I think The Verge's angle is pretty good: it's going to be hard to restore trust, and many developers were surprised at how easy a shift of frameworks is looking for future releases. I'm following a number of indie game devs who got their next release ported away from Unity within a week, including Brian Bucklew of the classic Caves of Qud team
I agree, Unity did disrupt the game engine experience for the smaller dev and earned their goodwill. Since then they really had provided little reason to continue with Unity other than tradition, and other engines made it easier to engage with or over time simply improved enough to meet the standard that Unity provided. Even before this pricing change you kept hearing the questioning of Unity and their 'edge' was quickly becoming paper thin.
Considering their competition, Unity projects were on a knife-edge before this entire debacle started. Unreal is better; Godot is less risk. It didn't take a big push to send every unity project tumbling down a better path. Damn right it wont be enough to kick out the CEO -- the poison is still there in the motivation of the private equity ownership.
I wouldn't have the first clue how to rescue Unity at this point. I think it's probably already a zombie, but maybe there is a way to turn it around. Publish the source?
I personally think Unity suffered from success - I suspect they grew to match their fairly outsized success, found out they were fairly large and needed more revenue to sustain themselves, and so they increasingly looked to and focused on pushing advertising to make up shortfalls, while the game engine was increasingly turned into a vehicle for profitably integrating advertising into games.
My suggestion: Personally, Unity really needs to go lean, embrace their developer experience more, and cut costs. There are 7703 staff (as per wikipedia) - and I don't wish this upon the employees, but they can probably afford to cut some fat.
I used to work there. I was appalled by how many people in the company spent company time in slack chats about controversial political issues (as if they would persuade someone with divergent values).
While I was working, I saw various slack channels filled with a constant stream of political chats. I thought "What the hell is everyone else doing while I have my head down and I am working?!"
I resigned after 3-4 months. I found it to be "clown world" inside Unity.
To be fair, what you consider political chat could be quite innocent talk to someone else. I was once called a communist activist for proposing making 2-sided default on the printer.
Indeed, it seems like their whole plan to address profitability issues is just "get bigger", but all that's done is create a bloated, immobile monster that's completely lost touch with thee customer base that got them to where they are.
At ~7000 employees, Unity has roughly double the employees that Epic has - where is all the labor going? To me it's pretty clear that Unity is more interested in being a commercial product/platform whereas Epic is leaning into the engine/technology side and developing their own games. Theoretically both angles can be valid, but I think Unity has completely misunderstood why most of their customers chose then in the first place.
There’s ~300.000 professional game developers in the industry (not including Indy).
They make revenue of approx 350 billion USD. That’s big tech revenue per employee. Profit probably about 450k USD per employee.
The average salary in the industry is somewhere around 50k usd!
The top 10% compensation outside of corporate execs is less than the profit per employee - and barely that of a mid range FAANG engineer.
I switched from senior tech director - top 5 people compensation in a big studio - in games to Mid level manager in big tech at a 5x in TC over 4 years to 8x at Director level over 6.
Yes the industry is extremely lo sided in profitability and risk, but people are not the problem.
In case of unity, insane ad tech plans and complete failure to predict the market are the problem.
Just like with the big tech layoffs, the “cut the fat” and “lazy employees aren’t working hard enough and coasting” narratives exist to absolve senior executives of their failure to adequately plan, manage and control costs and new initiatives or L&D spend. Nothing mid level controls or approves.
In public companies, the senior management and shareholders get to use employees (and game developers) to pay for their i’ll fated bets and mistakes. Rarely, like in this case, there are consequences.
We are on track to lay off 3-5% of games this year, in an industry where on average every employee is vastly profitable. Talent that’s desperately needed and hard to train.
Games is the story of what happens when you don’t have unions and regulation forcing fair distribution of value - massive profits with lobsided distribution that makes many studios only operate with tax credits and at the constant edge of layoffs.
It's a common theme: A powerfull entity does something bad, and everybody stays with them because switching is too hard. They do it again a few times.
One day, they do it once too many, and a lot of people switch. This makes it more easy for the remainers, so some more of them switch. So you don't get a gradual decline, you get an avalanche.
