from Hacker News

Unity's oldest community announces dissolution

by Morizero on 9/25/23, 6:05 PM with 445 comments

  • by Willish42 on 9/25/23, 7:15 PM

    I wish I had a large enough Twitter following to make a public claim about this before Unity "went back" on the first version of the recently-announced pricing changes, but I was nearly certain this was an intentional move to make the "Update on our update" second version more palatable.

    There's probably a wiki link somewhere to the Proper Noun PR phenomenon in business school for this strategy, but the "terrible plan then less terrible plan but still worse than before the initial terrible plan" strategy seems like essentially a confirmation Unity is not to be trusted for small developers. It's sad to lose a great dev community but it sounds like BUG is making the right call here.

  • by kdottt on 9/25/23, 6:46 PM

    "More importantly, we've seen how easily and flippantly an executive-led business decision can risk bankrupting the studios we've worked so hard to build, threaten our livelihoods as professionals, and challenge the longevity of our industry. The Unity of today isn't the same company that it was when the group was founded, and the trust we used to have in the company has been completely eroded."

    Profoundly sad, and completely avoidable. Have never seen a company so quickly and completely just throw away all of their public good will.

  • by taikahessu on 9/25/23, 8:37 PM

    I have a hard time coming up with a worse decision in the history of game industry.

    Why did it come to this? Just more profits? I mean the landscape is highly competitive with free tools getting better and Unreal Engine eating all the highlights. Unity's stock price was even before this decision a third of it's all time high.

    I mean there must've been a dramatic cultural twist quite some time ago. That would've lead champions to leave and the codebase comes crashing down. This will be a great lecture material for business schools, goes in the same bucket as Nokia.

  • by karaterobot on 9/25/23, 7:20 PM

    I grant the premise that Unity sucks and has made changes that make it much harder to be an indie developer using its runtime.

    That said, I don't understand the decision to shut the group and encourage members to move to a more general game dev group instead. If the reason is "everyone stopped using Unity, we don't have any members" then I understand, but the press release didn't say that. In fact it implied there might be thousands of members.

    The closest thing to a reason they gave was that Unity has become hostile to indie devs. But Unity doesn't run BUG, so if some people are still using Unity, which I assume is the case, wouldn't they still benefit from having a users group? If it's an act of protest by the group organizers, that seems annoying for the people who still use Unity and got value out of having access to that community.

    Without sufficient context to understand the decision, I find I'm not sure what this act accomplishes, or what it intended to accomplish.

  • by asynchronous on 9/25/23, 6:37 PM

    Unity really showing the world how to tank a business by letting a few MBA’s at the top make a decision for profit.

  • by soulbadguy on 9/25/23, 6:51 PM

    like getting blood from a stone...

    Most of those open-source companies turn "evil" stories (like IBM/redhat ) seems to follow the same pattern. IMO, there is a limit of the amount of value one can extract from those venture. Trying to increase revenue beyond a certain limit will always result very bad outcome.

    But i also think it's a lesson for the gaming industry. Why is something as core are a game engine, not something properly open-source and license such as QT, LLVM or GCC...

  • by HeavyStorm on 9/26/23, 10:53 AM

    I keep saying it: the only way Unity will possibly convince the community that this was a mistake that won't happen again is by firing the CEO and whichever other C-levels involved in the affair. This signals that they understand this to be a fatal mistake, removes the people who has this distorted agenda, and makes it clear to future C-levels that other mistakes like this won't be tolerated.

  • by protocolture on 9/26/23, 2:09 AM

  • by gumballindie on 9/25/23, 10:23 PM

    The difference between game developers and other types of developers is that they figured out how to fire companies and mediocre executives. Should take notes. Well done, and hopefully Unity's done, along with all other mediocre MBAs that think their clientelle works for them and not the other way around. Game devs are badass.

  • by malfist on 9/25/23, 6:47 PM

    I think enshitification will be the word of the year this year

  • by hartator on 9/25/23, 8:02 PM

    I remember at a game trade show, there was an Unity stand. I was really excited by Unity at the time, was in line to ask the representation random questions, and was trying to get my friend excited as well. The representant (I think some head of Sales) took my excitement talking to my friend as impatience and was rude about us "he is busy and us having to wait our time" when we weren't trying to talk to him. We left and never got excited by Unity again. I guess that was a premise of things to come.

  • by wolverine876 on 9/25/23, 9:17 PM

    > Over the past few years, Unity has unfortunately shifted its focus away from the games industry and away from supporting developer communities. Following the IPO, the company has seemingly put profit over all else, with several acquisitions and layoffs of core personnel. Many key systems that developers need are still left in a confusing and often incomplete state, with the messaging that advertising and revenue matter more to Unity than the functionality game developers care about.

    > Recently, Unity unveiled a set of unthinkably hostile terms of service and pricing changes for its users. The resounding, unequivocal condemnation from the games industry was unprecedented and Unity had no choice but to rescind some of the most egregious changes. Even with these new concessions, the revised pricing model disproportionately affects the success of indie studios in our community.

    That strategy, including hyper-aggressive changes in terms, seems common across different businesses and industries. A recent one in the news was Hasbro's move with some of their leading game products.

    I asked something similar in another thread: Does anyone know the story behind this phenomenon? Is there a name for it? A paper or book or 'expert' that is its genesis?

  • by deafpolygon on 9/26/23, 8:41 AM

    This signals the beginning of the community brain drain from Unity. This will continue to happen until no one is enthusiastic about Unity anymore.

  • by ilyt on 9/26/23, 10:24 AM

    Should've just renamed to Boston Unrealengine Group

  • by debacle on 9/26/23, 12:47 AM

    This is a speedrun on killing a company.

    I adored Unity's tooling. After working with Godot on a project, I loved Unity even more.

    I can't sanely recommend it to anyone at this point.

  • by nla on 9/26/23, 12:50 PM

    Ouch.

  • by Quindecillion on 9/25/23, 10:32 PM

    Best thing about this divisive action by Unity is all the attention it's giving Godot.

    It's a project that deserves far more attention, and I hope in a few years that it's far more common in popular game development.

  • by dang on 9/25/23, 7:48 PM

    We changed the URL from https://bostonunitygroup.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/index.ht..., which is what the submitted URL redirects to. Our software follows redirect; in this case it seems worth reversing. Thanks to the user who pointed this out!

  • by wly_cdgr on 9/26/23, 8:15 AM

    The idea that Unity was ever to be trusted is incredibly naive. They were obviously corporate tools from the very earliest get go. The fact is, indies used it because it was the best way to make money, something to which they are no way entitled, and now they are big mad that the devil they themselves signed a contract with has decided to collect. Boo fckin hoo. The Unity dev community has always been the most soulless corpocreep indie gamedev community out there, good riddance, I hope most of them go out of business

  • by napierzaza on 9/25/23, 7:44 PM

    It took me a little while to get it but now I do. They want their community to continue on even if some of their members are moving off of Unity.

  • by jconley on 9/25/23, 9:45 PM

    Unity's just outgrowing the early adopters. The starving indies will move on to the next up and coming engine. Professionals will continue using Unity (and UE, which also charges royalties) because of the breadth and depth of the toolsets.

    I first used Unity when their WebGL system was in private beta. IIRC they tried charging royalties early on but then reverted that for marketshare, but I don't have time to look it up. In any case the royalties aren't burdensome at that scale. I don't think it'll affect much. Vocal minority, yada yada. Maybe it'll even get them to profitability next year!