and disc loans/resales would have to go through the same digital system as every other game. (Similar to Steam making all Half-Life 2 sales just Steam unlocks; but Microsoft's mistake was making it console-wide rather than just their own games.) They thought it would be easier (for themselves, and conceptually for users) to manage one combined system of digital loans/resales than the confusion of mixed cases like someone buying a disc for the base game but then a bunch of DLC through the digital store.

When the physical stores went angry that physical copy resales would need to be tracked in Microsoft's digital systems and resold through that and that Microsoft would get some or all of their cut, they spun the whole plan as "no game sharing" and won on that PR. But that original plan would have been the largest game sharing system on any digital goods platform if it actually had been delivered as promised. It's just incredibly sad that Microsoft didn't figure out a better answer to that "hybrid" problem, didn't have a great PR fix for the spin from the pawn shops that at the time still owned too much of the game sales market, and had to kill the digital game sharing system in its infancy to "fix" the physical disc resale "problem".

For the first 2-3 years, both Microsoft and Sony sold every single unit they could produce. Not sure if that generation of consoles is valid market data.

This. ."In comparison: Unity has been in trouble for a long time. They've never posted a profit, at least since going public, and have instead accumulated an aggregate of over $2B in losses. Their main competitor (Epic) is a technological savant of a company, which has a literal money-printing machine in their closet"

The Unity actions are purely financial.

That CEO was the one that Enshitified EA, but it was profitable.

Eventually it comes down to survival, you can be the most trusted, loved, adorated company, but if you can't pay employees, what good is it whether you self enshitify to stay alive, or die.

> Why did it come to this? Just more profits?

It seemed to be specifically aimed at free to play mobile games - and if studios really had to pay per install, it would basically kill this entire genre on Unity (because it would count every install of f2p games, even though people aren't buying them - so the economics don't work out, and the more popular the game, the harder is to pay the install fees).

Except that.. they later announced that they would waive the install fees if mobile devs migrated to their ad solution. So they didn't want anyone to actually pay the install fee; the idea is that game devs would need to choose between shutting down their game, or using Unity's ad tech.

So in the end this was all a ploy to get ad revenue, which is analogous to revenue share, but for f2p games.

Here are some sources for this (I just found at Google, but I saw this discussed in many places)

https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/16j6cip/ironsource...

https://mobilegamer.biz/unity-is-offering-a-runtime-fee-waiv...

burning a real game engine business that enhances an industry (a lot of new talent is coming in through learning unity) to pivot into the advertising scam as the big players desperately try to diversify... that's some weapons grade MBA short sightedness.

advertising in mobile games too, that's like barely under the table gambling. You'd be more ethically clear making missiles.