Another good lesson about why we should trust only FOSS ecosystems
Unity employee here, idk anything specific about the departments that handle this I wouldn’t even know what their name is. With that caveat, I will say that all the layoffs last year going into this year, changing CEOs, and the competition between big company beurocracy and the dying breath of small company culture, a lot of departments are behaving erratically. I wouldn’t be surprised if nobody internally has a clear answer why this was banned but others aren’t. Some workers may legit be trying to help but their hands are tied for corporate or maybe even legal reasons, it could be people trying to keep their heads down and close tickets quickly to keep metrics up in the hopes they’re less likely to be fired. I think you all know this already but please don’t be too hard on the workers we’re doing what we can but it’s a corporate mess right now
Look, it’s a low level employee of a faceless corporation!
GET 'IM!
Jokes aside, thanks for the transparency, and salute to you and your coworkers for trying to weather the storm caused by “shifting paradigms”… that’s what they call it, right? I know the execs can shift my paradigm, that’s for sure.
Peace and love.
Tech in general but especially the game industry desperately needs to unionize. If the last couple years doesn’t convince tech bros they’re just as expendable as all the other working class out there, idk what will. Got to do something to insulate us from “restructures”, “rightsizing”, and “company resets”
I feel like more than anything right now, you need a hug. 🤗
Wow I never knew it was that bad. I hope you have something else lined up it sounds like everyone’s employment is shaky
A friend of mine worked in a position I would have assumed was considered vital to one of Unity’s products, in fact to my knowledge they were the only one keeping that part running. Apparently the higher-ups were able to lay them off without much hesitation this time around. The company seems to be leaking hard.
Stop making excuses for your fuck ups and start fix things.
Amazing lol. Yeah I’ll get right on that maybe I can talk some sense into the CEO during my daily morning cocktails with him
THAT’S BETTER GOSH
Really though, what were they thinking. Why would anyone risk staying with unity after all their bad decisions, especially when they clearly have no intention to stop being dumb.
They’re mostly banking on the cost of change being higher than the inconvenience of staying.
They probably are, but it’s not really about cost, it’s about fear. I fear that while it costs $x to switch to Unreal Enigne now, it’ll cost $x+10 after a few weeks when they do their next decision, and $x+20 a month or so after that.
Like buying a reverse lottery ticket. If you’re unlucky, you suddenly have to pay a big amount somewhere in the future.
That description really fits all kinds of technical debt.
Also I think there’s a vast majority of crap in app purchase games that will happily pay money to unity as they run their gacha systems. Real, honest developers care about stuff like this, but international game farms (the kind that always seem to be sponsoring YouTubers and streamers) are just running calculations on what it will cost them to keep using Unity.
And now that unity has backed down on pricing those devs are still raking in money, so they, as potentially unity’s biggest customers, and unity themselves, don’t care what more indie devs think as they push forward higher growth targets.
ah the mainframe strategy
The microsoft strategy.
Which signals to investors that there is little to no expected growth. If you aren’t attracting new customers to grow your user base, then you only have the option to milk your existing customers to increase revenue.
That may work short term, but long term it signals a death knell for the company, since as the old customers retire or the studios close down, the new crop of game developers would have been trained on or adopted a different engine so aren’t going to switch to Unity. Eventually they just run out of customers.
Especially in a competitive market where compelling alternatives exist.
Especially in tech.
And especially in software.
Yep, but the best part is because their core demographic is moronic, know-nothing-about-how-any-technology actually works, start-up indie game devs with basically only a dream and prayers combined with ‘i have played some video games, it cant be /that hard/ to make one!’ kinds of people…
…you can expect discussion around everything going on with Unity to be filled with irrelevant and infuriating opinions/beliefs/concerns that will eat up most discussions in most communities while also mocking and downplaying actually correct and actually relevant things.
It never fails to amaze and infuriate me how confidently completely wrong nearly all video game players are about literally everything about /creating/ video games.
That may work short term
That’s all that matters. The next quarter’s growth is more important than the year-end P/L sheets.
I went to a game dev meetup in Seoul last year. Everyone was using Unity.
I went again last month. Half the people were using Godot.
