One possible interpretation of events is that he was ousted not for the initial proposal and backlash but precisely for how he backtracked after the fact -- perhaps the board gave a clear mandate and Riccitiello was unable to successfully change pricing structure to match financial expectations. That would explain the replacement.
Things aren't looking great for Unity right now...
The word "interim" was clearly used, and there's no hint in the PR statement about this being a permanent appointment. So I don't think it's reasonable to equate this to a clear doubling down of anything.
At the same time, a guy like Whitehurst is a safe, relatively unimpeachable medium term choice, not like someone you'd use for a truly short interim 30-90 days while you execute an executive search quickly. If you need him for 1-2 years of just don't rock the boat leadership, it'll probably work out fine for the company and the board would be satisfied.
Other commenters in the thread have also given good thoughts / potential scenarios in similar veins - essentially that this was actually a failure of messaging, sticking to the plan, and / or both, plus some other combination of "no, seriously, we need to make money and become profitable, nothing else matters as long as the boat still floats, make it happen and keep this ship going."
And I do suspect that Whitehurst will likely be a better fit for that. A seasons gaming industry executive (regardless of investor / revenue focus) may actually be a negative if that's the goal right now... I'll be very interested to see how this all turns out.
There might have been an explicit mandate that Unity's pricing structure should be changed, but more likely it was just an explicit or implicit mandate that the Unity division should produce more revenue.
The actual details of how to achieve that mandate would be left up to Riccitiello and his management team.
My interoperation is that while the board probably agrees with the need to change Unity's pricing structure, Riccitiello is being ousted for the poor implementation with a proposal that generated so much backlash and then with some pretty poor handling of that backlash.
In this particular instance, Whitehurst isn't a board member, but per the press release[0] he is a "Special Advisor at Silver Lake". Silver Lake is one of Unity's largest shareholders (~10%) and Egon Durban is on the board.
——————————
[0]: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231009494331/en/Uni...
I wonder to what extent Silver Lake drove this overall decision (vs. others on the board potentially initiating it)
The night before the same transaction, they issued a pile of diluting shares to themselves, effectively clawing back something like 50% of the rank and file employees’ stock options.
I might have the date and percentage wrong, but it doesn’t really matter.
Silver Lake are total bastards and probably belong in jail. Avoid.
How is it legal to say "you bought 50% of this, but now I've arbitrary decided that I own 99% of it because I gave myself more percent"
The company starts up, it has 100 shares, you get 50. If you calculate it, you own 50%.
Later on the company needs to raise cash, so it issues another 100 shares. Company now has a ton of cash in the bank. Total shares outstanding is 200. Now you own 25%.
In general companies typically raise money because they think the cash infusion will benefit the existing shareholders in the long run, either by not bankrupting or having the cash to do investments / move into new markets etc.
^W is a control code. This specific one represents the keys ctrl+w, a keyboard command in Vi and Bash among other things. It deletes the previous word. You often see something similar with ^H as well, which is a single-character backspace. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backspace#^W_and_^U has some more information about these.
Some people use them more to make visual jokes in written text, more or less the same way you'd use strikethrough formatting in text.
…thsi typo^Ŵ^H^H…
start to appear, sometimes followed by several random letters hit in frustration, before the final hard-reset of the terminal and resignation to the fact some unsaved work has been lost.
Even then, there are no guarantees. A company can simply be mismanaged and overvalued as we saw recently with this Danish airline: https://apnews.com/article/scandinavian-airlines-air-francek...
Either way, if you had a majority of the voting shares, you could've stopped the issue.
Apple has been doing this aggressively for the past 10+ years.
I think apple is now heavily navel-gazing. Their products point inwards into their ecosystem, they don't interoperate, the customer is trapped, they have few choices. maybe I should say egosystem?
I would have agreed with this before the M1 Macbooks came out, but when it did it caused a big change in my opinion.
When that happened, basically the mac was a better pc, since you could run windows natively on your mac. The mac now shared hardware and software with the pc industry, and innovations transferred over, like graphics cards. Apple let its customers benefit from multiple ecosystems, and they have more choices.
The apple switch to arm, went the other way. how many PCIe cards from a pc work in a "mac pro"?
The problems you have selling sugar water are not the same problems that Apple has today (or since Cook moved into the post).
