This "for profit" thing seems like the wrong framing. Customer goodwill and community are extremely valuable. It seems like what we are looking at is more about short-termism and the distortive effects of suddenly (post-IPO) having to report to investors who are essentially outsiders to the business and have no knowledge or stake in the operation-as-an-entity-in-a-larger-ecosystem other than having dumped a bunch of money into it.
Sure, you can argue that said investors are treating the business as nothing but a vehicle "for profit", but that framing loses something essential. You can have profit and be a player in something mutually beneficial. In fact you need profit to be sustainable.
Yep, it's not profit motive that's the problem, but short term profit above all else, including long term profit. Because in the long term, whoever is making the decision will already be gone.
The film was shot almost entirely in Unity, then the final render used some extra stuff and other tools. But the scenes, shots, etc were done in Unity. A quick google shows you this.
That article I seems to imply Unity only used to generate "camerawork" data (camera positions and movements), and the actual rendering is done on other system using that camerawork data. IIRC on 2019 (Lion King release year) Unity didn't even have ray tracing support yet, so I think the final render might not use Unity at all, but Unity editor itself used extensively during production.
In contrast, Unreal Engine rendered scenes seems to be used in actual footages on some recent shows. Was Unity acquisitions of CGI firms meant to pursue this direction, or boost Unity editor usage during firm production like in Lion King?
You are correct, they used it for production, building the scenes, getting camera data. I then assume they exported the scenes and camera data to whatever they used for the final render. So Unity was used for 70-80% of the work.
It is possible but I don't know. Just was trying to point out that it's more than just some demo that it was used for.
> Unity isn't close to profitable, and never has been
This isn't really true though, their core business is and was profitable if you exclude all the of acquisitions junk, stock shenanigans, and loans to pay for it they have been doing.
It just didn't have the margins expected of a public company and so they did all that other junk to pump those numbers.
> This isn't really true though, their core business is and was profitable if you exclude all the of acquisitions junk, stock shenanigans, and loans to pay for it they have been doing.
"We're profitable if you ignore all the things we're spending money on"
Not all the things, just their unprofitable side business attempts. It's like knowing a guy with a well paying job who always complains he is broke. But he conveniently never mentions that he's spending $4500 per month on a Lamborghini lease.
The claim here is that none of that spending is generating revenue. They could stop spending that money, their income would remain the same, and then they would be profitable.
I would argue that Unity is about 10x the size it needs to be. They could shed a significant portion of their employees and still produce a good product.
They are in the perpetual growth trap that so many of these companies fall into when they get bigger than a niche audience
Hiring is too much people is much easier than firing them. If you cut 90% of the staff keeping the people you'd want to retain is pretty much impossible (since obviously the management won't have any clue who they are).
He's done a lot of stupid things with twitter, but having a significant reduction in headcount doesn't seem to have been one of them. (The way he did it was awful, but that's a different matter.)
Doesnt make profit because directors are paying themselves millions, spending 400 million a year on marketing (how??) and buying ironsource for 4billion in exchange for 1billion bonus for directors. They getting rich and dont care about the dried up carcas they will leave behind
Build product / service at a loss. Product becomes popular because it provides so much value so cheaply (because is being sold at loss). Maintain through continual investment and chasing "growth." Bill comes due. Investors left holding the bag and ecosystems built around assuming bubble was real have a bad time.
In many ways it's the best form of socialism, cheaper products and services provided to the people, paid for by investors who are rolling the dice on a pyramid scheme posing as a business model. Completely voluntary and works even within a capitalist system.
Now all we have to do is hope Unity goes under really quickly, then gets bought up for cheap by a business either willing to make far less as their investment was well below the cost of development for the tools... or that another sucker comes along to buy them at a higher price to either enter the market or expand their own dominance in it as they are still on their "chase growth" curve.
This strategy is still pretty awful. If 2.5% revenue share after $1,000,000 would be enough to survive on, they probably could have opened with matching Unreal's 5% instead of all the bullshit and won people over.
Yeah their new pricing model is quite literally more expensive than Unreal for many of their customers (mostly the ones who make less money - for massive studios it's cheaper) and it's ALSO more complex to comply with. A simple "we're doing revshare now, and the per-seat fee is going away" would have been viewed more favorably I think.
I mean in my naive world, you'd slap some minimum revenue onto the rev-share and you'd have a clear separation between hobbyists, unsuccessful indies, indies, and huge successes. It'd be muddled in the middle, sure, but if some companies hits jackpot with a unity project, you'll know and could act on it.
i remember back when Avid decided they were no longer going to offer a Mac version of their NLEs because Apple's new machines were only going to have 3 expansion slots. while admittedly, there were probably a much smaller number of affected users than the Unity decision, it did cause a huge amount of turmoil. urban legend has people dumping their Avid stations on the doorstep of the Avid offices.
