Interview: "It was not our intent to nickel-and-dime it, but it came across that way."
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Unity exec tells Ars he’s on a mission to earn back developer trust
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I have to agree with many of the voices here without a huge change in the leadership I think that any changes they make are a non-starter from my point of view.
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Shame, no hard questions were asked (maybe because the asshat was doing a great job coming off as an asshat?) I still would've liked more questioning on the decision making process or how come everyone in the world was able to see this coming except apparently for the Unity C-Suite? I don't think this is a puff piece, but imo it's not a good interview.
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Welp! It appears I was entirely incorrect and you can nowadays track views; I did not know that. I feel quite humiliated now.
Thanks, anyways!
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IncorrigibleTroll
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
This is incorrect. Quite a few MS-owned studios use Unity in their games. As far as I'm aware, all of InXile's games are built on Unity, as are a number of Obsidian titles. I'm sure there are plenty of others; that's just what I can pull off the top of my head.
If the Actiblizz acquisition ends up going through, they'll have even more Unity titles. For example, there's this little game called Hearthstone...
Granted, none of that means MS is necessarily likely to be interested in acquiring Unity.
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Celery Man
Ars Legatus Legionis
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I'm not sure I can remember a recent case (maybe Tesla) of the analysts and the actual stockholders being so far apart. The analysts have been giving "buy" ratings on Unity for a couple weeks now, several of them even upgrading it, while I don't think the stock itself has had a single up day (including today). I know they (analysts) kinda suck at technical stuff in general, but the "hey, we're going to make SO MUCH MONEY" line while the building is on fire is particularly weird.
Unity itself seems pathologically unwilling to try and address developer flight; even their half-step walkback doesn't do anything to answer the question of "why should I choose you over Unreal Engine (or one of the open source engines, if the meet the needs of my project) for any future project?"
I think we're in the "buyout or bankruptcy" part of the game now, although multi-billion-dollar companies usually take a while to completely fail, and Unity has some current-project-lock-in to fall back on for a year or two.
Unity itself seems pathologically unwilling to try and address developer flight; even their half-step walkback doesn't do anything to answer the question of "why should I choose you over Unreal Engine (or one of the open source engines, if the meet the needs of my project) for any future project?"
I think we're in the "buyout or bankruptcy" part of the game now, although multi-billion-dollar companies usually take a while to completely fail, and Unity has some current-project-lock-in to fall back on for a year or two.
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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
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
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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.
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Oh, I can guarantee Unity talked to partners. What they've made abundantly clear is that developers are not their partners. Their partners are ad brokers and monetization integrators, specifically the ones managed by people currently sitting on the board of directors. Think ironSource. Think Sequoia Investments. Organizations that have used these same techniques in other software verticals, until they made themselves unwelcome there and migrated to gaming.
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The board, assuming it isn't captured. Which is an assumption.
The settler of my trust, when I pass, has explicit instructions to bring in multiple bidders on my MtG collection, all proceeds to go to her brother within my trust, which she will then control. She is a bad-ass attorney. I would sell off a bunch of it today. but she would probably negotiate a better deal, and I am persisting comfortably.
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Ever wonder how many of those analysts own Unity stock, or are friends with someone who does ?
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Could be, but that sort of thing carries extreme penalties, and Unity is sort of a niche thing compared to most of the tech market. I'm more inclined to suspect incompetence, or--more charitably--lack of any sort of familiarity or context with what Unity even does.
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Well, stock analysts rarely issue sell recommendations, period. Stock analyst reports are worthwhile for the actual facts and data they contain, as they generally do good jobs of organizing information in easily accessible format—including some that aren’t otherwise easily accessible to the world at large—but the ratings they issue shouldn’t be treated as serious advice.
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He's being so obtuse about this that I'm getting a feeling he has a horse in this race.
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This argument is so tired. FOSS is all around us, and getting stronger while commercial software (like Unity) gets crappier (in one way or another).
True, Linux hasn't made much dent in the desktop market. And yet, my household currently has 2 Windows PCs, 1 Linux PC... and at least 10 Linux-based smart devices. Linux is creeping in everywhere, because its openness makes it fundamentally better to work with than commercial platforms.
Many other FOSS products already hold at least enough market share to put pressure on their commercial equivalents to be less evil. I rely on Inkscape where I once used CorelDraw and Illustrator. And I use GIMP extensively as well. It's already ahead of Photoshop in some ways (apart from price) and evolving steadily. Soon it will leave Photoshop behind in the dust - and/or force Adobe to give graphics professionals a better deal.