[0]: https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/16/investing/retail-sears-privat...
[1]: https://www.stern.nyu.edu/experience-stern/faculty-research/...
May a lot of noise, declare you're done with Twitter's bots and BS, sell a ton of stock -- not because it's overhyped, no it's for Twitter -- and then back out of the sale.
And he would've gotten away except he tried to back out 3 times and they held him to it. So now he's got this trainwreck situation, and he's doing what he thinks is the right play, lemons into lemonade.
Also not sure about R&D, as I don't know what R&D Twitter was doing pre-acquisition, but there's been an extraordinary increase in the rate of addition of new features and changes to the platform.
I don’t think that’s ever likely to offset the massive amounts of debt Musk offloaded to Twitter’s balance sheet to fund the acquisition.
> changes to the platform.
Likely one of the most horrible rebrandings in the history of corporate rebranding?
I wonder how many of these $$$ people are looking at Musk and saying, 'hold on, we could do that too'. It's amazing how resilient a company can be to code rot and infrastructure stagnation. It takes a long time to kill a company, once it has a customer base and decent revenue streams. You could probably fire everybody outside strictly operational teams and simply coast along on the momentum for a few years, creaming off gigantic profits. And what the hell, jack up your prices too, right?
https://www.reuters.com/technology/elon-musk-says-twitters-c....
https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-ad-revenue-musks-x-dec...
Sure, he scared off advertisers by welcoming nazis onto the platform. That's not something you'd want to replicate.
But he also fired 80% of the workforce, and the product kept working. If you have some subscription software where users keep paying $$$$ whether you add new features or not - getting rid of 80% of those expensive developers could be pretty tempting.
I think Unity is the next big test case. If users leave the platform in droves and revenue tanks it will continue to confirm the current hypotheses. That said private equity firms will keep trying it no matter what as the market biases make it an easier space to compete so I’m not sure it matters much to software companies.
A company that uses Photoshop, or Altium, or SolidWorks, isn't going to move off it easily. Hell, existing users will often initially be thankful when product managers stop moving the buttons every 6 months.
Of course you'll stop attracting new customers as your product gets surpassed - but there could be a lot of $$$$ to be extracted before revenue drops to zero.
SAP offered to migrate us -- on to their new HANA platform. Guess how much that would cost?
So we still have these ancient Oracle boxes and newish MSSQL kicking around. They should be entering high school before too long...
1. Fire most of the company
2. Introduce new charges (blue tick worked, but the API cost was just stupidly high)
3. Then start tearing into the platform, breaking shit
The 3rd bit is what's weird. Private equity don't usually want to destroy the product that they just bought. Perhaps he thought that Twitter needed to be simplified in order to be manageable with a skeleton crew, but it still doesn't explain a bunch of user-friendly changes or the lame "X" rebranding.
To me, it seems he has plenty experience with managing companies.
What I meant in my original comment was, "wow, this seems like a hire that is only focused on finding someone with lots of experience managing, and not at all on the gaming industry / customer goodwill".
So I think you're right - and I also think this shows how I misjudged how I originally thought a scenario like this would have played out.
I posted before that comment, which was definitely helpful - that context (and some other helpful replies here and elsewhere in the overall thread) have changed my assessment as well.
Appointing a "developer-friendly" candidate would have caused more uncertainty.
As a temporary pick, I'd guess Whitehurst is intended to message "We realize we screwed up, but there won't be any sudden changes."
The reaffirmed guidance for current quarter is hilarious though, given any changes would play out in future time (e.g. developer flight for next project).
It's interesting that after-hours / future trading doesn't seem to have responded positively (yet). Maybe that's just another symptom of lost trust as well.
Jim was active on memo-list and seemed to listen to people. That doesn’t mean he’s perfect, but I’d give him very high marks and I think that he had a lot of goodwill among Red Hatters as CEO.
What Jim did do successfully is destroy the actual FOSS spirit within the company. Everyone has Mac Books now. All the standard corporate welfare initiatives for liberal arts majors (Chief Diversity Officer and their ilk).
Underperform the rest of the tech sector? No... 70+ quarters of successive double digit growth until the acquisition.
Mismanaged the company with respect to virtualisation? You're conflating mismanaging the company with possible strategic errors in virtualisation.
