Picture taken from their Twitter
We have never made a public statement before now. That is how badly you fucked up.
Lmao shots fired. Unity’s C-suite made their own bed… and the bed is made out of anti-personnel mines. I genuinely hope this picks up steam.
Unity showed their hand when they made the announcement. I had never thought to look up who owned them before. Now that I am aware that they’re majority-owned by VC and PE firms, it’s pretty clear to me that this category of monetization-oriented behavior is here to stay, because that’s how VC and PE operate. Unless and until they somehow get a new owner, it’s my sincere opinion that Unity should absolutely not be seriously considered as a game engine for any new game project.
Is it just me or are all big companies killing themself right now?
Yeah, inflation rate is high, so central banks are trying to counteract that by basically slowing down the economy, so that our normally scheduled inflation countermeasures kick in appropriately. Well, and the usual way to slow down the economy is to make it more costly to loan money, i.e. increase interest rates. Which means investors can’t just pump money into any company anymore, they want that money to actually pay out to cover those interest rates. And that means companies need to actually be profitable to get money to finance their operation.
And it’s most costly to increase interest rates not because those directly affect the investors, but because those interest rates affect the borrowers since the borrowers will need to make more and more money to be able to pay back the initial injection + interest.
If borrowers don’t think they can pay back, then they probably won’t borrow in the first place. If they do borrow but don’t make enough to pay back those loans + interest, then the investor loses out.
And if borrowers don’t borrow in the first place, then investors sit on their money when they could theoretically inject it into other businesses so they can earn on what they own, and not just let their assets stagnate (or decay). To investors, this might also be perceived as a loss.
Do I have that right?
In principle, yes, although two things to note:
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Borrowing isn’t always the active part. When a company is listed on the Stock Exchange, then investors play the active role by buying or selling their stock.
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Most investors don’t just have tons of money laying around. They have property, which they can list as security when borrowing money from banks. And then they lend that borrowed money to companies seeking(/allowing) investment. That means:
a) With high interest rates, investors do have a need for their lent money to pay out, too. As do the banks, because they borrowed it from the central bank.
b) Ultimately, lots of money will be given back to the central bank. The money is effectively removed from the economy then. If you’ve ever heard that inflation comes from too much money being in circulation, that’s how that ties back in.
I’m no expert either, though. I’m just summarizing what makes sense to me and what I’ve learnt from making this post a few weeks ago: https://feddit.de/post/2514573
So does that mean all these businesses were always doomed to fail anyways, just living on borrowed money/time, and now the bill comes due, they’re all fucked?
They should honestly just move their engine anyway. Unity has played their hand, and showed they are willing to make changes to their pricing retroactively.
I bet they will do so for their next game but reimplementing a entire game is FAR easier said than done, something like that could very well bankrupt a smaller studio!
I mean it’s easy to reimplement entire games if you’ve built it modularly. Just swap your core game logic to run on another library and the game works the same it did before.
Edit: 'course, exceptions exist like if you wrote everything using their proprietary coding language, instead of using something universal.
Edit 2: It MAY still be possible that a translation/compiler exists that’ll run as a plugin in a proprietary engine, and converts it into something universal.
The surface area is huge. This is not an SQL database where you can just change the ORM’s backend.
I’ve written game engine wrappers and converters for all sorts of code and file types.
It would honestly be easier to fire up Unreal Engine 5 or Godot and start again.
Even if they do revert it, the trust has been lost. They’ve made mistakes before, but none as stupid as this one
It’s a matter of self-preservation to get away from Unity as soon as possible at this point.
With the words of the rust developer: Unity can get fucked
I read rust as the programming language for way too long reading that article, lmao.