For a bit more context, I used to work in the gaming industry. We used Unity because it was great for making money - drop in ads and tracking, you’re good to go. The Godot ecosystem isn’t as mature for that yet. However, even we were considering switching to Godot. It wasn’t worth switching for a number of reasons (besides the above mentioned ones, Godot is also “laggier” and we have some heavier games), but had we started shop yesterday, it’s safe to say we would have used Godot too.
Unity just laid off 25% of their workforce. That is not a small number. Their days are numbered.
Small correction they haven’t fired 25% of us yet, it is a work in progress
Yep, I started my own game dev journey a year ago after a decade in the tech industry.
My gamer friends: Use Unity Bro its so easy to learn!
Hrm but uh what about cost structure, licensing, all that kind of stuff?
Doesnt matter bro, you can just port it all if it doesnt work!
Well uh, porting is actually a lot of work and burnout is a serious concern so wouldnt it make more sense to-
Youre making this too complicated, what you need to do first is-
…
And that conversation was obviously useless.
Anyway yeah, I picked Godot after doing, you know actual research on all the benefits and limitations of various engines.
See, Godot, being open source, and myself, not having a huge amount of money to throw at this, and also not just knowing any reasonable or reliable people that could contribute… I can afford to work with Godot at a comfortable pace and not be driven insane by budgetary concerns and a timetable, and Godot is likely to only improve, and I can improve with it, expand the scope or add new features as they become better supported by engine updates or freely usable nifty tools and techniques proliferate.
Also at this point I am planning on really only supporting linux users, as I am again looking to do this as a hobbyist that isnt really concerned about making a ton of money, and also at this point I just literally despise every technically incompetent person non FOSS user I have ever known, so Godot suits that well.
Oh and linux gaming marketshare is growing rather rapidly.
I just literally despise every technically incompetent person
Those are strong words for people that just didn’t dedicate 90% of their lives to tech like we did. Some people actually do have other interests you know.
Is it okay to hate you simply for not knowing what a flyback diode, colpitts oscillator, phase-locked loop, or regenerative receiver is? That’s my hobby. And there are not as many of us as there are software devs. There are not many here who I can discuss electronics engineering with. But I don’t despise people because of that.
You gotta realize, WE are the weirdos, not them. A very high interest and obsession over tech is not an average human quality.
You conveniently left out the qualifier of my statement.
That I have ever known.
Probably unlike the field of electrical engineering, every /single/ person I have known in my life has relied on me to provide free expertise in software related issues of all possible kinds, and also simultaneously mocked my expertise and ability any time I suggest they do something or use something that will actually work, but they do not think it will because -insert utterly nonsensical concern about issue they do not even know how to use basic vocabulary to describe-.
This is apparently a rather unique phenomenon that happens to those who are programmers and know software.
Software and programming is in every modern computerized device, but an astounding amount of people who use such devices both realize they are not experts and will seek the help of a software expert for assistance, but will also feel as if they are better able to solve a problem when -literally any random thing they do not like for any random reason is different in any other way-.
If you attempt to explain anything to these people at this point it does not matter if you are correct, they will be angry and abuse you quite often.
I do not hate the tech illiterate people I have known because they are ignorant.
I hate them because they are abusive.
Finally, when it comes to the kind of game I want to make?
I want to make something I would enjoy playing.
And I have found that I enjoy games that offer a mix of skill based challenge in the sense of being able to quickly execute exact commands to the controller rapidly and with precision, but also with a larger sense of strategy, and also with multiple possible ways to solve a problem, some that are obvious, and some that are non obvious and encourage thinking outside the box.
And I have also found that every technically incompetent person I have known is utterly incapable of enjoying this kind of gameplay.
And that is fine. As I said, I want to make a game for myself and people with similar game preferences, and mental capacities.
I have been surrounded by abusive morons my whole life and I have no interest in making a game that appeals to such people.
Godot, being open source
This is the key thing IMO. If they ever do anything like try to make it a paid framework with huge fees, or just move in a direction the community disagrees with, the existing open source code remains open source and someone can just fork it.
Ding ding ding, winner winner chicken dinner.
Sure if you are a bigger entity and have more money to throw around, there are other engines that’ll probably be a much better fit.