Destroy FOSS spirit? Absolutely the opposite. He is held in the highest esteem by every red hatter I have ever spoken to. Not only that, but he made the effort to do red hat training to learn the tech in the early days. How has he destroyed any FOSS spirit through his actions? Give an example.
Everyone has macbooks now? No. Sellers generally do, I'll give you that, but technical staff are mostly using Fedora or RHEL. Flexibility has always been a huge part of the employee experience.
Standard corporate welfare initiatives for liberal arts majors? You sound like an angry white man who can't stand that people other than yourself may have their disadvantage recognised nowadays. Stop feeling so threatened.
Why are you so bitter?
A lot of people felt betrayed when they switched to gmail. Those voices were all shouted down.
Jim turned a $1T opportunity into a $30B one.
Some people were pissed about switching to Gmail. They were not anything close to a majority of users.
It's fine that you don't share a positive opinion of Jim's tenure as CEO, but the commentary that shows ignorance of how public companies work, petty gripes about switching to Gmail (as if that was Jim's personal project) and grudge-holding about diversity doesn't paint you as someone to take seriously.
[1] https://www.lightreading.com/virtualization/red-hat-sharehol...
> They were not anything close to a majority of users.
You're making my point for me. Jim destroyed the actual spirit of FOSS at Red Hat. It transformed into "Everything we distribute is open source, and that's all we care about." The GPL has been all but abandoned in favor of non copy-left licenses.
Are you? Because your comments don't reflect that. "We all" don't "know" that, actually. Maybe they were, but as I understand it IBM's bid was unsolicited.
Do you have a citation for the claim Jim "pocketed the most money" from the sale? I am sure he made plenty, but so did the other execs, so did the shareholders -- the sale price was quite a premium on the share price.
Red Hat was a public company. Too many people have magical thinking about how Red Hat's execs should've run the company according to their ideals when the reality is if Jim ran the company the way you'd have liked it would've probably triggered an investor lawsuit.
If you want ideological purity to the satisfaction of your FOSS standards, then working for a public company is a path to unhappiness every time.
I didn't agree with every choice made by Jim and the rest of Red Hat's leadership at the time -- but he was a decent CEO within the parameters allowed for public company CEOs.
That's the prevailing opinion. It's safe to have. IMO, he's just an empty suit that peddles kool-aid. Red Hat was in a unique position as the top kernel contributor for a long time, meanwhile VMware, Google (android), and AWS ate up all the value.
“Bitter”
“White man”
“Facts are a mostly ignorable obstacle”
Please review the guidelines and save the clap trap for reddit.
Since "red hatters" believe they "are open source" and have turned their backs on the community (see the CentOS changes and the active attacks on Rocky Linux) dont know "red hatters" opinion carry much weight in FOSS these days.
Red hatters certainly have an the ego to believe only their opinion matters but reality often does not match ego
To me, I hope I never have to use another software product from RedHat again... I dont know if IBM killed RedHat, or if RedHat just reviled their true colors... either way RedHat is no friend to FOSS, they are just another corporate software company attempting to control FOSS not contributing freely to it.
To me in this day, Oracle is better steward of Linux that RedHat is.
Red Hat and Oracle are more or less the same now
But when it comes to Oracle Linux, atleast they are not putting the sources behind the paywall and threatening customers with bans if they follow their GPL Rights
B) Oracle cannot be described as a "steward" if their entire goal is to produce a RHEL clone using the sources provided by Red Hat. Oracle maintains a kernel package themselves, but that's about it.
C) "The sources" are not behind a paywall. CentOS Stream is "the sources". The only difference between now and 6 months ago is that it used to be the case that the specfiles for every package in the distro were maintained in a single publicly facing git repository which made it trivial to rebuild the entire distro, whereas now you would have to create a mapping of which CentOS Stream packages were used first, which is not as straightforward as having it all in one place. It is nonetheless possible to do.
That's exactly what he meant to communicate by using the traditional angry white man shibboleth of shaking his furious fist at the "Chief Diversity Officer and their ilk" who are active out to get him and ruin his life by making it impossible for him to get a job. Life is just so difficult for him with his anti-diversity disability, you can understand why he feels so angry and threatened and acts out like a toddler in this way.