Avid is still around, but it's not looking very healthy. They've fired whole dev teams - one of whom was largely hired by a competitor, who have now developed a competing project that is eating Avid alive in that (fiarly niche) space.
I was wondering why the name Avid was familiar but also had a negative connotation in my head, then I remembered it was from a YouTube video [1] about how horrible its interface is.
man, i was hoping this was going to be a serious discussion on NLEs. instead, we get some niche product of a niche field. i'm not really sure this counts. that's like the team that works for lighting within Unity left to build a new tool that exports settings to JSON.
You're being overly dismissive. There are thousands of people working in such software every day - from serious composers, professional music engravers, orchestra libraians, down to church choirmasters and the like.
It's a several hundred dollar product that supports a dev team in the low double digits. It's niche, but it's not THAT niche.
Unity will survive but this could be the start of a steady decline of users, which isn't good for any game engine. Leads to a loss of knowledge which makes the engine even less popular.
Ghe whole situation is somewhat similar to when GameMaker Studio switched to subscription model.
what would be better for the community would be not just a decline in devs using the engine, but also the devs working on the engine. working for Unity should now be a stain just like working for FB/socials/ad-tech. there will be tons of people willing to do it, but hopefully the great minds leave the rot
That’s the opposite of what would be better. We need more engineer solidarity not more divisiveness. Give me a list of your past employers and I can guarantee I can find some sketchball business practice you indirectly contributed to and make some tenuous argument for you to be blackballed.
95% of shitty tech industry practices can be root caused to people identify more strongly with their employer than with their profession. We desperately need a professional organization / union with teeth and the main thing that should be shunned is rhetoric that divides rather than unites it
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You must subscribe to the idea that the employees can change the culture of a company from bottom up. I strongly disagree. Company culture is dictated from top down, and only rarely does the bottom get to make substantive changes. However, I'm willing to have my mind change with examples of companies changing their culture based on employees changing the minds of the execs.
We can't, but many of us are forced by circumstances we can't control to stay on board even if we don't like where the company is heading. The most recent and probably most nastiest story I'm aware of is post-Musk Twitter - Musk ordered that everyone put in effort like hell, people slept in conference rooms... so, naturally, many people left but one group had to stay because their literal legal existence in the US was tied to that job: H1B employees.
Other cases include if you've got a house that's not paid off, a child on the way... that's where common sense says to not change anything major due to the consequences of shit going down very very VERY hard.
To me, at least, you and even MBAs that like Unity's behavior are welcome here. It's essential to understand broad perspectives, especially the ones I dislike.
I probably should have led with "I spent 35 years as a software developer and THEN got an MBA." Which is to say... when I make snarky comments, they're firmly grounded on basic comp sci and extensive software dev experience. However, When I show the kids at work how to use old-school command line tools like awk, sed, cut, grep and find, I leave off the bit that they've been educated by an MBA.
I feel like we've seen a bunch of businesses show what happens when you take private capital and scale on a community based product with out a clear business model that doesn't involve retroactively screwing the community in some way.
I mean, Unity's just the latest example. Before it came Hashicorp and Docker. I'm sure we could think of many more examples if we tried.
And what's really frustrating is that if these businesses had focused on simply "building a product the community wanted, supporting that community, and making enough money to comfortably keep going" - all of them could have been successful.
I'd really love to see the tech community try more models that simply aim for comfortable sustainability - not astronomical growth. You know, enough to pay a modest engineering team market salaries indefinitely while they continue to support and develop the product.
That's why it happens so often though -- the very people who are directly enriched by doing it (holders of the majority of the company's equity) are the only ones asked to decide to do it (board votes).
Canonical example: MailChimp
The founders retained essentially all the equity (Atlanta), so when push came to shove they decided "Fuck it, we'd rather be rich than work" and sold the company.
It feels like the only way to avoid this would be aligning the equity structure with employees and customers in a better way.
Exactly. I think what we are seeing is the result of decision makers at these businesses now having to report to investors who are essentially outsiders to the community. Their only stake or interest in the operation comes from having dumped a bunch of money into it. But now they get to call the shots or if not, exert a ton of pressure.
I think the takeaway is that businesses built around a community really should not go public.
VCs don't like this. How are they going to get their ROI immediately? Having normal investors vs funders changes the mentality of long term to cash grab.
They have a business model and they would've been fine if they hadn't started increasing their headcount by 50% every year and focused on their core products.
