- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
Another good lesson about why we should trust only FOSS ecosystems
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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
I feel like more than anything right now, you need a hug. 🤗
I appreciate you
Wow I never knew it was that bad. I hope you have something else lined up it sounds like everyone’s employment is shaky
Yeah it’s a bit of a shit show for sure. Unfortunately I do not have anything else lined up right now, I know that’s an unsafe decision. My life has been a mess lately I can only handle so much at once and finding different work is exhausting
If you’re a software engineer, and you’re in the unity Austin area, lmk. Assuming you would be open to writing b2b software, the company i work for is huge, and still hiring devs.
I appreciate this, I’m not in that area though. I also plan on migrating back into making games for my next job because I’m a slut for corporate abuse
I can understand that. I wish you the best
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.
As a long time Unity user, thanks for your hard work. It’s appreciated more than you could ever know.
Can you prove that unity’s employee?
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
It’s not his fault that his bosses and their bosses are fuckwits. Don’t blame the common worker for the shit the company board does
Written by someone who has never beena cog in the machine at a company like this.
There’s nothing he can do to affect things there. Nothing. Not even quitting will change anything.
Quitting would probably be doing them a favor tbh they’re already trying to fire everyone
You don’t understand how development works, at all. The developers themselves don’t make these kind of decisions at these companies. They just do what they are told to do by their higher-ups. The higher-ups happen to be corporate businesspeople that don’t really know much about tech, and only care about profits.
The blame for Unity’s failures belongs to the executives and businesspeople, not the developers.
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.
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
Good luck. It’s a stressful time. I hope you get yourself sorted in whatever you plan to do.
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.
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.
Agreed.
Except, you don’t win a negative lottery prize so much as you take on someone’s loanshark debt and now have to service it at insane interest rates.
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.
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 moonlight as a small app developer. This is absolutely correct. I have a handful of legacy apps which uses Unity, and makes so little that moving them would cost more.
That said, if/when I do another project, it won’t be in Unity.
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
With ibm working hard to enshittify redhat even faster than newredhat themselves, we should consider avoiding them as a first-class porting and work target.
Look at OpenEL as a successor to the RH and an upstream for the other ELs once RH starts eating from that tasty “free stuff they can sell” trough. Having made bank on TheForeMan without actually making an effort to support it, they have a model they can use for everything.
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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.
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?
The parachutes don’t work if you stay on the plane.
What?
I think they were referring to golden parachutes.
What²?
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 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.
The CEO just does what the board are pushing for
Too many people don’t understand this.
Usually[1], CEO’s exists mostly to be the public fall guy for the faceless board’s decisions, and those are mostly shaped by the shareholder’s unending drive for profit. The only real subtlety is whether that drive for profit is short or long term, which drives expansion policy.
[1] Certain high profile CEOs excepted, who have a lot of weight with the board’s direction because they founded the company or are considered too valuable to lose.
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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.
Who tf bans something so good, benevolent, and upstanding as VLC?
Unity has been getting better press because they mildly walked back a few of their policies. One prominent gamedev channel i saw (games from scratch i think?) did a video praising them for booting out ironsource execs (adware company unity bought a while back) from the company.
And, like clockwork, Unity proves that it was never the plucky underdog that was going to take on the behemoths of unreal and (at the time of inception) cryengine. In fact, it feels like its more hostile to its users than either of its original competitors, that were once known for hostile and expensive features.
And again, im gonna shill for godot. You’re better off using FOSS for your tech stack primarily because of this kind of arbitrary behaviour that becomes standard once you’re too big to be internally accountable.
I know there are a lot of Godot tutorials out there, wondering if there are any you would specifically recommend though? I’ve got a lot of Unity experience but looking to move my personal projects to Godot
I would recommend Clear Code. Good, thorough project-based tutorials at a good pace.
I can vouch for Clear Code, as well. That’s where I started and learned to build some 2d platforming games. If you want to get into 3d right away, there is a channel called BornCG that has a very good series on building simple 3d platformer games, too.
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Ingo dot It rust
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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.html_
Seems like they’re not just “someone”.
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Videolabs is what was created instead of trying to make Videolan closed source or for profit. The founder of Videolan is the founder of Videolabs. Fully intentional.
“Every right”, sure. But people have just as much right to decide that they’re not OK with the pattern of behavior from Unity, to talk about it, and to avoid doing business with them as a result of it.