Your comment would be fine without the first and last bits.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: yikes - you broke the site guidelines quite badly in several other places in this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827776
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827745
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827731
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827386
We have to ban accounts that post that way. If you'd please stick to the rules in the future, we'd appreciate it. The idea is: if you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully; if not, please don't comment until you do—regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are.
These are some wild takes, it's only Monday my dude.
Talk about code words.... that right this is big code word...
If you know, you know.
Which as we know puts you down an irreversible ideological path of... something?
This is in the site guidelines:
"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."
a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls
This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
It's true rainbow activist types use sexual orientations and minorities as shields when their politics get criticized, as already seen above.
If people say "listen to gay people" they hardly mean say, UK writer Douglas Murray or the activist group Gays Against Groomers.
If people say to listen to black people, I'm quite sure they don't mean economist Thomas Sowell.
If they say transpeople, they definitely don't mean Scott Newgent of "What is a Woman?" fame.
But they don't mean Newgent either. All these people have the correct identity groups, but they're no-nos because they have the wrong politics. The DEI people clamoring for better representation definitely don't want offices staffed with Sowells and Murrays. Because the identity is just a shield, and the politics is the point, as eg. Rep. Ayanna Pressley put when she said they need "more black faces willing to be a black voice" - again, Sowell certainly is black and has a voice, but Pressley meant having the correct politics to count as representative.
Wanting less DEI is wanting less of a certain kind of politics, not wanting less people of whatever sexual orientation or skin colour. Because the politics is the point.
I have found that reactionary positions are not good ones and contain people who don't know what they want, only what they are opposed to.
Do they? A lot of the benefits of DEI policies are simply more quotas for people who were already well off and capable of gainful employment, where it's more inter-elite competition than anything.
But what of the actually underprivileged? I can't fathom a way in which forbidding teachers from keeping order in class (because discipline problems are unevenly distributed, and thus racist - I wish I was kidding) helps actual minority kids from genuinely underprivileged situations. Instead, the teachers are mandated to aid and abet the very dysfunctions that keep them down.
Or what's shown in this tweet? https://twitter.com/FreeBlckThought/status/17085822241767754...
Active recommendation that "Schools should NOT 'encourage students to change their behavior or families to do more things that were like white families do, like reading to their children or adopting a growth mindset'"
These are upper class ideologues adopting nice-sounding, feelgood ideas, inflicting them on genuinely underprivileged people, and won't themselves have to pay for the consequences of these beliefs. The poor black kids will pick up the tab.
A friend of mine commented on the video that: "People who really, actually hate minorities and want to destroy their children's futures must feel so frustrated that teachers' unions, Ed schools, and school bureaucracies have left them with nothing more to do. Clearly, the point of education is to keep kids doing what they were already doing that was working so well."
These very same education people will, if asked, swear that poverty causes dysfunctions and bad outcomes, but we should never ever try to drag people out of those dysfunctions.
This is what I meant above: The politics are the point, and this shit is a disaster, as far as I can tell. I couldn't imagine better policies to tear people down if I tried. And the teaching establishment gets lauded for it.
And this is just the stuff disguised as kindness, or born of misplaced kindness. It's not getting into the actively hateful side of their culture, because they have carte blanche to spread hate, if the target is right.
The Smithsonian—*The Smithsonian*—did the same thing. Three years later I still can't believe it. <https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/artic...>
I don't even work there and I know that this is, at the least, hyperbole.
Oh wow, you're not kidding.
I have my reasons for thinking things changed later on, but they are subjective / personal opinion based on personal experience, so I respect anyone who would disagree and exclude him from a list like this.
Unity is a developer platform/tooling company. They don’t care about hits or franchises - they need service, stability, community, and technology innovation.
Game publishers are creative industry plays, like movie studios. Completely different business.
Of course Epic confuses things by being in both camps but I don’t think Unity is confused that they are competing with Epic in the sense of needing to outmatch Fortnite.
The backlash was staggering, and much of what they tried was rolled back. Ellen Pao took the blame for it, but it wasn't actually her fault. The founders just scapegoated her in order to make changes they needed for investors -- and depending on how cynical you are, they picked an asian woman so that they could channel internet racism and sexism as part of the distraction. Years later, they did the same thing, making multiple unpopular monetization changes, but this time the CEO taking the backlash is Steve Huffman himself, not a scapegoat put in front of him.
