[airstrike]

RedHat customers and Unity customers make for two very different types of beasts...

It will be interesting to see how his Whitehurst's pedigree translates to this smaller-scale, higher-touch sales motion.

Forgoing the core Unity audience of game developers and gunning for studios / VFX when Unity is clearly not the graphically superior engine sounds risky at best, reckless at worst.

[reactordev]

>”RedHat customers and Unity customers make for two very different types of beasts...”

You misunderstand. They have different verticals but Jim’s mission is the same. Sell them tools at enterprise subscription prices. Per seat, per project, per shot if they can. Forget the indie game devs and their small studios. That bridge is burned beyond recognition or reconciliation.

[anonylizard]

The problem is that in gaming, its often the indie studios that are the most profitable. They may have only 10 staff, but easily make 50 mil a year. Traditional industries rarely have such lopsided staff/revenue ratios.

And small indies may transform into large enterprises surprisingly fast. Mihoyo was a small indie only 10 years ago.

Its much much easier to repair bridges with indies, who don't really want to move off unity as much as you think, and can be placated by backpedaling and the CEO replacement.

[qwytw]

> They may have only 10 staff, but easily make 50 mil a year

Considering Unity's previous pricing model (per seat) it really didn't matter that much whether their client made 5, 10 or 50 mil unless they massively increased their hiring because of that, unless they can charge per install/% of revenue.

> Traditional industries rarely have such lopsided staff/revenue ratios.

A negligibly small proportion of indie developers are even close to that.

[rspoerri]

Do you have examples for indie game studios (with 10 employees) that make 50mio a year?

[hibikir]

It's an industry of booms and busts, we've all heard about the head of Xbox discussing the risky model of large publishers, making expensive sequels until the well dries, and everything collapses. Selling to the largest companies is more difficult too: Slower decision making, more negotiation. It's the road to having a working business, but not one for growth.

It's just so much easier to get your product ingrained into a company that is growing, as long as you are getting your revenue tied to theirs. Their growth becomes your growth. But it has to be done in a way that makes them not run away. Offer different funding models depending on the project on the other end, and let the customer pick their pricing plan. When the plan for the small company starts looking too expensive for the big one, you get to renegotiate when your tools are already everywhere, and moving away is a hassle.

It works for AWS, Stripe and the like. It should work here.

[airstrike]

I'd rather fix that bridge than bank on an non-existing bridge to enterprise customers with an inferior offering and no cash flow to meaningfully fund R&D to outpace competitors.