Unity exec tells Ars he’s on a mission to earn back developer trust

Interview: "It was not our intent to nickel-and-dime it, but it came across that way."

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[Dark Jaguar]

Oh their professional liar is here to tell us all we just misunderstood their greed. It was actually generosity misconstrued as greed, of course! I make that mistake all the time.

So, even if they completely reverse course, they need to go even further and make an iron clad new legal agreement that CAN'T be retroactively changed by any means once in place. Even then, how can anyone trust Unity ever again? It's doing the one thing I really didn't want, and that's making Unreal seem a lot more appealing to independent developers, as if it needed to get even closer to a monopoly. That said, I can't really come up with any reasons why these companies shouldn't switch to Unreal after this.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

At what point do the unwashed masses start to realize that capitalism ain't all it was cracked up to be?

When the pain of standing still becomes greater than the pain of changing.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

In other words, what you're really upset about is being downvoted into oblivion.

What you're ignoring is that Unity did not offer the option to stick with previous terms if devs stuck with previous versions, but imposed the new terms retroactively, and it's not the first time they've done that. That is why people don't trust them.

You can be naive and assume they'll stick to their promises this time, but nobody else is under the same obligation. Given they are claiming the ToS tracker was removed because it "didn't have enough views", there is evidence this latest turnaround is not at all sincere.
View attachment 63846

What an absolutely ridiculous excuse. Even if the views WERE low, there is no reason at all to remove the page. None. It's TEXT. It's not eating up any bandwidth. Heck, if the views are that low, it would eat up even LESS bandwidth. Unless your TOS page consisted of an 8K 3 hour long video streamed in 3D of someone reading it out, this is a ridiculous complaint. Things like TOS shouldn't be measured in viewer count, but necessity, and it was necessary.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

And it was hosted on Github, so they weren't even paying for the bandwidth.

Yes, thank you!

 

[Dark Jaguar]

They've done this twice. Why on God's green earth would you give them the benefit of the doubt?

edit, a half-hour later: and they did it with the same executive team. This isn't a mistake, it's an MO!

The level of deference some people are willing to show corporations, even ones that are actively harming them in a decision objectively made out of pure greed, is at times stunning. It's like cultural Stockholm syndrome.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

They also wouldn’t be able to see page views if it was a normal GitHub repo

Good lord, I knew it was a lie, but I didn't realize the sheer depths of the lie until you pointed it out. They lied in every possible direction.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

This is getting downvoted so much that I'm suspecting people are reading more into it than I said (or they hate the term "X-cretion," I suppose).

I literally wonder how many of those resignations actually happened. That's key data on Unity's health, and we don't have it. If there were very few, it doesn't matter, but if they had a significant fraction of their tech expertise walk out the door, then whether or not they can regain trust is effectively irrelevant.

Ultimately, we customers don't matter directly--shareholders do. Unity isn't traded after hours, so we won't have another data point until Monday, but so far it ain't lookin' good. Honestly, I don't understand how they've kept their incompetent leadership even this far. Unity's share price was once over $200/share. It's under $33 today, and while a bit of that came in the last week, they've been utter failures as a publicly traded company much longer than most boards would tolerate.

I would be happiest with an actual buyout: let Apple, Microsoft, or some non-profit consortium buy them, dump all the services and malware crap, and return them to their "build a good game engine" roots. But if they've lost a significant fraction of their best engineers, even that isn't going to be enough.

No, nononono. Getting gobbled up by an even bigger company won't "fix" them. Why do people delude themselves into thinking the answer to corporate greed is "more consolidation"? It never is. It has only ever made things worse, historically.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

Many, many products have done better after acquisition; it's almost the default condition for the tech industry. And in this case, it's likely literally existential. It doesn't seem likely Unity can survive much longer without massively increasing its income, and they burned all the bridges that would allow them to do that.

The choice here might be "Unity exists, owned by someone for whom it is a key tool (e.g. Microsoft/Apple or some game studio)" vs. "Unity no longer exists."

Glib lines about how acquisitions are never successful notwithstanding, it's hard to argue that from the point of view of the company and its customers, existence is preferable to nonexistence. And honestly, it's a dev tool. Either of those companies would likely be a good steward in this case.

If it dies, it dies. Better that than the steady monopolization infecting the entirety of the business world.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

And finally, Epic gets the monopoly Tim Sweeney so desperately wants, and can leverage that monopoly in whatever way they choose to. Devs lose a powerful engine and game prices rise (as any product does in a monopoly).

That's the worst outcome. It's great to quote that Russian boxer and feel all cool, but it's bad for an entire industry. Better an acquisition than that.

So, you're saying we should encourage an acquisition because the alternative is something worrying, frightening, an acquisition, just by Epic instead of Apple? I reject both parts of that, and have no idea what russia's got to do with this besides.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

How are these execs never fired? If any employee screwed up this massive they would be let go the next day. An exec screws up, they go on an apology tour and then get a massive bonus

I thought being an executive earning big pay meant you take on more risk, thus justifying the huge pay. But now days nothing ever seems to happen to these folks. They make idiotic decisions, double down on them, then backtrack, lay off employees when profits go down due to their stupid decisions, and still get bonuses

What a racket

Who could fire them? They're in charge. The average stockholder doesn't have a clue what a magic gathering is or what demons the satanists buying that occult D&D game are trying to summon, they only care if line go up this year.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

Things are getting off-topic here, but IMO things are changing: I relied on Photoshop for many years, but I haven't touched anything Adobe for years now; I'm a happy user of the Affinity suite. Sure, it's not open source, but it's not a subscription and considering its features it's definitely good enough, and much better value, for most prosumers. I'd like to believe that Adobe's greed opened the door to such competition.

So, to bring this back to Unity, its enshittification might just help something "good enough" to grow. It doesn't have to replace Unity; even just being an alternative worth considering would be great. And Godot seems to have the most potential ATM.

I know this is a strange thing to focus on, but one thing that isn't helping GIMP's adoption is that name. Schools simply can't adopt something that basically is a slur against the disabled.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

I always thought it was referencing the bdsm kink.

Granted, that isn't really an improvement WRT schools.

Oh I forgot about that "gimp" guy from Pulp Fiction! Good point, though officially, apparently it's named after the creator's dog. That... isn't really much of a defense, because H.P. Lovecraft's cat wouldn't exactly make a suitable name for a product either, no matter how beloved his "n-man" is (details intentionally left blank).

In any case, the request has been made numerous times over the years, but the creator got all haughty and offended about "self censorship" and now is simply refusing to ever change the name because... that's a hill to die on I guess.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

Other cases in point: the JavaScript test runner called "Testacular" that got renamed Karma, or the music gear site "Gearslutz" that got renamed to Gearspace (and their old name had been around for a long time).

Neither was changed without protest, but the names were changed and life went on as usual. It's really not that crazy of a thing.

Heck of all those names, "Testacular" is the least problematic. Still couldn't really get it into a primary school with that, but at least it's not insulting to half the student body like "Gearslutz" is.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

In my next game, "Trust Was Broken", you'll play as the wife of an abusive guy who keeps pulling the rug out from under you, then he beats you, and he tries to hide the evidence, and then he tries to gaslight you and tell you that "please honey, I've changed, thank you for the feedback"... And in the end you get to decide if it is a good idea to stay with him or not.

Is that even a game? If you only get one binary choice right at the end, it should just be a simple "choose your own adventure" game.

...Yea I'm completely ignoring the point aren't I? Sorry!