CEOs don't make decisions on their own, not really. This pricing change was the direction the company wanted to go in, and they got put on their heels, but only temporarily. They're still going to try to find ways to aggressively monetize.
Prove it.
Really taught me not to celebrate these "CEO steps down" stories. Short of an entire board replacing itself it's just a new shade of black coming in to lead the change they want all along.
I'm just saying that I care a lot more about actions than playing the blame game. And it's clear Reddit took the bait here, hook, line, and sinker. Should have been the best time to work on an alternative and it would have been ready for the API schism if they invested those 6 years in to polishing the experience and fostering a community.
instead we got... Lemmy. Oh well.
1. Imgur blocked its images from being shown on FPH, essentially crippling the subreddit
2. In response, the FPH mods put a collage of Imgur's overweight staff in the subreddit sidebar
3. Reddit will have had to ban the subreddit to maintain their relationship with Imgur (who they ended up buying).
Part of the API drama goes back to her time doing BD, making partnerships with apps, and possibly buying apps.
I doubt there was a master plan to making her CEO, but I believe Alexis's line was "it's her job to lose." At the end of the day, she was bad at making friends, was an awkward fit for the company, and was more experienced in politics and climbing the ladder than running a company.
Good background on her: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/scandal/2013/03/buddy-fletc...
Depends how many millions he’s accepting to walk away.
It's who they choose after the search that will tell you something.
But things don't look good no matter who they choose. Unity has to become sustainable... that, or go out of business. Their fundamental problem is somehow getting revenue and costs in line with each other.
Here are some general ways that could be done...
* Squeeze a lot more money out of existing customers * Get a lot more paying customers * Cut spending on things that impact revenue a lot less than the cut saves
The first one is what the last CEO tried with that cockamamie licensing scheme. You could go at it in other ways but in the end the impact on customers is the same so I don't think the reaction would be a lot better.
Is there any clear way to accomplish the second, at least without an even larger negative impact on revenue?
For investors, cutting cost is the least desirable -- they want to grow, not shrink. And customers also don't like to get less for the same price. But perhaps there is a way to cut costs that would spare what provides the core value to customers, and perhaps a business guy could get shareholders to accept that it is the only way.
Whitehurst, on the other hand, has a history of strong execution across multiple industries, and built a reputation as someone who protected Red Hat's culture against attempts from within IBM to "Big Blueify" it (possibly to the detriment of his own role within IBM). Even as an interim, having him onboard is a good sign for how Unity is looking to repair its relationships with developers.
On the other hand, the continued growth of gaming revenues, for both developers and services providers, compared to all other creative industries, is all attributable to innovations in business models. I suppose if people rocked the boat as little as you suggest, the only software being sold to game developers would be Denuvo.
Even game studios can't just change things willy nilly. If Baldur's Gate 3 had been a microtransaction-funded F2P game, it would have been a flop—their target player base doesn't like that business model and wouldn't have gone for it. It's better to try out a new model with a brand new franchise than to try to pivot an existing franchise.
Enterprise software has these same constraints and more, because monkeying with the business model doesn't just mildly irritate prospective customers, it can and does throw off years of planning for thousands of people per company. They can't just shrug and decide to not invest in the next installment in your game franchise, they have to re-do their corporation's 5- and 10-year plans.
This, very much so. Unity made two cardinal sins: creating a pricing model that didn't align with customers' business models (tying price to downloads rather than revenue), and then attempting to apply it retroactively to existing contracts (which, at best, would have resulted in high-profile and ugly legal battles against their largest customers and, likely, would have ended in a judge slapping their lawyers around with a copy of Williams v. Walker-Thomas).
In both cases, creating business model risk and uncertainty drove developers towards other software choices, not because developers are opposed to Unity asking for an engine license fee (after all, they already incorporate console fees, app store fees, etc. into their business models), but because Unity created financial uncertainty: they couldn't forecast those fees with decent probability and precision, and because they no longer trusted Unity not to try to retroactively screw them years down the road. Unity fixed the first problem, but now they've got to work to win back trust on the second.
https://chat.openai.com/share/537dd325-1c5c-422b-8b4a-a44852...
