Unity employee here, idk anything specific about the departments that handle this I wouldn't even know what their name is. With that caveat, I will say that all the layoffs last year going into this year, changing CEOs, and the competition between big company beurocracy and the dying breath of small company culture, a lot of departments are behaving erratically. I wouldn't be surprised if nobody internally has a clear answer why this was banned but others aren't. Some workers may legit be trying to help but their hands are tied for corporate or maybe even legal reasons, it could be people trying to keep their heads down and close tickets quickly to keep metrics up in the hopes they're less likely to be fired. I think you all know this already but please don't be too hard on the workers we're doing what we can but it's a corporate mess right now
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Look, it's a low level employee of a faceless corporation!
GET 'IM!
Jokes aside, thanks for the transparency, and salute to you and your coworkers for trying to weather the storm caused by "shifting paradigms"... that's what they call it, right? I know the execs can shift my paradigm, that's for sure.
Peace and love.
Tech in general but especially the game industry desperately needs to unionize. If the last couple years doesn't convince tech bros they're just as expendable as all the other working class out there, idk what will. Got to do something to insulate us from "restructures", "rightsizing", and "company resets"
I feel like more than anything right now, you need a hug. 🤗
I appreciate you
Wow I never knew it was that bad. I hope you have something else lined up it sounds like everyone's employment is shaky
Yeah it's a bit of a shit show for sure. Unfortunately I do not have anything else lined up right now, I know that's an unsafe decision. My life has been a mess lately I can only handle so much at once and finding different work is exhausting
As a long time Unity user, thanks for your hard work. It's appreciated more than you could ever know.
Really though, what were they thinking. Why would anyone risk staying with unity after all their bad decisions, especially when they clearly have no intention to stop being dumb.
I went to a game dev meetup in Seoul last year. Everyone was using Unity.
I went again last month. Half the people were using Godot.
For a bit more context, I used to work in the gaming industry. We used Unity because it was great for making money - drop in ads and tracking, you're good to go. The Godot ecosystem isn't as mature for that yet. However, even we were considering switching to Godot. It wasn't worth switching for a number of reasons (besides the above mentioned ones, Godot is also "laggier" and we have some heavier games), but had we started shop yesterday, it's safe to say we would have used Godot too.
Unity just laid off 25% of their workforce. That is not a small number. Their days are numbered.
Small correction they haven't fired 25% of us yet, it is a work in progress
Yep, I started my own game dev journey a year ago after a decade in the tech industry.
My gamer friends: Use Unity Bro its so easy to learn!
Hrm but uh what about cost structure, licensing, all that kind of stuff?
Doesnt matter bro, you can just port it all if it doesnt work!
Well uh, porting is actually a lot of work and burnout is a serious concern so wouldnt it make more sense to-
Youre making this too complicated, what you need to do first is-
...
And that conversation was obviously useless.
Anyway yeah, I picked Godot after doing, you know actual research on all the benefits and limitations of various engines.
See, Godot, being open source, and myself, not having a huge amount of money to throw at this, and also not just knowing any reasonable or reliable people that could contribute... I can afford to work with Godot at a comfortable pace and not be driven insane by budgetary concerns and a timetable, and Godot is likely to only improve, and I can improve with it, expand the scope or add new features as they become better supported by engine updates or freely usable nifty tools and techniques proliferate.
Also at this point I am planning on really only supporting linux users, as I am again looking to do this as a hobbyist that isnt really concerned about making a ton of money, and also at this point I just literally despise every technically incompetent person non FOSS user I have ever known, so Godot suits that well.
Oh and linux gaming marketshare is growing rather rapidly.
I just literally despise every technically incompetent person
Those are strong words for people that just didn't dedicate 90% of their lives to tech like we did. Some people actually do have other interests you know.
Is it okay to hate you simply for not knowing what a flyback diode, colpitts oscillator, phase-locked loop, or regenerative receiver is? That's my hobby. And there are not as many of us as there are software devs. There are not many here who I can discuss electronics engineering with. But I don't despise people because of that.
You gotta realize, WE are the weirdos, not them. A very high interest and obsession over tech is not an average human quality.
Godot, being open source
This is the key thing IMO. If they ever do anything like try to make it a paid framework with huge fees, or just move in a direction the community disagrees with, the existing open source code remains open source and someone can just fork it.
They're mostly banking on the cost of change being higher than the inconvenience of staying.
They probably are, but it's not really about cost, it's about fear. I fear that while it costs $x to switch to Unreal Enigne now, it'll cost $x+10 after a few weeks when they do their next decision, and $x+20 a month or so after that.
