[Aurornis]

> but somehow I suspect that private equity

Unity is publicly traded: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/U

Can’t blame private equity for this one.

> crunched the numbers and decided it's time to milk this one dry.

More realistically, they crunched the numbers and saw that they aren’t making enough money to keep the company going forever. It’s not a secret, because it’s a public company: They need to make more money to survive.

More monetization was inevitable. I know it’s unpopular public opinion, but Unity as it is today cannot exist forever on the monetization model they had in the past. The numbers didn’t add up. They had to change something.

[SXX]

They tried to take sustainable B2B middleware business and make new Google out of it. And they keep failing, but still paying exorbitant amounts to their execs.

According to their SEC fillings their staff almost tripled in just 4 years

> Dec 31, 2022 7,703

> Dec 31, 2021 5,245

> Dec 31, 2020 4,001

> Dec 31, 2019 2,715

Development of game engine is costly and take a lot of resources, but they already had a successful product back in 2019 and long before that. With all that hiring quality of their software was more or less constant (and not too high as always) which means all recent growth was not in their core business.

[somenameforme]

It's relevant to also add that the entirety of Epic Games is less than 4,000 people worldwide. That's not only for a vastly more advanced game engine, but also for numerous projects like Fortnite, a game store, just absurd amounts of educational material being published, and so on.

I don't really get why companies keep hiring themselves to death. It clearly does not translate to meaningful productivity gains, yet sends their labor and related costs skyrocketing. It's so alien to me from the outside.

[Proziam]

Companies don't hire themselves to death. Managers hire themselves towards promotions and kill the company in the process.

[bathtub365]

Managers need budget and headcount to hire against. This is given to them by the company with the goal of growing.

[Proziam]

In almost every large company the incentive structure is such that hiring is a "win" for everyone involved. It's a win for the HR team doing the hiring, often they have quotas. It's a win for the manager getting more headcount under their umbrella, adds perceived value and status which leads to promotions. It's a win all the way up the ladder, because it adds perceived growth (remember how many VCs used to tell startups to hire and spend fast?).

The decision maker at the top is usually too disconnected from the rank and file to see the bloat. And the ones that aren't tend to be ruthless about headcount.

[gmerc]

That’s not at all now this works. It’s a convenient myth for senior executives to absolve themselves of their own failure to build incentives and sustainable culture.

Managers don’t get headcount without allocation. It needs to be budgeted and approved.

[chaostheory]

This is what happens when you are publicly traded. You become a slave of 3rd party Wall St analyst revenue expectations. Only a few CEOs like Jobs can effectively deal with that. Having a CEO like Riccetiello exacerbates the problem.

[gmerc]

Most of their losses was in the last 1.5 years. They actually could have been profitable. They are not sustainable because of mismanagement and massively failed bets. “We got greedy but don’t worry, you’ll pay for it” doesn’t have the best ring to it.

[matthew-wegner]

They were profitable from 2013 until around 2016, beginning the buildup to IPO...

[0xAFFFF]

I don't think that people realistically oppose monetization going up. The main complaint is adding retroactively a new form of monetization with a unverifiable metric that is not bound to revenue.

Sure people wouldn't have been happy with higher fees, but current clusterfuck is an order of magnitude worse.

[HlessClaudesman]

Charging per install would have been the death of free to play gaming, or just the death of Unity as a mobile games engine.

[nottorp]

> would have been the death of free to play gaming

That would have been ... perfect. And when did they back up on charging per install?

[pierat]

That would have been a good thing, to not see "free" services, due to anti-competitive reasons.

Companies subsidize "free" by redirecting money from successful areas to fund new or unsuccessful areas. And in this case of "free" (advert, data collections) games, is basically a anticompetitive dumping ground and is a common trend with monopolists.

[JohnFen]

> The numbers didn’t add up. They had to change something.

This seems likely, but from what I've been hearing from game devs, the issue isn't the increased fees so much as the fact that they retroactively changed licensing. That they did this (again, after promising not to the last time) indicates that regardless of what the fees actually are, you'd be a fool to enter into a business relationship with them.

[bigfishrunning]

> (again, after promising not to the last time)

The lesson to be learned here is to never trust a "promise". Enter contracts that one party can't change on a whim. If a product you're using to run a business can pull the rug out like this, maybe move your business to one that can't.

[Macha]

Unity did have such a clause in their contract until 2019 when they removed it in a click through contract on an update.

So the moral here is "don't patch your software without having a lawyer diff the TOS?" I don't think that's the world we want to live in. I don't think that leaves consuming proprietary software as a feasible option in today's fast moving security landacape. It's fair to call out bad actors who muddy the water to make the world that way.

[gnramires]

Sure, but thinking just because it's a publicly traded company "anything goes" is equally deeply misguided. Whoever owns your company or organization, we should always respect and try to do the best for our customers and everyone involved -- we don't get to destroy things in the name of profit.

This behavior is not only destructive of their legacy, the promises they kept, but of course of their own reputation as a game company... I don't see any independent developer choosing Unity from now on (without a radical change for the company) in their right minds.

I'm pretty sure this wasn't the only solution to the situation. If they're going to ruin the company anyway... might as well make it open source. Start charging a large amount for a license. Cut the company size (maybe competition for other open source software is too great, and they couldn't survive at that size!). We have the choice to do the right thing, although many times that isn't the easy thing to do.

This goes even to society at large. No social or economic system can exist without ethics -- to believe so is delusional. Not communism, capitalism, social democracy, or something else(and I think we need some other ideas in the mix... but that's another story!) can function well when individuals don't have a good grasp of ethics. Governments are made of people making decisions, and companies likewise. No matter how much structure you impose on top, if people don't generally cooperate, a good outcome is impossible (garbage in, garbage out). So, like a friend says, "Be excellent to each other, or else..." :)

[gnramires]

All that said... Free Software is just a great idea. Why would you not use an engine open to collaboration, an engine that's a public resource, an engine that could never truly pull the rug on you? An engine that can be forked, go in different directions, copied, redistributed.

And we need to support free software too. If you use it, please donate :)

[anon25783]

If a company can't get by without mistreating its users/developers, that company should not exist.

[webninja]

Unity (ticker symbol “U”) has a price to earnings multiple of negative —11.74 and a (quarterly) earnings per share of -$0.51 which was a decline of -26% year over year. That’s pretty much unacceptable for a company that’s as mature as Unity. Most companies are either growth or value stocks and Unity is neither.

Unity’s value was previously in the hype and now is possibly in the voting rights by shareholders. With enough voting rights, I bet you could vote for a 0% commission for your video game company and offer to vote out the CEO/COO/ECT or anyone overpaid if they don’t concede to your demands.

[vintermann]

> Can’t blame private equity for this one.

Yup, it's Epic which is the private equity rollup. They're innocent, unless there are some Stephen Elop-style shenanigans going on.

[danjoredd]

A revenue share or a price hike could have sufficed. Not this weird junk