Everyone is assuming the majority of Unity's customers ("most" as measured by $$$, not by quantity of devs) aren't F2P games. I'm not sure that's actually the case; if most of their revenue comes from F2P then shafting everyone else in order to shore up their F2P business would likely be the correct business decision.
The traditional game developers can just go "Unity takes 1$ per download (or whatever), the average player downloads 3 times, the game costs 10$, 3$ goes to the storefront, so we have am average profit of 4$", which seems simple enough to deal with to me.
Which forces them to use Unity’s Ads and other services which can be used to offset the per install fee. So on paper Unity would win either way.
Hot take, but I think it would have been fine financially. Would the online consumers and even media drag it through the mud? Definitely. But I reckon console gamers have less than a 10% chance in correctly predicting some f2p model would crash and burn.
Now I can't say if it'd be more profitable than selling as premium, because it didn't target mobile and that is the real market for that monetization. But I doubt it would have crashed.
- Dungeon keeper mobile - Ultima Forever
100%
I was at IBM at the time. We really hoped he would eventually take over from Ginni once she left... nope. We really could have used someone who wasn't drinking the blue koolaid. Well.. the rest is history.
All this other crap about Silver Lake being a giant POS is concerning though.
It's interesting that everybody focuses on Red Hat after acquisition but no one ever asks how IBM is doing now. Maybe it's delusional to think that Red Hat could change something of its new overlord, but perhaps the acquisition was already showing the desire to change IBM from within?
Amazing that he could so correctly identify why price-blinding tactics would work on people trying to have fun, but not do the inverse and see why it wouldn't work on people trying to develop a product.
This is said by someone who wants nothing more than to see Unity die.
Whitehurst was pretty instrumental in getting Red Hat sticky in places where it was just RHEL. Open Shift, Open Stack, etc all drove value-add for the business and for their customers. Cloud is fickle though so selling tools to studios and trying to compete with Unreal in the VFX space is how Unity moves forward. Take your lashings from the game devs. Shore up your presence in VFX, Movies, Film. Evolve.
The tsunami has squarely landed on Godot’s doorstep. It will be up to them on how they manage the swell.
It will be interesting to see how his Whitehurst's pedigree translates to this smaller-scale, higher-touch sales motion.
Forgoing the core Unity audience of game developers and gunning for studios / VFX when Unity is clearly not the graphically superior engine sounds risky at best, reckless at worst.
You misunderstand. They have different verticals but Jim’s mission is the same. Sell them tools at enterprise subscription prices. Per seat, per project, per shot if they can. Forget the indie game devs and their small studios. That bridge is burned beyond recognition or reconciliation.
And small indies may transform into large enterprises surprisingly fast. Mihoyo was a small indie only 10 years ago.
Its much much easier to repair bridges with indies, who don't really want to move off unity as much as you think, and can be placated by backpedaling and the CEO replacement.
Considering Unity's previous pricing model (per seat) it really didn't matter that much whether their client made 5, 10 or 50 mil unless they massively increased their hiring because of that, unless they can charge per install/% of revenue.
> Traditional industries rarely have such lopsided staff/revenue ratios.
A negligibly small proportion of indie developers are even close to that.
It's just so much easier to get your product ingrained into a company that is growing, as long as you are getting your revenue tied to theirs. Their growth becomes your growth. But it has to be done in a way that makes them not run away. Offer different funding models depending on the project on the other end, and let the customer pick their pricing plan. When the plan for the small company starts looking too expensive for the big one, you get to renegotiate when your tools are already everywhere, and moving away is a hassle.
It works for AWS, Stripe and the like. It should work here.
I think we both agree that small indie studios will not be returning no matter what promises are made, who is CEO, or what new shiny monetization idea they come up with next.
I wish him the best of luck.
One thing I agree on: more often than not, behind an interesting piece of art lies an interesting personality.
To advance the conversation based on some substantive facts, based on my conversations with creators of large free to play Unity games, all were already using IronSource and were not impacted by the changes anyway. As a game developer who publishes himself, I do not plan to migrate away from Unity, and I wasn't really impacted either. I can't speak for the 30 or so studios who posted pleas to revert the changes, but based on what happened, I believe they got what they wanted. So if their decision-making is rational / based on facts, I don't think they're migrating either.