I also use endless FOSS utilities for digital 'odd jobs' - KeePass is a good example. I use these products not (primarily) because of my belief in the principles of FOSS, but because open standards are practically the only worthwhile guarantee that a product won't abruptly turn against me - as Creative
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DeschutesCore
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Never had a project collapse or go closed source on ya, eh?
In my experience:
Open source formats?
Yes, please and thank you.
Open source tools and utilities?
They've been reliably unreliable. I'll roll it myself or go with something guaranteed for x number of years, thus Unity being excluded from our toolchain.
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Um, right. The only way GIMP will Photoshop behind in the dust soon is if you redefine the word "soon" to be the one Elon Musk was using when he described the time schedule for Tesla's FSD. Back when Adobe launched the subscription model, photographers and graphics designers cried bloody murder...and dejectedly went back to using Photoshop, because it was the only viable solution out there. Life hasn't changed today. GIMP doesn't even register for most non-Linux users. Don't believe me, go look at DPReview's forums. Searching for "photoshop" returns 180K results while "gimp" returns 9800 results, and the first two threads to hit are from people saying they found GIMP too hard.
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GIMP's problem is GIMP's developer. They've gone out of their way to make everything as different from Photoshop in every way possible that transitioning TO GIMP is a nuisance right from the start. It defies all conventions of virtually any other image editor out there today just for the asinine sake of being 'different.' And let me tell you -- when a developer is that deliberately obtuse, it does NOT say good things about their priorities. Because a SMART developer makes picking up and using their software as easy and seamless as possible, and that means building around industry and user conventions and expected standards. Not ignoring them 'just because.'
By comparison, Paint.net is MS Paint but with a whole bunch of bells and whistles added to it, in ways that follow pretty much all the industry-standard conventions, which makes picking up and using Paint.net virtually seamless, regardless of what other image editor you usually use.
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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.
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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.
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The problem with Gimp is that it's a "category killer" in esr's nomenclature: there's not space for something that's Gimp-like when Gimp is already there. And Gimp hasn't been a great occupier of that space - only switching to GTK3 as GTK was switching to version 4, for example, despite GTK starting out as the Gimp Tool Kit.
But projects have found success by pushing at the frontiers of the Gimp space: things like Krita on the drawing side and things like Darktable on the photography side. In the absence of someone refactoring Gimp for the jack-of-all-trades workflow, hopefully those other projects can get good enough for their specific-task workflows.
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It's 2023, and I've been hearing this since at least 1999. It hasn't happened yet. I worked in the graphics arts industry much of my career and many of my friends still do. Nobody is using GIMP or Inkscape for professional work. ADBE is doing quite well. A previous poster mentioned Affinity: in a couple of years, they developed an excellent consumer-grade image editor (and over a little more time, a suite). They didn't do it using a FOSS model, and they finished it. I have no industry data for them, but I'd be very, very surprised if Affinity users didn't outnumber GIMP and Inkscape ones, too.
There actually are a few game dev companies that use Blender, but the bulk of them are still on Maya, at least for their key assets.
Could it happen? Sure. And Godot could become the game engine of choice. But right now, for work that I need to do TODAY, it's not ready. And if it follows the path of GIMP and Inkscape, I'll be long, long dead before it is.
The rosy-colored glasses--combined with the "I've built my whole environment around FOSS" cherry-picking--of your post is why "this is the year of Linux on the desktop" is a meme.
I have nothing against the FOSS model in theory, but the idea that it's taking over the world in high-end; easy-to-use consumer/prosumer/professional non-tech apps today isn't borne out by evidence.
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There was a "Gimp with a better name" project - Glimpse - but it didn't achieve critical mass, and so it died.
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Celery Man
Ars Legatus Legionis
GIMP could just... change the name, of course. It wouldn't be as simple as edit -> replace word -> save, obviously, but it'd be far easier than getting people to migrate to yet another program just because of a name change.
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IncorrigibleTroll
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
I always thought it was referencing the bdsm kink.
Granted, that isn't really an improvement WRT schools.
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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.
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Celery Man
Ars Legatus Legionis
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.
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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.
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The point of a golden parachute is that even if a CEO damages to company beyond repair, the executive still gets a nice and tidy profit as they leave. It's wild because no matter how bad these CEOs are, they continue to get great sums of money and somehow additional jobs on other boards. They go on to become venture capitalists or start their own 501(c)(3) with contracts.
Very rarely do these people ever become so radioactive that they are never touched again.
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I'm more inclined to believe it's Joachim Ante, but the comments definitely felt like "defense of my company."
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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.
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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!
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