- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Unity (NYSE: U) (the “Company”), the world’s leading platform for creating and growing real-time 3D (RT3D) content, today announced that John Riccitiello will retire as President, Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and a member of the Company’s Board of Directors, effective immediately. James M. Whitehurst has been appointed Interim Chief Executive Officer, President and a member of the Board. Roelof Botha, Lead Independent Director of the Unity Board, has been appointed Chairman. Mr. Riccitiello will continue to advise Unity to ensure a smooth transition.
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Probably too late for Unity. A commercial game engine only makes money if there is a constant influx of new games to sustain it. I bet a lot of developers, large and small, have already decided to dump the platform either immediately or for their next project. So revenues are going to go into free fall.
Devs will move to Unreal (powerful) or Godot (free) and Unity will die. And it’s all thanks to John here and the other members of the board who thought squeezing people for $$$ who have choices was a good idea.
Unity is not going anywhere, even in a bankruptcy it would get acquired by the likes of Microsoft or Meta. The “good guys startup” Unity is long gone, and it’s been replaced by the same corporate structure you would expect anywhere.
Tying yourself to Unreal would be just as naive, and Godot is nowhere ready to fill the niche Unity is filling. I would place the opposite bet as yours, the vast majority of actual game devs are not rich enough nor care enough about corporate drama to ever switch engine for possibly worst. Also, experienced C# Unity devs and experienced C++ Unreal devs are not that interchangeable. Unity made this move to survive and they know there is no true alternative.
This is my pov, I worked in the industry for over a decade and I am an Unity ex-employee.
Who on earth would rely on a game engine in bankruptcy? Would you get support? Would you get product keys? Would backend services get turned off? Who would collect revenues and would the terms change again? I think Unity has already done itself irreparable damage and if it ends in bankruptcy then blame the outgoing CEO. Engines need a constant conveyor belt of new games to sustain their revenues and I don’t see this happening. If the company is bought it will just be to pick the bones of a dead platform, collecting revenues from games out in the wild.
And yes there is pain and a learning curve to moving to other engines though I think most programmers would be able to cope with change and if they’re that incurious and inflexible that they can’t then maybe it’s time to find new programmers. I expect most teams will jump to another engine at a natural break in the development process, e.g. after completing a game and moving onto the next and they might start on a smaller project and work up to familiarise themselves with their new tools.
As for Godot, I am sure it is not a 100% feature for feature replacement for Unity. But it sure as hell is capable of powering 95% of indie games out there no trouble whatsoever and I daresay some more challenging titles. Another compelling reason for devs to reevaluate their relationship with Unity.
Who on earth would rely on a game engine in bankruptcy?
They aren’t nearing bankruptcy first of all, and I as I mentioned even in this doom-and-gloom scenario they would likely just get acquired and operations would continue as normal. Is that what you think? That Unity is about to go bankrupt? I am not sure what we’re arguing here.
Engines need a constant conveyor belt of new games to sustain their revenues and I don’t see this happening.
What are you basing this observation on? Unity never made money from the volume of games released using their engine. Also, the part where everyone is suddenly dropping Unity is mostly just a narrative here on social media, and the bulk of the reason why it might not be happening is that there is no true alternative.
And yes there is pain and a learning curve to moving to other engines though I think most programmers would be able to cope with change and if they’re that incurious and inflexible that they can’t then maybe it’s time to find new programmers
It is not about coping and being incurious. Changing engine means trashing a part of your team, trashing your content pipeline, trashing your internal tools. It costs a lot of money, money which most studios don’t have. It would make sense if there was a true alternative to Unity for those mid-sized studios, which there isn’t.
As for Godot, I am sure it is not a 100% feature for feature replacement for Unity. But it sure as hell is capable of powering 95% of indie games out there no trouble whatsoever and I daresay some more challenging titles
Again, not sure what you’re basing those numbers on. Godot can’t even do consoles natively so there is definitely some troubles and headache in using Godot in 2023. I would agree that Godot is perfectly fine for solo devs and very, very small teams, but it is not a serious alternative for even mid-sized productions. It is still pretty much a toy compared to the bigger engines, and it lacks commercial support to really attract those studios.