If youre a broke ass indie dev, I am not really seeing a better choice than Godot right now, as youre not gonna be able to afford a more expensive engine without /usually/ pulling some kind of asset flip scam type thing.
Sure there are some very good more niche 2D only development engines, but even with a lot of them youve still got some kind of liscensing to deal with.
That basically leaves Unity and … OGRE, as far as I am aware for possibly good choices for a 3D game.
Unity is currently self destructing, and OGRE, at least as far as I have tried, is pretty hard to get a native dev environment working on linux. Maybe I missed something or got confused, but I kept running into error after error trying to set up its more advanced features, which seem to require windows specific dependencies.
I guess you could run it in a VM but that seems basically insane, and even if I was to set up a dedicated Windows machine just to develop on OGRE, it is far more clumsy to work with than Godot.
It’s 25% of their swelled up post COVID workforce it’s not that bad.
x * 1.25 = 1.25x
1.25x - (1.25x * 0.25) = 0.9375x
(I know you’re memeing, but growing 25% then cutting 25% is actually a significant net-cut)
You tell those people who left good jobs and now need this to put food on their table and pay the bills. You have the empathy of a CEO.
edit: The following is off topic, but I’ll.leave it as a testament to my gray-beardedness. In my defense: Unity isn’t Unity anymore. Don’t get old.
I’ve been using Linux for 30 years now, and for a while I was an advocate for Ubuntu and Canonical (among others, I’m pan-distributive). Then things changed: GNOME 3, Wayland, Unity, something-sonething, Snaps… All too much.
As an advocate, I’m apt not to emerge with favorites, or to yuck others’ yums. Neverthekess, Canonical is a press beyond the pale, many days.
In the end, I don’t recommend Canonical distros. LMDE is solid, as are most of the *bian and redhat downstreams. I don’t recommend the others because I don’t know them, but more importantly I couldn’t help a friend un-bodge a bad installer on them (likewise for "BSD or Darwin).
But really, no love for Canonical. They went to some Dark Side, and I’ll have a hard time forgiving them for it.
I also thought of Unity the DE before reading the article
I understand the confusion. This doesn’t belong to a Linux community. I mean, I see the relation with FOSS but I’m sure there are FOSS communities out there. The article doesn’t even mentions Linux, just Windows and Android.
You do realize this is about the Unity game engine, right?
I do now. See edits upthread.
This is about the Unity game engine, not the unrelated Unity desktop shell from Canonical.
Well said nevertheless. Both suck.
Yes understood. See edts up thread
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At this point you should know that unity is an evil company.
It was literally led by the evil EA guy.
Was led. He left after the license fee catastrophe.
Wait he already left?
But the interim CEO led the redundancies. The common factor in all of this is the board. The CEO just does what the board are pushing for and sign off on. Ricky is bad and not a good man by any stretch of the imagination, but he was less bad 2/4/6 years ago for a bit. He’s just the hatchet (yes) man doing the business of the big shareholders.
The next CEO will likely be following the same play book. Without a change of board, it’s still an evil company. Ricky was just the fall guy that naive people they bin off so naive folk buy into the fact it’s “all fixed, and back to old Unity”.
The great advise right now, is stay away from Unity. You have Godot, Armory3d, and hell, even Epic run Unreal Engine is better.
He and John Riccitiello should start a studio together.
The VLC team are heroes. Three cheers.
This headline was the subtle push I needed to donate to Videolan. What an amazing project, we’re lucky to have it.
What a horrible way to handle this. A bit like YouTube demonetization policies.
Only in the licensing space in particular there is really no good reason to hide the exact rules what is acceptable and what isn’t. Nobody is going to circumvent your defences if they know exactly which licenses you allow.
Companies really do be taking people’s work and profiting off of it, then not giving back whatsoever. :(
Thats why you need Licenses to stop that… well jf you can afford to fight them at all, haha.
Money always wins…Licenses are only as good as your most expensive lawyer
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Videolabs is a company founded by VideoLAN members and is the current editor of the VLC mobile applications and one of the largest contributor to VLC.
_https://www.videolan.org/videolan/partners.htm_
Seems like they’re not just “someone”.
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