This is all to say that when you have no budget, so you value your time at zero and you have no visual art you didn't author yourself, it's easy to put 100% of the personality into the product, and make that The Thing. There are people I know who turned 20,000 followers on a TikTok about games into a $1m check for a game studio! This is a viable strategy, it is uniquely suited to people to have opinions about game engines. But my facts-informed opinion is that this isn't representative of most game developers, and that they are actually really happy with Unity and relieved that the pricing changes found a middle ground that is less emotionally charged.
I've been using unity for almost a decade now and enjoying it despite the many caveats and idiosyncrasies I come across.
The bottom line is, I definitely don't want to throw away the decade of experience I have using Unity if I can help it. Ultimately I want them to learn from their mistakes and move forward. While Unity has had a fair share of missteps ultimately it's the devil I know.
I do think this is the right approach. This is the approach I took. I was dependent on an engine for a long time until I realized it was just a facade and that I already possessed the knowledge to do it myself. So when XNA died, and MonoGame wasn’t mature yet, I had no choice but to write my own. Some of that effort went into MonoGame’s early days, most of it didn’t (I respect keeping the API the same but we, devs, could have done better to improve it).
Unity made it easy to build games without having to know the underlying proponents that do what they do. Instead, it’s presented through a massively opaque interface called a MonoBehavior. Because of this opaque abstraction, it’s almost impossible for a Unity game developer to know exactly what’s going on under the hood.
My first game engine took me 3 years to get to a point where I could ship something. My second was 1 year. My latest was 3 months.
Eventually, it becomes just adding another interface to your GPU abstraction to support wgpu or DX14, or Vulkan2, or Metal, any graphics api becomes just a Buffer, a Queue, and a sync lock.
instead of indies, i think this applies much more to mid-level studios. Indies tend to be much more flexible and agile, esp. very small indies. Mid-level studios, with a dozen people that have gotten used to the toolchains and have existing investment in it (any custom plugins for example), would have a harder time switching away.
However, this whole debacle just goes to show that proprietary software may be a trap, unless the T&C explicitly clarifies and makes it _not_ a trap. This is what unreal engine has done (you at least will always remain on the same T&C for the version you signed it for).
Open source is a much safer bet for the long term for an indie, esp. if they're just starting out now and do not have toolchains attached to unity. And the godot ecosystem is just budding right now, which means the opportunities are also great there.
Opportunities to spend significant amounts of time working on tooling and other engine features (with a non insignificant likelihood of still ending up with something inferior to Unity depending on your use-case) instead of actually making your game?
Yes, what Unity's management tried pulling off was stupid. However The engine itself is remarkably cheap from the perspective of many developers compared to any open source options.
> unless the T&C explicitly clarifies and makes it
Funnily enough IIRC Unity had a similar issue with the T&C back in 2019 when they promised to never change it retroactively again. Somehow they managed to "forget" it in a couple of years...
I guess one important difference with Unreal is that Epic has way less bloat (several times less employees) and make huge amounts of money from Fortnite so they don't need to try and squeeze as much as possible from their engine clients (currently anyway..)
it's not about changing it, it's about including a clause in the T&C that the version they signed is the version in perpetuity for their version of software (obviously, an upgraded version may have the T&C changed).
Unreal has this clause iirc, but not in unity.
Their founder/CTO (who seems to be MIA these days) published this back in 2019:
https://blog.unity.com/news/updated-terms-of-service-and-com...
"For this reason, we now allow users to continue to use the TOS for the same major (year-based) version number, including Long Term Stable (LTS) builds that you are using in your project."
Which is something they presumably "forgot" about...
The unreal terms[1]:
> 7. The Agreement Between You and Epic
> a. Amendments
> If we make changes to this Agreement, you are not required to accept the amended Agreement, and this Agreement will continue to govern your use of any Licensed Technology you already have access to.
vs the unity terms[2]:
> 23.2 Changes to Terms
> To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, Unity reserves the right from time to time to (and you acknowledge that Unity may) modify these Terms (including, for the avoidance of doubt, the Additional Terms) without prior notice.
I never implied it was otherwise.