I get it. The popular sentiment here is that Unity is doomed to fail, and the internet as a whole kind of wish it did. I am not gonna gather sympathy and votes by saying otherwise, but I just don’t see it. Godot is not ready, switching to Unreal does not make much sense since it is the same proprietary “garbage”. It is easy to make big statements here on Lemmy and claim how easy it would be for game studios to get rid of Unity, and how this would improve their business, but to be honest I don’t think you guys have a clue. If you are actually a developer or own a game studio then I am sorry for assuming.
You make a great point, and I want to add to that.
The popular sentiment here is that Unity is doomed to fail, and the internet as a whole kind of wish it did.
A lot of people confuse their wishes with the observable reality. There were a lot of people that migrated to lemmy and thought reddit would die in 3 months, tops. Many people are still waiting for Xitter to suffer a “sudden death”. Unity is in a similar situation, it’s too big to simply close down and file for bankruptcy.
The shitstorm made some people migrate away from it, just like people migrated off reddit when fuck u/spez started fucking things around, and twitter when elon musk took over. Yet all of them survived with healthy-ish userbases, despite many people wishing otherwise.
Things a lot of people forget or ignore for whatever reason is the sheer volume of shovelware produced with Unity, aimed straight at Google Play and Microsoft Stores. Asian studios targeting Asian audiences are probably the highest source of income for Unity, due to sheer numbers (China, India and other SE Asian countries are roughly half of the world population). Unity gets money from “per seat” subscriptions and from advertising. Even assuming a 20% reduction of those subscriptions, there’s still enough money coming in to keep the company going, especially if they decide to axe sectors that are “money drains”.
Also, some studios simply can’t afford to let go of Unity because their main income earners are made with Unity and they need to keep the game updated. If their games also use stuff they can’t easily replicate in a different engine, like some plugin, that’s an extra reason for them to put up with Unity’s shit. I also wouldn’t be surprised if Unity’s now previous license of “no royalties” was preferred over Unreal and the reason some studios went with it, as the subscription cost would be lower than paying “success fees”, with Honkai/Genshin Impact being likely examples.
Unlike Twitter or Reddit, Unity is in a better position to make a slow comeback. Whether they’ll manage remains to be seen, but even assuming all the worst choices taken by the higher ups, the company will live for a good 2 years as is, then sell out to someone bigger.
My only complaint is such maneuvers tend to come with golden parachutes - his mismanagement of Unity leading to the whole fee debacle and erosion of trust deserves no such soft landing.
Yeah I can almost guarantee that the original plan was always for him to leave. He was going to be the scapegoat with a golden parachute, allowing the company to keep the unpopular changes while disbursing the bad publicity. It’s exactly what he did with EA too.
Basically reddit’s Ellen Pao plan. Bring in someone unpopular to make the unpopular changes, then let them go with a massive payout while keeping the unpopular changes.
But then Unity realized that the companies weren’t going to forget about the unpopular changes and it wasn’t going to blow over. Companies started bailing left and right and switching to other engines. At that point Unity realized that the smoke was actually a full blown fire, and started doing whatever they could to try and regain some trust. But by that point it was too late, because companies had already seen the potential for abuse. And as the saying goes, when someone tells you who you are, believe them. So now companies are unwilling to go back to Unity, and Unity is grasping at straws.
Yeah I can almost guarantee that the original plan was always for him to leave.
I don’t think so, mostly because of how long it took for him to be “retired” after the whole fiasco, almost a full month. Had it taken only a week, I’d find that more plausible, as that’d actually make it look like it was his fault and that Unity as a company “saw the error in their way”
Or it could be that they suck even harder at saving face than we thought.
You’re looking for blood you’ll never get unfortunately
Roelof Botha, Lead Independent Director of the Unity Board, has been appointed Chairman.
Imagine working in gaming with an actual name that’s just the beginning of a Deez Nuts joke
That was fast…
busts into company
destroys reputation
refuses to elaborate
multi million severance
leaves
Just chad shit.
Did the same at EA (IIRC).
He did what he was hired to. Take the company public, turn the founders into billionaires and become the scapegoat when things go south.
Unless there’s something I’m not aware of (which is very possible), what you said doesn’t make sense. The company was already publicly traded (so no IPO to pump up the numbers for), and none of the recent moves he made increased the stock price.