The big entity finally takes notice, rolls backb the last chance, but people keep leaving. They don't realize they have to rollback all unpopular decisions, not only the last one, plus give people a reason to choose them over all others.
So the powerfull entity bleeds dry. Either it keeps a hard core of remainers that take any abuse thinkable, allowing them a hollowed out existence for a long time. Or some other powerfull entity gobbles up the remnants. In extreme cased, the big entity just desintegrates, unable to minimally sustain itself.
You see this pattern with big corporations, with governements. The catholic church in Europe seems another example. In fact, I fear what we're doing to the planet might become the mother of all examples.
Reddit isn't fazed. Traffic dipped for a week or two then returned to what it was. Some subreddits suck now more than they did before, but suckage always comes and goes. I don't post there any more, but staying away completely was difficult, so I have somewhat returned to lurking subreddits of particular interest that don't have counterparts elsewhere. It's not ideal.
15 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 46.6 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37825292
I wouldn't have the first clue how to rescue Unity at this point. I think it's probably already a zombie, but maybe there is a way to turn it around. Publish the source?
My suggestion: Personally, Unity really needs to go lean, embrace their developer experience more, and cut costs. There are 7703 staff (as per wikipedia) - and I don't wish this upon the employees, but they can probably afford to cut some fat.
They have TONS of fat to trim
I used to work there. I was appalled by how many people in the company spent company time in slack chats about controversial political issues (as if they would persuade someone with divergent values).
While I was working, I saw various slack channels filled with a constant stream of political chats. I thought "What the hell is everyone else doing while I have my head down and I am working?!"
I resigned after 3-4 months. I found it to be "clown world" inside Unity.
But yes, unity as a company has somre problems.
At ~7000 employees, Unity has roughly double the employees that Epic has - where is all the labor going? To me it's pretty clear that Unity is more interested in being a commercial product/platform whereas Epic is leaning into the engine/technology side and developing their own games. Theoretically both angles can be valid, but I think Unity has completely misunderstood why most of their customers chose then in the first place.
It’s bullshit.
There’s ~300.000 professional game developers in the industry (not including Indy).
They make revenue of approx 350 billion USD. That’s big tech revenue per employee. Profit probably about 450k USD per employee.
The average salary in the industry is somewhere around 50k usd!
The top 10% compensation outside of corporate execs is less than the profit per employee - and barely that of a mid range FAANG engineer.
I switched from senior tech director - top 5 people compensation in a big studio - in games to Mid level manager in big tech at a 5x in TC over 4 years to 8x at Director level over 6.
Yes the industry is extremely lo sided in profitability and risk, but people are not the problem.
In case of unity, insane ad tech plans and complete failure to predict the market are the problem.
Just like with the big tech layoffs, the “cut the fat” and “lazy employees aren’t working hard enough and coasting” narratives exist to absolve senior executives of their failure to adequately plan, manage and control costs and new initiatives or L&D spend. Nothing mid level controls or approves.
In public companies, the senior management and shareholders get to use employees (and game developers) to pay for their i’ll fated bets and mistakes. Rarely, like in this case, there are consequences.
We are on track to lay off 3-5% of games this year, in an industry where on average every employee is vastly profitable. Talent that’s desperately needed and hard to train.
Games is the story of what happens when you don’t have unions and regulation forcing fair distribution of value - massive profits with lobsided distribution that makes many studios only operate with tax credits and at the constant edge of layoffs.
One day, they do it once too many, and a lot of people switch. This makes it more easy for the remainers, so some more of them switch. So you don't get a gradual decline, you get an avalanche.
The big entity finally takes notice, rolls backb the last chance, but people keep leaving. They don't realize they have to rollback all unpopular decisions, not only the last one, plus give people a reason to choose them over all others.
So the powerfull entity bleeds dry. Either it keeps a hard core of remainers that take any abuse thinkable, allowing them a hollowed out existence for a long time. Or some other powerfull entity gobbles up the remnants. In extreme cased, the big entity just desintegrates, unable to minimally sustain itself.
You see this pattern with big corporations, with governements. The catholic church in Europe seems another example. In fact, I fear what we're doing to the planet might become the mother of all examples.