However if we look at their TOS from 2019 (the time of this blog post) they do have this:
> if the Updated Terms adversely impact your rights, you may elect to continue to use any current-year versions of the Unity Software (e.g., 2018.x and 2018.y and any Long Term Supported (LTS) versions for that current-year release) according to the terms that applied just prior to the Updated Terms (the “Prior Terms”). The Updated Terms will then not apply to your use of those current-year versions unless and until you update to a subsequent year version of the Unity Software (e.g. from 2019.4 to 2020.1)
I don't think the section is still there anymore? But presumably it still applies to you if you haven't upgraded past 2018/2019 versions. But it was actually in the TOS (just like for Unreal) which I didn't expect.
*https://github.com/thaliaarchi/unity-termsofservice/blob/243...
maybe if this happened two years down the line and W4 Games had more time to establish itself (maybe even make it's own game to inspire confidence) it'd be a different story, but I can still see indies coming back. If they ever left to begin with. And this isn't even talking about the corporate giants in the mobile space.
Why are you so certain that a significant proportion of them even left in the first place?
> As an employee at Unity
I don't think they are even remotely close to being as transparent internally as they used to be a few years ago. Also as far as I'm aware sales data wasn't accessible to every single employee even back in those days?
Give it 5+ years and another screw-up from Unity at the tail-end, and I 100% agree that Unity is sunk for indie devs. But as it is, Unity has a grace period where devs are locked-in and if Unity can demonstrate stability over the next few years, then people will forget it.
And yes, if. Unity's current PR position is in a fully-stocked rope warehouse, but they could navigate out relatively unscathed.
I wholeheartedly disagree. There’s more choice than ever. A search on GitHub would show you.
Unity has had one thing going for it. It was easy to get started and it had a ton of learning material. It is NOT the only choice. Off the top of my head there’s:
- Ogre3D
- O3DE
- MonoGame
- GameMaker
- Godot
- Cocos2d
- GDevelop
- Pandas3D
- Reactor
- Stride3D (formerly Xenko)
- Three.js
- Babylon.js
Unity’s editor first approach and their C# “everything’s a behavior” is why so many think it’s the only game in town. It’s not. It never was.
And I love Godot -- love it-- but it doesn't do all the things Unity does. Even if it did, it would take years to get all the teams to switch. Think how long it took people to move away from Flash!
I'm not sure about that. Unity itself is not at all a particularly modern engine (just like most engines being iterations of something designed in the 00s or early 10s)
But I'm probably just daydreaming.
You can also see that the Urho3d repo is readonly on Github. I don't know which fork is the most active but there are a few that sprung out of the mess.
If there weren't people at Unity that could influence or stop the former CEO, the problem probably also didn't vanish with his termination.
It could also just be a PR move. Riccitiello is disliked among Unity customers, so you get goodwill by firing him.
You may know what a CRDT is, but (apparently) the Trello board is beyond you.
My read of this debacle is that the Unity CEO did not pay attention to details. It's as if he had ever thought of how the policy would play out -- a signature move of a corner-office boss who simply delegates everything about product to his lieutenants. Or worse, to the lieutenants of lieutenants.
This is in such contrast with those founder CEOs, who painstakingly think through product and policy changes.
No way to know, I suppose, if it was him + the board vs everyone, or him vs the board... but unless somebody leaks the details, I'd assume the board is just as culpable.
To be clear, I know essentially nothing about James M. Whitehurst other than what is readily publicly available (IBM / Red Hat, advisory roles, etc.).
But my read on a lot of the Unity crisis, as a long-time game industry veteran myself, was that one of the increasingly common "management consulting" / investor- & revenue-focused type of gaming executives (e.g. Riccitiello, Don Mattrick [Zynga replacement CEO when Pincus stepped down], Kotick [Activision-Blizzard]) had finally overstepped their bounds and let revenue goals drive decision-making just a bit too far without customer consideration.
So, I had assumed that if Unity did make a leadership change here, it would be in a direction away from that - i.e. a more industry-seasoned executive with less of a pure revenue / "business" focus.
I think I clearly misjudged the situation here in light the Whitehurst pick; while it's possible that is truly just an interim role and they will still pivot to this in the final hire, or that I simply misjudge "the label on the tin" and Whitehurst is very culture / customer focused, I don't think I would bet on it. This seems like the board actually "doubling down" on driving revenue results - and fast.