Like buying a reverse lottery ticket. If you're unlucky, you suddenly have to pay a big amount somewhere in the future.
Which signals to investors that there is little to no expected growth. If you aren't attracting new customers to grow your user base, then you only have the option to milk your existing customers to increase revenue.
That may work short term, but long term it signals a death knell for the company, since as the old customers retire or the studios close down, the new crop of game developers would have been trained on or adopted a different engine so aren't going to switch to Unity. Eventually they just run out of customers.
Especially in a competitive market where compelling alternatives exist.
Especially in tech.
And especially in software.
Yep, but the best part is because their core demographic is moronic, know-nothing-about-how-any-technology actually works, start-up indie game devs with basically only a dream and prayers combined with 'i have played some video games, it cant be /that hard/ to make one!' kinds of people...
...you can expect discussion around everything going on with Unity to be filled with irrelevant and infuriating opinions/beliefs/concerns that will eat up most discussions in most communities while also mocking and downplaying actually correct and actually relevant things.
It never fails to amaze and infuriate me how confidently completely wrong nearly all video game players are about literally everything about /creating/ video games.
ah the mainframe strategy
The microsoft strategy.
edit: The following is off topic, but I'll.leave it as a testament to my gray-beardedness. In my defense: Unity isn't Unity anymore. Don't get old.
I've been using Linux for 30 years now, and for a while I was an advocate for Ubuntu and Canonical (among others, I'm pan-distributive). Then things changed: GNOME 3, Wayland, Unity, something-sonething, Snaps... All too much.
As an advocate, I'm apt not to emerge with favorites, or to yuck others' yums. Neverthekess, Canonical is a press beyond the pale, many days.
In the end, I don't recommend Canonical distros. LMDE is solid, as are most of the *bian and redhat downstreams. I don't recommend the others because I don't know them, but more importantly I couldn't help a friend un-bodge a bad installer on them (likewise for "BSD or Darwin).
But really, no love for Canonical. They went to some Dark Side, and I'll have a hard time forgiving them for it.
I also thought of Unity the DE before reading the article
I understand the confusion. This doesn't belong to a Linux community. I mean, I see the relation with FOSS but I'm sure there are FOSS communities out there. The article doesn't even mentions Linux, just Windows and Android.
You do realize this is about the Unity game engine, right?
I do now. See edits upthread.
The VLC team are heroes. Three cheers.
This headline was the subtle push I needed to donate to Videolan. What an amazing project, we’re lucky to have it.
At this point you should know that unity is an evil company.
It was literally led by the evil EA guy.
Was led. He left after the license fee catastrophe.
But the interim CEO led the redundancies. The common factor in all of this is the board. The CEO just does what the board are pushing for and sign off on. Ricky is bad and not a good man by any stretch of the imagination, but he was less bad 2/4/6 years ago for a bit. He's just the hatchet (yes) man doing the business of the big shareholders.
The next CEO will likely be following the same play book. Without a change of board, it's still an evil company. Ricky was just the fall guy that they bin off so naive folk buy into the fact it's "all fixed, and back to old Unity".
The great advise right now, is stay away from Unity. You have Godot, Armory3d, and hell, even Epic run Unreal Engine is better.
The CEO just does what the board are pushing for
Too many people don't understand this.
Usually[1], CEO's exists mostly to be the public fall guy for the faceless board's decisions, and those are mostly shaped by the shareholder's unending drive for profit. The only real subtlety is whether that drive for profit is short or long term, which drives expansion policy.
[1] Certain high profile CEOs excepted, who have a lot of weight with the board's direction because they founded the company or are considered too valuable to lose.
What a horrible way to handle this. A bit like YouTube demonetization policies.
Only in the licensing space in particular there is really no good reason to hide the exact rules what is acceptable and what isn't. Nobody is going to circumvent your defences if they know exactly which licenses you allow.
Who tf bans something so good, benevolent, and upstanding as VLC?
Companies really do be taking people’s work and profiting off of it, then not giving back whatsoever. :(
Thats why you need Licenses to stop that.. well jf you can afford to fight them at all, haha.
Money always wins..
Unity has been getting better press because they mildly walked back a few of their policies. One prominent gamedev channel i saw (games from scratch i think?) did a video praising them for booting out ironsource execs (adware company unity bought a while back) from the company.
And, like clockwork, Unity proves that it was never the plucky underdog that was going to take on the behemoths of unreal and (at the time of inception) cryengine. In fact, it feels like its more hostile to its users than either of its original competitors, that were once known for hostile and expensive features.
And again, im gonna shill for godot. You're better off using FOSS for your tech stack primarily because of this kind of arbitrary behaviour that becomes standard once you're too big to be internally accountable.